Digressions&Impressions

Long Covid Diaries: On Gaukroger (RIP), Jongbloed (RIP), and Margaritaville

[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

One of the great joys of academic life is that, if you are receptive to it, you meet interesting new people. These are generally also younger than you — any campus is a steep pyramid in which the young vastly outnumber you at any age — and so you can avoid the slow vanishing of landmarks and shared habits that are so characteristic of natural aging and decay.

I mention this because on Friday, while at a lunch to mark the bittersweet departure of my co-author Federica Russo who landed a professorship in Utrecht {and so reminded me of the persistent dysfunctionality of my home university], I met bright young scholars with inspiring projects in the philosophy department. (It was my first encounter with the department in almost four years.) I was also reminded that these long covid diaries are sometimes read by more distant acquaintances. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; and here.)

As I walked home over the bustling Rokin I was in a reflective mood not just because of the lunch. Earlier that day I had visited the practice of my dad’s foot reflexology therapist, Dorine van Saanten-Daane, who had grown into one of his friends. She had invited me to visit shortly after his death (recall), in part to mourn together and in part for me to experience what her therapy was like. I resisted at first because while I mourned my dad I didn’t want to have to navigate her sense of bereavement. And then lockdowns and my long covid got in the way.

As an aside, many years ago (in 2018), a student came up to my after a seminar. She turned out to be a friend of one of the children of Dorine’s long-time business partners. My student informed me (after establishing I was indeed the same Eric Schliesser that wrote Adam Smith: Systematic Philosopher and Public Thinker) that my book was proudly on display next to some memorabilia of my father’s in the practice. Back in the day when I asked Dorine about it she informed she had bought it after my dad’s death because he was so proud of me.

I think I decided to take her up on her invitation because on Monday I had told my GP about a tremor I have in my hands. My wife (a surgeon) increasingly noticed it. While it doesn’t hinder me at all in daily life (and don’t have any fixity), I do have a tendency to spill ground espresso beans when I try to put them in my Mocha. My dad used to have it, too. I always assumed it was a kind of effect of trauma with a childhood in a concentration camp. But I now think it runs in the family. (My sister revealed hers on Friday.) It seems to have only started after the onset of long covid, so it may have been triggered by it in me.

So when I visited the practice on Friday morning I discretely checked for the presence of my book. (Didn’t see it.) But later during our session Dorine did show me a tasteful collage of pictures and drawings/memorabilia connected to my dad placed on her desk. (In my mind I called it a ‘shrine.’) After some catching up I did receive a foot reflexology session which was divine although I missed most of it because I slept through it.

As regular readers know, my sister taught me a modest meditation technique that almost unfailingly puts me to sleep. Luckily Dorine took it as a big compliment seeing in it my trust and receptivity toward her. I suspected my sleep also had to do with the fact that I had been sleeping badly again because of my return to Amsterdam and the impending start of the academic year on Tuesday, my life had become more demanding with more socializing, multitasking, more meetings, and also more triggers of modest anxiety and organizational decision-making.

On the Rokin, as I was thinking of the invisible threads that still connected me to my dad’s life, I decided to write a post about Jan Jongbloed (1940-2023) an icon of my youth. Jongbloed’s passing didn’t go completely unnoticed, but it wasn’t a major event. Yet, Jongbloed was the goalkeeper in the two lost finals of 74 and 78. Unusually, even then, he played without gloves and he anticipated the ‘modern’ goalkeeper who is very much as much as the last defender as the first link in attack. He had incredible reflexes, was fearless, and had a sense of showmanship by making his saves look spectacular. (Go check it out on youtube.)

Jongbloed’s international career was incredibly long-lasting but erratic. He was never thought of as the best keeper of his era, and never played for a ‘big’ club. I saw Jongbloed play in for FC Amsterdam in a relatively empty Olympic stadium in one of the first professional matches I ever witnessed. (I believe we were taken there with the youth teams of AFC, where I played.) FC Amsterdam (then a relatively new creation that has united the professional activities of many of Amsterdam’s traditional neighborhood clubs) was, then, the other Amsterdam team. I liked listening to interviews of him because of his independence, and he spoke in the typical Amsterdam accent that was already disappearing when I was kid. FC Amsterdam soon relegated and folded.

When I was home I called my GP because I had not received a referral yet. As regular readers know, in England since May I get semi-regular botox shots in my neck in order to combat the side effects of migraine. I would like to get those in Amsterdam so I can reduce the number of visits to London while I am teaching. One of the most frustrating features of a ‘new chronic illness’ are the recurring, emotionally and physically exhausting efforts of having to get care when you are most vulnerable even after it’s been established it’s useful for you (and you are willing to pay out of pocket). In general, I don’t have libertarian sympathies, but the system of rationing and rules that structure all modern health systems does remind me of the enduring germ of truth in that philosophy.

As an aside, the initial impact of botox was spectacular. For about six weeks all my migraine related symptoms including cognitive fatigue and recurring tinnitus disappeared altogether. Unfortunately, in the second week of July, I got a modest flu on holiday and then about three weeks, the symptoms returned including the headaches. But since the second week of August, things have improved again. I do get bouts of cognitive fatigue (which is the first phase of migraine according to the neurologists at NHS’ long covid clinic in London), but I usually spot it before the headaches start and by meditating and modest rest/pause I don’t go through the next cycle of headaches. I want to continue with the botox, or at least give it a few more chances, because if I can avoid the headaches my quality of life is massively better.

The next morning I arose to news Jimmy Buffett died. I had never heard of Buffett when I stepped on Tufts’ Medford campus in the Fall of 1989. But several of my dorm-mates were from small towns in Massachusetts and Parrot Heads, and I tagged along to Great Woods to see and hear him. I loved the tailgating — a new experience — and (as we say now) the vibes. (Undoubtedly the smell of thousands of spliffs reminded me a bit of Amsterdam.)

During my sixteen years stateside, I endlessly listened to Songs You Know By Heart, especially after I got my convertible with my first pay-check (and mom and grandma’s help). I eat sliced mango nearly every day, and I always get a chuckle, then, humming a few bars from Last Mango in Paris. In fact, Come Monday (a surprisingly subtle ballad—’subtle’ one should not overuse around Buffett,), is one of my favorite songs.

In it there is lyric that goes,

Remember that night in Montana
When we said there'd be no room for doubt

Which unfailingly reminds me of my own road trip during the Fall of 1993, and uttered some such words myself in Missoula. I honor the memory of that night (the romance didn’t last), in part, by using ‘nescio’ as my email handle (and also the pen-name of one of my favorite writers).

This is all set up because I just received word from Helen Irving that Stephen Gaukroger (1950-1923) just died. I had my last lunch with Stephen outside at the Wells Tavern in Hampstead a few days before he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor. Because it was my turn to treat, he had come up the hill down from Belsize Park where he and Helen owned an apartment. During our lunch he was unaware of his tumor, but in between academic gossip and talking about our work we did discuss his health because several other serious conditions required treatment after his Summer travel plans. I did share a sense of foreboding with my wife because I had noticed he was not planning any new major projects (see below).

I tend to think of Stephen as one of the great scholar of seventeenth century natural philosophy. His work on Descartes and Bacon helped inaugurate and participate in ‘the contextual turn’ of the study of history and philosophy of science. Because he was in distant Sydney, my first meeting with him was relatively late in my academic development. I suspect we first met at a HOPOS event about twenty years ago. But we first got to know each other at a small workshop Dana Jalobeanu had organized in Bucharest while I was in Leiden (so around 2007 or so). It was a consequential event for me because I first met several of my future PhD students, but also spent a long time talking with Stephen about the Leibniz and Huygens relationship while we were waiting for a delayed flight at the gate.

Not long after, my department was undergoing a merger and foreseeable budget cuts and Stephen invited me to apply for a position at the department he was building at Aberdeen alongside Catherine Wilson. This itself was a memorable trip because I first met the late M.A. (‘Sandy’) Stewart, who had retired but picked me up at the B&B I was staying at and we promptly got lost driving around an Aberdeen suburb looking for a fish restaurant. It was a tremendous opportunity, and I gave one of my best job talks ever. My better half couldn’t imagine living and being happy in Aberdeen (which she found too grey), and so I went to Gent and commuted for six hard year.

I got to know Stephen more personally only relatively recently in July 2016 when I arrived early for my first visit to Sydney because I was co-organizing the Hume Society event at the university. Stephen and Helen lived right near campus and I was invited to their lovely home filled with art. That Brexit Summer my family moved to London, and since we saw each other quite regularly on their visits to Belsize.

I knew Stephen primarily as a mild-mannered gentleman scholar who was touchingly in love with Helen whose achievements and impact he admired and he was incredibly proud of their daughter, Cressida (an accomplished Hume scholar in addition to her many other literary talents). In all my interactions with him you could tell he felt incredibly blessed with his life, his travels with Helen, and his career.

In formal retirement he has been incredibly productive, including a major series of enormous works, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685; The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760; The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841; Civilization and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1795-1935 all with Oxford University Press. This was a man who didn’t only write about the work ethic, but also instantiated it. Over lunch at the Wells, he admitted that this huge project was a way to stay busy while satisfying his curiosity. A ‘bit like my blogging’ I said, and we both laughed heartily.

I sometimes envied Stephen not so much for his ability to complete books, but for his un-flappable nature and his general sunny disposition. However, this did not prevent him from having strong opinions. One of his last academic interventions was a polemical review in TLS. And while I increasingly believe that most polemics are unfruitful (and so unnecessary), his review had gratified my greatly (about that, perhaps, some other time). We discussed it, and Stephen told me with a relish wholly unexpected by me of how he was galvanized into writing it, and he was not at all perturbed even pleased by the polemical reactions it generated. I saw a glimpse of more fiery elements in him previously unknown to me. I will miss him, his mentorship, and our regular meals and talks. I have made a mental note to read his The Failures of Philosophy later this Fall.

On Tuesday classes start, including a new lecture course that I should be preparing. My occupational physician taught me that I should not compare my health on a day to day basis, but over longer stretches. Compared to this day two years ago and even last year, I am massively better despite being down from the glorious symptom-free heights of June. I am a bit nervous about teaching two new courses in a rather full load of three courses (one semester long, two half-semesters) this Fall. I am a bit sad that these diaries have not concluded yet.

But I visited campus earlier in the week. I saw all the students on orientation boasting to each other in their nervousness; met with the tutors, Anna and Aris, who will co-teach one of my lecture courses, and had dinner with my exciting new colleague, Kevin Pham. Come Tuesday I start my lecture on Hobbes’s social contract with a discussion of excerpts from Plato’s Crito and Manegold’s Ad Gebehardum liber, and I am so excited to invite my students along on intellectual discovery to explore jointly the roots and nature of concepts that are authoritative today. Maybe the connections we’ll forge will develop in enduring conversations between us or among them, or play an unexpected role in their lives.

• This first appeared at: <On How to Teach Old Books, Burnyeat vs Strauss, Part II (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On Stebbing on Social Injustice

[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

I have noticed, in passing (recall), that in Ideals and Illusions Stebbing is without being a utilitarian quite favorably disposed to Mill's philosophy. In fact, to be more precise, Stebbing is rather dismissive of Mill's "ill-expressed and ill-planned pamphlet Utilitarianism" which she also (elsewhere) dismisses as "hastily written." She much prefers Mill's "pamphlet On Liberty" which shows "clearly what his ideal was; these writings provide the most effective criticism of his Utilitarianism." She reads On Liberty (to simplify) as able exposition of the democratic creed articulated in the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence in favor of individual happiness and freedom, and opposed to human suffering.

In the first chapter of On Liberty, Mill and Taylor (whom Stebbing does not mention) make it clear that in conditions of domination and subordination, reigning moral views will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes: "Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority." Among the examples they give are slave societies and patriarchy. It is, thus (recall), not far-fetched to see in Mill and Taylor theorists of what is now known as ideology.

Now, contemporary analysists of ideology tend to claim that in addition to justifying the interests of the ruling class, it also creates a form of ignorance among the ruling class. While the former is quite plausible, the latter claim has always struck me as quite odd because it would entail that elites don’t realize how they benefit from the status quo or what social mechanisms maintain class privileges and security. (I am equally mystified by the interest in tacit bias.) If that were so, one would see ruling classes give up their privileges and sources of power willingly (or at least by accident).* However, this rarely occurs. And the one time it manifestly did – the warm embrace of the early stages of the French revolution on the Enlightened part of the nobility – it ended so badly that it has been a stark warning ever since reinforced by many facts of our liberal arts education.

For Mill and Taylor, ideology produces a deformation of “the moral feelings of the members” of the ruling class, and they emphasize (this is a bit surprising), “in their relations among themselves.” I call it ‘surprising’ because one would have expected them to emphasize the maltreatment of the subordinate class (a topic that is of genuine interest to them). To be sure, I don’t mean to suggest this is missing from their analysis.

Echoing Hume (and Smith), and anticipating Dicey, they go on to claim that “the likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion of it, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the rules laid down for general observance, under the penalties of law or opinion.” So for Mill and Tayler a society’s laws and norms always express to a considerably degree the interests of (at least a part of the) ruling classes and these, in turn, do not merely secure ruling class hegemony, but they come at a cost of a corrosion of the moral sensibility of the ruling class. This seems quite plausible.

In On Liberty, Mill and Taylor don’t really explore the nature of this deformation of the ruling classes’ moral sentiments except, perhaps and non-trivially, that it produces conformism. In the context of a critical discussion of Clive Bell’s (1928) book Civilization (hitherto unknown to me), Stebbing does take up the issue (in Chapter V). She first quotes Bell and then comments as follows:  

What interests me most in Mr. Bell’s pronouncement is his uneasy and unwilling admission that [among the elites] “a sensitive and intelligent man cannot fail to be aware of the social conditions in which he lives.” If only he could shut himself up in an ivory tower how delightfully and valuably he might pass his time. But a “ civilized man ” must be sensitive and intelligent, so, as Mr. Bell is reluctantly forced to admit, either he must harden his heart or be discomforted. It is very unfortunate, but that is how things are. How satisfactory would it not be for a civilized Nero, if only Rome were not burning? But it is burning, and he cannot, if sensitive and intelligent, be unmoved by its plight. To-day, although Rome is not burning, not a few of the cities of Europe are, or have been, in flames— deliberately set on fire. What does it matter to us, if we be sensitive and intelligent men, provided that our own city is not in flames or, if it is, if we can take refuge in California and there produce masterpieces, or at least enjoy the masterpieces of others? Mr. Bell has, I think, given us the answer. We cannot remain unaware of what is happening; we may escape the danger and the discomfort; we may still, far removed to a safe place, continue our civilized pursuits; but we do so at a cost—the cost of callousness or a sense of discomfort.

Before I continue it is worth noting that Stebbing herself goes on to note that there is something really wrong with Bell’s position; he ignores the Kantian dictum that we should treat people as ends not merely as means. The fundamental problem with social hierarchy is not its side effects on the social elite, but the maltreatment of the have-nots and the militarism it licenses. (She is writing in the immediate context of WWII.)

But she is clearly intrigued by the fact that even somebody who defends the possible worth of social hierarchy (in terms of aesthetic and hedonic qualities) has to concede, first, that those at the top are not unaware of the conditions that produce their social privileges and, second, that this awareness generates permanent unease and cruel disregard (“callousness”) to others among (at least a part) of the social elites, and, third, encourages forms of escapism among the elites. She repeats these points multiple times in immediate context. She notes that “there is some slender ground for hope in this discomfort.”

In fact, and to reiterate, there is no doubt that Stebbing wants to draw on more capacious social, psychological, and ethical resources than this slender hope; in addition to Kant’s dictum, she also discusses the significance of cultivating the sympathetic imagination (she cites Hume, but sounds like Adam Smith) in the same chapter. And, as I noted recently, in Thinking to Some Purpose she clearly argues that considerable social-economic leveling is required.

Even so, it may be worth a brief reflection, in closing, why Stebbing dwells on the existence of elite discomfort. Part of the answer can be found in the next chapter when she writes that “Only a deep dissatisfaction with our present mode of life combined with a definite hope for the not distant future will make-this destruction of Europe endurable.” We can discern in this passage a hint of a kind of secular theodicy. (She is clearly no Christian.) Perhaps, ‘theodicy’ is too strong, but she clearly believes that a democratic faith requires some hope that present suffering can be overcome in the future if at the end of the road there has been a definite social change (for the better).

For Stebbing, democratic hope presupposes that at least some of the social elites have to be willing to buy into minimal change. (She is no advocate of violent revolution.) And they will do so, she thinks, when some of them recognize, as they inevitably will, that the existing social hierarchy harms them psychically in various ways. That from the perspective of social elites, in democratic life social change, thus, need not be understood exclusively in terms of the risk of loss of privilege, but that it also may bring not just better social relations with the existing have-nots but also better self-relations (among elites and individually). Thus in drawing out Mill’s and Taylore’s ideas on the perversion of morality in social hierarchy, there is lurking here a commitment to the claim that social elites will recognize themselves in the Socratic doctrine that when one harms others, as social hierarchy inevitably entails, one really harms oneself and this will reduce resistance to social reform.

• This first appeared at: <Stebbing on the Harm(s) of Social Hierarchy - by nescio13 (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

On How to Teach Old Books, Burnyeat vs Strauss, Part II

[This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

As I noted yesterday, in his famous polemical 1986 NRYB essay, Burnyeat treats Leo Strauss as a charismatic (he uses "inspiring") teacher, who founded a school. He quotes Coser to emphasize the point that Strauss "alone among eminent refugee intellectuals succeeded in attracting a brilliant galaxy of disciples who created an academic cult around his teaching." But Burnyeat notes that inspiration is not sufficient to explain the nature of the school and he implies that there is something about the manner of teaching texts that can help explain not just the devotion of Strauss' students to their teacher, but also to the influence these have on their students (and indirectly on policy).  

This is worth reflecting on because even within analytic philosophy we are not immune to the charms (and vices) of school formation (I could list half a dozen in the Harvard, Pitt, Chicago triangle). Here, I focus on the teaching of (historically and culturally distant) texts. So I am leaving aside the teaching of methods and arguments, although in practice all these can blend into each other.

Burnyeat structures his critique of Strauss' teaching by way of a sharp contrast, which I treat as kind of ideal types in what follows. I have taken courses with Burnyeat (who was a spectacularly exciting seminar leader) and some of Strauss' inspiring students, and their ways of proceeding is, in practice, not so different as the ideal types suggest. 

First, let's look at how Burnyeat describes the method of teaching he favors (we will call it 'analytic pedagogy'). He writes:

When other teachers invite their students to explore the origins of modern thought, they encourage criticism as the road to active understanding. Understanding grows through a dialectical interaction between the students and the author they are studying.

Anyone that comes to analytic (history of) philosophy from other (more philological or historicizing) approaches will recognize what Burnyeat is gesturing at. There is a refreshing -- a term I often hear in this context -- lack of distance between student and text, and the students are encouraged not to treat the assigned material as eternal truths or authoritative, but as material to cut their teeth on in analytic pedagogy. Of course, Burnyeat himself is committed to the pedagogical thesis that we learn by way of criticizing what we're reading and discussing in class. And once this is properly structured -- notice the interaction between students and author is implied to go both ways, and so is dialectical -- this is supposed to produce understanding, although it is not entirely clear what the understanding is understanding of (the ancient texts, of the origin of modern thought, of the distance between us and the old texts?).

One way to think about analytic pedagogy is that philosophy students will seek out the arguments they can recognize in the text, and, if necessary, reconstruct them by looking for premises in the text. Often there are suppressed premises that will make an argument valid and these can be found elsewhere in a text. One can then explore to what degree the argument is sound and this may lead to lovely exploration for the reasons behind the premises and to what degree these stand up to scrutiny in light of an author's other comments. Even when Burnyeat's approach encourages what we might sometimes call an uncharitable attitude of 'fault-finding in a text,' with a skilled instructor and inquisitive students initial (and anachronistic) criticism need not be the end of the matter. 

Before I move on it is worth noting that Burnyeat frames his way of presenting his favored approach in terms of exploring 'the origins of modern thought.' At first sight, this is a peculiar move by Burnyeat, especially in the context of his polemic with Strauss. Let me make two observations, first, I find it peculiar he claims it because there is no reason to believe that the understanding that is yielded by the method Burnyeat defends should or would lead to better genetic understanding of modern thought. I am not claiming this method would hinder one from doing so (although I suspect it), but the dialectic Burnyeat describes doesn't get you there through engagement with texts unless the instructor has deliberately shaped the syllabus to do so (often by inscribing the syllabus in a narrative of progress or unfolding). Oddly enough, what may feel as independent criticism by the student is really, then, a carefully orchestrated (and predictable) march through history. This can still be riveting to the novice, but otherwise best not repeated.

Second, in the context with the polemic with Strauss, Burnyeat's phrasing is rather revealing (and so structures this post). Because Burnyeat explicitly presupposes that it is understanding modern thought that is the telos of pedagogy. Given the details of his criticism of Strauss, one cannot help but suspect that this enterprise becomes a kibd of vindicatory understanding of modern thought. To be sure, even there the means toward understanding will be critical, but it will be pursued with (what one might call for present purposes) shared 'modern' premises. This very much suggests that in the dialectical pedagogical process Burnyeat defends 'we' who are beneficiaries of progress are in a superior position to the authors studied in a number of (moral and technological) ways.

To be sure, there are ways of construing Burnyeat's phrase 'origins of modern thought' more innocently and without some of the baggage I am attributing to him. Feel free to do so, if you think that's right. But do remember that we're supposed to be dealing with an important contrast (and as, you shall see, is made explicit by Burnyeat). And, in fact, Burnyeat explicitly presents his own "task here" (not to be the polemical vanguard of analytic philosophy, but rather) "to tell readers who are interested in the past, but who do not wish simply to retreat from the present." (emphasis added) So, Burnyeat explicitly sees himself as, in some sense, providing an apologetics for a certain kind of modernity.

Strauss' proposed teaching method (hereafter 'Straussian pedagogy') is said to be constituted by a kind of immersion such that the student ends up (empathetically and intellectually) identifying with the author. I quote Burnyeat's summary:

Strauss asks—or commands—his students to start by accepting that any inclination they may have to disagree with Hobbes (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides), any opinion contrary to his, is mistaken. They must suspend their own judgment, suspend even “modern thought as such,” until they understand their author “as he understood himself.”

Self-understanding is notoriously difficult and we're especially likely to fail to be aware of our own blind spots, so this will be a fraught enterprise. Before I get to Burnyeat's criticism of this way of doing things it's worth noting that the evidence Burnyeat cites on Strauss' teaching (from one of Strauss' students), doesn't merely require such sympathetic identification with an author, but also the embrace of the idea that what they say is "simply true." (emphasis in Burnyeat's text.) That is, the texts studied are treated as if they are a kind of revelation and in which no textual detail is unworthy of attention. Lurking here, thus, is a form of (or a variant on) the joint study Chavrusa (literally, fellowship) one may find in a Yeshiva. (Strauss was, I believe, never enrolled in a Yeshiva, but he may have encountered the practice when he boarded with a cantor in Marburg.)

Learning to suspend judgment is an important skill, one that guards against some non-trivial epistemic vices, especially common among philo-bros (fill in your favorite example). It is a bit of shame that Burnyeat did not pause to let him and his readers reflect on the significance of this. So, Burnyeat is correct to claim that for Straussian pedagogy, "it would be presumptuous for students to criticize “a wise man” on the basis of their own watered-down twentieth-century thoughts. Let them first acquire the wise man’s own understanding of his wisdom." And all I am pointing out in response is that even if one admires analytic pedagogy, it has down-side risks that the Straussian pedagogy internalizes. 

For, there is also no doubt that bracketing -- I use this phenomenological term in part because of Strauss's debts to that tradition --- the superiority of one's own intellectual culture will allow not just a more sympathetic engagement with the text (this is explicitly noted by Burnyeat), but also puts the student in the position to let the text criticize some of the student's (often tacit) commitments (say, about how certain social arrangements naturally are) immanently. (And while this may not be expected at first, it seems more plausible once one has gotten in the habit of treating multiple authors in this way.) This is quite salutary practical wisdom to acquire for educated elite (recall yesterday's post), or to put it more democratically, the public-spirited citizen.

At this point, I should note an important potential confusion in or caused by Burnyeat's argument. He correctly notes that understanding an "author “as he understood himself” is fundamental to Straussian interpretation" and "that it is directed against his chief bugbear, “historicism,” or the belief that old books should be understood according to their historical context." Burnyeat kind of implies that Strauss, thereby, proposes a-historical interpretation of old books, for he quotes Strauss as recommending "listening to the conversation between the great philosophers." This would, by implication, involve Straussian pedagogy in a kind of conceptual confusion because if one wishes to understand an author as she understood herself one needs to have a sense of how she understands or wishes to shape her context (and what that context might be.) In fact, if one goes to the primary text (of several) that Burnyeat cites (On Tyranny, p. 24) Strauss does not advocate an a-historical stance, rather he opposes historicism to what he calls "true historical understanding."*

It should be readily clear why Strauss rejects obtaining an understanding of old books from, as it were, the outside in that is, by appeal, to historical context. For, this is a mechanism to impose conformity on a text by way of assumptions about how a particular age must have or only could have thought. This is especially so because the historicist tends to assume that the past involves cultural unities (as a kind of organic whole.) In addition, the historicist student assumes she has a privileged methodological, asymmetric position relative to the past texts often constituted not just by this historical sense, but also by the progress achieved since.

For, even without being exposed to Dilthey (et al), students often come with some such sense of superiority toward the texts and they are often really surprised to find really smart people in the distant past. One need not be a Straussian or a conservative to appreciate this. In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber& Wengrow attack some such historicism because they, too, want to undercut a kind of self-satisfied eurocentrism and get their readers to appreciate the intelligence of those culturally and historically distant agents they discuss. To be sure, I doubt analytic pedagogy is itself intrinsically wedded to historicism. But by privileging criticism is may fall into similar traps. 

Okay, be that as it may, Burnyeat quotes Dannhouser (one of Strauss' students) as claiming that Strauss' pedagogy also involved the maxim that "one ought not even to begin to criticize an author before one had done all one could do to understand him correctly." So, this suggests that the Straussian student does get to criticism but only at a much later stage. So on Straussian pedagogy, sympathetic identification with an author is then necessary, but not sufficient to complete ones understanding. 

Interestingly enough, Burnyeat denies that one ever gets to the critical stage in Straussian pedagogy, because "It is all too clear" that completion of the first stage is an "illusory goal" given the constraints of university education ("the end of the term.") Again, it is worth noting that Burnyeat is so eager to criticize that does not pause to reflect on the possible benefits of practice in such incomplete identification--that learning to see the world from a diverging perspective is hard and requires effort and skill, may well be thought a useful democratic insight in a complex, multi-cultural society if not for the gentleman, then, for the citizen! (One can recognize this without embracing a natural aristocracy as the proper end of education.)

As an important aside. I met Burnyeat through Ian Mueller, who was much more of an eclectic than either Burnyeat or Strauss (and also much more willing than Burnyeat to let ancient commentators and differing scholarly traditions teach him something about Plato), actually taught (despite clear focus on discerning and rationally reconstructing arguments) in the manner I have called 'Straussian pedagogy.’ For the students that stayed, the effect was always a skeptical Aporia, but also a real appreciation of the difficulties of any interpretation. (For the details, see Stephen Menn's In Memoriam.)

Even so, Burnyeat worries that in virtue of the never-ending process of sympathetic identification with an author one's critical faculties are atrophied and that one ends up surrendering to the text or the teacher (and, if the latter, so a school is formed). As Burnyeat puts it surrendering the "critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas." Let's stipulate that Burnyeat gets something right that the Straussian pedagogy risks under-developing certain critical skills.

To put some clothes on this claim: in Strauss' writings one repeatedly is directed to the idea that (to paraphrase one formulation) to philosophy means to ascend from public dogma or opinion to knowledge. But one is rarely shown what such knowledge is or the practice that might constitute it. As Burnyeat puts it, correctly, there is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of “the philosopher” but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy. In fact, one would never guess from Strauss' writings that he was a student of Cassirer, Husserl, Heidegger who would have been in a position to advance any of their (ahh) programs. To put this as a serious joke: Strauss voluntarily abandoned his place on the philosophical research frontier, and his school never returned to it (except, perhaps, in the study of certain figures).

Burnyeat also observes this, "Certainly, neither Strauss nor Straussians engage in the active discussion of central questions of philosophy which is characteristic of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and modern philosophy departments. They confine themselves to the exposition of texts, mainly texts of political philosophy—not, for example, Aristotle’s Physics or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason." In so far as they even care about old texts (and most do only in a very mitigated sense), nearly all my friends in analytic philosophy will agree vigorously with Burnyeat here.

But, of course, part of the issue here -- and I am baffled Burnyeat of all people misses this -- is what counts as "central question" or what is first philosophy. If one thinks that 'how should one live?' is central, then political philosophy becomes (at least closely related to) first philosophy and encompasses the rest. While, by contrast, structuring one's education around the so-called 'core' [Logic, Language, Epistemology, and Metaphysics], and to model ethics/meta-ethics on the principles popular in the core, becomes then criminally irresponsible if not to oneself then to society. The recurring inability to even think that responsible speech might be worth thinking about is, thus, symptomatic of the effect of analytic pedagogy. 

Finally, is peculiar that Burnyeat thinks that Straussian pedagogy leads, as described, to "initiation into the world of Strauss'" ideas. In fact, in nearly all the courses I attended taught by Straussians, Strauss was never mentioned, and that even was a kind of running gag about such courses. So, except for the Straussians (now quite aged) who studied with Strauss himself, his ideas could only be accessed through his texts. Unsurprisingly, Straussians themselves don't agree on his views and their own project (with East coast, West coast, Claremont approaches, etc.). At best what the class-room teaching does is whet an appetite to read his texts in the manner that he may wished to be understood. But the more likely impact of the Straussian pedagogy is to whet an appetite for more close reading of texts.

I don't mean to suggest that Burnyeat lacks an argument for his initiation claim. But it's important to see that the argument for this does not reside in the details of what I have been calling 'Strausian pedagogy.' Rather it resides in the purported power of a kind of indirect implication. For to get at Straussian content (of Strauss' own views or the views he attributes to the texts he discusses), "much labor is required to disentangle its several elements from his denunciations of modernity and the exegesis of dozens of texts." That is the Straussian hermeneutic (as distinct from Straussian pedagogy) reads texts as incredibly complex puzzles that can only be solved by a kind of capacious reading and multi-dimensional puzzle-solving. This requires certain dispositions most of us (even in the old-text studies niche of the universe) lack. And so the initiation through the hermeneutics selects on a certain set of dispositions and practices.

But we're left with a kind of weird puzzle here: if (and it is a big if) Burnyeat get Strauss' initiation practice right, and so has properly understood Strauss' teachings, how come it fails to work its magic on Burnyeat, who is singularly unpersuaded? (Persuade and its cognates are the key word in Burnyeat's essay.) This suggests that at best Burnyeat has uncovered a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. One might think that Strauss mistakenly assumed a unity of the virtues thesis -- and given how often we are told about the need to return to the Ancients -- this assumption may seem plausible. But since Strauss is much exercised by the conditions under which philosophical teaching fails (Strauss likes to point at "rash Alcibiades"), and certainly is personally familiar with Heidegger as an exemplary case of a conspicuous lack of such unity, this assumption does not pass the smell test. At this point one may be tempted to claim that only exposure to Straussian pedagogy and exposure to Straussian hermeneutics is jointly sufficient to breed Straussians. But this can't be right because, as intended, and in fact, this is not so. (Even Burnyeat notes this because it's only a "few" who fall for it.) I leave it here, but will suggest -- I don't know where this inspiration comes from! -- that the nature of the "power of persuasion" in the Republic is a key to make progress on this very question.  

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---

*This is p. 25 in The University of Chicago (2009) edition

Burnyeat vs Strauss, Again

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In a famous polemical essay (1986) in NYRB, my (recall) teacher, Myles Burnyeat, distinguished between two ways of entering Strauss’ thought: either through his “writings” or “one may sign up for initiation with a Straussian teacher.” That is, as Burnyeat notes, Strauss founded a school – he quotes Lewis Coser’s claim that it is “an academic cult” -- with an oral tradition. In the 1986 essay, Burnyeat spends some time on the details of Strauss’ teaching strategy and style that he draws from autobiographical writings by Bloom and Dannhauser[1] as well as by aptly quoting Strauss’ famous (1941) essay "Persecution and the Art of Writing." Somewhat peculiarly, given what follows, Burnyeat does not comment on the surprising fit he [Burnyeat] discerns between Strauss’ writing and teaching!

Burnyeat goes on to imply that without the oral tradition, Strauss’ writings fall flat, or (and these are not the same thing, of course) lack political influence. I quote:

“It is the second method that produces the sense of belonging and believing. The books and papers are freely available on the side of the Atlantic from which I write, but Strauss has no discernible influence in Britain at all. No one writing in the London Review of Books would worry—as Stephen Toulmin worried recently in these pages about the State Department’s policy-planning staff—that Mrs. Thatcher’s civil servants know more about the ideas of Leo Strauss than about the realities of the day. Strauss has no following in the universities where her civil servants are educated. Somehow, the interchange between teacher and pupil gives his ideas a potency that they lack on the printed page.”

I want to draw out to two themes from this quote: first, I’ll focus on the reception of Strauss in the UK. And, second, on the way governing elites are educated. So much for set up.

 

First, this is an extraordinary passage once we remember that already in 1937 Michael Oakeshott wrote an admiring and insightful review of Strauss’ ,The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: its Basis and its Genesis (1936) that is very much worth re-reading. (In his earlier, 1935, essay in Scrutiny on Hobbes, Oakeshott alerts the reader that he is familiar with Strauss’ (1932) French article on Hobbes.) It matters to Burnyeat’s empirical claim because while Oakeshott, who did have an impact British political thinking, certainly is not a slavish follower of Strauss, one would have to be confident that none of Oakeshott’s teachings weren’t taken from Strauss at all. Writing in the London Review of Books a few years later (1992), Perry Anderson alerts his readers to non-trivial differences between Strauss and Oakeshott (which is compatible with my claim), and more importantly for present purposes, treats Strauss as a major influence on the then newish resurgence of the intellectual right (although that can be made compatible with Burnyeat’s claim about Strauss’ purported lack of influence in the UK).[2]

 

But even when taken on its own terms, there is something odd about Burnyeat’s claim. For, even if we grant that Strauss has no following at all in British universities by the mid 1980s, this could have other sources than the lack of potency of Strauss’ ideas. After all, there had been a number of influential polemics against Strauss in the United Kingdom. Most notably, the so-called ‘Cambridge school’ of historiography (associated with Pocock, Dunn, and Skinner amongst others) polemically self-defined, in part, against Strauss and his school; this can be readily ascertained by, for example, word-searching ‘Strauss’ in Quentin Skinner’s (1968) "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas."[3] One can also discern, as I have noted before, such polemics by reading Yolton’s (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review.[4] Yolton was then at Kenyon, but he had been an Oxford DPhil student of Ryle’s, who supervised his dissertation on John Locke.[5] Polemic is simply unnecessary with writings one foresees would have no influence or potency at all. So, I am afraid to say that Burnyeat’s presentation does little justice to even the broad outlines of the early reception of Strauss in the U.K.

 

As I noted, there is a second theme lurking in the quoted passage, namely Burnyeat’s interest in how civil servants are educated at university. This theme is developed by Burnyeat as follows in the NYRB essay:

The leading characters in Strauss’s writing are “the gentlemen” and “the philosopher.” “The gentlemen” come, preferably, from patrician urban backgrounds and have money without having to work too hard for it: they are not the wealthy as such, then, but those who have “had an opportunity to be brought up in the proper manner.” Strauss is scornful of mass education. “Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness.” Such “gentlemen” are idealistic, devoted to virtuous ends, and sympathetic to philosophy. They are thus ready to be taken in hand by “the philosopher,” who will teach them the great lesson they need to learn before they join the governing elite.

The name of this lesson is “the limits of politics.” Its content is that a just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about. In the 1960s this became: a just society is impossible. In either case the moral is that “the gentlemen” should rule conservatively, knowing that “the apparently just alternative to aristocracy open or disguised will be permanent revolution, i.e., permanent chaos in which life will be not only poor and short but brutish as well.”

Burnyeat infers these claims from a number of Strauss’s writings in the 1950s and 60s which he has clearly read carefully. In fact, at the end of the second paragraph, Burnyeat adds in his note (after citing Strauss’ What is Political Philosophy? p. 113), “where Strauss indicates that when this argument is applied to the present day, it yields his defense of liberal or constitutional democracy—i.e., modern democracy is justified, according to him, if and because it is aristocracy in disguise.”

Now, even friends of mass education can admit that modern democracy is an aristocracy in disguise. This is not a strange claim at all when we remember that traditionally ‘democracy’ was associated with what we now call ‘direct’ or ‘popular’/’plebiscite’ democracy, whereas our ‘liberal’ or ‘representative’ democracy was understood as aristocratic in form if only because it functionally preserves rule by the relatively few as Tocqueville intimates. This fact is a common complaint from the left, and, on the right, taken as a vindication of the sociological ‘elite’ school (associated with Mosca, Pareto, etc.). It is not limited to the latter, of course, because the claim can be found in the writing of Max Weber on UK/US party politics (which Strauss knew well.)  

Of course, what matters is what kind of aristocracy modern liberal democracy is, and can be. And now we return, anew, to theme of the education of the governing elite(s) as Burnyeat put front and center in NYRB. That a liberal education can produce a ‘natural’ aristocracy is, in fact, staple of writings in what we may call ‘the conservative tradition’ as can be found in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The idea is given a famous articulation in the writings of Edmund Burke (1791) “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.” (I have put the passage from Burke in a note.)[6]

So, as summarized by Burnyeat, Strauss simply echoes a commonplace about how Burke is understood by post WWII conservatives. What’s distinctive then is that Strauss is presented as claiming that the ancient wisdom he discloses is that trying to bring about a fully just society would re-open the Hobbesian state of nature/war, that is, permanent chaos. It won’t surprise that Burnyeat denies this is the unanimous teaching of the ancients (although when I took a seminar with him about fifteen years later he came close to endorsing this himself as a reading of the Republic). For, the closing two paragraphs of his essay, drive this point home:

“Strauss believed that civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners. The impossibility of international justice was a considerable part of what persuaded him that “the justice which is possible within the city, can only be imperfect or cannot be unquestionably good.” But Strauss spent his life extolling what he believed to be “the truth” on the grounds that it is the unanimous “wisdom of the ancients.” Hence something more than an academic quarrel is taking place when Strauss defends his eccentric view that Plato’s Socrates agrees with Xenophon’s in teaching that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies.

Plato’s Socrates attacks this very notion early in the Republic. No matter: Strauss will demonstrate that it is the only definition of justice from Book I which is “entirely preserved” in the remainder of the Republic. Plato’s Socrates argues passionately in the Gorgias for a revolutionary morality founded on the thesis that one should not return wrong for wrong. Strauss’s unwritten essay on Plato’s Gorgias would have summoned all his Maimonidean skills to show that Socrates does not mean what he says. Much more is at stake here than the correctness or otherwise of the common scholarly opinion that Xenophon, a military man, was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates. The real issue is Strauss’s ruthless determination to use these old books to “moderate” that idealistic longing for justice, at home and abroad, which grew in the puppies of America during the years when Strauss was teaching and writing.”

 

That Xenophon was incompetent at philosophy and did not understand Socrates is, in the context of the debate with Strauss, a petitio principii. That’s compatible with the claim that Burnyeat is right about this. But it's worth noting that this is characteristic of analytic historiography. For example, in his early (1951) review of Strauss, Vlastos also describes Xenophon as having a “pedestrian mind.” (593)

Even so, that international justice between states is impossible is not a strange reading of the Republic (or the other ancients). Plato and Aristotle are not Kant, after all. (Plato may have thought that Kallipolis could have just relations with other Hellenic polities, but I see no reason he thought that this was enduringly possible with non-Greek barbarians.) And if we permit the anachronism by which it is phrased, it strikes me that Strauss is right that for the ancients civil society must, of necessity, foster warlike habits and make its citizens apply different rules of conduct to one another and to foreigners (even if many foreigners could be treated in pacific fashion and in accord with a supra-national moral norms). Part of Plato’s popularity (recall; and here) in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly due to the plausibility of reading him as a pan-hellenic nationalist. It doesn’t follow from this, of course, that for Socrates whatever justice is possible within the city has to be attenuated or imperfect. It is, however, peculiar that even if one rejects Strauss’ purported “great lesson” and if one grants that Kallipolis is, indeed, the ideal city one should treat the effort to bring it into being as anything more than a dangerous fantasy; and while I wouldn’t want to claim that a “just society is so improbable that one can do nothing to bring it about,” it is not odd to wish to moderate those that try knowing, as we do, the crimes of the Gulag or the Great Leap forward, if that's really what Strauss taught.

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The Conservative Mind on Nemesis, and Liberal Imperialism

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It will probably discredit me in the minds of some, but I have to admit that I read Russell Kirk’s (1953) The Conservative Mind with a great deal of guilty pleasure, and admiration. Some time I would like to return to his defense of the liberal arts in the service of the cultivation of a natural aristocracy. But today I explore what I earlier (recall) described as a his “call for a reformed more prudent imperialism.”

At first sign, Kirk’s work belongs to the tradition of American isolationism. It’s quite critical of imperialism, and one can quote many passages like the following (from the discussion of Irving Babbit in chapter XII): “Imperialism is one aspect of man's ancient expansive conceit, which the Greeks knew would bring hubris, and then blindness, and finally nemesis.” For Kirk (and Babbitt) it clearly means the divine punishment of hubris. Nemesis plays an important role in this chapter (and Kirk’s general argument).

First, the existence of nemesis is part of the argument against the false realism, and false empiricism, of Machiavellianism (I quote Kirk who partially quotes Babbit):

Yet Machiavelli and his followers are not true realists: "The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic; it is a matter of keen observation." With Hobbes, this negation of morality enters English political thought, and we continue to suffer from its poison.

Nemesis, thus, follows eventually and necessarily from an enduring transgression of moral boundaries. (I leave it to fans of Star Trek to draw the obvious connections.) Kirk’s claim is, part and parcel of, and supported by, the providentialism articulated throughout The Conservative Mind. But having said that, Kirk’s “whatever one may term it” betrays a hint of the need for new myths for a materialist (a point he ascribes to Santayana).

As an aside, while the main official target of this argument will be ‘liberal humanitarianism,’ the quoted passage is clearly a swipe against Burnham, whose The Machiavellians, defenders of freedom had sought to offer anti-liberals a positive program. But Burnham’s new (managerial) elite is, in fact, dangerous because, like the modern Nietzcheans whose poetry it constantly emulates, it fails to recognize natural limits and so is itself an engine of destruction.

Second, in his own age Nemesis is exemplified and illustrated by Hiroshima and Nagasaki--a point reiterated several times throughout the book. Here it also sets up the argument against ‘Liberal humanitarianism’ which “in the United States found itself embarrassed, to put the matter mildly, when the Second World War was won-won at the expense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and all they meant to the American conscience, won at the expense of consuming centralization at home, the maintenance of permanent armies abroad.”

No less eloquent than the Marxist critic or the Schmittian, Kirk evokes Liberal humanitarianism (with its self-confident standardization and consumerism) as the false imperialism throughout his argument. In fact, it is the task of the twentieth century conservative to tame this “corroding imperialism more ominous even than those the Romans failed to resist after they had crushed Macedonia.” It is precisely “in victory” that conservatism is required “to redeem her from ungoverned will and appetite” that is the product of two centuries of (Hamiltonian) expansionism. Kirk forcefully rejects the idea that American “institutions” can be imposed “upon cultures which have as good a claim to respect.”

In fact, Kirk’s providentialism is informed by the near miraculous revival of conservative forces during the mid-twentieth century against the grain of progressivism. This revival he understands as a moral awakening due not just to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the horrors of the Gulag and many smaller examples of the excesses of planning.  

I don’t think Kirk advocates retreat from empire altogether. Rather, he councils national humility in preserving it, against what he calls “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy.” Goes on to claim that it is an empirical “error (as Mirabeau said) to suppose that democracy and imperialism are inimical; they  will hunt together in our time, as they did in Periclean Athens and Revolutionary France.”

Those of us long accustomed to an imperial presidency with its tendency toward plebiscitary democracy, the permanent multitude of US American bases around the world, and a number of disastrous foreign interventions in the name of humanity will have to judge Kirk’s exhortation – despite its truth – a failure. But no liberal can rejoice in this failure—rather it should be the foundation of more sober reflection on reform of our crass political culture, our weakening institutions, and empire.

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Ideals and Illusions, and the forgotten history of analytic political philosophy

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Ideals and Illusions, Susan Stebbing's (1941) moving wartime work, published while she and the Kingsley Lodge school for girls (of which she remained the principal in addition to being the first female British philosophy professor) had moved to the far end of Cornwall, aims to rectify the absence of an ideal that speaks to what one may call democratic and spiritual yearning in British public life.* In fact, Ideals and Illusions, deserves some mention in the history of political theory. While not wishing to ignore some of the limitations of the work, I list three reasons that, perhaps, invite you to read this book.

First, Ideals and Illusions decisively challenges an idea then promoted by political realists of her age (especially E.H. Carr) that debate between realists and democratic theorists within political theory is, and now I quote Hans Morgenthau (who explicitly cites Stebbing), "...tantamount to a contest between principle and expediency, morality and immorality." Morgenthau (1952) de facto concedes Stebbing point, and this led him to reformulate political realism (and its opposition to a kind of democratic idealism as follows): "The contest is rather between one type of political morality and another type of political morality, one taking as its standard universal moral principles abstractly formulated, the other weighing these principles against the moral requirements of concrete political action, their relative merits to be decided by a prudent evaluation of the political consequences to which they are likely to lead." (p. 988; see note 25) To what degree Stebbing would eschew paying attention to prudent evaluation of political consequences may well be doubted. (I return to that some day.)

But the important point here is that Stebbing's criticism of Carr shaped the development of the most influential articulation of post-war realism (in IR).+ And it it is worth noting that Ernest Nagel, who was a serious admirer of Stebbing (1885 –1943), was (in 1947) quite critical of Morgenthau's version of such realism. There is, thus, lurking in the relatively early history of analytic philosophy a polemic, from the perspective of a democratic and liberal theory, with (so-called) political realism that has gone largely unnoticed. (I have discussed Nagel's polemic a bit here. )

Be that as it may, as is well known, in his autobiographic manifesto Liam Kofi Bright writes: "There is something within us that takes joy in the happiness of others, sees their misery as something regrettable, and compels us to act in solidarity and friendship with fellows." In an accompanying footnote, Bright cites (rightly) the fourth chapter of Stebbing's Ideals and Illusions. This chapter articulates a democratic creed that is explicitly indebted to the preamble of the American declaration. Stebbing connects this creed eloquently to Bentham's and Mill's frontal attack on acquiescence in human suffering.  Stebbing is by no means a utilitarian/Radical, but she recovers the enduring significance of the Radical program (which one wishes contemporary longtermists would heed).

But not unlike Jefferson, she inscribes her ideal in a republican political philosophy (while being more attentive to the ills of slavery). In fact, and this is my second point, she deserves to be re-inscribed in the genealogy of modern republicanism, for after claiming that her creed can be captured with the ethical principle, "all men alike ought to be free and happy," she writes:

The democratic ideal does not confine a man within the limitations of his own narrowly conceived self-interest; it widens his interests to include all men, so far as this is possible to the limited intellectual grasp and the groping imagination of a finite human being. To achieve this ideal we must make such political machinery as will enable every man to have his needs considered and to contribute to the working of this machinery according to his ability. No one must be slave to another nor subject to the arbitrary will of any of his fellows, whether he lead or be led. We must create such an economic order as to allow to every man the satisfaction of his primary needs and to permit the development of himself as an individual. (Chapter VII, "Conflicting Ideals," p. 157)

Stebbing clearly embraces the idea that being subject to the arbitrary will of another is a fundamental problem in political and economic life and should be combatted. While rejecting Marxist economics (and explicitly rejects Marx as "prophet"), she quotes The Communist Manifesto approvingly on the idea of "a community of individuals, each of whom counts, associated together in such a way that 46 the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all.” (pp. 144-145) Stebbing's republicanism was already visible, and (as I discerned) presupposed, in her (1939) Thinking to Some Purpose, but it is much more subtly and carefully developed in Ideals and Illusions not as a normative theory in a post-Rawlsian sense, but as a living faith apt for her times. (I return to that below.) 

Third, one of the key theme among my friends in the ‘'bleeding heart’ wing of contemporary libertarianism is the insight that the closed border regimes of our age are not just a frontal attack on the rights of outsiders or non-natives, but are a very sly and insidious attack on the rights and lives of citizens/insiders who often don't realize initially that many of their own liberties are undermined (often due to aggressive policing of border zones, but not limited to this). I first learned the point from Jacob T. Levy, and it’s a very important theme in Kukathas' Immigration and Freedom. (Levy and Kukathas are, thereby, developing an insight lurking in Mises but not as well developed there as one would wish.) I don't mean to suggest it's only a libertarian talking point; many (Foucault-inflected) scholars in security/immigration studies have developed a similar analysis (and as a skeptical liberal I will make it my own).

Here's Stebbing's version of a related insight:

[D]uring the Victorian age and up to the outbreak of the 1914-18 war there was considerable advancement in the direction of the ideal of the American revolution. It is convenient to call this the ideal of a civilized democracy. This ideal is far from having been accomplished. That, however, is not the point that is of main importance for my present purpose. The point is that it was an ideal consciously held and, on the whole, deliberately pursued. The moral significance of this period lies in the fact that there was a widespread conviction that there was an ideal worth pursuing, that there were high aims to the achievement of which a man might fittingly devote his life; to live strenuously for an ideal is more difficult and exacting than to be prepared to die for it. During the last twenty years this ideal has not only been explicitly denied and vilified in certain countries, it has further faded as an ideal even in those countries where the citizens continue to admire the sound of the word “ democracy.” For, it must be remembered, the democratic ideal is founded upon the moral principle that all men alike ought to be free and happy. It requires a temper of mind free from suspicion of others, from hatred of the foreigner, and from intolerance. It requires further an active sympathy with those who are oppressed. In all these respects the last twenty years have seen a serious deterioration. Before the last war it was possible to travel from one end of Europe to the other without a passport; during the last twenty years it has not been possible. This may seem unimportant; in fact, it is not. Its importance is that it is a symptom of the change for the worse that has befallen us. Each State in turn has tightened its restrictions upon the entry of foreigners. In a world which is economically so interdependent that it may be said to be a unity, certain of the most powerful States strive to be wholly sufficient in their economic requirements. The growth of economic internationalism is in conflict with an emotionally sustained nationalism. Hatred of others is fostered. (Chapter VI, pp. 112-113 [emphasis added—ES.])

What I wish to highlight here is that Stebbing discerns that a closed border policy doesn't just restrict the inflow of people, commodities, and capital, it also transforms the very ideals, the pattern of thoughts, and even morals of one's own polity. For Stebbing a 'temper of mind' -- we might say ethos -- is rather important to democratic life. With this diagnosis she is rather close to the liberal-realists explored (recall) by Cherniss in his recent Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century.

Okay, let me wrap up. I leave you to discover her fantastic genealogical analysis of conscience, and her excellent critique of Bradley's political theory amongst other gems. I have suggested before (recall here; here etc.) that the narrative that there 'was no political philosophy within analytic philosophy' before Rawls is a lie that keeps us in a self-imposed tutelage. To be sure, this fact is difficult to see as a consequence of the division of labor in which (inter alia) economics and philosophy split, and political philosophers became specialists in normative theory and judge each other accordingly. From the perspective of contemporary philosophy, Stebbing’s book would seem to lack something.

But in so far as political philosophy aspires to educate the thoughtful citizenry in the reasons for its commitments (it should hold), Stebbing's book is, warts and all (and I have not developed my criticisms here), without parallel in early analytic philosophy. (No, I am not ignoring Popper or Russell's political essays!) Neurath insisted on the very point in 1946:

I clearly realized the tendency within our movement to deal with the actual life when I looked at Stebbing's "Ideas and Illusions", the preface dated Tintagel April 1941, where the school she and her friends had organized had been evacuated from London. Here she continued her fight against muddled arguing, as started in "Philosophy and the Physicists" and in "Thinking to some Purpose". But during the war also appeared her "A Modern Elementary Logic" which was intended to be a book for students, some of them in the army, without any guidance from a teacher. I speak of these details, because they clearly show, how persistent scientific life is.**

 

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*For a summary of the book, I recommend chapter 8 of  Siobhan Chapman. Susan Stebbing and the language of common sense. 2013. 

+For some further details see S. Molloy (2006) The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics, pp. 64-70. (Molloy treats Stebbing as a historian of science.) In a different work, Peter Wilson (2000) acknowledges the significance and cogency of Stebbing's criticism, but suggests she drew heavily from Leonard Woolf. (I have not been able yet to verify this.)

**This is also quoted in Chapman's book, p. 165.

Hume's odd footnote to Grotius, and Pufendorf

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Readers who come to David Hume through the Treatise may be forgiven for thinking that he wasn't an especially learned or scholarly philosopher deviating from the reigning tendency toward eclecticism. I include myself among these, until I heard a paper (which may still be unpublished) by Ken Winkler on the way Hume carefully edited his notes engaged with Locke through the successive editions of the Enquiries. In fact, Hume's long essay on population exhibits him as quite learned. So much for set-up.

After offering his famous definition of convention in the third Appendix to the Second Enquiry (paragraphs 7-8), Hume adds a note suggesting that this "theory concerning the origin of property, and consequently of justice, is, in the main, the same with that hinted at and adopted by Grotius," (De jure belli & pacis. Lib. ii. cap. 2. §2. art. 4 & 5.) which he then quotes in Latin. There are four peculiarities pertaining to the passage from Grotius that Hume quotes.

First, throughout it his writings, Hume himself had explicitly denied that property had its origin in an explicit/verbal convention (that is, social contract), whereas Grotius explicitly allows that this is a possible source: "Simul discimus, quomodo res in proprietatem iverint; non animi actu solo, neque enim scire alii poterant, quid alii suum esse vellent, ut eo abstinerent, & idem velle plures poterant; sed pacto quodam aut expresso, ut per divisionem, aut tacito, ut per occupationem." (emphasis added.) Yes, Grotius does more than hint at his preferred account of tacit contract of property, so I am not suggesting Hume gets this wrong.

But, second, as readers of Hume would have been quite aware that's developed by Locke (and Pufendorf). In fact, I have been arguing that Hume completely effaces how much of the distinctive details his own definition of convention (including that of property) is already present in Locke (recall here; here; and see here for slightly more scholarly version).

Third the passage from Grotius cited by Hume is utterly banal. He could have cited any number of ancient authors here (from Plato's Laws to Lucretius) as one can readily see in Pufendorf's Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Book IV, chapter IV, paragraphs viii-X.

In fact, in Book IV, chapter IV, paragraph IX Of the Law of Nature and Nations, Pufendorf had partially commented the very passage from Grotius that Hume quotes. I quote Pufendorf in Basil Kennett's translation (from the fourth, corrected 1729 edition which includes Barbeyrac's notes): 

Thus far Grotius is in the right, that were the first negative Communion to continue, without disturbing the general Peace, Men must live with great plainness and simplicity, contented to feed on what they found, to dwell in Caves, and either to go naked or to cover their Bodies with the Barks of Trees, and the Skins of Beasts: Whereas, if they grew more inclined to a Life of Elegance and Refinement, the Conveniences of which must be acquired by Diligence; there was a necessity of introducing distinct Properties. But when he adds, That this Communion might have lasted, had Men lived under the Influence of an eminent Charity and Friendship towards each other; he confounds negative Communion with positive; such as was observed by the Essenes of old, by the primitive Christians inhabiting Jerusalem, and by those who now follow an Ascetic Life: For this can never be constituted nor kept up, except amongst a few Persons, and those endued with singular Modesty and Goodness. When Men are scattered into different places, and fixed at a distance from each other, it would be a foolish Labour to gather all the Provision into one Heap, and to distribute it out of the common Mass. And where ever there is a great Multitude of People, many must of necessity be found, who through Injustice and Avarice, will refuse to maintain a due Equality, either in the Labour required for the getting of the Fruit, or afterwards in the Consumption of them. Plato insinuates as much as this, when he makes only Deities, and the Sons of Deities, Members of the Republic where he would have this Communion absolutely obtain. But 'tis idle to believe, that when Men were divided into numerous Families, they neither actually established, or had any design to establish such a Communion. Lastly, it's a true Remark of Grotius, That things were at first turned into Property, not by the bare Act of the Mind, or by Thought and inward inclination. For neither could others know what any Person intended to keep for his own, to direct them in abstaining from it, and besides, it was very possible that many should be Competitors for the fame thing. There was need therefore of some external Act of the Mind formal seisin [sign?],* which, that it might be capable of producing a Moral Effect, or an Obligation in others to forswear what each Man had thus taken for his peculiar, must necessarily have depended on the force of some precedent Covenant: When things which lay together in Common were to be parted amongst many, then the Business was transacted by express Covenant. But a tacit Covenant was sufficient, when Men fixed a Property in things which the first Dividers had left for waste. For we must suppose them to have agreed, that whatever in the primary Partition had not been assigned to any particular Owner, should belong to him who first took possession of it. [emphases in original; modernized spelling by ES]+

What's neat, given my present purposes, is that Pufendorf praises Grotius for exactly the passage that Hume cites as the origin of his own theory. In fact, Pufendorf's criticism of Grotius here also kind of anticipates Hume's account because Pufendorf implies that Grotius theory is too naïve: because Grotius' approach presuppose a too rosy picture of human nature ("singular Modesty and Goodness") and cannot scale up ("except amongst a few Persons"). That is, the question is, as Pufendorf shows, how can large-scale tacit social conventions be established among potentially self-regarding people? Pufendorf's own answer seems to be: through trial and error and habit/custom.

Building non-trivially on Locke (whose contribution is ignored), Hume's explicit answer is "through a sense of common interest; which sense each man feels in his own breast, which he remarks in his fellows, and which carries him, in concurrence with others, into a general plan or system of actions." This answer may seem to work if one allows, as Hume stipulates, that one generally benefits from the common interest.

However, Adam Smith recognizes that Hume's answer puts the cart before the horse, because it is not obvious how the common interest is recognized before the convention is relatively stable, and so Smith suggests that the convention itself originates in and is stabilized by drawing on our reactive attitudes (especially resentment and gratitude). But that story I have told elsewhere. 

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*A seisin is a possession of a fief. But it seems more likely that 'sign' is intended here in light of Pufendorf's account of the origin of social/moral entities.

+I thank Dario Perinetti for nudging me back to Pufendorf. And I thank Bart Wilson and Vernon Smith for emphasizing the importance (alongside Buckle and Haakonssen) of Pufendorf to the Scots.

Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, and Spinozism

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A few days ago I was showing off the antiquarian books in my library to the distinguished philosopher of physics and scholar of early modern natural philosophy, Katherine Brading, she made herself comfortable and started reading my copy of one (!) of the translations of Fontenelle's (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (known as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The title-page of my copy announces it is a "new translation from the last edition of the French with great additions extracted from the best modern authors, on many curious and entertaining subjects" (and also proudly announced a glossary for technical terms). The book is dated 1760 and the translator as "A Gentleman of the Inner-Temple." There is also a second 1767 edition of this translation.

Google.books has a scan of this edition from the British Library. Somewhat oddly, despite this prominent location, this translation is omitted when people discuss translations of Fontenelle's Entretiens. So, for example, Wikipedia states: "The first English translation was published in Dublin by Sir William Donville or Domville in 1687, followed by another translation by Aphra Behn in 1688, under the title A Discovery of New Worlds and a third by John Glanvill later in 1688." In the translator's preface of recent translation (p. xlviii), H.A. Hargraves includes these three, and mentions a fourth (1715) by William Gardiner. But seems unfamiliar with this fifth, 1760 translation. There is also a sixth (1803) English translation, as Wikipedia notes, by Elizabeth Gunning that (Wikipedia omits this) includes La Lande's notes.* (The 1803 edition also gives a nice overview of French 17th editions of the work.)

In The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy exhibits familiarity with all of these, except with 'my' 1760 and the translation by Donville. And he is confident enough to claim that the 1715 by Gardiner is largely plagiarized from Glanvill's (p. 348, note 57 in the 1966 Harvard University press edition circulayed in the UK by OUP). Lovejoy acknowledges his debt to the early polymath and Newton scholar, D. Brewster's More Worlds than One. Brewster seems also unfamiliar with the 1760 translation. (Brewster was also a fine scientist!) I indirectly return to Lovejoy’s interests at the end <hint>.

My friend Helen de Cruz, plausibly treats Fontenelle's work as an early contribution to hard science fiction (that is, a speculative genre that is constrained by scientific knowledge). Often commentators treat the book also as popularization of then recent primarily Cartesian science and cosmology. In both cases the fact that the new science supports the real possibility of alien life forms is part of the recurring interest. In his introduction to the 1803 edition, Lalande gives a history of respectable/scientific speculation on extraterrestrials, and shows ample evidence this can be found all over eighteenth century natural philosophy. Fontenelle's work attracts the attention, in addition, of scholars interested in the role of learned women because the narrator's interlocuter in the book is a woman and the role of women translators of the book.

However, and this is key to what follows, when Fontenelle's book appeared it was arguably also the first book that pulled together a century’s worth of astronomical observations to put these into a coherent framework/narrative provided by the new science, in a wide sense, to be read fruitfully by natural philosophers and the educated public alike. In this latter learned 'Enlightenment' genre the book risked being quickly out of date, first surpassed by the mathematically challenging Principia of Newton and then in the more accessible Cosmotheoros written by Newton's great rival Huygens (and posthumously published by Huygens' brother Constantijn). (I showed Brading my copy of the first edition of the English translation of it, too.) But Fontenelle updated his editions to keep his book in the Enlightenment genre.* And I assume -- I need to check this carefully -- that the 1760 translation is based on the revised 1742 edition (which appeared in Fontenelle's Œuvres complètes). Fontenelle died aged nearly 100, in 1757!

At some point (ca 1700), one may well think that further interest in Fontenelle's work would by antiquarian. However, both the 1760 translation as well as the 1803 updated translation, hybridize Fontenelle's original work with a great deal of additions that reflect new scientific findings (as well as some refutations of Fontenelle's earlier speculations). This can be readily ascertained by the fact that the fifth and sixth English translation are much larger than the original or the modern (1990) English translation (mentioned above) by H.A. Hargreaves, which appeared in a pleasant, slim paperback with University of California Press, and that I used in one of the first undergraduate courses I ever taught back in the 1990s at The University of Chicago. (This 1990 edition is a translation of the first edition and so lacks the sixth evening dialogue that Fontenelle added to his 1687 edition..)

The 1803 edition and translation really are conceived as a kind of popularization (Lalande is explicit on this). But the additions of English translation of 1760 are of a different kind. These consider a wide variety of topics and new findings, and so the 1760 translation (based as it claims to be on Fontenelle's own 1742 edition) is very much in the spirit of the original Enlightenment sense of the work. It competes, in fact, with the ambitious kind of works now shunted aside as 'natural religion' (associated with names like Derham, Nieuwentijt) and works that are now slotted into the pre-history of biology like Buffon. I return to this below. One very nice feature of the 1760 translation is that all the translator’s additions are listed, descriptively, in a table of contents (and, thereby, also reveal many of the translator's non Fontenelle/Huygens/Newton sources, including Boerhaave, Desaguliers, Gravesande, Lovett, etc.).**

I am unsure who the 1760 translator -- "a gentleman of the Inner-temple" — is. But one of the additions by tthe1760 translator has attracted modest scholarly attention. In a footnote (14) to a recent paper by Huib Zuidervaart and Tiemen Cocquyt, they speculate on the following.

Intriguing is the fact – unnoticed so far – that in 1760 a text was published devoted to the optics of the human eye and the properties of light concerning colours, written by “a gentleman of the Inner Temple.” Chester Moor Hall frequently added the phrase “of the Inner Temple” to his family name, for instance in various book subscription lists, so the text (an appendix to a new English translation of a famous French cosmology book by Fontenelle) could be his. See Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by M. de Fontenelle. A New Translation from the Latest Edition of the French with Great Additions, on Many Curious and Entertaining Subjects by a Gentleman of the Inner Temple (London: R. Whity a.o., 1760), pp. 239–263.

Their paper, "The Early Development of the Achromatic Telescope Revisited," is very much worth reading because it involves priority disputes, court cases, deception, lies of omission, etc.+ These page-numbers (pp. 239-263) are, in fact, part of the translator's addition to the fourth evening. The addition starts on p. 216 with an account of fire. Then a brief digression on dilation. And then on p. 228 starts the material on the "inflexions of the rays of light" with six definitions that lead into the text briefly described by Zuidervaart and Cocquyt (and which I consider an integral part of)!

As an aside, the history of the Inner-Temple itself originated "when a contingent of knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem moved from the Old Temple in Holborn (later Southampton House) to a larger site between Fleet Street and the banks of the River Thames." Some readers may well wonder if they have landed on Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet, but no I am not going to lead you to templar knights. The Inner-Temple was later an inn and law school, amongst many other social functions. 

Despite the many bewildering range of additions, the main point of the 1760 edition is actually not hard to discern, especially if one is familiar with eighteenth century cosmology and natural religion. Or so I claim next.

At first sight the 1760 translation ends with the optimistic cosmic economy of nature familiar of the closing paragraphs of the first edition of the Principia: the universe is teaming with life, and comets bring the necessary building and replenishing materials of life (and even suns) to other solar systems (pp. 385-401, "Of Comets.") So, I first thought this book is a kind of Newtonian, deist providential domestication of Fontenelle's more skeptical spinozism. "Of Comets" is added, as a kind of appendix, beyond the translator's additions to the sixth evening.

However, I suspect this is a deceptive ruse. The main part of the book — we are very deep into the translator's additions to the sixth evening — nearly concludes with a short section "of chance." (In the table of contents this is listed as "of chance, applicable to what Mr. Fontenelle mentions in his work.") The translator here denies, in his own words, the so-called 'doctrine of chance' or Epicureanism. So far so good.

Now, during the eighteenth century the doctrine of chance is opposed to doctrine of order. This doctrine of order, is sub-divided between the equally heretical Spinozist doctrine of necessity which creates order immanently, and the ordered doctrine (which comes in deist and theist varieties). This is no surprise because the whole book assumes that nature has order (and often seems to appeal to various versions of the PSR). In fact, our translator goes on to claim that:

Every reasonable perfon will allow that this World, that the Universe, that every thing, we fee or know of which is great or good, was at firft formed, and is yet fupported, by a great and omnipotent Being, which we call GOD: a Being whofe attributes man knows little of, and can only judge concerning from his works, which we fee, and which when compared to what we may guefs of, Worlds unnumbered that float fufpended over our heads, in immenfe unbounded fpace are scarce any thing; therefore, as we know but little of the works of the DEITY, we can know but little of their Author it is therefore impoffible to form an adequate idea of him: here even imagination fails us, and we can only fay, he is great beyond our utmost comprehenfion. This we can judge of him with certainty; we know fufficient to anfwer all our purpofes, and therefore confequently to convince us Chance is a chimera without foundation, and that there is not any fuch thing in Nature. It is felf-evident, and does not require a demonftration: it is like an intuitive truth, as evident to our reafon as that 2 and 2 makes 4. (pp. 378-379--spelling left unmodernized)

This may seem, at first blush, a relatively orthodox Newtonian inductive claim in favor of a cautious species of deism. But extrapolating from the argument of the General scholium and reminding us of the immensity of the university, and our lack of ignorance of it, the translator basically argues we really have almost no inkling of God at all. (And this goes well beyond Newton's own view that we lack knowledge of his inner substance.) In fact, all we can really know of this god is that his existence denies the reality of chance, and so -- despite all the providential language -- Spinozism is slid back in. (This is not a surprise because Fontenelle's own work slides, despite regularly evoking deism, into Spinozism at various points.)

And in case one misses it, in the very next, and formally the last of the translator's explicit additions to Fontenelle's sixth evening, the "modern discoveries concerning the fixed stars," the translator immediately teaches his readers that it is the astronomical consensus that the cosmos is teeming with new stars and stars that go extinct. And then, after a book that has celebrated a universe teeming with life on innumerable planets, this book closes with the following chilling, even shocking line: "It is no ways improbable, that these Stars loft their brightnefs by a prodigious number of spots, which intirely covered, and as it were, overwhelmed them. In what dismal condition must their Planets remain, who have nothing but the dim and twinkling rays of the Fixed Stars to enlighten them." (383) And so, in conclusion, we come face to face with the mass extinction of aliens, and (by implication) the possibility of a very cold death of our own species (if we can't figure our interstellar flight).

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*In the preface to her translation Hargreaves notes that the 1708, 1714, The 1724  (seventh), and the 1742 are all expanded editions (p. xli). There is a 1966 critical edition by Calame, which should be consulted by scholars.

**That the 1760 is very much a new hybridized book not of the late seventeenth century but of the middle of the eighteenth century, is, for example, ignored by F.J Tipler in his "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept published in the prestigious" Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1981). Based on Lovejoy, Tipler asserts (correctly) that Fontenelle's Entretiens was a bestseller and "was translated at least three times into English" (p. 127). In fact, Tipler's quotes from Fontenelle are derived from the 1760 translation (and luckily only material already present in the first)!

+If the 1760 translation is indeed by Moor Hall, it would be nice to figure out which translation he repeatedly criticized in his introduction. 

 

On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete

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Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Patočka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Patočka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.

Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.

I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clichés without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.

Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:

• Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.

• Elie Kedourie, August 1992, Commentary: The phenomena against which Benda was writing were much more visible in France than in England or the U.S. There was no movement here comparable to the Action Française in its intellectual prestige or in its spread within the academy and among the intellectual classes....But in today’s English-speaking world (as indeed in today’s France), we do now see a political commitment within the academy having to do neither with the character and definition of the body politic nor with the class struggle.

• George Monbiot, 14th May 2013, the Guardian: In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars) act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political “realism” by upholding universal principles. “Thanks to the scholars,” Benda maintained, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.”.. the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. 

• Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still ­Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds. 

I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.

Now, what I like about Patočka's little essay (it’s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Patočka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting mélange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:

The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one’s life. Thus Plato’s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the “object” of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.

Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Patočka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Patočka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal “exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Patočka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."

Now Patočka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic,  592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Patočka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Patočka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)

For, Patočka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ‘formally’ is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Patočka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Patočka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.

For Patočka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend José Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with José there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.

Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Patočka's position.

In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.

As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.

Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Patočka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*

However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.

But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ‘problematicity,’ perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ‘problematic’ we must resolve.

• This first appeared at: <On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."

 

On Hazony vs Kirk, and original sin in modern conservatism

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony’s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk’s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below. 

Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:

Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) “custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power”—although they also recognize that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including “belief in a transcendent order” and the recognition that “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” They see that (iii) “freedom and property are closely linked,” and that the attempt to eliminate “orders and classes” from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a “proliferating variety and mystery” that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.

So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk’s emphasis on regional traditions."

In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.

And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.

As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one’s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.

Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.

But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.

As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.

If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It’s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt’s views, “The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.” And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.

While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*

Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar’s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk’s diagnosis.

Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.

Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.

Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.

As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.

Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."

Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.

This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments—and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.

Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn’t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).

Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.

Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.

On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we’re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.

Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday’s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance. 

• This first appeared at: <Hazony vs Kirk - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.

**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.