Digressions&Impressions

Borges and Leo Strauss on Virtue is Knowledge

If instead we begin with the presupposition that Meno is irremediably stupid and wicked, and then go looking for support in the text, we will find it. There are always many things in a Platonic dialogue which depend on our stage directions. This method may involve some danger to our own souls, however. Meno doesn’t do too well in the face of Socrates. But which one of us would? To exaggerate Meno’s arrogance, laziness, smugness, snobbishness, rudeness, failure to pay attention, slavish tendency to follow teachers or common opinions, and so forth, might well be to underestimate our own.--Abraham Stone.

Through the years a man peoples a space with images of provinces, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.--Borges (quoted from this piece by Nada Elia)

In writing about Borges's (1949) Averroës's Search (yesterday), I was reminded of Leo Strauss's (1941) essay, Persecution and the Art of Writing. I hinted at this at the start of my post by calling attention to Borges's awareness of the significance of strategic silences when dealing with theological questions. The practice of esotericism is also alluded to with a nod to the doctrine of "Quran's two faces." (This is merely attributed to "people" not to any of the speakers nor any of the poets and scholars mentioned.)* To what degree Borges's quotations (and misquotations ) of Averroes are also a labyrinth into his own theological views, I leave for another day.** This being Borges, esoterism's comedic twin mirror -- the learned not grasping what is fully present -- is also, perhaps even more fully, present in the story; most readers note that Averroes (who is struggling to understand what Aristotle means by tragedy and comedy) is incapable of recognizing  the performances of comedy and tragedy he is exposed to.

As an aside, and speaking of lacunae: as of yet the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lacks an entry on Averroës!

The main reason to be reminded of Strauss (1941) essay is because Borges's Averroës's Search starts and ends with nods/citations to/of Renan's (1852) Averroès et l'Averroïsme: essai historique. This book is now obscure, but as it happens its author is Strauss's only named target in the text. In particular, Renan is held to be responsible for changing opinion about Averroës, from somebody who is perceived to be hostile to "all religion," to somebody who is a "loyal, even believing, Moslem." (494) One need not be a logician to see that these two options do not exhaust all real possibilities even among "scholars." (Renan's interest in racial hierarchy goes unmentioned.) Averroës later returns in Strauss's essay as one of several thinkers who suffered "a kind of persecution that was more tangible than social ostracism." (499-500; in context Strauss is careful to distinguish between religuous persecution and persecution of free inquiry (500), while also insisting that such ostracisim is the "mildest" species of persecution.)

Now, Strauss lists "axioms" that can naturalize the seeming "miracle" of writing for a minority of one's readers in a publication. The first axiom is that thoughtless readers are careless, and only the thoughtful are careful readers.  (There is also a second axiom which pertains only to twarthing legal persecution.) Strauss recognizes that there is an objection: that there are clever and careful readers who are not trustworthy. His response to this objection is that the literature he is discussing accepts the "Socratic dictum" that "virtue is knowledge." (492) For convienence's sake I call esotericism that accepts this dictum, 'Socratic esotericism.'

Strauss's response to the objection to Socratic esotericism is manifestly unsatisfying as the mere mention of Heidegger -- a very careful reader, after all, -- reminds us. It is an open question to what degree Strauss's learned American readers in 1941 would have been familiar with Heidegger, but Strauss would not have thought it prudent to call attention to his own particular familiarity with Heidegger.*** That is to say, Strauss esoterically introduces another form of -- let's call it 'post-Socratic' -- esotericism: one for authors and readers that do not accept the unity of the virtues and that all knowledge is virtue. While Strauss offers elaborate details on how to pay attention to the signs of Socratic esotericism, he is, shall we say, less explicit on the post Socratic kind.

You may think, 'what does any of this have to do with Borges?' Averroës's Search is preceded by Deutsches Requiem. The story is a lightly edited soliloquy by a self-knowing, and highly literate Nazi with a self-proclaimed passion for "music and metaphysics" who manages to destroy his own compassion. That is to say, if Borges practices esotericism then it will be of a post-Socratic kind. 

 

Averroës, Today

"The acts of madmen...are beyond that which a sane man can envision."

And concerning both universals and individuals it is true of [God] that He knows them and does not know them. This is the conclusion to which the principles of the ancient philosophers led.--Averroës The Incoherence of Incoherence, Ch. 11.

Averroës, who had written his commentary on the Republic,  might have said that the mother of the Book is similar, in a way, to the Platonic Idea, but he could see that theology was one subject utterly beyond the grasp of abu-alHasan.--Borges (translated by Andrew Hurley).

In the third quote above, Borges shows us the self-command of the great Spanish philosopher, whose silence, paradoxically, keeps conversation going (the essence of civilization) with those less capable of first philosophy. In so showing Borges refutes, so to speak, the claim of one of the speakers in his tale, La Busca de Averroes -- commonly translated as Averroës's Search but there is something to be said, too, for Averroës's Hunt --, who had said, "A single speaker could tell anything, no matter how complex it might be." (Emphasis in original.) In context, the speaker is offering an efficiency claim: rather than showing things by way of multiple characters, it is more efficient and less confusing to tell things in proper order. It is worth noting that the speaker (a traveller) endorses, perhaps without fully grasping it, the doctrine of Rationalism--all can be articulated. There is no denying that Rationalism is a useful heuristic, but it does not follow that it is true even if we grant the speaker and his agreeable interlocuters (who show that a symposium does not require wine) that Rationalism does not flounder on complexity as such (nor does it flounder on the fact that some things are beyond the grasp of most speakers). Earlier in the tale, Borges gives more instances of the same point: for example, he describes feeling as beyond, in some sense, the working of the intellect ("the shaping of syllogisms and linking together of vast paragraphs did not keep him from feeling.")

In the story, Borges, lets a very Humean Averroës distinguish between nature and art; accordingly, grasping natural essences is easier than grasping linguistic meaning ("both birds and the fruit of trees belong to the natural world, while writing is an art. To move from leaves to birds is easier than to move from roses to letters.") For, texts generate multiplicity if you wait long enough and apply imagination and belief. The character, Averroës tells us this poetically, "Time widens the circle of the verses, and I myself know some verses that are, like music, all things to all men." Rather than treating this as an indictment of poetry, or the Quran, Borges lets his philosopher say that the poetic is the only enterprise capable of true profit over time: "then time, which ravages fortresses and great cities, only enriches poetry." (Emphasis added.)

There is an ironic alternative, of course: poetic madness is required to grasp what is previously unsayable. This would entail that Rationalism's Principle of Sufficient Reason is not founded on necessity, but on -- to use an old-fashioned word -- inspiration.* 

Deleuze as (proto-Carnapian) Philosophical Historian of Philosophy

Our only teachers are those who tell us “do with me,” and are able to emit signs to be develop in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (hereafter DR), 26).

Difference and Repitition, 26DR 26)

Duns Scotus, Spinoza, and Nietzsche are three moments in the “history of the philosophical elaboration of the univocity of being.” (DR 48) This history is progressive: Spinoza “marks  a considerable progress.” And Nietzsche becomes world-historical (he offers “a Copernican revolution” (DR 50)) by opening the “possibility of difference having its own concept,” that is “eternal return” not of the “Identical,” but rather “returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes,”  (DR 50; it matters to Deleuze that what returns are the ‘extreme’ or ‘excessive’ forms). The history of progressive conceptual development is not just a “theoretical” exercise, but delivers a “practical” criterion in Nietzsche.

As the epigraph to the post suggests, for Deleuze the history of philosophy is an occasion to encounter exemplary thinkers that both invite their readers to think with their thoughts as well as demand from their very best readers a development that does not mindlessly repeat the original, but in the development introduce variance. This creative act of the historian of philosophy, this repetition and difference, which Deleuze calls the method of dramatization is, thus, a way to conceptualize the doing of the history of philosophy as a means toward progress in philosophy. Deleuze attributes the origin of the method to “Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” who “invent an incredible theatre within philosophy, thereby founding simultaneously this theatre of the future and a new philosophy.” (DR 9) So, Nietzsche plays a double role of the founder of a method and a contributor to a key development in which it is deployed. (That double role is -- witness Kierkegaard -- apparently not necessary.)