Catherine H. Zuckert, ed.: Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
This is a combination of two reviews, originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 30, 1989 and in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 1989-90.
Rhetoric, election campaigns, even coups d’état and wars: Anger and ambition feed political life, sometimes intoxicating it. Catherine Zuckert reminds us that the Greek philosopher saw spiritedness or thumos as “the psychic origin of distinctively political action.” Political men seek justice, especially justice for themselves and ‘their own’family, friends, country. Politics often first comes to sight as self-defense, “the need people experience to defend their lives, lands, and liberty from the dominating desires of others.” The classical political philosophers understand the necessity, the benefits, the charms, and the dangers of politics.
In association with reason, spiritedness makes man a political animal. Classical political thought asks, What shall we do with the wrath of Achilles? Without spiritedness or thumos, you have a city of pigs; with too much of it, you have civil war or tyranny—the self-destruction of the city. The destruction of Rome marked the end of the classical efforts to moderate thumos; neither Christianity nor modern political philosophy have ‘managed’ it in an entirely satisfactory way. Perhaps the most troublesome part of the human soul, thumos seeks not to be managed but to rule.
Catherine H. Zuckert introduces this instructive collection of essays by observing that moderns “tend to take an economizing view of politics,” aiming at securing private rights and desires, emphasizing our individuality. Christianity contributed to this emphasis on the individual by replacing thumos with will; in Christianity punishment is a function o God, or of God’s instrument, the pagan magistrate. The old use of politics to form character declined, with character formation now centering in a different kind of political community, the Church; eventually, the very notion of character came to seem overly stern. Blocked from disciplining the desires, spiritedness rules the intellect, producing ideology—the use of ideas as weapons, instruments of conquest. The desire for a mental conquest of human beings drives totalitarian politics.
Zuckert harbors no nostalgia for ‘the ancients’; the Aristotelian triumvirate of honors (distributive justice), friendship, and family requires small communities, and these tend to fight among themselves. As soon as one community finally wins the fight, a military imperialism rises, declines, and falls.
The contributors to this volume discuss three ‘ancients’—Homer, Plato, Aristotle—and five ‘moderns’—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book’s one essay on non-philosophers considers the American Founders.
Arlene Saxonhouse recounts Achilles’ discovery of the limits imposed on spiritedness by death, which he had hoped to overcome by achieving everlasting fame, a share of the immortality reserved for the gods. But “under the principles of universal equality in which no distinctions are made according to worth”—each of us equally must die—”the spirit of Achilles is not only moderated, it is killed.” Achilles’ love of Briseis, his measured acts of public honor for his dead friend Patroclus, and his reconciliation with Priam all reestablish a middle place for human being between gods and beasts.
Mary P. Nichols writes that “Plato joins Homer in teaching the need for man to moderate his spiritedness,” although in a very different way. As does Homer, Plato sees that spiritedness rebels against death. In doing so, it defends but also threatens the city by its willingness to sacrifice and even life itself for the city’s sake—dealing out the very death it rebels against. Spiritedness also commits the soul entirely to the city, “against the truth that man needs something for his satisfaction that goes beyond the city, beyond what he can create and control.” Nichols recapitulates the argument of her book, Socrates and the Political Community, that the guardian-philosophers of the regime-in-speech of the Republic are more guardians than philosophers. Socrates, by contrast, “makes spiritedness gentle,” and takes account of the individuality of his interlocutors. This point should perhaps be qualified by noting that Socrates’ interlocutors for the most part represent human types, not individuals in the modern sense of the word, as a comparison of Plato’s characters with those of Dickens will show.
Ann P. Charney relates courage to prudence, as understood by Aristotle. “Spiritedness combined with intellect is needed to philosophize in the face of knowledge of one’s ignorance about the gods.” Spiritedness also helps the intellect to moderate the appetites and fortifies the intellect in its quest for the truth behind and above conventions and opinions. The discovery of natural right allows men of strong intellect and character to act for the sake of the noble, and not merely for the sake of pleasing public opinion, whether popular or oligarchic. Aristotle carefully substitutes natural right for divine justice. Statesmen, too, can benefit; while carefully taking account of public opinion, the classical statesman can also resist it, and the classical political philosopher teaches him why he ought sometimes to resist. Charney may overestimate the place of friendship in this enterprise. Friendship cannot be “the core of political justice”; Aristotle explicitly teaches that friends do not treat each other with strict justice, instead inclining to ‘cronyism.’ But she is surely right to say that Aristotle’s great-souled man “replaces the Homeric heroes” and thereby makes political life more stable than Achilles could.
Machiavelli is the first of the ‘moderns.’ In a witty and sobering essay, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. calls Machiavelli “the first writer on politics to use the word ‘execute’ frequently and thematically in the modern sense”—or, as Mansfield soon notes, its two modern senses. Mansfield contrasts seven characteristics of the modern Machiavellian executive with the classic Aristotelian statesman. Machiavelli downplays the role of deliberation, practical reasoning, in politics, and praises the use of force and fraud. He replaces the Aristotelian concept of political friendship with the concept of political conspiracy. “Primal fear” becomes “the first mover of politics”—not natural right and most assuredly not divine providence. Spiritedness rules Machiavellian politics, albeit with cleverness; conquest is the aim.
Thomas Hobbes and John Locke progressively soften Machiavellian politics, without abandoning it. Hobbes shares Machiavelli’s cynicism about human nature but, as Timothy Fuller shows in a characteristically thoughtful essay, he finds the rule of law a better means to attain spirited ends. The very idea of the rule of law signifies to Hobbes “that mankind has been set free from divine tutelage and supposes that freedom and reason are mediated by human [not divine] will.” Spiritedness now inheres in law-abidingness; honor (spiritedness high-toned) and self-restraint combine to uphold law’s rule, and to preclude ‘personal’ rule. Civil liberty replaces natural liberty under the covenant or social contract. “The covenant is not, finally, a unique event but the paradigm of a lifetime of rational willing, the test of the enduring capacity for self-overcoming in civil association.” In this, Fuller offers the reader a more austere Hobbes than the cynical materialist of morals we normally view.
John Locke tames spiritedness still further. David Lowenthal observes that for Locke, “conquest is never justified.” Locke’s state of nature is not so much a state of war, as in Hobbes, but a state of scarcity. In Locke, ‘economic man’ begins to come into his own. “With this sweeping contradiction of Hobbes, Locke lays the basis for thought on war that became the common sense of twentieth-century liberal societies,” with their “concepts of aggressor nations, reparations, wars of national liberation and national self-determination….” Lowenthal cautions that this project can endanger itself in two ways. If a liberal regime becomes too narrowly commercial and forgets to defend itself, it will perish by attack from other regimes that have not forgotten the martial spirit. And if a regime embraces the Lockean concept of national self-determination without Locke’s constitutional safeguards—a commercial economy, representative government—it will become a worse tranny than the traditional, ‘authoritarian’ regime it overthrew. Spiritlessness and excessive spiritedness both threaten the liberal regimes.
Contemporary intellectuals decry the undramatic, ‘bourgeois’ virtues and vices of commercial republics. In this they imitate some of the late-modern political philosophers, the greatest of these being G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. Michael Gillespie contributes a substantial essay on Hegel’s remedy for ’embourgeoisement.’ “Hegel doubts… that homo economicus can ever free himself from his desires and truly rule.” Left alone, bourgeois man will only sink deeper into decadence. If ‘History’ is not to grind to a halt before reaching its proper end or purpose, bourgeois man must be overcome, dialectically. Hegel proposes a serious, modern version of Socrates’ playfully constructed ‘republic.’ The bourgeoisie replaces the artisan class, soldiers replace the guardians, and bureaucrats replace the philosopher-kings. Not commerce but war “is the only viable restraint upon bourgeoisification and political degeneration,” strengthening “the rationality of the state by evoking the latent general will and community spirit of the citizenry.” War overcomes bourgeois individualism without returning to the tiny, now defenseless polis of antiquity. In the Hegelian dialectic, right makes might because that modern state which is the most autonomous and rational will prove stronger than its less advanced antagonists. Gillespie quite prudently judges Hegel over-optimistic about modern war and modern philosophic rationality.
Nietzsche does not marry war and reason at shotgun-point. He celebrates “wild wisdom”—thought set free from logic, even from that most ambitious logic of Hegel. He dismisses moderation. Werner Dannhauser writes that Nietzsche exalts spiritedness over the other dimensions of the souls because only the most extreme spiritedness can affirm life even while embracing Nietzschean nihilism. “Courage is the quality of mind most needed by the mind as it faces the utter and comprehensive meaninglessness of life. That meaninglessness must be affirmed, lest the spirit of revenge corrode us and we face a hostile”—perhaps the better word is indifferent—”world with bitterness and resentment.” Dannhauser judges Nietzsche’s project humanly impossible, and rejects Nietzsche’s claim that man may overcome his own humanity.
The deficiencies of late-modern political philosophy may prompt a reexamination of modernity’s most successful regime. Nathan Tarcov brings to this task a profound understanding of the Lockean political philosophy that influenced the American Founders more than any other. Locke, he observes, is not so ‘bourgeois’ as his critics contend. To assert rights, one makes “a spirited claim that there are duties both to respect others’ rights and to vindicate one’s own rights.” Some Thoughts Concerning Education “leaves room for properly educated spiritedness.” Pride in this combination of liberty and rationality forms the basis of morality; at the same time, love of dominion, that part of pride that spurs tyrants’ immorality, must be corrected and rechanneled. “Locke attempts to control the proud desire for mastery over others by satisfying the proud desire for liberty and mastery over oneself,” a mastery that wins the esteem of one’s fellow men and women.
Tarcov compares the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence with Lockean morality. There is a major similarity: Both teach that the spirited by rational assertion of liberty “alone secures political happiness.” There is also a difference. To the Signers, spiritedness is “part of what entitles one to liberty,” and relates to honor—that is, “gratitude to ancestors and responsibility to future generations.” This is why the Declaration culminates in a pledge of sacred honor among the people’s representatives, not among the people themselves; this is how would-be rulers show the virtue that will enable them to rule well. As for the people, consent is the key concept. Lack of popular spiritedness yields mere acquiescence; excess spiritedness fuels fanaticism. Consent—moderately spirited and reasonable—hits the mean between the extremes and provides a solid foundation for that rare thing, a politics of moderation in modernity.
This highly instructive collection of essays would have been improved by the inclusion of a more thorough discussion of thumos as a psychological concept—this, perhaps, in the introduction or in an essay immediately following it. A comparison and contrast of the Platonic view of the soul with the Christian view would have added a needed dimension to the study, as well. The writers do an excellent job in showing how modern political philosophers have come full circle since Machiavelli liberated spiritedness from the intellectual apprehension of, and the ethical respect for, nature—how first they tamed spiritedness, then tamed it again. The moderns denied reason’s capacity to rule, yet insisted on overturning traditional customs and opinions. The results have not been encouraging. These studies clarify the reasons for these results, and thus invite further consideration of a perennial political problem.
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