Digressions&Impressions

On Plato's Noble Lies (and a bit on Spinoza and Hobbes)

“How, then...might we contrive one of those opportune falsehoods of which we were just now speaking, so as by one noble lie to persuade if possible the rulers themselves, but failing that the rest of the city?...Nothing unprecedented, but a sort of Phoenician tale, something that has happened ere now in many parts of the world, as the poets aver and have induced men to believe, but that has not happened and perhaps would not be likely to happen in our day and demanding no little persuasion to make it believable....I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the rulers themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city, that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream; but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being molded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth.”

“It is not for nothing,” he said, “that you were so bashful about coming out with your lie.” Plato, Republic, 414B-E (Shorey's translation)

In this post I want to reflect on what the doctrine of Noble Lies reveals about Plato's understanding of  political philosophy. But before I get to that, I will ignore the controversies about hidden doctrines/esotericism/Straussianism. (Yes really; that's not a coded message!) Perhaps, what follows is also ready well known to students of Plato, but in preparing for class, I realize, that the main point of the Noble Lie is actually explicitly stated in the myth: to get people to sacrifice their lives for others in defense of the polity. That is, the Noble Lie is explicit that the ultimate defense of the state will benefit other citizens. What's remarkable about this, is that it's true. It is also notable that the Noble Lie does not disguise that the patriotic sacrifice benefits others (rather than just  the more abstract state).

I want to elaborate on the previous paragraph. But I do not want to disguise some of the peculiarity of the rest of the Noble Lie, which entails that (i) the reality of lived experience is a kind of successful simulation -- there are strange echoes with the cave analogy here -- and (ii) that the truth is that we come preformed into the surface world (a thought that Hobbes exploits in his treatment of the state of nature in De Cive, where he treat people as emerged from the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity (De Cive, ch. 8, 1)).  I call this 'peculiar' not just because it is so hard to imagine that this would be really believed, but also because (iii) the rulers are also supposed to buy into it. That is, nobody in society is expected to see through the myth, which is, then, de facto, an origin myth in both senses: (a) it tells the story of human origins and (b) it is an ideology that is part of the original founding of the state (derived from Socrates).

Okay, let's return to the main thread here. As I said, the Noble Lie is explicitly aimed at encouraging the ultimate sacrifice on behalf others. In fact, it's pretty clear that the rationale for the Noble Lie is not to encourage the totalitarian use of propaganda for any purpose. Rather, the purpose is to defend the survival of the state when it requires a willingness to sacrifice one's life in the defense of others. (I think here Socrates is also tacitly relying on the thought that one always has the option to flee the battlefield or go into exile.) Of course, the practice of Noble Lying can be abused in practice, and so one wonders why it is introduced at all. In particular, recall, that the whole point of the ship of state analogy is to argue that one of the main problems of a direct/popular democracy is that truthful politics is impossible [recall here].

I think the answer lies in the thought that Socrates clearly insists that this particular end -- the requirement that one is willing to sacrifice one's life to ensure that others can thrive in the state's survival -- justifies the means (some deception). And the underlying thought seems to be, and this is why I mentioned Hobbes already, that without the survival of the state nobody can enjoy any fruits of existence. I think this fits Socrates's/Plato's more general rejection of what I have labeled 'rustic wisdom'--and the clear preference for urbane/city life  (Phaedrus, 230D).*

Before I close with Spinoza, just one more point: I call the Noble Lie a species of 'ideology' and not 'civic religion.' I take the latter, which is very important to Socratic political thought, to involve no falsehood. Civic religion provides images of the good/true for the masses, but does not engage in falsehood. The Noble Lie -- while really speaking the most important political truth** -- uses false means.+

In the preface Theological Political Treatise, Spinoza attacks the use of Noble Lies to encourage the ultimate sacrifice:

It may indeed be the highest secret of monarchical government and utterly essential to it, to keep men deceived, and to disguise the fear that sways them with the  specious name of religion, so that they will fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for  their own deliverance, and will not think it humiliating but supremely glorious to spill their blood and sacrifice their lives for the glorification of a single man. But in a free  republic, on the other hand, nothing that can be devised or attempted will be less successful. For it is completely contrary to the common liberty to shackle the free judgment of  the individual with prejudices or constraints of any kind. Spinoza, Preface, Theological Political Treatise 7 (Translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel)

I don't mean to ignore the fact that a (Christian) monarchy is not a Platonic Kallipolis. Nor to deny the differences between really existing religions and Socrates's fable. The point is rather that on Spinoza's account the function of religion in a monarchy is to produce the kind of effects of Socratic Noble Lie. But that in a monarchy only one person really benefits--namely the one who is not asked to sacrifice (the monarch). That is to say, for Spinoza a monarchy requires something like religion in order to survive.

I introduce Spinoza not to compare religion to Noble Lies. But rather that Spinoza plainly asserts that one can have a society without the need for such a Noble Lie. His claim is that in a true republic a reign of truth is possible because people will be willing to sacrifice themselves for distant others and do so knowingly without propaganda or ideology.** For all I know Spinoza is right about this possibility (and he surely was influenced by some Roman republican examples). But it is a notable empirical fact that most republican-democratic governments have not trusted Spinoza's advice.

 

On the 'first' Political Philosopher (Ilimilku of Ugarit)

The Baal Cycle stands out in that it does not use the type-scene to reaffirm the legitimacy of the reigning law and the political positions that the law enshrines. Instead, it turns matters on their head by placing the protagonist in the position of the rebel who disrupts order, thereby rendering questionable the principles according to which that order is defined...

Ugarit's experience as a vassal state subservient to Hatti informed this representation. According to Bronze Age conventions, vassal status was grounded in an international order that reflected the organization of a kin-based household -- with its fathers, sons, brothers, slaves, and masters. The extension of these relations to the international sphere rested upon a legal fiction that aimed to bolster the idea that politics confirmed to a natural hierarchy. Instead of reinforcing this fiction, the Baal Cycle throws it into doubt. As a witness to (and participant in) a world of incessant power struggles and competing assertions of authority, Ugarit produced a poem that encourages its audience to engage with the idea of a universe that lacks the comforts of order. The story of Baal's rise in such a world served as the vehicle for a critical form of political wisdom....

That Ilimilku continues Baal's story beyond the point of enthronement implies an understanding of politics in which struggle is everlasting. There is no telos of peace and joy.  Aaron Tugendhaft Baal and the Politics of Poetry (93, 95-6, 120)+

There are two classical conceptions of myth: first, myth is associated with superstition and something to be overcome by modernity and rationalization. On this view, which takes myth seriously as the necessary stepping stone toward a political or ethical decision that removes us from the state of myth. The only question is if modernity is a permanent achievement or if back-sliding into myth remains a live possibility. As Tugendhaft reminds us in his fascinating book, the post-1933 Cassirer, for example, came to see that his early progressive optimism was a mistake and that back-sliding was always a life possibility in times of crisis: "we are always living on volcanic soul." The other, second, classical conception is that myth just is the stuff of everydayness, an ordinary comportment or way of being in the world.  This Tugendhaft, a classical philologist, associates with Heidegger.*

What the classical conceptions disallow is that myth -- an "ancient poem about the gods" (17) -- itself can be a means toward or expression of rational thinking. That is, because what the poetic form portrays is from the point of view of monotheism or science obviously a fable, then it can't be a source of rational insight. In the Phaedrus (recall), Socrates famously and explicitly has no time for the attempts by fellow intellectuals to "play the sophist" (sophizomenos) (229C)  and naturalize the hidden, kernel in myths, that is, reduce them to what is likely. Now, one can have some sympathy for Socrates's stance if the project is to find the natural event that gave rise to the myth. (For example, a common rationalizing reading of the Baal cycle is to see in it a story of nature's fertility cycle.) But in context (albeit not elsewhere) Socrates refuses to engage with an other alternative, namely that myth is an allegorical representation of reality. That is, while literally a myth cannot be true, that's perfectly compatible with its elements symbolically standing in for intelligible bits of reality.

There is nothing mysterious about an allegorical representation of reality (if you possess the interpretive key that unlocks the allegory). But this conception of myth is disallowed by the classical conception, and so the possibility of a mythic instruction in reality is systematically occluded. One can kind of see that the in the progressive classical view, in which modernity is understood as an overcoming of myth, the idea of myth as a means of rational reflection is almost unthinkable. This need not be the case in the second classical conception, but because it is often a response to the progressive view of myth it tends to inherit this blind-spot.

Tugendhaft's scholarly book -- it is not a popularization, and while written very cleanly can be challenging at times -- is one long argument for the conceptual possibility of myth being a representation of political reality at a certain level of abstraction. And that, in fact, that the Baal Cycle, which was written ca 1220bc in a semitic language (and for a long time primarily studied to provide cultural background to the Hebrew Bible), is in fact, such a representation not as a roman a clef about political local agents, but a more abstract representation about what is taken to be (by the poet) the enduring nature of political reality which is not, simultaneously, a form of propaganda or justification for the existing political order. Rather, the audience of the poem is put in the position to question the forms of justification of authority found in existing political society.

Tugendhaft nicely shows that the poem was written in the periphery of an empire that was crumbling. If I understand him correctly Ugarit was a commercial town which itself was, by Bronze age standards, relatively egalitarian and despite being long lasting, itself never a great empire often a vassal of much larger states (Egypt, Hittites etc.). One member of this society, the poem's likely author, Ilimilku seems to have been an experienced diplomat in late bronze age game of thrones. Perhaps because I am Dutch, but I suspect that it is significant that in virtue of being in the imperial margins in a society where natural hierarchy could not be taken for granted, that Ilimilku could discern the reality behind the dueling imperial orders more starkly and live to tell it.

One striking contextual fact that Tugendhaft points out is that as the Hittite empire was collapsing the ruling kings of that empire started to claim that they themselves were divine in order to shore up their authority and legitimacy (127). It's one thing to believe in the divinity of invisible agents, it's quite another (although since familiar enough) to believe in the divinity of fellow mortals.

Hume points out that not "every Alexander meets with a Lucian, ready to expose and detect his impostures." Even if there is somebody who could expose the imposture, it may often not be prudent to do. If your overlord tells you he is divine you may keep your mouth shut, too. Moreover, even if somebody is secure enough to do so, there is not always an audience that can use the information in an actionable way. Ilimilku must have thought it important to represent the nature of political reality to his king or society.

Tugendhaft's argument will have to be evaluated by his scholarly peers.++ I could close here, but I was surprised that Tugendhaft did not spend more time on the reality represented by his poem. (Tugendhaft's focus is on the way political authority and legitimacy is represented, and here I am not doing justice to his argument.) For, it is significant that Baal's first major opponent is the sea-god Yamm. For, while the sea was a source of commercial riches for Ugarit, it was also a permanent source of political danger. A wealthy town like Ugarit is a permanent target for opportunistic raiders and pirates, especially when its citizen-soldiers/sailors are out of town defending the empire in far-away lands. And, in fact, there is considerable evidence that suggests that within a generation or so Ugarit was attacked, perhaps destroyed, by its traditional enemies from the sea. If that's right then Ilimilku was not merely giving a general analysis of the nature of political reality, but also trying to remind his audience that in the context of collapsing protection of the empire, the city needed (and this is fully compatible with Tugendhaft's analysis) to be on guard against its enemies waiting for an opportunity.** I shall return to the Baal Cycle with the aid of Tugendhaft before long.

PS UPDATE: the initial version of this post did not have  quotes around the 'first political philosopher. Obviously I did not really wish to convey that Ilimilku was the firs political philosopher. For on my reading, political philosophy is a permanent possibility. But Chike Jeffers reminded me that he is published on an earlier (Egyptian) political philosopher in a paper I much admire. So, I changed the title of this post accordingly.

 

 

 

On Four or Five Methods of History of Philososphy (and the debates over Stoicism and Spinozism that Encouraged them)

In the middle of the seventeenth century, [I] the standard approach to the historiography of philosophy, which at this time almost universally meant writing the history of ancient philosophy, was still closely modelled on Diogenes Laertius's book on the Lives of Eminent Philosophers. A typical work would be organized by sect, each section being subdivided by author, with a doxography of the sect's distinctive arguments presented in the section to devoted to its founder--in the case of the Stoics, Zeno of Citium. Passages on later philosophers adhering to the particular school would follow the treatment of the founder, in broadly chronological order. While mention would be made of particular specialisms or idiosyncracies which appeared in the work of these later adherents, there would be no detailed treatment of what scholars would today recognize as the basic stuff of the history of philosophy, [II] the presentation of how the course of philosophical argument over time led to modifications in the doctrines maintained by the philosophers and the schools. Those who wrote on the history of philosophy could discuss whether theses were true or false, in light of the best philosophical accounts of their own age, or of revealed religion, but they provided no serious account of how progress in philosophy might be made, of how within a certain tradition of philosophical argument, arguments might be found wanting and replaced, where possible, with better ones. [Emphasis and numbering added--ES] Christopher Brooke Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from Lipsius to Rousseau, pp. 139-140. (For an earlier version of Brooke's argument, see here.)

I have quoted from the opening lines of a section on changes in the historiography of philosophy that Christopher Brooke recounts in chapter six of his impressive monograph (from which I learned a lot). Before I get to that, let me say something about Brooke's wonderful book. The main thrust tells the story of the miraculous come-back of Stoic ideas in political theory (and ethics, meta-ethics) after Machiavelli's seeming knock-out blows against them. The Stoic political theory that Machiavelli undermined is associated with Seneca's views on the ruler's constancy. As Brooke nicely notes a key move made by the re-founder of Stoicism, Lipsius, is to switch constancy as a virtue from the ruler to the subject. In an unusual oversight, Brooke fails to note the significance of this move  to Descartes, whose philosophy is -- as I have noted before (here; see also this post on Descartes's pride and generosity) -- written from the perspective of the technocratic (and constant) subject and, which, in  fact, embraces constancy as a key virtue in his second methodological and regulative maxim in the Discourse on Method.  Be that as it may, a more fundamental difference, and this is nicely emphasized by Brooke, is that the Machiavellian prince is not immanent in the political order (she acquires dominions and subjects for her own glory) whereas for Lipsius she is serving the common good (32-33). Lipsius's position comes under attack from both Christian (Augustianian) moralists as well as 'secular' (61--Montaigne)and (Hobbesian) political realists and Brooke ably recounts the developments of Stoic ideas (switching from Seneca to Marcus Aurelius along the way) all the way to Rousseau.*

Okay, let me turn to methodology. In chapter six, Brooke recounts a "revolution" (141) in the historiography of philosophy away from doxography (which, it is worth noting, itself imposed an order on its source material). One of the innovations was (III) to think of philosophy as "problem-driven," in particular,

examining particular philosophical questions, the arguments to which these had historically given rise, and, crucially, those moments at which the participants in those arguments appeared to agree that the state of the question had changed, or that the argu­ment had moved on. In considering the topics that were debated between the artisans of the different schools, furthermore, the new historians of philosophy had the highest praise for those they considered to be 'eclectic' philosophers, those who were not beholden to the dogmas of a particular school, but who enjoyed the freedom to draw as they saw fit from among the various authorities and arguments that were available to them. (141)

This revolution is associated with Pufendorf and Thomasius and makes a narrative of "progress" possible. (I go over some of the same material here, where I provide an analysis of how the new early modern historiography creates revolutionary baselines from which progress is to be discerned.) Brooke correctly notes that this historiography is itself made possible by the embrace of eclecticism -- the selection (of what is best) -- as a respectable philosophical stance. It also involves a more subtle shift from philosophy as a coherent way of life as philosophy as arguments (of course, arguments are possible in the former and the latter is compatible with a life-style). In context, Brooke notes that it, thereby, rejects a focus on schools and their internal tradition/development. While problem driven philosophy is still familiar to us, it is important to emphasize that such eclecticism is also incompatible with another way of thinking about philosophy, systematicity.

Systematicity is mentioned when Brooke discusses another methodological innovation (one responding to the ways in which Stoicism and Spinozism were seen as species of atheism or at least hostile to "religious orthodoxy" (141)) pioneered by Buddeaus:

Rather than examining each of the ancient philosophical schools by list­ing their opinions on various topics, Buddeus sought (IV) to identify the nuclear or constitutive principles of those philosophical schools, the key teachings from which other doctrines were considered to flow. This was then a way of dist­inguishing the core from the peripheral arguments of the various schools...(141)

The core is here like a timeless, but knowable essence from which other less essential doctrines flow. (This is the central explanatory framework of seventeenth  century science before it gets displaced by a focus on laws.) Buddeus treats a temporal tradition here as akin to a substance. But once such a body of knowledge is treated as a substance with an essence it is not a huge step to seeing it as a system with a core and a periphery. This allows then a comparison, as Brooke notes, in Spinozism before Spinoza, between Stoicism and Spinozisms and the identification of these as instances of the same system. (Leo Catana has done fine work (see here, and here) on how Buddeus's ideas on systematicity were carefully developed (and partially transformed) and made influential in the work of Brucker whose ideas were taken up in the critical (Kantian) philosophy and its historiography.)

Okay, so we have here three methods of history of philosophy:

• Doxography of potentially many sects (I)
• A focus on the innovations in arguments that solve (philosophical) problems and, thereby, produce new doctrines (II&III)
• A focus on systems with a core and a periphery. (IV)

In Brooke's hands the views of Pufendorf and Thomasius (III) are very close to what he takes to be the contemporary understanding ('scholars today') of the history of philosophy (IV) which is why I don't distinguish them in this list. To be sure, and Brooke ignores this, there are able adherents of IV today (see Alan Nelson; not to mention those of us that reject I-IV).

Of course, there is a non-trivial difference between II & III: many scholars today would, while not eschewing evaluation altogether ('does an argument succeed on its own terms?;' 'are there hidden tensions?;', etc.), understand  themselves primarily as describing the arguments that lead to novel doctrines of the past finding, as it were, the historical truth or historical meaning (see Lærke); while the eclectic historians (of the seventeenth and eighteenth century) are seeing themselves as paving the way for improved doctrines, that is, more progress (say in a 'science of morality' (144)) by learning from other people's mistakes.

That is to say the eclectic historians share  something in common with Lipsius and Machiavelli. For, one commonality between Lipsius and Machiavelli noted by Brooke is that both believe (V) that history can be instructive. For Lipsius and Machiavelli, the instruction does not generate "general rules with universal application" (31), but maxims which rely on contextual judgment and prudence in knowing then and knowing when to apply them.  That is the historian can also aim

• to be instructed by the past (III&V)

Now, here my point is not to collapse entirely the distinction between political history and the history of political theory, although a too rigorous separation makes one misunderstand, even underestimate, contributions to both genres (Thucydides  Machiavelli, Hume, maybe Tacitus),--about which another time very soon. Rather, I want to close with a pet-peeve about the contemporary stance that Brooke subscribes and exemplifies so ably: it privileges recent scholarship and, thus, exhibits a certain unwillingness to learn from the source material. So, for example, Brooke does not treat his sources (many of which are offering philosophical interpretations about the nature of Stoicism) as symmetrical in understanding with recent scholars. So, for example, the sources are never allowed to challenge the findings about ancient Stoicism by recent scholars (although he ably notes controversies among them and also ably shows when material was or was not available). Now, undoubtedly recent scholars have the advantage of using more sources and better technical tools (about dating, authorship, etc.), and I would not wish to deny that classical philology advances (say, from the days of Lipsius). But Brooke always privileges the perspectives of recent scholars over his early modern sources.

So, for example, as we have seen, in chapter six (in fact, the argument starts at the end of chapter five), Brooke treats the interest in the Stoic attitude toward providence and divinity as a modern phenomenon primarily as  a result of the rise of Spinozism, Pantheism, and Deism and the ways these (each) swerve uncomfortably close to atheism. I agree with his reading of the early moderns. But he treats their interpretation of Stoicism as a distinctly (early) modern phenomenon. This is odd because it is a recurring theme in a widely read text and important source, Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, that (recall) ancient schools disguise their true doctrines on the gods out of fear of popular odium. (In Cicero the topic is raised polemically about the Epicureans twice, but it is also discussed in the context of other schools and himself). Early Modern readers did not miss the point and often treated fear of popular odium as a danger for all of the ancient, philosophical sects (recall here, and here on Smith and Toland on Pythogoreans). While this seems apt for Epicureans, it may seem odd to raise this concern about the Stoics. But while, the Stoics often talked of (partial) providence (for the virtuous [for evidence and this terminology, see Runia]), they also embrace fatalism and so the early modern suspicion of the nature of their theism is not without ground. The point here is not to defend esotericism or the early modern readings of the Stoics (who, inspired, by Plutarch often treat Stoics as religious hypocrites);** rather the point is to nudge us toward a methodology that treats our historical subjects as equal partners in our intellectual voyage(s).

 

On Virginia Woolf on Thoreau being a Counterpart of Emerson

But for a time he was to live in the world of men, at least in that very remarkable section of the world of which Emerson was the centre and which professed the Transcendentalist doctrines. Thoreau took up his lodgings in Emerson’s house and very soon became, so his friends said, almost indistinguishable from the prophet himself. If you listened to them both talking with your eyes shut you could not be certain where Emerson left off and Thoreau began ‘…in his manners, in the tones of his voice, in his modes of expressions, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson.’ This may well have been so. The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny.--Virginia Woolf (July 12, 1917:) commemorating the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth for the Times Literary Supplement.

It's almost a century ago that Woolf published these remarks. I was reminded of her moving essay, and this passage, in particular, yesterday when, in the company of my former supervisor, I heard him (my Doktorvater), say, in passing (in a festive mood after a succesful defense of one of my students), that's just swell.+ (As it happens we had just discussed Allan Bloom's distaste for Zelig.) Now, I was not surprised by his use; I have long known that somehow, without initially noticing it, I have picked up the habit of using this (folksy) expression from him. Luckily, despite my fascination with prophets, we do not share many doctrines (but recall) and, as he will be the first to remind me, I am no Thoreau (and he is no Emerson).

While few philosophers live with their intellectual mentors, the phenomenon that Woolf describes is familiar enough. There are many mannerism associated with certain intellectual environments (when the Oxford trained philosopher of a certain generation in a galaxy far away says (recall), 'I am confused' to you, you know they think you are a moron.) I am sure the next sentence will land me in  trouble (but here goes): for a while, I could unfailingly pick out a Pittsburgh trained philosopher based on the way s/he nodded during a lecture (in apparent disagreement) or used the phrase 'deep' to pick out a favored position. (There was selection bias.)

Of course, what makes Woolf's description (she is quoting a description by a former classmate of Thoreau, the Rev. John Weiss,) especially amusing is that both Emerson and Thoreau strongly attacked conformism and praised robust forms of individuality (recall this post, for example). In fact, Woolf enjoys her own joke so much that she adds for good measure, "The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly; it is perhaps a sign of their strength." Here she is also recalling Emerson's and Thoreau's interest in magnanimity (of course a strong soul need not always be a magnanimous soul, but, following, say, Thomas (inspired by Seneca), Emerson couples them (for example here) and so does Thoreau) [for a lovely paper on this topic, see Andrew Corsa, himself a former student].

Besides joking, Woolf makes the further point that certain forms of submission may well be the expression of a form of courage.* At first, she does not explain what she has in mind. But she returns to the topic later in her essay, "He was a wild man, and he would never submit to be a tame one." Again, she echoes Thoreau here (his work is suffused with the strong tropological contrasts between wildness/strength/true America vs civilization/weakness/cultured Europe (false America). Somewhat mischievously,** Woolf goes on (in the original quote at the top of this post) to conflate the persona as presented by Thoreau to his readers with the author/the man Thoreau.

Be that as it may, we may say that for Woolf, on her reading of Thoreau,*** that in one's education, or path to wisdom, a species of courage consists in submitting to the right sort of influence or exemplar. In so doing, one need not become inauthentic (colours...natural to himself) nor loose one's identity/strength++ (lost any of his own force), although even the strong soul may do so along the way (permanently).

Woolf here reminds the reader that much true education involves a potentially temporary submission to the will of  another. (My blog-persona reminds you, dear reader, that this is also true (recall) of reading other people's ephemera.) And sometimes education involves oneself in a comical, repetitive mimicking, with or without difference, of other people's ticks or turns of phrase.

    Isn't that swell?

 

On Two Styles of Conservatism; or Is Conservatism a Philosophical Tradition?

The year 2016 marked a dramatic change of political course for the English-speaking world, with Britain voting for independence from Europe and the United States electing a president promising a revived American nationalism. Critics see both events as representing a dangerous turn toward “illiberalism” and deplore the apparent departure from “liberal principles” or “liberal democracy,” themes that surfaced repeatedly in conservative publications over the past year. Perhaps the most eloquent among the many spokesmen for this view has been William Kristol, who, in a series of essays in the Weekly Standard, has called for a new movement to arise “in defense of liberal democracy.” In his eyes, the historic task of American conservatism is “to preserve and strengthen American liberal democracy,” and what is needed now is “a new conservatism based on old conservative—and liberal—principles.” Meanwhile, the conservative flagship Commentary published a cover story by the Wall Street Journal’s Sohrab Ahmari entitled “Illiberalism: The Worldwide Crisis,” seeking to raise the alarm about the dangers to liberalism posed by Brexit, Trump, and other phenomena.

These and similar examples demonstrate once again that more than a few prominent conservatives in America and Britain today consider themselves to be not only conservatives but also liberals at the same time. Or, to get to the heart of the matter, they see conservatism as a branch or species of liberalism—to their thinking, the “classical” and most authentic form of liberalism. According to this view, the foundations of conservatism are to be found, in significant measure, in the thought of the great liberal icon John Locke and his followers. It is to this tradition, they say, that we must turn for the political institutions—including the separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism—that secure the freedoms of religion, speech, and the press; the right of private property; and due process under law. In other words, if we want limited government and, ultimately, the American Constitution, then there is only one way to go: Lockean liberalism provides the theoretical basis for the ordered freedom that conservatives strive for, and liberal democracy is the only vehicle for it.

Many of those who have been most outspoken on this point have been our long-time friends. We admire and are grateful for their tireless efforts on behalf of conservative causes, including some in which we have worked together as partners. But we see this confusion of conservatism with liberalism as historically and philosophically misguided. Anglo-American conservatism is a distinct political tradition—one that predates Locke by centuries. Its advocates fought for and successfully established most of the freedoms that are now exclusively associated with Lockean liberalism, although they did so on the basis of tenets very different from Locke’s. Indeed, when Locke published his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, offering the public a sweeping new rationale for the traditional freedoms already known to Englishmen, most defenders of these freedoms were justly appalled. They saw in this new doctrine not a friend to liberty but a product of intellectual folly that would ultimately bring down the entire edifice of freedom. Thus, liberalism and conservatism have been opposed political positions in political theory since the day liberal theorizing first set foot in England.

Today’s confusion of conservative political thought with liberalism is in a way understandable, however. In the great twentieth-century battles against totalitarianism, conservatives and liberals were allies: They fought together, along with the Communists, against Nazism. After 1945, conservatives and liberals remained allies in the war against Communism. Over these many decades of joint struggle, what had for centuries been a distinction of vital importance was treated as if it were not terribly important, and in fact, it was largely forgotten.

But since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these circumstances have changed. The challenges facing the Anglo-American tradition are now coming from other directions entirely. Radical Islam, to name one such challenge, is a menace that liberals, for reasons internal to their own view of the political world, find difficult to regard as a threat and especially difficult to oppose in an effective manner. But even more important is the challenge arising from liberalism itself. It is now evident that liberal principles contribute little or nothing to those institutions that were for centuries the bedrock of the Anglo-American political order: nationalism, religious tradition, the Bible as a source of political principles and wisdom, and the family. Indeed, as liberalism has emerged victorious from the battles of the last century, the logic of its doctrines has increasingly turned liberals against all of these conservative institutions. On both of these fronts, the conservative and liberal principles of the Anglo-American tradition are now painfully at cross-purposes. The twentieth-century alliance between conservatism and liberalism is proving increasingly difficult to maintain.

.... But to have a strong and intellectually capable conservatism, we must be able to see clearly what the Anglo-American conservative tradition is and what it is about. And to do this, we have to disentangle it from its old opponent—liberalism...--- "What Is Conservatism" (2017) By Ofir Haivry and Yoram Hazony  @AmericanAffairs.

I tend to think of Conservatism as a humane, anti-philosophical tradition (or if it has an esoteric philosophy, it is skeptical in tenor) rooted in a status quo bias grounded in gradualist risk aversion, cognizant of human folly, and willing to embrace a plurality of human value (e.g., beauty, craftsmanship, nobility, understanding of history, the classics, etc.) in education and averse to relentless embrace of public utility or moralism (recall here). This tradition is opposed to diverse forms of tyranny. When American conservatives, even when taught by Leo Strauss and his students, embrace the Enlightenment project of Jefferson and Lincoln, I see them as adapting the virtues of conservatism to local their milieu. By now, the Enlightenment project, liberal democracy, and even the welfare state are part of our tradition, and so deserve careful conservation. Let's call this Type 1 conservatism.

As an aside, if one believes in providence, Type 1 conservatives are essentially tragic figures breaking the historical tidal waves and orienting these toward less bad outcomes they cannot endorse themselves. When one rejects such providence, Type 1 conservatives are essentially heroic--mocked from the point of view of reason and justice--who use their rhetorical and tactical genius to domesticate the ambitions of reason.

By contrast, Haivry and Hazony treat contemporary exponents of this Conservative anti-philosophical tradition as misguided.  Sensing a world-historical moment, they construct a nationalist, religious Conservative philosophical tradition not just by a list of names ("Sir John Fortescue, Richard Hooker, Sir Edward Coke, John Selden, Sir Matthew Hale, Sir William Temple, Jonathan Swift, Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, John Dickinson, and Alexander Hamilton. Men such as George Washington, John Adams, and John Marshall...would also have placed themselves in this conservative tradition rather than with its opponents, whom they knew all too well") but also by emphasizing the "shared common ideas and principles" of these men,  who on their account "saw themselves as part of a common tradition of English, and later Anglo-American, constitutionalism."  Of these names, they spend most of their time on Fortescue (1394–1479), who was previously unknown to me and I am pleased to learn about, and Selden (known to me, in no small part, due to Haivry's work), who deserves more study. In turn, they connect Fortescu to the history of Biblical Hebraism.

Haifry and Hazony, treat Conservatism as a constitutional tradition, which embraces national distinctiveness, and that, as a matter of principle, stands both against authoritarian absolutism (associated with certain forms of monarchy/empire) as well as liberalism (associated with another form of universalism, namely rationalism, which is connected to Grotius and Locke). This conservative tradition is both pragmatic and gradualist, and proceeds by trial and error (which is why practice of common law matters so much to it), but rooted in natural law and the teachings of revelation and an embrace a national church (which provides basis for national unity and lack of dangerous conflict over what revelation teaches). To prevent misunderstanding, Haivry and Hazony are aware that Locke is ordinarily classified as an empiricist (in epistemology and psychology), but they treat him as a rationalist because of the axiomatic "elements of Locke’s political theory".... [that is, the “perfect freedom” and “perfect equality” that define the state of nature"]... "are not known from experience." 

In sum, their let's call it Type 2 conservatism as a philosophical tradition has five core commitments:

(1) Historical Empiricism. The authority of government derives from constitutional traditions known, through the long historical experience of a given nation, to offer stability, well-being, and freedom. These traditions are refined through trial and error over many centuries, with repairs and improvements being introduced where necessary, while maintaining the integrity of the inherited national edifice as a whole. Such empiricism entails a skeptical standpoint with regard to the divine right of the rulers, the universal rights of man, or any other abstract, universal systems....

(2) Nationalism. The diversity of national experiences means that different nations will have different constitutional and religious traditions. The Anglo-American tradition harkens back to principles of a free and just national state, charting its own course without foreign interference, whose origin is in the Bible. These include a conception of the nation as arising out of diverse tribes, its unity anchored in common traditional law and religion. Such nationalism is not based on race, embracing new members who declare that “your people is my people, and your God is my God” (Ruth 1:16).

(3) Religion. The state upholds and honors the biblical God and religious practices common to the nation. These are the centerpiece of the national heritage and indispensable for justice and public morals. At the same time, the state offers wide toleration to religious and social views that do not endanger the integrity and well-being of the nation as a whole.

(4) Limited Executive Power. The powers of the king (or president) are limited by the laws of the nation, which he neither determines nor adjudicates. The powers of the king (or president) are limited by the representatives of the people, whose advice and consent he must obtain both respecting the laws and taxation.

(5) Individual Freedoms. The security of the individual’s life and property is mandated by God as the basis for a society that is both peaceful and prosperous, and is to be protected against arbitrary actions of the state. The ability of the nation to seek truth and conduct sound policy depends on freedom of speech and debate. These and other fundamental rights and liberties are guaranteed by law, and may be infringed upon only by due process of law.

The key genealogical move is to suggest that the American revolution founding is not exclusively indebted to Lockean rationalist-radicalism, but that "there were already two distinct political theories" in America one conservative one, associated with Hamilton, and the other more radical one associated with Jefferson (who is lumped together with English radicals influenced by Locke: "Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charles James Fox, Charles Grey, Thomas Paine" who were Burke's target.) The high point of the radicals is the Declaration, and the high point of the Conservatives is the Constitution, which then gets corrupted -- there is always an ejection from Eden! -- by the influence of Jeffersonian separation of Church and State and, then, destroyed by FDR's New Deal. (They skip over Lincoln, which is odd.)**

It should be obvious, at once, that Haivry and Hazony have great difficulty finding a place for the non-Lockean, liberal tradition one can associate with the younger Burke and now primarily known to us from the writings of Hume, Montesquieu, Smith, Madison, Constant, Sophie de Grouchy, and, more recently, Hayek, or Shklar--this tradition has considerable overlap with their their Type 2 conservatism, but rejects their (2)-(3) as organizing principles (and has a more positive views about immigration). In my view, this non-Lockean tradition is not conservative because it also recognizes the political and prudential utility of having a normative and systematic ideal guiding one's pragmatic choices (see, for example, Hume's Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth), but it does so through a willingness to embrace a second-best ameliorative stance that gets articulated by way of dynamics of historical, practical reason. If one is interested in the complex interplay of different strands of liberalism, one could usefully start with Jacob T. Levy's excellent Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom.

In fact, Haivry and Hazony often sound like Hayek in their critique of what they call 'rationalism,' but are suspicious of his cosmopolitanism and lack his interest in commerce and trade.* Once this anti-Lockean Liberal tradition is allowed back into the historical story, one can immediate see that Liberalism has a lot more resources than Haifvry and Hazony recognize. The include resources for folk one may well understand as Type 1 conservative and that have long been comfortable, perhaps  too comfortable, on the political Right.**

But let me close with an observation. Haivry and Hazony berate liberals for failing to grasp the menace of radical Islam. Let's grant, for the sake of argument, that liberalism has been slow to articulate a proper response to it. But Haifvry and Hazony spend so much time trying to distinguish (Lockean) liberalism from their own Type 2 conservatism that they forget that their greatest difficulty is to distinguish themselves from ethno-religious-nationalists with a fondness for authoritarianism. (This is not to deny they have some such resources--their nationalism is self-consciously not ethnic.) In fact, even if one grants that Type 2 conservatism is a genuine historical tradition, Haifry and Hazony overlook the fact that totalitarianism is not the only species of tyranny opposed by liberals and, bless their souls, Type 1 conservatives: after all, we recognize that non-totalitarian, ethno-religious-nationalism (i.e., folk that reject their (4)-(5)) is the other true menace of our times (a case can be made that it often merges with versions of radical Islam), and we think that Type 2 conservatives like Haivry and Hazony run the risk of becoming the intellectual handmaidens of such petty, yet nasty, tyrants.

 

On hints of a unified Perspectives on the world

I really value the ability to produce such an emotionally coherent philosophy in humanistic thinkers. One -- not the only, nor even the most important, but one -- valuable thing I think we can offer as humanists is placing facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys. I don't think this need be the explicit subject matter of what is done, indeed I think it is often best done kind of obliquely as one focuses on more immediate or precisely formulated problems. Indeed, a lot of what I say here is shaped by my reading of Carnap, who I think also deliberately did this obliquely, and ends up painting a very different picture from Williamson. But some of my favourite thinkers are such precisely because they have the ability to conjure in me a window into their lifeworld. I think analytic philosophy has greater potential to contribute to this kind of humanistic project than even some of its own practitioners admit; and as I develop as a thinker I aspire to have such a vision emerge from my own work.

Eric Schliesser's post... does a great job of not just pointing to Williamson's lifeworld but also exemplifying what it would be to live in it. One gets the sense that even in the face of personal and social catastrophe, even where others cannot be brought to see it, there is still a value to be found in discovering the world as it is and acclimatising to it, terrible tough it may be. The determination to gain that knowledge and comport oneself accordingly just is a good, and that value is invariant across the waxing and waning of fortune---The Sooty Empiric.

In the concluding paragraphs of his generous* and insightful post, Liam Kofi Bright boldly proclaims (in partial response to my post) that he wishes to develop a unified perspective on the world, which will be, perhaps, obliquely available to his discerning readers as well as "shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." He will reveal this perspective as he addresses other philosophical challenges. Articulating such an aspiration is a means of binding future selves -- assuming these selves value internal consistency over time --, and an invitation to witnesses to become complicit or co-constitutive of the enterprise. It is, however, not mere consistency, but also a claim to a kind of existential philosophical integrity, which, demands from us not just (recall) that our the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere, but that these (public philosophical integrity) are anchored in what he calls an "underlying emotional basis for their work."

It is worth noting that systematicity and an embrace of obliqueness both have a complicated status within analytical philosophy. Systematicity bumps up against the tradition of conceiving philosophy as puzzle-solving in the context of an intellectual (and non-hierarchical) division of labor (#noheroes); while deploying hints offends our fondness for clarity and direct/assertoric speech and our distrust of polysemy. For most of my education it never even occurred to me that obliqueness would be deployed in the pale gray threads of our intellectual elders until I learned from Abe Stone the significance of hints in Carnap (recall and in David Lewis, who -- together with Jody Azzouni (recall) -- may be the only major systematic philosopher analytical philosophy has produced).

One way, I think, to distinguish analytical hinting or obliqueness from vulgar Straussianism (which is verboten) is precisely the demand to adhere to the  two-fold coherence that public and existential philosophical integrity demand from us. By contrast, a Straussian is allowed to embrace a noble lie or an esoteric doctrine that contradicts the exoteric doctrine.

It was especially kind of Liam Kofi Bright to note that I was aiming to convey even exemplify what it would be to live in Williamson's lifeworld. Recall that I quoted him as follows,  although language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us. Like the children we make, the meanings we make can have secrets from us. One can recognize this while holding on to (recall) the ideal of clarity as a kind of property or by-product of formal systems, of constructed languages, that is, to aim for transparency in one's inferential practices, one's commitments, and the use of terms (etc). In fact, Williamson could have said (but didn't) although formal language is a human construct, that does not make it transparent to us even if it simultaneously can be a means to greater transparency in many respects. When we construct languages we gain control over some matter, but we also (often unintentionally) produce secrets for ourselves. A continental philosopher would be inclined to start talking about  hidden-ness, but here I'll resist that temptation.

There is quite a bit more to be said about Williamson's remark. But here I wish to close by noting that I have often found my analytical training a hindrance to the task of (to quote Liam Kofi Bright) placing "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on the world, that they can shape and guide a coherent approach to life's many problems and joys." By this I do not mean that analytical training is a hindrance in constructing such a lifeworld for oneself or close peers (I think it is not); rather I find my training and the intellectual and emotional dispositions that accompany them a hindrance in recognizing the lifeworlds of others with a different orientation (recall also this post). (This is especially so if I am correcting another person's fallacy also generates an incapacity to listen to the emotional basis of his words.) One way one can understand these daily impressions is as hard exercises in placing other people's "facts, arguments, perspectives, into such a light as they provide a kind of unified perspective on" their "world," which they may, or not, share with others.

 

On Intellectuals that Support(ed) Donald Trump (II); What's True in The Pro-Trump Critique

That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the new Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this: America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress. Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism, greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively according to scientific knowledge.

Progressivism’s programs have changed over time. But its disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained fundamental. More than any commitment to principles, programs, or way of life, this is its paramount feature. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that “half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’” as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed.--September 27, 2016  Angelo M. Codevilla "After the Republic" @Claremont Review

This is the second in a series after Trump's victory (recall here; but don't forget this post and this one). Codevilla's starting point is that the American Republic is doomed and that the choice between Trump and Clinton merely represents the choice between the nature of empire. In the essay, Codevilla traces this decline over "the past half century," that is, the period of Great Society, the Voting Rights act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which is treated with particular scorn by Codevilla--his silence on the racial injustices it corrected reminds us that all supporters of federalism and constitutionalism find it difficult to confront the problem of racism with forthrightness);* but as the passage above suggests, the ideas precede it and can be traced to the Progressive movement's faith in managerialism. Alongside it, there has been a growing tendency of presidents to rule "not by enforcing laws but increasingly through agencies that write their own rules, interpret them, and punish unaccountably—the administrative state." Even if we disagree over that 'unaccountably' (generally one has recourse to courts), the administrative state has grown because of the needs of the (imperial) military-industrial-welfare-finance-state.

One may respond, with the experience of Republican obstructionism toward the Obama administration in mind, that President turned to executive orders and administrative rule because the Congress had no interest in working with him. But this does not address Codevilla's point because it is pretty clear that the (let's call it Madisonian) constitution was designed to generate considerable status quo bias. To a considerable extent this status quo bias was maintained in the settlement after the Civil War. So, from this vantage point the last century has been an unmitigated disaster from the perspective of constitutionalism.

One may then wonder, what makes 2016 so different from earlier elections? Here then one must recognize the disappointment of the Reagan years; while critics from the Left treat Reaganism (and Thatcherism) as the successful arrival of neoliberalism, from the Right it is seen as a solidification of the New Deal and Great Society--one that is made official in the compassionate conservatism of Bush the younger. (It is notable that Clinton's The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was the only major cut in the welfare state.) One reason why Trump is welcomed, then, is that he offers an alternative to status quo consensus among Democrats and Republicans.

One may then find it peculiar that a constitutional-republican would welcome Trump because -- like European new right politicians who combine nationalism with welfare-statism -- he actually campaigned on defending and extending the welfare state in various ways. In traditional terms, some of his attacks on Clinton were from the Left. But Trump is not being welcomed because he promises us to return back to a constitutional order (first best); he is being welcomed because he would signal the de facto regime change.

Before I note a final peculiarity in Codevilla's argument, it is worth mentioning that I agree with elements of his criticism of managerial Progressivism, As I noted when criticizing Jason Brennan's attempts to promote more technocracy,** "across the western world, government today is the province of the educated...epistemocratic elites have created a two-tier polity: the credentialed are protected by the state and have lots of economic and judicial privileges; the uneducated are, well, left to fend for themselves harassed by law enforcement and technocracy. Brennan notes that "all across the West, we’re seeing the rise of rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters." What he fails to recognize is that these are the effects of a political culture and institutions that are already highly epistocratic. Why prescribe a double dosage of a medicine that has nearly killed the patient?"

Codevilla's main argument in favor of Trump is a lesser-evil argument. Yet, it is peculiar that part of his positive argument for Trump is the following: "The character of an eventual Trump Administration is unpredictable because speculating about Trump’s mind is futile." Indeed, I agree with this as a psychological fact (or fact about character). Early signs suggests that many of Trump appointments will continue the rent-seeking (and worse) that Codevilla decries. But what is peculiar here is that somebody with fondness for classical republicanism and constitutional order would embrace (guaranteed?) unpredictability. For such a theorist the rule of law is justified as a means to reduce uncertainty and, simultaneously, create reasonable expectations. (Of course, there are better and worse versions of the rule of law.) But by marrying the (imperial) military-industrial-welfare-finance-state  to unpredictability one gets the worst of both even if Trump turns out to be merely pragmatic and not tyrannical.

Codevilla recognizes this point, and like traditional Marxists, suggests that "Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them." That is to say, if we listen carefully, the most insightful and eloquent defenders of Trump foresee a bad and bloody ending to his rule. Let's pray they are wrong.

 

A Common Historiographic Mistake By Students About Their Professionally Successful Teachers

Serious intellectual history and intellectual biography consist in more than presenting a chronological set of textual summaries, even if some of those texts are parts of debates. Any number of serious historical narratives cum explanations of, say, the emergence of SSR, might be grounded on such a chronological archive as Marcum provides, but they would have to go quite a bit further, in terms of interpretation and analysis of the agendas, resources in play, problems and struggles of Kuhn and his key interlocutors.

For example, Marcum's treatment of Alexandre Koyré is peremptory, consisting of several brief mentions at different chronological points (11, 26, 38, 75, 112). We learn little about what Koyré was trying to do, and how Kuhn struggled within and beyond Koyré's dispensation. It is perhaps not well known that in the late 1960s and early 1970s Kuhn would summon his first year Princeton HPS graduate students to a meeting with him on their first day. To this gathering he would bring his tattered copy of Koyré's Études Galiléennes, the 1939 edition. (Of course there was no English translation until 1978.) He would hold it up and pronounce, "Nobody is getting out of here until they have read this." Kuhn meant nobody would graduate who did not come to understand Koyré (and Kuhn himself) as practitioners of textual analysis and internalist history of science writing.

Kuhn was devoted to Koyré: He took up and pluralized Koyré's notion of the centrality of metaphysics -- the metaphysics of any given real science need not be Galileo and Copernicus's watered down neo-Platonism. Kuhn searched for what Koyré's notion of ruptural revolution lacked, to wit, an explanation of what it was about science dynamics that led to and shaped revolutions (enter eventually normal science). Kuhn shared and disseminated Koyré's disdain for doctrines of scientific method as keys to scientific practice and the shape of the history of the sciences. He also less fortuitously was led by Koyré's catastrophism to downplay the creativity of normal science, the role of small but significant discoveries in science, and to miss the dynamics of what we might call the politics of experiment. Koyré is not just one amongst many items in a chronology; he was the single most important resource and constraint (I do not use the language of 'influences') in the making of the younger Kuhn's practice as an historian and in setting his problematic, for better and worse as it turned out.

...

I was a graduate student of Kuhn at Princeton 1969-73, followed by a year as his colleague in the HPS Program there. Like almost all the Program's graduate students I was in the 'history side' of the Program and formally a member of the Princeton History Department. In addition I was a participant, from the late 1970s in the evolution of 'post-Kuhnian' history of science (and sociology of scientific knowledge). What happened in these domains, say in the generation after about 1980, gets almost no mention.--John A. Schuster reviewing James A. Marcum, Thomas Kuhn's Revolutions: A Historical and an Evolutionary Philosophy of Science?, Bloomsbury, 2015, at NDPR.

John Schuster is (even when wrong) an interesting and sophisticated Descartes scholar. His fascinating review of Marcum's book on Kuhn provides many insights into both Kuhn's teaching at Princeton and Kuhn's impact on the development of the distinct American disciplinary contours of late twentieth century history of science (and work on HPS and sociology of knowledge more generally). But it also exhibits a common historiographic fallacy. Because he writes from the vantage point of "Serious intellectual history and intellectual biography," it is especially important the fallacy. The fallacy I am about to describe also shows up in philosophy (especially in students of Rawls, Strauss, Cavell, Wittgenstein, etc.). It has two distinct, but connected elements.

1. A PhD student mistakenly takes how his (revered) teacher (Y) teaches his own work X as (trumping) evidence for (a) how Y arrived at X or (b) what Y thinks important about X while writing X or, more surprisingly, what (c) Y thinks really important about X.
2. The teacher (Y) is a founder of a school of thought (and often the student does not even recognize it as such) or a key agent in discipline formation.

On (1): there are many aims in graduate teaching of philosophy. But it would be really surprising if (a) or (b) are part of them. Even if a teacher were sincerely interested in sharing his/her biographical details, it does not follow that such post facto comments are reliable. Memory is a tricky faculty, especially when there is an audience around; it is simply not to be trusted. It is very odd that a trained historian would fail to recognize this point. (To be clear Schuster explicitly denies an interest in "influence" (that is (a), but he does think he can discern something like (b).)

It is admittedly more plausible that the teaching reflects what X thinks is important about Y. But even here one cannot assume this. The art of teaching consists, in part, of guiding another toward the truth (Good, etc.). What is emphasized in teaching, and here I'll add a rhetorical 'significant tecahing,' is emphasized for pedagogic purposes not for revealing one's estimation of significance. This is especially so when we consider (2).

On (2) a teacher who founds a school or the players in a discipline, always submerges something of significance in order to allow for puzzles, problems, the sense of achievable aims. Such a teacher also tends to create a tacit hierarchy within the school, but about that some other time more. Such a teacher creates shared bits of background knowledge (say Rawls on the history of philosophy) that are not just hoops to jump through ("Nobody is getting out of here until they have read this,") but ways to see the project. That is to say, we can assume that such a teacher did not teach all of the most significant bits of his own achievement.

This is not to deny that Koyré is a non-trivial figure in contextualizing and understanding Kuhn. But from Kuhn's teaching we cannot infer that he is the "single most important" such figure. There are other reasons to doubt this claim, but that's for another occasion. 

RIP: José Benardete (1928-2016)

Kris McDaniel informed me that my former colleague and mentor, José Benardete died last week. Before I came to Syracuse for my job talk I only knew of José as the other brother of Seth (the classicist), whom I encountered in person and in his writings, and of Diego (the mathematician), whom I knew, through a mutual friend, by reputation. I was no fan of Seth  -- not because of his Straussianism --, because I found that public conversations with him had the character of a blood sport; undoubtedly, my memory is colored because he got the better of me in public. After my job-talk talk, at the reception José cornered me and while I was ducking his arms that he flailed around in animated gestures, I was introduced to one of the liveliest, analytically acute, erudite, and humorous minds I have ever encountered. His was a peculiar charm: he was just as at ease in thinking through multiple permutations of moves and counter-moves of an argument (I was not surprised to learn he really liked chess), as he was placing that argument in world-historical philosophical context that seemed simultaneously  completely obvious and, upon reflection, utterly original. He would regularly tell me  that qua philosophical historian, I lacked spirited ambition -- my true task qua historian was to change philosophy --, yet do so in a way that made me feel elevated, nearer to the clouds (where we could engage not just with Aristophanes's Socrates, but provide Icarus with directions).

José was one of those characters that generated legendary anecdotes (about him), but whose profundity of thought could not be reduced to them. He would corner you for lunch or in your office (sometimes because had locked himself out of his own), and would start talking. Often you had the feeling you were encountering him in medias res, but he had a keen sense of audience. Once he started telling me about Quine's footnotes (later I learned he had actually written on some of these [recall]), and then, en passant, slyly noted that the footnotes of one of the papers I had sent along as a writing sample (on Adam Smith's obituary of David Hume) the year before contained the heart of the matter and that I should stop hiding the important things from my readers. Once a week, we would meet for lunch and the most memorable ones were the ones in which he gave me master classes on either Wallace Stevens's poetry or recent analytical metaphysics.

José started his philosophical life as a funny mixture of Husserlian, Whitehead-ian metaphysician, and Straussian. His dissertation (at Virginia) was on the philosophy of time and philosophical theology. But his (1964) book on Infinity revived the genre of analytical metaphysics [this baffled the readers in the 1960s {in my lecture below I provide evidence for this claim}] and -- inspired by Wittgenstein -- offered a philosophy of mathematical practice. (The Husserlian and Straussian elements are still visible, but do not predominate.) The book dazzles and continues to dazzle with arguments. It is no surprise that when genuine metaphysics returned to fashion in analytical philosophy, Syracuse (with in addition to Jose, Bennett, Alston, and Van Inwagen) in upstate new york was one of its hotbeds. By the mid 1970s his writings exhibit a deep engagement with the then Quine-ean analytical mainstream. I have argued (see below) that the change of register hides a unity of philosophical vision.

Much to my amazement, while I was at sabbatical at Santa Barbara, I was asked to speak at his retirement party back in Syracuse about his book manuscript on magnanimity. For one divine Fall while overlooking the Pacific, I read all the works of Jose I could get my hands on in order to prepare my lecture alongside Spinoza's Ethics (that I was teaching). I discovered he was not just a great conversationalist; to my horror I noticed that all kinds of ideas I thought I had dreamed up -- in light of his challenge to aim to be a philosophical historian of philosophy [cf. 'Wiggins on Locke'] --, were to be found more cleanly and with more acuity (and poetry) in his writings. Below the fold is the invited lecture I gave at the occasion of his retirement in which I try to characterize Jose's meta-philosophical vision.

Jan Cover closes his moving tribute, May there be a place for him, in the heavens, near Plato. I doubt Plato will get much of a word in.

On Esoteric Writing and Skepticism

As to those Works of Alpharabius which are extant, they are most of them Logick. There are a great many things very dubious in his Philosophical Works; for in his Méllatolphadélah, i.e. The most excellent Sect, he asserts expressly, that the Souls of Wicked Men shall suffer everlasting Punishment; and yet says as positively in his Politicks that they shall be dissolv'd and annihilated, and that the Souls of the Perfect shall remain for ever. And then in his Ethicks, speaking concerning the Happiness of Man, he says, that it is only in this Life, and then adds, that whatsoever People talk of besides, is meer Whimsy and old Wives Fables. A principle, which if believ'd would make all Men despair of the Mercy of God, and puts the Good and Evil both upon the same Level, in that it makes annihilation the common end to them both. This is an Error not to be pardon'd by any means, or made amends for. Besides all this, he had a mean Opinion of the Gift of Prophecy, and said that in his Judgment it did belong to the faculty of Imagination, and that he prefer'd Philosophy before it; with a great many other things of the like nature, not necessary to be mention'd here.--Ibn Tufayl Hayy Ibn Yaqzan translated by Simon Ockley (1708).

Because I met Daniel Tangay as a PhD student in graduate school, I read his intellectual biography of Leo Strauss. One of the claims in it that surprised me was that he suggests that Strauss' zetetic species of skepticism is due to, or inspired by or modelled on, Al-Farabi's (200-1). As it happens during the last few years, I have been studying and offering Impressions of Farabi (in translation, alas), and I have been puzzled not by Tangay's interpretation of Strauss, which strikes me as apt, but by what is reported as Strauss's interpretation of Al-Farabi because he (Al-Farabi) quite naturally reads like a neo-Platonic philosopher (who often uses Aristotelian terminology in his arguments). I had made a mental note to study Strauss on Al-Farabi some day, but that plan was put on the long pile of projects to be pursued after I complete the introduction to the experimental novel Celebrating the Obvious, which culminates the descent of reason.

So, I was badly prepared for Ibn Tufayl's remarks quoted above. I have mentioned Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan -- a twelfth century philosophical, Utopian novel -- before (and also last week). At the start the tale is offered to an unnamed disciple who is interested in the esoteric knowledge (or mysteries) emanating from the East sometimes mentioned in Avicenna's work. In fact, the tale is framed by the problem of esoterism because it also closes with these remarks:

I have thought good to give them a Glimpse of this Secret of Secrets, that I might draw them into the right Way, and avert them from this other. Nevertheless, I have not so delivered the Secrets which are comprehended in these few Leaves, as to leave them without a thin Veil or Cover over them, which will be easily rent by those who are worthy of it; but will be so thick to him, that is unworthy to pass beyond it, that he shall not be able to get through it.

Some other time, I'll try to address how we should understand Ibn Tufayl's self-description. Rather, here I note that before Ibn Tufayl gets to his actual tale, which takes up the vast majority of his narrative, he briefly offers a partial history of Islamic philosophy. The paragraph about Al-Farabi I have quoted above is followed by one about Avicenna and one about Al-Ghazali. All three paragraphs remind the reader that one should not take the words of these thinkers literally at face value (e.g., about Al-Farabi he writes, "if the Reader, take the literal Sense only, either of the Alshepha or Aristotle, with, out penetrating into the hidden Sense, he will never attain to perfection, as Avicenna himself observes in the Alshepha.")

As an aside, this theme returns through the tale of Hayy because, first, it is key to debate between two friends, Asâl and Salâman, who disagree over the proper way to understand the revealed text of the "ancient prophet." And, second, it is central to the polical failure of Hayy, who is himself an exemplar of a great self-taught, sufi-style-philosophical-mystic, who fails to persuade his audience to depart from a base literal-ism and so withdraws from human society.

It is notable that when Ibn-Tufayl reads his predecessors, he is primarily focused on noting the tensions and contradictions between the works of each individual author. It is these tensions that provide him with a clue toward their true meaning. (As my student noted, he is not tempted to read these tensions as evidence of intellectual development or change.) Now, Ibn Tufayl does not say that Al-Farabi is a skeptic (although it is possible that the phrase, "There are a great many things very dubious in his Philosophical Works" may be translating the idea that his "philosophical works express much doubt.")* But it is clear that by Ibn Tufayl's lights if you really understand Al-Farabi he is really inclined to deny the reality of the afterlife. (Depending on how this is worded this is a species of skepticism or dogmatic denial.)

In fact, Ibn Tufayl's criticism of Al-Farabi, who is deflationary about the power of prophecy (and anticipates Spinoza in insisting that it is due to the working of the imagination), is not that he denies the afterlife as such, but that if people were to come to recognize Al-Farabi's true views and believe it, a form of generalized nihilism would follow (it would make all Men despair of the Mercy of God). And as context reveals, the concern is that without some such belief in afterlife (with punishment for the wicked and reward for the virtuous), there may well be concern over people's willingness to do good and maintain social order. That is, from our vantage point, Ibn Tufayl reads Al-Farabi in a way that anticipates elements of the philosophy we now more commonly associate with Hobbes and Spinoza. If there is a criticism of Al-Farabi  in these remarks, it seems to be primarily that Al-Farabi is not just immoral, but also reckless.

So, has Strauss's reading of Al-Farabi been thereby vindicated? All that has been shown here is that there is historical precedent for it to be found in somebody who had a decent grasp of the intellectual and religious habitus that Al-Farabi inhabited and helped shape. What we can say with more confidence, perhaps, is that Ibn Tufayl left us a text that invites the reader to reflect not just on the nature of allegory, but also modes of writing whose meaning will be understood differently by different readers.