Bernard Semmel: John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 13, No. 2, May 1985.

 

John Stuart Mill may understand the moral and political dilemmas resulting from the conception of reason propounded by modern philosophy better than any subsequent liberal. He faults his contemporaries Bentham and Comte for inclining toward despotism, for misusing reason in ways that undermine liberty.

Semmel reports that Mill’s father impressed upon his son the lesson of a story from Xenophon’s Memorabilia. The Sophist Prodicus relates that the young Hercules met two beautiful young women at a crossroads. Hercules rejected the advances of one, called “Happiness” by her admirers, “Vice” by her detractors. He preferred “Virtue,” who taught that true happiness comes from exertion, particularly exertions in the service of others. According to Semmel, this lesson “shape[d] at the root the character of John Stuart Mill’s liberalism.” Far from choosing the easy way of false “Happiness,” Mill was animated by the “spirit” of “Hercules and the Christian-Stoics of the Renaissance.” “We live by myths, sometimes without being fully aware that we do,” Semmel writes. “The choice of Hercules may be seen as Mill’s personal myth,” a myth he “translated… into a public myth as the necessary basis of a good society.”

To say that Mill lived by a myth is to question—perhaps without being fully aware of it—Mill’s status as a philosopher, as one capable of transcending myth. Semmel never suggests that a third, “middle” way between private vice and public virtue might have been available to Mill. (See Leo Strauss: Xenophon’s Socrates, Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 35-38). He does not remark that the man who tells the story of Prodicus telling the story of Hercules is the philosopher, Socrates. This confirms Semmel’s own observation that he does not “adopt the… approach” of “political theorists and philosophers” but rather that of “the historian of ideas.” One might question whether this “approach” can bring anyone to historical accuracy.

This notwithstanding, Semmel does provide a good introduction to Mill’s principal concerns and to the ethos  in which Mill operated. Perhaps without being fully aware of it, Semmel shows that the young Mill was no philosopher but an intellectual who could sympathize, up to a point, with the antics of the Saint-Simonians. Semmel retells the amusing story of B.-P. Enfantin, the “Père Suprême of the group, who called for a “female messiah” to save women from marriage on the one hand and from prostitution on the other. “Enfantin and forty of his disciples retired to a monastic retreat at his Paris estate of Ménilmontant, where they took up a celibate life” in anticipate of this feminist redeemer’s arrival. Understandably enough, the strategy soon gave way to a more active one. “[Convinced that his new messiah would be found in a Turkish harem,” they departed on a pilgrimage to Constantinople “pour chercher la femme libre.” Viewing these incidents from the other side of the Channel, “Mill’s patience was exhausted.” He “could suggest only that such was the inevitable consequence of a good idea [equality of the sexes] fallen into the hands of Frenchmen.” Sober Virtue was better loved in England.

To strengthen his case for Mill’s “Stoicism,” Semmel quotes remarks by Mill praising the Stoics and criticizing the Epicureans. He omits remarks praising the Epicureans and criticizing the Stoics. In his post-1840 writings, Mill never hesitated to make use of divers allies—as he did, for example, in Utilitarianism, wherein the young Socrates, Epicurus, Bentham, and Jesus of Nazareth are all commended as exemplars of utilitarian ethics. “Mill’s mind was essentially illogical,” the unreconstructed Benthamite W. S. Jevons charged. Alternatively, one might wonder if Mill was a philosopher who had mastered rhetoric. (See Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship, University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 402-403). The latter possibility implies an interesting Mill. It deserves more extended investigation by someone who understands the issues.

Meanwhile, we have Semmel’s essay, which says things worth saying about a neglected aspect of MIll. Semmel reminds contemporary liberals of several facts: Mill opposed the practice of paying government debts with inflated currency; he opposed the abolition of capital punishment; he endorsed a wartime government’s right to seize enemy goods in neutral ships; he praised the Swiss practice of universal military conscription. “Mill saw himself countering the tendencies of a weak-willed, commercial, modern democratic society and providing a basis for a virtuous one.” Semmel traces this spiritedness to Machiavelli, perhaps with being fully aware of all the issues involved. (For starters, Machiavelli was no Stoic).

Semmel regards the unsystematic nature of Mill’s writings as deliberate, but not rhetorically deliberate. System-building “would merely confirm the tendency toward liberticide” seen in Bentham and Comte. As noted previously, Semmel does not sufficiently reflect upon possible additional motives for apparently in-systematic presentation. However, the avoidance of intellectual despotism and the consequent insistence that the reader think for himself surely explain some of what Mill is about. Intellectual and moral activity guard against tyranny. Passivity does not. “Like the ancient philosophers whom he admired, and their Christian-Stoic disciples of the Renaissance, as well as the moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the humanists [Thomas] Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, Mill understood that a good society could not long survive the eclipse of a freely chosen virtue.” On the basis of that sentence, Semmel may be said to be wiser than he is learned.

 

Douglas J. Den Uyl: Power, State, and Freedom:An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1983.

 

“Spinoza’s approach to political issues is decidedly modern,” by which Den Uyl means “scientific or positivistic.” That is, Spinoza’s “fundamental concepts” are “devoid of normative content” although some of his other, non-fundamental “principles” do have “normative content.” This foundation presents a difficulty. Modern science at least appears to begin with the “normative”: an invitation to conquer nature. At the same time, its proponents insist on ‘realism,’ by which they mean, among other things, the rejection of teleology. What is the relation of the modern ‘norm’ to the modern ‘freedom’ from ‘values’?

In five chapters and two appendices, Den Uyl explores the dual character of Spinozist modernity. In the first chapter he discusses Spinoza’s version of natural right. Spinoza regards human nature as ‘normative’ and nature as non-‘normative.’ He regards right and power as “co-extensive terms.” “[O]ne has the right to do whatever one can do.” Den Uyl claims that according to Spinoza “it cannot be said that the man who acts according to reason is acting more in accord with natural right than the man who acts exclusively from passion or appetite” but he also sees that Spinoza considers rational men more powerful than impassioned ones. Den Uyl does not explicitly draw the conclusion: if right and power are co-extensive terms and rational men are finally the most powerful, then he who acts according to reason does act more in accord with right. Den Uyl claims that Spinoza differs from Hobbes in that Hobbes does not equate right with power but with “right reason”; thus Hobbes was “clearly tied to the older normative traditions.” But if right reason does yield power, then those ties do not bind. “Spinoza’s equation of right and power is perhaps the most novel feature of his political theory.” Perhaps—but one might consider not only Hobbes but Bacon, Descartes, and Machiavelli.

Making right and power co-extensive gives “normative” human law a tenuous moral status. In subsequent chapters Den Uyl explores Spinoza’s version of the state, the nature and foundations of political authority, and the relation of power to liberty. Den Uyl somewhat incautiously assumes that any teaching not found in the Political Treatise cannot be Spinoza’s final teaching, even if it is found in the Theological-Political Treatise. He makes this assumption because Spinoza tells readers that “he will discuss what is relevant to his task in the [Political Treatise] without requiring the reader to consult his other works.” Fortunately, Den Uyl sees that the two books share “a remarkable similarity in their theoretical foundations.” Nonetheless, some readers may wish for a more careful consideration of Spinoza’s literary devices. Although Den Uyl reads Spinoza with intelligence, it is difficult for him to probe his usually stimulating interpretations. Den Uyl is perhaps even more right than he realizes when he suggests that “casting off prejudices is perhaps the most difficult task facing the reader of Spinoza; for it is no uncommon for Spinoza to attach unfamiliar meanings to familiar terms.” To understand those meanings, their context must be considered; to understand a book by Spinoza, its context, first and foremost Spinoza’s books, must be considered.

Den Uyl’s interpretations include the suggestion that for Spinoza “fear and love are the two basic passions by which one may fall under the authority of government.” Thus “the government has no authority over reasonable man,” who is “his own master, his own authority.” The distinction between citizen and slave is rendered problematic by the political philosopher sometimes regarded as the founder of modern liberalism. Spinozist “political authority” is “norm-giving” but “determined by power.” Spinoza’s “is a philosophy of liberty only to the extent that liberty can be equated or shown to be consistent with a theory of power.”

Spinoza reconciles power and liberty by contending that reason liberated from passion and superstition is the source of power. The civitas is most powerful when acting rationally. Perhaps because reason requires the elimination of contradictions (Den Uyl does not say), peace “is the political expression of reason or rational action.” Because true power aims at, even yields, peace, the Spinozist state allows fairly substantial individual liberty. True power does not concern itself with regulating private vices. Tyranny depends too much on fear instead of “willing obedience to the law”; it is inefficient largely because of its irrational deployment of power.

In Spinoza one sees many of the elements of modern liberalism. Difficulties now well known to us, most particularly those concerning the character of reason, come to light in the writings of this conspicuously daring philosopher. If reason is a means of action only, and not also the best means of contemplating truth, it seems to be reconciled with politics in a way rejected by the ancients. But if reason is essentially ‘active,’ what can it serve but the body? And does not service to the body eventually corrupt reason and empower the passions? Will such corruption and empowerment eventually yield the destruction of the liberal order, then despotism?

Richard J. Bernstein: Beyond Subjectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.

Stanley Rosen: G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol. 13, No. 2, May 1985. Republished with permission.

 

In his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero, Leo Strauss restates his assessment of classical and modern political science. The former takes “its bearings by man’s perfection or by how men ought to live, and it culminate[s] in the description of the best political order.” The classics consider that order’s realization unlikely and dependent upon chance. Modern or Machiavellian political science, however, takes its bearings not by how men ought to live but by how they do live. It teaches that chance “could or should be controlled.” Strauss does not write “could and should be controlled”; the word “or” suggests that for moderns ‘is’ and ‘ought’ are interchangeable in principle, if not yet in practice. This tendency culminates in historicism, the doctrine that “the foundations of human thought are laid by specific experiences which are not, as a matter of principle, coeval with human thought as such.” The distinction between practice and theory, then, also blurs.

If “all human thought is historical,” philosophy as described in Plato’s Republic—the ascent from the cave where mere opinion rules—may not exist, absent some ‘absolute moment’ wherein truth becomes accessible. For most if not all of history the philosopher differs from other thinkers only ‘in degree.’ Modern philosophy tends to democratize our thoughts about thought and thinkers. Having observed modern tyrannies ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ Strauss warns of a “perpetual and universal tyranny” based upon the “collectivization” of thought. In the Republic democracy leads to tyranny; modern tyranny enforces the democratization of thought that historicism depicts as characteristic of all or most thought.

Many contemporary intellectuals recognize the inconveniences of tyranny. Some see that certain kinds of historicism encourage tyranny. This does not cause them to abandon historicism altogether. It rather intensifies efforts to formulate what might be called a humane historicism. Richard J. Bernstein’s project exemplifies this trend. Bernstein would jettison historicism, at least in its more radical forms, while retaining what he calls historicity, a sense of reason’s limits or horizons.

Bernstein criticizes the “intellectually imperialistic claims made in the name of [modern scientific] Method.” He describes “the Cartesian foundations of modern philosophy” as involving a “spectator theory of knowledge”: objectivism, defined as “the basic conviction that there is or must be some permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which we can ultimately appeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality, goodness or rightness.” At the same time, Bernstein wishes to avoid relativism, “the basic conviction that when we turn to the examination of those concepts that philosophers have taken to be the most fundamental… we are forced to recognize that in the final analysis all such concepts must be understood as relative to a specific scheme, theoretical framework, paradigm, form of life, society, or culture,” of which a “nonreducible plurality” exists. Thus Bernstein regards modern philosophy’s pretensions to truth (a word he often encloses in quotation marks) a remnant of pre-modern illusions. But he denies that the abandonment of truth need bring chaos, conceptual or moral. Reporting that he has “been attracted to, and at the same time skeptical of, Hegel’s concept of Geist,” he disbelieves Hegel’s claim to scientific knowledge while endorsing Hegel’s “insight” that “dynamic movements of thinking… pervade, inform, and give direction to cultural life.” Bernstein would retain reason but ‘liberate’ it from expectations of precision and certainty. Reason may then govern but not rule, much less tyrannize.

Bernstein concentrates much of his attention on Thomas Kuhn’s treatment of scientific “paradigms” and on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s treatment of “hermeneutics.” After some adjustments, he finds their doctrines complementary. As regards science, Bernstein insists that scientific disputes involve “validity claims,” not mere likes and dislikes. (For example, Newton and Einstein disagree about nature, not about their own inclinations). But rational men may nonetheless disagree rationally without arriving at a rational resolution of their differences. “[F]or Kuhn, rival paradigm theories are logically incompatible (and, therefore, really in conflict with one another); incommensurable (and, therefore, they cannot always be measured against each other point-by-point); and comparable (capable of being compared with each other in multiple ways without requiring the assumption that there is or must be a common, fixed grid by which we measure progress).” If it is not altogether clear exactly what this leaves, that may be part of the point. Crystalline clarity is more than we are entitled to expect. Bernstein quotes a scholar who cites the Nicomachean Ethics I.3 on this. Bernstein would adapt Aristotelian practical wisdom for use in scientific theorizing—not in scientific research itself, wherein theses must still be tested experimentally, but in the more comprehensive domain now called ‘philosophy of science.’ Bernstein finds an analogue in Gadamer’s attempt to rehabilitate practical wisdom.

Gadamer takes hermeneutics beyond its traditional use as the means of understanding texts. As “beings who understand and interpret” we must “understand understanding itself” if we would understand ourselves; understanding the combination of interpretation and application, “may properly be said to underlie and pervade all activities” of human beings as such. Interpretation consists of the “dynamic interaction or transaction” between, for example, a work of art and the spectator; neither entirely of the object nor of the subject, interpretation exists ‘in between’ them. Interpretation is an infinite process, not a fixed achievement. This contention suggests that the infinity of the process owes more to the subject than to the object. “[W]hat the ‘things themselves’ say will be different in the light of our changing horizons and the different questions that we learn to ask.” The metaphor, “horizons,” reminds Bernstein of Kuhn’s incompatible, incommensurable but nonetheless comparable “paradigm theories:; we learn, in both cases, by “fusing” or “horizons” with those of another. “The appeal of truth—a truth that enables us to go beyond our historical horizons through a fusion of horizons—is absolutely essential in order to distinguish philosophic hermeneutic from a historicist form of relativism.” This “truth” resembles Hegel’s version of truth in that it is revealed in the process of experience and emerges in the dialogic encounter with tradition. It differs from Hegel’s version of truth in that it is never final; there is no absolute knowledge/wisdom that completes and overcomes experience—only more experience. If this is historicism—and both Gadamer and Bernstein deny that it is—it is a historicism made humane by its modesty. But, as Strauss in effect asks Gadamer (see “Correspondence Concerning Warheit und Method,” The Independent Journal of Philosophy, Volume II, 1978, p. 7), can such historicism remain modest about itself, or does it posit (or assume) and “absolute moment” of self-consciousness wherein it is discovered? If it does not posit an “absolute moment,” is it really distinguishable from relativism? If it is distinguishable from relativism simply because it acknowledges human fallibility, can it be redeemed from triviality? In short, are our “horizons” natural, historical, or both? If both, what’s the ration of nature to history?

Bernstein criticizes Gadamer for failing to produce “a form of argumentation that seeks to warrant what is valid in… tradition”; practical wisdom needs some solid (if not very precise) content. Further, Gadamer “does not include a detailed understanding of how power as domination… operates in the modern world.” “[P]hronēsis without technē is empty,” particularly phronēsis without the techniques of “contemporary social knowledge.” In search of these, Bernstein turns primarily to Jürgen Habermas, secondarily to Hannah Arendt. Habermas calls for “a genuine dialectical synthesis of the ancients and the moderns, not turning one’s back on modernity as many neo-Aristotelians do.” (Habermas and Bernstein object to, among other things, neo-Aristotelianism’s usefulness to “bourgeois conservative thought”—thereby failing to fuse their “horizons” with one alien form of life). The “norms” to be followed in making this synthesis “can only be validated by the participants in a practical discourse,” discourse “grounded in the very character of our linguistic intersubjectivity” and of  purposive action. Bernstein quite understandably wishes that Habermas would firm this up a bit. But Bernstein can only say that the “telos immanent in our communicative action that is oriented to mutual understanding” requires both “autonomy” and “solidarity,” a combination that would be a synthesis indeed. Arendt does not offer Bernstein much help in his project because “the criticism of Gadamer that I suggested earlier” also applies to her: “the danger for praxis does not come from technē, but from domination.” Bernstein does not show how technē c,an be separated from domination of some sort.

Moving “beyond objectivism and relativism is not just a theoretical problem but a practical task.” In practice it means developing “dialectical communities”—egalitarian political orders animated by “solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion.” Such communities appear prominently in much of contemporary Leftist political thought, as seen in the writings of Benjamin Barber and Alasdair MacIntyre. Consistent with this orientation, Bernstein ends by referring readers to Marx. Just as Bernstein’s historicism, if it can be called that, is a humane historicism, so his Marxism is a dilute Marxism. “We can no longer share Marx’s theoretical certainty, or revolutionary self-confidence.” Bernstein denies Marxism’s necessitarian historical dialectic. But he does insist, with Marx, that a theoretical movement, such as the one “beyond objectivism and relativism,” can gain “reality and power” only if practice supplements theory.

It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Bernstein’s project does not so much synthesize classical and modern thought as it effects an uneasy compromise, leaving both weaker. Or, as Strauss put it, “Syntheses effect miracles. Kojève’s or Hegel’s synthesis of classical and Biblical morality effects the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint” (Leo Strauss: “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” in On Tyranny [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963, p. 205). To clarify the issues involved, one looks for stronger stuff, even if it has proven more dangerous. For a truly magisterial attempt to synthesize classic and modern, only Hegel will do. Stanley Rosen has written an indispensable guide to Hegel’s “science of wisdom.”

“[F]irst and formost a logician,” Hegel “accepts the Greek conception of philosophy as an attempt to give a logos or discursive account of the whole.” But Hegel goes beyond the literal meaning of the word “philosophy,” claiming not merely to love wisdom but to possess it. A modern who attempts to possess wisdom concerning the whole faces an obstacle the classics perhaps underestimated: subjectivity. If the intellect “is itself a resident in the spatio-temporal world, it, together with its products, must be historical rather than eternal.” Alternatively, a modern may regard intellect as separate from ‘this world,’ obtaining a dualism in which the subject is deemed ‘creative’; Rousseauan imagination eventuates in Heideggerian poetry. Hegel would overcome or head off these anti-philosophic philosophies by “defin[ing] the process by which we acquire wisdom as identical with the historical experience of Western man—not so much the history of actions as the history of rational thoughts, of philosophy. Hegel intends his “science of wisdom” to be “the logical conclusion or culmination of Western philosophy taken as a whole.”

Hegel would understand history’s significance by ‘recapturing’ conceptually “the logical pattern of [history’s] development,” which proceeds not linearly but “dialectically,” that is, by a series of contradictions whereby pairs of contradictory elements are “assimilated into a third and higher level of development.” This occurs by the grace, so to speak, of the “Absolute Spirit,” the source of spiritual activity and not a static form or idea. History, “the gradual unfolding of the universal significance of the human spirit,” is “fundamentally political.” It can be both spiritual and political because Hegel unites theory and practice; the “spiritual” is in ‘this world,’ immanent. When fully manifest (as it is, for the first time, in the thought of Hegel), the Absolute Spirit brings history to a stop. The ‘end of history’ does not mean that no more events will occur but that no radically new events occur. “[N]o degree of essential satisfaction [is] still to obtained in some historical or transcendent future”—Christian, Marxist, or even Bernsteinian. Unlike the latter two thinkers, Hegel is no egalitarian. His theory, while united with practice, remains superior to practice. Reality, truth, or being is not contingent. Absolute Spirit or “God” exhibits its essential nature in historical events; it does not derive its essential nature from those events. “God reveals himself to himself, and through the medium (or audience) of man. Man understands God by understanding himself.” Still, because Absolute Spirit does exhibit its essential nature in human history, Hegel insists that a few if not most human beings can possess wisdom and not merely admire it from afar.

Wisdom is knowledge of a particular kind, knowledge of “the rule by which classes are formed.” This rule is not itself a class (the attempt to find a “class of all classes” would lead to infinite regress); the rule expresses the essence of any class. Hegel would overcome the subject/object dichotomy characteristic of modern philosophic thought from Machiavelli to Descartes and up to his own time by teaching that “the object is given to us within the knowing-process by the activity of the Absolute, or the process by which everything is what it is.” To be and to know are co-extensive. Politically, this means that the state is the image and actuality of reason. “The content of essential history and logic” is “the same” (emphasis added) because we are dealing with a logic of activity and not a logic that articulates static forms. Speaking metaphorically, one can say that “God actualizes within the thinking of man.” Speaking less metaphorically, one can say that “the Absolute [Spirit] manifests itself in individual form”; it “individuates.”

Hegelian logic arises as a response to a difficulty in “analytic or scientific thinking.” Such thinking is “regulated by the principle of contradiction.” There can be no analytical reflection upon this principle that does not assume the principle. If the ego cogitans examines itself, it becomes both subject and object, thereby “violat[ing] the principle of contradiction by the act of asserting it.” This leads non-Hegelians to posit the existence of intellectual intuition. Hegel attempts to avoid this exigency by asserting the essential identify of being and thinking, subject and object. This ‘completes’ or explains traditional logic without annihilating it. Rosen makes the provocative suggestion that Plato understands this, or at least provides the grounds for understanding this, near the beginning of philosophy’s history. “As soon as we analyze the Platonic conception of Being, it transforms itself into the Hegelian conception,” with one major qualification. Platonic Being is not self-conscious, whereas “Hegel’s One… is self-conscious Absolute Spirit, or the Parmenidean One brought to life.” (We are therefore entitled to think that Rosen’s two subsequent books, titled The Limits of Analysis and Plato’s Sophist, follow from his G. W. F. Hegel).

Rosen observes that for Aristotle the principle of contradiction is finally not a principle so much as “a most stable opinion.” Hegel boldly transforms this opinion into dialectic, “the science of the sciences.” This transformation comports with his claim to possess, and not merely love, wisdom. Problem: How to deduce the principle of contradiction from itself, thus avoiding infinite regress? Here Hegel introduces the concept of “reflection,” which Rosen calls “the center of the center” of Hegel’s logic. The ego can only think the principle of contradiction if it somehow is both what is posited and what is not posited, both P and non-P. The One (= Absolute Spirit = “God” = The Whole) differentiates itself in a manner analogous to Aristotle’s formless “pure thought thinking itself” by both positing and negating, self-consciously and simultaneously. To say ‘P’ is to simultaneously distinguish P from all non-P and therefore to think both P and non-P. Hegelian reflection perceives that the Whole “is itself a ‘sophist,'” which “continuously changes its shape or pretends to be what it is not,” eluding classification by non-dialectical, non-Hegelian logicians. In a sense, the Whole is self-contradiction, generating or positing the conflicting thoughts and things of this world. There is an order to this, but it is an order of (dialectical) development and not a stable framework. Philosophy is transformed into wisdom “by the process which renders [the ‘principle’ of contradiction] self-reflective.”

The formation process of Absolute Spirit is “always and everywhere the same.” Its consequences are not. Phenomen-ology, the logos of the phenomena, reflects Hegel’s conviction that phenomena have (Hegelian) logic within them. For example, the simple act of eating shows contradiction that results in an object’s assimilation into a higher order: hungry animal + food (destroyed ‘in itself’) = satisfaction. The Hegelian logic within the phenomena finally reveals itself after “a given number of historical stages” in which “the totality of… logical categories is revealed.” (Those lacking Hegelian wisdom or “perfect satisfaction” find life tragic, a “slaughterbench” of contradictory persons and thoughts). So while The Phenomenology of Spirit in one sense introduces The Science of Logic, in another sense it could not be written until after the completion of the Logic, after the end of history.

Reason is “cunning.” It works through objects, and through our desires for objects. We consume and produce until all objects have been produced and assimilated, “until man has satisfied his desire by producing the objective world as the complete actualization of his own subjectivity” and “thereby identifies himself with God.” “[M]orality and freedom [the making of the self in the activity of producing the world] depend upon the production of this world of intersubjectivity, as initiated in the war of each against each” but as eventuating, finally, in peace made possible when I “recognize myself in the other because we are both instances of the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit.” In political history this has meant replacing the active, noble silence of the Spartan aristocrat, which ends in death, with the moderns’ emphasis on rhetoric and self-preservation. “[I]f the best men die in silence, the state will fall into the hands of the worst men.” The good must become ‘bad’ in order to provide a foundation for political virtue; the high must “learn the ways and the weapons of the low”—another example of reason’s cunning.

Even nihilism is dialectically necessary. The worst must be overcome in order to yield the best. (Here Rosen permits himself one of several jabs at Nietzsche: the will-to-power is merely “Hegel’s Absolute Spirit suffering from a loss of consciousness.”) “Nihilism is intelligible, and therefore it may be overcome. Indeed, it must be overcome; the mind responds inevitably to the intelligible by grasping it. The presence of an obstacle is ‘food’ for the engine of desire in its pursuit of total satisfaction.”  Nihilism takes numerous forms, from the terror of the French Revolution to the esthete’s refined hedonism. All find themselves superseded by the revelation of “Hegel’s heresy”: “God becomes man in order to become God,” a metaphorical way to express the self-revelation of Absolute Spirit. “For Hegel, to think the truth is to be ‘in the truth,’ or still more sharply, to be the truth.” The soul and the concept are finally identical, both aspects of Absolute Spirit. Hegel calls the completion of analysis and synthesis “speculation”—”the thinking of the Whole.” The Hegelian sage “remembers the totality of his wisdom as he completes it, and so can never step ‘beyond’ it but must rather begin to think it again.” Wisdom/speculation is circular. Hegelian logic yields not an infinite progress but an infinite revolution. “Spirit is now complete, and so ‘resting in itself,’ although it is ‘excited.'” Hegel regards this as the solution to “the fundamental problem of the entire philosophic tradition,” as presented in Plato’s Sophist: “How can Being or the Whole be both at rest and in motion?”

Rosen offers criticisms of Hegel’s doctrine; several are noteworthy for our purposes. First, Rosen suspects that recourse to intellectual intuition is not avoidable. Even Hegelian discourse “can occur only after the actual presents itself.” Without intellectual intuition, how do we know the actual has presented itself? Second, while attempting to explain the formation process Hegel “fail[s] to explain how any thing comes to be.” Hegel’s vulnerability to such ‘How’ questions perhaps tempted Marx to formulate his materialist neo-Hegelianism.

In addition to these an other theoretical problems, Rosen identifies a practical dilemma. Plato commends a sort of alienation whereby the philosopher transcends ‘this world.’ Hegel would overcome alienation by rendering practice absolute: that is, spirit and body are reconciled by the grace of the Absolute Spirit, incarnated in the living, self-conscious process of thought thinking itself within the mind of the Hegelian sage, who is satisfied within, not ‘above,’ concrete political-historical life. But “the very existence of the sage is the most radical evidence of the difference between the few and the many.” In modernity this difference, when resented, can lead to “the condemnation to death of philosophy itself.” This condemnation is made in the name of the many, said by their putative spokesmen to embody wisdom, and therefore no longer in need of philosophy or of philosophers. There is little satisfaction in that for the Hegelian sage, although much for Lenin and Mao. Politics remains as problematic for the sage as for the philosopher.

In his exchange with Strauss, Alexander Kojève insists that the philosopher depends upon the many for a philosophic necessity. By himself, the philosopher cannot know if his “first principles” are truly evident and not the result of some madness. In isolation one can never know. Only “social and historical verification” will do, absent the personal god(s) a philosopher likely rejects. “[T]he ‘success’ of his philosophical pedagogy is the sole ‘objective’ criterion of the truth of the philosopher’s doctrine,” and that pedagogy must not be restricted permanently to an elite. On this, it is fair to say that Kojève partakes of the democratization of thought Tocqueville observed first in America, where mind and heart alike feel the pull of egalitarianism. Kojève thus assumes that madness will find ‘the many’ therapeutic; he further assumes that the many are not mad, and even educable. This egalitarian or ‘Left’ Hegelianism also requires the assumption that contradiction can only be resolved “to the extent” it is “played out in the historical terrain of active social life where one argues by acts of Labor (against Nature) and Struggle (against men).” To Kojève’s Hegel, political givens must be negated in action before a new reality can be philosophically understood. The tyrant “who will realize the universal and homogeneous State” is the precondition of “the coming of the wise man.”

In his reply, Strauss expresses a philosophic skepticism concerning the alleged philosophic necessity of the many and of the universal and homogeneous state. Throughout, he questions the contention that mixing the philosophic with the sub-philosophic can yield that which transcends both, wisdom. (One might think that the addition of the sub-philosophic would yield something in between: the intellectual. But Hegelians would find this thought lamentably undialectical.) Strauss does not deny that the many can, in a limited way and inadvertently, serve the philosopher. “The philosopher cannot devote his life to his own work if other people do not take care of the needs of his body.” But Strauss denies that the philosopher is much instructed by those who take such care. The universal and final tyrant does claim to take care of the body. He also pretends to take care of the soul, even the philosopher’s soul. But there is no reason to suppose that he can do any such thing.

That such criticisms irreparably damage ‘Left’ Hegelianism may be seen in the very attempts to formulate a modest, humane, ‘Left’ Hegelianism that Bernstein’s project typifies. One must doubt that these efforts can succeed philosophically, if only because they exaggerate, sentimentalize, the egalitarianism of ‘Left’ Hegelianism, which in turn exaggerates the egalitarianism aspect of Hegelianism itself. But the latter egalitarianism—the attempt to synthesize ‘high’ classicism with ‘low’ modernism—is intended to serve sagacity, which is not egalitarian. If anything, sagacity makes fare more immodest claims than philosophy does. Yet so do the ‘low’ moderns themselves: from Machiavelli on, almost every one of them claims to know enough to achieve, or help men achieve, godlike mastery over nature. In this, Hegel clearly sides with the moderns. Can this combination of low means with high pretensions cohere rationally? In modernity the problem of historicity and reason leads to this question.