Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

 

“Ethics is inescapable” because human beings “find it impossible to prevent ourselves inwardly classifying actions as right or wrong,” no matter how hard some of us may try. This admitted, problems remain in “understanding the nature and origin” of ethical standards. Objective or subjective? Natural or conventional? Universal or ‘relative’ (to individuals, families, civil societies, regimes)? 

Singer rejects God as the origin of ethical standards. If I say murder is wrong “only because God” said it is, the “God might just as easily have said: ‘Thou shalt kill.'” And if He did, “Would killing then have been right?” If you concur, that “makes morality too arbitrary; but to deny that it would have been right is to assume that there are standards of right and wrong independent of God’s will.” And if you say God is good, I reply that this “implies a standard of goodness that is independent of God’s decision.” Ah, but not so fast, Professor Singer. If one says God is good, and God is God—that is, the ultimate cause of all things, beyond human conventions, human nature and the whole of His creation—then His command is good. His will issues from His goodness and His goodness inheres in His being. Another way of putting this is to observe that every set of ethics has some source of what ‘the good’ is. It might be God, nature, ‘history,’ custom, but whatever it is, it is. If God is God, then if He’d said ‘Thou shalt kill,’ that would indeed have made it right. Indeed, He did indeed sentence all human beings to death.

But Singer wants to philosophize about ethics, to address ethical questions with reasonings ‘unaided’ by divine revelation, not to engage seriously in theology. More specifically, he wants to philosophize about the ethical claims made by the entomologist E. O. Wilson on behalf of ‘sociobiology,’ a subsection of biology that attempts to show the biological bases of human societies, in contradiction to the claim that human societies are entirely conventional. Against this, Singer proposes a rationalist ethics founded on historicist premises. His enterprise overlaps with Wilson’s insofar as both endorse evolutionism, the principal means of ‘historicizing’ nature. In order to do that, he needs (so to speak) to clear God and His revelation out of the way, however implausibly. So, then, what will his rationalist ethics be, and how will it answer the challenge of a biologist who denies that reason amounts to much when it comes to ethics?

Wilson rejects social contract theory, which holds that “our rules of right and wrong sprang from some distant Foundation Day on which previously independent rational human beings came together to hammer out a basis for setting up the first human society.” Supposedly, “we now know that we have lived in groups longer than we have been rational human beings.” This assumes that we were not social and rational at the same time, but Singer is willing to walk with Wilson this far, presumably on the further assumption that ‘we’ began as sub-rational but social hominids. (If ‘we’ began that way, then ‘we’ were not ‘us,’ yet, not real human beings, but again let that pass.)

“So what does sociobiology offer us in place of the historical myth of the social contract?” Since sociobiology accepts the survival of the fittest as the driving force of evolution, it must explain certain forms of social behavior that have endured and even advanced over time as fitter than others. The most obvious problem is altruism. Genes are passed from two individuals to one; only “if a gene leads individuals,” not groups or the species as a whole, “to have some feature which enhances their prospect of surviving and producing, that gene will itself survive into the next generation.” Would this not make individuals with ‘selfish’ genes much more likely to survive than individuals with unselfish, altruistic, especially self-sacrificing genes? (Not necessarily, one might think, inasmuch as heroes who survive their battles might be more attractive mates than cowards who survive those battles, but neither Wilson nor Singer takes that line.)

Sociobiologists explain altruism in natural-selection terms by examining kin altruism and reciprocal altruism. Kin altruism is seen in the fact that parents rate the protection and flourishing of their children higher than the protection and flourishing of other people’s children. (No doubt professors Wilson and Singer have seen this in the parents of their students.) Kin altruism is limited to the love of one’s own. A “genetically based tendency to help one’s relatives” makes evolutionary sense if parental self-sacrifice, and a lesser but still noticeable degree of self-sacrifice on behalf of more distant relatives, protects more individuals than the family loses as a result of self-sacrificial protective behavior. This doesn’t mean that kin altruism is rational or even intentional, only that animals “act roughly as if they were aware of these relationships.” 

Reciprocal altruism, too, may well have evolutionary benefits. We see it in apes, who groom one another, relieving not only kin but members of their small societies of parasites. This gives an advantage to a group that engages in reciprocal grooming “over other groups who do not have any way of ridding themselves of parasites.” In periods of extraordinary stress on all the groups, the healthier and stronger group will more likely survive and prosper. Admittedly, “a group would have to keep itself distinct from other groups for group altruism to work”; indeed, it “would work best when coupled with a degree of hostility to outsiders,” which is exactly what we see in many kinds of social animals. 

Why does any of this matter ethically? For starters, biological evidence shows that Hobbes was wrong about the state of nature as simply a condition of the war of all against all. Human social nature derives from pre-human ancestors. So does logos, or at least the potential for it; apes can learn words in sign language, and dogs can reason (the latter claim awaits a definition of ‘reason’). Although anthropologists correctly observe that ethical codes vary widely from one human society to the next, sociobiologists rejoin that “there are common elements underlying this diversity.” Kinship altruism in the form of mothers caring for children and fathers supporting and protecting families are universal, and attempts to abolish the family, Marxist or other, have failed. Such behavior means that human beings “are led by bonds of natural affection to do what would otherwise fall on the community itself and either would not be done at all or would require labor unmotivated by natural impulses”—an “expensive and impersonal bureaucracy,” in the instance of the modern state. And “the bond of reciprocity is almost as universal” among human beings as the kinship bond, also for reasons evolution can explain. I trust those who help me, and those who help me trust me if I reciprocate; such bonds strengthen the society in which we live, giving it an advantage over any society that fails to establish such bonds. Individuals who violate the bond of mutual trust and (in speaking, reasoning humans) “the concept of fairness” or justice that arises from it will incur revenge, and “personal resentment becomes moral indignation when it is shared by other members of a group and brought under a general principle.” Tribal blood feuds give way to impartial judicature—the theme of a Greek tragedy or two. And logos not only enables human beings to judge impartially but to honor and dishonor their fellows. “If I can talk…I can tell everyone else in the group what sort of person you are.” 

Some of this isn’t altruism but “enlightened self-interest.” But some of it really is altruistic, “behavior which benefits others at some material cost to oneself” and “motivated by the desire to benefit others.” Still, “if one is more likely to be selected as a partner if one has genuine concern for others”—the ‘heroism’ example mentioned earlier, but not only heroism—then “there is an evolutionary advantage in having genuine concern for others,” although of course human beings will still need to separate false altruists from true, a task their ability to speak and to reason will sharpen on both sides of the ethical divide. 

Finally, altruism in families and in social groups can rise to the level of political societies. “The group bias of our ethics in respect to loyalty to the group as a whole shows itself in the high praise we give to patriotism.” Some, including Diogenes the Cynic and some of the Stoics deprecate patriotism as “group selfishness,” avowing loyalty to “the world community.” “Yet patriotism has proved difficult to dislodge from its high place among the conventionally accepted virtues,” which may or may not (sociobiologists allow) mean it has a biological basis. 

Singer cautions that “no ethical conclusions flow from these speculations” about “the origins of human ethics.” ‘Universal’ doesn’t mean ‘good’ and biological fact does not justify itself. There are many biological facts, many ills that flesh is heir to, that we seek to remediate or eliminate. He turns to an examination of Wilson’s claim that “sociobiological theories have great significance for ethics.” 

Wilson argues that human self-knowledge “is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain.” Philosophers in fact “consult” their own emotions when they “wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.” In Singer’s paraphrase, “only by interpreting the activity of the emotive centers as a biological adaptation can the meaning of the [ethical] canons be deciphered,” according to sociobiologists. These standards do change as human societies change—a family hut calls for different behaviors than an urban apartment complex—and thus “no single set of moral standards is applicable either to all human populations” or even “to all the different age and sex groups within each population.” Wilson derives three moral conclusions from this mixture of biology and varying social circumstances: the natural law teaching about sexual behavior is wrong because reproduction isn’t “the primary role of sexual activity” and thus homosexuality and the use of contraceptives are licit; attempt to reform behaviors that are really natural (families, for example) will come at the cost of heavy regulation and cost; and a future sociobiologically-based ethics will promote the survival of the species by the preservation of human genes, diversity of the gene pool to avoid the ill effects of inbreeding, and promotion of the universal human rights, which supports the group membership human survival requires. Sociobiology can assist in the achievement of these ruling principles and practices by advancing “new knowledge about the consequences of our actions” (especially their evolutionary consequences), by undermining ethical beliefs that are unnatural, and possibly by “provid[ing] us with a new set of ethical premises or a reinterpretation of old ethical premises” that will replace evolutionarily harmful prejudices.

Singer demurs. “Philosophers working in ethics take little notice of genetics or evolutionary theory,” and rightly so, inasmuch as “the important philosophical questions—like ‘What is good?’—have to be answered before we can use information about the consequences of our actions in deciding what we ought to do.” “Information about the consequences of our actions does not tell us which consequences to value.” Is the human good utility? Liberty? Happiness? Or is Kant right in holding that morality has nothing to do with consequences at all? As an ethical ‘consequentialist’ himself, Singer rejects Kant’s categorical imperative and admits the need for gathering “the best information available” when one considers the means to achieve moral ends. But that doesn’t justify sociobiology’s “dramatic claims about explaining ethics ‘at all depths’ or fashioning a biology of ethics which will do away with the need for ethical philosophers.” (Perish that thought.) 

If biology could discover a natural law undergirding ethics, that would have “an important effect” on philosophy. But “natural law systems of ethics are not widely held outside religious, and especially Roman Catholic circles,” and even if, say, homosexuality could be proved to be unnatural, “obviously there are many things, from curing diseases to using saccharin, that are unnatural but not therefore wrong.” Moreover, “far from justifying principles that are shown to be ‘natural,’ a biological explanation is often a way of debunking the lofty status of what seemed a self-evident moral law.” [1] Singer will return to the latter claim, which is based upon Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ but one might well linger on the slap at religion. Surely no philosopher could claim that ‘widely held’ claims somehow refute claims not widely held, simply because majority rule ought to prevail? Where would that leave ethical philosophers, whose direct influence on public opinion seems slight? 

Concerning the pretension that science might itself provide a new or substantially reformed set of ethical principles, Singer appeals to Hume’s critique of what he calls “the naturalistic fallacy,” the attempt to “defin[e] values in terms of facts.” I can’t “convince people that, say, the survival of the human gene pool is a cardinal value” unless I give them a reason for thinking that it is. Science can’t tell me that. “Facts, by themselves, do not provide us reasons for actions,” although they do “tell me what my options are.” “No science is ever going to discover ethical premises inherent in our biological nature, because ethical premises are not the kind of thing discovered by scientific investigation.” Such premises are chosen, not discovered. “I, and not my genes, am making the decision.” “The mistake made by sociobiologists who think that their explanation of ethics can tell us what we ought to do parallels that of anthropologists who thought that the diversity of morals between societies implies that people ought to follow the moral code of their own society” or, one might add, that no moral code has any basis other than in what anthropologists call ‘culture.’

If so, then on what basis do I choose? It is undoubtedly true that modern science, which describes nature as non-teleological, can find no ethical commands in nature. But even if it cannot find commands in nature might nature not still provide moral guidance? If philosophic inquiry into ethics seeks the good for human beings, would human nature not indicate that good, even as it would tell us what the good is for a dog or for a plant? That is, if I say, ‘Good dog!’ I might mean that the dog is following my command; I would be commanding the dog in a way that might or might be naturally good for the dog. But I might rather be saying that the dog is a good specimen of a dog—healthy, evidently contented under ordinary conditions. Whether the dog ‘wants’ to be healthy and contented is irrelevant to determining whether it is a good dog, although I suppose one might argue that a dog that sought illness and discontent would be one sick puppy. 

Singer makes a further argument about ethical choice itself. “Our ability to be a participant in a decision-making process, to reflect and to choose, is as much a fact about human nature as the effect of the limbic system on our emotions.” This does not imply that we “believe in a mysterious entity known as ‘I’ or ‘the self’ or ‘the will.'” Even if we had “a complete causal account of our behavior,” if “an observer could predict how we would choose,” we nonetheless “would be making genuine choices” because “the distinction between the standpoint of the observer and the standpoint of the participant is ineliminable.” That does not, however, authorize Heidegger and other ‘existentialist’ philosophers to claim that “our choice of ultimate values is simply a commitment, a ‘leap of faith,’ which is beyond any rational assessment, and thus ultimately arbitrary.” Otherwise, Heidegger’s leap of faith to Nazism would be no less justifiable than Sartre’s leap of faith when he resisted the Nazis or (one might well add) that Sartre’s leap of faith to socialist fellow-traveling with French Communism was as justifiable as some other existentialist’s leap of faith in opposing Communism. Leaps of faith might contradict one another, a point which brings the principle of noncontradiction, and therefore reasoning, into the picture. “Unless there is a rational component to ethics that we can use to defend at least one of our fundamental ethical principles, the free use of biological and cultural explanations would leave us in a state of deep moral subjectivism.” Whereas “Wilson’s statements about ethics leave him with no escape from ethical subjectivism, once the impossibility of deriving ethics from biology has been admitted,” it may be that ethical judgments do (might we say, ‘in fact’?) have “a rational component.” “The fact that we choose our ethical premises does not in itself imply that the choice is arbitrary.” 

Unfortunately, Singer does not define reason as thought guided by the principle of noncontradiction. Instead, he defines it as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences—a process exemplified by the way counting leads to arithmetic. Nature ‘counts,’ in the other sense of the word: “Ethics starts with social animals prompted by their genes to help, and to refrain from injuring, selected other animals. On this base we must now superimpose the capacity to reason.” Kin and reciprocal altruism, discovered to be natural in human beings, becomes refined as language develops and “consciousness” strengthens and is refined. This brings “tremendous advantages in the evolutionary competition for survival” but it also, and crucially, brings with it “something which has not existed, so far as we can tell in any non-human society: the transformation of our evolved, genetically-based social practices into a system of rules and precepts guiding our conduct toward one another, supported by widely shared judgments of approval for those who do as the rules and precepts require, and disapproval for those who do not”—a “system of ethics or morality,” a standard “acceptable to the group as a whole.” Singer carefully refrains from saying that this acceptance itself makes the system right. Indeed, there can be “oppressive customs.” The “readiness with which we bring particular events under a general rule may be the most important difference between human and animal nature.” This suggests that reason, like emotions, is natural to human beings, and it further suggests, although Singer doesn’t say so, that there is such a thing as natural right, even if there is no natural law in the sense of a cosmic order from which human beings ought to take their ethical bearings. 

Socrates shows how ethical reasoning can progress beyond custom. “By the standards of customary morality Socrates was corrupting the youth.” Guilty as charged. “Customary morality cannot stand the scrutiny of rational inquiry which questions the customary standards themselves,” assuming that the customary standards are self-contradictory. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates says, because such a life coherently seeks the good only by accident, and therefore seldom finds or even seeks coherence. “Few of us examine our lives in the Socratic manner.” Socratic questioning requires “a leap into the unknown,” but—and here it differs from existentialism—ever-reasoning Socrates looks before he leaps. This is why Singer defines reason as a set of thoughts leading to unpredictable consequences. He wants to preserve the freedom that choice implies, to allow choice to remain invulnerable to prediction, while also keeping it reasonable. Here is where a historicist or quasi-historicist element enters into his theory. “Reasoning is inherently expansionist” in the sense that “it seeks universal application,” gaining territory, so to speak, from unexamined moral customs from one generation to the next, so long as there is no substantial interruption in the process of transition between generations. Reasoning, then, is ‘evolutionary’ in its own way, whether or not it follows the path of Hegelian dialectic. “Once the limits [of conventional beliefs] become the subject of rational inquiry and are found wanting, custom has to retreat and reasoning can operate within broader bounds, which then in turn will eventually be questioned.” This amounts to a more ambitious form of Socratism, an earnest Socratism, or a more modest form of Hegelianism, one that does not claim to have arrived at the end of ethical reasoning. 

It is reminiscent also of Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. [2] “We can progress toward rational settlement of disputes over ethics by making the element of disinterestedness inherent in the idea of justifying one’s conduct to society as a whole, and extending this into the principle that to be ethical, a decision must give equal weight to the interests of all affected by it,” “disregard[ing] my knowledge of whether I gain or lose by the action I am contemplating.” In this formulation, the problem lies in “interests.” To count ethically, must they not be exclusively good interests—begging the question of natural right, once again.

Singer emphasizes the social character of his ethical system, resisting the notion that “values” (as he calls them, deciding the question in advance) have “objective” standing, by which he means “something in the universe, existing entirely independently of us and of our aims, desires, and interests, which provides us with reasons for acting in certain ways”—whether divine or natural. As to God, He exists independently, all right, but according to the Bible has linked Himself to us first by the act of creation and then by his continued love for us, seen in His care for our well-being. As to nature, if ethical reasoning is part of human nature, and human nature part of nature as a whole, then there must be ethics “built into the very nature of things,” the things that include human beings, that produced human beings, that continue to support human beings (at least for now). Singer is right to say that “values” are “inherently practical,” but the fact that practical reasoning differs from theoretical reasoning does not preclude any connection between the discoveries of practical reasoning and the discoveries of theoretical reasoning. The theoretical discovery of human sociality, for example, evidently “requires me to take a perspective from which my own interests count no more, simply because they are my own, than the similar interests of others.” The nature of things other than human beings would presumably continue to exist if human beings perished, but it would be a somewhat different nature. Would that nature not continue to have the potential to produce human beings, if the right ‘local’ conditions prevailed? This is what Leo Strauss may mean when he writes that the earth provides a “home” for man.

Singer contents himself by adjuring us to “cling to the simpler idea that ethics evolved out of our social instincts and our capacity to reason,” and that the result of that evolution is “the principle of equal consideration of interests,” which depends upon “nothing but the fact that we have interests, and the fact that we are rational enough to take a broader point of view from which our own interests are no more important than the interests of others.” This indicates the influence of democracy or egalitarianism on Singer’s thought, suggesting that his thought inclines in the direction of the regime in which he has lived. Singer recognizes that his thought is democratic, while insisting that democracy is an innate property of reason itself, that “the feeling of need for consistency” or avoidance of self-contradiction universalizes conduct, if left to work itself out unimpeded by force or fraud. 

“Where does this process end?” he quite reasonably asks. It ends not only with liberty and equality but fraternity. The French revolutionaries were right. And so, for example, “there can be no brotherhood when some nations indulge in previously unheard-of luxuries, while others struggle to stave off famine,” or if the more complex animals are not seen to have rights (“from an impartial point of view, the pleasures and pains of non-human animals are no less significant because the animals are not members of the species Homo sapiens“). To claim otherwise is to commit the sin of ‘speciesism.’ This consideration does not extend to plants, however, as they lack sentience; “there is nothing we can do that matters to them.” In his own egalitarian way, Singer respects the Aristotelian definition of distributive justice: equal things to equals. We may kill and eat oysters and insects, but not cows or deer, which are our equals when it comes to feeling, and fearing, pain. The universalizing process of rational thought ends with rationally perceived distinctions among beings.

Hume would say that such concerns are impotent, that reason is “the slave of the passions.” Speciesism or no speciesism, I am unlikely to forgo filet mignon, topped with mushrooms, my taste clarified by sips of a good Cabernet and topped off with a slice of chocolate mousse cake. Singer prudently takes on a lesser challenge: “the growth of modern contraceptive techniques is a splendid example of the use of reason to overcome the normal consequences of our evolved behavior,” showing “that reason can master our genes.” That is, “there is no reason to believe that we always do what is in our own interest,” defined as satisfying our emotions. “We can therefore go on to consider with an open mind the possibility of rational based altruism,” although the use of contraceptives may not always be the best example of that. “Once reason is admitted to have a role to play in ethics, however, there is nothing at all surprising in the fact that, despite immense cultural differences, outstanding thinkers in different periods and places should extrapolate beyond more limited forms of altruism to what is essentially the same fundamental principle of an impartial ethic.” Doing unto others what you would have others do unto you: God and His revelation are looking better and better.

How, then, do we explain the fact that so many of us act as if the reasons for taking “an objective point of view” do not apply to them? Because Hume wasn’t entirely wrong to say reason is the slave of the passions. “Alone and unaided, reason cannot give rise to action,” as “there must be some desire, some want or aversion, some pro or con feeling with which reason can combine to generate an action.” That might lead to Socrates’ proposed alliance between logos and thumos, ruling the appetites and thereby achieving justice within the soul and the city. But Singer takes the ‘modern’ stance; reason is the slave (Hume) or the scout (Hobbes) of the passions, “a tool for obtaining what one wants.” Nonetheless, “tools have a way of influencing the purpose for which they are used,” as seen in the automobile, invented for transportation from one place to another but also used for recreational driving and exploration. “In the case of ethical reasoning, we begin to reason impartially in order to justify our conduct to others, and then discover that we prefer to act in accordance with the conclusions of impartial reasoning.” There is human nature, but it evolves because we ‘feel better’ if we act consistently. (Well, unless we are Walt Whitman, untroubled by ‘cognitive dissonance,’ otherwise known as self-contradiction.) Socrates would tell Walt that his soul is wrongly ordered and insofar as wrongly ordered, unnatural. Singer cannot bring himself to say such a thing, only going so far as to suggest that Walt would feel better about himself if he gave logical self-examination a good try. Indeed, “the lives of those who have nothing to do but enjoy themselves are much less happy than we would expect them to be if human nature were suited to the unalloyed pursuit of personal pleasure…. Perhaps the boredom and loss of interest in life observable in many of those with no purposes beyond their own pleasure are the result of neglecting this aspect of our nature.” Perhaps so, perhaps so.

Singer concludes by giving sociobiology its due. “It enables us to see ethics as a mode of human reasoning which develops in a group context, building on more limited, biologically based forms of altruism”—evidently by deploying the equally natural human capacity to reason. “The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings,” and “the fact that our ethical judgments are not dictated to us by an external authority does not mean that any ethical judgment is as good as any other,” as we choose “what we are going to do,” even as “we do not choose the way the world is.” It then transpires that “emphasizing the rational element in ethical choice…narrows the gap between facts and values,” as “facts may be relevant” to ethical reasoning, even if they do not determine it. But of course even as Singer resists the thought, the fact of human nature does indeed turn out to be the basis of such reasonable choice.

Another Aristotelian notion occurs to him in the last chapter. What ought to be the ethical code not only of individuals but for human society? The ‘impartial spectator’ standard is important but too abstract to give the specific ethical guidance we need as individuals and as members of civil societies. At the same time, any guidance should remain cognizant of “the realities of human nature.” “Just as city life does not fit into the abstract rational patterns of town planners, so a code of ethics for human beings will not fit the abstract imperative of impartial reason,” as “we cannot pretend that human nature is so fluid that moral educators can make it flow wherever they wish.” On the other hand, although “human nature is not free-flowing…its course is not eternally fixed.” The impartial spectator needs allies among the emotions, and these should be “rules” or (in civil societies) laws designed to foster family bonds, to encourage reciprocity, and to discourage cheating. Such an “ethic of rules builds on our feelings for others as individuals rather than on an impersonal concern for all,” a concern which remains the standard but cannot be said to be self-enforcing. Such rules shore us up, especially when under stress. Singer quotes the American foreign-policy expert Chester Bowles: the Bay of Pigs fiasco showed “how far astray a man as brilliant and well intentioned as Kennedy can go who lacks a basic moral reference point.” “A social code of ethics needs moral rules for several reasons: to limit our obligations, to make them more personal, to educate the young, to reduce the need for intricate calculations of gains and losses, to control the temptation to bend ethical calculations in our own favor, and to build the commitment to truthfulness which is essential for communication.”

Singer also appreciates the opposite point about rules or laws: just as they helpfully stiffen our adherence to the abstract standard of right, so they can stiffen us too much. The well-known example Socrates mentions in the Republic is entirely valid. Lying is usually wrong, but if an enraged man demands to know where you keep your weapons, you’ll do well to mislead him. “The rules of ethics are not moral absolutes or unchallengeable intuitions” because “human nature and human life are too complex for that.” Here is where Singer should recall Aristotle’s emphasis on prudential reasoning as indispensable for ethics. Prudence or practical reason takes account of the circumstances of time and place. It may ‘tell’ us to violate a law but never the ‘spirit’ of the law, the purpose of the law as set down in observance of the abstract ethical standard or set of standards. 

In sum, “ethics is a morass, but a morass with a definite and explicable shape.” 

 

Notes

1. Singer adds that in addition to biology, historical study can also debunk “accepted ethical practices,” which may be as much “relics of our culture history” as “relics of our evolutionary history.”
2. Oddly, Singer associates the opposite principle to Smith—the principle of egoism, that everything should follow his self-interest. This confuses Smith’s theory of moral sentiments with his theory of economics and its attendant law of unintended (often good) consequences that result from motives that are anything but good, on Smith’s own terms as well as by Singer’s.

 

 

Daniel J. Mahoney: Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2022.

 

Mahoney begins by writing, “There is no more fundamental task that lies before us than a self-conscious effort to recover the meaning of politics, civilization, and the soul for this (or any other) time.” By politics he means what Aristotle means: ruling and being ruled in turn, made possible by speech and reasoning about “the advantageous and the just.” Although politics so understood does not reduce to morality, “it is an essentially moral enterprise.” Civilization is “that state of human flourishing where ordered liberty is tied to law and self-limitation, and where progress in the arts and sciences, and in economic productivity more broadly, is accompanied by a sober appreciation of human imperfection and the fragility of all human achievements.” Taken together, ordered liberty, law, and self-limitation amount to self-government, necessary given “the sempiternal drama of good and evil in every heart and soul, and even of the fragility of civilization itself.” As to the soul, neither metaphor nor poetic fiction, nor even (only) the self, that mode of self-awareness or self-consciousness introduced to us by Montaigne, convey its full meaning; the soul is the person within us, the one who “exercises the virtues, moral and intellectual, and that experiences remorse when we human beings act or choose poorly or event inexcusably,” expressions seen outwardly in our face and our speech when “we encounter other human beings in familial, social, and political settings.” “Inseparable from logos,” from speech and reason, it makes both political and philosophic life possible. Each soul forms a character over time, “endur[ing] as we physically age and endlessly metabolize.”

“Why do modern intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers take such pride and pleasure in explaining away their own powers of ratiocination?” As ‘personalists’ not ‘reductionists,’ Scruton and Manent have both resisted this tendency, which rests on the “dogma” that “the Good is absolutely unsupported in the nature of things.” Against that presupposition, they start with the world around us and the need for choiceworthy action that world imposes upon us—the necessity for choice, as Henry Kissinger puts it. Both thinkers agree that care of the soul is “the great imperative”; that to guard the soul’s capacity to govern itself one must (among other things) guard the capacity of one’s political community to govern itself against the forces of ‘globalism’; that this entails a concomitant need to “defend sound practice against bad theory”; that the philosophic thought needed to do that is neither immoral nor amoral; and that, finally, “the wisdom inherent in the Christian religion” remains relevant to the quest for both sound practice and accurate theorizing. 

They differ not so much in principle as in their emphases. “Scruton is more concerned with saving the residues of high culture and civilization and our inherited tradition; Manent with renewing the possibilities of human action and practical reason.” Accordingly, while Scruton titles one of his books Beauty, ranging widely and knowledgeably over the visual arts and (even more impressively) music, Manent titles one of his books Seeing Things Politically. Scruton reads Kant and Burke, Manent reads Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Tocqueville, and Leo Strauss. One is English, the other French (“in this case, an American,” Professor Mahoney, “will do the mediation”). To these distinctions, one should add that Scruton, who thought so seriously about the Cold War and the oppression of nations within the Soviet empire, usually addresses politics in terms of regimes, whereas Manent, who thinks more about the international, not to say imperial, bureaucracy called the European Union, usually addresses politics in terms of what he calls “political forms” or states, political communities as defined in terms of their size and degree of centralization—the small and centralized ancient polis, the large and sprawling ancient empire, the middle-sized and decentralized feudal state, the (usually) middle-sized and centralized modern state, and the federation, which under modern conditions has combined a degree of centralized ‘sovereignty’ with substantial self-government within its provinces. 

No mean personalist himself, Mahoney readily insists that this book is “no merely scholarly study,” as “these two men and thinkers have been very important to me in my own search for a true understanding of politics, civilization, and the soul.” The eminent literary scholar Hugh Kenner advised his students to go and “meet the great men of your time.” Although he never met Kenner, Mahoney has done just that. “I am blessed to count them among my friends.” This is indeed his most personal book, although all of his books have centered on persons, from de Gaulle to de Jouvenel. 

He introduces Scruton as a real Englishman, a man of oikosophia, of the “principled love of home,” albeit with an appreciation of “other peoples and civilizations.” (“I once commented to him that he cited de Gaulle far more than he mentioned or praised another candidate for conservative hero, Winston Churchill.”) He took the trouble not only to meet the Czech dissidents who established what they called their “parallel polis” under Communist rule, and not only to assist them, but to write a novel with the Dostoevskian title Notes from Underground, in which he “got to the heart of totalitarian mendacity” by getting to the hearts of the dissidents committed to living in the truth. Truth is finally what a genuine conservative intends to conserve, whether in his own soul or in his actions, whether individual, social, or political. 

The metaphysical side of Scruton’s conservatism consisted of “reject[ing] every form of materialistic and scientistic reductionism,” taking instead as “the center of his thought” the “life world, the world of concrete experiences where humans came to sight as persons.” Human beings do not present themselves, either to themselves or to one another, as mechanisms determined by physical matter and physical force. It takes some fairly elaborate argumentation to persuade oneself of any thoroughgoing materialism. Rather, at least initially we understand ourselves and others as free and responsible beings—if not “free of all natural and external limitations” nonetheless as incarnate persons. Not for Scruton the “philosophies of freedom” which attempt to liberate humanity from responsibility for themselves and for others. He “affirmed legitimate authority—moral, intellectual, and political—that is the other side of human freedom.” Throughout the circumstances of the Cold War and after the Soviet empire collapsed, he retained a Burkean suspicion for assertions of “human rights” abstracted from the concrete conditions of political life whereby such rights can be secured. This means that a philosopher doesn’t only think. He has his own regime, his own way of life, carrying “a duty to come to the defense of the home and starting point of all incarnate persons.” Mahoney doubts that Scruton’s esteem for freedom conceived in the spirit of Kantian ‘noumenalism’ added much to his own thought, remarking that “unlike Kant…for Scruton there is no absolute and impassable divide between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the metaphysical and the physical.” Scruton consistently held that “human beings are neither matter in motion, brains that are compelled to act independent of human agency, nor noumenal selves who need not respect the requirements of the world around them.” For him, what guides, but does not compel, the human soul is conscience, what he called “a light shining from the center” of each human being, the “‘I’ that does the knowing.”

Pierre Manent, Mahoney writes, “is not only an old and dear friend, but he is arguably the thinker who has had the greatest influence on my own intellectual itinerary.” As for Manent himself, he takes his orientation from Tocqueville and Pascal, coincidentally but aptly the philosophic guides of the late Peter Lawler, another among the trusted ‘friends of Mahoney.’ Add their mutual elective affinities for the thought of Raymond Aron, Leo Strauss, and Catholic political philosophy, and the Mahoney-Manent bond quickly became well established. 

Manent’s conversion to Catholicism had nothing to do with mysticism or emotionalism, but from the reasoned realization that Christianity, in his words, “knew the truth about man,” providing the best account of human nature and of nature tout court, to use a favorite Mahoneyan expression; Pascal really did understand himself, and the rest of us. To “the Christian proposition,” to reasoning about the human spirit, Manent soon added the “political reason,” the practical or prudential reason seen in the writings of Cicero and, under modern circumstances, Raymond Aron. Finally, Manent encountered Leo Strauss’s analysis of politics, political philosophy, and revealed religion, ‘Athens and Jerusalem,’ finding in Strauss not so much a guide as a dialogic partner along his own more Thomistic walk. Manent “sees himself as inside the triangle formed by politics, philosophy, and religion, refusing ‘complete devotion’ to any one of the poles,” motivated as he is by “fidelity to experience in all its amplitude”—a fidelity he shares with Scruton. He finds his own mediator between Athens and Jerusalem not only in Aquinas but Augustine, who offers a vision of “the unity of man, under the God-man Christ.” Christianity “can preserve separations,” against the modern “religion of humanity” which baptizes itself in the “indiscriminate egalitarianism” that makes that unity into a homogeneous blob, obliterating the discriminate affinities between the philosopher and the prophet, the Jewish man of Law and the Christian man of agape. Finally, Manent never despises modern philosophy and its science, including elements of its political science. Christians should resist the temptation Christianity seems to offer, the temptation to “despise the temporal,” as Charles Péguy phrased it—exactly the point of Machiavelli’s attack. But instead of succumbing to Machiavelli’s blandishments, and more in the manner of Strauss, Manent avails himself of “the pagan virtues—honor, courage, confidence in the human capacity to govern oneself in freedom—[which] have been distrusted by Christians who are tempted to see the natural order as already having been definitively transformed by grace” (or, it should be added, polluted by sin). If Christianity supplements itself with adequately defined and refined virtues that uphold political life it can meet the Machiavellian critique. “In Manent’s view, there is a ‘noble risk’ in accepting our liberal ‘temporal order'”—our inheritance from the more modern ‘Machiavellians,’ Locke and Montesquieu) “and bringing Christian conscience and classical wisdom to bear in humanizing and elevating it.” 

After all, the Bible itself reconciles piety and experience. It was a future king of Israel who wrote the Psalms. In them, “Manent finds ‘an experience of something radically different from all human experience but which does not prevent this experience from being lived and described in its whole truth, in its nakedness,'” an achievement Manent considers itself “an argument for the Bible’s ‘revealed character.'” The will of God does not eclipse the will of human beings; it sets loving limits upon it, in the manner of an Aristotelian king, who rules his people for their good, event self-sacrificially. It is not Christianity but the religion of humanity, with “its self-deification of man,” that threatens “republican liberty, with its confidence in man’s ability to govern himself,” by refusing to recognize the natural limits, the definition, of man as man. “The dialectic of magnanimity,” of the finite greatness of the human soul, with humility before the infinite greatness of God, “has marked the West from the beginning and continues to operate, however dimly, within our liberal dispensation.” “The liberal state allows human beings to govern themselves better than they were governed during the long Middle Ages, not to mention under the authoritarian corporatist states in Austria or Portugal upon which the Catholic Church looked with some favor in the year before World War II.” In that effort at self-government, “the Church has something to say about the nature and needs of human beings and ends and purposes of human freedom” guided by conscience. “Modern rights cannot…easily escape the demands or requirements of Christian conscience or the moral authority of heroes and saints.”

Which political form, as distinguished from regime, best enables human virtues scope to form and to act in the modern world? Manent recommends the nation-state, opposing the European project as an attempt to replace politics, ruling and being ruled, “with a non-negotiable règle—a rule-based society dominated by administrative or bureaucratic dictates—that always and everywhere have priority over the will of the people as expressed in democratic election or in referenda about the future of the European community.” Called ‘democratic,’ the European Union does have a kratos but elides the demos. The EU amounts to a pseudo-republic ruling a pseudo-state animated by a pseudo-religion, the Comtian “religion of humanity.” Manent “soberly warns his fellow Europeans that if they completely break the tissue of national time, of national belonging, these longings will take the form of illiberal separatist and religious movements that will be tempted to put ‘communion before democracy.'” Even more immediately, the religion of humanity’s combination of universalism with individual self-assertion, reinforced by the administrative state, weakens the nation-state, which has served as “the great mediator between the universal and the particular, the faraway and the local.” Thinking globally and acting locally cannot satisfy the political nature of human being, any more than a religion without God can satisfy the human need for reverence. Europeans of previous centuries had found themselves “torn by the conflicting claims and authority of the city, empire, and Church,” a quarrel about political forms that required them to make serious choices about “the human type that ought to inspire European life.” Should human beings imitate Christ’s way of life or the Roman way, and if the Roman way, Cato’s or Caesar’s? The principal attempts to resolve this quarrel were the Reformation and Machiavellianism. Mahoney intervenes to suggest that the quarrel itself arose for the reason Tocqueville proposed: that “democracy” or civil-social equality had issued from the Christian dispensation, gradually widening its influence to political and intellectual life. In any event, the question remains: How shall Europeans recover the political practices that best express their nature as political beings?

In the lifetimes of Scruton and Manent, the most radical European radicalization of democracy was attempted in France during the Évènements of 1968. Scruton identified its source in the Paris “nonsense machine,” which reproduced the less-than-thoughtful opinions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. At the time, Malraux classified the ideological passions of the moment as “Freudo-Marxism” and the Évènements themselves not only as an attack on the French republican regime but as a “crisis of civilization”; its longer-standing legacy may be seen in the “obscurantist mix” served up by such subsequent writers as Deleuze and Lacan. Scruton calls this the “culture of repudiation,” really an anti-culture which “transformed [thought] into an instrument of pure destruction” in an attempt “to destroy the remnants of the natural moral law and all authoritative institutions necessary to free and civilized life.” This “sophisticated nihilism”—which, among other things, lauded Mao Zedong’s “violent discourses during the murderous Cultural Revolution”—has been “lauded by academics and literati throughout the world.” [1]

Scruton was not alone in his principled opposition to the New Left. Several distinguished French intellectuals have concurred in his judgment. In his book The Elusive Revolution, Raymond Aron saw the danger to the universities in particular, as students and many of their teachers alike attempted to institutionalize “the new morality” along with “a liberty that has little place for robust non-relativist moral judgment.” Aron’s daughter, Dominique Schnapper, has continued both her father’s critique of this “moral anarchism and facile antinomianism” along with his call for renewed democratic citizenship within “a vigorous and self-respecting nation-state,” bringing “classical moderation to bear on modern liberty.” For his part, Philippe Bénéton addresses the theoretical dimension of the matter, arguing “that we have literally theorized ourselves out of good sense and human decency,” leaving ourselves in need of re-grounding morality in “the human world before us” instead of succumbing to doctrines of moral subjectivism. “The new morality masquerades as a project of emancipation even as it makes its adherents slaves of the passions and of a new, unforgiving intellectual conformism” of ‘political correctness,’ “what Pope Benedict XVI famously called ‘the dictatorship of relativism.'” Or, as Chantal Delsol observes, “we do not rationally establish the moral order,” nor do we establish it irrationally: “Instead, we participate in it.” But it is Manent who sees most clearly what Machiavelli could not foresee. Christianity may have de-politicized the West (although it is more accurate to say that it put politics within a new metaphysical framework). The de-Christianizing of the West that Machiavelli undertook has not finally yielded re-politicization. It has rather accelerated de-politicization, whether in the form of ‘totalitarian’ modern tyranny, the soft despotism of the administrative state, or the dictatorial practices of the ‘post-modern’ Left. Today, the New Left program already begins to weaken itself. Manent tellingly charges that “the French and European political and intellectual class, in its dominant form, will be satisfied with nothing less than ‘an empty world without nations or religions,'” finding itself not only helpless before the advances of Islam but applauding its increased presence in Europe as “a sign that Europeans are truly leaving behind a recognizably Christian world.” Yes, but for a far more rigorous religiosity that rather frowns upon sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. [2]

Scruton responds to this crisis of Western civilization with a good dose of Burke, “defend[ing] a regime of liberty that is conscious of its debts to a civilization that is not reducible to contract and consent alone”—especially, one might add, a ‘consent’ that means mere assent, not reasoned choice. For this defense, libertarianism or (as it calls itself) ‘classical liberalism’ (although far removed from Roman libertas) will not do. He warns, “Like much of the cultural Left, many on the Right have mistakenly come to identify politics with power and domination,” putting themselves “in danger of capitulating to one of” the counter-cultural New Left’s “most destructive philosophical presuppositions.” Against this, “Scruton sets out to recover an older and richer conception of liberty that owes much to conservativism properly understood,” the conservatism which understood “that government is natural to the human condition and reflects ‘extended loyalties’ that connect the living to the dead as well as to the yet to be born,” a set of institutions that can serve as “the indispensable vehicle for mutual commitment and public spirit among human beings who are accountable to each other”—accountable precisely for the enforcement of the abstract rights ‘we moderns’ so prize, rights held both by individual persons against the depredations of government and against one another against mutual depredations—choose one or the other. “In social and political life we are obliged to give an account of ourselves, even as government is obliged to give an account of its doings to citizens.” Nor does real conservatism neglect to guard the well-being of the poor, even as the poor must be held “accountable as citizens and moral agents.” It is this “mutual accountability”—the moral foundation of politics, of ruling and being ruled—which forms “the heart of civil society,” the meaning of what it is to be “civil.” Although Scruton emphasizes the secular dimension of the modern state more than Manent, he agrees that “we must combine a spirited defense of liberty with the spirit of love and forgiveness taught by Christ,” never reducing “our civilization to the defense of a formless liberty that sits complacently over a moral abyss”—a sort of soft Heideggerianism that imagines some inner truth and equality in bureaucratism. 

Against that reduction, Manent argues in “defense of political reason” and on behalf of “the truth of our political nature.” In his 2004 book, A World Beyond Politics? he engages in exactly such political reasoning of the highest kind, political philosophy, doing so politically, reciprocally, by entering into dialogue with Rousseau, Marx, Tocqueville, Aron, and others—thinkers who disagree with one another, making his book “the furthest thing from doctrinaire” because it mimics political discourse itself. [3] He disagrees with many but ‘cancels’ none.

As a Socratic political philosopher will do, he begins where Europeans are, within regimes of liberal democracy. “It is our fate to live in a world framed and transformed by the presuppositions of modern liberty,” with its “foundation of individual consent” where “free and equal individuals…affirm their collective sovereignty and individual rights.” While “emancipat[ing] human beings from old constraints and injustices, even from the idea of an order of command” (“or such is its pretension”), late-modern liberalism especially has “separate[d] human beings, undermining institutions and attachments that gave stability and meaning to human life,” bringing civil societies dangerously close to the state of nature the liberal social contract was intended to get us out of. “The Achilles’ heel of the modern order is its failure to appreciate its dependence on moral contents that predate the formation of the liberal state and society,” including religious principles and nation-states under the rule of law, including laws that ‘constitute’ them, giving them institutional form. “Manent insists that the logic of modern freedom is essentially antipolitical or individualistic,” a logic that necessarily undermines the willingness to be ruled and sometimes (as seen in libertarianism) the willingness to rule, to take responsibility for civil society. Self-government atrophies, even though self-government was one of the principal aims of modern liberalism. Tocqueville had hoped that the remaining aristocrats, men and women who retained a sense of the political, could guide democracy, fearing that instead democrats might find themselves guided, indeed ruled outright, by oligarchs corporate and bureaucratic. The latter, dystopic outcome has prevailed.

To recover, more than ‘reform’ is needed. “For Manent, a serious engagement with the history of political philosophy is indispensable for self-knowledge” for ‘we moderns,’ “since the liberal world was shaped by the modern philosophical solution to Europe’s ‘theological-political problem,'” whereby religion separated from politics “and more fundamentally” private opinion separated from political power, blocking my and your ideas “about the human good” from direct expression in government policy, which limits itself to the defense of “human rights.” In much of this, he follows Strauss, but always refusing “to treat the contemporary world as a mere epiphenomalization of the modern project,” since it also featured, and even today continues to feature, ‘unmodern’ elements, such as the classical and Christian virtues. 

European internationalism has “undermin[ed] the capacity and will of European peoples to make war on each other,” which is good, but it has also undermined their capacity and will to govern themselves within nation-states altogether. Modern Europeans want economic prosperity, humanitarianism, and peace without the trouble of political life, wrongly “perceiv[ing] politics as an external and oppressive imposition” instead of the indispensable means of securing liberty under law. This is a humanitarianism that undermines the human—a point Scruton, too, would expect, given his own distaste for abstractions. “Only in a political order can the different experiences of life learn to communicate with each other and fruitfully overcome their tendency to become ‘the sole immediate and absolute’ criteria of human existence.” In other words, ‘diversity,’ the shibboleth of bureaucrats, cannot be imposed from above—that is, by bureaucrats. Only an inhuman diversity, a diversity limited to such subhuman categories as ‘race’ and ‘gender,’ can be imposed without talking things over. “Liberal humanitarianism promises access to human unity without the intercession of politics,” even as modern ‘totalitarian’ tyranny “promised to restore the political unity of the human race through a ‘superpoliticization’ or overpoliticization.” Manent rejects both extremes.

Morally, in the name of this false diversity, liberal humanitarianism seeks to enforce moral relativism in the name of ‘human rights,’ incoherently attempting to set a no-standard standard. All with no ‘back-talk,’ with none of the “political reason [that] is indispensable for resisting the totalitarian and humanitarian subversion of free political life.” “The emphasis on rights creates an increasingly homogenous world—a world where every institution and claim is beholden to the consent of the individual,” while taking care to limit that consent to the ‘politically correct’ menu of the day. This inclines ‘we moderns’ to esteem choice, but it is a ‘choice’ freed of reasoning, animated by mere will and/or desire, seeking to levitate individuals above “the nature of things,” the reality of our own human being. Manent sees that this intended levitation is in fact a debasement of human nature, with its capacity for reasoned judgment.

Here is where Manent turns from political forms to political regimes. Political forms have their requirements—ruling an empire requires a different sort of ruler or rulers than does ruling a polis—but it is the regime that truly shapes the character of citizens and subjects. When thinking of modernity, “Manent follows both Leo Strauss and Raymond Aron in arguing for the primacy of the political regime,” a primacy readily seen in the twentieth century, with its “triangular conflict between liberal democratic, fascist, and communist regimes and ideologies” making war on each other for geopolitical mastery. Just as each political reform requires a regime, so each regime requires a form. The characteristic modern form has been the nation-state, but Machiavelli’s invention as instantiated by the state’s men suffered from “a crippling ambiguity that led it to repeat the oscillation between liberty and war” that had undermined the polis or city-state. “The nation indeed provided the crucial framework for citizenship or democratic self-government,” seriously compromised by empires and feudal forms alike, “but it was also open to nationalist self-assertion” at the expense of human rights. The twentieth century saw the culmination of such self-assertion, “discredit[ing] the nation” and leading Europeans to suppose that they could end warlike nationalism by constructing “a merely social and economic community.” If nothing else, Mr. Putin has disabused them of that supposition, however temporarily. “Quasi-pacifist, humanitarian Europe remains a prisoner of its fear of war and therefore a victim of its history” as a result of its “irresponsible display of wishful thinking.”

Such a realization might drive them to the opposite illusion, to succumb to the “totalitarian temptation,” in the manner of their grandfathers. Here, Manent draws upon the arguments of Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Aron, and Besançon (a longtime friend), all of whom “have emphasized the ideological roots of both Nazi and communist totalitarianism,” roots that readily thrive in the soil of social egalitarianism. Totalitarianism taps into the same passion for economic, political, and social equality as liberal humanitarianism does; if the latter fails, then the former may not hesitate to replace it (with the Chinese communist regime eagerly waiting to do exactly that). The failure of Soviet communism in Europe left “the structural problem of democracy wholly intact.” On the Right, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, Nietzche, Jünger, Heidegger, and their epigoni conspicuously despised the ‘Last Man’ of bourgeois democracy, but often with violent intent; on the Left, Marx, Lenin, Mao, and their epigoni also conspicuously despised the bourgeoisie, but in the name of egalitarianism. This made, and continues to make, the Leftist ideologies “a much more dangerous spiritual temptation for democratic intellectuals,” as consistently seen in their fondness for ‘popular fronts’ with radicals on the Left, their excoriation of radicals and even moderates on the Right—readily forgiving the sins of ex-communists while hounding ex-fascists, American Confederates and other such malefactors beyond their graves. 

Scruton knew the oppression of modern tyranny from the inside, an experience unusual for a citizen of a prominent commercial republic, the one that stood alone for months against Nazi bombardment. He visited Czech dissidents frequently during the last years of the Cold War, writing his novel, Notes from Underground, “to convey the surreality of an ideological regime founded on lies that are simultaneously ontological, metaphysical, human and political (or, more precisely, anti-political).” Famously Vaclav Havel and his friends determined to “live in truth,” standing as witnesses to and against totalitarianism. Scruton’s main character begins his conversion against the false religion when he discovers his late father’s copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes, which enables him “to diagnose his own alienation.” Underground man, Jan, meets underground woman, Betka, and their love affair forms the heart of the story, which includes a clueless U.S. embassy press attaché (“a perfect representative of limitless Western incomprehension about communist totalitarianism”), a dissident organizer of a clandestine reading group who introduces Jan to the writings Czech philosopher and regime critic Jan Patoçka, and a sharp-eyed satirist who mocks Communism as “a new kind of kitsch: kitsch with teeth,” and a priest who makes Patoçka’s teaching, “care of the soul,” real and immediate.

As it happens, Betka’s opposition to the regime is compromised. The regime knows that her grandfather stole the family home in Sudetenland from its original owners at the end of the Second World War; the invading Soviets and their puppets in Prague rewarded him with it because he’d been part of “a brutal and chaotic band of partisans” who had aided the Red Army in addition to plundering the countryside. The episode reminds Mahoney that “finding and sustaining a home worthy of free and responsible persons is perhaps the Scrutonian theme par excellence,” and Betka will never find one; the nearest she comes to having one, the tainted one, is also the nearest thing that any of these victims of modern tyranny find.

There is the home on earth and the home in Heaven. The underground priest “lived by the truth of Christ’s light that is paradoxically revealed in his freely chosen suffering and death” at the hands of the regime. He embodies Scruton’s “three great transcendental features of human experience”: person, freedom, and the sacred. Pavel is especially disgusted by a New York University professor (“with more than passing resemblance to the legal theorist Ronald Dworkin”) whose conception of human rights includes “marginalized groups” with the notable exception of unborn children. The professor’s “soulless conception of human rights, informed by ideological clichés, and bereft of serious moral content, is a portent of a future” in liberated Czechoslovakia, “where human rights are more or less severed from perennial human obligations, from the experiences that give rise to moral and civic responsibility and a truly common world.” At the conclusion of the novel, the narrator remarks, “The slaves had been liberated, and turned into morons,” as “democratic mediocrity replaced soulless totalitarianism, an improvement no doubt, but no true ascent of the soul.” Need the ‘open society’ always prove a vacuous society?

Betka turns out to have been a collaborator with the regime who had protected Jan and his mother because she had unexpectedly fallen in love with him. With this, Mahoney turns to his final chapters, on the nature of the human soul.

“Scruton ultimately saw in the face of man an intimation of the face of God.” It has been the effort of twentieth century nihilism to efface God and thereby unwittingly to efface the personhood of human beings. Without God, he argues, the soul’s freedom and concurrent responsibility lose their rightful recognition in public life and souls fall into “a nihilistic voluntarism,” some iteration of ‘the will to power,’ “at the service of fanatical politics.” “To resist this perverse assault on the prerogatives of God, Scruton turned his attention to the imago dei, the incarnate person, who is indeed an animal, a part of the natural order, but in ‘whom the light of reason shines, and looks at us from eyes that tell of freedom,'” however doggedly scientistic theorizers try to talk him out of it. But the scientistic attempt to (in Scruton’s words) “forbid the experience of the sacred” falls short when contrasted with the ineluctable look into the eyes of another, the knowledge of whom no learned description of DNA or evolutionary theory can really capture. Science requires precision and forgives no one who fails to achieve it; the personhood of God and man admits, indeed requires, a touch of forgiveness.

Manent finds in Montaigne the philosopher who shifted the self-understanding of Europeans from the soul to the modern ‘self,’ with profound consequences for political life. For Montaigne, human beings should “take their bearing neither from great models of heroism or sanctity or wisdom, nor from natural and divine law.” “Montaigne asks his readers to eschew self-transcending admiration for others, no matter how exemplary great souls may seem to be,” to eschew also the requirement to repent for sins before any personal or even abstract standard beyond oneself, and instead “to bow before the demands and requirements of one’s unique self, what he calls” (very much in an attempt to wreck Platonism) “one’s ‘master-form.” For Plato’s Socrates, the forms exist outside the soul, which yearns for them; for Montaigne, the ‘self’ is its own form, which may long for material things but rejects the Platonic forms or ideas as fictions. Adjurations to find your own passion, to march to your own drummer (this, from a supposed ‘Transcendentalist’), to sing your own song or at least to take someone else’s song and ‘make it your own,’ all bear the stamp of Montaigne’s “turn to the authority of the self in place of the classical Christian demand to put order in one’s soul in light of the requirements of the Good itself,” deferring “neither to the Word of God, nor to the temptation of a glory-seeking republican political life” while walking “the path of private, idiosyncratic, and this-worldly contentment” according to a sort of post-Christian, post-Machiavellian Epicureanism. Manent judges Pascal to have been right: “Montaigne talked far too much about himself, the only authority he treated as genuinely authoritative,” succumbing to a “deeply solipsistic and even unnaturally antinomian” internal regime which no longer allows “reform, repentance, or conversion” as “sincere or authentic human possibilities.” For his part, Manent rather doubts that Montaigne’s soul, in telling itself that it was only a self, ever quite freed itself “from the drama of good and evil that it constitutive of every human soul.” To Manent, “Montaigne’s account of the self, his self, is, strictly speaking, unbelievable,” his “alluring humanism…far less humane than it [seems] at an initial glance” into his merry eyes. His famous essay, “Of Cannibals,” its lesson of moral/cultural relativism, finally “commands us in the name of autonomy and authenticity to disregard all law, all command, all moral authority,” thus disconnected rights “from any appreciation of the ends and purposes that are inherent in moral judgment and prudential choice.”

For the Christian, the human soul’s natural moral guide, receptive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, is conscience. In his 2019 collection of essays, Against the Tide, Scruton presents an “ample and persuasive (non- or extra-theological) defense of the soul.” “When we respond to another human being, we are responding to an ensouled person and not just a conglomeration of matter-in-motion.” I was talking with a materialist one time, a man who took modern science to have disproved the existence of God. I didn’t attempt to deny his denial, but instead asked him to consider his daughter. Your daughter (she was about ten) couldn’t say much about your biochemical chemical composition, but it would be very odd to claim that she didn’t know you. This means that analysis doesn’t exhaust knowledge, and that makes materialist reductionism inadequate for a full understanding of human nature and of human life. “And how are philosophy or science even possible if the human person as philosopher or scientist doesn’t even exist” in a way explicable by his materialism? Marx’s attempt to enliven materialism with dialectics only “led to a cruel despotism, a systematic assault on the human soul, and a social condition marked by” what Scruton calls “absolute enmity and distrust,” rendering his intended socialism, let alone his communism, unsocial, self-contradictory. 

Manent takes care not to “take his political bearings from theological categories or from revelation per se,” since political forms and regimes have an integrity of their own, as indeed do the human beings who found and perpetuate them. Accordingly, he remains “a philosopher who takes his bearings from reason, from the natural order of things, while being fully attentive to the workings of grace and conscience on the souls and free will of human beings.” Even the comprehensive theology of most Thomists isn’t quite comprehensive enough, as they “read Aristotle’s Ethics in complete abstraction from his Politics.” What is needed is what Manent calls a “productive disequilibrium” among philosophy, politics, and religion, refusing “to let either philosophical reflection or religious devotion get in the way of allowing the ‘simply human perspective’ receiving its full due,” the perspective that forces reason and faith to respond to the concrete situation, the realities of us, now. “Christianity and political philosophy must both begin by maintaining scrupulous fidelity to the ‘real’ as it first comes to sight in human experience,” since “nature necessarily precedes grace in the human experience of things,” even if Creation necessarily preceded what God created—a point we learn not from experience or even reasoning but from revelation. Humanly speaking, “to begin with grace, or the ‘sacred,’ or the transcendent, is to risk obscuring the real.” In this, Manent follows Charles Péguy and Pierre Corneille, who never “pull down the world in order to elevate religion” any more than they pull down religion to elevate the world.

This means that Aristotle’s consummate moral virtue, magnanimity or greatness of soul, can indeed coexist with the Hebrew and Christian virtue of humility before God. A magnanimous soul resents no one, not even the God Who is infinitely greater-souled than any man. Manent aims at “mediation, attentive to the capacious balancing of the genuine goods of life, the city, and the soul and of reason and the Christian proposition more broadly.” In so doing, he understands Strauss’s distinction between the life devoted to reason and the life devoted to the teachings of revelation but does not consider them mutually exclusive if rightly understood. For Manent, “a due respect for the cardinal virtues—courage, temperance, justice, and prudence—must precede every effort to sanctify the world.” He nonetheless shares with Strauss the insistence that “no historical process or ideological constructions can free us from our natural and supernatural responsibilities and obligations.” 

Manent finds “a real, if complicated and somewhat tenuous, relationship to political freedom,” a relationship suggested by Christianity’s character as “anti-totalitarian to the core.” Christ demands that the obligations to God and to ‘Caesar’ run on parallel tracks, not crossing one another but keeping human souls going in the right direction. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church has too often rejected “the pride and self-assertion associated with liberal and national movements,” deprecating the “virile virtues” of “virile citizens” commended by Aristotle and Tocqueville in favor of “the relatively quiescent” subjection seen in “clerical and authoritarian regimes.” Manent nonetheless warns that Christianity has its own distinctive ‘marker’ in our souls. While the Greeks understood how our souls move, he writes, “they knew nothing of conscience.” The virtues of the great citizens of antiquity made themselves visible in their actions, but we cannot see, but only hear, the voice of conscience. The absence of that voice in the ancient regimes “was a defect of real importance,” as it speaks to us “in ways crucial to human self-understanding and to the exercise of moral and political agency” with “a powerful, if indirect relevance to political life.” It might be replied that the nature of the soul itself is invisible, made so only by speech and action, or by a look in the eyes, and that at least one ‘ancient’ philosopher, Socrates, listened to his “daemon,” a being that acted very much like a guardian angel. 

Be this as it may—and Manent’s emphasis remains generally true—he is right to hold that the founders of modern philosophy intended to “expel from their emerging science of politics both Aristotelian prudence or reflective choice and the free will and conscience that ’emerged from the context of Christianity.'” But this attempted turn to realism, to political life as it really is, left human nature, and therefore real politics, far behind. With the dismissal of prudence, free will, and conscience, “human beings lose the tools to understand themselves and the human world.” To reverse this impoverishment of human choice—done in the name of freedom—Manent makes a ‘phenomenological’ recommendation: “a lived engagement with the requirements of reflective choice itself.” Those requirements are, as they have always been, “common sense and common experience.” In republican politics, this means that alert citizens will see, and appreciate, “men of talent and virtue aim[ing] to emulate each other in service to the common good,” putting their “honorable ambition” at “the service of the self-governing city.” Well-designed ruling institutions in that regime will make ambition counteract ambition with ordinary citizens as judges of the ambitious. The problem is that modern republics “have largely severed freedom from action informed by practical reason and civic and moral virtue” by erecting substantial oligarchic institutions in the form of bureaucracies. “It is not a question of statism or collectivism, as some classical liberals and libertarians mistakenly think, but rather the self-government that animates, energizes, and renews a truly free society.” In his later writings, then, Manent comes to adopt the regime emphasis of Aristotelian political science, even as Scruton had done throughout his career.

Against the New Left, inclined to “despise civic loyalty as evil” and to adopt “an ideological Manicheism reminiscent of twentieth-century totalitarianism,” a Manicheism that “is becoming more coercive, more censorious, with each passing year,” Manent and Scruton “reaffirm that authority is not authoritarianism” if aimed at the good of those ruled, and that “the structure of reality” is “not closed to the possibilities of the Good.” Freedom doesn’t justify itself, morally or politically. And the philosophy of freedom is insufficient because it doesn’t love wisdom.

 

Notes

1. For a cogent analysis of an earlier form of nihilism, see Leo Strauss’s 1941 lecture, “German Nihilism” (Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Spring 1999, Volume 26, Number 3. See also George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School, reviewed on this website: “Origins of the ‘New Left'” (in the “Philosophy” section).
2. On this website, the reader may find reviews of The Companion to Raymond Aron, José Colon and Elisabeth Dutertre-Michael, eds. (“Aron Companion,” in “Philosophy” section); Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law (“The Spirit of Democratic Laws,” in “Philosophy” section); Chantal Delsol: Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law (“Is International Law Tyrannical?” in the “Nations” section). 
3. Mahoney points to “Manent’s masterly use” of what the writer Paul Thibauld calls “the art of citation,” whereby he guides his readers to writings that will further their thoughts on the character and merit of political life. It should be added that Mahoney himself is a noteworthy practitioner of that art. On this website, one may find a review of Manent’s Seeing Things Politically (“Manent on Thinking Politically,” in “Philosophy” section) and his La Loi Naturelle et les Drois des Hommes (“Natural Law and the Rights of Man,” in “Philosophy” section).

 

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Conclusion: The Fragmented Legacy of the Philosophy of Freedom.

Michael Millerman: Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin and the Philosophical Constitution of the Political.  London: Arktos, 2020.

 

Notoriously, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy had not only philosophic but political consequences. Its political consequences are more notorious than its philosophic consequences, thanks to Heidegger’s endorsement of the Nazi Party in Germany and his refusal entirely to repudiate Nazism, even after its genocidal murderousness had been fully exposed. After examining the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics, Newell turns to his philosophic consequences as seen in the doctrines of critical theory (as urged by Jürgen Habermas), postmodernism (Michel Foucault), and hermeneutics (Hans-Georg Gadamer). Beginning not with Heidegger’s antecedents but with Heidegger himself, Michael Millerman examines a somewhat larger selection of thinkers, including Leo Strauss, who rejected Heidegger’s philosophy and politics ‘root and branch.’

Newell observes that Habermas accepts the doctrine of historicism while rejecting Hegel’s historical teleology. There has been, and will be, no ‘end of history’ in which the longing for wisdom becomes wisdom itself. Habermas confines himself to “a formal or procedural ethic,” the “ideal speech situation,” which retains Hegel’s esteem for rationality, for “discursive coherence,” with the “practical pluralism” that allows everyone his say, so long as one follows the procedural ethic. In practice, this has “amounted to a politically moderate social-democratic stance”—albeit, rather more notoriously with the addition of an administrative state that curtails citizen self-government. The recent offshoot of Hegelianism, Critical Theory, aims at “salvag[ing] what can be useful taken away from Hegel, Kant and Marx without succumbing to their totalizing claims.” Absent a historical telos, one must ask, useful for what? Evidently, useful for the avoidance of ‘totalitarian’ tyranny but, beyond that, no clear end but an end to be constructed ad hoc as humanity putters along, freely but with political purposes that are likely to shift with whatever the ‘critiques’ of the moment discommend and commend (the latter, if only by a sort of inertia). Critical Theory’s most prominent thinker, Jürgen Habermas, expects the several “horizons” of doctrines to “fuse” into one horizon (rather like Hegel) but without the eventual permanency of an End of History. It is ruling by consensus—the “consent of the governed” phrase of the Declaration of Independence with all that pesky stuff about unalienable rights subtracted. [1]

By contrast, Foucault’s postmodernism radicalizes the post-rationality of Nietzsche and even Heidegger, completely “uncoupling…the rational and irrational dimensions of the Philosophy of Freedom; the uncoupling of a historical dialectic from the underlying ontological premise of sheer self-origination.” If, as Foucault claims, society consists of nothing but “a field of power centers,” then all previous doctrines of political legitimacy are mere tools “by which the dominating power coerces the subordination of the others.” Although he hopes to win freedom from all of these tyrannies by encouraging “the growth of dissenting powers” to counteract all such monopolies of morality, politics, and thought, why does this lead not to liberation but simply to new arrangements of powers, with every shake of the philosophic and political kaleidoscope? If “Habermas would have concluded that Foucault’s postmodernism supplies no structure for public debate and the emergence of consensual norms from currently conflicting groups,” would Foucault reply that he wants a sort of permanent revolution (a comprehensive Trotskyism) whereby the shaking goes on forever, to no other end but freedom? Leaving us the question: Why freedom?

Since Habermas never engaged Foucault, we cannot know what they would have said to one another. But he did engage Gadamer. Gadamer’s hermeneutical school of interpreting ‘texts’ remains even more vague than the agenda of Critical Theory, “entertain[ing] no political project,” “not even general principles of legitimacy.” Why engage ‘texts’ at all? Because Gadamer wants “liberal learning and aesthetic taste to cushions against the transmission of traditions of liberal learning and aesthetic taste, opening up havens of reflection within the prevailing horizon of technology.” (As Newell notes, in this he resembles not Hegel but Schiller.) This is a civil-social project of sorts, “relying on a renaissance of liberal education to offset the modern emphasis on economic self-interest while avoiding any revolutionary political crusades (which he had witnessed firsthand under the Third Reich).” Gadamer does borrow Heidegger’s “notion that we are always already engaged with the past and with past texts and art,” an engagement whereby they change us, and we change them, as the texts both reveal themselves to us and conceal themselves from us.

Foucault demurs, vehemently, charging Critical Theory as Habermas conceives it too conducive to complacency, too optimistic in its hopes for gentle social and political change. Foucault goes so far as to abandon the modern state “as the most reliable and successful vehicle for achieving modern freedom both of individuals and of society as a whole.” So does his fellow postmodern, Jacques Derrida, who “called for a new global civil society of the marginalized and dispossessed” to be located beyond states’ sovereign powers. In this, he recurs to a Marxism-Leninism without the proletariat, or at least without it alone, as the revolutionary class, and without the iron laws of history that Marxists imagine will bring about communism after the modern state withers away.

Newell rightly remarks the several attempts to combine neo-Marxism with Heideggerian existentialism. “Under the influence of Heidegger’s existential analytic of everyday life, our alienation from modern bourgeois capitalist society is expanded in meaning beyond the socioeconomic dimension stressed by orthodox Marxism to include psychological, spiritual, erotic and aesthetic varieties of alienation, nothing less than what Heidegger termed our ‘alienation from Being’ as such.” The Left needed this expansion of its political base, given the decline in numbers and power, to say nothing of the embourgeoisement, of the industrial proletariat Marx had expected to lead humanity to socialism under the guidance of the vanguard Communist Party. This had been understood as early as the 1920s by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci—the same decade when Heidegger came to prominence. By the late 1960s, the New Left, spurred by the Freudo-Marxian Herbert Marcuse and the socialist of ‘Third Worldism,’ Frantz Fanon, were more influential among intellectuals in the democratic-republican regimes than the now moribund hacks in the Kremlin.

Today, the most important theorist internationally among the Heideggerians is the Russian Alexander Dugin, who has “basically transferred Heidegger’s notion of the German people as the ‘people of destiny’ caught between the pincers of West and East in the 1930s, capable of making a stand for its destiny that would redeem all mankind, to the position of Russian today, which Dugin envisions as leading a revolution of ‘archaic values’ against the bourgeois world headed by the United States”—although evidently not located between the “pincers” of the United States and China. Exactly how “archaic values” comport with the Russian taste for high-tech weaponry remains as much of a question as it was for Heidegger when he looked back at the Nazis after World War II.

Michael Millerman rather likes Dugin. Dugin “begins with” Heidegger in four ways. Heidegger’s notion of “inceptual thought,” of returning to original, pre-Socratic philosophy “seen from the end of the philosophical tradition” does in fact begin with the beginning insofar as anyone not present at the beginning can do. Second, the four thinkers he has selected for discussion—Strauss, Richard Rorty, Derrida, and Dugin—all “began their own activity as political theorists in response to the challenge of Heidegger.” Third, Socrates’ new beginning, his turn to political philosophy, embodies “the sometimes troubling relationship between philosophy and the political.” Heidegger “is perhaps the main case of that strange relationship” in the modern world. Finally, “taking all these three meanings together,” “from the standpoint of a prejudice in favor of inceptual thinking, four responses to Heidegger that begin from a recognition of his philosophical-political priority are considered, the better to grasp issues associated with the theme of the philosophical constitution of the political.” Modern politics has indeed been decisively inflected by notions derived from philosophic thought and, Millerman rightly observes, “since the beginning of the twentieth century, the rational foundations of liberal democracy have been attacked and undermined by anti-liberal philosophers.” Many previous anti-liberals had criticized liberal democracy from the religious standpoint of ‘throne and altar,’ although of course Hobbes had criticized modern republican regimes more or less avant la lettre according to his own natural-rights philosophic criteria. But the major philosophic assault did indeed begin with Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth century, his influence advancing into the twentieth and, now, beyond. Since Heidegger responded to, and radicalized, Nietzsche (as Newell has shown), Heidegger makes sense as the starting point for examining “the post-Heideggerian left and right as well as the liberal center” today, thus “bring[ing] into relief the theoretical issue of competing philosophical constitutions of the political.”

Heidegger claims that “the major concepts from the Western philosophical tradition are historically constituted, rather than universal or timelessly true.” Millerman goes so far as to claim that Heidegger “showed how such concepts arise from finitude and history, and even from the inauthentic relationship of man to his own true self” as a historical being (emphasis added). That is, while philosophy constitutes (modern) politics and politics may well influence philosophic concepts, both of these actions are ‘historical’—that is, changeable over time and necessarily so, since Being itself is ‘historical.’ Millerman’s forthrightly admitted “prejudice” in favor of Heidegger’s inceptual thinking provides, he says, “more fundamental access to a broader spectrum of philosophical-political topographies than another starting point might.” For example, while “it is possible to reconstruct an argument for natural right as a response to Heidegger, but comparatively difficult on the basis of natural right to make sense of inceptual thinking,” the prejudice is justified. It must be remarked, however, that these are two different tasks. To make an argument for a doctrine isn’t the same thing as making sense of an opposing doctrine. To make sense of inceptual thinking “on the basis of” natural right would indeed be difficult, since the underlying assumption of the natural right teaching contradicts inceptual or historical thinking, but to make an argument for natural right in response to historicism need not, must not, take natural-right concepts as axiomatic when defending them—as indeed the term “concepts” already concedes something to the historicist principle of ‘man-as-maker.’

Millerman recounts his own ‘beginning’ in philosophy, his road to Heidegger. He developed “a prejudice in favor of Heidegger’s inceptual thinking well before I knew what that was,” have been “interested in beginnings” and initially approaching them through “theological thought,” through the teaching of God as creator. He saw that this teaching begs the question of “the origin of the creator himself,” which might be answered, faithfully, that God’s origin simply cannot be explained or, alternatively, that God had no origin, that God is eternal. To this, an atheist will respond that if so, “why can we not say the same about the universe and save ourselves the trouble of positing God?” Millerman replies that God and the universe are “different sorts of being”: God is “not manifold, material, or extended”; the universe is. This comports with “Heidegger’s distinctions between being and beings, and between original being (“beyng”) inceptually understood and later, ‘metaphysical’ interpretations of being as ‘essence,’ ‘idea,’ ‘actuality,’ etc.”

Moreover, the mystics’ practice of non-rational ascent to the origin of Being also interested Millerman. Eastern Orthodox spirituality, heavily influenced by neo-Platonism but rejecting Platonism’s rationalism, adopted the philosophic term, theoria, to denote the light manifested to Jesus’ disciples at the Tranfiguration; theoria lights the way to theosis, “in which one beholds God—evidently the spiritual equivalent of the philosophers’ noesis. “It has been my tendency to read theory as theosis, and hence political theory as mystical political theology. If that is an error,” he cheerfully concedes in a sort of philosophic prayer, “may it at least prove to be a fruitful one.” When he encountered Hegel he therefore took him as a rational mystic, that is, as a thinker who proceeded on a path to enlightenment, albeit without the aid of the Biblical God.

Leo Strauss’s writings introduced him to the political, raising the question of how his “initial interest in theology, mysticism, ontology, and phenomenology” intersected with politics. It was Strauss who taught him that philosophic empiricism wedded to the principle of infinite progress not only informs much of modern politics but grounds politics on “the belief that being is irretrievably mysterious,” the future into which we are ‘progressing’ being a thing unknown. That is, much of modern rationalism has unwittingly opened itself to the rationally unknowable. This, too, built up a prejudice in favor of Heidegger’s thought. 

Given this this bundle of similar yet disparate interests, Millerman wanted to understand the criteria for judging among several “philosophical-political topographies.” And “what would it take to displace one from a commitment to or prejudice in favor of one approach to an alternative,” e.g., to replace a commitment to Straussian natural-right teaching to Derrida’s deconstructionism? Natural right or history? Considered as a political question, the criterion might be an aversion to the Nazism espoused by Heidegger; his radical historicism did not prevent, and in some sense led him to, sympathy with Nazism. But (as Millerman doesn’t recall) Strauss himself mocked the argumentum ad Hitlerum as an insufficient criterion for philosophic or even political judgment, inasmuch as even an “insane tyrant,” as Strauss described Hitler, might have some sane notions kicking around in his crazed and vicious head—an esteem for public health, for example, limited though it was to his fellow ‘Aryans’ and malignant though it was towards everyone else.

“Strauss wants to protect politics from both excess and lack of philosophy and to protect philosophy from political persecution and corrupting influences.” This is commendable, in Millerman’s estimation, but it doesn’t prove that natural right as opposed to historicism is true. At the same time, insofar as one philosophizes one leads a philosophic life, that is, a way of life that is not some other way. The question of the soul’s conversion or ‘turning around’ at the prompting of the love of wisdom raises the question of “sovereignty”—both the question of Socrates’ philosopher-king who rules his City in Speech and the question of undertaking a way of life, a regime of the soul, a ruling spirit that may well not be the same as the spirit which faithfully obeys the ruling Spirit of the Bible. In Millerand’s Heideggerian formulation, “Philosophical conversion effect existential transformation.” This new being, what “Heidegger sometimes names ‘Da-Seyn,'” implies that “the compelling sovereignty of the primordial refers to the fact that one’s star is the highest law.” In this beginning, this “existential conversion,” there “occurs the emergence, birth, or inception of philosophy from the chaos of one’s Dasein“—that is, from the competing and contradictory “interests” the pre-conversion human person has entertained. It should be noted that by Millerman’s own testimony his pre-conversion ‘self’ was not entirely chaotic. It featured certain homologies, albeit in the form of prejudices. He did not replace chaos with order, but what he takes to be a less comprehensive and coherent order of thinking and of soul for a more comprehensive and coherent order.

Such an altered sovereignty within the ‘self’ “should result in the reconfiguration or reconstitution of the field of the political,” inasmuch as the philosopher is perforce a member of a political community and his thoughts about that community will change as a result of his conversion. As Newell has observed and Millerman confirms, “it is hard to say in advance precisely what that might look like in practice, particularly because Heidegger did not give many indications along these lines” about “the possible shape of ‘Da-Seyn politics.'” It might be thought that the conception of inceptual thought, with its emphasis on the seemingly infinite possibilities available at the inception of Being itself, might make any such projection more or less impossible, potentially leading to catastrophic misjudgments about, say, Nazism.

‘Be’ this as it may, Millerman contends that Strauss, for all his political sobriety, does not adequately address the matter of philosophic conversion. “Strauss does not describe the becoming-philosopher of the philosopher from the perspective of the philosopher: Heidegger, however, does.” This charge, however, ignores Strauss’s emphasis on Platonic political philosophy, which addresses exactly the issue of philosophic conversion, explicitly or implicitly, in (one is tempted to say) every one of the dialogues.

At any rate, as an unconverted-to-Socratic-philosophy Heideggerian, Millerman identifies several “becomings or conversions” philosophers experience: becoming-philosopher; being-a-theorist (hypothesizing and then perceiving noetically); and becoming the bearer of an essential claim or doctrine about what one has perceived. This does not imply “static thinking”—an oxymoron in any case?—or “something stable, unchanged, pre-constituted, known, predictable, objective, and dogmatic about a single thing, called ‘the relationship’ between two pre-constituted realms”—he may well be thinking of Strauss’s distinction between the philosophic and the political, among others—but rather a historicized, ever-changing, fluid relational kaleidoscope in which what all such concepts mean “varies as a function of the transformative potentials of inquiry.” Here, he avails himself of Foucault’s distinction between “truth,” a simple act of knowledge possessed by the knower, and “spirituality,” which takes the possession of knowledge to transform the knower. “Philosophy,” in Millerman’s estimation, “aims at knowing the nature of the political” but nature itself is historical, ever-transforming and ever-transformative. “Regimes of political life and regimes of political thought and theory can be traced back to the ‘shelterings’ or existential embodiments and elaborations, of these ‘grantings,’ or conversion-encounters”—encounters, that is, in which Being reveals or grants access to itself, as a transforming and transformative agent. In this way, Heidegger takes philosophic conversion to be an analogue to Christian religious conversion. As the Apostle Paul avers that his old ‘self’ is crucified with Christ, that “not I but Christ liveth in me,” so too the Heideggerian convert crucifies his ‘I,’ his “individual subjectivity” and yet opens himself to the revelation of Being and is transformed by it from Dasein, the being who questions, to Da-seyn, a reborn being. Da means “localization,” within oneself; Seyn means the revelation of some hitherto concealed aspect of Being, in time and not ‘for all time,’ since both Being and the being granted noesis of Being change over time. Indeed, as a result of the revelation both the being and Being are changed by their encounter with one another.

Since, as Millerman remarks, Heidegger never wrote a Republic or a Laws, and indeed wrote no dialogues at all—as Newell says, he deploys little if any irony, unlike Plato’s Socrates— since he “presents his profound meditations on being and truth directly,” his directly expressed “philosophy of resoluteness and German rebirth” has made many observers understandably nervous about his “involvement” with the Nazi Party. Some try an equally direct tactic, cutting the Gordian Knot by either by dismissing Heidegger’s philosophy as self-contradictory or by resolving the supposed contradiction by treating his Nazism as epiphenomenal. The Straussian Harry V. Jaffa argues that to say all truth is relative to a time is to make a universal and atemporal and therefore self-contradictory claim. Millerman objects that while this argument refutes any facile relativism it “fails to deal” with Heidegger’s notion of “being as time.” (While this may be true, Heidegger’s claim itself requires some convincing evidence that being is time, as distinguished from the evidence that time is one aspect of being.) The Nazi deniers, on the other hand, either sacrifice “the claims of theory to the exigencies of practice” or transfigure “practice in theory’s all-consuming fire.”

The latter, theory-dominated defenders of Heidegger have been convinced that “key concepts of the philosophic tradition have been destabilized and uprooted in Heidegger’s writings, revealing them as unauthentic incrustations formed over a long-forgotten original experience.” Being is temporality. While the first philosophers, the pre-Socratics, “underwent a fundamental experience of being as emergence and concealment,” Plato and subsequent philosophers overemphasized what had emerged at the expense of considering what remained concealed, setting forth Being as if what is visible to the eye and to the ‘mind’s eye’—nature and ideas, “presence”—as if it were Being tout court. Platonism and subsequent philosophies “forgot” the original experience of Being. Owing to this crucial misunderstanding, “Being withdraws itself from constant presence into concealment” and, in doing so, brings on the modern attempt to conquer what remains visible by the means of modern science. But this means nihilism, the attempt to dominate all Being. At the same time, nihilism may produce a reaction against itself, “another inception of philosophy from out of its most original and concealed wellsprings,” an eschewal of ‘Platonism’ in the broadest sense in favor of not a simple return to the pre-Socratics—philosophy has experienced Socrates, since then—but to the Heideggerian transformation of “the human being” into Da-Seyn and the consequent “ground[ing] and shelter[ing] [of] the truth of beying amidst beings.” Some Heidegger-influenced thinkers (Derrida, Rorty) stop short of that new beginning; others (most prominently, Dugin) “leap into” it. The timid ones won’t jump, eyeing the dangerous political-historical consequences of Heidegger’s philosophic radicalism. The bold ones do jump but in a different direction, seeing that Heidegger didn’t elaborate a fully articulated political theory, one that might have prevented him from his entanglement with Nazism. This brings Dugin, for example, to “criticize Nazism as incompatible with inceptual thinking, following Heidegger’s own muted theoretical criticisms of Nazism” but unmuting them and elaborating upon them. In this, he does not abandon reason (and thus the political limits reason more than suggests) but urges human beings to “situate our self-understanding on a level that precedes the division between rationality and irrationality,” moving beyond our self-understanding of the human being as the rational animal and toward Da-Seyn, a being which “transforms our understanding of reason.” With Heidegger (and Nietzsche), Dugin abandons the idea of human rights, one of the many ideas or “worldviews” that “block access to a genuine grasp of our authentic existence.” But this, he insists, will lead us not to tyranny, not to the rule of unreason, the rule of an insane tyrant, but to a philosophy which is “primarily questioning,” not doctrinaire (liberal, fascist, communist). 

If so, such a philosophy, like the philosophy of the pre-Socratics, cannot be political, except insofar as its ‘politics’ is the politics of the permanent revolution, a never-ending quest in action parallel to the never-ending questioning in thought. Millerman evidently sees this, or something like it, quoting Heidegger as writing that philosophy is both “immediately useless” and “nevertheless sovereign.” “There,” Millerman adds, “is the rub.” Philosophy rules in the sense that it has the capacity “to reconfigure other fields essentially”—to turn contemplative philosophers into nature-conquering scientists, for example—but other fields cannot reconfigure philosophy; only philosophy can reconfigure philosophy. “It is our task here to explore some of the ways in which [Heidegger’s] philosophical reflections configure or threaten to reconfigure the constitution of the political.” In this, he follows Sergey Horujy, an Eastern Orthodox thinker influenced, oddly enough, by Foucault, who supplements Heidegger’s philosophy of Being with what he calls “synergic anthropology,” or “post-humanity.” After all, if Being transforms itself, if human being transforms itself, might human being not transform itself out of its humanity altogether? “By the conclusion of this study, it will become clear that Heidegger alone is not enough.” This is the final meaning of “beginning” with Heidegger.

Somewhat perplexingly, Millerman invokes the tarot deck as an image of political philosophy, in the sense that one ‘card’ alone will not suffice. The Strauss card, the Rorty card, the Derrida, Dugin, “and even” the Heidegger card are “spokes in the ‘wheel of tarot’ that ‘speaks’ both ‘law’ and ‘love.'” “Rota Taro Orat Tora Ator: thus the strange axiom of this study.” Strange, indeed: the phrase (itself a compound of words taken from several languages) means “The wheel [or cycle] of Tarot speaks [or teaches] the law [Torah] of Hather.” The Tarot-Torah pun associates the Book of Thoth, the Egyptian moon god and equivalent of Hermes, god of knowledge, with Biblical law. But this law isn’t God’s law, since Hather is another Egyptian deity, the goddess of love or (for the Greeks) Aphrodite. So, the Tarot teaches the law of erotic love. This is quite in keeping with the man who invented the Tarot cards (Heidegger points us to origins, so the point is fair): the Germanophiliac English mountebank, occultist, and probable Satanist, Aleister Crowley, an insatiable libertine and lifelong scoundrel. One hopes Millerand is having a bit of fun.  

Millerman offers an overview of Heidegger’s thought, beginning with his 1925 lecture, History of the Concept of Time: A Prolegomena to a Phenomenology of History. In it, Heidegger distinguishes the natural sciences, which investigate the “domain” of nature, from the human sciences, which investigate the domain of history. (It is of course noteworthy that in this early writing Heidegger signals a ‘historicist’ orientation in so describing the human sciences.) The problem faced by both sciences is simple: “there is no guarantee that the thematized domains provide access to ‘the actual area of subject matter out of which the thematic of the sciences is first carved'”—the word “carved” signaling the assumption that the sciences are ‘made,’ that we know what we make. After all, the sciences as presented in universities may be conventional categories unrelated to “the authentic reality of history,” unable to enable us “to see history in its historicity.” What is more, there may be an “original and undivided context of subject matter” common to both sciences, which their division obscures. What is the genesis of these sciences in “pretheoretical experience”?

Nature and history: from what did these categories originate? Human beings conceived of them at some point in time. What, then, is time? One can investigate the various conceptions of time that have prevailed in the past, but, as Heidegger says, “it is precisely the understanding of the phenomenon of time, worked out in advance, which permits us to understand earlier concepts of time.” We need to know what we’re looking for before we can go looking for it. (Is this true? One might, after all, consider the opinions about what people have called ‘time’ as those people understood the idea. That would be Socrates’ approach, which Heidegger will reject.)

Heidegger instead points to the pre-scientific notion of time, and thus of both ‘nature’ and ‘history,’ by “an analysis of that being for whom the meaning of being is or can become a question, namely Dasein.” He surveys the discoveries of the phenomenologists, particularly Husserl. There were three basic discoveries: intentionality, “categorial intuition,” and a new conception of the a priori.

Dasein is “intentional,” that is, self-directed toward something. I direct my attention toward a chair. Initially, I perceive the chair as an “environmental thing,” as this chair and none other; I will also perceive it as a “natural” thing, not of course in the sense that is not man-made but in the sense that it falls when lifted and released, consists of a certain material, etc. I can also perceive the chair “in its very ‘thingness,'” thinking of qualities it shares with all other material objects—materiality, extension, coloration, local mobility, and so on. And (still pre-scientifically), I can think of the chair in terms of my intentions regarding it, whether I like it or dislike it. Phenomenologists do not limit this understanding of things to material things; a thing may be a thought or an image.

How do I know if my perceptions are true? Precisely because Dasein is an intentional being he needs to know that he cannot eat that wooden chair. This necessity leads him to think in categories of things. Phenomenologists identify three “concepts of truth”: “demonstration fulfillment,” the intuitive envisaging of a thing, seeing it in ‘the mind’s eye’; sense perception; and the fulfillment of both of these in noesis (theosis in religious thought). If I say, “this chair is yellow and upholstered,” I am saying something more than what sense perception tells me; the words “this,” “is,” and “and” register nonsensory perception, giving me the full, or at least a fuller, perception of the chair and its properties. (In this, one might observe, Heidegger tracks Hegel’s short essay, “Who Thinks Abstractly?”). What we call an ‘objective’ description of a thing is much more than what we perceive through our senses alone. Heidegger says that these “categorial forms,” which are not “made by the subject and even less something added to the real objects…actually present the entity more truly in its ‘being-in-itself.'” The pre-Socratic philosophers aimed at exactly this; phenomenology has “arriv[ed] at the form of research sought by ancient ontology,” as “scientific ontology is nothing but phenomenology.” In Heidegger’s estimation, phenomenologists have returned philosophy to it origin, before the ‘Socratic turn’ toward political philosophy.

The third basic discovery of phenomenology is its new understanding of the a priori, the structure of knowing in the subject, in the one who knows. This is not necessarily ‘subjective’ in sense of biased, emotive, partial. Rather, “a sense of being is presupposed in the notion of the a priori,” quite apart from the philosophical doctrines (most notably those of Plato) which have attempted to explain being. Philosophers want to know what ‘being’ means; it is in this question, this quest, that what’s now called ‘ontology’ arises, and this quest can be renewed only if philosophers recover that original notion, now buried beneath philosophers’ doctrines. Dasein is the entity that questions; our own being even questions itself. What is our own ‘a priori’?

Heidegger continues this quest in his best-known book, Being and Time. There, Heidegger seeks to clarify what being means by interrogating “the privileged being, Dasein,” the one which, “in its being is concerned about its being.” He addresses this interrogation on two levels, the “ontic” and “existentiell,” which consists of particular cases, and the “ontological” and “existential,” which concern the constitutive structures of Dasein. Ontically, Dasein’s “essence lies…in the fact that in each instance it has to be its being as its own”; each individual Dasein has potential beings. Each individual “can show itself to itself on its own terms.” But these terms typically find themselves obscured by entanglement in the world and its readymade categories, which tempt the individual to “interpret itself in terms of that world by its reflected light.” An additional layer of obscurity comes from tradition, which Dasein often accepts as a set of givens, instead of seeking “the original ‘wellsprings’ out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn.” 

Heidegger presents two parts of a “preparatory analysis” of Dasein. Dasein is in the world. What is “being-in-the-world”? He argues that this is a “unified phenomenon,” not a dichotomous ‘me’ separate from a world ‘out there.’ Dasein is in the world. I encounter the world beyond my own body as a set of “useful items,” a status that makes them meaningful to me. I don’t ‘add’ their usefulness to them; they are intrinsically useful to me, related to me, relevant to me. Dasein is the only being which has no utility; the world Dasein finds useful is thus crucially related to “Dasein’s self-understanding.” If Dasein fails to understand itself in relation to the world it will misuse the world. This is the basis of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology.

There is also a ‘Who’ of Dasein, its relation to other Dasein-beings as part of the world. “Dasein is essentially being-with” other Dasein-beings; we alienate ourselves from them if we pass one another by, treat one another with indifference, as ‘theys.’ This is the basis of Heidegger’s critique of both modern democracy, which “flattens” other individuals as if we knew them, and of modern bureaucracy, which claims to make everyone manageable, robbing each of his responsibility for himself. Such a relationship is “inauthentic.” 

To overcome these deficits, to reach self-understanding, Dasein can draw upon its ability to introspect. If we do so, we sense that we have been “thrown” into the world, but we can become “attuned” to it. We can also come to the condition of “understanding,” that is, seeing ourselves as beings capable of “being-possible.” Dasein “is always being projected,” always exploring multiple possibilities for itself. Among such projections are political regimes; a people, a group of ‘who’s,’ has several to choose from. In Heidegger’s words, “Only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless,” authentic or inauthentic, choosing among the ready-to-hand things that can serve the purposes “projected in understanding.” “Interpretation” of the world makes this understanding explicit. I am in the world, but I am also constantly ‘thinking ahead,’ weighing my own possibilities. Care is integral to Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

Constantly, but not forever. Dasein is limited by death, by the fact that someday I will no longer ‘be here.’ We are thrown into the world, then eventually thrown out of it. I should therefore anticipate death as an act of self-knowledge, not flee from my mortality, the non-being intrinsic to my being, into “the everydayness of entanglement and the they.” This is what links Heidegger to what Newell calls the philosophy of freedom—in Heidegger’s case, freedom from everydayness and from indifference to other Dasein-beings. Freedom is resoluteness. “Upon what does Dasein resolve itself in its resoluteness? To what should it resolve itself?” he asks. “Only the resolution itself can answer this,” in the concrete situation Dasein finds itself at the moment it resolves. Only in confronting its own finitude in having been born and eventually to die, in its thrownness, can Dasein resolve itself “authentically.” This is Dasein’s “historicity”; “Dasein is existentially historical.” It chooses its “fate.”

Being and Time is incomplete, lacking the projected analysis of time itself in relation to being. Millerman accordingly turns to Heidegger’s later writings, beginning with his 1941 lecture, “Basic Concepts.” Elaborating on his account of historicity, Heidegger explains that history vulgarly understood defines old and new superficially, by the time of its appearance. Yet what seems new, what is ‘new to us,’ may be old; only its revelation may be new. More, as Heidegger puts it, “The earliest…can also be the first according to rank and wealth, according to the originality and bindingness for our history and impending historical decisions.” He calls such phenomena “the incipient,” and they carry with them a “Call,” a beckoning to us, insofar as we have wandered from this architectonic beginning. For Europeans, the inquiries of the pre-Socratic Greeks—philosophers and poets—provided this archē. “The ‘earliest’ is accessible to us when we are ‘transported into the essential’ by being called back to our ownmost relation to being, out of our everyday falling prey to beings in the world.” This is at far remove from mere antiquarian curiosity about ‘the ancients.’ Heidegger writes, “The measure of whether remembrance of the inception is genuine can never be determined from an interest in reviving classical antiquity but only from a resolve to attain and essential knowledge that holds for what it to come.” The essential past, and the essential, architectonic past alone, deserves to be carried into the future, as the authentic, inceptual thinker experiences “being-embraced-into the ‘essence’ of the ground,” thus “standing in an abode laid out be being itself.

To convey something of the radical character of his project, Heidegger invents some novel vocabulary. Being conceived inceptually becomes “beyng”—an appropriately more archaic spelling. The Dasein who so conceives beyng becomes “Da-Sein” or even “Da-Seyn,” to “mark that he is no longer dealing with an analytic of the given Dasein, but rather with something to be earned in a fundamental ontological transformation.” 

In his later work, Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event), Heidegger provides an overview of his project, careful to describe it not as a system (which would smack of Hegelian rationalism) but a “conjuncture” consisting of six junctures. They are: “the resonating”; “interplay”; “the leap”; “the grounding”; “the futural thinkers”; and the “Last God.” The resonating and the interplay prepare for the leap; grounding, futural thought and thinkers, and the Last God follow from the leap. 

What resonates with us today is the crisis of modernity. In this age, “in which humans dominate beings as objects,” in which beyng has concealed itself from us so thoroughly, our alienation has become so acute that we have been unwittingly prepared for a new revelation of beyng, one comparable to the architectonic revelation experienced by the preSocratic Greeks. Science means knowledge, but modern science has become so entangled with the attempt to conquer nature that it has buried the true meaning of science, which is knowledge—specifically, the quest for the knowledge of beyng, not the chasing after profit that has made modern science a sort of “business establishment,” ensconced in universities that subsist on corporate and government grants, all aimed at progress toward the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Millerman rightly observes that Heidegger’s remarks here “are not insignificant for an understanding of the fields of political philosophy and political science,” themselves inhabiting ‘departments’ in ‘the university system.’ Beyng has abandoned us; hence our alienation, our foreignness to the roots of our own being as Dasein.

By the “interplay,” Heidegger means the history of metaphysics, that is, the wrong turn taken by Plato and all subsequent philosophers until Heidegger, who intends to overcome metaphysics “out of its ground” by reviving the question of being on the inceptual level, recovering “a primordial sense of being,” “confronting and passing beyond Platonism.” By Platonism, Heidegger means the interpretation of beings in terms of the Idea, “the ‘constant presence’ that makes a thing a thing.” For Plato, the Idea is “the most beingful being”; among the many ideas, the supreme idea is the idea of the good.” Heidegger rejoins: Plato’s “questioning asks only about beings and their beingness” and therefore “can never detach itself from beings and strike up against beyng itself.” For Plato, beings and being are visible, the ideas visible to the mind’s eye. But beyng conceals itself (rather like the Biblical God, one must note). 

“The interplay prepares the decision to leap.” Why a “leap”? Because to abandon the visible, the rational, the noetically perceptible conceived ‘ideationally,’ takes daring. It takes daring because we do not, and cannot, see what we are leaping into. The leap, necessitated by our crisis, is a leap of faith, not the rational philosophic ascent from the ‘Cave’ of a given regime’s opinions and customs described by Plato’s Socrates. 

Once we have made that leap, Heidegger avers, the human becomes Da-sein, “the site for the grounding, preservation, and stewardship of beyng.” In the stage of the grounding, Da-Sein is beyond humanity, the “highest possibility” human beings can attain, a condition of life which can endure “the truth of beyng,” first and foremost human mortality, the very opposite of Plato’s eternal ideas or the Bible’s promise of eternal life. The “future ones,” the “futural thinkers,” are the few “who linger in what is most questionworthy.” Concurring with Nietzsche’s judgment that the Biblical God is dead, Heidegger plays off Nietzsche’s satirical portrait of the Last Man, positing the “Last God” as the god of the futural thinkers, “the other beginning of the immeasurable possibilities of our history.” The Last God “awaits the grounding of the truth of beyng and thus awaits the leap of the human being into Da-Sein.”

Why is this good? Heidegger claims that “being itself has a history, or ‘is’ as history.” “The history of Being is something is something essential to Being itself,” not “a product of human thought, but as it were the producer of human thought about being.” In this, Heidegger recalls not Platonism but the thought of Heraclitus, for whom ‘everything flows,” for whom nothing is eternal except change itself. “Heidegger tries to let Being speak though him,” regarding “his speaking as not his own, but as Being’s speaking in him”—rather as a Biblical prophet understands the work of the Holy Spirit. If Heraclitus is the Moses of Being, Heidegger is the vessel of “Being’s second beginning,” its second coming-into-view. Beyng originates Being, Being the beings (including ideas). “What must be noticed” by the Heideggerian ‘archaeologist’ is that Beyng and all that flows from it “has a history,” and (therefore) “truth, too has a history, inseparable from the history of Beyng.” Truth always changes, along with Beyng; truth must be “wrested from” self-concealing Beyng. The good for Da-Sein, the being that questions Being, is Da-Seyn, the manifestation of Beyng in Da-Sein. This is a historical event, “a movement, an essential occurrence.” ‘The good’ is no idea but that which “lends to the knower the power of knowing”—knowing in what once again must be described as a quasi-Biblical sense of intimacy, union, and transformation. 

According to Millerman, Leo Strauss gets it all wrong. In addressing Plato, Heidegger considers the Theaetetus and the Sophist, but Strauss insists on including the Statesman. “What does it mean to say that the ‘statesman’ belongs to the study of philosophy? For Strauss, it would seem to mean that the horizon that opens up the question of Being is fundamentally the political horizon: the question of Being passes through or is raised on the basis of the question of the city, i.e., of law.” But Heidegger regards the ‘cave’ of political law and custom to be “the philosophic tradition itself, rather than the political cave.” Indeed he does, but Strauss does in fact understand that the “philosophic tradition” has become partially integrated into modern politics. To ignore this is to allow oneself to contend, as Millerman does, that “Strauss’s treatment in his book on natural right [Natural Right and History] does not rise to the level of philosophical analysis.” If Millerman’s Heidegger rises through to the level of philosophical analysis by his critique of the philosophic tradition, and Strauss also offers a critique of the philosophic tradition, albeit one that sharply differs from Heidegger’s, then Strauss at least might be philosophizing, too.

Millerman observes that Strauss centers philosophic inquiry on the distinction between phenomena that are natural and phenomena that are conventional. “Heidegger would retort, or would have grounds to retort, that the very concept of ‘nature’ is already ‘historical’ or already an interpretation of the more fundamental ‘event,’ occurrence, or happening (unfolding, unfurling, temporalizing) of ‘Beyng.'” Yes, he would so retort, but at this level the retort is mere assertion. Straussian political philosophy looks first at the forms of political life, working up from them Socratically, by showing the contradictions of the legal and customary assertions regime partisans make about the beings they suppose lend the regime its authority—typically, the gods. Finding such claims dubious, the Socratic philosopher only then considers what Strauss calls the “natural articulation” of the whole, the cosmos that has arisen out of “the roots out of which the completed whole…has grown.” He attends to the forms, the results of change, the ‘looks’ of things. The roots of things, which Heidegger so ardently seeks, are highly unlikely ever to be discovered; hence the ‘Socratic turn’ away from philosophy that attempted to discover those roots by observing the cosmos directly to political philosophy. Millerman quite rightly quotes Strauss’s remark in The City and Man: “Socrates conceived of his turn to the ‘what is’ questions as a turn, or a return, to sanity, to ‘commonsense,’ as refuge from the stupefying study of the mysterious and ‘hidden’ roots of the whole.” But in claiming that this turn is “subphilosophical” because “it fails to respond adequately to Heidegger’s movement beyond Plato and the ideas to the truth of beyng” equates political philosophy with “the political rhetoric needed to serve philosophy’s interests.” But is it only that?

Strauss considers political philosophy to be immoderate in its quest but measured in its expectations—zetetic or skeptical, not assertoric. To attempt to uncover the roots, the origins of nature, is precisely to take a sort of leap of faith; it hopes for certainty without claiming to know exactly what certainty it will find, while at the same time asserting that what it will find is historical, not eternal. Millerman claims that “Strauss regards classic natural right as precisely ‘political philosophy’ not because it deals with a ‘political’ topic, ‘right,’ but because in sticking to the idea, i.e., to the look, to ‘the surface of things,’ it preserves the politically necessary characteristic of moderation, lost, with disastrous political consequences, when one’s emphasis shifts ‘beyond being’ to the ‘roots.'” Whereas “Heidegger regards the idea-interpretation of Beyng as fatefully, philosophically erroneous,” Strauss “regards it as the correct and prudently deliberate marking of the boundary between the study of the part (being/idea) and the study of the whole (beyond being), straddling the boundary between the political or the moderate and the philosophical, which exceeds the immoderate.” Millerman dislikes this because “at most,” Strauss’s “‘refutation’ of Heidegger is the…’refutation’ on the plane of political philosophy.” But it clearly is not, since Strauss in effect challenges Heidegger to prove that ‘Beyng’ is what he says it is. Heidegger asserts that Beyng is historical. Does Strauss really fail to address this question?

At this point, one must turn not to Natural Right and History, which concerns itself primarily with the distinction between classic natural right and modern natural right, only introducing the modern shift to historicism near the end of the book, to what Strauss actually wrote about Heidegger, particularly in his 1956 lecture, “Existentialism.” [2]. Strauss clearly identifies the disagreement between Platonism, which contends that “pure thought, being ‘anonymous,’ transcends every dynamic context”—that is, ‘history’ or change—whereas historicism contends that “at least all concrete or profound thought essentially belongs to a concrete dynamic context.” Existentialism contends that “all principles of understanding and of action are historical, i.e., have no other ground than groundless human decision or fateful dispensation” of that decision. “There is no room for politics in Heidegger’s work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by gods or the gods,” that is, by the rationally unknowable. Hitlerism is intimately connected “with the core of his philosophic thought” because the supposed “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism consisted of the existential leap from the rationally knowable whole of measured, articulated political life within a measured, articulated cosmos to the rationally unknowable origins of the cosmos, tyrannically (if incoherently) embodied in Nazism’s attempts to invoke the roots, the archaic origins, of Germanness. Strauss soberly but also philosophically regards these as “fantastic hopes.” He sees that Heidegger must assume that he lives at an “absolute moment in history,” a moment in which Beyng has revealed himself through himself. But he sees no reason to believe him.

This doesn’t mean that existentialism has no philosophic value. It “has reminded many people that thinking is incomplete and defective if the thinking being, the thinking individual, forgets himself as what he is.” Insofar as it has done this, it has helpfully repeated “the old Socratic warning” against the nature-philosophy of the preSocratics, who could not explain themselves by their investigations of the cosmos. [3] Modern science is no better, in this regard, having “increased man’s power in ways that former men never dreamt of” yet nonetheless “absolutely incapable to tell men how to use that power.” The question of what or who I am “cannot be answered” by science, and if it cannot answer that question, it cannot tell me what the good is, what good the power won by modern science should serve. Heidegger further understands that “the inner time belonging to the pure consciousness cannot be understood if one abstracts form the fact that this time is necessarily finite and even constated by man’s mortality.” That Plato’s Socrates understands this as well as Heidegger may of course be seen in the Apology. Politically, although modern tyranny has led to disaster, the regime of liberal democracy has its own problems, and “it would be wholly unworthy of us as thinking beings not to listen to the critics of democracy even if they are enemies of democracy—provided that they are thinking men and especially great thinkers and not blustering fools” like Mussolini and Hitler.

Strauss tellingly observes that Heidegger himself came to see difficulties in his own ‘existential’ stance. Heidegger rejected Christianity while appropriating such Christian concerns as mortality, anguish, and conscience (one might add the ‘absolute moment’ in which the mysterious God reveals Himself, the “Call” to a leap of faith). He worried that his insistence on the existential “choice” was too arbitrary. How do articulated beings arise from inarticulate Beyng? And “how can finiteness be seen as finiteness if it is not seen in the light of infinity?” Finally, does his “synthesis of Platonic ideas and the biblical God,” a synthesis “as impersonal as the Platonic ideas and as elusive as the biblical God,” really cohere, or is its brilliance more dazzling than clarifying? Heidegger’s “historical consciousness” itself amounts to an interpretation of phenomena that were interpreted quite differently by the Socrates one meets in Plato and Xenophon. It is the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes, who demote nature into the realm of matter in motion, rightly ruled by purposeful human beings, who prepare “historical consciousness,” which seeks to recover a sense of the noble denied by thinkers who reject nature as the standard for human conduct, which is what ‘natural right’ is. For historicists, nature has been still further demoted, the idea of nature now regarded as only one nomos or law/custom among many. For them, all of being, natural and conventional, changes constantly; change is the only ‘constant.’ For earlier historicists, this change was rational, ‘dialectical.’ Not so, for Nietzsche or Heidegger. And, in Heidegger’s estimation even Nietzsche’s will to power operates within the eternal return and therefore lacks pure historicity. For Heidegger, “the leap through which Sein is experienced is primarily the awareness-acceptance of being thrown, of finiteness, the abandonment of every thought of a railing, a support”; the eternal return is yet another mental crutch. Heidegger claims that “out of nothing every being as being comes out.” “This could remind us of the Biblical doctrine of creation,” except that “Heidegger has no place for the Creator-God.” 

This is why Strauss repeats the Socratic turn. Plato departs from pre-Socratic nature philosophy because the stars of the cosmos are “mute riddles,” Strauss writes to Karl Löwith. [4] Modern experimental science, one might add, amounts to a mute dialectic, torturing stubbornly mute nature to compel her to reveal her secrets wordlessly, in action. This mute dialectic has indeed wrested far more truth from the cosmos than the pre-Socratics could discover by their investigations guided by reason informed by the ‘naked eye.’ But being mute, it still cannot tell us what the good is, especially since it conceives of nature as non-teleological. The philosophers of freedom have attempted to recover humanity’s moral and political bearings by substituting custom (Hume), the categorical imperative (Kant), utility (Bentham), the Absolute Spirit (Hegel), dialectical materialism (Marx), the will to power cum eternal return (Nietzsche), and now Beyng (Heidegger). Each of these attempts has resulted in a moral and political dead end. This suggests to Strauss that the overcoming of modernity cannot be overcome with “modern means” but only insofar as we understand that “we are still natural beings with natural understandings,” even as ‘the ancients’ understood themselves to be. To Löwith’s reply—that there (a) can be no return to nature because Christianity has “fundamentally modified ancient ‘naturalness'”; that (b) history is “deeply anchored” in man; and that (c) all political orders or regimes are contra naturam, Strauss observes that Socratic philosophy “is the attempt to replace opinions about the whole with genuine knowledge of the whole,” whereas for you, Löwith, “philosophy is nothing but the self-understanding or self-interpretation of man” as “historically conditioned,” dependent upon ever-changing “culture.” But “the fact that [the polis] is institutional is still not proof that it is contra naturam: some institutions assist natural tendencies.” Plato and Aristotle indicate how a “surveyable, urban, morally serious society, based on an agricultural economy, in which the gentry rule” is “the most reasonable and the most pleasing” form of life for most men, even if I, Strauss would not necessarily want to live in “such a polis,” since “for philosophers moral-political considerations are necessarily secondary” although not for that reason inconsiderable. For this reason, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle themselves preferred the Athens’ democratic regime to Sparta’s aristocratic regime. In weighing the ways of life of different political regimes against the way of life of the philosopher’s way of life, the philosopher’s personal ‘regime,’ his own rightly ordered soul, one begins to think philosophically precisely by not undertaking the leap of faith into the unknowable, in either politics or in the whole.

Strauss remarks to Löwith that the later ‘moderns,’ beginning with Rousseau, needed to “learn to see again from Plato the problem with ‘science-politics,'” namely, that it cannot discover justice and therefore cannot fully account for human nature, which requires justice in order to survive and flourish. In reviving the pre-Socratics, Heidegger sparks the same crisis Socrates and Rousseau saw in the philosophic teachings of their times and places, illuminating once again the need for political philosophy.

Millerman identifies Heidegger’s most cogent contemporary follower as Alexander Dugin of Russia, author of four books on the German. In Dugin’s words, “the main strategic task of the Russian people and Russian society” is the study of Heidegger as “the key to the Russian tomorrow.” For his part, Heidegger himself wrote, “The history of the earth of the future is reserved within the essence of the Russian world, an essence that has not yet been set free for itself.” How this might happen, given his prior claim that one can only philosophize adequately in ancient Greek or modern German, is difficult to assess; Millerman doesn’t try.

Dugin understands that the impasse stems from the Westernizing and modernizing reforms of Peter the Great. All attempts to graft Western ideas and practices onto the Russian tree must fail; such attempts only engender “bizarre monstrosities,” not happy Hegelian ‘syntheses.’ From Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the Russian soil itself, the archē of Russia rejects the West—including, finally, Marxism. As Millerman puts it, “There can be no possible adequate compromise between the two poles” of East and West.

It may seem odd that a thinker intent on establishing a uniquely Russian ground for philosophy would turn to a German thinker for guidance, but Heidegger’s insistence on returning to the archē invites this move anywhere. As in Heidegger, Dugin points to the ‘archaic’ not as something merely ‘ancient’ but a beginning; this beginning has been obscured by subsequent overlays from foreign sources. Dugin calls for a new beginning for Russian thought, one “correlated with the West in a radically opposite way like truth is correlated with deceit.” More radically, Heideggerian post-metaphysics can provide Russian thinkers with the philosophic means of uprooting the fundamental Western deceit, which is philosophy itself. Heidegger harkens back to the pre-philosophic roots of the West, to its “conception of being.” “In the Russian context,” Millerman observes, “the task is the destruction of not metaphysics, which Russia never had, but Archeomodernity”—the futile attempt to graft modernity onto Russia—in “the service of a fundamental ontology of Russia’s first beginning.”

What do we know about the Russian archē, prior to further ‘archaeological’ inquiry? “The Russian person is always integrated into a whole and perceives himself as part of the whole,” the narod or people, Dugin teaches. The parallel to Heidegger here is the German volk. As with the Heideggerian (and in this case the National-Socialist) volk, “the Russian person exists not by himself. but through the narod.” No modern-Western ‘individualism’ can make sense for the Russian Dasein. 

In Western religion, speaking metaphorically, the ruling sense is hearing, listening to God’s revelation. In classical Western philosophy, the ruling sense (as it were), the metaphor for knowledge, is sight, standing for the noetic insight achieved after rational inquiry. In modern philosophy, and in Machiavelli explicitly, the ruling sense is touch, which both perceives empirically and seizes, controls, shapes what it so perceives. But for Russians the ruling sense is taste; being is “so close for the Russian” that he need not have faith or reason or even experimental science. “It is not we who must study and strive toward understanding,” Dugin writes, “but rather we are to be studied and attempted to be understood.” Slavs have no philosophy and need none “because we differ principally from other Indo-European peoples in how we regard ourselves in relation to being”—intimately, with immediacy. Europeans experience being as division, dialectic, conflict, tragedy (hence Nietzsche’s tracing of the pre-philosophic West to the ‘birth of tragedy). As Heidegger shows, Western Dasein “always hangs over an abyss,” anxious about death, which it typically attempts to overcome by the will to power. In diametrical contrast with Western care and thrownness, identified by Heidegger, the Russian Dasein has no such tensions because “Russian Dasein is entirely inclusive.” Millerman worries that this might provide the foundation for a vast imperial project, which Russian history itself more than suggests, but Dugin will deny this. 

Dugin asserts that a Russian Heideggerian would title his book not Being and Time but Being and Space. (And it is at least true that Russia is a spatially impressive place.) Time suggests mortality, but space conceived as territoriality, as ‘country,’ suggests continuity, even immortality, one that is pre-rational. This provides no ‘ground’ for imperialism, however, because each country has its own being, within its own “horizon.” Like languages, being is “local.” This notwithstanding, these various territorial beings converge “in the depths of the earth,” as each territory on the earth’s surface ‘points down’ to the earth’s core. Thus, as Millerman paraphrases it, “whereas from the perspective of logos and order, chaos”—the archaic core of being—seems “to be ir-rational, dis-order, and the opposite of what is regarded as good, from the perspective of chaos itself, chaos includes logos, rationality, and order in its bosom.” In this, too, Millerman shows, Dugin follows Heidegger exactly. In the Western sense, he writes, there is not and should not be philosophy in Russia, but the true, all-inclusive, “Russian philosophy as the philosophy of chaos” is indeed possible. Or, as Millerman elaborates, “the new beginning of chaotic philosophy in the Russian Dasein is not only the liberation of Russia for itself, but also the salvation of the West from itself.”

In theological language, this means that in Western religion Dasein yearns for God, but “in the Russian case it is God who intends and the Russian people who are intended”; they are the new Chosen People. In accepting Christianity in the form of Russian Orthodoxy, Russians “accepted it in accordance with their inner structure.” The Russian need not think because “God thinks for him, and, what is more, he is himself a thought of God, not as a person and all the more not as individual, but as the Russian people, as the Russian church.”

To understate the matter, this is a long way from politics as ordinarily understood. Dugin aspires to “the Seyn-Political,” which he defines as “simultaneously meta-politics and even contra-politics, since it does not raise and does not resolve any of the task and problems that politics deals with,” while simultaneously serving as the ground of politics. The Seyn-Political, then, takes the place of divine right and natural right and even historical right as (mis)understood by Western rationalists like Hegel, Marx, and Dewey, which leads to the technocratic politics of Western modernity, despised by Heidegger and Dugin alike. To take the Heideggerian “leap” into the Seyn-Political future will be to surpass time, to break free of time, and to achieve life in accordance with the archē, which exists in the past, present, and future. True, Dugin writes, to make the leap will bring on “suffering, anxiety, horror, fear, adversity and catastrophes,” but it will end in “triumph, victory, the descent to Earth of the Heavenly Jerusalem, the universal revealing of eternity and the abolition of death.” The task of “conservatism” is “to fight on the side of the coming-to-be” against the “coming-forth” of the Anti-Christ in the form of those miseries. 

“At heart, Dugin proposes to apply to anthropology the operation that Heidegger applied to questions of being.” By aggregating “all individuals past and present,” then “abstract[ing] what is common from the aggregate, that gives us what Dugin calls “the broadest, most acceptable, well-known, and universal model of anthropological thought.” This so-to-speak horizontal move precedes a ‘vertical’ one, whereby the individual overcomes himself through his nation’s “national genius.” As already established, one national genius or “Angel” differs from another; Russians, for example, “need to be with the King, for him to rule over us.” Finally, every people, led by the Russians, will constitute the “existential City,” but many among those peoples will be excluded, inasmuch as “all those who do not philosophize at all or philosophize poorly are excluded from the projection called the existential City.” Thus, Dugin gives a vigorous nod to Plato’s ‘republic,’ after all. “Man can ‘be-with’ only with those who exist. He who exists intensively dwells fully in being-with only with those who exist as intensively. The philosopher lives alone, as though surrounded by animals, until he sees another philosopher; then Mit-Sein begins, then the politeia begins.” Millerman cites Dugin’s distinction between his own philosopher-kings and those of Socrates; in Plato’s Republic, the politeia follows ‘from above’; it is deduced from the Idea of justice. For Dugin, the existential City “is projected from below through Dasein’s authentic existence, whereby the Heideggerian leap or decision may find an affirmation from “being itself.” This affirmation is the Last God. “Man can create a political system; he is able to organize a cosmos; but by himself he will never be able to replace the Theopolis, Heavenly City, with himself and his constructs.” But “nothing guarantees the last god’s arrival,” unlike Plato’s politeia, which consists of an imitation of a noetically ‘seen’ Idea. 

Millerman caution his readers not to jam Dugin into an ideological classification. He is neither liberal, leftist, nor fascistic. Nor is he a vulgar relativist, inasmuch as each people, with its own ‘gods,’ to be sure, nonetheless aims at truth or unconcealment. Millerman recommends “withhold[ing] judgment” on this point “until it has been better understood,” especially since Dugin himself “is exploratory, not dogmatic, on the issue of existential plurality” of nations. Zeteticism, after all, then?

Inceptual thinking eschews Platonism, returning in a sense to pre-Socratic thought but replacing the nature-philosophy of the pre-Socratics and the creationism of the Bible with the historical archē of Being. Yet the problem remains in crucial respects just as Socrates found it. The origin of Being not only provides no serious guide to political life, to the condition of reciprocal ruling and being ruled, but offers an extraordinarily vague and indeterminate beginning for rigorous thought of any kind. The refusal of Heidegger to anticipate where his ‘leap’ would land him suggests as much. And his followers have in fact leapt into all manner of things.

 

Note

1. Almost predictably, when in spring 2022 the South Dakota Commission on Social Studies Standards included learning the Declaration as an important feature of the draft Standards, one of the first attempts to alter the Commission’s document was to excise the first sentences of initial sentences of the Declaration and to begin with “the consent of the governed.”
2. Leo Strauss: “Existentialism.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.  Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1995.
3. See also Leo Strauss: “The Problem of Socrates.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.  Volume 23, Number 3, Spring 1995.
4. Karl Löwith and Leo Strauss: “Correspondence Concerning Modernity.” Independent Journal of Philosophy. Volume IV, pp.105-115.