Aristotle: On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. George A. Kennedy translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Aristotle: Rhetoric. In Plato’s Gorgias and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Joe Sachs translation. Newburyport: Focus Philosophical Library, 2008.

Larry Arnhart: Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the Rhetoric. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1981.

 

Note: This is the second of two essays on the Rhetoric and Arnhart’s commentary. The first will be found under the title “Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric.'”

 

Arnhart asks, “Can rhetoric be distinguished from sophistry?” (3) And while rhetoric may be said to “elevate politics by bringing thought to bear upon action,” “the problem is that while rhetoric seems in some respect to be the means by which reason guides political action, it often seems to be an art of deception, inimical to rational deliberation” (3). What, then, is “the place of reason in political life”? (3)

Modern thinkers cannot make up their minds. Some of them want reason, usually defined as induction based on the result of experiment, to rule. Others reject this ‘rationalism,’ saying that it cannot account for the depth and power of human passions and appetites. These two opinions share a suspicion of rhetoric, as “the rationality of rhetoric becomes especially dubious if scientific demonstration is taken to be the sole model of valid reasoning”; a “further consequence” of that assumption is that “the political itself becomes irrational” (4).

Arnhart turns to Aristotle to show the way out of this dilemma. Aristotle considers reason to be broader and more complex than modern rationalists say it is. He differentiates persuasion from instruction and compulsion, opinion from absolute truth and falsehood, probability from necessity and chance, and enthymeme from strict demonstration and sophistical fallacy. Arnhart concerns himself especially with Aristotle’s knack of showing how opinions have rational content and how the passions are at least amenable to reason. Enthymeme, the characteristic form reason takes in rhetoric, links rational logos to character or ethos, and both to passion or pathos. Even as Plato’s Socrates opposed the sophistic rhetoric of Gorgias, Aristotle opposes the rhetoric of Isocrates, reputedly the student of Gorgias. In doing so, as Arnhart remarks, he structures his treatise like a speech, beginning with an introduction and ending with a peroration (189 n. 1).

Rhetoric is the counterpart, “the antistrophe of dialectic,” Aristotle observes (1354a). Both address things as they are, with things “within the knowledge of all people,” and both “belong to no separately defined science” (1354a). Dialectic is the characteristic philosophic way of Socrates; it “test[s] and maintain[s] an argument” (1354a). Rhetoric enables persons to “defend themselves and attack others” (1354a)—most obviously at trial. Socrates defended himself at trial and saw the jury vote against him. Given both its status as dialectic’s complement or counterpart and apparent failure of Socratic rhetoric to defend Socrates’ life (even as it defended his way of life in a way that indelibly marked Western civilization), it may be no accident that the name of Socrates appears more often in the Rhetoric than in any other Aristotelian treatise.

Rhetoric is an art, and enthymeme, the form of reason most associated with that art, makes up “the body” of rhetorical persuasion, even as stylistic ornamentation and appeals to the emotions make up its ‘externals’ (1354a). “It is wrong to warp the jury by leading them into anger or envy or pity,” Aristotle writes, Socratically (1354a). Rhetoric, whether before a jury or in the assembly, finds its place within a framework of laws which should constrain the judges. Aristotle finds this good, given that “legislation results from consideration over much time, while judgments are made at the moment” of the trial or debate also because lawmakers tend to look to the future and to general principles, whereas judges and juries live in the present, often looking to emotions of “friendliness and hostility and individual self-interest” (1354b). As Arnhart observes, the laws themselves issue from the political regime, knowledge of which requires political science, which is not itself the art of rhetoric (24).

An enthymeme is a syllogism based not on a certainty, a truth held to be self-evident, but on a probability. Syllogisms based on probability can encompass opinion because there is a likelihood that opinion has some element of truth in it; “humans have a natural disposition for the true and to a large extent hit on the truth” (1355a). “Rhetoric is useful because the true and the just are by nature stronger than their opposites” (1355a). This is how rhetoric differs from instruction, which is knowledge-based not opinion-based. Both rhetoric and dialectic can argue both sides of a question, which raises suspicions about those practiced in them; rightly used, they both sift out true from false. In rhetoric, this requires the speaker to know his opponent’s argument; specifically, the function of art of rhetoric “is not to persuade but to see the available means of persuasion in each case,” even as the knowledge-based art of medicine does not “create health but… promote[s] this as much as possible” (1355a). As Arnhart puts it, “One possesses rhetoric as an art only when one knows the reasons for the success of some techniques of persuasion and the failure of others”; art requires knowledge, as does science, but unlike science it aims at a practical purpose or telos (15). “The result is that rhetoric is a certain kind of offshoot of dialectic and of ethical studies, which it is just to call politics” (1356a).

More formally, then “Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion” (1355b). Unlike other arts it has no particular subject, but instead ranges over human character and conduct generally. It does so in three ways: by reflecting upon the character of the speaker; by inclining the listener “in some way”; and by making an argument “showing or seeming to show something” (1355b-1356a). Character persuades because “we believe fair-minded people to a greater extent and more quickly [than we do others],” especially “where there is not exact knowledge but room for doubt” (1356a). Listeners are inclined to believe by appeals to emotion, “for we do not give the same judgment when grieved and rejoicing or when being friendly and hostile” (1356a). And of course the argument itself must be plausible. It may include deductive arguments or enthymemes but it can and often should also include inductive arguments based on example, on “paradeigma” (1356b). But all rhetorical arguments concern matters for choice–that is, matters not necessarily true (as a geometrical proof) but probably true, and moreover contingent upon taking some action–a matter of practice not theory. And, as Arnhart writes,”Once it is recognized that the enthymeme encompasses all the pisteis—logos, ethos, and pathos—that it is a rhetorical vehicle not only for purely logical proof but also for displaying the moral and intellectual virtues of the speakers and for dealing with the emotions and characters of the listeners, the unity of [the] first two books of the Rhetoric becomes apparent” (52-53). “Through rhetoric the political discourse of ordinary men can become a rational activity, but such a discourse could never become rational if scientific instruction were the only form of reasoning,” given the fact that not all of us are scientists (26). Or, as Aristotle puts it, “rhetoric is a combination of analytical knowledge and knowledge of characters”; “on the one hand it is like dialectic, on the other like sophistic discourses. Insofar as someone tries to make dialectic or rhetoric not just mental faculties but sciences, he unwittingly obscures their nature by the change, reconstructing them as forms of knowledge of certain underlying facts, rather than only of speech” (1359a).

Aristotle identifies three kinds of rhetoric: deliberative rhetoric consists of either exhortation or dissuasion, looking to the future, aiming at achieving the advantageous or avoiding the harmful; judicial rhetoric consists of either accusation or defense, looking at the past, aiming at achieving justice or avoiding the unjust; epideictic or “display” rhetoric consists of praise or blame, looking at the present and aiming at bringing honor or in shaming.

Deliberative rhetoric addresses matters not of necessity, nor of nature, nor of chance but only those things that “by their nature, are within our power and of which the inception lies in us” (1359a). These subjects include finances, war and peace, national defense, imports and exports, and legislation. Aristotle mentions the several kinds of knowledge each of these entails, emphasizing the importance of understanding the several forms of political regimes and the things that corrupt and strengthen each one; “to know what regime is advantageous on the basis of past history but also to know the regimes in effect in other city-states, observing what regimes are suitable to what sort of people” belongs “to political science, not to rhetoric,” but nonetheless forms the basis of any prudent public speech (1360a). In his discussion of regimes he discusses democracy (which distributes offices by lot), oligarchy (which distributes offices to the wealthy), aristocracy (wherein offices go to the educated), and monarchy (ruled either by one person bound by custom and law or by a tyrant, whose power is “unlimited” (1365a-b).

With respect to the end or telos he aims at, the rhetorician will understand that “just about every person in private and all people in common” aim at eudaimonia or happiness, by which Aristotle means “good activity combined with virtue, or self-sufficiency in living or the most pleasant life consistent with safety, or abundance of possessions and bodies along with the power to protect and make effective use of them” (1360b); everyone agrees that happiness consists of one or more of these things. With respect to the means to that end, the political or deliberative rhetorician should aim at the advantageous, which is a “good,” by which Aristotle means “whatever is chosen for itself and that for the sake of which we choose something else and what everything having perception or intelligence aims at what everything would [aim at] if it could acquire intelligence” (1362a). The virtues “are necessarily a good; for those having them are well-off in regard to them, and virtues are productive of good things and matters of action” (1362a). His list of the virtues generally follows the more extensive account offered in the Nicomachean Ethics; consistent with his politics of moderation, Aristotle propounds his famous ethics of moderation, the ‘mean between the extremes’. Persuasive arguments will appeal to the inclinations of the type of persons addressed—victory, honor, money—while seeking to temper these loves, lest they run to self-destruction. He commends a sober realism, reminding his readers that “the possible is greater than the impossible, for one is useful in itself, the other not” (1365a). In view of the actual city in which the speaker lives, one “should not forget the purpose of each regime; for choices are based on it. the purpose of democracy is freedom, of oligarchy wealth, of aristocracy things related to education an the traditions of law, of tyranny self-preservation” (1366a). Given these purposes, each regime fosters a certain ethos or character, and a prudent speaker will recall that “the character distinctive to each is necessarily most persuasive to each” (1366a). To this the speaker must appeal, even as he aims at moderating its extremes.

This leads Aristotle to a discussion of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame. He defines virtue as “an ability… that is productive and preservative of goods” an ability for “doing good” in “all ways in all things” (1366a). Since rhetoric aims at moving listeners to action, the “virtue of intelligence whereby people are able to plan well for happiness in regard to the good and bad things” (1366b), prudence, should characterize the rhetorician who would strengthen this ability in his listeners. Virtuous character and actions generally deserve honor; “praise” or epainos means speech in praise of character, “encomium” speech in praise of actions. “The deeds are signs of the person’s habitual character” (1367b); virtue is then an ability strengthened by good habits. Because imitate what is praised, imitation of virtue, if repeated, will become habitual. “Duties and studies and exertions are painful,” but “habit makes them pleasurable” (1370a). The form of speech heard in epideictic rhetoric is “amplification”; it “aims to show superiority” (1368a). This contrasts with the form of speech best in deliberative speeches, which is example, and that best in judicial speeches, enthymeme. Examples get us thinking of how to choose; enthymemes get us thinking about proof, evidence.

Judicial speech consists of accusation and defense. Enthymemes here should derive from the purposes for which persons do wrong, how such persons are mentally disposed, and what kind of persons wrongdoers do wrong to. “Vice and weakness are the reasons why people make the choice of harming and doing bad things” (1368b); actions impelled by necessity or compulsion or nature do not amount to criminal actions. But “those who think they can do wrong without penalty” often speak well, have many friends and/or wealth; they “think they can get away with [wrongdoing]” (1372a). Their victims are the opposite: friendless, moneyless, and inarticulate (1372b-1373a). Because judicial speech particularly addresses matters of justice and injustice, Aristotle offers a definition of justice suitable for the courtroom: obedience to the law. He names two kinds of law: “specific” law, the kind deliberately enacted by the regime and thus “defined by each people in reference to themselves,” and “common” law, “based on nature, for there is in nature a common principle of the just and unjust that all people in some way divine, even if they have no association of commerce with each other” (1373b). This is the origin of what came to be called “natural law,” a notion that appears nowhere in the Nicomachean Ethics or the Politics, but which fits well with the discussion of judicial speech here (see Arnhart, 104-105). Offenses against law may be directed either at individuals within the polis or at the polis itself (1373b).

“Fairness” or equity “goes beyond the written law” (1374a). As befits the author of the Nicomachean Ethics, where the ethical importance of circumstances receives considerable attention—an action usually wrong might be right in certain circumstances, as for example killing in self-defense—Aristotle praises those “forgiving of human weakness,” urging speakers to “look not to the law” in every case “but to the legislator and not to the word but to the intent of the legislator, and not to the action but to the deliberate purpose and not to the part to the whole, not [looking at] what a person is now but what he has been always or for the most part” (1374b). The equitable person will “bear up when wronged,” “go into arbitration rather than to court” (1374b). “If the written law is contrary to the facts [of the case], one must use common law and argument based on fairness as being more just” (1375a), closer to the “common” or natural law. This emphasis on equity extends to the means by which a court should collect evidence; Aristotle opposes torture, urging that speakers in court reject evidence gathered in that way as unreliable (1376b-1377a).

If Book I centers on the kinds of arguments speakers should use, Book II centers on ethos, the character of the speaker, which “makes much difference in regard to persuasion” (1377b) and also pathos, the emotions of the listeners. “There are three things we trust other than logical demonstration”: the character-qualities of prudence and of virtue generally, and the emotionally appealing quality of eunonia or goodwill. “A person seeming to have these qualities is necessarily persuasive to the hearers” (1378a); in the Rhetoric, “seeming” often comes up, because Aristotle knows as well as Machiavelli that men see what you appear to be, not always (or even usually) what you are. The difference between the two philosophers lies in the uses to which they put that observation.

Unlike arguments, which appeal to reason (which is painless), the emotions “are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure”; these include “anger, pity, fear, and other such things and their opposites” (1378a). Emotions should be considered from three angles: the state of mind of those in the grip of emotion; those on whom their emotions are fixed; the reasons for which they have fixed their emotions on those persons. A speaker must appeal to his listeners’ emotions, not only their reason, so to neglect any of these angles would cause his speech to fail. Modern political philosophers—Thomas Hobbes above all—have esteemed the Rhetoric‘s account of the emotions, committed as they are to the manipulation of human nature, and conceiving of human nature as primarily an impassioned thing. As Arnhart remarks, Aristotle proceeds differently. “Aristotle shows how the passions can be led to an integral part of enthymetic argument”; while “the sophist excites the passions to direct his listeners from rational deliberation, the Aristotelian speaker controls the passions by reasoning with his listeners” (112). This can happen because “men are continually talked into or out of their passions, either by themselves or by others. Passions do respond to arguments,” unlike bodily sensation and appetites (114).

Aristotle discusses seven pairs of contrasting passions. Pairings of opposites suggests the possibility of balancing. He first pairs anger and calmness, anger being the most immediately dangerous of the passions, whether in the courts or in assemblies. Anger is “desire, accompanied by distress, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous slight that was directed, without justification, against oneself or those near to one” (1378a). Dwelling on retaliation also brings “a kind of pleasure” (1378b). On the level of opinion, anger leads to belittling, whether in the form of contempt, spite, or insult. The young and the rich especially love insult, “for by insulting they think they are superior” (1378b). Those belittled also feel anger, rulers and the well-born most of all, because they deem themselves worthy of great respect. Interestingly, even philosophers feel anger toward those who speak “against philosophy,” “taking pride in philosophy” (1379a)—likely another glance at Socrates’ confrontation with the jury that convicted him of impiety and corrupting the young. Generally, everyone becomes anger at the belittlement of what they take pride in, and even more so “if they suspect they do not really have” what they take pride in (1379)! For the speaker, this suggests that “it might be needful in speech to put [the listeners] in the state of mine of those who are inclined to anger and to show one’s opponents as responsible for those things that are the causes of anger and that they are the sort of people against whom anger is directed” (1380a).

Anger’s opposite, calmness, “a settling down and quieting of anger” (1380a), prevails when we contemplate “all who regard [us] as [we] ourselves would” (1380a) and also when those who have wronged or offended us “confess themselves justly punished” (1380a). If anger entails belittling, calmness entails respect. “Those wishing to instill calmness [in his listeners] should speak from these topics; they produce such a feeling in them by having made them regard those with whom they are angry as either persons to be feared or worthy of respect or benefactors or involuntary actor or as very grieved by what they have done” (1380b).

The second pair of emotions, friendliness and enmity, center on loving, and whether it is returned or rejected. “A friend is one who loves and is loved in return,” and in that reciprocal love we want what we think are good things for our friend, “not what one thinks benefits oneself” (1381a). Virtues attract friendship, especially liberality, courage, justice, and moderation. We are friendly with “those who are ready to make or receive a joke,” “able to be kidded and kidding in good sport” (1381a). At the same time, friends take the same things seriously, those “who long for the same things when it is possible to share them at the same time” (1381b). Friends “join in doing good” (1381b). Enmity arises from the opposites of these conditions. Aristotle distinguishes between enmity founded on anger, a painful emotion, and enmity founded on hatred, which does not pain the one who hates.

Fear and confidence form the third pair. “A sort of pain or agitation derived from the imagination of a future destructive or painful evil”—in the near future, not far removed—fear derives from a perception of ill-will in another combined with his power to do something about it (1382a). There is much to fear from our fellow human beings, as “most people are rather bad, slaves of profitmaking, and cowardly in danger” (1382b). With Machiavelli and John Calvin, Aristotle knows that “human beings usually do wrong when they can” (1382b). We should especially fear those among us who do not rage but remain “calm”—the dissembling and the unscrupulous—”for with these it is unclear if they are close [to acting]” (1382b). Fear has a good side, however. It “makes people inclined to deliberation” (1383a). A speaker who wants to put his listeners in a deliberative frame of mind might well “make them realize that they are liable to suffering” (1383a). Confidence arises in those who “have not been put to the test” and in those who have the resources needed to pass it (1383a). Dangers at sea do not faze those who have never undergone them or those who have undergone them many times. People also feel confident if they have done no wrong, or few wrongs, and generally “if their relationship to the gods is good, both as known from signs and oracles and in other ways” (1383b). One can infer from this that a speaker who wants his listeners to face danger with confidence will invoke the favor of the gods.

Shame and shamelessness, the fourth pair of emotions, derive from the social aspect of human nature. Shame is pain or agitation at those evils which seem “to bring a person into disrespect,” whereas shamelessness belittles such evils, or doesn’t care about them (1383b). Actions resulting from vice—particularly injustice, licentiousness, or greed—bring us to shame. More subtly, Aristotle observes that we feel ashamed if we don’t “share in the fine things of which all have a share or all those like oneself or most of them”—”one’s equals,” members of the same nation, fellow citizens, or the same age or family (1383b). And doubly so if it seems to be our own fault. Arnhart suggests that shame and shamelessness are central to Aristotle’s list because the Rhetoric deals with emotions as they are shaped by the civic training of the laws, and this pair of emotions form the psychological basis for the difference between a law-abiding citizen and an outlaw (130).

Kindness and unkindness form the fifth pair, kindness being a willingness to serve the needy, and “not in return for anything” (1385a). A kind person will “stand by someone in poverty and those in exile” (1385a). Unkind persons expect repayment in kind; if you go bankrupt or are expelled from the polis they tend not to know you, anymore. After all, in those circumstances what can you do for them?

Pity and indignation differ from kindness and unkindness because they involve self-regard rather than self-interest, a concern for one’s person rather than for one’s property. Pity is “pain at an apparently destructive or painful evil happening to one who does not deserve it and which a person might expect himself or one of his own to suffer, and this when it seems close at hand” (1385b). We feel pity for good people, and for those like ourselves. “The situation here is analogous to that of friendship,” Arnhart remarks, “in which love of others arises from love of oneself” (131). We feel indignation at the success of bad people. We are likely to feel it at the newly rich than those loaded with ‘old money,’ because “what is long established seems close to nature,” thus better, more acceptable (1387a). We feel indignant at persons of lesser worth; for example, a musician who wrangles with a just man will arouse indignation because “justice is better than music” (1387b). Conversely, person who know themselves to be ‘of no account’ seldom feel indignation; “the servile, the worthless and the unambitious are not given to indignation, for there is nothing of which they regard themselves as worthy” (1387b).

The seventh pair of emotions, envy and emulation, continue in this vein of men’s social inclinations. Envy resembles shame in that it registers distress at the success of one’s equals who have attained good things when you have not. “Small-souled” or petty people often feel envy because “all things seem great to them” (1387b). But most people feel envy most often in matters of honor and love. We also envy those who naturally enjoy what we once did; “this is why the older [envy] the young” (1388a), sighing that youth is wasted on them, rather than seeing that youth is necessary to them for the sake of recouping their many blunders. By contrast, emulation is “a good thing and characteristic of good people,” especially “great-souled” or magnanimous ones (1388a). Emulation registers distress at not having what one’s equals have but then aspiring to have those things and not wishing that others do not have them.

Aristotle next begins an ascent from the passions, returning to a consideration of character first as relating to nature and specifically to age, then as relating to family status, then as relating to wealth, and finally as relating to political power. Our age influences our character. The young “are prone to desires and inclined to do whatever they desire,” especially in pursuing their sexual desires (1389a). In all things they prove “unable to resist their impulses,” loving not only beautiful bodies but honor and victory even more than honor, “for youth longs for [the] superiority” their inferiority in years has denied them (1389a). They don’t love money because “they have not yet experienced want,” and they are not cynical because they have “not yet seen much wickedness” (1389a). Trusting and hopeful, “like those drinking wine, the young are heated by their nature,” and tend toward wishful thinking (1389a). They are magnanimous because “they have not been worn down by life” and “think they know everything and strongly insist on it” precisely because they don’t know much (1389a-b). Their wittiness tracks their quest for superiority, “for wit is cultured insolence” (1389b).

Old people are the opposite not only in years but in character—less sure of themselves, cynical, suspicious. “They love as if they would one day hate and hate as if they would one day love,” having lost the whole-heartedness of youth (1389b). They have been worn down by life, becoming small-souled as a result. They are fearful, cold-blooded; “age has prepared the way for cowardice, for fear is a kind of chilling” (1389b). “They are more fond of themselves than is right,” living for the small advantage and committing wrongs not out of insolence but malice (1390a). Grumpiness suits them; “they are querulous and not witty nor fond of laughter” (1390a). Prudent speakers who appeal to the aspirations of youth will talk to the elderly about Social Security.

Men in the prime of life (physically between thirty and thirty-five years of age, intellectually at about forty-nine) “combine prudence with courage and courage with prudence, while among the young and old those things are separated” (1390b). Arnhart notes the brevity of this chapter and the narrow age limits to men in their prime, speculating that Aristotle implies that “only philosophic souls can combine the exuberance of youth with the steadiness of old age” and sustain that balance (137).

Good birth, a good that “comes from chance” rather than nature, means “rank in society that derives from ancestors” (1390b). It too influences character, supposedly in a good way but not always. “Many” of the well-born “are worthless” by nature (1390b), the silver spoons stuck in their mouths from birth provide no nutrition to their souls. The virtuous among the well-born, one ventures to suppose, derive their goodness from emulation and education.

Sheer wealth is still further removed from nature, having no necessary connection with birth, with family. The character of the wealthy is “plain for all to see”: insolent, arrogant, ostentatious and pretentious, vulgar, “they think everybody else has the same opinions as they do” (1391a). “At the same time, this feeling is reasonable”—recall Arnhart’s observation that Aristotle looks for some form of reason even in the emotions, and even more in character—because “there are many who need what they have” (1391a). Asked if is better to be rich or wise, Simonides the poet somewhat acerbically intoned, “To be rich, for one sees the wise waiting at the doors of the rich” (1391a). Aristotle is less amused; “the character that comes from wealth is that of a lucky fool” (1391a). The newly-rich are the worst, “lack[ing] education in the use of wealth” and thus given to insolence and immoderation (1391a). The newly-rich trap themselves permanently in the vices of youth, self-contradictorily imagining themselves playboy-philosophers.

And finally there is the character of the powerful. They have “some characteristics that are the same as wealth, some that are better” (1391a). More manly and ambitious than the rich, and often conscious of the responsibilities attendant to their station, the powerful will behave with dignity and often with moderation. But “if they commit wrong, they do it on a large, not a small, scale” (1391a). For better or for worse, they think big. Generally, with both the wealthy and the powerful “there is one very good characteristic” following from their good fortune: “these people are lovers of the gods and have a special relation to divinity, having faith in the gods because of the benefits that have come to them from fortune” (1391a-b).

Speaking of the elevation of the soul as it looks to the divine, Aristotle now moves from character to reason, back to enthymemes. Rightly guided emotions and well-developed character, in part guided and developed by reasonable speech, can bring citizens to the sound judgments in the courtroom and the assembly, persuasive speech being directed precisely toward bringing listeners to arrive at such judgments. Deliberative, demonstrative, and judicial rhetoric all aim at this, and Aristotle outlines several features common to rhetoric generally, whatever its genre. These include “magnitude,” by which he means the use of magnification and diminution of persons and actions, and assessments of possibility, impossibility, and above all probability, assessments which induce listeners to think and indeed to think practically and not in terms of their fond hopes or chilling fears.

Aristotle wants speakers to keep the minds and hearts of their listeners in the real world. Hence the four “sources” of enthymemes he identifies are all ‘down-to-earth’: probabilities, examples or parallels, and the two kinds of “signs” or evidence, “necessary” and “fallible.” Exemplary parallels may be drawn from the past—what we would call parallels or analogies drawn from history, such as the need to respond to an enemy’s military buildup with one of your own, as was so conspicuously not done in Europe or the United States in the 1930s—or they may be drawn from fables, such as the stories of Aesop—memorable tales generally accepted as specimens of prudential wisdom. Fables work somewhat like maxims, “assertion[s] of generality” (1395a) which may come at the end of a fable; if you add a reason or a cause to the maxim you will have an enthymeme. Both fables and maxims appeal to the “assumptions people have”; maxims “then speak in general terms consistent with these views” (1395a), adding plausibility to what the speaker says.

Enthymemes or “rhetorical syllogisms” can be demonstrative or refutative. Aristotle lists 28 strategies of argument employed in them. These include drawing out the consequences of a proposed action, spotting contradictions in your opponent’s argument, linking cause to effect, and defining terms. In his discussion of definition, Aristotle points to Socrates, who saw the importance of ‘What is?’ questions. Arnhart remarks that the chapter on definition, “more than any other, points to the problem of Socratic rhetoric” (148) and to the animus against philosophers who insist on asking awkward questions like “What is the divine?” (1398a), questions that raise suspicions about their piety. Sophists do that, too, often adding challenges to “public standards of justice as merely conventional” (152). But “unlike the sophists, Socrates thinks that certain ends of nature require the aid of convention for their fulfillment” (152), and Aristotle, with his way of including appeals to emotions and character within a rhetoric framed by enthymetic syllogisms, evidently concurs. “It is clear,” Arnhart writes, “that rhetorical reasoning may be judged by the standards of syllogistic logic” (160).

In Book III Aristotle turns to lexis, to how to say things; the three dimensions of lexis are delivery, literary style, and the arrangement or structure of the speech. “It is not enough to have a supply of things to say, but it is necessary to say it in the right way” (1403b). Although matters of delivery may seem trivial to a serious man, they can be crucial to success “because of the corruption of the citizens” (1404a), which comes as much to see a show as to weigh policy proposals. Audiences have been corrupted in this respect by the poets, who traditionally memorized their poems and pronounced their “sweet nothings” with bardic self-assurance (1404a). Aristotle insists that “the lexis of prose differs from that of poetry” (1404a) because its virtue is clarity. “Authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally,” minimizing the use of strange words, clever puns, and neologisms. He admits metaphor because “all people carry on their conversations in metaphors” (1404b); for that reason, their use isn’t showy. Metaphors can also engage the mind in a proto-philosophic activity: “if “transferred from things that are related but not obviously so,” they do something philosophers do, namely, “to observe the likeness even in things very different” (1412a). He quotes a Pythagorean philosopher who likened an arbiter to an altar because “one who has been wronged flies to both” (1412a).

Aristotle takes care to make his stylistic recommendations consistent with his guiding intention to bring reasoning into rhetoric. He commends propriety to speakers, advising them to measure appeals to emotion and to character in accordance with the subject-matter. Don’t imitate the tragic poet Cleophon; “some of what he used to say is like calling a fig ‘Madame'” (1408a). Prose has its own rhythms, and in this as in so much else “all things are limited by number” (1408b)—a point poets too do well to appreciate. He praises the “periodic” style of rhetoric, by which he means exactly the opposite of Cicero’s sense of the word. Instead of long and complex sentences, Aristotle wants them to write “an expression having a beginning and an end in itself and a magnitude easily taken in at a glance” (1409a).

Different styles go with different genres of rhetoric. Written statements are more precise than performed ones, which are “very much a matter of delivery” (1413b). Performed speeches may read poorly when reduced to writing; an American might think of Henry Clay, by all accounts a perfect spellbinder on the floor of the United States Senate, but whose speeches seem rather thin in substance on the printed page. Performed speeches themselves fall into two categories, the “ethical” or character-centered and the “emotional” (1413b), the first more sober than the second.

Aristotle concludes his discussion of the formal characteristics of speeches with a discussion of their structure or taxis. Simply put, the speaker should state his subject and then demonstrate his claims. In epideictic speeches, his introduction should identify who are what is to be praised or blamed; in judicial speeches, he should offer a sample of the argument to come in order to clarify his purpose. As for deliberative speeches, an introduction isn’t necessary because the listeners already know the topic. Deliberative speeches also need little or no narrative (“no one narrates future events” [1417b]), but epideictic and judicial speeches do, because narrative can illustrate character, and those kinds of speeches character is very much at issue. In an aside, Aristotle mentions that mathematical works have no moral character because they treat necessities, not matters of deliberate choice, whereas Socratic dialogues do have such a character and do address matters of deliberate choice. And they do have narrative frames. Every narrative will point to reasons for action, but the speaker must take care to make these plausible to his listeners; remember that “people do not believe anyone does anything willingly except what is advantageous” (1417a).

The kind of proofs offered also vary from genre to genre. Epideictic speeches will amplify (or, in a critical speech, diminish)  the good and advantageous aspects of the persons or deeds expounded. Deliberative speeches should focus on probabilities and examples, whereas judicial speeches should feature enthymemes above all else. Enthymeme doesn’t go so well in the other two genres because “logical demonstration has neither ethos nor moral purpose” (1418a). The counterpart of proof is interrogation, whereby the speaker tests the arguments of his adversary. When Meletus denied that Socrates believed in gods, Socrates asked him if daimones were not children of the gods. Meletus admitted that they are, and Socrates, who often mentioned his guardian daimon, had him cornered: “Does anybody think there are children of gods but no gods?” (1419a). Aristotle urges care in interrogation, inasmuch as if your adversary comes up with an apt reply your rhetorical goose will be cooked. Humor, too, should be used with care. “Irony is a more suitable style for civilized people than clowning, since someone who is ironic is making the joke to his own standard, while someone who is clownish is making it to that of someone else” (1419b); listeners distrust servility in a speaker.

An epilogue should dispose the hearer favorably toward the speaker, unfavorable toward the adversary, amplify one’s own arguments and minimize his, move the listeners emotionally, and remind them of the main points of the argument. Reminding will impress the listeners with your credibility; you have delivered on the promises you made at the beginning of your speech.

Arnhart concludes his commentary with two points for his audience, which consists not of would-be rhetoricians but political scientists. First, political reality is contingent, based on choices as well as necessities. “To understand these choices, the political scientist must study them as they are manifest in common opinions,” inasmuch as they cannot be understood as if they were physical objects perceived by the senses (186-187). Second, all reasoning—theoretical as well as practical—”depends upon commonsense opinions” or presuppositions; these “cannot be proven because they are the source of all proofs” (187). “The Hobbesian political scientist know more than he will admit (188), which a polite way of hinting that he knows less than he will say.

 

 

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Translated with preface, notes, and an interpretive essay by Charles E. Butterworth. Hardcover editions: New York: New York University Press, 1979. Softcover edition: New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

“[C]ompletely faithful to Rousseau’s manuscript,” according to translator and editor Charles E. Butterworth, this edition of the Reveries does justice to a philosopher in the best way most of us can: by letting him speak for himself. Rousseau insists on that—the first word of the Reveries is “I”—but as if to confirm its author’s blackest suspicions of men, even the French editions of this “final statement of his thought” (ix) contain numerous errors, errors uncorrected in the two centuries since its posthumous publication. Butterworth gives us the real text of the Reveries for the first time, albeit translated.

“I am now alone on earth,” Rousseau begins, “no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend or society other than myself” (1). Detached from others, “what am I?” he asks—posing the question of his nature so as to assume man’s natural asociality, while simultaneously courting men’s pity. If, as Rousseau asserts elsewhere in his writings, human nature is fundamentally asocial, then the Solitary Walker has returned to man’s natural state, despite being “the most sociable and the most lovable of humans” (1). Among the themes of the First Walk are hope and fear, sentiments often associated with religious faith. Resigned to his exile from human society, Rousseau has abandoned hope in his fellow men for tranquility. That exile has also banished his fears; no one can injure him any more than they have already done. He has undergone a kind of creation, falling from order to chaos to a new order, now “unperturbed, like God Himself” (5), beyond hope and fear—both created and Creator. The Solitary Walker does not walk with God, but as a sort of god. He “find[s] consolation, hope and peace only in myself” (5). He even offers a prayer to himself: “Let me give myself up entirely to the sweetness of conversing with my soul, since that is the only thing men cannot take away from me” (5-6). Modestly (and, it will prove, falsely) averring that this book is “only a shapeless diary of my reveries,” a mere “appendix to my Confessions” (6), he intends by writing it “to make myself aware of the modifications of my soul and their sequence” (7). “My enterprise is the same as Montaigne’s, but my goal is the complete opposite of his: he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself” (7). It so happens that Montaigne actually said that he wrote for himself alone, but Rousseau doubts him. We may then be permitted to doubt Rousseau. This notwithstanding, Rousseau’s “self” may indeed differ radically from that of Montaigne, which seeks, among other things to impress us with its erudition, to ‘socialize’ with poets, philosophers, historians of the past.

But is Rousseau entirely alone? In the Second Walk, he writes that “These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in he day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed” (12)—the obvious implication being that there are other hours of the day when he is not solitary. Be this as it may, to be alone and meditating proves that “the source of true happiness is within us” (13). The Solitary Walker tranquilly meditates on his memories, but the memory he recalls turns out to be a memory of an unusual sort: a memory of lost memory. Knocked over in a collision with a large dog, and rendered unconscious, as he regained consciousness he had the feeling of being born—born again, so to speak, a fortunate fall indeed. “I knew neither who I was nor where I was; I felt neither injury, fear, or worry,” only “rapturous calm” (16). The remainder of the Second Walk consists of less tranquil memories, memories of his persecutors, those who plotted against him to push him out of society. Most prominent among these was a woman, perhaps Eve-like in her betrayal?

Consistent with true wisdom acquired in his second birth, in the Third Walk Rousseau condemns the wisdom that comes with age. By the time we acquire it we are ready not for life but for death—a glance, perhaps, at the Socratic claim that philosophy teaches one to learn how to die. Nor is true philosophy social; thinkers who write for others do not know themselves but act out of “literary vainglory” (31)—a dart aimed again at Montaigne, among others. Nor will Descartes do. Reading the “modern philosophers” didn’t remove Rousseau’s doubts or end his irresolution but rather shook “all the certainty I thought I had concerning the things that were most important for me to know” (32). So much for the clear and distinct ideas offered by the Cartesians. Hope and fear determine the content of one’s faith, Rousseau argues, implicitly rejecting the concept of grace and also the Christian doctrine of divine punishment for erroneous faith. If, after consulting “one’s own feeling” and “choos[ing] it with all the maturity of judgment one can put into it,” we nonetheless “fall into error,” we “could not justly suffer the penalty, since we would not be at fault (34). This puts his own sense of justice against that of the Christian God. Butterworth observes that “the philosopher is necessarily something of a solitary walker,” separate from the religion that binds society (178).

Rousseau makes this separation even more apparent in the Fourth Walk, which he begins by announcing that Plutarch is “the author who grips and benefits me most,” and not (for example) Matthew, Mark, Paul, Luke, or John. On the question of truth and knowledge, his criterion is justice, as determined by “moral instinct,” not reason (48). Neither the divine Logos of the Gospels nor the logic of the philosophers reveals truth. Considering both self-deception and deception of others, Rousseau supplements his memory of his betrayal by a woman with a memory of having betrayed one, when he lied about a theft he committed and implicated an innocent chambermaid in the crime. But he immediately raises the question of whether we owe the truth to others. If one “gives counterfeit money to a man to whom he owes nothing, he undoubtedly deceives the man, but he does not rob him” (45). He concludes that we owe others the truth when it affects justice; a truth concerning something that does not affect justice, an “idle fact” (46), is not owed to another at all. “Truth stripped of every kind of possible usefulness cannot therefore be a thing owed, and consequently he who suppresses it or disguises it does not lie at all” (46). Conversely, “useful fictions” (including the stories in the Reveries?) are “true lies” (48). On this, Butterworth observes that Rousseau can prudently resolve to lie no more because he now lives in solitude (187)—or perhaps more precisely, lives in part-time solitude.

Rousseau’s newborn faith includes a paradise. As fortune would have it, it’s named St. Peter’s Island, and the Fifth Walk contains its description. This paradise exists in this life, not in the next, and it requires only an appreciation of “the sentiment of existence” to achieve (69), not any striving for a telos beyond ourselves, nor any filling of the soul by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, Rousseau teaches that “we are sufficient to ourselves, like God” (69). “I would like this instant to last forever” (68): an eternal present. Reverie consists of a “thorough conjunction” of fictions and realities, he also teaches. Butterworth observes that this “passively sensual” experience discards reason, traditional faith, and action. On this rock Rousseau builds his church. If philosophy consists of a rational ascent from the cave of public opinions and customs, and if the first political philosophers took this ascent to be the dialectical investigation of those opinions, then it is fair to say that philosophers beginning with Machiavelli took a different turn. Machiavelli advises the Prince not so much to engage the opinions and customs of his city but to withdraw from them—more, to withdraw from his own beliefs and feelings in order to consult his inner nerve of libido dominandi. Philosophers following in this Machiavellian line undertake a similar mental operation, whether it be Descartes’s cogito ergo sum or Hobbes’s fear of violent death or Locke’s “simple ideas” or sense impressions. Rousseau undertakes the same inner-looking quest, the same attempt to eschew public opinion in the search for a solid, custom-uncluttered starting point for thought, while playfully mocking his predecessors, philosophic and Christian alike.

And so, in the Sixth Walk, he asserts, “There is hardly any of our automatic impulses whose cause we could not find in our heart, if we only knew how to look for it (74). Having treated faith and hope in the Third Walk, he now turns to the third theological virtue, charity. His charity has a natural, not divinely inspired character; it is a sentiment that society corrupts by transforming into a duty. Rousseau prefers to treat men with “a universal and perfectly disinterested benevolence” (81), although he modestly declines to accept, even in fiction, the godlike power of the ring of Gyges to go with this godlike morality. Could one say that Rousseau’s literary skill is a sort of ring of Gyges, making him elusive if not invisible to many readers, while granting him near-creative power over others? Butterworth remarks Rousseau teaching his readers that “By nature, all men are good.” he makes this observation without explicitly contrasting it with the Christian teaching. While thus rejecting social duties (“I have never been truly suited for civil society where everything is annoyance, obligation, and duty” {83]), Rousseau also rejects what Aristotle calls the moral failing of democrats, namely, to define freedom as doing what one wants. “I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do” (84). This negative freedom permits a sort of virtue, a virtue animated by natural sentiments susceptible to corruption by society and its opinions. We are led to suppose that Rousseau never would have betrayed that chambermaid if he had not been so worried about what others thought of him, and what they might do to him. Such temptations can be resisted only if you walk away, in solitude, leaving servility to others behind along with the concomitant fearful need to dominate them. This is Rousseau’s reply to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and other, previous philosophic individualists, and it is his reply in advance to the philosopher who set out to ennoble their teachings, Friedrich Nietzsche.

Considering human nature sans custom will make members of a predominantly Christian society think of Eden. In the Seventh Walk Rousseau turns to considering the larger nature, outside civil society, which encompasses human nature. He makes this turn while leaving ratiocination behind. “I have always thought rather deeply, but rarely with pleasure, almost always against my liking, and as though by force” (91); thinking feels suspiciously like socially-imposed duties feel. “Reverie relaxes and amuses me; reflection tires and saddens me; thinking always was a painful and charmless occupation for me” (91). And so when the Solitary Walker explores his Edenic island, he botanizes in a way unlike that of Adam (charged with the duty of classifying plants) or of modern scientists (who search for their medicinal properties, often for material interest, profit). He instead appreciates their color and structure—what would soon be called their esthetic qualities. “My ideas are now almost nothing but sensations, and the sphere of my understanding does not transcend the objects which immediately surround me” (96); Rousseau soaks in Locke’s simple ideas without striving for the complex ones. Botany, the study of plants on the surface of the earth, avoids the unhealthy, effortful study of minerals in the earth and the bloody vivisection of zoology; it is “a study for an idle and lazy solitary person” (98), so long as he resists the temptation to put what he learns to some use, whether for material profit or worse, for fame, for the satisfaction of amour-propre. On the seventh day, Rousseau rests content.

He can do so because in his botanical study he tastes fruit supposed poisonous, which turns out not to be so. “No pleasant-tasting natural product” is harmful “to the body” (102). He is silent concerning the soul. Botany “recalls to me both my youth and my innocent pleasures” (103); one might call it the prelapserian science. Butterworth remarks, “Because [Rousseau] does not think it possible to explain the whole, he insists that all one can do is to enjoy being art of the whole” (211).

The Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Walks are unfinished—unintentionally so, as far as anyone can tell. The Eighth Walk concerns fortune, which Rousseau calls the basis of public opinion, and which Machiavelli had adjured the Prince to conquer. “I no longer saw in [the public’s “interior dispositions”] anything more than randomly moved masses, destitute of all morality with respect to me” (114), mere products of passions and the prejudices those passions produce; “even when [people] judge well, these good judgment still frequently arise from a bad principle” (113). An “innocent and persecuted man” such as himself had better withdraw “into [his] own soul,” renouncing the “comparisons and preferences” that society with its instrument, amour-propre, wields so foolishly (116). “All other old men are worried about everything; I am worried about nothing” (117). “As soon as I find myself under the trees and in the midst of greenery,” away from society, “I believe I am in an earthly paradise” (119).

Insofar as public happiness or civil contentment is possible, it requires equality, according to the Rousseauian implication uncovered by Butterworth in his interpretation of the Ninth Walk. Inequality requires forceful, hurtful assertion of the superior over the inferior, and may provoke the forceful, hurtful rebellion of the inferior against the superior. As all atoms are created equal, one might add that this equality has a kind of justice to it. (If we become curious about what such a civil society might look like, that is what the Social Contract is for). For a Rousseau, of course, a different justice applies. He is sufficiently bold to tell us that he writes his Tenth Walk on Palm Sunday, the fiftieth anniversary of the day he first met his mistress, Madame de Warens. The Solitary Walker’s entry into the new Jerusalem coincides with his memory of his Eve. The final word of the Reveries, by intention or fortune, is “her”. This completes his reverie of paradise.

Butterworth concludes that what Rousseau embraces philosophically as his (as it were) spiritual mistress is a refined nihilism. Be that as it may, Rousseau does set out to annihilate previous religious and philosophic teachings, even as he follows the path of ‘individualism’ set down by Machiavelli.

Review of George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

 

Founded in 1923 in Frankfurt Germany, the Institute for Social Research “developed a unique and powerful critique of modern life,” providing “the basis of much of the student movement of the 1960s” (13). Its luminaries included Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and (most famously) Herbert Marcuse; thinkers closely associated with the Frankfurt School included Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm.
George Friedman wrote this book under the guidance of the late Werner Dannhauser, that witty and humane scholar whose mastery of Nietzsche must have proved helpful, inasmuch as the Frankfurt School pioneered the appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought by the ‘Left.’ This was a move by no means obvious to make, but the technologized horrors of the First World War convinced many socialists that Marxian social-class analyses could not adequately explain the modern world. By the time Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944, revulsion against Nazi and Communist mass-murder had convinced anyone with eyes to see that the great diagnostician of nihilism spoke more immediately and more profoundly to the crisis of the West than anything Marx had to say.
On a visit to Auschwitz, I saw the remains of a small death factory. Nearby, at Birkenau, I saw a vast space where the Nazis undertook murder on a truly industrial scale. And all so meticulously organized. “In our time,” Friedman writes, “we have discovered the darker side of reason. We have found that along with great triumphs, reason has also brought great brutality. The Frankfurt School set itself the task of defining the relationship between reason and brutality” (13-14). From Machiavelli, who advises the prince to pull back from all beliefs and sentiments in order to master Fortuna, to Bacon, who would harness experimental science in order to conquer nature for the relief of man’s estate, and culminating in Hegel, who claimed that the course of events itself unfolded rationally, ‘dialectically,’ and had reached its logical conclusion in his own system of thought—replacing philosophy or the love of wisdom with sagacity, wisdom itself—”modern philosophy… is marked by a radical self-confidence” (14). It “believes that all things could be as they ought to be,” that “the real and the rational had become one” (14).
But had it? Reason understood as modern rationalism has indeed given human beings power over nature. But given that power, how shall we use it? The world wars and the concentration camps show that scientific, world-transforming rationalism can serve the purposes of insane tyrants as well as humane democrats. Hegel pointed to the administrative state as the means of making societies rational, but Auschwitz deployed the science of administration in a slaughterhouse for humans. “Auschwitz was a rational place, but it was not a reasonable one” (15). “It was this unreasonable rationality, this modern paradox, that was the great concern of the Frankfurt School,” whose members saw in Auschwitz the abandonment of critical reason (16). To make social science ‘value-free,’ as social scientists had tried all too successfully to do, left social science intellectually and morally powerless against the use of social science by tyrants.
Accordingly, “the Frankfurt School denied modernity’s complacent certainty of its progressive excellence”—its claim that the course of events or ‘History’ unfolds logically to a good conclusion–while nonetheless “affirm[ing] modernity’s confidence that all things human could be known, or at least sensed, however dark their origins.” These scholars “condemned modernity’s sense of itself without denying its project”—which is probably why Friedman carefully avoids using the fashionable term ‘postmodernism’ to describe them (16).
The Frankfurt School followed a longstanding line of modern thought, beginning with Rousseau, which directs its ire at the characteristic modern social class, the bourgeoisie. In the Anglophone world alone, we have seen the Romantic poets, Victorian essayists like Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Arnold, and Ruskin, down through the ‘counterculture’ writers of the second half of the twentieth century, alit with loathing for the materialism and pedestrianism of bourgeois life. Frustratingly for these thinkers, the working class upon which anti-capitalists pinned their hopes have continually sided with the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie delivers the material goods that the workers want every bit as much as the businessmen do. And so the central dialectical clash of post-Rousseauian modernity has turned out to be not the bourgeoisie against the proletarians (as Marx and his followers expected) but the bourgeoisie against the ‘intellectuals’—very often the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, rebelling against the boring banality of life dedicated to comfortable self-preservation.
“The Frankfurt School took on as its political project an attack on bourgeois philistinism,” understanding that the real struggle was esthetic, not economic, a matter of sensibility not sense (18). Marxism in both its dictatorship-of-the-proletariat, Bolshevik form and its democratic-parliamentarian social-democracy form had failed by valorizing the same mindless ‘work ethic’ touted by the bourgeois. Bourgeois or modern-liberal thought had aimed its ire at religious fanaticism; in taming religious passion, it had gone a long way to conquering not just nature but the human sense of the sacred, making of religion into mere moralism.

Following Heidegger, the Frankfurt School approached philosophy through textual explication or “critical theory,” but “under the apparently dispassionate exegesis moved a radical purpose: to comprehend modernity in order to undermine it,” and to recover, through what seems at first an esthetic project, “a politics of principle rather that of mere effectiveness” (20)—”to formulate a theoretical exegesis of the sociocultural crisis of the contemporary world and to prepare the theoretical ground for practical activity” (22) freed from the morally neutral inability to exercise moral judgments which enabled the tyrannical enormity of Auschwitz to occur. Not in foolishly optimistic progressivist historicism but in a return—Friedman calls it “nostalgia”—to the ideational roots of modernity and even (in Benjamin’s case) to the pre-modernity of Judaism we can think and feel our way out of the “brutal catastrophe” of Marxist and other historicist rationalisms (25). The Frankfurt School urged modern man to move away from rationalist utopianism back, but also forward, to a renewed Messianism; “they craved the Messianic from the bitterest roots of historical despair” (26).

Friedman divides the body of his book into three parts: a nine-chapter section on the philosophic roots of the Frankfurt School (in which Heidegger appears as the central figure); four chapters on the problem of modernity; and three chapters on the “solution” to that problem, which is most emphatically not a ‘final’ solution in either the straightforward, Hegelian and Marxist sense of an ‘end of history’ or in the sinister genocidal sense we associate with Nazism. Indeed, the Frankfurt School’s distinctive break from the ‘Left’ philosophies and ideologies which they had imbibed may be seen in this refusal of historical finality, which they had come to associate with the tyrannies now described (following Mussolini) as ‘totalitarian.’ Out of “the complex of antibourgeois thought that emerged from the nineteenth century” (29), they “appropriate[d] the criticism of the mass”—the esthetic and political culture of democracy or egalitarianism—”for the Left” (30) (italics added). At the same time, they opposed the old Left, the Marxist Left, because “they did not share Marx’s idea that the perpetual rationalization of the human condition is a good and inevitable thing” (31).

What would later become known in the United States and elsewhere as the New Left selected a few thoughts from Marx while eschewing Marx’s proudest claim, to have discovered laws of historical development modeled on those of Hegel—complete with the notion of an unfolding ‘dialectical’ clash of opposites leading inevitably to the end, the purpose of that conflict. Having learned from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, “they simply were no longer Marxists in any ordinary sense” (37). They regarded Marx’s deterministic laws of history as themselves products of late capitalism, “not an insight into the nature of human history but rather an attitude of a corrupted age,” “humanly false and evil” (38). While retaining some of Marx’s class-based analysis of social development, they rejected the actual self-understanding of proletarians, which they regarded as bourgeois-too-bourgeois. Instead of claiming that proletarians and the middle classes would lose their false consciousness by their decline into impoverishment, as class divisions under capitalism widened, the Frankfurt School expected these classes to confront an ever-increasing sense of the meaninglessness of lives devoted to comfortable self-preservation. Socialism will occur not because social change will lead to psychic transformation but rather psychic transformation will spur social change (41). This line of argument eventually appealed less to proletarians than to the disaffected sons and daughters of the middle classes, now at university en masse. It also dovetails with the growing ‘environmentalist’ movement of the 1960s; “the conquest of nature becomes the ratification of repression rather than the preface to heroism”; “a rationalized existence is antithetical to a free one,” they averred, in their “most profound break with Marx” (48). Marx had supposed that fully-instantiated human rationality would both construct and deconstruct, both affirm ‘History’s’ progress and cunningly advance it. But “to the Frankfurt School, reason had become affirmative”—justifying the worst crimes—”and seemed to have lost its cunning” (48), and indeed its common sense.

Nor did the critique of Marxism lead them back to Hegelianism, although they shared Hegel’s obsession with “the problems of history and reason”(51). They rejected Hegelianism on four grounds: Hegel’s dialectically unfolding Absolute Spirit leads to a final synthesis of opposites, an affirmation of “the prevailing social order” with no room for any further negation or critique of that order; his claim that the Absolute Spirit proceeds according to rational laws embodied in the sociopolitical institutions of each historical epoch; his “positive faith in the dialectical certainty of history”; and his “actual social and political prescriptions”—most notably, his esteem for modern, statist bureaucracy animated by the spirit of the science of administration (51). To put it in the language of modern philosophy, which distinguishes sharply between the thinking ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ the thinker thinks about, the attempt of Hegelian rationalism to make the thinker’s logical/dialectical thought objective, to fully instantiate that thought in the world around him via the science of administration, destroys human freedom; at the moment this project is realized, it “makes itself and what it rules unfree by forcing them into its necessarily formal confines” (55). A fully rationalized world leaves no place for human freedom, but ossifies into a ‘totalitarian’ structure that leaves no room for criticism. For the Frankfurt School, “the rationalized world [of the administrative state] constituted the gravest threat to authentic being” (60). Enlightenment, culminating in Hegelianism, “had not driven away darkness; it had caused the darkness to descend more thoroughly than ever” (61). Less metaphorically, “Reason, which had existed to discover authentically true horizons, had succeeded only in abolishing the old and false ones. Reason had become its own horizon, and the formal and objective requirements of the logic of reason had supplanted an authentically useful horizon” (62), leaving only two possibilities remaining: positivism or a retreat to some outmoded metaphysics.

Nietzsche and Heidegger to the rescue—remarkably, to the rescue of the Left. Nietzsche’s slashing attack on all of the “transcendental and antisensual moralities” had “made real the possibility of the sensually erotic life, which was the true intention of the Frankfurt School” (63). Reason or Enlightenment rationalism had merely established itself as a new myth, but one without content, “incapable of supplying anything but facticity and doubt” (63). Fully-developed Enlightenment rationalism (and indeed, Nietzsche argued, reason itself, beginning with Socrates and his enunciation of the principle of non-contradiction) “must deny the autonomy of any part [of the world] excluded from its reality,” most notably the “autonomous will” of the thinking subject” (64). But to give oneself over entirely to ‘objectivity’ one must deny self-consciousness; since the self-conscious or self-knowing subject is the ground of reason, “reason, in order to conclude its own conquest must regress, since it must deny the one thing that would allow will: consciousness” (65). Positivism or brute facticity then reigns supreme; what began in mindfulness drowns in a sea of mindlessness. “Reason, therefore, must deny what it had initially promised: freely realized humanity”; “modernity is catastrophic for man” (65).

Mass culture exemplifies this mindlessness. The high culture of the old aristocracies has become subordinate to “the demand of the social mechanism” (65), the philistine tastes of an egalitarian society. Nietzsche excoriates this as decadence. Adorno called upon the few persons of taste now remaining “to withdraw from the culture that makes one ill—which is illness” (67). However nostalgic this may seem, the Frankfurt School rejected the path of Romanticism, believing, with Nietzsche, that there is no road back to high culture. Nor, of course, did they return to the historical teleology of Hegel or Marx, these being manifestations of the rationalism which caused the problem in the first place. Rather, they followed Nietzsche in the willed rejection of all systems, valorizing negation or critical thinking. They most emphatically did not follow Nietzsche (and indeed seemed to ignore Nietzsche’s teaching) in claiming that deep inside every individual there is a small but ineluctable core of fatum, of fatality. Rather, more optimistically, they contended that the right response to the banality of mass culture is to negate, negate, and negate again, to exercise critical rather than positivist thinking.

Most tellingly, the Frankfurt School refused to follow Nietzsche in his radical individualism. Unlike Nietzsche, they could not bring themselves to reject compassion or to deny the social circumstances in which they lived. They endorsed revolution, not the Superman. Centrally, they turned to Heidegger (Marcuse had been his student), but turning him politically leftward, away from fascism. Heidegger takes from Marx the concept of the alienation of modern man in the face of unlivable social conditions, and the resultant search for authenticity. Marx and Heidegger adopt, but also adapt Hegelian historicism—the latter following Nietzsche in rejecting the rationalist dimension of all previous forms of historicism.  “The Frankfurt School occupies the nexus connecting the two giants” (72), Marx and Heidegger—rejecting Marxist rationalism while accepting Marx’s socialism, rejecting Heidegger’s national socialism or Nazism while accepting his emphasis on authenticity as non-rational. Whereas historicist rationalism succumbs to the error of positing a fully rationalized world that leaves no room for the human subject, its will and its consciousness, Heideggerian irrationalism refuses “to allow Being to become identical with a being in the world” that would at the same time reserve to itself the power to criticize or negate elements of the world (74).  What is invaluable in Heidegger is his acknowledgment that the human subject is a historical being, not a natural being; Heidegger in this sense not only remains a historicist but radicalizes historicism; and he does this without abstracting the human subject from its authentic, non-rational essence, without making the subject a rationalist, Cartesian ego cogito, a being which imagines its ability to think proves that it exists. In the eyes of the Frankfurt School, “Heidegger’s search for being was the search for an authentic whole” (74). He failed because he “grasps at an illusion,” namely, “a Being radically free of its social context” (75). “He fails to place Being into practice” (76), succumbing instead to the uncritical endorsement of the existing social condition of his time and place, Nazism.

To avoid the error of his teacher, Marcuse pointed to the individual as the ground of the future revolution: “The revolution begins with the individual and ends with his transformation” (77). “Narcissism” or “self-realization” retains Nietzschean/Heideggerian individualism while remaining cognizant of, and more ambitiously aiming at the radical transformation of society, too. This is Marcuse’s “aestheticization/eroticization of being” (77). Because Heidegger and Marcuse “both render the individual radically important” in their own ways, both must “face the radicalized problem of death,” given the mortality of each individual life (77). Owing to his estheticism and eroticism, Marcuse valorizes art, high culture against low or at least art-as-negation of mass culture; owing to his individualism, he valorizes “a life without metaphysical solace” or “existentialism (78).

These moves led the Frankfurt School to its fascination with the thought of that odd yet highly suggestive thinker, Oswald Spengler, whom they considered “a great, if limited, prophet” (79). In The Decline of the West, Spengler describes “the dual character of the Enlightenment”—its promise of human liberation via the conquest of nature and its actual “Caesarism,” which was Spengler’s term for a worldwide, scientistic-administrative rule and its “static culture,” all of which meant “that the West would necessarily revert to a barbarism” (80). As we have seen, “these three insights formed the crux of the Frankfurt School’s vision of the West in late modernity” (80). Spengler even saw the function of the communications media within this system, predicting “the coming of Caesars of world-journalism” (81)—William Randolph Hearst and the other ‘press barons’ whose rise complemented that of the ‘robber barons.’ Spengler’s book was “the origin of [the Frankfurt School’s] critique of technology and the culture begotten by technology” (84); in the fully rationalized but unreasonable machine-age, man becomes the object and the machine becomes the subject, destroying human creativity—as seen in a thousand science-fiction novels and as analyzed in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Finally, Spengler warned that the money-cultural, mass-cultural, machinist, prison would find opposition in the bloody horrors of barbaric, technology-driven war, as spirited men rebelled violently against the enclosing, soul-deadening embourgeoisement. “It was Spengler, more than Marx” (or Hegel) “who gave the School their sense of the future” (85). “The crisis is whether any way to breakout can be found” (85), and the Schoolmen entertained few hopes for that, beyond the kind of psyche-transforming revolution they held out in some desperation.

For investigation of the psyche, the Schoolmen turned to Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory describes the profound tension between reason and desire and speaks of the malign effects of rational and social repression of desire. Freud thus offers a dimension of human life hitherto neglected by the Left, and by the Marxian Left above all. Starkly, “Marx’s failure to consider psychology in a way paved the way for the Russian terror” because “failing to consider subjectivity in a revolution opens the door to reification and tyranny” (88). The inhuman shallowness of Marxist revolution led it first to the violent brutality of state-sponsored terror and then to a philistinism more bourgeois than that of the bourgeoisie, as seen even a century later wherever the remains of Soviet-era architecture pimple the landscape of eastern and central Europe. Marxism leaves no real place for Eros; as such, it must remain fundamentally bourgeois and psychically repressive, as when Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev fulminated like a fundamentalist preacher at the dancers when he visited the Hollywood set where the movie Can-Can was being produced.

Freud saw something the economic determinist Marx could not see: even with material abundance, “the scarcity of nature constituted a permanent and transhistorical reality” (90) because our erotic desires will remain frustrated even as we eat pineapples on the moon. “The real intention of the School is to deepen the possibility of liberation” to include the erotic desires of the human psyche. This means that the rationalist conquest of nature cannot liberate us. Only the unleashing of “libidinous energy” against the tedious and painful labor commended by both the bourgeois and proletarian work-ethics will do this. Only such a transformed inner, psychic world can satisfactorily transform the social world. By “turn[ing] the revolution inward” (91) as the initial step, the Schoolmen would solve the Marxian problem of alienation in a non-Marxian way by appropriating elements of Freud for their own revolutionary purposes.

Heidegger and Spengler flirted dangerously with contempt for Jews and Judaism, associated as they were in the minds of their enemies with money and cosmopolitanism. Before and especially in the wake of the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School utterly rejected this aspect of these thinkers. Here Friedman turns particularly to the thought of Walter Benjamin, a somewhat marginal figure (he never actually joined the Institute) but an important voice on the non-Marxist Jewish Left. Benjamin and to some degree the core of the Schoolmen understood that supplementing Marx with Freudian psychology would not suffice; the “Jewish Question,” upon which Marx had written and which Hitler had answered with murderous fanaticism, could find no answer in either Marx or Freud. With regard to Freud, it might well be replied that the satisfaction of erotic desires comport quite well with the rule of the administrative state; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World comes to mind, as does Tocqueville’s description of soft, democratic despotism in Democracy in America. To Marx, “The practical side of Judaism, the god of commerce, had overwhelmed and obliterated he sacred possibilities of man” (93). The answer to the Jewish Question was the abolition of capitalism; the advent of communism—after the seizure of the state by the proletariat, its use to abolish all social classes, and the consequent withering-away of the state itself—amounted to an atheist Messianism: “Marx’s preoccupation with the abolition of Jews has about it a strange and not quite expressed Jewishness” (93). European Jews had embraced the Enlightenment, but Enlightenment liberalism had failed to provide them the protection it had promised. The Schoolmen saw that Marxism didn’t protect Jews, either; Friedman doesn’t mention it, but Stalin eventually came for the Jews, too. The road to liberation could not lead through statism, much less through statist terror, but that is where Marxism-Leninism had tried to lead it.

In view of concentration camps built by both the tyrannical Right and the tyrannical Left, the Left needed to rethink the Jewish Question. Benjamin understood that the Fifth Commandment, requiring the Israelites to honor their parents, serves as the fundamental bond of society under the Mosaic Law. “The redemption by the son of the promise of the father is what inextricably makes one a Jew” (94). The redemption of Israel and humanity as a whole (for which Israel will serve as the light unto the nations) will require divine intervention in the form of the Messiah. Crucially, the Messianism of a Creator-God, of a Holy Spirit, differs fundamentally from the Messianism of Marxism or of any historicist thinker. Hegelian historicism posits an Absolute Spirit, not a Holy one. The Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things; the cosmos itself is nothing other than the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit, over time. Marx takes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit and gets rid of the spirituality, positing an entirely materialist theory of historical development. In radical contrast to these theories, the Creator-God of the Bible, holy (that is, separate from and utterly superior to His creation), creates the cosmos not out of Himself but out of nothing. Thus the Messiah-substitute of Marxian communism issues from rationally knowable laws of History, the predictable development of class conflict; Walter Benjamin knew Judaism teaches that “the Messiah may enter at any moment,” redeeming the sufferings of the parents and all the ancestors, but according to the will of God, not the supposed laws of History. The will of God is knowable to human beings only insofar as God chooses to reveal it to them, and He has not chosen to reveal the time of the coming of the Messiah.

Benjamin “saw in the Messiah the metaphor for the historical problem” (96). Until now, history has been profane; escape from profaneness cannot come via the historical dialectic, whether Hegelian or Marxist, but only through the unpredictable irruption of a Messianic event. Accordingly, “Benjamin turns Marxism into a Jewish event” (95), an event that can be invoked not through the dictatorship of the proletariat in control of the state but (in a way paralleling a religion of the Holy Word, a religion of the Book) via language. “The intention of the revolutionary, like the Kabbalist, is to discover the formula that will invoke the sudden and miraculous intrusion into history of an exogenous force, thereby shattering the structure of time and opening the path to redemption” (97). The language needed to free humanity from the chains of profane history is not the manipulative language of political rhetoric or propaganda seen in late-modern politics. Again paralleling the Bible, the language needed is the language of naming, seen first in the divine command to Adam in the Garden of Eden. “The name incorporates the thing into the structure of language” (96); what the American scholar Harry V. Jaffa called “the miracle of the common noun” consists in the human capacity (in the Bible, given by the God who creates Man out of dust) to see the commonalities amongst many particulars, to see and express the commonality among the many red oaks as the identifiable species, ‘red oak.’ But the language of naming can only go so far, because it cannot incorporate a thing or a being that exceeds the human capacity to describe. And so God’s name is not to be spoken. Similarly, it will take the advent of the Messiah “to remake the very structure of time in such a way as to redeem the past by annihilating the suffering that constituted its moment” (97). The character of the future Zion, the future ‘Heaven on Earth,’ is as ineffable as the character of God. “Profane language cannot speak without having something to speak of. In the speaking of the triumph, the language of history is unfree. The conquest of nature is the preface to redemption, but only the preface, because the second problem is not solved Language must turn to itself through naming in order to be purged of the profane” and thus at least prepare the way for the unpredictable coming of the Messianic event that will issue in the ineffable Zion.

Such a language cannot be scientific or rationalist. It must be metaphorical, an indirect expression or suggestion of something that cannot yet be humanly defined. “Only the metaphor frees us from identity but roots us in reality” (98). For example, if I say “God is love” I have spoken of God, but I have not defined God, inasmuch as God is not only love. “Jews speak of God and redemption metaphorically. Identity and abstraction are catastrophic to them. So, too, Benjamin and Adorno speak metaphorically. But where the Jewish conception of redemption is a metaphor of a thing unimaginable—redemption—the Frankfurt School’s is a metaphor for a metaphor. They use the Jewish formulation of language to explain their own epistemological dilemma: language is the ground of freedom but simultaneously of imprisonment. Redemption requires the Messiah who would cut the dialectical knot.” (98) For them, the advent of communism is the Messiah-substitute for the Biblical Messiah. “The point of Communism is that it is a radical break with the past—a Messianic break” (99). Benjamin understood that this parallels the Biblical condemnation of idolatry. He “chooses a Jewish metaphor for Communism because his alternative is a Greek image“—one thinks of the picture of communism painted by William Morris in News from Nowhere. “An image is, however, on a continuum with the original and is thus dialectically bound up with it” (99). An image of the future Zion, the world of communism, would amount to an idol, and idolatry anticipates the error of rationalism, especially in its historicist form, the error of demanding lawful predictability from Being, the error of believing that reality is fully ‘enlightenable’ or knowable, humanly controllable.

As Friedman quietly understates the matter, “The problem is the leap from metaphor to reality” (99). Historical dialectic had been exhausted in bureaucratization; “neither damned nor redeemed, history exhausted itself, suspended between hope and horror” (100). One can only hope for “the Messianic intervention into seamless time,” an intervention “blast[ing] that moment and that time into nonexistence, thereby redeeming its suffering” (99). To prepare for this moment devoutly to be wished, the Schoolmen identified “the political task of Critical Theory [as] establish[ing] the prismatic formula through which the Messianic entity could be invoked and identified” (100). Almost pitiably (I remark), they searched for a “revolutionary subject” outside the course of modern history: these included the peoples of the ‘Third World” (that is, outside the ambit of either the bourgeois West or the communist East), peoples of color living inside the sphere of the liberal West, and even, by the 1960s, the students of the New Left, who had given themselves over to the Dionysian ‘counter-culture’ of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll—all in conjunction with a politics of communitarianism.

To their credit, the Schoolmen understood that these reeds were quite likely weak. The odds of finding a Moses in those bulrushes seemed very long to them. In the intellectual dimension of their project, Critical Theory resembled the Midrash: “the profane hermeneutic of the utterly sacred” (101). “Both are the attempt of the unredeemed to glean visions of redemptions from the words that mediate between the sacred and the profane” (101).

Friedman concludes the section on the ideational origins of the Frankfurt School by clearly distinguishing them from the Old Left of Marxism. “Marx was no solution. Indeed, in many ways, he was the heart of the problem. To industrialism, he could juxtapose only more industry; the reason, only more rationalization.” All of this resulted in “the towering emptiness [the Babylon?] that accompanied Communism” (104-105). The Right, which did oppose modernity without availing itself of modernity’s conceptual tools, also failed because it was ‘reactionary,’ attempting to return to an irrecoverable past. Would the Frankfurt School prove to be “the redeemer or the executioner of the teleological hopes of the Enlightenment” (106-107)? With this, Friedman turns to the second section of his book, in which he examines the Schoolmen’s statement of the problem of modernity in their own terms, not in the terms of the thinkers they drew upon.

“The centerpiece of modernity faith is its belief in Enlightenment,” in the “demystification” of all remaining mysteries, the dispelling of all shadows of ignorance. The Schoolmen trace the Enlightenment to Homeric Greece, to “the myth of Odysseus,” the man who assumes “that through reason or cunning, the natural can, somehow, be known to man” (111-112). Reason has its place, but only in the form of criticism or negation of the given, never as “positivity” or construction, which only leads to tyranny (113). By denying the rational subject’s power to know the essence of a thing, the ‘thing-in-itself,’ Enlightenment rationalists inclined to denying essence altogether, dismissing it as a pseudo-problem on the shaky assumption that if the rational subject cannot understand the essence of a thing, if Enlightened reason cannot shed its light upon it, essences may as well not exist at all. In the rational attempt to remove all contradictions the Enlighteners dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their ideas: “the idea becom[es] identical with the thing” (116). This leads either the identification of reason with whatever exists—Hegel’s error—or, as seen in the ‘totalitarian’ tyrants, the identification of reason with whatever must be forced to exist, according to the tyrant’s systematic plan. Either way, the result is the denial of critical reason, the denial of the human capacity to negate the fact in favor of the essence. “Reason, under the rule of Positivism, stands in awe of the fact” (118), losing “true subjectivity” (120) or the capacity to judge the fact. Reason comes to “recognize no standard beyond the fact” (121). This illusion perpetuates itself easily because positive, instrumental reason does succeed in delivering economic goods and because it is logically consistent with its own anti-essentialist premises. To “break out of its self-satisfaction,” this form of rationalism “requires an act of self-conscious will rather than dialectical movement” (123), which would only confirm the premises with which it begins. No logical system can overcome the problem of systematization itself. Only critical theory—purposely unsystematic or “prismatic”—can enable philosophy to escape its self-made cage.us

If Enlightenment yields materialism; materialism yields the criterion of quantifiability as the test of truth; quantifiability characterizes modern science and lends itself to technology; and technology aims at the conquest of nature, overriding the essence of things, then the conquest of nature implies the self-deification of man. Because man is not really a god, this means that the result of Enlightenment ‘demystification’ of the world is a myth, that the “Enlightenment is itself a myth” (130). Like the mythical Odysseus, that “human Prometheus” (130), “with real and imagined suffering and with authentic cunning,” the rational man “roams the world slaying whatever is enchanted, eluding and deluding those magical things that can only be dealt with so” (130-131). Enlightenment “never escapes mythology but recapitulates myth in rationalistic form” (132); like the magicians of antiquity, it fears what it cannot see, namely, the essences of things. Anything that “did not conform [was] ruled out of existence,” and those elements that did conform were integrated into a precreated structure of thought” (133). What began as a critique of mythology and barbarism ends in a new myth and a new barbarism.

The Enlightenment thus precipitates a crisis of culture. Against rationalism, the Frankfurt School upheld esthetic sensibility; “our tastes determine our experience of the world” (139). Culture “consistently subjects itself to analysis and criticism” precisely because it has this esthetic criterion of judgment. “The critic’s role is pivotal in relation to culture” (139)—never allowing culture to ossify into a supposed ‘end of history.’  “The root of the cultural crisis is the failure of the work of art in this age to take a critical stance. Rather than upholding the beautiful as a historical alternative to the ugly irrationality of the world, the work of art either lapses into historical irrelevance or into a positive affirmation of the world as it is” (141)—useless abstraction or pointless concretion” (143), art-for-art or artful propaganda. Art becomes either a commodity, as under capitalism, or an instrument of political control, as under ‘totalitarianism.’ Against this, the Schoolmen deployed critical textual exegesis in an attempt to “conjure the radical possibilities embedded in the tradition without falling into reaction” (154). Exegesis keeps truth rooted in language, not in the distorting objectivism of Positivism.

Can this work? Under contemporary conditions, human beings are entertaining themselves to death; “amusement replaces art as the principle of mass culture” (163), as we doze in a relaxing hot tub of uncritical bliss. “Television takes this [inauthentic or pseudo-art] to radical extremes” (161); by penetrating the home, it makes the rightly private, erotic quest of art into a public spectacle. The entertainment industry “must maintain itself and thereby maintain the system it is a part of” by eschewing the critical function of genuine art. “It does this by abolishing the distinction between the cultural product and life. Life becomes like a movie, and movies tend to recapitulate life” (164). The Schoolmen did not live long enough to view ‘reality television,’ and Friedman published his book decades before its invention, but they would see it as the culmination of the phenomenon they abhor.

The modern crisis extends, therefore, into the human psyche itself. The abolition of scarcity accomplished by the conquest of nature has not abolished the problem of alienation, as Marx had supposed. “Clearly, something had gone wrong with the consciousness of the masses” (169). As we have seen, the Frankfurt School turned to Freud as the great explorer of the unconscious and the repressive Superego, while rejecting Freud’s naturalism as too conservative, ahistorical. For the Schoolmen, “scarcity is historical and not natural” (172). They also rejected Freud’s theory of the death wish, which tends to deny the possibility of Messianic irruption. “Freud’s pessimism, moderated through Marx, becomes optimism” (179). Having conquered nature, we should now be able to liberate our repressed desires, which had to be repressed while we conquered nature but are no longer repressed for any good reason. “The greater the potential for liberation from material want, the less possible is freedom from psychic distortion” (185). It is easy to see why the comfortable, middle-class university students of the 1960s found all of this so appealing.

“The overarching crisis” of modernity is a crisis of history, “the failure of history to transcend itself—the freezing of history at an inhuman moment” (186). If “the essence of humanity is in its negativity,” in its capacity to say ‘no’ to the factual conditions in which it finds itself, in “its standing against the affirmations of everyday life, in the rejection of the demand to be a member of the group”—that Freudian Superego—then “the attack on [the] private sphere,” the attack on the human subject, whether by commercial capitalism or ‘totalizing’ modern tyranny, “is the essence of the historical crisis” (188). In the United States, capitalism uses technology to seduce; in Nazi Germany, the regime uses technology to terrorize. The Soviet regime, too, “sprang from the same ground of Enlightenment as the West” (198), so it could never fulfill its self-proclaimed Messianic mission. Like anti-imperialist Third-World guerrillas, the ideational warrior of Critical theory carried on “the warfare of irregular against regularity itself” (203).

Friedman devotes the third section of his book to elaborating the Frankfurt School’s “search for the solution” (205)—again, never to be an ominous, dehumanizing ‘final’ solution. The Schoolmen proposed three interdependent solutions: exegetical, political, and Messianic.

The exegetical solution, Critical Theory, arose out of their conviction that Marx was mistaken, or at least no longer correct in his demand that philosophy bend itself to the practical purpose of advancing the proletarian revolution or, to put it more grandly, that theory and practice could achieve unity at the end of History. Bolshevism, Social Democracy, and Fascism had each “given the lie to the promise of philosophy” (208). On the contrary, reality will not come to embody philosophy in any predictable way—that is, as the result of any supposed laws immanent in History itself. For now, philosophy must become contemplative and (especially) critical again. “The opposition between appearance and reality, which was an essential element of ancient philosophy, constitutes the core of Critical Theory” (209). More, Critical Theory returns “to what is both the most concrete and the most metaphysical element of the philosophic: the text,” to language, because “what was true in the universe came to man not directly but rather mediated through the word” (210)—an insight embodied in both the Bible and the Platonic dialogues. Even if the noetic perception of Being is wordless, “prior to all that [is] profane,” we live enmeshed in the profane; we can approach “philosophic and religious truth” “only through the words of those who had captured the truth in the web of language, whether Moses or Plato” (212).

Critical Theory addresses the condition of human beings as they exist now, offering a critique of that condition and “pointing to” (without attempting foolishly to delineate) “the next moment in time” (213); it does so by “negat[ing] the existent untruth, at least in theory” (214). Philosophy is not ideology, not merely the expression of the interests of a given ruling class; it has a transhistorical element, which enables just this ‘pointing beyond.’ And beyond that, Critical Theory “conjures up images of authentic being that are rooted not in time but in the unrealized possibilities inherent in men” (213). In this form of exegesis, “the text as a whole is not treated as sacred; rather, elements of the text, little chips of the sacred (or more precisely, the prophetic) embedded in a complex of the profane, are conjured from the circumstances that defile them” (216). The significance of Spengler (for example) “was in what he knew and not in who he was or what he accomplished” (215), but the Schoolmen also persisted in identifying his contradictions. That is where reason, and even a sort of Socratism, come in. This philosophic approach follows from the characteristic style of Nietzsche, as opposed to Hegel: the critical insight encapsulated in an aphorism, not as a building block in some grand system. The word “conjures” makes sense, as the critical selection made from any text amounts to a “Messianic mediation” which prepares the actual, unpredictable Messianic moment by making “the sacred sensually real” (219) through metaphoric rather than rational, imagistic, and discursive system-building or “positivity” (219). “The historical can no longer tolerate the burden of being systematized,” inasmuch as “the systematic stance would be to abandon the struggle against the system” (223). Auschwitz was simply too stark and crushing, too much an event of “awesome singularity” (even if, sickeningly, replicated many times in the twentieth century) to be explained away as just another dialectical incident in the march of historical progress. This is true, one surmises, even if, as Hegel had remarked, the dialectical clash of opposites can be described as a slaughter-bench. “History has become such that the particles of experience can no longer be understood if they are forced into the unnatural categories of eternally unchanging systems” (222). Transcendence via contemplation, not immanence via dialectics is the only approach that holds out the promise of breaking free from the stultifying system of the World State. “The ultimate hope is for the transfiguration of being itself into a realm of utter negativity and autonomy” (225).

The Frankfurt School never loses sight of the political aim of its contemplative and critical approach. “Just as the goal of Critical Theory in dealing with texts had been to transcend the textual material, so the goal of the Critical Theory in dealing with the world was to transcend the practical” (226). This transcendence, again, is not immanent in any historical process but Messianic, to be revealed in a catastrophe of history and not in some mythical historical telos. Here is where the Schoolmen pin their hopes on ‘Third World’ peoples, American blacks, and students, which they take to be “strangely archaic” forces outside of the tentacles of Enlightenment historicist systematizing. “If the Enlightenment turned the world profane, the revolutionary act would make it divine again—more fully than before” (242), as “the revolutionary act puts man in contact once more with the roots of his being and sensibility,” with the sensuously erotic subject rather than the abstractly conceived object (246). But the political revolution is not the Messianic moment itself. That is rather “the transfiguration of Being” (248).

Like Jews, and even a bit like Marx in his saner moments, (in admitting he could not delineate the exact character of life after the withering-away of the state, life under communism), the Frankfurt School eschews any firm knowledge of the future. Still, some things can be guessed at, negatively. Just as a strict Jew will describe God’s attributes negatively (God is not lacking in loving-kindness, not lacking in justice, and so on), the condition brought about by the Messianic event will betoken the negation of the struggle against nature and the disappearance of the death wish from the psychic landscape. To say any more than that, the Schoolmen had recourse to mythic language. So, for example, Marcuse would replace the figure of Prometheus with those of Orpheus and Narcissus, personifications of “the joy of gratification” and of “self-gratification” (257). “Marcuse rediscovers the individual in the age of the mass in the privacy of the erotic” (261). Consistently enough, the Frankfurt School sympathized with the drug use popularized in the Sixties because “the faculty of fantasy shatters the power of the reality principle,” fantasy being “perpetually indifferent to reason” (264-265). Drugs, dreams, art, and play all can serve to “forge a space between the powers of Positivism and [Heideggerian] existentialism” (266). The man of the Messianic age will be the Last Man, not the aristocratic Superman: but he will spend his time fantasizing and playing, not working as a drone in the industrial beehive.  The whole body will become sexual/erotic, not just a few erogenous zones. Perpetual progress will give way to “perpetual gratification” (276). As Friedman wittily and accurately puts it, this is “the spirit of Nietzsche turned egalitarian” (261). This is a point that cannot be emphasized too much. It is Tocqueville’s soft despotism reconceived not as a place of industrious herds but as self-gratifying individuals. One may well consider it an implausible notion, but many daydreaming university students took it as a realizable vision of Paradise.

Friedman offers his own criticisms of Critical Theory in his concluding chapter. The Frankfurt School’s (and most especially Marcuse’s) vision of a world o erotic gratification runs into two problems: administration and death. However eroticized human life may become, we will all still die. In such an intensely pleasurable life, “death comes not as a relief but as a tragedy” (281). Death’s prospect “will sour such a life, every time the individual thinks of it. Nietzsche answered the problem of death by calling a good death “the consummation of life, the greatest and deepest act of will,” but Marcus cannot do that. “To see virtue in the negation of Eros is to see virtue in the negation of gratification,” to tear Orpheus to pieces (283). “Marcuse founders on the heart of his problem: joy cannot have eternity” (283). Adorno tries to solve the problem by waving it away, by claiming that fear of death is bourgeois, all-too-bourgeois. The problem, he declares, is “null and void” (286). Brave words from the brave new worldist, but how plausible? Not to Friedman: “The Frankfurt School’s love of life makes it impotent against life’s universal and inevitable negation” (286-287). To negate that negation, you need the God of the Bible, a genuinely divide intervention. “What Adorno never answers is how satiety in socialist society would be less boring and troublesome” than it is in bourgeois society (289). He recapitulates the very problem he sees in the administrative state organized by the social democrats. Yes, work will be abolished, but why will a life of perpetual play satisfy human beings? His “radically childlike” vision of life would freeze men and women in a condition of perpetual infantilism. “In a way, the Frankfurt School attempted to do metaphysically what Trotsky and Mao attempted politically: to institutionalize revolution by making it permanent” (296). In this, they partook of the modernity they opposed, inasmuch as “modernity has always tried to abolish the distance between being and becoming by somehow rooting being in the practice of becoming”—quite unlike the erotic quest seen in Plato’s Republic, or the God-fearing, prophetic quest of the Biblical prophets. Recall that it was Machiavelli who condemned “imaginary republics.” “The Frankfurt School is, in the end, most praiseworthy for he thing that they failed to accomplish, for by failing, they demonstrated the bankruptcy of modernity” (301).

The Frankfurt School thus offers us an astounding mixture of insight and bosh.