Digressions&Impressions

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

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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 Aristotelian Causes in Hume

When by natural principles we [humans] are led to advance those ends, which a refined and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we are very apt to impute to that reason, as to their efficient cause, the sentiments and actions by which we advance those ends, and to imagine that to be the wisdom of man, which in reality is the wisdom of God. Upon a superficial view, this cause seems sufficient to produce the effects which are ascribed to it; and the system of human nature seems to be more simple and agreeable when all its different operations are in this manner deduced from a single principle.---Adam Smith The Theory of Moral Sentiments 2.2.3.5

Yesterday, I noted that one way to understand Hume's significance to our conceptualization of causation is two-fold: first, that he whittled down four Aristotelian causes to just one kind of cause (previously known as 'efficient causation'); and, second, that he is the source of the modern conception of causation by offering a counterfactual definition of it in the first Enquiry. Hume is also taken to be the source of our modern discussion of convention, (recall here) although a very good argument can be made that Hume is greatly indebted to Locke (see also this more recent post and this one as a follow up). In today's post I suggest that Hume's account of convention itself is greatly indebted to the Aristotelian causes. Let me explain by first re-quoting a familiar passage from Hume: 

But if by convention be meant 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, which tends to public utility; it must be owned, that, in this sense, justice arises from human conventions. For if it be allowed (what is, indeed, evident) that the particular consequences of a particular act of justice may be hurtful to the public as well as to individuals; it follows, that every man, in embracing that virtue, must have an eye to the whole plan or system, and must expect the concurrence of his fellows in the same conduct and behaviour. Did all his views terminate in the consequences of each act of his own, his benevolence and humanity, as well as his self-love, might often prescribe to him measures of conduct very different from those, which are agreeable to the strict rules of right and justice.

In the posts linked above I argued that Hume's analysis of convention has eight parts (most also to be found in Locke's Second Treatise and the Essay):

1. a sense of common interest
2. felt in each person's breast;
3. It (viz, (i)) is observed in others;
4. this fact (the existence of (i&iii) creates collaboration & reliable expectations;
5. the collaboration is structured in non-trivial ways;
6. and this has good consequences or positive externalities for society.
7.  A Humean convention is explicitly contrasted with practices founded in explicit promises and/or in practice regulated by formal governmental law. In addition,
8.  the process (I-III) need not be verbalized at all. It can be entirely tacit.

I call I-VIII: ‘the Humean template,’ and they are jointly sufficient, although (VII) is not necessary.

Now, the Humean template has quite a few moving parts. And given that in Locke the Humean template is used but, as far I am aware, not explicitly analyzed it's worth asking to what degree he would have been fully conscious of the Humean template. It's always a risk with the kind of structuralist analysis I offer here that it is merely a projection of the historian onto an earlier text. Even if that were so it can still be illuminating, of course, but to use the 'Humean template' about Locke would be straightforward anachronism (albeit useful anachronism).

But even though Locke does not explicitly analyze the Humean template, i don't think it's a mere projection on my part for three reasons (the first two of which outlined in the linked posts): first, as I realized by reflecting on work by Martin Lenz (Socializing Minds) Locke is clearly responding to lacunae in Puffendorf's account of the origin and stability of conventions. Second, the Humean template can be found in the second Treatise and the Essay (and is evoked later in the Essay). These two reasons are internal to Locke's project.

In addition, third, we can discern the portfolio of Aristotle's four causes in the Humean template. For, (VI) is the final cause(s) of a convention.  And (I) is the formal cause. In addition, (II-V) are the efficient and material causes of the convention. I mix these causes here because jointly they tie the formal and final cause together in the workings of the convention.

If Locke's use of the Humean template presupposes the Aristotelian causes then it's also no surprise that he doesn't need to offer an explicit analysis of the Humean template. His readers would have noticed it without his saying so. In Hume, the template is made explicit precisely because a reader familiar with Hume's philosophy cannot take for granted that Hume would draw on the non-efficient Aristotelian causes.

That (VI) is a final cause strikes me as uncontroversial. But it is surprising to find it in Hume, who is really an explicit and implicit critic of final causes (see here also for references). Of course, in virtue of providing the mechanism for its functionality one may well say that the Humean template naturalizes or presupposes a naturalized teleology. One may also claim that in human affairs, a certain kind of intentionality and goal directed is inelimenable.

The real question here is to what degree the common interest that a tacit convention secures is fully foreseaable and articulable ahead of time. For example, Adam Smith famously criticized the deployment of the Humean template in Hume's account of the origin of justice in circumstances that echo a state of nature because Hume's account seems to presuppose awareness of the final cause, or at least assume common interest, in a context where this sense of unity or mutual loyalty, seems unlikely. (See here for the full story.)

The passage at the top of the post is near the conclusion of Smith's diagnosis of the error in Hume. Interestingly enough, in Part II of the Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart notes Smith's criticism of Hume, and quotes the passage in order to illustrate "a common error," which Stewart associates with the "dangerous" revitalisation of utilitarianism (he explicitly discusses Paley and Godwin in context). Stewart praises Adam Smith because "he always treats separately of their final causes, and of the mechanism, as he calls it, by which nature accomplishes the effect; and he has even been at pains to point out to his successors the great importance."

To be sure, Smith's criticism does not touch all instances of Hume's use of the Humean template. For, in some contexts the common interest is knowable even known and the efficient and material causes of the Humean template can do their work without presupposing that all the benefits from the convention are presupposed in the mechanism that gives rise to the convention or that these benefits are or would have to be obscure to the agents involved. 

This problem does not even arise in Locke. For, of course, the natural reading of much of Locke's writings is that he embraces a God given providential order. (But recall this post for the debate.) So, in Locke the use of the Humean template is completely natural and without a blemish of inconsistency.* 

The Fascist Alternative, Fukuyama, and the End of History,

The post-historical consciousness represented by "new thinking" is only one possible future for the Soviet Union, however. There has always been a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union, which has found freer expression since the advent of glasnost. It may be possible to return to traditional Marxism-Leninism for a while as a simple rallying point for those who want to restore the authority that Gorbachev has dissipated. But as in Poland, Marxism-Leninism is dead as a mobilizing ideology: under its banner people cannot be made to work harder, and its adherents have lost confidence in themselves. Unlike the propagators of traditional Marxism-Leninism, however, ultra nationalists in the USSR believe in their Slavophile cause passionately, and one gets the sense that the fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely there.
The Soviet Union, then, is at a fork in the road: it can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history. The choice it makes will be highly important for us, given the Soviet Union's size and military strength, for that power will continue to preoccupy us and slow our realization that we have already emerged on the other side of history.--Francis Fukuyama "The End of History?" The National Interest , Summer 1989, No. 16 (Summer 1989), 17-18.

I realized the other day that I (partially) misremembered Fukuyama's famous essay. I had thought it claimed that (as it does) "Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well." (p. 9) And by fascism he means (helpfully) "any organized ultra-nationalist movement with universalistic pretensions—not universalistic with regard to its nationalism, of course, since the latter is exclusive by definition, but with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people." This is I think a useful definition because it allows us to recognize fascism even where it presents itself in a suit. 

I always thought the view that fascism was destroyed oddly optimistic not the least in virtue of Fukuyama's emphasis that historical consciousness is the driver of history. Why couldn't this defeat not be (thought) temporary, and facism return in a modernized face? In effect, this possibility haunts the French students and generation after Kojève and it is what gives French intellectual thought (associated not just with names like Aron and Furet, but also Deleuze, Beauvoir Derrida, and Foucault its enduring vitality). And it is peculiar, I assumed, that Fukuyama, who understands himself in terms of Kojève lacks this sensibility.

Fukuyama's argument in the essay draws heavily on Burnham (or beyond Burnham on the elite-theorists like Mosca and Pareto) and also on Leo Strauss. (If you want I can spell that out with evidence  some time, but I assume this would not be original.) And what is characteristic of both Burnham (of the 1940s) and Strauss is that they both rebel against historicism and insists that certain political realities are enduring or at least can make a genuine come-back despite apparent 'progress' in some other direction. And this is, in fact, where Fukuyama ends his essay (with a Nietzschean look at the longtermist future), that eventually "history" can be "started once again." (p. 18)

As an aside, it is worth emphasizing (if only because Fukuyama became associated with triumphant neoliberalism in some quarters) that "The End of History?" is fundamentally a polemic against then contemporary Chicago economics. He describes his main target as follows: "there is on the Right what one might label the Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual. It is precisely this kind of individual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited as the basis for economic life as such in economic textbook." (p. 6)

Be that as it may, in re-reading "The End of History?" the passage quoted at the top of the post caught my I attention. Fukuyama did discern that Glassnost could end in (what he calls) fascism, and stay there. He deserves credit for his prescience. But he also seems to think that it could never threaten the ""Common Marketization" of world politics." (16; this has echoes of Schmitt, by the way.)

That is to say, he does not seem to allow that the success of fascism somewhere makes the end of history itself fragile. But what we have learned since is that the fascists stuck in history are a source of inspiration (and perhaps also sources of financial and material assistance) to those who wish to return to it.

Or to be precise, Fukuyama does allow this very possibility on a conceptual level. For he writes, "What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success." (9. This is, in fact, the very next sentence from the one I quoted in my first paragraph above.) For, what this entails is that when fascism is sufficiently sucessful anywhere, it will inspire others. The end of history was always going to be a temporary affair.

 

On Esoteric Locke (and Cicero/Newton); Yolton's (and Blau's) Polemics with Strauss, PT 2

Strauss has gone to very particular pains to say that Locke was really a genuine Hobbist in his social theory, a claim Strauss pretends to demonstrate by minute attention to and quotation from the Locke corpus. It is not so much the obvious incorrectness of Strauss's reading which calls for comment as it is the techniques employed in support of his reading. Strauss has an ulterior reason for dealing with Locke as he does: he claims that Locke's real doctrine has been purposely hidden under the show of respectability.5 It is not surprising that the Strauss esotericism turns out to be insupportable when applied to Locke, but it is startling to discover the flimsiness of the pretended support and the unscholarly nature of Strauss's analysis. Strauss's general esotericist thesis suffers a severe blow when we consult the techniques he employs.

5. I do not want to question Strauss's general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of esotericism. His views on this subject are best expressed in Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill., 1952). (For a judicious discussion and rejection of this claim as applied against ancient writers, see George Boas, "Ancient Testimony to Secret Doctrines," The Philosophical Review, LXII [I953], 79-92.) What I challenge and charge with irresponsibility is Strauss's application of this esotericist thesis to Locke. The lengths to which Strauss will go in making Locke say what Strauss wants him to say are clearly evident on pp. 207-209 of Natural Right and History. Locke is there made to hold a "view of caution" which accepts the generalization: "cautious speech is legitimate if unqualified frankness would hinder a noble work one is trying to achieve or expose one to persecution or endanger the public peace." Strauss refers to those passages in Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity which discuss Jesus's activities and the way he kept his identity as the Messiah implicit. Locke's point is that Christ did not come right out and say "I am the Messiah" simply because he knew he had to fulfill his mission of preaching the gospel. Locke in no way generalizes from this very special situation to a theory of the art of writing under persecution.--, John W. Yolton (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature." The Philosophical Review 67.4: 478.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in Strauss' lifetime during the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; here; here; and here, which was pt 1 on Yolton vs Strauss) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). In the last post I discussed Yolton's (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" Ethics (65):3, which is a respectful criticism of Strauss' Natural Right and History (NRH). The underlying point is that in his arguments against relativism Strauss has ignored a plausible alternative position. Yolton's argument can fruitfully be read as an immanent criticism (also because of the kind of authors/authorities he appeals to). As I noted, Yolton's argument itself suffers from some weakness, and somewhat surprisingly does not engage with Strauss views on Locke in NRH which diverge greatly from those that Yolton defends in his important monograph, (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP).

In fact, while I have encountered lots of criticism of Strauss, on the whole the criticism is professional in character. Even when there is deep disagreement, there is also a mark of respect. For example in criticizing Strauss' Hobbes' book, J.W. N. Watkins, who later became quite an influential Popperian at LSE, writes (1955), "Professor Leo Strauss's brilliant, influential and, I believe, misguided work." The main exception is Vlastos' (1951) review of Strauss' (1948) treatment of Xenophon's Hiero, but while the review is polemical the tone is more one of disappointment than the disparagement of Strauss he engaged in later in life (see here). 

Yolton's (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4), changes all that. In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) Yolton anticipates, say, the polemics of Ryle's (Yolton's supervisor) review of Bloom's Plato translation (NYRB, 1969 [HT Wiep van Bunge]) and (his student) Shadia Drury (here).

It's very hard to find neutral ground on the issue of Strauss' esotericism. But I warmly recommend Adrian Blau's (2012)"Anti-Strauss." The Journal of Politics 74.1: 142-155, which accepts that for some historical authors esotericism is likely, that most criticisms of Strauss have been lazy/hasty, and who is simultaneously rather critical (even satirical) of Strauss' particular techniques. (This sums up my own position.) Somewhat sadly, in his paper, Blau does not discuss Yolton's paper or Strauss' reading of Locke in NRH. What follows is a mitigated defense of Strauss against some of Yolton's criticism.

Even Yolton, who claims to restrict himself to Strauss' esoteric reading of Locke ("I do not want to question Strauss's general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of esotericism"), immediately adds a reference to George Boas, who is presented as undermining esoteric readings of the ancients. So, while Yolton's official argument is restricted to Strauss' interpretation of Locke, it's pretty clear that Yolton is a critic of esoteric readings more widely. In context, I find Yolton's hostility toward esotericism rather odd because McCarthyism had been a real thing Stateside (and elsewhere).

Now, unlike most critics of Strauss' esotericism up to that date (and since), Yolton actually followed Strauss' steps in depth. And it is worth quoting one of Yolton's footnotes to get a sense of what this might involve:

10. I indicate in what follows the more glaring errors made by Strauss and the irresponsible methods he uses to substantiate them. But a word about his method of citation may lend more flavor to the appreciation of what is involved. The pages devoted to Locke in Strauss's book (pp. 202-25i, especially 202- 227) are filled with brief words, phrases, sentences quoted from Locke. After a long series of such quotations, a footnote lists a string of references to the Locke texts. But the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation. In many cases, the references are quite irrelevant to the point Strauss has been arguing. In other cases, parts of sentences have been turned around, a later portion being quoted before the earlier. In all cases, Locke is quoted out of context, the context being ignored or carefully covered up; the references are scattered throughout the Locke corpus. It takes literally hours to trace the references to single words and brief phrases, which usually have a different meaning in their context than they have on Strauss's page. (Yolton 1958: 483, [emphasis added])

At a high level of superficiality/generality, Strauss's esoteric method in NRH is two-fold: first, he interprets texts as if they are written in a code that needs to be broken, and, second, he demands from his readers that his texts are read as if they were scrambled/jumbled ("the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation") and so in kind of code, too. If each code has a different key, then each interpretation will have to be worked out on its own terms; this is one reason why even Strauss' most prominent methods can, as Blau recognizes, be no better than very imperfect heuristics. As Yolton notes this means that one spends hours tracing references in the primary and secondary source(s).

So far so good. But now comes the weird part. Yolton's practice and arguments suggest that he thinks that in order to refute Strauss's irresponsible method "the techniques employed," all Yolton needs to do is show that (i) Strauss is quoting out of context and that (ii) in context Locke is saying something different than what Strauss claims about Locke. If Strauss were not offering an esoteric reading, then (i-ii) would be devastating to Strauss' argument even scholarly standing. (And this is presumably the effect of Yolton's procedure on an impartial bystander.) But they are the wrong sort of argument against any esoteric reading. (I hope Blau would agree.)

Now, Yolton's procedure does make sense if you assume that Locke never practiced esotericism. I have to admit -- and I know I will be ridiculed for this -- that I find this a very strange bedrock assumption, especially (of all books) about the Essay. So, in what follows, I first show why I think this is strange. My argument is my own. I then look at Newton's reception of the Essay to suggest Strauss' response is not a fortiori silly. But, third, I also show that Yolton fails to acknowledge and engage with Strauss' (more or less) explicit argument denying Yolton's bedrock assumption about Locke's esotericism.

On the frontispiece of Locke's Essay, there is a quote from Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods) 1.84: "Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias, quam ista effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi displicere." Here's a recent translation (by Walsh): "How splendid it would be, Velleius, if you were to admit ignorance of what you do not know, rather than puking and feeling disgust with yourself for uttering such balderdash."  Yolton does not discuss the motto in his book on Locke (or 1958 article). 

Now, it's not at all surprising that Locke would use a motto that expresses a skeptical position. The motto also is an injunction to avoid babbling/nonsense [effutientem]. And it foreshadows the Locke we analytic philosophers admire (if only he had been more concise).

Of course, it is a bit peculiar that pious Locke would, of all people, use Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods). It's a book more naturally associated with Hume (whose Dialogues concerning natural religion are clearly inspired by if not modelled on it). The Motto, thus, also invites the reader to reflect on how Locke's Essay relates to theology. How to understand that relationship is, in fact, the core intellectual debate between Yolton and Strauss. (Something I cannot do justice to here.)

As regular readers know (recall), Locke echoes a famous argument from Cicero's De Natura Deorum (without attribution to Cicero or Boyle, who had used the same argument) later in the Essay (at 3.6.9). (For a more scholarly version of this material, see here.) So, the motto is not wholly incidental as a source to the content of the Essay.

So far so good. But in De Natura Deorum, Cicero also has one of his characters say the following:

Undoubtedly closer to the truth is the claim made in the fifth book of his Nature of the Gods by Posidonius, whose friendship we all share: that Epicurus does not believe in any gods, and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods were made to avert popular odium. He could not have been such an idiot as to fashion God on the lines of a poor human, even if merely in broad outline and not in substantial appearance, yet endowed with all the human limbs but without the slightest use of them, an emaciated, transparent being conferring no gifts or kindness on anyone, and in short discharging no duties and performing no actions. ‘First, such a nature cannot exist. In his awareness of this, Epicurus in actuality discards the gods, while paying lip-service to them. (1.123; here's the Latin.)

I quote it for two reasons. Somewhat oddly, Boas, who Yolton cites approvingly, skips this whole passage. Second, Cicero's Nature of the Gods was very widely read and debated in the early modern period. (For evidence of that see my paper.) Of course, this debate also involved debates over Cicero's own position relative to the arguments and character's in the dialogue (with free thinkers reading it very skeptically and more orthodox types reading it in support of design arguments). That is to say, to those familiar with Cicero's text, and its reception, the motto invites alertness to the significance of Locke's doctrines to theology, and to the possibility that Locke may be paying lip-service to orthodoxy. 

As an aside, throughout his life Strauss repeatedly cites Cicero's Nature of the Gods (although I am unfamiliar whether he ever discussed the passage just quoted or the motto to Locke's Essay.) But in NRH Strauss does not use Cicero to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. To the best of my knowledge, the only time that Yolton refers to the work is to alert the reader that Locke's critic, Stillingfleet, is drawing on it (in his Origines Sacrae), when describing the Epicurean version of prolepsis or anticipations of nature (usually associated with Stoicism).

Anyway, on my view Yolton is on shaky ground to assume without argument at all that Locke would never engage in esotericism.  (It would also be odd an claim because we know that Locke was quite interested in alchemy and he definitely hid that interest.) As I noted above, all Yolton's arguments against Strauss presuppose such a denial.  

Having said that, what I have said so far (and below) cannot decide the many first order, interpretive questions between Strauss and Yolton about Locke. However, as Yolton notes (see the quote above), Strauss ends up reading Locke's social theory as a kind of Hobbist/Hobbesian in all kinds of ways. It's quite clear that Yolton thinks this utterly ridiculous. I have to admit that I would never teach or read Locke this way myself. But it is worth nothing that Newton (and now I quote Peter Anstey) "after reading Locke’s Essay he took him for a Hobbist." (See The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3: 280). Locke and Newton shared mutual acquaintances, but when Newton first read the Essay they were not very well known to each other.

I mention this not because Newton's reading of Locke would settle the debate between Strauss and Yolton (it doesn't because it is by no means clear in what sense Newton took Locke to be a Hobbist). But to note that if we take Locke's Essay in context, which is what Yolton claims to be doing throughout his work, the esoteric, Hobbist reading cannot be ruled out by assuming it away or by quoting passages that seem to violate it because it is a natural reading for some of Locke's major contemporaries. (See what I did here; I used a contextualist move to block a contextualist dismissiveness of Strauss.)

Now, Newton himself was rather prone to esoteric readings and (as Steve Snobelen has shown in 2001) practiced the esoteric art of writing even in the General Scholium to the Principia. It's no surprise, then, Newton would engage in such a reading of Locke because (through Boyle) he knew that Locke shared in their common fascination with chymistry (whose practitioners used code to record and share findings). This is not the end of the matter: as Anstey notes, after Newton got to know Locke personally he changed his mind over Locke's Hobbism. (So I am not motivating a Hobbist reading of Locke myself!)

I am close to wrapping up. What I find really odd about Yolton's criticism of Strauss is that he does not confront Strauss' explicit argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke while devoting lots of effort on refuting footnote minutiae. When Strauss introduces his interpretation of Locke, he points out that Locke has a tendency to refer to Hooker as "the judicious Hooker." To the best of my knowledge Locke does this three times in short order in Second Treatise. And admittedly when you hit the third one, it is a bit jarring. Strauss then goes on to claim "But the moment we take the trouble to confront Locke's teaching as a whole with Hooker's teaching as a whole, we become aware that, in spite of a certain agreement between Locke and Hooker, Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally different from Hooker's." (NRH 165)* And at first this seems to be Strauss' ridiculous argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke.

Strauss then skips forty pages (mostly on Hobbes) to indicate the significance of this: Locke "appealed as frequently as he could to the authority of Hooker—of one of the least revolutionary men who ever lived. He took every advantage of his partial agreement with Hooker. And he avoided the inconveniences which might have been caused by his partial disagreement with Hooker by being practically silent about it." (NRH 207) Again, if this were Strauss' argument for his esoteric reading of Locke, I could completely understand Yolton's dismissiveness.

But Hooker is a feint. The real argument follows immediately, and it involves Socrates' fate and Plato's prudence as seen by Locke. Strauss quotes the following passage from Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity:

There was no part of mankind, who had quicker parts, or improved them more; that had a greater light of reason, or followed it farther in all sorts of speculations, than the Athenians, and yet we find but one Socrates amongst them, that opposed and laughed at their polytheisms, and wrong opinions of the deity; and we see how they rewarded him for it. Whatsoever Plato, and the soberest of the philosophers thought of the nature and being of the one God, they were fain, in their outward worship, to go with the herd, and keep to the religion established by law; (NRH 208, emphasis added).

Somewhat oddly Yolton skips this entirely. But Locke is here praising ("soberest") a certain kind of lack of forthrightness when it comes to religious views that may violate common opinion and the law (and with the soberest philosophers seemingly endorsing a Hobbesian claim about outwardly following the law regardless of one's private views). This passage in Locke recalls the passage from Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods 1.123 above. And this motivates Strauss' stance on Locke.

One need not accept Strauss' argument that Locke is an esoteric writer in the Essay. (After all, the Reasonableness of Christianity is the later work.) I am honestly agnostic on the matter.** And I certainly agree with Yolton (and Blau) that Strauss' particular readings often seem strikingly ad hoc and based on selective quotation without method and with confirmation bias. But what I have shown is that Yolton does not address Strauss' own explicit argument and evidence to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. And so the purported refutation with appeal to ordinary scholarly practice, does not get off the ground. That's notable because Yolton's was, I believe, the most elaborate attempt to discredit Strauss' practice in the early English language reception of Strauss. And certainly the most careful before Blau. 

Yolton's Polemics with Strauss, PT 1

I learned a few days ago -- [HT Michael Kremer] -- that (see here) Gilbert Ryle was the supervisor was of John William Yolton (1921-2005). This made me decide that I should treat Yolton as 'analytic.' That he is an analytic philosopher is by no means obvious when one reads his (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" (Ethics (65):3) with its learned references to Hegel, Collingwood, Santayana, Croce, and Cassirer even if one allows that, unlike so many other Analytic partisans, Ryle was himself widely and deeply read in non-analytic philosophy of the age, especially (as Ami L. Thomasson (2002) summarizes) the phenomenological tradition. 

In the 1955 article, Yolton explicitly takes on a claim that he (not implausibly) attributes to Strauss' (1953) Natural Right and History (hereafter: NRH):

For Strauss, there are just two alternatives: either we are able to ground moral criticism in natural rights, or we are faced with moral nihilism. By extension, the same alternative could be posed in aesthetics and social criticism. While Strauss's defense or plea for natural right seems anachronistic, the fears which he expresses are genuine. But though genuine, they are misplaced, based as they are upon a misunderstanding of both the implications of the relativistic analysis of criticism and of the possibilities of criticism in general. There is nothing in cannibalism or civilization, in communism or democracy, which compels us to accept either. Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted. But to urge that such a view opens the danger of moral chaos is simply to overlook the nature of moral conviction as well as to misunderstand the relation between criticism and values. (206)

That Yolton was familiar with Strauss' NRH, even a critic of it, surprised me greatly. And it is worth explaining why. This post is part of a series -- (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here; here) -- on the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers in the post WWII era (triggered by an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The (1952) dissertation Ryle supervised, was clearly the basis for Yolton's influential book (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP). In its "preface" Ryle is explicitly thanked for his "many critical suggestions" and guidance (p. x).  

I didn't recall any mention of Strauss in the book, so I went back to search for it and found none. Since Strauss' interpretation of Locke is so important to the argument of NRH, and Yolton clearly was highly familiar with it, I was rather puzzled by the situation. Even more so, because Yolton's key claim about Locke's Essay (highlighted in the preface), it that "its philosophical doctrines were almost always directly related to the moral and religious disputes of the day." (viii) And that is Strauss's territory (especially the first two chapters of Yolton's book which deal, inter alia, with the law of nature).

One hypothesis I entertained was that Yolton had decided he didn't need to engage with NRH after (say) reading the highly critical (1955) review of Strauss' NRH in The Philosophical Review 64(2) by John Plamenatz (1912–1975). Plamenatz was (quoting Berlin's entry in ODNB) "trained in the use of the methods of such British thinkers as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and W. D. Ross which dominated the Oxford scene in the 1920s and early 1930s."* And, Jo Wolff includes Plamenatz in his influential survey of the history analytic political philosophy. In his review (which, to be sure, is not only critical), Plamenatz had claimed that "Dr. Strauss's assertion that Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally the same as Hobbes's is easily refuted." (p. 301). In fact, Plamenatz closes his review with a swipe at Strauss' method:

In several places Dr. Strauss suggests that one or other of the philosophers discussed by him was exercising caution in keeping his real opinions hidden from the vulgar, and that that is why he has been misunderstood. The reader is given the impression that he is being taken into the confidence of some of the greatest thinkers of the past. Whether he finds this impression flattering will depend on what he thinks of Dr. Strauss's book. (302)

But, of course, that a reader is flattered -- and surely Plamenatz is right about the effect of Strauss' writing on some -- is not itself an argument that Strauss' hermeneutics is unreliable or that the interpretations are false.

Anyway, my current guess is that Yolton's book went to the press before he read NRH. But that Yolton recognized Strauss' views were an alternative to his own, and worth refuting, is indisputable. For, in 1958, Yolton published "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4). In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) In his (1958) paper Yolton draws on his own book.+ And, in fact, the 1958 article is one long argument that Strauss' method is bogus and his reading of Locke (as, inter alia, a kind of Hobbesian) utterly misleading.

My current view is that Yolton's 1958 essay, marks a sharp distinction in the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers.** Although its impact was really felt, only after Peter Lasslett's edition of Locke's Two Treatise, which strongly condemns' Strauss' reading of Locke and appeals to Yolton's essay, started to circulate widely. (Yolton's essay is itself barely cited before the mid 1970s.) I return to this paper in a follow up digression.

Okay, with that in place let's return to Yolton's earlier (1955) engagement which is much more respectful and also, de facto, an immanent critique (and also one that kind of anticipates Gadamer's philosophy).

Let's grant on Yolton's behalf  that his position embraces a circularity ("Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted.") It's not a vicious circularity because the value is, in part, to use anachronistic language that accepted values help solve coordination problems; knowing the wide acceptance of certain values helps predict behavior and also helps organize political life. (This is among the reasons why they are valuable because they are accepted.) This is a kind of Humean point (although Yolton doesn't cite him here.) My reason for mentioning Hume should be clear below.

Okay, how does Yolton respond to Strauss? (Much of the article is a working out of Yolton's own view on the complex relationship between relativity of one's values and possibility of mutual criticism.) Here's what he says after developing his own views (which can be intuited from what I quote which is the final closing paragraph(s) of the paper):

Then it is time to set forth with boldness and firmness the criticism entailed in our position. Histrionic understanding, while being an indispensable condition for worth-while criticism, does not (as it first seems) render criticism impotent; rather it discloses its only valid habitat.

The bias and externality which are provincial and objectionable without histrionic understanding lose their discreditability [sic] when combined with a careful, sympathetic understanding. For some time now the critical problem has been resolved by the historicist emphasis upon the relativity of understanding viewed as conditioned by one's time and place. Such emphasis is obviously overstated since we can transcend our cultural context and understand other points of view internally. Criticism needs to be harnessed to such histrionic understanding, but it is necessary also to free ourselves from the either-or position of assuming, as Strauss does, that either criticism is based upon some absolute, such as natural right, or we end in moral nihilism. The kind of criticism which we make of other points of view is controlled by the kind of values inherent in our own position. Once the other position is understood intrinsically, our own commitments compel us to criticize. Since all criticism must be thus rooted in a point of view, the kind of placid change into cannibalism suggested by Strauss will be avoided simply by vigilance, by speaking and acting in defense of our own point of view. Criticisms cannot be made in vacuo; we must look to some set of values, to some basic convictions in order to determine what criticisms are appropriate in any given situation. Such a recognition of the intimate, dependent relation between accepted values or convictions and criticisms will not, of course, take care of the other problem that bothers Strauss: how can we say that our position should triumph over cannibalism? But the problem here is ill-stated, and the anticipated solution frustrating. The only solution for this problem tolerated by Strauss is some totalistic or some indisputable point of view which can legislate between right and wrong, while itself being immune to such ethical decisions. The desire to solve the issue of such moral and social tensions is urgent and important. But if we assume, as has been done so often in the past, that the solution of this problem must either be justified philosophically (in the sense of finding some absolute basis from which to resolve the conflict) or else degenerate into brute force or moral nihilism, we have misconceived the nature of this particular problem. The resolution of such moral or social conflict cannot be done in the manner required by Strauss simply because it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution: there is no point of view which is itself immune from criticism. Important as this area of ideological tension is, it cannot be solved by theory. We can only trust to reason and the council table for a peaceful coexistence. (211-212)

If I understand Yolton correctly here, his solution to the dilemma posed by Strauss, is to deny that it is capable of philosophical resolution (" it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution.") This has a Humean sensibility. I believe this is also Strauss' all things considered point of view.++ But rather as understanding that as a concession to Strauss, Yolton thinks it is an alternative and he opens the door to wise statecraft: "we can only trust to reason and the council table."

It suspect that Yolton means here to invoke the United Nations' Security Council. But it might be also understood as a metaphor for either great power discussions (this is how I understand what he is saying) or be understood for more general commitment to civilization as peaceful coexistence, that is, (recall this post on Khan; this one on Coetzee) of keeping the conversation going (rather than resort to arms). Either way, while philosophy may not be absent around the council table (recall 'reason') in the end it's a kind of prudence and skill -- Locke might see this as part of the 'art of government' - that maintains co-existence between incompatible viewpoints. While I have some practical sympathy for Yolton's position (and by no means hostile to his kind of relativism), having a seat at the table cannot be taken for granted in the manner he does. To be continued.

Mediating between Strauss and Dewey: the forgotten radical liberal Arnold Kaufman

In this paper political theory is regarded as properly serving an instrumental function. This view is elaborated, then defended against the criticisms of Professor Leo Strauss...
Political theory should be a guide to action. The political philosopher should provide those who make policy with principles which will aid them in the attempt to cope with specific sociopolitical problems. Instrumental theories of this type should have two roughly distinguishable components: (1) an ultimate ideal; (2) intermediate ideals in their relation to specific policy recommendations.--Arnold S. Kaufman (1954) "The nature and function of political theory." The journal of philosophy 51.1: 5-22.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; here; here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. In fact, Forrester mentions Kaufman's work (in the 1960s) on civil disobedience, and treats Kaufman as "the New Left philosopher and intellectual founder of the “ teach-in.” (p. 52; see also p. 56; 61--in her footnotes she also alerts the reader to his views on Black reparations and participatory democracy.)

Kaufman died, June 6, 1971, aged 44 when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling. Oddly, his supervisor at Columbia, Charles Frankel, who in the 1960s served the LBJ administration that Kaufman was battling from the left, died a few years later in an armed robbery in his home in Bedford Hills. In fact, while at University of Michigan, Kaufman was at the center of things at the founding of SDS and the Port Huron Statement (as Tom Hayden acknowledges), and was, as Forrester hints, alongside Marshall Sahlins and Rapaport one of the Michigan faculty key to organizing the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. (Sahlins was the supervisor of Graeber, who in some respects, is the heir to Kaufman.) Later, while at UCLA, he was (despite their non-trivial political differences) one of the most outspoken defenders of Angela Davis' appointment at UCLA and freedom to teach.

The (1954) piece I quoted at the top of this post was published before Kaufman completed his dissertation (on Hobhouse). It situates itself between Dewey, who is the advocate of instrumental political theory (but of whom Kaufman is also critical), and Strauss, and also wishes to draw from both. (How Kaufman draws from Strauss I leave aside here.)

One might well wonder why I treat Kaufman as an 'analytic' philosopher. I have two reasons for this: first, the later work from the 1960s is very naturally read as analytic philosophy.* Second, the early work I discuss here bears the imprint of Ernest Nagel (who was then at Columbia) because it anticipates some of the methodological claims of Nagel's 1954 presidential address (while still advocating a more activist stance).

While, in this post I can only leave this second reason as a promissory note, it's worth noting what Kaufman's two main criticisms of Dewey are: first, on Kaufman's  view there ought be also "a concern with theory, with logical interrelatedness, with the generality of political principles which would be anathema for Dewey." (21) In particular (and this very much echoes Nagel), Kaufman claims (while drawing on the analogy between natural and social science), "there is considerable evidence that attention to conceptual adequacy, to logical interrelatedness, and to the connections between a verbal structure and the events it was designed to help human beings control, will yield a rich reward." (22) And second, Dewey's political theory is too "programmatic in character. His formulations were extremely abstract and he always shied from the difficult task of linking those views to the "concrete" situations of which he was so fond of talking." (22; Kaufman acknowledges, of course, that Dewey also acted quite nobly in concrete situations of which he talked.)

While an older generation of political theorists and intellectual historians is definitely familiar with Kaufman, and there is some scholarship on him, to the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has completely forgotten him in the post Rawlsian era. For example, in Jo Wolff's authoritative and fascinating survey, "Analytic Political Philosophy" (in the OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy), Kaufman goes unmentioned (presumably because he made no impact on those collected in the series in Philosophy, Politics and Society. This is a shame because Kaufman quite clearly anticipates and pioneers the revival of advocacy (which is an important theme in Wolff's article). 

Kaufman recognizes that Leo Strauss is a fierce critic of the instrumentalist stance.** (He quotes Strauss' Review of Dewey 's German Philosophy and Politics, in Social Research.) And pieces together from scattered remarks in Strauss' writing an argument against the instrumentalist approach. Kaufman writes this before the publication of Natural Right and History (but he is aware that it is about the appear and hopes that in it Strauss will spell out some of the details of the argument that Kaufman attributes to him (see note 17 on p. 19)). Here's Kaufman's reconstruction of Strauss' criticism of instrumentalism:

[Strauss] argues (1) that it is possible and necessary for the philosopher to search for an objective political philosophy; (2) but one cannot be objective unless he escapes the influence of opinion; and, finally, (3) the instrumentalist, because he regards himself as a guide to action instead of as a discoverer of an objective external order, is influenced by opinion. Therefore, the instrumentalist cannot be objective and is unable to embark on that investigation which alone constitutes political philosophy.
This is the skeleton of the argument. (16)

Let's call this reconstruction of Strauss's position the 'contamination argument.' In my view it's quite plausible to attribute something like this position to Strauss. A weakness in the contamination argument is that it's quite possible for somebody to hold an instrumentalist view of theory without oneself engaging in action, and so creates an instrumentalist theory for others to use from the ivory tower arm-chair. And it is not obvious that such a theorist is necessarily influenced by opinion even if, let's grant this for the sake of argument, she must take it into account in how to move from principles to successful policy. (I don't quite return to this below, but see my final paragraph.)

Kaufman recognizes that (1) is connected to Strauss' criticism of relativism (historicism, positivism, etc.) and the Weberian fact-value distinction. He treats (1) as common ground between him and Strauss, and even Dewey by claiming that "Dewey does believe we can discover moral truths, these truths are relative to specific conditions." (17) It's left unclear if Kaufman actually agrees with Dewey's style of relativism. (Strauss would reject Dewey's position as stable.)

Most of Kaufman's criticism focuses on (2) & (3), which he treats jointly. A key issue is what is meant by 'objective' and why it's impossible to attain for the instrumentalist theorist. And Kaufman settles on the view that according to Strauss "no one engaged in political activity is in a position, no matter how carefully he attempts to make his investigations impartial, to acquire an understanding or a knowledge of political fundamentals, to determine the nature of the best regime." (18) In Strauss' platonic terminology in the 'cave' no real knowledge is possible.+

At this point, Kaufman goes on the offensive because rather than trying to figure out what would make the contamination argument stick (if that's possible), he starts criticizing (not unfairly) the lack of specificity in Strauss' position who leaves underexplained how 'understanding or knowledge of political fundamentals [is] acquired.' And Kaufman concludes his argument that it is very unlikely that Strauss' method "is continuous with that of the empirical sciences. This constitutes a decisive objection to his underlying theory." (19: emphasis added. Along the way, Kaufman implies that Strauss has no adequate response to Mill's criticism of relying on nature as a standard of adequacy.) 

Kaufman here instantiates what I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy," that is to argue from the authority of science to some criticism of an opponent. But this begs the question against Strauss who does not recognize that authority in political philosophy.

In fact, Kaufman has many astute and telling criticism of the details of Strauss' philosophy (including on Strauss' better known criticism of the distinction between facts and values). Kaufman is at his best, in fact, when he channels Hume to point that nature sometimes is itself a source of ungrounded action (this is the argument that eludes Oppenheim when he discerns that Strauss is relying on the PSR (recall here; here)). It is a shame (if you were to care about such matters that) for the reception of Strauss, that to the best of my knowledge no sober debate about these criticism ensued subsequently because unlike many criticism of Strauss they go to the heart of Strauss' project. And unlike a later generation of analytic critics, there is no lazy dismissal.

As should be clear from my comments, I do not view Kaufman's response to the contamination argument as fully adequate. He basically claims not to understand some of its key terms (and does show that Strauss has not clarified them properly), and so ultimately sets it aside. This is unfortunate because Strauss' criticism of the instrumentalist position has been echoed in recent times by analytic philosophers who claim that, say, feminist philosophy (and other 'activist' philosophies) is not really philosophy. (In fact, many of Strauss' apparently substantive positions have been quietly adopted by analytic philosophers in later generations.) Such claims against the instrumentalist conception have been met by vigorous rebuttal from (say amongst others) Dotson and in a number of papers, Srinivasan. But the recent analytic critics rarely dare to put their criticism explicitly in the elitist terms of Strauss (and generally fail to reflect on the nature of political philosophy). This matters not because one must agree with Strauss' return to natural right (and the ancients), or  his elitism, but rather because the most realistic interpretations (and justification) of our imperfect liberal democracies (as one can find in the writings of, say, Hume, Smith, Madison, Kant, and, say, more recently, Arendt) crucially suppose that political life is indeed ruled by opinion and so, if the argument isn't met, that such contamination appears to be inevitable for democratic theorists (broadly conceived). 

Kaufman himself falls in the wide gap between Marxism and Rawlsianism (even its leftist incarnation). With the demise of the New Left and the lack of students to take up his program it is no surprise that he left little mark on post Rawlsian philosophy. Yet, many of his papers from the 1960s have, given that they are the product of immersion in political activism, a sense of freshness and immediacy that I hope to share with you in later digressions. While I do not share in his politics or even his philosophic sensibility, one cannot help but be saddened that his life and career were interrupted just as he was developing his own systematic conception of what a liberal philosophy might be. To be continued.

With Cameos by I.J. Good and Carnap; Felix Oppenheim vs Leo Strauss, pt 2.

(C) Non-Cognitivism and Value-Commitments. Non-cognitivism does not maintain that value-words, even in the intrinsic sense, are meaningless, but only that they have normative, evaluative, directive, rather than cognitive meaning. Natural law theorists are therefore mistaken when they claim, as e.g., Leo Strauss does, that the denial of natural law implies "the prohibition against value judgments in social science," (p. 50) [note to: Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953), p. 52.]

....

(d) Non-Cognitivism and Rational Choice. Some natural law theorists have reacted to this as follows: admittedly, non-cognitivism does not deny cognitive status to extrinsic value-judgments or to other empirical statements but only to intrinsic value-judgments. Admittedly also, the denial of natural law neither precludes value-commitments nor entails any particular normative system. However, if valuations are but the expression of subjective value-feelings, all preferences are therefore capricious, all choices irrational, and all behavior irresponsible. Thus, according to Leo Strauss, the denial of natural law implies that

we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e. regarding their soundness or unsoundness; our ultimate principles have no other support than our arbitrary and hence blind preferences.... We cannot live any more as responsible beings. [Note to: Leo Strauss, op. cit., pp. 4, 6.]

And John Wild criticizes the "extreme irrationalism" of the

noncognitive or emotive theory of ethics which reduces the whole phenomenon of obligation to the subjective compulsion of raw appetite or desire.

To deny the natural law thesis is not to deny that the criteria of rationality are applicable to choosing and acting as well as to thinking. Conversely, rational decision-making does not presuppose that intrinsic value-judgments have cognitive status. It would be paradoxical indeed, if rational behavior depended on belief in a mistaken epistemological theory.

To make a rational choice," the decision-maker must predict the consequences of each of the alternative courses of action open to him in a given situation. His decision will be rational provided these anticipations are based on the total evidence available to him. Such predictions are, of course, true only with a certain degree of probability, and a decision may be rational, yet unsuccessful, and vice versa. -Felix E. Oppenheim,  "The Natural Law Thesis: Affirmation or Denial?." American Political Science Review 51.1 (1957): p. 52

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). So, following up on a recent post (recall) I am interested in Felix Oppenheim's criticism of Leo Strauss. To the best of my knowledge, Oppenheim was one of the few and probably most prominent political philosophers working within analytic philosophy (alongside, perhaps, Margaret Macdonald and Thomas Dewar Weldon) in the 1940s and 50s. (Oppenheim lived until 2011, and his distinguished career continued well beyond these years.)

As I noted, in 1955 Oppenheim criticized Strauss for claiming that relativism about values leads to nihilism. Oppenheim and Strauss agree that in Oppenheim's relativism, the principles of our actions our based on ungrounded preferences. (The ground for Strauss has to be something like the PSR.) And, Strauss argues (down a rather quick slippery slope), in virtue of these preferences lacking a proper ground, we cannot truly believe in them -- they become, as it were, random for ourselves, and so when we act on them we are, in a sense, play-acting or inauthentic, and -- more important -- we "cannot live...as responsible beings."

In 1955, Oppenheim understands Strauss' criticism as a psychological thesis. And so he refutes it by way of empirical-historical evidence. This also shows he is unconcerned by it because he understand his own moral relativism as an epistemological thesis.

Even if one is utterly unmoved by Strauss's argument (which is expressed rather concisely), it's pretty clear that Oppenheim has misjudged it. Strauss' claim is not a contribution to psychology, but existential. And the fact  that Strauss thinks our preferences lack ground means that for him they are fundamentally unexplained from the perspective of rationality. (This is why I initially guessed he is relying on the PSR here for argumentative purposes.)* So, Strauss's position is much more related to epistemology than Oppenheim allows.

I suspect Oppenheim himself felt something akin to the problem I have just diagnosed because in his 1957 APSR article, he returns to the debate with Strauss and quoted (in redacted form) the same passages as he did in 1955. But he offers a new response.

The response is basically Humean in character, although (following the authority of  I. J. Good: 1967) I think Oppenheim's terminology is ultimately derived from Carnap's 1947 ("On the Application of Inductive Logic.") Judging by Oppenheim's (1950) "Rational Choice" (published in JPhil), Carnap's 1950 book, Logical Foundations of Probability (which incorporates material from the 1947 article) was his source (see p. 343, note 3  in Oppenheim 1950). And, in fact, in the passage quoted from his 1957 APSR article above, Oppenheim is basically drawing on his own account of rational choice (e.g., "To arrive at a rational decision, it is sufficient to make warranted predictions about the significant effects of one's significant alternative potential actions." It's in his discussion of warrant that Oppenheim (1950) reflects on Carnap's account of total evidence, which he modifies slightly for his own purposes.)

I am going to ignore how compelling Oppenheim's view of rational choice is. Although it's notable  how thin the view is; there is no requirement here of internal consistency at a time or over time. It's not even obvious we're dealing with a species of instrumental rationality (because the predictions are in no way connected to the arbitrary preferences or principles on which choices are founded). Having said that, and glancing at his 1950 article, I am assuming that Oppenheimer is assuming a kind of instrumental rationality here, and that he intends to be describing how preferences can be satisfied in light of evidence and knowledge. 

What's important for present purposes about Oppenheim's new response to Strauss is that he blocks the claim that choices founded on ungrounded preferences are arbitrary altogether. They are now constrained by evidence and how it relates to genuine possibilities and one's knowledge of these (since they are based on predictions). In addition, these actions can be intelligible in an important way because a spectator (who becomes privy to the evidence and knowledge used) may well predict and perhaps even understand the choices made. In fact, this is really Oppenheim's point. He wants (looking ahead to his book Dimensions of Freedom) to provide conceptual tools for empirical science. And he understands his position as "an extrinsic value-judgment, namely the empirical hypothesis: whenever you want to bring about the state of affairs which, under the circumstances, will be most valuable (or least disvaluable) to you, apply the rules of rational decision-making." (53)

The Straussian rejoinder is not hard to guess. Such predictable choices or instrumental rationality in the serves of ungrounded or arbitrary ends may well exhibit a species of madness/sociopathy or evil. (That's to say the nihilism charge has not been blocked.) So, I doubt that a Straussian would be very impressed by  Oppenheimer's follow up. This is not to claim that a position like Oppenheimer's cannot be salvaged, but that's for another occassion.

PS You may wonder why I am ignoring the first quoted passage,  (C), above. To the best of my knowledge Oppenheim quotes Strauss out of context. In context Strauss is criticizing Weber's account of the separation of facts and values. 

 

Relativism and The Principle of Sufficient Reason; or Felix Oppenheim vs Leo Strauss

    Absolutists often adopt another line of attack against their relativist foes; they brand relativism as socially harmful if not outright subversive. Even if this were the case, this would obviously be no objection against the validity of the relativist thesis. To argue this way would be like questioning the validity of nuclear physics by pointing to the H-bomb.

    I myself would fall into a similar trap were I to say that relativism must be beneficial because it is true. While I share J. S. Mill's high regard for the propagation of knowledge, I realize that this endeavor may come into conflict with other social goals which I consider at least as important or even more desirable.

    To claim that relativism is harmful makes no sense unless one specifies: harmful to the pursuit of what goal? Curiously, but not surprisingly, absolutists tend to consider relativism incompatible with whatever goals they adjudge demonstrably valuable. Thus value-absolutists who are also political absolutists (i.e., who claim that the values underlying political absolutism are the "true" values) maintain that relativism is dangerous because it promotes democratic values. Absolutists who believe that the de way of life can be proved to be the best often hold that a subjectivist be a "true" democrat. The latter thesis is based on arguments such as the following: if good and evil is not a matter of objective knowledge, then everything is a matter of indifference. The relativist must therefore be tolerant of every ethical viewpoint, even of doctrines which command the overthrow of democracy. Or still worse: if there is no justice, it does not matter how one acts; so one may just as well climb on the bandwagon. Thus relativism becomes akin to nihilism, cynicism, and opportunism.8

    Actually, it is not relativism but a certain naturalistic brand of absolutism which leads to such conclusions. If what is considered just in a given society determines what is just in that society, then apartheid is demonstrably as just in South Africa as segregation is unjust in certain parts of the United States, while in other sections where opinion on racial issues is divided everyone may do as he pleases.

Relativism is an epistemological theory which denies that anything can be shown to be intrinsically good or bad - or indifferent. The relativist theory that science cannot determine whether racial discrimination is intrinsically just or unjust also denies the status of a scientific statement to the view that discrimination is right here and wrong there, or that it is neither right nor wrong. A relativist may, without inconsistency, favor discrimination or equality, and practice intolerance, tolerance, or over-tolerance.

At this point, absolutists are likely to shift the argument from the logical to the psychological level and maintain that it is psychologically impossible to commit oneself whole-heartedly to any set of values unless one is convinced that it corresponds to the objectively valuable.10 This thesis can easily be refuted by the evidence of the history of ideas. For example, while it is true that in England and the United States liberalism and even socialism have traditionally been linked to the value-absolutism of Protestantism and natural law, in continental Europe these same ideas have been promoted principally by relativists. Yet there too the values of liberty and human dignity have had their heroes and even their martyrs.

Perhaps most people have a healthy unconcern for philosophical problems. One tends to commit oneself to certain ultimate goals because one feels strongly about them, and does not ask whether they can be proved to be the "true" values.--Felix Oppenheim (1955) "In defense of relativism." Western Political Quarterly 8.3 (1955): 415-416.

After my last Digression, Daniel Dennett pointed out to me that Felix Oppenheim was the son of Paul Oppenheim of Hempel & Oppenheim (1948) fame. One might add Oppenheim & Putnam (1958) fame and (inter alia) Bedau & Oppenheim (1961) fame, too. The story of Paul Oppenheim's collaboration with those who passed through Princeton is worth telling. Turns out Felix Oppenheim had a son, Paul, who also went to Tufts and studied with Dennett (well before my time).

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; and especially this one) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). So, here I am interested in Felix Oppenheim's criticism of Leo Strauss. For, as he notes himself in notes 8&10 (which I left in), Strauss' (1953) Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH) is the explicit target (alongside John H. Hallowell's (1954) The Moral Foundations of Democracy, which is identified in note 9). Strauss' NRH originates in the 1949 Walgreen lectures (delivered at The University of Chicago); some of these were published thereafter separately as expanded journal articles and then reincorporated into NRH.

But before I get to Strauss' position, and Oppenheim's criticism of it, it's probably useful to say a bit about the nature of Oppenheim's relativism. (Somewhat sadly, Oppenheim goes unmentioned in the SEP entry on relativism.)* In this 1955 essay, Oppenheim is committed to the claim that "words such as "good," "desirable," and "valuable" do not designate properties of things or events or actions, but express the speaker's subjective preferences." (411) To be sure his "relativism is opposed to value-objectivism, not to objectivism in science. If "objectivity" means possibility of objective, i.e., intersubjective, verification, relativism denies the objectivity of intrinsic value-judgments, but not the objectivity of empirical statements." (411)**

An auxiliary claim that matters a lot to Oppenheim's argument (and which is visible in the material I quoted above) is that "logically, there is no necessary connection between any particular value-judgment and either absolutism or relativism." (412) I suspect this is key to Oppenheim's argument against Strauss.

There is, of course, a lot to be said about the widespread popularity of a whole variety of kinds of relativisms mid-century within the golden age of analytic philosophy (and also without), and the subsequent demise in popularity of such doctrines among the professionals. But let's turn to Strauss. 

The whole quoted passage at the top of my post is from a section titled, "RELATIVISM Is NOT "SUBVERSIVE."" (I return to that title below.) In it, Oppenheim explicitly takes aim at two of Strauss claims. Both of these claims can be found in the "Introduction" of Strauss's NRH. It's important to mention that because in that context Strauss does not offer his detailed arguments for the claims (so they will seem rather arbitrary). And it is a bit peculiar that Oppenheim ignores here the rest of Strauss' arguments developed later in the book.

Even so, there is something interesting to be said about the state of the debate between Strauss and Oppenheim. The first Strauss passage [I] is quoted in note 8. 

[I] 8 "If our principles have no other support than our blind preferences, everything a man is willing to dare will be permissible. The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism." [Oppenheim cites p. 5 from the 1953 edition NRH; in my 1965 edition it is p. 4]

It's worth noting that Strauss does not claim here that relativism leads to "cynicism or opportunism." Even so, it is not obvious why nihilism follows from the rejection of natural right of from thinking that our principles are derived from our preferences.

The second [II] is quoted in note 10:

[II] 10"Once we realize that the principles of our actions have no other support than our blind choice, we really do not believe in them any more. We cannot wholeheartedly act upon them any more. We cannot live any more as responsible beings. [Oppenheim cites p. 6 in the 1953 edition NRH; as it is in the 1965 ed.]

In fact, Strauss's second quote [II] helps start to explain why Strauss thinks nihilism follows from the kind of relativism somebody like Oppenheim defends. Obviously, it's not obvious why Strauss seems to be committed to such a dramatic slippery slope argument. But it becomes intelligible if we recognize that, fundamentally, there is a suppressed premise that something needs to ground the principles of our actions or these grounds (and so on) to halt the slide down the slope. So, lurking in Strauss' position is a kind of appeal to some version of the PSR.

That Strauss is committed to this is not obvious in context of the introduction to NRH. But later, in the long chapter 2 on his critique of Weber's account of the distinction between fact and values (which is the chapter that Ernest Nagel criticizes (recall here; here), in the context of ascribing to Weber the idea that "science or philosophy rests, in the last analysis, not on evident premises that are at the disposal of man as man but on faith" he goes on to claim: 

By regarding the quest for truth as valuable in itself, one admits that one is making a preference which no longer has a good or sufficient reason. One recognizes therewith the principle that preferences do not need good or sufficient reasons.--Strauss (NHR 1965 ed), p. 72.

There is much to be said about this account as a reconstruction of Weber, and as a diagnosis of the effects of Weber's position. But what does seem clear is that Strauss associated the rejection of what Oppenheim calls 'absolutism' with the claim that preferences are ungrounded or at least not grounded in sufficient reason. 

In fact, being alert to this feature of Strauss' position also helps explain the recurring use of "blind" in modifying "preferences" and "choice" in the passages Oppenheim quotes in the notes. (This use of 'blind' echoes the kind of language early modern critics of epicureanism would use.) Such preferences and choices are treated as unguided, and so de facto random. 

Interestingly enough Oppenheim agrees. Because Oppenheim claims that his flavor of "Relativism does not question the possibility of explaining or giving reasons for people's valuations; relativism denies the possibility of validating or giving grounds for them." (412; emphasis in Oppenheim) So, not unlike Russell, Oppenheim rejects the PSR (at least in the context of values). 

In fact, the first paragraphs quoted at the top of the post, which take on unnamed critics that de facto [III] diagnose an inductive risk from holding relativism (recall the denial that relativism is subversive in the title of the section), are also directed at something like Strauss' meta-philosophy. For one of the commitments that runs through Strauss' philosophy is a concern over the inductive risk(s) of philosophical positions.+ 

Because I have gone on quite a bit already, I leave it to the reader to evaluate Oppenheim's evidence as arguments against the bits of Strauss that Oppenheim wishes to tackle here. However, Oppenheim returns to his disagreement with Strauss in a 1957 APSR article, that I discuss before long. To be continued.

 

Analytic Political Philosophy Before Rawls with special attention to Morris, Naess, and Oppenheim

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). There is remarkably little of it preserved in historical memory, in part because there seems to be remarkably little of it within analytic political theory, it seems, in Strauss' life-time (I emphasize this because later there is plenty), despite Strauss' significance in political theory of the age and despite my growing up with recurring diss of Strauss (and Straussianism). This is all a bit puzzling in one sense because part of Strauss' fame rested on his thesis of persecution generating esotericism, and since Reisch' magisterial work, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science To the Icy Slopes of Logic, we know that such persecution was experienced by many in the founding generations of analytic philosophy. So, one might have expected some mutual affinity. One hypothesis would be there simply was no analytic political philosophy in the period so there was no felt need to polemize against Strauss (and Straussianism), or to absorb it.*

Thus, the topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; and here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. She uses archive material and the responses by those whose views were already formed before Rawls to help guide us on Rawls and his reception. Another way to begin to do so is to read reviews and surveys of works blissfully unaware that a Rawlsian tidal wave is about to hit them. 

In 1965 Karl W. Deutsch and Leroy N. Rieselbach published a kind of state of the field, review article, "Recent trends in political theory and political philosophy," in a supplement of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 360.1 (1965): 139-162. I don't know anything about Rieselbach (sorry), but Deutsch is a fascinating character, who is worth reading. Their survey suggests that in the mid 1960s the field of political theory/philosophy is incredibly eclectic and more heterogeneous than it is today. But in this Digression I want to use their review as a means to point us to the existence of pre-Rawlsian analytic political philosophy. 

Before I get to that, I should mention Jo Wolff's (2013) chapter "Analytic Political Philosophy," in a OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy, edited by Michael Beaney. His strategy to get around the Rawls light cone problem I mentioned above, is two-fold: first, he goes through the series Philosophy, Politics and Society, which started to appear in 1956 (then edited by Peter Laslett). This is a clever choice because this series, which (mostly?) republished existing papers was de facto canonizing then recent work. (There is a peculiarity here that I will quietly skip in that Laslett himself was more of a historian.) This is especially evident if you look at the table of contents of the second series edited by Laslett and Runciman.

Second, and in a way it's the same as the first, Wolff uses as a method or criteria of inclusion of a work in analytic political philosophy that they become "part of a tradition of academic political philosophy." This is why Wolff ends up mentioning Popper, but not discussing his views.

My deviation from Wolff's approach is motivated by the fact that his gives slightly too much weight to the contemporary status quo (and our ancestors). And because I take so-called Kuhn losses rather seriously, and also because of non-trivial linguistic isolation (or linguistic imperialism) of much of the tradition, I am slightly more  permissive than him in that I wish to find work using methods of, say, ordinary language philosophy or those popularized by logical empiricism (etc.) even if ignored by the tradition.

Of course, since on my view it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it sponge-like assimilates new techniques from other fields, there is a lot to be said for Wolff's approach. In fact, he observes that Rawls himself is an exemplary analytic philosopher in this greedy respect. But in virtue of this spong-like character, Wolff's stance generates historiographic challenges. For example, when it appeared The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) by von Neumann and Morgenstern, certainly did not belong to analytic philosophy. But you might be tempted to argue, as it was developed within political theory (Schelling, Riker, etc.) that game-theory also became assimilated by the analytic tradition after (say) Gauthier. By Wolff's standard we might well then at some point see von Neumann and Morgenstern's work as a key moment in pre-Rawlsian analytic political philosophy. Perhaps, my friend Ryan Muldoon might even be tempted to claim that! (Something like this has started to happen to Hayek as I discovered to my surprise.)

Anyway, Wolff's chapter is lovely. If for example, you want to know more about T.D. Weldon, who I mentioned in my digression last week on Riker's review of Buchanan and Tullock (because he was mentioned by Riker), you should check it out. But because of its reliance on the Philosophy, Politics and Society series, Wolff's chapter does have a modest bias to the English language even British philosophy. (The first series was explicitly insular in geographic/linguistic orientation.) And that can be seen if we read the survey by Deutsch and Rieselbach.

Analytic philosophy barely registers in their account. But the section on the "impact of communication studies," [sic!]closes with the following two paragraphs:

Insofar as the analysis of communications involves the analysis of messages, it leads to a concern with semantics. Insofar as it involves the analysis of communication channels and networks, it soon enters common ground with the theory of organizations. Logical analysis may be relevant for either of these two concerns, for logical analysis clarifies the content and meaning of messages and theories, and logical conjunctions and disjunctions-the "ands" or "ors" of logical discourse-often may correspond to the switching points or points of decision in communication networks or organizations.

Semantics has been developed in ways relevant to political theory and to the analysis of values by Charles Morris, Arne Naess, Charles E. Osgood, and in the semantic portions of the political writings of Anatol Rapoport. Symbolic logic has been used as a tool of political analysis by Robert Dahl in his A Preface to Democratic Theory and more recently by Felix E. Oppenheim in his Dimensions of Freedom. (153-154)

Sadly Weldon is absent, perhaps because he died in 1958.+  The two accompanying footnotes list the following works:

Charles Morris, Signification and Significance: A Study of the Relations of Signs and Values (Cambridge, Mass.: M I.T. Press, 1964) and his influential earlier work, Varieties of Human Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Arne Naess, Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity: Studies in the Semantics and Cognitive Analysis of Ideological Conflict (Oslo and Oxford: Oslo University Press and Basil Blackwell, 1956); Charles E. Osgood, G. J. Suci, and P. H. Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957); Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games and Debates (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), Part III, "The Ethics of Debate," pp. 245-358; and Strategy and Conscience (New York: Harper, 1964), Part III: "The Two
Worlds," pp. 199-288. Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956); Felix E. Oppenheim, Dimensions of Freedom (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1961).

Not all of these works would be thought analytic philosophy today.** Of these there are really only three candidates for inclusion: Morris, Naess, and Oppenheim. Charles Morris was really one of the key figures in the scientific wing of pragmatism which welcomed the European exiles who helped bring analytic philosophy to the United States through the unity of science movement. (Today Morris has been disowned by pragmatists and analytic philosophers alike.) I don't know anything about Signification and Significance, but his Varieties of Human Value is explicitly situated in the unity of science program, albeit more towards the empirical end and without (alas) much attention to political theory or politics.

I don't think many people today associate Naess with analytic philosophy given his towering influence on deep ecology (and even a subtle branch of Spinozism), but if you would open up his (1936) Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalte you would feel like you had entered a Borgesian world. It's clearly analytic philosophy, but at the same time uncannily unfamiliar because (to bow to Wolff's criterion) it has had no discernable impact on the tradition. (I bet there is a similar aesthetic experience to be had if you read some of the untranslated folk from the Lvov-Warsaw School, and you can read Polish.) 

Naess's book, Democracy, Ideology and Objectivity has rightly been rediscovered (I hope) by XPHI folk (a sub-branch of analytic philosophy, but not especially salient in political philosophy alas, I think, but definitely salient to ethics). It is one of the funkiest books ever with a weird mix of history of ideas and new kinds of snowballing survey techniques to elicit views on the context relative views (of experts) on the meaning(s) of democracy and ideology. (That sentence does no justice to it.) While it seems entirely off the wall to call this 'analytical', it's worth nothing it is pretty contemporary with (recall) Donald Davidson's & Patrick Suppes' and Sidney Siegel' (1957) Decision Making. An Experimental Approach. The early 1950s are really an age of philosophers jumping into doing empirical social science alongside conceptual work. And from that vantage point, Morris actually looks like very much of his age.

Oppenheim's book is really very much how one would imagine a behaviorist, logical positivist analysis (including lots of capital Xs and ordinary y's.) It aims to offer an analysis even explication of 'freedom' such that the concept can be used in, or operationalized for, empirical social science (while still being fairly close to ordinary usage). It also has a normative aim: to make wise discussions about freedom possible. I don't think it had much uptake in either end.

Oppenheim "taught at the University of Delaware (1946–57), was a visiting faculty member in Philosophy at Yale University (1951–52), Research Associate in Philosophy at Stanford University (1954–55), Visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University (1960), faculty member at the New School for Social Research (1960–61), Visiting Professor of Political Science at Amherst College (1963–64), Visiting Professor at Instituto di Scienze Politiche of the University of Turin (1965), Visiting Professor of Government at Columbia University (1967), Visiting Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford (1970), and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst from 1961 until his retirement in 1983." So, in his day he was clearly not obscure. 

While I think Oppenheim's 1944 "Logical Analsis of Law" is the more fruitful original work, Oppenheim's book deserves a more detailed, second look. But I mention all of this here because with Oppenheim I have found an early, analytic critic of Strauss (aside from Ernest Nagel). The criticism is developed in two journal articles from 1955 and 1957. To be continued...