Stanley Rosen: Hermeneutics as Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Leo Strauss: On Tyranny. Corrected and expanded edition. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Near the beginning of the nineteenth century, Ernest Renan saw that his contemporaries’ fascination with decadence and their equal fascination with origins, with the primitive, constituted not a contradiction but two sides of the same thing. The attempt to find an underlying unity in contraries animates Hegelian dialectics, in which contradictions really express different aspects of the Absolute Spirit as it moves forward in time toward the ‘end of History’ by means of these very conflicts. As the author of the definitive study of Hegel’s System of Logic, Stanley Rosen might be suspected of making a similar move as he considers modernism and ‘postmodernism.’ Postmodernism is really “a continuation of the Enlightenment” and, like the Enlightenment, it deploys a sort of art (in its case hermeneutics instead of technology) for “intrinsically political” purposes (3). But Rosen instead points to a real contradiction, not a resolvable paradox. “Kant is the paradigm of the internal incoherence of the Enlightenment” (3), attempting to mix Newtonian science (with its foundation in mathematics) with the desire for individual and political freedom.
Rhetorically, modern science seeks what Bacon (following his master, Machiavelli) sought: the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, which relief Kant understands as freedom from necessity. The human ‘subject’ will rule inhuman ‘objects,’ not (as in all human life hitherto) the other way around; Enlightenment or the pervasiveness of science in society will free humanity from the chains of nature’s deterministic laws, laws governing such phenomena as the gravity Newton explained. But if we subject this subject to scientific investigation, we can identify no rational purpose inherent in the subject. Why seek dominance? “Science, as well as the underlying subject-object distinction that characterizes the modern epoch, is no more reasonable than any other product of the will. Indeed, if freedom is our goal, then reason is less reasonable than the imagination” (4), which obeys no law.
Kant proposes another sort of law, a law of ‘History,’ illustrated by this sense of “the unreasonableness of reason and the turn to the imagination” (4). What Kant calls the “understanding” “constitutes both the world of experience, as well as scientific knowledge,” the realm of necessity, of “the formulation of and obedience to rules” (4). If freedom is also rational, it cannot be rational in the way science is rational; “reason in this technical sense has nothing to do with scientific knowledge” (4). But the reason Kant associates with freedom cannot be lawful in this necessitarian sense, or it ceases to be free; if freedom means choice, why choose science or “understanding”? “What grounds or motivates reason?” (4) In Kantian terms, only “the will to freedom” can serve as the grounds of freedom; therefore, “judged by the canons of traditional logic, which Kant accepts, his argument is invalid” (4). Indeed, there is no logical argument here at all, because “the entire Kantian enterprise is justified by rhetoric,” obscuring “the consequence of the separation of understanding from freedom as well as the subordination of reason to the will” (4). And to what does the will subordinate itself, if not imagination?
It is the imagination which posits ‘History’ as the story of the course of events leading to a conclusion, and end—in Kant’s case, universal and perpetual peace among nations. Thus history is neither nature nor freedom but “a self-contradictory domain of auto-emancipation governed by theoretical and practical rules” or ‘laws of History’ (5). The spontaneity of imagination “makes reason unreasonable because arbitrary” (5). “This is the basis for the subsequent view that reason is an artifact of history, in other words, the reverse of the eighteenth-century view that history is an artifact of reason. We thus come directly to the late-modern view, made dominant by Nietzsche and today accepted among postmodernist thinkers without any prominent exception: to reason is to interpret, because reason is itself an interpretation” (5). Postmodernism results from the incoherence of modernism without remedying that incoherence. Postmodern politics reacts against the ‘rationalist’ administrative state but can only generate its wan “call to anarchism” in opposition to it (5). It occupies Wall Street without getting rid of it, before being swept away with the cannons and canons of the ruling bureaucracy.
The arch-postmodernist, Jacques Derrida, aims his notion of “difference” at modernism. In doing so, he “radicalizes Kantian spontaneity and entirely detaches it from concepts or rules,” making it purely a matter of making. Even “to read is not merely to interpret, but to signify or write, and hence to produce a different text” (7). According to Derrida, when Plato’s “philosopher-soldier” claims to reason his way to perceiving the ideas or forms, stigmatizing those who don’t make the philosophic ascent as ignorant, he really attempts to impose his tyrannical constructions on everyone else (8). This is true of every rationalist, including those who misunderstand themselves as liberals. Kant, for example, imposes his will to rationality on all who philosophize with him because he “insists upon being rational, and so not merely logical but comprehensively systematic” (8).”In place of the philosopher-soldier, the postmodernist puts Nietzsche’s artist-warrior: poetry replaces mathematics, difference replaces identity, and creation is unmasked as destruction” (8). (Or, as Rosen puts it a bit later, “There is no God in Derrida’s anticosmos, but only the Talmud. And since there is no God, the Talmud is not the Talmud.” [17]).Postmodernists replace theory with interpretation, openly acknowledging that interpreters do not perceive but replace what they see. Because Kant’s whole theory rests on spontaneity (despite its rationalist rhetorical trappings), “it is a much shorter step from Kant to Nietzsche”—via Hegel and Marx—”than one might think” (9). This claim authorizes postmoderns to synthesize Marx and Nietzsche, giving us an otherwise improbable Nietzscheism of the Left.
The other major postmodernist Rosen discusses in his introduction is Jürgen Habermas. Habermas’s key concept isn’t difference but “intersubjectivity,” the claim that societies organize themselves around the relations among their members. This may be trivially true, inasmuch as “we do not require theories telling us how to cross the street or that the best way to communicate with people is by speaking to them” (12). Or it may be simply false, inasmuch as intersubjectivity scarcely solves the problem of subjectivity but merely enlarges it to encompass the whole society. To say that citizens agree on how to organize their society tells us “nothing with respect to the correct organization of society or the most fundamental political problems” (13). Regime-neutral, the theory of intersubjectivity “may be adopted by monarchists as well as by socialists” (13). Further, “if subjectivity is replaced by intersubjectivity, then surely objectivity is replaced by interobjectivity. Does this not mean simply that objectivity is replaced by subjectivity”—resulting in “an internally incoherent brew of positivist objectification and historicist subjectivism” (14)? In sum, Habermas cannot rescue liberalism from its internal contradictions because he remains within Kant’s epistemological net, struggle as he may to escape it. “I would almost be willing to say that I prefer the straightforward and clear-headed approach of Maoism” (15), Rosen intones, delighted as he toys with his victims.
Mao was at bottom a Stalinist, breaking with Khruschev and the Soviet Union almost immediately after Khruschev’s much-publicized “Secret Speech” of 1956, in which he distanced himself from the excesses of the late Man of Steel. The Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève (who shortened and Frenchified “Kojevnikov” when he moved to Paris in the 1920s), was nothing if not an ardent Stalinist, and it is to him, and to his dialectical opponent, Leo Strauss, that Rosen next turns. In a well-known exchange published in the 1950s, Kojève and Strauss argued for a neo-Hegelian historicism and a return to the natural right of the classical philosophers, respectively. “The quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, as it was played out in the exoteric debate between Strauss and Kojève, has its inner or esoteric meaning in the question quid sit deus?” (16) In Rosen’s striking formulation, both men were “atheists who wish[ed] to be gods” (16)—that is, philosophers or even sages. Rosen aspires to join them in a life of “genuine Socratic leisure,” which leaves no time for taking the niaiseries of fashionable postmodernism too seriously (17). But he will devote the next three chapters of his book to fuller expositions of the proto-postmodernist Kant, the postmodern (but really modern) Derrida, and the Kojève-Strauss exchange, respectively.
Kant presents a “rhetoric of the Enlightenment” (Title, 19). Such a rhetoric becomes necessary as one sees that the Enlightenment requires daring but provokes terror along with hope. The “mathematical enthusiasm of Descartes and his progeny” typifies the daring; the misgivings of Pascal as he considers the “infinite spaces” revealed by modern science typifies the terror. And Pascal doesn’t worry only about the infinite space that leaves human beings lost in the cosmos; he also finds that the scientific project of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate makes its devotees think so much about the future that they neglect the present: “We never live,” he laments, “but we hope to live” (19)—a fair anticipation of Kant’s conception of ‘History’ as progress toward universal and perpetual peace.
Kant famously puts forward a slogan for the Enlightenment: “Dare to know!” He shares the “inquietude” that comes along with his daring, concealing it with “a rhetorical mixture of hope and technical ambiguity” (19), which Rosen proceeds to uncover in his own act of enlightening brio. Whereas Machiavelli, Hobbes, and (perhaps especially) Locke “attempted to regulate Cartesian daring with one form or another of classical political prudence” (19), Kantian rhetoric takes an apparently more ‘epistemological’ route. He distinguishes science, “knowledge of natural necessity,” from morality, the realm of freedom understood as autonomy; “there can be no knowledge of morality” (20). Politics, although motivated by natural not moral inclination, isn’t scientific, either, but rather a matter of Klugheit or cleverness. Politics is “neither scientific nor (in the proper sense of the term) moral; if morality is obedience to law reasoning sets for itself in accordance with the Categorical Imperative, political ‘freedom’ “is the preservation of justice and tranquility, which allows the individual to pursue worldly happiness”—exactly the thing the moral person eschews (20). Accordingly (and here is where the disquietude comes in), “we can never know” if morality and happiness will ever conjoin at the ‘end of History” (20). Political progress isn’t determined by nature (there is no ‘political science,’ strictly speaking) but neither do real men for the most part follow their moral duty as set down in the Categorical Imperative. Kant sees that they are too selfish, and too calculating or clever, for that.
It is then easy to see how Kant prepares the way for historicism. Human freedom in this world depends upon the scientific conquest of nature, which means that “science must also be forced to submit to the human will” (20). To act in such a way that the maxim of my action can be universalized without contradiction, as per the Categorical Imperative, is consistent with but does not necessitate the willed submission of science to the project of the conquest of nature. “Fundamentally political,” history is not irrational, but neither is it rational (21); it is in a domain of its own, not irrational but also without rational or philosophic grounding. “We must have recourse to rhetoric and hope when speculating about history” because it operates in accordance with a momentum of its own (21). This “anticipates the nineteenth-century discover of historicity,” without developing the new dialectical logic of Hegel; lacking that, it leaves itself open to Nietzsche’s claim that history is irrational (21). Kant’s notion of politics and history also “radically lowers the status of political prudence,” so prized by the classics, because insofar as history moves toward morality the morality it moves toward has no room for prudence, and insofar as history moves toward worldly happiness it does so more or less as participants in Adam Smith’s free markets do—each pursuing his own selfish interests but in doing so producing wealth for the nations, inadvertently (21). One way to understand this new category, historicity, will be ‘logics of History’; another will be a sort of poetry depicting an imagined future, a utopia to be realized in time. The latter possibility brings forth Nietzsche, but more recently the postmodernist notion of “difference” or constant, creative reinterpretation democratized for the delectation of (even) college students. This is what Rosen means by saying that “postmodernism is in fact a continuation of the Enlightenment” (22).
There is more. Kant also anticipates postmodernism by “the transformation of philosophy into global hermeneutics” and “the introduction of the rhetoric of frankness” (22). Consider “the first principle of Kant’s thought: the unquestioned desirability of freedom” (22). First principles are by definition not deduced from any other principle; this particular first principle “also suffers from the serious disadvantage that anything at all can be deduced from it” (22). On this latter point, Rosen may be thinking of Hegel’s riposte to the Categorical Imperative: the maxim “Thou shalt not steal” in principle could surely be universally followed without contradiction, but so could the contradictory maxim, “Thou shalt steal.” It might not be possible to deduce anything at all from the principle of Kantian freedom or autonomy, but one can deduce maxims that contradict one another, and that is rather a problem. “From the outset,” therefore, “it is evident that the defense of freedom is necessarily rhetorical” (22). Kant is too much the dutiful moralist to seize upon Rousseau’s estheticism as the philosophic way of life, and too much the modern to return to the classical idea of the practically unrealizable best regime; he chooses instead “a hermeneutics of freedom” consisting of the rhetorical formulation and defense of a rationally indemonstrable “doctrine of infinite historical progress” (23).
The realm in which we can demonstrate progress is modern natural science. But to continue this progress we must abandon the remnants of classical thought whereby the intellect attempts “to conform to an ostensibly independent nature,” instead “requir[ing] nature [to] conform to the intellect” which will be systematically plotting nature’s conquest (24). In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant’s distinction between “understanding” or scientific knowledge of nature, the realm of necessity, and “reason” or rational self-legislation for freely “initiating moral action within the world” rests on a shared similarity: both understanding and reason are spontaneous, self-organizing (25). Understanding produces concepts which unify our sense-impressions “into objects of experience, which are also possible objects of scientific knowledge” (25). Reason produces a non-sensory set of moral maxims. The spontaneity of both these intellectual faculties, their status as “self-produced law” (26), means that thinkers do not reflect or perceive Being but approach it via constructs: “What counts as experience, and also as confirmation, is created by our acceptance of the hypothesis. Kant acts not like a humble empirical scientist but like a world-maker or god” (25). And, like the laws of the God of the Bible, one is free to accept or reject Kant’s commands. “We are free to accept or to reject the worlds of knowledge and morality as ‘defined’ by Kant” (26). Instead of positing an orderly cosmos we can posit chaos, as Nietzsche later did; we are free to posit difference, as Derrida did, still later, in transforming philosophy into hermeneutics.
The third and final way in which Kant anticipates postmodernism is what Rosen calls his rhetoric of frankness. Classical rhetoric sanctioned lying “in the specific sense of pretending to believe what one does not believe and not to believe what one does believe,” typically in order to protect the philosopher from indignant defenders of conventional opinions (27). Enlightenment rhetoric in Kant’s formulation “states frankly that it does not know what it does not know,” admitting that its first principles are hypothetical; “it will assume what it needs in order to preserve a case it deems worth making” (27). Dare to know, exercising resolution and courage. Such resolution and courage underlie Kant’s notion of History by taking a Hobbesian idea of human nature as selfish and passionate and making it “the engine of historical progress”; this differs from Hegel in keeping History within the realm of nature instead of positing an Absolute Spirit which animates all of nature and all of thought, ending the dichotomy of object and subject (29). We no longer need the classical rhetoric of caution and prevarication because Kant dares to will change, “reject[ing] the world ‘produced’ by his predecessors in order to establish his own regime” (31). Such a rhetoric is “simple and popular,” not “philosophical or prudential” (32). To transform the world one must not merely think seriously and teach disciples but publicize one’s thought, “make learning and science public, or transpolitical,” a thing to be spread throughout the literate world (32). In this he opposes not only Bacon and Descartes but Plato, the student of that master of irony, Socrates. What he does preclude is any disobedience to the law of one’s country. Rosen regards Kant’s version of liberalism as untenable because it collides with the reef of religion: If “no political association has the right to interfere with Enlightenment,” then “this certainly entails that religion will not merely be subjected to public ‘theoretical’ criticism but that it will be brought ‘within the bounds of reason alone'” (33). Intellectual liberation means illiberalism or intolerance with respect to religious doctrines and strictures.
Another way to put it is to see that Kant falls into the trap Aristotle had identified centuries earlier in the Second Book of the Politics. There, Aristotle criticizes a proposal to reward citizens who propose improvements to the laws that are enacted by the polis. Law is a kind of command, and to be obeyed commands need to be respected; constant innovation erodes respect for the law, and a law that gives citizens incentives to dream up changes to the laws, and to agitate for those changes, can only incline the polis to lawlessness. Similarly, “Kant desires orderly or law-abiding progress,” “but this is like trying to mix oil and water” (34). The oil will separate into the statism of Hegel, or the proletarian dictatorship of Marx; the water will separate into the doctrine of creativity in Nietzsche, or the envisioned communism of Marx. Whereas Kant, still acknowledging the power and persistence of nature, “does not expect human nature to change during the unending progress of history,” his predecessors will posit an end of History that results from just such a change or transformation (43).
In rejecting practical or prudential reasoning as a moral guide, and restricting solely to the level of “worldly cleverness, the instrument of self-interest,” Kant leaves himself with “no serious doctrine of political rationality” (45). “This is one of Kant’s most terrible legacies to late modernity,” as “the separation of theoretical from practical [intellectual] eros” has done anything but defend political liberty in the past century (45). Enlightenment daring overbears Kantian duty and law-abidingness; “daring triumphs over prudence and flirts with madness” (46). In the postmoderns this has led to the decay of the idea of progress because progress presupposes a criterion by which one can tell which actions are progressive, which reactionary. The politics of difference, of “unending signification,” results in practice in something Rosen himself did not see: the attempt to practice a politics of the ‘flash-mob,’ the flash-bulb, and the thought-flash or ‘tweet.’ One may worry about Plato’s guardians, but shall we worry less when they are “replaced by tribunes of the vulgus“? (47) “We are now living through the rhetorical frenzy of the latest attempt of the self-contradictory nature of Enlightenment to enforce itself as a solution to its own incoherence” (49).
Speaking of incoherence, Rosen turns next to the prince of postmodernism, Jacques Derrida. Derrida wants to pull an endless series of ‘somethings’—namely, signifiers or meanings—out of nothing, while nonetheless denying the existing of the all-powerful Creator-God who can actually do so. In denying the existence of any knowable reality beyond the words which continually reinterpret previous verbal statements, postmodernism parallels the analytical philosophy which dominated the philosophy departments of Anglophone universities; they share a “common heritage in the conception of ontology as grammatology” (50). It is a short step from analysis to deconstruction, and either one ends in self-immolation if pursued to the end. That in some sense they can’t be pursued to the end becomes clear when we remark that philosophy departments are still with us, after all these decades of what the Shakespeare scholar Michael Platt has called their “dour play.”
Derrida echoes Heidegger’s historicist charge that all previous philosophers have claimed to know nature and/or History by planting themselves firmly in the present moment and gazing at ‘Being’ from that unwarrantedly privileged position. The present is unwarrantedly privileged because the thinker who takes his orientation from it perforce neglects the past and especially the future. But this point in time isn’t fixed, but is always being replaced by another moment; by committing himself to this illusion, the thinker wittingly or unwittingly reduces nature to an object that may be defined and exploited. All previous philosophy has been, or has been propaedeutic to, bourgeois capitalism. In terms of the way in which philosophers work, the metaphysics of presence leads them to assume that words can have fixed meanings or definitions. It also leads Plato (in the Phaedrus, most conspicuously) to privilege speech over writing on the grounds that speech more directly conveys the noetic perception of ‘Being’ than writing does.
Rosen judges Derrida to be correct in distinguishing the God of the Bible from the gods mentioned in the Platonic dialogues. The Creator-God remains beyond the Being He created, separate from it; one can only approach Him by attending to His spoken words, as prophets do, or to His written words, as the rest of us do. Plato’s Olympians “tend the cosmos” but they do not “make it” (52). The god who figures most prominently in the Phaedrus is Eros, “who neither speaks nor writes” as he “guide[s] us upward to the nonliving and nonspeaking Ideas” which we see rather than hear (52). Rosen finds this account true as far as it goes but too simple.
“The Jew approaches God in the fulfillment of the Law,” which “is not logos” (53). To approach God in some way other than through Torah amounts to “a revolt against the distinction between creator and creation, or the attempt to achieve the promise of Satan (‘ye shall be like God’)” (53). Plato’s Socrates would have the lovers of wisdom approach the Ideas (not a personal God) through logos, not law. This approach or “erotic ascent” is noetic—”silent and direct”; speech isn’t its vehicle but rather a report of what the philosopher has seen (53). Speech is therefore not evidence of a Platonic metaphysics of presence, and is therefore not ‘privileged’ over writing. The distinction drawn between speech and writing in the Phaedrus has everything to do with politics, not ontology. “Speech, according to Socrates, is superior to writing for political reasons” because “we can adjust our conversation to the nature of the interlocutor, in the way that the equity of the judge adjusts the written law to the individual case, whereas writing says the same thing to everyone” (87). Writing does not know when to keep silent; it is in fact more ‘garrulous’ than speech, which can fall silent when censorious souls intrude into the conversation. That is, “speech is the living presence, not of Being, but of the speaker to himself, of intellect or Geist, not of form” (54). If the ultimate reality is the personal God, then His speech and His writings reveal Himself to us to exactly that extent to which He judges His creations to be able to bear; if, on the contrary, the ultimate reality is silent nature, then we look first, listen later.
We listen to ourselves speaking about the nature we have seen, but we cannot look at our perceiving souls the way we look at the rest of nature. For that, we can have recourse only to myth. “Speech, the presence of the living intelligence, is able to silence itself: to commune, or to strive to commune, with the silent Ideas in the silence of pure noēsis. The living intelligence thus disappears as it approaches the vision of the Ideas; it ‘loses itself in thought.'” (55) Contra Heidegger and Derrida, Plato has already refused a ‘metaphysics of presence.’ He has heeded the Socratic maxim, ‘Know yourself’ (56). By contrast, “Derrida, who apparently identifies the self with the modern doctrine of subjectivity, which he believes himself to have deconstructed, has on his account, no self. As a consequence, he has no knowledge.” (56)
In the Phaedrus Socrates makes much of the distinction between speech and writing, associating the latter with the Egyptian god, Theuth. Derrida fails to distinguish adequately among the gods on this count. The God of the Bible creates by speaking; for Him, “to speak is to write,” as “divine speech constitutes itself as the world, of which Torah is the living essence” (56). The Egyptian god invents writing but we hear nothing about his speech. The Olympians speak but do not write. Among these gods, then, the Olympians are the most friendly to philosophizing, the Egyptian most political and legalistic. Rosen playfully suggests that Derrida may “unconsciously conceive of himself as Moses,” the prophet who leads God’s people out of Egypt and into the promised land where speech and writing are balanced (58). But logos “in its critical Platonic sense, namely, as truth, reason, or proportion,” is neither speech nor writing but the noetic perception of the Ideas or nature (58). This is why the philosophic quest for godlikeness does not aim at overthrowing God. Nature is the end-point of its ascent. Finally, speech and writing are, or at least can be made to be the same. They are the same because they both imitate the divine logos; “they differ in their political function” (60), inasmuch as writing fixes speech in place via the literary genre of the dialogue. As indicated in the Phaedrus, writing can imitate speech when the writer writes a dialogue because the reader must complete the thoughts of the speakers, treat the fixed speeches as if they were living speeches, with hints, intonations and all the other unspoken or partly-spoken features of live speech registered in ink. “What, then, is the [philosophic, as distinguished from the political] difference between speech and writing? Answer: none, or in other words, silence.” (63) The Platonic dialogue—literally a monologue of Plato’s— “orders the cosmos after a silent vision of the good, which transforms the pretheoretical understanding of the world,” the world of conventions symbolized by the Cave in the Republic (64). The good is primary, ‘creation’ or nature secondary. In the Bible, “goodness is relative and posterior to creation, hence to the will of God,” who creates first, then looks, then pronounces His creation “good” (64). Derrida, on the contrary, “takes language or writing to be its own origin” (63). This is “the radicalization of sophistry” (65), the verbose shape-shifting that serves as philosophy’s rival in the Phaedrus.
But if Derrida thus stands “outside of philosophy,” philosophic refutation will not faze him (65). “There is no Derridean evidence, because each signifier signifies merely another signifier” (66). But if so, deconstructionism self-deconstructs. No refutation is needed, even if Derrida is “not especially impressed by the principle of noncontradiction” (67). One can also point out, as Rosen does, that Derrida gets Plato wrong, overlooking the redemption of a certain kind of writing after the critique of writing (in the Phaedrus), the turn from physics to logos (in the Phaedo), and the fundamental point that philosophy does not assert that the Ideas, “the origin of being,” are invisible but that they are discursively unspeakable (68). “These forms can be seen and named, but as soon as we try to state more definitely their properties and relations, we stumble into self-contradiction” (68), as seen in the Sophist. As pure ideas or forms, being and same can be distinguished; “yet we cannot speak or think of being as distinct, except by thinking of being itself, and hence as the same as itself” (69). Being and sameness may be ‘abstracted’ from one another, but in actuality they are not independent. This means that Plato has no ‘ontology‘ in the modern and postmodern sense of a fully-articulated speech about being. When “we insist on developing an ontology” we produce either the “conceptual artifacts” of Kant or Hegelian dialectic; “in both cases, we are exploring constructions of thought, not of Being” (69).
By claiming that discourse and writing “continuously deconstruct[s] or differentiate[s] itself,” Derrida produces “a kind of inverted Hegelianism” whereby concepts or constructions of thought do not synthesize but fall apart. “But this is nonsense”: geometry, algebra, logic, and set theory do no such thing, because they are intrinsically formal and formality “cannot be separated from its form” (69). “Even deconstructionists can see what they are saying” (70); if they self-deconstruct, that is the end of them, but they never really do. Even if our reasoning gaze can only bring back “a likely story” or poem about the Being we have glimpsed, this does not force us into nihilism. In the Timaeus we are reminded “that I who speak and you who judge have the human nature” (quoted, 71); we are part of the whole we have glimpsed, alike to it and not simply ‘subjects’ observing ‘objects.’ Plato plays (and Rosen imitates him in this), writing dialogues not treatises; he cannot by a metaphysician of presence because “metaphysicians of presence are not playful” (73). Derrida “does not know what it means to wish to be a god” (73). His ‘differentiating” is neither playful nor serious (73); he lacks the divine madness of the philosopher, and he fails to see it in Plato (74). Although Plato’s account of the soul is playful, “the soul is divine, and hence a serious matter” (75). But divine in what sense?
The soul is divine in that it’s erotic, and Eros is a god. Eros is not the Creator-God, of course, Who does not manifest Himself to the classical philosophers. Rather, Eros (in the words of Socrates in the Symposium) “binds together the whole to itself (quoted 75). The ultimate ‘god’ in classical philosophy is nature as a whole, and Eros is its messenger. The human equivalent of nature is Plato, the philosopher, “whose philosophic eros produces the dialogues” (76). Just as philosophers never see the whole in its entirety, but only glimpse the Ideas (“Seeing the ideas is like stargazing, not astronomy” [76]), so Plato’s readers only glimpse, or interpret, the dialogues. ‘Rosenian’ interpretation differs from that of Heidegger and Derrida because it does not historicize either the Ideas or the dialogues; Rosen silently gazes first, and only then speaks or writes of what he glimpses. By contrast, “Derrida cannot read at all, because requires a moment of silence in which we see the text”; for Derrida, “seeing is already writing,” that is, displacing the text (77).
“Humans must rest content with philosophy, or the dream of wisdom” (78). Dialectic cannot give us ‘ontology’ (except as poetry) but it can give us ‘phenomenology,’ or a description of formal structures in nature (79); these descriptions “vary with the perspective or intention of the phenomenologist” (80), and so are partially if not comprehensively true. Mathematics, however, is more purely divine, fulfilling with “indifferent reliability any intention, and the application of any paradigm, within any perspective” (79). Whether in dialectics or mathematics, intellectual intuition or noēsis perceives truth; without it, “there would be no possibility of intelligent speech, since the criterion for the distinction between two speeches would itself be a speech, thereby giving way to the infinite regress that we may as well call grammatology” (80). This should reduce postmodernists to silence, inasmuch as it means that postmodernism turns deconstructing on itself, although of course it won’t, because so many postmodernists have tenure. “The blind postmodern listens for the voice of Being; he hears nothing but the rustling of texts turning their own pages” (86).
Between Kantian transcendentalism and Derridian deconstruction sits the rationalist historicism of Hegel. Historicism, animating the bureaucratic state, Marxian communism, and the race theory of the Right, has had a much more profound impact on the late-modern world than its predecessor or its successor. Rosen gives his fourth chapter the same title as his book, Hermeneutics as Politics, because in it he addresses the dialogue between the Hegelian-Stalinist Alexandre Kojève and the defender of classical natural right, Leo Strauss on the question of modern tyranny and indeed tyranny ‘period.’ As rationalists, both men eschew the anti-rationalist historicism of Heidegger; in considering Xenophon’s dialogue about tyranny, the Hiero, they base their hermeneutical claims on their shared erotic quest for wisdom.
He begins by remarking that Derrida’s deconstruction of ‘Platonism’—a rather loose term used as shorthand for the metaphysics of presence—revives the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in “the latest convulsion in the death throes of the Enlightenment” (87). In this quarrel, can “a resident of modernity… understand the terms of the quarrel with his ancestors in a way that is not distorted by the aforementioned convulsions” (87)? Strauss thought so, and advanced a hermeneutics aimed at understanding writers, including the “ancients,” as they understood themselves. Kojève thought not, or more accurately thought it important only in understanding the dialectical development of human thought over time, culminating in the end of History in the thought of Hegel. Strauss thought that moderns could learn from the ancients, and needed to do so, in view of the crisis of modernity seen in the tyrannies of the twentieth century. As a first step toward the recovery of their thought, Strauss urged readers to pay attention to the details on the “surface” of the dialogue instead of trying to determine its meaning from Plato’s ‘historical context’ or by attending to the interpretations of subsequent philosophers and scholars. The features of the “surface” of the dialogue will point the careful reader to the meaning beneath the surface.
Rosen concurs with Strauss on this point. The surface of a Platonic dialogue connects hermeneutics and politics. Perhaps glancing at the derivation of the word ‘hermeneutics’ from Hermes, the divine messenger of the gods, Rosen asserts, “From the very beginning, hermeneutics has been concerned with the communication between gods and mortals,” a communication that is “private rather than public” (88). The political issue arises when prophets and others convey this message to the public; the various messages prove “to be diverse and mutually inconsistent” (88). Because the diverse “divine commands either found or dissolve communities,” the “interpretation of a divine command is necessarily a political act” (88). Historicism “was accompanied by a lowering in the status of political philosophy”; whereas Kant still viewed history as “fundamentally political,” Nietzsche had recourse to the “fantasy” of “the radically transpolitical superman,” the Roman Caesar with the soul of Christ (88). It is an untenable synthesis. Freud, Heidegger and Derrida have done no better: “The shift from the public to the private, from politics to existential ontology, are like stages in the psychoanalysis of the enlightened European bourgeois, who is liberated from his neuroses at the cost of his soul. Unfortunately, Caesar without the soul of Christ is also without the soul of Caesar.” (89)
Can one do better by returning to Hegel? Kojève so argued, but this “did nothing to renew the status of politics in history” (91). He did establish his own status, quite spectacularly, “influenc[ing] two generations of French intellectuals” (91). Although he lectured at the École des Hautes Études in Paris, he “was not a professor,” “prefer[ring] the term ‘god'” (92). Intending to overcome “the separation of theory and practice [he not only wrote and lectured on philosophy but served as a powerful administrator in the apparatus which later became the European Union] and thus to bring about what he called the universal and homogeneous world-state,” Kojève assigned to himself the role of a creator-god. Unlike the vast majority of European intellectuals, he frankly acknowledged, with Hegel, that History is a slaughter-bench, that “the murder of millions of innocent persons” by modern tyrants was finally a detail, a needed sacrifice to progress (94). The slaughter-bench is only the altar “upon which are prepared the feasts of the gods” (94). Rosen demands that we face up to this “very harsh and explicitly inhuman argument”; to do less, to fail to refute or deflect it, will “guarantee our own appearance beneath the executioner’s axe” (94).
In entering into dialogue with Kojève on tyranny, Strauss undertook to refute historicism. Before turning to Rosen’s discussion of the two opposing arguments, plunging into the depths, a summary of the exchange, the surface of the dialogue, will get us oriented in exactly the way Rosen, following Strauss, recommends.
Looking at his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in academia in the aftermath of the Second World War, German-Jewish refugee scholar Leo Strauss raised an embarrassing question: How was it that political scientists had failed to recognize tyranny when they saw it arise during the years between the world wars? Most immediately, he observed, Max Weber’s insistence that social scientists separate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ prevented these impressively-trained academics from identifying what anyone should want to know first of all about any ruler, namely, does this ruler take it as his right and even his duty to kill and imprison law-abiding citizens? To study political regimes as if they are bacteria in a petri dish isn’t really science; it is the imitation of science, and a professional deformation. Genuine understanding of political life would need to come from somewhere other than social science as conceived by Strauss’s contemporaries. He looked far behind them, to the political philosophers of Greek antiquity, as better guides to understanding politics than even the most celebrated ‘hard-nosed realists’ among the moderns: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx.
What is tyranny? When we hear tyrants, and even politicians in democracies invoke ‘historical progress’ or simply ‘change’ as their slogans, what are they really talking about?
To understand tyranny in the modern world, Strauss engaged in a sly but serious provocation: He commended study of a long-forgotten short dialogue by Xenophon—then as now hardly a staple of university syllabi, even in ‘Classics’ departments, let alone in social-science classrooms. Xenophon’s Hiero, subtitled On Tyranny, recounts an imaginary dialogue between the eponymous Syracusan tyrant and the poet Simonides of Cleos, a rival of Pindar whose practice of demanding money for his poems and whose reputation for wisdom made him into a sort of proto-Sophistic wised man in the eyes of later generations. In 1948 Strauss published a translation of the dialogue along with his own detailed and subtle interpretation; more than a straightforward exegesis, Strauss’s essay raised the issue of the relation between ancient or ‘classical’ and modern tyranny. He sent the book to his friend Kojève, who agreed to review it, and also agreed to have the dialogue, Strauss’s commentary, his review, and Strauss’s rejoinder published in a new edition, which appeared in 1954.
Xenophon’s Simonides opens the dialogue by asking Hiero how the tyrannical life and private life differ in terms of pleasures and pains—Hiero having followed both of those ways of life, whereas Simonides has never lived as a tyrant. Frequently (and perhaps rhetorically) swearing by Zeus, Hiero maintains that his physical pleasures are now weaker than they were when he was a private man because they are satiated by easy and repeated gratification. As for the gentler pleasures, the tyrant’s life is a lonely one; in loving, he never knows if his love is truly returned, and he can trust no one, not even his family. A tyrant must fear the decent and brave, the wise (presumably including Simonides), and the just. At the central point of the dialogue, Hiero avers that even killing one’s suspected enemies cannot relieve the tyrant’s pitiable condition. “When, because of their fear, they do away with such men, who is left for them to use except the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” (12) Far from being capable of helping his friends and mastering his enemies, the tyrant finds that his friends fear him and his enemies are too numerous to master. But if he killed them all, he would have no one left to rule.
No stranger to rhetoric himself, Simonides brings his wisdom to the rescue of this poor tyrant in distress. Hiero, he intones, I know how you can rule and still be loved. First (and in this the ‘classical’ thinker anticipates Machiavelli) reward farmers, importers, and inventors as persons who benefit the polis. Command your mercenaries to guard not only your own person but all your subjects. Finally, spend your money for the public good. “If you prove superior to your friends in beneficence, your enemies will be utterly unable to resist you” and, “while being happy, you will not be envied for being happy” (21). On that cheery note the dialogue ends; the tyrant rewards the poet with silence. Historians do tell us that Hiero did not have him killed.
In Strauss’s reading, the Hiero provides modern thinkers with a window into the thought of the classical philosophers on the now-misunderstood but crucial problem of tyranny, and on political life generally. Behind the fact-value distinction of Weber lies not simply an approach to social science but a philosophical doctrine, the doctrine or family of doctrines Strauss calls “historicism” (25). For all his talk about ‘ideals,’ Weber assumed that ideals are culturally determined; cultures arise, grow, then wither; that is to say, they are fundamentally ‘historical’—beings transformed in the course of time. While academic historians understand the term ‘historicism’ to mean simply to ‘contextualize’ the actions, thoughts, and persons of the past, showing how contemporary events relate to one another, Strauss offers a philosophic definition. Historicism in this sense means 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” (25); every human thought is ‘relative’ to the historical time-frame in which it is conceived, and it has no necessary validity beyond that time-frame.
The moral and political result of historicist thinking proved catastrophic in the generation immediately following Weber’s, for while the ancient Greeks in fact identified and described tyranny, in the eyes of Strauss’s contemporaries that definition had little or no relevance to our own time and place. Similarly, while those Greeks in fact made certain value judgments about tyranny so defined, their values are not our values. We can have little or nothing to learn from Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, even if our antiquarians may enjoy learning about them.
Assuming that classical description and judgment of tyranny no longer had anything to teach us; assuming that the very notion of a ‘value-laden’ political science couldn’t be scientific at all because ‘values’ lie outside the boundaries of the knowable, and endure as mere sentimental reflections of the factual conditions of a given time and place; inclined to suppose that tyranny itself need no longer concern them, because humanity had moved on, progressing beyond such a thing, twentieth-century historicists failed adequately to assess such men as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. More, these new tyrants formed ambitions well beyond those of someone like Hiero or even Alexander the Great; armed with the philosophic doctrine of historicism, the new tyrants sought a “perpetual and universal tyranny” over not only human actions but human thoughts (27). Historicism itself advances this “collectivization or coordination of thought” because it enables tyrants to claim that their rule will enact the most ‘progressive,’ the most ‘advanced’ ideas of this historical time-frame (27).
To put this in terms of the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Socrates maintains that a philosopher can ascend from the conventional opinions of his polis and begin to understand the nature (including the human nature) obscured by those opinions. The way to do this is through dialectic or the clash of opinions sorted out by reasoning—that is, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. As Socrates repeatedly shows, conventional opinions rationally examined will turn up many incoherencies; although dialectical conversations may embarrass and even infuriate non-philosophers who cherish their opinions, they enable the philosopher to progress toward a clearer and more accurate understanding of the natural order or cosmos. By contrast, historicists locate dialectic not in conversations among individuals engaged in rational discussion but in the collisions of masses of people—social classes, nations, even civilizations—struggling for dominance over time. This reconceived dialectic lends itself precisely to the “collectivization and coordination of thought” seen in modern tyrannies.
Strauss argues that in order to learn from the classics we will need to re-learn how to learn from them. Strauss subjects Xenophon’s Hiero to intense and detailed scrutiny with a view not to understanding it as an expression of its ‘time,’ relativizing it in relation to a putative ‘march of History,’ but rather to understanding it on its own terms. He intends to teach his readers how to read a philosophic dialogue as its author intended it to be read. In addition to improving our strictly ‘historical’ understanding of the classics (how, he asks, can we claim to understand the past unless we see what the people who lived then were trying to do?), in addition to helping us identify tyranny when we see it, whenever it arises, under whatever disguise, study of philosophizing as presented in the form of a dialogue requires us to think not only theoretically but practically. By this Strauss means that to understand the dialectical subtleties of even the simplest philosophic dialogue we will need not only to understand the arguments of the participants but also the conversational situation in which they meet, the significance not only of their words but their actions, and indeed their silences—exactly what we all do when we engage in our own conversations. The dialogue form as a literary genre (not unlike a novel by, as Strauss suggests, Jane Austen) makes us think prudentially. Philosophic treatises typically don’t invite us to do that, but we should, especially when thinking about politics.
In considering the concluding speech of the Hiero in light of this careful way of reading, Strauss comes to doubt that it is right to hold out hope for the benefactor-tyrant Simonides extols. Such a tyrant will scarcely be immune from envy. Hiero’s problem isn’t that he hasn’t found the right techniques of tyrannical rule but that he wants his subjects to love him. Simonides’ wisdom, as seen in his own way of life, consists in wanting not love but honor, and that from a few understanding friends, not from everybody. While the tyrants makes himself dependent upon ‘the many,’ Simonides enjoys relative self-sufficiency. His pains are few because his needs are so modest. Simonides moved freely from his native Cleos to Athens to Syracuse, while Hiero stayed in one place. Even “the best city”—whether ruled by a beneficent tyrant or a virtuous citizenry—remains “morally and intellectually on a lower plane than the best individual” (99). And respecting the pleasures enjoyed by individuals, the “highest pleasure” is experienced by him who tracks his own “progress in wisdom and virtue,” even as he acknowledges that “no man can be simply wise” (101). Although no individual can be simply wise, no polis can be wise at all, and the tyrant in his self-imposed neediness cannot make it so.
Kojève rises to the challenge with a brilliant critique of Strauss’s argument. He agrees that the problems of tyranny identified by Xenophon “are still ours” (136), but he rejects the classical critique of tyranny and the natural-rights theory underlying it. Simonides errs in practical terms because he fails to tell Hiero any specific steps he should take to implement the three forms he urges; here, Kojève the professional bureaucrat surfaces. Further, and contra Strauss, although the reforms may have been impractical at the time, they are commonplaces of modern statism. Strauss fails to see that what was ‘true’ for Xenophon could be ‘false’ for us (139, paired with 168-169). In these initial comments Kojève already hints at his deeper objections to Strauss and the classics: they fail to combine or ‘synthesize’ theory and practice.
Simonides also errs in defining honor as the province of “real men,” whom Kojève supposes to be aristocrats (140). We moderns now know that labor can be a source of pride and joy; therefore, everyone from a tyant to a street sweeper can gain satisfaction from a job well done. Hegel has taught us that we can synthesize honor and labor, Master and Slave, thought and action. Hiero’s dilemma has been fully explained by Hegel as “the tragedy of the Master” in the pre-modern world, but the dialectic of History removed this tragedy long ago (142). As Hegel also teaches us, Xenophon gets the tragedy wrong in the first place; the tyrants doesn’t really want love, he (and his subjects) want recognition. They will get that, but only at the end of History, in the universal and homogeneous state—universal because it extends throughout the world, homogeneous because in it all find equal recognition for their work. This state is “the goal and outcome of the collective labor of all and of each” (146); in this Kojève hints at the Marxian cast of his Hegelianism.
As for Strauss, he misunderstands the status of philosophy in the contemporary world. Insofar as History has ended we can and must abandon philo-sophy—literally, the love of wisdom—because wisdom itself has been attained, having been instantiated in the mind of G. W. F. Hegel, evidently with subsequent refinements by Karl Marx. The philosopher-king must give way to the Wise Man-King (or perhaps the aforementioned Wise Man-God), recognized by all and therefore obeyed without coercion. In fact, at the end of History only “administrative questions” remain, so the Wise Man may be able to retire completely as the (non-Hegelian but Marxist) “classless society” takes shape (172). “The tyrant who here initiates the real political movement toward homogeneity followed the teaching of the intellectual who deliberately transformed the ideal of the philosopher so that it might cease to be a ‘utopian ideal'” (173)—an ideal which Hegel prematurely claimed to have been brought about by the Napoleonic Empire. For “intellectual” read “Marx; for “the tyrant” read “Stalin.” So long as History hasn’t instantiated the universal and homogeneous State, the philosopher must exercise his human freedom by actively negating the ‘given’ social and political order, supporting the Tyrant-Philosopher who aims to bring it to fruition.
Kojève also departs in an important way from Hegel ‘ontologically.’ Hegel posits the existence of the “Absolute Spirit.” The Absolute Spirit differs sharply from the Biblical Holy Spirit in two ways: it isn’t holy, separate from ‘Creation’; it isn’t a Person but a form of energy which converts itself into matter but remains immanent in matter as well as in all of human thought and action. Kojève excludes matter or nature from the historical dialectic, which for him consists only in man’s progressive attempts to master brute nature. That is to say that Kojève retains the modern and particularly Kantian esteem for human freedom, which in strictly Hegelian (and of course in materialist-Marxian) thought cannot exist. Aided by intellectuals, the Philosopher-Tyrant’s task is to hasten human progress; this supports the historicist ontology which asserts that Being is not eternal (the “theistic conception of Truth,” whether Biblical or classical) but rather that Being is Becoming (the stance of “radical Hegelian atheism”) (152). Being will continue to ‘become’ or change until it reaches its end, its culmination, as this exclusively human reality “creates itself in the course of time” (155).
Because human reality creates itself over time Strauss is entirely wrong to endorse the classical philosophers’ attempt to ascend from the Cave of political conventions to the sunlight of Nature by dint of the logical efforts of the individual philosopher. No mere individual, not even the philosopher, can perceive the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth until the collective human advancement that is History has reached its final, grand synthesis, wherein all contradictions disappear into the universality and homogeneity of the World State. This is philosophically necessary because, absent that State, the philosopher cannot know with certainty that he is not mad, or that he and his circle of philosophic friends are not prejudiced.
How will philosophers (and the rest of us) know that History really progresses ‘dialectically,’ and how will we know that it has reached its culmination? In other words, how do we know that this grand Kantian-Hegelian-Marxian narrative is not simply the grandest of grand illusions, a spectacular, all-encompassing instance of the madness of crowds? The criterion of truth, Kojève explains, remains the one discovered by Machiavelli and systematized by Bacon: experimental manipulation. We know if a bridge is well-constructed if it doesn’t collapse; we confirm our anthropological theories by building a state that doesn’t collapse, putting ideas into practice, synthesizing what earlier philosophers separated into ‘rationalism’ and ’empiricism.’ Machiavelli’s notion of “effectual truth,” which he held out against the classics’ contemplation of nature, will allow the Wise Man at the end of History to contemplate the completed Whole, but in the meantime philosophers should not and cannot afford such a luxury. Until History ends, philosophers must not behold but negate, experiment, build and rebuild. The dialectic of History is properly not a verbal argument; it is “played out on the historical plane of active social life where one argues by acts of Work (against Nature) and of Struggle (against men)” (168).
Given this unity of theory and practice, “There is therefore [contra Strauss and the classics] in principle no difference whatsoever between the statesman and the philosopher; both seek recognition and both act with a view to deserving it” (156). The “consistent atheist” “replaces God… by Society (the State) and History” (161). Instead of glimpsing the holy Creator-God’s Last Judgment in the Book of Revelation, we now say ‘Let History judge,’ and we will need a new ‘Bible’ or comprehensive account of the Whole, which will be possible only after History has ended. Kojève was still working on it at the time of his death.
Reading Kojève’s essay, one is tempted to think, “They don’t write book reviews like that, anymore.” But they didn’t then, either, and Strauss was delighted: “Kojève belongs to the very few who know how to think and who love to think” (185). Citing not only Xenophon but also Empedocles and Plato in his rejoinder, Strauss begins by observing that “the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science” were both known to the classics (178). He proceeds to answer Kojève’s critique point by point.
On the complaint that Simonides doesn’t give Hiero step-by-step directions on enacting the reforms he proposes, Strauss replies that “the criticism may be said to be based on an insufficient appreciation of the values of utopias”—outlines of “the best social order” (187). Xenophon regards such an outline as a standard, but rarely if ever an achievable one. Truly to reform a tyranny would be to get rid of it altogether, to shift the power wielded by the tyrant and his mercenaries to the citizens, who then would no longer be tyrannized. Xenophon more modestly suggests one specific step Hiero might take, to abandon his participation in the Olympian and Pythian games—this, on the grounds that a tyrant should not lower himself to compete against private men—and to redirect his energies toward competing against his fellow rulers in foreign cities in making his citizens happier than theirs. Strauss pointedly observes that Stalin hadn’t done this, as evidenced by his secret police and labor camps.
On the criticism that Xenophon fails to synthesize honor and work, as Hegel does, Strauss remarks that the classics regarded neither honor nor work as the highest goo; after all, a criminal might take pride in a job well done. If the ‘ancient’/aristocratic love of honor and the ‘Protestant’/bourgeois esteem for work, synthesized, produce modern tyranny, then we have “effect[ed] the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities which made very strict demands on self restraint”: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition” (191). Hegel as understood by Kojève gives us not a higher morality but Hobbes’s Leviathan on steroids, and modern leviathans were big enough, already. Under conditions of modern statism, we are better off with “liberal or constitutional democracy” (194). A universal empire ruled by a tyrant who is unlikely to be either philosophic or wise will exacerbate, not cure, the ills of modernity.
Regarding Kojève’s argument that only History can judge if a philosopher is mad or prejudiced, Strauss replies that “the mass party,” the engine of political life in the modern state, is even worse than “snobbish silence or whispering” within a coterie of philosophic friends because it inclines to crush dissenting voices, including philosophic whispers. In Strauss’s estimation, Kojève asks too much of both individual philosophers and History when he demands “subjective certainty” of human thought (195). “Philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance” (196). This is the closest we can get, humanly speaking, to certain knowledge, inasmuch as “one cannot know that one does not know without knowing what one does not know” (196). Beyond that, philosophy entails only “genuine awareness” of “the fundamental and comprehensive problems,” about which the philosopher will form reasonable and revisable views, “neither dogmatic nor skeptic” but “zetetic”—from the Greek zētēo, meaning “seeking” or “inquiring” (197). In this view, both dogmatism and skepticism wall themselves away from the continued quest for wisdom; “zetetic” philosophy continues to love wisdom, pursuing it without fainting.
On Kojève’s Hegelian insistence that tyrants seek not love but honor, and philosophers do, too, “the classics identified satisfaction with happiness” (198). Because “no one can find solid happiness in what he knows to be paltry and ephemeral,” genuine human satisfaction can only occur when a man “looks up in search for the eternal order” (198). The political man, however, attaches himself to perishable human beings; he needs them to need him, and to feel that they do. Like a mother who loves her child, he loves them because they are ‘his own’ subjects, not in a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice, as Kojève (actually following Hiero’s rhetorical self-portrait) claims. Insofar as the philosopher does attach himself to his fellow human beings—talking to them in the marketplace, for example—he acknowledges first of all that he is human, more self-sufficient than anyone else to be sure, but no god. He therefore will interest himself in the laws and customs of the marketplace he frequents, which in turn requires him to consider the regime of the polis in which that marketplace is located. For this reason, he may advise the ruler or rulers, with the care exemplified by Xenophon’s Simonides. Finally, “of all perishable things known to us, those which reflect [the eternal order] most, or which are most akin to that order are the souls of men” (201); accordingly the philosopher will delight at the ‘sight’ of a well-ordered soul. He will want to gather such souls around him, and to help “the young whose souls are by nature fitted for it” to “acquire good order of their souls” by the practice of philosophizing (202). This also directs his attention to the regime, which may or may not leave philosophers to pursue this task in peace. In doing so he seeks not ‘recognition’ but progress in the direction of wisdom; ‘recognition’ by the subjects of a universal and homogeneous state, even if achievable, would only mean you have succeeded in impressing large numbers of folks who don’t really understand what you’re talking about. That is a formula for distraction, not intellectual certitude.
The universal and homogeneous state will not even succeed in its own terms, because in it men (indeed “real men”) will arise to negate the tyranny, whether it be that of the Wise Man or the administrative drones he leaves in his wake. And if the universal and homogeneous state actually did succeed, eradicating not only all existing real men but preventing their existence in all future times, we would not have fully human men but the Last Man mocked by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—who, insofar as he thinks of the eternal order merely asks idly, not really wanting to know, “What is a star?” And then turns to People magazine for the answer—or even the National Enquirer, wherein the motto, “Inquiring minds want to know” takes on a decidedly non-zetetic cast.
Thus, Strauss concludes, Kojève is right to think “the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth” (212). He is only wrong in calling this good.
Rosen points not only to the “harsh” and “nonhuman” character of Kojève’s argument, with its calm acceptance of the necessity of the Stalinist slaughter-bench (a term used by Hegel, long before); he also contends (along Straussian lines) that the ‘end of History’ in a universal and homogenous state would replace “the ambiguous erotic conversations between gods and mortals”—in non-mythic language, philosophy—with a dehumanizing, ‘postmodern’ “hermeneutic of bestiality” consisting of “neither discourse nor silence, but inarticulate noise” (94-95). But he gives Kojève’s argument serious attention, and he does not leave Strauss unscathed.
He considers first Kojève’s lectures on Hegel, published as a book years after they were delivered and intended primarily as lectures, indeed as propaganda or dissemination of certain doctrines to promising students. Kojève’s Hegel points to a problem in the Enlightenment project: the intellectual certainty sought by the individual philosopher (as seen in Descartes’s phrase, cogito ergo sum) is “essentially private and silent,” unable to “justify itself or distinguish itself from faith” (95); moreover, the supposed certainty afforded by mathematics, and by conceiving of all knowledge as essentially mathematical, gives the individual the illusion that he has achieved a sort of universality. Modern thought thus exalts and suppresses individuality. The modern individual claims universality for his private thoughts and then goes out into the public square only to find that the other individuals he meets there have come to different conclusions. And they cannot talk to one another, each having walled himself up into a fortress of subjective certainty, enraged at the riot of error all around him. “The direct political result is the French Revolution: the universal principle of freedom with the content of the Terror” (95). For Kojève’s Hegel, however, this is not all bad because such “negativity is also the force of work or production,” with Robespierre succeeded by the world-historical conqueror, Napoleon (95).
This political example embodies a metaphysical principle. To negate is not to cancel because both Being (here, the Old Regime) and Nothing or Negation (the Revolution) are really “abstract moments of the fundamental actuality,” which is Becoming (96). The act of negating does not wipe out the prior existent; it limits it, and is limited by it. The negative is always “the negative of something,” always “bringing something into being”—a new synthesis (96). The question then becomes, Does this process spin out infinitely, or does it have a telos, a conclusion, which gives meaning to each of the dialectical steps which preceded it? Kojève argues that in the history of philosophy, the fundamental choice is between Plato and Hegel, between the denial of the possibility of the full achievement of wisdom by human beings and the affirmation of that possibility. Plato does not think that the temporal and the eternal can or ever will combine in a final ‘synthesis’; never fully divine, human beings at best only glimpse the divine. Hegel claims that a “philosophic speech about totality or the whole” is now possible, that the history of philosophy has been completed with his systematic account, and (crucially) “the structure of intelligibility [has] reveal[ed] itself completely, not to intuition (or revelation) but to human discourse” (96). The distinction between God and man dissolves into its synthesis, the sage, the person of wisdom and not the philosopher, who could only love wisdom. Immanence reveals itself by synthesizing transcendence with humanity, a dichotomy which has become false now that historical dialectic has come to an end. “The death of God is at the same time the death of man, or, symbolically, the repudiation of personal immortality” (96). True, Hegel remains mortal, but he has lived as a “mortal god whose ‘deathlessness’ consists in his wisdom or complete discursive account of totality” (96).
And how does he know himself to be a god, know that he is not the sad (or mad) victim of merely individual certainty? This matters, because for Kojève’s Hegel historical necessity is not “an impersonal (or transcendental) historical necessity,” but an “project of the human will,” as is Kojève’s very interpretation of Hegelianism itself (99). Here Rosen invokes the title of his own book, writing “Hermeneutics is politics,” a matter of making a ruling decision (100). What ‘certifies’ such a willed effort, such a project? “Kojève’s reply is that a discursive account of totality must certify itself, and this is done when it is no longer possible to say anything new,” when “every attempt to enunciate a new principle, or to provide a new philosophy, results in the repetition of some finite part of the already completed ‘Hegelian’ discourse” (96). That is, ‘subjective’ attempts to cut free from the net will end in ‘objective’ failure; Kojève himself had that experience, initially having thought of himself as synthesizing Hegel and Marx, but then (subsequent to 1948) realizing that he, like Marx before him, was only doing what a jazz musician would call a ‘riff’ on Hegelianism—interesting perhaps, but nothing fundamentally new. Accordingly, he appended a footnote to the Introduction to the Reading of Hegel admitting that History really is over, that the universal and homogeneous world-state has arrived in the guises of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan (now conquered by modernity). Indeed, Hegel was basically right in saying that History had ended as he, the erstwhile philosopher, contemplated the arrival of the world-conquering man of action, Napoleon, in 1806 Jena, a realization that spurred him into sage-hood. The world in the aftermath of the Second World War similarly had only played out the logic of Napoleonic conquest. This realization also caused Kojève to shift away from supposing that men living within the universal and homogeneous world-state will be happy; they are subhuman but content with that. What Tocqueville viewed with horror, a century before, Kojève viewed with calmness.
Rosen does not share Kojève’s satisfaction with Kojève. In both his pre-postwar optimism and in his postwar resignation, “Kojève contradicts himself on the nature of the satisfaction that characterizes the end of history” (102). If History wasn’t quite over (as he supposed prior to 1948), then Kojève can only propagandize (as in his lectures), in a potentially endless sequence of willed hermeneutical decisions or revolutionary politics. And in fact “history deprived him of the chance to fulfill his dream” of effecting his desired synthesis of Hegel and Marx. He could not be the creator-God of the new world order. By 1948, “the most Kojève could claim for himself was the subordinate or daimonic task of bringing Hegel’s wisdom up to date. What he had initially conceived as theological propaganda for himself, he now saw as in fact propaganda for Hegel.” (105). He could at least laugh about it. “I tell my secretary that I am a god,” he told Rosen, “but she laughs” (106). Rosen comments, “Automata are not intended to laugh” (106), which is true enough, but he surely knows that Rosen was alluding to a familiar story about the Greek philosopher, Thales, who fell into a well as he was looking up at the stars. A witty Thracian slave-girl laughed at him, saying he was so eager to know what was going on in heaven that he could not see what was in front of his feet (Theaetetus 174a). (There is an added irony in a post-Socratic version of the story, which claims that Thales’ plunge into the well convinced him that water is the originative element of nature because it combines the natural and the divine; Thales’ doctrine of immanence thus anticipates that of Hegel, albeit without the dialectic. Had the slave-girl inclined toward philosophy, she might have wondered aloud if Thales had hit his head on the way down, rather in the spirit of Kojève’s skeptical secretary). In the Platonic version, Socrates goes on to say that this criticism may be made of all philosophers, and especially when they appear in a law-court or any other place where they must speak of things at their feet and before their eyes (notoriously with fatal results, in his own case). However, and conversely, non-philosophers drawn into discussions of high and not easily visible things will find the circumstance reversed; then they the ones who stumble and seem foolish. Plato plants these observations in a dialogue in which Socrates describes himself as a mere midwife of thoughts, unproductive or infertile himself, a dialogue which undertakes to show potential philosophers how to be like Socrates, a dialogue which does not to show how to know but how to know that one doesn’t know—these being two of Socrates’ most celebrated claims about himself, claims to a sort of knowledge, namely, self-knowledge. Kojève’s secretary laughed not at her boss’s inability to notice what was right in front of him—he was a supremely competent, knowledgeable administrator—but at his claim to know the heavens, to have ‘created’ the heavens and the earth.
Rosen doesn’t think Kojève could defend himself in the same way Socrates defended philosophers. To be the embodied god at the end of History, Kojève needed not to speak and write to be silent, inasmuch as all serious speaking and writing was by definition over. Yet he performed two roles: the playfully idle ‘god’ who nonetheless could not still his voice and the “philosophical administrator of automata,” at least one of whom stubbornly refused to give up her humanity by taking his claims of divinity seriously (106). “Had he remained silent, he could never have been refuted. By continuing to speak after 1948, in other words, by continuing to philosophize, he refuted himself,” and he had no choice, being “a human being,” after all (106). This leads Rosen to his concluding point on Kojève: human beings can neither metamorphose into gods or beasts, “because self-consciousness or self-recognition cannot arise from the ‘struggle for recognition.’ I cannot recognize my own desire, and hence myself, in the desire of another, unless I have already cognized it. The human being is human from the outset: we do not ‘become’ human, nor do we cease to be human except by dying. ” (107) Readers of Rosen’s first study of Hegel, reviewed elsewhere on this website, will recognize this as a variation of his refutation of Hegel, as well. Strauss would say that human nature imposes limits to historical change, and it is to Strauss Rosen now turns.
Unlike Kojève, Strauss was a scholar rather than a philosopher. He wrote on ‘political philosophy,’ which Rosen regards as only “the public appearance of philosophy,” not “genuine philosophy” (109). Rosen does not prove this assertion, leaving open the question he wants to close, namely, can genuine philosophy deepen the philosopher’s understanding of nature (or if you prefer, ‘Being’) by consideration of politics? Is there a genuinely philosophic “political philosophy”? As Steven J. Lenzner has observed, Strauss goes on to say that political philosophy is a branch of philosophy tout court, an attempt to replace opinion about the nature of political things with knowledge of the nature of political things. [1] To Rosen’s remark that Strauss “presented very few ‘technical’ arguments and no answers to ‘what is’ questions” (120), one can only observe that he wrote a book titled What Is Political Philosophy? In it, he does at least address his self-posed question.
Whereas Kojève claims that the tension between the philosopher and the city can end in “a historical rapprochement,” Strauss does not (109). Strauss rejects that aspect of the Enlightenment. The political community will insist on some fundamental principle—typically belief in the god or gods of the city—and will countenance no public questioning of that principle. In continuing to philosophize, the philosopher defies the city; he may attempt to evade its censorious gaze by speaking and writing discreetly, but the tension will always remain because the philosopher wants to know, and not merely to believe. But this is where Rosen demurs. When Strauss writes that “philosophy in the strict and classical sense is the investigation of the eternal order or the cause or eternal causes of all things,” while admitting that “this hypothesis is not evident in itself” (Restatement, 212), Rosen finds in this an admission that the classical hypothesis as described by Strauss “is an act of will and hence a moral matter,” not rational at all (111). Strauss (along with his “classical” political philosophers, propagandize rather than philosophize, and the same goes for the choice between philosophy and religion, the choice between wonder and fear as the beginning of wisdom (112). In publicly exposing the artful ways in which philosophers ancient and modern defended themselves from political authorities who had made the religio-political choice, Strauss undertakes a sort of enlightenment, and therefore shares in the ‘modern’ project to that extent, in this respect as much as Kojève.
On the crucial matter of the choice between philosophy and religion, Rosen identifies choice with an act of will. But is it, or is it simply so? If I choose, I have some ‘reason’ of my own for that choice. My reason might not be rational; it might be an impulse, unthoughtful. If I choose between the philosophic way of life and the religious way of life, I may or may not choose thoughtfully, but it is probably safe to say that Strauss chose thoughtfully and, even if he didn’t, he had every opportunity to reconsider his initial choice in light of new evidence—for example, if he had been prompted by the Holy Spirit, Who brings persuasion with Him. It is not self-evident (to coin a phrase) that the choice between philosophy and religion is purely an act of will, or indeed that morality itself (even if that really is what drives the choice) has little or no rational content.
Rosen continues on to say that philosophy cannot be moral because philosophy is not moderate, and moderation is a virtue. He cites Strauss on this very point saying that moderation is not a virtue of thought” but rather a sort of divine madness (119). If so, the way of life of philosophic inquiry would require moderation of the bodily desires insofar as these interfere with that inquiry; the philosopher would exhibit moderation not because he fears divine punishment but because he so ardently wants to know. But this must mean that philosophy is not founded on a moral choice.
“My thesis is that Strauss is himself almost a Nietzschean, but not quite: he comes closer to Kant in the roots of his thought” (125). For Nietzsche, of course, the will (specifically the will to power) is everything. We need not wonder and we must not fear; the great philosophers “engage in the divine prerogative of willing a world into being and hence of creating a way of life, not of submitting thought to this way” (126). Ergo, “life is a creation of the strongest will” (126). Strauss does not go that far, but in willing philosophy as his way of life he is a Kantian. Against this, Strauss himself describes a two-step process rooted in nature, not will. Initially, our “pre-philosophic consciousness” understands political life as presented to us in our everyday lives; this commonsensical understanding suffices for practical navigation of the regime in which we live (quoted, 127). A potential philosopher only begins his quest—to understand politics as a whole, not merely from the perspective of his own city—when the cracks begin to show, when he perceives irresolvable tensions or contradictions within the way of life he knows. Strauss then proceeds to make an argument Rosen rejects, distinguishing classical political philosophy from all other kinds on the grounds that it alone had no philosophic predecessors, no “philosophic tradition which acted like a screen between the philosopher and the political things” (quoted, 127). “The argument is dubious,” Rosen writes, “because it does not meet the objection that what classical political philosophers described with unequaled vividness was precisely their own political tradition” (127). But Strauss doesn’t need to. He doesn’t claim that the first political philosophers had no “political tradition” to describe, but rather that the tradition as it then stood had no element of philosophic doctrine. Political philosophy was their discovery. Socrates did not need to concern himself with the doctrines Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. Plato and Xenophon did need to concern themselves with Socrates, and Aristotle with the lot of them, but all of these men were sufficiently close to politics unscreened by philosophy to vindicate Strauss’s claim.
Rosen also denies that the Greeks really “had access to nature as the pretheoretical standard” (128). But this access or knowledge was not “of a philosophically decisive kind” (128). Indeed not, but does that not act as the spur to political philosophy as genuine philosophy, the thing Rosen denies? What Rosen is getting at, however, is the claim that ‘what is?’ questions about morality—the virtuous, good, just, and noble—are not raised seriously by these philosophers because “the answers are entirely relative to other and higher consideration” (129). In the example above, for the philosopher the virtue of moderation serves his philosophic quest, not the gods of the city. Rosen cites as evidence the Socratic distinction between philosophic and “demotic” virtue, and also Aristotle’s discussion of “right by nature” in Book V, chapter 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics (129). There, Aristotle distinguishes natural right, what is just everywhere and “not affected by whether it seems so to people or not,” from conventional right, which is established by human ordinance (Nicomachean Ethics 1134b). Rosen cannot mean that Aristotle gives no serious theoretical account of natural right anywhere at all, unless he takes the Ethics and the Politics as purely exoteric works, but rather that the pre-theoretical truths we learn in our political communities do not support theoretical truths. “Knowledge of the first sort, however necessary, does not provide a standard for claims to knowledge of the second sort” (130). So, for example, to know “that a certain being is a human being” does not help us in erecting a theory of social science. I disagree, and Strauss of all people would and should have insisted that it is indispensable. Recall that Strauss began his discussion of tyranny by criticizing the failure of contemporary social scientists to recognize tyranny when they saw it. ‘Value-free’ social science could not distinguish between a tyrant and an absolute monarch, for example. The modern tyranny Strauss saw firsthand was Nazi tyranny, a tyranny that denied that Jews are fully human; he also observed from afar Soviet tyranny, whose founder described enemies of the regime as harmful insects. In these cases, the pre-theoretical ability to recognize a human being as a human being found itself paved over by ideological claims stemming not from pre-theoretical misperceptions but from perceptions deformed by the philosophies from which those claims were wrested: ‘race theory’ and Marxism. Rosen rightly observes that “it does not follow from the soundness of the observation that our experience of nature is articulated into kinds or that this articulation is the precondition for scientific theory, that such an articulation provides us with genuinely fundamental philosophic knowledge” (131), but Strauss is rather saying that the pre-theoretical articulation of kinds is the necessary pathway to such knowledge, that without taking that pathway our philosophic theories are likely to go very wrong. “To take the example that Strauss himself insists upon most frequently, since philosophy cannot refute revelation, it may well be that the Ideas of natural kinds are not themselves natural at all, but contingent creations of God,” or even constructs of Kant’s transcendental ego (131). They might be, but in that case some proof would be needed to budge us from our pre-theoretical perceptions.
Rosen concedes some of this by saying that while common sense “is incompetent to adjudicate a truly ‘fearless'” or “divinely mad” philosophical thought, a philosopher does need “a robust sense of reality” (132). I once heard Rosen say that as a student he was attracted to Strauss because “he was the only sane man at the University of Chicago,” the only one who understood politics in a way that made sense to “a kid from Cleveland,” which was what Mr. Rosen had been at the time he stepped into Strauss’s classroom. The question then becomes, is common sense entirely incompetent to adjudicate divinely mad thought, or only partly incompetent? If the latter, how much so, and in what way? Physicists had accepted Einstein’s Theory of Relativity long before they found empirical grounds for it, but they were delighted when they found them, anyway. Even they were reassured, however much they despised common sense.
Rosen helpfully puts his critique in political terms in saying that we can see in common-sense terms “whether a theoretical construction makes sense, whether such a construction does what it purports to do, and whether its intentions are in harmony with our fundamental intentions or ends,” ends “founded in the life-world or the pre-theoretical horizon of constructive activity. But so are rival and contradictory ends.” (133) So, for example, against Strauss’s esteem for what Strauss calls the noble reserve and calm grandeur of the classics, Rosen objects that a regime founded today on those virtues would be “base rather than noble” (133). The criticism misses Strauss’s own insistence that modern liberal democracy is the best practicable regime under modern conditions; his praise of noble reserve and calm grandeur comes in a description of the writings of the classics and the habits of mind and heart most conducive to reading them with understanding. It isn’t a recipe for regime-building. “Are we seriously to believe that the way out of the postmodern crisis is by rehabilitating an American version of the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century English gentleman? And if we are, what has this gentleman in common with the contemporary populism that passes for conservatism?” (137). These are reasonable as well as rhetorical questions, but they are prudential and not theoretical ones.
In the end, however, Rosen denies that modern liberal democracy is the best practicable regime under modern conditions, although he doesn’t go so far as to follow Kojève into Stalinism (even while playfully calling himself a “Maoist” when it comes to a preference to epistemological realism over the imagination). Democracy has inclined toward postmodernism because democracy inclines toward anarchy, its “universal homogeneous state” being “the era of Nietzsche’s last men” (139), who are anarchic because incapable of ruling or of being ruled. Rosen does not say what regime he does prefer under today’s conditions.
He does offer a criticism of postmodernism by means of a twist on a famous moral-political aphorism once deployed by Rosen’s eminent Straussian contemporary, Harry V. Jaffa. A great scholar of American political thought from the Founders through Lincoln, Jaffa also contributed a controversial line to 1964 Republican Party candidate Barry Goldwater’s nomination acceptance speech at the Party convention: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Rosen evidently plays off that line by writing, “When we are talking about politics at a philosophical level, an excessive defense of moderation leads to an extremism that is closely related to the excessive defense of excess”; “philosophy is by nature immoderate” (138). Accordingly, when one mixes philosophy and politics and calls the result ‘Enlightenment,’ the universal and homogeneous state follows “in principle“; error and superstition must be suppressed and excluded from any such regime (138). Moderation understood as liberal ‘muddling through’ won’t do, being “a rebellion against the Enlightenment, [coming] dangerously close to being a rebellion against truth” (138). But the postmodern cure only worsens the disease. “There can be no doubt that the thesis that art s worth more than the truth is the dominant principle of our time,” but this conviction does not protect us from the tyranny of Enlightenment rationalism by “prudent moderation” in the use of rationalism, “but by a reckless embrace of recklessness, or the rejection of rationalism in favor of the imagination” (138).
As a result, “what we call freedom today is all too frequently the result of a failure to think through the corruption of finitude by history “(139), that is, ‘History’ as (mis)understood by historicists gives itself a storybook ending. The finitude it proposes is ‘the End of History,’ a thing of the imagination. Although Rosen takes Strauss’s side on this—preferring many philosophic sects to the universal, homogeneous state in an attempt to the end of philosophizing—”this is not enough to convince one of the merits of Strauss’s politics,” which Rosen finds all-too-conservative (140). Rosen shares Strauss’s admiration for the statesmanship of Winston Churchill (he might have added Jaffa’s admiration for Lincoln) because Churchill acted “in a daring manner of extreme danger, and on behalf of noble motives” (140). He criticizes Strauss for failing to connect such political daring with philosophic daring, the underlying connection between theory and practice which, while not to be rendered all-encompassing in the manner of historicism, nonetheless exists. In different ways, philosophers and statesmen both step outside their regimes, although it must be noted that philosophers don’t need a world crisis, or even a crisis of the house divided to do so. (But of course a statesman might not need such a crisis either, on the level of his thought; he will need it only in order to act on his thought. Without the Civil War and the run-up to it, the author of the Lyceum Address would have remained an obscure Illinois politician—undeservedly so, no doubt, but nonetheless so. Churchill would have fared better, but without the Second World War he would have remained a brilliant orator and political historian who got blamed for the Dardanelles debacle in the Great War.)
Rosen summarizes his critique of Strauss’s philosophic politics: “The fact that philosophy holds to a middle position between relativism and universal dogma does not mean that philosophy must always be moderate in its public appearance” (140); despite his exotericism, Plato wasn’t moderate in that way. Strauss might reply, ‘Neither am I, as you, Rosen, acknowledge when you say that in openly discussing exotericism and esotericism I am an heir of the Enlightenment.’ Be all of this as it may, Rosen has established the ‘political’ character of hermeneutics, if not in the Aristotelian sense of politics as ruling and being ruled, then in the more general sense that hermeneutics seldom if ever proceeds from an intention innocent of libido dominandi (for good or ill).
“Every hermeneutical program is at the same time itself a political manifesto or the corollary of a political manifesto,” and that goes double for “the postmodern attack upon the Enlightenment” (141). Although this resembles the multiplication of theological sects in the Middle Ages, it differs from them in being godless. Nonetheless, with postmodern hermeneutics we have “political revolution… concealed by the phenomenon of academic scholasticism,” “often in conjunction with radical political projects, but in such a way as to leave us with the impression that politics is a subspecies of ontology” (141). Rosen describes this as “decadence,” by which he means that postmodernism issues “not from revolutionary fervor” but “political despair” (142); it might be said that the rise of postmodernism (as distinguished from its earlier formulation) derives from the retreat of the campus Left of the 1960s from the streets to the universities, where it had originated. “The predominant view seems to be that, since the Enlightenment has failed, or even in certain cases since we are merely bored with it, and since Western philosophy, also known as ‘Platonism,’ is simply a preliminary stage in that failure, all that remains for us is technical badinage. Objections to the reification of being have thus succeeded—in reifying being.” (142).
Rosen accordingly proposes a radical new beginning. There is no theory of hermeneutics at all; if hermeneutics is political, and politics a matter of prudence more than (although not cut off from) theory, then postmodernism as a hermeneutical theory deserves not merely to be deconstructed but destroyed, an act preliminary to “return[ing] us to the older stage in which competent persons argued about the meaning of writings without interposing methodological filters between themselves and the texts” (142). Inasmuch as “no text worth reading wears its meaning on its sleeve,” that will give readers, liberated from their in-erotic boredom, plenty to think and talk about (142).
The attempt to repudiate the subject-object distinction has led to the repudiation of the subject. But only a ‘subject’ can read, cognizing and judging as he does. Rosen shares with Strauss’s preference for “the natural consciousness” (while mistakenly supposing that Strauss’s commendation of the ancients is an artifact of unwitting historical consciousness) (145). No set of rules for reading, deconstructive or otherwise, can replace the alert exercise of practical reason; Rosen traces the attempt to deny this to Descartes and his “method.” “There is no theoretical substructure to reading or to writing: there is only the infrastructure of the reader and the writer” (146); the first assumption presupposes that writing and reading can be reduced to the writer’s and reader’s historical circumstances such as race, class, and gender (all ‘interpreted’ as historical, not natural), whereas the second assumption preserves intellectual Eros, the yearning of the reader to understand what the writer has written, as the writer intended, without reductionism. And “if there is no human nature that remains constant within historical change, and so defines the perspectives of individual readers as perspectives upon a common humanity, then reading is impossible” (146). The reader no longer construes but deconstructs and constructs.
Attempts to ‘theorize’ hermeneutics result from the critique of intuitive intellection, now paved over by “ever more complex methodologies,” and by reliance on the “speculative imagination, unrestrained by the standard of nature,” which causes intellectuals to “slip into the dream world of fantasy” (147). (This of course parallels ‘progressive’ movements in politics, handicapped as they are by attempts at comprehensive rule by administrative technique yoked with ‘visionary’ rule by official elected and unelected who offer distraction for demi-citizens or subjects bound by the bureaucracy). “The Greek word theoria designates a contemplative gazing upon divine phenomena, and by extension, a purely intellectual apprehension or vision of the natural order” (147). That’s not what ‘theory’ means to moderns and the moderns, who follow Machiavelli in seeking not to ‘see,’ to understand, but to conquer nature; one is tempted to say that the thinkers called postmoderns have extended modernity to the realm of reading, now reconceived as the conquest of the writer’s text. But such “discursivity” cannot elude intuition so easily; “art completes nature, but there must be a nature to complete if art is to be distinguished from fantasy,” knowledge from poetry (148).
Early moderns still wanted to regulate discourse by a natural standard, but for them human nature was essentially a thing of passion. As such, it succumbed to the grand rationalism of Hegel, which synthesized passion in its comprehensive frame. By contrast, Aristotle’s tripartite division of the sciences into the theoretical, the practical, and the productive “corresponds to distinguishable but related aspects of nature” (149). If theory is ‘higher’ (in the sense of affording an overview of things) than either prudence or art, it is nonetheless “up to the exercise of [prudence] to determine who are the theoretical experts and what role they play in the public economy. Even the sage must tend to the needs of the body before he is free to cultivate the soul. conversely, a soul that is politically cultivated is thereby qualified to establish those conditions that are essential prerequisites to the development of the sage”; although distinct, prudence and theory have “a natural harmony,” “independent of political distinctions, including those of distinct city-states as well as of historical periods” (149). Similarly, when considering art, Aristotle distinguishes between seeing and making. “Whereas we must state what we have seen, it is equally necessary to see what one is talking about,” and “this is as true for the flights of divine madness as it is for the exercise of common sense” (150). By contrast, in Descartes, “the distinction between theory and practice is dissolved” in an attempt to ‘geometrize’ the world in order to bring it under human control (150), whereas virtue becomes virtù. “Descartes is the paradigmatic expression of divine ‘authorial intention’ in the creation of the book of the world,” a book “legible not because it is indistinguishable from myself but because I have willed it into being” (151).
Kant wants to find a way out of such proto-nihilism, including such later developments as Hume’s radical skepticism and Rousseau’s moral sentimentalism. The answer, as seen in Rosen’s chapter on Kant, is the transcendental ego, or what the natural ego would want if it could think logically. Dissatisfied with this ghostly realm of the ‘noumenal,’ which fails to free itself from self-contradiction because opposite principles can be universalized (as in ‘Thou shalt not steal’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’), historicists transform the transcendental ego into the “living absolute spirit” (152), whereby theory, prudence, and art are synthesized into a supposed historical dialectic, buttressed by Hegel’s “dialecticospeculative logic” (153). Postmoderns take the step of denying “the ostensibly absolute nature of that process,” transforming theory into interpretation, a sort of production without prudence (153). Thus “poetry has triumphed in its ancient quarrel with philosophy” (153), much to the satisfaction of professors of literature.
The hermeneutic enterprise began with Spinoza’s Bible interpretation, as he attempted to apply modern-scientific method to that task. It remained for subsequent generation to extend ‘philology’ to other books as well, an ambition made easier because modern-scientific method applied in Bible study makes the Bible essentially the same as any other ‘great book.’ But at least until Heidegger, textual interpretation continued to posit “a common human nature, that remains stable within history” (156)—hence ‘the humanities.’ The reader’s self-knowledge as a human being enables him to “understand the thoughts of other human beings” (156), although, as Rosen acknowledges, Nietzsche’s replacement of “dialecticospeculative logic” with “aesthetic perspectivism” goes a long way toward the eventual fragmentation or chaos that prevails now. Because “Heidegger rejects both the classical doctrine of nature and the modern doctrine of the Absolute,” he has “no basis for distinguishing between a theory and an interpretation” (160); since then, nothing fundamental has changed. “We live in a generation of epigones” (160). From an attempt to explain the Word of God, to the widening of this attempt to explain “the word of man,” to the atheism of Hegel and Nietzsche, hermeneutics has asserted that God is dead, and then that man is dead, too. (Rosen mistakenly attributes the notion of the death of man to Kojève; to my knowledge, it was a character in André Malraux’s early novel, The Temptation of the West, who first observed that “Man is dead, following God, and [the West] searches with anguish for that to which you can entrust this strange heritage.” And he adds, “moderate nihilisms do no longer seem to me destined for a long existence”—unfortunately, a less-than-prophetic remark, even if admittedly made by a Chinese observer, who might measure time from a longer perspective than I do.) “The two original sources of hermeneutical meaning, God and man, have vanished, taking with them the cosmos or world and leaving us with nothing but our own garrulity” (161). “The world is fractured into a multiplicity of ‘worldviews,’ a misleading expression in which the echo of vision is in fact a camouflaged reference to discourse” (164); the philosophical doctrines of Bacon and Descartes can be ‘checked’ experimentally against nature, but “the practical results of a philological interpretation of a humanistic text certify nothing other than the power of that interpretation” (164). With “no enduring stratum of human nature” to serve as a standard of verification, there can be “no meaning of the text to be grasped by the reader who belongs to a different historical perspective” (164). The attempt to understand texts is replaced with theories of interpretation of texts, which no longer exist in any strong sense of the word. Such a theory is impossible, because it theorizes about supposed nullities.
In his concluding chapter, Rosen cites Friedrich Schlegel on “the contradiction intrinsic to the modern development of hermeneutics”—namely, the simultaneous claims that objectivity interferes with the achievement of “pure and unconditioned aesthetic worth,” with its ideal of “subjective aesthetic force,” and that there can still be false feelings, wrong judgments, defective intuitions, incorrect concepts, wrong directions of investigation, and “totally inverted fundamental laws,” all of which strike Schlegel and Rosen as a set of objective standards, (quoted, 175). By foregrounding freedom and ‘backgrounding’ nature, modern philosophy “requires the assimilation of Nothingness into Being and of Being into the subjectivity of conceptualization”; “beings deconstruct themselves as they are constructed by the process of genesis that is ostensibly the same as the process of self consciousness” (176). But if “to be is at bottom to be nothing,” where does that leave the subject? The death of ‘God’ entails the death of ‘Man,’ and what, then, is all the fuss about? “This is the theoretical counterpart of the uneasiness that is the dark side of the will to freedom,” which, as Locke saw, forms “the chief, if not the only spur to human industry and action” (176). For Locke, such uneasiness serves the good purpose of getting us to work, not so much forcing us to be free but forcing us to produce. Tocqueville calls this “restlessness,” and finds it a mixed blessing.
“The attribution of priority to freedom, in short, leads to the assimilation of Being by Nothingness and of happiness by uneasiness” (176). Science becomes rhetoric, theory interpretation, justice a sort of weak empathy; as supposed creators of our own meaning, we have democratized religion by claiming, in effect, “we are all gods”; we have even democratized aesthetics, believing “we are all interesting” (176-177). As it has played out over time, the Enlightenment produces both domination and chaos, each allegedly at the service of ‘progress’ toward an imagined or in some cases undefined future condition the criteria for the evaluation of which do not exist. Among the early Enlightenment philosophers, libido dominandi was understood to risk a dangerous “unleashing of the passions,” a danger that must be risked “because intellectual power requires the will to activate it, and the will is moved by passion or desire, not by clear and distinct ideas” (179). It might be added that the early Enlightenment’s preoccupation with political constitutions reflects the need to unleash but also limit the passions by channeling them, and power generally, along a well-defined institutional grid. In contrast to classical political philosophy, according to which “passion or desire must by habituated by the intellect” in order to enable the intellect to rule, modern political philosophy valorizes the human will, which, in an inversion of Christianity, replaces the divine will as the source of creativity and rule over nature. If classical political philosophers choose “that the intellect be god,” with the moderns “the intellect resolves that the will be god,” demoting the intellect “by making it instrumental to the will” and promoting “what from the classical standpoint is the lower part of the soul” (180). Philosophic wonder and religious fear give way to curiosity, the desire to know how things work. Morally, the unleashing of the passions and politically, the unleashing of “the great multitude of unphilosophical human beings” results in volatility: “The masters require servants, but they must beware lest the servants become masters” (180-181). Alexander Kojève, meet Donald Trump. On the basis of historicism, how can one “prevent the interpretation of power as success” (183)?
“When one listens to the ‘edifying discourse’ and postontological niaiseries of the academic disciples of Derrida, Foucault, and the Maoists with a posthuman face, one wonders whether a certain ‘reeducation’ or indeed ‘liberation’ of ‘the enemies of the people’ and hence of ‘the masses’ is not in order” (191). Rosen thus ends on a note of wonder. Wonder being the beginning of, if not wisdom then philosophy, this gives credence to his apologia: “My own ‘deconstructions’ of some contemporary doctrines have been undertaken not as part of a return to the past but in the service of philosophia perennis” (181).
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