Catherine H. Zuckert: Natural Right and the American Imagination. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990.
The title Natural Right and the American Imagination recalls Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. It is risky to invite comparison to a formidable book. In this instance, the risk was worth taking. Although there might be a numbskull or two led to imagine that Professor Zuckert is attempting to rival Strauss—the vainest personalities unfailingly impute vanity to others—she is right to draw attention to Strauss’s book and to invite, not a comparison, but a parallel consideration of her book and his.
By writing of natural right and history, Strauss intends to question the conventional opinion of our time: that we have a ‘time,’ that all of life, including human life and thought, is ‘historical’—that is, relative to whatever ‘epoch’ it occurs in. Strauss not only refers his readers to the older teaching of natural right transcending times and places. He further tells readers that if they want truly to ‘think historically,’ to be faithful to the historical record, they must read the books of the past without presuming to pigeonhole them into readymade categories: the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the Dark Ages, the rosy dawn of Enlightenment, and so on. A genuine historian wants to know what the author of any book was trying to do. The only way to discover that is to put first things first, to pay attention to the details of the arrangement of the words in front of your nose. There is no ‘method,’ no royal road of reading, only a patient familiarizing with the boulevards and back alleys of the city in which you’ve chosen to take up intellectual residence, for a time.
This seemingly modest argument brought down on Strauss a farrago of fear and loathing, when it did not simply cause him to be ignored or dismissed as a crank. Strauss paid much attention to the dangers of the philosophic life precisely because he anticipated and then experienced them—if, in his later years, only in those mild forms seen in commercial republics.
By contrast, Professor Zuckert’s book has won considerable praise. She reads very much the way Strauss read, directing her intellectual energies to the books at hand. Yet there are no reviewer-denunciations of her, no charges that she is some sort of Professor Moriarity of philosophic crime. The book has earned wide respect.
The solution to this mystery may be found in reflecting not upon the way Professor Zuckert reads, but upon the way she writes. In her preface she asserts that the American novelists she will examine concurred in seeing the “need for a peculiarly democratic kind of literary political thinker” (ix). Professor Zuckert appears to be a peculiarly democratic, peculiarly American kind of literary-political critic; she appears so by writing as if she is one. Strauss does not write that way. No American democrat, he does not mention America, or the imagination, in any book-title of his. Strauss is ineluctably foreign. Zuckert comes across as one of us.
Americans recur perhaps too quickly to fundamentals, having the example of the Declaration of Independence always before them. A “recurrent theme” of the American novel, Zuckert writes, is “the hero who withdraws from civil society to live in nature” (1). As did the American Founders, these re-founders “almost immediately establish new kinds of social relations” on “the grounds on which a just community might be founded” (1). Because recurrence to the foundations of America in some sense constitutes thoughtful Americans, “one can become an American” (6, emphasis added): learn a civic catechism, convert. And a citizen can become a statesman in his own right, conceive an architectonic project, even if the intent is fidelity not rebellion. In “trying to reshape” American ways, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner engaged in a “form of political leadership” (7). Zuckert chooses the word “leadership,” not statesmanship–a measure of her rhetorical skill. Her audience consists of feminist and historicist literary academics. ‘Statesmanship’ says ‘male,’ stasis, permanent things. “Leadership” says ‘progressive,’ ‘historical,’ with equal opportunity for all.
The details of Zuckert’s argument may best be understood by following her example and studying her book alongside not only Strauss but also the books she discusses. (For an excellent summary, see Diana Schaub’s review in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume XIX, Number 1, 105-110.) Consider, for the moment, a simple list. Zuckert begins her overview of these novelists with a Rousseauan (Cooper), followed by an anti-Rousseauan careful not to fall back into Calvinism (Hawthorne), a democratic tragedian who stands closer to Shakespeare than to any philosopher (Melville), a satirist who writes like a Benjamin Franklin reared in the South (Twain), an American ‘Heideggerian’ (Hemingway), and a Bergsonian historicist (Faulkner). That is, Zuckert begins with a novelist influenced by a proto-historicist and ends with two historicists, one a scourge of tradition and the second a tender of it. At least three of her novelists reject the founding principles of the American republic. Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are, each in his own way, more nearly compatible with ‘American’ principles than are Cooper, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Zuckert thus forces her thoughtful reader to consider political principles that cannot be ‘synthesized’ or made into a unified ‘tradition.’ Natural right and history, indeed.
In her ninth and final chapter, Zuckert argues as follows: The founders instituted a government in order to secure the unalienable, God-endowed “natural rights” of the American people (242). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness number among these rights, which are self-evident. However, the worth of human life itself, and therefore the worth of the right to it, are not self-evident, even if our possession of that right is. “[T]he things that make human life worthwhile are not externally visible” (242). “If the goodness of human life is not externally visible, American political institutions ultimately must be founded in an appreciation of the inner beauty of an ordinary person” (242)—that is, one who has been “created equal” with respect to his unalienable rights, as the Declaration styles it, but may be lacking in any obvious beauties. However, the beauty of such a one “cannot be described historically or analyzed theoretically”; “it can only be revealed through the work of a literary artist” (242). “Because such revelations are explicitly fictional, their political and philosophical import has generally been ignored. Should contemporary readers become more aware of the ontological and epistemological limitations not merely of ‘science’ but of discursive reason more generally, however, they might—as Martin Heidegger has argued—come to see the way in which poetic ‘fiction’ not only can but also does shape communal human existence.” (242) Accordingly, some of the American novelists have had recourse to European philosophers in attempting to correct alleged flaws in the American regime.
Zuckert takes this last fact as an invitation not to literary criticism or even literary theory, but as an invitation to political philosophy. That this is not an obvious, or shall we say self-evident, step may be seen in the fact that so many scholars who devote themselves to the study of American novelists do not take it. Yet many of these same scholars admire Zuckert’s book.
How can this be?
Contemporary American literary academics might best be characterized as Heideggerians of egalitarianism. Gone are the traces of Nietzsche’s steep, rigorous order of rank. Retained are the historicizing and the poeticizing, the radical critique of reason and (it must be said) the severely intolerant politicizing. By the grace of egalitarianism or unself-conscious democratism, this is a politicizing from the ‘Left.’
Zuckert charms this nest of vipers. To make goodness desirable one must reveal it as beautiful, because beauty isn’t skin-deep. To discover beauty in human goodness may require a making-visible, a poesis, as both Plato and Aristotle teach. But Zuckert does not point to them. She points to Heidegger, whose notions of poeticizing differ radically from those of Plato and Aristotle. Between those philosophers and Heidegger arises the popularization of the concept of creation. This is a concept the Declaration declares, but the Founders declare nothing about human creation, only divine creation.
The worth of human life—its inner truth and greatness, to appropriate a fine phrase infamously used by Heidegger—is not ocularly self-evident, externally visible. This leaves open the possibility that it may be self-evident noetically, to the mind’s eye. Poetry as understood and ‘corrected’ by Plato and Aristotle depends upon some such perception. Poesis depends upon noesis. This is why it is so intelligent to make the central chapter of a book on American novelists the chapter on the Shakespearean, Melville.
These facts, presented to a candid world, will guide Zuckert’s thoughtful readers toward political philosophy and toward a more serious understanding of literature. Just as Strauss shows that a genuine historical understanding will find certain thinkers to have transcended ‘history’ as conceived as a pattern of events or a ‘time,’ so Zuckert shows that an understanding of natural right as a philosophically discoverable idea is required to reach a genuine literary understanding of certain novelists. The genuine literary understanding will see the novelists as they saw themselves, entailing, among other things, a clear understanding of their poesis. To understand the American imagination (and its popular cousin, the American dream), you need to understand natural right. Without naming names, Zuckert gently but firmly guides her readers toward the most ‘poetic’ of the political philosophers—Plato, Aristotle (in the Poetics), Lucretius, Boethius, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche—and the most philosophic of poets—Dante, Shakespeare—all the while sounding as if she might be a neo-Heideggerian, ‘one of us’ literary-critical types. She is of course well aware that noesis or intellectual intuition sets a strict limit on historicism, preventing it from becoming radical or Heideggerian. At the same time, she agrees with Heidegger that analytical and discursive reasoning are inadequate for the task of perceiving or understanding either the beautiful or the good. Hence the value of appreciating poesis, even if it is quite dangerous to appreciate it too much. She knows that in order to understand natural right, you don’t need to understand, or even to have heard of, the American imagination. Still, to arrive at such an understanding of natural right, the American imagination is an excellent place to start.
Zuckert also knows that a large portion of the audience she addresses is none too candid, none too thoughtful. She will not arouse those who slumber dogmatically, those who elevate their narcolepsy to the level of ‘principle’ and from that dubious vantage point proclaim themselves self-conscious. She may awaken others from their dogmatic slumber, those others who dreamily see that there is no reconciling all her novelists, or all the philosophers she invites her readers to read. Let those alert to the principle of non-contradiction follow its lead to new perceptions.
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