Will Morrisey Reviews

Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

Stanley Rosen: Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.

An earlier version of this review was published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. It is republished with permission.

“There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (6), MacIntyre writes. Not only the “language of morality” (2) but its “integral substance” (5) have been savaged. He invokes G. W. F. Hegel and R. G. Collingwood as exemplars of ways in which to reconstruct moral reasoning; MacIntyre would counter nihilism with a form of ‘Right’ Hegelianism.

In contemporary moral philosophy, morals are often said to reduce to the sentiments of individuals. When on occasion they have not simply endorsed “emotivism” (as Bertrand Russell did, to take a prominent example), both ‘analytic’ and existentialist philosophers have failed to overcome it (6 ff.). In this they echo the nineteenth-century debate on “utility” versus “rights”—that “matching pair of incommensurable fictions” (68).

Emotivism fails because it is circular; if I say I feel that something is right, I am appealing to what kind of feelings if not, well, moral ones, which doesn’t much help to tell me why they are moral. Emotivist morality gives no reasons, having ruled out reasoning when it comes to morality. As a historicist, MacIntyre turns not to philosophic argument for a substitute for emotivism but to history. Emotivism is “connected with one specific stage in moral development or decline, a stage which our own culture entered early in the present century” (17). He traces this stage to the thought of Kierkegaard, and before him, Kant, whose failure to provide a persuasive rational maxim for moral principles was exposed by Hegel. It might be observed that Hegel’s refutation of Kant is logical, not historical, and obviously does not depend upon Hegel enjoying the vantage point of a more advanced historical “stage” than Kant did, but MacIntyre, having endorsed Hegel’s historicism, overlooks this.

MacIntyre blames contemporary moral confusion on the Enlightenment, wherein philosophers attacked religion but in effect made their own moral theories parasitic upon the beliefs of “their shared Christian past” (49) while appealing, contradictorily, to arguments grounded in human nature. Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism convicted reason of moral incompetence (except for the calculation of means) and upheld divine revelation as man’s only trustworthy source of teleological enlightenment. “[O]nce the notion of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral judgments as factual statements” (57)—unless, one might add, one regards sentiment or faith as a reflection of morally significant fact.

To restrict reason to the calculation of means and morality to sentiment or to faith results in two moves characteristic of Anglophone philosophy in the nineteenth century: the attempt to formulate a new teleology (utilitarianism) or the attempt to formulate a new categorical status for right. Utilitarianism fails because its pleasure principle runs into the multifariousness of human pleasures. By what criterion can it rank or order them? A theory of rights reconceived neither as natural nor as Kantian-categorical fails because it falls back on claims of moral ‘intuition’—that is, conscience without God or moral sentiment without nature. “The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a sign that something has gone badly wrong with an argument” (67). The “mock rationality”ensuing utility-versus-rights debate “conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power”—or maybe the will to power—”at work in its resolution” (68), which typically involves protest, indignation, unmasking (accusing your opponent of hypocrisy whilst masking your own), and (very often) appeals to supposed expertise. The latter prevails in bureaucratic settings. But claims of expertise in moral matters runs into such notorious problems as the fact-value distinction, which lands us back into the Humean skepticism Kant was trying to overcome. “Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundation of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises” (108).

MacIntyre observes that older writers understood ethics differently. “A man in heroic society is what he does” (115). The same could be said for a modern bureaucrat making his way up the ladder of ‘meritocracy,’ but MacIntyre is thinking of the classical understanding of virtue as excellence of character not of skill. Sounding a bit like Nietzsche himself, he endorses Sophoclean tragedy’s presentation of an “objective moral order” that avoids the harshness of Homer’s tribalism and the too-optimistic ethical harmony MacIntyre ascribes to Aristotle. And, as in Nietzsche, for the Greek tragedians “life is the standard of value” (117) not in the Hobbesian sense of preferring its preservation above all else but in the sense of owing a life for a life; if someone kills my brother, I owe it to my brother to kill his killer. Such honor killings show that for the tragedians “morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society” (116); my fellow-citizens expect no less an action of me. By contrast, he rejects Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology” (151) and repeats Hegel’s complaints about Aristotle’s defense of slavery and is refusal to provide a sense of ‘History,’ a telos for all mankind. He does, however, share Aristotle’s esteem for practical reasoning or phronēsis as a moral capacity, in sharp contradistinction to Kant, who eschews prudence except as an instrument of low calculation. Politically, he wants to think about what this partly Aristotelian, partly Hegelian, and partly Nietzschean morality might look like in a world without poleis. He ends his historical survey with a chapter on the medieval ‘synthesis’ of Aristotle and Christianity in which he carefully leaves Christianity in limbo.

Thus the first two-thirds of the book contain an outline of our current moral dilemma and of reasons for it. They do not contain an explanation of why moral chaos is a true dilemma. nor do they contain an account of the foundation(s) of MacIntyre’s praise and blame of Western intellectual history’s various aspects. This is, after all, a history told with more care and at least as much accuracy by several earlier writers.

MacIntyre began to address these more fundamental matters while he discussed Sophocles, just before turning to Aristotle. MacIntyre’s “theory of knowledge” allows him to call “each particular set of moral or scientific beliefs… intelligible and justifiable—insofar as it is justifiable—only as a member of a historical series” (136). But even the last “belief” in the series is “open to being in turn corrected and transcended by some more adequate point of view” (136)—a claim that puts him at odds with Hegel and ‘the end of History.’ This novel historicism, obviously, requires some standard of “adequacy” by which one can correct and transcend current beliefs if it is not to descend into the historical and moral relativism MacIntyre deplores. After discussing Aristotle, sidestepping Christianity, he returns to this problem, devoting his two longest chapters to an account of the moral virtues, beginning by pointing again to Sophocles and tragedy but now attempting to put tragic conflict into a framework of a kind of logic, although not quite Hegelian logic.

He attempts a compromise between rationalism and historicism whereby he can produce a “core conception” of the virtues, a conception that “in some sense embodies the history of which it is the outcome” [italics added; in what sense, by the way, can a “conception” embody a history?] (174). He describes three “stages” of this conception’s “logical development” (174). The “first stage of the virtues’ logical development is a “practice,” defined as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative activity through which good internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence [that] are appropriate to, and partly definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the goods and ends involved, are systematically extended” (175). Architecture is a practice, bricklaying is not; farming is a practice, planting turnips is not. War, household management, flute-playing, and geometry are all practices. Virtues are acquired human qualities need to achieve the goods internal to a practice. “Practices never have a goal or goals fixed for all time—painting has no such goal nor has physics—but the goal themselves are transmuted by the history of the activity” (180-181).

Of the several problems here, two stand out; credit MacIntyre for seeing one of them. By defining an art, painting, and a science, physics, as practices, MacIntyre forgets that, while an art’s “goal” might change, a science’s “goal” may not—at least insofar as it is a science and not an art. The purpose of physics remains knowledge of physis. It cannot become anything else and remain physics; it has not become anything else. Of course, the purpose of acquiring knowledge can and has changed.

MacIntyre does see that his definition of a practice could include evil activities. He mentions torture but, following his own distinction between farming and planting turnips, a concentration camp would be the better example. He could mitigate this consequence by putting extra weight on “human conceptions of the good and ends involved” in a practice; his “second stage” of virtue’s logical development does in fact attempt a definition of humanness.

Man is “essentially a story-telling animal” whose stories combine intentions, beliefs, and settings (201). (This may account for the enthusiasm of the novelist John Gardner, who called After Virtue “the best book of philosophy in years”). Man “is not essentially, but becomes through history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth” (201).  Reason comes into the narrative because “history is not a sequence of actions, but the concept of an action is that of a moment in an actual or possible history abstracted for some purpose from that history, so the characters that history are not a collection of persons, but the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history” (202).  What, then, is “history” abstracted from, what is the background of “history,” this story whereby story-tellers aspire to truth? MacIntyre calls it a quest for “the good,” a quest that the virtues sustain. This leads to a somewhat tautological formulation: “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking the good life for man” (204). On to the “third stage.”

MacIntyre calls it “tradition” (206). Here we get something that begins to look a bit more like philosophizing. A tradition is “an historically extended, social embodied argument… in part about the goods which constitute [it]” (207). One needs, first, “an adequate sense” of one’s tradition and of any other tradition(s) that confront(s) one and, second, “a grasp of those future possibilities [that] the past has made available to the present” (207).

Such undefined notions as “argument,” “the good,” “adequacy,” “sense,” and “grasp” leave MacIntyre with a lot of explaining to do. Credit him, again, with acknowledging this. “My negative and positive evaluations of particular arguments do indeed presuppose a systematic, although here unstated, account of rationality” (242). He promises one in a future book.

The unresolved problem in this book—its insufficiently articulated combination of logic, storytelling, events, and social forms—results in part from MacIntyre’s failure to see the significance of historicism (as distinguished from history) in modernity. MacIntyre omits from his bibliography one book that could have prevented this failure: Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay by Stanley Rosen. If MacIntyre does not come to see the links between historicism and such lesser doctrines as analytic philosophy and existentialism his project will collapse. That would be unfortunate; for a number of reasons, MacIntyre has the attention of many intellectuals who may never read Rosen.

This quasi-political consideration leads to a purely political consideration. MacIntyre ends his book with a call for the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages [that] are already upon us” (245). However he intends this, it will surely be read as an endorsement of some ‘small-is-beautiful,’ Lindisfarnesque communalism. In this his hero is St. Benedict, a hermit. Imagining himself surrounded by barbarism pure and simple, MacIntyre fails to distinguish between barbarians who tolerate Lindisfarnes and saints and barbarians who don’t tolerate Lindisfarnes or uphold heroes and saints anything like Benedict. To show what emergence from the post-virtuous age would mean in practice as well as in theory, he will need to begin with that distinction.

Rosen quotes the definition of nihilism Nietzsche borrowed from Dostoevsky: “the situation which obtains when ‘everything is permitted'” (xiii). If everything is permitted, then there is nothing to talk about, morally speaking; “the speech of ‘justification’ is indistinguishable from silence,” and this nihilism or ‘nothing-ism’ “reduces reason to nonsense by equating the sense or significance of speech to silence” (xiii). “The danger of nihilism is a permanent human possibility,” but nihilism pervades contemporary societies because “a series of specific philosophic decisions” in the past has inclined us towards it (xiv). Rosen published his book in 1969, the same year in which Henry B. Veatch’s Two Logics appeared; both men point to the re-conception of reason (in Rosen’s words) “exclusively on the model of mathematics” (xv). Veatch concentrates his attention on the Principia Mathematica of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead as the principal agent of this re-conception, whereas Rosen looks further back to the redefinition of mathematics itself as the mode of expressing Newtonian physics (as distinguished from Pythagoreanism). The nature Newtonian physics describes changes constantly to no purpose; in so concluding, it adopts the metaphor of a machine as its picture of nature, and (at least in Newton’s case) looks exclusively to Biblical revelation for moral bearings. This inclined subsequent philosophers to conclude that reason alienates man from his own desires; simultaneously, it inclined them to ‘secularize’ metaphysics “by transforming it into the philosophy of history, whereupon the influence of history, together with the autonomous tendencies of the mathematizing ego, led to the historicizing of mathematical physics”—rebounding against the rationality of science itself (xvi). “Today philosophy and historical existence are both threatened by the nihilistic consequences of the denaturing of reason, which was ostensibly the purification of reason” (xviii).

Rosen would re-connect reason with philosophy and with human nature. He begins by saying that “the problem of nihilism [is] implicit in human nature” (xviii); by showing how nihilism inheres in human nature itself he takes the first step toward reversing the denaturing of reason. Dividing his book into six chapters, he shows the nihilism implicit in the West’s two dominant contemporary philosophic schools, then discusses the philosophic ancestors of those schools and the political consequences of their teachings. He concludes the book with two chapters contrasting nihilism with Platonic philosophy.

The first of the contemporary schools he considers, ‘analytic’ or ‘linguistic’ philosophy, finds its most important spokesman in Ludwig Wittgenstein, the proponent of what he called “ordinary language philosophy,” which Rosen does not hesitate to identify as “a version of nihilism” (1). Wittgenstein believes nature and theory mythological. In the Philosophical Investigations he reduces logical thought to “a language at a given historical stage” (9)—the Lebensform, “the verbal incarnation of history” (13). He “denies the possibility of a logos or theoretical account of speech” because all that is not speech can only be contemplated in silence (9). The problem with claiming that a form of human action or ‘doing’ (speech, playing ‘language games’) cannot itself be spoken of is simple: before speaking intelligibly, one must exercise intelligence. Wittgenstein tries to “ignore the derivation of speech from the prior intelligence of doing” (10). “By demoting logical form to the status of speech, Wittgenstein destroyed the last vestige of ‘nature’ in the classical sense of the standard or end of speech” (12). For nature he substitutes utility as the standard, “identify[ing] the fact of use with the philosophical soundness of that fact” (17). But “to say that x is a sound use is not to use x but to generalize upon the difference between x and non-x, and therefore to refer to a universal framework or theory of signification” (17). The celebration of convention and practice ends in circularity because Wittgenstein cannot make his conventionalists claims without interpreting something; by conventionalist definition, definition reduces to “an arbitrary attribution of sense to nonsense” (27). Unlike Nietzsche, whose arbitrariness partakes of grandeur, Wittgensteinian arbitrariness prides itself on a verbal microscopy that limits it to triviality. He “teaches us to philosophize, not with a sledgehammer, but with a nail file” (28).

Any “theory about speech [that] is itself a denial that such a theory may be stated or fully formulated” yields nihilism (29). This is as true of Heidegger as it is of Wittgenstein. Heidegger differs from Wittgenstein in that he does not simply deny Being but regards it as so radically temporal/historical that it cannot be said to be a thing at all. ‘His’ Being is rather like Wittgensteinian convention, but in fact is no-thing. No-thing resembles the Supreme Being of the Bible in one way: hidden, it speaks. But No-thing, unlike the Supreme Being, cannot speak; Heidegger attempts to “transcend verbal speech, or to evoke the silent process of Being itself” (37), to “elicit pre-verbal experiences of Being” (38). “Heidegger and his disciples are not saying, as does Plato indirectly, that whereas noēsis is the preverbal intuition of silent forms themselves, we are nevertheless enabled to, and in fact must, say what we have seen in discursive speech. Instead, they claim that what we ‘intuit’ is itself speaking pre-verbally, and that ‘intuition’ (the new kind of thinking) is preverbal listening or apprehending that ‘speech’.” (39) Being is movement, process, not form or nature; “Being is the source of the emergence of forms” (41). The problem here is that “whatever the nature and revelatory capacities of pre-verbal experience, the significance of such revelations can only be expressed discursively” (41). Heidegger is left with the unenviable job of trying to speak silence; he produces a sort of poetry he calls ‘ontic’ speech, a celebration of acts—that is, a celebration of not-words. This is “not just self-refuting but self-canceling” (45). “Heidegger, as it were, ‘reduces’ the act of speech to existential activity (such as gathering in the harvest); he does not make clear that visibility of what is gathered together depends upon its structure. Thus he does not distinguish clearly between the structure of speech and the structure of what is spoken.” (47)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger offer us the curious spectacle of attempts simultaneously to exalt and dissolve the present. Rosen traces their genealogy to the Christian (as he calls it) effort to divide nature into prelapserian and postlapserian phases. After the Fall, reason can aim only at utility, at secondary goods, whereas understanding of the primary good is said to be transrational, a divine gift. Disbelieve the existence of divinity and one will invent a sort of imperial utilitarianism that would use all of nature to satisfy human desires. Historicism, “the inability to distinguish between being and time,” theory and practice, results from this attempt at a vast subsumption of existing nature to restless, acting man (56). “The crucial decision”—taken by thinkers prior to Wittgenstein and Heidegger—”was to neglect practice in favor of theory, while at the same time conceiving theory as a kind of practice,” as “a human project or the instrument of a human project” (56). Theory-as-project “emerges from the pre-rational stratum of desire, basically, the desire to master nature” seen in Machiavelli, Descartes, and Bacon (56). While succeeding in satisfying this desire, we have rendered ourselves “unable to explain to ourselves in a rational way the point of our success, and consequently the difference between success and failure” (56). “Contemporary man desperately needs a rational interpretation of reason” (56).

Socratic philosophers did have such an interpretation. To them, “the world is ‘logical’ or ‘reasonable’ because it provides us with a basis for speaking meaningfully about the relative merits of various human activities: (59); that basis is nature—specifically, human nature. “The link between theory and practice, then, is not an abstract argument in epistemology or an imagined developing pattern in world history, but the nature of man as the animal who both speaks and acts” (59). To see and say what the nature of such a being is, is to be able to see and say what is good for it; for example, if man has by nature the capacity to speak it cannot be good for him to lose his voice. Voicelessness in a human being contradicts the nature of that being. “There is then a reasonable basis in nature for distinguishing and responding to the unreasonable” (59).

Christianity (in Rosen’s view, but, if one proceeds more cautiously, certain forms of Christianity) and modern mathematics introduce a split between two constituents of the good. They retain utility as a good attainable by reason. After the Fall, human beings obey God by (among other things) working, whereas understanding of the primary good is said to be transrational, a divine gift; modern mathematics, following the Machiavellian turn in philosophy, empowers human beings to work more masterfully than before by giving them substantially greater power over nature. Cartesian ratio “is the ‘will to power,’ still articulated in a mathematical vocabulary, but one which is spoken, and to some extent created, by the ego cogitans” (63-64); “reason is, or is on the verge of, being defined as construction in accordance with human will” (64). But if one then applies the ratio to human nature itself, and one has conquered the human soul in the name of—what, exactly? If the passions drive the human soul, and these are nothing “but facts,” and moreover “the pattern of the facts is a matter of chance, man has been revanquished by fortune” (69). The mathematization of reality provides “no basis for the reconstruction of moral or psychological imperatives (71), ‘categorical’ or otherwise. Rationalist historicism makes its most impressive stand in Hegel, who replaces Cartesian mathematics with ‘History’ or the dialectical unfolding of the ‘Absolute Spirit’; Rosen’s interpretation and critique of Hegel begins in his book G. W. F. Hegel and continues in his Hegel’s Science of Logic.

With the rebellion against Hegelian rationalism, historicism finally yields irrationalism. “Hegel’s successors retain his conception of man as radically temporal and historical; they reject his conception of the completeness of time in eternity and history in wisdom” (91-92). They do so for what one might call Tocquevillian reasons (although Rosen does not mention Tocqueville). Hegelianism ran into the solid reef of Enlightenment (and in Tocqueville’s account Christian) democratization: “Hegel claimed to have carried through to completion the Cartesian project to make men gods, but by defining divinity as speculative wisdom rather than as virtue [read “virtù], technics, or merely external work, he made it the genuine possession of the few and therefore unpalatable to the many,” “incompatible with the moral and political forces of the Enlightenment from which [Hegelian rationalism] sprang” (92). Will-to-power and imagination, often at the service of egalitarianism, have proved more palatable than the sparingly-bestowed highest gifts of the Absolute Spirit.

Before that happened, however, historicism went through an irrationalist halfway house in the form of Nietzsche’s valorization of the will to power as a force for aristocracy. Nietzsche’s world is the arena of “purposeless play” and “eternal return” or the joyfully meaningless cyclicality of Being. In rejecting the Nietzschean ‘return,’ Heidegger proves the “much more thoroughgoing nihilist” (97). Being now becomes pure possibility, inarticulable silence, the no-thing out of which all things are created. Morally, this registers as a call for “authenticity,” freedom from all formal determinations of conduct; this bows to egalitarianism by commanding, “No one can say anything to anyone about what constitutes genuine choice in as specific situation” (100). Resolute moral relativism prevails. Epistemologically, this registers in the “search for an ontologically adequate speech” (101), a search that results in “a profound resignation in the face of nihilism” (102).

With the establishment of this moral and epistemological stance, historicism finally yields poeticist politics in both Nietzsche and Heidegger. If Being and History are the same, and if neither is rational (much less kind) then the fact of human cruelty in History exemplifies “the self-preservation of chaos” renewing itself (107). Heidegger’s notorious endorsement of Nazism itself exemplifies this on the ‘Right,’ as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in his book Humanism and Terror) may be said best to exemplify it on the ‘Left.’ This politics destroys cruelly in order to bring the forgetfulness ostensibly needed in order to create anew. “To be reborn means to recur to the level of beasts through the loss of one’s memory” (108). The poeticist politician negates the present “on behalf of an unknown and unknowable yet hoped-for future” (108). Historicism in this form thus exalts those aspects of the present that tend toward the destruction of the present. Unfortunately for its publicists, “in the absence of a creator God, creation ex nihilo is unintelligible” (108). The philosopher must finally submit to the politics of the time, and if the politician of one’s time and place is Hitler, then that is that.

Rosen avoids suggesting that historicism may be fully explained by a history, even by a history of philosophy. Although nihilism has become easily noticeable today because a series of thought-events have encouraged it, “nihilism has its origin in the nature of man, and not in contingent historical events” (137). This insight underlies his final two chapters, which concern the good and wisdom, respectively.

The chapter on the good contrasts nihilism with Platonic philosophy. “Nihilism is fundamentally an attempt to overcome or repudiate the past on behalf of an unknown and unknowable yet hoped-for future,” an attempt that negates the present (at its most bloody, negating many present human beings), “remov[ing] the ground upon which man must stand in order to carry out or even merely to witness the process of historical transformation,” urging us to “destroy the past on behalf of a wish which he cannot articulate, let alone guarantee fulfillment” (140). Plato’s Socrates understood this as well as any modern philosopher; in The Republic he proposes the expulsion of all citizens over the age of ten. The differences between Socrates and Merleau-Ponty are, first, that Socrates arguably understood that his proposal wasn’t feasible, advancing it rather as a specimen of his celebrated irony and, second that “whereas nihilism points us toward the historical future, Plato turns us neither backward nor forward in a historical sense” but ‘upward’ to the Ideas (140). He wants us to stand our ground and think, neither as ‘progressives’ nor as ‘reactionaries.’ In terms of the Platonic vocabulary, “nihilism is doomed to shipwreck because it sunders courage from wisdom, justice, and moderation” (142-143), “ignor[ing] the danger implicit in the marvelous powers of the daimonic” and to aspire to godhood (145). “The problem arises,” Rosen drily remarks, “of how, in the absence of the genuinely divine, divine madness may be distinguished from mere madness” (145). Now, the young Socrates made something of the same mistake, an observation that buttresses Rosen’s claim that nihilism is a permanent or transhistorical feature of human nature itself: the young Socrates’ “identification between divinity and number has the same disastrous consequences for the relation between reason and good as does contemporary nihilism” (146), and likewise draws powerfully from mathematics and the mathematical frame of mind. Unlike the mature Socrates, mathematical physicists, devotees of symbolic logic, and Heideggerian ontologists “share a disdain for icons; they are iconoclasts, who in their eagerness to see the divine disregard the merely human, which requires some mediation between itself and the divine (149). Such thinkers overlook the fact that physics and ontology are also speeches, also icons; to attempt to purge speech of “iconic content” tempts the thinker to forget about the origin of speech and the images his speech describes “in the human psyche” (150). “To see is to see something—in the language of sense perception, to collect (or re-collect) the sensuous qualities in a spatio-temporal field into a determinate shape,” a process “takes place with speech,” whereby “the psyche identifies to itself unities within the perceptual field” (150). Speech guided by the principle of non-contradiction helps us perceive the articulations of nature, by the act of articulating. To Plato’s Socrates (as seen for example in the Phaedo 99e 5-6), “there is a difference between the speech and the form revealed by speech. Truth in the fullest sense is not a property of proposition or icons, but is the being reflected within the icon” (152); unlike the moving bodies physicists study, and unlike the hidden Being of the ontologists, ideas are stable, intelligible, requiring for their perception the steadfastness of a soul fortified by the virtues of courage, prudence, and moderation. To philosophize, to love wisdom, the soul must first be rightly ordered. “The philosopher is also a soldier or citizen” (163). “Only those who are by nature friendly to the good will be illuminated by its image” (176).

Politics comes in because “divine madness is permissible only after the polis has been made sober and steadfast” (154). Stable and silent, the Ideas provide a standard for judging moral and political conduct without giving us to suppose that we can embody them and become perfectly just ourselves, personally or by founding a political regime. “We can count upon the Ideas precisely because they do not care about us,” having “no intentions, no will, no perspective, and no history”; “all men are equal before the Ideas” (156). “Political stability depends upon the stability of logos” because “if men cannot give an account of their deeds, they will never be able to measure the relative value of those deeds” (157). And “without measure, speech becomes self-contradictory or is reduced to silence”—a “freedom which cannot give account of itself” and therefore “indistinguishable from slavery” (157). Or, as Socrates famously says, the unexamined life is not worth living.

“It is the human psyche, conceived as a whole, that unifies philosophy and politics. Man is the principle of his own unity because he is able to measure himself by the Ideas.” (163)  The dichotomy between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ doesn’t exist in Platonic philosophy because “what we today call a ‘fact’ is for him rather a moment or phase in a dialectic between the psyche and the domain of intelligibility” (166). Whereas moderns now take ‘facts’ to “represent an unanalyzed historical synthesis of nature and history”—data to be explained in mathematical terms within the framework of ‘natural history’ or law-governed change—Socrates “does not identify nature with history, nor does he restrict it to the subject of the mathematical sciences” (166). The Platonic eschewal of mathematics as a comprehensive means of understanding reality looks not to what moderns call knowledge but to the standard of perfection, blessedness, the satisfaction of human desires as a whole. Accordingly, “there cannot be any other standard of goodness than wisdom,” as distinguished from technical expertise (167). Wisdom is knowledge of the good, the whole good for human beings: “We know what we can be by an actual investigation, through the instrumentality of logos [and not of mathematics], of what we do” (167). Moreover, “if wisdom is knowledge of the whole, and the intelligibility of the whole is the good, or more precisely the ground or form of he good, then the good, whether as the perfection of the psyche or the order of the noetic cosmos, can no longer be called ‘useful'” (171).

As wholeness, as the “form of forms,” the good isn’t itself an Idea, although there is an Idea of the good (171). To speak in the Platonic/Socratic metaphor, the good is the sun considered not, as moderns do, in terms of its motions and substance, but rather in terms of the “generative or biological powers of the sunlight” (176). By this, Socrates means that “we can infer the mathematical properties of form from biological visibility, but we cannot infer life from the mathematical properties of form” (176). The good is what sheds light on both formal structure and life, and knowledge of the good or wisdom shows the philosopher that life takes on shapes without being the same as shapes and without having been generated by the shapes it takes. The sunlight or the good generates the Ideas but does not generate the particulars of reality. (If it did, the good would be identical to God). Similarly, speech or logos is “an icon of things” but not the truth itself. Seeing with the indispensable aid of the light represents wisdom because by sight “we combine discrimination of form with detachment from body,” in contrast to touch (whereby we can discriminate form but not as detached from the body) and hearing (which detaches our knowledge from the corporeal entirely). Unlike sense perception, thinking is reflexive, inasmuch as “the cooperative and in part self-correcting activities of the senses take place only under the unifying direction of thinking” (179). Platonic Ideas do not exist in a world separate from what we call the ‘real world.’ “In looking at the looks of things, thinking grasps a pattern which cannot be reduced to the looks without blurring, and even negating, them. This is true in every instance of mental work, from sense perception to logical or mathematical inference.” (180)  (On Rosen’s own Platonic terms, one might quibble with his choice of the word ‘grasp,’ a metaphor of touch, that is to say of Machiavellian knowledge by means of manipulation of matter, but that is only a quibble). Yes, of course individual human beings see only from their own perspectives, and “the perspectival nature of thinking prevents a complete, determinate, synoptic vision of the Idea,” but that does not prevent us from inferring the existence of the Idea, even if only partially. It is this acknowledgment of one’s own necessary intellectual limitations that prevents the classical philosophers from regarding the regime of the Republic with anything other than irony, guarding them from the intellectual and political excesses of Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. If religion posits the existence of God, that is, a link between the good and life, these later philosophers attempt to do away with God but retain the link; they would “replace the church with the body” (200).

“In noetic terms, the Ideas stand to the good as the light stands to the sun: they light up the shape of the object, which corresponds to the color of the visible body. Furthermore, the good stands to the mind as the sun does to the eye: both noetic and visual perception occur thought the mediation of a third or binding element (Ideas, sunlight) which not only is different from but draws our attention away from, its source. In order to see an object, we do not look at the sun or even at the light, but at the illuminated object.” (182) We would be blinded if we looked directly at the sun, and we can’t actually see the light the sun generates, apart from the bodies it makes visible to us. Thus “the good does not cause things or beings in the sense of instances, but is the ground or principle of their intelligibility” (182). More specifically, “to say that the mind sees in the light of the good is not to say that the mind has been generated by the good,” inasmuch as illumination isn’t the same thing as generation (183). We see the light of the good thanks to the shapes or forms or structures of particular things; the light is “visible only in and as a specific intelligible form, a what, or in a pattern of whats” (184). This is why Socrates characteristically asks ‘What is?’ questions of his interlocutors.

The answers to such questions aren’t always pretty. Noesis or apprehension of the truth may or may not be beautiful; dianoesis or correct statement of the truth is always beautiful. The doctor who correctly tells me I have cancer is reporting and ugly truth, but the report itself is beautiful, fitting, in perfect harmony with what is. The truth ‘is what it is,’ but the manifestation of the truth in the human soul “serves as the stable foundation for the dianoetic judgments of beauty, justice, utility, and the like” (187). Right moral and political principles “emerge from man’s vision of the Ideas, or from the measurement of desire by that vision, hence not simply from a harmony between mind and being, but rather on the basis of the unity of the theoretical and practical psyche” (187). This isn’t the modern ‘unity of theory and practice’ seen (for example) in Marx because Marx wants to unify theory and practice by realizing the Ideas instead of using them as a measure that always remains ‘above’ us in its good indifference to what we want. As for the good that generates the Ideas, “it is present in the noetic world without delimiting itself as the class of all the whats, or as a specific what, just as the sun is present in the world of genesis without (Socrates’ phrase) itself being genesis, or an element undergoing genesis” (190). To put it in Heideggerian terms, there is “no concept of ‘Being’ in Plato, identical to that of Heidegger, which encompasses mind and form, but only the incompletely analyzed conception of nature, cosmos, or the whole”: “life is not the same as form,” and although “one can speak of the ‘whole’ of life and form” one can “never give a logos which serves to exhibit the ground from which the two are derived” (196). That is religion’s task.

The Platonic-Socratic understanding of reason defends “against the emergence of nihilism” but does not serve as “an infallible preventive or cure” of it (194). Nihilism springs eternal, “a fundamental danger of human existence” (194), one that even Socrates had to think his way out of. “To be a man is to be constantly falling apart and growing together again. This means that nihilism is a perpetual danger, rooted in the very division which make speech, thought and so completeness possible” (197). The full cure for nihilism in the human soul would be wisdom, but at best human beings can become only lovers of wisdom, partially wise.

Among historicists, Hegel comes the closest to overcoming nihilism, in Rosen’s estimation. Hegel claims that ‘History’ has come to an end in his own work, the assertedly comprehensive speech about Being. Earlier, Rosen had noted in passing that Hegel’s solution is not so much refutable as unbearable—excessively elitist for democratic souls. He now contrasts Hegel’s self-deification to the teaching of Plato’s Socrates. To deify the human, obviously, one must destroy its nature in an attempt to achieve a different and superior nature—if godliness may be said to have a nature. Hegel thus attempts to end the problem of nihilism, inherent in human nature, by overcoming human nature: a new version of the old promise, ‘Ye shall be as gods.’ Rosen doubts that that Hegel fulfilled the promise, or that it can be fulfilled, because human beings (even Hegel) continue to desire and continue to speak until they die; gods may rest content, in silence, if they so choose, without dying. Nature gives human beings both desire and speech; ‘History’ failed to overcome nature in the person and thought of Hegel. Real history, the narrative of the course of events, continues as an inquiry, not as a final answer (214). “The very conception of a complete speech is self-negating,” inasmuch as the complete speech would need to include a statement about itself, which could not exist until after the speech was finished (229).

The superiority of Plato’s Socrates over Hegel amounts to the fact that he sees this. Socrates’ speaks “in the light of wisdom” but not as wisdom (221). He regards the whole as intelligible but he does not believe it achievable in speech. Much less does he believe it achievable by human action. A philosopher may be thought wise in that he partakes of wisdom. He cannot make himself into wisdom. At most, Socrates may playfully suggest that he is a good; literal-minded self-deification—often monotheistic self-deification, at that—he leaves to more hubristic souls.