The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age

The Responsibility of Reason

The Responsibility of Reason Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age Ralph C. Hancock

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hancock, Ralph C., 1951The responsibility of reason : theory and practice in a liberal-democratic age / Ralph C. Hancock. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-4422-0737-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Reason. 3. Liberalism. I. Title. JA71.H312 2010 320.01—dc22 2010035708


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For Julie

The good isn’t being but is still beyond being, exceeding it in dignity and power. Plato, Republic VI (509b) The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 1 Corinthians 1:25

At least it is as sovereign praiser that the prudent man praises his own life. Plato, Republic IX (583a) Whatsoever things are true, . . . honest, . . . just, . . . pure, . . . lovely, . . . of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Philippians 4:8

Contents

Preface Chapter 1 Chapter 2

xi Reason’s Meaning and Responsibility in a Liberal-Democratic Age

1

The Crisis of “Moral Analogy” and the Problem of the Rule of Reason

31

Chapter 3

The Rule of Reason and Paradoxes of Transcendence

75

Chapter 4

Heidegger’s Rejection and Radicalization of Modern Transcendence

115

Chapter 5

Leo Strauss and the Nobility of Philosophy

177

Chapter 6

Tocqueville’s Responsible Reason

253

Chapter 7

Reason’s Postmodern Responsibility

283

Index

319

ix

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Propadeutic to a Thumotic and Erotic Ontology. This is the fanciful and facetious subtitle I used to try out on friends when asked about the book I was writing. It was a serious joke. “Propadeutic” is just a philosophically pretentious word for “introductory,” or “preparatory,” I think, so we can pass over that. “Ontology” can only invoke Heidegger and his question about the meaning of Being in relation to human being. “Thumotic,” from the Greek for spiritedness, suggests what Leo Strauss learned from the ancients about the political in political philosophy, that is, in a way of philosophizing that is attentive to the question of its own purpose and status, a philosophy aware of the need to affirm its own importance. Of all Straussians, Harvey Mansfield, who led me to Strauss, has been most attentive to the manly assertion of human importance as an essential philosophical problem. And “erotic” suggests a Platonic and then a Christian longing for a completion beyond our ken. An erotic philosophy could never fulfill such a longing, or it would be satisfied and no longer a longing. Ontology’s question, the question of Being, arises from a kind of secondorder wonder. Philosophy begins with the immediate experience of wonder before a partially intelligible whole of which we are small and apparently insignificant parts. Christianity deepens this wonder through its conviction that little parts like us who are aware of and can be open to the whole, open to something that exceeds us infinitely, are somehow ourselves, individually, of infinite significance to the whole, which whole must then have personal significance, which is to say it must be God’s. Ontology in the present sense was revived when Heidegger pursued this Christian deepening but attempted to remove God; ontology is a pondering on the openness of human beings to Truth, and on the power of Truth to solicit human beings. (Heidegger would xi

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like this pondering to be at once somehow maximally bold and maximally reverent; Leo Strauss somewhere remarks that Heidegger’s Being is as mysterious as the Biblical God yet as impersonal as the pagan Plato’s ideas—that is, utterly inhuman because neither personal nor intelligible.) Ontology, or talk about “Being” articulates a dissatisfaction with an assumed separation between thinking and meaning. For me, though not exactly for Heidegger, this implies dissatisfaction with the assumption that seeing things clearly and understanding moral and spiritual purposes are different capacities. What we call a questioning of the meaning of “Being” springs from a need to address the common ground of theory and practice. Yet obviously there can be no simple “theory” of the common ground of theory and practice. This set of preparatory essays is “thumotic” in that it invites us, not to discern such a ground as if it were a neutral object of cognition, but responsibly to affirm and enact such a ground; it is “erotic,” moreover, in striving to hold such an affirmation open to some consuming fulfillment, some revelation of meaning, that must ever surpass it. And again unlike Heidegger, I do not insist that such a revelation be thought in isolation from or against the notion of a personal God. Though I have forsaken the self-mocking title, it is not obvious, in the explanation I have just given of it, that I have removed the cause of ridicule. This prefatory account of a response to the wonder of Being that would attend to thumos as well as eros no doubt still appears laughably remote from common sense, ordinary language, and actual practical concerns. So I may as well admit that I am a professor writing to other professors and to their students. Of course I warmly welcome readers who are neither paid professionals nor their captive audience, but I confess in advance to the professional deformation that is the cost of pursuing a conversation that our busy society has left to a very few—inevitably, no doubt, but still to the detriment, I think, of both few and many. I am not willing, in any case, to forsake all hope that this project, and kindred projects that it might stimulate, could matter beyond the echo chamber of the philosophical and political-philosophical academy. I write to an academic audience with considerable recourse to a distinctly academic vocabulary, addressing as I must established and somewhat inbred schools of thought. But I do not write for simply academic purposes. In fact I would hope ultimately to contribute to a kind of healing of the rift between academic philosophy and social science on the one hand and the concerns of thoughtful citizens, statesmen, believers, and lovers on the other. For in fact each side suffers from this separation of the most critical and self-critical thinking from practical (political, religious, poetic) existence. The alienation of thinking from goods we affirm or long for as human beings is a matter of far more than academic consequence; it concerns our city and civilization as well as our souls.

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The investigations and reflections offered here are my own response to what I have experienced as a call to attune my own thinking to my own human (moral and spiritual, thumotic and erotic) being. But let me try to say that more directly and colloquially: what I have written is a working out of a hunch I have not been able to repress that intellectual excellence and moralspiritual excellence cannot finally be separate. Such a response is never adequate, but I find some satisfaction in the capacity and the opportunity to share it. For this I am grateful. If others find some resource here in seeking their own attunement, their own integrity in theory and practice, then my satisfaction and my gratitude will be multiplied. And I hold it to be possible that by multiplying examples of such a reconciliation between thinking and goodness the common good might become both better and more common. There is no way to avoid here the familiar clichés of acknowledgment pages because they are very true. To say I have worked on this book a long time and been helped by many is an understatement. And the fear of neglecting to acknowledge some important benefactor while naming others is real. But it must be braved. And of course mistakes and deficiencies are my own fault, and should not color your opinion of those who have helped and encouraged me. They may well have tried to set me straight, but failed. It is sweet for me to review the names of so many friends and colleagues who have read drafts and listened and conversed most attentively and patiently as the ideas in this book were gestating. This undertaking clearly would have been impossible without the solicitude and respectful interest of such companions. It seems ridiculous to resort to an alphabetical list, and untrue to the individualized aid given by each, but even a minimal narrative would exceed the bounds of the genre. So I can only say that deeply felt thanks go to: Philippe Beneton, Bryan Benson, Brant Bishop, James Ceaser, Bryan Garsten, Marc Guerra, Mark Henrie, Joshua Mitchell, Michael Platt, Nalin Ranasinghe, Paul Seaton, Susan Shell, and Catherine and Michael Zuckert for their interest, questions, suggestions, and words of support. Likewise to many colleagues at Brigham Young University, including Scott Cooper, James Faulconer, Brent Gilchrist, Matthew Holland, Stan Knapp, Neal Kramer, and Scott Sprenger. The task of thanking becomes even more daunting as I consider the faces of students in small seminar-style classes on the subjects of this book who have contributed so much over so many years to the emergence and elucidation of this book’s key arguments. Rather than try to name them all, I will nominate one dear former student as fully worthy to represent what is best in BYU students: Cristina Billikopf, a sublime soul and truth-seeker, as candid in criticism as in assent, as fully attuned as anyone I know to Truth as essential to human

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existence. Research assistants Spencer Driscoll, Kristen Robinson Doe, and Joshua Barton provided timely and competent service in the latter stages of this project; let them stand in for others who prepared the way for them. The Postmodern Conservative blog, now at FirstThings.com has allowed me valuable chances to try out ideas on some alert and inquisitive internet interlocutors. Institutional and financial support have been provided by Brigham Young University (including its very competent Faculty Editing Service), the Earhart Foundation, and the Liberty Fund, where I was privileged to spend a year as visiting scholar. Various institutions contributed to the development of these ideas by hosting a talk of mine: Patrick Deneen’s Tocqueville Forum at Georgetown, Alan Levine’s Washington Political Theory Forum at American University (twice!), Pierre Manent of the Raymond Aron Institute in Paris, Notre Dame University (through the good offices of the Zuckerts), the Bradley Lectures at Boston College, thanks especially to Robert Faulkner and Ernest Fortin, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, thanks to Mark Henrie. Two friends, especially, have been required to sustain their encouragement and advice over an unreasonably long period, and this somehow without expressing the doubts that must have occurred to them over the years: Peter Lawler, despite the fact that “my teaching style does not match his learning style,” has cheered me on and promoted my work far beyond what it was reasonable to expect. No less constant in encouraging me has been Daniel Mahoney, who gave the last full measure of devotion by examining a stack of papers unworthy yet of being called a manuscript and offering invaluable suggestions as to how this stack might be reduced to some order. It is neither speculation nor exaggeration to say that I could not have completed this task without the aid and advice of such friends. More simply and truly: I could not have done it without their friendship. Finally, my dear Julie, though completely untouched by the professional deformation of the academy alluded to above, has always been sure that I was on to something important. I cannot even imagine what it would have meant to attempt this in an atmosphere not infused with such an unfailing faith. The following parts of this book are included here with the permission of the previous publishers—for which we thank them: Chapter 1: The discussion of Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God first appeared as “Back to Where We Started or, the New Hobbism Comes Out,” Perspectives on Political Science 38:1 (Winter 2009), 13–15.

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Chapter 2: Various parts of the discussion of Tocqueville are adapted from the following: “The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy: Tocqueville and Guizot,” Perspectives on Political Science 30:4 (Fall 2001), 213–17; “Tocqueville: Democratic Politics and the Modern Soul (Guest Editor’s Introduction),” Perspectives on Political Science 30:4 (Fall 2001), 201–2; “Tocqueville’s Practical Reason,” Perspectives on Political Science 27:4 (Fall 1998), 212–19; “Introduction” (with Gary Lambert), pp. 1–15 in The Legacy of the French Revolution, eds. Ralph C. Hancock and L. Gary Lambert (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); and “The Uses and Hazards of Christianity in Tocqueville’s Attempt to Save Democratic Souls,” in Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, ed. Ken Masugi (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). (Parts of this last article are also adapted and revised in the present chapter 6.) Chapter 3: Selections from “Luther and Calvin,” pp. 144–81 in An Invitation to Political Thought, eds. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Joseph R. Fornieri (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008); “The Philosophical Problem of Religious Liberty,” in Religious Liberty and the Global Church: the Challenge of Sharing, Seventh Annual Conference of The International Society, David M. Kennedy Center, Brigham Young University, 1997; and “Necessity, Morality, Christianity,” pp. 45–61, in Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield, eds. Mark Blitz and William Kristol (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). (Parts of this last chapter are also found revised in the present chapter 5.) Chapter 5: Some paragraphs from “Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: The Justice of Philosophy” in Levinas autrement (Wilsele, Belgium: Peeters, forthcoming). The discussions of Thomas Pangle’s and the Zuckerts’ works on Leo Strauss first appeared as “What Was Political Philosophy? Or: The Straussian Philosopher and His Other,” Political Science Reviewer 36 (2007), 13–46. Chapter 7: Some elements adapted from “Two Revolutions and the Problem of Modern Prudence,” pp. 257–88 in The Legacy of the French Revolution, ed. Ralph C. Hancock and L. Gary Lambert (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). Discussions of Michael Gillespie and Remi Brague first appeared as, respectively, a review of The Theological Origins of Modernity in Perspectives on Political Science 38:3 (Summer 2009), 173–84, and “Law and Counsel: On Remi Brague’s The Law of God,” Modern Age 51:1 (Winter 2009), 36–41.

Chapter 1

Reason’s Meaning and Responsibility in a Liberal-Democratic Age

“All we ask is that law and policy be based upon reason.” The speaker was a political scientist, addressing other political scientists on the subject of the role of the American judicial branch. But the frustrated assertion of the authority of simple reason is a familiar one in contemporary American political discourse. The assertion is frustrated because the term reason is taken to have a simple meaning, since it is thought to be simply opposed to mere opinion, to prejudice, and to the mother of all prejudices, revealed religion. This simplification has roots that go back hundreds of years to Marsilius of Padua’s truncated Aristotelian response to “one singular and very obscure cause”1 of Christendom’s troubles—the political claims of the Priesthood— and to Machiavelli’s separation of “the effectual truth”2 from the truth simply, or the truth of the soul. In another sense, as we shall see, this modern simplification is prepared by the Christian complication to which it responds—the separation of Caesar’s realm from God’s. This device has certainly served a worthy purpose in promoting a truce among warring sects, in checking the political ambitions of religious authorities, and in channeling rationalized energies towards the relief of the human condition. But the question of the meaning of reason and of its competence and limitations with respect to human purposes—what was long called the soul—cannot be deferred forever. Modern rationalism’s debt of reflection, after many remarkably successful restructurings, may be falling due, again, perhaps one last time. Reason’s responsibility is a problem because the rule of simple reason is as impossible as it is inevitable. It is impossible because a clear and distinct grasp of the meaning and goodness of human existence eludes our natural powers, if only because we human beings are naturally aware of being part 1

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of some larger whole that exceeds our grasp. Thus an answer to the practical question of human purpose cannot be simply separated from the theoretical question of the way things are, of the nature or Being of what is highest or somehow ultimate. As Tocqueville saw with great clarity, human existence, considered personally or collectively, depends on “dogmatic beliefs,” and nothing can prevent beliefs or intimations regarding what is highest or ultimate “the common source from which all the rest flow.”3 The good or goods to which reason is necessarily oriented cannot be produced by reason itself; therefore, the meaning of good and right—the purposes and norms that provide reason’s compass—cannot escape contamination from shared and inherited understandings of ultimate purposes and laws and thus of the nature of things. Thus reason can never be autonomous in any simple sense, if only because the independence or integrity of practical in relation to theoretical reason is not a given, but, as we shall see, a standpoint that must somehow be secured. To make reason our “only star and compass,”4 it would first be necessary to know what that can possibly mean. Yet the rule of reason, however problematic, is also necessary or inevitable because this rule follows from our nature as speaking and political beings—as rational, though not wholly or simply rational, beings. Our most basic and necessary activities: self-preservation, production, and reproduction are not governed by simple instinct but mediated by thinking—by awareness, foresight, and speech. Indeed every recognition of the limits of reason, and therefore of the necessary subordination of human agency to ancestral ways or to a revealed Word, is mediated by reason. To recognize the limits of reason is itself an act of reasoning, an act that must have a positive or constructive as well as a negative or critical moment. If we are flies caught in the web of an understanding of Being that precedes and exceeds us, then we are also spiders who actively create threads of meaning by which we more or less knowingly contribute to the production of these webs. Perhaps the direct and comprehensive rule of God or of an absolutely comprehensive and unambiguous Divine Law would cancel the necessity of the rule of reason, but such a condition would not be the human condition as we know it, and the beings so ruled would not be what we mean by human beings. As long as we remain human beings, even the sacrifice of the rule of reason would seem somehow at some point to engage reason’s responsibility. Since the simple rule of reason is impossible—because reason cannot autonomously produce the meaning or purpose with a view to which it might rule—responsible reason necessarily stands ambivalently in relation to commonly held beliefs and assumptions: it negates or questions them at the same time as it depends upon and reinforces them. Reason draws its own meaning from mere opinion or prejudice even as it guides and shapes less

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rational understandings. The problem of the constitution and character of the elusive public, authoritative horizon (or, if you prefer, of the field of the perpetual renegotiation of authoritative horizons), out of which we more or less knowingly assume responsibility for ourselves as individual persons, and the problem of the meaning and status of reason—of our imperfect and everrenegotiated awareness as speaking, thinking beings of the way things are, an inescapably governing awareness of our being in relation to our surrounding world—these are pervasively, inescapably bound up together. Truth must be extracted, disentangled from opinion. Yet we must choose and act, and somehow do so reasonably, before this task is complete, because we never finish it. The existential-ethical questions as to who I am and what I am to do are inseparable at once from the political question who we are and from inexhaustible theoretical or ontological question of the way things are. When I proposed above that we are all more or less spiders actively or knowingly producing the webs of meaning we inhabit, I was glossing over a huge complication. This complication goes to the heart of the human condition as a political condition: some people are much more flies and some much more spiders; some are more active and some more knowing in the production of the meanings that others, or that both they and others, inhabit. The question of the responsibility of the few who are active and/or knowing in this fundamental way is massively suppressed in an age in which the rule of reason is at once categorically denied in the name of boundless individual freedom and yet absolutely affirmed in the form of the authority of science. My aim here is to assist those who are more active—the “strong poets”5 or “legislators of democracies,”6 or at least the multitudes of clerks who wish to claim their little piece of the poetic-legislative action—to be more knowing, more rigorously aware of what they are doing, and thus to be more responsible reasoners or, at least, less blind rulers than is generally the case under the mysterious joint reign of Freedom and Science.7 To be clear: I do not intend to produce anything like a universally or even widely available and acceptable public understanding of reason. Excuse for now my Straussianism (for which you may find that I atone further on), but it ought to be obvious that any understanding of so difficult a notion as the meaning of reason that is shared by the wide public will be one that is accepted on some kind of authority, a dogmatic belief, a more or less sound or wholesome approximation. The fashioning of such accessible approximations is a challenging and worthy task, but my purpose here is rather to persuade some few of those capable of reasoning about the meaning and essential responsibility of reason to abandon the notion of simple reason illustrated above—a concept that takes for granted the dual imperative to expand individual rights and the practical power of science—and to adopt an

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understanding of reason in which responsibility for the concrete, substantive ethical structure of human existence is interior to its very meaning. Let me add immediately—especially for those who are about close this book—that to deny the simple rationality of this dual imperative of freedom and science is not, by any means, to reject the authority of rights or of science. It should be obvious that this ethical responsibility would have an inherently political dimension; at the deepest level, that is, it would include concern for the preservation and cultivation of public beliefs concerning reason consonant with this very responsibility. An attentive reader might by now have noticed a certain slippage in my usage between the terms rule of reason and reason’s responsibility. Let me explain. The rule of reason is a classical formula rooted in Plato’s insight into an analogy between the order of the soul and the order of the city, and thus an insight into a profound linkage between our theoretical and our practical existence, between our desire to know and our desire to live well. In The Republic, notably, Plato offers to stabilize this linkage, to fix a hierarchy between theory and practice, by affirming the transcendent superiority of purely theoretical, contemplative activity in which the soul is oriented towards a Good that somehow governs the highest order of intelligible being. This superiority grounds the rule of reason, justifying the philosopher-king by establishing his virtues as the true types of the practical virtues, even if it does not actually bring about the philosopher’s rule. Aristotle seems to concede much more than Plato to the practical realm and to practical reason, phronesis, as its ruler, but, as I will argue in the third chapter, the rule of practical reason, for Aristotle, still depends upon a horizon defined by the superiority of theory or by the practical assertion of such a superiority. Aristotle interprets the responsibility of reason as the rule of reason because, like Plato, he understands reason’s ultimate responsibility as responsibility to intelligibility itself, or to a cosmos of pure impersonal rationality. Medieval Christian theology strives nobly to integrate reason’s responsibility to itself with its responsibility to a personal, loving God and, therefore, to the community formed by God’s love. Modern thought attempts to emancipate reason’s responsibility to humanity from any dependence on divine authority. A certain postmodernity attempts to emancipate responsibility to the Other from reason’s rule, but it underestimates reason’s claims and thus fails to escape the orbit of this modern, humanitarian rationalism.8 My articulation of reason’s responsibility is agnostic regarding a medieval synthesis and frankly critical of the modern (including postmodern) reduction of reason’s responsibility to the service of what is verifiably common to all humanity: our flight from death and discomfort. But unlike Strauss and many of his formidable students, I cannot herald a return to the classical rule

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of reason as grounded in the pure goodness of impersonal knowing. In fact, I have discovered that reason’s necessary orientation and limits are such that its responsibilities to God and to humanity are no less insuperable than its self-responsibility—so there are no grounds for simply subordinating love and practice to theory or impersonal contemplation. The most rigorous and responsible understanding of reason, therefore, cannot be reduced to the rule of reason grounded purely in reason itself but must be held open to the claims of God and of duties to other human beings. Aristotle famously described man as a rational and a political animal. I agree in important respects and hope to help to revive Aristotle’s insight: that human beings are essentially purposive speaking beings, that they necessarily constitute and inhabit authoritative communities, and that these facts are intimately connected in the fact that human agency necessarily understands itself in terms of more or less intelligible purposes shared by others in their community. However, I will argue that complications arise for the Aristotelian conception because human beings are not simply political or rational beings—what is transpolitical in man cannot simply be captured (as Aristotle’s framework seems to require) by the figure of the man of theoretical wisdom whose life is grounded in the pure pleasures of contemplation. They arise because it is not only the potentiality of perfected reason but something belonging to our humanity more generally that transcends the city, and because the philosopher does not wholly, unambiguously transcend the city. The problem of reason’s responsibility—of thinking together the claims of reason with those of obligations that exceed reason—cannot be adequately framed wholly in terms of man’s being at once a rational and a political animal, because transcending the city is a problematic possibility for the philosopher (even for the most acute and self-critical thinker), and, however problematic, because it is not only for the philosopher that transcendence is a possibility. We cannot even approach the question of the meaning of reason, then, without at the same time engaging the authoritative spiritual and intellectual horizon we inhabit. What, then, can reason mean now for us, for citizens of liberal democracies or members of societies in which the most fundamental ethical norms are conditioned by an irrefragable and effectively irreversible commitment to the freedom and equality of all human beings? This is one way of stating the central question of this book. Notice that I do not by any means simply identify ethical with democratic, as do some democratic theorists. Like Tocqueville, I want to be a friend of liberal democracy, not a flatterer. But, again like Tocqueville, I begin with an awareness that the power of the idea of democracy is not a mere political fact or an historical accident. Democracy is a compelling force (Tocqueville calls it “providential,”9)

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because it is a compelling idea or sensibility; it responds to something fundamental to our humanity. Thinkers who, like Tocqueville, would guide and moderate this force must begin by acknowledging it and by seeking to understand it in their souls, as well as in their cities. On the other hand, unlike mainstream liberal-democratic theorists, I do not believe the question of the meaning of reason for us late liberal democrats can be limited to the public square, somehow simply opposed to the private; on the contrary, this question cannot be addressed without plumbing the depths of the connection between practical and theoretical reason. Unlike Rawlsians and other liberal theorists, I do not believe public reason can somehow be simply insulated from questions of the meaning of human existence and of the way things are. That these questions are inexhaustible does not mean that they must be held a priori to be politically irrelevant or out-of-bounds. The strategy of an a priori circumscription of a safe and neutral realm of public reason cannot help but privatize and thus neutralize certain kinds of answers to ultimate questions while effectively, if only implicitly, authorizing others. Nor do I believe it satisfactory or safe simply to take for granted, like Richard Rorty, “the priority of democracy to philosophy,”10 thus somehow placing democracy beyond question and beyond reason’s responsibility. If the essentials of secular late liberalism were really as consensual as Rorty pretends, history truly would have ended and there would be nothing to argue about. But then, again, in such a condition we would not be human.

LIBERALISM VS. NATURE: LILLA RESURRECTS A STILLBORN GOD It will be useful to pause to consider Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God, for Lilla sees the problem of simple reason quite clearly, even if he eventually succumbs to the liberal intellectual’s longing for a simple theoretical or willful solution. He offers a resolute defense of liberal and secular rationalism in full (or almost full) awareness of the vulnerability of truncated liberal reason. Despite his awareness of the vulnerability of Hobbes’ argument and its failure to address our full humanity, Lilla’s residual commitment to the Hobbesian project of solving the theological-political problem finally brings him to call for its continuation. This resolution is profoundly characteristic of almost all contemporary political theory, at least in the Anglo-American mainstream. Lilla knows that maintaining the secularization of the public realm is not easy, but he would arouse our efforts to the task. The days are gone by, he notes, when we post-Christian Westerners could comfort ourselves with tales of the natural progress of secularization towards a serene and lucid repose in

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the bosom of the end of history. The resurgence of political theology, both externally (expansive Islamic extremism) and internally (re-politicized Christianity), have made secularism questionable again, and, for that very reason, Lilla thinks, interesting and challenging, a position worth re-articulating, a worthy cause for which to rally our best intellectual efforts. Secularism for Lilla is hard and noble work because it is, in an important sense, against nature; it requires a kind of suppression, or at least a rigorous disciplining, of our natural interest in the whole—the big picture, what it all means. This natural interest in the whole, Lilla points out, does not always and everywhere express itself in political theology (not in China, or ancient Greece, he observes), but there seem to be deep theological reasons for the near-irrepressibility of political theology, of the conjunction of thinking politically and thinking theologically, within Christianity. Christianity’s vulnerability or openness to political theology is rooted in its distinctive understanding of the relation between the divine and the human, that is to say, in the doctrine of the Incarnation. Lilla maps the whole terrain of theological possibilities as follows: God may be identified with the world (pantheism); God may be considered remote from, alien to the world (Gnosticism); or—the possibility represented by Judaism and Christianity—God may be understood as transcendent, beyond the world but not alien to it. The human being who looks up to this transcendent God lives in nature while standing above it, delicately perched between immanence in the world and rejection of the world, attached to the world as it is given in our natural experience, yet never fully at home in it. The core beliefs of Christianity express this complex sensibility on the relation of the human to the divine: God has become man and entered into the world—this is the truth of immanence. But he has departed and is now absent—this is the truth of God’s otherness. He is not, however, simply absent; his coming has splintered time into three epochs and given it a meaning and directionality as the world strains toward God. Christianity’s rich and inherently unstable notion of transcendence is represented in doctrinal debates surrounding the Trinity and in corresponding debates about the nature and status of man. The Christian teaching on the Incarnation may seem to support an understanding of the world as essentially good,11 or it may be mobilized in favor of an emphasis on the fallenness and badness of the world and of the natural faculty of reason. Since Christendom found itself the heir of an accidental empire, following the disintegration of pagan Rome, the possibility of an essentially apolitical Christianity faded, and political theologians groped for some model (e.g., the two swords metaphor)12 that would allow them to make sense of the political role of a religion that is supposed to transcend all earthly cities and yet at the same time to attach eternal significance to what happens in time. Intermittently a

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messianic or apocalyptic Biblical strain, drawn from the books of Daniel and Revelation, would erupt in the pursuit of some justice radically beyond the reach of ordinary politics. Finally, the indeterminacy of the Christian idea of transcendence, as reflected in its doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Trinity, gives rise to the wars of religion of the early modern period and thus to a crisis that finally prepares for the radical questioning of the whole enterprise of Christian political theology. Reflecting on Lilla’s account of the doctrinal distinctiveness of Christianity, I am led to conclude that both its glory and its misery or stem from the Christian ability or compulsion to hold on to both the defining poles of human existence—our sense both that this world, the world of our natural experience, is paltry and ephemeral and that it is at the same time eternally, infinitely significant. By the early modern period, the misery of this insight or this longing had proven to be politically unstable and explosive to an intolerable degree. Enter Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes would not attempt to defeat the claims of Christianity in open combat or to disprove the existence of the Christian God; rather, according to Lilla, Hobbes makes the audacious move that consists, essentially, in changing the subject. Abstracting at the outset from the soul, Hobbes begins with matter, with the body, and proposes to understand everything (or everything that needs to be understood) as derivative of corporeal reality. God, on this view, can be no more than a name we give to our own experience, to our hopes and fears. The God we project from these hopes and fears, however, refuses to be reduced to their service, and so He must now be domesticated by a more refined concentration on what we really fear: violent death.13 To contain our fears, we must erect an absolute sovereign—an earthly God—exercising a total monopoly, not only on political authority, but on the very definition of right and wrong and our understanding of any supposedly transcendent God. Transcendence must be altogether subjected to the demands of our immanent fears. Lilla does not want to detract from the radicalism of Hobbes’s solution. Some, he notes, have “seen it as an eerie premonition of the political totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. And one can see why.”14 Indeed. But the rather plainly (if I may say) totalitarian implications of Hobbes’s utter reduction of truth to power are not what interests Lilla. No, he would have us “think more soberly” about Hobbes, “for the truth is that the way modern liberal democracies approach religion and politics today is unimaginable without the decisive break” Hobbes made.15 Now, the phrase “unimaginable without” is a capacious formulation that is hard to contest. But much depends on whether liberal democracy’s management of the religious question is understood, as Lilla proceeds to understand it, in an essentially Hobbesian frame. Of course Lilla notices that authors such as Locke and Hume saw the need to round out

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the hardest edges on Hobbes philosophy, that is, not to lead with the atheism, or, more generally, with the utter inaccessibility of any higher good. But for Lilla Hobbes’ essential reductionist thrust remains: whatever the tone of the political rhetoric, the “art of intellectual separation”16 of the human from the divine was never intended to do equal justice to both of the two separated regions, but rather to effect the emancipation of the human from the divine. The later “liberalization of Leviathan”17 does not affect the basic Hobbesian strategy of the consolidation of human power by the rejection of the question of the good. Of course, there is no way that Hobbes could prove the non-existence of a good higher than comfortable survival, or of a God who reveals himself to man. His brilliance, Lilla argues, lay in not attempting this impossible theoretical task, but rather in skirting it all together by practically changing the subject.18 If the violence-fraught questions of God and the good could not be answered, everything must be done to distract us from them. To say, with Lilla, that Hobbes changed the subject is thus to say that modernity is a gigantic diversion, a sleight-of-hand in which everything depends on keeping the subject changed and on continually distracting us from the most natural of questions: to what end? Lilla seems to understand the fragility of this strategy. Hobbes and the “modern Epicureans” had proposed a “clean break with Christian theology,” which would allow politics to become, “intellectually speaking, its own realm, deserving independent investigation and serving the limited aim of providing the peace and plenty necessary for human dignity.”19 However, this strategy required suppression of “speculations about the divine nexus.”20 This formula, at least as applied to Hobbes, appears more than a little disingenuous, since Hobbes clearly understood that the exclusive focus on material necessities required the suppression of the question of human dignity. For Hobbes, worth, even human worth, has no meaning apart from its market value. In any case, the whole burden of the rest of Lilla’s book appears to be to illustrate the impossibility of focusing on the limited aims of such necessities as peace so as to avoid questions surrounding the meaning of human dignity. Toss out that “divine nexus” with a pitchfork, it keeps blowing right back in your face. I will not rehearse Lilla’s account of this blow-back, except to observe that his strictures against early twentieth-century theological radicals seem particularly unjust in light of the fact that he in fact shares their rejection of mediation between the human and divine realms: “The Great Separation did not presume or promote atheism; it simply taught an intellectual art of distinguishing questions regarding the basic structure of society from ultimate questions regarding God, the world, and human spiritual destiny.”21 The great

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mystery, or, let us say, puzzle of Lilla’s book is that, whereas it seems its whole purpose is to demonstrate that questions surrounding the divine nexus cannot be suppressed, he concludes by proceeding as if he had demonstrated the possibility of just such a suppression. This procedure is facilitated by Lilla’s own falling back on a radical Protestant, Jewish, or Straussian assumption of a clean break between reason and revelation, between “the modern conviction that man attains happiness by freely developing his capacities, not by submitting them to God’s authority”—as if only moderns have shown an interest in the development of human capacities, and as if God’s authority could not be thought, from an authentically Christian standpoint, to have something to do with human flourishing.22 Lilla is not willing to defend Hobbes’s “simpleminded . . . religious psychology,” but he still thinks we can somehow follow Hobbes’s “wisdom regarding the separation of theological and political discourse,” or his fundamental insight “that the scope of political thought, and therefore political life, could be self-limited by focusing on the problem of the passions.”23 He has no doubt that this insight “lies at the foundation of the liberal-democratic tradition.”24 And so Lilla concludes by summoning us, or the brave among us, to join him in the difficult political-intellectual labor of resisting the compulsion of “the unconstrained mind . . . to travel up and out,” to situate our political purposes in some larger spiritual whole. “Only with effort and a great deal of argument can people be trained to separate the basic questions of politics from questions of theology and cosmology.”25 I could not find such an argument in Lilla’s book, although perhaps some will there find the training. Lilla would recruit us by praising the difficulty of the task: “Those of us who have accepted the heritage of the Great Separation must do so soberly . . . We have made a choice that is simpler and harder . . . we must rely upon our own lucidity.”26 Pending the benefits of a great deal of so far non-existent argument, lucidity seems to consist in nothing more or less than the resolute suppression of our natural interest in the whole. For Lilla, some kind of Hobbesian separation is our only hope. There is no other way the “problem . . . could be solved.”27 But, contrary to Lilla’s resolution, I would argue that to think politically with true sobriety would require confronting candidly the absolutist implications of Hobbes’s secular-liberal separation—still at work today in the fatuous claims of an essentially closed public reason—and then seeking some non-Hobbesian articulation of liberal political freedom as compatible with a substantial and publically meaningful religious liberty. The truly stillborn god is that mortal god—the god of simple, resolutely secular reason—Hobbes’s Leviathan. The worship of this god prevails, alas, in the most characteristic assumptions of contemporary liberal thought, even among those who question our secular age.

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REASON AND MODERN REVOLUTION Those of us who are not so keen as Lilla to formulate a final solution to the religious problem, (which, as the example of Hobbes shows us, can only be effected in the name of a specious and unnatural separation) would want to have another look at the concrete historic achievement of the Anglo-Saxons in religious liberty that Lilla treats in a half a paragraph.28 In the present book a reflection on this achievement will take the form of an engagement with the work of Tocqueville, whom Lilla mentions just long enough to honor him with the title of devoted student of Rousseau and to dismiss in advance as a mere accommodation what Tocqueville admires America’s success in somehow “combining marvelously . . . the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom”29 “But accommodation is not understanding,” Lilla points out.30 As an alternative to Lilla’s kind of project for renewing a resolute secular rationalism, I here propose appreciating Tocqueville’s task of understanding the traditional American accommodation, and thus learning how it might be preserved or renewed. Rather than encouraging the often blind partisanship of secular intellectuals intent on some supposedly non-partisan solution to the problem, Tocqueville can help thinkers understand what it means to adopt a higher partisanship, to assume responsibility, not for violently neutralizing, but for refining and managing the robust claims of transcendence—explicitly religious and otherwise—that must characterize a truly free and substantially pluralistic society. In its more radical and explicit forms, the spiritual disorder of modern revolutionary rationalism has been recognized and analyzed from a number of different perspectives by authors ranging from Edmund Burke to Hannah Arendt. The radically modern project to vindicate the autonomy of human reason by the systematic refashioning of the human world according to pure intellectual constructs, a project that first emerged as a mass political movement in the French Revolution, fully revealed its dreadful power in the totalitarian devastations of the twentieth century. These calculated deployments of massive destructive power in the name of the creation of a New Humanity or a Master Race were not long ago quite widely understood among critical social theorists as only the most horrible instances of a more general experience of the tyranny of scientific rationalism and social rationalization that seemed to cast a pall over the once brilliant hopes of modern progress. Around mid-century, C.S. Lewis limned the underlying dynamic as clearly as anyone: if reason is understood in Cartesian and Baconian fashion as a universal instrument for the mastery of nature, then “man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.”31 Many theorists have discerned, moreover, a disturbing kinship between the most explicitly promethean ideologies

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and the often more implicit rationalist framework of modern liberalism itself. Thus Tocqueville descried, behind the appealing features of democratic individualism, a deep-seated temptation to mass conformity, statism, and even pantheism.32 Tocqueville’s at once troubled and sympathetic interpretation of American democracy remains indispensible in alerting us to the dichotomy represented by liberal democracy’s practice and its theory—the problematic relation between the moderate practice of liberal democracy and the extremism and extreme appeal of what is taken to be its theoretical foundation. The violent attempted translation of a pure or extreme theory of the rights of man into practice in the French Revolution was never far from Tocqueville’s mind. This extremism is of course very obvious in the infamous Terror of 1793–94, but the commitment to theoretical purity can be clearly discerned already in the very language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789, as well as in the French philosophes’ critique of the American implementation of the idea of rights. The French were persuaded that, whereas the Americans were preoccupied with specific legal forms and limitations, the French owed it to themselves and to the world to address with full clarity the question of the essence of law. Their answer is best represented in articles three through six of the Declaration. These articles appear, in certain respects, consonant with the American statements; they seem to bespeak a commitment to a liberal-individualist social order and to a rather restrictive notion of the scope of legitimate government. It is clear, however, in the last analysis, that the people or nation, a collective entity, must be regarded as absolutely superior in right to the individual, for the rights of individuals are in fact determined by law, the voice of the General Will. The individual can appeal to no authority higher than that of actual statutes legislated by “all the citizens or by their representatives.”33 In the French formulation, the effectual truth of the sovereignty of the people is the sovereignty of the legislative power.34 This commitment to absolute legislative sovereignty lies behind French impatience with the American doctrine of separation of powers. The economist Turgot blamed the Americans on this point for what he regarded a thoughtless imitation of English institutions; he could not see the point of checks and balances in a system where privilege had been abolished in favor of the equal rights of all citizens.35 Likewise, the philosopher Condorcet found that in the American constitutions the luster of the new political science was tainted by “prejudices that those who drafted them had imbibed in their youth”; thus “their simplicity was impaired by a determination to preserve a balance of power within the state.”36 All this inelegant limiting and balancing made no sense to the French philosophes; it only served unnecessarily to

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obstruct the simple truth that philosophy had discovered: that the will of the people as expressed in legislation is sovereign. To the French, the American disinclination to deduce legislative sovereignty from natural rights thus represented a simple failure of rational consistency. They had learned from Rousseau what Rousseau had learned from Hobbes: that the denial of any transcendent ground of political authority entails the necessity of an absolute human sovereign. From this point of view, the Americans seemed not to have come to terms with the fact that we human beings must create by and for ourselves the ground of authority that God and nature have failed to provide. Following Tocqueville’s analysis, one might conclude that the revolutionary enthusiasm for the General Will, the assertion of unchecked legislative sovereignty, was dictated by a radically modern reduction of the individual to a completely pre-social and pre-moral state of nature. The human nature upon which the French founded their political theories was a nature stripped of all inherently social and transcendent dimensions. Their theories founded respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the General Will. In recent decades, we have witnessed the apparently definitive ascendancy of what might be called a moderate and pluralist version of liberal democracy over the radical Jacobin and revolutionary idea that the Bolsheviks, among so many others, had emulated. If this ascendancy means that French Revolution is indeed finally over, then it should at last be possible to determine what is to be learned from it. Has the idea of the universal rights of humanity been vindicated or repudiated? Has the dream of the universal regeneration of mankind by human means been realized or abandoned? Has the radically new beginning promised by the modern idea of Revolution been achieved—have we, in fact, begun anew—or are we Moderns now reconciled to the dependence of political order on sources of authority that cannot be constructed from pure reason? A common and reasonable reaction—a moderate liberal-democratic reaction—to these questions would be to reject these stark alternatives, to hold out for the possibility of saying “yes and no” to each extremity: the pure rationality and universality of the rights of man has neither been exactly vindicated nor quite repudiated; we have not exactly produced a new humanity nor quite given up on the idea of creating a new one; we don’t claim to have executed a radically new beginning in pure reason, but we don’t simply admit the legitimacy of appeals to something beyond reason. All these late-liberaldemocratic hesitations might seem quite reasonable at the practical level, but

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they indicate that our standing with respect to the legacy of modern rationalism remains fundamentally unsettled. To think responsibly about the prospects for liberal democracy will require coming to terms with this question. The regime of extreme rationalism in which humanity is reduced conceptually to a pre-social, sub-moral construct, an object of limitless power is best understood, I propose, as stemming from a disorder in the relation of the philosophical passion, the desire to comprehend the whole, to the passion directed towards political life, the desire to rule or command. As Mark Lilla reminded us in another work, Plato was already keenly aware of a deep connection between the love of truth and a passion for “the right ordering of cities and households,”37 a connection that had to be chastened and moderated, for the sake of both philosophical and political health. When the rule of reason in the soul is sacrificed to the project of the actualization of reason’s rule in the city, both souls and cities are caught up in a destructive storm of spiritualized politics. In the light of the classical understanding of the priority of the soul’s concern for truth to the city’s concern for justice, the totalitarian horrors of the last century are thus seen to stem from a confusion of theory and practice, a collapse of philosophy into politics, the conversion of a metaphysical into a political passion. To be sure, a discussion of the crisis of rationalism may now seem somewhat stilted, academic, and archaic. The alarms first sounded by thinkers such as Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and, most potently, by Nietzsche, a literature of crisis that extended through Heidegger to, most recently, certain strands of French postmodernism, are heard now as faint echoes of an earlier age, material for courses in intellectual history. Thus it is already getting hard to remember that Western confidence in the authority of reason was shaken to its foundations in the twentieth century. Evidently the authority of reason and of the rational ones (intellectuals, scientists, experts) somehow survived this putative crisis of reason, no doubt in large part because rationalist intellectuals have largely succumbed to the authority of democracy—or, rather, because they confuse their own authority with that of the progress of democracy. As long as people freely, as a rule implicitly, accept the authority of science and of the privatization of values, there is no urgent need explicitly to impose it, except where the manifestly irrational are concerned. The unquestionable material benefits of technology and the lure of limitless individual freedom carry us along, and no alternative source of intellectual authority seems attractive, or even real, for the modern West, or for the world that is increasingly falling under its influence. Science, commerce, and human rights propel us forward (or propel us somewhere), if only by default—so much so that it seems almost churlish or pedantic to conceive the question: whereto?

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If, therefore, we show little taste, two decades after its publication, for Francis Fukuyama’s Neo-Hegelian description of our age as approaching the end of history in which a universal consensus on essentially secular liberaldemocratic values will increasingly marginalize all “spiritual” intrusions into public affairs, this is less because we take notice of any serious intellectual or spiritual challenges to the basic assumptions of late-modern liberal democracy (the terrorist challenges of incomprehensible fanatics are a separate category, happily isolated and contained, intellectually if not militarily), than precisely because we find any such grand narrative as is implied in the notion of history’s end somehow superfluous and vaguely embarrassing. It seems to answer a question nobody (nobody who matters, that is—again, except in the way that terrorists matter) needs to ask. This spiritual imperturbability of course counts, as far as it goes, as evidence for Fukuyama’s thesis. The most authoritative practices and their accompanying sensibilities, democracy and human rights first of all, seem plain enough, and so uncontroversial, that it is hard for some to imagine what purpose might be served by attempting to ground such notions in some kind of reflection on human nature or the nature of things, not to mention by seriously considering alternatives to them. The late-Rawlsian definition of legitimate political claims as those we enlightened secular liberals already somehow find reasonable, that is, not tending to disturb the left-liberal peace, fits the mood of the more literate political class, and this definition and this mood are not easy to distinguish from Rorty’s still more peremptory disqualification of all arguments that are not secular-liberal-democratic.

ATTUNING THEORY AND PRACTICE No matter how little our mood inclines us to fundamental critiques of liberal democracy, however, we cannot forever procrastinate confronting a number of more or less urgent practical problems associated with the ongoing progress of our easygoing, unpretentious rationalism—environmental concerns, biotechnical issues, social questions associated with globalization, and now the shocking instability of our supposedly regulated markets—that may suffice to justify some consideration of the “whereto” question. But what form can such a questioning take, if it is in any way to go beyond or beneath a kind of ad hoc attention to whatever issues are thrust onto the agenda at any given moment? And how can such an inquiry, the moment it steps beyond the most immediate practical negotiations, avoid tumbling into the vagaries of ultimately subjective concerns normally, and more safely, assigned to the private realms of values, of sub-rational ideologies, or of religious beliefs that are tolerated but that have no public authority?

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This difficulty will have to be braved. For if we admit, quite minimally, that we are going somewhere—that there is a powerful drift, a discernable transformative dynamic in the constellation of forces that drives our development, then how, except by the most abject thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, can we avoid considering the question in the name of what substantive common purposes and understandings we might undertake to govern this scientific, social, and economic dynamic, in what language we might reason together concerning the conditions of our existence, and of our children’s existence, insofar as such matters may still be within our power to determine? This is to say that, although the meaning of democracy is now dominated by the rights of individuals and of an ethic of authenticity to be sought in sub-political identities, it remains that the idea of democracy is strictly inconceivable if severed entirely from the idea of self-government and thus of the common good. But can we discern and define the common good? Here the problem of the competence and limits of reason immediately arises. Thus friends of democracy cannot be entirely indifferent to the question of the responsibility of reason, or of the meaning of reason as a faculty of practical (moral and political) responsibility. To begin to see the outlines of such an understanding of reason’s responsibility, let me return for a moment to a consideration of what seems to be an inescapable dualism or tension in human existence. Human beings are practical beings, necessarily engaged in answering to material necessities inextricably linked with higher purposive activities, sharing with their fellows in beliefs and customs, participating in a world of ends and understandings that precedes them and escapes their grasp. Our very identities and deepest preunderstandings are rooted in collectively authorized meanings that precede and exceed us. But we humans are also beings capable of reflection, of standing back from (which does not mean achieving a standpoint altogether apart from) the common or public world in order to examine and to question what is generally taken for granted in practice. These respectively practical and theoretical dispositions or orientations, though perhaps never fully separate or distinct, seem to represent two permanent dimensions of our existence. I will argue that how these two dimensions are composed with respect to each other has great consequences for the health or meaningful ordering of both the soul (if you will allow the quaint term—since something like the soul is, in fact, what is at stake in reconceiving reason’s responsibility) and the polity (a system, that is, but with a soul, or for souls). It is arguable, indeed, that modern threats to humanity, whether in the form of revolutionary totalitarianism or progressive-technocratic statism, can be understood as resulting from a pathological disposition of theory in relation to practice, or vice versa—from an ambition either to fuse or to separate radically and

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unnaturally man’s engagement in life and his capacity for reflection. When reason projects itself upon some Archimedean point standing somehow outside nature in order to master and transform nature,38 then it blinds itself to its own humanity, and renounces responsibility for judgment concerning human purposes. Concrete, inherited structures of human meaning (which, despite their diversity and contingency presumably are more or less attuned to permanent features of human existence) are violently cast aside in the name of some Humanity that does not yet exist, and in fact can never exist. Reason is wrenched away from the common, practical world, exalted to some superhuman status, only to be made simultaneously the slave of mankind’s practical hopes and dreams (freedom, equality, justice, prosperity, etc.). But these very dreams, orphaned by substantive reason, are left without stable, limiting substance or content, and thus are reduced to empty and temporary forms subject to the limitless deployment of will. Theory is thus in one sense radically separated from practice and in another sense fused with it. The power of reason is raised to the highest degree only by divorcing reason from nature, or from any authoritative structure of meaning, and thus, in the last analysis, by erasing the distinction between reason and will. The rule of reason, once emancipated from all authoritative structures of meaning except those of its own making, is indistinguishable from rule over reason, or from sheer mastery, the will to power. Some kind of critical self-knowledge, an understanding at once of the dignity of reason (its inescapably ruling character) and of its limits (its implication in norms or goods or meanings that cannot be founded in pure autonomy) would seem to be key to recognizing and resisting the pathological separations and fusions that seem to follow from the inherent radicalization of modern rationalism. But this negative strategy I have so far been following, this review of the perversity of a certain configuration of the theoretical and practical dimensions of our existence, can only be heuristic; it can increase our interest in a sound configuration, and show us what possibilities have been explored or projected and found wanting, but it cannot determine or ground the alternative we are looking for. The understanding we are looking for obviously cannot be in any simple sense the mere object of a theory; nor can it be (what at the limit would come to the same thing) a pure practical project, an assertion of sheer will. The disposition of existence, the attunement of the soul I want to begin to articulate or to evoke must be in some sense prior to the distinction between theoretical and practical. The only adequate response to the unstable and destructive modern fusion by radical separation would have to be neither simply theoretical nor simply practical but somehow both. The alternative to the violent, ultimately nihilistic fusing must be, not another fusing, to be sure, and thus not a way of definitively

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getting behind the dichotomy, the diremption between theory and practice, but some kind of originary practical-theoretical attunement, some kind of acknowledgment of the way things are that is also a responsible-taking-up-of or caring-for beings. Pardon my Heideggerianisms, but it is indeed hard to avoid sounding a little like Heidegger in attending to the problems before us. No one has pushed the question of the practice of theory or of the theory of practice as far, or as explicitly, as Heidegger. So I cannot help but retrace certain of his footsteps, or think in the channels of meaning he has dug, up to a certain point. I hope it will become clear how far I follow him and where I am trying to escape from his excavations. I will just say here that it seems to me he has confronted us with the question of theory and practice in almost the most profound way, only to succumb at the end (over and over again, in different ways) to a certain finally modern violence, to the allure of a certainty inhuman purity he often names Being. So Heidegger is, for me, the author at once closest to and furthest from the truth concerning reason’s responsibility. To be sure, the later Heidegger was supposed to have overcome modern willfulness by renouncing the residually anthropocentric investigation of Being via Dasein in favor of more passive and reverential strategies. But my view is that Heidegger fails to free himself from the deepest modern compulsion precisely because he wrongly believes, from beginning to end, that to overcome it requires an utter rejection of the anthropocentric or anthropological moment in thinking—in other words, because of his anti-humanism. That is, he is prevented by his radical construction of what he once called the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings) from ever truly attending to the meaning, the meaningfulness of beings, including, notably, human beings. In a word, Heidegger despises ethical and political philosophy and thereby, I think, shields himself against claims central to human selfunderstanding and therefore to reason’s essential responsibilities.

PROFUNDITY AND MODERATION No doubt some of the blame for a general lack of interest today in a fundamental questioning of the status of reason in relation to our late-modern liberal and democratic ethos lies with the extreme practical immoderation of most earlier attempts at such questioning. Whether from the left (Marx, Foucault) or from the right (Nietzsche, Heidegger), fundamental examinations of the rationalistic premises of modern liberalism and democracy have seemed inseparable from bottomless contempt and root and branch rejection. The case of Heidegger is exemplary on this point. For Heidegger, James Ceaser has observed,

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America represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of authenticity, and his furthest distance from Being. America thus stands as the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. It must be overcome or destroyed if any kind of renewal is to take place . . . America in Heidegger’s thought designates not only a way of life, but also the political form of liberal democracy.39

Ceaser reminds us further that, according to Heidegger, “from a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same, with the same dreary technological frenzy and the same unrestricted organization of the average man.”40 Both Communism and Americanism represent—but Americanism more successfully—the danger that “calculative thinking comes to be accepted and practiced as the only way of thinking.”41 The essence of Americanism is “something European”—that is, it derives from the rationalism of the European Enlightenment.42 “It is the not yet fully understood variant of the still unfolding and not yet full or completed metaphysical essence of the emerging monstrousness of modern times.”43 This monstrousness consists in the eclipse of all poetic and meditative thinking by the power of mere instrumental information and a consumerist fixation on replaceable commodities. Americans represent the furthest devastation of the modern loss of a sense of history; they are radically homeless, their concern confined to the perpetual present. Against the background of this relentless reduction of America to a monstrous culmination of modern rationalism, we should not be surprised, even if appalled, by Heidegger’s remark to the effect that “as for its essence, modern mechanized agriculture is the same thing as the production of dead bodies in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same thing as the blockade and reduction to starvation of a country, the same thing as the construction of hydrogen bombs.”44 Heidegger’s aversion to America or Americanism is by no means unprecedented among European intellectuals; as Ceaser’s book as a whole demonstrates, it draws upon a long tradition of contempt for American philistinism and vulgarity cultivated on both the right and left extremities of the European political spectrum. However, Heidegger’s formulation of this attack in the context of a radically original history of metaphysics has been singularly influential in determining the (often implicit and unexamined status) of America and of liberal democracy among its remaining radical opponents. In Heidegger’s thought, American vulgarity is seen as the last stage of a process of decadence that began with the Platonic Ideas and devolved fatefully through the Christian theological representation of divinity to Cartesian subjectivity, only to slide finally into the abyss of American consumerism. As Ceaser writes, “Modern thought or technology culminates—equally, one might say—in the American founding, the Communist terror, and the policy of the Final Solution.”45

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There is perhaps no need here to argue the grotesque lack of proportion in a political judgment that equates American liberal democracy with murderous totalitarianism. Still, to dismiss the relevance to the real America of Heideggerian dread regarding the reduction of thought to technology would be to ignore concerns shared by as important a friend of democracy as Tocqueville. Nor should the reputation (too often deserved) for political puerility or extremism of postmodern thinkers influenced by Heidegger prevent reflective friends of liberal democracy from appreciating the nihilistic dynamic of mastery and debasement that lurks within modern rationalism. The question I mean to raise, and which, I argue, Tocqueville best helps us address, is how a full awareness of the ultimate bankruptcy of modern rationalism (taken seriously in its fundamental theoretical claims, that is) can be reconciled with a firm disposition to befriend liberal democracy. As we consider this perhaps surprising comparison between the accessible and reasonable Tocqueville and Heidegger’s brooding profundities, we are confronted with a kind of paradox that I hope to show goes to the heart of the theory/practice problem. Heidegger’s uncompromising theoretical critique of the equivalent decadence of all forms of modernity can be said to result from an effort to liberate practice from theory, whereas Tocqueville’s much more nuanced and, in a way, practical view of the nature of and prospects for modern democracy proceeds alongside what appears as a thoroughly traditional or classical habit of praising the dignity of theory above the mere necessities of practice. For example, Tocqueville clearly urges the cultivation of the life of the mind, as it were for its own sake, as a counterweight to the homogenizing utilitarian undertow of American democracy. He praises, for example, “pure science” understood as the “ardent, proud, disinterested love of truth” as distinct from the “industrial side” of science.46 Thus we can say that Heidegger sets out to liberate practice, and seems to end up more radically “theoretical,” whereas Tocqueville praises the elevation of theory, and seems much more practical. To understand these opposing paradoxical reversals in the status of theory and practice would take us far, I think, towards more rigorously articulating the status of the most critical thinking in relation to the now inevitably liberal-democratic framework of our common life. It should be clear that I sympathize with efforts of sober friends of modern democracy, such as James Ceaser, to defend the autonomy of politics and therefore of political science against the “pincers of a new historicism (Seinsgeschichte) and a passionate aestheticism,”47 both of which have profound roots in Heidegger’s thought. But such a defense also implies the task of asking what, precisely, would be the meaning and status of such an autonomy? Surely it would be a mistake to concede the honored name of philosophy or, for that matter, of thinking to those who can see no difference between

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Auschwitz and agriculture, thus reserving only the apparently narrower or more modest realm of political science to those who see clearly and judge well in such important matters. Or perhaps the prudent student of politics concedes that interest in such things is an idiosyncrasy or perhaps a weakness of mediocre minds, or at best merely instrumental to the philosophers’ freedom to think about the way things—other, more important things than politics—really are. I cannot concede claims of comprehensive philosophical profundity to those altogether lacking in sober political judgment; I cannot accede to the severing of insight from wisdom. While there can be no question of simply identifying philosophical and moral-political excellence, we cannot expect a thinker who cannot articulate a link between the ground of his thinking and the goods of the common world or, therefore, the worth of own very humanity to see things clearly, to apprehend beings as they are. With a view, then, to reconciling critical reason with a sober appreciation of practical goods the philosopher shares with non-philosophers, I propose a renewal specifically attuned to our age of the classical question of the relation between theory and practice. This renewal will be sought through a kind of triangulation involving the thought of (1) Martin Heidegger (2) Leo Strauss, and (3) Alexis de Tocqueville.

TOCQUEVILLE AND PHILOSOPHY The juxtaposition of Strauss with Heidegger may surprise at the outset, but there is good reason to engage these two bodies of thought that, after all, can be shown to spring from the same basic problems. Beneath obvious differences in intellectual style and political orientation, Strauss shares with the postmodernists an appreciation for the profundity of questions raised by Heidegger concerning the character of modern reason. The difference between them might be simply stated as followed: whereas Strauss sees classical reason as represented in the thought of Plato and Aristotle as an alternative to the nihilism inherent in unalloyed modern rationalism, the postmodernists, like their German teacher, believe that the germ of nihilism is already present at the birth of reason in ancient Greece. But this simple statement masks certain profound questions concerning the meaning of Strauss’s recovery of classical political philosophy. We will see that these questions finally turn precisely on the relationship between theory and practice, or between the philosopher and the moral-political world. Although the superiority of the philosophic life is a persistent theme in Strauss’s writings, the lack of any substantive, cosmological anchor to the contemplative life seems to throw Strauss’s philosopher

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back on a dialectical engagement with the world of moral-political opinion. And this insuperable dependence of theory on practice is further complicated for Strauss by the unanswerability of revealed religion as an alternative to philosophy. When this problematic relationship between theory and practice in Strauss’s thought is taken into account, it is no longer so obvious how to explain the differences between Strauss’s and Heidegger’s understanding of the debacle of modern, instrumental reason. I will argue that the answer lies in understanding in what way Strauss’s political philosophy is indeed political all the way down, as postmodernists like to say, and thus in a sense more truly postmodern than those usually known by that label. By undertaking to explore and explain these differences, I hope to elaborate the philosophical implications and underpinnings of Strauss’s political moderation, making explicit and drawing out a certain understanding of the relation between theory and practice that is generally only hinted at in his writings, and at the same time bringing to light the mostly unconsidered and still quite modern political-ethical assumptions of the postmodernists. And by engaging Strauss from a Heideggerian direction, it will be possible to clarify the status of a certain moral and political conservatism in Strauss’ thought. The postmodernists’ extreme metaphysical skepticism will serve to sharpen the question of the character and basis of Strauss’s rhetoric of classical moderation; at the same time, their lingering commitment to the emancipation of humanity will provide a standpoint from which to situate the meaning of classical moderation in an age in which the very meaning of morality is irreversibly conditioned by the universalistic hopes (traceable ultimately to Biblical religion) of modern society. A consideration of the work of Tocqueville will serve as a kind of base in this triangulation that seeks to re-situate the problem of theory and practice in a liberal-democratic age. Tocqueville stands unsurpassed as a firm and sober friend of democracy, equally alert to its promise as to its temptations. At the same time, the philosophical basis of this friendship remains as elusive as his work is richly suggestive on fundamental philosophical themes. Indeed, the insertion of Tocqueville into a dialogue between Heidegger and Strauss may appear inapt, since it may appear Tocqueville does not address the issue of theory and practice as a philosopher, but only, let us say, as a practitioner of the emerging discipline of sociology, as a political scientist, an edifying writer, etc. But this issue is precisely one in which the question of the style and method of writing cannot be separated in any tidy or a priori fashion from the substance of the teaching or point of view. To assume that the most rigorous thinking takes a certain form we recognize as philosophical would seem to presuppose the adequacy of a theoretical standpoint in some way outside of or absolved from moral and political concerns and thus a resolution of the

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very problem of theory and practice. Rather than attempting here to ascertain what Tocqueville’s rating should be against some standard of philosophical profundity, I will for the moment simply propose that the author of Democracy in America exhibited a vivid, even exquisite self-awareness as a writer, an openness to the problem of his own practical-theoretical standpoint that was intimately bound up with his finely nuanced judgments concerning the human goods both present in and threatened by modern democracy. Thus, while a consideration of Tocqueville’s exemplary political moderation will serve as a kind of practical, political anchor to this engagement between Strauss’s revival of classical political philosophy and the radical Heideggerian critique of Western rationalism, Tocqueville’s profound but unsystematic suggestions concerning the philosophical standpoint of his political judgments will provide a fertile source of reflection on the underlying problem of theory and practice most intensively explored by Heidegger.

RE-ORDERING THEORY AND PRACTICE On the basis of the triangulation Tocqueville-Heidegger-Strauss, this book argues that the question of the humanity of modern liberal democracy is inseparable from problem of the relation theory to practice, or, in its most classical articulation, that of the relation of philosophy to politics. How should our most careful and radical thinking stand with respect to our deepest and most comprehensive judgments regarding how we should live, how we should order our lives together? Or, to state the problem somewhat more concretely, as it must arise for us today: given that all reasonable and responsible hopes (that is, hopes in some way within the purview or touching the responsibility of human beings) for humanity in the foreseeable future must be situated somehow within the framework of liberal democratic notions of equality and freedom, then how does the task of thinking itself stand with respect to this political and moral order? This question, moreover, does not apply only in one direction; it does not mean simply: how should we think about liberal democracy, or perhaps, how should the most rigorous thinking evaluate liberal democracy? Rather, philosophy will not be able to take liberal democracy as its object with maximum clarity and responsibility except by coming to terms with a more elusive question: how should the task or calling of thinking understand itself in relation to the most fundamental commitments of liberal democracy, taking this latter term in its deepest and broadest sense, that is, as representing the practical horizon of our late-modern world, the common, pre-theoretical matrix of the meanings that condition our more explicit and deliberate ends or projects. To reduce this fundamental matter of

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questioning to a formula: if it is good to think, and good to be free, then what is this good of thinking, and what is this good of freedom, such that these goods can be held together? My governing hunch is that a new articulation of the responsibility of reason can provide a yoke between these goods, and thus a touchstone for theory and practice in our times. While the question of the meaning of reason and of its rule in relation to a reasonable contemporary view of the common good obviously admits of no simple or formulaic answer, I do hope to show that achieving clarity about the question itself would go a long way towards a more healthy relationship between theory and practice, in large part by discrediting inadequate answers that are too often dogmatically assumed, not only by intellectuals but by the publics they help to form. By referring to the prospect of a more healthy relationship, I thus mean to suggest that the thinker’s task of achieving greater self-understanding in relation to the practical horizon of liberal democracy is not a point of refined theoretical interest alone, reserved perhaps to those few who confront such matters due to academic specialization or idiosyncratic taste. Rather, I would argue that, given the powerful role, both direct and indirect, of the intellectual and the expert in our public affairs, to understand the relationship between critical thinking and the common life is indeed a matter of great general concern. It would be no small achievement to help to persuade intellectuals, philosophers, and experts to be friends of liberal democracy, nor a trivial undertaking to indicate what it might mean at bottom to be good and wise friends. I am especially interested in the first step in such a project of persuasion, that is, in bringing to light or fashioning an interior link between the most uncompromising self-knowledge and a measured and qualified but nonetheless genuine reconciliation with the common world of liberal democracy. Let me conclude this introductory chapter by laying out the argument that follows in the rest of the book. In the next chapter, “The Crisis of Moral Analogy and the Problem of the Rule of Reason,” I explore Tocqueville’s account of the political and spiritual threat presented by modern democracy and the very subtle understanding of human transcendence that frames this account. This threat can be explained as issuing from the modern attempt to synthesize reason’s pride (what I will call the vertical dimension of transcendence) with its openness to universal possibility (the horizontal dimension of transcendence), to collapse the tension between these two axes. Tocqueville named this threat the abolition of the laws of moral analogy, a collapse of the structure of meaning that results in the merging of the passion for equality with a surrender to an understanding of being as sheer power, a threat we learned in the twentieth century to call nihilism. To begin to conceive a response to the nihilism of modern reason, I explore Plato’s idea of the Good as the founding

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example of the reflexive responsibility of reason, and then show how Plato configures this responsibility as the aristocratic rule of reason. I then prepare the argument that Tocqueville’s understanding of and response to the collapse of moral analogy will prove in fundamental respects superior to Heidegger’s and of Strauss’s responses to nihilism. In chapter 3, “The Rule of Reason and Paradoxes of Transcendence,” a close reading of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics reveals a subtle circularity and mutual dependence between theory and practice—the nobility of reason on the one hand and moral excellence on the other. While praising both practical and theoretical excellence from the apparent ground of an idea complete self-identity and self-sufficiency, Aristotle shows the fundamentally ethicalpolitical, relational character of human openness to truth. Lacking unmediated access to the meaning of the good, philosophical accounts of human ends cannot avoid falling back on a sense of nobility or of the higher—a sense of vertical transcendence—that is constituted within a political community, a community ruled finally by a certain interpretation of transcendence. After Aristotle I turn to the Christian critique of classical reason, a critique which, though no doubt one-sided, reveals something deeply true about the human condition in a way irreversibly limits any return to the classical understanding of natural right. The radicalization (by John Calvin especially) of this Christian critique—the refusal of all teleological responsibility—reveals a deep complicity between extreme transcendence and resolute immanence that is mirrored in the modern theoretical pretension to an Archimedean point from which to master nature. Chapter 4, “Heidegger’s Rejection and Radicalization of Modern Transcendence,” argues that Heidegger fails to overcome the modern complicity, in a way prepared by Christianity, between extreme transcendence and radical immanence. He understood, better than anyone, the need for a reflexive responsibility of thinking, but he refused (wrongly, even disastrously, in my view) to connect this responsibility with the practical responsibility of reason. In responding to the nihilistic implications of the modern alliance of technological rationalism and democratic individualism, he throws out the baby with the bathwater: he rejects the tendency of natural beings to emerge within a hierarchically articulated, heterogeneous, vertically ordered aristocratic world along with the reduction of things to a homogeneous standing reserve, mere stuff to make more stuff. He is thus resolutely closed to a true letting-being of beings, a letting-being that would require acknowledging and thus taking responsibility for some interpretation of a distinctive, elevated place for humanity. In my view, Heidegger’s thinking is almost always decisively misunderstood (even, it appears, by Strauss) as an effort to contest the traditional

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philosophic privilege of theory in order to attend without partisan filter to human practical existence. But Heidegger knows better than his acolytes that there is no purely neutral manner of articulating existence, that some practice must always be held to be most fundamental, revelatory, and authentic. Authentic practice, for Heidegger, is finally revealed in the practice of theory (that is, science) itself, once this practice is brought to confront itself. For theory to let practice be itself, that is, to articulate theoretical responsibility for the goods of ordinary practical life is thus the furthest thing for Heidegger’s intention. In chapter 5, “Leo Strauss and the Nobility of Philosophy,” I start with Strauss’s vigorous refusal to follow Heidegger in severing philosophy, or the task of thinking, from the perennial human questions. Strauss grasps the practical-theoretical challenge of what Tocqueville calls “moral analogy” with both hands, and seeks to reconnect and thereby reground both theory and practice by means of what he presents as a recovery of classical political philosophy. For Strauss, a ground for practice in natural right would have to draw out and preserve a sense of elevation inherent in actual practice, in moral and political order. Theory must confirm and shelter practice by articulating its implicit reference to some elevation; it must enact an orientation to something higher. This is what Strauss seeks in his return to classical natural right, as anchored in the notion of the transcendent goodness of pure theory. Nothing could be more practical. Philosophy, for Strauss, must recognize the necessity of this practical partiality, which is to recognize its own deeply political conditions, its own implication in the necessity of a moral analogy linking theoretical truth to practical meaning. In fact, the most acutely self-aware, self-critical and therefore responsible philosophy will knowingly sponsor a kind of aristocratic partisanship, since it knows that its own nobility is necessarily grafted upon the idea of perfection, or excellence that is concretely represented in a political regime. Thus Strauss’s claim that theory transcends practice is rooted in an awareness, not only of the practical conditions of theory, but also of the practical root of the nobility of theory. However, I argue, Strauss’s deliberately aristocratic proposal of the lofty autonomy of philosophy as a stable ground of practical elevation is already proving implausible and unstable, even or especially in the hands of Strauss’s most ardent or high-minded disciples. Returning, in chapter 6, “Tocqueville’s Responsible Reason,” to the author of Democracy in America, I argue that, when he refers to the science of association as “the mother science,”48 he means this in a radical sense. Tocqueville calls our attention to the basis not only of political and ethical reasoning but of the common font of both theoretical and practical meaning—an essential moment in any rigorous reflection by reason on its own activity.

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Tocqueville’s thinking about modern democracy is, at the deepest level, a thinking about the very possibility of thinking, judging, reasoning. Tocqueville understands that no justice can be conceived in abstraction from elevation, and no elevation can secure its autonomy from justice. Neither the vertical (the rule of reason as grafted on to a noble resignation of merely human cares) nor the horizontal (the projecting into the future of a salvation of the whole person, body and soul—or “the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all”49) dimension of meaning can be sustained without drawing upon the other. Tocqueville’s genius and his superiority in the most important respect to Heidegger and to Strauss thus consists in his marvelous equanimity concerning the two dominant figures of transcendence, aristocratic and democratic, vertical and horizontal. In my final reflections, chapter 7: “Reason’s Postmodern Responsibility,” I conclude that the irreversible Western inheritance of an eternity not indifferent to time implies a more elusive, if arguably also richer and dynamic, sense of the meaning of human existence than can be contained in the classical ruling idea of reason. It therefore also implies a more hazardous horizon for practical reason, in effect a resignation to the impossibility of containing the soul’s longings within a specific, stable, substantive understanding of the nobility of the good. The modern Legislator has no choice but to follow Tocqueville, to improvise some way of imitating the God of modernity, whose non-representable elevation cannot be distilled as a pure essence distinct from his justice, providence, and charity. Practical wisdom today must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the aporia defined by the alternatives of, on the one hand, a horizon of knowable goodness above ordinary human concerns and, on the other, by the Christian and revolutionary promise of the regeneration of all humanity.

NOTES 1. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, I.i, xix. 2. Nicollò Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 15. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), II.i.5, 417. 4. John Locke, First Treatise, §58. 5. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.ii.15, 518 and II.iii.22, 622.

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7. Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, trans. Marc Le Pain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); see also Phillipe Beneton, Equality by Default, trans. Ralph Hancock (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004). 8. I am thinking of Emmanuel Levinas in particular. See my “Emmanuel Levinas and Leo Strauss on Nature and Transcendence,” forthcoming in Levinas autrement, ed. Joelle Hansel (Leuven: Peeters). 9. Tocqueville, Democracy, Introduction, 7 and II.iv.8, 676. 10. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14. 11. A possibility that finds its fullest expression in Thomas Aquinas’s articulation of Christian doctrine on the framework of Aristotle’s philosophy. 12. This metaphor is based upon Christ’s words at the Last Supper as recorded by Luke in 22:38 (KJV). It was adopted to justify the coordinate power of priests and kings as early as Pope Gelasius I (494 AD). 13. Or is death not what we in fact fear most—maybe we fear hell more—but what we really ought rationally to fear? But is not the sheer material fact of our fear supposed to ground our reasoning concerning what we ought to fear and ought to do? It is not clear that Lilla notices this sleight of hand of Hobbes, still at work in contemporary, Rawlsian liberalism: we ought to fear death most—or, in the softened, contemporary version, we ought to sacrifice transcendence to a purely immanent, inter-subjective justice—because . . . we just do fear it most, because we must, because it is rational, because it is dictated by public reason. What counts as rational is to be determined by what everyone—or all citizens not affected by religious delusions or philosophic eccentricities—can be made to agree on; and everyone can be made to agree on what is . . . rational. 14. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (First Vintage Books, 2008), 88. 15. Ibid., 88. 16. Ibid., 89. 17. Ibid., 91. 18. Ibid., 108. 19. Ibid., 162. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 298. 22. Ibid., 300. 23. Ibid., 302. 24. Ibid., 300. 25. Ibid., 307. 26. Ibid., 309. 27. Ibid., 301. 28. Ibid., 304. 29. Tocqueville, Democracy, I.i.2, 43. 30. Lilla, Stillborn, 304. 31. C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 64. 32. Tocqueville’s term for the sacrifice of our concrete humanity to a boundless passion for homogeneity, a passion that is as much intellectual as it is social.

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33. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Art. 6. 34. Note: see Phillipe Raynaud, “The ‘Rights of Man and Citizen” in “The French Constitutional Tradition,” The Legacy of the French Revolution, ed. Ralph Hancock and Gary Lambert (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 199. 35. Phillipe Raynaud, “American Revolution,” A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989). 36. Marie Jean Antoine De Condorcet, “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind,” Condorcet: Selected Writings, ed. Keith Michael Baker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 235. 37. Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2006), 209 and 214. 38. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 39. James Ceaser, “Katastrophenhaft: Martin Heidegger’s America,” Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 187–88. 40. Ibid., 188. 41. Ibid., 194. 42. Ibid., 196. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 208; also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du Politique: Heidegger, L’art et la Politique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987), 58. 45. Ceaser, “Katastrophenhaft,” 208. 46. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.17, 461; 463–64. Tocqueville’s rhetoric reveals only the surface of a reflection that is by no means as simple as it appears. See my discussion below [from: “Liberal Education and Moral Liberty: Tocqueville as Critic of Bloom,” in Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, ed. Peter Lawler and Joseph Alulis (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 121–33.] 47. Ceaser, “Katastrophenhaft,” 212. A similarly wholesome impulse is expressed in a recent review by Linker of Lilla’s edition of New French Thought: Political Philosophy. Linker appeals to Tocqueville, who, Linker believes, “never lost sight of the fact that democracy, and perhaps even modernity itself, will take on distinct forms in distinct countries, each of which has its own unique history of political institutions and customs. In contrast, it is the later, virulently anti-modern thinkers such as Heidegger who have maintained that all nations are ‘metaphysically the same.’ Perhaps, seen from sufficient philosophical altitude, they are. But that is quite a different thing than saying that they are all politically the same. . . . [One ought to] engage in a sober analysis of politics as an independent explanatory factor in human life.” Damon Linker, “Exiting Extremism,” American Scholar 65, no. 2 (Spring 1996). Very well, I might reply, but just what does it mean to concede the lofty philosophical altitude” to the critics of modernity? 48. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.ii.5, 492. 49. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 1998), 76.

Chapter 2

The Crisis of “Moral Analogy” and the Problem of the Rule of Reason

If I choose to attend to Tocqueville’s thought at the beginning of this study and again near the end, it is because it seems to me that the fineness and depth of his analysis and critique of the modern horizon, which he addresses under the name “democracy,” is bound up intimately with the moderation and delicately nuanced character of his moral and political judgment. Tocqueville’s critique may appear less profound than the animadversions of “crisis” theorists on the right or the left, not only or mainly because it addresses an earlier stage in the unfolding of modernity, but rather because it is grounded in a subtler attunement to the problem of modern humanity, to both the risks and the possibilities modernity presents to mankind. Tocqueville’s extraordinarily prescient and measured account of the social and spiritual danger that accompanies modern “progress” like a dark shadow is by no means obviously inferior to those of the later and more conspicuously or flamboyantly profound thinkers of the crisis they call “nihilism.” In his introduction to Democracy in America, Tocqueville presents the rise of “equality” as a rushing river whose force cannot be thwarted but at best only deflected away from the dangers of a new kind of despotism and towards a more wholesome version of the new order. “Democracy” here must be understood as the intersection of certain social and intellectual factors that affect fundamental conditions of human existence and that, taken altogether, are substantially equivalent to the complex twentieth century authors will interrogate under the name “modernity.” This modern alteration of humanity’s self-understanding, which, according to brief and sweeping account we find in this introduction, had sprouted from Christian soil seven centuries earlier, now seems destined to transform everything in its path. While repeatedly acknowledging actual or potential benefits of this modern democratic 31

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transformation, he also confesses that this practically irresistible democratic force inspires in him a “religious terror.”1 The name he gives the object of his horror provides a key to Tocqueville’s rich and multi-faceted diagnosis of the existential danger of modernity: “all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished.”2 Through an exploration of the implications of this characterization of the dark side of modernity, I will to develop a framework in which to situate and criticize the two most powerful philosophical engagements with the modern transformation, those of Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger. Tocqueville’s reputation as a friend, albeit a cautious and critical friend, of democracy as he saw it emerging in America has generally overshadowed any awareness of the depths of his reservations concerning the new order. These reservations were deep indeed, and we need to come to terms with them fully in order to grasp what is at stake in Tocqueville’s very studied and deliberate—even agonized—choice to befriend modern democracy. A heightened appreciation of the stakes of Tocqueville’s choice in favor of democracy might provide a useful example to contemporary philosophy as it attempts to situate itself in relation to a social order that appears now, even more than in Tocqueville’s day, destined in practice to overwhelm all rivals. What might it mean both practically and theoretically to befriend modern or modernizing democracy with the utmost awareness of the implications of such a choice? What ought to be the character of such a choice in an age in which the reign of the ideas or at least the vocabulary of freedom and equality is so complete as to be honored even among those “postmoderns” who carry on the intellectual tradition of radical critique of democracies as they actually exist? In the opening lines of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville calls our attention to a “primary fact” that he found at the bottom of all human phenomena in the United States he visited in 1830, “the generative fact from which each particular fact seemed to issue,” that is, “equality of conditions.”3 He traces the genesis of this immensely powerful “fact” to a surprisingly modest source in the opening of the Christian clergy to all orders of society some seven hundred years earlier. Somehow (as we will explore more closely further on), this opening creates conditions in which, over the centuries, all social and intellectual developments contribute, even despite themselves, to the momentum of democracy: “Everywhere the various incidents in the lives of peoples are seen to turn to the profit of democracy.”4 This is the huge historical force that inspires in Tocqueville’s soul “a sort of religious terror,” and which, since “it is universal, it is enduring, [and] each day it escapes human power,” he proposes to regard as “a providential fact,”5 a development possessing “the sacred character of the sovereign master’s will.”6 The stipulation of this sacred fact of democracy’s irreversibility may be said to constitute, for Tocqueville, modern reason’s first act of responsibility.

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In this act the author establishes a framework within which to attempt to “direct” this huge democratic force. He invites others who “direct society in our day” to assume their duty to “instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts.”7 To qualify themselves to offer such instruction, those who would direct democracy must first themselves possess “a new political science . . . for a world altogether new,”8 a science on the basis of which democratic peoples might be taught to connect “society’s benefits” with its “burdens,” and which would thus allow democracy to appropriate at least “all the useful and good that it can present.”9 This new political science Tocqueville never describes explicitly or theoretically; rather, I suggest, he provides the discerning reader an example of its practice and some rich hints concerning its foundations, such as they are. Certain it is, as we shall see, that this “political science,” a science of and for modern democracy, can in no way be identified with modern political science. Such a “science” is needed to repair the damage of a “democratic revolution” which has transformed “the material of society without making the change in laws, ideas, habits, and mores that would have been necessary to make this revolution useful.”10 The people have been stripped of their place, however inferior, in an “immutable order of nature,” but have not been supplied with another.11 The responsibility of form to matter has somehow been abandoned. The resulting disorder is the “frightening spectacle” that Tocqueville describes as he reaches the eloquent climax of his Introduction: Animated by the heat of the struggle [of the Revolution in France], pushed beyond the natural limits of his opinion by the opinions and excesses of his adversaries, each loses sight of the very object of his pursuits and takes up a language that corresponds poorly to his true sentiments and secret instincts. . . . [I]t seems that in our day the natural bond that unites opinions to tastes and actions to beliefs has been broken; the sympathy that has been noticeable in all times between the sentiments and ideas of men appears destroyed; one would say that that all the laws of moral analogy have been abolished.12

Tocqueville goes on to offer a number of examples of this alarming rupture between ideas and actions: “Men of religion combat freedom, and the friends of freedom attack religions; noble and generous spirits vaunt slavery, and base and servile souls extol independence; honest and enlightened citizens are enemies of all progress, while men without patriotism and morality make themselves apostles of civilization and enlightenment!”13 This state of “intellectual miseries” where “nothing is linked” ultimately portends complete theoretical and practical chaos, “where nothing seems

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any longer to be forbidden or permitted, or honest or shameful, or true or false.”14 Note that this intellectual squalor now appears to be the result, not merely of reason’s abandonment of responsibility, the failure of form to shape the “material” of society, but rather of the intellect’s positive abuse of its formative, productive, or poetic function. Thus Tocqueville levels blame squarely at those he considers the leading representatives of this intellectual squalor, and thus his principal enemies, the self-styled “champions of modern civilization, [who] insolently put themselves at its head, usurping a place that has been abandoned to them.”15 It is these usurpers who, “in the name of progress, [strive] to make man into matter, . . . to find the useful without occupying themselves with the just, to find science far from beliefs, and well-being separated from virtue.”16 Democracy in America may therefore be understood as a sustained attack on the doctrine of materialism, or, more precisely, as we shall see, on those materialists who claim political leadership with the pride of gods while reducing mankind to the level of brutes. Thus, in the concluding exhortation of the whole work, Tocqueville finds the occasion for a final denunciation of his chief rivals: I am not unaware that several of my contemporaries have thought that people are never masters of themselves here below, and that they necessarily obey I do not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force born of previous events, the race, the soil, or the climate. Those are false and cowardly doctrines that can never produce any but weak men and pusillanimous nations.17

According to Tocqueville, reason’s responsibility would seem to consist in somehow reconstituting or reenacting the “laws of moral analogy” that have been abolished by the democratic revolution insofar as it is led by the materialist “champions of modern civilization.”18 In order better to understand the true Legislator’s responsibility for “moral analogy,” we will seek a clearer view of its “materialist” negation by examining Tocqueville’s discussions of the pathologies of the French Revolution and of the intellectual and spiritual disorder of democratic materialism. MODERN PHILOSOPHY AND DEMOCRATIC NIHILISM Like Heidegger,19 Tocqueville regards the philosophy of Descartes as central to the rise of a pervasive tendency to elevate man to the mastery of subjectivity while reducing humanity to objectivity and, eventually, nothingness. Though Americans are in a way the least theoretical of modern peoples, it does not follow that theory is irrelevant in understanding them, for “almost

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all the inhabitants of the United States direct their minds in the same manner and conduct them by the same rules.”20 Indeed, America is the country in which “the precepts of Descartes,” though “least studied,” are “best followed.”21 In Tocqueville’s account Descartes represents an intellectual disposition encompassing Luther, Bacon, and Voltaire, as well as the American mind. What all the authors mentioned represent (in varying degrees) is a wish to be liberated from habits, prejudices, traditions, and orthodoxies, through a commitment “to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone,” with confidence that “nothing exceeds the bounds of intelligence.”22 Such a method promises to pierce through the veil of mere “means,” “form[s],” and pretensions to the “supernatural,” in order to accede to “result[s]” and to “the foundation . . . in broad daylight.”23 The most direct practical meaning of the Cartesian orientation towards the world is, simply, revolution, in the sense given the word by the French revolutionaries: they “turned the world upside down” by proposing to attack “all ancient things” in order to pave the way for “all the new ones.”24 The destructive blindness of the modern democratic mode of thought emerges clearly from this simple formulation: the method is effective in identifying the ancient enemies but not at conceiving genuine possibilities; it seems to issue a blank check to the “new” but in practice issues only in negativity. This blindness is at the heart of the “frightening spectacle” of a rupture between theory and practice presented by “the Christian peoples in our day” which Tocqueville has described in his Introduction to the first volume of Democracy.25 Tocqueville’s awareness of the dreadful significance of this rupture is clear in his treatment of the deepest springs of modern revolution as discussed in The Ancien Regime and the Revolution.26 Here we notice that Tocqueville is equally sensible to the glory of the Revolution (its idealism and love of liberty) as to its squalor (its immoderation and underlying inclination to despotism). Indeed, he holds up the revolutionary spirit of liberty as a rebuke to the mediocrity of his contemporaries.27 Tocqueville praises the revolutionaries insofar as they exhibit a love for liberty, a sublime taste for the irreducible and largely incommunicable pleasures of freedom:28 “I have studied much history, and I dare to affirm that I have never encountered a revolution in which one could see at the beginning, in such a great number of men, a more sincere patriotism, more unselfishness, more true greatness.”29 But Tocqueville deplores with equal fervor the violent excesses of the revolutionaries who “carried audacity to folly.”30 These excesses, moreover, were not simply the result of accidental circumstances. Rather, he argues that the practical self-destruction of the Revolution has deep roots in its

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theoretical framework. Most evident is the revolutionaries’ attack on religion, which produced “an immense public evil”: “the human spirit entirely lost its foundation.”31 Tocqueville states that the deep cause or meaning of this revolutionary disorientation of the human spirit must be sought in a prior intellectual revolution. He saw a very close connection between the world of ideas and the political and social upheaval of the end of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution was a revolution of a new kind precisely because it made theoretical, universalistic claims. The core of this intellectual revolution Tocqueville located in the belief that one must “substitute simple and elementary rules, derived from reason and natural law, for complex and traditional customs.”32 A rational philosophy based upon “human nature itself” must supplant religion and tradition as the foundations of society.33 But this universalizing theory, under whose banner the revolutionary proponents of liberty marched, in fact had no place for liberty; it excluded all resources for the articulation of human freedom. This is the deepest message of Tocqueville’s chapter “How the French wanted reforms before wanting freedoms.”34 The original movement for reform Tocqueville traces to writers of the middle of the 18th century, particularly Voltaire and certain économistes and physiocrates. These reformers had no interest in political liberties, but only in the rationalization of French administration in view of material benefits. Thus when Voltaire visited England, Tocqueville reports, he was “ravished” by its freely proclaimed philosophic skepticism, but little impressed by its specifically political freedoms.35 This is representative, according to Tocqueville, of the foundation upon which the French Enlightenment built. Thus, when the desire for political freedom erupted in France, it lacked philosophic as well as institutional grounding: “It is this desire to introduce political liberty in the middle of institutions and ideas that were foreign or contrary to it . . . that has for sixty years produced so many vain attempts at free government, followed by so many disastrous revolutions.”36 Therefore, if, as Tocqueville writes, “we find ourselves today resembling the economists of 1750 much more than our fathers of 1789,”37 this is essentially because the skeptical and materialistic Enlightenment represented by Voltaire continued fundamentally to determine French thought in a period of revolutionary idealism. The universalism of the skeptical Enlightenment was purchased at the cost of a conception of the dignity of humanity. The philosophes achieved a simple and rational account of humanity only by reducing mankind to his material interests. The tragedy of the French Revolution is the dislocation of its generous, high-minded and public-spirited appeal to liberty and the universalistic-materialistic theory in terms in which this appeal is couched. The revolutionaries were admirable in that they at least believed in

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themselves;38 they were destructive because they embraced ultimately Cartesian ideas of mastery and objectivity that could not account for this belief. Although the prospects for democracy are more hopeful for the Americans (who “arrived at democracy without having to suffering democratic revolutions” and so “[were] born equal instead of becoming so”39) than for the revolutionary French, it is clear that for Tocqueville the destructive pretensions of modern theory are very much a threat in the new world. Tocqueville flatly contradicts these Cartesian-American pretensions when he states that “one cannot make it so that there are no dogmatic beliefs, that is, opinions men receive on trust without discussing them.”40 The Americans’ rejection of traditional sources of authority thus threatens to end not in liberating men but in discovering “a new face for servitude,”41 the face of mass public opinion, which “imposes [its beliefs] and makes them penetrate souls by a sort of immense pressure of the minds of all on the intellect of each.”42

MATERIALISM AS IDEALISM In a chapter on the life of the mind in American democracy,43 Tocqueville alludes to one of the most ancient metaphors of political philosophy to express his horror of a society in which the light of the mind would be extinguished altogether: One can conceive of a people within which there would be neither castes, nor hierarchy, nor classes . . . which would at the same time be deprived of enlightenment and freedom. . . . The poor man, deprived of enlightenment and freedom, would not even conceive the idea of raising himself toward wealth, and the wealthy man would let himself be carried along toward poverty without knowing how to defend himself. A complete and invincible equality between these two citizens would soon be established. No one would then have either the time or the taste to engage in the works and pleasures of the intellect. But all would dwell numbly in the same ignorance and in an equal servitude. When I come to imagine a democratic society of this kind, I believe I feel myself in one of those low, dark, stifling places where enlightenment, brought from the outside, soon fades and is extinguished. It seems to me that a sudden weight is crushing me, and I drag myself in the midst of the darkness that surrounds me to find the way out that would bring me back to the air and broad daylight.44

But before Tocqueville or his reader is overwhelmed by the suffocating confinement of the democratic cave, he informs us that this dreadful condition does not seem to apply to a modern, enlightened democracy: “But all this cannot be applied to men already enlightened who remain free after having

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destroyed the particular and hereditary rights among them that settled goods in the hands of certain individuals or certain bodies in perpetuity.”45 It is true that certain “particular causes,” including “their wholly Puritan origin . . . have concentrated the American mind in a singular manner on caring for purely material things . . . making the inhabitant of the United States incline toward the earth.”46 But the nature of democracy itself, in fact, favors the extension of intellectual interests to a greater number of citizens47 than would have that opportunity under conditions of inequality. Thus “the circle of readers is constantly extended and in the end contains all citizens.”48 It seems, then, that, far from confining mankind to the darkness of the cave of ignorance, the long-term tendency of democracy is, in fact, to bring enlightenment within the reach of every man. On closer inspection, however, Tocqueville clearly has certain reservations about the quality of light in a democracy. In the next chapter, he will explain “Why the Americans Apply Themselves to the Practice of the Sciences Rather Than to the Theory,”49 but it is clear from the present chapter that this tendency is not peculiar to Americans: The utility of knowledge is revealed with a very particular clarity even to the eyes of the crowd. Those who do not taste its charms prize its effects and make efforts to attain it. . . . From the moment when the crowd begins to be interested in the works of the mind, it is discovered that a great means of acquiring glory, power, or wealth is to excel in some of them. . . . The number of those who cultivate the sciences, letters, and arts becomes immense . . . and although the results of individual efforts are ordinarily very small, the general result is always very great.50

Thus, Tocqueville concludes, the natural tendency of democrats is not to neglect intellectual pursuits but rather to “cultivate them in their own manner”51—that is, in a fashion that conceives of intellectual activity only as a means to material ends, or which subordinates theory to practice. In opposing “materialism,” the author of Democracy in America may thus fear the form of intellectual activity in a democracy as much as the prospect that intellectual activity will cease. Indeed, this is clear from the moment we see that Tocqueville’s energies are directed not only against the natural human tendency to care excessively for the body, but against a doctrine propounded by certain intellectuals, that is, by the “materialists”: “Democracy favors the taste for material enjoyments. This taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is nothing but matter; and materialism, in its turn serves to carry them toward these enjoyments with an insane ardor. Such is the fatal circle into which democratic nations are propelled.”52

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The specific malady of modern, enlightened democracy consists in the vicious circle that is formed when men engaged in the life of the mind publicly propound the teaching that mind is subject to body, form to matter, or when philosophers outdo men of affairs in asserting the priority of practice, when they give the name “light” to the darkness of the cave. “There are many things that offend me in the materialists,”53 Tocqueville writes. In explaining what he finds offensive in the materialists, he emphasizes the doctrine of materialism itself less than he does the disjunction or disproportion that he sees between this theory and the attitude or practical disposition of those who teach it. He seems ready to allow, in fact, that under certain conditions a doctrine unflattering to humanity might serve the purpose of “giving [man] a modest idea of himself.”54 But there is nothing useful in the doctrine of the champions of modern civilization, Tocqueville observes, and he rebukes the materialists with this brilliant epigram: “When they believe they have sufficiently established that they are only brutes, they show themselves as proud as if they had demonstrated they were gods.”55 In this sentence is distilled Tocqueville’s critique of the intellectual framework of modem democracy. The materialists assert themselves proudly on the basis of theories that cannot account for the possibility of self-assertion; as they debase humanity as a whole in theory, they implicitly arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of gods. Form exerts an unprecedented power over matter by claiming to defer to matter. And it appears that it is only implicitly and surreptitiously that the materialists’ claim to divinity can be effective, since its only theoretical representation is the inarticulate standpoint of power from which mankind is seen to be powerless. The materialists make themselves gods by making men brutes; indeed, the more their theories establish the brutishness of humanity, the more they in practice assert their own divinity. Thus the subordination of theory to practice results in (or issues from) a grotesque divorce of theory and practice: the theory of the materialists cannot account for the practice of theorizing; that is, for the choice of the life of the mind over a life devoted to the body. Because the materialists cannot give an account of themselves or will not stand up for themselves as theoretical beings, they, in practice, assert themselves as gods.

THE POETRY OF DEMOCRACY Let us return to Part I of Volume II of Democracy in America in order to see the roots of the “intellectual miseries” that Tocqueville deplores.56 The rupture between theory and practice or the destruction of “the laws of moral analogy” effected by democratic intellectuals is perhaps most clearly exhibited in

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Tocqueville’s chapter 20, “On Some Tendencies Particular to Historians in Democratic Centuries.” Whereas classical historians tend to exaggerate the influence of individuals, Tocqueville here observes, democratic historians exhibit the opposite and more dangerous tendency; they deny individuals and whole peoples “the ability of modifying their own fate, and they subject them either to an inflexible providence or to a sort of blind fatality.”57 And somehow these historians’ low view of the powers of mankind generally does not lead them to despair of their own faculties; indeed, “they also take pleasure” in proving that men are not free. Tocqueville hints briefly at the political implications of this anomalous standpoint: “Historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything other than how to obey. In their writings the author often appears great, but humanity is always small.”58 What disturbs Tocqueville most about materialists and democratic historians is not their implicit claim to superiority over ordinary men and women but, on the contrary, the fact that their point of view pervades the democratic mind. Indeed, he is offended less by the pride of democratic authors than by the fact that they elevate themselves, not by explicitly claiming exemption from the weaknesses of the rest of humanity but, rather, in the very act of reducing themselves to the common level. The disproportion between authors and subjects that Tocqueville describes is one that exhibits itself within each author as he projects a low view of himself as subject and within each subject as he adopts the viewpoint of the democratic author on his own humanity. As Tocqueville writes in another, closely related, context, “author and public corrupt one another at the same time.”59 The democratic historian thus exhibits the divorce between theory and practice that, more than the natural tendency to care excessively for the body, threatens the soul of democratic man. The content of the groundless pride of democratic historians and the way in which this pride and this groundlessness threaten democratic man in general are presented somewhat obliquely by Tocqueville in his chapter “On Some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations.” “[I]n my eyes,” Tocqueville writes, “[poetry] is the search for and depiction of the ideal . . . Thus poetry will not have for its goal to represent the true, but to adorn it, and to offer a superior image to the mind.”60 In the realm of the poetic, we may thus discover the hidden ideal that makes it possible for the historian to take pride in his low view of human reality and thus of his own humanity. At first, Tocqueville’s view of poetry and democracy seems to be that the two tend to be mutually exclusive: “One must first recognize that the taste for ideal and the pleasure one takes in seeing it depicted are never as lively and as widespread in a democratic people as within an aristocracy.”61 Poetry requires leisure, or considerable freedom from the care of the body, and such freedom

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is in short supply in democracies, where “the love of material enjoyments, the idea of the better, the competition, and the imminent charm of success” dominate the soul.62 Whereas, under aristocracies, men are inclined to believe in “intermediary powers” between man and God, and “the universe is peopled with supernatural beings,” democracy “brings the imagination of poets back to earth and confines them to the visible and real world.”63 Poetry requires a reference beyond the real or actual to the ideal, and democracy tends to deprive men of such reference.64 Thus one might expect poetry to wither away in a democratic society. But this is not Tocqueville’s argument; instead, he writes that “equality, in establishing itself on the earth, dries up most of the old sources of poetry. Let us try to show how it uncovers new ones.”65 Contrary to our original impression, Tocqueville does not believe that the poetic imagination is necessarily stifled when it is brought back to earth and shut up in the actual, visible world. The “other springs” that democracy reveals are somehow consistent with being “confine[d]” to the actual. From the viewpoint of the old poetry, the ideal has to be added to the real; the new poetry, on the other hand, finds the ideal “confine[d]” within the real or actual.66 The new poets of democracy, as they renounced the ideals of the past, at first found their attention fixed on inanimate nature: “Losing sight of heroes and gods, they undertook at first to depict rivers and mountains.”67 But this descriptive poetry is only “a passing phase”: “I am convinced that in the long term democracy turns the imagination away from all that is external to man to fix it only on man. Democratic peoples can amuse themselves well for a moment in considering nature; but they only become really animated at the sight of themselves.”68 But what are democratic peoples so excited about? Tocqueville has just observed that “[i]n democratic societies . . . men are all very small and very much alike.”69 How can this monotonous insignificance stir the imaginations of democratic men? An answer seems to be implied in the next sentence, where Tocqueville notes that “[p]oets who live in democratic centuries can therefore never take one man in particular for the subject of their picture.”70 Thus, it is not any particular man or woman that exalts the poetic imagination of Americans, but “themselves” taken collectively. But this hardly diminishes our puzzlement; for how can a mass of insignificant and essentially similar individuals, any more than a single such person, strike us as significant, even exciting? Tocqueville introduces his answer to this question by referring us back to his chapter “How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man.”71 It is “the idea of progress and the indefinite perfectibility of the human species”72 that make confinement to “the visible and real

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world” consistent with poetic excitement. More precisely, it is not the real, visible world itself that stirs democratic souls, but the idea of this world’s movement toward an indefinite perfection. And since the perfection envisaged is indefinite—that is, since it cannot be represented by a democratic people in any particular, concrete, embodied form—the democratic imagination focuses on the movement itself. Thus, “[t]he American people sees itself advance across this wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature.”73 It is the very indeterminacy of the character of a democratic people that allows the people to concentrate on themselves as a movement or activity; undiverted by any qualitative differences among men or among the ends that men pursue or by any “intermediary powers” between God and man, a democratic people can be fully present to itself: “The similarity of all individuals . . . permits poets to include all of them in the same image and finally to consider the people itself. Democratic nations perceive more clearly than all others their own shape.”74 The indefinite end projected as the future of a democratic people at once makes this people visible to itself by reducing individuals to indistinguishable parts of a homogeneous whole and infuses this vision with a poetic excitement that has no basis—indeed, must have no basis—in the nature of any of the parts taken individually. The spread of equality thus reveals new springs of poetry only by drying up the old springs; indeed, the excitement of an indefinite perfectibility represents itself concretely only in the active and perpetual leveling of any individual assertion that claims to represent a definite idea of perfection. The universalization of the democratic vision requires the leveling of any particular causes that might attempt to stand independent of the universal democratic movement or to “contend for the earth.”75 The effectual truth of a progress purified of every reference to intermediate powers is thus perpetual destruction: the Americans “perceive the admirable forests that surround them only at the moment at which they fall by their strokes.”76 “A taste for the infinite,” thus stands in a very ambiguous relation to “a sentiment of greatness.”77 Tocqueville’s chapter on democratic poetry thus explains the fundamental paradox of democratic theory; it shows how it is possible for the insignificance of human beings to redound to the pride of humanity: When men assume the perspective of an omnipotent god to whom no purpose can be attributed other than humanity’s conquest of nature, then the powerlessness of men appears as equivalent to the limitless power of mankind. This means that the theory of democracy cannot take responsibility for but is explained and governed by its poetry: the characteristic pride of the champions of modernity is rooted in a poetic inspiration they cannot account for; modern materialism does not comprehend its own idealism. And one could say equally that modern idealism does not comprehend its own materialism; the poetry of progress cannot

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articulate the indefinite perfectibility it posits as the direction of the material conquest of nature; it must accept without question a material interpretation of its inspiring ideal.78 Thus the champions of modernity are not really leaders but followers of a democratic inspiration they do not understand. In this they resemble the average American, whose “dull, . . . anti-poetic” daily life is supported by the “hidden nerve” of the poetry of progress.79 The champion of modernity merely continues and radicalizes the tendency of democratic man to employ and devote his noblest faculties to the leveling of all that is noble. Thus the point of view that poses as most theoretical (that is, most detached from the needs and wants of ordinary men) turns out to be the most practical; i.e., the most subservient to those very needs and wants. Similarly, by focusing his devotion on one supreme God to the exclusion of all “intermediary powers,” human or divine, the democratic citizen harnesses his God to the enterprise of material progress. The attempt to adopt a standpoint altogether above humanity thus tends to reduce one’s standpoint to that of the most common humanity. DEMOCRACY, ARISTOCRACY, CHRISTIANITY It is not, therefore, the natural tendency to care excessively for material comfort and security but a certain poetic or idealistic materialism that Tocqueville must defeat in order to save the democratic soul from degradation. This understanding of the disease of democracy, however, makes it much more difficult to see how Christianity can be a cure. For in the course of describing the poetry of modern materialism, Tocqueville clearly suggests that this democratic idealism is, to say the least, compatible with a fundamental tendency of Christian transcendence: “Even if equality does not shake religions, it simplifies them; it turns attention away from secondary agents to bring it principally to the sovereign master.”80 It may therefore be not only in the form of “doubt” but in the form of Christianity that equality “depopulated Heaven.”81 Thus Tocqueville by no means presents idealistic materialism as the enemy of Christianity but, in fact, offers a Christian, or at least theistic, version of the poetry of worldly progress: At the same time that each one, by raising his eyes above his country, finally begins to perceive humanity itself, God manifests himself more and more to the human spirit in his full and entire majesty. . . . Perceiving the human race as a single whole, [democratic men] easily conceive that one same design presides over its destiny, and they are brought to recognize in the actions of each individual the tracing of a universal general and constant plan according to which God guides the species.82

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That the intellectual paradigm of democracy is linked with Christianity as well as with skepticism is confirmed in the chapter “How, in the United States, Religion Knows How to Make Use of Democratic Instincts.”83 Despite its title, this chapter, in fact, has a lot to say about how democracy makes use of religious instincts: [T]hat equality brings men to very general and vast ideas . . . ought to be understood principally in the matter of religion. Men who are alike and equal readily conceive the notion of a single God imposing the same rules on each of them and granting them future happiness at the same price. The idea of the unity of the human race constantly leads them back to the idea of the unity of the Creator.84

One might argue, of course, that, although Christianity can be made to conform to the intellectual paradigm of democracy, it need not do so, or that the essence of Christianity is really distinct from democracy. And it is true that Tocqueville observes here: “Christianity itself has in some fashion come under the influence exerted over religious beliefs by the social and political state.”85 Perhaps, one might think, Tocqueville intends to treat the disease of democracy with a form of Christianity purged of democratic influences. This does not seem to be Tocqueville’s intention, however, for he does not, in fact, recommend that American Christianity resist the democratic attack on intermediate powers: “It is therefore particularly in centuries of democracy that it is important not to allow the homage rendered to secondary agents to be confused with the worship that is due only the Creator.”86 Furthermore, the primary example Tocqueville offers of the social and political conditions of Christianity concerns, not the modification of the Christian faith, but its very origins. Thus he clearly suggests that, if Christianity has an essential character, this character is much more in tune with democracy than with aristocracy. Referring to the unification of “a great part of the human species” under the Roman emperors, Tocqueville argues that “this new and particular state of humanity ought to have disposed men to receive the general truths taught by Christianity.”87 The subsequent, more aristocratic interpretation of Christianity which, “unable to divide the Divinity . . . at least multiplied it and magnified its agents beyond measure”88 was therefore an aberration, a departure from the essence or origins of the Christian faith. Tocqueville thus refers to the medieval worship of angels and saints as “almost idolatrous.” Christianity, by its very nature, thus has something fundamental in common with democracy: both incline powerfully toward “very general and vast ideas.”89 The problem of general ideas is treated thematically by Tocqueville in the third chapter of Volume II, Part I: “Why the Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas Than Their English Fathers.” This chapter is of

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the first importance because it invites us to compare the characteristic points of view of aristocracy and democracy with the one true perspective, that is, God’s. “God therefore has no need of general ideas,” Tocqueville explains, because “he sees separately all of the beings of which humanity is composed, and he perceives each of them with the similarities that bring [each one] closer to all and the differences that isolate [each one] from [everyone else].”90 God knows each and every individual thing fully and precisely, and has no need to use one identical concept or “form” to cover many individual things that are not the same but only similar. Human beings, on the other hand, “would soon be lost in the midst of the immensity of detail”91 if they tried to know each individual thing fully as it is in itself. Thus “[g]eneral ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence but rather to its insufficiency.”92 Furthermore, paradoxically, this crutch of the human mind is not cast aside as humanity progresses in knowledge and civilization, but is actually relied upon more and more: “The habit of and taste for general ideas will therefore always be the greater in a people as its enlightenment is more ancient and more manifold.”93 The more a people knows, one might say, the more it must ignore. It is true that there are better and worse uses of this crutch of general ideas. The better forms minimize the distortion that accompanies every generalization; this kind of general idea results from “a slow, detailed, and conscientious work of intelligence; and . . . enlarge[s] the sphere of human knowledge.”94 The inferior kinds of general ideas, on the other hand, “are readily born of a first rapid effort of the mind and lead only to very superficial and very uncertain notions.”95 Now aristocratic peoples tend to fix their attention on differences among things just as they take for granted the social inequalities that exist among men; they thus show “an inconsiderate scorn”96 of even the better or more truthful kind of generalization. A democratic people, on the contrary, is likely “indiscreetly to become inflamed over”97 the inferior kind of generalization: When I repudiate the traditions of class, profession, and family, when I escape the empire of example to seek by the effort of my reason alone for the path to follow, I am inclined to draw the grounds of my opinions from the very nature of man, which necessarily leads me, almost without my knowing it, toward a great number of very general notions.98

The democrat repudiates artificial inequalities but has little time or aptitude for the “slow, detailed, and conscientious work”99 necessary to distinguish judiciously between natural and unnatural inequality. He thus understands the universal “nature of man”100 as opposed to inequality simply; he assumes that “truths applicable to himself . . . apply equally and in the same manner

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to each of his fellow citizens and to those like him.”101 Thus the tendency to generalize and, in particular, to reduce mankind as a whole to one’s own level “becomes an ardent and often blind passion of the human mind.”102 Tocqueville chooses a remarkable example, or contrasting pair of cases, to support his theory that aristocratic peoples tend to distrust and democratic peoples to embrace general ideas. Immediately after describing “the ardent and often blind passion” of democrats for general ideas, he asserts that “[n]othing shows better the truth of the preceding [proposition] than the opinions of antiquity relative to slaves.”103 In its present context, one might expect “the preceding [proposition]” to refer to the blind passion of democrats for general ideas, but the first example chosen leads us to believe that Tocqueville intends rather to illustrate his general argument comparing aristocrats with democrats: The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each bears from birth; and they did their utmost to prove that slavery was natural and that it would always exist.104

The “great writers of antiquity,”105 Tocqueville argues, were unable to see through the conventional inequalities of their own societies to the truth about human nature. But what, then, is the truth about human nature? And how were men empowered to see this truth? “[I]t was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”106 God had to become his own mediator, to descend to the level of our common humanity, in order to destroy the claim of certain men to the right to mediate between men and God, to lord it over other men. Tocqueville thus introduces the most general of general ideas, the idea of the natural equality of all mankind, as a dogmatic truth grounded in Christianity. He allows his Christian and egalitarian reader to focus on the errors or alleged errors of pagan writers and to forget for the moment that the central thrust of the whole chapter in which this passage appears is to expose the weakness of general ideas and particularly the reductionist tendency of general theories of humanity. However, if careful attention is paid to the context of Tocqueville’s comparison of pagan antiquity to Christianity, it appears that the political interpretation of the Christian idea of equality, and the Christian prejudice against the philosophic defense of inequality, may indeed constitute the supreme example of an “ardent and often blind passion” for general ideas. Perhaps it is not so much “the opinions of antiquity relative to slaves” as the Christian and modern reading of those views that “shows . . . the truth of the preceding [proposition].”107 In any case, Tocqueville’s chapter on general ideas clearly indicates that the Christian religion is not to be understood fundamentally as an aristocratic

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phenomenon; indeed, it seems that it was the religious doctrine of the incarnation that gave decisive power to the political idea “that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”108 One might quite plausibly argue, however, that the democratic idea of political equality does not stem from Christianity but is, in fact, a perversion or “secularization” of a fundamentally spiritual doctrine. Indeed, by Tocqueville’s own account, God himself does not even need general ideas, and so the Christian idea of the equality of mankind can only be an approximation of the divine point of view, an approximation little suited to political application. But Tocqueville does not believe that the mutual influence of politics and religious beliefs can be prevented: “One cannot keep these ideas from being the common source form which all the rest flow.”109 Man is by nature in bondage to general ideas, whether in the more restricted form of aristocratic ideas that see the whole world, both human and divine, from the point of view of a largely artificial inequality or, in the more radical, democratic form that finally rejects inequality altogether, excepting, perhaps, the inequality that divides man and God. Thus, however much a Christian might resist the political use of the doctrine of spiritual equality (that is, of an equality that is only visible from the standpoint of God), such a doctrine, in destroying intermediate or secondary powers between God and man, necessarily erodes the intellectual foundations of any nondemocratic order. And since neither individual action nor political order is possible except with reference, explicit or implicit, to dogmatic beliefs about ultimate reality, Christians must choose between an “almost idolatrous” introduction of beliefs in intermediate powers, or proceed to the politicization or secularization of Christianity itself.110 As long as Christianity is addressed to human beings, it cannot escape involvement in a fundamentally political understanding of the world, whether aristocratic or democratic.111 Against the background of Tocqueville’s analysis, in Volume II, of the deep affinity between Christianity and democracy, it is now possible to see that an awareness of this affinity underlies Tocqueville’s account of the rise of democracy within the Christian West in the very first pages of Democracy in America. Returning now to the Author’s Introduction to the first volume, we recall that the first moment of the “great democratic revolution [that] is taking place among us”112 is traced to the emergence of “the political power of the clergy.” The authority of Christianity was the first to oppose the power of the nobility: “[E]quality begins to penetrate through the church to the heart of government, and he who would have vegetated as a serf in eternal slavery takes his place as a priest in the midst of nobles, and will often take a seat above kings.”113 It is not obvious, however, how the political power of priests could constitute the germ of the modern idea of equality, and, after mentioning the clergy

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in introducing his account of the seven- hundred-year march of equality, Tocqueville surveys various apparently discrete developments which seem to have little to do intrinsically with Christianity: the rise of lawyers and of tradesmen, the emergence of the intellect as “a social force,”114 and the leveling influence of the monarchy and of inventions and improvements in trade and industry. This survey of the causes of the democratic revolution might leave the impression that Christianity was at most one factor among many in the rise of democracy, but Tocqueville prevents us from drawing this conclusion. He invites the reader to reflect on the problem of the overarching cause that integrated the effects of the particular factors he has enumerated: Everywhere the various incidents in the lives of peoples are seen to turn to the profit of democracy; all men have aided it by their efforts: those who had in view cooperating for its success and those who did not dream of serving it; those who fought for it and even those who declared themselves its enemies; all have been driven pell-mell on the same track, and all have worked in common, some despite themselves, others without knowing it, as blind instruments in the hands of God.115

The mysterious principle that integrates these various discrete causes of democracy is thus referred to God. But in declaring the power of the democratic revolution to be irresistible, Tocqueville bows before the “sacred character” bestowed on this revolution, not directly by God, but by the “long observation and sincere meditation” of “men in our day,” men who can find no bearings for themselves except in the “gradual and progressive development of equality.”116 If such patient and sincere men can see no alternative to equality, then “to stop democracy would then appear to be to struggle against God himself.”117 The force of the inability of patient and sincere men to know themselves except in and through the idea of equality118 is, for Tocqueville, like God in its irresistibility; furthermore, it seems to derive from God or from a certain idea of God, since it is phenomenon encompassing, not mankind in general, but “Christian peoples in our day”119 or “the Christian universe.”120 Thus Tocqueville’s discussion of the democratic revolution of the last seven hundred years returns to the problem of Christianity with which it began, and the impression that modern democracy is somehow rooted in Christianity is inescapable, although it is far from clear just how this is so. Indeed, Tocqueville appears willing to confine himself to the perspective of patient and sincere men of Christian lands and thus to consider the march of democracy as much beyond human understanding as it is beyond human control. Still, in distinguishing the Christian world from the world simply, and in referring to the power of the opinion of his patient and sincere contemporaries,

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Tocqueville invites the careful reader to look beyond the providential power of equality to the human cause of this power, to search for the intellectual cause of the subordination of all other causes to the progress of equality. I will quote in its entirety the paragraph in which Tocqueville comes nearest to explaining this overarching cause: Once works of the intellect had become sources of force and wealth, each development of science, each new piece of knowledge, each new idea had to be considered as a seed of power put within reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, memory, the graces of the mind, the fires of the imagination, depth of thought, all the gifts that Heaven distributed haphazardly, profited democracy, and even if they were found in the possession of its adversaries, they still served its cause by putting into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests therefore spread with those of civilization and enlightenment, and literature was an arsenal open to all, from which the weak and the poor came each day to seek arms.121

The emergence of the intellect as a source of power seems to be associated very closely with the equalization of society. Tocqueville has already drawn our attention to the centrality of the fact that “the mind becomes an element in success; science is a means of government, intelligence a social force. . . .”122 But it is far from obvious why the rising status of the intellect should ineluctably serve the cause of democracy, for clearly, as the paragraph quoted above indicates, all intellects are not created equal, and many superior intellects are likely to be possessed by the adversaries of democracy. What, then, is this force that turns all causes, and in particular intellectual inequality itself, toward the progress of equality? Tocqueville’s only answer seems to be that inequality served equality essentially by “putting into relief the natural greatness of man”123—that is, not the greatness of any man in particular or of certain unequal kind of man, but the greatness of mankind in general or the species man. But on what ground, precisely, is every assertion of human excellence or inequality interpreted as supporting “the natural greatness of man” understood as a homogeneous species? Tocqueville does not undertake to explain this in detail, but points to this ground in the words he chooses to describe human inequality: All forms of intellectual excellence are presented gifts “that Heaven distributed haphazardly” (dons que le ciel repartit au hazard).124 When the unequal is interpreted as random or arbitrary, as having no basis accessible to human understanding, then the natural can be understood only as the equal; when intellect virtues are interpreted as “graces de l’esprit,” then nature can assert itself only in the form of equality. When supernatural “works of the intellect” were pressed into the service of humanity, the natural ends accessible to that intellect were “force and wealth,” that is, the needs of mankind understood

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as “weak and . . . poor.”125 In sum, Enlightenment, in opposing the worldly power of priestly claims to transcend nature, in effect took up the cause of nature implicitly understood as the correlate of a radically transcendent God; it was fundamentally derivative of Christianity even when it took form of an attack on Christianity. It is as created that the creation asserted itself against the Creator. Thus the “natural greatness of man” joined itself to the cause of equality on the basis of a fundamentally Christian orientation toward the world.

PANTHEISM AND MEDIATION In a brief and at first rather puzzling chapter on the subject of Pantheism,126 Tocqueville reveals the vanishing point of the democratic synthesis of religion and politics. The full title of the chapter is “What Makes the Mind of Democratic Peoples Lean Toward Pantheism.” “Pantheism,” Tocqueville argues, is a form of thought that has begun to appear in German philosophy and French fiction, not for accidental reasons, but because it is the theoretical outlook toward which democracy drifts of its own accord; it is the final form of the democratic passion for universalization or “general ideas,” and is thus “most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries.”127 The concept of unity obsesses [the mind]; it seeks it on all sides, and when it believes it has found it, it willingly wraps it in its bosom and rests with it. Not only does it come to discover only one creation and one Creator in the world; this first division of things still bothers it, and it willingly seeks to enlarge and simplify its thought by enclosing God and the universe within a single whole. If I encounter a philosophic system according to which the things material and immaterial, visible and invisible that the world includes are considered as no more than diverse parts of an immense being which alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual change and incessant transformation of all that composes it, I shall have no trouble concluding that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men who live in democracy.128

The final achievement of the democratic passion for likeness or unity would thus consist in the obliteration of the only remaining representative of qualitative differentiation, and thus the last ground of human individuality: God. Tocqueville makes plain his attitude toward this deep temptation of the democratic intellect: “[a]ll who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it.”129 The consummation of the idealistic materialism of democracy in the pantheistic synthesis is another

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name for the utter “abolition of moral analogy,” and to mobilize an intellectual struggle against this synthesis may be said to be Tocqueville’s central purpose in Democracy in America. Returning to the chapter on “Poetry in Democratic Nations,”130 it is clear that Tocqueville here describes the drift of democracy toward Pantheism, but without naming the final outcome. Indeed, he seems in one passage to describe the democratic mind as perched precariously on the edge of the cliff of radical monotheism that overlooks the abyss of pantheism: “At the same time that each one, by raising his eyes above his country, finally begins to perceive humanity itself, God manifests himself more and more to the human spirit in his full and entire majesty.”131 Here the vision of the unity of God is practically but not explicitly identified with that of the unity of mankind. In the following paragraphs Tocqueville retreats slightly from this near pantheistic version of the democratic imagination to a somewhat less radical statement, referring to “[divinity’s] intervention in human affairs” and to the “general and constant plan according to which God guides the species.”132 As we shall see when we return to Tocqueville in chapter 6, the preservation of Christianity as a positive religion is essential to Tocqueville’s project for avoiding the abyss of pantheism.

THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY OVER THOUGHT Tocqueville’s limning in Volume II Part One of the intellectual disorder of modern democratic materialism provides a context for appreciating the depth of his forebodings in Volume I Part Two concerning “The Power That the Majority in America Exercises over Thought.” Here Tocqueville describes a democratic threat to human dignity more powerful than traditional despotism. Whereas the old “despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it,” the new tyranny “leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.”133 To understand the gravity of Tocqueville’s concern with this new tyranny, it is important to note, as Pierre Manent has written, “that the phenomenon that [he] is looking to describe is not a democratic variant of eternal conformity,”134 that is, the conformity that exists in all societies. Rather, the collapse of the hierarchical articulation of traditional or “aristocratic” society means the dissolution of all particular or individual social influences. Thus “the very matrix of the influence that one man has over another—whether it be that of ‘reason or virtue’ . . . is destroyed.” The “individual” liberated from the bonds of deference to traditional social influences has no more confidence in his own judgments than in those of any other particular person or group or institution,

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and so effective authority is transferred increasingly to some abstract third (public opinion, the State, History). Manent explains: Separated from the influences of another, [democratic man] has no access to the things themselves, because to know things, a person has to go outside himself, and this is something only one’s better can teach. The changes in the relations of men change the relations of men to things.135

Clearly Tocqueville’s apprehension regarding the apparently irresistible march of “democracy” is far from narrowly political, or from that matter simply “social,” or “moral.” He is concerned, rather, with a radical transformation in the orientation of human beings towards reality, and therefore with a threat to the very meaning of being human. I will not try to improve upon Manent’s reading of Tocqueville on this fundamental point: The ultimate presupposition of the majoritarian idea is that what is the most just lies with the idea of the strongest. This very thing by which democratic men resemble each other more and more, this very thing through which they think and perceive themselves, this very thing that is dearer and more intimate than themselves, is nothing human. They can only think it and represent it to themselves in positing it as outside themselves, an irresistible force that pushes and calls to them, a power so much more penetrating than it would be were it their own: the necessity of history, mass power without limit, the irresistible grip of society.136

For Tocqueville the collapse of all social hierarchy into a homogeneous mass signifies the collapse of all sense of truth, all orientation towards a reality other than the common or average perception, which perception, in turn, since it has no anchor beyond the mass, can only be understood in terms of the greatest power. A rigorous reflection on “the tyranny of the majority” thus reveals another face of “the abolition of moral analogy.” The deepest revolution that modern democracy ultimately portends is the eclipse of truth by an abstract, inhuman power.

GUIZOT AND TOCQUEVILLE ON THE INTERNAL AND THE EXTERNAL A comparison of Tocqueville’s perspective on the course of European history with that of his teacher, Francois Guizot, will help further to reveal what is at stake in Tocqueville’s “religious terror” concerning an “abolition of moral analogy.”137 What Tocqueville owes to Guizot as well as where departs from him will emerge from a consideration of the first chapter of “Lecture

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the First” in Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe138 in relation to Tocqueville’s “Author’s Introduction” to Democracy in America. In his first lecture, Guizot undertakes a “common-sense examination” by consulting what he regards as “the general opinion of mankind” in order to arrive at the “popular and natural meaning of the word civilization.”139 He concludes that the “great fact” of civilization is twofold: [I]t subsists on two conditions, and manifests itself by two symptoms: the development of social activity, and that of individual activity; the progress of society and the progress of humanity. Wherever the external condition of man extends itself, vivifies, ameliorates itself; wherever the internal nature of man displays itself with lustre, with grandeur; at these two signs, and often despite the profound imperfection of the social state, mankind with loud applause proclaims civilization.”140

The “external” aspect of civilization or its “social state” refers to “the relations of men among themselves;” it includes, for example, the following elements of a nation’s history: “its institutions, its commerce, its industry, its wars, all the details of its government.” The “internal aspect” Guizot associates, for example, with “the moral man, the intellectual man,” “the individual man,” or “the development of man himself, of his faculties, his sentiments, his ideas.”141 Now, it is crucial to Guizot’s understanding of history that these two aspects of civilization, while distinct, are not finally separable, for “sooner or later one brings on the other.”142 “[A]t the sight of the one, man at once looks forward to the other. . . . It is . . . the instinctive belief of humanity, that the movements of civilization are connected the one with the other, and reciprocally produce the one the other.”143 Internal (moral or intellectual) development naturally and necessarily produces in a man “the desire, the want, to communicate the new sentiment to the world about him, to give realization to his thoughts externally.” Likewise, a “revolution . . . in the state of society”—a better regulation and more equal distribution of “rights and property,” and thus a “more just, more benevolent,” indeed “purer and more beautiful . . . conduct of men in their social relations”—“leads sooner or later, more or less completely, to an internal fact of the same nature, the same merit.”144 To be sure, the fit between external and internal is imperfect and far from immediate, “but sooner or later they will rejoin each other: this is the law of their nature, the general fact of history, the instinctive faith of the human race.”145 The leading case of this coordination of the internal and external aspects of the progress of civilization, indeed a comprehensive and perhaps limiting case, is that of Christianity. Although the Christian religion at first presented

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itself as addressed exclusively to the “internal man,” its regeneration of “the moral man, the intellectual man” inaugurated “a great crisis of civilization”146 that has only recently reached a kind of resolution: “How many centuries, what infinite events passed away before the regeneration of the moral man by Christianity exercised upon the regeneration of the social state its great and legitimate influence. Yet who will deny that it any the less succeeded?”147 This success is not final as long as ultimate human hopes are not fully realized in society. [L]et each of us descend into his own mind, let him interrogate himself as to the utmost possible good he has formed a conception of and hopes for; let him then compare his idea with what actually exists in the world; he will be convinced that society and civilization are very young; that notwithstanding the length of the road they have come, they have incomparably further to go.148

Still, the meaning of the progress of civilization has at last become clear enough to overcome the “laborious and stormy” condition associated with the dislocation between spiritual ideals and external forms and thus to bring peace and order to man’s intellect: “in modern times, for the first time, perhaps, the human mind has attained a state, as yet very imperfect, but still a state in which reigns some peace, some harmony.”149 It is from the standpoint of this imperfectly realized but already adequately envisioned harmony between soul and society that Guizot proposes to relate the History of Civilization. I will not undertake here to review that history according to Guizot, but will only consider a theme most critical for establishing our comparison with Tocqueville, namely, the place of the French Revolution in this perspective of the progress of civilization.150 It is clear that Tocqueville’s emphasis on the continuity between the centralizing absolutism of the Old Regime and that of the Revolution is adapted from Guizot. If the “insurmountable vice of absolute power” eventually brought down the government established by Louis XIV, then, Guizot argues, essentially the same defect spoiled the efforts of the revolutionaries. In an analysis that clearly foreshadows Tocqueville’s critique of the “literary politics” of the French eighteenth century and its revolutionary consequences,151 Guizot, in the fourteenth and final lecture of the History of Civilization, deplores the “singular character of ambition and inexperience” that characterized the life of the mind at that time.152 “Never before had philosophy aspired so strongly to rule the world, never had philosophy been so little acquainted with the world.”153 Completely detached from political experience and responsibility, the “human mind appeared as the principal and almost the only actor” on the stage of history; like the absolute monarchs, it “possessed an almost absolute power,” by which it was inevitably “corrupted and misled.”154

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This is not at all to say that Guizot simply rejects the philosophy of the eighteenth century. On the contrary, he embraces its “onward impulse” as “beautiful, good, most useful,” and judges it to have made the greatest contribution to the progress of civilization. And how, indeed, could he judge otherwise, since, as we have seen, he understands the essential motive of the progress of civilization, that is, of the externalization of Christianity, to be represented in the revolutionary principles proclaimed by this philosophy? “Let us attach ourselves firmly, faithfully, undeviatingly, to the principles of our civilization—justice, legality, publicity, liberty,” Guizot urges in the last sentence of his first lecture, in what is clearly an explicit endorsement of the leading ideas (as distinct from the practice) of the Revolution. His reservations seem not to concern fundamental principles but only prudential timing: “Let us not expose ourselves to danger by indulging in vague desires, the time for realizing which has not come.”155 Thus, although Guizot blames revolutionary philosophy for “holding established facts and former ideas in an illegitimate disdain and aversion,” his rejection of the absolute power of the mind has no permanent foundation, but appears to be only provisional. He by no means rejects the disposition of “Christian” civilization to evaluate existing institutions and practices against the standard of “the utmost possible good he has formed a conception of and hopes for,” for these hopes represent the defining motive of European progress. Far from repudiating “vague desires,” Guizot understands History as directed towards their realization. He asks only that “we, of the present day, . . . content with our condition,” project this realization indefinitely into the future.156 Tocqueville’s “Author’s Introduction” to Democracy in America provides, as we have seen, a brief and sweeping overview of the unfolding of the modern democratic revolution. This account may now fruitfully be compared with Guizot’s History of Civilization in Europe. Such a comparison will illuminate Tocqueville’s concern regarding a breakdown of “moral analogy.” Tocqueville’s most fundamental debt to Guizot lies deeper than any particular feature of his story of the rise of democracy; it resides rather, as Guizot’s English editor has pointed out, in what Tocqueville learned from “Guizot’s emphasis on the ‘two kinds of facts’ which historical analysis must run side by side, external and internal facts, the development of social relations and the development of the mind.”157 Tocqueville’s interpretation of Western history as the inexorable march of equality it at once a story of the pervasive ramifications of “equality of conditions” and of the moral, intellectual and spiritual correlates of this equality. I do not say merely internal “effects” of the external condition of equality, for, although Tocqueville’s presentation would sometimes seem to suggest such a causal priority of

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“social conditions,” it seems impossible finally to reduce his approach to such a view of causality.158 Most notably, as concerns this Introduction, the rise of equality appears, as we have seen, to be in some essential way a Christian phenomenon. More particularly—and here the debt to Guizot appears to be quite direct—Tocqueville locates the beginning of the movement of equality, the first rupture with an order based solely on inherited property and force, in a practice of the Church, as we saw above. Guizot had written, very similarly: There can be no doubt that the equal admission of all men to the ecclesiastical functions, that the continual recruiting of the church according to principles of equality, has powerfully contributed to maintain, and incessantly re-animate within it, its life and movement. . . . The Christian Church derived . . . immense strength from its respect for equality and legitimate superiorities. It was the most popular society, the most accessible and open to all kinds of talent, to all the noble ambitions of human nature.159

For both Guizot and Tocqueville, then, Christianity, both as an institution and as a belief, is in some fundamental way the wellspring of the modern revolution. Yet in comparing even this first moment in each of the two author’s accounts of the Christian sources of this revolution one glimpses a difference that prefigures Tocqueville’s profound departure from Guizot’s confident rationalism and progressivism. For Tocqueville clearly claims less here for the idea of equality than does Guizot; he is not nearly so confident as Guizot of the stability of the link between “equality” and “legitimate superiorities” or “the noble ambitions of human nature.” In a word, Tocqueville does not see equality and liberty as springing from an identical and unproblematic motive in the human soul. This is to say that the lesson to be learned from the French Revolution is much more troubling for the history of progress for Tocqueville than it is for Guizot. Both see the absolutism of the Revolution as in a way a mirror of the absolutism of the monarchy; but whereas this reaction represents for Guizot an ultimately accidental interruption of man’s twofold (social and spiritual) progress, Tocqueville sees it as revelatory of a profound threat that lies at the very heart of the revolution of equality.160 In his Introduction, Tocqueville identifies this threat eloquently in terms whose debt to Guizot is clear. The French Revolution presents in its clearest form the “frightening spectacle” of a radical dislocation between man’s internal life and his attempts to give external or social representation to his belief, the spectacle of a world “where nothing is linked” and where “conscience casts only a dubious light on human actions.”161 That for Tocqueville this dislocation is understood more radically than for Guizot may be gathered from the very instability of the border between internal and external in

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Tocqueville’s almost anguished account. The rupture between beliefs and practices, between the soul and the world, is one that cannot be confined to man’s relation to his social and institutional expressions; rather, this rupture now threatens the order of the soul itself. This is the deepest threat implied in the rupture between “actions [and] beliefs,” the abolition of “the laws of moral analogy.”162 Tocqueville is disturbed by the prospect, not of only social and political tumult, but of a condition that affects man’s very orientation towards truth or being and which we have learned in the twentieth century to call nihilism: “where conscience casts only a dubious light on human actions,” and “where nothing seems any longer to be forbidden or permitted, or honest or shameful, or true or false.”163 Tocqueville’s notion of “moral analogy” goes to the pivotal questions of political philosophy, questions involving the relation between our interest as human beings in transcendent truth and meaning and our belonging to authoritative social, moral, and political structures that perform necessary functions. I propose that this concept, understood in its full implications, can provide a uniquely fertile perspective from which to situate the leading possible configurations of political philosophy, notably those available in the work of Martin Heidegger and of Leo Strauss. In the end I will argue, in fact, that Tocqueville’s thought involves or at least points the way towards a firmer and more comprehensive command of the essential problem of thinking and being, the problem of theory and practice, than is available in the teachings of these twentieth century masters.

THE AXES OF HUMAN MEANING In order to prepare engagements with Heidegger and Leo Strauss, I must first develop further and expand upon Tocqueville’s idea of “moral analogy.”164 Here I return to the suggestion offered in the first chapter that human existence is marked by an inescapable dualism or tension between the “practical” and the “theoretical,” categories that have been essential to the configuration of the field of philosophy since Aristotle articulated them in The Nichomachean Ethics Book VI. Clearly the practical dimension of human existence corresponds to what Guizot called the “external,” whereas the capacity to abstract from our common, practical existence and even to negate it can be aligned with the category of the “internal” as understood by Guizot. These “internal” and “external” dispositions or orientations, though never fully separate or distinct, seem to represent two permanent dimensions of our existence. To prepare further investigations in later chapters I will here only suggest other formulations of these fundamental orientations. What Guizot

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Table 2.1. External Practice Authority Concrete Immanent Actuality Home Tradition Aristocracy

Internal Theory Freedom Abstract Transcendent Possibility Homeless Modernity Democracy

called the “external” as opposed to “internal” can also be aligned somewhat roughly but very meaningfully with authority as opposed to freedom, with the immanent as opposed to the transcendent, with actuality as opposed to possibility, with the concrete as opposed to the abstract, with being-at-home as opposed to homelessness or alienation, with tradition as opposed to modernity, and, finally, with aristocracy (in Tocqueville’s very broad acceptation of the term) as opposed to democracy. Of course these correspondences are far from perfect, as the meanings of the terms vary considerably with context. In fact I will be at pains to uncover the instability of these oppositions. I hope to show, nevertheless, that an understanding of the polarity represented by these two sets of terms provides a key to a uniquely rich understanding of the human condition in relation to the faculty or possibility of “reason.” Table 2.1 summarizes these broad but very significant correspondences. Tocqueville’s fundamental insight is that human meaning happens in a field defined by the fundamental polarity between free, transcendent possibility and concrete, authoritative actuality. Tocqueville understands that the powerful tendency of modern democracy is at once to drive these poles apart and to evacuate the space between them such that it collapses; the radical emancipation of one pole from the other releases the energy from their normal tension into a compulsion to fusion: the attempt to “abolish” the laws of moral analogy cannot in fact erase the human need to actualize transcendent possibility, to concretize in some way the purest and most abstract longings of the human spirit or to embrace traces of transcendence in the most practical functions. Thus the modern pursuit of unlimited freedom (idealism) can only fall back on the authority of the most common practical needs (materialism), and the most resolute pragmatism cannot fail to project a horizon of abstract and limitless hope. The attempt to abolish or deny “moral analogy” succeeds, not really in overcoming, but only in perverting the linkage between transcendence and immanence, in reproducing it in extreme and potentially inhuman forms. Thus, in the modern attempt to abolish the “laws of moral analogy,” or to deny all likeness between God and man, all continuity between transcendence

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and immanence, human beings do not cease to imitate some God, but in fact radicalize transcendence to the point that they can only imitate Him by occluding and thus debasing their own humanity. To be sure, Tocqueville does not surrender to pessimism regarding the modern revolution. Indeed, the whole purpose of his Introduction is to point hopefully to the example of American democracy as an alternative to the moral and political chaos sewn by the French Revolution. The partisan extremism arising from the “heat of the struggle” in France is contrasted with the “firmer and calmer and future”165 that America seems to promise. The transplanting of the principle of equality to the New World seems to justify the hope that the possibility of progress inherent in the principle of equality itself might be extricated from the particular European circumstances that rendered it destructively revolutionary. Thus democracy in America would justify the hope that the modern revolution might attain a stable and satisfactory conclusion, and that due authority might be re-established on the basis of notions of rational interests, reciprocal rights, and orderly progress.166 Fully to assess to what degree Tocqueville believes that the American case in fact supports such hopes would require a thorough review of Democracy in America. In chapter 6 below we will consider Tocqueville’s practical reasoning more closely. For present purposes let it suffice to notice that Tocqueville’s “religious terror” before democracy’s relentless assault on “the laws of moral analogy” has by no means been quelled even as Tocqueville concludes his second volume.167 If Tocqueville is still struggling in his final chapter to make peace with the God of democratic Providence, this is not only because he cannot be completely satisfied with the exchange of elevation for justice, but, more profoundly, because he does not believe justice can really be founded in the soul or in the polity, that moral analogy can be sustained, without reference to elevation. The justice of democracy in America is not only partial and partisan, but is founded on pre-democratic beliefs and practices, impurities happily smuggled in with the seedlings or saplings of civilization transplanted from the old world to the new. But since democracy cannot account for and represent to itself these saving impurities, a threatening fissure in the structure of moral analogy remains. As Pierre Manent has shown, for Tocqueville both French history (more brilliantly) and American democracy (more subtly) exemplify the fact that “Revolution is the revelation of democracy.”168 This is so, finally, not despite but because of the essential continuity that, for Tocqueville as for Guizot, obtains between Christianity and modern democracy. Because Guizot still nourished the absolutist hope (however softened by his prudent gradualism) that “the utmost possible good” might be universally externalized, he could not see that absolute power is not an accidental effect of the circumstances

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that bound the French Revolution to the Old Regime; as Tocqueville understood a certain absolutism is inherent, rather, in the revolutionary attempt of the West to externalize the idea of a source of meaning wholly other than what is embodied in human conventions and hierarchies. “Equality” is a bottomless concept because it implies the endless subversion of traditional human meanings with reference to which it might be judged and moderated. Tocqueville’s fundamental insight is that “Equality” and “Absolute Power” are strict correlates; either may be considered the attempted “externalization” of the other. It is because neither can really be externalized or concretized in a world of moral and social meaning that the rupture of the “laws of moral analogy” must be understood in the most radical sense.

REFLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY IN THEORY AND PRACTICE In order to prepare to see the deepest implications of Tocqueville’s enactment of reason’s responsibility in the face of the democratic-materialist abolition of moral analogy, I must attempt briefly to characterize an early and paradigmatic example, indeed the primordial and definitive example, of an act of reflexive responsibility, an articulation of the rule of reason: that is, Plato’s evocation of the “idea of the good” in the sixth book of the Republic. (Recall that, for Plato, to know the meaning of justice one must describe the perfectly just city, which turns out to be ruled by philosopher-kings. And the idea of the “philosopher” turns out to be a strict correlate of the idea of “the good”— the philosopher is the one whose soul has been turned from the cave and its fleeting shadows to the sunlike idea of the good.) Plato’s teaching here, or his suggestion, is at once so mysterious and challenging that no technical explanation captures or exhausts it, and yet in a way so elemental, so primitive that every child who has delighted in the sunlight’s illumination of natural beings has experienced what Plato is evoking. Let me attempt my own rendering of what is at stake in this “idea of the good.” The good is described as the ground at once of knowing and of being. To know any natural being is implicitly to be aware of and in wonder of the givenness of the possibility of knowing, of some fittedness of my mind to the thing, to a natural being, and of that being to my mind. If I can see and know the tree whose leaves I see shimmering in the sunlight, if I can embrace the reality of the seeing and knowing I experience immediately, then I must also somehow be aware that the tree is in some sense made or ordained to be seen by a being such as I am, and that I am somehow made or ordained to see a being such as a tree. The beginning of reason’s responsibility is this reflexive awareness of wonder of the very possibility of knowing, of a yoke

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between being and knowing. But this awareness of the mutual fittedness of myself and the tree is also an awareness of a larger, comprehensive order, of a whole of which the tree and I are parts. The sheer reality of knowledge implies the embeddedness of knower and known, of mind or soul and being (I do not say subject and object) in some larger whole. And since this seeing and knowing is immediately, intrinsically, irreducibly wondrous and good, its ground in some larger whole is naturally thought to be The Good. The Good is a “yoke,” a bond between knower and known. To affirm some connection between one’s own mind’s participation in the reality of what is given and some ground of goodness is Plato’s primordial expression of what I call reflexive responsibility—that is, of responding coherently and truthfully to an immediate participation in truth. On the other hand, to reduce mind and being, knower and known, to some “material” object on the one hand and some subject that is radically free to impose any form whatsoever169 (thus reducing the thinking being itself, insofar as it is knowable, to some merely biological or mechanical or cybernetic psychological object) is simply to forsake or to suppress peremptorily and violently the primordial experience of things, the very reality of beings—let us say the experience of the reality of be-ing, the joint happening of being and knowing—from which Plato, like and any child, begins. The beginning of reason’s responsibility is thus the moment of reflection in which thinking becomes aware of itself and thus opens itself to the next moment, to the question of its own conditions and thus to wonderment. This sense of wonder issues into an awareness of a yoke between knowing and being, an awareness that gives rise to the idea of the essential goodness of knowing and thinking within some larger whole, the idea of a fundamental link between the human being’s rational faculty and the goodness of The Whole. This is the moment of a fundamental awareness of the goodness of thinking. But this awareness of the goodness of thinking cannot fail to issue into the thinking of goodness. The primitive discovery of the immediate evidence of some order and goodness connecting mind and being does not of course give anything like a complete understanding of the order of this whole. The whole and the good that yokes it, that makes it a whole, remain elusive—a mysterious something that, as Plato says, every soul pursues whatever it is pursuing, but without being able to grasp what it is.170 But every soul already participates, already is part of some larger whole and is subordinate to some “higher” authority— political, moral, religious, or rather, originally, all these at once, indistinguishably. The “soul” or “the human spirit” comes to self-awareness as a part of a larger whole, a particular whole with a particular history.

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And so, inevitably, any orientation towards the cosmic whole can only express and articulate itself in language conditioned by subordination to this prior, political whole. The very terms “higher” and “good” already have a profoundly political meaning before it occurs to philosophers to take them up in their efforts to respond to an awareness of The Good. (At the same time, let it be noted, that, if philosophy is something more than a sheer construction of a certain faction of aristocratic Greeks, then this very political usage of “higher” and “good,” or their Greek equivalents, must already have been conditioned by humanity’s implicit ontological or teleological openness.) Therefore, in striving to respond articulately to an awareness of some cosmic ground, some order of the whole, the philosopher cannot help but situate this whole, this higher order, in relation to the more familiar order, the highs and lows in which he already participates as a speaking, reasoning being in the practical, political world—that is, in his particular political world, his cave, as Plato says. The elusive cosmic good can be thought only as both other than and continuous with the goods a speaking, reasoning human being seeks to attain or preserve in the practical, political realm. To articulate this otherness and this continuity is to take theoretical and practical responsibility for what Tocqueville names “moral analogy.” What begins as a reflexive responsibility inherent in the sheer activity of reason itself thus eventually assumes an inherently political dimension. Reason’s immediate responsibility of reflection yields an awareness of the good of thinking that further calls reason to think the good. The yoke between being and knowing must somehow be both thought and enacted as a yoke between the Good and the goods of common, practical human existence. This is the theoretical-practical ground from which all responsible thinking and the thinking of all responsibility must issue. Plato enacts this ground by affirming or seeming to affirm the simple superiority of theory to practice, of pure thinking to human being, as if the good, the yoke of being and knowing, were not beyond but could be fully grasped and enjoyed by the superior human beings, the “philosophers.” He thus suppresses by appearing to answer the question of the relation of the good of thinking to the common human good: the rule of pure knowing in the philosopher’s soul is presented in The Republic as the pure ground of the philosopher’s authority over the souls of non-philosophers. This is what is at stake in the fundamental analogy between the order of the philosopher’s soul and the order of the true city. The responsibility of reason here takes the simple and classic form of the rule of reason as grounded in reason’s claim to absolute self-possession in The Good. The myth of the Republic is a very refined and exquisitely self-conscious form of an essentially aristocratic configuration of transcendence. To doubt (as we must) this implied claim that the best soul

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possesses a natural capacity adequately to grasp its own participation in the ground of being is to consider that the pure right of reason to rule is hard to distinguish finally from the pure identification of reason with the necessary responsibility of ruling in the soul and in the city. The claim to transcend our political conditions by purely natural powers is a very political claim.171

ARISTOCRACY AND DEMOCRACY: THE RULE OF REASON Tocqueville’s way of addressing the collapse of moral analogy, in which what is godlike in man turns against his very humanity, his very nuanced sense of reason’s responsibility, must be understood in relation to the two great spiritual and intellectual alternatives that the author of Democracy in America puts before us: “Aristocracy” and “Democracy.”172 In traditional or Aristocratic societies, the transcendence of the human spirit, its awareness of some elusive order or meaning and self-affirmation within some larger reality, is intimately associated with actual ruling practices. The rule of reason here takes the direct form of the association of the mind’s transcendence with existing hierarchies in the practical world. What is better or higher is immediately linked with the definite, particular, concrete authority of ruling classes and their ways. In traditional or “aristocratic” societies, as we have seen, these ruling ideas or notions find poetic expression in concrete representations of particular heroes and gods that are as it were the idealization of figures of transcendence that are immediately effective in that particular society. “Aristocracy” is thus another name for the simple and direct authority of “moral analogy,” for the availability of an effective sense of the hierarchical linkage between actual practices and institutions on the one hand and “higher” spiritual or theoretical possibilities on the other. Even Plato’s lofty notion of a philosopher-king, however radically innovative, would have made no sense even to his more philosophical readers if it did not draw upon an existing sense of the nobility of a serene and leisured aristocratic who appeared “above it all” in the sense of not being preoccupied with “common” concerns. In aristocratic or traditional societies, the rule of reason is the more or less rational articulation of already ruling figures of transcendence. The defect of the “rule of reason” so understood is of course just that against which Karl Marx declaimed: in general such ruling ideas are not reflexive and critical but simply the rationalizations of a ruling class,173 of whatever class or type of human being happens to rule. Here the rule of reason is mostly rule and hardly reason. Even in its most refined philosophical form as the “right of the wise to rule” (as our reading of Leo Strauss will illustrate further), wisdom’s claim, however noble and even plausible in the best of cases, can

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never be established on the basis of pure reason but must always appeal to some more or less sound prejudice in its favor. The rule of reason is never purely rational, but always a form of ruling. In a modern or modernizing, democratic society, as Tocqueville has shown, these concrete hierarchical figures and the practices of obedience or deference that accompany them are less and less available. The poetic imagination of democrats is thus increasingly untethered from concrete figures of transcendence. The effective subject of the democratic imagination is democracy itself, the prospect of a whole people marching forward, leveling all obstacles to its progress. Reason plays a role in this democratic and progressive poetic imagination, as we have seen, but its role is, or risks becoming, purely negative: critical reason—Descartes’ idea of reason, Tocqueville says—is used to debunk traditional and aristocratic claims to the representation of something “higher,” and thus to liberate individuals from particular and artificial constraints. In this modern, rationalistic formulation of the rule of reason, all the emphasis is on reason in its pure and therefore purely critical form, not as ruling but as liberating from rule, the rule of reason not for its own sake (for any sake it might have, any higher claim to rule would be tainted with aristocratic pretensions) but as a means to the liberation of “the individual.” In this modern democratic or universalist rationalism, reason rules by suppressing its claim to rule, by covering its own tracks. Reason purified of “moral analogy” cannot affirm itself, cannot stand up for itself, cannot exercise reflexive responsibility. Tocqueville demonstrates with unsurpassed power and clarity the spurious and unstable character of this rationalistic liberation. As seen above, emancipation from traditional authority does not eliminate the need for authority, a need which is at once socio-political and existential,174 and so a new authority emerges that is all the more powerful since it is generally unacknowledged: the individual, stripped of a hierarchically ordered frame of existence, falls back on the tyranny of the majority, a tyranny that dispenses with crude physical coercion and imposes itself directly on the naked and exposed democratic mind. The very possibility of a truth grounded in something higher is eclipsed by the prestige of quantity, the power of the greatest number. This prestige of power tends further to slip from the hands of an actual majority (for any actual majority would be concrete and particular, like an aristocracy) into the increasingly general idea of progress towards some indefinite perfectibility. Purged of all particular claims of goodness, such an idea of progress would be mere change, or the authority of sheer, groundless historicity, of whatever historical world into which we happen to be thrown. Thus, the rationalist rule of reason, which knows itself only through its negation of the traditional or aristocratic contents of life, dissolves all moral analogy and thus itself

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dissolves into the rule of the majority or of “progress,” before it finally just dissolves altogether. The risk of what Heidegger called “technology,” the risk of the progressive heightening of human power at the cost of the oblivion of human meaning is inherent in the democratic-individualist construction of the rule of reason, in which reason undermines ruling and thus, implicitly and finally, its own ruling activity.175 Purely critical reason thus cannot defend its own claim to rule. Thus reason is either impure or empty. If it is possible for reason to achieve reflexive probity, this can only be by coherently affirming and thus by deliberately assuming responsibility for the limited rationality of its claim to transcendence or nobility. Reason must assume responsibility for sustaining some kind of “moral analogy,” although the analogy between the spiritual-theoretical and the moral-practical can never be simply determined by reason. Tocqueville, Heidegger, and Strauss all understand and attempt to respond to this tendency of modern reason to evacuate its own meaning. I wish here briefly to characterize these responses and to begin to suggest why I think Tocqueville’s is, or points toward, the most adequate response. Martin Heidegger understood better than anyone the necessity of reflexive responsibility at the philosophical level, but he refused, in my view wrongly, disastrously, to connect this responsibility with reason’s practical responsibility. He saw that theory and practice, knowing and being must have a common root, and that thinking cannot be whole and rigorous if it does not account for its own practical possibility. Heidegger pursued the root of this possibility with unparalleled, gigantic passion. But he inherits and fails adequately to question the mistake his teacher Husserl learned from Descartes, or from misreading Descartes: he associates the project of technological science with “the natural attitude,” the pre-philosophic comportment towards natural things.176 Thus, in responding to the nihilistic implications of the modern alliance of technological rationalism and democratic individualism, he throws out the baby with the bathwater: he throws out the tendency of things to emerge within a hierarchically articulated, “aristocratic” world along with the reduction of things to a “standing reserve,” stuff to make more stuff. He throws out what Strauss calls the “heterogeneity” of the given, which includes a distinctive, elevated place for mankind (however this elevation is interpreted). Leo Strauss, for his part, rejects from the outset Heidegger’s attempt to sever philosophy, or the task of thinking, from the perennial human questions. We might then say that he grasps the challenge of moral analogy with both hands. He seeks to reconnect and thereby reground both theory and practice through what he styles as a recovery of “classical political philosophy.” A ground for practice in “natural right” would have to draw out and thus preserve a sense of elevation inherent in traditional practice, in moral

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and political order. For Strauss, theory must confirm and shelter practice by articulating its implicit reference to some “above,” it must enact an orientation to something “higher.” This is what Strauss seeks in his return to “classical natural right” as anchored in the notion of the transcendent goodness of pure theory.177 Nothing could be more practical. This does not at all mean that Strauss proposes to discover some set of rationally cognizable eternal laws that would be adequate to govern human conduct and order human societies. For Strauss, although justice is in principle universal, nature—the natural conditions of full human development, of virtue or excellence—requires that society be particular, closed—that each society be a “cave.” Sound theory must then consist in accommodation to the necessary confinement of practice to the domain of the cave. From this it follows that coercion is endemic in the human condition—law is founded in politics, in a regime that may be more or less noble but that cannot avoid the necessity of keeping down “lower” impulses. This presupposes a particular definition of higher/lower, which will always be contestable, never fully natural. Strauss understands, then, that “philosophy” cannot dictate directly to the city; there is no universalizable natural law because human life must be ruled by some idea of perfection, and every such idea is political conditioned, partial, partisan. Philosophy, for Strauss, must recognize the necessity of this practical partiality, which is to recognize its own deeply political conditions, its own implication in the necessity of a “moral analogy” linking theoretical truth to practical meaning. Philosophy must not try to abolish the cave, which would only universalize it (as in modern universalistic reductionism), but rather take responsibility, however indirectly, for ruling it. For Strauss, then, the most acutely self-aware, self-critical and therefore responsible philosophy will knowingly sponsor a kind of aristocratic partisanship, since it knows that its own nobility is necessarily grafted upon an idea of perfection or excellence that is concretely represented in a political regime. Strauss’s claim that theory transcends practice is rooted in an awareness of the practical conditions of theory, and of the practical sources of the nobility of theory. Today, however, Strauss’s deliberately aristocratic proposal of the lofty autonomy of philosophy as a stable ground of practical elevation is already proving implausible and unstable, even or especially in the hands of Strauss’s most ardent or high-minded disciples. In an attempt to restore to philosophy its aristocratic elevation and thus its power to resist the technological leveling of modern rationalism and the irresponsible abyss of radical historicism, Strauss is driven to exaggerate philosophy’s claim to transcend the common concerns of humanity. Driven by an understandable animus against what he takes to be Heidegger’s reduction of theory to practice and therefore wishing

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to restore the distinctive elevation of the philosophical life, Strauss risks forgetting, or inviting others to forget, that this very elevation can only spring from and draw upon an actually existing practice of nobility. Taking my bearings from Tocqueville’s exquisitely nuanced adjustment of the claims of “elevation” against those of “justice,” I propose to free Strauss’s best insights, and in particular his awareness of the insuperability of the problem Tocqueville names “moral analogy,” from their subordination to this one-sidedly classical and aristocratic (and therefore not only anti-modern but, more profoundly anti-Christian) rhetorical strategy. NOTES 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Introduction, 7. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. Ibid., 3; See, for example, Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 127–28. 4. Tocqueville, Democracy, Introduction, 6. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. Ibid., 7; emphasis added. 11. Ibid., 8. 12. Ibid., 10–11; emphasis added. 13. Ibid., 12. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., II.iv.8, 675–76. 18. Ibid., Introduction, 11. 19. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 20. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.1, 403. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 403–04. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 405. 25. Ibid., Introduction, 7. 26. Parenthetical references are to Alexis de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Regime et La Révolution, ed., J.P. Mayer (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). The translation is my own.

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27. Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, 251. 28. Ibid., 267–68. 29. Ibid., 252. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 230. 33. Ibid., 70; Tocqueville here argues that it is characteristic of religions to “consider man as himself, without being satisfied with the particularities the laws, customs and traditions of a country might have added to this common core.” This would seem to apply only or especially to the monotheistic and universalist religions of the West. In any case, Tocqueville’s point is that the determination to supplant religion gave modern revolution a quasi-religious character; the French Revolution was the first that inspired proselytizing and world-wide propaganda; it was the first to claim, in effect, the power to regenerate mankind. 34. Ibid., III.iii. 35. Ibid., 254. 36. Ibid., 266. 37. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.9, 432. 38. Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, 251. 39. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.ii.3, 485. 40. Ibid., II.i.2, 407. 41. Ibid., 410. 42. Ibid., 409. 43. Ibid., II.i.9, 428–33. 44. Ibid., 430. 45. Ibid., 430–31. 46. Ibid., 430. 47. Ibid., 432. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., II.i.10, 433–39. 50. Ibid., II.i.9, 432. 51. Ibid., 433. 52. Ibid., II.ii.15, 519. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., Introduction, 12. 57. Ibid., II.i.22, 471. 58. Ibid., 472. 59. Ibid., II.i.18, 464. 60. Ibid., II.i.17, 458. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 459.

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64. Ibid., 458–59. 65. Ibid., 460. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., II.i.8, 426–28. 72. Ibid., II.i.17, 460. 73. Ibid., 461. 74. Ibid., 460–61. 75. Ibid., 462. 76. Ibid., 461. 77. Ibid., II.ii.15, 519. 78. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), part 1, no. 13. Compare on the residual teleology of modern thought. 79. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.17, 461. 80. Ibid., 459. 81. Ibid., 460. 82. Ibid., 462. 83. Ibid., II.i.5, 417–24. 84. Ibid., 420. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 421. 87. Ibid., 420. 88. Ibid., 421. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., II.i.2, 411. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., 414. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 415. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 413–14. 99. Ibid., 414. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid., 413. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid.

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106. Ibid. 107. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.3, 413. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid., II.i.5, 417. 110. Ibid., 421. 111. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 61n. Leo Strauss, whom one would expect to understand this at least as well as anyone, seems to ignore it in his discussion of Max Weber’s attempt to associate Calvinism with the rise of capitalism. There Strauss maintains a rather rigid distinction between true Puritanism and “the Puritanism that had already made its peace with ‘the world.’” 112. Tocqueville, Democracy, Introduction, 7. 113. Ibid., 4. 114. Ibid., 4. 115. Ibid., 6. 116. Ibid., 7. 117. Ibid., 7; emphasis added. 118. Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 64. “Equality becomes the very horizon of social existence and the principle in whose name all is experienced and judged.” 119. Tocqueville, Democracy, I. Introduction, 12. 120. Ibid., 6–7. 121. Ibid., 5. 122. Ibid., 4. 123. Ibid., 5. 124. Ibid., 5. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid., II.i.6, 425–26. 127. Ibid., 425. 128. Ibid., 426. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., II.i.17, 458–63. 131. Ibid., 461. 132. Ibid., 462. 133. Ibid., I.ii.7, 244. 134. Manent, Tocqueville, 38. 135. Ibid., 39–40 (italics added). In a later chapter, Manent further describes the relationship between political-social hierarchy and man’s orientation towards reality: “In aristocratic societies, the framework that structures conventional influences of individuals nourishes the idea of nonconventional influences, that is to say, individual influences based on natural superiorities. Such influences preserve the natural order of things external to oneself and to which one does not have access in one’s ordinary life. They preserve the idea of an objective order; they nourish intellectual eros” (77–78).

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136. Ibid., 44. 137. François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe (London: Penguin, 1997), xxx–xxxi. That Tocqueville’s approach to the study of history and society owes much to Guizot is clear. He attended Guizot’s lectures on “The History of Civilization in Europe” for two years beginning in 1828, and praised them enthusiastically in letters to his friend Gustave de Beaumont. See the Introduction by Larry Siedentop; see also André Jardin, Alexis de Tocqueville: 1805–1859 (Hachette: Fondo de Cultura Economica USA, 1984), 81–82. 138. Cited in the previous note. I would like to thank Paul Seaton for alerting me to the significance of this text for understanding Tocqueville’s reference to “the laws of moral analogy.” (See below.) 139. Guizot, History of Civilization, 18, 16. 140. Ibid., 18. 141. Ibid., 16, 19, 13, 18. 142. Ibid., 19. 143. Ibid., 21. 144. Ibid., 22. 145. Ibid., 22. 146. Ibid., 18-19. 147. Ibid., 21. 148. Ibid., 24. 149. Ibid. 150. Pierre Rosanvallon, “Guizot,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1989), 939. Concerning the place of the Revolution in Guizot’s work, Pierre Rosanvallon has written: “Guizot thus felt no need to write a history of revolutionary events even though the Revolution as a political and philosophical issue is at the heart of all his works. Interpreting the course of the Revolution seemed less important to him than gaining a better understanding of its deeper historical meaning . . . . the true subject of his historical work was the modern revolution.” 151. See especially Ancien Regime, vol. 3, chap. 1. 152. Guizot, History of Civilization, 243. 153. Ibid., 243. 154. Ibid., 244. 155. Ibid., 244, 26, 25. 156. Ibid., 244, 24, 25. Apart from this ungrounded gradualism, there is one passage in which Guizot does, however, suggest another motive for a measured or conservative embrace of revolutionary principles. Having ventured to raise the question, between the “the development of society” and that of “humanity” or of “the individual,” which should be considered as the end and which as the means, Guizot recurs to a speech by his friend Royer-Collard. Royer-Collard holds that, beyond man’s engagement to society “there remains to him the noblest part of himself, those high faculties by which he elevates himself to God, to a future life, to unknown felicity in an invisible world.” Guizot leaves this statement without comment, except to reformulate it as the question

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whether “when the history of civilization is completed . . . all is exhausted, whether [man] has reached the end of all things?” This, Guizot observes, is “the last, the highest of all those problems to which the history of civilization can lead. It is sufficient for me to have indicated its position and grandeur.” Sufficient, indeed—or rather, to say the least. For would not the very framework of Guizot’s thought be shaken by this question, if one were to take it fully seriously? Does not Guizot’s conception of historical progress depend essentially upon its orientation towards the ultimate possibility of the exhaustive “external” realization of the “internal” truth of Christianity? If certain, most important goods were not susceptible of realization in society, or at least in the general society of humanity, then would it be possible to understand history as a whole as governed by the a unilinear idea of progress? In any case, Guizot’s faith in progress seems not to be shaken by the possibility of an irreducibly transcendent perspective; instead, he appears to welcome the rhetoric of transcendence as an aid in his effort to deflect the energy of the revolution reason into the reasonable gradualism of progress. 157. History of Civilization, Introduction, 32. 158. The causal priority of the “social state”—at least “once it has come into being”—is most plainly asserted in vol. 1, part 1, chap. 3 on “The Social State of the Anglo-Americans.” However, as Pierre Manent has pointed out, this causal priority immediately finds itself in competition with two other definitions of the “generative principle” of democracy—“the sovereignty of the people” and “public opinion.” To grasp the unity of these principles one must understand how it is that under the influence of equality “all human bonds are politicized at the same time that the political bond is naturalized.” Manent, Tocqueville, 6–7, 9. 159. History of Civilization (Lecture the Fifth), 91–92. 160. Thus, I believe Furet is wrong to distinguish so simply the “optimisme raisonné” of Democracy in America from the “fear” (crainte) he believes governed the writing of l’Ancien Regime et la Revolution. François Furet, Penser La Révolution française (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 190–91. 161. Tocqueville, Democracy, Introduction, 7, 12. 162. Ibid., 10, 11. 163. Ibid., 12; emphasis added. 164. For readers familiar with the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, it is impossible not to hear a resonance with Thomas’s idea of an “analogy” between God and man. In Thomas’s system, “analogy” served to link Divine infinity with the finitude of His creation and thus with human reason. The categories with which we understand the finite world are by no means adequate to God’s infinity, but they have a meaningful application by “analogy.” It is only thus through analogy that we are able to affirm, for example, to use the same word, “just,” to refer to a human judge and to God. Whether such a verbal device of “analogy” is finally sufficient to hold together the poles of divine infinity and concrete human meaning is of course another question. The subsequent history of Christian scholasticism, and, after that, indeed, of the postChristian encounter with infinity, seems to suggest doubts. 165. Ibid., 10, 12.

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166. Tocqueville, Democracy, 8–10, 12. 167. Ibid., II.iv.8, 674–75: “What seems to me decadence is therefore progress in his eyes; what wounds me is agreeable to him. Equality is perhaps less elevated; but it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty. . . . No one on earth can yet assert in an absolute and general way that the new state of societies is superior to the former state.” 168. Manent, Tocqueville, 120. 169. Machiavelli, Prince, chap. 6. 170. Plato, Republic, 505e. 171. We will see further on that this is the aristocratic strategy that Leo Strauss attempts to recover for our times: the idea of the pure and complete satisfaction of human nature by the highest exercise of the theoretical life itself is offered as an antidote to the leveling power of modern rationalism. This is the ground of “natural right” according to Leo Strauss. 172. See, in particular, Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.17 and II.iii.18–19. 173. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, II. 174. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.2, 407–10. 175. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 176. This will be discussed in the following chapter. 177. See chapter 5 below.

Chapter 3

The Rule of Reason and Paradoxes of Transcendence

Theory must rule practice, and yet it cannot. Thinking (Guizot’s “internal” dimension) is called to assume and to represent Being (the “external”), but thinking is always preceded and exceeded by Being. This very excess of Being with respect to thinking—transcendence—reason necessarily configures along two axes of significance or of free signifying that we may call “vertical” (aristocracy, actuality) and “horizontal” (democracy, possibility). The vertical axis is determined by the self-affirmation of the thinking agent himself or herself: the affirmation of the rule of reason, general and impersonal, merges with the concrete affirmation of the goodness of the thinker’s own concrete being, of his soul. Vertical transcendence enjoys itself and would be satisfied in its superiority over mere necessity and instrumentality; it is good in itself, it is noble. The freedom of this transcendence is the proud rule of reason, its positive affirmation of its own nobility. This freedom is pagan. The horizontal axis of transcendence emerges from reason’s awareness that it is called by something or someone other than itself, that thinking is responsible to what is irreducibly other. This awareness opens thinking to the claims of all other human beings and to non-representable possibilities or to the possibility of what is non-representable, what cannot be grasped by reason. Horizontal transcendence hungers and thirsts for justice, a justice it does not possess, and therefore does not grasp or represent, a possible unlimited and universal justice projected upon a possible future. The freedom of this transcendence is humble openness to the possibility of a justice it does not claim to possess or represent, and thus its implicit negation of present, concrete, prideful representations and affirmations of nobility. This humble spiritual freedom is biblical. But when its negation becomes active 75

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and emancipates itself from biblical obedience, then it is more prideful than natural, vertical pride. Neither of these axes of transcendence, vertical and horizontal, can signify without the other; there is no place for meaning in either pure line but only in some surface opened up by the tension between them. The freedom of selfaffirmation would collapse into mute sameness or self-identity without some openness to a possibility it does not already represent; to affirm one’s being is always, implicitly, to indicate a possibility that exceeds one’s actual being. And the freedom of openness to otherness and possibility would be no one’s freedom and have no meaning in any actual world if it were not affirmed by an actual human agent who possessed some sense of his own concrete goodness or nobility as representable within some actual world. Reason’s responsibility is therefore to hold open some such surface of meaning within some available space defined by these axes. As we have seen, Alexis de Tocqueville came to understand this responsibility by reflecting on the threat to meaningful, humane transcendence posed by the modern attempt to synthesize reason’s pride with its openness to universal possibility, to collapse the tension between the two axes of transcendence. He named this distinctively modern threat the abolition of “the laws of moral analogy.” Before examining how the two most powerful thinkers of human existence of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss, understood and responded to this threat, we first, in this chapter, support and elaborate Tocqueville’s understanding of the Christian roots of the crisis of “moral analogy” against the backdrop of Aristotle’s classic articulation of the rule of reason. The rejection of the substantive rule of reason, a rejection that takes both Protestant and secular-modern forms, does not escape the problem of transcendence but in fact presupposes and implies an extreme claim of transcendence.

THE RULE OF REASON IN ARISTOTLE The point at which theory meets practice, transcendence engages immanence, and thinking assumes being, Aristotle calls “phronesis.” All discussions of “prudence” or “practical wisdom” descend from the articulation, especially in Book VI of the Nichomachean Ethics, of this characteristic as the virtue of a distinct region of human intelligence, a region possessing a certain dignity and autonomy of its own—a dignity somehow apart, that is, from that of scientific theorizing (epistémé), which for its part is governed by the virtue of theoretical wisdom (sophia).1 Aristotle’s development of the idea of practical reason can be understood as a response to Socrates’ or Plato’s tendency to subordinate ethics to

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theoretical knowledge, and thus in effect to explain it away. If all virtue is, finally, knowledge, then no one does wrong willingly, and ignorance is the only sin. This teaching (whether it is truly Plato’s final word or not) is attractive, even in a way compelling, insofar as it vindicates our sense that our very humanity is bound up with the rule of reason. If what distinguishes us as rational animals is our being guided not exclusively by instinct but in the most important respects by deliberate, articulate (or articulable) understanding, then to accept that, in Paul’s words, “the good that I would I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do”2 is radically to complicate the question of what kind of beings we are, and in what way reason might guide us. If all beings seek their own good, and if the rational faculty succeeds in accurately representing to itself what is good or advantageous for the being in question, then that being’s pursuit of that good should follow without fail, as it were automatically. However, in our experience, at least outside the (poetic?) case of Plato’s Socrates himself, there is of course nothing automatic about the human pursuit of the good. The rule of reason is no direct and transparent translation of some purely exterior, theoretical truth into action, of theory into practice; our being good is in no simple way reducible to our knowing what is good. Aristotle’s interrelated accounts of moral virtue and of practical reason are in part a way of coming to terms with this complication. The practical meaning of truth has to be something different from the mere “application” of some “theoretical” truth to practice—and this will have consequences, not only for the meaning of practice, but for the meaning of truth. The truth of practice, or the practice of truth, cannot be without implications for the deepest meaning of truth itself. The essential, finally unsurpassable problem of practical reason emerges already in the first lines of the Nichomachean Ethics. An activity may be directed, Aristotle says, towards some end, or it may itself be an end. A rational account of action (and therefore rational action itself), an account that can answer our worry that the series of our desires is end-less and therefore meaningless, seems to require reference to “a good at which all things aim.”3 But is there such an overarching, architectonic Good? And how could such a Good govern even those “actions” whose “ends . . . lie in the activities themselves”?4 How can our actions be at once intrinsically meaningful, meaningful in a sense on their own terms, and yet also integrated within a satisfyingly rational whole? This is a problem that cannot be “solved,” but that seems essential to what we can know of our very humanity. For is there any standpoint from which we can coherently deny that the certain activities (loving, achieving, giving, overcoming, understanding . . .) that make up our lives have their own finally distinct and irrefragable albeit imperfect, perhaps

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fragmented meanings? If there is “nothing good except the Form of Good,” then “the Form will be pointless.”5 And yet is it not also the case that we are bound to or at least that we tend to situate these meanings within some elusive larger Meaning, some inclusive horizon, some implicit cosmology or sacred story? Thus we ought not ask Aristotle or, further on, Tocqueville to resolve this tension between the good and the Good, the part and the Whole, but rather attend to the way that each articulates, manages, and upholds it. Aristotle sustains this tension between the immediate meaning of our actions and our lives and our interest in situating them within some larger whole through a rich articulation along two principal dimensions. One dimension is defined by this basic polarity between the claims of intrinsic goodness of particular activities and conditions on the one hand and our interest in a unifying, gathering principle on the other. The other dimension consists in the polarity between the “practical” claims of the city as a unifying horizon on the one hand and the “theoretical” claims of the natural cosmos as the unifying ground of meaning on the other. The question whether particular goods are sufficient unto themselves and understandable on their own terms or, rather, more fundamentally part of some larger architectonic, is intermingled with the question whether this larger horizon ought to be understood practically-politically or rather theoretically-naturally; these questions are engaged and reengaged in various ways from various directions in Aristotle’s account of human ends. For example, early in Book I of the Nichomachean Ethics the architectonic claim is first introduced within a political horizon, where it appears obvious that the good of the city is nobler than that of the individual.6 But in seeking some content to inform this formal claim, the notion of happiness is introduced, which itself cannot be explicated without recourse to a natural teleology, to the “function” ascribed to humanity in some larger natural and rational order.7 But this suggested natural teleology of rational man is itself immediately explicated by reference to the known “facts” of excellence or virtue as learned by habituation, and thus the whole account falls back within a political orbit, indeed a certain, particular political orbit. There is no reason to assume that the discussion has been propelled completely free from this orbit, that is, from the habituated “facts” of Aristotle’s Greek gentlemen, when the author concludes Book I by re-introducing and further articulating the putatively natural teleology of the human faculties. (This is to say that Aristotle may be quite aware of a certain interplay or mutual conditioning between his “political” and “natural” horizons.) Of special interest to us is a double-division within the rational faculty. First, the “rational” in the human soul is divided between what possesses reason in the strict sense and what only listens to reason (the realms of intellectual and moral virtue, respectively); and then the properly intellectual part itself

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is divided into the realms of theoretical and practical reason, the realms governed by sophia and by phronesis.8 (This latter division is only fully specified in Book VI.) The necessity of such divisions speaks to the heart of our present inquiry: in what way knowledge governs action—or, what is “knowledge,” and what is “action,” such that knowledge can govern action? If knowledge simply determined action, as it were automatically and purely from the outside, then there would be no such thing as action. There must be something of “knowledge,” or some kind of knowing, already implicit in action. This is the problem that compels the double-division of faculties on the boundary between theory and practice, and in truth, if the problem were approached purely technically or mechanically, the search for the little gearing where cosmic truth engages human meaning might produce a kind of infinite regress of divisions and re-divisions of the boundary so to speak “all the way down.” Of course Aristotle’s approach is anything but mechanical, or far from wholly mechanical. Rather than vainly redoubling the divisions of the soul he lays out before us in Book VI a kind of circularity in the relationship between practical reason and moral virtue. The sense of the “mean” that has been shown to lie at the heart of moral virtue must somehow be shown to be governed and informed by “right reason,” but this in turn requires that we specify “what right reason is and what standard determines it.”9 But in seeking to specify this standard, and thus the sense of practical reason, we are led not to some impersonal, “objective” principle but rather to “studying the persons to whom we attribute” practical wisdom. And looking at these persons we learn that “in matters of action, the principles or initiating motives are the ends at which our actions are aimed,” i.e., the end of morality itself, morality for its own sake. The end of morality is to have the morally right motive: “good action is an end in itself.”10 Of course, unlike Kant, Aristotle does not absolutize this claim of morality to a perfectly self-contained meaning; the right of “reason” to rule morality, or the internal subordination of morality to the rule of reason, keeps popping up again to challenge this simple autonomy. *** It might appear that practical reason can only guide moral virtue in a purely instrumental way: “virtue makes us aim at the right target, and practical wisdom makes us use the right means . . . Now, it is virtue which makes our choice right. It is not virtue, however, but a different capacity, which determines the steps which, in the nature of the case, must be taken to implement the choice.”11 But the wisdom of implementation can govern the rightness of virtue (unlike Kantian practical reason) because these are never wholly separate; the “right target” and the “right means” are mutually conditioning

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or contaminating considerations. “It is a mark of men of practical wisdom to have deliberated well,” to have taken into account a kind of calculation of means and circumstances, but the very meaning of this deliberation or “correctness in assessing what is conducive to an end” is colored by the fact that “practical wisdom gives a true conviction” concerning this end.12 Practical wisdom is a kind of intelligence of particular facts relevant to practice, a kind of seeing cultivated through experience (“for experience has given such men an eye with which they can see correctly”),13 an acute sensitivity to the circumstances and conditions surrounding the implementation of virtue, but a seeing that can never be understood in abstraction from a certain light of moral virtue itself; the experience that gives men of practical wisdom a special eye is itself already a moral experience. “A man cannot have practical wisdom unless he is good.”14 Finally, the irreducibility of practical wisdom to a mere means serving the end of virtue is guaranteed by another recourse to the teleology of faculty psychology: “It is now clear that we should still need practical wisdom, even if it had no bearing on action, because it is the virtue of a part of our soul”15—which of course only seems to ignore the problem of how the end or function and thus the very nature of this part might be understood as other than simply instrumental to the habituated practical activities of the part over which it is supposed to rule. Practical wisdom thus appears to direct moral virtue in two senses that may be distinguished, but that in practice appear to be quite intermingled, even confused: On the one hand, practical wisdom directs moral virtue through its insight into the particular circumstances and conditions attending the implementation of virtuous action. On the other hand, in some more elusive sense practical wisdom guides because it rules, because it represents the activity of a more rational and thus intrinsically superior part of the soul. In any case, this fundamental circularity appears unsurpassable: practical wisdom both guides and is guided by moral virtue. Moral virtue looks up to “right reason,” but right reason cannot be defined or given content without recourse to moral virtue. This apparently seamless, harmonious integration of reason and virtue (practical reason and moral virtue), this complete attunement of the rational to the practical and habituated is attractive, even beautiful, but it is natural to wonder if Aristotle’s account up to this point is not too good to be true. Is the fit between the highest human faculties and the practical requirements of life really so perfect, even in the best case? Is it possible for human beings, especially the best human beings, to be so at home in the city, or in the world? Aristotle himself immediately complicates the picture, and directs our interest towards the possibility of a higher kind of integration, by introducing, in Book VII, the distinction between moral virtue (in particular, the virtue of moderation or self-control), and “moral strength.” The man of moral virtue has built such a good character that

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he no longer has any excessive or base appetites to overcome. One might thus say that reason does not rule “over” his soul; rather, reason rules his character as it were from within, as a principle already embedded in a harmonious whole. Up to this point, this has appeared as unreservedly good news, but now Aristotle begins unobtrusively to invite doubts about the rationality of this “right opinion” embedded in practice. Without evaluating moral strength directly in comparison with moral virtue (indeed proceeding all along on the apparent assumption of the superiority of moral virtue), but instead by comparing their respective opposites, that is, moral weakness and vice, Aristotle invites us to consider another, perhaps more realistic sense of the rule of reason: “A vicious man is not aware of his vice, but a morally weak man knows his weakness.”16 Would this not hold true in a sense for the corresponding good characteristics? Is not the rule of reason in moral strength more separated from habit and convention and therefore in a sense more self-aware, and in that sense more purely “rational” than in the case of moral virtue? Thus, when Aristotle next stresses that steadfastness in moral strength is not like obstinacy but rather implies openness to rational argument,17 one might well wonder whether he is not pointing to the potential of a certain obstinacy implicit in the pretension to moral virtue, that is, to a perfect fit between character and reason. For it is precisely the supposed beautiful wholeness of moral virtue, the integration of reason with habit, that would seem to imply at least the risk of a closedness to any questioning “from the outside.” By setting moral strength alongside moral virtue, Aristotle thus points beyond moral virtue without directly attacking its foundations. By raising the possibility of reason ruling the non-rational soul more distinctly as an outside and thus potentially a more fully rational principle, he renews the question of the nature of the good—the natural, as opposed to habituated or conventional good—in view of which reason might rule. Thus there immediately emerges a certain rehabilitation of pleasure (the discussion of which surrounds the theme of friendship, Books VIII and IX), which is now considered not so much as what must be ruled by reason as an accompaniment and indicator of the good in view of which reason might rule. The theme of pleasure clearly marks the passage from a point of view in which reason as “right reason” is more or less identified with the habituated rightness of moral virtue to the search for a more clearly natural ground of reason.

THE GOOD, AMONG FRIENDS Pleasure seems to provide the necessary link between what is good simply and what is good for us; pleasure would be nature’s way of securing the fit between the whole and its living, self-animated parts. Aristotle dismisses as

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nonsense the attempt to reject the manifest natural goodness of pleasure, and even sees truth in the view that pleasure is in some sense the highest good.18 Of course, for us speaking beings, thinking and choosing beings, the matter is not so simple, since the rule of reason is necessary largely in order to overcome the power of passions and appetites, and therefore of pleasures; the rule of reason is largely rule over pleasures. There must then be a truer, purer pleasure by virtue of which reason might resist, contain, and set limits to the other pleasures. This would be a pleasure that did not itself need to be ruled. Already in concluding Book VII, Aristotle introduces the idea of a pure, “divine” pleasure, unattended by pain and admitting of no excess, a single and simple pleasure inseparable from unimpaired activity according to nature.19 This of course is the pleasure associated with contemplation, the praise of which marks the peak and almost the conclusion (in Book X) of the Nichomachean Ethics. (A final chapter descends rapidly via ethics to the hard, unpleasant facts of politics.) Disinterested contemplation of the highest things constitutes the unimpeded and therefore supremely pleasant activity, the virtue or excellent functioning of what is best in us, and thus the highest virtue. It therefore forms the core of happiness. Aristotle’s investigation of the ends of human existence seems to have reached a most satisfying conclusion, and the threat of human desires forming an endless, rationally incomprehensible and thus ungovernable series has been met by the author’s anchoring of the human soul’s desires in the “highest” eternal realities (“the objects which are the concern of intelligence are the highest objects of knowledge . . .”).20 At the same time, the plane on which the more problematic rationality of phronesis was exhibited seems to have been definitively overcome. Or has it? There is no need to engage a modernist (scientific or other) critique of the natural cosmology that seems to undergird this happy conclusion to Aristotle’s search for the End of ends, since there is clearly something distinctly hypothetical about Aristotle’s argument, even before he lets us down by noting that “such a life would be more than human,” involving a “divine element within” us that is somehow “far above our composite nature.”21 So the possibility that Aristotle holds out to us is not exactly or simply a human possibility. Aristotle does not seem to claim that his own account of this “divine” activity or condition is grounded in some pure, unmediated, uninterpreted experience. We seem to know that theoretical activity is “the highest”—i.e., ranked highest on some inevitably political-ethical scale—before we know that it is best.22 The superior pleasure of this experience, posited as a pleasure far beyond the common, is supported by the evidence of common opinion: “Now everyone agrees that [or ‘it is held that’] of all the activities that conform with virtue activity in conformity with theoretical wisdom is the most pleasant.” And the

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next argument for the supreme experience seems to put it at two removes from immediacy: the enjoyment of contemplative wisdom is endorsed on the basis of its supposed superiority to the mere pursuit of wisdom, i.e., philosophy—but even the pleasures of philosophy, “marvelous in purity and certainty,” are advanced on some anonymous general authority (“everyone agrees” or “it seems that”).23 Finally, the argument from self-sufficiency (“a wise man is able to study even by himself . . .”) is qualified, even half-withdrawn, as soon as it is made: “Perhaps he could do it better if he had colleagues to work with him, but he still is the most self-sufficient of all.”24 The nature of the sovereign knower’s interest in friends is a critical point, and a brief review of a fundamental feature of Aristotle’s account of friendship will advance the question of the status of Aristotle’s “divine” ground. It is well known (even notorious for us Christians and moderns) that Aristotle grounds the love of the friend in the love of self—in the highest sense, to be sure: the “true egoist” is one who “gratifies the most sovereign part of himself.” This higher egoism is grounded metaphysically in a certain understanding of the self-sufficient goodness of nature in its natural articulations: “what is determinate belongs to the nature of the good.” If perceiving, thinking, and therefore knowing are good, this is because they are ways of attending to or releasing the natural goodness of things in their definite (presumably eternal) determinations, for, so understood, “existence is by nature good and pleasant.”25 The goodness shared with another, the goodness of friendship thus seems distinctly subordinate and secondary to what appears to be this immediate and direct goodness of existence as experienced most purely by the knower. But, again, as we look closer, such immediacy eludes us. Not only is the self-sufficiency of our attending upon the natural goodness of existence questionable, since “it is not easy to be continuously active all by oneself,” but in fact “we are better able to observe our neighbors than ourselves, and their actions better than our own.” Our very notion of the immediacy and selfsufficiency of natural goodness seems to be contaminated by the mediation of friends. The good is not an immediate possession, but is somehow other than us, somehow always at one remove, more re-presented beyond us than immediately present “within.” The implicit background to Aristotle’s famous dictum, “a friend is another self” is in fact its reversal: the self is another friend. If the self, even the “highest” self of the “highest” human type, has no pure ground uncontaminated by reference to another human being, then the conditions of our existence in common must in some way color all our understandings, even—or rather, especially—our understandings of what is “beyond” such conditions. In a word, politics lies at the very heart of philosophy.

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Without access to some unmediated anchor of meaning, our notions of purpose, of goodness can never escape the necessity of falling back on a sense of nobility or of the “higher” that are constituted within communities of rule: Just as a state and every organized system seems to be in the truest sense identical with the most sovereign element in it, so it is with man. Consequently, he is an egoist or self-lover in the truest sense who loves and gratifies the most sovereign element in him.26

Aristotle achieves the appearance of stability and a certain finality in his investigation of human purposes by playing the instability or open-endedness of man and that of the city off each other. The city is anchored in the soul (or the soul’s presumed communion with the cosmos), while at the same time the city’s hierarchy of “nobility” is used to model the transcendence, the elevation of the soul. To discriminate among pleasures it proves necessary to appeal not simply to what is most pleasurable (certainly not to what is most intense), but to a distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures (to the way pleasures appear “to a good man”27), a distinction already clearly informed by a ruling political-ethical context. The Good does not emerge purely, self-sufficiently, immediately by its own power, but must be brought to light by association with what is noble and therefore with effectively ruling power. Thus it is often at just the moment when Aristotle seems to have left behind the necessary concerns of politics and political ethics altogether that he recurs most strikingly to a political frame of reference. The highest egoism, the supposed ground of friendship, cannot be explained without identifying man’s very being “in the truest sense” with “the ruling element within him.”28 And at the very peak of his argument in Book X, in the midst of his praise of the divine capacity for contemplation, that “small portion [of our nature]” that “surpasses everything else in power and value” he immediately makes the identification of this part depend upon its ruling function: “One might even regard it as each man’s true self, since it is the controlling and better part.”29

THEORY AS PRACTICE I have been suggesting that the intimate association of what is controlling with what is better is necessary to the deepest structure of Aristotle’s argument. I do not mean simply to reduce “better” to “controlling.” Rather, I propose that the interpenetration of our sense of what is best with our sense of the necessity of governing the passions and appetites goes “all the way down.” And since this necessity of control, though obviously grounded in

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nature (postmodern extravagances to the contrary notwithstanding), always appears within a particular, conventional framework, it follows that any possible sense of the sovereign good will always bear the trace of some finally political configuration of meanings. Since a pure and complete grasp of the “divine” is beyond our natural reach, the content we give to this concept cannot help but borrow from notions of excellence or elevation that arise in a practical world, a world in which the meaning of “high” is always already doing some political work, already implicated in some (more or less) effectively ruling hierarchies. We cannot leap over our own shadow to some self-standing Good in order to justify principles of rule; we can only articulate (elaborate, embellish, extend) some good (or some potentially opposing goods) already at work in actual ruling structures. The putatively pure good of contemplation appears for Aristotle within a field of meaning clearly conditioned by practical existence. The purest praise of the intrinsic goodness of contemplation (chapters 7 and 8 of Book X) is framed on one side by politics and on the other by the gods. The life of theory appears on the practical horizon as an extension of the sense of the nobility of the activities of the political virtues in opposition to the servility or baseness of mere amusement or of purely economic activities. The simply good life, if it were possible, would be the life that could look down on the lives of the statesman and the general just as these look down on merchants and slaves. The activity of contemplation is imputed to the gods as it were by subtraction: if we assume the gods exist and therefore are in some way active, then “if we take away action from a living being, to say nothing of production,” that is, once we dismiss as petty all actual human concerns and activities of which we have direct experience, then “what is left except contemplation?”30 All this is not to deny that Aristotle’s praise of the pure pleasures of theory has some basis in real experience, but only to question whether this basis can itself be altogether pure, absolute, uncontaminated by political-ethical concerns, by pre-philosophic understandings. The political-ethical imperative for a formal category of a final “for its own sake,” that is, of a sovereign, ruling activity, is prior to or at least coeval with any positive experience that might provide the content of such a category. We know the need to rule unreason before and more surely than we know any standpoint of pure reason from which to effect such rule, and any account of the purely rational end of reason remains to some degree a postulate, a projection of the need to rule. The purest pleasures are not known first in their purity but in their elevation, their nobility. Purity of contemplation is a figure grafted on to a fundamentally political ranking of activities as necessary or noble.31

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Therefore the horizon glimpsed in Aristotle beyond the realm of moral virtue and practical reason itself has a practical character. This is to say that the circularity that we discerned involving moral virtue and practical wisdom repeats itself at a higher or more comprehensive level in the relationship between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom: practical wisdom points beyond itself, and must by its nature point beyond itself, to something purer and more important. But at the same time theoretical wisdom is never completely absolved of its character as that which is posited, projected as the horizon of practical wisdom. The elevation of theory is inescapably practical; the ruling idea cannot altogether shed its character as an idea of ruling. This “political” reading of Aristotle’s praise of the contemplative life should not be read in a reductionist sense; to descry an origin common to the lofty aspiration to the rule of reason and the effectual rationalization of ruling does not imply the reduction of the former to the latter. Such a claim would presuppose the attainment of some “objective” standpoint, some access to a purely “material” reality allegedly prior to that irreducible moment in which we have found the gratuity of reason and the necessity of ruling to be intermingled. I would suggest in fact that it is only by sustaining the irreducibility of this ambivalent origin that reductionism can be avoided, for it in fact represents the link between the humanity of the author and that of his subject, between theoretical reflexivity and pre- or extra-theoretical being-in-the-world. And caring for this link would be at least as critical for the humanity of the one called especially to think as for his fellows. The great circularities we have discerned in Aristotle’s account of reason and its rule are thus marks of great self-awareness and of a kind of existential consistency or coherence: the meaning or the worth of his own activity as knower cannot be affirmed except as a modification, an inflection of the rule of reason as more conventionally understood. The very coherence of Aristotle’s investigation of practical life implies the capacity and the right to direct what is investigated; it implies situating the good of theory as the horizon of the good of practice, thinking the thinker as the friend of the noble, as nobler than the noble. Central to the rule of reason as configured in this noble and reflexive circularity of practical and theoretical wisdom is a certain attitude of resignation concerning common or even universal human hopes and longings. The gods are too high to be concerned with justice.32 The deference of practical reason to some higher, purer realm, its orientation within a horizon ruled by the unsurpassable goodness and thus divinity of pure, perfectly intelligible and thus determinate, restful activity is inseparable from the belief that “man

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is not the best thing in the universe.” We have seen that this very sense of elevated resignation must itself be grafted upon politically constituted figures of nobility: as the concerns of gentlemen are higher than those of slaves and merchants, so those of the philosophers and their gods are above those of the rest of humanity. There may be no direct, Platonic claim of the right of philosophers to rule, but the right to rule of the morally virtuous and practically wise is inseparable from their deference to the theoretically wise ones/philosophers (these being not too rigorously distinguished). Whether Aristotle’s argument depends essentially on a cosmology grounded in a positive, active, yet still and restful eternity, on the metaphysical divinity of a self-thinking thought, is therefore less evident than that it depends on the possibility of philosophy as a ground of human existence. Can philosophy as the reflective assumption of responsibility for the rule of reason operate as the ruling ground of human existence? Can it bear the weight of the resignation it represents? Can the knower achieve serenity in knowing adequate to ground an interpretation of all fundamental desires, to redeem the sacrifice of all unruly, rationally indeterminate human longings? Christianity answers these questions in the negative, and thus irreversibly complicates the meaning of political philosophy as the rule of reason.

AUGUSTINE’S RADICALIZATION OF PLATONIC DUALISM To grasp Augustine’s assessment of what he regarded as the highest expression of pagan philosophy and thus of the classical world as a whole, one must confront this puzzle: Augustine seems to attack Platonism both for failing to carry the idea of transcendence far enough and for carrying it too far. On the one hand, he contends that the Platonists fail adequately to separate the divine realm from the human in their belief that the natural soul possesses within itself a power—the intellect—capable of reaching God: “You Platonists have . . . so lofty a conception of the ‘intellectual’ soul (which must be identified with the human soul) that you assert that it is capable of becoming consubstantial with the Mind of the Father.”33 On the other hand, Augustine attacks the philosophers’ belief that the divine or transcendent is incompatible with the material nature of this world. He complains that they despise the human body and refuse to admit either that God could take on human form or that the human soul may achieve eternal salvation within a material body. Thus the Platonists, according to Augustine, have both too high and too low an opinion of humanity: they have too high an opinion of the human soul, and too low an opinion of humanity in general, and in particular of the human body.

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Indeed, the philosophers wrongly despise the body precisely because they claim too much for the intellectual soul. Believing that the human soul has only to purify itself from bodily contamination in order to attain divine happiness, they refuse to acknowledge their need for a mediator who is at once divine and human, at once pure and bodily. Believing that superior human beings can liberate themselves through the superior part of the soul, they blind themselves to the salvation miraculously revealed to all humanity—to all human beings and to all that is human, soul and body. Now he [Porphyry] states that he has never become acquainted with any philosophical sect . . . which would offer a universal way for the liberation of the soul . . . And yet how could it be a genuine philosophy, it if it did not offer this way? For what is a universal way for the liberation of the soul, if it is not a way by which all souls are liberated, and therefore the only way for any soul? . . . This [Christianity] is the way which purifies the whole man and prepares his mortal being for immortality, in all the elements which constitute a man. We have not to seek one purification for that element which Porphyry calls the ‘intellectual’ soul, another for the ‘spiritual,’ and yet another for the body itself. It was to avoid such quests that our Purifier and Savior . . . took upon himself the man in his entirety.34

By elevating the Divine still further than had Platonic philosophy, Augustine’s Christianity denies human reason privileged access to it but at the same time enhances the status of humanity simply, and therefore of the body. It is no longer an essential element of humanity that obstructs salvation, but only an accidental cause: sin. It is not the body, but only an arbitrary willfulness that stands between humanity and its divine salvation. In acknowledging his distance from God, man discovers his closeness. This enhancement of the status of man’s corporeal nature shows itself clearly in Augustine’s discussions of politics. His refutation of the claims of philosophical reason is the lynchpin of a more general debunking of human pretentions to excellence and self-sufficiency: What use is it to give as an excuse [for Rome’s cruelties] the splendid titles of ‘honour’ and ‘victory’? Take away the screens of such senseless notions . . . Let us strip off the deceptive veils, remove the whitewash of illusion . . .35 If the perverse standards of the world would allow men to receive honors proportional to their deserts, even so the honour of men should not be accounted an important matter; smoke has no weight.36 For although the virtues are reckoned by some people to be genuine and honorable when they are related only to themselves and are sought for no other end, even then they are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices rather than virtues.37

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Since “it is not something that comes from man, but something above man, that makes his life blessed,”38 the human virtues must be considered as merely instrumental to piety on the one hand and to physical well-being on the other. Thus it is mere pretension for the political community, as distinct from the religious, to aim at any end higher than the physical well-being of its members. “[T]he earthly city . . . aims at an earthly peace, and it limits the harmonious agreement of citizens concerning the giving and obeying of orders to the establishment of a kind of compromise between human wills about the things relevant to mortal life.”39 This “temporal peace” consists in “bodily health and soundness, and in fellowship with one’s kind,” and in those physical goods that serve these ends.40 The rulers of this city in no way represent virtues to which the city as a whole is directed, but are “the servants of those whom they appear to command,” acting from “a dutiful concern for the interests of others, not with pride in taking precedence over others, but with compassion in taking care of others.”41 Since “everything under the sun is vanity,” the life of action ought to seek not “honor or power in this life” but rather “to promote the well-being of the common people,”42 which is a common or frankly material kind of well-being. In Augustine’s thought we thus begin to see how a certain “secularization” of the political order, a reduction of politics to purely “mundane” or “naturalistic” concerns, may emerge from a distinctly other-worldly or dualistic orientation. Christianity offers a new, otherworldly sanction for duties stripped of any purpose beyond this world. In this it departs from the platonic tradition, which tended either to direct political and moral obligations towards the perfection of the soul or, more characteristically, perhaps, to counsel retreat from practical affairs. To understand this difference, let us examine the decisive break between Christian and platonic or neo-platonic thought that Augustine located in their respective treatments of the problem of mediation—the problem of the link between the human and the divine. Although philosophical readers may have little interest in Augustine’s polemics against exotic “neo-platonic” theologies and demonologies, these engagements sometimes penetrate to certain essential questions concerning the status of reason. The engagement with Apuleius on the question of demonic mediation is a case in point. In the course of an attack on Apuleius’ teaching that demons can provide the link between humanity and divinity, Augustine defines the difficulty as that of finding a middle term between “wretched mortality” and “happy immortality.”43 Two logical alternatives present themselves: wretched immortality and happy mortality. Augustine dismisses wretched immortals, or bad demons, as obviously unfit to mediate for humans seeking salvation. Then, in a very brief digression, he considers the “vexed question . . . whether man can be both mortal and happy.”44

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Certain authors, he notes “have dared to say that those who are possessed of wisdom can be happy, though mortal.” Such men would indeed appear qualified to mediate between humans and gods, for, being free of envy, “they will give to unhappy mortals all the aid in their power, to help them to attain happiness.”45 To admit such a possibility would undermine Augustine’s entire argument, which posits universal and absolute dependence upon a mediator who is at once fully divine and fully human. For any human being capable through his own intellectual nature of grasping the Good itself, of possessing that which, according to Plato, “every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything,”46 could in effect be his own mediator and would possess a natural right to rule and to shape the souls of his inferiors (though he might have to be compelled to do so). The decisive difference between Augustine’s teaching and Plato’s—and this comparison is valid as well for the various “Platonisms” that populated Augustine’s world, however much they suffer by comparison with the subtlety, grace, and rigor of the founder of their school—is that for Plato the human and divine realms overlap, however slightly, on a graduated scale of being, whereas for Augustine there is a clean division between creator and creation. However “dualistic” Plato or Platonism may appear in their emphasis on the remoteness of divine truth or blessedness from common human concerns, it remains that such truth and blessedness are conceived to fall somewhere within the range of the strongest human intellects, properly purified and exercised. In Platonism the good of philosophers secures what Tocqueville called “moral analogy” in the form of the rule of philosophical reason.

THE PEOPLE’S PLATONISM Thus the philosophic author, in implicitly claiming the right to mediate between his public and the “divine” truth, at the same time implicitly acknowledges or presupposes at least some slight continuity, some natural link, between the common concerns of the human city and the highest things, between the good “for us” and the good simply. The “city in speech” of Plato’s Republic, a “pattern laid up in heaven,”47 clearly describes no actual city, and is not seriously intended as a direct model for political action; but this heavenly city emerges, as it were naturally, from an attempt to clarify, by the use of natural intelligence, the nature of moral and political order. Plato’s Republic may share with Augustine’s City of God a tendency to undermine the common claims of virtue and politics; but any body of thought that preserves a natural link between the human and the divine, however extenuated and problematic, necessarily elevates and in a sense grounds the human cares

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and pretensions it debunks; the remoteness of the real from the illusory can only be exhibited naturally by exhibiting their natural, albeit distant, connectedness. If Plato’s Socrates invites Glaucon to despise wealth and honors, he yet enjoins him to “mind the political things” as these are refined and perfected in “the regime within him.”48 Dualism between heaven and earth cannot have the last word when the human author, in speaking for himself, claims competence as mediator, that is, as a link between the good of the soul and the needs of the city, and thus as the anchor of moral analogy. Augustine’s City of God, on the other hand, is set forth not as the result of a rational examination and refinement of the claims of the human city, but as the supernaturally revealed alternative to it. Augustine himself does not claim to mediate between the two cities, but only points to the revelation of the one true mediator. As we have seen, the paradoxical effect of this radical separation between the divine and the human is that, while the debunking of the virtues of the human city is often extreme and categorical, the city as provider of physical security and well-being receives a new theological endorsement, and the duties of material solicitude a divine sanction. We must note, however, that Augustine is not perfectly consistent in upholding the radical separation between the divine and the human, or the spiritual endorsement of the material interests of humanity that follows paradoxically from this separation. For example, he does not at all refute the philosophic claim, mentioned above, that “those who are possessed of wisdom can be happy, though mortal,” but merely dismisses it with the unsupported observation that “the more credible and probable position is that all men, as long as they are mortals, must needs be also wretched.”49 Indeed, in other contexts the Bishop seems incapable of dismissing entirely the philosophic claim of natural access to the divine.50 At the very least he grants that the best of the philosophers understood the character of the soul’s destination, though they did not accept the “one road” to that destination provided by “one who is himself both God and man.”51 This is to say that Augustine does not carry the Christian radicalization of Platonic dualism to its most extreme conclusion; or, in other words, that because he does not sever the human and divine with perfect completeness or consistency, he preserves a certain dualism within the range accessible by nature to human beings. The residues in Augustine’s thought of a hierarchical or “great chain of being” metaphysic is pervasive and unmistakable, as is at least the traces of the ethic of contemplation associated with it. Thus, although he redirects the life of action from the pursuit of honors to the promotion of the common well-being, Augustine yet describes such duties of “righteous engagement in affairs,” of love for one’s neighbor, as a “compulsion” and a “burden,” whereas the contemplation of truth is a “delight” and “enjoyment.”52

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In Augustine’s thought, the duality of the human and the divine is not so extreme as to efface entirely that duality within the soul which secures a natural link between the two worlds. Still, his radicalization of Platonic dualism liberates the soul from human hierarchy and thus necessarily puts moral analogy, the bond between the spiritual and the practical, at grave risk. Without here taking a position on the substance of Augustine’s Christian claims, I would suggest that his critique of classical reason reveals something deeply true about the human condition in a way that may irreversibly limit any return to the classical understanding of natural right. The minimal truth that Biblical revelation reveals is that philosophers have no exclusive claim to a sense of the limits and inadequacy of even the most comprehensive goods available within the human city, or, as Christians will say, within the cities of “this world.” Without presupposing the perfection of their rational natures, humans are capable of an awareness of their mysterious otherness from the conventions and implicit understandings that are the medium of our political existence, from the world organized by human power and human reason. Human beings are “fallen;” even, or perhaps especially if they are not philosophers, they can somehow sense that their true home is elsewhere. Nietzsche will ridicule Christianity as “Platonism for the people,” but already Augustine advances the claim that the people have a right to, so to speak their Platonism—that is, to their sense of transcendence or otherness, of having a home beyond any earthly city or “culture,” and this apart from any specifically philosophical claim. A moment’s reflection will make it clear that this universalization of the awareness of a possible transcendence irreversibly complicates the task of political philosophy. Man’s perfection and fulfillment are no longer available to him as a simply natural being, and so the philosopher’s claim of natural right is profoundly problematic. And yet the political character of the human condition remains: in the absence of an authoritative and comprehensive Law determining human affairs, men must somehow reason together regarding the authoritative terms of their lives in community, or else abandon themselves to sheer accident and force. But how will they reason when they cannot claim competence regarding final purposes? Here we open up the central problem of Christian political theory, the development of which I will not here venture even to trace. Let it suffice to observe that already in Augustine we find a clear anticipation of the modern reduction of political ends to the essentially material or bodily realm: politics is understood as a necessary compromise of human wills concerning the necessities of our mortal, bodily existence. Of course, the morality that governs relations among human beings is preserved; indeed, its authority is now grounded in the commands of a personal God. But precisely for this reason the philosopher’s attempt to trace the good of

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morality to a naturally attainable perfection is short-circuited. Virtue as the cultivation of the soul’s natural potential tends to give way to moral laws now understood at once as social necessities and as divine commands, or as both. Thomas Aquinas’ magnificent attempt to think the truths of Christianity through the categories of Aristotle’s philosophy involves a sustained effort to bring out continuities between natural virtue or perfection and man’s supernatural end. But since man’s natural perfection is not finally complete or intelligible on its own terms, the virtues necessarily appear as politically useful on the one hand and divinely commanded on the other. There is thus within Christian political and ethical thought a tendency for the higher goods, the goods of the soul, to be supernaturalized, and thus to become the concern, not of the political community but of the Church. Of course, the very big question how these two authorities are to exist side by side remains, and it largely frames Medieval Christian political thought. The failure to arrive at a definitive answer to this question, or the intransigence of the political-theological problem, provides the motive, or at least a compelling pretext, for the modern break with both the classical and medieval traditions. As long as the Church claims final authority over man’s highest good, then any attempt to articulate political authority in terms of the natural finalities of humanity inevitably redounds to the ecclesiastical power. And when that power is, eventually, divided and then fragmented, then any such articulation can only fuel the flames of a religious conflict that reason appears to have no power to moderate, much less settle. Deliberation regarding the good is short-circuited by non-negotiable beliefs (as always supported by vested interests) concerning God. Modern political philosophy and eventually the modern idea of rights arise from a response to this problem, a problem that in term stems directly and necessarily from the Christian articulation of a transcendence above and beyond the political, a source of meaning the interpretation of which can no longer be confided to the prudence of statesmen or philosophers. The modern response to this disruptive transcendence first takes the form of a radicalization of the Augustinian separation of the two cities: the political realm, the realm subject to human deliberation and decision, is cut off altogether from the question of the good, and only the realm of material necessity remains. But, contra Augustine, the sovereign authority of reason in human affairs is reclaimed, though its sphere of competency, the political sphere, is defined explicitly and rigorously against the claims of transcendence in terms of purely immanent interests. This modern response to the impasse of Christian politics can thus be seen as a kind of negative synthesis of classical virtue and Christian humility. Modern secularism accepts each side’s critique of the other: the Christians are right to debunk the pretensions of reason to the good, and the pagans are right to assert the

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claim of reason to govern human affairs.53 Reason now will rule, but without reference to the good. The pride, the self-assertion of reason is thus harnessed to a non-rational understanding of humanity. The most common name for this self-assertion, somehow at once supremely prideful and abjectly humble, and so neither really prideful nor humble, is precisely the term in which and by which humanity has lately come to recognize itself, or at least by which it increasingly refuses all other forms of self-representation: “rights.” But surely it is reasonable to ask how reason can assert itself without affirming any rational content, any intelligible purpose. Here lies the great mystery of modern reason, and the key to its end-less dynamism. And this self-assertive dynamism of modern self-assertion finds a surprising mirror image and therefore accomplice in the Protestant radicalization of Augustinian humility.

REFORMATION CHRISTIANITY AND THE PROBLEM OF TWO WORLDS Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the last chapter of The Social Contract, forcefully describes Christianity’s fundamental transformation of the political problem. Before Christianity, he observes, there was no separation between the political and the religious; every religion was “uniquely attached solely to the laws of the State that prescribed it.” It was Jesus who, by introducing “the new idea of an otherworldly kingdom” separated “the theological system from the political system” and destroyed the unity of the pagan state.54 One need not share Rousseau’s nostalgia for pagan unity to recognize the seriousness of the challenge Christianity poses for political philosophy. We modern beneficiaries of a liberal democratic regime that many take to establish “the separation of church and state” may imagine that the spiritual and secular realms can be neatly divided and insulated from each other. But a moment’s study of the actual politics of the United States, for example, would suffice to show that the very meaning and the terms of such a separation remain contentious political and philosophical questions. Christianity opens up the possibility of another, spiritual world, distinct from our present world, from the world determined by the exercise of human power within the limits set by nature. But, whatever their ultimate, spiritual destiny, humans remain natural and political beings, and their orientation toward another world, their sense of possibilities beyond the limits of the human condition, must somehow be reconciled with the requirements of political order in the here and now. The spiritual and the secular may be distinct, but they are far from simply separate; they must be ordered with respect

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to each other in some way. There is no Christian exemption from thinking the political, or from thinking politically. The difficulty of this ordering of the secular to the spiritual is clearly visible already in St. Augustine’s City of God. Augustine honors the New Testament’s separation between the spiritual and political kingdoms, and in fact structures his entire account of the human condition and of history around the distinction and the rivalry between the City of God and the City of Man. Accordingly, in terms that seem to anticipate a modern liberal restriction of the scope of politics, the Bishop of Hippo limits the purposes of secular authority to the securing of a “compromise between human wills in respect of the provisions relevant to the mortal nature of man.” The heavenly city grants the legitimacy of the earthly city for these limited purposes, and does not prescribe any single vision of the political community: “She takes no account of any difference in customs, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace is achieved or preserved.”55 But even as Augustine acknowledges the necessities of politics, he clearly subordinates them to man’s ultimate purposes, with which the Church is charged. After all, heavenly peace is “the only peace deserving of the name,” and the heavenly city (of which the Church is the visible anticipation) “makes use” of the peace secured by the temporal authority. Earthly peace is seen as ministerial to heavenly peace, and so the Church defends the lower, defective peace only “so far as may be permitted without detriment to true religion and piety.”56 The spiritual and the secular are distinct, but the latter is clearly answerable to the higher purposes and thus higher authority of the former. This distinction, colored by a clear sense of the superiority of spiritual to secular purposes, may be called the central feature of medieval political thought. But medieval theory did not arrive at any final and authoritative understanding of the institutional implications of man’s spiritual destiny in relation to those of his political condition. Although the distinctness and legitimacy of political authority was unmistakably affirmed already in the New Testament—“Render therefore unto Caesar . . .”57 “the powers that be are ordained of God”58—the Church’s responsibility for man’s higher purpose inevitably implied claims to “make use of” the political arm. By the end of the Middle Ages such religious claims over the political realm had been formalized in the clearest and most extreme fashion in the idea of absolute papal supremacy. This idea was proclaimed in Boniface’s 1302 bull Unam Sanctum, ghost written by Giles of Rome (d. 1316, Archbishop of Bourges and prolific scholar). Giles’s logic was impeccable (if we admit his terms and premises), and can be seen as the culmination of a tendency inherent in the medieval Christian understanding of the subordination of body to soul, temporal to spiritual: The Pope governs souls; political

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authorities govern bodies. But the soul is more important than the body; so the Pope’s authority trumps any secular ruler’s.59 Giles was working within an Augustinian framework, but his argument can just as well be seen as the culmination of Thomas Aquinas’s Christian appropriation of Aristotle. If “grace perfects nature,” as Thomas so influentially taught, then it would seem to follow that those who claim natural, political authority must finally defer to those endowed with the means of grace. Giles’s argument was of course by no means universally accepted; in fact it represented a rather late and desperate attempt to stem the rising tide of secular power, as European kings asserted increasing powers against the authority of Rome. By the late Middle Ages the claims of “grace” over “nature,” of the heavenly city over the city of man, were meeting resistance on many fronts as the crisis that was to become the Protestant Reformation approached. Martin Luther and John Calvin, destined to emerge as the most important makers of this Reformation, were thus seized in the most fundamental way by the problem of the relationship between the two worlds, between the “spiritual” and “secular” realms. While their primary concerns were theological, their re-configurations of the relationship between these realms could not help but have momentous political implications.

MARTIN LUTHER: THE LIBERTY OF FAITH VS. ROMAN “WORKS” Martin Luther’s fateful break with Rome began as a personal crisis, an intense individual struggle concerning the meaning of salvation. The tyranny against which he revolted was in the first instance what he came to understand as a tyranny over his soul that was the effect of a fundamental theological error. Luther had suffered from an intolerable malaise that he came to believe resulted from a misunderstanding of the righteousness that God requires of us. He had believed that God demanded a transformation of his, Martin’s, nature to some divine purity, but Martin was vividly aware of his gross impurity, despite his best efforts to conform to the monastic discipline of poverty, chastity, and so on. It was Luther’s re-reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans that finally allowed him to see that the righteousness required was a righteousness of faith, one that was not and could not be possessed by the penitent sinner through some transformation of his nature; what was promised was rather God’s righteousness imputed to the sinner by faith (an inward assent and trusting acceptance of Christ) and the grace (that is, unmerited gift) of God.

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Luther blames scholastic theology for perverting the Biblical meaning of justification, and he locates none other than Aristotle as the pagan fountainhead of this perversion. The forty-first thesis of his Disputation against Scholastic Theology (1517) could not be clearer on this point: “The whole of Aristotle’s Ethics is the worst enemy of grace.”60 The scholastic appropriation of Aristotle corrupted Christianity, according to Luther, by attributing to human nature the power to cultivate a certain measure of virtue or righteousness. By practicing the moral virtues, Aristotle had taught, a man can fulfill his natural potential and in fact become virtuous. Theologians from Aquinas down to Ockham and Gabriel Biel had adapted this teaching in various ways in order to limit the Biblical teaching concerning the fallenness of human nature and thereby to define a role in the economy of salvation for the moral efforts of human beings. But this apparent boon to humanity was in fact, according to Luther, the source of the harshest tyranny over men’s souls. By requiring of human beings an inner rectitude that was in fact impossible for fallen human nature, the Roman church terrorized souls and exploited this terror to gain earthly power. The church’s shocking traffic in “indulgences” was the plainest case of the Church’s wielding worldly power by exploiting the broadly Aristotelian belief in the spiritual efficacy of outward acts. Luther contested this Aristotelian corruption of Christianity by arguing that the righteousness that God commands, especially and in the first instance the pure and absolute loving worship of God, Luther argues, is something of which no human being is capable. By nature we are enemies of God. Only God himself in the person of Jesus Christ can reconcile us to Him by covering our sins with his righteousness. This is “grace,” and “faith” or “belief” is the spiritual act by which we receive God’s righteousness. Luther does not, of course, deny that good works are commanded and ought to be done; he only insists that they have no saving efficacy in themselves. At the same time, the very meaning of “good works” shifts from an emphasis on sacramental performances, dependent upon the authority of ordained priests, to ordinary service addressing the mundane needs of one’s neighbor.

POLITICAL AUTHORITY RECONCEIVED Luther’s radical understanding of justification by faith alone, with the sharp distinction it involves between the “spiritual” and “temporal” realms, has revolutionary implications for conceptions of authority, both ecclesiastical and political. Though Luther accepts the utility of distinct ecclesiastical offices, he radically narrows the meaning of ecclesiastical authority by proclaiming

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the “priesthood of all believers.” At the same time, he severs political authority from all concern for the good of the soul and reconceives Christian obedience as an expression of service for the temporal needs of others. Luther’s most deliberate and careful statement on political questions, “On Secular Authority: How Far Does the Obedience Owed to It Extend,” provides a very striking example of Luther’s complete collapsing of the traditional hierarchy between “spiritual” and “secular” functions: the policeman and the cobbler are no less “priests” than those who happen to be charged “with the administration of the word of God and the sacraments.” This leveling is possible only because the dignity of such functions has been severed from any humanly accessible evaluation of “higher” or “lower” purposes, that is, from the “teleological” or purpose-oriented reasoning of the classical (especially Aristotelian) tradition of political reflection. By this means Luther effects an ingenious and surprising breakthrough in Christian political theory, one that is rich in implications for modern thought. He accepts and in fact radicalizes the basic Christian dichotomy between the two kingdoms, the spiritual and the temporal. In the earlier tradition of Christian political thought, from Augustine forward, the drawing of this dichotomy had always implied a depreciation of the affairs of this world and thus redounded finally to the benefit of the spiritual power. The logic that had constrained political theorizing in the earlier Christian tradition in fact appears inescapable: If spiritual and secular concerns are considered distinct, and spiritual concerns are acknowledged to be of ultimate importance and therefore superior, then clearly these “higher” concerns must always trump those that are “merely” political. If the secular realm has any dignity, then it can only be derived from and considered subservient to the superior, spiritual realm. In a word, as long as man’s ultimate purpose is understood as distinctly spiritual or otherworldly, as a Christian can hardly deny, then it seems inevitable that secular authority be subordinated to spiritual or priestly authority. Whereas, in pre-Reformation Christianity, the spiritual and the temporal are of course distinct; but they cannot be absolutely separate as long as one is understood to be “higher” and the other “lower”; a sense of high and low is impossible without some bond of continuity between the two regions, without some residue of moral analogy. Luther cuts through this Gordian knot of medieval Christian thought by radicalizing the basic Christian dichotomy and in a way liberating the secular from the spiritual. Salvation, or the spiritual kingdom, is radically inward, a matter of “conscience,” “secret, spiritual, hidden” region dependent on no human power but entirely on the Word of Scripture. The kingdom of this world is wholly “external;” it deals with mortal life and with property. So complete is Luther’s removal of the Kingdom of God from the Kingdom

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of the World that he proclaims the absolute uselessness of politics for true believers, since the righteous do of themselves more than the law commands, attach no intrinsic importance to the things of this world, and have no need of compulsion. (Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, taught that political authority was essential to our humanity, even our uncorrupted humanity prior to the Fall.) He is confident, on the other hand, that the “individual’s conscience” is immune from external force: “Faith is a free work, to which no one can be forced.”61 Now, one would expect this radical separation to imply a radical depreciation of the political realm. But Luther avoids this consequence by shifting the account of the purpose of politics entirely to the needs of the unchristian neighbor. Politics in no way contributes to the spiritual purposes of Christians, but only to the secular needs of their neighbors. Secular needs become authoritative for Christians as someone else’s needs. By this remarkable displacement of the question of purpose, Luther bypasses the logic that seemed, in Christendom, to necessitate the subordination, direct or indirect, of political to spiritual authorities. Luther thus insulates the political realm from any “higher” purposes and thereby from the authority of priests. He re-founds politics on material necessity, yet does so in such a way that this “secularization” does not amount to a depreciation. The key to Luther’s ingenious re-thinking is that the worldly or material necessity of politics is not left to rely on its own dignity but is considered as enjoined by the Christian duty of love. Thus Luther accomplishes what seemed impossible: securing at once the dignity of the political realm and its separation from any more authoritative, “spiritual” ends. The linking of “love” to a material political necessity and the severing of any direct ties between this dutiful love and the authority of higher, specifically religious purposes is evident in Luther’s uncompromising examples: “Therefore, should you see that thee is a lack of hangmen, beadles, judges, lords or princes, and find that you are qualified, you should offer your services.”62 Or, further, in the case of war, “it is a Christian act, and an act of love, confidently to kill, rob and pillage the enemy, and to do everything that can injure him until one has conquered him according to the methods of war.”63 Luther is convinced that, by radically separating the two “spheres,” he has finally reconciled them, or ordered them properly with respect to each other, satisfying “at the same time God’s kingdom inwardly and the kingdom of the world outwardly.”64 Both the spiritual and the secular are given their due, without one impinging on the other. The “powers that be are ordained of God,” part of “God’s work and creation,” and therefore “good.”65 Given the fallenness of human nature (no one is by nature Christian or pious, but every one sinful and evil . . .”),66 these powers must be ample and energetic. “The

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world is too wicked to deserve princes much wiser and more just than this. Frogs must have storks.”67

THE MUTUAL EMANCIPATION OF THE “SPIRITUAL” AND THE “SECULAR” We have seen that Martin Luther breaks decisively with the Medieval Christian political tradition by a twofold strategy. First, he emancipates the spiritual and secular realms from each other by a radicalization of the Christian distinction between spiritual and inward things on the one hand and secular and external things on the other. Next, having severed secular, political matters from higher spiritual purposes, he nonetheless secures the dignity and binding character of political authority by recourse to the Christian duty of love for the other. It is fair to call this duty of love operative in politics “secularized,” since it concerns only external necessities, thus preserving the essential separation from concern for the good of the soul. My neighbor’s material-political need is in no way intrinsically ordered with respect to my spiritual destiny; my duty to love my neighbor is commanded by God, but in no intelligible way ordered by His love. This duty is commanded by God, but it aims at nothing divine, except insofar as everything is God’s creation. My Christian love has no other object, at least as far as politics is concerned, than the fallen needs of my unchristian neighbor. Beneath the now familiar dichotomy between the spiritual and the secular, or the internal and the external, this abstraction of duty from purpose is the lynchpin of Luther’s remarkable attempt to do full justice at once to the claims of the soul and those of the body, spiritual transcendence and material necessity. The critical question Luther leaves to future thinkers is whether the secular realm, now grounded on its own needs, can avoid encroaching on concerns of the spirit. Luther seems not to envision a situation in which a person’s duty to the needs of humanity might appear to be in tension with, or might even claim to trump, his calling to some inward perfection.

JOHN CALVIN: THE ELUSIVE DIGNITY OF THE POLITICAL It would seem to follow from Calvin’s radical separation of the spiritual from the temporal, and from his consequent denial of the efficacy of human choice, that politics is a low and sordid business without spiritual significance. But this is far from Calvin’s teaching. In fact, like Luther, but more emphatically and systematically, Calvin radically separates the two realms only to prepare to join them in a new way.

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From the beginning of Calvin’s political teaching it is clear that he grants politics a much higher status than did St. Augustine. For . . . it is not owing to human perverseness that supreme power on earth is lodged in kings and other governors, but by Divine Providence, and the holy decree of Him to whom it has seemed good so to govern the affairs of men. . . . Wherefore no man can doubt that civil authority is in the sight of God, not only sacred and lawful, but the most sacred and by far the most honourable, of all stations in mortal life.68

Calvin thus does not follow Luther’s argument that government is necessary only for those who are not true Christians. Rather, he holds that government is directly ordained of God and, in apparent agreement with Aquinas, that it is essential to our humanity. [I]ts use among men being not less than that of bread and water, light and air, while its dignity is much more excellent. Its object is not merely, like those things, to enable men to breathe, eat, drink, and be warmed, (though it certainly includes all these, while it enables them to live together;) this, I say, is not its only object, but it is that no idolatry, no blasphemy against the name of God, no calumnies against his truth, nor other offences to religion, break out and be disseminated among the people; that the public quiet be not disturbed, that every man’s property be kept secure, that men may carry on innocent commerce with each other, that honesty and modesty be cultivated; in short, that a public form of religion may exist among Christians, and humanity among men.69

How, though, is it possible for Calvin to combine such a low view of human nature—the doctrine of total depravity—with such a high view of the political function? If everything human, including, notably, the faculty of reason, is utterly corrupt, then how can politics be not only necessary but “excellent”? We will see that Calvin goes beyond Luther in separating the spiritual from the temporal and thus in fact invites their fusion. This fusion, moreover, anticipates the idealist materialism of modernity. Calvin, like Luther before him, was ready to appeal to Augustine’s writings on every point where such an appeal might lend authority to the Reformation. Thus many scholars have seen the Reformation as essentially a revival of what Perry Miller called the “Augustinian strain of piety.”70 This is no doubt a fair characterization of the practice of Reformation piety in general and indeed of much of Calvin’s preaching. In his deepest theological premises, however, the Genevan reformer broke in the most decisive respect with the whole tradition of medieval theology of which Augustine was a leading founder. Calvin radicalized the Platonic and Christian idea of divine transcendence to the extreme point where the hierarchy of the soul and of the world vanishes altogether;

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God is pushed so far beyond the human world that divinity can provide no intelligible reference point above the common, material interests of humanity, but only a spiritual sanction for the universalization of these interests. In its most straightforwardly political particulars, Calvin’s teaching seems to bear no resemblance to liberalism. His complicity in the execution of Servetus for heresy is often adduced to terminate discussion of liberalism’s allegedly Calvinist pedigree—and rightly so, at a certain level, for there can simply be no question of making John Calvin an advocate of political freedom as we would understand it. But if liberal toleration is not an end in itself but a strategy serving a deeper modern commitment to secularism, then, to judge whether any affinities exist between liberalism and Calvin’s interpretation of Christianity, one must look beneath the Reformer’s particular policies to his understanding of the end of political order and the meaning of political action. And to grasp Calvin’s political teaching at this level requires an examination of his fundamental teaching concerning human beings as they relate to God and to the world. Calvin rejects as presumptuous and impious the teaching of “sophists” (scholastic philosophers) such as Thomas Aquinas that human laws can and ought to contribute to the forming of the human soul to virtues understood to be intrinsically good.71 His very radical understanding of the Fall implies the absolute inability of human beings to contribute to the good of their own souls or of their fellows’, or even to grasp intellectually in the slightest degree the nature of the good. Calvin rejects Aquinas’s partial exemption of the rational faculty from the effects of the Fall; he insists that “the whole man is flesh” and that “the soul . . . is utterly devoid of all good.”72 At this point one might expect Calvin’s thought to tend in the direction of Augustine’s, whose skepticism regarding the high-minded classical politics of virtue issues, as we have seen above, in the view that politics is only a temporary remedy for the Fall, a mere compromise of human wills relative to the inferior goods of this world.73 Despite apparent affinities in their views of human nature, however, Calvin adopts a very different tone from Augustine’s in describing the status of politics in the divine economy. The Reformer describes government, not only as necessary, but as honorable and even excellent.74 He praises the political calling as “not only holy and lawful before God; but also the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings in the whole life of mortal men,” and considers magistrates as possessing “a mandate from God, . . . invested with divine authority, and . . . wholly God’s representatives.”75 Thus, although he assigns no inherently divine purpose to politics, Calvin insists that the political order is not just a makeshift remedy but is very much God’s own order. In comparison with either classical or Thomistic theory, therefore, it appears that Calvin at once lowers the ends of the political order and elevates

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its status. How this is possible will become clearer on considering more closely his teaching concerning the ends of politics. Insisting primarily on man’s duty to obey constituted authorities, Calvin avoids the classical problem of the best regime or “the best kind of laws.” He does, however, pause to consider “what laws can piously be used before God, and be rightly administered among men.”76 The standard that the Reformer applies to positive laws he identifies variously as the natural law, the moral law, conscience, the “rule of love,”77 and the divine law. These latter terms, particularly, seem to indicate a very high standard for the political order, and all the more so as Calvin writes, in a fuller discussion of the moral law, that “the purpose of the whole law [is] the fulfillment of righteousness to form human life to the archetype of divine purity.”78 Such a standard would appear as far removed as possible from the modern liberal’s commitment to secular or material ends. But how can this spiritual purpose be squared with Calvin’s own doctrine of the impotency of the human soul with respect to virtue? In fact, Calvin’s standard for politics and morality, though certainly rigorous, is by no means “high” in the traditional sense. Calvin’s radical break with classical moral and political philosophy—more radical than Augustine’s, not to mention Aquinas’—consists precisely in his repudiation of the hierarchical view of nature and of human nature which makes it possible to speak of “high” and “low.” For Calvin, there are no higher and lower parts of the soul, even before the fall.79 The “original integrity of man’s nature” thus has nothing to do with the classical idea of virtue. Indeed, the pretension of pagan philosophers to intrinsic virtues of the soul, which culminate in the fitness of the mind for restful contemplation of divine truth, is the clearest expression of the idol of self-sufficiency, the very essence of sin. For Calvin, therefore, “purity” must consist, not in rising above the lower desires, but in extending or universalizing our desires so as to include our neighbor: “[T]he emotion of love, which out of natural depravity commonly resides within ourselves, must now be extended to another, that we may be ready to benefit our neighbor with no less eagerness, ardor, and care than ourselves.”80 The divine law is a natural law in that it consists in the universalization of (otherwise depraved) natural desires. This helps to explain how Calvin can at once insist on the absolute and thoroughgoing depravity of human nature, the virtual death of the human soul, and yet maintain the existence of a “natural law.” The soul has no access to a transcendent purpose, but reason does not need a purpose in order to govern man, because purposeless “natural instinct”81 provides a standard of reason consistent with God’s purpose in the creation. The presumptuous urge to posit a “rational” good above natural instinct, above the preservation of self and society, “to fight against manifest reason,” is in fact essentially

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characteristic of fallen man. Men fight against the manifestly rational connection between natural instinct and the preservation of society “on account of their lust,” but in the name of some allegedly higher good.82 Calvin’s doctrine is thus not opposed to the rule of reason as such but only to the idea of the intrinsic goodness of reason, of the rational soul which governs by virtue of its own goodness. In reducing all men to equality before the law of generalized self-preservation, the Reformer does not oppose modern rationalism so much as classical reason. Calvin links the Glory of God with the most common needs of humanity, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of any intermediate ends. In order to exonerate God from all responsibility for evil, Calvin insists that nature, including human nature, as originally created, was uniformly good; no part of God’s original creation needed to be ruled by another part.83 From this it follows, not only that the appetites are in complete conformity with reason, but that reason is directed wholly towards the appetites, that it is altogether an instrumental faculty; there can be no distinction, for Calvin, between the good of reason and the goods of the body. Calvin thus radicalized the platonic and Christian idea of divine transcendence to the extreme point where the hierarchy of the soul and of the world vanishes altogether; God is pushed so far beyond the human world that divinity can provide no intelligible reference point above the common, material interests of humanity, but only a spiritual sanction for the universalization of these interests. Thus divinity is reduced to beneficent power in the service of humanity, and the soul is reduced to the locus of consciousness of this power. God becomes a vanishing point of transcendence from which the material world itself is infused with spiritual purpose. The paradoxical worldliness of Calvinism thus provides a surprising mirror image to the implicit standpoint of masterful transcendence presupposed in modern secular rationalism. The standpoint from which “this world” is constituted cannot itself fall within this world; it thus cannot be simply “worldly” or “secular” or “rationalistic.” Our universalizing worldliness, our disciplined and self-denying humanitarianism, cannot be understood or sustained without reference to such an other- or non-worldly standpoint.

MACHIAVELLI’S MODERNITY: CHRISTIANITY’S APPROPRIATION This strong reading of a fundamental tendency of John Calvin’s anti-theology is meant to point up the non-worldly pre-condition of modern worldliness. A brief consideration of Machiavelli’s patently this-worldly project of

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modernity will further illustrate this far-reaching paradox. Here I take Harvey Mansfield’s lucid exposition of this project as my point of departure. For Machiavelli, as Mansfield has explained, the essence of religion is the need of most people to have their cake and eat it too: to believe in goodness—their own, and, ultimately, the world’s—yet without sacrificing the human necessity of acquisition. “Goodness refuses to accept that necessity and takes refuge in religion, where it uncomprehendingly comes to terms with necessity.”84 It is through the notion of a mysteriously providential God that the believer embraces the “successful” outcome of immoral means within what he must continue to believe is a moral universe. The prince who understands this readiness of the people to be persuaded of the morality of successful wickedness can play the role of “God” while invoking his name in reconciling the moral appearance and the acquisitive reality of humanity, thus answering the people’s necessities while serving his own. “The prince can therefore secure himself and his regime with both the recommendation and the fear of God.”85 The Christian “sect,” in particular, provides at once a partial model for and the immediate obstacle to the establishment of new modes and orders: A model because “the Christian sect, unlike other less universal and less competent religions, has shown men how to unify mankind and capture the world for their own benefit”;86 but an obstacle because “Christianity is strong enough to defeat the strong, but not strong enough, because of its dependence on arms in an otherworldly sense, to be strong on its own.”87 The ultimate cause of the weakness of Christianity in answering human necessities, according to Mansfield’s Machiavelli, “is in the principles of classical political science, perhaps especially in the classical notion of the soul.”88 The classical understanding of the soul attempted to anchor human dignity and freedom by combining “two essentials: the soul as the beginning of motion and the soul as intellect.”89 (Tocqueville would certainly recognize here the “moral analogy,” the coordination of practice and theory that he regards as essential to the soul as well as the city.) In order to liberate humanity from the claims of otherworldliness, Machiavelli rejected the understanding of the soul as impartial intellect and thus was led to deny “the possibility of detachment in the human soul,” even if this meant “denying that men are capable of voluntary action.”90 The traditional idea of human freedom is thus sacrificed to the project of the liberation of human necessities from the claims of another world. But what can be the meaning of this sacrifice? How can Machiavelli’s own activity as author be understood in relation to his reduction of freedom to the “anticipation of necessity”?91 Mansfield, following Leo Strauss, seems to put the question of Machiavelli’s self-understanding front and center by keeping ever in mind the Florentine’s “strange suggestion that he was a prince.”92 But

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what is the nature of the necessity Machiavelli himself embraces in teaching others to embrace necessity? Is this a material necessity—”because one’s own body is the only common thing that can be benefited”?93 Such a reading would seem most clearly to establish Machiavelli’s decisive contribution to the pre-history of the modern (and in particular Hobbesian-Lockean) idea of “the individual.” According to Strauss, this would seem to be the decisive contribution, since “the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns concerns eventually, and perhaps even from the beginning, the status of individuality.”94 This Machiavellian-materialist genealogy, however, does not so much illuminate the modern notion of individuality as it confronts us with the darkness surrounding this notion. For clearly Machiavelli’s authorship cannot be understood as instrumental to some straightforwardly egoistic, material purpose of Machiavelli’s: the prince of princes did not found new modes and orders in order to put a roof over his head, or secure a pension, or even, presumably, to win favor with the ladies. It is more plausible, certainly, to refer Machiavelli’s authorship to the motive of “glory,” but then one still has to reckon with his reduction of all glory to bodily necessity, as well as with the puzzle of the strange fame of a project that, however effective in transforming the world, would only be fully appreciated by a handful of captains, at least before the ultimately deconstructive appreciation published by Leo Strauss. There seems, then, to be something irreducible in Machiavelli’s will to “acquire the world”95 by making himself “a patriot on behalf of humanity.”96 To master his natural concern for his own soul, Machiavelli must embrace without reserve the cause of this world. To attach himself to this world, he must renounce all claims of soulful detachment; but this renunciation itself implies a detachment from all consideration of his own “good,” on behalf of a humanity itself stripped of all idea of purpose. Thus, since the idea of a free choice is inseparable from the possibility of a rational and therefore in some way “detached” understanding of the way things are, humanity’s liberation from detachment must be at bottom a liberation from freedom itself,97 a renunciation of purposive action and therefore of a meaningful orientation towards the world in the common, natural sense. Does modern individualism not then presuppose a detachment from nature more radical than that of classical rationalism, or indeed of traditional Christianity? The “low but solid ground” of liberalism appears to dissolve into this mysterious resolution of the abstractly humanitarian self. To point up the mystery at the heart of Machiavelli’s “realism” does not invalidate his insight into the temptation of religion to reconcile necessity with morality “uncomprehendingly,” a temptation to which Christianity would appear to have succumbed more competently and universally than

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ancient religions. But to confront the difficulty of comprehending the spirit informing or impelling Machiavelli’s own project for the management of the relationship between deeds and beliefs is to re-open the question of whether Machiavelli appropriates more than a certain strategy from Christianity. For one cannot say, finally, which party is more “comprehending” than the other, and therefore who might be better said to be appropriating whom. If modern self-assertion is a kind of secularization of Christian universalist hopes, then the Christian subversion of the classical rule of reason, a subversion that is embraced most radically and consistently in John Calvin’s anti-theology, is also an anticipation of the modern conversion of transcendence to the horizontal plane. Modernity must be understood primarily negatively, that is, as the ongoing, eventually compulsive effort to “abolish moral analogy.” It has neither a simply religious nor a rational-secular foundation, because it has no stable, determinate foundation. The materialism of modernity needs but cannot acknowledge its idealism. The leveling of “this world” to matter to be mastered can only be accomplished by implicitly claiming an abstract or spiritual standpoint exempt from the highs and lows of the given world. And vice versa. This essential negativity of the movement of modernity can be simply stated: modern thought denies the classical teaching that human action and political order are guided by a natural orientation towards some “higher” good, some end qualitatively superior to material survival or satisfaction. Note that, on this definition, it is possible for Christianity to fall on either side of the classical/modern divide. If the Christian does not withdraw from the world altogether (which hardly seems Christian), then he must incline either towards the aristocratic, “vertical” transcendence of classical teleology or the Protestant-modern rejection of intelligible purpose. (The only other options would be to be guided not at all by choice or reason but absolutely by a comprehensive, revealed code of law, leaving no gaps to be filled in or tensions to be resolved by human judgment; or by continuous Divine revelation). From the standpoint of political philosophy (that is, from the most selfaware human standpoint), the dichotomy between classical and modern thus appears more fundamental than that between Christian and non-Christian, or between religious and non-religious. Every religion, as soon as it articulates some engagement in the world shared by human beings, must either act on the view that the good is somehow, in some degree, intelligible to man, or on the denial of this view.98 To be sure, common sense must object to this paradoxical fusion of idealism and materialism that a gulf remains between modern self-assertiveness and Calvinist assertion on behalf of the glory of God.99 But, in fact, such a gulf can

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be maintained only insofar as moderns betray their principles by articulating, or assuming some articulation of, the good of the self or soul, or Calvinists the goodness of God. Is modern rationalism thus a neutral instrument that can be directed towards the salvation of the soul as well as the preservation of the body? No. I would rather say that in modern thought the means tend to become the end—the relief of man’s estate is an excuse for the mastery of nature; it is the sense of mastery that seems to promise the collapse of theory into practice and therefore the overcoming of man’s duality or alienation from himself. Both Calvinism and liberalism direct man’s activities towards the universalization of self-preservation, but both are moved by a deeper interest in mastery than can express itself concretely only in the laying low of human claims to some intrinsic good.100

FAITH IN RIGHTS Consider, finally, in the light of these paradoxes of transcendence and immanence, the early and influential formulations of the modern doctrine of rights in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and of John Locke. For these modern founders human rights are understood as “natural” and appear to have a permanent and determinate nature, as defined within a context called “the state of nature,” a state in which “the individual” human being stands forth as prior to any moral, political, or religious authority. All authority must therefore be constructed, or created as it were ex nihilo, by human reason. This reason, having no positive purposes to guide it, can only frame a moral and political project by taking as a negative standard the evils it necessarily flees, that is, the death and discomfort of the body. (Hobbes emphasizes death, and Locke discomfort, or “uneasiness.”) This is the classical liberal idea of human rights as natural rights, rights defined and circumscribed by the most obvious features of our natural condition, our susceptibility to physical pain and death. But this limited and apparently reasonable conception of rights proves hard to maintain, and in fact its vulnerability to radicalization appears in the very moment of its birth. For, however reasonable we may find the priority Hobbes gives to physical security, it is not so easy to show conclusively, by reason alone, that there are no higher ends for which a human being might be willing to give his own life—or, to be sure, someone else’s. Human beings have always understood their existence in terms of some qualitatively higher possibilities, some “vertical” understanding of transcendence, and Hobbes cannot simply dismiss these possibilities with a wave of the hand, however convenient this may be to the worthy project of securing civil peace. Man does not live for bread alone, and

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this is true even if we understand that disastrous, fatal disagreements are likely to arise in our attempts to define what there is to live for other than bread. At the same time, it is clear that Hobbes’ theory of the construction of authority finally relies upon motives that his reductionist theory of human nature cannot account for. This is seen most easily in a kind of circularity that surrounds the fundamental social contract, or what Hobbes calls the authorization of the sovereign. Prior to the establishment of sovereign power, no obligation exists; nothing limits the natural right of the individual to defend his life and extend his power; in the state of nature man has a right to everything, not excepting the very bodies of other human beings. There is no natural obligation of any kind, and thus no obligation to keep promises; indeed the term promise has no meaning in the absence of a sovereign enforcer. And yet a promise, a pact among those authorizing the sovereign, is necessary to the creation of that very power. Hobbes proposes to create morality from purely non-moral natural materials, but this very creation presupposes the existence of a certain moral motive. The obligation to authorize a sovereign power, a power that has been explicitly severed from any qualitatively superior motives, natural or supernatural, is not finally reducible to purely individual selfishness. The argument from self-interest presupposes and rests upon a deeper commitment to the good, or rather to the interests, of an abstract humanity. The idea of obligation advanced by modern reason is if anything more mysterious than the religious argument it proposes to replace. The naturalness of “natural rights” was thus problematic from the beginning; modern naturalism is a pretext for the modern conquest of nature. This is just one indication that Hobbes’ cold, calculating materialism— apparently the most sober, limited basis for defining of “rights”—depends from the outset on an idealism, a mysterious ground of obligation, that it cannot see and cannot name. The appeal to “nature” understood materialistically is finally a pretext for an unacknowledged and therefore potentially limitless secular idealism, an idealism untainted by any positive content and therefore endlessly committed to the negation of all natural or divine frameworks of human meaning. Thus I think we find already in Hobbes an early indication of an essential characteristic of the modern doctrine of rights: modern rights, the rights of abstract, allegedly self-defining individuals, are directed against all substantive conceptions of human purpose, religious or philosophical, and yet to have any meaning they must be supported by an unacknowledged and abstract and radically horizontal transcendence, a kind of content-less faith that projects itself towards a future by progressively repudiating all contents inherited from the past. This future appears all the more glorious as it liberates itself ever more from all concrete experience other than the heady experience of an increasingly abstract self-assertion.

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From the beginning, then, the superficially “rational” assertion of human rights is inseparable from the promulgation of a new faith, a religion of humanity, or rather of the future of humanity, a faith, that is, in which the very definition of humanity must always once again be deferred to the future. Today, for example, following Kant, but only as far as we find it convenient, we pursue “human rights” as an expression or vindication of “human dignity.” But to define this dignity would be to limit it, and so we are left with no experience in terms of which to understand the worth or dignity of humanity but the very activity of the negative assertion of human rights, the ongoing repudiation of all attempts, rooted in religious or philosophical traditions, to give this “dignity” some positive content. And so a lazy materialism and militant relativism emerge as the effectual truth of the sublime dogma of human dignity. However destructive and frightening we may find this blind flight of humanity from the limited goods commensurate with its nature as a familial and political being, we must recognize that the power of this negativity derives from a certain truth that this flight expresses, however partially and thus irresponsibly. This truth is that human beings will always be driven to some degree and in some way by an awareness of their mysterious transcendence of every concretely representable or publicly determinate good. Augustine was right: no classical philosophical image of human perfection as culminating in the serene autonomy of the philosopher himself can contain or govern the longings of the human soul for some other kind of home. The rule of reason cannot be direct, but must honor the problematic articulations of transcendence generated in man’s practical existence, religious, familial, and political. For reason to assume any constructive responsibility among a humanity addicted to the flattery of “human rights,” to the unprecedented power over nature resulting from the coupling of universal material incentives with a negative spirituality or idealism, it will have to learn to show the connections between the indefinable freedom of the human spirit and the humbler necessities of our natures as beings dependent upon family, community, and polity. But to do this, to take responsibility for some “moral analogy” connecting our theoretical freedom with our practical belonging, reason would first have somehow to learn to see its own goodness in the light of a transcendence it can never adequately name. NOTES 1. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (New York: MacMillan, 1962), bk. 6, esp. chapters 5, 7. 2. Romans 7:19 (KJV).

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3. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 1, chap. 1. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 6, 1096b (20). 6. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 2. 7. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 7. 8. Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 13. 9. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 1, 1138b (34). 10. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 5, 11040b (5–7). 11. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 12, 1144a (8–9, 20–22). 12. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 9, 1142b (36, 24–25, 34). 13. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 11, 1143b (13). 14. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 12, 1144a (37). 15. Ibid., bk. 6, chap. 13, 1145a (4–5). 16. Ibid., bk. 7, chap. 8, 1150b (35–36). 17. Ibid., bk. 7, chap. 9, 1151b (8–10). 18. Ibid., bk. 7, chap. 13. 19. Ibid., bk. 7, chap. 14, 1154b (16–32). 20. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 7, 1177a (21–22). 21. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 7, 1177b (28–29). 22. Leo Strauss, “Restatement,” in On Tyranny, rev. ed., ed. Gourevitch and Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 204: “the ranks of the various kinds of pleasure ultimately depends upon the rank of the activities to which the pleasures are related.” 23. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 10., chap. 7, 1177a (23–26). 24. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 7, 1177a (35). 25. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 9, chap. 9, 1170b (14–15). Cf. bk. 7, chap. 14, 1154b (6–7, 29), where Aristotle observes that “for many people . . . it is painful for them to feel neither [pleasure nor pain],” and where the human interest in change or novelty is ascribed, following “the poet,” to “some evil in us.” 26. Ibid., bk. 9, chap. 8, 1169a (2–3). 27. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 5, 1176a (16–17). 28. Ibid., bk. 9, chap. 8, 1169a (1–2). 29. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 7, 1178a (2–3). 30. Ibid., bk. 10, chap. 7, 1178b (7–24). 31. Consider in this connection Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 9, chap. 8, 1169a (32–34), in which the higher selfishness, or the love of “the most sovereign element” in oneself is linked with a certain gratuity of the noble (that which ever rises above the common needs or desires) and then traced through an association with the “needs of the community” to a purer sense of gratuity in which the vanishing point of nobility appears to consist in a willingness to leave the actual actions of nobility to “friends”. Is this final one-upmanship of the noble not a figure of the philosopher, whose “larger share of what is noble” consists in taking not even nobility too seriously? But this claim to a nobility beyond nobility would have to be read in both directions, would it not?— philosophy is a step beyond nobility, but a noble step.

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The concrete meaning of the superiority of theory thus appears as the noble ascendancy of certain leisured friends of the noble gentlemen, friends who find it noble to leave to others the more common work of nobility. 32. Aristotle, Ethics, bk. 10, chap. 8, 1178b (11–12). 33. Augustine, The City of God, ed. David Knowles (New York: Penguin, 1972), bk. 10, chap. 29. This and all subsequent citations of Augustine by book, section, and sometimes page refer to this edition of The City of God. 34. Ibid., X.32. 35. Ibid., III.14. 36. Ibid., V.17. 37. Ibid., XIX.26. 38. Ibid., XIX.25. 39. Ibid., XIX.17. 40. Ibid., XIX.14. 41. Ibid., XIX.14. 42. Ibid., XIX.19. 43. Ibid., IX.14. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Republic VI. 505e 47. Ibid., IX.592b. 48. Ibid., IX.592a. 49. Augustine, City of God, IX.15. 50. Ibid., VIII.3, X.2. 51. Ibid., XI.2. 52. Ibid., XIX.19. 53. See Pierre Manent, The City of Man, trans. Marc Le Pain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 54. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract with Geneva Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 1978), 125, 126. 55. Augustine, City of God, XIX.17. 56. Ibid. 57. Matt. 22:21 (KJV). 58. Rom. 13:1 (KJV). 59. Paul Halsall, “Medieval Sourcebook,” www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/ b8-unam.html (accessed June 22, 2010). 60. Martin Luther, “Disputation Against Scholastic Theology,” In Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 34–39. 61. Martin Luther, “On Secular Authority,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 385. 62. Ibid., 374. 63. Ibid., 398. 64. Ibid., 375.

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65. Ibid., 377–78. 66. Ibid., 369. 67. Ibid., 389. 68. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1960), IV.xx.4. (Citations indicate part, chapter, section.) 69. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xx.3. 70. Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), chap. 1. 71. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xiii.11, 1265; IV.xiii.16, 1271. 72. Ibid., II.iii.1 and 2. 73. Augustine, City of God, XIX.17. 74. Calvin, Institutes, IV.xx.3. 75. Ibid., IV.xx.4. 76. Ibid., IV.xx.14. 77. Ibid., II.vii.15. 78. Ibid., II.vii.51. 79. Ibid., I.xv.6-8. Compare II.viii.51: “The reasoning of these sophists is not worth a hair: that the thing ruled is inferior to its rule.” 80. Ibid., II.viii.54. 81. Ibid., II.i.13. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., I.xv.7. 84. Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 27. 85. Ibid., 77. 86. Ibid., 111. 87. Ibid., 120. 88. Ibid., 276. 89. Ibid., 277. 90. Ibid., 277. 91. Ibid., 277. 92. Ibid., ix. 93. Ibid., 280. 94. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 323. 95. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue, xiv. 96. Ibid., 278. 97. See Pierre Manent, La Cité de l’homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 224, 226: “La nature enveloppe la liberte; elle est plus forte qu’elle. Pour autant, elle la nie. La philosophie moderne, en niant le libre arbitre, nie cette negation et libere la liberte . . . Affirmer la necessite des actes humains, c’est rendre possible l’affirmation d’une pure liberte; pour autant, c’est affirmer celle-ci.” “Nature envelops freedom; it is stronger than freedom. Thus it denies freedom. Modern philosophie, by denying free will, denies this negation and liberates freedom. Thus it affirms it.” Compare Strauss’s

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discussion of Machiavelli’s assumption of an Archimedean point outside of nature in Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 297. 98. Cf. Pierre Manent on this point: “Religion itself, which in principle elevates men above all earthly things, can give itself to men only in a conventional setting, only in being authorized—in both senses of the term—by certain men and certain institutions” in Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 103. 99. Calvin certainly retains the traditional language of the soul in many contexts; to the extent that this implies a hierarchy of goods his thought carries residues of classical, teleological Christianity. But it is characteristic of Calvin to turn man’s attention from his own soul toward the glory of God. The soul, I have written, is reduced to the bare consciousness of God’s material goodness. Since this glory cannot be interpreted according to the soul it can only be seen as directed towards the body. Calvin certainly believes that man has some post-mortal destiny; but the foreclosing of the question of the good makes it impossible that this destiny in any way impart its character to a conception of human ends. Calvin deliberately avoids any speculative or contemplative talk of blessedness or eternal peace. Whereas Augustine’s City of God accepts the classical orientation towards happiness as a final end, Calvin insists on putting aside happiness in favor of activity. He is emphatic that man must not be concerned with the condition of his own soul. Activity becomes its own end (except that preservation serves as a kind of default). 100. Consider, for example, a characteristic assertion of modernity, Descartes’ attempt to ground all knowledge in the activity of the thinking subject: “I think therefore I am.” Note that the Cartesian cogito points not to a self-sufficient ground of identity and purpose, but to a sheer assertion or resolution that, because it will not look up to any good, must exhaust itself in service to an abstract humanity and an endless mastery. If reason is but a “universal instrument,” then it can only adopt for its end “the law which obliges us to procure . . . the general [material] good of all mankind” (Discourse on the Method, Part VI). If the soul provides no bridge to a qualitatively superior realm, if the “self” in knowing itself knows no limiting and directing goodness, then pure self-consciousness and pure God-consciousness are equally reducible to consciousness of Mastery, and are practically indistinguishable because equally bound to the service of material necessities. Cartesian consciousness, like Calvinist conscience, points to a universalized, reductionist charity.

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Heidegger’s Rejection and Radicalization of Modern Transcendence

Tocqueville agrees implicitly and in advance with Heidegger’s critique of the naive autonomy of philosophy or theory. According to this critique, for thought to be lucid and self-critical regarding its own conditions and orientations, it must acknowledge its embedment within a life-world or practical horizon shared by non-philosophers. Nevertheless, theory and practice—the open possibility of thinking and the more determinate and shared goods of the common world—are never simply identical. That is, thinking is not simply reducible to its pre-theoretical conditions, and so the problem of the interrelation between theory and practice, the extraordinary and the ordinary, is inescapable. A preliminary comparison of Heidegger with Tocqueville will help begin to chart a path through the question of this interrelation. Here we are confronted with the paradox that Heidegger’s lofty “theoretical” critique of the equivalent decadence of all forms of modernity resulted from an effort to liberate practice from theory, whereas Tocqueville’s much more nuanced and in a way “practical” view of the nature of and prospects for modern democracy proceeds alongside what appears as a thoroughly traditional or classical habit of praising the dignity of theory above the mere necessities of practice. For example, Tocqueville clearly urges the cultivation of the life of the mind, as it were for its own sake, as a counterweight to the homogenizing utilitarian undertow of American democracy. He praises, for example, “pure science,” understood as the “ardent, haughty, and disinterested love of the true,” as distinct from the “industrial side” of science.1 Thus Heidegger sets out to liberate practice and seems to end up more “theoretical,” whereas Tocqueville praises the elevation of theory and seems much more practical. To understand these opposing paradoxical reversals in the status of theory and practice will take 115

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us far, I think, towards more rigorously articulating the status of thought and reflection in relation to the now inevitably liberal-democratic framework of our common life. Martin Heidegger understood better than anyone the necessity of reflexive responsibility at the philosophical level, but he refused—in my view wrongly, even disastrously—to connect this critical responsibility with the practical dimension of what I have called the responsibility of reason. He saw that theory and practice, knowing and being must have a common root, and that thinking cannot be whole and rigorous if it does not account for its own practical possibility. Heidegger pursued the root of this possibility with unparalleled, gigantic passion. But he inherits and fails adequately to question the mistake his teacher Husserl learned from Descartes, or from misreading Descartes: he associates the project of technological science with “the natural attitude,” the pre-philosophic comportment towards natural things. Thus, in responding to the nihilistic implications of the modern alliance of technological rationalism and democratic individualism, he throws out the baby with the bathwater: he throws out the tendency of things to emerge within a hierarchically articulated, “aristocratic” world along with the reduction of things to a “standing reserve,” stuff to make more stuff. He fails to attend to and to take responsibility for what Strauss will name the “heterogeneity” of what is given, which must (for reasons that are both “theoretical” and “practical”) include a distinctive, elevated place for mankind (however this elevation is interpreted).

HEIDEGGER’S RADICALIZATION OF PHENOMENOLOGY: THE LEAP OVER CHOICE The significance of the phenomenological movement in general and of Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology in particular may be grasped in the form of this paradox: he must attempt to respond theoretically to the tyranny of theory over life or practice. In fact, a perpetually radicalizing thrust in Heidegger’s thought may be understood as driven by a most intensely probing confrontation with precisely this paradox, a confrontation that refuses resolutely to abandon the paradoxical project. In confronting Heidegger’s resolute confrontation, we will not be able to propose a theoretical means of abandoning Heideggerian anti-theory, but we may perhaps glimpse or conceive (in the form of a qualified re-appropriation of classical political philosophy) the possibility of another—more wholesome and no less rigorous—attunement to the problem of theory and practice. Theodore Kisiel has brilliantly laid bare the steps by which, beginning properly in the “War Emergency Semester” course of 1919 on “The Idea of

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Philosophy and the Problem of Worldviews,” Heidegger became the philosopher we know by employing a radicalization of phenomenology in order to pursue the project (already conceived in the Eckhartian conclusion of his habilitation work of 1916) of a “breakthrough into true reality and real truth.”2 The most immediate obstacle to such a breakthrough—that is to say, what was immediately to be broken through—was a neo-Kantian philosophy that divided the matter of thought into scientific facts on the one hand and the philosophy of “worldviews” on the other. But the task of breaking through this particular obstacle would lead Heidegger to a radical and comprehensive dismantling of the whole tradition of philosophy from which neo-Kantianism had issued, and indeed to a confrontation with the way of being human that underlies that tradition. The “primal leap”3 that Heidegger undertakes in order to break through the tyranny of theory or to “salvage meaning against the scientific worldview reducing all to causal determination and brutally factic necessity”4 is a kind of excavation towards a “pretheoretical something,”5 a “preworldly vital something,”6 “the immanent historicity of life itself,”7 the very “experience of experience.”8 Heidegger believes he has found the means to such a breakthrough in the method of “phenomenological reduction” pioneered by Edmund Husserl. The method of “bracketing out all objective formations”9 seems to promise the possibility of an “understanding science,” a way of avoiding the reifying imposition of theory by achieving a “nontheoretical, nonobjectifying ‘intuition’” or “dedicative submission to life, sympathy with it.”10 Thus Heidegger takes up Husserl’s call “away from forms, back to the matters themselves,”11 to the pretheoretical, experiential truth, but with a determination to avoid subsuming the truth of these experiential things under an objectifying understanding. In this Heidegger might be said to be more faithful than Husserl to Husserl’s own goal of “reduction” of experience, that is, the attainment of “a sphere of experience which is not thinglike or real.”12 To probe further the meaning of Heidegger’s radicalization of Husserl’s phenomenology, it will be useful to consider both in their aspect as critiques of the then ascendant philosophy of “worldviews.” Why would not the return to a pre-scientific stratum of experience yield precisely an articulation of ethical, political, and religious views of the world? Heidegger, in fact, cites a moment in the work of Emil Lask that seems to lead in this broadly ethical or practical direction: Lask discovered in the ought and in value, as an ultimate experience and experienced ultimate, the world, which was not thinglike, nor sensorily metaphysical, as well as not unthinglike, extravagantly speculative, but rather was factic.13

But what can such a discovery (apparently of a certain primordiality of the ethical) mean in light of the fact that, as Kisiel writes, Heidegger has

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proposed “as an opening thesis (of the War Emergency Semester course) that philosophy and worldview have absolutely nothing to do with each other”? And lest we think that this a priori rejection of the interiority of ethics to politics applies only to the subjectivist implications of neo-Kantianism, consider that Heidegger explicitly proclaims “a brand new conception of philosophy . . . which would have to place it outside of any connection with the ultimate human questions.”14 Heidegger thus proposes an access to lived experience that involves or indeed rests upon an absolute repudiation of any connection with ultimate human questions. What can this mean? It must be that the tyranny of theory springs precisely from or finds expression in the traditional orientation of philosophy towards “ultimate human questions,” an orientation not completely overcome in Husserl’s work. Heidegger’s project must therefore be at once “pretheoretical” and “supratheoretical.”15 An interpretive phenomenological return or rather leap to the pretheoretical things themselves requires the most radical supratheoretical reduction, not only of the world of objective things but of “ultimate human” meanings. The return to the things themselves is anything but a return to nature; it is indeed the accomplishment, or the ever-renewed project of accomplishing, the most radical bracketing of natural meanings. Husserl had failed to undertake the final step or consummating leap of this anti-natural project, since he left un-reduced the human meaning of theory or intuition itself, as a remnant of the natural orientation, a residual natural teleology. Already in 1919, Heidegger had thus conceived the (inherently endless) project of grinding to nothingness the natural world of meanings or of “ultimate human questions” between the stones of the pretheoretical and the supratheoretical. To undertake what Kisiel calls the “virtually contradictory limit-case of an Ur-science” which is implied in Heidegger’s claim “to articulate the pretheoretical realm of life in a pretheoretical way,”16 Heidegger does not retreat from but proposes to pass through the nihilism of a scientific reduction of the world to facts, and this by radicalizing this very reduction. A nonobjectifying conceptualization of the pre-theoretical requires a method which carries the characteristic generality and formalism of science to the nth degree, a “unique eidetic universality needed to grasp the ‘world-character of experienced experience.”17 Heidegger proposes as an alterative to and radicalization of traditional theory, “that allusive universal called the formal indication;”18 he will fashion a vocabulary that allows the form of lived experience to indicate itself without privileging any particular content of experience. It is out of this preworldly vital something that the formal objective something of knowability is first motivated. A something of formal theoretization. The

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tendency into a world [that of es weltet] can be theoretically deflected before its demarcation and articulation as a world.19

Kisiel continues, now paraphrasing Heidegger: In short, the universality of formalization has the direct access to the flowing “primal something” which phenomenological intuition wishes to have. The reflexive categories derived from formalization are not “parasitical” upon the constitutive categories of the world, as Lask thought. Their contentlessness reflects a freedom from the genera and species generated in the theoretical generalization of the world, a freedom which makes them philosophically useful.20

Thus, Kisiel remarks a little further on, Heidegger’s proposed hermeneutical approach to ontology fulfills the traditional quest of philosophy for what is “at once comprehensive and fundamental.”21 But it does this, we should notice, by a radical liberation from the traditional contents of philosophy. Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology is radically practical in that it seeks intimacy with the most primal “preworldly”22 moment of life; it endeavors to slip discreetly into the very stream of life in order to capture the sheer form of temporal intentionality, a “moment of ‘out towards . . . into a (determinate) world’”23 prior to any concrete determination; and yet it is for this very reason radically theoretical and violent in relation to concrete practical life in that it must constantly “tear itself away from the natural attitude . . . it tears itself out of the life-context in ever renewed spontaneity.”24 In order to release this most radical spontaneity or to develop a language that will end the tyranny of theory and provide an “index for the highest potentiality of life,”25 Heidegger’s theoretical man, “much like the religious ascetic . . . must free himself from the burden of this basic stratum of experience and reshape his emotional ties to it.”26 If, as Kisiel observes, Heidegger already in 1919 understands philosophy as “an orienting comportment, a praxis of striving . . . more a form of life on the edge of expression rather than a science,”27 then we must insist that this “striving” and this “life” are not the concrete or natural world-oriented life of human beings as such, but rather the most radically refined and purified reductions of scientific asceticism itself. Thus, it is somewhat misleading of Kisiel to characterize Heidegger’s “formally indicating ‘concepts’” as “first intended to serve life rather than science.”28 It would be more precise to say that they are intended to serve life as science, or science as life, since the tendency of Heidegger’s project is precisely to collapse, by radicalizing, the distinction between science and life. We are standing at the methodological crossroad which will decide the very life or death of philosophy; we stand at an abyss: either into nothingness, that

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is, absolute thingness, or we somehow manage the leap into another world, or better: for the first time into the world as such.29

Kisiel shows that Heidegger’s access to “the world as such” is indeed for the “first time” and thus at the same time precisely a leap into another world—a world not of natural human meanings but a leap through absolute reification to the mean-ing of science that remains after science has reduced all natural meanings to nothingness. The absolute freedom of science is finally realized, or rather perpetually enacts its realization, not in a retreat from but in a leap toward the far side of “the total domination of the thing itself.”30 The reduction of the world to sheer facticity is the necessary condition or accompaniment of the releasing of pure spontaneity or potentiality. The encounter with a facticity not less but more purely factical than objective facts releases the possibility of a meaning more intimate to human existence than the subjectivity of worldviews, not to mention “the ultimate human questions.”

HEIDEGGER’S RADICALIZATION OF ARISTOTLE: LIBERATION FROM THE GOOD In a kind of preface to his lecture course published in English as Plato’s Sophist,31 entitled “Preliminary Considerations,” Martin Heidegger alerts his students to the “necessity of a double preparation,” an “orientation” involving, “on the one hand, the character of the objects to be dealt with and, on the other hand, the ground out of which we attain the historical past.” The “peculiar objects” are identified as “Being, and non-being, truth and semblance”; the ground from which the past is to be attained is described as a “right way” which will allow us to avoid imposing “arbitrary viewpoints” on “the past we encounter in Plato.” Immediately we see how closely the question of the objects and that of the way are bound up, for Heidegger proposes as a preparation for the objects (a “taking up of the matters at issue themselves”) “a consideration of the method and aim of phenomenology.”32 Heidegger’s brief account of phenomenology in this context seems to reveal in a very dense and compact way both the privileged status he accorded this philosophical school and the direction in which he would go beyond or transform it. He describes “the phenomenological way of consideration” as “distinguished by the determinate respect in which it posits the beings that show themselves and in which it pursues them. The primary respect,” he continues, “is the question of the Being of these beings.” But this potential of phenomenology is apparently not fully at work in the phenomenology of “the present era,” that is, in Husserl’s work, since this work considers the phenomena

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within a certain domain, namely, “consciousness or lived experience.” The priority of these Husserlian themes is itself founded, however, “in the times, i.e., in history;” and thus the phenomena are so far taken up only as conditioned by “a rich history of research,” by “already determined perspectives and modes of questioning.” In particular, Dilthey’s “descriptive psychology” provides the immediate background and basis for Husserl’s interest in a certain determinate domain called “consciousness and lived experience.” Thus, although “phenomenology has once again made it possible, in the field of philosophy, to raise questions and to answer them, scientifically,” Husserl’s method must be deepened in order to realize this possibility, in order to “posit” and “pursue” the beings in question in “the primary respect,” that is, with respect to “the question of the Being of these beings.” It is here that ancient philosophy comes into play, for it is “precisely from the simple and original considerations of the Greeks” that we can learn what “is not a mere technical device but is alive in every originally philosophizing work,” that is, attention to the “phenomena,” or to the “beings as they show themselves in the various possibilities of their becoming disclosed.” We can thus learn from the Greeks how to see beyond or to see deeper than a phenomenology that presupposes a certain character of “consciousness and lived experience.” And “the Platonic dialogues, in the life of speech and counter-speech, are particularly suited to carry out such criticism and cross-checking.”33 This way of attending to the phenomena or “the matters themselves,” a way more adequate than that determined by the historically conditioned categories of “consciousness” and “lived experience” has nothing to do, of course, with some naively theoretical or objectivist understanding of beings, an understanding in which beings would be simply “seen” as objects present before the theorist. On the contrary, the point is “to bring oneself into position to see phenomenologically in the very work of discussing the matters at issue.” The position of a radicalized phenomenology would be one in which vision and discourse are understood in their inseparability. Once the common ground of seeing and discussing is attained, “then phenomenology may very well disappear,” not because the questions of “consciousness” and “lived experience” will have been set aside, but precisely because both will have been raised and understood from their ground, a ground that Heidegger evokes in the following arresting, even foreboding call to “the authentic task” of “an inner understanding of scientific questioning within your own respective fields”34: Only in this way is the question of science and life brought to a decision, namely by first learning the movement of scientific work and, thereby, the true inner sense of scientific existence.35

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The matter is ultimately inseparable from the way, and what we know as theoretical “consciousness” must be traced to the same ground as “lived experience,” a ground that is as much that of “science” as of “life,” of scientific apprehension and of existential decision. It remains that this matter and this way are fraught with difficulty: we need the past—Plato’s thought, in particular—to get leverage on the present, “to take what is obvious and make it transparent in these foundations,” but there is no simple access to this past. The past “does not simply lie there before us,” for “we are this past itself.” Thus “to understand history cannot mean anything else than to understand ourselves” in the radical sense that we must “experience what we ought to be.” What we ought to be is not something apart from our history, but this very history knowingly appropriated; herein lies “the authentic possibility to be history.”36 Our history must become a problem for us, not in order to accede to some truth above or outside it, but precisely in order for us to be this history authentically. The past is our lever against the obviousness in which we now swim unknowingly like fish in the sea; but even this lever requires in turn its own privileged lever, some pointer “that precisely does not simply lie there before us.” To study Plato with any hope of real penetration into his “actual philosophical work . . . we must be guaranteed that right from the start we are taking the correct path of access.”37 And it is just such a guarantee that Heidegger believes Aristotle can provide us. This is justified by the “old principle of hermeneutics, namely that interpretation should proceed from the clear to the obscure,” coupled with the presupposition (“We will presuppose” . . .) “that Aristotle understood Plato,” indeed that he understood Plato better than Plato understood himself.38 Plato may have been more “creative,” but precisely for this reason it seems to have been left to Aristotle to say “more radically” and develop “more scientifically” what Plato had first “placed at his disposal.”39 What is at stake for Heidegger in Plato’s Sophist, and thus in Aristotle as a privileged “path of access” into Plato’s thought, is “human Dasein in one of its most extreme possibilities, namely philosophical existence.”40 It is from within the question of the meaning and possibility of philosophy (and, accordingly, of the non-philosopher par excellence, the sophist) that Heidegger proposes a study of the Being of beings. It is with such questions in view that Heidegger turns, in the (brief) second part of the three main parts of this preface, to an “Orientation toward Plato’s Sophist, with Aristotle as point of departure.”41 It is notable that in this first, preliminary discussion of “The theme: the Being of beings,” Heidegger does not begin to define a “path of access” by engaging a text either from Plato or from Aristotle. Rather, he simply makes some very general and fundamental observations on his own authority. “Beings” appear

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first, “wholly indeterminately,” in the two categories of “beings of the world in which Dasein is” and “the beings which are themselves Dasein.”42 The first disclosure of beings is thus their limited disclosure within man’s “surrounding world.” The possibility of philosophy or science must somehow be accounted for out of this original situation. Out of this natural orientation in his world, something like science arises for him, which is an articulation of Dasein’s world, and of Dasein itself, in determinate respects. But what can be the meaning of these “determinate respects” equivalent to the rise of science, and how will they stand with respect to “this natural orientation”? The first orientation of consciousness, Heidegger continues, takes place with reference to a “determined view,” to a δóξα [doxa] or opinion, in particular “opinions about life and its meaning.” It is precisely the realm of such opinions about life and its meaning, a realm unquestioned by “everday Dasein,” that “scientific research” must question, indeed “penetrate through.” Every Platonic dialogue shows Plato attempting such penetration, but each also shows the limits of his efforts; the dialogues “manifest where Plato had to stand still and could not penetrate.” Here again it is Aristotle who must teach us, or show us the way towards, the “correct way of seeing,”43 a way that fully penetrates the natural orientation, or the realm of opinion. This way of Aristotle, Heidegger alerts us in advance, will not rest with “truth” understood as a proposition or a judgment, a way that “disclose[s] beings as such and such and take[s] possession of what is thus disclosed.”44 Rather, a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of truth must be sought. In the third and final part of this preface, Heidegger thus turns to the meaning of truth, and takes as his guide the Greek word αληθεια [alethia]. He focuses decisively on the privative character of this word: “‘αληθεια’ means: to be hidden no longer, to be uncovered.” This privative character of the Greek understanding of truth Heidegger takes as a clue to “the fact that the uncoveredness of the world must be wrested, that it is initially and for the most part not available.”45 And thus our attention is directed towards the obstacles to truth, to that from which uncoveredness must be wrested. “The world is [at first] disclosed only in the immediate circle of the surrounding world, insofar as natural needs require.” Perhaps, then, one might gather, the wresting work of truth must be directed first against attachments founded on natural needs. But this is not at all Heidegger’s emphasis. Indeed, he grants a certain validity to “that which in natural consciousness was, within certain limits, perhaps originally disclosed.” Heidegger’s characterization of the perennial obstacle to unconcealment confirms the earlier targeting of opinion: what is originally disclosed “becomes largely covered up again and distorted by speech.” The “much more dangerous coveredness” is that of “idle talk.” The “positive task” of “breaking through for the first time to the

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matters themselves” by following through on the original but inadequate disclosure of natural consciousness, the consciousness pursuant to natural needs, is compounded by the “battle against idle talk.” Opinions rigidify themselves in concepts and propositions; they become truisms which are repeated over and over, with the consequence that what was originally disclosed comes to be covered up again.46

Heidegger thus describes our condition as that of a “double coveredness,” but clearly his agonistic attention is focused, not on any distortion (never mentioned) pertaining to disclosure driven by “natural needs,” but rather on the second coveredness, that is, on the imperative to “cut through idle talk and penetrate to Being itself.” And the challenge to today’s thinkers is particularly great—one might even speak (though Heidegger does not) of a third coveredness—since “we are burdened by a rich and intricate tradition.”47 It is notable, moreover, that Heidegger neither draws nor even suggests any connection between the distortions of speech and the needs of nature. Indeed, he grants that “nature is there at hand even before it is disclosed,”48 and in fact concludes these “preliminary considerations” by what might be called a somewhat zoological transition (with reference to Aristotle’s De Anima) to his interpretation of the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics: Truth (as disclosing or uncovering) is associated with speech (“which most basically constitutes human Dasein”49), which in turn is immediately associated with calculation (in the broadest sense of “to be designing”). And this faculty of calculative speech is referred to the vocalization of animals: “speaking is a mode of being of what is alive.”50 Thus Aristotle, in De Anima, first founded the possibility of speaking or interpreting (αληθευειν) [aletheuein] ontologically, through the concept of calculating or designing, in the more general phenomenon of life. But it is in the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics that the possibility of interpretation will be referred to itself, that a further “interpretation is accomplished:”51 there, “for the first time and before all else, [Aristotle] saw and interpreted on that ground the multiplicity of the phenomena, the multiplicity of the various possibilities of αληθευειν.”52 Whether, how, or to what degree such “interpretation” avoids the re-covering-up of “idle talk” is a question we should have in mind as we proceed further in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle. PHRONESIS UNCONCEALED Following this preface (“Preliminary Considerations”), Heidegger turns to an “Introductory Part” consisting of three chapters (pages 15–129 altogether in the English translation), followed by a “Transition” (pages 131–155) to the

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“Main Part” of the course, or the part that deals thematically with Plato. Our task of wresting a determinate meaning and intention from Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is a difficult one, for Heidegger often appears to be simply expounding Aristotle’s meaning, with remarkably careful and even respectful attention to the sense of Aristotle’s words for the author himself and for his original audience. And there is no question that Heidegger’s exposition of Aristotle’s thought is admirably rich and thus of great (though of course not incontestable) value as such an exposition. But we will note a number of passages in which Heidegger makes clear an intention—or rather makes it clear that he has an intention—that goes far beyond faithfulness to Aristotle. We will collect and consider a number of such passages as clues to the deepest meaning of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle. Eventually, such a study of Heidegger’s use of Aristotle should allow us to discern precisely what is at stake in his departure from the Greeks, and whether any possibilities were left behind in this departure that we may choose to reconsider. In chapter 1of this “Introductory Part,” Heidegger proposes a “Preparatory Survey of the Modes of αληθευειν [aletheuein]” on the basis of the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics. In this way Heidegger promises to “secure the ground on which Plato moved in his research into the Being of beings as world and,” more critically, “into the Being of beings as human Dasein, the Being of philosophically scientific existence.” Here he immediately invokes that against which such an effort must proceed: though we may speak of truth as “a character of beings . . . it is human Dasein that is properly true.” True Dasein “cultivates an association” with beings,” “the soul sets itself by itself on the way toward truth, toward beings insofar as they are unconcealed.” But, “on the other hand, the many “are still far from the unconcealedness of things.”53 This distance from truth manifests itself in the distorting prejudice that associates truth with “objectivity understood as universal validity, universal binding force.” But the truth Heidegger wants to exhibit may not be “binding for everyone but only for a single individual.” Nor should we assume in advance that “genuine uncovering has to be by necessity theoretical knowledge,” such as offered by “science” or mathematics.54 Truth, unconcealedness, uncoveredness, conforms rather to beings themselves and not to a determinate concept of scientificity. That is the intention of the Greek concept of truth. On the other hand, it is precisely this Greek interpretation of truth which has led to the fact that the genuine ideal of knowledge appears in theoretical knowledge and that all knowledge receives its orientation from the theoretical.55

We see clearly in this passage that, for Heidegger, Greek thought is both the problem and somehow a key to the solution: the Greeks are the source

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of the still reigning prejudice in favor of theoretical knowledge; and yet their thought, or their “intention,” can point us beyond any “determinate concept of scientificity” to a more original understanding of unconcealment, and thus, presumably, to “the Being of philosophically scientific existence.”56 The Greeks point us beyond scientificity to authentic science. “It is primarily the πραγµατα [pragmata] . . . that are uncovered,”57 and it is primarily speaking λóγóς [logos] that operates the uncovering of things. But speaking immediately becomes the spoken, and the repeated propositions that are spoken acquire “a peculiar detachment” from what was originally disclosed. And so truth comes to be associated with propositions or judgments, and with the correspondence of the judgment with the object. This is the genesis of the perennial resistance to authentic truth: “Idle talk . . . has a peculiar binding character, to which we adhere inasmuch as we want to find our orientation in the world and are not able to appropriate everything originally.”58 And this “fallenness” of the concept of truth is by no means “accidental, but is grounded in Dasein itself, insofar as Dasein moves in the common everyday sort of knowledge, in λóγóς.”59 How can Dasein’s original disclosure in speaking (λóγóς) [logos] be retrieved from this fallenness of the spoken λεγóµενον [legomenon]? How can “the true inner sense of scientific existence”60 or “the Being of philosophically scientific existence”61 be wrested from the idle talk of common, everyday existence”? This is the question that drives Heidegger’s encounter with Aristotle. Heidegger’s answer—to leap ahead somewhat in this text—clearly lies in some reinterpretation of Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom (φρóνησις [phronesis]). In order to concentrate our interest on φρóνησις, Heidegger must first reveal the limitations of that mode of truth or unconcealing that was “for the Greeks surely the one which grounds the possibility of science,” that is, scientific knowledge or επιστεµη [episteme]. Heidegger observes, somewhat abruptly, but in a way that clearly marks out a project of inquiry leading to Being and Time and beyond, that it is “remarkable” that in επιστηµη “beings are determined with regard to their Being by a moment of time,” that is by the present: “For what the Greeks mean by Being is presence, being in the present.” The Greek understanding of the everlasting (Áεí) [aei]62 or eternally present is bound up with “a positionality toward the beings of the world which has at its disposal the outward look of beings.”63 This “outward look” (ειδος) [eidos] is of course the mode of disclosing that takes center stage in Plato’s philosophy, in the famous “doctrine of the Ideas.”64 But Heidegger proposes to look beyond “what the author himself designates as the most important,” in order to attend to Plato’s silences, to “remain oriented toward the place where the ειδος first steps forth quite naturally, i.e., in which mode

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of αληθευειν [aletheuein] it explicitly emerges.” And in attending to this emergence we discover that Τεχνη [Techne] is the ground upon which something like the ειδος becomes visible in the first place.”65 The Greek understanding of scientific knowledge is thus founded, according to Heidegger, on the availability for making of the always retrievable look of the thing. But this reveals a deficiency in the understanding of science as επιστηµη [episteme]. επιστηµη understands itself as a practice πραξις [praxis] “which does not have as its goal some sort of result (the way producing does) but instead simply strives to get hold of beings as αλεθεια [alethes— unconcealed].” But in fact, “this knowing is in the service to a making.”66 Because επιστηµη takes up its understanding of being from τεχνη, it shares with it a critical deficiency with respect to the disclosing of Dasein itself. Both are undermined by a certain “accidental” quality in relation to the beings they take up: Τεχνη “does not have at its disposal, with absolute certainty, the success of the work. In the end the εργον [ergon] is out of the hands of τεχνη. Here we see a fundamental deficiency in the αληθευειν [aletheuein] which characterizes τεχνη.” Similarly, “every επιστηµη . . . always presupposes that which it cannot itself elucidate as επιστηµ”67; it depends upon a certain perception of the beings (a perception derivative from the comportment of τεχνη that it “cannot itself demonstrate.”)68 “Every comportment of Dasein is . . . determined as πραξις καí αληθεια [praxis kai aletheia].” But, precisely because scientific knowledge understands itself as “autonomous,” as a self-sufficient practice desired for its own sake, it does not understand that its original positionality towards beings as perceived is determined in advance by the comportment of τεχνη [techne]. And so scientific knowledge cannot reveal “the uncoveredness of Dasein itself as well as of the beings to which Dasein relates in its actions.”69 For such a revelation we must turn to another comportment, to the mode of unconcealing proper to πραξις [praxis] itself. This mode of disclosing is φρóνησις [phronesis]. Heidegger is clearly drawn to what he sees as a kind of self-referential quality in Aristotle’s exposition of the understanding of the truth of φρóνησις: “The αληθευειν [aletheuein] of φρóνησις therefore contains a referential direction to the αληθευων [aletheuoon] himself.”70 “In the case of ποíησις [poesis], the τελος [telos] is something other; but this does not hold for πραξις [praxis]; the ευπραξíα [eupraxia; right action] is itself the τελος.”71

Dasein “has at its disposal its own transparency.”72 This transparency is possible because φρóνησις [phronesis] does not aim at some result other than

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itself, because “a result is not constitutive for the Being of an action; only the ευ [eu], the how, is.”73 Heidegger is clearly eager to associate φρóνησις [phronesis] with the agonistic character of disclosure. The αληθεια [aletheia] effectuated in φρóνησις [phronesis] is necessary because a disposition can cover up man to himself. A person can be concerned with things of minor significance; he can be so wrapped up in himself that he does not genuinely see himself. Therefore he is ever in need of the salvation of φρóνησις [phronesis]. Circumspection regarding himself and insight into himself must again and again be wrested away by man in face of the danger of διαφθεíρειν [corruption] and διαστρεφειν [distortion].74

Heidegger notices that, for Aristotle, pleasure and pain seem to be main threats to the clear-sightedness of φρóνησις [phronesis]; but this is not the threat that most concerns Heidegger. He is interested in φρóνησις as “a view of a concrete action and decision,” and not as a speculation on the principles or ends of action; his φρóνησις “is not an ethics and not a science.”75 In fact, in a very arresting moment of the lectures he abruptly identifies φρóνησις with “conscience:” It is . . . clear from the context that Aristotle has here come across the phenomenon of conscience. Φρóνησις is nothing other than conscience set into motion, making an action transparent.76

What can be the import of this surprising identification? Heidegger more than once pauses to insist that what interests him has nothing to do with “religion” or “theology.”77 He is particularly taken by the fact that φρóνησις , like conscience, cannot be forgotten. The burden of the term conscience seems to be a transparent awareness of Dasein in action—but an awareness that is not dependent upon any higher reference, but which, on the contrary, is fully transparent because it is identical with the worldly, situated awareness of the action itself; thus, “conscience set into motion.”78 One might say that Heidegger’s phronesis-conscience combines the worldly contextuality of pagan action with the transparent purity of Christian obedience—Heideggerian φρóνησις is the effectual truth of conscience. Throughout the remaining two chapters of this “Introductory Part” on Aristotle, Heidegger’s chief concern will be to address Aristotle’s challenge to Heidegger’s own attempt to interpret φρóνησις [phronesis] as a privileged mode of truth. For Aristotle articulated an alternative to φρóνησις as the highest comportment of Dasein—that is, σοφíα [sophia]—and indeed seemed finally to rank this latter alternative as the highest. How then can the

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possibilities of φρóνησις be wrested away from this Greek authority? The key will be to show in what way the understanding of “σοφíα as the highest possibility of the Being of Dasein” depends upon “that which the natural understanding of the life of the Greeks strove for”—how what they took up as simply natural was, in fact, determined by its being Greek. To penetrate through this Greek determination it is necessary to understand Aristotle better than he understood himself, to further radicalize the understanding he was already radicalizing. The presupposition of such a radicalizing interpretation is “that Dasein be thematic, and if the interpretation interprets something ‘into’ Aristotle, it does so merely to attain and to understand what is genuinely taking place in him.”79 To make Dasein thematic is to refer Being to time: “If we as a matter of principle orient the Greek concept of Being to time, then this is not a mere haphazard idea but has a quite determined foundation.”80 BEYOND THEORY AND PRACTICE To trace the origin in “natural” Greek Dasein of the privilege of σοφíα [sophia], Heidegger offers a close reading of the first two chapters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. I will not rehearse this reading in detail, but will only note that the path Heidegger traces leads from perception to retention to experience and then to τεχνη [techne], which proceeds through the abstraction of the ειδος [eidos], or outward look of things. Finally, “in τεχνη σοΦíα is predelineated.”81 ΣοΦíα understands itself as free from the instrumentality of τεχνη, but it takes up from it a determinate understanding of Being as disposable presence. The relation between σοΦíα and the “natural” or everyday understanding of things is a complex one, and it is not easy to tell when Heidegger, in examining this relation, is himself embracing the “Greek” orientation and when he is distancing himself from it. For, though the main thrust of his argument is clearly the appreciation of the possibilities of φρóνησις [phronesis], there is a certain moment of radicalism in Greek σοΦíα that he wishes to preserve or to extend. “Within the fabricating, the λεγειν [legein] becomes more and more autonomous, and the naturally most immediate Dasein interprets it as σοφωτερον [most wise].”82 The movement from the useful to the purely theoretical begins in a natural or everyday interpretation. Everyday Dasein appreciates and praises what goes beyond everyday Dasein: His [the wise one’s] discovering goes beyond the immediate possibilities in the power of Dasein. In this way, the admiration dispensed by everyday Dasein demonstrates that in Dasein itself there lives a special appreciation of discovery.83

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The “leap from the tendency to fabricate” to “mere onlooking and disclosure” finds social and political expression in the privileged, leisured status of priests: “the first sciences, e.g., mathematics, originated in Egypt, because the priests had the time to do nothing but observe.”84 And yet “σοΦíα [sophia] . . . is concerned with a disclosure which proceeds as a counter-movement in relation to immediate Dasein.”85 The puzzle is that the counter-movement to immediate Dasein is in another sense a natural (or “natural”) movement of Dasein—a movement towards free, pure, non-instrumental disclosure. One can understand Heidegger’s intention in this second chapter to be that of securing the purity of this movement by radicalizing and thus completing the counter-movement against “natural” Dasein. But can this purity be equivalent to that of pure, theoretical onlooking? The autonomy of σοΦíα [sophia] presents itself as grounded in a pure theoretical attunement to “the good” αγαθóν [agathon] or “the highest good” αρíστων [ariston]. It is through an understanding of “αγαθóν as τελος [telos]” that Aristotle “achieves for the first time a fundamental ontological understanding of the αγαθóν.”86 Heidegger appears to embrace this understanding of θεωρειν [theorein] as “a completely autonomous comportment of Dasein”—but when he adds, “not related to anything else whatsoever,”87 then we begin to see that by radicalizing Aristotelian “pure unlooking,” he is wresting it away from Aristotle. For the autonomy of theory in Aristotle is conditioned by Dasein’s orientation towards a good with which it is not simply identical. This good Aristotle ultimately refers to an understanding of “everlasting being” and thus to “the basic constitution of beings in themselves.”88 Heidegger’s account, as indeed he has promised earlier, subtly but distinctly turns away from this orientation to αγαθóν [agathon; the highest good] in order to point to the understanding of Dasein on its own terms, to the disclosing activity of Dasein itself; the movement toward “the world” or toward the αγαθóν is effectively bracketed in order to focus on the movements of Dasein itself, in such a way that the απορειν [aporein; impasse] does not concern what is encountered accidentally and happens to be striking but rather includes the sense that Dasein sets itself on the path where what is striking is what was always already there. Where such απορειν occurs, there takes place this setting oneself on the way, this being underway toward.89

Toward what? This is no longer the most pertinent question, for any “what,” even the Good, is notable mainly for its having been always already there, for its being a mode of Dasein. Heidegger’s radicalizing of pure theory frees the wonder of Dasein from any being but the Being of Dasein itself. “In this way σοΦíα [sophia] manifests a possibility of existence in which Dasein

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discloses itself as free, as completely delivered over to itself.”90 To complete Aristotle’s ontologizing of the good is to go beyond the good to the Being of Dasein. Is Heidegger here abandoning his case for φρóνησις [phronesis] in favor of a radicalized understanding of σοΦíα [sophia]? One could easily get that impression from the following remark about Plato and Aristotle: Aristotle’s designation of σοΦíα as a τοιαυτη φρóνησις [toiaute (peculiar) phronesis] manifests at the same time an orientation against Plato, who did not attain a very discriminating understanding of these phenomena. When Aristotle speaks of σοΦíα as φρóνησις, he is indicating that he sees in σοΦíα (as Plato did in φρóνησις) the highest mode of αληθευειν [aletheuein] and in general man’s highest comportment, the highest possibility of human existence.91

But Heidegger’s intention is not so simple, and he soon turns (in chapter 3) to restating and refining the case for φρóνησις. The difficulty, as stated at the end of chapter 2, is that σοΦíα, though radical and pure in principle, appears to be beyond the reach of human beings, in bondage as we are to circumstances and importunities. The life of pure wisdom is best, but it is beyond us, it is “of the gods” or “divine.” It is thus “in a certain sense possible, and in a certain sense impossible.”92 And so Heidegger turns again to the possibility of a “more radical conception of φρóνησις [phronesis],” a possibility prepared by the remark that “the νεοιν [noein] operative in σοΦíα [sophia] is carried out by man within speech.” The representation of theory as sheer speechless unlooking is thus necessarily a distortion. How does it stand then concerning φρóνησις? “Can φρóνησις disclose and preserve the αρχη [arche] of the beings at which it aims?” To show in what way it can, Heidegger then repeats and amplifies the argument for the transparency and autonomy of φρóνησις, now enriched by the account of a certain mode of speech, namely βουλευεσθαι [bouleuesthai], or “circumspective self-debate” (more commonly: “deliberation”). “It will be shown that φρóνησις too is νους [nous] and νοειν [noein] and is a genuine disclosure of the αρχη [arche].”93 The self-disclosure of πραξις [praxis], in its absolute particularity or finitude and through circumspective self-debate, reaches beneath the dichotomy between speaking and seeing. From the αρχη [arche] on, from what I want to do, from my decision to act, all the way up to the completed action itself, φρóνησις belongs intrinsically to the acting. In every step of the action, φρóνησις is co-constitutive. That means therefore that φρóνησις must make the action transparent from its αρχη up to its τελος. For the action is a being that can in each case be otherwise; correspondingly, φρóνησις is co-present, such that it co-constitutes the πραξις [praxis] itself.94

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The complete transparency to itself of self-disclosing Dasein depends on the radical coincidence of the αρχη [arche] and the τελος [telos] of action in the non-theoretical deliberative awareness of φρóνησις [phronesis]; thinking self-discloses as a kind of acting, and acting as a kind of thinking: The how of the deliberation, λογíζεσθαι [logizesthai], is determined by the character of the action itself. . . . As ευβουλíα [euboulia], φρóνησις [phronesis] is genuinely what it is. . . . The τελος) [telos] is the action itself, the action as achieved, carried out.95

This transparency yields a kind of “pure perceiving”96 that concerns the εσχατου [eschaton; the terminus of deliberation], “νους [nous] in its most extreme concretion,” “a look of an eye in the blink of an eye, a momentary look at what is momentarily concrete, which as such can always be otherwise.”97

AGAINST THE TRADITION In order to secure the radical transparency of self-disclosing practice as a key indicator of the Being of Dasein, Heidegger must set aside more traditional interpretations of φρóνησις [phronesis] that would compromise its autonomy. In particular, “the expression ορθος λóγος [orthos logos] . . . has generated a veritable history of nonsense.” A traditional reading of this expression is “right reason,” but Heidegger must insist that “λóγος [logos] means discussion, not reason.”98 In the traditional understanding, “reason” refers to some standard of rightness that in some sense stands above the action. Now it is just such an external standard that Heidegger must deny. The “correctness” in question, he insists, is nothing but “the peculiar character of directedness of φρóνησις” itself, a directedness which “rests on the fact that in the case of πραξις [praxis] the λóγος belongs intrinsically to the action.”99 Reasoning coincides with desiring, choosing with grasping; this is what guarantees the self-transparency of the action. The reader senses here, in Heidegger’s counter-movement against the tradition of “right reason,” a distinct hardening of certain features of Aristotle’s argument: The elaboration of the concrete situation aims at making available the correct resoluteness as the transparency of the action. And insofar as this resoluteness is in fact appropriated and carried out, i.e., insofar as I am resolved, the action is present in its final possibility. The directed disclosure of the full situation terminates in genuine resoluteness toward something, venturing upon the action

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itself. . . . The consequent of the βουλευεσθαι [bouleuesthai; deliberation] is the action itself; it is not some sort of proposition or cognition but is the bursting forth of the acting person as such.100

To evoke such a full “bursting forth of the acting person,” Heidegger must turn away from any features of Aristotle’s account that seem to subordinate the person to any higher authority. Thus he seems to have established that “insofar as his own Being, his own existence, is of decisive importance for man, that truth is the highest which relates to Dasein itself, and therefore φρóνησις [phronesis] is the highest and most decisive mode of disclosure.” But once he has developed certain radical possibilities of φρóνησις, Heidegger is free to acknowledge a difficulty in the text. The difficulty is precisely that of a standard that appears, in a sense, external to the acting person. Just as “the good” αγαθóν [agathon] compromised the purity and accessibility of theoretical wisdom, here too it seems to condition the self-disclosure of φρóνησις [phronesis]. In fact, Heidegger closely associates the subordination of φρóνησις [phronesis] to the good with its subordination to σοΦíα [sophia]: “the difficulty can only reside in this, that φρóνησις is not completely autonomous but instead remains related in its very structure to another mode of human comportment.” This difficulty shows up concretely in the fact that “the αγαθóν manifests itself in φρóνησις only to an existence which is in itself good (αγαθóν). . . . The possibility of the αληθευειν [aletheuiein] of φρóνησις is bound up with the proviso that the one who carries it out is himself, in his Being, already αγαθóς [agathos].”101 Let me pause now in this reconstruction of Heidegger’s argument to frame it by some considerations he does not, it seems to me, fully attend to. The notion of the good seems to operate a kind of elusive mediation, as we saw in our own reading of Aristotle, between the realms governed by σοΦíα and by φρóνησις. Good action depends upon a prior notion of goodness that cannot be founded in the practical realm, except insofar as it is left to vary with the opinions of the good of particular cities (and thus indeed with the concrete requirements of “good” in those cities). Aristotle is indeed concerned to distinguish φρóνησις from opinion, as Heidegger notices,102 but this would be the whole truth only if φρóνησις were wholly autonomous, and did not itself move within and draw its meaning at least in part from a moral and political context. To be sure, Aristotle is able to draw from morality’s own characteristic claim to be more than merely instrumental the possibility of an activity of the soul wholly liberated from mere necessities, the possibility of an activity truly “for its own sake.” This is, of course, the activity of pure theoretical contemplation. And so the good of action, fully thematized, seems to lie forever beyond the scope of action.

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The difficulties are no less great when approached from the side of the notion of the good of pure theory. Heidegger, of course, is nothing if not alert to these difficulties. Considered as purely autonomous, what is thematic in it (σοΦíα [sophia]) is the (αεí) [aei], hence that which has nothing at all to do with γενεσις [genesis], whereas the Being of human Dasein intrinsically involves (γενεσις, πραξις, κíνησις) [genesis, praxis, kinesis] . . . What philosophy considers, according to its very meaning [for Aristotle], settles nothing for human existence.103

On the other hand, as soon as theory is considered meaningful for human existence, it is effectively implicated in the practical world. Heidegger has already noted that, in affirming the superior autonomy of theoretical wisdom, we hold it up as “the αρíστω [ariston], the highest good, in relation to which every other τεχνη [techne] and επιστηµη [episteme] must be oriented. To that extent σοΦíα [sophia] is αρχικωτατη [guiding and autonomous].”104 It is the very lofty apart-ness of σοΦíα [sophia] that sets it up as a ruling standard and implicates it in the practical world. Thus if σοΦíα aims at the αγαθóν [agathon], then it seems that it is ultimately a πραξις [praxis], whereas the preceding has shown precisely that it is free of πραξις and is a pure θεωρειν [theorein].105

It is only insofar as the lofty autonomy of σοΦíα is interpreted as αγαθóν [agathon], and therefore situated with respect to action and thus compromised by the worldly importunities of ruling, that it meaningfully engages human Dasein. Both theory and practice are thus found to be oriented towards an elusive good—a good, one might say, that, when approached from the side of practice, appears finally to exist in the unattainable realm of theory, and when approached from the side of theory, draws one over into the compromised realm of practice. The good of practice is forever slipping into a separate, “higher” realm that can be named “theory,” and the good of theory only comes to itself concretely in setting itself up as the rule for practice, and thus understanding itself as the fulfillment of practical goods. This is the state of affairs that compromises human autonomy, or, as Heidegger prefers to say, the transparent self-disclosure of the Being of Dasein. We can now see how a certain acquiescence in this condition of humanity is at the heart of the tradition that Heidegger proposes to transform by radicalizing. Recall that the “peculiar binding character” of “idle talk” stems from our need to “find our orientation in the world” and our inability “to appropriate everything originally.”106 It is inherent in the essential fallenness of common,

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everyday Dasein that it orient itself by reference to an understanding of the beings of the world as determined by a congealed, authoritative λεγóµενον [legomenon], by inherited stories and rankings. Philosophy first itself emerges from within such inherited authoritative articulations of the world: Heidegger himself has called our attention to the prototypical leisure of the Egyptian priests, and to the politically-rooted description of the “freedom” of philosophy in relation to the human condition in Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.2:107 [T]he man is free, we say, who exists for himself and not for another, so we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for itself. Hence the possession of it might be justly regarded as beyond human power; for in many ways human nature is in bondage.108

Heidegger’s complaint against the tradition of philosophy may be expressed as follows: even when it proclaims its freedom, philosophy has spoken in terms derived from the very bondage of mankind to its political circumstances, the spiritual bondage of humanity to speech as inevitably and profoundly conditioned by the rule of opinion, or, from Heidegger’s point of view, “prattle” or “idle talk.” Heidegger’s persistent critique of Plato is precisely that his dialectical philosophy fails to achieve a radical standpoint definitively outside the realm of opinion; deaf to the radical disclosing of Being, Plato is left to multiply speculations about “higher beings” and, finally, to posit God as the Highest Being. Heidegger embraces Aristotle as an alternative: “Aristotle saw through this [Plato’s] peculiar error perfectly, which was quite an accomplishment for a Greek, nearly beyond our power to imagine.”109 Aristotle penetrates through this error endemic to tradition typified by Plato and directs our attention to modes of disclosing or unconcealing proper to Dasein. But “even Aristotle was successful here only within certain limits, and in spite of his tendency to radicality he did not press on into the ultimate originality of the Being of the world.”110 Aristotle is more “radical” in the sense that he clearly separates his pursuit of science from Platonic phronesis, and thus for the most part manages to keep properly philosophical/ scientific concerns distinct from “religious” or “ethical” talk that can only be a prolongation of the common, everyday chatter. Thus Heidegger frequently praises the “purely ontological” character of Aristotle’s inquiries. But, again, even Aristotle does not go far enough, and so Heidegger finds himself apologizing for or explaining away Aristotle’s lapses into a dialogue with everyday opinion, poetic, ethical, or religious.111 (It is worthy of note, certainly, how little Heidegger’s reading of the Nichomachean Ethics has to do with ethics!) Most telling, even scandalous, no doubt, from Heidegger’s point of view, is the fact that Aristotle never seems to have succeeded in

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disentangling what should be considered two radically different understandings of “First Philosophy”: as ontology and as theology.112 Finally, of course, Aristotle’s failure to overcome the enslavement of philosophy to the common talk of the practical (poetic, ethico-political, religious) world manifests itself in the very concept of Being than determines his understanding of the pure onlooking of theory, namely, everlasting presence. “The Greeks gathered this meaning of Being, Being as absolute presence, from the Being of the world.”113 In Aristotle’s understanding, then, “this most proper Being is grasped in a radically ontological way so that it is as such the ontological condition of the factual concrete existence of man.”114 This is the understanding that allowed Aristotle to conceive of “that comportment of man which is dependent only on itself.” For, “whereas the possibilities of Being with regard to πραξις [praxis] are dependent on being with others, the pure onlooking upon what always is is free of this bond,” and the philosopher succeeds in being “alone with himself.”115 This pure aloneness and thus selftransparency of philosophy remains compromised only by the derivation from the common world of the notion of “everlasting presence” itself. To secure the radical self-disclosure of Dasein against all dependence on the common world, it will be necessary to join the transparent finitude of φρóνησις [phronesis] with the solitary probity of σοΦíα [sophia]. But this joining or collapsing can only result from a radical separation; the ground beneath these opposing poles that have heretofore held each other in place—the poles of theory and practice—can only be attained by deploying the radicalized claims of each against the “good” that seems to call it back toward the other. Only by repudiating the good can authentically scientific existence liberate itself definitively from the talk of the common world.

HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF TIME: REDUCTION OF THE REDUCTION Heidegger thus employs the ascetic, unworldly rigor of modern science against the inherently political and ethical orientation of classical philosophy at the same time he employs the practical character of classical philosophy against the presuppositions of modern scientific theory. In this way he seeks to reach or perform some ground that is more theoretical than theory and more practical than practice. In order to further consider the meaning of Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology, we shall take up certain other texts, first from History of the Concept of Time (hereafter HCT),116 a virtual draft of Being and Time, and then from related sections in the masterwork itself.

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Chapter 3 of HCT, “The Early Development of Phenomenological Research and the Necessity of a Radical Reflection in and from Itself,” is of great value to our investigation, since it represents one of Heidegger’s most fully developed accounts of his project in relation to the phenomenology championed by Scheler and, especially, Husserl. After a brief bibliographic overview of the development of the school of phenomenology, Heidegger turns in §10.b to a “Fundamental reflection upon the regional structure of the field in its originality: elaboration of pure consciousness as an independent region of being.” Since phenomenology’s essential thrust is “the analytic description of intentionality in its apriori,” the question arises “can intentionality in its apriori be singled out as an independent region, as the possible field of a science.”117 Heidegger first provides a lucid review of Husserl’s tracing of “the ‘new scientific domain’ of phenomenology” to the form in which “lived experience” is “first given,” that is, to the “so-called natural attitude.”118 According to Husserl, in the natural attitude “I am ‘a real object like others in the natural world,’” and my acts and experiences, the continuous totality of which “can be called an individual stream of lived experiences” are themselves understood to be “‘occurrences of the same natural reality.’” But the “new act” of “reflection,” that is, of “self-directedness toward our own experiential continuity” constitutes a state of affairs in which “reflection and reflected object both belong to one and the same sphere of being,” and thus “are really [reell] included in on another.” “This real inclusion . . . is called immanence.”119 The region of “immanence” is thus constituted as “the wholeness of consciousness,” a “self-contained totality” that “excludes every thing, that is, every real object, beginning with the entire material world. Over against the region of lived experiences,” Heidegger emphasizes, “the material world is alien, other.”120 To be sure, “the stream of experience understood as a real occurrence is conjoined with the real world, . . . but at the same time consciousness is also separated from [the real world] by an absolute gulf.”121 The puzzle of how the regions of immanence and transcendence (our relation to worldly things as worldly things) are joined is taken up within phenomenology from a certain direction (which Heidegger appears simply to accept): Now this separation into two spheres of being is remarkable precisely because the sphere of immanence, the sphere of lived experience, establishes the possibility within which the transcendent world, separated from it by a gulf, can become objective at all. . . . How is the drawing out and highlighting of consciousness as an independent region of lived experiences, as an independent region of being, still at all possible?122

At the end of this section, Heidegger restates this question as “the line of questioning motivating the elaboration of the phenomenological field of pure consciousness in Husserl”123:

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How is it possible that lived experiences constitute an absolute and pure region of being and at the same time occur in the transcendence of the world.124

Heidegger’s aim is to be more faithful, more relentlessly rigorous in following this motivation than Husserl himself. One can see already in the remainder of this section that Heidegger, in the very course of a sympathetic summary of the key stages of Husserl’s research, is formulating the thrust of this research in such a way as to lead beyond what Husserl had accomplished. Heidegger credits Husserl, not only with developing the concept of “intentionality,” according to which “the transcendent is in a certain sense there in the lived experience,” but also with recognizing that “apprehending the given things is only one particular mode” of intentionality. Intentionality, or “directingitself-toward,” is much broader than mere “apprehension.” “Apprehension is only a very particular and not necessarily even a predominant mode of intending entities.”125 Husserl’s insight into a wide variety of intentional acts is made possible, Heidegger’s account shows, not by some simple or naive abandonment to non-cognitive comportments, but, on the contrary, by a particular modification and refinement of our capacity for reflection. In the act of reflection I discover the possibility of “‘not going along with’ the thesis of the material world and of every transcendent world,” and he calls this “not going along with” epoché. The genius of this suspension or epoch is that it “makes the act itself the theme”126 by interrupting our natural tendency to understand the act in terms of its content, object, or end, that is, in terms available to our cognitive apprehension. The paradoxical and towering ambition of phenomenology, one might say, is to know acts without superimposing upon them the act of knowing. The success of this project for a new kind of knowledge thus requires the perpetual thwarting of a more natural and ordinary desire to know. No particular species of human act or comportment, in particular the theoretical comportment itself, must be allowed priority or pre-eminence, if a new kind of theory of acts or comportments in general is to be founded. And this is precisely, as Heidegger will go on show, where Husserl has fallen short of the possibilities of phenomenology: he has been insufficiently vigilant and thorough in attacking the claim of reason to rule consciousness or human existence. Husserl has, however, shown us the way. He has taught us to make “the act itself the theme,” such that, for example, “the perceived is not directly presumed as such, but in the how of its being.” “This modification, in which the entity is now regarded to the extent that it is an object of intentionality, is called bracketing.”127 We must keep this emphasis on the how in mind—an emphasis by which Heidegger is subtly introducing a project of thought beyond Husserl’s—in reading Heidegger’s further descriptions in this section of the uses of bracketing:

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This reversal of perspective has rather the sense of making the being of the entity present . . . of making the entity present in regard to its being . . . what is really at issue now is the determination of the being of the very entity.128

One might say that Heidegger’s departure from Husserl turns precisely on the verbality of “being” as it can already be heard in these passages. But what the surrounding account of phenomenology makes clear is that the possibility of hearing this verbality does not at all imply a renunciation of the project of phenomenology but precisely its radicalization. Husserl has shown how the “sphere of intentional acts and its objects in the uniformity of a specific sphere” is secured through the phenomenological reductions, first “transcendental” and then “eidetic.”129 These reductions make possible “the detachability of its how,” the how, that is, of precisely this sphere or “domain of consciousness.” However, as will become clearer in the following sections, Husserl fails to exploit “the detachability of its how” precisely because he assumes an identity between “pure consciousness” and “the sphere of absolute being.”130 A further radicalization of the phenomenological reductions, we shall see, will issue precisely into the question of Being. In §11 Heidegger shows in what way Husserl has failed fully to honor the phenomenological injunction to “go back to the matters themselves.” He has rather fallen back on “a traditional idea of philosophy” in that he has considered the “context of lived experience” only “as a region for absolute scientific consideration.” The idea of “an absolute science” as a particular access to being is itself never scrutinized. But it would be a mistake to assume that Heidegger is simply abandoning the idea of “an absolute science”; instead he will radicalize its formalism by examining the very “way taken to elaborate pure consciousness,” as far back as “the starting point of the entire reflection . . . where it is said that phenomenological reflection must start from the natural attitude, from the entity as it first gives itself.”131 This is the task of the pivotal §12: “Exposition of the neglect of the question of the being of the intentional as the basic field of phenomenological research.”132 Husserl’s determinations of being, Heidegger recapitulates, “are not drawn from the entity itself but are attributed to it insofar as this consciousness as pure consciousness is placed in certain perspectives;” that is, “consciousness is regarded as apprehended.” Now Heidegger allows that “if these determinations are not originary determinations of being, then on the positive side it must be said that they only determine the region as region but not the being of consciousness itself.” Such a formal approach has its legitimacy, Heidegger explains, citing the example of mathematics: “the mathematician can circumscribe the mathematical field . . . He can provide a certain definition of the object of mathematics without ever necessarily posing the

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question of the mode of being of mathematical objects.”133 Thus it is not so obvious why Husserl’s failure to question the being of the intentional is to be considered decisive. What is decisive is rather that, in Husserl’s research, “the question of being is after all under consideration,”134 but precisely in a way that Husserl cannot account for. For Heidegger will go on to show that “the question of being is thus raised, it is even answered.” But it is not answered adequately, for “we have to do solely with the genuinely scientific way of answering it, which attempts to define the sense of the reality of something real insofar as it manifests itself in consciousness.” This inadequate answer appears to be implicit in the phenomenological approach itself, for “in its methodological sense as a disregarding, then, the reduction is in principle inappropriate for the being of consciousness.”135 It appears inherent then in the character of the reduction itself that it disregards not only reality but also any particular individuation of lived experience. It disregards the fact that the acts are mine or those of any other individual human being and regards them only in their what. It regards the “what,” the structure of the acts, but as a result does not thematize their way to be, their being an act as such . . . not the essence of their being.136

In eidetic reduction, Heidegger continues, we discern only “the structure” of “the essential content of acts,” and so miss “the essence of the being of lived experience . . . I disregard its existence, and so all the more the essence of its existence.”137 It might appear, then, that Heidegger is proposing simply to abandon the method of reduction in order to benefit from some immediate access to “lived experience.” But such an interpretation would, I think, profoundly underestimate the boldness of Heidegger’s enterprise. To penetrate through “the dominance of the tradition” will instead require a more radical operation of the reduction. To go beyond the “structure” of the acts is not at all to return to the acts as naively understood in relation to their content, not to give up the reduction to “go along with” the “natural” interpretation of experience, but precisely so to strip the acts of content so that the act itself can emerge, as it were as the “content” (a new kind of “content,” to be sure) of a refined phenomenological reduction. Not at all the content of any particular, individual acts, but the way of being of acts, the very “mine-ness” of individuation, “the essence of its existence” must be revealed or released by a more radical reduction. A more rigorous bracketing of all contents is necessary in order to give access to “an entity whose what is precisely to be and nothing but to be.”138 It is thus the very “starting position of the reduction . . . the consciousness-of just as it is given in the natural attitude”139 that must be subjected to a

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reduction—that is, to a reduction of a new, more radical kind, precisely a second-order reduction, or a reduction applied to its own act of reducing—a reduction in which the matter and the activity (the object and the subject) become indistinguishable, finally overcoming the sway of “the natural attitude.” “If the being, the ‘reality’ of the intentional, is experienced in the natural attitude itself, then we only need to supplement the considerations of the intentional and of the reduction as we have understood it up to now.”140 In attending to the natural attitude Heidegger’s intention is not at all a retreat from the method of reduction but, on the contrary, a final assault on the natural attitude in order to gain access to what it hides. The aim is to uncover what is experienced in the natural attitude, which must be understood precisely as other than what is experienced by the natural attitude, that is, what is “naturally” experienced. The key is to bring the natural attitude explicitly under the reduction, which is the only way to avoid allowing the natural attitude to determine the meaning of the reduction, that is, to determine its contents as “as a real worldly occurrence just like any natural process,” to avoid, that is, an outcome in which “the actuality of the intentional is . . . constituted as a reality in consciousness.”141 Thus, when Heidegger argues that the so-called “natural attitude . . . is an experience which is totally unnatural,” his point must not be mistaken: he does not mean to recommend the natural attitude, nor quite to declaim against the un-natural. His meaning, rather, is that we must come to terms with the unnaturalness of what we take to be natural. To begin with, if this experience is “rightly called an attitude [Einstellung],” then it is must first be derived from natural comportment. But we must go further, for “another issue is whether the character of the reality of man and of the acts which appear in this way of experience is the primary and authentic character.” This is to say, the reduction must not retreat to the “natural” but rather push on further to “the primary and authentic,” that is, to “the specific act-being of the comportments as such,”142 or to the “question of being,” now understood verbally. It is thus through a final reduction of the residue of “nature” in Husserl’s phenomenology that Heidegger proposes to penetrate still further than Husserl beneath the “so-called natural attitude” in order eventually to arrive at “an entity whose what is precisely to be and nothing but to be.”143 Husserl failed to attend to this entity because in his research, “the formation of the region of pure consciousness is undertaken for the purposes of theoretical reason.”144 In attending to this formulation we can see in what way Heidegger’s project may be characterized at once as an abandonment of theoretical reason and as a an extreme purification. For Heidegger does not propose a purpose other than that of theoretical reason, but rather a more thorough bracketing of all purposes. The methodological formalism that Heidegger brought to our

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attention in the example of mathematics is not to be simply abandoned but rather to be overcome but application to any residual purposes: the neutrality of theory must be understood as grounded in a certain neutrality of being itself, a neutrality far beyond or beneath an everyday formal abstractness— the neutrality, as Being and Time will show more clearly, of the no-thingness that is the “essence” of Dasein’s existence.

BEING AND TIME: THE POSSIBILITY OF PHENOMENOLOGY Here we will be able to notice only certain features of Being and Time that help us pursue some of the issues we have raised with respect to Heidegger’s courses of 1919 and to his History of the Concept of Time. First we must consider Heidegger’s classic settlement with the school of phenomenology in ¶7, which constitutes the penultimate section of a two-part Introduction and is entitled “The Phenomenological Method of Investigation.” Already in an introductory paragraph to this section, one can discern a distilled statement of the radicalization of phenomenology which is worked out in HCT. Rejecting any interpretation of phenomenology in terms of a particular “standpoint” or “any special direction,” Heidegger associates himself with phenomenology understood “primarily as a methodological conception.” But he is quick to warn the reader against interpreting what he means by methodology in terms of any “technical devices”; certainly one is invited to think of the famous “reductions” that lay at the heart of Husserl’s research. What Heidegger means by “the how of that research”145 operates at a level beneath any Husserlian technique. The more genuinely a methodological concept is worked out and the more comprehensively it determines the principles on which a science is to be conducted, all the more primordially is it rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves . . .146

The “how” of the research when understood radically discovers its identity with the ground of the “things [or matters—sachen] themselves”147 under investigation. The first two of the three subheaded parts of ¶7 attempt to get at the meaning of “phenomenology” through an investigation of the two Greek roots of the word. In Part A on “The Concept of Phenomenon,” Heidegger sorts through the various usages of this word, “the bewildering multiplicity of ‘phenomena’ designated by the words ‘phenomenon,’ ‘appearance,’ ‘mere appearance’” to argue that these must be understood “from the beginning” on the basis of

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“the concept of the phenomenon . . . as that which shows itself in itself.” But this does not mean that the “ordinary conception” of the phenomenon as “the entities which are accessible through empirical ‘intuition’”148—a conception still at work in Kant’s philosophy—is adequate to the ambitions of the properly “phenomenological conception.” In order to go beyond Kant we may then say that that which already shows itself in the appearance as prior to the “phenomenon” as ordinarily understood and as accompanying it in every case, can, even though it thus shows itself unthematically, be brought thematically to show itself; and what thus shows itself in itself (the ‘forms of the intuition’) will be the “phenomena” of phenomenology.149

If phenomenology as a radical research method is necessary, it is because the truly phenomenological phenomena must be wrested from the phenomena “as ordinarily understood.” Part B on The Concept of the Logos immediately joins hands with part A in that it aims to bring out the revealing or “purely apophantical signification” of the originary meaning of logos; logos is “a letting-something-be-seen.”150 But since logos is a certain kind of bringing to appearance, a “letting something be seen in its togetherness [Beisammen] with something—letting it be seen as something,” it is at risk of being understood merely “in the sense of ‘agreement,’” in the sense, that is, of the “‘truth of judgments,’” which, however, is a derivative sense, “merely the opposite of [a] covering-up.”151 On the basis of these etymologically inspired observations, Heidegger is ready in Part C. to offer his “Preliminary Conception of Phenomenology” as “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself,” a formula that makes explicit what is expressed in the maxim “To the things themselves!”152 The inevitable English translation of Sachen as “things” is particularly misleading here, since the whole thrust of this formulation is to lead us from “that which shows itself” to “the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” And so Heidegger immediately insists that Phenomenology designates neither the “object” or “subjectmatter” of research but rather “the ‘how’ with which ‘what’ is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled.”153 Also potentially misleading, indeed, is Heidegger’s endorsement of the qualifier “descriptive” as applied to phenomenology, for the sense of “description” is itself transformed by Heidegger’s radicalization of the method. The term descriptive is not to be understood in any ordinary sense, Heidegger indeed immediately explains, it has “rather the sense of a prohibition—the avoidance of characterizing anything” except by “exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.” And so what is to be described, what appears

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for the phenomenologist is not at all what appears to people in general, but rather something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden . . . but at the same time . . . belongs to what thus shows itself, and it belongs to it so essentially as to constitute its meaning and its ground.

This, of course, is “the Being of entities.”154 Against a certain philosophical tradition, Heidegger insists that “‘behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else.”155 And yet a task for philosophy remains—“there is need for phenomenology” (recall the threat, invoked in 1919 of abandonment to sheer facticity), since “what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden.”156 The phenomenon is no ordinary “object” of description; on the contrary, The way in which Being and its structures are encountered in the mode of phenomenon is one which must first of all be wrested from the objects of phenomenology. . . . The idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is ‘original’ and ‘intuitive’ is directly opposed to the naiveté of a haphazard, ‘immediate’, and unreflective ‘beholding.’157

There is no simple access to Being, no naive beholding; Being must somehow be accessed through beings or entities. But since entities ordinarily show themselves as some thing, the very Being of entities is ordinarily covered up. One might say that in natural or ordinary experience, the “appearing” of phenomena is confusedly mixed up with the “as some thing,” the discursive “togetherness with something” of logos. That is, each tends to be taken for the other: the appearing is taken up as a discursively available kind of thing, and the activity of discourse or interpretation is at the same time covered over in this very thingness. Heidegger must wrest phenomenon and logos apart in order to purify them. Since no natural or ordinary union exists, he must in fact deploy each violently against the other to uncover the originary verbality that underlies both and thus to constitute a new fusion called phenomenology, or, more precisely, “universal phenomenological ontology.”158 The what must be revealed as a how, and the how must be susceptible to being revealed thematically, or as such. Thus, “the entities . . . must . . . show themselves with the kind of access which genuinely belongs to them” and not at all in the way they ordinarily are taken to show themselves. The only sense in which the “ordinary conception of phenomenon” comes into play is that a certain, “ontologico-ontically distinctive” entity—human being or Dasein—is in fact this genuine “kind of

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access.”159 And from this follows the critical importance of “a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of the word” for the new phenomenology. The access to the entities is to be uncovered as the very how of the Being of entities. By thus reducing entities to their how and so conceiving the fusion of the how of entities with the how of our access to them, Heidegger is able to overcome absolutely philosophy’s traditional dependence upon some privileged or allegedly higher “class or genus of entities”: The “universality” of Being “is to be sought still higher up. Being and the structure of Being lie beyond every entity and every possible character that an entity may possess.” Note, however, that the somewhat traditional vocabulary of elevation risks misleading here, since it inevitably evokes an articulation of the world or entities into “higher” and “lower” spheres or ranges. But such an articulation is an elaboration of precisely the inauthentic understanding of Being from which true phenomenology must wrest an authentic understanding. For “the transcendence of Dasein’s Being is distinctive in that it implies the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation”—that is, precisely an individuation unlimited by any articulation of higher or lower beings, unconstrained by any “class or genus of entities.”160 But one may ask whether the appeal to the traditional elevation of philosophy (or of religion or of the political-ethical realm) is really avoidable for Heidegger, even if he might have avoided the use of the word higher. The word, in fact, almost immediately reappears: “Higher than actuality stands possibility,”161 Heidegger writes, in a final apologia for his wresting of the possibility of phenomenology from the actuality of Husserl’s practice of it. But can any sense of higher—or for that matter universal—remain once the understanding of the possibility of philosophy has been so radically wrenched away from the rule of reason as articulated in the philosophical tradition and reduced to “the possibility and the necessity of the most radical individuation”?162 Can a content-less “universality” stand up to radical individuation, or the very meaning of “individual” to a radical, ontological universality? Can the elevation of possibility survive its radical severing from actuality?

BEYOND FORM AND EXPERIENCE: THE AUTHENTICITY OF SCIENCE How is it possible for a science or mode of revealing to be at once radically universal and radically individual? To understand what Heidegger means by this, one must attend to his relentless effort to accede beyond the “what” or the content of both the universal and the particular or individual in order to

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arrive at the way or “how” of Being; it is in the “how” that the extremes of universality and particularity meet. But how precisely can one access such a “how”? The key, again, is to understand that the how of access must finally merge with the “how” to be accessed, or, rather, than one must finally uncover the primordial identity of these two “hows”—that is, of the manner and matter of study, or of the “subject” and the “object.” The answer, then, must somehow be always already in the question, or rather the questioning. But how then is one to determine the right manner of questioning, the right starting point or initial disposition? To characterize as plainly as possible the governing trajectory of Heidegger’s thought (at least prior to the Kehre), we can note that from the very meaning of the problem, one can arrive at a certain formulation of the solution: the right manner of questioning must be rigorously universal or formal, since it must not arbitrarily prejudice the outcome of phenomenological research; and yet it must at the same time be thoroughly, intensely individual, or concrete, personal, “lived,” in order not arbitrarily to privilege an uncritically assumed theoretical or cognitive comportment. The aim of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is thus a “how” at once radically formal and radically experiential— more formal than a form, I am tempted to say, and more experiential than any given “experience.” The experience of pure formalizing = the pure form of experiencing. According to Heidegger, Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological reduction as founded on the “entire freedom” of cognitive subjectivity left unthought precisely the meaning of Being implicit in the cognitive comportment. He failed, that is, to understand that ontologically mood [Stimmung, attunement] is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is disclosed to itself prior to all cognition and volition, and beyond their range of disclosure. And furthermore, when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods.163

But this would appear to be a counsel of despair for the thinker or researcher, since it seems to reduce all thought to the power of the subrational. But Heidegger would say that our very category of “subrational” depends upon an understanding of rational that has not been adequately scrutinized and grounded. The point is not to abandon the “rational” in favor of what we understand to be other than rational, but to attend to the more basic mood or attunement from which the rational arises. Husserl has brought us to the brink of this question by developing the purest formalization of the cognitive comportment in his method of reduction. It remains for Heidegger to intensify this formalization, to understand it as a pure “how” and thus at

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the same time as the lived experience of formalizing or emptying of content. Thus, although there is no mention of the reduction, this most essential element of the phenomenological method, in this ostensibly phenomenological treatise, the reduction is in fact present in the radicalized form of fundamental mood of anxiety. This has been established persuasively by Jean-François Courtine in a study of “The Phenomenological-Transcendental Reduction and the Ontico-Ontological Difference”: In its methodological function, one might say with little exaggeration, reductive anxiety is not absolutely different from the transcendental reduction in a Husserlian mode, even if it is deployed in an altogether new dimension: no longer that of reflection, ideation, abstraction, and intuition, but that of Stimmung, of affective tonality as being primordially attuned and open to the world, of Befindlichkeit, of the feeling of the situation as primary revelation of the “there” and of fallenness (Geworfenheit).164

Anxiety is the lynchpin of “universal phenomenological ontology” because it brings together pure formalism with pure existentiality. It is the disclosing mood underlying what Husserl called “entire freedom” of theory. It radically individualizes as it radically universalizes, that is, by annulling the world and so bringing Dasein to confront itself as groundless worlding. But how secure is this lynchpin? Courtine is perhaps a bit hasty in observing that “the absolute priority of the Stimmung immediately determines anxiety as ‘that which assails us,’ without bothering any further with the Husserlian problematic of the ‘motivation’”165 of the reduction. For in fact Heidegger does not simply ignore the question of the privileged status of the mood of anxiety; he does not go so far as to treat the fundamentality of anxiety as a straightforward fact. Heidegger perhaps opens himself most fully to this problem in the very challenging ¶63: “The Hermeneutical Situation at which we have Arrived for Interpreting the Meaning of the Being of Care; and the Methodological Character of the Existential Analytics in General.” Recognizing that “Interpretation necessarily has the structure of a projection,” he considers what can justify the “free discretion” of the author in undertaking a violent “capture” of the Being of Dasein.166 The text has an unfinished quality (even by the standards of Being and Time) at once disarming and perplexing, and seems to offer the reader a peak at Heidegger’s agonizing over the soundness of his own project. More than once Heidegger raises with startling candor the possibility of the arbitrariness of his whole approach, only to retreat again to the safety of a certain formalism. “Is it not the case that underlying our Interpretation of the authenticity and totality of Dasein, there is an ontical way of

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taking existence which may be possible but need not be binding for everyone?” Heidegger answers that interpretation can do nothing else but project ontical possibilities “upon their ontological possibilities.”167 But the problem returns in the form of the question “Does Being-in-the-world have a higher instance for its potentiality-for-being than its own death?” “From what point of view,” after all, is the project of wresting authentic Being from actual, positive Dasein conceived? The justification seems to lie in positing “an outline of the formal structure of the understanding of Dasein . . . in a way which is not binding from an existentiell point of view.”168 And yet the question returns again, since “even in this formal idea of existence, which is not binding upon us in an existentiell way, there already lurks a definite though unpretentious ontological ‘content.’”169 Heidegger is thus led finally to address squarely the insuperability of a certain circularity in interpretation. The charge of circularity as an objection is based upon common sense, and “common sense misunderstands understanding.” It “concerns itself, whether theoretically or practically, only with entities which can be surveyed at a glance circumspectively . . . it has in view only the experiencing of ‘factual entities.’” But all facts presuppose some pre-understanding. “All research” is circular, because the “basic structure of care is circular.” And so the research into “that kind of being that belongs to existence” is itself necessarily in a way circular; one might even say doubly circular. “Can such research be denied this projecting which is essential to Dasein?” Such research, Heidegger seems to imply, would not only reveal the circular, but would be a circular revealing, and again the “how” and the “what,” the access and the matter, would tend to merge. The circularity of research grounds the circularity of care as much as it is grounded by it. When Heidegger asks us to follow him in his “leap into the ‘circle,’ primordially and wholly,”170 we must not underestimate the dizzying radicality of his invitation. For this is not simply the leap of research into the circle of life or experience, but the circle of research leaping into itself and thereby claiming for itself the circle of life—or, of course, vice versa. This, I think, is what is at stake when Heidegger frames another tacit criticism of Husserl in remarking that if, in the ontology of Dasein, we ‘take our departure’ from a worldless “I” in order to provide this “I” with an Object and an ontologically baseless relation to that object, then we have ‘presupposed’ not too much, but too little. If we make a problem of ‘life,’ and then just occasionally have regard for death too, our view is too short-sighted. The object we have taken as our theme is artificially and dogmatically curtailed if ‘in the first instance’ we restrict ourselves to a ‘theoretical subject,’ in order that we may then round it out ‘on the practical side’ by tacking on an ‘ethic.’171

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To presuppose enough would be to assume the circularity of projection explicitly at the outset, and thus, not to cease to project, but to project authentically by projecting the very circular form of projection itself, and thus to see through the “problem of ‘life’” to the horizon that reveals the circularity of existence, or, rather, that forms the lived underside of the formal projection of circularity, that is, the horizon of death. Once the theoretical and the practical circularities have been taken up in their extreme purity and thus have absorbed each other, there can of course be no question left over of “tacking on an ‘ethic’”172—any more, for that matter, than of articulating a “theory.” The radically projective character of phenomenological ontology is again in evidence in ¶69(b) on “The Temporal Meaning of the Way in which Circumspective Concern becomes Modified into the Theoretical Discovery of the Present-at-Hand Within-the-world.” In an attempt to trace “the genesis of theoretical behavior,” Heidegger evokes the difference between a hammer understood “circumspectively” as “too heavy or too light” (ready-to-hand) and a hammer understood to possess the abstract “‘property’ of heaviness” (present-at-hand). Thus “The Understanding of Being . . . has changed over.”173 This change-over is a kind of “releasing from environmental confinement.” To secure “the perspective for one’s methodical inquiry” under such a change-over would be to articulate the understanding of Being in which the entities are released and thus to make explicit “in its basic attributes a possible area of subject-matter for a science.”174 Heidegger then turns immediately to “the classical example for the historical development of a science and even for its ontological genesis, [that is,] the rise of mathematical physics.” What is decisive for this development is “the way in which Nature herself is mathematically projected.”175 But it is not the mathematical projection in itself that here interests Heidegger, but more fundamentally that this projection discloses something that is a priori . . . the entities which it takes as its theme are discovered in it in the only way in which entities can be discovered—by the prior projection of their state of Being.176

The explicit spelling out of “the totality” of the projections determining the meaning of being would constitute “the full existential conception of science.”177 Now, far from opposing his quest for “the things themselves” to the projecting characteristic of mathematical physics, Heidegger in fact embraces this projecting as an example of the “resoluteness by which Dasein projects itself towards its potentiality-for-Being in the ‘truth.’” Since “science has its source in authentic existence,” the point is not to set science aside but

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rather to attend to this authentic source. The very possibility of “the scientific projection of Nature” indicates that “Dasein must transcend the entities thematized.”178 The key, then, is to grasp this projection (that is, the projection of something as something) as a projection—in other words, to project upon projection, to project projection itself. “Transcendence does not consist in Objectifying, but is presupposed by it.”179 Heidegger has no quarrel with objectifying as such (or the act of projecting), but with objectifying objectified. The power of objectifying must lead us to uncover or release the very transcendence or transcending-projecting presupposed in objectifying. Thus a radicalization of scientific projecting leads Heidegger to a deeper projecting that is prior to the distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand, or between theory and practice. Heidegger reaches practically beneath practice in reaching theoretically beyond theory. This resolute quest for the merging of an ur-praxis with a supra-theory is reflected in two striking formulae he develops in the next subsection (c), “Dasein is its world existingly,” precisely because “the world is, as it were, already ‘further outside’ than an Object can ever be.”180

TO LEAP OR TO CHOOSE What are we to make, then, of Heidegger’s invitation to “leap into another world, or better: for the first time into the world as such,”181 to “leap into the ‘circle,’ primordially and wholly”?182 There would seem to be no way to evaluate such a leap, no grounds for deliberating and choosing, since any possible ground would have to circulate within the primordial hermeneutical circle itself. Such a leap cannot be motivated by any prior reason or any inclination, since the only possible motive is precisely the primordial mood of anxiety, which is not external to but is inherent in the very leaping from the familiar comfort of worldly entities to the pure possibility of Being or worlding. There is no “feeling” of anxiety separate from a “theory” of radically temporalizing Being. Heidegger’s leap leaves us no choice, but perhaps we may yet, despite Heidegger, articulate a way of resisting the leap (or the simple negation of the leap) and thus of choosing choice. Such an articulation might begin by observing that Heidegger’s quest for an abyssal ground beneath the diremption between theory and practice is determined decisively by the practice of theory. It is the project of mathematical physics, in particular, that reveals what is then taken to be the radically projective character of Dasein’s understanding of being as present-at-hand, and thus, by implication, of the practically circumspective, ready-to-hand understanding of being of which the

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theoretical comportment is a “change-over.” Heidegger’s concept of authentic access to the Being of beings is a radicalization, a verbalizing of the projective theoretical comportment exhibited in mathematical thought. This is why Heidegger’s letting-be must take the form of a violent wresting away from common sense, or from “everyday” understandings. The ground of theory/ practice is generated from a radicalization of theory as practice. And it is on the basis of this projection of Heidegger’s that the practical (in the ordinary, “inauthentic” sense) or everyday world, the world of “common sense,” is understood as a world of meaningless things, of sheer facticity183—before, that is, its reinterpretation on the basis of the verbal, projecting understanding of being drawn from modern theory. Heidegger must seek meaning in Dasein’s projection of understandings of Being because things as understood by common sense are meaningless—but then we must not forget that these ordinary things are understood as meaningless because Heidegger projectively interprets meaning as Dasein’s projecting. To understand Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology and therefore of modern scientific projecting as a choice would be to descry a motive or mood, or, let us say, a state of soul in some way prior to the Angst that situates us already within the circle of the leap. Such a mood perhaps comes briefly into view in a striking passage in ¶62: Anticipatory resoluteness . . . frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein’s existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive selfconcealments . . . Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakeable joy in this possibility.184

The understanding of Being according to which the “sober anxiety” of “anticipatory resoluteness” appears as authenticity (and every other motivation therefore as “fugitive self-concealment) may thus itself appear as arising from the choice of a “joy” of a certain quality, a certain power-joy. From our chosen standpoint of a certain priority of choice, the fateful necessity of Dasein’s projecting would thus come to light as founded upon an unexamined or at least contestable choice of the power-joy characteristic of modern science. To see Heidegger’s radicalizing embrace of the projecting of modern science as a choice rather than, say, as a fateful leap, is to uncover the possibility of choosing choice, and therefore of choosing to understand theory or thinking as primordially attuned to choice. Such an understanding could be said to arise, not from the practice of theory (as understood in Heidegger’s radical sense—that is, as the practice of a theory that brackets or suspends everyday

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practice at the outset), but as a certain theory of practice—a theory in a way belonging to practice, arising from practical problems of concrete human existence and taking seriously the meaningful world in which human beings encounter these problems. Such a theory would not be constrained to interpret the transcendence of the world a priori as a projection of or as grounded in Dasein’s transcendence. One could argue for an approach to thinking as choice rather than as leap with reference to the wholesomeness of consequences, and here a discussion of Heidegger’s lamentable, even deplorable interpretation of his own facticity in 1933 (anticipations of which can certainly be heard in passages of Being and Time) would be pertinent indeed. But let us frame the question in a way that does not lose touch with a concern for theoretical rigor. The ethical barrenness (at best) of Heidegger’s leap is of a piece with what we are entitled to regard as a defect of thinking: he undertakes to liberate human be-ing from the tyranny of theory, and either does not see or does not care that this liberation requires a radical and ongoing violence. He is bound to call for a leap because he cannot articulate the goodness of his own activity, he cannot trace any connections between the activity of thought and the goodness of life. He thus has no way to distinguish the universal liberation of radically individual human projecting from the arbitrary (and, in the event, historically grotesque) imposition of his own (or his adopted) facticity. He asserts a monstrous claim to rule because he cannot acknowledge and take up knowingly, responsibly, his claim to rule. In two remaining engagements with Heideggerian texts (“The Question Concerning Technology” and his reading of Holderlin’s “Homecoming/To the Kindred Ones”), I will show that, despite the chastening Heidegger experienced in recovering from his espousal of Nazism, this immoderate claim to rule is never really overcome, because the ethical-political problem, the problem of choice, is never taken up and acknowledged.

HEIDEGGER ON THE DANGER AND THE PROMISE OF TECHNOLOGY By “questioning concerning technology” Heidegger proposes to “prepare a free relationship to it”—neither, it seems, to praise it or to blame it, neither quite to promote it or to promote resistance to it, but somehow to free us up in relation to it in the sense of “opening” us to it: “The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology.”185 To prepare such a freedom, Heidegger must first bring us to see that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” If at present

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we “remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it,” this is because, in regarding it merely (however “correctly”) as “something neutral”—as “a means to an end” and “a human activity”—we in fact continue to regard it technologically. Thus we imagine that “everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means.”186 We will, as we say, “get” technology “spiritually in hand.” We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.187

This “instrumental and anthropological” understanding of technology appears to be deeply rooted in humanity: “For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity.”188 To get beyond such a “correct” understanding to a “free” one will require questioning what connects the instrumental and the anthropological. Heidegger undertakes such a questioning through a consideration of the Aristotelian understanding of causality. Heidegger reviews the four causes of traditional philosophy, which he takes up in the following (untraditional) order: material, formal, final, efficient. He uses the Aristotelian doctrine to subvert our modern prejudice in favor of the efficient cause (which now “sets the standard for all causality” to the point that “we no longer even count the causa finalis, telic finality, as causality). At the same time, in asking “what does cause really mean?” he reaches beyond the Aristotelian doctrine itself to some deeper ground. 189 So long as we do not allow ourselves to go into these questions, causality, and with it, instrumentality, and with the latter the accepted definition of technology, remain obscure and groundless.190

Behind the technological understanding of technology we find instrumentality, and behind this, causality. Heidegger intends to start a kind of chain reaction by which the subversion of the conventional contemporary understanding will uproot and thus reveal the roots of the notion of causality itself. He puts final causality in play in order to dislodge efficient causality in the very process of subjecting teleology itself to a radical questioning. In fact, as we will see, having, in a way, used teleology to subvert instrumentality and technology, he uses an understanding of technology—radicalized and purified of all teleology and even all instrumentality—in order to complete the subversion of teleology. By invoking the Greek aition, Heidegger disrupts our contemporary [Ursache] and Roman [causa] understanding of cause as “that which brings

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something about . . . to obtain results, effects.” He translates the Greek term as “that to which something else is indebted,” and concludes that, in their origin, “the four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else.”191 The example Heidegger chooses to illustrate this original Greek understanding—a silver chalice used as a sacrificial vessel—is of course by no means arbitrary, but serves to privilege certain aspects of causality (provisionally: those associated with a certain sacred quality) and to subordinate or obscure others—that is, precisely the technological and the instrumental. (Whether this privileging is in fact compatible with any traditional understanding of piety will depend ultimately on whether piety can be severed so radically from instrumentality.) After reviewing material and formal causes as ways of being “co-responsible for the chalice,” Heidegger moves on to “a third that is above all responsible for the sacrificial vessel.” This third is the Greek telos. But Heidegger’s apparent endorsement of the Greek privileging of the final cause is conditioned by his determination to purify finality of all traces of instrumentality: somehow, the telos must be freed from the context of means and ends. The final cause is thus described as that which in advance confines the chalice within the realm of consecration and bestowal . . . That which gives bounds, that which completes, in this sense is called in Greek telos, which is all too often translated as “aim” or “purpose,” and so misinterpreted.192

This wrenching of telos from teleology is accompanied by what appears to be a complete rejection (at least with reference to this example) of efficient causality: “the silversmith is not a causa efficiens.” The causality, or way of being co-responsible, of the silversmith in fact completely escapes the traditional categories: “The Aristotelian doctrine neither knows the cause . . . nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it.” Heidegger himself proposes certain Greek words (legein, apophainesthai) to lead towards an understanding of the silversmith’s co-responsibility as a “pondering . . . for the that and the how of [the] coming into appearance and into play” of the other three causes “for the production of the sacrificial vessel.”193 What is at stake in this reinterpretation of the final cause and rejection of the efficient cause? We sense a difference between the customary “to bring about . . . to obtain results, effects,”194 and Heidegger’s “bringing forth”195 or “bring something into appearance,”196 but the meaning or import of the difference is not at first obvious. To see what is at stake we must attend to Heidegger’s indications as to what he is arguing against. We risk missing the “primal meaning” of causality, Heidegger says, because

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Today we are too easily inclined either to understand being responsible and being indebted moralistically as a lapse, or else to construe them in terms of effecting.197

Although the tracing of the notion of causality to a Greek understanding of responsibility or co-responsibility might seem to open the questioning of technology to ethical and political concerns, Heidegger clearly has no intention of inviting that kind of openness. The moral is not at all an alternative to the instrumental; rather, the two are bound up together. Even the moralpolitical implications of telos, the connection between the “circumscribing” that “gives bounds to the thing” and the human interest in a purposive understanding of things, must be suppressed at the outset in order to evoke a kind of bringing into appearance or “starting something on its way to arrival” radically detached from any consideration of human purposes.198 One might be inclined to credit Heidegger with the most intransigent resistance to any kind of reductionism, the most rigorous attention to the thing itself—in this case, the ceremonial chalice—as it actually comes to light. But this would be to grant that a thing such as a chalice in fact comes to light in a way that can be described in utter detachment from any sense of human purpose. In any case, Heidegger’s consideration of the chalice does not reach fulfillment in some pure contemplation of the independent reality of this sacred thing. On the contrary, Heidegger insists upon what appears to be the sacred integrity of the chalice, its sheer circumscription or boundedness as a sacrificial vessel, just long enough to cut off any “anthropological” or “instrumental” interpretation, any description in terms of means or ends. His real interest, after all, is to reach behind the four causes to some deeper ground, to ask “what, then does the playing in unison of the four ways of occasioning play?” The answer lies in another Greek word: “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth.”199 No kind of bringing forth and thus no kind of being seems to be excluded from this understanding of poiesis: “Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense.”200 No more than the sacrificial chalice are the things of nature to be understood most primally in terms of their teleological boundedness, but rather in terms of a “bringingforth” that “brings hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment.”201 What we call “truth,” what the Greeks called “aletheia” (revealing, or more precisely, unconcealing), means just such a bringing-forth.202 At this point Heidegger recalls us abruptly to the question of technology, and indeed gives us a surprising answer: What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing . . . Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.203

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This striking statement may seem to answer our concern about what appeared to be our enslavement to technology. One might conclude that what appeared to be a problem is no problem after all, since technology is itself a mode of truth. But of course things are not going to be that easy. Technology may be a “realm of revealing, i.e., of truth,” but only “if we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open up to us.”204 And so Heidegger must proceed to open the reader up to what it might mean to “give heed” to technology as revealing. He re-begins, as he so often does, with etymology, tracing “technology” to the Greek “techne,” which embraces “the activities and skills” not only of “the craftsman” but also refers to “the arts of the mind and the fine arts.” “Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.” It is, as such, “a mode of aletheuein,” the mode, in fact, linked with episteme, or scientific knowledge.205 But, Heidegger asks, is not the difference between techne and technology decisive? Can the connection between truth and craftsmanship be applied to “modern, machine-powered technology,” a technology “based on modern physics as an exact science”?206 Heidegger grants that there is something distinctive about technology, and that this something has to do with a “relationship between technology and physics,” but he calls this relationship “mutual” (thus denying the simple priority of science to technology) and calls us again to a questioning of “the essence of modern technology.” And at this point he is prepared to advance such questioning powerfully and decisively: [T]he revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable207 demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.208

Heidegger goes on powerfully to depict and to illustrate “the monstrousness that reigns here”209 when nature is framed or ordered in this essentially aggressive way. The reign of technology as a mode of revealing, or what Heidegger calls Enframing (Gestell),210 goes beyond the reduction of nature to the status of an object to leave nothing distinctly real or meaningful, but only a “standing-reserve” [bestand] regulated and secured in its very essence, indeed nothing but the sheerest substrate, a “stuff” more primal and less real than “matter,” nothing but the stuff of storing, transforming, regulating and securing, stuff to make, store, and regulate more stuff, stuff without end. And where is man amidst the stuff of “standing-reserve”? Since everything has been reduced to the sheer outcome of man’s ordering, his aggressive challenging-forth, man effectively “exalts himself to the posture of lord of the

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earth.” The world is man’s construct, and so “it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself . . . In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence.” Man, as “nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve . . . comes to the brink of a precipitous fall; that is he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve.”211 Humanity is on the verge of being swallowed up, of disappearing silently into the infinitely self-referential machinery of its own impersonal mastery. Heidegger’s evocation of the nightmare of technology is brilliant, profound, dreadful, unforgettable. No one who as ever attended genuinely to this evocation can ever again see things the same way, can ever be the same again. But what guidance can Heidegger give us in responding to this nightmare? None, in a sense; nor does he wish to help us “respond” in any usual sense. Enframing, as “the way in which the real reveals itself as standingreserve,”212 holds sway in a way far beyond the realm of human choice and action. “As the one who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of Enframing.” Any attempt to respond practically to Enframing already arises within Enframing: “Thus the question as to how we are to arrive at a relationship to the essence of technology, asked in this way, always comes too late.”213 What can it mean, then, to establish a “free relationship” with technology? Here again we can achieve some clarity by beginning with the meanings Heidegger rejects: “The essence of freedom is originally not connected with the will or even with the causality of human willing.”214 Note well that Heidegger denies not only that freedom is only or mainly or even secondarily a matter of will or of choice; he rejects any original or intrinsic connection between human willing and what he means by “freedom.” He thus separates himself radically from all traditional and all commonsensical discourse concerning human freedom. Therefore, if the dread we experience at the prospect Heidegger evokes so powerfully of the inhuman mastery of technology has anything to do with the threatened eclipse of human agency, then we may have learned something from reading Heidegger, but it cannot be what Heidegger wants us to learn. If Heidegger’s humanity is to comport itself freely with respect to technology, this freedom must not be understood in any traditional way—if only for the simple reason that the traditional (anthropological-instrumental) ways are implicated in our present unfree relation to technology. That is to say that the understanding of Being framed according to or in coordination with a meansend relationship or human purposiveness or being-responsible-for understood in any way in connection with choice and causality—such an understanding must be seen as an early form of the dispensation of Being that now holds

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sway as Technology or Enframing. For Heidegger any such freedom attuned essentially to purpose and to choice issues ultimately in the “freedom of . . . unfettered arbitrariness” or “in the constraint of mere laws.”215 For Heidegger the purposive or anthropological-instrumental interpretation of freedom must be dismissed utterly in order to begin to open human being to “that which frees—the mystery” of unconcealment/concealment.216 Humanity must let go of the imagined privilege of reason, its claim to purposive purchase on “nature;” he must look back upon the history of this imagined privilege as a sheer “destining” [Geschick] not referable to any remotely humane meaning; he must see the mysterious destining of history as radically prior to any sense of history as “the fulfillment of human activity” (which might as such be “the object of written chronicle”). In particular, he must see the aptness of modern physics for technological mastery as in no way a human responsibility referable to human choices or projects, but rather as the “enframing that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man and puts him in a position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”217 To begin once again to encounter his humanity, man must not seek his freedom within or by engagement with or over “nature”; his true freedom calls him from a dark clearing beyond any of the modes of the revelation of nature, from the realm of sheer historical destining. Only by renouncing the correlates of purposive freedom and nature and by acknowledging that “always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man,” can man open himself to a freedom completely freed from the anthropological-instrumental; only then can he accept the complete sway of destining, not as “a fate that compels,” but as the only true freedom: “For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so become one who listens and hears, and not one who is simply constrained to obey.”218 By letting go of what seemed to be freedom, man recovers (for the first time?) his humanity, far beyond nature in the very bosom of Being. Against this background I believe we are now prepared to understand the most challenging and troubling feature of Heidegger’s essay, the mysterious suggestion introduced, apparently quite arbitrarily, by the famous quotation from Holderlin: But where the danger is, grows The saving power also.219

The key to this mysterious turn or conversion by which the greatest danger transforms itself into salvation seems to be this: “It is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by essence.” That is, technology, or the boundless power of / susceptibility to

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ultimately meaningless transformation and re-transformation has swept away or crushed the sense of essence inherited from Plato, the orientation towards the eternal or “what remains permanently.”220 Enframing as a mode of revealing issues from the anthropological-instrumental, but it pulverizes or consumes the beings and finally the objects associated with this mode. Or, rather, it all but consumes them. To complete technology’s work of the destruction of being as permanently enduring essence, or to be open to this completion, is in fact the destiny to which Heidegger’s essay calls us. Standing before the abyss, “on the very brink of a precipitous fall,” we have only to take one step further, to relinquish our desperate hold on the last shreds of anthropological-instrumental essence, in order to leap into the lap of Being. This last step obviously has nothing to do with effecting some practical or worldly change in the tendency of technology, but rather with seeing it in a new way, with letting it be by learning to be at home in the origin of its destining. The “challenging” of Enframing seems to be “anything but a destining.” But we have only to “notice that the challenging-forth into the ordering of the real as standing-reserve still remains a destining that starts man upon a way of revealing.”221 The bringing-forth of Enframing appears as opposed to the bringing-forth earlier named poiesis. But the challenge of Enframing to poiesis in effect brings us to the present crisis in which the common origin of Enframing and poiesis in “granting” can be glimpsed. This is the home of a freedom more originary than any distinction between human activity and passivity. Thus, having evoked poiesis to question Enframing, Heidegger prepares us to deploy Enframing to dig still further, beneath poiesis to “granting”: “It is precisely in this extreme danger [of Enframing] that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light.”222 The standpoint of sheer destining or granting is that from which a “free relation” to technology is possible. Of course this freedom has nothing to do with “willing” or “effecting” in any ordinary sense, and still less with choosing or with the responsibility of reason. Man’s only “freedom” consists rather in the possibility of his openness to participation in the sheer destining or granting of revealing/concealing; his “highest dignity . . . lies in keeping watch over the unconcealment—and with it, from the first, the concealment—of all coming to presence on this earth.” On the far side of technology’s destruction of the interpretation of revealing in terms of permanent beings, far beyond all properly “human” concerns, “the essence of technology comes to pass in the granting that needs and uses man so that he may share in revealing.”223 The “saving power” of technology, “as yet unexperienced” [but glimpsed only by Heidegger himself] lies in the possibility that man “may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the coming to presence of truth.”224

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Human freedom thus depends for Heidegger on a radical abandonment of all merely anthropological and therefore instrumental concerns or orientations, on a radical sacrifice on the altar of “revealing” understood as “that destining which, ever suddenly and inexplicably to all thinking, apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth and that also challenges, and which allots itself to man.”225 This is a sacrifice, not only of the distinction (at least as concerns human practice) between physis and poiesis, but now even of that between poeisis and Enframing. Just what it would mean to enact such a sacrifice, or what human world might be envisioned as attuned to such a sacrifice, Heidegger of course does not say. His last paragraphs point us, in a way no doubt intended to be exoterically reassuring, to poiesis as “art.” “Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing?”226 But lest we be too reassured, he reminds us that his meditation on technology has surely undermined any ordinary, humanistic or even simply “aesthetic” interpretation of “art”: “Yet the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”227 For the later Heidegger, this seems to be enough: “For questioning is the piety of thought.”228 And lest we are tempted, again, to hear this concluding sentence as in any way edifying, let us recall that the form or spirit of Heidegger’s questioning is determined at the outset by his resolve to consider the attendance of humanity upon the primordial destining or granting of all revealing/concealing as utterly, inhumanly mysterious. The primordial attendance of humanity upon Be-ing must be considered inexplicable “to all thinking”229 in order to prevent the falling of thinking into anthropological or instrumental modes. To ask, then, what it would mean, concretely, to construe the call or responsibility of “thinking” in this way, to heed Heidegger’s invitation to open ourselves up to some orientation to Being beckoning from the far side of technology—to ask in what sense such thinking could inform our humanity and guide the choices of individuals or communities—is obviously impossible within the kind of thinking Heidegger in fact prescribes. Such ethical and political thinking is not the kind of “being-responsible” that interests Heidegger. But has Heidegger in fact shown that such a responsibility of reason, a more human responsibility, is not primordial, or that it can in fact be escaped or renounced?

HEIDEGGER’S “HOMECOMING”: BEYOND TECHNOLOGY? Does Heidegger offer human beings a way “home,” an overcoming of modern technological alienation, a reconciliation between thinking and practical being? Heidegger’s discussions of the notions of home and homelessness

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arise mostly in connection with his ponderings of the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin. Following the debacle of his Nazi rectorship at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger sought a new means of breaking free of the Western metaphysical tradition It is in this period of the mid 1930s that he first turns to the poetry of Holderlin, to which he will return to a number of times throughout his journey as a thinker. As he wrests himself away from political temptations and from what he now considers the still metaphysical horizon of Nietzsche, Heidegger looks to Holderlin’s poetry in search of a new understanding of thinking as a kind of partnership with the most fundamental or “originary” poetic evocations of the fate of human being in relation to fundamental figures of meaning such as “the gods,” “the earth,” “the sky.” The relation between thinking (formerly known as “philosophy”) and poetry is intimate but not an identity: “Thinking,” he will write, “is almost a co-poeticising.”230 One would be wrong to assume, though, that Heidegger’s disengagement from Hitler and from Nietzsche included a distancing from German nationalism. On the contrary, all the Holderlin lectures of the 1930s affirm a relation to the historical people (Volk) as essential to the poet’s vocation. Primordial time, Heidegger writes, “is the time of poets, thinkers, and the founders of states, i.e., those who essentially found the historical Dasein of a people and give them their fundamental character. These are the authentic creators.”231 Here I will examine the theme of “home” in Heidegger by considering his reading of Holderlin’s “Homecoming/ To Kindred Ones.”232 While this poem may seem to represent, as Heidegger points out, “a joyful trip home” from the Alpine mountains to Holderlin’s Swabian homeland, his purpose throughout this reading is to complicate or problematize this theme. “The first stanza, which concerns the mountains, is anything but homelike, and the sixth and last resonates with the word care and ends with an abrupt not.” The homecoming itself may “seem pleasantly familiar,” but the “nearness” of home proves to be a withdrawal of what is sought; “home” can never be appropriated or possessed; it is ever held back: “the treasure, the German . . . is still reserved.” The seeker, returning from the “immeasurable workshop” of the “unhomelike” mountains seeks for a home among the “dear ones” in the homeland. But “those who ‘have cares in the fatherland’ are not yet ready to receive the homeland’s very peculiar character,” its German “destiny” is held back. “But how should we ever find this, unless a seeker is there for us, and the sought-for essence of the homeland shows itself to him?”233 The poet from the immeasurable mountain workshop must show the people of the homeland the destiny he hopes to meet in them. This is a destiny he is equipped to recognize because he has known of the Alpine joy. (The second stanza, Heidegger notes, abounds with references to

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joy and the joyful.) Joy inheres in the poetic response to the “silent shining appearance” of “things and persons alike.” Poetry as a cloud hovers and mediates between the “lofty brightness of the heavens” and the “yawning valley” it covers.234 This joyful composing cloud orders and illuminates everything in its proper place, producing “gaiety itself in which people and things appear.” Nearer still than “the gentle spell of well-known things and their simple relations . . . is the gaiety itself in which people and things appear.” The gaiety of simple things simply related appears within the Alpine joy of the poet, who invokes “the angels of the house . . . Here ‘the house’ means the space opened up for a people as a place in which they can be ‘at home,’ and thereby fulfill their proper destiny.”235 I conclude that the simple people’s “home” in the order of gaiety (“in whose clarity the ‘nature’—note quotation marks—of things and people is safely preserved) can only be built within the space of the poet’s loftier, “immeasurable” joy. The “angels of the house” and “of the earth” depend upon the granting of the joyful poet: “messengers of gaiety can appear only if there are poets.”236 Yet at the same time the joy of “loving strife” that Chaos celebrates seems to depend upon the gaiety that “preserves and holds everything within what is safe and sound.” Gaiety is now “the highest” and “the holy,” “the source for everything joyful.” “The joyful one” must open things up, illuminate them in the heart of men. “Through a grand gaiety, he first lets the dark depth gape open in its illumination. What would depth be without lighting?” The depths of Alpine joy are inseparable from the “peaks of time” above which, and “above the light,” the “pure opening” of gaiety imparts “to every temporal space.” 237 The joyful poet needs gaiety, and yet gaiety needs the poets’ “experience in the being of the gods, that is, the joyful ones,” to save “the orbit of gaiety” from becoming “virtually exhausted.”238 Much of Heidegger’s reading seems to turn on a kind of mutual dependence between the lofty joy of the Alpine seeker and the gaiety that seems at first derivative of joy (gaiety as the orderliness of a granting of beings) and then the source of joy (an opening above the light). This relationship is at stake next in Heidegger’s observation that “nearness to the most joyful is now sacrificed precisely for the return home . . . joyfulness starts to bloom upon the farewell to the ‘fortress of the heavenly ones.’” We will never understand this, Heidegger insists, now audibly impatient, as long as we imagine “that there is first of all nature in itself and then a landscape for itself, which with the help of ‘poetic experiences’ becomes mythically colored. How much longer are we going to prevent ourselves from experiencing beings as beings?” 239 There are no “natural” beings prior to their poetic revealing; the be-ing of beings is in the joyful production of simple gaiety without dependence on any permanently present standard or model. Plato’s

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philosopher looked up to the eternal ideas, and finally to the sun-like idea of the good, in order to fashion approximations in human virtue; Heidegger’s poet looks up to a gaiety above the light in order to grant a world to human gaiety. There is no standard above gaiety, no eternity above time. The poets’ going down among the people is at the same time an ascent to the granting of holy gaiety beyond the exclusive joy of the poet. It is at this point that Heidegger, continuing his chastisement of his German contemporaries, quotes Holderlin’s “Patmos” hymn and thus provides us a connection to his “Question Concerning Technology.” The poem, strikingly similar in theme to “Homecoming,” begins: Near and Hard to grasp is the god. But where the danger is, There also grows our saving grace.240

The poem then evokes “the sons of the Alps” walking over an abyss on “lightly built bridges.” The stanza ends with a prayer: “Oh, give us wings, most faithful in heart / To cross over and to return.”241 Connecting this with the poem “Homecoming,” Heidegger comments that “nearness to the most joyful,” or “the origin of all that is joyful” cannot be found “beneath the Alps,” but requires, mysteriously, a return to “the Swabian homeland.” “Homecoming is the return to the nearness of the origin.”242 When Heidegger speaks of “home,” then, it should be clear that this is not your mother’s home. The image of a return to a Swabian landscape and community provides Heidegger the occasion to evoke what he regards as a much deeper or more “originary” meaning of homecoming: “The poetic activity . . . is the homecoming itself.” Not the common village folk, who seem to be at home in their common homeland, but only the seeker who has walked over the abyss can utter the word of poetic joy in which “the joyful greets us while reserving itself.”243 In fact, it is the absence of the god from the common life of the people that favors the poet’s understanding of the “holy” in the simultaneous nearness and distance of the god: “The time of reserved discovery is the age when the god is absent.” Thus “god’s absence . . . is not a deficiency.” In fact, those “singers” who keep the poet’s word in waiting upon the naming of the now absent god must, “without fear of appearing godless . . . remain near to the god’s absence,” taking care that the “countrymen” of the poet “may not try to make themselves a god by cunning, and thus eliminate by force the presumed deficiency. But they must also not comfort themselves by merely calling upon an accustomed god.”244 The saving power of technology, we can now see, is its power to accomplish the time of the utter absence of the god, and thus prepare the soil for a

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future poetic naming of the holy. Technology has in fact all but eliminated the “calling upon an accustomed god,” the God of the Bible. If this atheistic destiny of the West can be fulfilled, and the people’s final metaphysical temptation to “make themselves a god by cunning” can be suppressed, then the path will be cleared for the mysterious poetic naming that will realize Germany’s world-historical destiny. Technology is the final stage of the self-destruction of Western rationalism, now hindered only by the cunning creation of gods who may momentarily appear to stand above and orient the blind process of technological production and consumption, but who must soon be swallowed up by this process. And this danger of the final, comprehensive ascendancy of nihilism is also the saving power of the revelation of the absence of the gods, the moment of possibility of an utterly new and mysterious poetic naming of the holy. There is nothing a statesman or founder can do to contribute to this rebirth of a people, for political thinking is always conditioned by consideration for the authority of existing human purposes and the gods who preside over them. But there is a role for thinkers, as is mysteriously evoked, Heidegger argues, in the last words of the poem: Cares like these, whether he likes it or not, a singer Must bear in his soul, and often, but the others not.245

These others are the true “kindred” of the poet, named in the subtitle, Heidegger thinks, who are thus called to become “listeners” awaiting the poet by pondering the “the mystery of the reserving nearness . . . so that for the first time they may learn to know the essence of the homeland.” These “thoughtful ones” who “devote and sacrifice their life for the still reserved find” are “the poets closest kin,” and certainly not “those who are merely residents on the soil of the native land,” who enjoy “the merely casual possession of domestic things and one’s personal life.” Heidegger, in fact, shows utter contempt for these common enjoyments; the only homecoming worth naming is “the future of the historical being of the German people,” “the people of poetry and of thought.”246

HEIDEGGER AND TOCQUEVILLE Heidegger, as always, is nearest and furthest from the truth. He seems to me to be attuned to an important truth when he speaks of how what is most joyful holds itself in reserve as it offers itself. But who takes better care of the nearness/reserve of the free joy of home, Heidegger or Tocqueville?

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Heidegger projects hope of transcendence to some future national destiny, as if the mysterious giving and reserving of joy could be historically realized among a mysteriously destined people. Tocqueville is fully aware of the threatened exhaustion of Western representations of elevation. And so he acknowledges the legitimacy of the projection of transcendence upon a historical future; but instead of invoking an apocalyptic alliance of thinker and poet, Tocqueville, as statesmen, defers to the American peoples’ deference to God as the link between what is available and what is withheld, what is common and what is extraordinary in human existence—that is, he recognizes that the mystery of presence/absence of joy as not fully assumable by human beings. That is, Tocqueville’s statesmanship on behalf of modern democracy involves an awareness that he shares the nearness and absence of the gods with ordinary citizens of democracy. Unlike Heidegger—and certain contemporary defenders of the joys of pure theoretical awareness (the HighStraussians I will address later), he knows that the extraordinary thinker’s articulation of meaning cannot severe itself from the goods of common life, or from liberal democracy’s Christian inheritance. Thus, whereas Tocqueville wants to reinforce to the American moderation and containment of the nihilistic logic of modern reason, Heidegger in fact calls for the fulfillment or final radicalization the spirit of “technology” as the only possible path to its overcoming: “[I]t is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of man within granting may come to light.”247 Whereas Tocqueville sees no alternative to human dependence on “dogmatic beliefs,” and thus attempts to discern and reinforce a relatively wholesome and manageable mixture of beliefs, traditional, Christian, and modern, Heidegger apparently hopes that on the far side of a complete absorption of the idea of nature by the processes of technology, the human being might find access to its own home in the temporalizing essence of Being itself. Tocqueville conceives no possibility of a direct access to Being, unmediated by moral-political and therefore partly instrumental concerns, and so aims to balance residues of broadly “Platonic” and hierarchical conceptions of the good against the dominant progressive, equalizing, materialist impulses of transcendence. He knows that even the idea of a radically transcendent God cannot escape implication in human instrumentalities, but he would see no point in attempting to talk about “Being” as altogether other than all (“higher” and “lower”) beings. Heidegger, on the other hand, wants to overcome both tainted reifications of transcendence (the modern subjectivist representation and consequent forgetting having issued from the classical “idea”) towards some pure hearkening to Being. Tocqueville discloses his more moderate view of modern democracy only as a response to a rigorous reflection on the nihilistic potential of modernity

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as well as upon the limitations of traditional notions of transcendence, and, indeed, upon the implication of such notions, via radical monotheism, in the destructive dualism of modernity itself. In this sense, he might be said to agree with Heidegger’s famous gloss on Holderin’s word: “But where the danger is, grows the saving power also.”248 But rather than aspiring to a transformation of the public world (either through resolute action or by waiting upon Being) which would open humanity directly to an abyssal understanding of Being, Tocqueville seeks to highlight and thus to preserve intimations of transcendence still glimmering within the practical world of democracy. Is this more “practical” disposition the result of a lack of rigor or boldness, or, on the contrary, of a more subtle understanding of the human predicament vis à vis transcendence, an awareness of the inevitable compromising of transcendence by the instrumental practices within which or on the borders of which is inevitably appears? If pure transcendence is ultimately unspeakable, as Heidegger and Tocqueville seem to agree, then should this not imply the end of the assumed absolute privilege of theory over practice, and thus of the intellectual, including the Heideggerian philosopher-thinker-poet, over the citizen or believer or, for that matter, the bourgeois individual? Does not Heidegger succumb (albeit in a new, indeed more radical manner) to the distinctively modern wish that some unmediated truth (even the truth of historical mediation or “temporality”) might become the “effectual truth” of a people and, eventually, of humanity? If so, then even Heidegger’s apparently passive and apolitical discourse of “letting-be” would remain ministerial to an ambition of mastery. And Tocqueville’s more obviously political or “legislative” discourse might then be seen, paradoxically, as a truer form of letting-be, since it takes its bearings from the hopes and hierarchies (always more or less instrumental/ technological) implicit in actual human practices. If Tocqueville can live with the understanding that our notions of transcendence are always more or less tainted by the all-too-human, this may be because he sees that the reverse must also be true—that all political and instrumental language secretes some understanding (however dim) of transcendence. Might not Heidegger’s contempt for democracy then be interpreted as a manifestation of resentment and of a certain envy regarding the modern intellectual’s social power? I am not interested here in a psychological analysis of Heidegger’s motives, but in an examination of the implications of the standpoint assumed by the author vis à vis the moral-political object of his study. Given modern philosophy’s loss of control over its own project of mastery, might not Heidegger’s radical critique of modernity betray a wish to re-occupy the modern intellectual’s role as champion and legislator of humanity? Though Heidegger rejects the idea of a theory governing practice from some supposed

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external Archimedean leverage point, does he not continue in effect to hope for some kind of salvation springing from or at least privileging the poet-philosopher’s insight—if not a theory to be superimposed on society, then a kind of non- or anti-theory, some poetry, some meditative thinking (or, earlier, some volkisch resolution) of which he, Heidegger, is the prophet, and which is to fill the void left by the collapse of metaphysics?249 What is at stake most fundamentally in this engagement with Heidegger from a Tocquevillean direction is the question of a healthy and truthful relation between the extraordinary and the ordinary. When the extraordinary attempts to deny its likeness to and dependence upon the ordinary, and thus the political responsibility of philosophy and poetry, it in fact falls into a more extreme, because unseen, obsession with the popular, historical actualization of its longings. This is the lesson of Heidegger’s debacle, a theoretical and practical failure that was not overcome in his rather feeble attempts to put the Nazi adventure behind him, without ever really repenting of it. Truly to repent of his Nazism would have required Heidegger to recognize what he had in common with ordinary, even bourgeois people—and this is something he could never do.

CONCLUDING POST-HEIDEGGERIAN REFLECTIONS 1. We want to be at home, and we want to be free. We want to fit into something larger than ourselves, something real and meaningful and permanent; and we want to control our destiny, to create something meaningful, and to express our unique personality. We want to be a part, and we want to be a whole. 1.a. We are parts, and we are wholes. This statement must not be a simple contradiction, because we human beings, aware of being parts and wholes—we are real and we exist. This apparent contradiction certainly names a tension, a problem that lies at the heart of our humanity, and therefore (I would say), at the heart of reality itself, at least as far as we humans can know. 2. Moreover, our desires for home and for freedom, since both lie at the heart of our humanity, cannot be completely extricated from each other. (In exploring the problem of “home,” spiritual and political, we may seem to set aside the problem of freedom. But of course we will be talking about it all along. For the longing for freedom, or the desire to realize oneself as an autonomous whole, is another way of saying the desire to be divine and thus to belong to or participate in what is more than merely conventional, what is real, with what is beyond human construction and

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human domination. Let us say that in its most radical form the longing for freedom is the blasphemous longing to be God, which is perhaps the nearest and furthest desire from the pious longing to be with God. But even the greatest possible impiety of longing to be God, the self-sufficient source of all reality, cannot avoid God’s longing for a world to love and be loved by. Even the freedom of divine wholeness cannot be disentangled, as far as we can know, from the longing to be a part.) 3. But some few human beings are more articulate, imaginative, intense than most in their desire for home/freedom: thinkers, poets, founders/statesmen (i.e., ambitious, movers and shakers). 3.a. This decisive fact of human inequality constitutes the political dimension of reality. It complicates everything: “home” is in some measure a human (historical) construction; some play a bigger role in this than others. Thinkers, poets, founders build our homes—and destroy them or undermine them. But where do they live? 4. In the ordering of human existence with respect to home and freedom, everything depends on the relation between the ordinary desire for home and for freedom, and the extraordinary longings and productions of thinkers, poets, founders. For these are inextricably connected. The ordinary is certainly conditioned by the extraordinary: those who would be happy just to be left alone will not be, and if they are, this can only be because of some arrangement of the affairs of the extraordinary, “ambition counteracting ambition,” or whatever. Less obvious to the extraordinary, they also depend upon the ordinary: the meaning of their thinking, the possibilities of imagination and of founding—these may soar far above the common, but they are launched from the common earth and never leave its orbit. The creator of every new possibility begins helpless, in some womb and some home. 5. Human meaning can be represented along these two axes, “home” and “freedom.” Home may be configured on the vertical axis, and freedom on the horizontal. We are at home in looking up to what is authoritative, to the givenness of the actual, to what limits us and comes before our particular desires or inclinations. A spiritual home is an authoritative structure of highs and lows, noble and base. Our freedom seeks an open horizon; it is impatient with limits and questions their authority, and thus points us toward an indefinite future. At the same time as it depreciates standing authorities, the affirmation of freedom entails a recognition of human equality, a sympathy with the open possibilities of every human being, and a hope for fulfillment of open and therefore indefinite human possibilities in some future. In the broadest terms: home is definite, particular, hierarchical, traditional, aristocratic. Freedom is indefinite, universal, egalitarian, progress-

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ive, democratic. Readers of Tocqueville will recognize this scheme: Traditional, aristocratic society articulated the social world in settled highs and lows, and tended to attach honor apparently to qualities that would appear arbitrary from a universal point of view but that were associated with concrete functions in that society. And this society conceives heaven after its view of earth, filling the space between God and man with a myriad of saints, angels, even heroes. Modern, democratic society flattens hierarchy and depopulates the heavens, projecting meaning instead on universal humanity as advancing towards some indefinite fulfillment. The great subjects of democratic poetry are unfettered individual expressiveness on the one hand and, on the other, the collective movement towards some future fulfillment. 6. The extraordinary in human thought, imagination, and ambition cannot avoid being articulated along one of these dimensions. Greatness will look up, or it will look out and forward, or will combine these orientations in some way. There is no movement of the extraordinary that can escape the necessity of these articulations of human meaning shared to some degree with ordinary human beings. 6.b. In view of proposition 2, the extraordinary (“transcendence”) cannot avoid being articulated along both these dimensions, however dominant one dimension may be.

NOTES 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), II.i.10, 435. 2. Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 18. 3. Ibid., 39. Kisiel quotes Heidegger here. 4. Ibid., 62. 5. Ibid., 39. 6. Ibid., 51. 7. Ibid., 53. 8. Ibid., 56. 9. Ibid., 58. 10. Ibid., 56. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. Ibid., 57. 13. Ibid., 62. 14. Ibid., 39; my involuntary emphasis added. 15. Ibid., 49.

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16. Ibid., 47. 17. Ibid., 55. 18. Ibid., 49. 19. Ibid., 51. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 52. 23. Ibid., 53. 24. Ibid., 67. Kisiel refers here to Heidegger’s 1919 summer semester course “On the Essence of the University and Academic Studies.” 25. Ibid., 52. 26. Ibid., 67. 27. Ibid., 59. 28. Ibid., 59. 29. Ibid., 43. 30. Ibid., 42. 31. Martin Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewica and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 32. Ibid., 5. 33. Ibid., 6. When multiple references to the same source page are cited here within one of my paragraphs, they will often be indicated by an endnote attached to only the last reference to that source page in my paragraph. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 8. My somewhat surprised emphasis. Heidegger justifies this interpretive move by the observation that “the later ones always understand their predecessors better than the predecessors understood themselves,” which, however, is immediately contradicted as a general rule by the observation that “Aristotle was not followed by anyone greater” Not, at least, until Heidegger: for what task is he now proposing to undertake, if not to do for Aristotle what Aristotle did for Plato? 39. Ibid., 8. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 10. 45. Ibid., 11. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 12. 50. Ibid., 13.

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51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

Ibid.; emphasis added. Ibid.; emphasis added. Ibid., 16; emphasis added. Ibid., 17. Ibid. Ibid., 17, 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Quoting Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1140b 6ff. Ibid., 35; see also 37. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 92, 94. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 68 Ibid., 85. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 89. Ibid., 85–86. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 101.

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95. Ibid., 102. 96. Heidegger continues that such perceiving “no longer falls within the domain of λóγος [logos].” But such a definitive moving beyond λóγος [logos] seems incompatible with the main thrust of Heidegger’s argument, and in any case appears to be corrected by a concluding section (§ 26) on the “Extent and limit of (λóγος) [logos],” in which Heidegger affirms that “pure perceiving is always a discussing” (Ibid., 123). 97. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 112. 98. Ibid., 103. 99. Ibid., 103–04. 100. Ibid., 103. 101. Ibid., 114. 102 .Ibid., 104–05. 103. Ibid., 115. 104. Ibid., 84; emphasis added. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid., 18. 107 Ibid., 65. 108. Aristotle, Metaphysics I.2; W.D. Ross translation. 109. Heidegger, Plato’s Sophist, 59. 110. Ibid. Heidegger continues, in what appears to be a clear invocation of the eventual program of Being and Time: “There is a possible interpretation which even endeavors to see the beings of the world detached from the Greek concept of Being. That, however, will not happen in these lectures.” 111. See, for example, ibid., pages 91–92, 146. 112. Ibid., 153–54. 113. Ibid., 122. 114. Ibid., 123. 115. Ibid., 121. 116. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 117. Ibid., 94–95. 118. Ibid., 95. 119. Ibid., 96. 120. Ibid., 97. 121. Ibid., 96–97. 122. Ibid., 98. 123. Ibid., 101. 124 .Ibid. 125. Ibid., 98. 126. Ibid., 99. 127. Ibid. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 100.

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130. Ibid., 101. 131. Ibid., 107. 132. Ibid., 108. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., 109. 135. Ibid., 112. 136 .Ibid. 137. Ibid., 110. 138. Ibid. 139. Ibid. 140. Ibid., 111. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 113. 143. Ibid., 110 144. Ibid., 111; emphasis added. 145. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 50. 146. Ibid., 50. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid., 54. 149. Ibid., 54–55. 150. Ibid., 56. 151. Ibid., 56–57. 152. Ibid., 58. 153. Ibid., 59. 154. Ibid., 59. 155. Ibid., 60. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid., 61. 158. Ibid., 62. 159. Ibid., 61. 160. Ibid., 62. 161. Ibid., 63. 162. Ibid., 62. 163. Ibid., 175. 164. Part II. chap. 3 of Courtine’s Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990), 245. Here I summarize too briefly the conclusion of this study, the whole of which I warmly recommend to the reader. 165. Ibid., 242. 166. Heidegger, Being and Time, 359; 360. 167. Ibid., 360. 168 Ibid., 361. 169. Ibid., 262. 170. Ibid.,363.

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171. Ibid., 363–64. 172. Ibid., 364. 173. Ibid., 412. 174. Ibid., 413. 175. Ibid., 412–14. 176. Ibid., 414. 177. Ibid. 178. Ibid., 415. 179. Ibid., 417. 180. Ibid., 416, 417. 181. Kiesel, Genesis, 43. 182. Heidegger, Being and Time, 363. 183. “What is distinctive in common sense is that it has in view only the experiencing of ‘factual’ entities, in order that it may be able to rid itself of an understanding of Being” (Ibid., 363). 184. Ibid., 357–58. 185. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3. 186. Ibid., 4–5. 187. Ibid., 5. 188. Ibid., 4; emphasis added. 189 .Ibid., 6–7. 190. Ibid., 7. 191. Ibid., 7. 192. Ibid., 8. 193. Ibid., 8. 194. Ibid., 7. 195. Ibid., 8. 196. Ibid., 9. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid., 8–9. 199. Ibid., 10. This is Heidegger’s translation of Plato’s Symposium, 205b. 200. Ibid. 201. Ibid., 11. 202. Ibid., 12. 203. Ibid. 204. Ibid.; emphasis added. 205. Ibid., 13. 206. Ibid., 13–14. 207. In what sense, by what standard, “unreasonable”? Not, apparently, in the sense that nature cannot meet the demand—the nature addressed as “standing reserve” in fact seems to respond (so far at least) as standing reserve. Surely Heidegger does not intend here to apply some traditional, “anthropological” or “instrumental” standard

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of reason. Perhaps, indeed, “unreasonable” will turn out to have a positive, or at least ambivalent resonance. 208. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 14. 209. Ibid., 16. 210. Ibid., 16–17. 211. Ibid., 27. 212. Ibid., 23. 213. Ibid., 24. 214. Ibid., 25; emphasis added. 215. Ibid., 25. This interpretation of freedom according to the arbitrary/lawful dualism seems to be connected essentially with the theological appropriation of teleology, in which the “cause-effect coherence” is referred ultimately to a God who thus “can, for representational thinking, lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. In the light of causality, God can sink to the level of a cause, of causa efficiens.” Thus is “the god of the philosophers” defined with reference to “the causality of making.” But in rejecting the philosophical reduction of God to “the causality of making,” or even the identification of God with Final Cause from which this reduction seems to issue, is it necessary to reject the interpretation of humanity in terms of purposes? 216. Ibid. 217. Ibid., 24. On human responsibility for the technological project, see Jerry Weinberger, “Politics and the Problem of Technology: An Essay on Heidegger and the Tradition of Political Philosophy,” American Political Science Review (March 1992). 218. Ibid., 25. 219. Ibid., 28. 220. Ibid., 30. 221. Ibid., 31. 222. Ibid., 32. 223. Ibid., 32. 224. Ibid., 33; emphasis added. 225. Ibid., 29. 226. Ibid., 35. 227 .Ibid. 228. Ibid. 229. Ibid., 29 230. George Pattison, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), 102; quoting Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe 52:55. 231. Ibid., 168; (GA 39:51) 232. In Martin Heidegger, Eludications of Holderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000). 233. Ibid., 33. 234. Ibid., 34. 235. Ibid., 35.

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236. Ibid., 36. 237. Ibid., 37. 238. Ibid., 38. 239. Ibid., 40. 240. Ibid. 241. Ibid. 242. Ibid., 42. 243. Ibid., 44. 244. Ibid., 46. 245. Ibid., 47. 246. Ibid., 48. 247. Heidegger, “Question Concerning Technology,” 32. 248. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 28. 249. Since the view of Heidegger I am sketching here is in some ways akin to a critique by Heidegger’s postmodern heirs, particularly Jacques Derrida (see, for example, De l’Esprit) , it may be useful to explain briefly that I believe Derrida himself would be vulnerable to a similar critique. Derrida’s attempt to purify Heidegger’s response to the abyss from all metaphysical and apocalyptic residues yields a discourse that is so perpetually subversive and self-questioning as to strike many readers as thoroughly apolitical. If this discourse nonetheless seems remarkably at home in a certain left-liberal or post-Marxist liberationist milieu, this is because it coincides conveniently with a distinctly modern rhetoric in which “progress” is held or assumed to be the result of the ongoing subversion of traditional prejudices and hierarchies. In other words, Derrida’s apparently unlimited openness is parasitic on a modern configuration of “openness” towards progress. In this configuration, the privileged status of intellectuals, the prophets of openness, remains hidden, especially, perhaps, from the prophets themselves; the postmodern gesture of questioning not only the allegedly modern notion of the “self” but even the privilege represented in the idea of the “author” in fact corresponds to a refusal to take responsibility for this status.

Chapter 5

Leo Strauss and the Nobility of Philosophy

Leo Strauss appreciated the power of Heidegger’s questioning of modern rationalism as much as he deplored his failure to honor philosophy’s obligation to political sobriety and human decency. He understood Heidegger’s disgrace as the most radical instance of the modern reduction of philosophy to the service of political passions—what he understands as the absorption of theory by practice. Through the intermediary of medieval Arab and Jewish philosophers, he discovered in classical political philosophy an alternative to the modern ideological subversion of reason, a subversion he believed was already prepared by the theological appropriation of philosophy in Christendom. Central to Strauss’s alternative was an emphasis on the dignity and goodness of philosophy, understood as a way of life distinct from and superior to practical, political existence. And yet this distinction was not an absolute separation, for Strauss argued that political reflection was essential to philosophy, or that “political philosophy” as understood in the Platonic tradition was not by any means a mere topical subfield within philosophy. Political understanding, he suggests, resides somehow at the heart of philosophic existence. In order fully to grasp the meaning of Strauss’s “return” to philosophy as “political philosophy,” it helps to view it as a response to Heidegger’s apparent radical depoliticization of ontology, which is itself a radical politicization. Or, one might say that Strauss is seeking to preserve some moral analogy, some kind of responsible engagement between theory and practice. Heidegger, for his part has nothing but contempt for such a task, and thus reels back and forth between a meditation on Being radically abstracted from any concern for the practical world, and, at the other extreme, a remorseless deconstruction of the intrinsic good of thinking, a deconstruction that issues 177

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into at blind embrace of History, either in the form of a movement he judges to be actually ascendant, or as some vague emergent possibility. In the latter part of this chapter I will argue that leading heirs and interpreters of Strauss (those I call the “High Straussians”) risk squandering Strauss’s insight into the insuperably political character of philosophy by reducing the political moment to a purely exoteric and prophylactic function. To counter this High Straussian interpretation, and thus fully to exploit Strauss’s insight into the right ordering of theory and practice, will require an exposition of the fundamentally political character of Strauss’s insistence on the unique dignity and self-sufficiency of the theoretical life.

TO THE POLITICAL THINGS THEMSELVES In order to situate Leo Strauss’s thought in relation to Heidegger’s resolute engagement with the problem of theory and practice, one should briefly consider some of Strauss’s remarks concerning Heidegger’s teacher, Edmund Husserl. Strauss’s most substantial engagement with Husserl consists in the 1971 article “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy.”1 No one, according to Strauss, had pressed the claim of modern rationalism, that is, “raised the call for philosophy as a rigorous science with such clarity, purity, vigor, and breadth as Husserl.” This is the claim that reason can govern human existence comprehensively, the promise that “science would satisfy the highest theoretical needs and in regards to ethics and religion render possible a life regulated by pure rational norms.” The present obstacle to fulfilling philosophy’s scientific destiny is in fact the “naturalism” of modern natural science, which holds that “everything that is forms part of nature, ‘nature’ being understood as the object” of this science, and which therefore imagines that knowledge itself can be grounded in physicalist experimental psychology. But (Strauss’s reading of Husserl continues) this “naturalism is completely blind to the riddles inherent in the ‘givenness’ of nature.” The alternative to this naturalism, the promise of a truly “adequate theory of knowledge,” is of course Husserl’s phenomenological project, which Strauss describes as “based on scientific knowledge of the consciousness as such,” that is, upon a “fundamental clarification of the consciousness and its acts.”2 Throughout most of his presentation of Husserl’s program for a “philosophy as rigorous science,” Strauss is very discreet concerning his own position on this project. However, when read in the light of Strauss’s work as a whole, the point at which Strauss departs from Husserl is quite clear. Strauss credits Husserl for having “realized more profoundly than anybody else that

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the scientific understanding of the world, far from being the perfection of our natural understanding, is derivative from the latter in such a way as to make us oblivious of the very foundations of the scientific understanding.” It follows that “all philosophic understanding must start from our common understanding of the world.” Now, Strauss’s own project formally agrees with this search for a common and pre-philosophic understanding, elsewhere proclaimed under the motto “to the things themselves.” The root of Strauss’s difference with Husserl appears in the completion of the sentence begun above: “from our understanding of the world as sensibly perceived prior to all theorizing.”3 Husserl does not, then, return to a “common understanding of the world,” but rather to a common ground of sense perception, indeed one radically severed or “bracketed” from all “understandings.” The scientific, naturalistic “taking for granted of nature” cannot be corrected by a recovery of the “pre-scientific” awareness, since “the latter is as much in need of radical clarification as the first.” The mistake, the forgetfulness of naturalistic science, results in fact, according to Husserl, from making “use of concepts which stem from every-day experience without having examined them as to their adequacy.”4 Whereas Strauss will counsel a certain return to “nature” as available in pre-philosophical experience, he notes that Husserl rejects the continuity with ordinary experience implied in the term “nature” in favor of the complete intelligibility or radical clarity indicated by the term “essence.” “[P]recisely because [for Husserl] phenomena have no natures, they have essences.”5 Strauss thus may be said to seek a return from modern naturalism to nature (understood, as we shall see, as profoundly political), while Husserl sees “nature” or “the natural attitude” as the very basis of naturalism and thus must develop a philosophical technique aimed at emancipating consciousness and intelligibility from this pre-philosophic attitude or orientation. At the end of this article, Strauss invites the reader to consider Husserl’s reflection on the ethical-religious significance of phenomenology. Husserl in fact envisages the possibility that the true phenomenological method would eventually render “possible in regard to ethics and religion a life regulated by pure rational norms,” even if to realize this possibility it would be necessary to wait for “centuries, if not millennia.” But Husserl recognizes, Strauss observes, that men cannot wait for these distant results because they need practical wisdom here and now; they need a source, Husserl writes, of “exaltation and consolation.” Such wisdom must be sought in what Husserl calls Weltanschauungphilosophie, “philosophy of worldviews.”6 According to Strauss, Husserl reflects sufficiently on the relationship between rigorous philosophy and Weltanschauungsphilosophie to worry about the temptation (to which Heidegger succumbed, Strauss suggests) to

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abandon the former in favor of the latter. But he does not reflect on it far enough to consider the essential conflict between the two or to ask himself whether “the single-minded pursuit of philosophy as rigorous science would not have an adverse effect on Weltanschauungsphilosophie which most men need to live by and hence on the actualization of the ideas which that kind of philosophy serves.” It is just this conflict, in its “essential character,” that one must consider thematically in order to “reach clarity on the essential character of what Husserl calls ‘philosophy as rigorous science.’”7 We see, then, that for Strauss, the very rigor of philosophy seems to depend on philosophy’s awareness of its inherently political situation. Like Husserl, in order to open thought to its own meaning, Strauss may be said to propose a kind of “return to the things themselves,” but in Strauss’s case this will be a return to political things, to the problem inherent in the political surface of things.8

“GERMAN NIHILISM” Having briefly situated Strauss’s thought in relation to the philosophical approach or apparatus of phenomenology, let us now briefly consider his 1941 address on “German Nihilism.”9 This lecture provides an early statement of Strauss’s project in its immediately political character. It includes, in effect, a confession of the young Strauss’s anti-liberal and even fascist sympathies, as well as a compact early statement of his conversion from youthful extremism and his conception of a project for befriending modern liberalism on non-modern grounds. This bracing text thus sheds a singular light on the question of Strauss’s disposition towards liberal democracy, and beneath a relatively straightforward surface raises profound questions regarding what might be called Strauss’s rhetorical project with respect to liberalism. One might say that it provides the fullest amplification available of Strauss’s remarks on liberalism in the concluding paragraph of “The Three Waves of Modernity,” where he maintains that “liberal democracy . . . derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.”10 This text may explain more clearly than any other Strauss’s reasons for supporting the practice of liberal democracy while deconstructing the theoretical foundations of liberalism. The argument of “German Nihilism” turns on a reflection on the spiritual significance of the military conflict between the Germans and the English. The Germans, who became a nation as the second idealist wave of modernity was already gathering force, have defined themselves from the beginning in

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opposition to the materialism of occidental “civilization.” Their native militarism predisposed them, and especially their youth, towards an aggressive and destructive anti-modern nihilism, which leading intellectuals such as the philosopher Nietzsche did nothing to assuage. As in “The Three Waves of Modernity,” Strauss acknowledges the legitimacy of the Rousseauist and German Idealist critique of modern or materialistic liberalism, but he blames the Germans for rejecting the practice of liberal democracy along with its leveling materialist theory. It is here that the English have shown their superiority, for they have had the prudence to understand modern ideals in practice as a reasonable adaption to modern circumstances of ancient and eternal ideals of decency, the rule of law, and liberty as opposed to license. Strauss thus takes up the defense of English and Western progressive “civilization” in its struggle with a German and Romantic moralism that has slid into nihilism—he takes the side of openness, progress, and the values of peace against the forces inspired by the cult of cultural closure and the celebration of war and its “virtues.” But at the same time he recognizes that the forces of nihilism succeeded in Germany only because the defenders of modern civilization could give no adequate answers to their zealous critics. The defenders of liberalism could articulate no alternative to the Communist view of a necessary future in which perpetual peace could mean nothing other than a pacified and leveled planet devoted to nothing but the production of material and “spiritual” commodities. The supposedly rational ideal of “civilization” was rational only instrumentally and thus provisionally; it had no actual content but the satisfaction of sub-rational needs and appetites. This is to say that the destructive nihilism of a critical mass of Germans, especially German youth, was provoked by the nihilistic implications of the precariously reigning liberal-progressivism. The rule of reason as understood in modern theory thus revealed itself as vulnerable to nihilism politically and militarily because, finally, it was intrinsically vulnerable at the level of ideas. The rule of reason as articulated in modern theory dissolved into the rule of unreason. Strauss’s task, then, is to connect a defense of Western liberal democracy with an improved understanding of the meaning of “reason” and its rule. This of course is where Strauss‘s recovery of classical political philosophy becomes immediately relevant to his practical concern for the health of modern liberalism. The richest and finally most problematic and perhaps enigmatic section of Strauss’s lecture on German Nihilism is the section in which he outlines an understanding of “civilization” as the rule of reason, reason here understood in a sense not reducible to the instrumental. This sense depends upon distinguishing theoretical from practical reason, not in order to separate them, but precisely in order to resist their separation. Morality and Science

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(that is, finally, not modern science, but philosophy or the effort to understand the universe and man) are the twin pillars of civilization, and each degenerates without support or moderation supplied by the other. The link between the two is supplied by the affirmation that there are rules of decent and noble conduct applicable to all human beings as such and accessible to “a reasonable man.”11 Thus even the most rigorously philosophical skeptic cannot help but despise certain base actions and so implicitly recognize the reality of the distinction between the noble and the base. Strauss goes no further in naming the content of this universal morality or natural right, but he does illustrate it by the puzzling remark that the decent and noble are as far removed from incapacity to inflict pains as they are from the disposition to take pleasure in inflicting pain—as far removed, it seems, from pure liberal and progressive pacifism as from the Nazi celebration of cruelty. And then he adds, ostensibly as another illustration of the content of this universal morality, the remark that decent and noble conduct is a matter not of “the natural end of man” but rather of the means “leading to this end.”12 No end is specified. The puzzles that emerge from these early and elliptical statements of Strauss are emblematic of difficulties inherent in the essential thrust of Strauss’s rhetoric in its later, better-known development. This rhetoric hinges on an effort to shore up the modern practice of liberal democracy by praising the ancient understanding of the theoretical life as the true end of man; it thus involves at once a distinction and linkage between, as he phrases it in this early lecture, “the search for truth” and the “effort to introduce the seeds of virtue.”13 A careful interrogation of these early statements may shed light on the meaning of Strauss’s by now more familiar, mature rhetorical posture. What does Strauss mean by the two remarks noted above—namely, the remarks to the effect that (1) natural morality is located somewhere between delight in cruelty and the incapacity to inflict pain; and that (2) morality concerns means rather than ends? Strauss’ intention begins to come to light against the background of a compressed critique of modernity that Strauss offers at the end of this same section (seven, of twelve in all). Here Strauss affirms that, although he has defined nihilism as the desire to annihilate contemporary or modern civilization, it by no means follows that the most radical critique of modern civilization is inherently nihilist. On the contrary, Strauss argues that, since civilization depends upon a “natural basis” that it does not create, the modern idea of reason as “the conquest of nature” is, at the limit, strict nonsense. This would imply that modern civilization consumes its own foundation in pursuing the limitless conquest of nature. But what exactly does Strauss have in mind by “nature” in this context? His example is telling and rich with implications for his whole project: the natural basis of civilization, he argues, is manifest in the fact that all communities,

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civilized and uncivilized, depend upon the use of armed force against their external enemies as well as against domestic criminals. This example should remind us of the otherwise surprising remark about the capacity for cruelty. It appears that Strauss’s understanding of “nature” and therefore of the standard of “reason” is intimately associated with acknowledgment of material necessity. The rule of reason appears to be inherently linked with the limitation of reason by something outside it. What limits reason, what is insuperably other than reason, is also in a way the ground or condition of reason. The rule of reason is inseparable from the recognition of a realm external, even hostile, to reason. But is this not another way of saying that the status of reason is precisely that of ruler, or that the rule of reason is intimately linked with the reasonableness of ruling? The condition of ruling would not then be accidental to the status or even the very meaning of reason. If Strauss’s concern to find an antidote against the nihilism that results from modern reason’s ambition of mastery leads him to cultivate the praise of classical political philosophy, this is because the proper cure for such ambitions would be the acknowledgment that the rule of reason implies the natural and permanent necessity of ruling, and therefore of force, and indeed of what might be considered (at least by those who believe in the possibility of a perfect mastery of or reconciliation with natural necessities) cruelty— cruelty to one’s enemies or to criminals, but perhaps in the first instance, to one’s own natural appetites and passions. What seems to distinguish Strauss’s approach almost from the beginning is a certain refusal to indulge the wish for resolution of a tension that seems to him inherent in the human condition, in its glory as well as its misery. For Strauss, the rule of reason remains a form of rule, which means that it involves force. This is not to say, though, that reason is simply equivalent to or reducible to force. Indeed the distinctive character of reason and therefore of humanity would appear to be threatened equally by the reduction of reason to force as by the reduction of force to reason. Are these threats not precisely those represented in the two opposite dispositions regarding cruelty which define the extremes between which morality must be situated—that is delight in cruelty and incapacity for cruelty, or German nihilism and the Western pacifism that gave rise to it? But what is the character or content of this “reason”? Strauss’s reticence on this question seems to be of a piece with his association of moral virtue, not with the “natural end of man,”14 but rather with the means leading to this end. If man’s final end were simply and wholly within his grasp, then reason would not have the permanently political or ruling character that it has. If man could achieve or even fully conceive the complete abolition of the distance between himself and his telos, then reason would absorb or be absorbed by that towards which it tends, and it would no longer be defined by

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the condition of ruling that which threatens its integrity as it were from below. The impossibility of any final and complete articulation of man’s natural end explains why Strauss states the evidence for a natural and universal moral standard in negative terms: even the most extreme skeptic, he argues, cannot help but disdain some actions by some men. The evidence for the existence of the noble appears to be derivative from the more immediate evidence of baseness. The noble is that which rises above, or rules, the necessarily existing base. Recognition of the base is the foundation of the “quiet and becoming pride”15 that defines civilization, or the rule of reason. Strauss’s concluding praise of the English, a measured but emphatic praise, can be understood in light of this political understanding of reason that undergirds his analysis of German nihilism. English civilization is characterized, he says, by a good sense that understands modern ideals as the reasonable adaptation to new circumstances of ancient and eternal ideals of decency, the rule of law, and liberty as opposed to license. The English (and not the Germans, who have made Hitler their leader) deserve to be and to remain an imperial nation because they learned long ago to exercise power moderately, or “spare the vanquished and to crush the arrogant.”16 Strauss’s befriending of liberalism involves a rejection of the liberal understanding of reason as purely instrumental. The alternative appears not immediately, however, to be the notion of purely self-sufficient life of contemplating or questioning. Rather, this text suggests that the mature Strauss’s well-known recourse to the notion of pure theory or philosophy as the ground of a good human life is best understood against the background of his sober recognition of reason’s practical or ruling responsibility. This suggestion will be vindicated by further explorations in works of Strauss’s maturity. Leo Strauss thus rejects from the outset Heidegger’s attempt to sever philosophy, or the task of thinking, from the perennial human questions. He grasps the challenge of moral analogy with both hands. He seeks to reconnect and thereby reground both theory and practice through what he styles as a recovery of “classical political philosophy.” A ground for practice in “natural right” would have to draw out and thus preserve a sense of elevation inherent in practice, in moral and political order. Theory must confirm and shelter practice by articulating its implicit reference to some “above,” it must enact an orientation to something “higher.” This is what Strauss seeks in his return to “classical natural right” as anchored in the notion of the transcendent goodness of pure theory. Nothing could be more practical. This does not at all mean that Strauss proposes to discover some set of rationally cognizable eternal laws that would be adequate to govern human conduct and order human societies. For Strauss, although justice is in principle universal, nature—the natural conditions of full human development,

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of virtue or excellence—requires that society be particular, closed, that each society be a “cave.” Sound theory must then consist in accommodation to the necessary confinement of practice to the domain of the cave. From this it follows that coercion is endemic in the human condition—law is founded in politics, in a regime that may be more or less noble but that cannot avoid the necessity of keeping down “lower” impulses. This presupposes a particular definition of the higher and the lower, which will always be contestable, never fully natural. “Philosophy” cannot therefore dictate directly to the city; there is no universalizable natural law because human life must be ruled by some idea of perfection, and every such idea is politically conditioned, partial, partisan. Philosophy, for Strauss, must recognize the necessity of this practical partiality, which is to recognize its own deeply political conditions, its own implication in the necessity of a “moral analogy” linking theoretical truth to practical meaning. Philosophy must not try to abolish the cave, which would only universalize it (as in modern universalistic reductionism), but rather take responsibility (subtle and indirect) for ruling it. In fact, the most acutely self-aware, self-critical, and therefore responsible philosophy will knowingly sponsor a kind of aristocratic partisanship, since it knows that its own nobility is necessarily grafted upon the idea of perfection or excellence that is concretely represented in a political regime. Strauss’s claim that theory transcends practice is rooted in an awareness of the practical conditions of theory, and of the practical sources of the nobility of theory.

THE MANNER AND THE MATTER OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Strauss’s essay, “What is Political Philosophy?”17 introduces us to questions and possibilities that provide keys to his lifetime project. After promising in this discourse “never for a moment [to] forget what Jerusalem stands for,” Strauss introduces “political philosophy” with apparent modesty as a “part” or “branch” of the “larger whole” of philosophy, “the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole,” the part that deals with political action and therefore with the question of the good.18 As he formulates the relationship between the political part of philosophy and philosophy as a whole, a tension immediately emerges: in the term “political philosophy,” philosophy is said to indicate the manner of treatment, that is, radical and comprehensive, whereas “political” names “both the subject matter and the function.” But then immediately this characterization in terms of “subject matter and function” slides into a reference to the manner of political philosophy, namely, one suited to the “ultimate goal of political

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life.”19 Thus we are confronted somewhat obliquely at the beginning of the essay with a tension between the manner of philosophy (radical and comprehensive) and the manner of political philosophy, somehow determined by its preoccupation with ultimate practical ends. These characterizations seem clearly to favor or to elevate the whole of philosophy, or the quest for knowledge of the whole, over the mere part, the merely practical part that is political philosophy. When Strauss writes that “political philosophy is that branch of philosophy which is closest to political life, to non-philosophic life, to human life,”20 the context might seem to imply that this preoccupation with the human is fundamentally a distraction from the radical and comprehensive task of philosophy. But can what is closest to our humanity be considered a distraction from the most rigorous thinking? Strauss seems to qualify political philosophy as descending from the properly philosophical question of the whole to consider the mere part that is humanity, and in particular the human question of the good. But is not the reversal of this schema also valid? Can we not also say, at least as pertinently, that political philosophy brings the practical question, the human question of the good to bear upon the question of the whole? And can the human question of the good be considered, even or especially with a view to the most exacting critical rigor, as incidental to the properly philosophic question of the whole, of “the natures of all things”?21 Following what appears as a kind of digression on what political philosophy is not (political thought, political theory, political theology, social philosophy, political science), Strauss returns to political philosophy via political science “in the original meaning of the term,” the knowledge that culminates in the political wisdom of the statesman.22 This practical wisdom always exists in a necessary tension with the mere opinion it strives to replace. However, owing to “a fairly recent change in the character of society,” such wisdom or the quest for it has been all but displaced by a specialized “scientific” political science that claims to have no practical stake in political things (animated as it is by the sheer “love of truth” considered as “a moral impulse”).23 But the struggle with opinion cannot be evaded by denying “the comprehensive character of politics” and treating politics “as one compartment among many.” First politics, and then political philosophy, is unavoidably concerned with “our situation as human beings, i.e., the whole situation”—a formulation that I propose (since Strauss does not say merely “the whole human situation”) might also perhaps be rendered: “the situation of the whole.”24 The manner of philosophy (radical and comprehensive) is not exempt from the comprehensively political situation of humanity and thus from the practical manner of political philosophy. Strauss proceeds to describe the attempts of “Science and History,”25 of positivism and of historicism, to evade what I have called the situation of

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the whole, or the insuperably moral and political conditions of philosophy or science. All science presupposes pre-scientific understanding, beginning (for “social science,” at least) with the simple capacity to “tell human beings from other beings,” a capacity that is always embedded in an implicit awareness of the whole and thus in opinions regarding the whole.26 Such evasion (often under cover of a devotion to democracy) is necessarily obfuscation and selfdeception, since the attempt to separate science from “values” ignores the immediately practical character of the phenomena under investigation. More fundamentally, perhaps, it precludes the scientist’s affirming the goodness or nobility of his own activity.27 It is because of historicism’s relatively superior attention to the wholes in which social phenomena are embedded that “positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism,” “the serious antagonist of political philosophy,” at least in our times.28 Historicism “abandons the distinction between facts and values,” but it also rejects “the question of the good society.”29 The more “thoughtful historicists” admit “certain permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base,” but, rather than taking responsibility for the “completion” of these rudimentary permanencies, they abandon themselves and those who follow them to dispensations of “fate,” such as that which Heidegger (unnamed here) embraced in 1933. The lesson Strauss draws, no doubt remembering his promise not to forget for a moment what Jerusalem stands for, is that “man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.”30 The alternative Strauss recommends, what he here calls “the classical solution,” must therefore be understood as a way of assuming responsibility for these “common” and “rudimentary” permanencies by in some way completing them, or taking them up into some whole. Classical political philosophy arises in a certain continuity with pre-philosophic opinion in that “it reproduces and raises to its perfection, the magnanimous flexibility of the true statesman, who crushes the insolent and spares the vanquished.”31 The precise way in which classical political philosophy offers “completion” to common opinions is a question, it is fair to say, that Strauss is determined not to answer. Nevertheless, the “spirit” or mood of “serenity or sublime sobriety” is “free of all fanaticism,” not because it rests upon some absolute skepticism or zeteticism, but precisely “because it knows that evil cannot be eradicated.”32 This mood and the knowledge upon which it based (or which is based upon it) thus seem to be the substance of the continuity between the magnanimous statesman and the classical political philosopher. Strauss chooses to illustrate this magnanimous mood, or “the character of classical political philosophy,” with a rather long development concerning

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Plato’s Laws, with particular attention to “the speech about wine,” which “appears to be the introduction to political philosophy.”33 Strauss takes wine (or rather talk about wine) to represent a kind of mediating element between the philosopher (here the Athenian stranger, a stand-in for Socrates) and the lawful and pious old pillars of society. Wine “enlarges the horizon of the law-bred old citizens,” while it “limits the horizon of the philosopher”; let us say it loosens up the citizen and narrows the perspective of the philosopher from a “mad” interest in the whole to the sobriety and moderation of political responsibility. The cost to philosophy appears obvious; thus, moderation is not described as a properly philosophical virtue, but as “a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.”34 The place where, with help of talk of wine, the philosopher and the pious citizen meet is the regime, “the guiding theme of political philosophy.”35 The citizen learns that laws are not made by gods but are the responsibility of human legislators, and the philosopher is somehow brought to share this responsibility with other humans. The idea of the regime follows from the goal-directedness of human “life” in general and of “social life” in particular. To achieve its comprehensive goal, a society must be “organized, ordered, constructed, [and] constituted in a manner which is in accordance with this goal.” For Strauss it seems to follow immediately that the decisive factor in such a rational organization of society is that the ruling or “authoritative human beings must be akin to that goal.”36 This of course suggests the question (which Strauss here addresses in no obvious way): who are these authoritative beings, said to be “akin” to the comprehensive goal of society? “Classical political philosophy is guided by question of the best regime,” and the best regime is that ruled by the best man, or the man most akin to what is best. Strauss says that “it is almost a miracle if an individual achieves the highest,” by which he seems to affirm the possibility of such an achievement.37 Is this “highest” to be identified with the political philosopher, who we learned above represents the perfection of the statesman? But the statesman was there characterized in terms of his flexibility, and perfection seems to imply definiteness. Can the political philosopher define his own perfection apart from the flexibility of the statesman? By “achieving the highest” does he escape the human condition as “the in-between being: in between brutes and gods,” in order to provide the statesman with a definite standard of perfection?38 Or is the most precise understanding of such a standard precisely that of an in-between being, negotiating flexibly and responsibly the space between brutes and gods? Strauss develops the problem of such a standard through a discussion of the relation between the good man and the good citizen, which corresponds

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to the eventually heart-breaking tension between love of the good and love of one’s own. “The partisan sees deeper than the patriot,” but “only one kind of partisan is superior to the patriot; this is the partisan of virtue.”39 In his willingness to sacrifice what is his own for virtue or the good or what is highest, the “form” or standard of the best regime, the best man may seem remote from the ordinary man, attached as the latter is to the mere “matter” of his own fatherland. But this very “idealistic” elevation of form (despite its lack of “actuality”40) over matter, an elevation that of course determines classical metaphysics as much as it does classical political philosophy, in fact expresses the deep continuity between the practical statesman and the godlike “philosopher.” This discontinuity between form and matter is also the continuity between the citizen and the philosopher, practice and theory; it is the “metaphysical” articulation of the elevated spirit or mood of serene resignation that the philosopher shares with the magnanimous man. In learning moderation by sharing talk of wine with the pious citizen, the philosopher might thus be learning something about himself, eventually something of genuine philosophical interest. Strauss further develops the theme of continuity between the best man and the citizen, or between the highest and the ordinary, as he responds to the second of “two very common objections” to which “classical political philosophy is today exposed.” The first of these objections will be addressed shortly; the second objection is that “classical political philosophy is based on classical natural philosophy or classical cosmology, and this basis has proven to be untrue by the success of modern natural science.”41 In Strauss’s response to this objection, he provides perhaps his richest and plainest statement, or his richest relatively plain statement, of the essential character of philosophy (“what philosophy is or what a philosopher is”). The question of the nature of man, which we have seen arise necessarily from practical questions of the good life and the good society, seems indeed to be inseparable from the question of “the nature of the whole,” or of “cosmology.” But the example of Socrates, who “originated classical political philosophy,” suggests that human nature may be understood on the basis of “the quest for cosmology rather than a solution to the cosmological problem,” that is, “in the light of the unchangeable ideas, i.e., of the fundamental and permanent problems.” The question of man leads to the question of the whole, which leads back to the question of man. This is possible because “the human soul is the only part of the whole which is open to the whole and therefore more akin to the whole than anything else is.”42 I note that this Socratic recourse from the whole to the soul in fact seems to require a cosmological insight into a link between the two.

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Strauss frames a discussion of such a link in terms of the categories of “homogeneity” and “heterogeneity,” a “fundamental” and unsurpassable dualism of human knowledge. At one pole we find knowledge of homogeneity: . . . in mathematics, and derivatively in all the product arts or crafts. At the opposite pole we find knowledge of heterogeneity, and in particular of heterogeneous ends; the highest form of this kind of knowledge is the art of the statesman and of the educator.43

Knowledge of the whole would combine these two kinds of knowledge, but this appears to be unattainable. But note that Strauss states clearly that “the latter kind of knowledge is superior to the former,” because, as knowledge of the ends of human life,” it is “knowledge of a whole”—presumably the best or the only clue to knowledge of the whole.44 Is not the reader then authorized to associate the “knowledge of homogeneity,” that is, mathematical or productive knowledge—technology in the deep, Heideggerian sense—associated with “the charm of competence,” and thus shamelessly or madly indifferent45 to the mystery of human difference46 with the “insolence” Strauss’s political philosopher arms himself to “crush.” The knowledge of heterogeneity is associated with “humble awe”47 before this difference; at the extreme (not, that is, in its “highest form”), this knowledge would seem to reduce to a poetic or religious sacrifice of reason before such mystery. Strauss of course espouses no such sacrifice; he succumbs to neither charm, but proposes, in a rare poetic abandon, a “mating of courage and moderation,” to be “accompanied, sustained and elevated by eros” and “graced by nature’s grace.”48 It is this rational and moderate partisanship of human meaning that will “spare the vanquished,” which presupposes that what is vanquished is indeed vanquished. And note that Strauss identifies the maintenance of this tension between homogeneity and heterogeneity, a moderately partisan maintenance favoring human insight into the human difference, not merely with “political philosophy,” but with philosophy simply. The wine of moderation thus appears in the last analysis to be not only a political, but a philosophical asset. Everything here thus suggests that Strauss’s insight into a cosmological kinship of the soul is in no way separate or independent from the kinship noted earlier between the regime or political whole and the authoritative human beings who rule it and through whom it knows its virtue or character. The meaning of the soul’s openness to the cosmic whole can never be discerned in pure isolation from the determination of the meaning of the political whole by its ruling virtues. There is no way to absolve the partisanship of the most delicately adjusted philosophic tension from its original dependence on a fundamentally political partisanship. The best man’s kinship with the Whole is continuous with his kinship with the best regime.

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NATURE & POLITICS: NATURAL RIGHT AND HISTORY When Leo Strauss invites the reader, in the third chapter (“The Origins of the Idea of Natural Right”) of perhaps his most famous work, Natural Right and History,49 to follow him in his search behind a “scientific” to a “natural” understanding of “political things,” it is clear that Strauss understands himself to be addressing the phenomenological projects of Husserl and Heidegger.50 Strauss’s departure from these projects is already apparent in his initial argument that “nature” is originally a term of distinction, the opposite of “convention” and cannot therefore be simply identified with “the totality of phenomena.”51 The fundamentally political character of Strauss’s understanding of philosophy itself comes clearly into view by setting Natural Right and History against the background of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics.52 In the context of Heidegger’s account of the “restriction of Being,” it becomes apparent that Strauss is very deliberately embracing such a restriction, or that he is perfectly aware that his understanding of philosophy is political in its inception and to its very core. Whereas Heidegger had bemoaned the restriction of Being to eternal presence, Strauss not only embraces this definition but on close inspection does so very deliberately on deeply political grounds. The main lesson, in fact, of chapter 3 of Natural Right History (“The Origin of the Idea of Natural Right”) is that “eternal presence” is from the outset a political notion; or, in other words, that the very notion of the trans-political in Strauss is politically grounded. Strauss traces the “original form of doubt” that founds the idea of nature as a term of distinction to “the original character of authority” from which it arose.53 This is to say that Strauss deliberately embraces the political-ethical framing of the originary perspective of philosophy, the original framing of the very notion of “nature.” He recognizes therefore that philosophic doubt or questioning is not absolutely free or boundless, but receives an original direction or orientation from its responsibility for supplanting an earlier form of authority. Philosophy aims at uprooting the ancestral good, yet it preserves an essentially practical perspective: nature itself is understood as “the ancestor of all ancestors . . . the authority.”54 Philosophy is decisively determined or restricted by a practical orientation inherited from the authority it attempts to supplant. In the next chapter (“Classic Natural Right”), Strauss presents Socrates’ study of human things as based upon a new approach to the study of all things, a return from the madness of his predecessors to a certain sobriety and common sense that is respectful of the “eidos” (form, shape, character) of things, attentive to “the ‘surface’ of the things.”55 This respect for the heterogeneity of beings as given to the common understanding implies a view

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of the whole as a “totality” of parts in some elusive “natural articulation”; the whole is not simply the sum of the parts, it cannot “be” in the same sense as its parts, but may be said to be somehow “beyond being.” We begin to see in what way this is a fundamentally political approach to understanding when Strauss observes that our only access to knowledge of the whole is through a consideration of opinions, partial and imperfect as these must be. Philosophy, for Socrates, is the ascent from opinion to knowledge of truth, an ascent that can be meaningful without ever reaching its end. All opinions reflect and culminate in an understanding of the most authoritative notions, an understanding of the good and the just. Socrates and the school of “classic natural right” argue against the conventionalists and hedonists that a life according to nature is a life directed not towards pleasure in and of itself, but towards virtue or excellence: “everyone can be forced to admit that he cannot, without contradicting himself, deny that the soul stands higher than the body.”56 Strauss understands that the choice for philosophy understood not as the Question of Being, but as a concern for or attunement to the heterogeneity of beings, for “what each of the beings is,” is inseparable from the embrace of a certain, ultimately political perspective.57 Strauss seems to endorse the elevation of philosophy above all practical concerns, but on closer inspection he shows that this very pretension is parasitic on an essentially aristocratic disposition. The philosopher’s transcendence is a prolongation of the gentleman’s lofty contempt for that which he considers beneath him: the philosopher is to the gentleman what the gentleman is to the vulgar. Philosophic elevation is thus parasitic on the rule of the gentleman—a rule the “nobility” of which Strauss praises, but the justice of which he also subtly questions. Strauss’s deliberately aristocratic understanding of political philosophy, as well as his deliberately political understanding of philosophy, are nowhere more succinctly stated than in his proposition that “the relation of virtue to human nature is comparable to that of act to potency.”58 Human nature cannot be the unproblematic ground of virtue because we only know the meaning of human nature from the standpoint of virtue—that is, from the perspective of an actual and therefore a definite, particular understanding of virtue. Human nature is not the foundation of natural right, since human nature is always an actualization or interpretation. There is even a sense, then, in which “natural right”—the natural right of the best to rule—is the foundation of “human nature.” For Strauss the ruling, authoritative opinions that constitute “the city” as a particular regime both conceal and give access to a more adequate understanding of the good and the just. Common opinions are at once the indispensable starting point of philosophy and its eternal antagonist. Therefore, although for Strauss philosophy can claim no final and complete access to

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“nature,” there may be said to be a natural and permanent situation of philosophy in relation to the city. Strauss’s attention to “the things themselves” takes the form of a reflection on this situation. This reflection is practical or political as well as theoretical because the philosopher must not only gather fragments of truth from the opinions of his fellow human beings, but must also take an interest in shaping their opinions such that they come to tolerate if not admire the activity of philosophy—a toleration that can by no means be taken for granted. In effect, then, the activity of philosophy is inseparable from an interest in ruling, either directly or indirectly, an interest in securing the ascendancy of a regime of opinion that allows a place for philosophy. This interest should not be interpreted, moreover, as simply external or instrumental. Consider Strauss’s statement that “the best regime, as presented by classical political philosophy, is the object of the wish or prayer of the gentlemen as that object is interpreted by the philosopher.”59 This wish, and the understanding of the good life implicit in it, thus belongs in no simple sense either to the gentlemen or to the philosopher. The gentlemen’s wish is articulated by philosophy in ways friendly to the philosopher’s interest in the activity of philosophizing. At the same time, Strauss discreetly suggests that the very self-understanding of philosophy is shaped by its inherently political condition, by the necessity it is under to rule over opinion. The good of philosophy cannot be articulated except as a refinement, purification, or intensification of the gentlemen’s good, of aristocratic virtue. Strauss’s sometimes extravagant claims on behalf of the philosopher’s serene self-sufficiency must be understood against the background of these political reflections. The philosopher stands in relation to the gentleman as the gentleman to the common man; the philosopher’s elevation and ostensible self-sufficiency can rule over the city only because these can be understood as interpretations, prolongations of the city’s ruling virtues. Strauss’s version of the phenomenological call to “the things themselves” is, then, a call for thinkers to reflect on and take responsibility for what he understands to be the natural and insuperable political conditions of thinking. It appears that our very understanding of what is “natural” as distinct from conventional is conditioned by a moral-political judgment, an understanding of human excellence, defined by reference to its fulfillment projected upon the figure of “the philosopher.” And Strauss appears to envision no complete fulfillment of philosophy’s theoretical aspirations; it might be said, then, that the truth of philosophy is at least as practical as it is theoretical. Philosophy fulfills itself in assuming its ruling responsibilities. The goodness of philosophy cannot be severed from its justice. Strauss’s return from the abstractions of modern theory to “the things themselves” is at once a return to concrete,

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practical human existence (in the determinate form of an assumption of political responsibility) and a return to “nature,” a “nature” ordered hierarchically in the light of that very responsibility. Strauss is keenly aware, to be sure, of the difficulty of sustaining such an orientation towards “nature” in the context of the massive success of modern natural science. It is obvious, moreover, that the justice that Strauss would have philosophy honor is distinctly aristocratic and thus apparently ill-suited to inform practice in the modern world. I will argue, indeed, that Tocqueville addresses the aristocratic dimension of the responsibility of philosophy in relation to modern practice more judiciously than does Strauss.

“THE PROBLEM OF SOCRATES” AND “PLATO’S STATESMAN” If philosophy, on Strauss’s understanding, cannot be simply identified with political knowledge, it is deeply, internally conditioned by this kind of knowledge. In his lectures on “The Problem of Socrates” Strauss seems to go further still, affirming that “Philosophy is primarily political philosophy.”60 But he again puts in question the meaning of this primacy by continuing: “because political philosophy is required for protecting the inner sanctum of philosophy.” As he does so often, Strauss thus seems here to indicate that interest in politics represents a purely exterior necessity in relation to the interior of philosophy. “The political is indeed not the highest, but it is the first, because it is the most urgent. It is related to philosophy as continence is related to virtue proper.”61 It will be necessary to consider, then, whether continence is not in some way philosophically superior to virtue. These lines last quoted appear at the end of the second of five lectures. But earlier in this same lecture Strauss seems to maintain that “political things, the merely human things, are of decisive importance for understanding nature as a whole.” This apparent contradiction is altogether characteristic of these lectures, and indeed of Strauss’s work as a whole. To understand it we might begin by noticing that this last quotation is part of a conditional proposition: “The recognition by philosophy of the fact that the human race is worthy of some seriousness is the origin of political philosophy or political science. If this recognition is to be philosophic,” then the decisive philosophic importance of political things follows.62 The question of the philosophic importance of politics returns us to the themes of “heterogeneity” and “homogeneity” that we examined above in connection with the essay “What is Political Philosophy.” In the present lectures on the problem of Socrates, Strauss returns at least twice to this quite distinctive theme. In these passages it is clear that for Strauss the

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recognition of the specificity and the dignity of political things is essential to the safeguarding, against the homogenizing tendencies of thought, of the qualitative differentiations operated by common sense that are the source of genuine philosophy. The very superiority of the philosophic life depends, moreover, upon this fundamentally political safeguard. The radical otherness of philosophy itself in relation to political life arises within the space of differentiation opened in and by politics—just as, at the heart of ethicalpolitical life, it is of the essence of virtue to affirm its distinction from mere continence. Virtue depends upon continence or moral strength but also upon denying this dependence.63 Similarly, philosophy is inseparable from the rule of reason, but must also claim to transcend ruling necessities. If “all nobility consists in [a] rising above and beyond oneself”64 and if every ascent that does not possess its end but rather glimpses it and reveres it participates in the thumotic character of political life,65 then it follows that even philosophic life is conditioned by thumos—perhaps especially in its claim to be exempt of it. Philosophy is rooted in an affirmation of the dignity of humanity, a particular and therefore inevitably partisan enactment of this dignity that cannot be referred to a prior, purely theoretical foundation. When Strauss writes that “philosophy stands or falls by the city,” this must therefore be understood in the most radical sense.66 True philosophy—that is, political philosophy—would thus seem to involve a kind of equilibrium or mean between the prideful “charm of competence” of homogeneous (mathematical-technical) knowledge and the “humble awe” associated with the knowledge of heterogeneous human ends.67 On closer inspection, though, the picture is more complicated, since heterogeneity is at once more humble and more prideful than homogeneity. This can be seen by pursuing the discussion of the meaning of philosophy in relation to the problem of heterogeneity and homogeneity in Strauss’ consideration of Plato’s Statesman that we find in the central section (between a discussion of The Republic and one of The Laws) of his chapter “Plato” in the History of Political Philosophy.68 Here Strauss explicitly associates “all arts, and especially the kingly art,” not with mathematical homogeneity, or the “art of measurement . . . which considers the greater and the less . . . in relation to one another” but with “measurements with a view to the right mean or the fitting.”69 Thus it appears possible to preserve the sense of philosophy’s kinship with the arts, in that the arts are here considered not from the standpoint of production (hence Strauss’ phrase: “the productive arts or crafts”) but from the statesman’s standpoint of their use in relation to the whole of human life. Strauss’s discussion of the problem of this wholeness suggests in fact that philosophy itself may be seen as the highest appearance of a certain equilibrium or “right mean” as a figure of the best life.

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Strauss acknowledges in this chapter that the impossibility of founding knowledge on an “absolute beginning” threatens philosophy and therefore human life with “Sisyphean” absurdity. What can philosophy mean if “we are condemned to rest satisfied with partial knowledge of parts of the whole and hence never truly to transcend the sphere of opinion?” If there is an answer to this question or challenge, Strauss suggests, it would seem to involve a linking or weaving together of the highest aspirations of knowledge—a pure and serene pursuit of cosmic truth, which would appear to reduce common human pretensions to insignificance—with the necessarily opinion-laden affirmation of human freedom or distinctiveness. Thus, whereas the “pride” by which human beings “divide the genus ‘animal’ into the species ‘brutes’ and ‘men’” and which underlies the political claims of human freedom at first appears as simply opposed to the “modesty or moderation” of the art of dialectics, Strauss finally suggests instead that “the whole is not whole without man, without his own effort, and this effort presupposes . . . knowledge which is not contemplative or theoretical but prescriptive or commanding or practical.”70 This participation of our pre-theoretical humanity in any possible philosophic meaning of “the whole” underlies the deep co-primordiality of theory and practice as it emerges from Strauss’s highly compressed discussion of the relation of the Statesman to the Republic.71 Whether considering the rule of reason from the standpoint of the political claims of philosophy (the Republic) or from that of the philosophic status of the art of ruling (the Statesman), one arrives at the mutual inextricability of reason and ruling: as all action implicitly involves a theoretical orientation towards a reality beyond human power, so all reflection involves a practical affirmation of its own worth. The linking of theory and practice in the rule of reason is by no means a fusion; rather, it is precisely the repudiation of this co-primordiality of theory and practice, the denial of a natural link between the soul as agency in the practical world and the soul as knower, that yields the modern construction of reason as mastery, or the absorption of theory by practice, or vice versa. Strauss clearly signals his rejection of this modern fusion of radical detachment and radical homogeneity: “The whole human race, and not any part of it, is self-sufficient as a part of the whole, and not as the master or conqueror of the whole.”72 Considering Strauss’s discussion of the Statesman in connection with the passages we have commented in “What is Political Philosophy?” the reader is led to understand the extremes of mastery and debasement at work in the modern understanding of reason (the limitless mastery of a homogeneous, objectified “nature”) as the result of an abandonment or forgetting of a classical equilibrium most fully explored in Plato’s dialogues. The classical claim

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of philosophic self-sufficiency is there brought to terms with its dependence on the meaningfulness of humanity as that most heterogeneous part that grounds the search for an articulate whole. At the same time, humanity’s prideful sense of distinctive significance is moderated by its philosophic subordination to the question of a larger meaning that surpasses and humbles all human pretensions. The kinship and otherness of the philosopher and the non-philosopher thus provides perhaps the most fundamental manifestation of the problem of homogeneity and heterogeneity; the philosopher secures his detachment from opinion only by returning perpetually to the opinion of detachment. To overcome this tension between intellect and action, nature and convention, necessity and goodness by asserting that all law and morality is simply conventional and thus ultimately the result acquisition or violence would be to follow Machiavelli’s incomprehensible or uncomprehending detachment. We can say rather that what is natural in law—what is good by nature—can never be fully extricated from what is simply inherited, from the ancestral or traditional. But this is not so much to depreciate the competence of reason as it is to acknowledge the images of the good as distilled and distorted, to a greater or lesser degree, by accident and force in memory or tradition. And does not Strauss himself invite us along this path when he describes the human soul as that singular part of the whole that is open to the whole? If this were not true already of the soul under ancestral-divine law, it could never become true of philosophers. If philosophy is “graced by nature’s grace,” then it is not itself identical to that grace.73 The philosopher can only transcend the city because the city in some sense already transcends itself.

LETTING BEING BE, POLITICALLY According to Strauss, “the discovery of noetic heterogeneity permits one to let things be what they are and takes away the compulsion to reduce essential differences to something common.” But how exactly does the “vindication of what one could call common sense” that gives us access to “the truth of the surface”74 differ from a late-Heideggerian letting-be or a Husserlian return to the things themselves? One word might suffice for summing up a response in both cases: Strauss’s approach is distinctive in the central place it gives to the political. As concerns Strauss’s relation to Heidegger, one might begin by recalling that Strauss calls the German master (referred to only as “the most radical historicist in 1933”) to account for having welcomed “as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while

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it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation.”75 This teaches us “that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason.”76 Strauss’s insistence on the political responsibility of reason points up the active, responsible, moderately courageous or perhaps rather courageously moderate character of what we might call, in Heideggerian language, the Straussian “letting-be” of the phenomena. To let beings be is to take responsibility for the heterogeneity of beings, a heterogeneity that can never be fully grounded in theory considered as prior to practice. The root of the error that Heidegger inherited from Husserl can be discerned in Husserl’s suspicion of “the natural attitude,” a suspicion that, we have seen, Heidegger never questions. This common front is clearly described in an early study of Husserl by Emmanuel Levinas.77 Levinas understands Heidegger to have developed Husserl’s insight that meaning must be sought elsewhere than in the natural attitude: “It is by an analysis of thought and not by that naïve vision that affirms existence all the while ignoring meaning and spiritual horizons—[sic] that the specificity of the object is guaranteed against all false interpretation.”78 In a section devoted to “The Phenomenological Reduction,”79 Levinas then takes up the same Husserlian text that Strauss focuses on in his discussion of Husserl (above), Philosophy as Rigorous Science. “Spiritual life consists in according meaning,” Husserl teaches, but the pure act of granting meaning normally gets lost in “the world,” in “commerce with the real.” Thus our spiritual life takes the distorted form of “an exercise of thought,” “a technique” that is acquainted with and pronounces naively upon being “without concerning itself with the meaning of its [own] objectivity.”80 It is the natural attitude that lies “at the origin of the equivocations and crises in which the very meaning of the operations the scientist executes with certainty as a technician of theory escapes him.” The decay of spirit or meaning into routine and technique requires the deployment of a counter-technique: “It is this natural attitude, this ‘innate dogmatism,’ of man that the phenomenological reduction must overturn.81 It is because the natural is the enemy of the concrete and spiritual that “the phenomenological reduction” must be considered “a violence that man does to himself, as a being among other beings, in order to find himself as pure thought.”82 This violence, moreover, is not a “provisional procedure” allowing for the eventual re-union with “reality.” It is, rather, a “definitive attitude,” “a way for the mind/spirit to exist in conformity to its vocation and finally to be free in its relation to the world,” a passageway to “the total possession of self in reflection” which is “only the reverse side of freedom.”83

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Strauss clearly shares phenomenology’s interest in a return “to the things themselves.” No less than Husserl and Heidegger, he seeks to liberate himself from the sedimentation of traditional theory and thus to attend to the life-world, the pre-scientific ground of science. However, whereas Strauss seeks such a liberation through a return, with the help of pre-Christian political philosophy, to man’s political nature, phenomenology attempts this by a redoubling of modern science’s violence toward nature, a violence (as we will suggest further on) inherited from Christianity. The concrete, lived experience that Husserl and Heidegger seek is not in fact what is lived in man’s “natural attitude.” For them, the objectification that science effects and that threatens human meaning is in fact the prolongation of man’s natural apprehension of beings in the world. From this point of view, to liberate man from the objectification that threatens him in his own scientific activity requires tearing man away from his own objectifying nature. Thus the phenomenological project, from Husserl to Heidegger and including Levinas, elicits ever-renewed violence in the form of ever-compounded “reductions” of man’s primordial self-understanding as a “being among beings,” a part of a heterogeneous whole. Note that Husserl’s alternative (“being among other beings” vs. “pure thought”) excludes precisely the approach to the world as irreducible heterogeneity that Strauss claims to uncover on the basis of a Platonic tradition. Strauss proposes to begin in a naturally-politically heterogeneous world where beings exist in a differentiated metaphysical space between baseness and elevation. In such a world, to find oneself naturally as a being among other beings implies no reduction to homogeneous objectivity. Strauss would rather ascribe such a reduction to a distinctively modern (post-Christian) and philosophical reductionism. Husserl’s essential error (an error inherited by Heidegger and Levinas) would thus appear to be that of taking the leveling or homogenizing theory of Descartes for the work of nature; in believing that the world that issued from the project of methodical doubt was the same natural world to which this project was applied, Husserl seems to have underestimated the constructive and therefore political ambition of the Cartesian reduction, and thus to have taken a founding modern abstraction for nature itself. It was thought that by virtue of this movement towards the concrete, recent philosophy has overcome the limitations, not only of modern political philosophy, but of classical political philosophy as well. It was overlooked, however, that this change of orientation perpetuated the original defect of modern philosophy because it accepted abstractions as its starting point, and that the concrete at which one eventually arrived was not at all the truly concrete, but still an abstraction.84

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PHILOSOPHY AS TECHNOLOGY’S OTHER: THE “RESTATEMENT” ON TYRANNY Returning to “What is Political Philosophy,” let us now consider the first modern objection to classical political philosophy, namely, the charge that it “is anti-democratic and hence bad.”85 The first thing to notice here is that, although Strauss points out that even Plato was capable of finding good things to say about democracy, he finally does not deny but explains and begins to justify the anti-democratic character of the Socratic philosophers. At first this justification seems to turn on the distinction between the democratic aim of freedom and the aristocratic aim of virtue. Freedom is “ambiguous” or indeterminate; it may be freedom for evil as well as for good. Virtue requires character education and therefore leisure and wealth, or rather a specific kind of leisurely wealth. Owing to “a kind of natural scarcity,” the rule of such virtuously educated ones must always be the rule of a minority.86 Now, Strauss cannot ignore the fact that “virtue” shares at least some of the indetermination of “freedom;” he has just shown us that every regime asserts its own partisan claim regarding virtue.87 But Strauss prefers such partisanship to the universality or homogeneity of democracy. To be sure, modern democracy advances the project of “universal education,” based on “an economy of plenty.” But such an economic means to education subverts its humane end, for economic expansion “presupposes the emancipation of technology from moral and political control.” Thus “the difference between the classics and us with regard to democracy consists exclusively in a different estimate of the virtues of technology.” Strauss stands with the classical political philosophers against a fundamentally democratic view of humanity because “their implicit prophecy that the emancipation of technology . . . from moral and political control would lead to disaster or to the dehumanization of man has not yet been refuted.”88 Strauss in fact acknowledges agreement with modern democrats (and “even our communist coexistents”) regarding the essential meaning of justice as “to give equal things to equal people and unequal things to people of unequal merit.”89 He does not attempt to refute on “objective” or theoretical grounds the modern democratic or socialist emancipation of equal freedom from partisan claims of unequal virtue. Leo Strauss thus avers that he is much less sure of the goodness of aristocratic virtue than of the badness or the threatening character of modern, technological democracy; this is the exclusive basis of his choice of classical, aristocratic, and necessarily partisan “virtue” over the modern and fundamentally democratic and non-partisan, universalist commitment to “freedom.” The good of humanity, which it is the calling of philosophy to represent and to defend, is knowable first of all and most surely as an alternative to the manifest evil of dehumanizing technology.

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Strauss’s response to technology through a reconstruction of philosophy as “political philosophy” lies at the heart of his “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” addressed to Alexandre Kojève and included in the volume On Tyranny. Strauss’s engagement with Kojève in this essay is set in motion by the question whether modern tyranny (the necessity of which Kojève grants with shocking equanimity), which is based upon the unlimited scientific conquest of nature and is thus a distinctive and post–Christian phenomenon, is therefore beyond the ken of classical political philosophy, or whether classical categories are adequate to understanding the modern phenomenon. Strauss of course is committed to the latter view. The classics, he affirms, were aware of both “the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science.”90 But whether they were aware of the awesome power that would be unleashed by combining these possibilities Strauss does not say; in fact, he invites us to doubt this by averring that the classics “did not dream of present-day tyranny because they regarded its basic presuppositions as so preposterous that they turned their imagination in entirely different directions.”91 Strauss maintains, however, that the classical framework is indispensable for addressing the challenge of modern technological tyranny. We must therefore use classical political philosophy to meet a challenge entirely beyond the imagination of the classics. It appears unlikely, then, that what this philosophy will mean in our modern or post-modern hands will be simply identical to what it meant for Plato and Aristotle. The key to the contemporary utility, even indispensability, of the classical view appears to lie in the ancients’ rejection of each of the elements that would later compose technological tyranny for the reason that they considered them “unnatural,” which for Strauss is another way of saying “destructive of humanity.”92 Further on he refers to the possibility of a society based upon “a degree of abundance which is possible only on the basis of unlimited technological progress with its terrible hazards.”93 Strauss identifies the following alternatives to such technological tyranny: (1) the rule of the wise; (2) permanent revolution; and (3) liberal or constitutional democracy. The first is in principle good and just, but is practically impossible. The second is equivalent to permanent chaos and implies a human existence that is brutish as well as poor and short. The third is Strauss’s clear and obvious preference, one that “comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alternative that is viable in our age.”94 The undesirability of these alternatives overcomes an objection to the classical view (and thus to constitutional democracy understood from that point of view) that Strauss here acknowledges with somewhat unusual candor: “It is true that it is at least partly a matter of accident—of the accident of birth—whether a given individual does or does not belong to the

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class of gentlemen and has thereby had an opportunity of being brought up in the proper manner.”95 Some element of injustice, then, is inherent in the classical or classically inspired constitutional rule. Strauss thus by no means simply rejects Kojève’s argument that aristocracy, as “the rule of a minority over the majority of citizens or of adult residents of a given territory . . . rests, in the last resort, on force or terror,” or his apparent view that “force or terror are indispensable in every regime”—though it does not follow that “all regimes are . . . equally tyrannical.”96 Tolerance for a certain injustice seems to be the price to be paid for avoiding the alternative of technological tyranny as well as that of revolutionary chaos. But this classical tolerance, it seems, can only be defended on the basis of a premise—an “assumption,” Strauss twice acknowledges—that lies at the heart of the classical view and thus becomes the lynchpin, the central stake, of Strauss’s argument: namely, “that the wise do not desire to rule.”97 Strauss’s classical alternative to technological tyranny and the disaster of dehumanization thus appears to depend fundamentally on a premise that is introduced as a mere “assumption.” Modern tyranny derives from the Hegelian and Marxist reduction of all distinctively human motives to the struggle for recognition by other human beings; a rational alternative to tyranny requires the existence of a motive higher than such recognition. Strauss locates such a motive in “the idea of philosophy” understood “in the strict and classical sense” as “quest for eternal order or for the eternal cause or causes of all things.” In his final paragraph, Strauss will acknowledge that this quest “presupposes . . . that there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not affected by History,” or that human freedom is finally subordinated to natural necessity. Thus philosophy presupposes, “in the words of Kojève, that ‘Being is essentially immutable in itself and eternally identical with itself.’”98 It assumes, in other words, that nothing of ultimate concern to human beings as human beings affects Being or is of a final and intrinsic interest to a true philosopher. Here, Strauss is prepared to acknowledge that “this presupposition is not selfevident.”99 Yet he seems to be driven by the challenge of historicism and the logic of modern tyranny that derives from it to exaggerate the detachment of the philosopher from common humanity. The idea of philosophy can only provide an anchor against tyranny if philosophy can be defined in terms of an end or a conception of happiness that is utterly exempt from ordinary human concerns. “As he looks up in search for the eternal order, all human things and all human concerns reveal themselves to him in all clarity as paltry and ephemeral . . . he is as unconcerned as possible with individual and perishable human beings and hence with his own ‘individuality,’ or his body;” indeed, he hardly “knows whether his very neighbor is a human being or some other animal.”100

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This hyperbolic reference to the philosopher’s trans-humanity (with a reference to Plato’s Theaetetus) might be enough to alert us to the rhetorical character of Strauss’s account of philosophy. In fact, at the core of his engagement with Kojève, Strauss makes it very clear that he is aware of the problematic character of the exemption of the philosopher’s “eternity” from all human conditions and concerns. Finally, it is far from clear whether Strauss ever effectively answers Kojève’s main objection to this idea of eternity or whether he believes he has. Here is the “fatal weakness” identified by Kojève: The philosopher cannot lead an absolutely solitary life because legitimate “subjective certainty” and the “subjective certainty” of the lunatic are indistinguishable. Genuine certainty must be “intersubjective.”101

In a paragraph summarizing Kojève’s view, Strauss writes that “the classics were fully aware of the essential weakness of the mind of the individual.”102 But we must be struck by the fact that Strauss never denies but, throughout the argument that follows, in fact implicitly grants, on behalf of his ancient masters, the pertinence of this characterization. In fact, a close reading of Strauss’s serpentine response to Kojève’s objection reveals in effect that Strauss acknowledges the philosopher’s need for “intersubjective” support; his disagreement with Kojève will bear on the character of this intersubjectivity: Strauss in effect does not deny that the philosopher is a human being who as a philosopher needs human support; rather, he denies only that this “intersubjective” support must or should be (1) certain and (2) universal. Whereas for Kojève, following Hegel, the very meaning of philosophy is determined by its demand for certainty and universality, Strauss seeks to recover an understanding of philosophy that is compatible with uncertainty or incompleteness and in which philosophy is necessarily understood as the preserve of a restricted and particular group. Or, to express this contrast in terms of relations between the few and the many, philosophers and non-philosophers: for Kojève “the philosopher must leave the charmed circle of the ‘initiated’ and enter into “the conflict with the political men;” he must engage in “political action” in order to seek the universal realization of the Truth; but Strauss’s guiding imperative, on the contrary, is to direct the ambitions of “philosophers” away from any attempt to realize or vindicate the Truth directly through public or political action. We will see, however, that this does not leave the few as independent of the many as Strauss would have many of his readers believe. More than once Strauss’s argument seems to affirm the detached self-sufficiency of the philosophic life, its “divine” independence from

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the common life of ordinary human beings, only to be drawn back to a consideration of the ties that bind philosophers to friends or to fellow citizens. At the outset Strauss concedes that philosophers do not enjoy such a “subjectively certain” hold on eternity as would transcend the need for friends. If philosophers enjoy some relation to eternal truth, their grasp of truth is not sufficient to bring them enjoyment in absolute solitude. Strauss observes, moreover, that friendship presupposes some substantive agreement; philosophy, however, cannot provide a demonstrable basis for such an agreement. Philosophy thus depends upon conditions of agreement that it cannot create. The agreement on the basis of which philosophers become friends includes a non- or pre-philosophical element, a matter of opinion and prejudice. For this reason, Strauss argues, philosophy is inseparable from the tendency to sectarianism.103 The love of wisdom, however, can never rest satisfied with the opinions and prejudices shared by friends. Dissatisfaction with the pre-philosophic substance of philosophic friendship drives the philosopher to leave his “charmed circle” in order to seek out other opinions to disrupt and put in question what he shares with his friends. It is not accidental but philosophically necessary, then, that the philosopher go down to the marketplace of ideas, the arena of political men. If there is a way beyond the city, it appears that it must lead through the city. By perpetually leveraging the opinions of non-philosophers to unsettle the beliefs he shares with philosophical friends, is it not then possible for the philosopher, despite the defect of absolute subjective certainty, to declare independence from all opinions, including those of philosophical “sects”? According to this possibility, philosophy would be understood as a way of life independent of all substantive views and thus as a “knowledge of ignorance,” a “genuine awareness of the problems.” This understanding of philosophy is attractive (and therefore often taken to be the last “zetetic” word in describing Strauss’s understanding), but Strauss here confesses a new difficulty that immediately arises: “It is impossible to think about these problems without becoming inclined toward a solution, towards one or the other of the very few typical solutions.” The risk of sectarianism is therefore permanent, insuperable, because it is internal to philosophy itself. “The danger of succumbing to the attraction of solutions is essential to philosophy which, without incurring this danger, would degenerate into playing with the problems.”104 The possibility of philosophy thus seems to be suspended somewhere between the risk of taking political and moral opinions too seriously and that of not taking them seriously enough. Still, the nature of this suspension is far from clear. It is here, following a review of Xenophon’s and Kojève’s views on the motivations of love and honor, that Strauss seems to find a way through this

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difficulty and to ground the elevation of the philosopher far above the political world. He now explains the difference between the philosopher and the political man as “a difference with respect to happiness . . . . The philosopher’s dominating passion is a desire . . . for knowledge of the eternal order.”105 As noted above, he is therefore supposed to care little for the ordinary human concerns that grip the souls of political men. But this merely returns us to the question: what, then, is Socrates doing in the marketplace? Why and in what way is philosophy engaged with political concerns? Strauss first offers what one might call a reductionist explanation in terms of the needs of the body and the economic division of labor.106 Immediately, though, he extends the implications of the philosopher’s shared mortality to a natural human attachment prior to any consideration of mutual benefit.107 He adds as well that the philosopher is not a threat to harm his fellows, since his desire for truth eclipses all unjust desires (although, I note, it is not clear how this desire, or indeed the very meaning of “truth,” can be absolved from dependency on the pre-philosophic substance of philosophy). Moreover, Strauss argues, the philosopher will be positively inclined to use his knowledge to try to help his fellows, but without indulging the illusion (or “delusions bred from collective egoisms”) that political action can bring some complete and final remedy to the evils of the human condition. (Strauss here alludes parenthetically to the metaphysical correlate of this view of the limits of political action: “for what has come into being must perish again.”) Therefore, moved by a tempered desire “to help his fellow man by mitigating, as far as in him lies, the evils which are inseparable from the human condition,” the philosopher will undertake a comprehensive reflection on political things and become a political philosopher.108 This motive of simple human beneficence does not, however, address the deepest sense in which philosophy is political. Neither the philosopher’s limited material interests nor his social solidarity with his fellow citizens fully explains his descent as a philosopher into the marketplace. Strauss thus returns us to the heart of the problem, that is, to its earlier formulation in terms of the question of philosophic self-sufficiency, the question of a “deficiency of ‘subjective certainty.’”109 He reminds us first that the philosophers’ need for like-minded friends is a response to this deficiency. Then he indicates that the philosopher’s interest in conversations with non-friends, and presumably non-philosophers (those whose views do not immediately help to supply the defect of certainty from which he suffers) is purer or more disinterested (and by implication more authentically philosophical) than his interest in those with friends. And this is where Strauss ventures “a popular and hence unorthodox” explanation of the relation between the philosopher and non-philosopher, an explanation that seems to represent the richest expression in this text of the essential problem of political philosophy, that is, the problem of the political conditions of philosophy.

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The philosopher’s attempt to grasp the eternal order is necessarily an ascent from the perishable things which as such reflect the eternal order. Of all perishable things known to us, those which reflect that order most or which are most akin to that order, are the souls of men. But the souls of men reflect the eternal order in different degrees. A soul that is in good order or healthy reflects it to a higher degree than a soul that is chaotic or diseased. A philosopher who as such has had a glimpse of the eternal order is therefore particularly sensitive to the difference among human souls.110

The philosopher’s interest in the virtue of non-philosophers is not merely instrumental or affective; it is intrinsic to his interest in the truth of the “eternal order.” To be sure, Strauss soon observes that he has not proven the kinship—denied by reputable philosophers, both ancient and modern— between the order of virtues and the order of the whole. But this observation may point up rather than detract from the philosopher’s philosophical interest in pre-philosophical virtue. For if philosophy necessarily proceeds as an “ascent,” then the philosopher’s “glimpse” of the eternal order cannot be prior to his appreciation of morally-politically healthy souls. The whole crucial paragraph from which I have quoted above does not so much state as it displays an essential circularity that characterizes the relationship between philosophy and pre-philosophic virtue. On the one hand, philosophy seems to depend upon and even spring from a prephilosophic (moral or practical) goodness. Thus the activity of philosophy is characterized as an “ascent.” And yet at the same time it is the philosopher alone who “knows what a healthy or well-ordered soul is;” in fact, in the last analysis, “the good order of the soul is philosophizing,” and only philosophizing.111 It appears that the philosopher would have no glimpse of the good, or no means of ascent towards a higher good, without the immediate evidence of the order of the pre-philosophic soul. And yet this very order, in a sense self-evident or immediately available, can only be articulated or interpreted in the light of a more adequate, precise, and higher understanding of the good, which is identified with “philosophizing.” What is common grounds an ascent to something higher, but then this very ground must yield to an interpretation from “above.” Now, although the determination of the higher as “philosophy” may initially appear peremptory, the argument for it is simple and persuasive: “By realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things, or philosophy.”112 And so a purely formal, “zetetic” understanding of philosophy seems to carry the day, and to emancipate philosophy from the problem of “subjective certainty.” On

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closer inspection, however, this emancipation is less clear or certain. This sentence precedes the one just quoted: “Philosophy, being knowledge of our ignorance regarding the most important things, is impossible without some knowledge regarding the most important things.”113 The very orientation or directedness of our quest for knowledge of what we ignore presupposes that we do not entirely ignore the character of what we are seeking, or—to return to the earlier formulation—that we have “glimpsed” pre-philosophically what it is that we are seeking philosophically. Philosophy, in the confession of ignorance by which it launches its ascent from the practical world, in one sense detaches itself radically from this world. It is this detachment that Strauss is generally eager to emphasize, for the understandable political reasons we are exploring. But at the same time his very formulations remind the alert reader that no “ascent” would be possible without some “knowledge” of the meaning of “important,” a knowledge that can only be borrowed from the pre-philosophic and practical world. We must know something or have glimpsed something of “the most important things” even to know that we are ignorant of them. This is not simply to deny that only the philosopher’s soul is truly healthy or well ordered, since only by knowledge of ignorance is it possible to escape the deformity of boasting.114 But philosophic virtue, according to Strauss’s analysis, would appear to be not so much a separate and distinct alternative to moral virtue as an interrupted, self-aware enjoyment of virtue, delicately poised between self-affirmation and self-doubt, somehow at once ironic and edifying.115 And its moment of self-affirmation, we can now see, cannot be exempt from a certain “boasting,” if only in the sense that philosophy can never fully validate the glimpses of the soul’s health—perspectives necessarily embedded in the implicit hierarchy of a practical world—that launch its own zetetic enterprise. Strauss’s remarks concerning the actual relations between philosophers and non-philosophers must be read in the light of this dependence of the nobility of zeteticism on the very practical nobility it undertakes to question. These relations fall into two categories: relations with potential philosophers and relations with others who are not potential philosophers. Strauss describes the philosopher as naturally desiring that “those among the young whose souls are by nature fitted for it, acquire good order for their souls,” which of course means philosophy.116 Against Kojève he thus contends that the philosopher has no desire to rule, but only, let us say, to recruit. But if philosophy’s grounding of its own health or nobility is always incomplete and therefore always at least residually an interpretation rooted in a practical or political perspective, then can this strict distinction between recruiting and ruling really be maintained? The “philosopher’s” desire to introduce young souls to

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philosophy can never be completely purified of the common human desire or ambition to form their souls on the model of his own. The project of opening another’s soul to the Truth, by the terms of Strauss’s own understanding of philosophy’s imperfect quest, is thus never free from the ambition to rule, to see one’s own “truth” represented in the character and opinions of others. Strauss addresses the philosopher’s relation to those who are not potential philosophers in connection with the pleasures attendant to “awareness of progress” in the quest for truth. “Xenophon goes so far as to speak of the selfadmiration of the philosopher,” and Strauss does not take exception to this formulation or to “self-satisfaction” as an alternative term. The key here is the claim that the philosopher does not need the admiration of others to confirm his own “estimate of himself.” Nonetheless, Strauss indirectly indicates, the philosopher depends, in his own self-understanding, on his relations with non-philosophers, since it is in bringing to the surface “self-contradictions” in their opinions that he assures himself of his superiority and of his “progress.”117 Strauss thus depicts the self-satisfaction and self-admiration of the philosopher—in effect, his “happiness,” such as it is—as thoroughly embedded in a practical, pre-philosophic world, despite Strauss’s protestations concerning the serene detachment of the philosopher. Thus, while there are indeed “specific pleasures” associated with the quest for wisdom, the enjoyment of these pleasures can never be separated from the philosopher’s sense of the “rank” of these pleasures as dependent upon the “rank” of the activities to which they belong.118 And thus we are thrown back on the “self-admiration” of the philosopher, which clearly depends upon or is bound up with the admiration of his philosophical recruits and with his capacity to look down upon the self-contradictory non-philosophers. The very rank of the ostensibly most selfsufficient activity is inscribed in a broader, pre-philosophical hierarchy. By further proposing a kinship between the socially embedded selfadmiration of the philosopher and the idea of “‘the good conscience’ which as such does not require confirmation by others,” Strauss calls our attention to the contrast between conscience and intersubjective support or recognition.119 For Strauss has, despite his own protestations to the contrary, traced the dependence of the actual activity of philosophy on various human sources of confirmation, direct and indirect. In fact he has given us no reason to disagree with Kojève’s dismissal, as paraphrased by Strauss, of the Christian idea of conscience as a trans-political moral standard: It is practically impossible to say whether the primary motive of the philosopher is the desire for admiration or the desire for the pleasures deriving from the understanding. The very distinction has no practical meaning unless we gratuitously assume that there is an omniscient God who demands from men a pure heart.120

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One might indeed say that Strauss’s fundamental agreement with Kojève lies in the determination they share to avoid the Biblical attempt to envision the practical realm from the standpoint of an omniscient God who searches hearts, and in this sense a determination to stay within the practical meaning of the question of the meaning of philosophy and of its relation to practice. Thus in the course of one of Strauss’s apparently unequivocal statements (contra Kojève) of the absolute transcendence or detachment of the philosophy (“the philosopher is concerned with nothing but the quest for wisdom”), he remarks that “we do not have to pry into the heart of any one in order to know that, insofar as the philosopher, owing to the weakness of the flesh, becomes concerned with being recognized by others, he ceases to be a philosopher.”121 There is no point in looking into hearts or in scrutinizing motives too closely because it appears we can settle the matter by sheer definition. In this way Strauss quite deliberately sets aside the question of whether the name for this purely detached or transcendent being, the “philosopher” corresponds to any actual being. At the same time he clearly invites us to admire—and bolster the self-admiration of—those who strive to be or who see themselves as philosophers. He would not call attention to the crucial consideration to which, on close reading, he alerts us, namely, that the philosopher’s aspiration to detachment or elevation is never absolutely fulfilled, and that it thus can only remain in part a partisan claim or “boast.” The ruling idea of philosophy as perfect and uncompromising operates in Strauss’s work to deflect humbling or conscientious questions regarding the actuality of philosophy. I conclude that Strauss’s “idea of philosophy” is determined by a pervasively political intention: the avoidance of the intellectuals’ embrace of a universal, technological, and transformative political project. The philosopher’s “absolute” detachment from the practical realm is inscribed within an understanding of rank, a frame of admiration that is profoundly political in nature. The philosopher’s sense of elevation remains embedded in a pre-philosophic hierarchy of goods: only this can convert the philosopher’s otherness into a sense of superiority. Leo Strauss’s “philosopher” is hardly less situated within an “intersubjective” or simply human world than Kojève’s revolutionary tyrant-philosopher. In Kojève’s case, however, the theoretical passion for certainty and universality is translated into a practical project and seeks transparent fusion with the substance of public opinion. For Leo Strauss, on the contrary, both the philosopher and the non-philosopher accept to be oriented by a theoretically uncertain hierarchy of goods that, despite its particular, partial, and therefore partisan character points “higher” and opens their souls to the possibility of a Truth beyond human power. Strauss’s “philosopher” shares more with political man than he knows: he avoids what Strauss regards as the disastrous compulsion to realize Truth politically only because his

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“rank” is already implicitly and indirectly grounded in understandings shared with the public. The Straussian “philosopher” need not seek universal and certain public recognition because he is “happy” enough or “satisfied” with the ruling recognition he already enjoys—if only indirectly. The lofty idea of an inhuman philosophical “eternity” is Leo Strauss’s political therapy for modern intellectual ambitions. Having closely scrutinized Strauss’s admirably discreet indications on the relation of the philosopher to the practical world from which he emerges, it is now possible to see that Strauss tips his hand near the beginning of this discussion in the very course of his extravagant praise of the philosopher’s otherness. Immediately after extolling the philosopher’s “search for an eternal order,” from the point of view of which “all human concerns reveal themselves . . . as paltry and ephemeral,” Strauss deftly situates the philosopher within a decidedly practical hierarchy: “He then has the same experience regarding all human things, nay, regarding man himself, which the man of high ambition has regarding the low and narrow goals, or the cheap happiness, of the general run of men.”122 Philosophy is to practical greatness as practical greatness is to commonness. This expresses as compactly as possible how philosophy’s detachment from the practical world is in a deeper sense continuous with that world. And in case the practical thrust of Strauss’s remarks is not clear enough, towards the end of the “Restatement,” he provides this charming call to arms, at once playful and moving: “Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of ‘the realm of freedom.’ Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, ‘the realm of necessity.’”123 This call expresses a profound irony that pervades Leo Strauss’s whole political-philosophical project: The growing modern, absolute (universal and certain) commitment to the human realm, “the realm of freedom,” in fact portends tyranny; and it is “the realm of necessity,” the realm governed by the idea of an impersonal eternity altogether remote from all human concerns, that in fact very much needs to be defended. For Strauss, our true freedom or humanity depends in our time upon espousing the cause of eternal necessity.

CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN EQUALITY Leo Strauss is almost always at pains in his published work to minimize the connection between Christianity and the modern equality/technology that he criticizes so profoundly. It is not hard to imagine reasons for this reserve. In his “Introduction” to Natural Right and History, while explaining his

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recourse to the “history of ideas” in order to excavate the “problem of natural right,” Strauss produces this quotation from Lord Acton: Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas. Sharp definitions and unsparing analysis would displace the veil beneath which society dissembles its divisions, would make political disputes too violent for compromise and political alliances too precarious for use, and would embitter politics with all the passions of social and religious strife.124

Strauss then immediately notes that the partisanship surrounding natural right in his day sets the camp of “liberals of various descriptions” against that of “Catholics and non–Catholic disciples of Thomas Aquinas.” He also notes that those of both camps are “modern men.” Clearly Strauss did not shrink from engagement with the liberals. In that sense the neo-Thomists were his most likely allies. This is enough to explain, apart from other considerations, why Strauss chose to withhold certain elements of a “sharp and unsparing analysis” of the “intellectual history” underlying the modern oblivion of the “problem of natural right.”125 To return briefly to Strauss’s “Restatement” to Kojève, we note that Strauss here bends every effort to exclude the question of Christianity from direct consideration. His strategy, which consists at bottom in situating the good of theory or philosophy within a fundamentally aristocratic horizon, depends crucially on the claim that nothing essential has changed since Plato and Aristotle surveyed the human condition. Thus, as we have seen, he must argue that the essential problem of “technology” (the linking of intellectual progress to common material aspirations) was foreseen by the ancients—even if they did dismiss its “basic presuppositions” as “preposterous.” In this context Strauss addresses Eric Voegelin’s claim that Machiavelli was influenced by “the Biblical tradition,” and discusses at some length Voegelin’s attempt to link Machiavelli’s remark about the “armed prophet” with a Christian influence.126 While, on close inspection, Strauss very characteristically leaves more questions open than at first appears, the clear thrust of this discussion is to chide Voegelin for putting the emphasis on “prophets,” whereas Machiavelli is supposed to have put the emphasis on “armed.” And “it is difficult to believe that in writing this sentence Machiavelli should have been completely oblivious of the most famous of all unarmed prophets.”127 Thus he seems to dismiss the notion that Machiavelli practiced his own style of imitatio Christi. But even those who are modestly familiar with Strauss’s reading of Machiavelli will recall that Strauss’s own Machiavelli in fact imitates Christ or adopts Christian arms in a single but decisive respect: “The only element of Christianity which Machiavelli took over was the idea of propaganda. This idea is the only link

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between his thought and Christianity.”128 On reflection, as in other cases when Strauss seems to settle a complex matter with a flat or absolute declaration,129 this insistent “only” appears to be a kind of provocation to closer scrutiny of the fundamental question of Christianity and modernity. Once this question is opened up, it is clear that the challenge of Christianity to the foundation of classical perspective is always in play just beneath the classical surface of Strauss’s argument in the “Restatement,” and indeed elsewhere, and that Strauss’s answer to it cannot be as straightforward as he wants it to appear. Of course Kojève himself follows Hegel in seeing Christianity, or, more generally Biblical or “slave” morality, as performing essential work in the historical construction of an ethic of universal intersubjectivity. The contribution of “the Biblical morality of Slaves or Workers” is held to be the recognition of the intrinsic value human beings derive “from the successful execution of their work, their projects, or their ideals,” that is, from various kinds of work without regard for glory or honor.130 Kojève’s view is that this Slave morality of work is synthesized with the Master morality of honor on the basis of the desire for recognition understood as the most fundamental human motivation. Strauss’s ingenious rejoinder is that classical philosophy had already conceived a superior resolution: “noble work is the synthesis . . . between the morality of workless nobility and the morality of ignoble work”— that is, between the leisure of the aristocrat and the productive activity of the commoner.131 But of course such a synthesis presupposes that common productive and reproductive (related to the bearing, nurturing and education of children) activity is already seen as “ignoble,” within an aristocratic horizon. To be sure, any articulation of the goodness of “ordinary life” must distinguish between good, innocent activities and bad ones. What is notable here is that Strauss recurs immediately to the notion of nobility, and thus implicitly to the aristocratic distinction between noble and base, in order to arrive at the conception of “the highest kind of job” upon which his praise of philosophy is built. He thus passes over in silence the more common and Biblical distinction between right and wrong. He therefore avoids considering a most troublesome possibility of which he is certainly aware, namely that there are real human goods available to ordinary human beings that cannot be subsumed under any purely human, rational hierarchy. To be sure, Strauss at least once here refers to common morality in a way that does not assume it under a hierarchical teleology, referring here, apparently without qualification, to “the untrue assumption that man as man is thinkable as a being that lacks awareness of sacred restraints.”132 It appears there are two main ways in which the immediate evidence of basic moral distinctions might be articulated within some larger context: either the moral is understood in the light of some humanly available end or architectonic

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purpose, in which case it is best construed in terms of the distinction noble/ base, or as a response to the absolute authority of a personal God, thus conceived dominantly in terms of right/wrong. Strauss’s aristocratic strategy requires that he privilege the first alternative. The cost of this strategy, we have seen, is in effect the suppression of the question of the rightness or purity of the aristocratic philosopher’s motive. Thus Strauss is willing to accept the substitution of human recognition in an aristocratic and thus implicit or indirect form for the infinitely rigorous Biblical demand for purity of heart, as conceived under the eye of an omnipotent God. The Christian critique of the vanity of pagan nobility, including that of philosophers, is silently deflected. Finally, let us note that the Christian critique of philosophic claims to a humanly available completeness or transcendence is inseparable from a certain rehabilitation of time and of individuality. As we have seen, Strauss acknowledges in the last paragraph of the “Restatement” that what I have called his aristocratic strategy depends upon the view that “there is an eternal and unchangeable order within which History takes place and which is not in any way affected by History.”133 Of course he is aware that the notion that human being somehow affects the heart of Being, and thus that history is a fundamental dimension of reality, was not first proposed by Hegel, Kojève, or Heidegger. Consider the words of St. Augustine: heaven forbid that those words of Solomon [“there is nothing new under the sun”] refer to those periodic revolutions of the Physicists, by which, on the theory, the same ages and the same temporal events recur in rotation . . . For “Christ died once for all for our sin”; and “in rising from the dead he is never to die again: he is no longer under the sway of death.”134

REASON, REVELATION, AND THE ANCESTRAL-GOOD Leo Strauss is quite aware that to understand the imperfect goodness of morality in the light of the idea of philosophic contemplation is to follow only one possible interpretation of the phenomenon. The great alternative to this interpretation is represented, at least in the West, by biblical religion. What is at stake in these alternative understandings of morality in relation to what is higher than morality? To pursue this question, I now turn to some pages from Strauss’s “Progress or Return” on the relationship between philosophy and revealed religion.135 It is well known that Strauss, impatient with the triviality or obfuscatory quality of pretended syntheses of Athens and Jerusalem, is concerned especially to underline the apparently unbridgeable gulf between the life of

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philosophy and the life of piety. Let us briefly review some key features of the landscape on either side of this gulf: philosophy is characterized by autonomous understanding, biblical piety by obedient love.136 The Bible requires humble obedience to the demands of justice; Aristotle makes room for magnanimity or noble pride beside the demands of justice.137 The Bible associates poverty with piety; the Greeks believed a moderate level of wealth was necessary to virtue.138 The Bible requires man to consider his guiltiness and impurity of heart in God’s sight; the philosophers do not imagine that God cares for purity of heart and seek rather to clarify opinions and to understand the place of mankind in general in the universe than to search their hearts.139 The Bible binds man to a community of the faithful; the Greek quest for asocial perfection presupposes the human hierarchy and enlightenment of the city, the political community.140 The Bible counsels fear of and hope in God; the philosopher, moved by a sense of wonder, lives beyond fear and hope.141 The Bible teaches creation out of nothing and divine omnipotence; philosophy teaches the eternity of the world.142 The Bible reveals a mysterious, omnipotent personal God essentially concerned with man, but with whom man can only relate through a covenant by which God binds himself; the philosopher’s highest principle is an intelligible, impersonal necessity.143 Revelation reveals the sacredness of certain particular and contingent events, and the one right way; philosophy is concerned only with the universal and necessary, discovering the idea of nature above all conventions or ways.144 The gulf is indeed wide. And yet Strauss knows that in order to discuss it he must in a sense bridge it: “every disagreement . . . presupposes some agreement.”145 We might say that, in order to disagree, philosophy and revealed religion must be about the same thing. What they are both about, according to Strauss, may be roughly described as what we now call “morality.” “We observe first a broad agreement between the Bible and Greek philosophy regarding both morality and the insufficiency of morality.”146 What they disagree about is how this insufficiency might be overcome: the Greeks’ understanding of philosophical contemplation as that completion, and the believers’ obedient love.147 The unity from which revealed religion and philosophy diverge may be defined more precisely as the “primeval . . . equation of the good with the ancestral.”148 “The good [or] the true . . . can be known only as the old because prior to the emergence of wisdom memory occupied the place of wisdom.”149 The order of the soul, which as we have seen above serves as the philosopher’s means of ascent toward the eternal order, originally understands itself as obedience to laws that embody the presumed unity of the good and the ancestral. This unity generally finds an anchor in the identification

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of the ancestors with “the gods, sons of gods, or pupils of gods.”150 But the multiplicity of comprehensive laws, each referring to its own ancestors and gods, subverts the unity of the ancestral and the good. Revealed religion and philosophy are the two classic means of addressing this subversion. Since the Bible and philosophy share a common origin, and since they address a common problem, they can be truly and altogether distinct only if at least one of them actually and finally solves the problem of the mutual conditioning of the good and the ancestral. However, on close inspection, Strauss gives us plenty of reasons for doubting that this is the case. Clearly Strauss’s rhetoric throughout this discussion relies heavily on assuming the possibility of philosophic self-sufficiency and completeness, an assumption that is rendered quite problematic by the “Restatement” examined above. While reading these pages of Strauss, one might well get the impression that nature is simply intelligible and that the philosopher finally and decisively transcends all human concerns in contemplating its order.151 Strauss would have the reader believe that the divine law, though “the absolutely essential starting point,” is only a starting point that is “abandoned in the process” of philosophy itself.152 But how can the starting point simply be “abandoned” if no alternative beginning point or origin unconditioned by the ancestralgood is established with certainty? And is it not an implication of Strauss’s own argument that philosophy must keep beginning by returning to the opinions of the marketplace, opinions the articulation of which, Strauss has taught us, can never be fully disentangled from implicit references to divine law? Strauss’s practical conclusion to his consideration of the problem of philosophy and revealed religion is perhaps best stated in the following passage: No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.153

My point is not at all to deny Strauss’s claim that none of us can be at the same time philosopher and theologian, as he has defined them. Nor do I envision some third thing that would synthesize both by surpassing them. I mean instead to suggest that Strauss has gone beyond proving that one cannot be both, to showing that one cannot strictly be either. For both his “philosopher” and his “theologian” (more precisely, I think his “obedient subject of the revealed God”) are defined so rigorously as to exclude dependency on awareness of the heterogeneous ends derived from the ancestral

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good, a dependency that seems to be insuperable. To vindicate the possibility of either philosophy or obedient piety in the pure forms in which Strauss presents them would require demonstrating the possibility of attaining either a purely rational or a purely revealed beginning, of separating “word” from “deed” or vice-versa, and Strauss avers that a “fundamental dualism in man” renders this impossible.154 To open both philosophy and piety to the challenge of the other leaves neither in its original condition, or seems to require an impossible, indeed a strictly unthinkable purification and radicalization. REVELATION OR IDOLATRY Strauss examines the authority of revealed religion as if it were possible to break radically and definitively with the authority of the ancestral-good. The revelation of a true divine law as distinct from merely ancestral divine laws seems to dispense entirely with the problem of the good, as if the soul understood as the beginning of action, the soul confronted with the choice between righteous obedience and evil rebellion, could be insulated altogether from the soul understood as intellect, with its interest in the nature or necessity of the whole. Strauss indeed proceeds, in accordance with a distinctive and rigorous understanding of his Jewish heritage, as if the natural though imperfect openness to the whole already implicit in the ancestral good were simply obliterated by the biblical revelation of divine law. This rigorous acosmism appears to be grounded in Strauss’s understanding of the radical transcendence at the heart of Jewish faith. The core of this understanding perhaps appears more clearly in the talk “Why We Remain Jews”155 than in Strauss’s more guarded scholarly writings. Here he explains why he regards as a compliment the accusation by the pagan Romans (and also the Christians) of the Jews of hatred of humanity. A nation is a nation by virtue of what it looks up to. In antiquity, a nation was a nation by virtue of its looking up to its gods. . . . And now, our ancestors asserted a priori . . . that these gods were nothings and abominations. In the light of the purity which Isaiah understood when he said of himself, ‘I am a man of unclean lips,’ the very Parthenon is impure.156

From the point of view, or rather the non-point of view, of this inconceivable purity, the highest goods by which the lives of all other peoples are ordered are revealed to be idols.157 This includes Christianity, which is ordered by a belief in the God-man or in the redeemer who has already come.158 Judaism alone is defined by the “suffering stemming from the heroic

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act of self-dedication of a whole nation to something which it regarded as infinitely higher than itself.”159 The Jewish people stand alone as “the living witness for the absence of redemption.”160 To any soul who is remotely responsive to Biblical piety, the greatness and sublimity of this invocation of an openness to infinite transcendence speaks for itself. And yet the soul’s interest in understanding must draw us to question whether revelation may be received simply and exclusively as a “brute fact, to which nothing in purely human experience corresponds,”161 or whether it must not also be interpreted immediately a meaningful fact, that is, a fact integrated in some way with what is meaningful to human beings as human beings, under one or another understanding of the good by which souls and cities are ordered. The attempt to understand revealed law as altogether absolved from a hierarchically ordered world may be understood as an attempt to radically insulate the soul as agent (under God) from the soul as intellect, or to liberate knowledge of heterogeneity (the differences among kinds of things that human action must respect) altogether from knowledge of homogeneity (the unity of the world under some intelligible first things). But must not this radical solution collapse in a manner parallel to Machiavelli’s godless version of denial of the rational soul’s detachment in favor of the soul’s power to act? For the anti-idolatrous rejection of all hierarchical and cosmological interpretations of the whole within which human beings act cannot escape the necessity of interpretation; it can only create a teleological vacuum to be filled by progressive-materialist interpretations of the meaning of human action and of “individuality.”162 If we admit that neither philosophy nor revelation can ever altogether abandon the ancestral-good (the pre-theoretical intimations of the good variously present in the implicit orientations toward the whole woven into every life-world), then we must question the absolute dualisms into which Strauss casts the differences between philosophy and piety. Most evidently, if, as concerns philosophy, we consider that knowledge and therefore the life of knowledge never achieve absolute autonomy; and if, as concerns piety, we recognize that no comprehensive law, divine or otherwise, is obeyed by a human being without being understood in some way with respect to some world—then it is hard to maintain an absolute distinction between thinking and obeying. Strauss himself notices that Socrates’s quest is in one sense— perhaps not wholly ironic, —a response to a divine command. And he has alerted us to the charms of a certain “humble awe” before the mystery of the human good to which political philosophy must not exclusively succumb, but which it must in some way preserve. It is not easy to say, after all, whether, in heeding one’s higher self’s call to the most lucid and rational way of life one is obeying oneself or something higher.163

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PHILOSOPHY AND THE MYSTERY OF THE SOUL Leo Strauss devoted most of his scholarly life to articulating the claims of reason in the governance of human life, giving a fair hearing to the “low but solid ground” of modern rationalism while clearly preferring the classical ideal of serene contemplation. Finally, though, he seems to have agreed with his great rival, Heidegger, that “being is radically mysterious.”164 More than Heidegger, however, Strauss provides us with a framework for understanding that the “mystery” of the human soul cannot be identified simply with the practical and poetic being of man any more than with man’s interest in necessary and eternal truths. To attempt to understand or to evoke poetically one dimension of the human soul or of Being in absolute abstraction from the other is to do violence to wisdom as well as to piety. For the mystery that must be respected lies precisely in this duality, that is, in the reality of individual beings who appear at once as wholes and as parts of some larger whole. To interpret dogmatically the classical rhetoric of serene philosophical autonomy is to court the divorce of philosophy from pre-theoretical intimations of the good and the just, and thus risk leaving the “philosopher” with no possible orientation towards heterogeneity or to what is other than thought but that of mastery. To admit such a divorce and thus to freeze classical political philosophy in the rhetoric of the self-sufficient sage would be to lend credence to the “postmodern“ claim that classical philosophy is implicated in the “totalism” of the modern project of the endless mastery of nature. As Strauss must have learned from Heidegger as well as from Machiavelli, the extremes meet: mastery implies humanitarian necessity, rationalism as autonomy shades into instrumental or technological rationalism, the claim of absolute detachment yields a perverse and unnatural attachment, and vice versa. If the humane roots of this Janus-faced rationalism are to be recovered and renewed, if the “philosopher” is seriously to go down into the city, it may now be necessary for philosophy itself to engage Biblical configurations of transcendence. In order to resist the facile identification of reason and revelation, Strauss seems to give himself over to the “charm of competence” of mathematical and productive knowledge. Thus he proceeds as if knowledge of the whole, or discovery of a “beginning” from which all things—including human things— could be explained, were simply possible. But if knowledge of ends must remain more a form of “humble awe” than an expression of “competence,” this is because the philosopher’s dependence for knowledge of ends on political virtue and therefore ultimately on divine law is never simply overcome. Human ends are not knowable in the way that mathematical objects

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and products of art may be grasped and mastered. The quest to understand human things as “natural” never entirely absolves itself from dependence on “memory,” or the “right way” understood as divine law.165 Strauss can write that “the ancestral and the good are two fundamentally different things” only by pretending that reason is competent to produce its own ends.166 To reduce this insight to the notion that all law and morality is conventional or the result of an act of violence would be to follow Machiavelli’s projection of all human meaning upon the possibility of limitless mastery. We can say rather that what is natural in law—what is good by nature—can never be fully extricated from what is simply inherited, from the ancestral or traditional. But this is not so much to depreciate the competence of moral reasoning, as it is to appreciate the resources of memory. And does not Strauss himself invite us along this path when he describes the human soul as that singular part of the whole which is open to the whole? If this were not true already of the soul under ancestral-divine law, it could never become true of philosophers. If philosophy is “graced by nature’s grace,” then it is not itself identical to that grace. The philosopher can only transcend the city because the city in some sense already transcends itself.

ATHENS VS. JERUSALEM: A PRACTICAL NECESSITY Leo Strauss’s elevation of the philosopher’s Eternity is intended as a rhetorical counterweight to the dehumanizing power of technology. Christianity, which referred the meaning of morality to an authority beyond the highest humanity and placed man at heart of Eternity, is the ultimate target of this strategy. For Strauss, any possible political salvation (or the rehabilitation of “natural right”) requires a recovery of the possibility of philosophy understood as the best way of life. The salvation of philosophy depends in turn upon Strauss’s discretely excavating and embracing its political origins: the humanity, the naturalness of philosophy must be rooted in the practical experience of the noble as above the base. But this experience competes with the experience of sacred moral restraints as flowing from the equal subjection of all human beings to a mysterious personal God, an experience in which is rooted the thirst for righteousness as universal justice, as already available in elementary premises of the Bible. Christianity re-configured reason to espouse this thirst, thereby creating demands it could not satisfy. Machiavelli founded modernity by mobilizing the strategy of propaganda against its Christian source. Strauss proposes to counter Machiavelli’s strategy by a return to classical political philosophy from a post-Christian perspective. The biblical insight

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into equality and the concomitant demand for justice cannot be denied, but must be quarantined: contrary to the tendency of Christianity, Athens and Jerusalem must be considered as radically distinct alternatives (on the model of Athens/Mecca167), so that philosophy can find satisfaction in its own putatively satisfying “virtue” and not be driven to project meaning upon a universal humanity. Strauss must know the cost to rigorous thinking and to authentic human existence of this compartmentalization of the two dominant figures of human transcendence; his opposition between Athens and Jerusalem is thus a very studied and deliberate practical choice in the face of “technology.” It follows that Strauss’s own thinking, or let us say his own existence as a thinking human being, can only lie beyond this simple opposition. The effectual truth of either/or is neither/and: neither simply one nor the other, and yet somehow both. This same would be true of any thinker who has understood what Strauss has understood. It may then be time to consider and assess the rhetorical character of the praise of “philosophy” as an autonomous way of life. Can the praise of the autonomy of philosophy today continue to point to a possibility beyond the dominant dogmas and habits of the age without unduly contributing to the complacency or insulation of “philosophy” as an academic sect, a mere counter-aristocracy? And can the rhetoric of the good moderate the modern passion for justice without respecting the sources of that passion as expressed in revealed religion? To interpret dogmatically the classical rhetoric of serene philosophical autonomy is to court the divorce of philosophy from pre-theoretical intimations of the good and just, which risks leaving the “philosopher” with no possible orientation towards heterogeneity or “the other” than thought but that of mastery. To admit such a divorce and thus to freeze classical political philosophy in the rhetoric of the self-sufficient sage would be to lend credence to the “postmodern” claim that classical philosophy is implicated in the “totalism” of the modern project of the endless mastery of nature. As Strauss must have learned from Heidegger, the extremes meet: rationalism as autonomy shades into instrumental or technological rationalism. If the humane roots of this Janus-faced rationalism are to be recovered and renewed, if the “philosopher” is seriously to go down into the city, it may now be necessary to encounter Jerusalem as well as Athens. More particularly, the thinker must meet Rome on the way to Greece.168 If Christianity claims the attention of political philosophy, this is not only because the historical question of the meaning of its appropriation by modern rationalism remains open, or simply because the positive truth of its revelation cannot in principle be excluded on rational grounds. Rather, Christian

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belief concerns the reality of the human soul as knower and as agent, and therefore points to problems and possibilities that the student of the whole and therefore of the human soul cannot afford to ignore. Additionally, the powerful and dangerous strategy that Machiavelli adapted from Christianity must reveal something about the human soul, and therefore about the Whole. The challenge of Christianity to political philosophy lies in the fact that both address and are addressed to human beings.

WHAT WAS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY? OR, THE STRAUSSIAN PHILOSOPHER AND HIS OTHER The recent public flare-up of the “Straussian” question has at least helped to create a market for books on Strauss’s thought and to ensure that these books address the practical implications of his idea of “philosophy. Here I will consider two very worthy examples among the recent books on Leo Strauss with a view, particularly, to scrutinizing the relationship between philosophy and political things. The Zuckerts’ Exoteric Strauss Given that the public stir over Leo Strauss’s influence has often traded on simplistic ideological caricatures of Strauss’s thought—when it did not descend into pure nonsense—it is understandable that Catherine and Michael Zuckert choose not to emphasize the deeply political intention of Strauss’s thought. In their very expert, timely, and readable The Truth about Leo Strauss,169 the authors are eager to point out that Strauss “said and wrote very little about American politics,” and that his “chief concerns lay elsewhere, with the question of the character and fate of philosophy.”170 Strauss’s “philosophical project” consisted essentially, they argue, in an effort to recover classical philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, etc.) and through this recovery to reconceive “the entire philosophic tradition.”171 And they emphasize that Strauss “wanted to revive ancient political philosophy, not ancient politics.”172 On attending further to the Zuckerts’ presentation of Strauss’s project, however, it proves harder than may first appear to separate what is “philosophical” in this project from what is “political.” In a formulation of Strauss’s intention that may seem to transcend or to be prior to the distinction between the “philosophical” and the “political,” the Zuckerts argue that “Strauss wanted to revive a truly noble form of human existence.”173 Such a revival was necessary because “modern philosophy’s act of rebellion against classical philosophy and biblical religion” had led to

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a flattening relativism and finally to a radical historicism, the denial of “any permanent realities whatever” that is equivalent to nihilism.174 Strauss may be said to share this aim of reviving nobility with his youthful hero Nietzsche; but Strauss broke with Nietzsche as he came to see that the latter’s project failed to liberate itself from modernity’s polemical attempt to “refute orthodoxy,” that is, to dispose once and for all of the Biblical teaching concerning an unfathomable God.175 Nietzsche, despite his noble desires, thus remained in the grip of the very modern project that had denied the reality of the noble and so had, “via an almost inexorable dialectic,” produced the “crisis of our times.”176 The essential mistake of the moderns, on Zuckert’s telling of Strauss’s story, lay in a transformation of the relationship between philosophy and politics, or between “theory and practice.”177 The moderns directed theory or science towards the satisfaction of bodily desires and thus “dropped the distinction between living and living well,” whether “living well” is understood in terms of the moral virtue of citizens or in terms of the good of philosophizing itself. They “lost sight of that form of human life that is truly satisfying and did not sufficiently take account of their own activity as philosophers.”178 Thus, whereas “the pre-moderns identified apolitical ways to transcend the bounds of the ordinary, everyday life: the ways of philosophy or religion,” the moderns make transcendence “a public matter.”179 They convert the human interest in transcendence into a “demand for actualization” and thus an impulse to transform the common, political world.180 Under the guidance of modern philosophy, humanity invests its transcendent impulses in the project of a public and general mastery or actualization, and thus loses the capacity to articulate and orient itself towards a reality that transcends human power. Our only hope for a recovery of the noble, which in the Zuckerts’ account would seem to be equivalent to an orientation of human existence towards that which transcends the human power of actualization, Strauss concluded that it lay in a return to “ancient political philosophy,” a return made possible for Strauss by the indications of the great medievals Maimonides and Farabi. But just how is ancient philosophy supposed to provide an alternative to the modern liquidation of nobility? The Zuckerts point out that the answer lies not at all in some settled metaphysical or cosmological doctrine, but rather in the Socratic practice of philosophy itself. Philosophy as “the search for wisdom . . . constituted a fully satisfying form of human existence that could be enjoyed by private individuals in less-than-perfect regimes.”181 This affirmation of the supreme happiness of the life of “zetetic,” that is skeptical or “seeking,” philosophy is clearly central to Strauss’s response to the modern crisis. The satisfaction inherent in the philosopher’s sense of “making progress” in the search for truth is held to be enough to ground the claim that

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philosophy is “the only truly satisfying and happy way of life,”182 and thus to provide an alternative to the modern reduction of reason to the service of common human needs and desires.183 We notice, though, that the question of nobility/transcendence has somehow been answered in terms of happiness or satisfaction—the happiness or satisfaction of philosophers. What, if anything, is the connection? The Zuckerts are eager to affirm, in answering certain reckless and moralistic critics of Strauss, that the philosopher is no “hedonist.” “‘The Socratic formula for genuine virtue is: virtue is knowledge.’ In seeking knowledge, the philosopher cannot help, therefore, but seek to become virtuous as well.”184 But this nice formula, I suggest, will remain hardly more than wordplay unless the relationship between the two ideas can be satisfactorily specified. For example, without such a clarification we do not know whether the substantive meaning of the equation involves transferring to the term “virtue” the meaning we already commonly attribute to “knowledge,” or perhaps the reverse. In fact the Zuckerts seem to show that for Strauss the formula “virtue is knowledge” is to be taken in the first sense: true virtue or human excellence is not what it is commonly taken to be—justice understood as a positive interest in the common good—but is instead knowledge. More precisely, it is the knowledge of ignorance possessed by the rare Socratic philosopher. We moralists may be consoled, however, by the fact that the philosopher is nonetheless virtuous in the common sense of the term, that is “just,” in that his devotion to progress in knowledge of ignorance is perfectly compatible with the minimal definition of justice as “not harming others.”185 The good news then is that the interests of “knowledge” and the interests of “virtue,” in the non-philosophic sense, are happily aligned. Thus the Zuckerts describe Strauss as seeking to revive, on the one hand as we have seen, a Socratic understanding of philosophy and, on the other, an Aristotelian understanding of politics. Philosophy and political science, theory and practice, are essentially distinct; Socratic skepticism regarding cosmology does not undermine the observable evidence that there are “ends toward which man is by nature inclined and of which he has by nature some awareness.” Prudence or practical wisdom governs its own self-sufficient sphere, and does not need a further theoretical basis. Philosophy is not needed to found the moral-political realm, but it is there to lend a hand, “primarily in clearing away false theories,” that is reductionist theories that would subvert a prudent confidence in the naturalness of man’s higher ends.186 The Zuckerts describe what is essentially a “good fences make good neighbors” settlement between philosophy and the moral-political realm in Strauss’s thought: these neighbors, Socratic philosophy and Aristotelian politics, get along because both mind their own business, though the superior

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neighbor is happy to lend the inferior a hand in a storm. And so, in answer to Strauss’s moral and political critics, the Zuckerts are able to report that his teaching in fact amounts to good news on every front: “He strove not only to support and defend the regime he thought was the best possible under modern circumstances, but also and more generally to remind his readers of the importance and dignity of politics, not simply for the sake of philosophy or his fellow citizens or the people of the West, but more broadly for the sake of humanity as a whole.”187 But surely things cannot be quite so simple; surely the goodness of philosophy and moral-political goodness cannot be at once quite so evident in themselves and so conveniently distinct from one another. To begin with, this fence between theory and practice seems to have some holes. The Zuckerts have already noticed philosophy’s service to politics in fending off “false doctrines”—but how different is this really from supplying a true doctrine?188 If man’s practical ends need to be protected from subversive understandings of the whole, then do they not in fact depend at least implicitly on a cosmology supportive of human purposes? Is there not, then, something problematic on its face with this convenient combination of a “Socratic” philosophy with an “Aristotelian” politics—of unhindered skepticism with edifying affirmation? A gap in the fence between theory and practice opens, indeed, in both directions. The philosopher’s skeptical and open-ended interest in “the whole” is not wholly insulated from the insights or judgments on the basis of which he defends the integrity of the moral-political realm. Socratic ignorance is not pure, but is “structured” and progressive; though the philosopher’s quest for knowledge of the whole is never completed, he finds satisfaction in his substantial if provisional attainments. Though he does not pretend to access the “roots” or “the cause” of the genesis of the whole, he accepts the evidence of “the manifest articulation of the completed whole,” the evidence that the mind is fundamentally “at home” in the world.189 And this grounding, this fit between the mind and the world, is said to attest at once the goodness of the world and the dignity, not only of the mind, but more generally of man. This sense of the dignity or worth of the mind as evidence of the goodness of the whole and as the ground of the worth of humanity seems clearly at least to qualify the teaching of a clear distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” realms. It is in a later chapter (5) of the book that defends Strauss against the charge that he is a “teacher of evil” that the Zuckerts focus most closely on the question of the relation between philosophy and morality. Here they present Strauss’s “theory of the two sources of morality.” One source is philosophy itself: “Morality as practiced by the philosopher is cause, concomitant,

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and consequence of the philosophic life itself.”190 The philosopher is just in that the good of the rational soul orders and satisfies the whole soul and thus causes it to despise “the things for which the non-philosophers hotly contest.”191 But there is also another, lower, source of morality: “the need of the city.”192 This lower “justice” is not by nature intrinsically good or satisfying for the individual; it is rather the product of an “habituation” that shapes conduct according to social utility but does not truly overcome natural human inclinations to “mastery, wealth, and sensual pleasures.”193 It appears that justice can be intrinsically good only for the rare philosopher. But this theory of morality’s two radically different sources raises an obvious question, as the Zuckerts notice Strauss acknowledges: How can we call the phenomena arising from such “radically different roots” by the same name? And how do we account for the remarkable coincidence presented by the fact that these two moralities converge to produce “more or less the same moral code?”194 In a word, are we talking about a single phenomenon, that of morality that is in some way shared by philosophers and non-philosophers alike, or does the term “morality” mask a fundamental difference that separates philosophers from the rest of humanity? The Zuckerts, following Strauss, are at pains to defend both the unity of humanity and the radical difference of philosophy. Both unity and difference are articulated in terms of the problem of “the part” and “the whole.” Man is both a part and a whole; this condition names the unity of humanity, philosophers and non-philosophers alike. “Man is self-consciously or manifestly open to the whole and erotically driven towards that whole.” This openness to the whole is not the exclusive preserve of the philosopher but is revealed in the most distinctively human practices: “philosophy, religion, morality.”195 Strauss differentiates between philosophers and non-philosophers in terms of the distinction between “the whole simply,” the object of the philosophical quest, and “society” which stands as the whole for non-philosophers. The Zuckerts further associate “society” with the body and individuality, and “the whole” with the non-individualized intellect. This framing of the essential difference also makes possible an articulation of a fundamental commonality: “society and the whole simply have this in common, that they are both wholes which transcend the individual, inducing the individual to rise above and beyond himself. All nobility consists in such rising above and beyond oneself to something greater than oneself.”196 Now if we ponder the meaning of this common nobility or “rising above” we will discover the fragility of the Zuckerts’ and, in many cases, Strauss’s radical distinction between philosophic transcendence and the religious and moral orientation of non-philosophers. The philosopher strives to identify himself with “pure intellect,” and from the standpoint of this claim is pleased

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to define the pre-philosophic life in terms of mere bodily need and the love of “one’s own.” From this point of view, the city reveals itself as a utilitarian function that subordinates individuals to its material necessities by the mechanism of a habituation that operates in large part through moral and religious delusions. But, at least on the Zuckerts’ own reading of Strauss, this reduction is too simple, for moral men are “animated by the eros for everything beautiful and graceful;” their motives cannot be accounted for without reference to the noble. At the same time, it is admitted that “individual embodiment restrains all forms of transcendence, not only philosophy,” in other words, including philosophy.197 Note in this connection that the Zuckerts have granted that wisdom is inaccessible, and therefore that the virtue and the happiness of the philosopher must always remain imperfect.198 Since the object of the philosopher’s quest remains a “noble” intention and in no way a full possession, it seems clear that the philosopher remains animated by the same elusive notions of “the beautiful and graceful” that stirred his soul as a moralreligious citizen, partially clarified as these notions may be. The “whole” that occupies the philosopher and the “whole” that governs citizens cannot then be as radically distinct as Strauss and the Zuckerts would have us believe. Philosophers never access the “whole simply,” which must therefore remain in some way and to some degree a projection from “the whole” that forms the horizon of the city. At the same time, the social whole is never determined wholly by material necessities, but is always shaped by a natural human orientation toward something beyond human need and human power. The idea of the social whole as simply the realm of bodily need is in fact an abstraction that appears from the standpoint of the philosopher’s noble pretensions to a transcendent nobility. “Society” is the other of “philosophy.” Both of the “two [distinct] sources of morality” are abstractions from the core phenomenon of morality or nobility—even moral abstractions, one might well say.199 Consider now the implication of this reflection on the relation between the whole simply and the moral-political whole for our earlier discussion of the political-philosophical problem in terms of the relation between “Socratic” philosophy and “Aristotelian” political science. It now appears that not only is philosophy needed to defend the theoretical framework that shelters practical wisdom, but also that philosophy itself depends upon insights or intimations that arise within the practical realm before they become the matter of theoretical speculation. In chapter 3 on Strauss “as a postmodern thinker,” the Zuckerts refer to “Socrates’ insight into the importance of recognizing that being is divided into essentially different kinds (or ideas).” By contrast, Jacques Derrida, they argue, accepted Nietzsche’s view that “there is nothing that fundamentally distinguishes human beings from other animals.” Thus,

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“[l]ike Heidegger, Derrida insisted that ‘ethics’ is a subordinate part of the ‘metaphysical’ understanding of the world.”200 The Zuckerts seem to hold, then, that the very noetic heterogeneity that is the fundamental correlate and condition of philosophical intelligibility seems to be grounded in, or perhaps coeval with, the deepest axiom of practical judgment; namely, that there are “observable differences between human and non-human.”201 And so the Zuckerts’ critique of Derrida seems to belie their earlier effort to maintain a “fence” between theory and practice, for it at least suggests a kind of priority of practice to theory. In defending the presuppositions of sound practice, theory is also defending the conditions of its own existence—not only the narrowly “political” conditions for the survival of philosophy, but the very root of the heterogeneity upon which intelligibility depends.202 Let us now return to the Zuckerts’ most extensive sustained discussion of the meaning of “Socratic” philosophy in order to scrutinize further the relationship between theory and practice in Leo Strauss’s project.203 We see that the claim that the “Socratic view of the whole as an order of essentially different kinds ‘makes possible the study of the human things as such’”204 can at least as plausibly be read in the opposite direction: the practical insight into the human difference makes possible and meaningful an inquiry into the natural kinds that make up the whole. Likewise, let us propose a reversal of Strauss’s eloquent statement that the dignity of the mind grounds the dignity of man, and that the world is man’s home because it is the home of the mind. Does not the mind’s being at home in the world presuppose a sense of meaning and order that precedes reflection? Or, if not a simple reversal of these formulae, let us propose that man’s dignity and his awareness of being a special part of a meaningful whole might be considered prior to the dichotomy between theory and practice. Thus Strauss observes, as the Zuckerts report, that man’s distinctiveness may be said to lie in being “‘the beast with red cheeks,’” that is in his sense of shame.205 The Zuckerts (citing here a helpful discussion by Nasser Behnegar206) quite reasonably wish to translate this capacity for shame into an argument for the primacy of “reason.” Shame presupposes morality, or an “awareness of how one ought to live,” and “this awareness cannot be clarified without the use of reason.”207 Now nothing could be further from my intention than to disparage the dignity of reason. My point is simply that reason can never fully “clarify” the very moral awareness with which its own dignity is bound up. I might even suggest that, for “reason” again to recover its proper authority, it is necessary to experiment with yet another reversal of Straussianism and consider the proposition that the use of reason cannot be clarified without a moral awareness. This Straussian or post–Straussian reflection on the relation between theory and practice ought to allow or require us to reframe the vexed question of

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the meaning and standing of esotericism in Strauss’s writings. The Zuckerts offer a very interesting and bold thesis on this subject, as readily conveyed in the title of chapter 4: “The Man who Gave Away the Secrets.” They propose that by exposing the ancient practice of esotericism to the broad daylight of modern scholarship, Strauss in fact abandoned esotericism, implicitly denying it was an appropriate or effective strategy in the circumstances of late modernity.208 The Zuckerts’ ingenious explanation of a counter-strategy, appropriate to a public atmosphere pervaded by the Enlightenment, is the following: “The only possible cure for the ills of Enlightenment was a new kind of enlightenment.”209 Conceding to the Enlightenment the dubiousness of “Platonic Ideas and Platonic immortality of the soul,” Strauss “schucks [these] off” as “mere exotericism” in order to reveal in broad daylight “the real stripped-down truth about philosophy.”210 The only truth that can now possibly “save us” is the truth about the perfect satisfactions of the imperfect search for truth.211 Still, any Straussian worth his salt must immediately reply: such a truth about the Socratic practice of philosophy might save “us” certified “philosophers,” but surely it is not available for general consumption. In fact, must this zeteticism not threaten and therefore offend the masses, thus endangering the lofty and rare practice of philosophy? The Zuckerts have a ready answer, which returns us to the tidy “good fences” policy we observed above. Not only does Strauss’s strategy provide the inner truth of philosophy to the few, it also supplies a “new grounding for ‘values,’ . . . a doctrine of natural right to hold against the extreme relativism . . . characteristic [of] . . . our post– Enlightenment age.”212 Thus purely zetetic philosophy is nicely insulated from the uncertainties and conflicts of practical life, while at the same time it is able to provide a doctrine to refute relativism. Surely the Zuckerts are aware that this convenient disposition of the relationship between philosophy and morality is too good, or too bad, to be true. Most obviously, nowhere does Strauss claim to provide a “doctrine” to counter relativism; rather, as the Zuckerts emphasize, he consistently celebrates instead an “awareness of the problems.”213 At the same time, from the moment this very awareness of the permanent philosophical problems becomes satisfied with itself, the problems are no longer real, living problems and so no longer really philosophical, and thus no longer satisfying. I conclude that the Zuckerts must be tipping their hand when, after seeming to have refuted any significant esotericism in Strauss, they hedge decisively as follows: “if there is [an esoteric doctrine in Strauss], it is buried so deep as to be irrelevant for all practical purposes.”214 Apparently the Zuckerts have their own “practical purposes,” purposes that require a widely-available and unthreatening Leo Strauss.215

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Pangle’s Purgatory Thomas Pangle’s Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy216 is an elegant, learned and, we gather, intentionally puzzling introduction to the master’s thought. Certainly it makes much more of Strauss’s esotericism than do the Zuckerts, and just as certainly strives more to emulate this art of writing than they do, at least on the surface. Pangle is clearly more impressed than they by the permanent risks associated with “the unhappily pervasive presence of tyranny in political life,” by the fact that “human aspirations to partake of the divine . . . are susceptible to terrible perversions.”217 He thus is clearly less impressed than the Zuckerts by the freedoms we owe to the Enlightenment, and more alert to “deeply rooted, moral prejudices that pervade every time.”218 Accordingly, he emphasizes even more than they the “complete . . . liberation” of philosophers from these prejudices and thus the “vast gulf in wisdom” that separates philosophers from the rest of us.219 Prof. Pangle’s work overall, and this most recent book in particular, therefore provide us an eminent example of what I propose to call the “High Straussian” position, which we here intend to begin to assess through a careful reading of key parts of the present volume.220 The main or most general purpose of esotericism, according to Pangle, is to “avoid the danger of a mutual contamination and corruption of politics and philosophy.”221 His aim, it seems clear, is to build a much stronger fence between theory and practice than the Zuckerts’. And although esotericism and its fundamental intention are coeval with political philosophy, the need for this fence is particularly acute in our times, since we are in the midst of a crisis of the West that is essentially a result of just such a contamination. Modern rationalism deformed philosophy, or made it vulnerable to a deformation, by publicly advocating human power over nature as the purpose of philosophy. This advocacy issued eventually into “a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imaginations of the most powerful thinkers of the past,” into “the appalling alternative that man, or human thought, must be collectivized either by one stroke and without mercy or else by slow and gentle processes.”222 These “slow and gentle processes” are at work even or especially within “modern liberal republicanism,” which, “by causing the purpose of the philosophers, or more generally the purpose which essentially transcends society, to collapse into the purpose of the non-philosophers,” and thereby “causes the purpose of the gentlemen to collapse into the purpose of the non-gentlemen,” which in turn portends the collapse of the idea of the intrinsic goodness of virtue into a pure instrumentalism.223 Now, since Strauss (as reported by Pangle) avers that this modern “predicament . . . is the incentive to our whole concern with the classics” we are authorized to conclude

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that Strauss’s whole intention, according to Pangle, is to resist this collapse of meaning.224 Moreover, Pangle is ever keen to insist upon the “‘tentative or experimental’ character of Strauss’s whole proposal,”225 and even admits on Strauss’s behalf that “the crucial claimed insights of radical historicism might be in a decisive sense sound.”226 Strauss’s “Socratic” quest is, finally “a late-modern quest.”227 One is therefore entitled, even practically compelled, to categorize the governing purpose of Pangle’s Strauss’s interest in the “purpose of the philosophers” as a practical, even a political purpose. Strauss is less sure of the idea of philosophy than of its practical, indeed historical purpose. Let us nevertheless attend to the idea, or the notion of “philosophy.” What is the meaning of the “classical philosophy” to which Strauss invites a return? Somewhat surprisingly, Pangle’s most substantial, if also most discreet or elusive, account of the meaning of philosophy comes not in the second chapter on “The Revival of Classical Political Philosophy,” where we might expect to find it, but instead at the end of the first chapter, entitled “Relativism: the Crux of Our Liberal Culture.” Pangle argues here that relativism, or the belief that reason is impotent to ground any principles concerning what is right and good, is a direct and fundamental threat to “the liberal and democratic West,” since our civilization is based on reason’s claim to authority.228 Our publicly articulate goal, “‘the universal prosperous society of free and equal men and women’—does not adequately capture what the West still experiences as morally sacred, as placing sacred limits on human striving, even on the striving for universal freedom and prosperity.”229 In our struggle with Communism we in the liberal West have been confronted with “a perverted or fanatic expression of this natural and inevitable civic concern for the sacred, which includes a sacrificial civic duty or call to identify and to fight, as evil, as devilish, that which always threatens the sacred.”230 Thus we have been reminded, long before September 11, 2001, that “the sacred and its perversions” are ever a factor in human life. Through a discussion of Isaiah Berlin, Pangle next illustrates liberalism’s utter lack of resources in answering the challenge of relativism.231 But then, lest we should grow too eager to find a solution, he points up the “Danger Lurking in the Reaction Against Liberal Relativism,” the danger of “sectarianism” that can only be avoided—Pangle is ready now to suggest—by the Socratic idea of philosophy, according to which “philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems.”232 Pangle indeed spares no pains in lowering or at least unsettling our expectations in our quest for an alternative to relativism. If in our search for an answer to relativism we risk falling into fanaticism, it must be that there is something fearful in “the truth disclosed by reason. Precisely what is it about

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this truth, about the truth, that makes it so profoundly disconcerting? Is it really the truth that is bad and ugly?”233 One is tempted to say that this invitation to philosophy might make one reconsider whether relativism was really so bad. Pangle’s tone is nothing if not (to use one of his favorite words) “intransigent:” “Strauss offers no certainty and no promise;” the outcome of our inquiries may be simply “to understand that and why [the crisis of relativism or radical historicism] cannot be overcome.” We must therefore at the outset be “resigned to the knowable limits of our powers . . . . Our discoveries must chastise our wishes.”234 Even before we know what philosophy is, we must know not to connect it with our hopes. This, then, is Pangle’s propadeutic to Socratism: be afraid, be very afraid. Oddly, it is here that Pangle interjects his only sustained treatment of the supposedly fundamental problem of reason and revelation.235 “To avoid misunderstandings,” he wishes to explain that this “most profound contradiction at the heart of the Great Tradition of the West” is not really a critical problem, but is something we can live with.236 Indeed, living with this tension is what the West is all about. (The more “fundamental tension”237 is in fact between philosophy and the city; “the sacred” is a necessary dimension of the city.) Moreover, “this conflict . . . is at the bottom of . . . modern philosophy.”238 To understand in what sense modern philosophy stems from the conflict between reason and revelation, we must attend to an inconspicuous parenthetical suggestion Pangle drops early in chapter 3 on modernity: “As for the deepest philosophic goal motivating this [modern] movement, see PL, Introd.”239 Ever attentive to deep philosophical goals, we refresh our memories on the Introduction to Strauss’s early work, Philosophy and Law, and find that the secret Pangle would have us discover from Strauss is that the Enlightenment was all about atheism. More precisely, the fatal passion of the Enlightenment seems to be that “it wanted to refute . . . the tenets of orthodoxy,” whereas it should have remained content with the classical strategy of “dismissing the tenets of orthodoxy as not known but merely believed.”240 The crucial error, the source of the compulsion to refute, lies in the fact that the Enlightened ones had “been impressed by the claim of these [biblical] tenets.”241 Thus, a theoretical refutation being impossible, they adopted the Napoleonic strategy of creating a new world and a new systematic science that would render religion irrelevant. The moderns were somehow impressed by the Bible in a way that compelled them to try to match it or outdo it, on its own terms, the terms, I infer, of fundamental human hopes. And thus was philosophy eventually prostituted to the propaganda of world mastery. To resist this prostitution and the attendant Crisis of the West, it will thus be necessary to remain or become unimpressed by biblical hopes. This is the safe way to live the excruciating tension of “this titanic controversy” that defines the West.242

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The return to classical political philosophy, or more precisely to “Socratic zetetic skepticism,” is of course the key to resisting or being purged of such hopes.243 The first step in such a return consists in recognizing certain “permanent characteristics of humanity,” especially “the distinction between noble and base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists.”244 Now since there is no general agreement on the effective meaning of “noble” and “base,” these historicists (most notably Heidegger) find this rudimentary distinction to be too slight to provide a permanent basis on which to judge historical dispensations. For his part, Strauss does not seem to deny the slightness of the permanent moral distinctions, but wants to show (in Natural Right and History, most notably) that the so-called “experience of history” that underlies historicism is itself merely an essentially accidental interpretation (stemming ultimately, we note, from the “impression” left by Biblical hopes)—he wants to show the historical relativity of the sensibility underlying radical historicism itself. Strauss intends this deconstruction of historicism, Pangle explains, to clear the way for a reconsideration of “philosophy in its original, Socratic sense,” “knowledge of ignorance,” an ignorance which is by no means empty but consists in “grasping” the “fundamental problems, such as the problem of justice,” problems that are permanent. Now here the essentials of Strauss’s anti-historicist argument would seem to be in place, but Strauss, in a move Pangle describes as “enigmatic,” throws the question wide open again by acknowledging that “if political philosophy is limited to understanding the fundamental alternative [sing.], it is of no practical value,” since it would be “unable to answer the question of what the ultimate goal of wise action is.” Philosophy as theory, knowledge of ignorance, must somehow be translated into practice. That practice is just one step in the argument away, it turns out, in “the Socratic answer to the question of how man ought to live”: by realizing that we are ignorant of the most important things, we realize at the same time that the most important thing for us, or the one thing needful, is quest for knowledge of the most important things or quest for wisdom.” This realization, moreover, not only answers the fundamental practical question for the philosopher, but is said to provide a “final solution” [!] to “the fundamental political problem.”245 Pangle has certainly whetted our appetite to know of this “final solution,” but from here on he follows Strauss’s own example by declining to provide any further link in the chain of argument, instead dropping a series of clues— along with the suggestion that we master all of Strauss’s writings, though we are allowed also to consult the writings of Christopher Bruell.246 This is surely good advice as there are doubtless many worse ways to spend one’s life. But for the benefit of any reader who may not be able to take it, I propose now

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to provide him the service of assembling these clues in the very pages that follow.247 The first clue has already been dropped: the “fundamental question” has been rendered in the singular, inviting us to attend to the fundamental question. That would be the reason/revelation question, of course. The next clue is the mention of “the possibility that [Plato’s] Socrates was as much concerned with understanding what justice is, i.e., with understanding the whole complexity of the problem of justice, as with preaching justice.”248 I trust there is no need, beyond my italicization, even for a readership that has not yet mastered the whole Straussian corpus, to point out the connection between the first two clues. Note too that we seem to have returned once again from practice to theory: the final practical solution is somehow an understanding of a problem. In the next clue, Pangle’s Strauss directly addresses the “perennial conflict between the Socratic and the anti–Socratic answer (to the question how man ought to live)”249 via an engagement with Max Weber, who takes reason to be morally impotent because he believes that “all devotion to causes or ideals has its roots in religious faith.”250 Weber cannot entertain the possibility of reason’s practical authority because he takes modern science and philosophy to be the perfection of reason. And on the basis of the clue from a later chapter discussed above, the account of modern atheism in the introduction to Philosophy and Law, we can say that the problem is that modernity converted reason into a faith—the faith in human world-transformation—in order to address certain “impressions” left over from the Bible. The reason/revelation controversy appears to admit of no solution—but only as long as we accept Weber’s modern understanding of reason. Next we are invited to penetrate through and see beyond the modern abstractions that confined Weber’s notion of “reason,” and thus to access the “pre-scientific world,” the “truly natural human world and consciousness.”251 But since this world is not immediately available to us moderns, we must rely on classical philosophy’s report of its own origins, “supplemented by consideration of the most elementary premises of the Bible,” premises which Strauss helpfully points out “are not of course the theme of the Bible.”252 These ancient sources bring us back to “the evidence of those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right.” And so we find that Pangle’s Strauss seems to have led us back again to where we started, about seven of his pages ago, back to the “permanent characteristics of humanity” recognized even by “thoughtful historicists,” the universal human distinction between noble and base. But did not the historicists already blunt this strategy by pointing out the slightness and indeterminacy of this awareness of nobility, a point that

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Strauss seemed to admit? Is this not why we were then directed away from any attempt to ground philosophy on moral substance and towards a purely zetetic strategy, the “knowledge of ignorance?”253 Mr. Pangle certainly seems to have returned us in some kind of circle back to where we started. No doubt this was necessary in order to prepare a re-launching of the argument, the reader now alert to the truly fundamental alternative between reason and revelation. We might otherwise have thought that the question concerned alternative understandings of justice or nobility, but now we have been prepared to see (though of course we have not been told directly, in a way that just anyone could understand) that the real question is between the life of pious obedience and the life of philosophic inquiry, or, in other words, between the life that cares about being just (or “preaching” about it) and the life that cares about “understanding what justice is,” which itself, we have been cued to anticipate, resolves into “understanding the whole complexity of the problem of justice.”254 The task before us, then, is the “painstaking clarification of what is implied in these ‘most elementary experiences . . . [of] the just and noble things.”255 Here—another clue—Pangle is at pains to point out that classical political philosophy does not begin “from specific assumptions about human nature.” Rather, it begins with opinions or speeches, from “what men say,” and from these “moves to, or issues in, an account of human nature.” “But ‘what men say’ is ‘contradictory.’”256 This contradictory state of the evidence of the most elementary experiences would seem to land us in another impasse. And rather than clearly indicating a route out of this impasse, Prof. Pangle somewhat surprisingly chooses instead to conclude this chapter with a tangle of clues, more than two full pages consisting almost entirely of a nearly continuous quotation from the last chapter of Strauss’s early The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, which Pangle describes as “Strauss’s first sustained adumbration of his decisive discovery concerning the nature of Socratic philosophy.” He praises these paragraphs as “one of the most illuminating statements in this regard that Strauss ever penned,” noting coyly, as well, that in it Strauss maintains his “meticulous sense of responsibility as a writer.”257 This latter remark is of course a reminder that we are dealing with clues, not arguments. Out of respect for the author, and because we have every reason to believe that Pangle has hidden the core of his argument, if there is one, in this extended quotation from Strauss’s Hobbes book, we have pursued the exercise and will report briefly on the outcome. But before this report, let us just notice that the author has dropped one additional clue in this very footnote that introduces the mysteriously pivotal quotation: he directs us to and partially quotes a passage from Natural Right and History concerning justice.258

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There we learn that justice “in the full sense . . . is identical with membership in . . . and devotion to . . . a society in which everyone does what he can do well and in which everyone has what he can use well.”259 I gather we are supposed to note a tension at the heart of justice: to do what one does best is not likely to be identical with being devoted to a society where everyone can do so, especially when we note “the conclusion of the argument sketched in this paragraph” that Strauss draws (albeit very responsibly in a footnote), but that Pangle chooses not to share (meticulously protecting our piety, no doubt), namely that this definition implies “that there cannot be true justice if there is no divine rule or providence.”260 Pangle then assists us a little further by looking up one of Strauss’s classical footnotes to reinforce the point that justice is all about “the utility of others,” and then mentioning but not reporting on another classical citation, the clues embedded in which I will now share with all who are able to receive: (1) The magnificent ones despise merely human life; and (2) The beautiful ought to be understood as the useful. Armed with this expert esoteric reading of the key footnote to the key footnote to the curious extended quotation that stands in for the core of Pangle’s argument, the reader is perhaps now prepared to see the momentous point.261 The contradictions and hence enmities of pre-philosophic experience center around “the just, the beautiful, and the good.” So everything depends on the proper understanding and arrangement of these notions. The key to Pangle’s strategy is to liberate the good from the other transcendentals and to make it supreme. The good, demystified or stripped of entanglements with the just or the beautiful, is the only possible basis we are told of internal and external agreement. Now we may think that people disagree about the good, but Strauss thinks that only happens if we consider what people “conceive of as good” (wealth, honors, etc.) and not what they “say,” that is, or what they “mean.” People may disagree and fight in deed or “conception,” but they are in marvelous agreement in what they say, namely, “that the good is virtue and wisdom/insight.”262 Thus agreement can be achieved, and philosophy vindicated, for those who partake of this “true external transcendent good,” to attain which requires a ‘divinely inspired madness” and “a conversion of the whole soul.”263 This, then, is the core of Pangle’s argument (expertly reconstructed from his very civicly responsible clues) concerning the core of Strauss’s argument. Is it persuasive? Divinely mad or not, I suppose we must find some way to judge. And it is hard not to observe that there are leaps in the argument. Remember that the case for philosophy is supposed to rely, not on any a priori “account of human nature,” but to issue from a “clarification” of what ordinary people actually say and “mean,” but not “conceive.” Now everyone

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indeed seems to agree that they want what is good—that seems reasonable enough. And people are known to say (or were known to say, before nature was hidden by modern abstractions) that “the good” is “virtue and wisdom.” But then we leap to the identification of virtue with this transcendentally purified and converted divine madness. Is this leap—this specific leap to Socratic zeteticism as the transcendent “insight”—really somehow inherent in what ordinary people say about “virtue and wisdom?” What authorizes us, for example, to conclude that virtue “is essentially wisdom/insight?” On this we still need to consider Pangle’s last paragraph taken directly from Strauss’s Hobbes book.264 Here the aim is precisely to examine “the antithesis . . . between true and apparent or pseudovirtue.”265 Everything, we are told, depends on focusing this comparison on the virtue of justice, and not on courage, “the lowest virtue,” and which Strauss here identifies, somewhat surprisingly, with self-assertion as “man’s natural self-love, or man’s natural hedonism.” Justice, I interpret Pangle/Strauss to be saying, philosophy can deal with: once we see that justice is about the good of society, and the good of society only makes sense with reference to the good of the individual, or of the best individual, then we see clearly the subordination of justice to the good and hence to philosophy. The just can fairly straightforwardly be emancipated from the noble/beautiful and subordinated to the good. But courage is more problematic, since it “seems more brilliant, more worthy of reverence,” than any other virtue.266 Courage, or manly nobility, I infer, is more closely bound up with—harder to extricate from—the mystery of “the beautiful” than is justice. As Pangle himself notes in a later chapter, “ta kalon” [the noble/beautiful], closely associated as it is “with self-respect, with dignity, as a rational and thus free being, capable of dedication, devotion, and even sacrifice for the sake of causes perceived as just and as thereby partaking of transcendent or eternal value,” is “the spiritual core of the human as the political animal.”267 So to isolate and purify philosophy as “the good,” courage must be demoted, identified with the most vulgar hedonism—despite the fact that it would seem to have a lot to do with sacrificing one’s own life for some “greater good,” such as one’s country. Now a really subtle clue: in order to accomplish and seal this isolation of the good from the noble, Pangle simplifies Strauss’s argument by leaving out a crucial phrase. I here italicize this quite remarkable omission: The reason [courage is the lowest virtue] comes to sight when one scrutinizes courage “not in its archaic form, in which its sense is, as it were, narrowed and limited by obedience to law, and in which, for that very reason, it is hidden wisdom,” but rather, “apart from this limitation, in itself.”268

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Courage—that is, “archaic,” or, let us say, “primitive,” perhaps even “primary,” courage—is bound up with justice, transcendence, nobility, even wisdom. Humanity’s deepest longing, Pangle himself says elsewhere, “is encased in, penetrated and molded by, a complex concatenation of more immediately felt physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social.”269 Our orientation towards transcendence is embedded in politically-conditioned understandings of the noble. Now Pangle’s whole purpose is of course somehow to sort out all this penetrating and molding and to isolate the true end of our longing, ostensibly found “only in the life of philosophy,” which requires that we be “intellectually and spiritually purified, or indeed purged.”270 This statement is presented as a conclusion drawn from a long quotation of Strauss’s perhaps most famous and eloquent paean to philosophy.271 Therefore it is quite remarkable to note that in this very quotation, Strauss does not at all counsel a complete “purging” of courage, but rather “the mating of courage and moderation,” a mating characterized by “highness and nobility.” This mating seems to consist in a sustaining of the “charm of competence” characteristic of mathematical “homogeneity” together with a respect for the ineliminable “heterogeneity” associated with distinctively human, that is political purposes. The very life of philosophy would thus depend, contrary to Pangle’s argument or his clues, not upon a radical purging of ordinary human and political reverence for the beauty of a good it cannot fully grasp, but on a respect for a pre-philosophic sense of the human difference upon which depends the appearance of the real itself, the manifestation of distinct beings or parts within a meaningful if elusive whole. It is surely out of concern for this heterogeneity that Leo Strauss chose to emphasize the otherness, the “transcendence” and even externality of philosophy, choosing thus to risk misleading ambitious students such as Prof. Pangle or his students. But when we place this emphasis within the context of Strauss’s understanding of the political conditions of philosophy we see clearly the political character of this very claim to transcend the political. When Pangle assures us that “human nature as understood by the Socratics is animated by a profound, passionate longing for self-transcending union with the eternal or divine,”272 he surely invites us to recall what he wrote earlier: that classical philosophy is not originally grounded in, but “moves to, or issues in, an account of human nature,” via, as we have seen, a rather venturesome “clarification” of what everyone says or means.273 There is no immediate, intuitive, univocal evidence concerning the meaning of human longing. Political reflection can surely bring to our attention the ways in which these longings are entangled with practical necessities—a very great contribution to self-knowledge, for which we are grateful—but no “clarification” can provide us with some utterly “transcendent” philosophy as a radical alternative

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to our practically embedded figures of transcendence. To say that the good exists “in speech” is to say that it is an interpretation—and therefore not final but eminently contestable, though no doubt worthy and well-intentioned. It is only from the standpoint of this honorable High Straussian interpretation, from the standpoint of “philosophy,” that it becomes clear that courage and concern for “honor” are of a piece with simple and vulgar hedonism, that what appears to be “reverence” is in fact mere “selfishness.” In Natural Right and History Strauss writes that “the relation of virtue to human nature is comparable to that of act and potency, and . . . the potency [only] becomes known by looking back to it from the act.”274 The virtue of philosophy is this act, and the definitions of the “vulgar” and “real” virtues of “human nature” are its “looking back.” “The City” as the realm of necessity is the Other of Philosophy, the negative pole Philosophy defines in order to enact, by opposing this pole, its own virtue. Let us try to imagine for a moment that we who consider these weighty matters are, rather than professors of Straussian “political philosophy” or their students, assigned by fate to sift through the tangled paradoxes of Mr. Strauss’s deliciously subtle writings, including his intriguing references to some primordial “common sense” or pre-philosophic ground of human awareness—let us imagine instead that we are, say, phenomenologists attempting, somehow oblivious to the tissue of modern abstractions that separates us from our natures, directly to consult and “read off” human experience. Or even, if you will indulge a still more reckless speculation, let us see if we can pretend that we are actual human beings in the grip (as Strauss might say) of the challenge of being human. If we attempt such an experiment, we might notice that to know that the greatest question is how one should live is always already to know that one exists under some obligation or law that is higher than oneself. One cannot dedicate oneself without self-deception to the life of “theory” or “philosophy” that might follow from a pursuit of that question without recognizing the authority of something above oneself, even if one cannot fully articulate the nature of this authority. The structured ignorance of Socratic philosophy, understood as a serious and deeply meaningful way of life and not merely as the academic exercise of an esoteric sect, must have some content, however provisional; this ignorance is not pure, but partakes of an orientation towards and a gratitude for what is above and beyond the activity of questioning. The sweetness of the activity of questioning, which Strauss and his students have praised so magnificently, seems to me inseparable from such gratitude, from such “grace.”275 In this way, the most lucid or self-knowing “theory” and the most conscientious practice arise from the same ground.276 There is no pure, content-free starting point to the question of the just and noble, and there is

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no final answer to this question that is not an interpretation, which is very far from saying that all interpretations are equal. It follows that philosophy’s claim to a radical transcendence purged of all practical nobility is itself an expression of such nobility.277 The deepest meaning of Strauss’s “political philosophy” was the political responsibility of philosophy—the responsibility of “philosophers” to represent, moderate and direct the human longing for transcendence. If enough would-be philosophers could accept the notion of a non-religious or cosmological but somehow apodictically eternal and supremely satisfying good, Strauss seemed to hope, then, without persuading masses of people of this good, that they might affect the orientation of the intellectual elite sufficiently to apply some brakes to the modern projection of transcendence upon the post–Christian hopes of human mastery, political and scientific. Unfortunately for Strauss’s noble project, however, even would-be philosophers have trouble believing in this absolutist zeteticism, and so they are compelled to “convert” more and more youth in order to confirm what they take to be their own conversions.278 But this proves not very productive philosophically, and perhaps more importantly, very annoying to people who actually find human beings and their concerns (as expressed in politics, religion, art) interesting, perhaps even loveable. And so, without for a moment forgetting our immense debt to Leo Strauss’s unsurpassed elucidation of the political-philosophical problem, we must forsake once and for all the “final solution” Thomas Pangle has defended, and discover or rediscover other ways to think the good of thinking together with the good of humanity. Though Strauss’s thought will continue to bear rich fruit as long as people are concerned with the permanent questions, the practical project of the theoretical supremacy of “Political Philosophy” has spent itself and must die, or what amounts to the same thing, bore ever more deeply into its esoteric retreat, its cave that claims to be absolutely beyond, and which must therefore lie beneath, all real caves. NOTES 1. In Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 2. Ibid., 35. Multiple references in one of my paragraphs to material from the same source page will be cited in the last reference in the paragraph to that page. 3. Ibid., 35. Strauss notices here that Heidegger “went much further than Husserl in the same direction,” displacing the “primary theme” of philosophy from “the object of perception” to “the full thing as experienced as part of . . . the individual world to which it belongs.” Strauss would appear to agree with this going further towards “the

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full thing,” but to reject the historicist implications of Heidegger’s subordination of all such experience to individual “worlds” (Ibid., 31). 4. Ibid., 35; emphasis added. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 36. 7. Ibid., 37. 8. See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 13. 9. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999). 10. In An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 98. 11. Strauss, “German Nihilism,” 365. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Virgil, Aeneid, VI.85. 17. In Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). This essay is based on lectures given in Jerusalem from December 1954 to January 1955. 18. Ibid., 10,11. 19. Ibid., 10. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Ibid., 14. 23. Ibid., 16. 24. Ibid., 17; emphasis added. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. Ibid., 23–24. 27. Ibid., 19–20. 28. Ibid., 25–26. 29. Ibid., 26. 30. Ibid., 27; emphasis added. 31. Ibid., 28. Strauss clearly is fond of this line from Virgil as an expression of a certain classical moderation; he cites it elsewhere, including, as we have seen, in the speech on “German Nihilism” of 1941. It is not obvious, though, just how it is to be applied to the bearing of the classical political philosopher: who are the insolent to be crushed, and the vanquished to be spared? This is perhaps best understood in the present context of Strauss’s critique of the moderns. Is not the insolence in question that of modern science and of modern historicism in their rejection of the practical and common origins (such as the distinction between noble and base) of the philosopher’s inquiry concerning the good and on the whole? Modernity, from Strauss’s point of view, is founded on a certain contemptuous dismissal of such “permanencies.” But the theorists of modernity pay for this contempt for vanquished practice

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by their slavish devotion to “democracy” (and its correlate, a slavishly moralistic commitment to an abstract “love of truth”) or their enthusiasm for those revolutionary activists who claim to speak for History, their promotion of “the least wise and least moderate” (Ibid., 27). These joined extremes of pride and submission are captured in another of Strauss’s favorite phrases: “et humiliter serviebant et superbe dominabantur” (“themselves obsequiously subservient while arrogantly lording it over others.” Livy, XXIV.25.viii., in On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, revised and expanded edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 212. (Translation provided by the editors). Strauss is ready to “crush” the insolence of modern abstractions, but his magnanimous philosopher’s “vanquishing” of what is common, of contradictory and inadequate opinion, is moderated by his awareness of the continuity between his own quest and our pre-philosophic humanity. Compare Pierre Manent’s brilliant apothegm: “While the proud philosopher is superior to other men, the modest sociologist is superior to man’s very humanity” Cité de l’homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 111; my translation. 32. Ibid., 28; emphasis added. 33. Ibid., 29, 31. 34. Ibid., 32. 35. Ibid., 34. 36. Ibid., 34. 37. Ibid., 34. 38. Ibid., 35. 39. Ibid., 35. 40. Ibid., 35. 41. Ibid., 36. 42. Ibid., 39; emphasis added. 43. Ibid., 39. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 32. 46. Ibid., 40. 47. Ibid., 40. 48. Ibid., 40. 49. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950) 50. Ibid., 81. 51. Ibid., 82. 52. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 53. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 86. 54. Ibid., 92. 55. Ibid., 123. 56. Ibid., 127. 57. Ibid., 122. 58. Ibid., 145.

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59. Ibid., 139. 60. Leo Strauss, “The Problem of Socrates: Five Lectures,” chap. 7 of The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 61. Ibid., 133. 62. Ibid., 126. 63. See the discussion of moral strength in Book Seven of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, chap. 3 above. 64. Ibid., 164. 65. Ibid., 166–67. 66. Ibid., 162. 67. Leo Strauss, Political Philosophy, 40. 68. Leo Strauss, “Plato,” in History of Political Philosophy, ed. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 69. Ibid.,73. 70. Ibid., 77. 71. “The Republic presents a practical discussion of theory . . . [in the Statesman,] the theoretical discussion of the highest practical knowledge . . . takes on a commanding character” (Ibid., 77). 72. Ibid., 77. This qualified, non-religious and non-technological humanism, this claim to represent the whole of humanity as a part of the whole simply, is a delicate position to say the least, since any claim on behalf of a part of the cosmic whole cannot escape the human, political condition, and is therefore a partisan claim on behalf of the self-affirmation of the “philosopher.” 73. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 39. 74. Strauss, “Problem of Socrates,” 142. 75. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 27. 76. Ibid., 23–24. 77. “The Work of Edmund Husserl,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger) (Paris: Vrin, 1988). Translations from this work are my own. I note that Levinas shares Husserl’s and Heidegger’s distrust of “the natural attitude.” 78. Ibid., 28. 79. Ibid., Section 10. 80. Ibid., 35. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 36. 83. Ibid., 38. 84. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 25. 85. Ibid., 36. 86. Ibid., 37. 87. Ibid., 34. 88. Ibid., 37; emphasis added. 89. Ibid., 37.

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90. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, Revised and Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 178. 91. Ibid., 178. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 194. 94. Ibid. This preference for a constitutional democracy (somewhat aristocratically or conservatively understood, to be sure) is a constant in Strauss’s mature writings, at least as early as the speech on “German Nihilism” of 1941. This should be enough to end discussions of Strauss’s sinister anti-democratic designs—unless, of course, a somewhat conservative interpretation of constitutional democracy (one that recognizes the permanent necessity of political rule) already counts as sinister, beyond the pale of reasonable scholarly discussion. 95. Ibid., 193. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 193–94. 98. Ibid., 212. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid., 198. 101. Ibid., 194. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid., 195. Strauss argues further in these pages that the philosopher’s need to put in question the prejudices of his own philosophical sect by engaging political opinions is concealed today by the “modern substitute” for the sect, that is, the “Republic of Letters.” This association is characterized by relativism or by a “soft eclecticism,” for which Strauss shows very scant respect: “A certain vague middle line, which is perhaps barely tolerable for the most easy-going members of the different persuasions if they are in their drowsiest mood, is set up as The Truth or as Common Sense.” This academic party is clearly inferior to the philosophical sect, and both are to be preferred to ideology: “Much as we loathe the snobbish silence or whispering of the sect, we loathe even more the savage noise of the loudspeakers of the mass party” (195). This suggests that, although Strauss himself was not a “Straussian,” he may in fact have intended that there be such a sect. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., 197–98. 106. Ibid., 199. 107. Ibid., 199–200. 108. Ibid., 200. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 200–1. 111. Ibid., 201; emphasis added. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid., 201.

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115. It is true that Strauss concedes the title of “philosopher” to “Democritus and other pre-Socratics, not to mention the moderns” who deny a kinship between virtue and the eternal order. But he gives us two strong reasons for questioning that concession (a concession which might be read as a lapse into the mode of what he has described as the eclectic or relativist “Republic of Letters”). First, without the assumption of this kinship, philosophy can only explain the philosopher’s desire to communicate his thoughts by his “desire for recognition or by his human kindness.” One cannot, therefore, explain it as intrinsic to the philosophic interest in truth itself. But to explain a characteristic activity of philosophy as motivated by something other than the interest in truth would seem to put in question the possibility of philosophy. Second, Strauss doubts whether, without glimpsing a kinship between the order of the soul and the order of the whole, it is possible to explain “the immediate pleasure which the philosopher experiences when he sees a well-ordered soul or the immediate pleasure which we experience when we observe signs of human nobility” (Ibid., 202). 116. Ibid., 201. 117. Ibid., 204. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 197; emphasis added. 121. Ibid., 203. 122. Ibid., 198. 123. Ibid., 209. 124. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 7. 125. Ibid. 126. Strauss, On Tyranny, 178. The Machiavelli reference is to Prince, chap. 6. 127. Ibid., 183. 128. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 45; emphasis added. 129. Consider this, for example, from Natural Right and History: “Aristotle did not conceive of a world state because he was absolutely certain that science is essentially theoretical and that the liberation of technology from moral and political control would lead to disastrous consequences,” 23; emphasis added). What can this absolute and “theoretical” “is” mean here, except that the prospect of the liberation of technology is judged, practically, to be a disaster? 130. On Tyranny, 189. 131. Ibid., 191. 132. Ibid., 192. 133. Ibid., 212. 134. Augustine, City of God, XII.14. 135. Gildin, Ten Essays, 249–310 136. Ibid., 273. 137. Ibid., 276. 138. Ibid., 277. 139. Ibid., 278–79.

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140. Ibid., 279. 141. Ibid., 280. 142. Ibid., 281. 143. Ibid., 281, 287, 293. 144. Ibid., 282–84, 290. 145. Ibid., 273. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid., 291. 148. Ibid. 149. Ibid., 294. 150. Ibid., 284. 151. Strauss seems to have reinvented this classical rhetoric to stiffen the spine of the late Enlightenment. Contrary to Heidegger, he appears to believe that modern nihilism is best resisted, not by deconstructing the spiritual links between classical reason and modern rationalism, but by reinforcing them. This rhetoric is not without beauty because it is not without truth. But it is perhaps permitted now to reconsider the judgments implicit in Strauss’ rhetorical choices. Can the praise of the autonomy of philosophy today continue to point to a possibility beyond the dominant dogmas and habits of the age without unduly contributing to the complacency or insulation of “philosophy” as an academic sect, a mere counter-aristocracy, or, rather, counterelite? And can the rhetoric of the good moderate the modern passion for justice without respecting the sources of that passion as expressed in revealed religion? 152. Ibid., 286. 153. Ibid., 290. 154. Ibid., 294. 155. In Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 311–56. 156. Ibid., 321. 157. Ibid., 327. 158. Ibid., 322. 159. Ibid., 323. 160. Ibid., 327. 161. Leo Strauss, “Progress or Return,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 304. 162. Surely Strauss knows that more than modernity is at stake in the “ultimate” question of the “status of individuality.” His awareness of the vulnerability of “individualism” to progressive-materialist (and therefore ultimately Machiavellian) interpretations no doubt underlies his tendency to dismiss any more high-minded genealogies of individualism. But once we see that there is indeed such a philosophical and spiritual question, and that “the individual” can by no means be simply identified with the attachment to one’s own body, then might not theory as well as

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practice be better served by paying more philosophical respect to the spiritual sources of individualism, whatever their vulnerability? 163. Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 45–52. 164. Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 328. 165. Strauss, “Progress or Return,” 284. 166. Ibid., 285. 167. See Rémi Brague, “Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: Leo Strauss’s Muslim Understanding of Greek Philosophy,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 239–55. 168. Pierre Manent, La Cité de l’homme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), last section, 294–95. 169. Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert, The Truth about Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 170. Ibid., 30. 171. Ibid., 31. 172. Ibid., 33. 173. Ibid., 32. 174. Ibid., 36, 35. 175. Ibid., 33. 176. Ibid., 36. 177. Ibid., 48. 178. Ibid., 48–49. 179. Ibid., 70. 180. Ibid., 70. 181. Ibid., 38. 182. Ibid., 84. 183. Ibid., 52. 184. The embedded reference is to Strauss’s “The Problem of Socrates,” in Rebirth, 163. 185. Zuckert and Zuckert, The Truth, 53. 186. Ibid., 56. 187. Ibid., 57. 188. Note in this connection the Zuckerts’ hesitation regarding the status of modern philosophy: whereas in chapter 2 they argue that for Strauss modernity is bad, not only for politics and morality but for philosophy, even that it is fundamentally irrational (65), they later suggest more cautiously or ecumenically or zetetically that Strauss “did not attempt to show that classical philosophy was simply superior to modern philosophy” (Ibid., 101). 189. Ibid., 85, 86. 190. Ibid., 173.

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191. Ibid., 171–72; Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 125. 192. Ibid., 173. 193. Ibid., 173. 194. Ibid., 174. 195. Ibid. 196. Ibid., 175; Strauss, “Problem of Socrates,” 164. 197. Ibid., 175. 198. Ibid., 46. 199. To follow this analysis a difficult step further, we begin to suspect that the very duality between transcendent-impersonal-intellectual and immanent-individualbodily is a representation from the standpoint of the philosopher’s claim. Strauss’s effort to revive a pre-modern and pre–Christian sense of transcendence requires the reduction of individuality to bodily necessity. But there is nothing obvious in this reduction. A part who is truly open to the whole would be open to the mystery of the very existence of a part, an individual, who is as such open to the whole; he or she would be open to the question of a being for whom the question of Being is an individual question, whose individual existence is open to such a question. 200. Ibid., 112. 201. Ibid, 56. 202. Thus it seems to me that the Zuckerts do not understand strongly enough the position they take against Stanley Rosen on the meaning of “political philosophy” (146). They rightly insist that “political life is not only an element of the whole that philosophers seek to understand, but an especially privileged part of it,” and they explain how this privilege leads to “Socratic dialectical or conversational philosophizing.” But they do not seem to see that the philosophy that “begins in opinion” can never outgrow the ground of all opinion, namely, the conviction concerning an essential human difference, the basis of all differences. In their discussion of postmodernism, they do not clearly notice the sense in which Strauss is the only author to see beyond modernity by grasping a certain priority of practice to theory, the only true postmodern. 203. Ibid., 84–88. 204. Ibid., 86; Strauss, Natural Right and History, 123 205. Ibid., 88. 206. Nasser Behnegar, Strauss, Weber, and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 164. 207. Ibid., 88. 208. To be precise, the Zuckerts admit the limited use of something like esotericism, a certain “pedagogical reserve” (137), but only for the purposes of philosophic education. That is, Strauss may have chosen not to “dot all the i’s” (136), thus allowing his readers to achieve their own philosophic insights, but he did not mislead, or say things he did not believe. Let me here register a doubt that this distinction can be fully maintained. The achievement of philosophical insight seems to be inseparable from the weaning away from deeply embedded practical orthodoxies. Any “reserve”

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that prevents one from directly contradicting these orthodoxies would in practice hardly be distinguishable from conveying a misleading impression of conformity. 209. Ibid., 134. 210. Ibid., 135. 211. Ibid. 212. Ibid., 134; emphasis added. 213. Ibid., 180. 214. Ibid., 137; my emphasis added. 215. To do minimal justice to the questions the Zuckerts raise in this chapter on esotericism, it would be necessary to consider their too brief engagement with the formidable and provocative Stanley Rosen. The Zuckerts understand Rosen (Hermeneutics as Politics [Oxford University Press, 1990]) to be contradicting himself by arguing that Strauss holds, on the one hand, philosophy to be impossible, or to be a noble lie, propounded in order to give meaning to human lives (Truth about Leo Strauss, 143), and, on the other, that he understands “political philosophy” to be only the rhetorical front of philosophy, deployed for the protection of the life of philosophy itself. This is indeed a contradiction—to protect something that doesn’t exist—but Rosen recognizes it and frankly attributes it to Strauss himself: “Strauss would appear to have deconstructed himself” (Hermeneutics, 122). More precisely, Rosen holds Strauss to have abandoned “philosophy in the strict classical sense” (123), which requires confidence in the existence of an intelligible eternal order, and then to have attempted, but to have failed, to replace this idea of the core of philosophy with philosophy as an awareness of “the permanent problems.” Like us, but unlike the Zuckerts, Rosen believes that, for Strauss’s project to be tenable, this philosophic awareness of the problems must somehow be linked with the practical or pre-philosophic awareness of nobility or dignity. However, unlike us, Rosen believes this connection cannot be maintained. He astutely quotes a passage in which Strauss deeply connects the theoretical and the practical: “The whole is not whole without man . . . But man becomes whole not without his own effort” (120). But Rosen rejects this argument, too readily reducing (it seems to us) this “not without his own effort” in effect to “by his own construction,” a simple act of will—thus he thinks Strauss’s “philosophy” reduces, or risks reducing, to willfulness. (Rosen certainly intends this as a criticism, although it is not clear how this criticism comports with Rosen’s remark that all great philosophers, like Nietzsche, engage “in the divine prerogative of willing a world into being.” [126]) Rosen, for his part, does not conclude the impossibility of philosophy, since he believes more than Strauss in, and is more competent than Strauss in, the non-political, “technical” aspect of philosophy as systematic inquiry into the manifold intelligible kinds of things (130n). That is to say, more than Strauss, and more than us, Rosen believes in the possibility of separating metaphysics, or inquiry into the nature of things, from an awareness and articulation of the human difference. In a word, he believes in the possibility of philosophy in more or less the traditional sense (though somehow overlain by an enthusiasm, or at least a tolerance, for Nietzschean constructivism). Strauss points, instead, in a direction that seems to us at once more radical in conception and more

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conservative or “moderate” in its disposition towards or engagement with the practical world: the co-primordiality of theory and practice is humbling to philosophy, but in no way an end to thinking—indeed, perhaps a new beginning. Rosen argues that the lack of any univocal basis in pre-theoretical moral judgment is ruinous for the project of “political philosophy,” and therefore that Strauss’s aristocratic strategy is a pure act of will. I think it better to see it as a contestable choice, an admirable but by no means final moral and theoretical response to our spontaneous and primordial but not fully determinate sense of human worth and a corresponding meaning of the whole. Rosen is ready to “grant to Strauss that all men prefer virtue to vice, good to evil, justice to injustice, and the noble to the base.” But he argues “this is not philosophically decisive (although it is interesting) until we decide what is virtuous, just, good, and noble” (129). Now I would say that this universal human orientation towards the noble and the good is philosophically decisive, not because it decides the question of definition of these terms, but because the question is itself primordial and insuperable, as much for philosophers or thinkers as for anyone else. Philosophy is a response to the evidence of, as well as the question of, nobility, and is always itself a kind of choice. Though he argues that Strauss’s analysis results in the view that “baseness is as much in conformity with nature as is nobility,” Rosen himself seems to demonstrate, almost despite himself, that untrammeled thinking is inseparable from a sponsoring of some notion of nobility, since what seems his must comprehensive criticism of Strauss takes the form of questioning whether Strauss’s classical-aristocratic political strategy “is directed to the most noble conception of human life” (135; see also 133). 216. Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss: An Introduction to His Thought and Intellectual Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 217. Ibid., 57. 218. Ibid., 60; emphasis added. 219. Ibid., 61, 64. 220. To be sure, the term “High Straussian” may be judged to overlap considerably with the familiar and venerable “East-Coast Straussian,” but my coinage is more descriptive. Anyway, the geographic distribution of the various sub-sects of Straussians is, inevitably, breaking down. 221. Ibid., 73. 222. Ibid., 74, quoting Strauss, On Tyranny, 27. 223. Ibid., 79, quoting Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 19–21. 224. Ibid., 68; Strauss, City and Man, 11. 225. Ibid., 97. 226. Ibid., 67. 227. Ibid., 31. 228. Ibid., 8. 229. Ibid., 12–13. 230. Ibid., 13. 231. Ibid., 18–20.

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232. Ibid., 23–24; Strauss, Political Philosophy, 114. 233. Ibid., 26. 234. Ibid., 28–29. 235. To be sure, as the author of the magisterial and erudite Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, Pangle can perhaps be excused for not offering an extended discussion on that theme here. The present book indeed provides us an opportunity to situate Pangle’s very impressive (practical) refutation of the Bible in the larger context of his project of “political philosophy.” 236. Ibid., 30. 237. Ibid., 54–56. 238. Ibid., 31. 239. Ibid., 70. 240. Pangle’s strategy in Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham is clearly modeled on this classical alternative, which recognizes the strict theoretical irrefutability of “creation, miracles, and revelation,” but is satisfied in the assurance that such things “are not known but only believed, and that they therefore do not have the binding character peculiar to the known” (Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law, trans. Eve Adler [Albany: SUNY Press, 1885], 30). We, for are part, are no less impressed than Pangle by the “binding character of the known;” but he has just taught us to wonder whether what can be known is sufficient to have a “binding character.” 241. Strauss, Philosophy and Law, 31. 242. Pangle, Leo Strauss, 30. 243. Ibid., 32. 244. Ibid., 34, quoting Strauss, Political Philosophy, 35–36. 245. Ibid., 35; emphasis added. 246. Ibid., 37. 247. Here I must say that I take no pleasure in laying my vulgar hands on Pangle’s carefully constructed and very refined puzzle, intruding into his esoteric craft. In fact I share his taste for subtlety and even grant the advisability of a certain discretion or, as he says, “civic responsibility” in publishing the results of our scholarly truth-seeking (as we are bound, by our distinctly un-aristocratic profession, to publish them). But the practice of esotericism faces the clear risk of degenerating into a bit of a parlor game, and a rather tedious one. In the end I suppose I am not sufficiently awed by the final solution that is supposed to be the reward that sustains such exercises. Let the reader judge, each according to ability. 248. Ibid., 36; emphasis added. 249. Ibid., 37. 250. Ibid., 38. 251. Ibid. 252. Ibid, 39; Strauss, Natural Right, 80. 253. Ibid., 28. 254. Ibid., 36. 255. Ibid., 39. 256. Ibid., 40.

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257. Ibid., 138. 258. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 148ff. 259. Ibid., 148; Pangle’s emphasis. 260. Ibid., 150. 261. Or, as Pangle might say, the “throbbing,” yet somehow “intransigently” “serene” outcome of this “perscrutation,” “at once mortal and melancholic.” But I have left out “titanic.” 262. Pangle rightly wishes to preserve the range of the German Einsicht. 263. Ibid., 40–41; Pangle’s emphasis. 264. Ibid., 41–42. 265. Ibid., 41. 266. Ibid., 42; emphasis added. 267. Ibid., 93–94. 268. This omission ought to be correlated with the other notable omission—in what is surely another pregnant clue and not instead an attempt to avoid difficulties in the argument—in this long string of quotations from Strauss’s Hobbes book (The Political Philosophy of Hobbes [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952]): “Plato does not without further ado oppose to materialist-mechanistic physics a spiritualistteleological physics” (40). By dropping the “without further ado,” Pangle exaggerates Strauss’s de-emphasizing of cosmology (as if philosophy were not linked to any substantive, if provisional, understanding of the whole), just as he chooses to set aside Strauss’s recognition that politically-infused notions of the noble are implicated in the philosophic claim of transcendence (Pangle, Leo Strauss, 41; Strauss, Philosophy of Hobbes, 146). 269. Pangle, Leo Strauss, 51. 270. Ibid., 50. 271. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 39–40. 272. Pangle, Leo Strauss, 49; emphasis added. 273. Ibid., 40. 274. Strauss, Natural Right, 145; emphasis added. 275. Strauss, Political Philosophy, 40. 276. Heinrich Meier’s admirably candid articulation of the High Straussian position, Leo Strauss and the Theological-Political Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), deserves close reading on this point in particular, and more generally on the core of Strauss’s thought. Meier is confident that the philosopher successfully “relates the beautiful back to the good,” such that he is certain of his emancipation from anything beyond his comprehension. Even “the experience of the call . . . he can integrate in the comprehensive movement of reflection in which he takes up what he is not, what is opposed to him and is able to call him into question” (42–43); emphasis added. 277. Strauss advances this ruling claim for the noble purpose of opposing the authority of dangerous and irrational hopes; thus the practical prominence in his project of the question of reason and revelation. But we now begin to see that, if all speech of transcendence is interpretation on the basis of orientations embedded in the

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practical world, then there is a sense in which the ancients/moderns question is the more fundamental theoretical question. The human experience of the good, as well as its “sacredness” or mystery, is at work in both “reason” and “revelation.” The modern projection of transcendence upon the future of humanity, a projection learned from the Bible, is not self-evidently less rational than the classical interpretation of transcendence as more aristocratic than aristocracy—though one may argue for the reasonableness of the classical view, as Strauss does, on the grounds of the dangers of “technology.” 278. Pangle, Leo Strauss, 55.

Chapter 6

Tocqueville’s Responsible Reason

Tocqueville raises the problem of theory and practice explicitly if rather enigmatically at the end of his introduction to Democracy. After inviting readers to look closely into the work for a “mother thought” that binds all its parts together, and asking them to read the book “in the spirit in which it was written,” Tocqueville further begs the indulgence of the reader in consideration of the natural difficulty of matching words to deeds: Nor must it be forgotten that the author who wants to make himself understood is obliged to push each of his ideas to all its theoretical consequences and often to the limits of the false and impractical; for if it is sometimes necessary to deviate from the rules of logic in actions, one cannot do so in discourse, and a man finds it almost as difficult to be inconsistent in his words as he does ordinarily to be consistent in his actions.1

To make the practice of American democracy intelligible, it will be necessary almost to distort the illogical practical reality of politics; to avoid distorting the political phenomena altogether, Tocqueville thus undertakes the task—almost as difficult for a theoretical man as logical speech is for an exclusively practical man—of being “inconsistent in his words.” But why would a man with theoretical gifts take such pains to be inconsistent, to accommodate the requirements of practice? In the very final words of his introduction, Tocqueville indicates that, while his book is not simply practical, that is, that he “did not mean either to serve or to contest any party,” it does not claim to be altogether detached from partisan concerns: I undertook to see, not differently, but further than the parties; and while they are occupied with the next day, I wanted to ponder the future.2 253

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Tocqueville does not set aside partisan points of view as theoretically irrelevant; instead, one might say, he attempts to reconcile them or perhaps rather to manage and moderate their conflict. But for what purpose, in view of what more adequate whole does he mediate this conflict of parts? To be sure, the partisan audience that Tocqueville is most immediately addressing is in the first instance a French and then a European audience; from his introduction it is clear that Tocqueville aims to show Europeans what they can learn from America. In any case, the practical context that Tocqueville addresses certainly differs in important, perhaps fundamental respects from our own. More broadly, though, he addresses a historical movement that he believes to be advancing over Western civilization as a whole, one that even in our day has not yet reached its terminus. Thus he observes that the irresistible march of democracy “is not peculiar to France. In whichever direction we cast a glance, we perceive the same revolution continuing in all the Christian universe.”3 France therefore represents only an aggravated case of a “frightening spectacle” presented by “Christian peoples” generally.4 Tocqueville will thus from time to time explicitly associate himself with the perspective of “legislators of democracies.”5 As discussed above (chapter 2), the essence of this “frightening spectacle” that confronts the West may be described precisely as a dislocation of theory and practice. To describe and respond to this spectacle is inseparable for Tocqueville from the effort to find a more adequate standpoint as a legislator of democracy than that of his materialist rivals, the self-styled champions of modernity. To find such a standpoint is decidedly not equivalent either to discovering a true theory already at work within American democracy or to constructing a new theory to urge upon Americans and the world. Nor, Tocqueville makes clear, is it possible simply to reclaim the worldview of the traditionalist or aristocratic enemies of modern equality and materialism. Let us briefly reconsider, in this connection, Tocqueville’s account of American Cartesianism. If Descartes’ precepts are best followed in America, it is not despite their being least studied, but, one might almost say, precisely because they are least studied there. In the first sentence of the second volume of Democracy in America, Tocqueville observes that “there is no country in the civilized world where they are less occupied with philosophy than the United States.”6 Americans have practiced the modern method of dismissing habits and traditions in order “to seek the reason for things by themselves and in themselves alone,” attending to results without regard to means and seeing “through the form to the foundation”7 with more success than other peoples—than the French, in particular —because in America the method has not been so strictly applied as by the French. Whereas the French “turned the world upside down” by following the logic of the modern method through

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to its conclusion in order to “attack all ancient things and open the way to all new ones,”8 the Americans were stopped short of such radicalism by two main circumstances. First is the privileged place of religion in American society from its colonial beginnings. Religion in America has maintained its integrity as distinct from and thus beyond the reach of political changes; it is not subject to political will but has “set its own limits.” Second, American society has become democratic without a democratic revolution, and has thus preserved many “ancient beliefs,” much “authority,” and many “common ideas”9 that would have fallen in a revolutionary confrontation with the new democratic and individualistic method of thought. Americans succeed in their practice of modern, democratic individualism because they have not mastered its theory—or (what comes to the same thing) because its theory has not mastered them. The theory of modern democracy is only viable when it is adulterated in practice by non-democratic residues. This would seem to imply that the theory itself is defective and ought to be replaced. And though Tocqueville indeed calls the reader’s attention in various ways to defects of the theory and directly attacks its purer and more extreme forms, it is significant that he forbears from proposing a theoretical alternative to replace it. To be sure, Tocqueville in the Introduction to Democracy calls for a new political science for a new world;10 but it has never been clear whether he answers or even claims to answer his own call. What is clear is that his response to the new world is less a systematic or even straightforward theory than a reflection on and appreciation of a practical example: American democracy. It would be a mistake, moreover, to assume that Tocqueville’s failure to provide a systematic alternative to defective democratic theory reflects a lack of theoretical depth or rigor. Rather, there is much evidence that Tocqueville has thought through the problem of the limits of theory or “general ideas” in relation to moral-political concerns and has chosen neither a moderndemocratic “theory” nor a classical-aristocratic appeal to a particular conception of honor but a mixed and nuanced rhetorical strategy consistent with his encompassing view of this problem. To cite just a few examples: Tocqueville seems to introduce the township as an example of the radical theory of the sovereignty of the people, according to which the people are “the cause and the end of all things,”11 but actually shows the careful reader how different the reality of communal self-government, which seems to “issue directly from the hand of God,”12 is from the modern theory of democracy. Similarly, Tocqueville encourages or allows the American belief in the democratic philosophy of “self-interest well understood,” although the honor they pay to this philosophy tends to dishonor them,13 and then shows how in practice they often honor themselves more

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than their philosophy.14 As a final example: Tocqueville gives an account of the critically important “manly virtues” of American women that clearly exaggerates the compatibility of these virtues with the fundamental individualism of democracy, as if the democratic pretension to see the “naked truth” of things were fully compatible with the acceptance of the husband as the “natural” head of the family.15 If “in democratic countries the science of association is the mother science” on the progress of which “the progress of all the others depends,” this “science” is therefore by no means identical to the “philosophy” to which the Americans themselves like to give credit. And Tocqueville’s proclaimed “new political science” clearly cannot be simply identified with the theory of enlightened self-interest. Tocqueville’s higher partisanship, his counsel to legislators of modern democracy, cannot be grounded solely in the modern “idea of rights to the personal interest that offers itself as the only immobile point in the human heart,”16 but must somehow be located in the vicinity of “the genuine greatness of man,”17 a terrain completely ignored by the materialistic science of modern individualism. But what is this greatness? And why has Tocqueville not made it the foundation of an alternative theory of man and society? These questions will come into clearer focus through an examination of Tocqueville’s remarkably ambivalent assessment of Christianity in relation to the problem of human greatness.

THE USES AND HAZARDS OF CHRISTIANITY IN TOCQUEVILLE’S ATTEMPT TO SAVE DEMOCRATIC SOULS The Spirit is so contrasted with flesh that no intermediate thing is left. —John Calvin18

On the face of it, Tocqueville’s political endorsement of Christianity in Democracy in America could hardly be more straightforward. The religious beliefs of Americans, he argues, provide them with a stable, common morality that moderates or contains the otherwise destructive passion of a democratic people for innovation.19 Religious authority supplies the defect of political authority in a democracy: How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond were not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if it has not submitted to God?20 . . . I doubt that man can ever support a complete religious independence and an entire political freedom at once; and I am brought to think that if he has no faith, he must serve, and if he is free, he must believe.21

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Tocqueville’s argument appears quite simple: The people will not accept the right to rule of any man or class of men; the people cannot be trusted to rule themselves absolutely; therefore, the people must be ruled by God or by their beliefs about God. In these passages Tocqueville clearly subordinates the question of the truth of Christianity to that of its political utility. Similarly, in other contexts, he admits to “considering religions from a purely human point of view”22 and indicates that, from the standpoint of “legislators for democracies,” any firmly established religion that includes “belief in an immaterial and immortal principle” will serve. Tocqueville is even willing to include among potentially useful religions those that teach the doctrine of metempsychosis, though he considers that doctrine “not more reasonable than that of materialism.”23 Thus, if Tocqueville is “so convinced that one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all cost,”24 this political judgment does not seem to rest upon a religious conviction. Tocqueville’s analysis of the human condition in his chapter “On the Principal Source of Beliefs Among Democratic Peoples”25 in fact suggests that religious beliefs rest inevitably on human or political foundations. Both social bodies and individual human beings, he argues, have daily need of more “truths” than they can discover or verify for themselves. As an individual, every man must accept on trust the “foundation” on which he “builds the edifice of his own thoughts”; as a citizen each man must accept the “principle ideas” by which “all the minds of the citizens always [are] brought and held together.”26 In a later chapter,27 Tocqueville identifies these leading or fundamental ideas, which are “indispensable to the daily practice” of human life28 as those concerning “God and human nature”: There is almost no human action, however particular one supposes it, that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them. One cannot keep these ideas from being the common source from which all the rest flow.29

Thus the “inflexible law of his condition” renders man subject to “dogmatic beliefs,” that is, to beliefs the only verifiable source or ground of which is not God or nature but other men. It is thus inevitable that human beings, or at least the great majority of human beings, depend on other human beings for their opinions about the most important matters. Tocqueville does not recoil before the harsh implication of his analysis: “It is true that every man who receives an opinion on the word of another puts his mind in slavery.”30 The bondage of the mind is the natural and inevitable condition of humanity.

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This bondage is inherently political in the sense that the “fixed ideas” that individuals must accept on trust are precisely the “leading ideas” by which citizens are “brought and held together.” Consequently, the character of this bondage varies with the character of the political order; it varies, in particular, according as the regime is fundamentally aristocratic or democratic: When conditions are unequal and men are not alike, there are some individuals who are very enlightened, very learned, and of very powerful intellect, and a multitude who are very ignorant and very limited. People who live in aristocratic times are therefore naturally brought to take the superior reason of one man or one class as a guide for their opinions, while they are little disposed to recognize the infallibility of the mass. The opposite happens in centuries of equality. As citizens become more equal and alike, the penchant of each to believe blindly a certain man or class diminishes. The disposition to believe the mass is augmented, and more and more it is opinion that leads the world.31

In both aristocracies and democracies, men are bound intellectually to other men. In democracies, however, this bondage is more self-conscious and more confining than in aristocracies. When men are equal “it is in themselves or in those like themselves that they ordinarily seek the sources of truth,” whereas, under conditions of inequality, the people accept the authority of a those thought to be wiser, whom they regard as a medium of access to a truth assumed to reside “outside of and above humanity.”32 However dubious such an assumption may be, it remains that an aristocratic people, while necessarily accepting on trust the ideas of certain fallible human beings on the most important questions, is necessarily oriented towards a ground of truth higher than humanity. This is perhaps what Tocqueville means when he observes, in the first volume of Democracy in America, that the principle of the sovereignty of the people lies at the bottom of almost all human institutions, although it has been brought fully to light and made effective only in American democracy:33 human opinion has always ruled but, whereas it once pointed beyond itself to some transcendent ground of truth, in modern societies it exercises authority in its own name. Although the bondage of the mind is the inflexible law of human existence, there are, according to Tocqueville, better and worse forms of bondage. The political use of religion in Democracy in America may therefore aim at securing a better form and avoiding a worse, and not simply at keeping the people in check, that is, at maintaining order in the bare sense of material security or prosperity. In other words, the apparently straightforward idea that Tocqueville is interested in the political utility of religion rather than in its truth

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reveals itself as problematic once one sees that utility cannot be interpreted in a utilitarian or materialistic sense and, indeed, that the question of what is useful to human beings and the question of religious or metaphysical truth are not entirely separate.34 Although Tocqueville has no hope of delivering mankind from the inflexible laws of intellectual bondage, he believes that this bondage can be “a salutary servitude that permits him to make good use of his freedom.”35 On the other hand, democracy, which seems precisely to hold out the promise of liberation from intellectual bondage to other men, actually threatens to “confine the action of individual reason within narrower limits than befit the greatness and happiness of the human species.”36 That Tocqueville is able to judge between a stifling or degrading intellectual confinement and a “salutary servitude” that serves as a basis for the “good use of freedom” and is consistent with “the greatness and happiness of the human species” implies that he does not believe himself to be enslaved to groundless human opinions; he thus seems implicitly to claim access to some standard “beyond and outside humanity.” And it is true that in the chapter “How, In the United States, Religion Knows how to Make Use of Democratic Instincts,” Tocqueville suggests that certain men of rare natural ability can, under favorable material circumstances, lay hold on truths about “God, their souls, and their general duties toward their Creator and those like them”: Only minds very free of the ordinary preoccupations of life, very penetrating, very agile, very practiced, can, with the aid of much time and care, break through to these so necessary truths.37

It is not clear whether Tocqueville intends to include himself in the class of these rare minds. In any case, he makes no attempt to reveal the content of these deep truths, but seems rather to maintain a distinction between these depths and any fixed ideas that can be revealed to the public. Those who sound the depths can see the truth in religious dogmas that are “clear, precise, intelligible to the crowd, and very lasting,”38 but the truth they see in the depths is not precisely identical to what is visible or can be made visible to all.39 Thus the ground of Tocqueville’s judgment concerning “salutary servitude” or “the greatness and happiness of the human species,” remains unclear, and the precise manner in which religion serves these ends is not treated thematically. In particular, it is not clear how American religion can contribute to widening the people’s intellectual horizons and thus to their happiness and greatness if, as Tocqueville observes in the very midst of his discussion of the degrading intellectual bondage of democracy, “religion itself reigns there much less as revealed doctrine than as common opinion.”40 But it appears that Tocqueville’s intention is to define the visible limits of freedom in order

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to approximate the deep or hidden truths about God, the soul, and duty. To understand Tocqueville’s use of religion, we must therefore see how it is that religion may help to create a space of the right dimensions for human activity and thus for human happiness and greatness, or for the good use of freedom. In other words, to understand the political utility of religion it is necessary first to understand what purpose(s) politics is supposed to serve. In discussing “How Religious Beliefs at Times Turn the Souls of Americans Toward Immaterial Enjoyments,”41 Tocqueville observes that the legislative art has a fixed goal, but he does not spell out just what that goal is. It is thus necessary to discern this end in the means to it that Tocqueville recommends. These means are ever-changing, since they must be fitted to the particular circumstances of the societies in question. But societies come in two main types, Tocqueville observes, and he recurs to the basic dichotomy that shapes his entire consideration of democracy in America, that is, the contrast between aristocracy and democracy. Tocqueville does not attempt to describe the lawgiver’s art abstractly or dogmatically, but exhibits it in its application to each of these general conditions of society. In an aristocracy, or a certain kind of aristocracy, where unearned wealth on the one hand and “irremediable poverty” on the other render “souls almost numb in their contemplation of another world,” the business of the legislator is to turn men’s attention to this world, to their physical needs. Under such conditions, Tocqueville writes, “I would try to excite [the human mind] with the search for well-being.”42 On the other hand, “legislators of democracies have other cares.” Democratic men are all too ready to hunt after prosperity; they thus risk degrading themselves or losing the use of their sublimest faculties. Legislators of democracies and all honest and enlightened men who live in them must therefore apply themselves relentlessly to raising up souls and keeping them turned toward Heaven. It is necessary for all those who are interested in the future of democratic societies to unite, and for all in concert to make continuous efforts to spread within these societies a taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a love of immaterial pleasures.43

The utility of religion for Tocqueville’s project thus seems clear: Democracy tends to degrade men by focusing their attention on the material realm, and religion helps statesmen and “honest and enlightened men” to raise them up. But this does not fully explain Tocqueville’s intention, since the religious elevation of man is not presented as the fixed goal of the lawgiver’s art but only as a means appropriate to a democratic age. And we have seen

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that for Tocqueville it is possible for men to be too religious or elevated, for them to attend too much to the other world. Just as men risk losing their sublimest faculties in an age of equality, so, in an age of excessive inequality, they risk falling into state of “numb” passivity, a condition unlikely to elicit “the greatest efforts of the human mind.”44 The common goal of democratic and aristocratic lawgivers seems to be the fullest activity of the best human faculties. Thus Tocqueville endorses “belief in an immaterial and immortal principle” less for its own sake than because it is “necessary to the greatness of man,” and he subordinates a “sentiment of greatness” in the abstract, that is, as bound up with “a taste for the infinite . . . and a love of immaterial pleasures,” to a concern for a specifically human greatness. Furthermore, if he is convinced that “one must maintain Christianity within the new democracies at all costs,”45 this seems to be because Christianity is at present the only viable form of “belief in an immaterial and immortal principle.” Therefore, when any religion whatsoever has cast deep roots within a democracy, guard against shaking it; but rather preserve it carefully as the most precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries.46

In sum, Christianity comprises belief in an immaterial and immortal principle, and such a belief in a greatness beyond human control is indispensable to human greatness, which includes the “greatest efforts of the human mind,” and particularly in need of support in a democratic age. Tocqueville’s governing intention is thus to make human greatness possible in a democratic age. The goal is neither precisely a religious one nor an aristocratic one, but a fixed political end that now requires the support of religion understood as an aristocratic heritage.

THE SEPARATION AND UNION OF RELIGION AND POLITICS The deeper one penetrates into Tocqueville’s understanding of the nature and origins of democracy, the harder it is to see what use he intends to make of Christianity in addressing the ills of democracy. For the elevation of soul provided by Christianity as an aristocratic inheritance is threatened by the Christian devaluation of nature and its pride. [F]ar from believing that one must recommend humility to our contemporaries, I should want one to strive to give them a vaster idea of themselves and of their species; humility is not healthy for them; what they lack most, in my opinion, is pride. I would willingly trade several of our small virtues for this vice.47

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To put the problem bluntly: How can Christianity cure democracy, if it is (as we have seen in chapter 2) in a way its cause? To address this question, it is necessary to examine more closely Tocqueville’s account of the particular situation of religion in American democracy. Whereas in Europe the great democratic revolution has produced the anomaly of a struggle between the proponents of equality and the defenders of the very religion from which the doctrine of human equality is derived,48 the Americans have somehow been spared this state of intellectual misery.49 Those who settled America “in some way” transplanted the principle of democracy in the New World, where it could “grow in freedom and, advancing along with mores, develop peacefully in laws.”50 The precise nature of this transplantation and the key to the development of American democracy are explained in the chapter, “On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans.”51 “The man is so to speak a whole in the swaddling clothes of his cradle.”52 The truth about America can be found in its beginnings. This is the interpretive principle with which Tocqueville introduces his account of the settlement of North America. The point of departure of the American people, he argues, gives us the rare opportunity to examine the origins and thus the nature of a society “in broad daylight,”53 under conditions, as it were, of experimental control. He presents this scientific opportunity as a gift of God: “Providence has put a torch within our reach that our fathers lacked and has permitted us to discern in the destiny of nations first causes that the obscurity of the past concealed from them.”54 Thus Tocqueville offers this chapter on the point of departure as “the seed of all that is to follow and the key to almost the whole work.”55 Tocqueville locates the key to American civilization in Puritan New England, whose principles “now exert their influence . . . over the whole American world.” “The founding of New England offered a new spectacle,” he argues, in that its basis was not greed or necessity but “a purely intellectual need.”56 He thus identifies the religious zeal of the Puritans with an intellectual passion; if we can now see the infancy of America in broad daylight, this is because the first Americans aspired to making a radically new beginning under God. This new beginning was to be a rebirth, not only of man but of society: “Puritanism was not only a religious doctrine; in also blended at several points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”57 One must not believe that the piety of the Puritans was only speculative or that it showed itself foreign to the course of human things. Puritanism . . . was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine.58

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Just as the intellectual squalor of Europe can be represented by the unnatural separation and conflict between piety and liberty, so the genius of American democracy and of its Puritan point of departure consists in their union: Anglo-American civilization . . . is the product (and this point of departure ought constantly to be present in one’s thinking) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each another, but which, in America they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously: I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.59

The union of Christianity and freedom, which Tocqueville seemed to present in his introduction as the natural harmony of elevation of soul and love of liberty, now appears as a marvelous combination of “two perfectly distinct elements” that was not natural but “somehow” possible. Indeed, it appears that it was precisely the radical theoretical distinction the Puritans made between these two elements that made their practical combination possible. At the deepest level, Puritanism was a political theory as well as a religion because it attempted, on religious grounds, radically to separate the political from the religious, or the worldly from the otherworldly. If the Puritans could seek “with an almost equal ardor material wealth and moral satisfactions, Heaven in the other world and well-being and freedom in this,”60 this was because they drew a clear boundary between the material and the spiritual. As we have seen in our study of Calvin (chapter 3 above), such an inviolable boundary radicalizes what lies on either side: “The founders of New England were at once ardent sectarians and exalted innovators. While held within the tightest bonds of certain religious beliefs, they were free of all political prejudices.”61 It seems, then, that Puritanism was a political theory mainly in the sense that it implied the liberation of the political from theological constraints. For them political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable things that can be turned and combined at will. Before them fall the barriers that imprisoned the society in whose bosom they were born; old opinions that have been directing the world for centuries vanish; an almost boundless course, a field without a horizon, are discovered: the human mind rushes toward them; it traverses them in all directions . . .62

The political significance of Puritanism was not, however, limited to the removal of theological constraints from political action. It also contributed positively to the spirit of democratic politics:

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Religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man; in the political world, a field left by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence.63

God withdraws His authority from the political world, but He does not withdraw His care; in asserting their freedom from God to manipulate the formless matter of politics, men are fulfilling God’s purpose. In practice, of course, the Puritans did not understand this freedom as absolute, since the limits of politics were not defined politically but were accepted on religious authority or simply taken for granted: [W]hen [the mind] arrives at the limits of the political world, it halts; trembling, it leaves off the use of its most formidable faculties; it abjures doubt; it renounces the need to innovate; it even abstains from sweeping away the veil of the sanctuary; it bows with respect before truths that it accepts without discussion.64

The Puritans understood the spiritual world to have a definite moral content that was not, after all, politically irrelevant. In some cases this moral content was taken directly and literally from Scripture, as when Connecticut lawgivers laid down a number of “provisions . . . borrowed from the texts of Deuteronomy, Exodus, or Leviticus.”65 Tocqueville does not show much respect for the spiritual authority of these provisions, but describes them as “the legislation of a rude and half-civilized people . . .”66 Indeed, although he certainly approves the combination of religion and freedom in America, on close inspection he shows no great liking for either of the two elements of the combination as Americans understand them; that is, neither for rigid moralism nor for boundless freedom: [I]in the moral world . . . there is passive though voluntary obedience; [in the political world,] there are independence, contempt for experience, and jealousy of every authority.67

What Tocqueville means by true freedom or by “salutary servitude” corresponds no more to absolute contempt for experience and authority than to absolute and passive submission. He shows us, in fact, in this very chapter that what was most valuable in the Puritan founding of American civilization did not issue from Puritan theory in either its specifically religious or its political dimension. If the “one saw more notions of rights, more principles of true freedom spread among” the New Englanders “than in most of the peoples of Europe,” this was not directly owing to their Puritanism but because, “born in a country that the struggle of parties had agitated for centuries . . . their political education had taken place in that rough school.”68 Similarly, Tocqueville seems to take a less favorable view of the religious and theoretical freedom

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according to which “political principles, laws, and human institutions seem malleable things that can be turned and combined and will”69 than he does of “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people” understood as present in the free institutions of local government rooted “profoundly into English habits” under the Tudor monarchy.70 If the Puritan point of departure is the key to the whole of Democracy in America, it cannot therefore be in the way the author first suggests. The religious and intellectual aspiration to a new birth of man and society in broad daylight proves to be a delusion.71 The civilization of the pilgrims was not, as it implicitly claimed, like an infant competent to preside over its own birth; on the contrary, fortunately, “democracy such as antiquity had not dared to dream of sprang full-grown and fully armed from the midst of the old feudal society.”72 Still, the belief in new beginning or creation in broad daylight, though largely false, may illuminate the whole of American democracy, as Tocqueville suggests. For it appears that it was because this fundamentally religious belief emerged first under the explicit auspices of positive religion that religion was able to ally itself with this belief and to moderate it: “In America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment; it is the observance of divine laws that guides man to freedom.”73 We have seen that the situation in Europe was less favorable to the harmony of religion and freedom or enlightenment. There, under the influence of an aristocratic or “almost idolatrous”74 Christianity, the claims of the other world had intruded far into this world, provoking an emphatically worldly and revolutionary reaction. In the ensuing conflict, defenders of both worlds were blinded to their deep agreement75 on the distance between God and man, and thus on the equality of men. In the New World, where Christianity was truer to its fundamental separation between God and the world, religion was able to exercise a more enduring influence on politics than in the Old World, which priests tried to rule, anomalously, in the name of an otherworldly God. Similarly, the theological and geographical separation of the New World from the Old World secured the survival of certain vestiges of the Old World within the New; the New World was thus less radically separated in practice from the Old World and from the other world where it was more clearly separated from them theologically and geographically. The New World that was to rise up within and therefore against the Old World would not enjoy this advantage. It is clear, then, that Tocqueville favors the results of the radical, Calvinist separation between God and man more than he does the separation itself. In particular, he admires the traditional English liberties and experience in local self-government that the Puritans brought to America and that the veil of sectarianism helped to protect from the broad daylight of radical democracy.

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Tocqueville loves the practical harmony of religion and politics, of elevation of soul and political liberty, rather than the theological and theoretical guardian of this harmony; that is, the combination of absolute submission and absolute freedom. Tocqueville affirms his preference for the practical effects of American religion over its theoretical basis in his discussion of religion in a chapter on “The Principal Causes Tending to Maintain a Democratic Republic in the United States.”76 In a section notably entitled “On Religion Considered as a Political Institution . . .” he prefaces this discussion with a far-reaching theoretical statement: Next to each religion is a political opinion that is joined to it by affinity. Allow the human mind to follow its tendency and it will regulate political society and the divine city in a uniform manner; it will seek, if I dare say it, to harmonize the earth with heaven.77

The harmony of religion and politics, which Tocqueville is taking such pains to secure, thus seems to be the natural inclination of humanity. Tocqueville’s objective, however, to be more precise, is to secure the harmony of religion with a certain political liberty, and this may be a more difficult matter. It is clear in any case that a certain harmony of the more general kind has existed in America from its point of departure: “From the beginning [principe], politics and religion were in accord, and they have not ceased to be so since.”78 But it appears that the nature of this harmony has undergone a profound evolution since the days of the Puritans. At that time the religious sectarianism of Americans seemed to dominate their political liberalism or radicalism; at present, the religious consensus of Americans is defined largely in terms of political beliefs. In describing the Puritan point of departure, Tocqueville thus quotes at length from an account of the early settlement of New England that calls the reader’s attention to “a religious and solemn impression; one seems to breathe a air of antiquity and a sort of biblical perfume.”79 He then goes on to explain the politics of the Puritans against the background of their remarkable piety. But in discussing his contemporaries, the order is reversed. It is true, he observes, that there is “only a single current in the human mind”80 in the United States and this current is democratic Christianity: “Americans so completely confuse Christianity and freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to have them conceive of the one without the other.”81 But the relationship between Christianity and democracy seems to have been reversed. Thus this consensus is no longer fundamentally sectarian but includes Catholics who have accepted the Protestant strategy for making the two worlds agree by radically separating them:

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Catholic priests in America have divided the intellectual world into two parts: in one, they have left revealed dogmas, and they submit to them without discussing them; in the other, they have placed political truth, and they think that God has abandoned it to the free inquiries of men.82

Likewise in this chapter, as in his discussion of the severe piety of the Puritans, Tocqueville quotes a religious source at length. But this quotation is the prayer of a priest whose piety seems to consist almost entirely in devotion to the cause of world democracy: Lord, who have created all men on the same model, do not permit despotism to come to deform they work and to maintain inequality on earth . . . arouse allies to the sacred cause of right; make the French nation finally rise, and . . . come to fight once again for the freedom of the world.83

One is left with the impression that this priest and the democratic Christianity he represents identify “the freedom of the world” with “the salvation of all men”84 for which Christ died. Thus Americans have preserved the agreement between religion and politics, a freedom secured by a radical separation between religion and politics, but the terms have changed; the radical separation of worlds, asserted against the otherworldly interpretation of this world, seems to have provided the intellectual framework for a worldly interpretation of transcendence or for the spiritual pursuit of material ends. No wonder, then, that Tocqueville expects less help from this “direct action of religion on politics” than from its “indirect action.” That Tocqueville does not espouse the agreement of religion and politics as understood by the Puritans or their successors is unmistakable: “[I]t is when [religion] does not speak of freedom that it best teaches Americans the art of being free.”85 It is not the freedom that comes from regarding “political principles, laws, and human institutions [as] malleable things”86 subject to human manipulation that he supports, but the “certain and fixed” moral beliefs or “forms” that serve as “insurmountable barriers” to this freedom.87 In particular he praises the moral regularity of American women as essential to the perpetuation of an orderly society. Nevertheless, Tocqueville’s final objective is no more to support the moral rigor of Americans for its own sake than to encourage the formless freedom contained by that morality. Nor does he aim at a complete agreement of religion and democracy on the basis of their radical separation, for such an agreement could only take the form of a fuller identification of the salvation of the soul with the worldly liberation of mankind. If, therefore, Tocqueville favors the intimate union and joint reign88 of religion and freedom under the banner of their separation as “in our day, the natural state of man in the matter of religion,”89 this is not because he believes religion and politics

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can really be separated. For he has shown that, where the political world is not understood as ordered by religious truth, then political ends are stripped of all concrete religious content but pursued all the more fervently as ultimate or religious ideals. Rather, Tocqueville endorses the democratic absorption of religion in America because believes the union of religion and politics takes a less radical form there than among the “ardent adversaries”90 of religion who, in Europe, attack belief with the zeal of true believers—“ardent adversaries” who may, in fact, be identified with those materialists who exhibit the pride of gods in reducing humanity to the level of brutes.91 It is thus precisely because the agreement of religion and politics understood as the spiritual pursuit of material ends is incomplete in America that Tocqueville endorses it. The residue of positive Christianity presents an obstacle to the synthesis of idealism and materialism and thus preserves a space in which an older form of liberty or self-government, rooted in a long aristocratic, experience, can survive: Religion, which, among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates their use of it.92

RESPONSIBLE GREATNESS Recalling our earlier discussion (chapter 2) of the drift of the democratic imagination beyond a world-liberating monotheism towards pantheism, we are now prepared to appreciate the subtlety and fragility of Tocqueville’s rhetorical strategy. He contrives to employ the universalizing movement of democracy against itself by fixing the imagination of the democrat on that final stage of monotheistic progressivism in which, although the ends of God are almost wholly identified with the worldly progress of mankind, some distinction between God and the world persists.93 As long as such distinction exists, the claim of the democrat to see all mankind “in broad daylight” is qualified and limited by reference to the point of view of a God who is not yet wholly transparent to him; as long as the distinction between God and the world exists, there is a point at which the restless democratic spirit “halts . . . abjures doubt . . . [and] bows with respect before truths that it accepts without discussion.”94 Beyond this point, the poet has the opportunity “to connect the general designs of God for the universe and, without showing the hand of the Supreme Governor, reveal His thought.” The name of God thus offers the poet of democracy a standpoint outside and potentially above democracy;

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it might therefore allow the poet to employ the indefinite idea of the human perfectibility in the service of the idea of “the genuine greatness of man.”95 To prevent the identification of the extreme of powerlessness with the extreme of power, and thus to teach democratic man how to stand up for himself, Tocqueville, as guide to democratic poets, must somehow locate and determine true human greatness so as to prevent it from passing over into its opposite. What, then, is genuine greatness? And how can it be made visible and available to democratic man? Tocqueville offers no dogmatic teaching on these fundamental problems.96 He offers only his example of deferring to the direct influence of Christian democracy in order to be able to preserve certain of its indirect consequences. He thus seems to have little hope of reversing the progress of general ideas, however superficial and uncertain97 they may be. Clearly there can be no question of reviving the “almost idolatrous” worship of angels and saints98 or the poetry of gods and heroes99 by which aristocratic man represented to himself “the intermediary powers between God and man.”100 Human greatness risks becoming non-representable under the pressure of a notion of infinity that democracy inherited from Christianity. Perhaps because of this fundamental theoretical and rhetorical difficulty inherent in the post-Christian democratic condition, Tocqueville generally indicates the gravity of the spiritual threat inherent in democracy only indirectly or in quite restricted contexts. In a number of apparently quite narrowly focused chapters in the second half of Part One of Volume Two concerning particular cultural expressions of democracy (monumental architecture, oratory, theatre),101 Tocqueville repeatedly calls our attention to a kind of missing middle term, a perception of greatness on a human scale. Thus in chapter 12 he provides a sort of image of the fundamental dilemma of the democratic mind in a chapter on the apparently peripheral subject of monuments: Thus democracy not only brings men to make a multitude of minute works; it also brings them to raise a few very great monuments. But between these two extremes there is nothing.102

Similarly, in chapter 18, Tocqueville takes up the apparently secondary subject of American oratory and finds the occasion to explain that American speakers and the writers who imitate them swing from the vulgar and banal to the bombastic, whereas “the intermediate space is empty.” Thus “they reach the gigantic, for which they often forsake the great.”103 And it is only here, after seeming to have concluded, in the previous chapter, his apparently sympathetic discussion of the poetic inspiration of democrats,104 that Tocqueville more somberly concludes that account:

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We have seen . . . that in democratic peoples the sources of poetry are beautiful but not abundant. In the end one soon exhausts them. Not finding more material for the ideal in the real and true, poets leave them entirely and create monsters.105

The poetic possibilities just presented, then, as the manifestation of God “to the human spirit in his full and entire majesty”106 is now identified with an ugly gigantism, and the poetic illumination of “certain still obscure sides of the human heart”107 appears as the creation of monsters. The concluding Part Four of Volume Two likewise shows the problem of the empty “intermediate space” between the democratic extremes to be of central importance, both intellectually and politically. In undertaking a summary of the intellectual framework of democracy, Tocqueville begins by noting that [t]he idea of secondary powers, placed between sovereign and subjects, naturally presented itself to the imagination of aristocratic peoples . . . [but] the same idea is naturally absent from the minds of men in centuries of equality; it can only be introduced artificially and is retained only with difficulty”108

The immediate context is political, but Tocqueville points here to a basic and intellectual paradigm governing politics, philosophy, religion, and the human imagination generally. In each of these manifestations of the democratic mind, “the notion of intermediate power is obscured and effaced.”109 This is the fundamental, intellectual cause of the primary political fact that so alarms Tocqueville: “The idea of right inherent in certain individuals is rapidly disappearing from the minds of men.”110 In reviewing the causes of this disappearance, Tocqueville clearly echoes earlier and apparently or initially more favorable accounts of the democratic mind: equality, he explains, seems to make men independent but soon brings them to accept equal and absolute dependence on an “immense being that rises alone in the midst of universal debasement.” Modern democratic man, like his intellectual champion, is thus described as “proud and servile at the same time.”111 The lack of an intellectual framework that would allow human beings to locate true human greatness somewhere in the space between absolute power and complete subjection thus threatens modern civilization with theoretical and practical squalor. This is the utter destitution of the human spirit that, as we saw in chapter 2 above, inspires in Tocqueville a “religious terror.”112 By now it should be clear that it is no accident that Tocqueville here describes his terror of the universal progress of democracy as religious.113 Similarly, in discussing the ills of democratic revolutions in the next to last

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chapter of Democracy in America, he remarks that these risk becoming “permanent and so to speak eternal.”114 But the human attempt to achieve the standpoint of a God of absolute freedom or possibility, the modern philosophical project that inherited radical theological longings, destroys the secondary powers of aristocratic worlds and breaks the bonds of moral analogy. The attempt radically to separate the idea of elevation or greatness—of the Good or of God—from ordinary, practical, human concerns tends to the same disastrous effect whether its original motive is to free God from human contamination or to liberate humanity from divine interference. Tocqueville’s profound insight is that the extremes of humility and of mastery meet; at the limit of both these extremes there remains only the pantheistic god of “continual flux” or History, a god who can manifest himself in the actual, human world only as destroyer of all that is unequal or distinct, all that stands up for itself.115 If it were an easy matter to refute and replace the spiritual-intellectual framework of modern democracy, if it were possible to give a dogmatic or scientific account of a distinctively human or intermediate form of greatness, then the danger and the terror or dread would not be nearly so great and so spiritual. Tocqueville does not, however, succumb to the power of this very religious and very rational dread. His critical examination of modern man’s profound moral and political predicament makes clear the impossibility of a complete theoretical or dogmatic articulation of what is highest in man, yet at the same time brings points to the greatness of the very standpoint of responsibility for human meaning from which both aristocratic and democratic, both vertical and horizontal configurations of transcendence can be understood sheltered. If democratic ideas, in seeking to express human meaning every more universally, inevitably ignore the true and unequal greatness of men, then aristocratic ideas inevitably distort this greatness through the imposition of narrow and artificial categories. One might conceive of the possibility of a divine standpoint from which to combine the universality of the democratic with the elevation of the aristocrat, but one cannot spell out what it would mean fully to adopt this standpoint.116 Tocqueville’s genius is grounded in his marvelous equanimity concerning the two dominant figures of transcendence, aristocratic and democratic, vertical and horizontal. To return to II.ii.15, in which Tocqueville discusses “the art of the legislator” in a materialistic age, we note that Tocqueville refers to some permanent standard or “goal toward which the human race should always tend,” but he does not name this goal, any more than he reveals the “mother thought” that, he has told us in the Introduction, informs this whole book “links all its parts.”117 He endorses the benefits for democracy of any teaching that affirms the immortality of

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the soul as a “precious inheritance from aristocratic centuries,” and in this context praises the Platonic doctrine “that the soul has nothing in common with the body.” He believes that such a teaching has a deep and permanent appeal for human beings, and that it thus can provide a useful antidote to democratic materialism. But Tocqueville by no means simply subscribes to any Platonic metaphysic. “The human heart is vaster than one supposes,” in a sense vaster even than Platonism supposes, since its “taste for the goods of the earth” appears to be mysteriously intermingled with “a love of those of Heaven”; even when the soul appears devoted to one, it has never really left the other.118 Tocqueville offers no theoretical strategy for disentangling these inclinations of the soul in view of discovering some pure intellectual anchor for a stable rank-ordering. Thus on close inspection Tocqueville shows himself to be what we might call a Platonist on Aristotelian grounds. His whole strategy in this and neighboring chapters is to strengthen democratic souls, or preserve their strength, by sustaining practices that the Americans themselves understand to be devoted to material well-being, “well understood,” of course.119 Tocqueville even mentions that in a fully Platonic or otherworldly century, the mind would “grow numb” and would need to be invigorated by an infusion of worldly incentives.120 Tocqueville thus understands that our humanity is manifest both in attempts to configure the cosmic good on the hierarchical grid we inherit from a particular city or civilization, and in opposing attempts to liberate the meaning of our humanity from any concrete, vertical, socially and politically represented orientation. He sees as clearly as Heidegger or Strauss the threat to meaningful human existence, the threat to “the laws of moral analogy” contained in the modern emancipation of individual freedom from politically and socially authorized virtue, but he does not imagine this threat can be contained by replacing aristocrats with academic philosophers, and much less by evoking the Being that gives rise to all worldly hierarchies but authorizes none of them. If Tocqueville attempts to enter into the perspective of the democratic poetry of Providence, it is not only to cultivate a moderate appreciation for the benefits it promises to provide, but especially to carve out a space within it in which to affirm the worth of goods it does not: Providence has not created the human race either entirely independent or perfectly slave. It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave; but within its vast limits man is powerful and free; so to with peoples.121

In his survey of the possibilities of human meaning, aristocratic and democratic, Tocqueville has discovered the impossibility of defending the honor of

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humanity from the standpoint of a radically transcendent God as well as from that of an abstract universal reason,122 but he has also found reason to affirm that “the classification of words,” the ranking of sentiments from “low” to “high” in fact derives “from the very nature of things,” from the fact that some things are “really low” and others “naturally very high.”123 His confidence in the ground of true elevation, and the standard by which he strives to judge and mold his contemporaries, to legislate for “legislators of democracy,” thus emerges along with a recognition of the impossibility of giving a full theoretical account of this spiritual and political ground.124 There can be no question that Tocqueville strives to exercise such practical responsibility. In concluding his critique of the democratic historians, he announces that “it is a question of elevating souls and not of completing their prostration.” And recall that his discussion of pantheism concludes with a virtual call to arms: “all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite and do combat against it.”125 By now it is clear that Tocqueville does not fail to define this greatness straightforwardly or explicitly for accidental reasons. To argue that Tocqueville bows prudently to the irresistible political force of modern democracy would be true, but incomplete. To conclude that Tocqueville simply sacrifices theoretical to practical concerns would be implicitly to assume that a theory of practice separate from practice is possible, whereas Tocqueville appears convinced that it is not. Rather, he understands perfectly that there is no answer, no theory of practice or practice of theory that can be distinguished from the assumption of a certain spiritual and political responsibility that is enacted in the whole of Democracy in America. A theory of practice would be a theory of greatness or of the good of practice. But there can be no such theory, for exhaustively to explain human agency theoretically would be to deny it, and thus to deny the very springs from which theoretical greatness emerges. The impossibility of a theory of greatness does not imply that practice is groundless or that theory is impotent because these are not finally separate but spring from some elusive common ground. If the dignity of practice in a sense depends upon its openness to the intrinsic goodness of the life of the mind,126 then the dignity of theory depends no less on openness to and respect for practical greatness. If the practical person must respect the dignity of theory, so the theoretical person can only orient himself by practical greatness, even as he necessarily conceives the possibility of transcending it. This interdependence of theory and practice helps to explain Tocqueville’s complex disposition towards his democratic subject: he offers a powerful and straightforward indictment of his theoretical rivals, the modern, materialistic champions, but typically approaches his practical subjects with a certain

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gentle irony (poignantly set against his religious terror), and sometimes evinces considerable respect for the inarticulate virtues of the Americans. Precisely because he understands the insuperable and hazardous antinomies of attempts to grasp the good or the great theoretical, Tocqueville finds a way to evoke a sense of greatness without dismissing the decency of the moderate materialism of the Americans.

WORTHY OF SUCCESS Tocqueville’s measured praise of Americans as the most practically successful of theoretical peoples must be understood in the light of his insight into the way in which thought graces practice without quite transcending it. The author of Democracy in America understands why reason can no longer claim to rule simply in its own name, and he understands that the failure of the rule of reason classically understood is no accident, but is rooted in the impossibility of containing human spirituality in any definite and representable hierarchy of goods. His discovery and articulation of his own sense of elevation can thus never be fully separated from his practical efforts on behalf of democratic peoples, from his own qualified egalitarianism and progressivism, we can now say. Tocqueville may be said to accept both the idealism and the materialism of democracy in America and to do his utmost to reinforce a moderate (and therefore theoretically incomplete) interpretation of both, an interpretation rooted in a subtle sense or affirmation of elevation. We thus need to take very seriously Tocqueville’s remark that the “science of association” is (at least in democracies) the “mother” of knowledge and thus the fountain of progress.127 As the matrix both of sound theory and of sound practice, this “science” or form of knowledge is of course by no means identical to the “philosophy” to which the Americans themselves like to give credit. And Tocqueville’s proclaimed “new political science . . . for a world altogether new”128 clearly cannot be simply identified with the theory of enlightened self-interest, for which he shows considerable solicitude—but from a certain distance. The “science of association” well understood, as practiced by the Legislator of legislators of democracy—that is, an understanding of the problem of human society and of the human soul in relation to both aristocratic and democratic styles of transcendence—is indeed mother of all knowledge in a radical sense, the basis not only of political and ethical reasoning, but in a sense the common font of meaning both theoretical and practical, and thus an essential moment in any rigorous reflection by reason on its own activity. Tocqueville’s thinking about modernity/democracy is

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inseparable from his understated and inconspicuous but very subtle and selfaware reflection on the very possibility of thinking, judging, reasoning. It cannot be said, then, that Tocqueville’s practical reason has an anchor that is simply distinct from its own activity, in the way that classical prudence projected its own ground upon the serene elevation of a contemplated eternity. A certain “restlessness”129 that Tocqueville shares with his democratic subject follows necessarily from the impossibility confidently to identify human meaning with such a projection of elevation upon a hierarchical cosmos. Thus, in the last chapter of Democracy in America we witness the very movements of Tocqueville’s soul in attempting to discern a ground of theory and practice. Striving to “enter into this point of view of God,” and thus following the movement of Christian humility, Tocqueville strains to reconcile himself with the judgment that “[e]quality is perhaps less elevated, but it is more just, and its justice makes for its greatness and its beauty.” But immediately he confronts the necessity of maintaining a terrestrial viewpoint, a moment of practical responsibility and sobriety inseparable from the act of standing up for the dignity of one’s own activity, for one’s own performative elevation: for “no one on earth can yet assert in an absolute and general manner that the new state of societies is superior to the former state.”130 In the last analysis, there would appear to be no justice that can be grasped in abstraction from elevation, and no elevation that can secure its autonomy from justice. Neither the vertical (the rule of reason as grafted on to a noble resignation of merely human cares) nor the horizontal (the projecting into the future of a salvation of the whole person, “body” and “soul,” or the longing for the perfect coincidence of the good of the city and the good of the soul, for the free development of each as the condition for the free development of all)—neither dimension of meaning can be sustained without nourishment and thus contamination by the other. From his study of human things in an emerging modern and democratic world, Tocqueville, by some miracle, derives the insight and the courage needed to mediate between a God who does not speak directly to the political and moral life of man and a democratic humanity that cannot articulate its own spiritual meaning. Having learned that a humanity that takes itself too seriously may issue into the most insidious and extreme form of pride, he knows that he can only hope to save the souls of democrats and Christians by affirming, however indirectly, the complex elevation of his own soul, a grace that is not simply natural but is by no means a merely willful assertion. This is the deepest significance of his remark, in the preface to the second volume of Democracy in America, that success in the task he has set for himself is less important than the fact that, as he writes, “I have conceived and pursued my enterprise in the spirit that could make me worthy of success.”131

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With Tocqueville’s exquisitely nuanced and even fragile self-affirmation in mind, we can still endorse an old observation by Harold Laski: There is a fascinating sense in which the whole effort of his thought was to discover the secret of a social order in which there was scope for the manner of man he himself was.132

Whether a manner of political and moral responsibility akin to Tocqueville’s might still be viable today, when the claims of liberation and progress have grown much stronger against the residually aristocratic habits of piety and local political responsibility, is of course a further question.

NOTES 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Introduction, 15. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. E.g., II.ii.15: 518, 519. 6. Ibid., II.i.1, 403. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 405. 9. Ibid., 406. 10. Ibid., Introduction, 7. 11. Ibid., I.i.4, 55. 12. Ibid., I.i.5, 57. 13. Ibid., Vol. II. Part ii. Chapter 8 (hereafter indicated thus: II.ii.8), 502. 14. See esp. II.ii.14. 15. Ibid., II.iii.12. 16. Ibid., II.ii.6, 228. 17. Ibid., II.i.8, 426. 18. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeil (Westminster: John Knox Press, 1960), I.ii.3. (Citations indicate part, chapter, section.) 19. Tocqueville, Democracy, I.ii.9. 20. Ibid., I.ii.9, 282. 21. Ibid., II.i.5, 418–19. 22. Ibid., I.ii.9, 284. 23. Ibid., II.ii.15, 518; 520; 519. 24. Ibid., 521. 25. Ibid., II.i.2. 26. Ibid., 407; 408.

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27. Ibid., II.i.5: 417–18. 28. Ibid., II.i.12, 443. 29. Ibid., II.i.5, 417. 30. Ibid., II.i.2, 408. Compare Doris S. Goldstein, who, in order to defend Tocqueville against charges of “conservatism” or “flawed liberalism,” must distinguish radically between “manipulation and coercion” and “belief and persuasion.” Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville’s Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 126–27. 31. Tocqueville, Democracy, Ii.i.2, 409. 32. Ibid., 408. 33. Ibid., I.i.4, 53. 34. Thus Doris Goldstein, Trial of Faith: Religion and Politics in Tocqueville’s Thought (New York: Elsevier, 1975), 124 is right to take Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 197, and Marvin Zetterbaum, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 122, to task for jumping from the observation that Tocqueville takes a “functional” approach to religion to the conclusion that “he considered religion ‘solely from the point of view of these [political] effects,’ or that he advocated ‘the propagation of spiritualistic myths.’” But Goldstein’s alternative, the view that “Tocqueville’s religious outlook is the inextricable meshing in his mind of ‘faith,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘utility,’” merely raises the question that I hope to begin to address, that is, the question of the character and interrelationship of faith, truth, and utility. See also p. x, where Goldstein states her methodological principle: “I assume that Tocqueville’s thought consists of a network of interconnected themes, with no fixed order of primacy among them.” A notable attempt to integrate Tocqueville’s views of notions such as faith, truth, and utility by showing their common subordination to, or emanation from, a certain idea of freedom is Ute Uhde, Politik und Religion: zum Verhaltnis von Demokratie und Christentum bei Alexis de Tocqueville (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1978). 35. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.2, 408. 36. Ibid., p. 410. 37. Ibid., II.i.5, 417. 38. Ibid., 418. 39. Compare Catherine Zuckert: Tocqueville “endorses those opinions which reflect fundamental truths” (emphasis added), “Not by Preaching: Tocqueville on the Role of Religion in American Democracy,” The Review of Politics 3 (April 1981), 277. 40. Ibid., II.i.2, 409. 41. Ibid., II.ii.15. 42. Ibid., 518. 43. Ibid., 519. 44. Ibid., 518. 45. Ibid., 521. 46. Ibid., 519. 47. Ibid., II.iii.20, 604.

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48. Ibid., Introduction, 11. 49. Ibid., 12. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., I.i.2. 52. Ibid., 28. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 28–29. 55. Ibid., 29. 56. Ibid., 32. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 35. 59. Ibid., 43. 60. Ibid., 43. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 38. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 43. 68. Ibid., 33. 69. Ibid., 43. 70. Ibid., 29. 71. Thus Tocqueville does not simply accept “the legend of the [Puritans] founding fathers,” as Goldstein believes (Trial of Faith, 21). 72. Tocqueville, Democracy, I.i.2, 35. 73. Ibid., 42. 74. Ibid., II.i.5, 421. 75. Ibid., Introduction, 11: Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God, will not be loath to see all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning. 76. Ibid., I.ii.9. 77. Ibid., I.ii.9, 275. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., I.i.2, 33. 80. Ibid., I.ii.9, 277. 81. Ibid., 280–81. 82. Ibid., 276–77. 83. Ibid., 277. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 278. 86. Ibid., I.i.2, 43. 87. Ibid., I.ii.9, 279.

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88. Ibid., 282. 89. Ibid., 286. 90. Ibid., 287. 91. Ibid., II.ii.15, 519. 92. Ibid., I.ii.9, 280; emphasis added. 93. Cf. Manent: “pour appréhender sans vertige sa liberté illimittée . . . [le citoyen démocratique] doit se dédoubler et se réfléchir dans l’image de l’homme naturellement soumis à Dieu.” (in order to grasp this freedom without swooning, [the democratic citizen] must produce his double and see himself reflected in the image of man naturally subject to God.”) Manent, Tocqueville et la Nature, 135. 94. Tocqueville, Democracy, 43. 95. Ibid., II.i.8, 426. 96. It is only because Zetterbaum assumes that Tocqueville’s main purpose is dogmatic (that is, that Tocqueville aspires to produce a theory of politics in the modern sense) that he can then conclude that Tocqueville failed at this and thus finally had to fall back on Rousseauian myth-making. Problem, 147, 158–60. But for Tocqueville, not all that is natural is within the compass of such theory. 97. Ibid., II.i.3, 414. 98. Ibid., II.i.5. 99. Ibid., II.i.17. 100. Ibid., 459. 101. Ibid., II.i.12, 18, and 19 respectively, for example. 102. Ibid., II.i.12, 444. 103. Ibid., II.i.18, 464; emphasis added. 104. Ibid., II.i.17. 105. Ibid., II.i.18, 464; emphasis added. 106. Ibid., II.i.17, 461. 107. Ibid., 463. 108. Ibid., II.iv.2, 640. 109. Ibid., 642. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., II.iv.3, 644. 112. Ibid., Introduction, 7. 113. Goldstein, in cautiously endorsing the view of Tocqueville as a “Christian moralist,” completely overlooks this ambivalence toward the Christian idea of absolute transcendence (Trial of Faith, 125). That is, she simply identifies a “Christian philosophy of history” with a “belief in the superior desirability and effectiveness of moral forces” (Ibid., 123; emphasis added). 114. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.iv.7, 671. 115. Cf. Manent’s eloquent conclusion: “[L’ami immodéré de la démocratie] sidere [l’humanité démocratique] par l’assurance vertigineuse de somnambule avec laquelle, dan chaque société, dans chaque institution, dans chaque homme, il met le pied, pour se soutenir en l’écrasant, sur tout ce qui est libre, sur tout ce qui est heureux, sur out ce qui a forme humaine: (Democracy’s immoderate friend intoxicates

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democratic humanity by the sleepwalker’s dizzying self-assurance with which he marches through every society, every institution, every human person, holding himself up by crushing everything free, everything happy, everything that has a human shape.) Manent, Tocqueville et la Nature, 181. 116. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.3. 117. Ibid., Introduction, 14. 118. Ibid., II.ii.15, 520. 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid., 518. 121. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.iv.8, 676. 122. Ibid., II.iii.18. 123. Ibid., II.i.16, 456. 124. Daniel Mahoney, “Liberty, Equality, Nobility: Kolnai, Tocqueville, and the Moral Foundations of Democracy” in Democracy and its Friendly Critics, ed. Peter Lawler (Lexington Books, 2004), chap. 3 points up some of the most impressive and enduring of Tocqueville’s insights by showing their influence upon and kinship with Aurel Kolnai’s (1900–1973) profound criticism of “progressive” democracy. Though conceding that the Hungarian-born author sometimes fell into a rhetorical style that may seem to associate him with more “cranky, backward-looking” thinkers, Mahoney offers a Kolnai who, very much like Tocqueville, “the greatest, most balanced and perspicacious of conservative-liberal thinkers” “was as firmly committed to the essential justice of modern democracy as he was alarmed by the ultimately nihilistic tendency of its formalism” (20). For Mahoney, Kolnai “gives theoretical depth to some of Tocqueville’s most profound, but naive and ‘untheorized’ observations” (20). Most notably, Mahoney shows that, in his two greatest political-philosophical essays, Kolnai extends and develops Tocqueville’s critique of the “pantheism” inherent in democratic formalism (its rejection of concrete, inherited goods) into an alternative theory of the human person. For Kolnai, a “humanizing understanding” of “participation” in or “response” to an order of “Being, Form, and Limits” beyond human power is the only answer to the willfulness that springs from the emancipatorydemocratic notion of human “identity” (23). Both Tocqueville and Kolnai recognize, moreover, that the human experience of elevation depends upon “social embodiments of nobility,” but Kolnai chooses not to follow Tocqueville in clothing certain of these embodiments, in particular the practice of municipal self-government, in the very language of the “sovereignty of the people” (25). Kolnai’s ideas are thus, Mahoney argues, in some respects clearer and in a sense more “philosophical,” than Tocqueville’s. But does the fact, noted by Mahoney, that Kolnai “underestimated the practical solidity of those abstractions to which America as a liberal democracy remains obstinately dedicated” (28) perhaps suggest that he may have overlooked an insight underlying Tocqueville’s rhetoric, the concretely political and in a sense pretheoretical dimension of this American and democratic abstraction? 125. Tocqueville, Democracy, II.i.8, 426. 126. Ibid., II.i.9–10. 127. Ibid., II.ii.5, 492.

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128. Ibid., Introduction, 7. 129. Peter Augustine Lawler, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993). Whether Tocqueville points the way towards a somewhat more serene or stable self-understanding of reason in its practical responsibility than is suggested by his personal confessions of anxiety is a question I am trying to raise in these final paragraphs. Tocqueville’s perhaps his most radical confession of the limits of reason’s responsibility may be implied in his remark that “aristocratic nations” and modem democracies “are, as it were, two distinct humanities” (675). If this is taken literally, and it is granted that there we have no access to any common humanity, then reason as a humane activity would appear to be altogether groundless. But it seems more consistent with the spirit of Tocqueville’s work, in which a certain sense or pre-understanding of “the spirit that could make me worthy of success” presides over the whole practical-theoretical enterprise, to regard the “as it were” (“Ce sont comme deux humanites distinctes . . .”; my emphasis) as an opportunity to affirm a real but untheorizable common ground. For what but such a common ground enacted in Tocqueville’s own soul can account for his capacity to mediate between these two humanities? 130. Ibid., II.iv.8, 675. 131. Ibid., II. Notice, 400. 132. “Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy,” in The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age, ed. F. J. C. Hearnshaw (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 114. This remark seems to me to hold the key to integrating Tocqueville’s concern for utility with his concern for truth, or for bringing together his “deeply personal” interest in religion with the concerns of “the man of knowledge” (Goldstein, Trial of Faith). See Ude, Politik und Religion, 19–26, on the unity of theory and practice in Tocqueville’s work. Zetterbaum also quotes Laski’s remark with approval (Problem of Democracy, 84). But this is hard to reconcile with his argument that the foundation of Tocqueville’s view is a belief in natural rights as asserted by Hobbes and Locke (21–40) or that Tocqueville’s ultimate objective is identical to Rousseau’s (92; see also 159–60). Nor is it easy to reconcile these two arguments with Zetterbaum’s belief that, for Tocqueville, there exists an “intelligible” common good that is “superior to private interests” (98).

Chapter 7

Reason’s Postmodern Responsibility

To bring these reflections, for now, to a kind of conclusion, let me test and elaborate my view of the inescapable mutual contamination of vertical and horizontal transcendence, and of the equally inescapable responsibility of reason for managing this contamination, by engaging a number of contemporary positions from the Tocquevillean standpoint of this responsibility. First I address the secular liberal view that may be said to form the mainstream, at least in the academy, and then some recent and notable attempts to articulate a positive contribution of Christianity to modern liberalism. In each case I discern an underlying complicity between Christian and post-Christian or “secular” failures of reflection and thus of political responsibility.

PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN RAWLS AND ARISTOTLE To an extraordinary degree John Rawls’ liberal theory of liberalism has set the agenda for the academic discussion of “normative political theory” since the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971. Here I will undertake no assessment of the content of Rawls’ “justice as fairness,” or even examine in any detail the ingenious and subtle methodological apparatus (“veil of ignorance,” “reflective equilibrium,” etc.) by which Rawls supports his understanding of liberal-democratic justice, which he seems not to distinguish from his liberal-democratic understanding of justice. My point is rather to suggest the importance of such a distinction by engaging Rawls just enough to point up the deepest commitments that ground his theoretical project, commitments that rise to the surface or near the surface of his arguments from time to time, 283

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but that he never shows any interest in questioning. That is, I want to catch a view of the way Rawls configures transcendence, or perhaps rather the way transcendence configures Rawls. Once we see the almost secret work of transcendence at work in A Theory of Justice, of which the author gives us a rare peek in the rarely commented last pages of that eminent tome, it will not be hard to see how essentially the same motives continue to inform the later, apparently more modest efforts of a merely “political liberalism.”1 As a shortcut to the questions that really interest me, and so as not to duplicate work already done admirably by another, I will graft my critique of Rawls onto a consideration of a very subtle and incisive examination of A Theory of Justice from a perspective that I would call “Straussian” in the best sense, a critique suitably attuned to the claims of vertical transcendence, all but completely suppressed in contemporary liberalism and even more so in liberal theory, but not so obviously attentive to the inevitable contamination and thus fragility of such claims. About thirty years ago Delba Winthrop published an article in the American Political Science Review entitled, “Aristotle and Theories of Justice.”2 It might have been called (after a famous old article in moral theory3), “Does Normative Political Theory Rest Upon a Mistake?” The answer Ms. Winthrop gives is: yes, it does. It is in fact a mistake, she argues, to assume that there ought to be or can be such a thing as a “theory of justice.” The fact that the demand for such a theory arises as it were naturally from within the political realm itself does not at all guarantee that this demand can be met, or that theory ought to understand itself as ministerial to such a demand. Intervening at perhaps the very peak of the Rawlsian fever, at the moment of her fellow professors’ greatest confidence in the competence of theory to lay down the law to practice, Winthrop gathered from Aristotle’s well a bucket of cold water with which to douse their heady expectations. After noting that “today it is all the rage for political theorists to have and to expound theories of justice,”4 she deploys a masterful reading of the Nichomachean Ethics to ground the suggestion that such theories “may in truth have no real basis in any fact other than an incoherent demand for justice.”5 Winthrop argues that the “working hypothesis” of Book I of the Ethics is that “the good of the city, and therefore the just, and the perfection of the individual, and therefore the noble, are roughly the same and effected by the same means.” A key burden of the argument is to show how this assumption of the neat confluence of the just and the noble is discreetly put into question and finally left behind in the course of Aristotle’s treatment of the problem. Justice is shown to depend upon a concern for the good of others, the grounding of which in nature is at best doubtful. The ground may seem to be provided by the ideas of fair distribution and of reciprocity, but these notions, which

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Aristotle contrives to present in the alluring simplicity in which they appear to the scientific and the pious,6 are shown to depend upon qualitative conceptions of the meaning of our humanity that are as diverse and as controversial as the political regimes in which they are represented. “It may be necessary to conclude that a theory of justice is impossible, because justice is merely an expedient human creation.”7 Justice is in fact deeply political, that is, at least partly conventional and as such “it necessarily takes as answered questions which would strike the philosopher as still unsettled.”8 “If there is any fixed principle in nature . . . it is that of the best, or the good.”9 And it is thus to “the best, or the good” that we should look for “the standard in the light of which laws and conventions should be evaluated.”10 A concern for the good is the natural ground for human action; and the best hope for justice, in Winthrop’s Aristotelian view, consists not in constructing a pure and universal theory of justice but in educating this natural human interest in the good. The latter paragraphs of Winthrop’s article follow the movement of Aristotle’s Ethics from justice to friendship and the philosophic life: our admiration for Socrates, who forsook the sphere governed by law and justice first by philosophizing and then in effect by committing suicide, draws us beyond the realm of justice’s demands. In the highest form of friendship our search for a natural ground of human association finds fulfillment. Not exactly justice, then, but “something like justice, or virtue towards others, does have a ground in human nature,”11 and “perfect friendship satisfies the natural, reflective concern for one’s own good.”12 Our best hope for justice is a limited hope, a hope derived from and subordinated to the recognition of a good higher than justice and therefore of “a rank order of human needs and the human beings who exhibit them.”13 Against the background provided by Delba Winthrop’s incisive critique of the assumptions underlying the construction of a “theory of justice,” it is interesting to note that John Rawls himself is convinced that there is something “Aristotelian,” as well as something “Socratic” about his own approach. Although Rawls’ claim of continuity with The Nichomachean Ethics may appear on its face preposterous to Straussians or Aristotelians today—and may be so—it will still be instructive to restrain noble indignation long enough to consider the meaning of Rawls’ claim to what we might call the “givenness” of morality, his claim, as it were, to ground his theory in the actual life-world of pre-philosophic opinion. The core of Rawls’ method in A Theory of Justice, or the nature of the claim he makes to “justifying” his theory, he denotes by the term “reflective equilibrium.” The equilibrium in question is one that he seeks between our “principles” on the one hand and our “considered judgments” on the other:

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each is supposed to be subject to modification in order better to fit with the other. Although he acknowledges that it is possible that such a method might reveal different theoretical equilibriums (which he would expect to fall into the major categories of academic moral theory he is addressing— intuitionism, utilitarianism, perfectionism) beneath the moral intuitions of different people, he still hopes (in 1971, at least), that his method might settle upon “principles [that] are approximately the same for [all] persons whose judgments are in reflective equilibrium,” that is, that he might make progress towards the discovery of an underlying “structure” of morality, a deep structure analogous to a “person’s sense of grammar” or to the “general structure of language.”14 Rawls contrasts this method of reflective equilibrium, adopted, as he says, “by most classic British writers through Sidgwick,” with attempts to found theories of justice “solely on truths of logic and definition,” or on “the analysis of moral concepts and the a priori.” And it is here that, in a footnote, he suggests extending what one might call this British tradition of common sense back to the Stagirite: “I believe that this view goes back in its essentials to Aristotle’s procedure in the Nichomachean Ethics.”15 Now, even if we are not inclined to acknowledge a kinship between the professor and the philosopher, we can perhaps at least see what Rawls means by claiming this filiation: unlike Kantians, utilitarians, or pure linguistic analysts, or, for that matter, dogmatic theologians, he sees himself beginning with—not exactly opinions or doxa, but with a ground of judgment Rawls assumes to lie deeper than opinions and thus to be more revelatory of a potential universal moral truth, that is, with the “moral sentiments” of the man on the street (even if the street is perhaps Brattle or Mt. Auburn and not Main Street). At the same time he cites with apparent approval Sidgwick’s hope that through the “scientific application” of the “primary intuitions of [moral] Reason . . . the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.” He recognizes, then, that the quest to uncover the universal form of justice through such a systematization and correction of certain common sense intuitions will not necessarily result in an equilibrium familiar to common sense: “we may want to change our considered judgments once their regulative principles are brought to light.” Rawls thus warns the reader that the quest for this universal system may in fact require that “a person’s sense of justice . . . undergo a radical shift.” And it is notable that in the context of this radical or transformative possibility Rawls associates his methodology not with Aristotle but with a “Socratic” transformation, reminding us what the search for a “reflective equilibrium” may cost in terms of our initial moral responses: “we may want to change our present considered judgments once their regulative principles are brought to light.”16

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Since we have noticed what might be called an “Aristotelian” and a “Socratic” moment—a respect for common sense, or for the commonly given on the one hand and an openness to some kind of rupture with the common, some kind of transformation on the other—in both Ms. Winthrop’s and Mr. Rawls’s approaches to the question of justice, we may begin to articulate the gulf between their views by noting their different configurations of these two moments. In Winthrop’s view (and in the view of Aristotle himself), the transformation that breaks in some way with the commonly given is a movement from the just to the noble. To achieve a kind of equilibrium or coherence it is necessary to leave behind the demands of justice as they arise in the common, political realm, and to ascend towards the higher good of philosophical friendship. But Rawls, on the other hand, seems to be at best unconcerned with “the noble” and therefore must find a transformation that operates as it were within the realm of the common and the just. What I am saying is of course what everyone already knows, namely, that Rawls’s deepest assumption, the one assumption that for him cannot be questioned, the one opinion that he accords the status of a deep, universal moral intuition, a “sentiment” supposedly uncorrupted by the vagaries of mere opinion, is the claim of equality. This is the claim sanctified by inclusion at the very foundations of the “original position” that is to be the matrix of all opinions deemed legitimate, or eligible for inclusion in a “reflective equilibrium,” a position from which all mere opinions relative to “the good” are excluded. The just is sovereign, the noble is altogether optional, a matter of arbitrary personal “preference”—which is to say that it is effectively abolished. Or perhaps not quite abolished. For if we suppose that “the noble” names some permanent orientation of human nature, some insuperable (vertical) dimension of the soul, then we must suppose that that the claims of nobility find some expression in Rawls’s august academic project of transformative moral theory. And in fact, if we were to turn to the too often neglected Part III of A Theory of Justice, entitled “Ends,” and especially to the last chapter, “The Good of Justice,” we would find that, once the priority of right has been safely established in exclusion of the good’s interference, once the just has been allowed to deploy itself free of complications of mere opinions regarding the noble, then “the good” is indeed allowed to return, that in fact it must return, as Rawls himself grants. What Rawls cannot grant, but what his parting words nevertheless reveal, is that the noble and the good have been there all along, in fact that a certain “perfectionist” passion drives the whole project of the rout of perfectionism. Far from having forgotten the human longing to “realize our nature,” Rawls insists on a solution that allows us to “express our nature” as rational beings. He interprets our highest and most authoritative desire as a longing for a higher freedom, a “freedom from

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contingency and happenstance.” The key to this higher freedom is revealed in Rawls’ concluding confession of faith, the last, poetic lines of his consummately prosaic book: The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. . . . Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.17

For Rawls a perfect “purity of heart” is possible because a perfect reconciliation of the just and the noble is possible, and this reconciliation requires an emancipation of the noble from contingent and partisan opinion, which emancipation makes possible the unhindered embrace of the just as the equal. We ought, however, to be alert to the danger of unacknowledged partisanship. The effectual truth of Rawls’s sublime or idealistic nonpartisanship is the most blind and therefore dangerous partisanship. In the light of Aristotle’s political science, it is clear that Rawls’s “fairness” effectively decides in advance in favor of the just over the noble: a full commitment to justice requires a suppression of the noble, an abnegation of the natural human interest in the noble—or, more precisely: a conversion of that interest into a purely this-worldly “purity of heart” wholly directed towards the just, now understood exclusively as the equal. Vertical transcendence has hidden itself completely in the horizontal dimension. Rawls, or some Rawlsian able at least to remember the claims of the noble as such, might at this point object, however, that, in order to be fair (and, we might add, in the interest of the very truth) one ought to consider the possibility that Ms. Winthrop’s Aristotelian disposition of the question of “theories of justice” has been determined by a certain partiality towards “the noble” at the expense of a commitment to the just. For can one in all fairness and probity deny that every notion of nobility and every friendship, however noble and even philosophical, is partial and partisan and even necessarily affected in its own self-understanding by this partiality? Delba Winthrop in fact notices the close connection between the requirements of politics and the character of a “noble friendship.” What makes a political solution possible at all, although not inevitable, is that there be capable and fortunate individuals who understand their good in a way most people do not and that the distinction between base and noble needs be maintained in an obvious way . . . Aristotle’s lengthy explanations of pride and of friendship based on knowledge of the superiority of oneself and one’s ends do support [the necessary distinction]. In other words, according to Aristotle, a

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just and good political regime is the consequence not so much of making justice one’s end as of acknowledging a rank order of human needs and the human beings who exhibit them.18

Ms. Winthrop’s is a luminous account of how only an orientation towards qualitatively higher ends can relieve the dangerous pressure of the demand, to some extent natural but finally incoherent, for a final solution to the problem of justice. But then, must one not also acknowledge that “the rank order of human needs and of human beings” is inevitably to some degree contaminated by the contingent requirements and circumstances of the regime (or, shall we say, by extension, the “civilization”) from which and in which friendship arises. The good is never simply “one’s own good capriciously willed”19; what makes the good “higher” than mere self-interest remains dependent upon what is looked up to, and not only by oneself, as noble; and the allure of nobility is never altogether emancipated from the concern for honors or for “reputation”20 that is bound up with the form of the regime. Are we to imagine that the distillation of the noble from its original and universal confusion with the just is ever finally complete, any more in Aristotle’s essentially aristocratic strategy than in the radically egalitarian (at the theoretical level) separation and fusion that Rawls attempts? Purely to distill the essence of the noble from its compound with the just and thus finally to establish the noble as the standard of the just would require that the noble be re-grounded in the whole, in a natural whole altogether above and distinct from the political whole. But Ms. Winthrop, our guide to Aristotle’s Ethics, seems not at all to affirm this possibility. According to Aristotle, she writes, “the justice necessary to political communities is in truth not grounded in a nature or a divinity as conceived of by either mathematical physicist or the pious.”21 But this does not dispose of the question of natural justice. Rather, Ms. Winthrop suggests, in the most venturesome remark of this very sober article, the insuperable interdependence of the political and the natural. By means of an examination of friendship, Aristotle attempts to make intelligible all human associations, both among human beings and within human beings, who have composite natures, and perhaps all associations, or wholes.22

The very meaningfulness and thus intelligibility of reality, the oneness and many-ness of being, thus comes to light on the horizon of a reflection on the just and the noble. The natural “good” itself is then not straightforwardly natural, but partly constructive, partly, that is, dependent upon human choice and human responsibility. As famously, elusively suggested in Aristotle’s example of ambidexterity, nature, Ms. Winthrop points out, may be

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understood as inviting improvements upon nature—even, I now extrapolate, contributions to the meaning of nature. Nature—our natures as political beings—may suggest to us the naturalness of taking responsibility for nature. The good is noble because it is a form of responsibility for the whole, including the common and thus the just. The noble transcendence of the just serves the just; and at its noblest and most self-aware such transcendence will know, if not always acknowledge, this service. Delba Winthrop thus invites us to consider the political responsibility of philosophy, and the philosophical implications of political responsibility. She glimpses an acute awareness of this responsibility in Aristotle, an awareness akin to what we have found in Tocqueville as well. The difference, as we have seen (chapters 2 and 6 above), is that Tocqueville is compelled by modern reason and (post-) Christian justice (which are of course not separate) publicly to acknowledge and address the mutual contamination of vertical and horizontal transcendence.

THE FAILURE OF PHILOSOPHIC RESPONSIBILITY IN A SECULAR AGE Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age is a rich book; the author’s erudition and breadth of intellectual sympathy are impressive, and there are few of his almost 800 pages that do not offer something worth pondering. On the other hand, the book is also exasperating in its prolixity and looseness of structure. But these formal flaws in Taylor’s argument are not the main difficulty of the book. The main problem is that Taylor seems not to have achieved a clear standpoint from which to make an argument; he allows us to see how things might look from one perspective and then another and then yet another—no small achievement, in its own way, but he never achieves a definite standpoint from which his interpretations and judgments might cohere and thus finally be fully intelligible. In the introduction to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor reviews two possible definitions of secularism or “secularity” before settling on a third. A secular society may be defined as one in which public spaces are emptied of references to God, even though the vast majority may remain believers. Or by “secular” we may mean to refer to a general decline of religious belief and practice. Taylor chooses what he regards as a more subtle and deeper definition. Rather than distinguishing simply between private and public or between religious and non-religious, he wishes to uncover a distinction in the very way that religion or non-religion is lived, or, more generally, he wants to investigate “alternative ways of living our moral/spiritual life, in the broadest sense.”23

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Taylor is convinced that, in our age, the very meaning of “belief” has changed. Whereas a common belief was once “naïve,” infusing a whole society and thus accepted as axiomatic, now even those (like Taylor, one gathers) who believe very strongly (“I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith.”) are necessarily aware that others (including “some very close to me”) who “cannot be dismissed,” do not believe. So today even strong belief is experienced against a particular “background of . . . experience” or “preontology;” it is aware of its problematic quality, of being just one alternative, “one human possibility among others.”24 It is not immediately clear, however, just how Taylor’s more subtle and deeper definition of “secular” differs from the straightforward, classically liberal banishment of religion from the “public” sphere to the “private.” Taylor’s sense of the problematic, questionable character of religion seems very closely related, at least, to the liberal strategy of privatization. It seems that Taylor is determined to see the condition of religion in our secular age in terms of a complex evolution of religious or “spiritual” sensibilities and not as grounded in some quite deliberate and plain political strategy. For as soon as we consider the configuration of “public” and “private” realms as a political settlement, we cannot help but notice that it is the public realm that is held to be rational and authoritative, whereas the religious is private and finally therefore strictly optional.25 Taylor’s failure or disinclination directly to address the political significance of the public/private distinction is closely connected with what we might call his “post-metaphysical” account of religion. By focusing on the “pre-ontology” or “conditions” of belief, Taylor from the outset downplays the cognitive dimension of religion. He is interested in “different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other,”26 not in belief and unbelief as “rival theories” of existence or of morality.27 Thus he does not see religious belief as something subject to “refutation” by scientific theories such as Darwinism.28 It appears that Taylor is ready to accept the privatization of religion (and thus its status as “one option among many”), but that he refuses the other half of the classical liberal equation, that is, the authority of “reason” in the public sphere. In this sense Taylor’s project might be viewed as “postmodern”: he is adamant in dismissing any nostalgia for the public reign of religious belief characteristic of pre-modern times, but he also keeps his distance from all modern appeals to “reason” understood materialistically or naturalistically. This rejection, or let us say problematizing, of the authority of “reason” is at the root of what Taylor himself refers to as his “continuing polemic against . . . ‘subtraction stories,’” that is, “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated

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themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Such “subtraction stories” hold that, once illusions and limitations have been overcome, then what emerges are “features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.”29 Taylor rejects these “stories” of human nature—the very philosophical basis of classical liberalism—in favor of the argument that modern secularism is in no way grounded in what is simply natural but is “the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understandings and related practices.”30 What apologists for modernity present as the simple truth that emerges from the dispelling of illusions is . . . one might be tempted to say, just another illusion. But the very category “illusion” presupposes the possibility of truth, and Taylor is not so “naïve” as to confuse the problem of human meaning with the pursuit of truth, or to seek a connection between the order of the soul and that of the city. So let us say that the various forms of modern secularism are just as much “constructions” of human meaning as are the various religious orientations that compete in modern civil society. As little inclined as he is to connect the pre-ontological with the metaphysical, the religious “experience” with cognitive assertions, Taylor cannot, however, avoid make certain claims about the way things are, or at least the way human things are: We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be.31

This important passage is perhaps Taylor’s closest approximation to a fundamental account of the anthropological ground upon which all descriptions of “religious” experience and of its “secular” or “naturalistic” alternatives must draw. He offers an extended example, drawn from the autobiography of Bede Griffiths, in which formerly ordinary sights and sounds of nature suddenly inspire awe: “I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”32 Such extraordinary experiences of what is better, fuller, and more admirable must then somehow be related to the ordinary, the routine, the common; this appears to be the next logical step in Taylor’s somewhat desultory reflection. The experience of extraordinary fullness may relate to our ordinary lives either mainly positively or negatively (my terms). In the positive mode, “our highest aspirations and our life energies are somehow lined up, reinforcing each other . . . so that we feel united, moving forward, suddenly capable and full of

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energy.”33 In the negative mode, our glimpses of “fullness” are experienced as a revelation of the “limit” of our ordinary existence, in a way that “unsettles and breaks through our ordinary sense of being in the world.”34 Such an experience leaves us “deeply moved,” but also “puzzled and shaken.” If we find no way to articulate such an experience, to address it in the language we share with other human beings and thus to link it in some way with the ordinary, then we are left with pure negativity, with a sense of “distance, an absence, an exile.” To the degree that we succeed in articulating such an extraordinary moment, a positive connection with ordinary life comes to the fore, a “sense of orientation” which “can help define a direction to our lives.”35 Apart from these positive and negative responses to some higher “fullness,” there is, according to Taylor, a third condition, “a kind of stabilized middle condition,” which would appear to be much more common than the other two, but still a condition “to which we often aspire.” In this lower but more stable state, we do things “which have some meaning,” because they seem somehow to be in contact with or to move us towards “the place of fullness.”36 At this point Taylor notices that his anthropology or phenomenology, his account of the structure of fundamental human experiences, appears to be biased in favor of religious believers, those oriented towards some extraordinary “fullness.” He does his best to redress this bias by acknowledging the case of “unbelievers” for whom “the ‘middle” condition’ is all there is.”37 But do such unbelievers ignore the call of “fullness” that Taylor seems to hold to be constitutive of our humanity? Or do they pursue under other names or in other modes what believers are seeking when they speak of “God”? But if this is the case, then it seems we would be compelled to ask whether those who seek fullness by reference to God or to some divinity are more aware of what they are seeking and therefore of themselves, of their own souls, than those who practice one form or another of “naturalism.” It is profoundly characteristic of Taylor’s approach that at this crucial juncture he does not wrestle with such a question, the fundamental question between believers and unbelievers concerning the aspiration to fullness, but sets it aside by re-affirming his move beyond truth claims and cognition to “a sense of the difference of lived experience.”38 This move allows him to conclude (very liberally or ecumenically) “that power, fullness, exile, etc., can take different shapes.”39 “We have to be aware of how believers and unbelievers can experience their world very differently.”40 To be sure. But is every articulation of an experience of the world equally adequate to that experience, or to the fullest human possibilities? Can Taylor’s account of humanity in “a secular age” avoid leaning towards one or another articulation of human fullness, or of

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the quest for it? Can the author’s own understanding of fullness be insulated absolutely from his investigation of modern meanings? If Charles Taylor’s book has a unifying purpose, it can only be to explore the challenges facing fullness of life in the modern West and thus to contribute to possibilities of living fully in our “secular age.” His task is greatly complicated by the fact that he both assumes and puts in question a certain Christian understanding of “fullness” as absolute transcendence, as well as the modern reaction against it in favor of an “immanence” defined in opposition to that very transcendence. He understands Christianity to be defined by service to a good “independent of human flourishing,” as “something other than human flourishing,” or as a “renunciation of human fulfillment to serve God.”41 And yet at the same time he understands that this renunciation of flourishing might finally be bound up with “the restoration of a fuller flourishing.”42 There are moments when Taylor seems to see that the question of the meaning and status of the end of human flourishing is necessarily bound up with the question of the political condition of our humanity. “Every person, and every society, lives with or by some conception(s) of what human flourishing is: what constitutes a fulfilled life? What makes life really worth living? What would we most admire people for?”43 This seems to suggest that every political society is grounded in a certain understanding of the good. But Taylor does not pause to examine the relationship between the orientation to fulfillment of “every person” on the one hand and of “every society” on the other, so let me state what might be obvious: a society’s conception very strongly conditions a person’s conception of the good. To say that the philosophical, moral, and religious doctrines and practices “which people around us engage in constitute the resources that our society offers each one of us as we try to lead our lives”44 is already to frame the question of the relation between the personal and the political, the soul and the city, in a distinctively liberal and modern way. For, as Taylor knows as well as anyone,45 we do not first exist as autonomous individuals and then have certain possibilities “offered” to us; in fact our very identity is shaped by ideas and practices authoritative in our communities (from the most general—say, at the level of Western Civilization—to the very local and particular). To achieve sufficient distance first to question such practices deliberately and intelligently and then to choose among them is no mean accomplishment, and in fact it is doubtful we can ever succeed in abstracting altogether from the authoritative “strong evaluations” that shaped our first understanding of the possibilities of fullness of life that might be available to us. The problem of the relation between the soul and the city aligns very closely with Taylor’s earlier polarity between the extraordinary and the

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ordinary, between our rare experiences or glimpses of fullness and the “stabilized middle condition”46 in which almost everyone spends most of their lives, and in which most spend practically all of their lives. The “routine order of life” is necessarily one that has evolved or has been fashioned so as to meet the common necessities of security, production, and reproduction. And yet no society can be defined or designed in view of purely economic instrumentalities alone, for man does not live by bread alone, or, in Aristotle’s formulation, human beings come together for life, but stay together for the good life. But bread there must be, and life must first be secured before the good can be sought. It follows that the problem of coordinating the extraordinary and the ordinary is a perennial challenge facing every human person as well as every society. A “personal” idea of the good, of what makes life worth living, therefore never exists in abstraction or isolation from a prevenient, authoritative and implicit understanding of our humanity, and so any personal interpretation or construction of transcendence must be wrested from (Heidegger) or grafted onto (Strauss) or coordinated with (Tocqueville) a primary understanding of what is “higher” than our own interest or convenience, the notion of the good or of fullness implicit in the laws and the ways of our city or civilization. Taylor sometimes addresses this primordial embedding of the philosophical and religious in the political, but at decisive moments he allows himself to forget it. This is possible because, paradoxically, his assumptions are too complacently Christian in form. That is, he accepts at the outset what he takes to be a Christian understanding of what is highest as somehow utterly “beyond” human fulfillment. By limiting himself to “a set of forms and changes which have arisen in one particular civilization, that of the modern West—or, in an earlier incarnation, Latin Christendom,” Taylor in fact accepts as if it were a natural fact what he takes to be the Western opposition between the “transcendent” and the “secular.” (He takes it as given, notably, that there is an “unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek philosophy,”47 and therefore that the Western world can be understood on Christian and post-Christian categories, which are in turn understood as simply incommensurable with the inquiries of classical political philosophy.) Although he offers a wealth of evidence of the mutual contamination of the extraordinary and the ordinary, the soul’s fullness and the city’s necessity, he adopts a conceptual framework that seems to absolve him from responsibility for articulating this relationship. He accepts at face value what he takes to be the Christian notion of “a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or ‘beyond’ human life” as well as the strictly correlate idea of “an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms,” the

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notion of “the immanent,” which “involved denying—or at least isolating and problematizing—any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on one hand, and the ‘supernatural’ on the other.”48 But by this very, insufficiently critical acceptance of the category of “the secular,” Taylor has crippled himself in his “continuing polemic” against “subtraction stories.” The very meaning of “secular” can finally be nothing but what is left over when the “transcendent” is excluded, but Taylor has systematically excluded reflection on the question whether the problem of fullness and that of transcendence can really be separated. In other words, Taylor’s whole book is about the interpenetration of ideas of fullness on the one hand and of religious and moral notions understood functionally in relation to political and social necessities, on the other hand. And yet his very definition of “the secular” simply assumes and carries forward a modern Western, that is, distinctively post-Christian claim according to which “human flourishing” can be defined in terms of the subtraction of “transcendence” and thus that there can be “a self-sufficing humanism,” that is, “a secular age . . . in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing becomes conceivable.” This tension runs throughout Taylor’s book and renders the argument elusive or unstable at critical junctures: he seems throughout the book to be tracing the development of various expressions of “fullness” as they come to be articulated in politically authoritative forms, and yet his final framework of judgment seems to be determined by the assumption or the hope that the problem of authoritative articulations of fullness is now somehow obsolete, that we have somehow settled into a neutral, default consensus on just plain “human flourishing,” or else that the very question of the meaning of flourishing has become irrelevant to our political condition. Taylor in fact sometimes strongly questions whether “human flourishing” can be conceived as strictly secular, as altogether unrelated to anything “higher.” Indeed the very terms in which he introduces the notion of “fullness” seem to imply that “human flourishing” cannot be grasped as a closed category but must be held open to the question of what exceeds our humanity. But if humanity can only be addressed as that which exceeds itself, then it follows that we can never exercise mastery over our own “fulfillment” and that it is impossible to define ourselves in such a way as to insulate a “secular” realm from aspirations that surpass us. On this view, the very self-understanding of the “secular age” would finally be a delusion, albeit a very effectual and productive one. But to call it a delusion would be to risk entering into the polemics or “culture wars” that Taylor is committed to spurning. Moreover, it would require articulating a standpoint regarding the moral and political representation of “fullness” from which to judge some expressions of human meaning to be more truly human, more open to “fullness,” than others.

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Up to a certain point, Taylor is certainly not bashful in offering such judgments. Much of his book is devoted to a very fine-grained depiction of what might be called the routinization or normalization of Christianity, the progressive instrumentalization of the language of transcendence. Holiness, in the story he tells, became more and more associated with morality, and morality was understood more and more in an essentially utilitarian fashion. In contrast with this functionalist totalizing (not Taylor’s term) of religion, Taylor presents a medieval orientation to the divine in which non-instrumental impulses expressed themselves in transgressive practices such as carnivals, where the usual rules linking authoritative ideas of transcendence with instrumental social norms were suspended. Monastic movements provide further examples of attempts to express transcendence in complete ways of life that cannot be simply aligned with needs of society as a whole. As Taylor had already shown beautifully in Sources of the Self, attempts to overcome tensions between ordinary life and extraordinary expressions of fullness were nourished by a profoundly Christian sense of the sacredness of the most common. Nevertheless, such attempts contributed to an increasing social rationalization of moral norms, a tendency that emerged first within Christian doctrinal frameworks and then later in Deistic as well as in explicitly secularrepublican versions; this drive to collapse the extraordinary and the ordinary closed medieval loopholes of transcendence and produced rigid and brittle moralisms that proved very vulnerable to the critiques that culminated in the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and 70s. Taylors’ discussion of this countercultural movement in chapter 13 entitled “The Age of Authenticity,” is decisive for the tonality and judgment expressed by his sprawling book as a whole. He is clear about the critical importance of this period, “which has profoundly altered the conditions of belief in our societies.” This is the period in which an already pronounced “moral/spiritual and instrumental individualism” was radicalized on the model of the “expressive” adventures of Romantic elites. Thus for the first time “this kind of selforientation seems to have become a mass phenomenon.”49 Taylor is of course by no means a naïve adept of the expressivist or liberationist ideology that has become so influential in the last few decades. Indeed one could well get the impression that the main point of this huge book, and indeed, finally, of Taylor’s whole brilliant career, is to counter the extreme individualism that more and more dominates our public space in the West. And he notes that “the heart of this revolution lies in sexual mores.”50 Thus he observes that our democratized ethic of self-expression “becomes the limit of our moral world, the basis of an all-encompassing slogan,” as when “bare choice [is held to be] a prime value, irrespective or what it is a choice between, or in what domain.” Such slogan-thinking in our “dumbed down

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political culture” simply conceals the “real moral weight” of issues we ought to deliberate.51 He clearly recognizes, moreover, that fashions of “mutual display” in dress and in conspicuous consumption of various commodities, which may “feel like choice and self-determination” are in fact manifestations of “conformity and alienation.”52 Taylor thus seems to see clearly that the sexual revolution of the 60s cannot deliver on its essential promise of liberation because it simply failed to take into account certain insuperable features of the human condition: the hard discontinuities and dilemmas which beset human sexual life . . . the impossibility of integrating the Dionysian into a continuing way of life, the difficulty of containing the sensual within a continuing really intimate relation, the impossibility of escaping gender roles altogether . . . Not to mention that the celebration of sexual release could generate new ways in which men could objectify and exploit women.53

Some may be surprised, then, to learn Taylor’s “over-all judgment about the gains and losses” of this transformative period: “I believe that this one has been on balance positive, while involving palpable costs.”54 He certainly wants to have nothing to do with “root and branch attacks on authenticity,” which attacks he thinks “help to make our lives worse.”55 In the last analysis, Taylor in fact concedes the decisive point to the liberationists or democratic expressivists, namely, the claim that individual meaning can be severed from authoritative public norms: “the ‘sacred,’ either religious or ‘laique,’ has become uncoupled from our political allegiance.”56 In all previous understandings of political life, as Taylor has largely devoted his career to showing, the bonds of political authority were in some way grounded in some sacred norms, “strong evaluations,” or ideas of the good prior to individual preferences; but here Taylor appears convinced that this linkage has been broken or dissolved, making possible a society in which “the spiritual as such is no longer intrinsically related to society,”57 a society therefore of “unlimited” pluralism.58 This is truly puzzling, and seems to be explicable only in terms of rather narrowly political considerations. For has not Taylor himself supplied the strongest grounds for doubting the possibility of such an uncoupling? Without drawing upon the powerful arguments of Sources of the Self for the inevitability of “strong evaluations” in political judgments, let us simply recall the anthropological axioms that we found in the introduction to the present volume. Taylor has shown that every human life takes place within some (surely dynamic or evolving) conception or pre-theoretical sense of a possible “fullness” of existence. Such a conception draws upon extraordinary insights or experiences, but it must somehow be related to, coordinated with the categories in which we articulate our ordinary, routine, lives, that is our

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normal (normative) and common lives, our lives as understood against a shared authoritative background. And how can such a normative conceptual or pre-conceptual background not be the source of authoritative understandings that form the deepest ground of our political judgments, practices, and institutions? In his wish to avoid “root and branch” rejections and thus to be a respected participant in the new politics of a new age, Taylor thus seems to set aside some of his own deepest insights or suggestions. The notion that we have achieved an effectively unlimited pluralism under which the authority of shared understandings of fullness no longer constrains the individual is contradicted, not only by Taylor’s anthropological premises, but by a number of his observations concerning contemporary society: “The pursuit of happiness has come to seem not only not to need a restrictive sexual ethic and the disciplines of deferred gratification, but actually to demand their transgression in the name of self-fulfillment.”59 He notices, moreover, that the “elision of virtue, health, and even sanctity, opposing together vice, sickness and sin”60 has not freed individuals from normative authority, but rather has subjected them to an “objectified expertise” that trumps “moral insight” and is “the charter for new and more powerful forms of paternalism in our world. Who dares argue with ‘science.’ ” Who indeed? And note this further caution by Taylor: “[W]hile remaining aware of the attractions of the new culture, we must never underestimate the ways in which one can also be forced into it . . . the immense weight of social approval and opprobrium begins to tell on the side of the new individualism.”61 Taylor himself thus understands that the promise of unlimited individual freedom under a regime of unlimited pluralism cannot truly liberate from all authority, but tends rather to mask an authority, that of the regime of “freedom” and of “science” itself, which therefore threatens to reign, as John Stuart Mill indeed promised, with an unquestioned legitimacy that would make the authority of traditional religions pale in comparison.62 Having resolved to remain strictly non-partisan in his account of the diverse possible interpretations of human fullness, Taylor seems to have forgotten Tocqueville’s prescient warning against a modern democratic form of tyranny that would forego traditional appeals to concrete authorities but, precisely by denying the existence of any authoritative moral or religious conceptions, would disarm the mind and soul at their source, thus producing a dominant power more effective than any that could be erected in a traditional society.63 The new counterspirituality of “authenticity” that Taylor judges “on balance” positively admits of no exceptions; there would be no “carnival” to relieve us of the authority of “liberation” itself. Beneath an ethic of personal choice absolved from the moral and political necessities of earlier, “naïve” societies lurks the

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massive authority of authenticity itself, and of the technological science that inherits the prestige of truth that philosophy (as the interpretation of “preontological” meanings) has abandoned. Taylor thus provides powerful evidence and reasoning against his own argument for the inauguration of a new age in which the problem of human “fullness” could become irrelevant to politics, or in which the extraordinary could become so ordinary that there would be no possibility of appealing beyond given political norms. His belief that “naïve” belief has become obsolete ignores the replacement of traditional belief (which has indeed been rendered problematic for most people today) by an increasingly axiomatic or “naïve” counter-ethic of liberation and the corresponding and dreadfully naïve abandonment of truth to purely instrumental “reason.” Ironically, it is by accepting what he understands to be a certain premise of Latin Christendom—the separation of the question of “transcendence” from that of a natural or immanent “fullness” available to rational articulation64—that Taylor disarms himself before his “secular age.” Philippe Beneton has warned that “whoever cannot experience wonder surrenders himself bound hand and foot.”65 Our critical reading of Taylor suggests, further, that whoever cannot articulate the experience of wonder in relation to the common good disarms himself in the face of dogmatic secularism, whether creeping or militant. By eschewing the central task of political philosophy as classically understood, that is, by refusing the responsibility to articulate the interrelation of the extraordinary and the ordinary, Taylor abandons himself to the “progress” of secularism. Charles Taylor, with all his erudition, remains very much a man in and of his Secular Age.

THE THEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF MODERNITY—GOOD NEWS OR BAD? With the publication of The Theological Origins of Modernity,66 at once analytically powerful and capacious in its synthetic ambitions, Michael Gillespie has cemented his reputation as one of our most learned and original students of the nature and origins of modernity. It is also finely crafted, astutely directed towards the timeliest concerns (e.g., the West’s confrontation with Islam), adorned with vivid imaginative touches of historical narrative and presented as clearly as such a deep inquiry can be. Gillespie re-situates the venerable inquiry into the nature and origins of modernity within our post 9/11 context: the question: why do these religious fanatics hate us so much? gives new intensity to the question: just who are we, what do we stand for? Self-understanding, according to

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Prof. Gillespie, has become more urgent than ever in the face of a new existential challenge. In one sense, Gillespie takes the meaning of modernity to be fairly obvious: the “decision that gave birth to the modern psyche and to the modern world” was a decision to replace “the authority of religion to shape private and public life . . . by a notion of private belief and ultimately personal ‘values.’” Yet he means to challenge “the conventional wisdom” according to which “modernity is a secular realm in which man replaces God as the center of existence and seeks to become the master and possessor of nature by the application of a new science and its attendant technology,” a realm founded in the seventeenth century by philosophers such as Descartes and Hobbes upon the rejection of scholasticism in favor of science.67 Drawing on “seminal work” of authors such as Hans Blumenberg and Amos Funkenstein, who have done much to “reveal the enormous complexity of the questions about the origins of the modern age,” Gillespie proposes to disprove the prevailing notion that “modernity in its origins and at its core [is] atheistic, antireligious, or even agnostic.” Modernity, according to Gillespie, “sought not to eliminate religion but to support and develop a new view of religion and its place in human life . . . in order to sustain certain religious beliefs.” It follows that to understand ourselves today we must “understand the metaphysical/ theological core”68 of modernity. The very term “modern,” Gillespie reminds us, represents the historical self-consciousness of our age, whether this historical consciousness is informed by faith in progress or a sense of apocalyptic crisis. But just who are we moderns? Do we define ourselves by nothing but the sheer awareness or assertion of a difference with traditional peoples? Or is there some stable, identifiable content to the modern difference? Gillespie seems to identify three main possibilities for determining modernity’s content. (1) The modern the project aims to establish a world based upon reason and thus breaks radically with the past. This is the “conventional story.” (2) The modern age borrows decisively from medieval predecessors; the French historian of medieval theology, Etienne Gilson, was a defender of this view. (3) The modern age emerged from a movement, not of reason but of “self-assertion,” though the purity of this self-assertion was obscured by attempts to respond to now meaningless questions left over from the challenge of an essentially “Gnostic” nominalism. This third view is defended by the German intellectual historian, Hans Blumenberg. Let us briefly consider what is at stake in each of these alternative accounts of the rise and meaning of modernity. The first, conventional account we might call . . . the modern account of modernity. The second is broadly romantic, if not reactionary, in its rehabilitation of the “Middle

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Ages” as supplying the metaphysical or religious depth modernity would otherwise lack, or perhaps as showing modernity to be parasitic on something it thinks it has left behind. The third account is clearly postmodern: modernity had its metaphysics, but we can now recognize that we have shed all that, and that nothing matters but our own self-assertion. Pausing to reflect on what is at stake in this little typology of the hermeneutics of modernity, a naïve response occurs to us that perhaps ought not to be suppressed: must not the conventional, the modern account of modernity finally be the right one? That is, if there is such a thing as modernity, a way of being human, individually, socially, and politically, then would it not be inherent in this thing to be aware of itself and to know what is at stake in its own way of being? Or must we not at least give some priority to the imperative (to coin a phrase) to “understand modernity as it understands itself?” But perhaps this naïve response is already too conditioned by modernity. As we have seen (chapter 6 above), Tocqueville famously argues, or asserts, at the beginning of Volume Two of Democracy in America, that all human existence, individual as well and collective, depends upon shared ideas or “dogmatic beliefs.” Our being would have no order existentially or politically if we could not look up to “truths” we share with others. But we might respond that Tocqueville’s idea that a life or a people should be governed by a definite and identifiable (one might say “clear and distinct”) set of ideas, theological or philosophical, is after all quite a modern idea (and that Tocqueville must know this, as much as he knows that his “Providence” is a Christian idea). This is not at all to deny that ideas and beliefs are essential to human being, and especially, no doubt, to being modern. But are these ideas ever utterly clear and distinct, susceptible of an exhaustive and non-contradictory description? A pre-modern society would appear to be ruled by religious ideas or notions of some kind, inherited or revealed and inherited, notions that we would by no means expect to be clear and distinct, though some might be clearer or more explicit that others. Tocqueville in fact shows us that traditional or “aristocratic” peoples are not ruled by clear and definite ideas but by notions of honor or transcendence concretely represented by a ruling class or type of human being. And it would seem to be characteristic of modern societies, not perhaps to be ruled by clear and distinct ideas, but to be ruled the claim or pretension to such ideas, that is, to be ruled by people (philosophers, intellectual, experts) who in turn claim to be ruled by clear and distinct ideas. Or let us say that the more a people accedes to this claim, the more modern it is. Seen this way, we can safely affirm that there has never been a thoroughly modern people, though some have come much too close for their (or others’) comfort, or their survival.

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The question of the meaning of modernity would then resolve to the question of the meaning of this ruling claim. Most notably, we must ask, do those would-be champions of modern civilization who claim to rule on the authority of clear and distinct ideas really believe what they are saying? If they do, then they must be wrong, if what Prof. Gillespie says is right: “[T]here can be no final theoretical vision of the whole that can serve as the absolute, fundamental, and unshakable truth.”69 Do the rulers of the ruling intellectuals of modernity, the modern philosophers, and in particular the “Founders of Modernity,” really believe they have access to clear and distinct truths, such as the truths of “equality” and “individual freedom,” or are their claims to be understood more . . . practically? Such are the questions it has seemed to me to one must have in mind in order to come to terms with a task on the scale of Gillespie’s, the task of rethinking modernity through an engagement with its putative makers. Gillespie in many respects follows Blumenberg’s lead in understanding the crisis posed by nominalism as the essential backdrop to the emergence of modern ideas. Unlike Blumenberg, however, Gillespie does not imagine that the ultimately nihilistic implications of nominalism can simply be relegated to the status of irrelevant historical curiosities in our age of “self-assertion.” If the questions surrounding nominalism are still with us, this is because they are good questions, even inescapable questions. Modernity allowed itself to imagine that it had disposed of the nominalist challenge to the grounding of human meaning and order, but Gillespie steps forward to report that the challenge still lies squarely in our path. What is this challenge? Nominalism sought to tear the rationalist veil [that earlier Christian theology had fabricated] from the face of God in order to found a true Christianity. This vision of God turned the order of nature into a chaos of individual beings and the order of logic into a mere concatenation of names. Man himself was dethroned from his exalted place in the natural order of things and cast adrift in an infinite universe with no natural law to guide him and no certain path to salvation.70

Gillespie strives to show, from a dazzling variety of sources and with considerable if uneven success, how each of the phases of modernity or of protomodernity (the “pre-conscious” phases of Renaissance and Reformation) can be understood as a response to this proto-nihilistic challenge, as one more attempt (every one unsuccessful, it turns out) to make some place for human beings in the anti-cosmos nominalism left in its wake. His case grows more persuasive as he progresses from the florid eclecticism of the Renaissance to the rigorous and theologically uncompromising piety of the Reformation and finally to the (ostensibly) fully conscious rationalistic projects of Descartes on one hand and Hobbes on the other.

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The author demonstrates very persuasively that much can be learned by re-mapping the rise of modern thought from the standpoint of the Nominalist challenge. The most brilliant and theoretically satisfying touch is surely his concluding deployment of Kant’s “third antinomy” to reveal the deep structure of modernity. This antinomy concerns “the two great goals of modern thought, the mastery of nature through modern science and the realization of human freedom.” The root problem is that “Freedom is . . . both necessary to causality and incompatible with it.”71 It seems impossible, that is, to think the freedom that we believe distinguishes human existence and gives it meaning together with the scientific understanding of natural causality on the basis of which we propose to employ our freedom and increase the effective scope of human agency. Gillespie thus—rightly, I think—understands Kant’s antinomy as revelatory of a trembling fissure that lies at the heart of the rationalistic project. And he projects the significance of this fissure forward to our time (since Kant’s attempt to solve the antinomy by separating science’s “island of truth” from our “transcendental” freedom was finally unpersuasive) and backwards not only to the debate between Descartes and Hobbes but even to that between Erasmus and Luther. Modernity, according to Gillespie, has consisted in various successive attempts to address this contradiction between nature and freedom. He neatly describes these attempts as so many reworkings of the terms of a metaphysica specialis, that is, of the “ontic” categories God, man, and nature: the Renaissance Humanists elevated man, the Reformers God, and then the founders of modernity proper (Descartes and Hobbes) gave priority to nature understood as “the mechanical motion of matter.”72 But every attempt has failed because they all take place within the “ontological revolution” of Nominalism “that called being itself into question.” Gillespie’s story, again with much ingenuity, portrays the debate between Hobbes and Descartes as a rematch of the ugly business between Luther and Erasmus on the question of human freedom, and so he makes as much as he can of the difference between the two modern founders, honoring so far as possible the traditional contrast between Descartes’ rationalism and Hobbes’ empiricism or materialism. But this narrative device may risk distracting somewhat from the author’s most powerful philosophical point, namely, that as long as the fundamentally Nominalist ontology is unquestioned, “nature” cannot subsist as an independent region of being, but is necessarily reduced to being the mere site of the exercise of power, either divine or human. And so Gillespie does not make enough of the fact that in both Descartes and Hobbes the stance of human being toward the field of “nature” is determined finally by the category of will or power; idealism and materialism are simply two sides of the same antinomy, or the same dynamic contradiction. In the end, moreover, the final “ontic” dualism created by the fusion Man-God set over

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against the field of “nature” tends to collapse; for, once the integrity of nature has been dissolved, man finds himself as limitless as God, and God in turn can be nothing but his power, his “how,” his Becoming. The effectual truth of Nominalism’s radicalization of the Biblical idea of divine power thus seems to be what Heidegger called “technology”: a sheer power that strips the world of human meaning by reducing all beings to so much stuff to make more stuff, non-world without end. There may, then, be a sense in which Heidegger has the final word in Gillespie’s interpretation of modernity, though he is discussed here only occasionally and as it were in passing. It is notable, no doubt, that Gillespie’s whole account is framed by the distinction between the “ontological” and the “ontic” which can only evoke Heidegger. And this evocation must suggest the question whether Heidegger can show us the way beyond the modern antinomies rooted in Nominalist ontology. I have answered this above (chapter 4) in the negative: the famed Heideggerian “ontological difference” in fact recapitulates and radicalizes the Nominalist-modern expulsion of meaning from the common human world, the world of moral and political meaning. What, then, seems to be the guiding purpose of Gillespie’s contribution to the re-thinking of modernity? Rhetorically his book often reads as if it were more or less in the tradition of Etienne Gilson, seeking to chasten modern rationalism and to rehabilitate the Christian intellectual tradition by showing how much the former has always depended upon the latter. Modernity, on this view, is actually much more Christian than leading intellectuals are now inclined to acknowledge. “Modernity is not the rejection of religion.”73 Thus Gillespie is at pains to discredit any suggestion that modern champions from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Descartes and Hobbes were atheists. He is thus led, not only to some very broad definitions of Christianity and its “deus absconditus” (which no doubt have considerable historical warrant), but to some rather strained arguments. For example, Gillespie knows as well as anyone that Hobbes is “less concerned with salvation and eternal life than with preserving and improving life in this world,” and that these priorities lead him finally to subject the very meaning of truth to the imperatives of human power—but God forbid we should therefore question Hobbes’ standing as a good Christian!74 This rhetorical tendency to play up the Christian dimension of modernity seems finally to detract from Gillespie’s more fundamental claims. For what is most important in his argument has little to do with whether or not the founders of modernity understood the foundations they intended to fall within the bounds of Christianity, or within the bounds of what Christianity could be persuaded to accept as compatible with some definition or re-definition of its own essence. He is concerned with implications of their projects

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that fell outside their intentions, with an inherited deep ontology that they carried forward without intending to, an ontology of the contradictions of which they remained unaware. Modernity is not the rejection of religion . . . even if it thinks it is: this is the deepest implication of Gillespie’s reading of modernity. We are not, then, heirs to a theological tradition whose resources might enrich us if we only knew how to draw upon them. We are heirs, rather, to a contradiction, a conundrum, an impasse. Modernity is not the rejection of religion . . . even if it would be better if it were. The question that Gillespie’s argument, taken as a whole, invites us, if only implicitly, to consider is: what would it mean to face up to this seven-centuries old ontology of power? Is the impasse of Nominalism “a reflection of contradictions that had been present in Christianity since the beginning”?75 Was Nominalism an inevitable reaction against a failed realism or rationalism of the earlier scholastics such as Thomas Aquinas?76 Gillespie indeed seems to agree with the Nominalists that Thomas’s attempt to hold together rational nature with divinity through a discourse of “analogy” tilted inevitably towards rationalism and denied divine freedom. Do the practical contradictions inherent in the Nominalist revolution therefore issue directly from the Christian idea of the incarnation, of God become Man? Is a return, then, to some pagan manner of thinking divinity, man, and nature our only option? But this would be impossible if Christianity had revealed something simply true or otherwise irreversible about human meaning, something like an openness to possibility and a dimension of human equality that transcends all political and social hierarchies. Or might these Nominalist contradictions rather result, not simply from some original meaning of Christianity, but from the attempt to master this meaning with the help of Greek philosophy, adapted or suborned to this purpose, and thus to rule Christendom on the basis of a clear and distinct systematic theology? In this perspective, Nominalism might be seen as a decisive amplification of the drive of a ruling theological priesthood for clarity and distinctness (beyond the poetic openness of “analogy,” not to mention the theoretical indeterminacy of simple scriptures). From this point of view, our modern “secular” intellectuals are still clinging to the prerogatives of this theological priesthood, still staking a claim to authorship of the dogmatic beliefs by which they would define us, as it were, ex nihilo. But if we are now having this discussion, is this not because the exhaustion of the claims of such a priesthood is beginning to become apparent, that the modern illusion of the rule of a systematic doctrine allegedly transparent to a ruling elite has passed? If this is indeed the case, then we thinkers are left with the question how our thinking can contribute to a humane order,

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and how we can avoid trying to construct one, thus leaving nihilism in our path. The overcoming of the Nominalist anti-foundations of modernity is thus inseparable from a forsaking of the intellectual ambition of a ruling transparency—including, I must add, the most refined, self-concealing ambition of a Rawlsian “purity of heart.”

THE MUTUAL CONTAMINATION OF LAW AND COUNSEL The great French scholar Rémi Brague, in The Law of God,77 undertakes no less than to sort out the relationship between the notion of “divinity” and that of “law.” He pursues this question, not mainly by a sustained philosophical analysis or the close analysis of pertinent texts (though his inquiry of course involves philosophical thinking and textual exegesis), but by a broad-gauged comparative examination of the configuration of the divine with respect to the legal in, respectively, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. And he alerts us at the outset that he aims to displace, not only the conventional “grand narrative”78 of “secularization” (the idea of a sort of natural drift towards the emancipation of the political from the religious), but, at a deeper level, the formulation of the question in terms of a “political-theological problem.”79 This term comes directly from Spinoza, and evokes the thought of writers from Varro to Carl Schmitt, as Brague notes. He chooses not to note, however, that the term has recently been made famous or infamous by Leo Strauss, and thus that Strauss (whose work Brague knows intimately) is a key interlocutor in Brague’s project. Brague argues that the term “political theology” preemptively narrows the question of the relation of the divine to the legal in at least three ways.80 First, the “logos” in theo-logy takes it for granted that the divine is “to pass through the prism of discourse.” Second, “theo” indicates, not the general notion of the divine, but a personal God or gods. Finally, “political” tends to privilege just one domain of the practical (the government of the city) over the other two, ethics (self-government) and economics (the government of the household).81 In order to overcome or think beyond this threefold preemptive narrowing, Brague proposes the neologism “theio-practical.”82 Brague’s history of the theio-practical problem is magisterial in its command of materials from various traditions and languages, and the reader is asked to follow a bewildering number of twists and turns through considerations of the writings of authors major and minor. Still, the book has a central argument, and it finally intends no less than to illuminate the basic character of the modern world, the world defined by a “rupture with the premodern relationship with the law,” a world in which law is supposed to have no relation with the divine but is “quite simply the rule that the human community gives itself.”83

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Some vague notion of divinity, Brague shows, appears to be coeval with humanity. Such a notion is generally, but not always, associated with the notion of power, though the extension of this divine power to political and legal realms is far from straightforward or automatic. Such an association between divinity and legal authority, when it happens, can take one of two main forms, or appear as a mixture of these: law can be associated with the divine as its origin, and/or as its intrinsic characteristic. The first alternative will become dominant among the Greeks, and be taken up by Greek philosophy, whereas the latter will be articulated by the three great revealed religions. And of course the Christian appropriation of Greek philosophy involves some combination of the two forms, as we shall see. The Greek gods did not make laws; divinity thus entered into law only through an indirect, regulatory function. The philosophers sought to appropriate this regulatory function by identifying divinity with the intellect. Plato, in his Laws, exceptionally proposed a theology as the state’s foundation, but he did not imagine that such a theology could be revealed in a book by a God. The religions of the book are also the religions of divine law in the strongest sense: man’s life is to be governed by rules revealed by God and available in a text. The Jews had only a brief experience under their own kings, after which they found themselves most often under alien sovereigns, and their political sensibility was characterized mainly by nostalgia for an earlier nomadic liberty. Without the power to live politically under their own laws, Jewish political thought was not practical and concrete but was projected upon a Messianic future. Thus, Jewish history has not encouraged the development of properly Jewish political thinking: the category of the political is “laminated” between a pre-political and quasi-anarchic liberty and the metapolitical longing for a Messianic king. The practical life of Judaism is that of “a law without a state.” The political situation of Islam is in a way opposite to that of Judaism: Islam entered history in a political guise, and the political dimension is central to Islam’s identity. Brague minces no words here: Islam is about conquest from the outset. Mohammed is both prophet and king, and the moral and social are understood as one block. But this is not at all to say that Islam has been successful in giving effect to this political essence; on the contrary, political power and religious authority in fact parted ways early in Islamic history, leading to a tendency to “nomocracy,” the rule of disincarnated religious laws, in some respects parallel to Judaism. But the separation of religion and politics is merely circumstantial in Islam, and has never been able to find a doctrinal foundation. Whereas Islam triumphed by warfare during the lifetime of its founder, Christianity’s first identity was that of a persecuted minority. When it

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became dominant in the Roman world, this, Brague argues, was through a Christian civil society’s conquest of the state, the reverse of Islam. While the temptation to identify imperial power with God’s kingdom was of course present (as in Eusebius), the separation between temporal and spiritual realms was effectively at work in Christendom from the outset, in Byzantium as well as in the West. The idea of an original unity of the spiritual and the temporal from which emerged a modern separation is, Brague is able substantially to demonstrate, a modern myth. This is not to say that this separation ever found a clear and definitive articulation in Christendom, either theologically or institutionally—but then we are still looking for a definitive articulation of the “liberal” separation we now mostly take for granted. But the resistance of religious ideas and institutions to fusion with political power was always at work, and the articulation of the two spheres was the fecund task that drove the development of Christian political thought. Under Christianity, the realms of religion and politics are distinct. Would that they were separate—that is, would that they could be simply and finally separated. This is the drama, the agony perhaps, of Christian political thought and of its institutional development, as described in chapter 9, Brague’s historically richest, “Christianity: a Conflict of Laws.” Countering the prevalent myth of an original fusion, Brague deftly traces the historical effects of Christianity’s inherent resistance to absorption into the political realm. This resistance created throughout the medieval period a situation in which both religious and political authorities (eventually the Papacy and the Empire) recognized the legitimacy of the sphere occupied by the other within a divine economy, but attempted to protect and expand its prerogatives at its rival’s expense. That is to say, each granted a real if subordinate status to the other within a world governed by God. The end of this rivalry based upon a certain implicit mutual respect is the end of the Middle Ages and the birth of the Modern world. This end, in Brague’s telling, is precipitated by the “Papal Revolution.” In the context of the investiture controversy, the Papacy was driven to claim a kind of absolute sovereignty grounded in its exclusive authority for the care of souls. The modern, “secular” idea of state sovereignty, first articulated as “the divine right of kings,” was a response to and a mirror image of these Papal claims. The modern fable of a natural or simply rational “secularization” ignores the necessity of a prior claim (rivaling that of the papacy) to sacrality.84 Even the word “state” (“status”) in the modern sense appears first of all in ecclesiastical arguments.85 Brague’s argument thus seems to be that the “secular” (let us say, the effectively absolute authority of the human) could not have appeared “natural” to us if it had not first appeared as the counter-assertion of the sacred.

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A spokesman for secular naturalism might, however, respond to Brague’s argument by proposing that the contest of absolutisms in the Late Middle Ages, while no doubt of historical interest, cannot be considered definitive of the essential character of modernity. Like Leo Strauss (not a typical spokesman for secular naturalism), such a critic might argue that the “break” defining modernity is to be sought “on the plane of purely philosophic or rational or secular thought.”86 The rational essence of modernity, on this view, must be distilled through an interpretive process that purifies it of the more or less accidental historical context of its genesis. Chapter 14 (“The Modern Age: The Destruction of the Idea of Divine Law”) is Brague’s response to the effort to liberate modernity from its history in the reaction against Papal absolutism. This chapter, philosophically Brague’s richest, might be entitled, “The Tyranny of Autonomy.” Here he argues that what passes in the modern age for “autonomy” is not autonomous, since “the modern age did little but draw the consequences of decisions that had been taken long before.”87 He develops a compact and powerful critique of this specious and tyrannical “autonomy” upon the basis of an elegant and luminous discussion of the traditional or pre-modern relationship between “Law and Counsel,” that is, between “what an authorized will imposes and what wisdom recommends.”88 Once “law bathed in counsel as in a nourishing environment.” The Right and The Good, one might say (though Brague does not use these terms), were inseparable, even equiprimordial, each informing and elevating the other. The autonomy or “internal rule” of a being was understood, Brague explains, “not as submission to the rule that a subject gives himself,” but as “coincidence with the rule that constitutes all things as they are.”89 This formula of Brague’s might, however, seem to give final priority to the Good, in the manner of classical political rationalism: law would ultimately serve counsel, and so the best counselor would embody or represent the highest law. As in classical political philosophy, wisdom here seems higher than law. But if “the rule that constitutes all things as they are” does not fall within the compass of human intelligence and/or human responsibility, then the ascendance of the Good over the Right, of Counsel over Law, would never be complete: a revealed command would always be necessary to lift Counsel above its incomplete grasp of the Good—though the command of Law would for its part always remain “bathed in counsel.” This is the delicate balance that Brague wishes to recover or to articulate: if “a man [ultimately] loves himself only for the sake of God,”90 then this divine charity is somehow continuous with the love that man as a natural being has for his own good. This delicate dialectic between Law and Counsel is betrayed, Brague thinks, in the modern idea of autonomy: the poles separate, and each flies off to an extreme. In repudiating Law, Counsel also forgets the Good, and is reduced to

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sheer “interest,” eventually understood in terms of “laws of nature” originally derived from and then wrested from a lawless God, laws that are thus as alien to humanity as they are to divinity. Law, for its part, contemns mere counsel and declares its utterly formal autonomy, as in Kant, for whom natural desires and tastes are “pathological.” Either Law or Counsel—which largely map the horizontal and vertical dimensions of transcendence I have traced above (chapter 2 and elsewhere)—emancipated from the other, becomes inhuman. When man attempts to take full possession of himself, he must understand himself either as pure Counsel (interest) or as pure Law (autonomy); but each of these necessarily falls back for its meaning on the now desiccated version of its abandoned partner. Pure interest becomes an inhuman “natural” or “rational” law, and pure autonomy is left with no content . . . but interest. This hollow modern dialectic between deontology and utilitarianism seems finally to derive, according to Brague, from an earlier, properly theological severing of Law and Counsel, that is, the Late Medieval and Nominalist “long-term shift to the primacy of the will.”91 But this observation confronts us directly with the question whether the wholesome dialectic of law and counsel was not always necessarily at risk in the context of a Biblical theology of an omnipotent Creator. Brague thinks not; it was not necessary that the “Almighty Father” be reduced simply, inhumanly, to the “Almighty.” If fact, twice at least, as it were in passing, he suggests a non-Christian responsibility for this catastrophic disruption: the radicalization of the idea of omnipotence “echoed motifs that recall and were perhaps indirectly derived from the Muslim Kalam.”92 Brague’s very discreet thesis would thus be that the absolutization of divine Sovereignty in Christian theology and papal politics, and thereby the resulting reaction in the modern sacralization of the “secular,” stem ultimately from the influence of Islam. If there is an alternative to this rivalry of absolutisms, and thus to its eventually “secular” outcome, then, for Brague, this must be found in some authentically Christian understanding of “The End of the Law.” Chapter 13, with its culminating discussion of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, is thus the true core and foundation of Brague’s argument. This is the most beautiful discussion in The Law of God, and we cannot do it justice here. Brague’s praise of Thomas’s work, “the most profound reflection that medieval scholasticism has passed on to us regarding the notion of law in general and divine law in particular,”93 may be said to come down to this: Thomas holds law and counsel together. He resists the Islamic-leaning emancipation of law from counsel, or will from reason, as well as the reduction of the Good to pure, impersonal intelligence (as in Maimonides and his “Islamic” teachers). God’s goodness cannot be contained in any fixed rational serenity but overflows creatively as a gift to his very creatures. His human creatures are

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not simply more or less rational animals but “irreplaceable persons” with the capacity to act freely (in a way irreducible to impersonal reason) and thus to be co-agents with God of history, of an “irreversible historical time.” The aim of the “New Law of Grace” as offered in the Person of His Son or of His Word is best understood as “to liberate liberty itself.” At the same time, this history-producing freedom is not arbitrary or merely subjective, since man’s agency dwells within his love of God, the ultimate reality: “the object of faith is identified with truth.”94 I, for my part, am prepared to confess that a conception so beautiful cannot be without a certain truth. But to consider, in all sobriety, the practical or political implications of Brague’s faithful liberation of liberty is to wonder whether his reaction against Islamic heteronomy has not left him closer to modern autonomy than he might want to be. In fact he goes so far as to say that, in Thomas’s Christianity, the dimension of law “as external to the person” is finally abolished.95 But this statement of Thomas’s understanding of Christian faith seems to me directly to threaten the delicate dialectic of Law and Counsel described above. Thus Brague insists in his conclusion that Christianity departs from both the Greek and the Jewish conception of man as “being under” law; Christianity is not a law or halakhah or sharia, but a way, a viaticum, and its central sacrament, the Eucharist, a meal, a nourishment that does not repress the creature from the outside but enables his freedom.96 Brague is thus left to conclude that the most decisive break in the understanding of the relationship between divinity and what is binding is not modernity’s break with the authority of religion, but the early medieval Christian emancipation of religion from law. But then he seems to be left, to our great surprise, in an ambivalent position regarding modernity. The modern separation of the normative from the divine is already nascent in Christianity,97 and it is Christianity’s separation of the whole genus of the practical (ethics, economics, politics) from the divine that made possible each of the three species’ (modern) declaration of independence from each other.98 The upshot, then, of what I take to be Brague’s anti-legalistic (that is, distinctly non-Jewish and non-Islamic) Thomism is a celebration of autonomy that appears to be practically, politically vulnerable to a modern cooptation. Brague is so careful to protect the Law of Grace from contamination by any merely practical law that he may expose it to a decidedly modern enthusiasm for the liberation of human meaning from any heteronomous authority. He appears to deplore the modern dissociation of the history of freedom from the history of salvation, but how can salvation restrain, or, in the end, inform freedom if the divine is separated rigorously from the normative or binding—if, as Brague says elsewhere, “God asks nothing of us”?99

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To sustain a distinction between Christianity and modernity might require more openness to a kinship between Christianity and religions of the Law, or at least one of them. Leo Strauss, to be sure, seems not to have been optimistic about such a strategy. He chose to absolutize the difference between reason and revelation, and thus to reduce revelation to a “brute fact” on an Islamic model, as Brague has elsewhere noticed.100 Brague seems finally to risk downplaying the role of obedience to a power beyond reason, or perhaps confining this role to a sacramental realm somehow divorced altogether from the interpretations and judgments of practical life. But to recognize reason’s part of responsibility for sustaining the delicate dialectic of Law and Counsel would seem to imply recognizing the primacy of the political within the practical. And if the Biblical and modern insight into, or at least the question regarding, the Eternal significance of personality in history is in fact unavoidable for us, then we are back to the theological-political predicament, if not necessarily to Strauss’s version of it.

TOWARDS REASON’S POSTMODERN RESPONSIBILITY The irreversible Western inheritance of an Eternity not indifferent to Time no doubt implies a more elusive, if arguably also richer and dynamic, sense of the meaning of human existence than can be contained in the classical ruling idea of reason. It therefore also implies a more hazardous horizon for practical reason, in effect a resignation to the impossibility of containing the soul’s longings within a specific, substantive understanding of the nobility of the good. The illusion of the simple superiority of “theory” to “practice” (or vice versa) cannot be sustained, and the circulation of meaning between these poles must be accepted and assumed into the very self-understanding of reason. A response to the modem fusion of theory and practice consistent with both prudence and probity cannot be a return to the beautiful illusion of a simple subordination; it can only be a more complex assumption of responsibility for the irreversibly public character of that circulation. Modern practical reason must responsibly assume modern rationalism, not either simply embrace it or deny it. There is no free-standing idea or theory of dignity or excellence, any more than there can be a “theory of justice”; rather, just as the dignity of practice in a sense depends upon its openness to the life of the mind, so the dignity of theory depends no less on openness to practical greatness and thus to the insuperable claims of justice. The modern Legislator has no choice but to improvise some way of imitating the God of modernity whose non-representable elevation cannot be distilled as a pure essence

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distinct from His justice, His providence, His charity. The post-Christian horizon of practical reason is the public circularity or mutual implication of vertical and horizontal transcendence, of the end of theory with the ends of practice, of the claim of reason to rule with the orientation of reason to the common needs and longings of humanity. A reflection on the meaning of reason today in relation to the political and moral goods of liberal democracy cannot dispense with a reflection on the leading institutional and intellectual matrix of these goods, namely the American constitutionalism founded over two hundred years ago. The relative stability and moderation of the American concepts of freedom and of self-interest depend upon these Enlightenment notions being embedding in a social and moral context shaped, as Tocqueville shows, at once by concrete experience in political responsibility and by deep if often quite general and even unorthodox religious belief. If, as Tocqueville wrote, the American Founders “spread their brilliance over the nation and did not borrow [their brilliance] from it,”101 this is precisely because they shared the meaning of brilliance or glory, embedded in certain traditional standards of praise and blame (including the worthiness of economic ambition), with the people and did not attempt, as the French Revolutionaries felt themselves compelled to attempt, to impose a standard purified of all “prejudice.” The American Founding must be understood as a synthesis of prudence and modern individual rights, a combination of classical reason with modern rationalism.102 But this insight leaves us not so much with a solution as with a new problem. To be sure, it is of the essence of prudence in any age to resist claims of theoretical finality in practical matters. But practical reason operating in a postmodern context would appear to demand a kind of meta-prudence, a second-order self-awareness regarding the problematic status of the liberalizing claims of modern rationalism as well as of the modern conservative denial of such claims. Modern prudence must examine and adjust the claims, not only of contending parties in the traditional sense, but (to echo Marsilius) also of a new and singular cause of discord, the limitless project of the party of humanity, the party of the “non-partisan” project of modernity, as well as of the opposing party of “tradition” it provokes. Practical wisdom today must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the aporia defined by the alternatives of, on the one hand, a horizon of knowable goodness above ordinary human concerns and, on the other, by the Christian and revolutionary promise of the regeneration of all humanity. Whether such an attunement is possible without respect for or perhaps even faith in a personal Divinity in whose love vertical and horizontal transcendence are thought to achieve their

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only true synthesis—this is the question I must further ponder, and on which I invite the reader’s assistance.

NOTES 1. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 2. Delba Winthrop, “Aristotle and Theories of Justice,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978):1201–16. 3. H. A. Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” Mind 21 (1912): 21–37. 4. Winthrop, Aristotle, 1201. 5. Ibid., 1215. Whether this elegant and incisive intervention had any cooling or sobering effect on the higher-ranking true believers is perhaps doubtful—the virus appears to be capable of indefinite mutations that manifest very similar symptoms. 6. Ibid., 1205. 7. Ibid., 1206. 8. Ibid., 1207. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 1208. 11. Ibid., 1212. 12. Ibid., 1213. 13. Ibid., 1214. 14. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 50. 15. Ibid., 51. 16. Ibid., 49. 17. Ibid., 587. 18. Winthrop, Aristotle, 1214. 19. Ibid., 1209. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 1205. 22. Ibid., 1212. 23. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 5. 24. Ibid., 3. 25. The limitation of “private” religious freedom by the public authority of secular rationalism is already clear enough in Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration. 26. Taylor, Secular Age, 5. 27. Ibid., 4. 28. To be sure, there need be no contradiction between theism and an acceptance of the scientific evidence for natural selection. At a deeper level, however, one cannot

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believe simultaneously that human purposes are grounded in ultimate reality and that reality is a purposeless material process. 29. Ibid., 22; emphasis added. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 5. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 6. 34. Ibid., 5. 35. Ibid., 6. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. Ibid., 7. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. Ibid., 14. 41. Ibid., 16, 17. 42. Ibid., 17. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. Ibid. 45. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), chapters 1 and 2. 46. Taylor, Secular Age, 6. 47. Ibid., 17. 48. Ibid., 15–16. 49. Ibid., 473. 50. Ibid., 485. 51. Ibid., 478–79. 52. Ibid., 483. 53. Ibid., 502. 54. Ibid., 480. 55. Ibid., 481. 56. Ibid., 487. 57. Ibid., 490. 58. Ibid., 489. To be sure, Taylor here adds a qualification: “Or rather, the limits are of another order, they are in a sense political, and flow from the moral order of freedom and mutual benefit. My spiritual path has to respect those of others; it must abide by the harm principle” (489). It is not clear whether the naïveté of this remark is Taylor’s own, or simply that of the moral-political viewpoint he is describing. In any case, this qualification, by falling back (like John Stuart Mill) on the ostensibly neutral notions of “freedom,” “benefit,” and “harm” merely displaces the problem to that of defining each of these terms. Of course these definitions will never be neutral, but will in fact always reflect one or another conception of what Taylor calls “fullness.” 59. Ibid., 493; emphasis added. 60. Ibid., 500. 61. Ibid., 492.

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62. See Utilitarianism, Part III. On the powerful collusion between “freedom” and “science,” see Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics: A Defense of the Nation State” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Introduction; and Philippe Beneton, Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement (Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 2004). 63. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.ii.7. See above, chap. 2. 64. In this Taylor seems to align himself with the “Nominalist” attack on Aquinas’ “realism” (542)—and with the same “secularizing” result. The effectual truth of the liberation of the divine from the natural is just the reverse. See the discussion of Gillespie below. 65. Beneton, Equality, 146. 66. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 67. Ibid., 11. 68. Ibid., 12. 69. Ibid., 46. 70. Ibid., 29. 71. Ibid., 259. 72. Ibid., 262. 73. Ibid., xii. 74. Cf. Gillespie’s generosity towards Machiavelli, Ibid., 90. 75. Ibid., 34. 76. Ibid., 132–34. 77. Rémi Brague, The Law of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 78. Ibid., 4. 79. Ibid., 5. 80. One statement of Strauss’s narrower formulation of the question of the relation between the divine and the binding is this, from Natural Right and History: The fundamental question . . . is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: human guidance or divine guidance (74). Note that this formulation involves a definite and demanding concept of “knowledge,” which is no doubt posterior to the primordial articulation of the divine and the legal, and likely dependent on Greek philosophy as intensified by its rivalry with the knowledge-claims of Biblical revelation. Note also that the specification “individually or collectively” implies the whole problem of the status of this most urgent kind of knowledge in relation to the conditions of our collective existence, which Strauss, as is well known, understands to be an insuperably political condition. It may be then, that Strauss carelessly frames the question of the divine and the authoritative in terms narrowed by a Western political-theological tradition; or, it may be that he

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judges advisedly that this tradition has not so much narrowed as sharpened questions that the most thoughtful heirs of Athens or of Jerusalem will find to be essential or even unsurpassable. 81. Brague, Law, 6. 82. Ibid., 7. 83. Ibid., 1. 84. Ibid., 138–39. 85. Ibid., 136. 86. Strauss, Natural Right and History, chap. 2, 22n. 87. Brague, 231. 88. Ibid., 231–32. 89. Ibid., 232. 90. Ibid., 232, citing Bernard of Clairvaux. 91. Ibid., 237. Note that Brague’s argument converges on this point with Gillespie’s. 92. Ibid. Compare 144, where we learn that the Unam Sanctum of 1304, the “most extreme expression of the claims of the Holy See” may have been inspired by “the theory of the caliph developed by Avicenna.” 93. Ibid., 220. 94. Ibid., 224. 95. Ibid., 225. 96. Ibid., 261. 97. Ibid., 257. 98. Ibid., 259. 99. Rémi Brague, Du Dieu des chrétiens. Et d’un ou deux autres (Paris: Flammarion, 2008). 100. Rémi Brague, “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca: Leo Strauss’s Muslim Understanding of Greek Philosophy,” Poetics Today 19, no. 2 (Summer 1998). 101. Tocqueville, Democracy, 247. 102. See Terence Marshall, A la Recherche De L’humanité. Science Poésie Ou Raison Pratique Dans la Philosophie Politique De Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss et James Madison (Paris: PUF, 2009).

Index

absolutist, 59 – 60 Acton, Lord, 211 actuality, 58, 75, 168 aletheia, 123, 130, 155, 159; aletheuein, 127, 128, 133, 156 America(nism), 19, 37 – 38, 59, 94; accommodation, 11 anthropology, 153, 155, 157 – 60, 174 anxiety, 147, 150 aporia, 27, 314 Apuleius, 89 Aquinas, Thomas, 72, 93, 96, 99, 101 – 2, 104, 211, 306, 311 – 12 arche, 132 Archimedian point, 17, 25, 114, 167 Arendt, Hannah, 11 aristocracy, 25 – 27, 40 – 41, 43 – 47, 51, 58, 62 – 65, 67, 73, 75, 107, 116, 122, 168 – 69, 200, 202, 258, 260 – 61; heritage, 261; partisanship, 185 Aristotelian philosophy, 153 – 54, 201, 211, 221, 223 – 24, 226, 242, 287 Aristotle, 1, 4 – 5, 21, 25, 57, 76 – 78, 80 – 81, 87, 93, 97 – 98, 120, 123, 125 – 26, 128 – 31, 133, 135 – 36, 211, 244, 272, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 295; De Anima, 124; episteme, 76, 156; Metaphysics, 124, 135; Nichomachean Ethics, 25, 57, 76 – 78, 97; sophia, 76 art, 160, 239 ascent, philosophical, 206 – 7

atheism, 9 attune(ment), 146, 147, 151 Augustine, St., 87, 89, 92, 98 – 99, 101 – 2, 104, 110, 114, 213; City of God, 90 – 91, 95, 114 authenticity, 16, 145, 147, 149, 151, 161 authority, 37, 57 – 59, 61, 92, 95, 97 – 99, 108 – 9, 133, 168 Bacon, Francis, 35 beauty, 235, 245 Behnegar, Nasser, 227 Being, 2, 4, 18, 60 – 63, 65, 75, 120, 122, 124 – 25, 129 – 31, 133 – 36, 139 – 46, 148 – 52, 157 – 60, 165 – 66, 172, 192, 202, 213, 218, 247 belief, 4, 57, 97; dogmatic, 2, 165; religious, 257, 261, 290. See also religion Beneton, Philippe, 300 Berlin, Isaiah, 230 Bible, 8, 22, 75 – 76, 92, 164, 211, 214, 219, 231, 233, 249, 252; and Biblical tradition, 211, 214; piety in, 217; right vs. wrong in, 212 – 13 Biel, Gabriel, 97 Blumenberg, Hans, 301, 303 body, 51, 87 – 88, 95 – 96, 104, 106, 109, 114 Bolshevik, 13 Boniface, St., 95 Brague, Remi, 307 – 13

319

320

Index

Bruell, Christopher, 232 Burke, Edmund, 11 Calvin, John, 25, 70, 96, 100, 101 – 4, 107 – 8, 114; Calvinism, 265; total depravity, 101 Cartesianism, 35, 37, 114, 254 causality, 153 – 55, 175 cave, 31, 62, 66; society as, 185 Ceaser, James, 18 – 20 certainty: subjective vs. intersubjective, 203 – 4 Christ, 46, 94; imitation of, 211 Christianity, 1, 4, 6 – 8, 10, 25, 27, 31 – 32, 35, 43 – 44, 46 – 48, 50, 54 – 56, 67, 87 – 89, 92 – 95, 97 – 98, 102 – 4, 105 – 7, 128, 165, 201, 210 – 12, 216, 219 – 21, 256 – 57, 261, 279, 303, 305 – 9, 311 – 12, 314, 283; definition of, 294; democratic Christianity, 266 – 67, 269; in the founding of America, 262 – 63, 265, 268; and Greek philosophy, 295; and modernity, 313; normalization of, 297; political history of, 309 choice, 116, 150 – 51, 157, 160 church: ecclesiastical, 95, 97 Cicero, 221 circularity, 86, 148 – 50 city, 5, 62, 219, 226, 231, 238 civilization, 53 – 55 classical political philosophy, 26, 181, 183, 187 – 89, 193, 218, 200 – 203, 220, 230, 295, 310; contemporary use of, 201; objections to, 200; role of history within, 202; Strauss’s classical solution, 187 clergy, 47 common, the, 165, 168, 290; good, 16, 21, 24, 91; life, 165; sense, 148, 151, 157, 174, 286, 287; world, 24 concrete vs. abstract, 58, 63, 75 conscience, 57, 99, 103, 121, 128, 137 – 38, 141, 208

contemplation, 4–5, 21, 82–86, 91, 114, 155 continence, 194 – 95 cosmology, 189 – 90, 223 counsel, 310 – 13; interdependence with law, 311 courage, 236 – 38 Courtine, Jean-François, 147 cruelty, 185; inherent in rule of reason, 182 – 83 Darwinism, 291 Dasein, 18, 122 – 23, 127 – 36, 144, 146 – 51, 161 death, 108, 149, 151 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 12 dehumanization, 202 deliberation, 130, 132, 133 democracy, 5, 14 – 16, 20, 24, 27, 32 – 33, 37 – 52, 58, 63 – 64, 75, 165 – 66, 169, 200 – 201, 268, 270 – 71, 277; American, 253 – 55, 258, 260, 262 – 63, 265, 274; constitutional, 243; contrast with aristocracy, 258, 260; democratic materialism, 272; individualism of, 256; liberal, 5, 8, 10, 13 – 15, 18, 20, 23 – 24, 165, 182, 184, 292, 314; modern, 255 Democracy in America, 31, 38, 53, 55, 253 – 56, 258, 265, 271, 273 – 75 Democritus, 244 deontology, 311 Derrida, Jacques, 175, 226 – 27 Descartes, 34 – 35, 64, 113, 254, 301, 303 – 5 destining, 158 – 61 destiny, 164 – 65 divine/divinity, 82 – 83, 85, 88 – 90, 93, 107, 307 – 8, 311 – 12, 314; economy, 309; law, 215, 217 – 19, 265, 308; right of kings, 309; sovereignty, 311 dualism, 16, 87, 89, 91 – 92, 166, 175 duty, 100, 103

Index

Eckhart, Meister, 117 economy, 16, 200, 307; economists, 36 egalitarian, 168 Egypt, 130, 135 elevation, 59, 66 – 67, 73, 85, 87, 102, 107, 116, 165 “The End of Law,” 311 Enframing, 156 – 60 England, 36, 44 Enlightenment, 33, 36 – 37, 41, 45, 49 – 50, 228 – 29, 231, 314; and constitutionalism, American, 314 episteme, 127, 134, 156. See also Aristotle; episteme equality, 5, 23, 31 – 32, 37, 41, 44, 46 – 49, 53, 55 – 56, 60, 165, 168; human, 262, 265, 267, 270, 275, 287 Erasmus, 304 eros, 70, 226 essence, 179 eternal order, 206, 210, 214 eternity, 27, 87, 163, 204, 210, 219, 288, 313 ethic(s), 117 – 18, 128, 135 – 36, 148, 152, 155, 160, 227, 307 Eupraxia (right action), 127 Eusebius, 309 experience, 140, 145 external/internal, 52 – 53, 58, 75, 98, 100 facticity, 120, 144 faith, 96 – 97, 99, 108 – 10 Fall, the, 7, 97, 99 – 104 family, 45, 110 Farabi, 222 final solution, 19, 232 form, 39, 45, 61, 117 – 19, 145 – 46 Foucault, Michael, 18 Founders, American, 314 France, the French, 13, 50, 59 freedom, 3 – 5, 11, 23, 32 – 33, 35, 37, 40, 46, 58, 75 – 76, 102, 104 – 5, 120, 135, 146 – 47, 152 – 53, 157 – 59, 164, 167 – 68, 175, 200, 210, 259,

321

271 – 72, 287, 288, 304, 314; political freedom in America, 256, 263 – 68; relationship with salvation, 312 Freiburg, University of, 161 friend(ship), 81, 83, 285, 287, 288, 289 Fukuyama, Francis, 15 fullness, 292 – 94, 296 – 300 fundamental question. See reason: and revelation Funkenstein, Amos, 301 Furet, Francois, 72 general ideas, 44 – 47 General Will, 12, 13 genesis, 134 German nihilism, 180, 184 German vs. Western ideals of modernity, 180 – 81 Germany, 50, 161, 163 – 64 Giles of Rome, 95 – 96 Gillespie, Michael, 300 – 301, 303 – 6 Gilson, Etienne, 301, 305 glory, 106; of God, 104, 107, 114 God, 2, 4–5, 8, 10, 13, 27, 42–45, 47, 48, 50–51, 58–59, 72, 87, 91, 93, 96–99, 102–5, 135, 163, 165, 168, 175, 209, 213–14, 216–17, 219, 222, 255, 257, 259, 262, 264–65, 268, 270–71, 275, 290, 292–94, 301, 303–13; personal, 213; separation from man, 268, 275 god(s), 39, 85 – 87, 90, 130, 161 – 63, 165 Goldstein, Doris S., 277, 278, 279 good(ness), 1, 4 – 5, 9, 27, 55, 59 – 62, 64, 75, 77, 80 – 86, 90, 92 – 94, 98 – 99, 103 – 4, 107 – 9, 120, 130 – 34, 136, 152, 192, 206, 215, 217, 223, 235, 237 – 38, 240, 249, 252, 285, 287, 289, 294, 298, 310 – 11; ancestral, 215 – 16, 219; form of, 78; human question of, 186 – 87; idea of, 24; moral-political, 224, 314; nobility of, 290, 313; personal idea of, 295 grace, 96 – 97 Great Separation, 10

322

Index

greatness, 35, 42, 49 – 50, 53 Greece, 21, 123, 125, 129, 142, 153 – 55, 172 Griffiths, Bede, 292 Guizot, Francois, 52 – 53, 55 – 57, 71 – 72, 75 happiness, 90 – 91, 202 hedonism, 223, 236, 238 Hegel, 202 – 3, 212 – 13 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 18 – 23, 25 – 26, 32, 34, 57, 65 – 66, 76, 115 – 20, 122, 126 – 28, 131, 135, 138 – 39, 146 – 47, 151, 154 – 55, 160 – 61, 164 – 67, 179, 184, 187, 190 – 91, 213, 218, 227, 232, 239 – 41, 272, 295, 305; History and the Concept of Time, 136, 142; point-at-hand being, 149 – 50; The Question Concerning Technology, 152, 163; ready-to-hand being, 149 – 50 hierarchy, 37, 51, 52, 60, 63, 65, 85, 91 – 92, 98, 101, 104, 165 – 66, 168 – 69 hermeneutics, 122, 145, 147, 150 heterogeneity, 65, 116, 189, 191 – 92, 194 – 95, 217, 227, 237 high(est), 62, 82, 98, 168 – 69 historicism, 186 – 87, 202, 230, 232 history, 20, 32, 40, 52 – 53, 61, 66, 120, 122, 158, 164, 202, 213; end of, 7; of ideas, 211 Hitler, Adolf, 161 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 8 – 11, 13, 106, 108 – 9, 236, 301, 303 – 5 Holderlin, Friedrich, 158, 161, 163, 166; “Homecoming/To the Kindred Ones,” 152; Patmos, 163 home(less), 58, 80, 92, 160, 162, 164, 167 homogeneity, 189, 194 – 95, 237 honor, 88 – 89, 91, 169 hope, 58, 164, 166, 168 horizontal, 168; transcendence, 24, 27, 75 – 76, 107, 109

how, 138, 142 – 45, 146, 148, 154 human: condition, 3, 5 – 6, 13, 17, 22 – 23, 27, 205, 272; existence, 152; greatness, 269 – 71, 273; rights, 15 humanity, 76, 86, 88 – 89, 92, 94, 99 – 102, 104, 106, 109, 110, 153, 157 – 58, 166 – 67, 201, 285, 308, 311, 314; nature of, 312 human nature, 31, 36, 39, 41, 43 – 47, 52 – 53, 59, 62, 118, 120, 133, 138, 192, 287, 290 Hume, David, 8 humility, 93 – 94 Husserl, 116 – 21, 137, 138, 139, 146 – 48, 148, 179 – 80, 191, 239 ideal(ism), 35, 40, 42 – 43, 50, 58, 106, 107, 109 – 10 ideas, 128, 163 idle talk, 123 – 24, 126, 134 – 35 imitatio Christi, 211 immanent, 58 immoderation, 152 incarnation, 7 – 8, 47 individual(ity), 3, 12, 16, 106, 108 – 9, 116, 145, 151 – 52, 166, 169, 202, 217, 225, 256, 284; freedom, 14; rights, 3 infinity, 42, 72 instrumental, 153 – 55, 157 – 60, 165 – 66, 174 intellect, 217, 225, 310 intellectual, 14, 19, 24, 36 – 39, 48 – 50, 53, 166, 175; bondage, 257 – 59; freedom, 14 intentionality, 137 – 38 interpretation, 147 – 48, 238 inward, 98, 100 Islam, 6, 7, 307, 311, 313; heteronomy of, 312; political history of, 308 joy, 151, 161 – 65 Judaism, 7, 10, 216 – 17, 307, 312; political history of, 308

Index

justice, 27, 59 – 60, 66 – 67, 73, 75, 86, 200, 214, 219 – 20, 223 – 24, 232 – 33, 235 – 37, 286, 287, 289; Christian, 290; liberal-democratic, 283; and nobility, 234, 238, 249; theory of, 284, 285, 286, 288 Kant, Immanuel, 79, 110, 117, 118, 286, 304, 311 kingdom of God, 98 – 99 Kisiel, Theodore, 116 – 20 knowledge: of ends, 218; of ignorance, 204, 207, 232; quest for, 206 – 7 Kojève, 201 – 4, 207 – 213 Kolnai, Aurel, 280 Lask, Emil, 117 Laski, Harold, 276 law, 2, 48, 66, 92 – 95, 99, 103, 107, 114, 307, 310 – 13; natural, 103 The Law of God, 307, 311 Law of Grace, 312 Laws, 308 leap, 116 – 18, 120, 129, 148, 150 – 52 legislation, 27; in aristocracy, 260; in democracy, 254, 257, 260, 274 leisure, 130, 200 liberalism, 10, 283, 284, 309; democracy, 181. See also democracy: liberal liberty, 36, 56, 64, 88, 104, 108, 110, 152, 312 life, 119 – 20, 152 Lilla, Mark, 6 – 11, 14 Linker, Damon, 29 Locke, John, 8, 106, 108 logos, 143 – 44, 172 love, 4 – 5, 83, 99 – 100, 103 Luther, Martin, 54, 96 – 98, 100 – 101, 304; Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, 97; On Secular Authority, 98; priesthood of all believers, 97 Machiavelli, 1, 104 – 7, 114, 211, 217 – 19, 221, 245, 305

323

Mahoney, Daniel, 280 Maimonides, 222 majoritarian, 52, 65 man, 42, 47, 84, 156 – 57 Manent, Pierre, 51 – 52, 72, 112, 114, 241 Mansfield, Harvey, 105 Marsilius of Padua, 1, 314 Marx, Karl, 18, 63, 202 material, 8, 34, 36, 38–40, 42–43, 50–51, 58, 61, 86–87, 89, 91–93, 99–102, 104, 106–7, 109–10, 114, 165 mathematical, 125, 130, 139 – 40, 142, 149 – 51 matter, 34, 38 – 39, 137 mediation, 46, 50, 83, 89 – 91 medieval period, 309, 311 – 12 Meier, Heinrich, 251 metempsychosis, 257 Middle Ages, 93, 95 – 96, 98, 100 – 101, 309 – 10 Mill, John Stuart, 299 Miller, Perry, 101 moderation, 22, 60, 80, 165, 188, 190 modern(ity), 9, 20 – 22, 31, 34, 37, 39, 43, 46, 54, 58, 64 – 67, 73, 76, 93, 98, 104, 106 – 8, 114, 151, 153, 156, 165 – 66, 169, 212, 218, 222, 228, 240, 300 – 307, 309 – 10, 312; and Christianity, 313; democracy, 255; naturalism, 179; relationship with law, 310; secular, 301; transcendence, 115 Mohammed, 308 monarchy, 48, 54, 56, 67 monotheism, 51, 166 monotheistic progressivism, 268 mood, 146 – 47, 150 – 51 moral: analogy, 24 – 26, 31 – 34, 39, 51 – 52, 55, 57 – 59, 62 – 63, 65 – 66, 76, 90 – 92, 98, 104 – 5, 107, 110, 184 – 85; strength, 80 – 81 morality, 88, 106, 155, 165, 213 – 14, 219, 224 – 28, 284, 285, 286; Slave vs. Master, 212; universal, 182

324

Index

natural/nature, 116, 118, 122–24, 129–30, 141 natural attitude, 108 – 19, 137, 139 – 41 natural right, 182, 184, 211, 228; and human nature, 192; natural law, 36, 73; school of classic, 192. See also morality, universal naturalism, 179, 293 naturalistic science, 179 nature, 17, 25, 33, 41 – 42, 45, 47, 50, 53, 65 – 67, 82 – 83, 85, 90, 92, 94, 96 – 97, 104, 109, 149 – 50, 155 – 56, 158, 162, 165, 179, 193 – 94, 218, 285, 304 – 5, 311; reason as conquest of, 182; state of, 13 Nazi, 161, 167 necessity, 2, 16, 75, 84, 93, 99, 104 – 6, 114, 117, 124, 133 neo-Thomists, 211 “New Law of Grace,” 312 New Testament, 95 Nietzsche, 14, 18, 69, 92, 180 – 83, 161, 222, 226, 245 nihilism, 20, 21, 24, 25, 31, 57, 116, 118 – 20, 164 – 65, 180 – 83, 222, 303, 307 nobility, 25 – 26, 33, 47, 56, 63, 66, 75 – 76, 84 – 87, 110, 184, 187, 195, 222 – 23, 225 – 26, 236 – 37, 239, 248; vs. baseness, 182, 187, 212 – 13, 219; of good, 313 noble, 66 – 67, 231, 237, 287, 288, 289; and base, 232 – 33, 240; and beautiful, 236 nominalism, 301, 303 – 7, 311 nomocracy, 308 non-partisan, 314 normative political theory, 283 obedience, 214, 216, 313 objectivity, 34 Ockham, William of, 97 ontology, 119, 135 – 36, 144, 147 – 48, 304 – 6. See also pre-ontology ontic, 147 – 48

On Tyranny, 201 opinion, 1 – 3, 21, 82, 123 – 24, 133, 135, 193, 214 – 16, 286; right, 81 order of the soul, 214 ordinary and extraordinary, 167 – 69 other(ness), 76, 92 pagan, 46, 75, 94, 104, 128 Pangle, Thomas, 229 – 52 pantheism, 7, 12, 50 – 51 Papacy, 309 – 11; absolutism of, 310 Papal Revolution, 309 partisanship, 11, 59, 66, 190, 200, 254, 288 Paul, St., 77, 96; letter to the Romans, 96 peace, 89, 95, 108, 114 perfection, 41 – 43, 66, 92, 110; standard of, 188 personality in history: insight into, 313 phenomenology, 116 – 17, 119 – 21, 136 – 39, 142 – 43, 146 – 47, 151, 179, 293 philosopher, 4, 21, 88, 92, 110, 163, 167; king, 60; otherness and superiority of, 209 – 10; relationship with citizen, 188 – 89, 192 – 93; Straussian, 209 – 10, 215 philosophy, 21, 23, 54, 57, 62, 65–66, 83, 87, 91–93, 115, 118–19, 122, 125, 135–36, 153, 161; calling of, 200; certainty of, 203; definition of, 192; Greek, 214, 308; the other, 238; political, 180, 185–86, 190–95, 204–5, 209, 220–21, 239, 248, 294, 300, 312; political responsibility of, 290; and politics, 201, 203; and religion, 214–17; role of friendship within, 204; role of humanity within, 203; role of solutions within, 204; ruling idea of, 209; Strauss’s “idea of,” 209; study of authority, 191; theory vs. practice, 185, 193, 223–24, 227, 253–54, 273, 313–14; universality of, 203. See also classical political philosophy

Index

phronesis, 124, 126 – 29, 132 – 33 physiocrates, 36 physis, 155, 160 piety, 154, 160 Plato, 4, 14, 19, 21, 24 – 25, 60, 62, 76 – 77, 90, 104, 122 – 23, 125 – 26, 131, 135, 159, 162, 188, 195, 200 – 201, 203, 211, 221, 228, 251, 308; Republic, 4; Sophist, 120, 122 Platonism, 87 – 90, 92, 101, 121, 165, 188, 211, 272 pleasure, 81 – 85, 128 poetry, 34, 39 – 43, 49, 51, 63 – 64, 135 – 36, 160, 161 – 62, 164 – 68 poiesis, 127, 155 – 56, 160 political, 5, 44, 46 – 47, 50, 52, 54, 61 – 63, 66, 78, 83 – 85, 88, 90 – 94, 97, 99 – 101, 103, 110, 117 – 18, 133, 135 – 36, 145, 155, 160 – 61, 164 – 66; calling, 102; order, 102 – 3; and religion, 256 – 58, 260 – 61; science, 33, 105; theology, 7, 8, 307 political philosophy, 21, 22, 57, 65, 87, 92, 94, 104, 107, 180, 185 – 86, 204 – 5, 209, 220 – 21, 239, 248, 294, 300, 312; conditions of, 237; responsibility, 167. See also classical political philosophy the Pope, 95, 96 porphyry, 88 possibility, 75 – 76, 82, 115, 122, 142, 145, 150, 168 postmodernism, 218, 220, 247, 291 postmodernity, 4, 14, 32, 20 – 22, 27, 85, 218, 220 power, 41, 42, 44, 47, 52, 104, 151 practical(ity), 4 – 5, 12, 16 – 17, 24 – 25, 119, 126, 134, 165; reason, 2, 4, 43, 65, 66, 76 – 77, 82, 85; religious, 290; wisdom, 86 pragmatism, 58 praxis, 130 – 32, 134 prejudice, 1 – 2, 22, 35, 46, 125, 146, 153 pre-ontology, 291 – 92, 300

325

presence, 126, 136 pride, 40, 75 – 76, 88 – 89, 94 priest, 47, 97 – 99, 130, 135 prince, 104 – 6 progress(ive), 11, 14, 31, 33 – 34, 42 – 43, 45, 48 – 49, 54 – 55, 56, 59, 64 – 65, 72 – 73, 109, 165, 169 promise, 109 present to hand. See Heidegger propaganda, 68, 211 protestant, 76, 94, 96, 107 Providence, 27, 32, 59, 101, 105, 272 prudence, modern, 93, 314 Puritanism, 38, 262 – 67 purity, 96, 103 purpose, 1–2, 5, 16–17, 92–93, 95, 98–99, 108–9, 142, 154–55, 157–58, 175 rationalism, 1, 4, 11, 14 – 15, 17 – 18, 20, 23, 25, 56, 61, 64, 73, 104, 107, 110, 164, 218, 220, 229, 304, 306; classical political, 310; modern, 313 – 14 Rawls, John, 6, 283, 284 – 89, 307 ready to hand. See Heidegger realism, 106 reason, 1 – 4, 10 – 11, 13 – 14, 16 – 17, 24 – 25, 35 – 36, 64 – 65, 75, 78, 79, 81, 92, 94, 101, 104, 108 – 9, 138, 145, 158 – 59, 175, 181, 183 – 84, 213, 218 – 19, 223, 227, 230, 277, 286, 300; authority of, 233; classical, 104, 314; modern, 165, 290; practical, 314; and rationalism, 245; responsibility of, 2, 4 – 5, 16, 18, 25, 32, 34, 60, 62 – 63, 65, 76, 87, 159, 160; and revelation, 231, 233 – 34, 251 – 52, 313; right, 79; rule of, 2, 4 – 5, 17, 24, 75 – 77, 81 – 82, 85, 87, 90, 94, 104, 107 – 8, 181; theoretical vs. practical, 181, 313 reduction, 118 – 19, 140 – 42, 146 – 47 reflective equilibrium, 285, 286, 287 regime, 188 – 90, 192 – 93; best, 103 relativism, 229 – 31

326

Index

religion, 1, 11, 15, 22, 33, 35, 44, 47, 50, 68, 95, 99, 101, 104, 107, 109, 117, 128, 135, 145; and politics, 256 – 58, 260 – 68, 277; in America, 255, 259; functionalist totalizing of, 297; of humanity, 110; in Old World vs. New World, 265; privatization of, 291; religious terror, 32, 52, 59; revealed religion, 215 – 16 “republic of letters,” 243 resolution, 106, 116, 132, 149 – 51, 165, 167 responsibility, 1, 3 – 5, 11, 16, 23, 34, 110, 152, 154, 155, 157 – 60, 175, 310, 314; reason, 116; reflexive, 60 – 61, 64 – 65 return to nature, 179 revealed religion, 215 – 16 revelation, 91 – 92, 107, 214, 216 – 18, 220 revolution, 11, 13, 27, 33, 35 – 37, 47, 48, 53, 55 – 56, 59 – 60, 201 – 2; French, 11 – 13, 34 – 36, 54, 59 – 60, 68 Revolutionaries, French, 314 righteousness, 96 – 97, 103 rights, 4, 12 – 13, 16, 93 – 94, 108 – 9; natural, 13, 26, 90, 92 Rome, 7, 46, 88, 96, 153; Roman Empire, 309 Rorty, Richard, 6, 15 Rosen, Stanley, 247 – 48 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 13, 94; The Social Contract, 94 rule, 85, 152; of law, 181; of minority, 202; of the wise, 201. See also reason, rule of Russia, 19 salvation, 88, 96 – 98, 158, 163 – 64, 166 – 67, 312 science, 3 – 4, 14 – 15, 34, 38, 49, 117 – 23, 125 – 28, 130, 135 – 37, 139 – 40, 145, 149 – 51, 156; of

association, 256, 274; mother science, 26; pure, 20 scholasticism, 97, 102 Seaton, Paul, 71 sectarianism, 204 secular, the, 295 – 96 secular: age, 293 – 94; liberalism, 10; modernity, 301; naturalism, 310 A Secular Age, 290 secularism, 6, 94, 96, 98 – 100, 102, 107, 109, 290 – 92, 298, 300, 307, 309, 311 – 12 secularization, 89, 100, 107 self-admiration, 208 – 9 self-government, 16, 255 self-interest, 256, 289, 314 self-knowledge, 17, 237; referential, 127 separation: of church and state, 94, 309; of powers, 12 Servitus, Michael, 102 slave(ry), 46 – 47 social contract, 109; state, 72 society, 33, 52 – 54 Socrates, 76 – 77, 91, 191 – 92, 194, 205, 217, 285; and philosophy, 200, 205, 217, 222 – 28, 231, 247, 286, 287 Solomon, 213 sophia, 128 – 29, 131, 133, 134 soul, 219, 221, 225, 235, 244; and city, 14, 16, 43, 54, 57, 59, 61 – 62, 75, 79, 80 – 81, 84, 87 – 88, 91 – 93, 95 – 96, 98, 100, 102, 104 – 6, 108, 110, 114, 217, 292, 294 – 95; mystery of the, 218; order of, 4, 214; of people, 258; sovereignty, 12 – 13, 76, 109 speech, 123 – 24 standing reserve, 156 – 58 Strauss, Leo, 4, 10, 21 – 23, 25 – 26, 32, 57, 65, 73, 76, 105 – 6, 110, 179 – 81, 200 – 30, 272, 295, 307, 310, 313; anti-liberal sympathies, 180; Straussians, 3, 10, 284, 285

Index

Taylor, Charles, 290 – 94, 296 – 300 technology, 14, 19 – 20, 25, 65, 116 152 – 60, 163 – 64, 200 – 201; problem of, 211, 219 – 20; “techne,” 127, 129, 134, 156 teleology, 78, 80, 98, 107, 212, 217 telos, 127, 130, 132, 154 – 55, 183 temporal, 97 – 99 terrorism, 15, 202; Terror of 1793 – 1794, 12 Theaetetus, 203 theio-practical, 307 theological-political predicament, 6, 93, 313 theology, 307 – 8 theory, 2, 4 – 5, 12, 16 – 17, 37, 42 – 43, 65 – 66, 85 – 86, 107, 110; of justice, 313; relationship to practice, 4, 6, 17 – 18, 20 – 26, 33, 35, 37 – 40, 57 – 58, 60, 62, 75, 77, 79, 84, 104 – 5, 107, 110, 115 – 16, 129, 136, 149 – 52, 160, 166, 181, 185, 223 – 24, 227, 238, 253 – 54, 273, 313 – 14 things themselves, the, 118, 142, 149 “thinker,” 165 – 68 thumos, 195 time, 126, 129, 152, 162, 172, 313 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 2, 5, 11 – 13, 20 – 27, 31 – 34, 36, 38, 41, 43 – 48, 52, 55 – 56, 59, 63 – 65, 76, 78, 115, 164 – 66, 194, 253 – 81, 290, 295, 299, 302, 314. See also Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; Democracy in America toleration, 102 totalitarianism, 8, 11, 19 – 20 tradition, traditional, 35 – 36, 51, 58, 60, 64, 124, 132, 134 – 35, 140, 145, 153 – 54, 157, 165 – 66, 168 – 69, 314 transcendence, 5, 7 – 8, 13, 25, 43, 50, 57, 58 – 59, 63, 65, 72, 75 – 76, 92 – 93, 100, 103 – 4, 107, 110, 137 – 38, 145, 150, 165 – 66, 209, 216 – 18, 220, 222 – 23, 226, 237 – 39, 247, 251 – 52,

327

271, 279, 284, 290, 295, 300, 302; absolute, 294; language of, 297; paradoxes of, 25, 108; problem of, 296; vertical and horizontal, 283, 284, 288, 290, 311, 314 Trinity, 7 – 8 truth, 3, 34, 52, 57, 61, 64, 77, 115, 120, 123 – 26, 133, 149, 156, 159, 166, 193, 203 – 4, 208 – 9, 218, 222, 228, 230 – 31, 241, 243 – 45, 286, 312; love of, 14 “Two Swords” metaphor, 7 tyranny, 201 – 2, 310; alternatives to, 201 – 2; of the majority, 51, 64; modern, 201 – 2; technological, 201 – 2 unity, 50, 94 Unum Sanctum, 95 utilitarianism, 286, 311 vertical, 168; transcendence, 24 – 27 Virgil, 75 – 76, 107 – 8, 240 virtue, 4, 34, 51, 78, 82, 88 – 92, 97, 102, 104, 192 – 95, 200, 206, 220, 223, 229, 235, 238, 249, 272, 285; moral, 77 – 81, 86, 207, 222; and wisdom, 236 violence, 152 Voegelin, Eric, 211 Voltaire, 35 – 36 war, 99; Emerging Semester, 116, 118 Weber, Max, 70, 233 Weinberger, Jerry, 175 weltanschauungphilosophie, 179 – 80 West, 14, 27, 47, 55, 161, 297; modern, 294 – 96; pacifism in, 183 Western civilization, 164 – 65, 181, 213 whole, 2, 10, 14, 61 – 62, 77 – 78, 81, 167; situation of the, 185 – 87, 189 – 90, 192, 194 – 95, 216, 219, 221, 224 – 27, 240, 244, 247, 303 will, the, 17, 311

328

Index

Winthrop, Delba, 284, 287 – 290 wisdom, 82, 204, 209, 222 – 23, 226, 232, 235, 314; practical, 80; quest for, 209; virtue and, 234 women, 256; in America, 267 wonder, 60 – 61 world, 76, 92, 94, 96, 98, 101, 104, 105, 117 – 20, 123, 125, 135 – 38, 141, 147 – 48, 150 – 51, 157, 160

works, 96 – 97 Xenophon, 204, 208 zeteticism, 206 – 7, 222, 228, 236, 239 Zetterbaum, 279, 281 Zuckert, Catherine and Michael, 221 – 229, 246 – 48, 277

About the Author

Ralph C. Hancock is professor of political science at Brigham Young University and president of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs, an independent educational foundation. His Calvin and the Foundations of Modern Politics will appear soon in a new edition from Saint Augustine’s Press. He has edited and contributed to a number of volumes, including, from Rowman & Littlefield, America, the West, and Liberal Education and (with Gary Lambert) The Legacy of the French Revolution. Professor Hancock has also published many articles, reviews, and translations (from French) in political philosophy and related fields, and has translated three books, including Philippe Bénéton’s, Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement and, with his son Nathaniel Hancock, Alain Besançon’s A Century of Horrors: On Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah. He is also a contributing editor for the quarterly Perspectives on Political Science and an editor at the online scholarly journal SquareTwo.org, which addresses public affairs for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Ralph and his wife, Julie, are parents of five children and will soon be grandparents of nine.

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