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Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College --
In 1908 Irving Babbitt published this unsentimental critique of where we have permitted education to take America. It remains depressingly applicable 100 years later. Our age, Babbitt says, suffers the same lack of intellectual rigor as did the late Romans in that intellectual laxity tends “to make love for one’s fellow men, or altruism, as we call it, do duty for most of the other virtues.” But this is foolish sentimentalism, and failing to understand the distinction between “humanists” and “humanitarians” is to abandon Plato for Rousseau, reason for its opposite.
The humanist, as Babbitt defines him,
“is interested in the perfecting of the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole; and although he allows largely for sympathy [today it has mutated into ‘empathy’], he insists that it be disciplined and tempered by judgment.”
Indeed, as Babbitt gives definition to his notion of the humanist, it seems to me that he is essentially defining moderation, the second of Plato’s great virtues and (ironically) the one most challenging to the modern mind: the humanist is one who “move[s] between an extreme of sympathy and an extreme of discipline and selection, and [becomes] humane in proportion as he mediate[s] between these extremes.”
And yet for Babbitt, to write dispassionately on such things, is -- as it is for anyone to do so today (e.g. Allan Bloom) – to walk on “burning ground.” The irony is that thinkers such as Babbitt and Bloom[1] are most frequently attacked as “elitist,” whereas they most resemble La Rochefoucauld’s gentleman and scholar who does not pride himself on anything because he knows too little. Babbitt is not afraid to say that becoming a scholar and becoming a gentleman are roughly the same thing and he does not hesitate to turn to the “splendid vitality” of the Renaissance for example.[2]
That is not to say that he intends the American college to be an undemocratic institution. Its mission, as he sees it, is to strive for a “blending,” which Babbit calls “an aristocratic and selective democracy.”[3] And lest anyone mistake his intentions, Babbitt does not leave his remarks a mere implicit repudiation of Rousseau. He attacks the “execrable wretch” with hammer and tong, insisting that Rousseau’s moral repulsiveness was not in spite of but “directly because of his idea of liberty.” For Babbitt, Rousseau was a “moral impressionist” who rejected everything, even the intoxicant of virtue, when it presented itself as a norm of conduct connected with duty or obligation. He was, in short, “morbidly subjective” and has left in modern literature a residue of “spiritual despondency” which in earlier times would have been accounted one of the deadly sins.
But all of this is by way of preparation of the main thesis of the book which is that modern life so requires expertise and specialization that education must be self-consciously vigilant to prevent that “mutilation of the mind that come[s] from over-absorption in one subject.” (Elsewhere, citing Burke, he calls this the “pedantry of individualism.”) Our civilization is “hard and positive in temper” and will permit literature and things of the imagination to be forgotten if our colleges are not vigilant. Already the college degree “puts a premium, not on the man who has read widely and thought maturely, but on the man who has shown proficiency in research.”
This is why the word “selection” appears so frequently in the Babbitt’s book. Selection, informed by judgment, leads to wisdom, the penultimate of Plato’s virtues, and is therefore the true opposite of sympathy which paradoxically leads to narrowness. (Without judgment, selection is meaningless, for it is then no more than Rousseauian sentiment and, as Babbitt, Harvard professor, puts it, “[t]he wisdom of all the ages is to be as naught compared with the inclination of a sophomore.”)
Thus Babbitt ultimately broaches the volatile subject of curriculum. The danger, as he sees it, is that education is becoming little more than an “endless accumulation of fact” with no moral conclusions, whereas the only worthy objective must actually be to detect the “constant mind of man.” Indeed, there is an unraveling of consensus on what that means. It is not difficult to imagine this sentence having been written by Burke himself:
“The mere fact that men once read the same book at college was no slight bond of fellowship. Two men who have taken the same course in Horace have at least a fund of common memories and allusions; whereas if one of them elect a course in Ibsen instead of Horace, they will not only have different memories, but so far as they are touched by the spirit of their authors, different ideals.”[4]
This is not to suggest an abhorrence for creativity (though Babbitt has an unconcealed contempt of innovation, or what he calls "originalism," for its own sake). But -- and this is difficult to describe in a few words -- intellectual creativity, by Babbitt’s lights, is most vital when it is imitative. He is concerned with Tom Paine, not Tom Edison. See. for example, his comparison of Montaigne with Rousseau. They are, he says, respectively "concentric" and "eccentric," and he leaves no doubt which he prefers. The “concentric” author inevitably is connected to classical, meaning Greek, literature.
“Nothing was more remarkable about Greek literature than the balance it maintained between the forces of tradition and the claims of originality, so that Greek literature at its best is a kind of creative imitation. It is precisely this lack of creative imitation that is the special weakness of our contemporary literature, just as the lack of creative assimilation is the special weakness of our contemporary scholarship. A pseudo-originality is equally the bane of both.”
Babbitt’s use of the word “assimilation” in this passage is expressly opposed to his earlier attack on “accumulated facts.” Indeed, in the case of the classics, assimilation is the very aim of knowledge, for it is intended to be converted into culture, which is not complete “until it has so penetrated its possessor as to become a part of his character.”
“Classical literature, at its best, does not so much tend to induce in us a certain state of feelings . . .; it appeals rather to our higher reason and imagination – to those faculties which afford us an avenue of escape from ourselves, and enable us to become participants in the universal life. It is thus truly educative in that it leads him who studies out and away from himself. The classical spirit, in its purest form, feels itself consecrated to the service of a high, impersonal reason.”
Thus “classical literature” becomes the “classical spirit,” and may be found at any time (since Babbitt makes provision for what he calls “the universal flux”). And the training for it must be rigorous and consistent from college to college.[5]
ENDNOTES.In 1908 Irving Babbitt published this unsentimental critique of where we have permitted education to take America. It remains depressingly applicable 100 years later. Our age, Babbitt says, suffers the same lack of intellectual rigor as did the late Romans in that intellectual laxity tends “to make love for one’s fellow men, or altruism, as we call it, do duty for most of the other virtues.” But this is foolish sentimentalism, and failing to understand the distinction between “humanists” and “humanitarians” is to abandon Plato for Rousseau, reason for its opposite.
The humanist, as Babbitt defines him,
“is interested in the perfecting of the individual rather than in schemes for the elevation of mankind as a whole; and although he allows largely for sympathy [today it has mutated into ‘empathy’], he insists that it be disciplined and tempered by judgment.”
Indeed, as Babbitt gives definition to his notion of the humanist, it seems to me that he is essentially defining moderation, the second of Plato’s great virtues and (ironically) the one most challenging to the modern mind: the humanist is one who “move[s] between an extreme of sympathy and an extreme of discipline and selection, and [becomes] humane in proportion as he mediate[s] between these extremes.”
And yet for Babbitt, to write dispassionately on such things, is -- as it is for anyone to do so today (e.g. Allan Bloom) – to walk on “burning ground.” The irony is that thinkers such as Babbitt and Bloom[1] are most frequently attacked as “elitist,” whereas they most resemble La Rochefoucauld’s gentleman and scholar who does not pride himself on anything because he knows too little. Babbitt is not afraid to say that becoming a scholar and becoming a gentleman are roughly the same thing and he does not hesitate to turn to the “splendid vitality” of the Renaissance for example.[2]
That is not to say that he intends the American college to be an undemocratic institution. Its mission, as he sees it, is to strive for a “blending,” which Babbit calls “an aristocratic and selective democracy.”[3] And lest anyone mistake his intentions, Babbitt does not leave his remarks a mere implicit repudiation of Rousseau. He attacks the “execrable wretch” with hammer and tong, insisting that Rousseau’s moral repulsiveness was not in spite of but “directly because of his idea of liberty.” For Babbitt, Rousseau was a “moral impressionist” who rejected everything, even the intoxicant of virtue, when it presented itself as a norm of conduct connected with duty or obligation. He was, in short, “morbidly subjective” and has left in modern literature a residue of “spiritual despondency” which in earlier times would have been accounted one of the deadly sins.
But all of this is by way of preparation of the main thesis of the book which is that modern life so requires expertise and specialization that education must be self-consciously vigilant to prevent that “mutilation of the mind that come[s] from over-absorption in one subject.” (Elsewhere, citing Burke, he calls this the “pedantry of individualism.”) Our civilization is “hard and positive in temper” and will permit literature and things of the imagination to be forgotten if our colleges are not vigilant. Already the college degree “puts a premium, not on the man who has read widely and thought maturely, but on the man who has shown proficiency in research.”
This is why the word “selection” appears so frequently in the Babbitt’s book. Selection, informed by judgment, leads to wisdom, the penultimate of Plato’s virtues, and is therefore the true opposite of sympathy which paradoxically leads to narrowness. (Without judgment, selection is meaningless, for it is then no more than Rousseauian sentiment and, as Babbitt, Harvard professor, puts it, “[t]he wisdom of all the ages is to be as naught compared with the inclination of a sophomore.”)
Thus Babbitt ultimately broaches the volatile subject of curriculum. The danger, as he sees it, is that education is becoming little more than an “endless accumulation of fact” with no moral conclusions, whereas the only worthy objective must actually be to detect the “constant mind of man.” Indeed, there is an unraveling of consensus on what that means. It is not difficult to imagine this sentence having been written by Burke himself:
“The mere fact that men once read the same book at college was no slight bond of fellowship. Two men who have taken the same course in Horace have at least a fund of common memories and allusions; whereas if one of them elect a course in Ibsen instead of Horace, they will not only have different memories, but so far as they are touched by the spirit of their authors, different ideals.”[4]
This is not to suggest an abhorrence for creativity (though Babbitt has an unconcealed contempt of innovation, or what he calls "originalism," for its own sake). But -- and this is difficult to describe in a few words -- intellectual creativity, by Babbitt’s lights, is most vital when it is imitative. He is concerned with Tom Paine, not Tom Edison. See. for example, his comparison of Montaigne with Rousseau. They are, he says, respectively "concentric" and "eccentric," and he leaves no doubt which he prefers. The “concentric” author inevitably is connected to classical, meaning Greek, literature.
“Nothing was more remarkable about Greek literature than the balance it maintained between the forces of tradition and the claims of originality, so that Greek literature at its best is a kind of creative imitation. It is precisely this lack of creative imitation that is the special weakness of our contemporary literature, just as the lack of creative assimilation is the special weakness of our contemporary scholarship. A pseudo-originality is equally the bane of both.”
Babbitt’s use of the word “assimilation” in this passage is expressly opposed to his earlier attack on “accumulated facts.” Indeed, in the case of the classics, assimilation is the very aim of knowledge, for it is intended to be converted into culture, which is not complete “until it has so penetrated its possessor as to become a part of his character.”
“Classical literature, at its best, does not so much tend to induce in us a certain state of feelings . . .; it appeals rather to our higher reason and imagination – to those faculties which afford us an avenue of escape from ourselves, and enable us to become participants in the universal life. It is thus truly educative in that it leads him who studies out and away from himself. The classical spirit, in its purest form, feels itself consecrated to the service of a high, impersonal reason.”
Thus “classical literature” becomes the “classical spirit,” and may be found at any time (since Babbitt makes provision for what he calls “the universal flux”). And the training for it must be rigorous and consistent from college to college.[5]
1. To put these two in the same sentence is not to suggest that they would haven seen eye-to-eye on very much.
2. But compare Tocqueville who sees literature as expanding democracy since it is "an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest always find weapons to their hand."
3. Specialization is expressly to be left to the graduate schools.
4. I wonder what the other Bloom, the canonist Harold, would make of this juxtaposition of authors.
5. As far as the Leland Stanford University is concerned, he remarks, "the Bachelor of Arts degree has already been emptied utterly of its traditional content" since the school permits a student to enter "not only without Latin and Greek, but without any language or nonscientific subject whatsoever except English composition, and then receive his Bachelor of Arts degree on completing a certain number of hours work in mechanical engineering." And if Stanford has redeemed itself in the past century (has it?), nevertheless Babbitt hit the bullseye when he went on to predict that in general for the BA degree to have any future significance it will have to be accompanied by the name of the institution granting it.
William Bennett, The Devaluing of America:The Fight for Our Culture and Our Children (Summit Books 1992) --
The last two presidential elections were so emotional that we may have forgotten that today’s culture disputes go back decades. In 1981, for example, when William Bennett was invited by President Reagan to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, he stepped into an angry debate every bit as alive as it is today. He was a conservative emissary (though a Democrat) and did little to calm the storm. Indeed, he seemed to relish the opportunity to grapple with the issues and challenge what he calls “the pre-conceived reality” of the left. To him, it was less a matter of changing the tone than of shifting the ground to “compelling empirical arguments,” letting the emotions take care of themselves. Start with evidence, not ideology, was his position.
Ten years later Bennett was out of government and published this book to recount his experiences. Bennett has always impressed me as a mensch with a good deal of that undefinable gravitas which makes for a successful public figure. That was the only reason I chose this book, which otherwise I thought would be just another memoir by a former government figure. Unfortunately, for the most part this is what it turned out to be. Bennett has two principal subject matters: his life as Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration and his tenure as "Drug Czar" under the first President Bush. In the latter area, he remains an absolutist and has no truck with any notion about the legalization of drugs, not even from men he admires such as Milton Friedman or William Buckley.
“In the end drug use is wrong because of what it does to human character. It degrades. It makes people less than they should be by burning away a sense of responsibility, subverting productivity, and making a mockery of virtue. “Using drugs is wrong not simply because drugs create medical problems; it is wrong because drugs destroy one’s moral sense. People addicted to drugs neglect their duties. the lure can become so strong that soon people will do nothing but take drugs. They will neglect God, family, children, friends, and jobs – everything in life that is important, noble and worthwhile – for the sake of drugs.”
Bennett’s stories are diverting enough, but not so brilliantly written as to set this book apart from scores of others. The anecdotes are largely banal and the first person writing necessarily means that the tone is less transcendent than what would be expected in a book of ideas. But there are moments worth recalling. For example, Bennett (a former professor) apparently taught class at numerous public schools as Education Secretary and his retelling of some of these encounters reveals what a good ear he has for kids. In a third grade class he asked, "Who's the biggest?" Then, "Who's the smartest?" and "Who's the oldest?" Each time the answer came, "You are." But then he asked, "Who's equal?" He was obviously gratified, as I am, that the unanimous answer was "We all are."
Over and over Bennett tells such stories to illustrate his theme that the American people are pretty sensible at all ages and that their views are going unheeded by intellectuals too arrogant to understand them. George Schultz was once quoted as saying “Nothing is ever settled in this town,” referring to Washington, D.C. Just a glance at Bennett’s chapter titles from 13 years ago – “Crisis in American Education,” “The Great University Debates,” “Religion in American Political Life,” etc. – shows just how right he was. For all its flaws, this book remains as contemporary as the day it was published.
Walter Berns, Freedom, Virtue and the First Amendment —
Several years ago, somewhat abruptly, a friend asked me if I was a libertarian. My answer, which popped out of my mouth with equal suddenness, was that no of course I was not, since libertarians honor freedom above virtue. Later that evening I thought back about what I had said so quickly and I remembered this book, which was written by one of my college professors.
Its title gives a strong idea of what I must have had in mind. With Allan Bloom (infra) and others of the Straussian school, Walter Berns is generally referred to as a “conservative.” In modern terms, the word fits more comfortably than “liberal,” but is subject to so much explanation as to be essentially misleading. In this book, the First Amendment is the prism through which Berns explains his broader views. While others (the modern conservative William Buckley, for example) see conservatism and freedom to be virtually synonymous terms, Berns explains why they are not – hence the “virtue” in his title.
“Conservative writers urge a return to a past that is praised as essentially conservative; liberal writers urge the maintenance of a tradition said to be essentially liberal. . . . To say that both may be right is to suggest that neither argument touches fundamental issues . . . “ (My italics.)
As Berns sees it, the “fundamental” issue is virtue, specifically political virtue, and this is not a relative term. Arguing based on nothing more than past behavior – however it has been honored in a society – is to leave little to distinguish between Burke and Marx. It is “to confuse the separate (but related) realms of theory and practice.” It is that confusion which Berns sees as the “problem” of freedom, not to mention the source of the derived problem of understanding the First Amendment. Freedom and justice are sometimes incompatible, Berns shows, and when that is the case, it is justice, the Platonic virtue, which must be predominant.
“Freedom in itself has no intrinsic merit. Freedom not associated with a moral principle may be permitted when it produces no harm, but freedom becomes good when and only when it is so associated.”
Hence our courts have proceeded on a “faulty theory: the theory that freedom of speech is a basic right, or even a natural right.”
That said, the book proceeds as an analysis of Constitutional law circa the mid-1950s, when the living Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was still remembered by Americans and the First Amendment had been subjected to rigorous Constitutional interpretation for only a few recent generations.[1] Berns does not regard Holmes as a god and he points out that Holmes’s “clear and present danger” test as a way of circumventing the First Amendment quickly became confusing, “pushed,” as he says anent the Dennis case, “like a drayhorse onto a racetrack, into service for which it was not equipped.” On the other hand, Berns’s larger point is that not all free speech is good speech.
“Which means that freedom of speech is not always a sound or just public policy. Since, however, absolute suppression of the freedom to speak is an evil that, under most circumstances, society must be alert to avoid and since one suppression can easily lead to another, the decent as well as the wise policy for a democracy is to permit as much even of the bad speech as can be tolerated, on the basis that its influence will be negligible.”
This is hardly the camp of the libertarians. There is always, Berns reminds us, the possibility that tyrannies may arise that do not arise from government – “unless it be from the failure to act.” Hence the “withering away” of the state is no more to be desired than to be expected. And the Supreme Court’s essential functions cannot be summarized in such contests by a fatuous phrase such as “balancing the interests.” It is necessary -- and Berns says “frequently” necessary – “to transcend the system of which the law . . . forms a part and to evaluate it according to other criteria. These criteria might not be supplied by the system, but they are not necessarily foreign to it either.” Hence, even though the Constitution does not and cannot prescribe the details of our government,
“it embodies a spirit, a sense of the right, beyond the provisions themselves. Wise interpretation of the Constitution would be impossible without it.”
And so Berns regards with some unease, if not contempt, those for whom due process, especially “procedural” due process, is the essence of Constitutional government. This is a bitter pill for a judge like me who believes that in virtually all legal disputes the predictability of the law gives each of us a firm place to stand. I have frequently shaken my head when I hear judges tell me that theirs is the best job because they go to work with no other mission than to “do the right thing.” That has always struck me as an unprincipled and irresponsible approach. But the obvious retort is that process alone, if it produces an unjust result, can hardly be said to be a principle itself. Indeed, if we approach the problem of freedom as Berns does, we are eventually obliged to set aside all such comfortable notions and come to his final chapter, which considers the problem of virtue itself.
Virtue was the ancient problem, the problem grappled with before the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, etc. The ancients knew, in other words, that there were things that were good according to a moral calculus, not the amoral calculus that freedom is enough.
“Those that adhere to this extreme position [i.e. that freedom is enough] believe that government has no concern with the virtue, or the moral training, of its citizens. This means that law and morality are distinct, that law is amoral; it assumes either that society will be civilized and habitable by decent men if government stands aside, or that governmental intervention is worse than the most degraded society.”
For thinking men with an eye to goodness, this is unacceptable. Heretofore, Berns says, government’s essential purpose was “moral education” – man’s inner life – such that the “problem” of freedom never would arise. That remains true, even in a liberal world of democratic government for “our lawmakers, if not always our jurists, still know that the law cannot assume that men will be civilized if left free.” Even now, more than 40 years after he wrote it, Berns’s book is an alembic for distilling how we must think about what we truly believe.
ENDNOTES
1. Insofar as press freedom, the jurisprudence ofthat era has left us, Berns says, with three rough approaches: (1) The Black and Douglas approach, which is that "justice is based on a principle, progress, that ordinary experience should force them to doubt," leaving them "to weild the judicial power with a ruthlessness that would have astounded their intellectual forebears"; (2) Those whose opinions "are generally devoid of anything of interest to anyone seeking anything beyond the outcome of the cases"; and (3) The rump of Justices Jackson and Frankfurter, the former "puzzled to the end and not ashamed to confess it," the other clinging to the tenet of classical liberalism such as to permit the legislature, "the majestic representative of the people," to decide the problem. Since such liberalism is not the only possible political doctrine, however, "it does not follow that it would be un-American to heed the advice Charnwood attributes to Lincoln and construe the Constitutioin, including te First Amendment, so as to 'render it agreeable to natural justice.'"
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution In France --
Possibly the least symmetrical thing about baseball, an asymmetrical game played on fields of varying shape and under no regimen of time, is the infield fly rule. The rule essentially runs counter to the prevailing rules of the game and was not originally part of baseball at all. But without the infield fly rule, the point of the game would be lost and so it was embraced at an early date in service of the larger cause.
Edmund Burke would love the infield fly rule. As Leo Strauss says, he was apractical man. He would see the rule as a paradigm of his sensible views on government. Because his book has no chapters or internal headings, it is not an easy one to read. In fact, even though Burke obviously intended it to be published from the outset, it is formally not a book at all but a letter, addressed to what must have been a rather overwhelmed young correspondent in France who had merely solicited some warm words about what had not yet become what we call The Terror. He could never have expected such a gigantic response.
The most prominent features of this extended meditation, of course, are Burke's intellect[1] and his genuine alarm over what is unfolding in France. His methodology immediately betrays his legal training: the book is, in other words, a brief. The French, it appears, had taken strength from the good wishes of two local societies in England who purported to see in the French Revolution legal parallels to England's own Revolution of 1688. This is too much for Burke who fears that such counterfeit ideas, smuggled into France, will then be re-imported on the bogus notion that they are native to England, all to great mischief.
The opening third of the book is expended in demolishing this idea and this gives Burke wide latitude to expatiate on the origins of the English constitution. His chief point here, though not expressly, is anti-Jeffersonian: our rights as Englishmen do not come to us from nature, but as an acknowledged inheritance. And this includes the rights of the English kings who, notwithstanding the Glorious Revolution, inherit their throne and do not owe it to the pleasure of the people. This is so because the nation of England, like all nations (like France, for instance), have personalities which develop over time -- just as the personalities of people develop as they grow older; just as the rules of baseball evolve to guard against such anomalies as an infield fly and a clever shortstop. A revolution traduces that personality and in creating a new government is unable to draw upon the tradition that produced the old one.
Because of the argumentative tone of this book, there are few opportunities for wit or creativity. They can be found, however. When it comes to sarcasm, for example, Burke is so accomplished that you can't help but laughing -- if for no other reason than surprise at his unbelievable skill. (He apologizes at one point for using the word "mob," explaining that it is unfortunately still current in England.) Where else does the apparently benign use of the phrase "the rights of man" evolve into an epithet? And when Burke briefly re-tells the story of the capture and humiliation of the French king and queen in October 1989, though he does it with outrage, the sadness is latent and no doubt intentional.
I have said that this book was published in 1790, before the Terror and before the murder of the king. To illustrate how clearly Burke foresaw things, it is worthwhile to quote this short passage:
"In the weakness of one kind of authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account. There is no other way of securing military obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which that event shall happen, the person who really commands the army is your master; the master ... of your king, the master of your assembly, the master of your whole republic."
A final point is the regret I felt when I realized that Burke expected his audience to understand the Latin passages to which he periodically repairs. (No parenthetical translations for him.) Alas he wrote for an educated reader. Three years of high school Latin has left me short of that goal.
ENDNOTES
1. In Boswell's Life he recalls Johnson remarking of Burke, "'That fellow calls forth allmy powers. Were I to see Burke now [Johnson was ill] it would kill me.' So much was [Johnson] accustomed to consider conversation as a contest, and such was his notion of Burke as an opponent."
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls Of Black Folk --
It is difficult to say just what kind of book this is. There is a good deal of "black history" in it, DuBois recounting the life and death of the Freedmen's Bureau and elsewhere giving mini biographies of a few notable Negro Americans. There is also a chapter devoted to DuBois's criticism of Booker T. Washington. DuBois tells instructional stories about the struggles of the poor Negroes he taught and lived with when he was a starting teacher in Tennessee and he includes an unfortunately overwritten chapter on the poignant death of his first son in infancy. In short, it is not one great coherent essay, but more resembles a very well-written personal journal or diary. Nevertheless, for me, to whom this was the first exposure to DuBois, it was gratifying to see how very well educated he was and even more refreshing that he never felt the need to overstate the case for the black man. When DuBois sees all men as equal, he is not arguing – in this treatise – for a communist fantasy. What he insists upon is the right of all extraordinarily bright people -- people like himself -- to achieve every intellectual advantage without artificial restraints. DuBois, in other words, is a dyed in the wool elitist. How he would have expressed himself in the late Twentieth Century cannot be known, but it is not impossible to imagine him saying (possibly covertly) the things that Clarence Thomas has said to the scorn of his own fellow African Americans.
T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture —
That is not what I meant at all;That is not it, at all.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In the early 20th Century, T.S. Eliot, an extraordinarily gifted graduate student, was at Harvard working on a philosophy Ph.D. He finished his dissertation during World War I but never picked up the degree. By then he had decamped to Oxford and had yielded to women and poetry. My memory may be faulty here, but I seem to recall having read that years later he confessed that when he re-visited his unpublished thesis, he found his own concepts too complicated to understand.
In his life, there followed Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, etc., all of them radically new, often unrecognizable as poetry, and utterly bracing and unnervingly despondent. I was called upon to read them — or some of them, as well as Murder in the Cathedral — in high school, Today, my recollection is that more than anything else I was puzzled and confused by them — but also implicitly warned by the words themselves that there was something I was supposed to know or to sense when I got older.
The Structure. On reflection, it should not be surprising that in his mature years a poet of such eminence should have taken on the mission that Eliot sets for himself in this volume, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. It is not poetry, however, and it is not literature. It is a collection of essays from the early 1940s which he brought out in book form in 1949. It might be called an academic meditation.
The book itself is little more than 100 pages in length, a small volume which would once have been called a monograph, a series of six short essays, with no larger (and no smaller) a purpose than what is said by its title: a "definition." In fact on the title page he has inserted, in small type from the OED, to illustrate what he means by "definition": "The setting of bounds; limitation (rare) —1483."[1] His mission, he says, is to "rescue" the word "culture." He describes it as a book written by one "who [has] acquired some reputation . . . . outside the subject on which [he has] made [his] reputation."[2]
Culture and Civilization. Who would expect a man of Eliot's wry fatalism to write a book like this and yet simultaneously to sail on the side of optimism? The title itself is forbiddingly dry and academic. He only intends to rescue a word and not the thing itself[3]. His tone is sober (albeit genial), his method analytical, and his mission is clarity[4]. He immediately dismisses any effort to distinguish "culture" from "civilization"[5] and also assures his readers that since he is building an argument, his business is not to be judgmental. The latter remark must be taken lightly, however, since quite early he also remarks in passing that "you are unlikely to have a high civilization" if the cultural conditions he identifies are not present. In short, he is judgmental in this respect: there is a high culture[6]. Indeed, that fact is the crux of his central definitional question: are there any permanent conditions "in the absence of which no higher culture can be expected"?
Never does Eliot directly ask or answer the unsettling question often posed in op-ed articles about whether anyone is situated to recognize that his culture is slipping into a dark age. That would be beside the point he hopes to make. He is already certain that, high or not, civilization (or culture) is in decline and that it is bootless to attempt a conscious change. Culture is not a "comprehensive" term for discrete things — opera, "classical" music, poetry, Shakespeare, Latin, etc. It cannot be summarized as "skills and interpretations." It is not fixed; culture is an organism. Although it can evolve or die, it is impervious to being directed by living people with a mission. In the identification process, the best that we can do is simply to combat our inevitable intellectual errors and emotional prejudices — particularly as they are exacerbated by this anomaly: people who often contribute the most to culture are not always cultured persons.
The Architecture. For definitional purposes, Eliot's first requirement is a recognition that "to understand the culture is to understand the people, and this means an imaginative understanding." It's hard, is it not, to avoid detecting Eliot the poet in this observation? Indeed, he fortifies the point by also affirming that a culture's most dependable safeguard is a language — as long as it is a literary, contra scientific, language. But more — and less —he asserts that the understanding which he requires about people by no means implies empathy and it inevitably entails risk. Glancing at Conrad's Kurtz, he dryly remarks that the anthropologist who dines with the cannibals whom he is studying "has probably gone too far."
And so Eliot posits his own architecture of culture, beginning with (i) the individual and the group (unplanned and growing)[7], largely dependent on social classes, followed by (ii) "regionalism" with geographical elements[8], and finally (iii) religion, a "universality of doctrine" but with particular cults and devotions.
Family. He is utterly convinced that culture is primarily, though not exclusively, transmitted by the family — "and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate." He is not referring to mom, dad, and two kids. He means a "reverence for the past and future" — far different from "the vanities and pretensions of genealogy." Consider what a child normally learns within the family. If not educated on the assumption that he is "just like his father," he says, a child will be inevitably be "trained on what the official opinion of the moment considers to be 'the genuinely democratic lines' '' with the result that the elites will have no common bond except their professional interest with no social cohesion or continuity." "[T]hey will meet like committees," a condition which is antithetical to culture — because "in a more highly civilized society there must be different levels of culture" for which the family is essential.
Social classes, though probably inevitable, are not always a good thing. Without examples, he senses in our times a growing isolation — as opposed to confrontation — of some elites from others —nevertheless an ominous sign that culture is weakening. Worse, however, he is quite certain that an accepted criterion of who are the best people has "an oppressive effect upon novelty." Novelty is an absolute requirement for an active culture. That means conflict, a notion that recurs repeatedly in his analysis. "A people should be neither too united nor too divided." Consider the life and death message of Antigone: the discord between hereditary functions is not "simply a clash between piety and civil disobedience, or between religion and politics, but between conflicting laws within what is still a religious-political complex."
Regionalism. In his third chapter Eliot considers "regions." More than simply feeling himself the citizen of a particular nation, it is important a man should also consider himself "a citizen of a particular part of his county," a situation which requires a generation or two of local residence[9]. Regionalism, he believes, leads to a "constellation of cultures within a nation, because "[a] true satellite culture is one which, for geographical and other reasons, has a permanent relation to a stronger one." Instead of considering cultural clashes in bi-lingual countries like Canada, or Switzerland, or Belgium, Eliot's reference here is to Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in their relationship to England. For evidence in our country, we would look at African Americans, southerners, and Main Street.
Such clashes between co-habiting cultures — deplored in Eliot's scholarly remarks as "dangerous" and "precarious" — are today not only common but virtually encouraged in the American media, fraught with broad dread and anxiety. But tension among a country's regions is generally salutary. "One needs the enemy. So, within limits, the friction not only between individuals but between groups, seems to me quite necessary for civilization." As he sees it, "the universality of irritation assures peace. It is the two opposite extremes that are either dangerous to the country itself or a menace to others." But in his era of almost universal relativism — still with us — Eliot will have nothing to do with the "absolutism" of a possible world culture. A uniform world culture would be no culture at all. His subject is national culture.
Religion. The theme now becomes "the intimacy of religion and culture" and where that leaves us today. No religion is likely to be permanent, but religion is vital to the definition of culture. "When we defend our religion, we defend our culture."
"Any religion, while it lasts, and on its own level, gives an apparent meaning to life, provides the framework for a culture, and protects the mass of society from boredom and despair."
Yes, in primitive communities religion and culture were virtually unified. But religions are now more complex, more demanding, more intellectualized, more difficult to believe. In part this seems to be because there is always a residual identity between the original religion and the modern culture. And yet once again there is also some comfort to be found in religion's propensity to arouse social conflict and torment —because it also "stimulates" the prevailing culture[10].
So what about ecumenism[11]? Eliot (presumably a conscientious Anglican) does not reject the prospect, but he does spy a danger of what might be called over-simplification, "a general lowering of culture if it has only been animated by the weakening of the cultural characteristics of the uniting bodies"[12]. "Reunion" means the reunion of a body having "episcopal government with the Church of Rome or reunion between bodies separated from each other in the same areas." Not to say the subcultures are inferior, but the chief cultural tradition in the west is that of the Roman Church and northern Europe's separation is a divergence from that mainstream. Protestantism only persists "upon the survival of that against which it protests."[13] And so if there is to be any reunification, "each region must shape its Christianity to suit itself," making provision for "an endless conflict between ideas."
Politics. How compatible are culture and politics? In chapter V, which comes close to a digression, Eliot betrays an uneasy perplexity. If we were a more local, decentralized society, he says, "political utterances might also tend to manifest greater clarity." But there are too many ideas, too many publications. Politicians have little time for such things and are normally content with "the emotional attitude [which] will go farthest."
For him, a "governing elite" must not be sharply divided from other elites. Without their mutual contact, a society would disintegrate — although by mutual contact he means more than just a bureaucratic assembly of committees and panels. The commerce among the elites must be "organic" with a shared "vocabulary" and "idiom." He speaks of this as "congeniality" — and by my lights this is more than an aspiration; it is a duty.
Education. Finally, though rational and organized, The Definition of Culture seems incomplete. The book has begun with a series of discrete publicly released essays, but the final chapter would not even have been separately published. As an addendum to the author's earlier thinking, it is not unwelcome, but it emerges as an afterthought, as what he now realizes he should have written earlier, perhaps for clarity or even correction. The analysis has its own configuration, perhaps a bit defensive, under which he gives his comments on some "prevalent assumptions" about education. Here, his last reflection, "The Mute Inglorious Milton Dogma" draws on Gray's Elegy, not to mock it. but to consider without sentiment the implications of "the last and finest line of the quatrain"— not to curse what we have lost by failing to achieve equality of opportunity in education, but to consider what we may have avoided. The observation is arresting, but largely irrelevant.
Epigraph. For whatever reason, at the end of the main text in the volume I read, Eliot (or his publisher) appended three lectures he gave to a "German audience," obviously in the post-war period and apparently on the subject of "the unity of European culture." The first addresses European poetry. Next, he regrets the international "confusion of politics and culture" and third, Eliot concludes with "the spiritual organism of Europe," which he regards as being in great peril because of a growing lack of reciprocity among nations. And he reiterates,
"I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. . . . If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again . . . . You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture . . . ; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it."
In 1948 T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature. In 2016, the award was given to Bob Dylan.
[1] Nearby he dedicates the book to the Christian intellectual Philip Mairet.
[2] By this, I take it he means that although he finally chose the path of a poet and not a scholar, his reputation in the latter realm remains formidable and not subject to question. (But in the appendix I find that he states parenthetically, "I was never a scholar myself.")
[3] Culture is but "a peculiar way of thinking, feeling and behaving."
[4] But how to account for this remark: "The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications."
[5] Yes, they differ, but he says they frequently overlap and it would be retrograde to his purpose to struggle over such details.
[6] We also notice an uncompromising quality in his title. It is neither "Notes Towards A Definition of Culture," nor "Notes Towards the Definition of A Culture."
[7] Groups ("smaller units of culture having their own local peculiarities") are interchangeable with "class." But he is also quick to say that "class" and "elite" are not the same thing.
[8] At this juncture, he draws several polite distinctions between his conclusions and those of Karl Mannheim. But the two of them do agree that we are evolving into a "mass society," toward which Eliot has the more pessimistic outlook.
[9] And yet he concedes the attractiveness of a lingering, though "reduced," sense of "local culture": "everything that is picturesque, harmless and separable from politics, such as language and literature, local arts and customs." Gramdma Moses, I suppose.
[10] He reminds us that "some of our most remarkable cultural advances date after the 16th century which was a time of religious disunity."
[11] Eliot's book is implicitly but obviously Eurocentric. This is a virtue. Had his book been more than that, it would have been much longer, less focused, less readable, and, to tell the truth, less thoughtful. It would be tedious; it would be anthropology. It is quite enough to explore the anxieties of the high culture. Moreover, simply to critique Renaissance portraiture or Homeric meter is not to identify a culture. Think about the stark differences in perspicuity between, say, Democracy in America and Coming of Age in Samoa. For that matter, even in the modern scholarship of "mythology," the writing tends toward cultural symbolism and metaphor, always a danger in clumsy hands.
[12] E.g. reducing theology to "such principles as a child can understand."
[13] In Protestant countries both faith and infidelity tend to be "mild and inoffensive" with a "vague" boundary between belief and unbelief.
Robert H. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy –
I first read this book as an undergraduate, probably less than 25 years after it was written. At the time, it seemed to have been written by God himself, Jackson having gone from Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General to Supreme Court justice, with noble service as allied war crimes prosecutor at Nuremburg. And so I swallowed whole his assertion in the very first sentence of the preface that at the time that The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy was published (1941, the year he was appointed to the Court), the Roosevelt plan to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 had passed out of politics into “history.” And why should I not have done so? I was a young man. Even today, Jackson remains an eminence and his writing style was delivered ex cathedra. Why should I not have accepted his assurance that this volume is no more than a “dispassionate” review of past events? Furthermore, Jackson’s claim that both sides ultimately won – the court “reform” bill was defeated and yet the court was reformed – is arguably true. On re-reading, however, I see that some of Jackson’s assumptions could be termed petitio principii, not least his assumption that the “reform” was salutary. There is a smug, almost triumphalist tone in his opening pages. Only “alert” and “hardy” justices, he says, are capable of “overcoming” the court’s regrettable instinct for conservatism, and therefore there is no assurance that future generations may not be compelled to re-fight the conflicts which “we” and our fathers have already been repeatedly obliged to contest. Indeed, he concludes that
“[i]n no major conflict with the representative branches on any question of social or economic policy has time vindicated the Court.”
His few historical examples to support this proposition are certainly valid[1] (assuming “time” stopped upon the publication of this book), but it is an odd liberal who uses the past to predict the future. In the half century since publication, for example, Jackson’s apercu has been turned on its head, by which I refer to decisions in which the court has marched out ahead of both of the other branches on social policy questions such as segregation, abortion, and the death penalty. Here is a conundrum for a self-described liberal who fears the recrudescence of the
“[h]istorical struggle of some of the Justices to maintain judicial supremacy over the legislative process and on the part of other Justices . . . to confine judicial power to its traditional and proper sphere.” Emphasis supplied.
Jackson condemns what he calls “government by lawsuit,” since in the dark days of the early New Deal, “lawyers bent on destruction of acts of Congress were quick to find out responsive judges[2] and to use sharp legal devices to test constitutionality.”
“Judicial justice is well adapted to ensure that established legislative rules are fairly and equitably applied to individual cases. But it is inherently ill-suited, and never can be suited, to devising or enacting rules of general social policy. Litigation procedures are clumsy and narrow, at best; technical and tricky, at their worst.”
Constitutionality, he later says, “should not depend on an advocate’s judgment, or want of it, in argument.” This, he says, is why the founders limited the federal courts to “cases and controversies,” and did not give them a writ for broader social problems. Of course, this has not been the recent view of the ACLU or NOW. They have been perfectly happy to bypass the popular branch of government if they feel that they can accomplish their ends by judicial decree. But even if Jackson is correct in his summary of the Court’s supposed unthinking detachment from popular social and economic trends, there is a more contemporary theme that he also strikes. Constitutional law, he says, is “evolutionary,” requiring “forward-looking” people to maintain its life. And this is really his point[3]. For all of Jackson’s presuppositions, his book is still a review of the Supreme Court’s growing judicial power in America until it was arrested in the late 1930s by the events he then describes. But as for a genuine history in advance of that time, what Jackson furnishes is brief. He acknowledges the judicial supremacy doctrine which grew out of Marbury v. Madison, and notes its eclipse during the Civil War. Then, Jackson says, this power reemerged. The fact that it was so robust[4]
“that it could strike down for the next seventy years many acts of social and economic reform, could sterilize other acts which embodied popular measures, could render ineffective much of the effort to aid the cause of labor and, at last, could mutilate in two years the whole reform and recovery program of the New Deal, is one of the most amazing chapters in the history of popular government.”
In some ways, his argument reduces to this: horrible economic devastation was caused by the Depression, the Roosevelt Administration proposed and passed well-motivated corrective legislation, and the Supreme Court (and lower federal courts as well) struck it down based on principles with which Jackson (and the country at large) disagrees. In other words, for reasons which Jackson does not pause to explain but which he assumes to be invidious, the Court took it as its mission to “make the teachings of laissez faire a part of our constitutional law.” But pointing to the many post-Civil War cases in which the due process clause of the 14th amendment was used to strike down state regulatory legislation, he reminds us that “[t]here is nothing in the Constitution which provides that there shall be no power to regulate prices or wages.”[5] Thus disposing of half a century of jurisprudence without giving it even an expression, except for glancing references to the due process clause of the 14th amendment, he risks what has now occurred: the contemporary parallel that the Constitution is equally silent, for example, on the states’ power to legislate against or in favor of abortion or to establish a death penalty. Each of the Court’s post-New Deal decisions on those topics was similarly derived from either a completely unarticulated Constitutional right of “privacy” or from implications drawn from the 8th amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In short, the Court’s liberal “activism” has found the same provenance as its earlier “conservatism.” For that matter, Jackson’s rage at the Court’s even looking at the decisions of regulatory agencies[6] raises even more profound due process problems. Jackson favors finality of such decisions without judicial review. Here his experience as the New Deal’s most conspicuous legal spokesman to the Court (he had been solicitor general) gets the best of him. He puts this debate in partisan terms, which seems shortsighted to me. How time consuming and cumbersome it would be, Jackson argues, to require the courts to determine the fairness of rates set by the New York Telephone Company. It’s a fair argument, but one which his heirs must struggle with themselves, when we count the cost of “liberal” courts deciding to run a school system or break up the telephone monopoly[7]. And for me, Jackson also includes an observation which is even more troubling, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you come from. Administrative bodies, he says, are at “the heart of nearly every social or economic reform of this [the 20th] century” and so although some of them have been guilty of “injudicious” conduct,
“no claim to such arbitrary authority has ever been asserted by any administrative tribunal in recent years, and the controversy of fact-finding by such bodies was settled by the Supreme Court in Crowell v. Benson. ” (Emphasis supplied.)
I suppose the Supreme Court “settles” things, but Jackson and the Roosevelt team were far less congenial to that concept before the Court’s volte-face of 1937, just as Lincoln was not prepared to accept Taney’s “settlement” of the question of slavery in the territories[8]. In short, Jackson has written more of a politician’s than a lawyer’s brief. He repeatedly leaves the impression that in the years before 1937 the justices (particularly Butler, Roberts, McReynolds, VanDevanter, and Sutherland) acted only out of spite with no genuine concern for the Constitution or legal principle. And on his side, economic need followed by short term success justifies all. Here is how he defends a tax imposed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (whose early antecedents in the Hoover Administration he emphasizes and whose provisions, I acknowledge, appear uncontroversial 70 years later): “[T]he need for some program was imperative, and the results from the particular plan were presented to the Court in its vindication.” I don’t mean to discount pragmatic, demonstrable success, though it can obviously be taken too far. But this book by an eminent jurist and man of the law and could stand to have a better explanation of the legal issues of the Butler case, particularly since Jackson dismisses the Court’s opinion as mere “emotionalism” in the face of such wonderful statistics. Indeed, if “emotionalism” were given no right of expression in court, many a liberal argument would never have been made in the years since Jackson’s death. For me as a trial judge, Jackson does offer one observation which I must be certain to remember:
“The legal profession . . . tends to become over-professionalized. We forget that the law is the rule for simple and untaught people to live by. We complicate and over-refine it as a weapon in legal combat until we take it off the ground where people live into the thin atmosphere of sheer fiction.”
His example of the danger is the fiction of a corporation as an individual when it is in actual litigation with another individual. Toward the end of his book, Jackson points out the utility of legislation enacted by bodies elected at recent intervals, concluding that
“after this political and legislative process has taken place, to add another and more extreme and inflexible hurdle in the form of judicial review of social policy loads the dice in favor of the status quo and makes the constructive task of liberal leadership impossible.”
And he closes brilliantly, telling the pathetic story of Roger Taney’s frustrated impotence in the face of Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, which was the direct result of his own Dred Scott decision. As Jackson says, “One such precedent is enough!”[9]
ENDNOTES
1. E.g. 19th Century cases invalidating the Civil War Legal Tender Act and a federal income tax and the recent (at Jackson's time) capitulation to the social and economic enactments of the early New Deal. But his ace is the horrid Dred Scott decision, which when delivered was not an example of the court taking a position in stark opposition to the popular will. Dred Scott exposeda failure of consensus in what Jackson calls the "representative branches."
2. This is called "forum shopping." It happens, of course, but courts don't like it any more than Jackson and normally they have procedural rules to discourage it. He gives no examples or details of how this happened.
3. "The greatest expounders of the Constitution, from John Marshall to Oliver Wendell Holmes," Jackson says, "have always insisted that the strength and vitality of the Constitution stem from the fact that its principles are adaptable to changing events." Even assuming that this is only a reference to those who have sat on the Supreme Court (as opposed to other "expounders"), this propositioin should have bveen enlarged with a separate chapter, with examples.
4. By the end of the book, Jackson calls judicial supremacy a "vice" because it closes "the avenues to peaceful and democratic conciliation of our social and economic struggles." In the early 21st Century, this line of argument has been most strongly advanced by "conservatives" in respect to federalism, particularly as it touches the abortion debate. A vocal band of "liberals" is horrified by any reconsideratioin of Roe v. Wade.
5. For Jackson, due process arguments in economic policy are no more than the "big top hat" from which magicians draw out rabbits.
6. In this, I believe he has a contemporary ally in Antonin Scalia.
7. In my brief life as a trial judge, I have been grateful for the existence of such agencies and specialty courts, for no other reason than that they relieve me of the tedium of having to adjudicate repetitive and monotonous disputes for which some expertise can be developed at that administrative level. But at the same time, when I am obliged to review such decisions as are appealable on due process standards, for the same reasons I confess to being dubious about the energy and probity of such bodies. It is a priority to be alert to due process abuses.
8. But I do grant Jackson the last word. In deciding Erie v. Tompkins, a famous obiter dictum in which the Court overruled a century of jurisprudence without advance notice, he notes that it did what "in the case of administrative officers, would be denounced as exercising an unlawful discretion."
9. Of course, the impact of this last lie would have been much greater were it not such a clear echo of Holmes.
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals --
Ideas are a harder sell than personality. Thoughtful and talented writers who understand this will acknowledge the value of the novel as an attractive as well as valid vehicle for their ideas. Biography is a riskier business since the author always runs the hazard of losing proportion and, in effect, novelizing the facts.
But what can be said of this series of essays by Paul Johnson, a respected historian, in which he dwells almost wholly on the personalities of men of ideas? Never mind that some of his subjects -- e.g. Rousseau, Marx -- are giants compared to nonentities like Lillian Hellman or Noam Chomsky who are also featured in this book. The ideas of all of Johnson's subjects are of little significance to this book except that they made them prominent in the first place. As he writes,
"It is a fact, and in some ways a melancholy fact, that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in personality."
The more I read this book, however, the more uncomfortable I became about its thesis. Who is an intellectual, after all? Johnson takes a stab at a definition in the opening paragraphs of his first essay (on Rousseau). He is speaking of "secular" intellectuals, he says, instead of the earlier "priests, scribes and soothsayers."
"For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. . . . In particular I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself."
Well most conspicuously, the book is a hardbound gossip sheet for the literary set. This is not to challenge the accuracy of the facts reported -- Shelley's philandering, Ibsen's lust for medals, and the like -- but simply to report that Johnson leaves the feeling that, long after their deaths, such renowned figures are unjustly treated like gods when they had feet of the basest clay. This said, Johnson is too shrewd an observer not to have provided some challenging insights. His having spotted Hitler as "lover" and Lenin as a priest in Modern Times is matched here with his arresting point that Marx was never a scientist but a poet. And he also makes this shrewd point about Marx
"How could an egoist like Marx inspire such affection [from his wife]? This answer I think is that he was strong, masterful, in youth and early manhood handsome, though always dirty; not least, he was funny. Historians pay too little attention to this quality; it often helps explain an appeal otherwise mysterious (it was one of Hitler's assets, both in private and as a public speaker). Marx's humor was often biting and savage. Nonetheless his excellent jokes made people laugh. Had he been humorless, his many unpleasant characteristics would have denied him a following at all . . . ."
I am equally indebted to Johnson for his hitting the Tolstoy bullseye (with the help of Edward Crankshaw): "he is like a painter who disdains shadows and chiaroscuro, employing only perfect clarity and visibility." And speaking of Tolstoy, Johnson's book is as good a demonstration as any how Tolstoy got it backwards in his famous observation in Anna Karenina that unhappy families are unique: his revelations about the flaws of these secular intellectuals is a predictable account of their virtually identical irresponsibility, sexual perversions, alcoholism, and dissimulations.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind —
“Upon recognition of individual fallibility, respect for property, and acceptance of natural, inescapable differences among men rest the tranquility of the human race.”
This is Russell Kirk’s passing observation of what matters in the world and on reflection I think it is really a wonderful formulation. Left out of this particular quotation, however, is another essential element which Kirk also makes reference to elsewhere in his book: conservativism is an approach to statecraft as much as anything else. Perhaps this is self-evident, but notwithstanding the liberal/conservative nomenclature which emerged in nineteenth century England, the two are not mirror images of each other. In the twentieth century, at least, “liberalism” began arrogating larger and larger realms for itself (Boy Scouts, abortion, education, etc.), and this has only accelerated in the early twenty-first century. The effect, in the epoch in which I write, is that each side uses the other’s cognomen as a mere Manichaean epithet to suggest the other’s attitude toward what are called the “culture wars.” From views of statecraft, the argument has degenerated into angry and unfocused partisanship with almost no room for examining how the one – convervativism in this case – is in many cases traditionally indifferent to the concerns of the other. This is not exactly Kirk’s point, of course, but to read his highly erudite study of thinkers, mostly English and American, is to remember that a familiar and sensible attitude (I won’t call it a philosophy), born of close observation, is shared by people on the right. It has such a strong pragmatic origin that it is inherently suspicious of novelty in the name of even the most admirable goals. And so when I say that there is a certain indifference by conservatives to the transient concerns of liberals, I am not speaking of the combatants on either side who make war at every opportunity. I am speaking of the men and women whose meditations on government are almost wry, pessimistic, and resigned. The conservative whom Kirk explicates is no warrior. I read the seventh edition of Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, the original of which was written in the early 1950s and has been much honored since then. Perhaps this history is why Kirk’s introduction to this 1980s version was a bit self-congratulatory. Putting that aside, however, there is much to commend in his efforts, which he describes as a prolonged essay. Modern conservatism, Kirk writes, dates back to Burke, whom he sees as having had an almost supernatural ability to see the future with unnerving clarity. Indeed, it is this prophetic gift which tends to be a linking characteristic of virtually all of Kirk’s chief exemplars, and for reasons which are not surprising: they know the past[1]. Thus John Adams, who is the curious and ultimately logical second personality to be considered by Kirk, is seen as well as one who knew too well the dubious history of fallible man and was therefore astute enough to ground his vision of municipal law upon that knowledge[2]. From there Kirk is back in England, reflecting on Coleridge – who said men were to be weighed, not counted – as the sensible counterpoint to Bentham. This gives Kirk an opportunity to dilate bitterly on the Reform Bills by which England moved toward “one man, one vote.”
“This was a utilitarian and industrial concept, confusedly recognizing the existence of a new proletariat. Previously men had been represented in their corporate capacities, as freeholders of a town, or tenants of a proprietor, or graduates of a university, or members of a trade or profession. Previously Parliament had reflected the several interests of the realm; hereafter it was to represent a ‘people’ whose will was said to be sovereign, but which had no real common mind or purpose discernible to the candid statesman.”
As Kirk sees it, universal suffrage “tends to be the natural basis of a tyranny; at best government by wire-pullers.” From there the book moves to considering, among others, James Fenimore Cooper, whose writings on the American democracy were unfamiliar to me. Like Adams, Cooper appears to have been publicly bilious, but no less perceptive, particularly in his The American Democrat where he dilated on the continuing need for gentlemen in a democracy. As Kirk portrays it, Cooper was as eloquent and persuasive on this subject as he was doomed to be ignored. But to consider this precis of The American Democrat is to realize the value of Kirk’s scholarship:
“Democracies tend to press against their proper limits, to convert political equality into economic leveling, to insist that equal opportunity become mediocrity, to invade every personal right and privacy; they set themselves above the law; they substitute mass opinion for justice.”
Kirk quotes trenchantly from Fisher Ames, an Adams contemporary whom he calls a New England pessimist, and also considers another lesser known New Englander, Orestes Brownson, who in the next century traveled the familiar path from radicalism through a variety of alternatives before coming to rest, as so many do, in Roman Catholicism. Whether it is Brownson, Ames, or numerous others, what eventually becomes clear is how widely Kirk has read the works of his subjects. In his entire segment on James Fenimore Cooper, for instance, he refers easily to novels I had never heard of and he never mentions the Leatherstocking Tales. He uses Hawthorne for an example in more than one spot (his “contemplation of sin is his obsession”), but passing references to Hawthorne’s more familiar titles yield to Kirk’s focus on the biography Hawthorne wrote of Franklin Pierce. In the 20th Century, having first considered the gloomy Adams brothers[3], Kirk considers among others Irving Babbittt, Paul Elmer More (an enlightening discussion[4]), and T.S. Elliot. One interesting section dwells on E.L. Godkin, an English emigree and editor of The Nation. As Kirk sees it, Godkin “tried to make the press an instrument of political purgation and a disseminator of good taste, to establish moral principle in the empire of journalism.” He failed, of course, although Kirk himself suggests in mitigation that it is partially Godkin’s legacy
“that some decent newspapers survive in an age of mass-emotion, that the press still can be, on occasion, the preceptor as well as the seducer of public opinion . . . .[5]”
(As the years fly by, I am personally less and less persuaded that daily attention to the press serves any purpose.) Anent the current public topic as I write this review, Kirk comments on Babbitt’s reflection that conservatism must be alive to “the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy,” which brings hubris, blindness and ultimately nemesis. The “only effectual restraint” to imperialism, he says, is humility formerly “made palatable to man by the doctrine of grace,” a doctrine which neither Kirk nor Babbitt elaborated and which I suspect needs much elaboration in light of the anti-imperialism that overwhelms the current public debate about human rights. Instead, Kirk considers what he calls the doctrine of “work,” attributing it to Bacon, Locke, Smith, and Ricardo, each of whom (with Marx) he dismisses as misunderstanding the subject. Calling upon Plato’s concept of justice, he quotes Babbitt as saying that the only true freedom is the freedom to work, the quality of the worker to be ranked according to the ethics of his work. More or less closing with Elliot, Kirk emphasizes, as he did from his very first chapter, the futility of maintaining any coherent culture unless it is founded on the vital component of a disciplined religion. Religion resists novelty and is a bulwark against the subversive “nineteenth century triumph of government by discussion.” It is a fundamental canon of conservative thought, therefore, to entertain “[b]elief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems” and “true politics” the art of justice.[6]
ENDNOTES
1. If I am not mistaken, this (as well as a genuine, pious belief in God) is one of the fault lines between conservatives and the Straussians, or to put it differently, between what are known as "historicists" and natural rights philosophers. Confusing the two might be common (e.g. Hegel), but as Harry Jaffa puts it, "[t]o identify nature with history is to identify the unchanging with the changing, or to alter the meaning of nature to its opposite." A New Birth of Freedom, p. 84. And the Straussians appear to have little truck with the concept of history as the mystical unfolding of the mind of God. Meantime, although there is an obvioius relationship between the Hobbes/Locke reasoning on the natural law and the Platonic idea of forms, I have never been clear on how to define the difference. I think the answer lies somewhere in Thomas Aquinas.
2. Kirk does not exactly dismiss Alexander Hamilton, whom he sees chiefly as a financier and mercantilist, but he concludes that Hamilton really did not have a transcendent vision of the sort that would earn him a place as a great conservative.
3. Kirk calls Henry Adams "the best educated man Aamerican society has produced. . . . But the product of these grand gifts was a pessimism . . . intensified by [his] long examination and complete rejectioin of popular American aspirations. . . . [O]ne may have leisure to recollect past nobility; now and then one may perform the duty of delaying mankind for a moment in [its] descent; but the end is not to be escaped." As for Brooks Adams and his peculiar pessisism, Kirk finds himn closer to Karl Marx.
4. Kirk offers this bracing summary of More on the rights of property: "Life is a primitive thing; we share it with the beasts; but property is the mark of man alone, the means of civilization; therefore, says More . . ., 'to the civilized man the rights of property are more important than the right to life." This is not likely to become a campaign slogan anytime soon.
5. But this was written when the New York Herald Tribune was still published.
6. It is beyond Kirk's mission to discuss a point he makes once or twice in passing, viz. that no more than anyone else do conservatives wish to live in a stagnant, unchanging world. He knows and acknowledges that the world will always change (and not always for the better). Those who change it are generally not the politicians, however. They are dreamers who more often than not have no social agenda. In our era most of them are men of business or science (Who developed the credit card? The internet?) More excitingly (and far more infrequently) they are artists. Liberals today despise the former. More distressingly, they embrace the soi dissant "artist."
John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University.
“I am not busying myself to prove the existence and attributes of God by means of the Argument from design. I am not proving anything at all about the Supreme Being. On the contrary, I am assuming His existence.”
In the nineteenth century, Catholics could be and were admitted as students to Dublin’s Anglican Trinity College. They were nevertheless marginalized and all Catholics were certainly excluded from university governance. That situation so rankled their church hierarchy that in 1854 they established their own scholarly refuge, what then was called the Catholic University of Ireland (now University College Dublin), with John Henry Newman as its rector.
Newman was nationally known in all Britain. A great intellect, critic, and poet, he had been a central voice in the Oxford Movement of his youth, had then become an Anglican priest, then a Catholic convert and priest. He held the rector post in Dublin for only three or four years, returning then to England and life as an aesthete author, gadfly cleric, and satirist. Toward the end of his life he was made a cardinal in the Roman church. But he had long before assembled his The Idea of a University, only published in 1858, from a series of lectures and even private meditations he prepared during his tenure in Ireland.
Newman himself calls this work “a sketch . . . of the doctrines proper to Theology,” particularly “the portion of it most on a level with human sciences.” In its fundamental definition, he points out, theology’s mission is neither art nor duty: “It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.” Put before any rational atheist, his theological explications, which to me seem lucid, internally coherent, and frequently beautiful, would be the object of scorn and smug rebuttal. But in fact The Idea of a University is its own rebuttal of such attacks.
The true university which Cardinal Newman describes in this volume would surely be utterly foreign to what America in the early 21st Century now offers under that name. To a modern college student (or administrator) I have no doubt his description would sound archaic, idealized, fantastical. Indeed, not only is it unattainable, the probability is that it never existed. And yet here I am writing about a book in which theology is central. Ignoring the author’s views would make no sense. And so as I go, I will do my best to record those I found most arresting.
For example, several times he remarks that there is no war between religion and what he calls the physical sciences (astronomy, chemistry, etc.) because the physical sciences cannot “issue untrue conclusions.” They were created as part of the Creation — “before the introduction of moral evil.” Revelation only came afterwards when it was needed for later human remedial purposes. The church is the “instrument” of that subsequent reanimation, with a teaching which is distinct, “though not divergent, from the theology which Physical Science suggests to its followers.” What dangers the physical sciences present to their students are those of omission, because they necessarily ignore the moral evil which only arose after the seventh day.
Given Newman’s prominence as a conspicuous apostate, one might be surprised to read in his very first chapter that he insists that the principles which he is about to explore are not strictly theological. A university
“is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is, on the one hand intellectual, not moral; and, on the other, that it is the diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement.”
Indeed, the university must be distinct from the far more practical “academy,” the latter being the appropriate place of experiment and invention, a place of calculation[1]. (That the ideal university and the academy are now wedded and have been for some time, is what he foresaw, but also what he regretted.)
And so he begins on a non-denominational note — but with that fundamental religious premise, namely that there is a supreme being and that there are things about Him that are known and can be known. This produces two critical questions. First, how can a university whose mission is to teach about all branches of knowledge, exclude theology as though it were not such an elementary branch? And next, if it does exclude such a vast area of inquiry, are “the useful arts and sciences” the university’s only concern?
Time was that theology studies were at the center of a university. Newman’s references are obviously European, but similarly in our earliest American schools — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — the study of theology and the issuance of divinity degrees (Protestant, of course) was their fundamental inspiration and life blood. But by the 1850s, when Newman produced this work, that fashion had died, so much so that there is more than a little irony in the 1865 founding of the proudly secular Cornell University under the motto, "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Unless it included theological studies, Newman would say, that statement would be incoherent to all but atheists.
Of course he is not writing for atheists[2]. And yet, he insists, he is equally not writing just for Catholics or even just for Englishmen. By his lights, he is writing for all believers in revealed truth who like himself stand on that same shore. It is for them that he is describing with clarity the idea of a university. In this sense The Idea of A University, though lengthy, is a monograph, and strictly within the academic tradition. Furthermore, although dense and sober[3], it is not written in the momentous tradition of classical philosophy. It is exactly what the title says, the exploration of an idea, the idea of a university because, after all, there is a God.
And when it comes to man, he sounds a warning about what we call genius. Though he never overtly mentions Ruskin, using the fine arts as an example, he says that when genius has “breathed upon” the natural elements of painting, it
“grows into the fulness of its function as simply imitative art . . . . It has an end of its own, and that of earth: Nature is its pattern and the object it pursues is the beauty of Nature, even till it becomes an ideal beauty.”
This passage, in fact, goes on to consider in the same vein music, architecture, and “sciences of a different character” (e.g. political economy). These things are not to be ignored. Indeed, they are to be wondered at, celebrated, and studied. But, as they are the flowering of sinful man, though wonderful, they cannot be perfect.
As for the sciences, what Newman deplores is their deviation from what he sees as their own natural boundaries, exacerbated by the simple fact that “the human mind cannot keep from speculating and systematizing.” It is a flaw to overspecialize in a single subject, he says, simply because it is beautiful and harmonious; no science is completely intelligible without the aid and safeguard of some other science. Intellectual training must certainly be acquired, but to it must be applied thought and reason. To understand this indivisibility of knowledge results in rising above it to what he calls “a science of sciences, which is my own conception of what is meant by Philosophy.”[4]
Somewhat later he returns to this point when he again offers by contrast to genius the qualities to be found in the hypothetical philosopher, presumably qualities that can be nourished by the training and effort which are the main subject of his dissertation. He also abruptly admits the unpredictable asymmetrical fact: there are great men. And yet what they have, has been conferred, not attained: “This is genius, this is heroism; it is the exhibition of a natural gift . . . at which no institution can aim.”[5]
So what is this religion that has become marginalized by scholars? Once, he says, faith was an act of intellect, “its object truth, and its result knowledge.” Now what we may call faith has been diluted into an emotion based on taste and sentiment — “venerable, beautiful, the sanction of order, the stay of government, the curb of self-will and self-indulgence, which the laws cannot reach.” In other words, is it now not based on reason and therefore no wonder that it is despised by the modern university[6].
But to return to my note that Newman’s meditations are not in the tradition of philosophy, this is certainly not to say that Newman ignores philosophy, as I have already shown. After all, how is exploring the nature of an idea not in the Platonic tradition? Moreover, in addition to his regular references to Aristotle, the work contains more than a touch of St. Thomas. Hence, numerous passages so fully worry an idea that I believe, were I inclined to parse them, I would find more than one syllogism. But I am a lay reader and content just to ride along the surface.
The fifth of the nine “discourses” into which The Idea of a University is divided concerns the students. Here again Newman iterates the harmony that he has emphasized in his consideration of the sciences properly viewed and again he is insistent on the ideal — though he continually makes reasonable-sounding concessions to tastes and differences in judgment. Hence a university faculty, he believes, is “an assemblage of learned men,” intellectual rivals perhaps, but brought together for the sake of “intellectual peace.” “They learn to respect, to aid each other,” creating a pure atmosphere of thought beneficial to all students.
It gives Newman little pause that this is a bit much to expect and rarely seen in a practical world. He knows that. I do too. But when writing about an idea, you write about the ideal. It is easy, maybe risible, to expatiate as he does on knowledge for its own sake. And yet, that is a yearning I certainly heard expressed at college and cannot really shrug off now, notwithstanding my strong sense of wanting to have “accomplished” something at the end of each day. In Newman’s world, my idiosyncrasy would be viewed as “servility,” though he would concede its transient virtues. “But that alone,” he says, is merely “liberal knowledge which stands on its own pretensions, . . . independent of sequel [and which] expects no complement.”
So how does this sort with my own private eagerness, never, ever to be achieved, to be what I call an educated man? I have always felt it, but why? It has mostly been an unexamined and pleasant persistence, but not an ambition to be attained, certainly not a utilitarian goal.[7]
Oddly, and given the foregoing, thoughts of this order presently lead to a consideration of whether there is actually a fatal tension between philosophy and revelation, perhaps between Athens and Jerusalem. “What have philosophers to do with the terror of judgment or the saving of the soul?” Still, this is not an Augustinian tract and he does not approach it that way. And yet that question is a central theme of this entire work.
Instead, as Newman sees it, modern, virtuous, and upright men with a strong sense of duty are not that way because of religion[8], but because of something like a sense of “taste.”[9] Such people possess an innate civilized conscience which, in an intellectual culture, leads them to self-reproach if they transgress. In other words, that implies self-regard: the transgression is a “sin of the intellect,” the natural conscience rising to a “moral sense.” In this milieu, therefore, one sins not against God, “but against human nature.” So the “educated man” is not a fallacy, but it is delusional.
Newman has a genius of scrutinizing vague reflections like this into concrete, though metaphorical, terms, hedged with a caution. As an example, he envisions an innocent from a remote place suddenly being introduced into a metropolis and who, though being borne forward, finding at first that he may have lost his bearings, also encounters
“a consciousness of mental enlargement; he does not stand where he did, he has a new centre, and a range of thoughts to which he was before a stranger. . . . [One] see[s] the world, enter[s] into active life, go[es] into society . . . coming into contact with the principles and modes of thought of various parties, interests, and races [etc.] . . . ; all this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, which it is impossible to mistake, be it good or be it bad, and is popularly called its enlargement.”
But then comes the caution:
“[T]he first time the mind comes across the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, and feels what a novel light they cast upon what he has hitherto accounted sacred . . . if it gives in to them and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream, begins to realize to its imagination that there is now no such thing as law and the transgression of law . . . that it is free to enjoy the world and the flesh, . . . who will deny that the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for knowledge, has made it one of the gods . . . .”
In the student, what Newman calls “liberal knowledge” gets its due, for knowledge is noble. The Idea of a University makes a gentleman. This is neither fatuous nor insignificant, but knowledge is not virtue. And if we do not claim more for it than is natural, its attraction and cultivation is intelligible — always remembering that our intellectual powers will decay.
I have said that this brief review is of Newman’s book The Idea of a University. Actually, the volume I read carried a longer title: “The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin.” That specific volume also contained a Part II, dealing with particular university subjects. I did not read that part, but it would be hard to believe that it is not worthwhile. What I have written are my observations taken from the “nine discourses.”
[1] In his seventh discourse he salutes the Victorian definition of “liberal education,” but with reservations.
[2] He addresses the perpetual cliché of relativism. “I understand [the atheist] excluding Religion from his University though he professes other reasons for its exclusion. . . . [T]he varieties of religious opinion under which he shelters his conduct, are not only his apology for publicly disowning Religion, but a cause of his privately disbelieving it. He does not think that any thing is known or can be known for certain, about the origin of the world or the end of man.”
[4] Quoting the philosopher, as he does more than once, he reminds the reader that “they who contemplate a few things have no difficulty in deciding.”
[5]And later, “[H]eroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of . . . leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations.”
[6] Here in the early 21st Century his conclusion that we may as well have university chairs endowed for teaching “fine feeling” is no longer the bitter joke it was intended to be.
[7] Cf. Locke or Jeremy Bentham. Anyway, by Newman’s lights, education aimed chiefly at future workplace success is little more than an illusion. Indeed, he says, a mind can easily be enfeebled by an “unending profusion of subjects . . . implying that a smattering in a dozen branches of study is not shallowness.”
Michael Montaigne, Essays (tr. by George B. Ives) –
Instead of writing in the margins, I read a book with “post-its” at hand, marking passages that catch my attention. It does less damage to the book than a collection of scribbled “indeeds!” and “exactlys!” and I can take them out once I’ve written one of these reviews. With Montaigne, however, I have gone through several packages of the little yellow squares, re-read the observations that provoked them, thought about the author’s organization and the implications of what I have marked, and still find it virtually impossible to come away with a theme for this comment. Over the almost 1600 pages which make up Montaigne’s essays, he does as thorough a job of revealing himself as Boswell did in disclosing the character of Johnson. In the process of recording his observations on virtually everything, Montaigne does nothing less than lay himself out to his readers, and since he is a man of wisdom, nobility, and accomplishments – not to mention unembarrassed self-indulgence and not a little complacency – the effort is a long and complex one. Not that Montaigne would necessarily embrace my use of the word “complexity.” He says that his mission is transparency. What this means is that he is frequently at pains to admit that he is among other things a man of vices. (He generally neglects to give the details.) One of his regrets is that he took up the task too late in life and had placed, as he puts it, his “decrepitude under pressure.” But I should not leave the impression that this is a work of autobiography. These essays are meditations on countless subjects that crossed the author’s mind over the years. Unlike, say, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne appears to have written to a wider audience than just himself and he is correct that his views are of wider interest. The gratifying reason for this, I think, is no more than what I have just said: he was a wise and observant man. Like Johnson, whose most enduring creation was also himself, Montaigne is read less for novelty than for the familiarity he offers within a distinct and recognizable personality. He has no intention to go over anyone’s head and would never advance himself as a philosopher. And yet it would be an interesting (though humbling) project for me to take his chapter titles just to see what I could produce on my own without reference to the ruminations that the author himself produced beneath them. (Actually, the commentary which accompanied the translation which I read[1] suggested that it was possible that Montaigne may have selected his titles after writing his text.) His Essays appear to have begun much as my book reviews did, by which I mean the author just kept scribbling away for years, adding and patching, until, like the Great Barrier Reef, they had grown into something large enough to take note of. In his essay on imagination (Bk. 1, ch. 21) the author acknowledges that his method is brevity and not informed by a compositional style; instead, he writes that he simply says “what I know how to say, accommodating the matter to my powers.” Yet there is more than intelligence and diffidence behind his mission, there is a sense of duty. Just as Shakespeare has Hamlet realize that man is not put here simply “to sleep and feed,” Montaigne submits a short paragraph “Of Idleness” giving similar weight to the idea:
“As we find fields that lie fallow, if they are rich and fertile, continue to abound in a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless plants, and that, to keep them serviceable, we must bring them under subjection, and make them produce certain crops for our profit, . . . so it is with our minds.”
(Did Shakespeare possibly read this? Hamlet also speaks disgustedly of “an unweeded garden.”) But quite apart from those who may have read him, it is obvious that Montaigne himself had read everybody else, although I take some comfort from knowing that the world’s library was not the size it is today. As it seems to me, his references to Plato show a deep understanding and respect, enough even to permit him to venture some of his own observations. On the recent discovery and explorations of the new world, long before Rousseau, Montaigne, taking all the savages as one, says
“[i]t is a nation . . . in which. . . t]he very words that signify falsehood, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, slander, forgiveness, are unheard of. How far from such perfection would [Plato] find the Republic he imagined: men recently from the hands of the gods.”
(Montaigne was a brilliant and generous man; but I very much doubt that his conclusions on this score have much basis.) Closer to the heart of Plato’s teaching, he ventures this observation about the “frenzy” that possesses one who understands poetry:
“ the ineffable, the divine , is above . . . the power of judgment. Whoever discovers [poetry’s] beauty with a firm and steady vision, he does not see it any more than the splendor of a lightning-flash; it does not employ our judgment; it seizes it and sweeps it away.” Ch. 32.
Of those I have read, Montaigne’s are the greatest of the reflective meditations. (In addition to Marcus Aurelius, someday I may make it to Cicero, et al. In the misty past, however, I also read more modern endeavors such as Charles Lamb and Francis Bacon, though they are but dim recollections now.) Like literary criticism, I find all of them helpful, because they often point out, not only what I could not see for myself but also the obvious thing that I stupidly missed. I need all the help I can get. I mention this because of the gratification I felt in coming across Monatigne’s essay, “Of Presumption”[2] in which he makes much the same confession:
“My sight is long, sound, and perfect, but is easily tired by work and becomes dim; for this reason I cannot have long-continued intercourse with books, save by means of another’s service.”
And with such guides on duty, the reader also gets the benefit of an occasional witty apercu like this one from Montaigne’s Bk 3, ch. 1: “No one is exempt from saying foolish things; the misfortune is to say them intentionally.” And later, the first sentence of his chapter “Of the Disadvantage of Greatness” is: “Since we cannot attain it, let us avenge ourselves by speaking ill of it.” In any event, I believe that the feature that I was most grateful for in the Essays – at least at the outset – is that it turns out that Montaigne thank heavens is not an esoteric. He says what he means and no tricks involved. The fact that he is very clever and enormously well read is quite enough for me at this time. After all, I have recently just come off of a wrestling match with Plato (finishing second), and a contest like that should not be undertaken more than once a year. Furthermore, because he appears to have worked most of his life in revising his notes, many of Montaigne’s essays have a touch of winter coming on. He feels his age painfully, and I mean that literally. There are dozens of references to what I guess were kidney stones and the months that he was too much in pain even to think straight much less write. As for his writing style, he apologizes for what is probably one of his greatest attributes, what he calls an “aping and imitative tendency.” All of his poems, he says, “clearly betrayed what poet I had lately read.” It is a lamentation.
“Whoever I regard attentively, quickly stamps me with something belonging to him. What I examine I make my own: an ungainly bearing, a disagreeable grimacing, a ridiculous way of speaking; vices even more . . . .” Book 3, ch. 5.
But this is what is needed in a commentator and frequently in an artist: the gift of noticing. Obviously a writer does not want to be derivative of another. But I think that what Montaigne sees as a drawback is actually the impulse that drove his essays. As he said, reading and personal intercourse “stamps” him with something indelible. I say if his sources are good – they were, in fact, the best – who could complain of that? Well, it is Montaigne himself who vacillates between the enthusiasms of his open mind and his appetite for travel and novelty with the gravitational pull of culture.
“There is great doubt if there can be found as manifest advantage in altering an accepted law, whatever it may be, as there is harm in disturbing it; inasmuch as a system of government is like a structure of many parts so closely bound together that it is impossible to move one of them without the whole building feeling it. . . . I am disgusted with novelty. . . . Indeed, no change from ancient customs is worthy of approval.” Ch.23.
“[I]ntense and long-continued altercations concerning the best form of society and the rules best adapted to bind us are altercations suitable only to exercise our wits . . . . [T]he most excellent and best form of government for each nation is that under which it has been maintained. Its form and essential utility depend on customs.” Bk. 3, ch. 9
But then he also says
“”[B]ecause we suck [customs] in with the milk of our birth, and because the face of the world presents itself in this guise to our earliest vision, we seem born necessarily to follow this course. And the common ideas that we find in credit around us, and infused in our minds by the seed of our fathers, seem to be universal and natural ideas. Whence it happens that whatever is unhinged from custom, we believe to be unhinged from reason, God knows how unreasonably in most instances.” Ch. 23.
By the time we come to his late essay “On Vanity,” he has confessed himself a complete cosmopolitan, comparing himself to “Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater [and] so many wise men of the toughest sect [who] abandon their country without any occasion to complain of it and solely to enjoy a different atmosphere.” Here are some excerpts I made note of:
Montaigne the cosmopolitan: “I was trained carefully enough in my childhood, and have lived in sufficiently good society, not to be ignorant of the laws of our French manners . . . . I like to follow them, but not so slavishly that my life is constrained by them. They have some troublesome forms . . . .” Ch. 13.
The Platonic Benthamite: “It is easy to see that what gives edge to pain and pleasure within us is our state of mind. . . . But since we have cut loose from [nature’s] rules, to abandon ourselves to the vagabond license of our imaginations, let us at least help to turn [our bodies] in the most agreeable direction. Plato is displeased by our immitigable union with pain and pleasure, because it binds the soul to the body and attaches it too closely; I, on the contrary, am displeased by it inasmuch as it detaches and separates them. Just as the enemy becomes fiercer when we fly, so pain grows proud to see us tremble before it.” Ch. 14.
French logician: “[T]he most agreeable and useful of our members seems to be those which serve the purpose of generation; and yet many persons have held them in mortal hatred solely for the reason that they were too delightful, and have rejected them because of their value.” Ch. 14.
Critic: “[E]veryone prefers to discourse on the occupations of another rather than his own. . . . See how diffusely Caesar holds forth to make us understand his inventions for building bridges and engines of war, and how concise he is, in comparison, when he is speaking of his professional functions, of his valor, and regarding the management of his troops. His exploits sufficiently prove him to be an excellent captain; he desires to make himself known as an excellent engineer, a somewhat alien matter.” Ch. 17.
Moral detective: “[I]n this last scene between Death and ourselves, there is no more feigning, we must talk plainly, we must show what there is good and unspotted in the bottom of the pot.” Ch. 19. [Ophelia: “They say a’ made a good end.”]
Modern Marcus Aurelius: “Let us deprive [death] of its unfamiliarity, let us live with it, let us habituate ourselves to it; let us think of nothing so often as of death . . . and thereupon let us strengthen and stiffen ourselves. . . . I have seen a man die who, when he was at the last gasp, incessantly complained because his fate cut the thread of the history he had in hand of the fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings” Ch. 20. [The grim reaper waits by the library door.]
Elite rationalist: “It is possible that the belief in miracles, enchantments, and such extraordinary matters is due chiefly to the power of the imagination, acting principally on the minds of the common people, which are more easily impressed.” Ch. 21.
Empathetic vulgarian: “And would to God I knew only by hearsay how often our belly, by a single refusal to break wind, carries us even to the gates of a very agonizing death; and would that the emperor who gave us leave to break wind everywhere, had given us the power.” Ch. 21.
Father of the book reviewer: “Just as birds go at times in quest of grain and carry it in their beaks without tasting it, . . . so our pedants go about picking up learning from books and take it only in their tongues, simply to void it and make parade of it. It is a wonder how nicely this folly finds an example in me.” Ch. 25.
Socrates’s Brother: “It is a great mistake to describe [philosophy] as inaccessible to children and of a glowering and frowning and terrifying aspect. . . . There is nothing gayer, more jocund, more blithe, and, I might also say, sportive.” Ch. 26.
Descartes’s Grandfather: “If what we have seen does not exist, our knowledge is wonderfully curtailed.” Apology for Raimond of Sabunde.
On Procedural Due Process: “”Lawful procedure is a cold, heavy, and constrained procedure, and is not fitted to make head against a lawless and unbridled procedure.” Ch. 23.
Fearless of Virginia Woolf: “All of us who can must have wives, children, property, and above all health; but not be so attached to them that our happiness depends on them; we must reserve for ourselves a private room, all our own . . . in which we may establish our true freedom . . . .” Ch. 39.
And having quoted all of this, there is no way to avoid finally Montaigne’s remarks about people like me: “I have seen it happen . . . that ill-grounded minds, wishing, when reading some work, to appear well skilled by remarking on some special beauty, fix their admiration with so bad a choice that instead of showing us the excellence of the author, they show their own ignorance.” Bk. 3, ch. 8.
ENDNOTES
1. My copy is a 3-volume departure gift which I received from the associates at Troy & Gould when I became a judge. I am eternally grateful to them.
2. There may be some artifice in this essay, but it really strikes me as the one which most closely introduces me to the author.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Vintage Muggeridge: Religion and Society --
This collection of essays and interviews not only explores Muggeridge's views on Christianity in the 1970s and 1980s, it even reveals the deepening intensity of his feelings -- as opposed to an evolution of his views, which do not change -- over time. This is most evident in the concluding portions which consist of a series of interviews with William Buckley. In the first of them, Buckley, though highly respectful of Muggeridge, begins straight out asking why he is not a Catholic. The answer is that Muggeridge is so concerned with recent stupidities in the church that he is afraid that he would convert merely to become the church's greatest scold. In the final interview, several years later, Muggeridge reveals that he has recently converted and explains why. Without overtly mentioning Elijah, he says that he feels that he has finally taken his seat at a table that has always been set for him. And he expresses his great satisfaction to participate in the sacrifice of the mass which, as he points out, has been occurring every hour in the 2000 years since the incarnation. It is not tedious, as I would have thought, to hear Muggeridge introduce at several places in this collection his most important inspirational sources: e.g. Blake's reference to "fearful symmetry," the anecdote of St. Augustine's learning of the sack of Rome, Muggeridge's deep-seated admiration for Mother Theresa, etc. The overall impression I come away with is that Muggeridge was only the latest example of someone who is so sweetly persuaded by God's message that he becomes persuasive on exactly the level which he believes to be the only worthwhile one: love. His intellect is there for all to see, but it is only his peculiar tool, and not a tool superior to others in the hands of other men and women. At the end, this man who always looked like a benign leprechaun, came to be affectionately called "St. Mugg." Requiescat in pace.
Friedrich Nietzsche — Thus Spoke Zarathustra. --
As a freshman in college, I was assigned to read an excerpt from Hegel. I struggled, as best I could, but the material was utterly incomprehensible. If I was ever to study philosophy, I decided, it had better not include German thought. I have pretty much followed that instinct ever after, depriving myself over the decades of Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Schiller, et al. There has always been plenty else to read.
As a freshman in college, I was assigned to read an excerpt from Hegel. I struggled, as best I could, but the material was utterly incomprehensible. If I was ever to study philosophy, I decided, it had better not include German thought. I have pretty much followed that instinct ever after, depriving myself over the decades of Marx, Kant, Heidegger, Schiller, et al. There has always been plenty else to read.
For my entire adult life, therefore, I have strenuously avoided Friedrich Nietzsche. Even the title Thus Spoke Zarathustra —— which I have always seen rendered as "spake" until I bought this particular volume — had a frightening sound. But I am now in my eighth decade. If I can get through Goethe's Faust, which I barely did about 20 years ago, why not take a run at Zarathustra? So I bought it and read it (in English, if you please).
"Through valuation only is there value; and without valuation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear this you creators!
"Change of values — that is a change of creators. Whoever must be a creator always destroys."
As someone once said, "We hold these values to be self-evident."
Zarathustra himself does not mince words. Marriage is for two equal superhumans, and not for the "superfluous":
"This man seemed worthy to me and ripe for the meaning of the earth; but when I saw his wife, the earth seemed to me a house for the senseless. Yes, I wished that the earth would shake with convulsions when a saint and a goose mate with each other."
Death should be voluntary; to be patient with it is a calamity. As for Jesus, he died too early, having known "only tears and the melancholy of the Hebrews." But then Jesus
"was seized with the longing for death. Had he but remained in the wilderness and far from the good and just! Perhaps he would have learned to live and to love the earth — and laughter too! [4] Believe it, my brothers! He died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching had he lived to my age! He was noble enough to recant! But he was still immature."
And Zarathrustra then retires.
Part Two. "Months and years" in the solitude of his cave having then passed, Zarathustra's growing "wild wisdom" causes him such pain that he vows to return to rectify the misapplication of his teachings among his "dearest ones." He has already taught them to say "Ubermench" instead of God (who is "but a conjecture"). Everything, he says, can be "changed into what is conceivable for man." To speak of the permanent and the sufficient is evil since creation is the great redemption from suffering; one's will is the creator, a liberator and comforter.
In college, I recall once saying in class that a person can't see well if he has tears in his eyes. There is something of that here, but Nietzsche develops the idea in a different way. To Zarathustra, those who are compassionate often "feel blessed in their pity." This is wrong, because those who suffer also suffer from wounded pride — and great indebtedness makes men vengeful. Compassion, Zarathustra says, must be anonymous, rendered at a distance, and be "hard" particularly when extended to a friend. The devil has told him that "God died of his pity for man."
The book does contain some progression of time and, towards the end, a narrative, but Zarathustra is certainly not a novel any more than The Republic is a novel. By extension, the character Zarathustra is not Nietzsche any more than Socrates is Plato. As I see it, then, this is at least an invitation by the writer to contemplate his message in light of the spokesman's own revealed character.
If so, it must be said that the character Zarathustra is uncompromising, cynical, and condescending — qualities we routinely find in all radicals and creators. He displays a resounding contempt for the "rabble," people whom he sees as a nauseating and unclean part of life and who are all the more loathsome because they, like him, are "rich in spirit." To this narrator, calls for equality and justice are repellent. "Equality" and "justice" are no more than comforting words, words actually meaning revenge. Thus Spoke Zarathrstra is a catalog of whom and what he rejects and why.
And so in Part Two there is a chapter about "wise men." It is neither longer than any of the other chapters nor does it occupy any significant place in the arrangement of the book. But given the book's overall direction thus far, I was prepared for a thunderous clash. If a clash is there, however, I confess I missed it. On reflection, the fact that this segment never identifies by name any of the men who are its subject should not have been a surprise. The reader's list of wise men is likely to be long and idiosyncratic. And yet I take it as the more subtle message that no clash could be expected. No battle with these unnamed "wise men" is called for. They are possibly the spokesmen for democracy, possibly the demagogues; probably both. But each of them speaks the same language. Whoever they are, although they can be praised as good servants of the people, for Zarathustra they nevertheless simply recall a master who indulges his slaves and their superstitions and resemble nothing so much as a little ass harnessed in front of the horses [5]. They are not even truthful as they claim to be[6]. The best that can be said of them is that they are also servants of virtue. But a genuinely truthful man is "hungry, violent, lonely, godless." The chapter, addressed to them, is scornful and dismissive, for they lack the spirit of "a sail crossing the sea, rounded and swollen with trembling with the violence of the wind." And still he is not done with "wise men." For Zarathustra, will is preeminent [6]; but for the wise men, their will is only "a will to the thinkability of all being," and that is ressentially a will to power.
Having dispensed with wise men, Zarathustra turns to "men of the present," who earn even greater contempt. He describes them as "mottled," made of colors and scraps of paper, "written all over with the characters of the past," the unintelligible sum of all that has ever been believed. Likewise are the "sentimental hypocrites," the "pure knowers" who piously purport "to gaze upon life without desire." He equally dismisses scholars whom he sees as mutually mistrustful and who otherwise passively "gape at the thoughts that others have thought." Having considered them, Zarathustra says, justice tells us that "men are not equal."
When it comes to poets, however, he pulls back. He sees himself as a poet, too, albeit reluctantly. This chapter on poets was particularly interesting to me, though it has probably gone over my head. For one thing, as it opens, we suddenly meet a second character, an unnamed "disciple," who asks Zarathustra a question. We are now in Platonic territory, especially since the question asked is taken directly from The Republic: "Why do you say that the poets lie too much?" If I understand Zarathustra's answer (which leaves his interlocutor angry but silent), it begins with the "too much" in the question. At best, the poet writes of lust and boredom, Zarathustra says [7]. But otherwise poets are "bad learners"; their "tender emotions" flatter them into believing that nature is in love with them. And it is not a good thing that poetry will always "lift us upward" above the heavens to the gods. Poets can only portray gods in "parables" — and as unchanging. So I am left with a dilemma: Zarathustra denies that there are gods at all; if they do exist they could not be immutable; and what is Thus Spoke Zarathustra if not a parable?
Or perhaps it is a metaphor. By and large, I don't like metaphors. In fact, as I think back on that dreadful excerpt from Hegel, I believe that I recall it was composed of one metaphor falling on the next to my utter confusion. More even than symbols, metaphors seem like a secret language invented by the writer deliberately to convey his intention of concealing some gigantic truth available only to the cognoscenti which I will never succeed in divining and which, if I make a stab at it, will leave me looking ridiculous. I can live with Moby Dick; I hate the Book of Revelations.
The catalyst for this reflection on metaphors was the chapter on Zarathustra's dream [8] and encounter with a "soothsayer." This unnamed person abruptly appears [9] and delivers some pessimistic remarks echoing Ecclesiastes thus causing Zarathustra to mope and then fall into a 3-day sleep, resulting in a dream which a "disciple" must interpret to him [10]. (Was I supposed to think of Decius persuading Caesar to come to the Senate? As I say, metaphor provokes ridicule.) In any event, the effort is successful as the disciple calls Zarathustra an "advocate of life" and he returns to his former state of mind.
The next chapter, called "Redemption," begins with Zarathustra crossing over "the great bridge" where he is met with a group of cripples and beggars[11]. It mimics scenes from the Gospel, but with the twist that Zarathustra tells the supplicants (metaphorically, of course) that in a broader sense he has actually come to see that there are "inverse cripples" — they are called geniuses — who "have too little of everything and too much of one thing." And then he dilates on what he calls his own "most unbearable burden," his knowledge of the present and the past and the comfort that
By this means he returns to his central theme of the will. As much as the will promises for the future, Zarathustra says, its "loneliest tribulation" is knowledge of the fragmented, unresolved past because the will cannot will backwards. The present is therefore coupled with irremediable suffering because, choosing another Christian image, he then says that "that which was" is a stone which time cannot roll, making the will a prisoner of time. (This stone reappears as part of the "gateway" parable in Part Three.)
The final chapter of Part Two completes this thought, making it more explicit (I think) that such things can be accomplished by one who, like Zarathustra, has succeeded in "growing young." So he retires again, presumably to complete the process "to become a child." "Break the tablets!" he cries. He is moving backwards.
Part Three. This segment does not again place Zarathustra among his disciples after a seeming passage of time as Part Two had done. Instead, it opens as he is climbing a mountain heading for a coast where he intends to embark upon a sea, eventually to return to his cave. All seems metaphorical again, and the enterprise began to remind me of the trouble I had in warming to Goethe's Faust. Islands, plains, mountains, and dusky seas apostrophized with ellipses and exclamation points. Zarathustra laughs and weeps; I yawned.
In one respect, however, Part Three also becomes more concrete. A developing Ubermench, it seems, must be entirely self-engaged, lonely, defiant, and lacking in pity [13]. Such qualities, of course, are almost entirely inconsistent with Christianity; this is both the implicit and explicit message of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Ubermensch's mission is to go back and set justice aright according to Zarathustra's terms. This project is wider than simply undoing Christian pieties, however. It is also an attack on Athens. Zarathustra freely uses familiar terms such as "virtue," [14] "justice," "wisdom" and "courage," — not to mention "soul" and "spirit" [15] — but his meaning is intentionally distinct from common Western usage. When Zarathustra speaks of justice, he is consciously indifferent to Plato. "Wise" men are insignificant and wisdom is compromised by self-doubt [16]. "Moderation" is reduced to mediocrity and pusillanimous modesty while "courage" seems to equate to rejecting comfort, but has nothing to do with confronting Achilles one-on-one [17].
Following hard on this it is no surprise that Zarathustra then dilates on what he calls "the three evils." But these three — sex, lust for power, and selfishness — are only evil in the eyes of the rabble. Zarathustra weighs each of them and not to our surprise finds in them the elements of virtue. He also says — but never illustrates, to my recollection — that gravity is his "archenemy" and that he has "spread out laughter like a colored canopy."
So much of this — and more — is there, that Nietzsche is periodically blamed for Hitler and Nazism. I refer not only to the formulation that "man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him — whatever is most evil is his best power." [18] Here, including his original italics, is a passage in which he compares "the people" to shopkeepers (which is what Napoleon said of the English):
"They lie around lurking and spy around smirking — they call that 'being good to neighbors.' O blessed distant time when a people said to itself: 'I want to be master over peoples!' For my brothers: the best shall rule, the best also want to rule!"
Part Four. Pity, Zarathustra has repeatedly told us, is a dangerous perversion. God died having choked on his pity for man. But Nietzsche is not done with pity. In Part Four, which is not an apostasy, pity furnishes both theme and riddle as Zarathustra hears a cry of distress, the source of which he sets out to locate. He encounters a variety of men — kings, a magician, a "leech," the disillusioned "old pope" who has come to search out "the most pious of all those who do not believe in God" (meaning Zarathustra), and then the ugliest man.
As he comes upon the ugliest man, Zarathustra himself is overcome with shame and pity. He sinks to the ground. When finally able to speak, he says to the man with a "brazen" voice — and here "brazen" surely means an artificial confidence — "I know you well . . . . You are the murderer of God.'" But metaphors about Socrates be damned, it was Zarathustra who announced God's death and in a literary sense, thus performed it. Indeed in this book, Nietzsche is bearing witness to the death of God. Now he calls it a murder.
The ugliest man, while not denying the charge, asks Zarathustra, "What is the revenge on the witness?" In fact, there are several witnesses. The murderer, whoever he is, feels pity for the murdered and is himself pitied by others, — meaning "those little people" who are also witnesses of the death as well as the intended beneficiaries of it. And Zarathustra, the ugly one points out, is "ashamed of the shame of the great sufferer" — the never expressly named Jesus, "the over-pitiful one" — whose own pity knew no shame. That "singular saint and advocate of the little people" (from whom he sprang) preached the ultimate immodesty: "I am the truth." And God, after all, is the witness of Zarathustra, of the ugliest man, of all men.
Ultimately Zarathustra sends each of those whom he has encountered in Part Four – including his shadow and the "voluntary beggar" — to his cave to be his guest that night. But it is only when he himself later approaches the cave that he realizes that the cry of distress which he had been seeking throughout the day was actually the combined sound of their voices coming from the cave. He greets them as "high ones" (i.e. not the highest) and then commences to lecture them in a chapter called "The Higher Man." It is in reality an almost giddy exhortation about art and creation.
ENDNOTES
1. In Part Two we learn that he wears an ivy-wreath on his head and keeps animals (who talk). He is also robed like a prophet.
2. And notwithstanding its title, if this work is supposed to be some explication of Zoroastrianism, except for the recurring idea of reincarnation, I missed it.
3. Zarathustra is also periodically called a "disturber of the peace."
4. Part Four contains an apostrophe to laughter, but those who claim that Nietzsche betrayed a sense of humor in the book are more perceptive than I.
5. Throughout Zarathustra there are numerous references to Apuleius.
6. A later chapter, "On Self-Overcoming," argues that far more fundamental to every life than the wise man's "will to truth" is a will to power — even when evaluating good and evil. Living is a matter of obedience, and the man who cannot obey himself is of little consequence. The final secret is that life must overcome itself and there is no such thing as unchanging good and evil: "Many a house is still to be built."
7. Later, when considering "prudence," he acknowledges that it is also of a dual nature pulling him simultaneously towards both man and Ubermensch.
8. For Plato, the poet was Homer. By the time of Nietzsche, the other essential poet, Shakespeare, had to be considered.
9. Dreams are a fertile field for metaphors. They can be used beautifully by an author, of course (Mid-Summer Night's Dream), and dream-like novels have always been seductive to me (Heart of Darkness). But Ulysses is just too much in the metaphor neighborhood and Freud showed (inadvertently) that the entire subject of dreams can also be essentially trivial.
10. We meet him again in Part Four.
11. "Thus spoke the disciple," says the text
12. Periodically in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, "man" is described as "an over-going and a going-under," something that Zarathustra purports to admire and love. But he is insistent that petty men — the little people — must be overcome: "[T]hey all preach submission and humility and prudence and diligence and consideration and the long et cetera of petty virtues."
13. As noted, I read a translation. I wonder if this noun was capitalized in the original German.
14. In other words, more or less congruent with the seething graduate students I remember from my college days in the 1960s. (In the fullness of time they became either criminals or board trustees.)
15. Virtue is "what makes modest and tame."
16. Everyone has a soul, but spirit is what counts. Souls are more complicated. They are melancholy; they have parasites and they require nurture. Zarathustra compares his soul to a vine which flourishes because of the vintner. (Admittedly, the mild word "nurture" is mine. In his apostrophe to his own soul in Part III, Zarathustra is characteristically more rhapsodic.)
17. Much later in Part Four Zarathustra affirms —metaphorically, of course — that eventually "all wisdom" will accumulate like a lightning cloud and blind the men of today.
18. In Part Four the tune is different when he refers to "hermit and eagle courage," and yet the picture does not really go beyond the metaphoric. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is not a work of argument.
George Orwell, The Lion and The Unicorn --
I always knew that Orwell was a committed Socialist and never let it bother me. He has always seemed so honest and open-minded that I could easily indulge a flaw like that. But notwithstanding this book was written in a most emotional time, probably late 1940 -- “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” -- I have for the first time seen him lose his bearings. Here is Orwell writing the most Utopian of platitudes, all the while assuring the reader that he is the embodiment of realism. In short, he posits that the War is a great opportunity because it provides a platform on which to build a genuinely Socialist state in Britain. “War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.” The “reality” that Orwell has in mind, it is clear, is the pervasive condescension and class distinctions as they are found in England and the self-evident fact that Socialism is its solution. But not the shopworn and craven British Socialism of the inter-war period. Rather, Orwell calls for a genuine planned economy which "anyone with eyes in his head," as he says several times, must see as Nirvana compared to what the author always calls "capitalism."
“We have got to make our words take physical shape, or perish. We know very well that with its present social structure England cannot survive, and we have got to make other people see that fact and act upon it. We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.”
In fairness to the book, it is consciously an argument, a tract, and it therefore has a “logic,” if that word can be applied to the author’s unbelievably naive views about a managed economy. Orwell’s fundamental premise is that there are unifying traits of Englishmen, including gentleness, and that their patriotism is stronger than class-hatred. Catalysed by the War, these qualities will unite the people in their final and sober (no mobs, please, we’re British) recognition of the Socialist paradise to be had. But it is pointless to rehearse the argument. The pleasure of an Orwell essay is in his insights, if not his wit. I only hope he wrote the following sentence with a smile on his face, though I doubt it: “An army of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount – that is our danger.” But if he is not humorous, Orwell is always trenchant. Thus he observes that while it is a major military power, Britain remains benign because, although “[m]ilitary dictatorships exist everywhere, . . . there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.” If only this angry but honest man had not become momentarily blinded to the contradictory and often uncouth virtues of democracy at home. Somehow, in all of the grime and poverty of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell never permitted himself to express as much overt and unfounded hatred as he does here. And therefore I saw with regret the unintended significance of the legend, probably written by the librarian, on the inside cover of the second-hand edition of this book which I read: “Repton Preparatory School Library – Fiction.”
Neil Postman, Technopoly --
During 1995, Dale Short and I had several conversations in which we both more or less decried the intrusion of computers into daily life. We had our individual reasons, but neither of us could have been described as enthusiastic about how the landscape had changed. That was about a year ago. In that year, Dale has become a fairly adept user of the Internet and I have made some genuine progress in accelerated "word processing." Indeed, yesterday, the office installed "Windows" on my system and I have wasted many of the past 24 hours "browsing the net" (the "web?"). So have we changed? I very much doubt that Dale would abjure his 1995 opinions and I certainly would not abandon my own. After reading Postman's short critique of what happens when technology takes a dramatic leap, I am inclined to believe that he would not be surprised by anything I have just written. In just a year, after all, both Dale's and my work lives have been noticeably changed by these machines, and there is no reason to believe that the future changes will not include changes in our vocabulary, behavior, and eventually our thinking as well. But Postman is no more resigned to this than I am. I gather that he is a widely known social commentator (though I have not previously read him) and would probably be described as a sociologist or anthropologist. But his appeal transcends "social science" because he has a very clear point of view that is obviously informed by something other than "empirical" studies. He even mentions the soul now and then. His book, however, has the feel of something that was published on the second draft. His style is journalistic and conversational, and on reflection there are numerous contradictions from one chapter to the next. As I have said, his overall point of view is clear, but the devil is in the details.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters Vol 1 (tr. Richard Gummere) — Now in my eighth decade I still would be hard-pressed to give a coherent definition of Stoicism. I know it is important, not to mention far more important to my reading than the distinctions between Presbyterians and Methodists, or Sunni and Shiite. Whenever I do come across a passage on point it leaves me feeling that there is something quite important — even praiseworthy — going on, but the catechism eludes me. All I know is that one could be either a Stoic or an Epicurean, but either side could talk civilly to the other and marry into the other's family without rancor[1].
But now, on my son's bookshelf, I have come across the Harvard Classics compendium of the letters of Seneca, written during the time of Nero. Nothing else of Seneca's thought has come so easily to hand, so as life is getting short I have undertaken an unusual effort of reading someone else's correspondence.
There is virtually nothing gossipy here[2]. First of all, these letters were written in the author's later years and addressed to an intimate friend, Lucilius, a Roman official in Sicily who seems to have been of comparable age, perhaps a few years younger[3] and also perhaps an Epicurean. Furthermore, given the author's earnestness, instead of a picture of the quotidian routine of Roman life in the first century, almost from the first we are in Montaigne territory with a touch of Thomas Aquinas.
My reference to Thomas is drawn from what appears to be the writer's favored format, responses to remarks or questions that Lucilius may have ventured to the author. They become the departure point for a variety of Senecan disquisitions on whatever topic has been posed —- or might have been posed. E.g. "Do you ask me what you should regard as especially to be avoided?" What then follows are Seneca's observations, always thoughtful and in the Stoic's idiom.
Before considering those Stoic thoughts, however, there are a few biographical details that the man revealed about himself beyond his adherence to the Stoic school[4]. My impression is that when he wrote these missives he was residing somewhere in Campania.
"I have lodgings right over a bathing establishment. So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing. When your strenuous gentleman, for example, is exercising himself by flourishing leaden weights, . . . . I can hear him grunt; . . . and whenever he releases his imprisoned breath I can hear him panting . . . . Or perhaps I notice some lazy fellow, content with a cheap rubdown and hear the crack of the pummeling hand on his shoulder. Add to this the racket . . . of the man who always likes to hear his own voice in the bathroom, or the enthusiast who plunges into the swimming tank with unconscionable noise . . . . [I]magine the hair plucker with his penetrating, shrill voice — for purposes of advertisement — continuing giving it vent . . . except when he is plucking the armpits and making his victim yell instead."
This passage continues in the same colorful vein for several more lines, but only to give the author the opportunity to dilate on the salutary advantages of the life of solitude of a relaxed, unperverted, Stoic mind.
But what is that?
These days "stoic" seems to be no more than an adjective for someone who shows little emotion, particularly when it comes to his own welfare. That is about where I was when I started these letters, but I was surprised to learn from an early letter that perhaps I shared some of the Stoic's wider qualities. I remember, for example, my wife once commenting contentedly that she had had a good day. "Really," I said. "What did you accomplish?" This was met with laughter and bemusement — I remember this because she still reminds me of my foolishness whenever she thinks I am being "weird." But Seneca tells me that the very question had been asked by Hecato, who appears to have been a pillar of Stoic writing. For Stoics, using one's time profitably is paramount.
Then there is Letter 51, Seneca's lengthy disapprobation of laxity and luxury, a topic he is never completely able to let go of. He rails with disgust at cities which have become exclusive resorts for vice (Baiae near Naples and Canopus in Egypt) and he stresses that this is not just a benign matter of differing tastes. It is a mutual cultural choice such that even where we choose to live can affect our character. The rugged Hannibal, conqueror of the Alps, he says, was ruined by a single season in Campania.
For Seneca, moreover, all worthwhile efforts are still not of equal importance. Work itself is not good — at least when it is to no purpose. Likewise, reading for breadth is to be discouraged,
"lest this reading of many authors and books of every sort may tend to make you discursive and unsteady. You must linger among a limited number of master thinkers and digest their works if you would derive ideas which shall win firm hold in your mind."
This is wisdom. The more I read, the more helpless ("unsteady") I feel in trying to come to any conclusions about philosophy's questions, even though I have certainly tried to confine myself to a "limited number of master thinkers."
But what does that phrase mean anyway — especially two millennia after the advice was given? The best that was ever written cannot simply be the oldest ever written. My personal rules have been two: first (which is faulty), the passage of time is the greatest critic[5] and, second, there is no luxury greater than the luxury of re-reading a great book once found. This leaves me open to the charge that I have little basis to criticize the ideas of those whom I have not read. How can I claim to prefer Adam Smith to Karl Marx, having read neither? The answer is to keep reading, but to stay wary based on what I have already read. There is no approved list.
Like Epicureans, Stoics may not have had an elaborated sense of an afterlife[6]; both schools concentrated on how to live one's life on Earth without regard for some eternal reward or punishment. But the considerations are not abstract. For example in considering friendship[7] — introduced in Seneca's Letter No. 9 and revisited in Nos. 48 and 58 —Seneca draws some respectful (but recondite) distinctions. Both schools teach self-sufficiency, he acknowledges, but friendship for the Epicurean is more utilitarian, a "bargain" made for convenience only. He will not feel the loss of a friend. In contrast, "our ideal wise man," who can also do without friends, does not desire to do without them, is actually selfish if he has only one friend, and when he does lose friends he must labor to "overcome" the loss.
And yet here is a more candid Senecan thought about the value of at least one friendship. Seneca promises Lucilius that even though he can and must be eminent only through his own efforts, Lucilius will nevertheless be remembered after his death — because he was beloved by Seneca. He mentions Idomeneus, a "minister of state," whose name is only known because Epicurus was his correspondent.
"That which Epicurus could promise his friend, this I promise you Lucilius. I shall find favor among later generations; I can take with me names that will endure as long as mine."
Is this a genuine distinction between the Stoics and Epicureans or perhaps just a passing nod to his correspondent's utilitarian Epicureanism[8]. Did the Epicureans care at all about how later generations saw them? Did Stoics? From my uneducated perspective, it would seem that both were far more concerned with how they conducted — and regarded — themselves during their lifetimes.
Consider Aufidius Bassus, a common friend of the two correspondents, Seneca and Lucilius, and evidently much older than the two of them. Seneca reports to Lucilius his recent encounter with the old man in both serious and optimistic terms. His health has suddenly collapsed, he reports, and old age has settled upon Aufidius Bassus with its entire weight.
"But the mind of our friend Bassus is active. Philosophy bestows this boon upon us; it makes us joyful in the very sight of death, strong and brave no matter in what state the body may be, cheerful and never failing though the body fail us."
This brings me back to Stoic philosophy and the core of the debate with Epicureanism. Life's fundamental fact is death; it must not be feared. Day and night we must exercise our minds to prepare for it[9]. Thus we cannot be slaves to our body: "virtue is held too cheap by the man who holds his body too dear."[10] To the Epicureans this would surely sound like "a stern matter"[11], but it is actually learning "how to feel joy." One who regularly ponders death, poverty, temptation, and suffering has a genuine joy which will carry him away from those vain pleasures and short-lived "gifts of chance" which unless checked lead into the "abyss of sorrow."
I conclude with this. This clutch of letters from one friend to another did not amount to an encyclopedia entry on the meaning of Stoicism and I should certainly not have expected otherwise. What I was able to draw from them I have related, including the one or two candid anecdotes repeated above. There is more reading to do.
[1] In these letters, Seneca betrays much respect for the writings of Epicurus, "the teacher of pleasure" and largely anathema to a Stoic life. But he points out that "the best ideas are common property," noting the frequent congruence of Stoicism and Epicureanism with each other and with various other schools. He also cautions that following the maxims of any single wise man, who is after all little more than a guide, is mere servility. Virtue comes from mental independence and no one who is dedicated to virtue will be popular. Popularity requires "trickery" because the crowd requires familiarity: "The favor of ignoble men can only be won by ignoble means." And, says Seneca the playwright, only actors are applauded by a crowd upon their entrance.
[2] And yet Letter 47 gives a scornful and homely picture of the lot of the young household slave. "[O]ne slave mops up the disgorged food, another crouches beneath the table and gathers up the left-overs of the tipsy guests. . . . Another, who serves the wine, must dress like a woman and wrestle with his advancing years. . . . though he has already acquired a soldier's figure, he is kept beardless by having his hair smoothed away or plucked out by the roots, and he must remain awake throughout the night, dividing his time between his master's drunkenness and his lust."
[3] Each of the letters is admirably confined to a single subject and quite readable. Unfortunately there is also a tedious quality, by which I mean that in many cases where Seneca approaches a too confidential harmony with Lucilius, he immediately retreats to explaining how Stoicism must require him to react. See Letter No. 59. The letters bespeak respect, but little intimacy.
[4] Are philosophy and a "school" the same thing? Elsewhere in these letters, though he doesn't use the word "school," Seneca is most disdainful of what he calls the dialectitians. Is that a school?
[5] My sub-rule of thumb: "If it's still talked about 100 years after publication, it's probably worth reading."
[5] My sub-rule of thumb: "If it's still talked about 100 years after publication, it's probably worth reading."
"[God] marks our good and bad deeds, and is our guardian. . . . . Praise the quality in him which cannot be given or snatched away, that which is the peculiar property of the man. Do you ask what this is? It is soul and reason brought to perfection in the soul. . . . . [O]ur soul is always in motion, and the more ardent it is, the greater its motion and activity. It is the quality of a great soul to scorn great things and to prefer that which is ordinary rather than that which is too great. . . . . [A soul] is ruined by uncontrolled prosperity . . . . Utility measures our needs, but by what standard can you check the superfluous?"
Today (I write in 2016) who among our public people will speak to us about our souls? For that matter, who speaks of virtue?
[7] For me, the entire friendship subject requires much further reflection and comparisons to Plato (Symposium), Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics), Montaigne, etc. A particular case is that of the Stoic and Epicurean friends, Brutus and Cassius, in Julius Caesar.
[8] I dimly recall a television biography of Michelangelo in which he was quoted as saying of his funeral effigy of the Duke of Urbino that of course it didn't look like the Duke at all, but in 500 years who would care about that. This is the certainty of a large ego — and the confidence of genius.
[9] Late in the letters Seneca reveals he has asthma which he calls "practicing how to die."
[10] If I had the time, I would like to compare the number of times any given philosopher referred to virtue as opposed to vice. My impression, however, is that there is more or less a consensus of what constitutes the vices. Gibbon (not a philosopher but whom I have recently been reading) seems to make repeated references to laxity and effeminacy. And yet Christianity's cardinal sins certainly include concepts radically different from what the classical writers would think.
[11] I seem to recall that Mark Twain said that there is no laughter in heaven — not that a hereafter enters into these letters —but here Seneca's "everlasting joy" apparently refers to no more than reputation.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures –
This is the third segment of Sowell’s books on culture. His objective here is to demonstrate how cultures throughout the world have evolved under the force of a conquering power – and to some extent have resisted, regardless of such force. These days, Sowell is controversial as a “conservative” black economist and sociologist, but I did not detect much in the way of politically controversial material here. At most, I notice that he does not flinch – but probably for stylistic reasons – from varying his terms when it comes to using the words “Africans,” “Negroes,” and “colored.” My chief impression is that he is a meticulous statistician. Virtually every sentence he writes is a statistic turned into English. Unfortunately, it’s not exciting English. He has an unfortunate tendency to write in the passive voice. And with headings and subheadings every page or two (there is no greater narrative killer than to be suddenly met with a section called “Summary and Implications”) the book looks more like a research tool than a broad discussion of historical patterns. And yet, given Sowell’s copious research, he inevitably offers numerous discussions of subjects that engage a larger interest. An area that I found particularly interesting, for example, is Sowell’s recognition that England, a leader in the early African slave grade, eventually recognized its evil and over the ensuing 100 years was then largely responsible for unilaterally stamping it out on the high seas. This included such provocative action as stopping the slave ships of other nations to liberate their cargo, not only at sea, but even within their coastal waters (e.g. Brazil). His discussion of the effect and implications of the African diaspora is exceedingly interesting, particularly as it touches the western hemisphere, although he is not at all hesitant to take the search for profit and slaves right back into Africa.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History –
Leo Strauss, whom I periodically see referred to in the press as a “philosopher,” has been dead more than 30 years now. Maybe the passage of time has elevated him, but calling him professor seems quite good enough to me[1]. In fact, his greatness consisted in his being a great reader, by which I mean that he always grapples with authors – many of them philosophers – on their own terms to understand them as they understood themselves.
In this series of essays from the early 1950s[2] Strauss explains the evolution, methodology, and ultimately the flaws of the dogmatic constructs of history[3]. History, he says, is “opinion as opposed to knowledge.” It has come a long way since the ancients, of course, and as he sees it history was only really “discovered” as the mortal opponent to philosophy in the 19th Century. But western thinking was more or less forced into this 19th Century crisis because there had been an earlier “crisis of modern natural right” in the 17th Century. It was then that natural right became a thoroughly politicized “weapon” as opposed to philosophy’s original quest for an eternal order through ascension “from public dogma to essentially private knowledge.”
Since then, what Strauss calls “historicism” has triumphed over political philosophy. Its essence is that it assumes the absurdity of philosophy, the idea that knowledge can replace opinion. The crisis came about because opinion, being the province of intellectuals, is also by definition variable[4]. For men to live together, then, the intellectuals also came to see that their opinions must be “stabilized by social fiat.”
Hence historicists, as Strauss sees it, have always remained in Plato’s cave, confiding to the rest of us their opinions about the meaning of the shadows on the wall. Definitionally, however, historicism’s flaw is that it must deny that the end of history has come while simultaneously asserting that nothing in the future can question its conclusion about
“the inescapable dependence of thought on fate, and therewith [ ] the essential character of human life[. I]n the decisive respect the end of history, that is, of the history of thought, has come.”
And so as a perishable human thought, historicism itself is destined to perish; and if it denies that – as it does – it acknowledges that there is trans-historical thought.
In his first chapter Strauss sketches the context in which we currently operate. He follows it with a difficult chapter discussing the “Distinction Between Facts and Values” which in large part is a detailed critique of Max Weber’s methodology[5]. Here Strauss discusses “value judgments” which, though of significance using Weber’s approach, are generally of secondary importance when considered next to “insight into the ways of folly and wisdom, of cowardice and bravery, of barbarism and humanity.”
For Strauss’s mission is to explain how philosophy – the quest for first things[6] – grapples with the problem of natural right (which he eventually equates with justice) as even the Bible does not. In the beginning, myth and custom were the origin of authority. But to conceive of natural right is to presuppose a doubt of traditional authority. And by discovering nature, man “uproots” the claim of the ancestral by appealing to something older still. Philosophy in short recognizes that “nature is the authority” which is “the necessary condition” – but insufficient – “for the emergence of the idea of natural right.”
It is insufficient because classical natural right necessarily has a political character, meaning that it only occurs in the city. Its bases are, first, “the critique of hedonism” – that the good is more fundamental than the pleasant – and second, the perfection of man in civil society, the only environment in which political freedom is possible. This environment of freedom “is not a gift of heaven; it becomes actual only through the efforts of many generations.”
These explanatory chapters are essential to understanding – and no easier than – the chapters that follow, beginning with the longest, subdivided into two parts, one on Hobbes and one on Locke. This is where modernism’s break with classicism begins. The most fundamental difference between pre- and post-modern political philosophy – duty vs. right – emerges emphatically in Hobbes. He is the originator of “natural public law” as opposed to the other form of modern political philosophy, the Machiavellian “reasons of state.” Although these forms contradict each other, both are motivated by a concern for a social order that does not depend on chance and hence the primary classical concern for a regime which forms the right character is replaced by the modern concern for a regime which forms the right institutions.
In discussing Locke, Strauss is at pains to explain that he was an esoteric and therefore that his underlying message was radically different from what the commentators generally believe. Locke’s entire political view is based on a state of nature, but one which is “wholly alien to the Bible.” The Bible emphasizes a prelapsarian state of innocence and man’s state thereafter. But Locke does not see the state of nature as “innocence” nor does he find anything more than a “partial” law of nature. His central teaching is about property, a fundamental institution of natural law since it is associated with self-preservation. Unlike the state of nature, where there is want – and thus theft – acquisitiveness becomes the common good in civil society. The meanest day laborer has more by way of subsistence wages than he ever had in a state of nature. Indeed the money which circulates in civil society provokes a desire to have more than can actually be used for subsistence. The first object of government, therefore, could not be less Platonic: it is to protect the acquisition of property because it is salutary.
In his last chapter, Strauss turns first to Rousseau and then Burke. Of course, Rousseau actually attacked modernity, but he did so from a novel angle, using two ancient and somewhat antithetical ideas: nature and virtue (i.e. “social” virtue to be found in the city). By Strauss’s lights although Rousseau never squared this circle – meaning that free society still cannot solve the human problem – the central interest in his thought is in “how he conceived of that insoluble conflict.”
Rousseau rejected science in favor of virtue, because he saw virtue as the soul of free society. Science is society’s enemy because its entire object is inaccessible truth which is at war with faith and opinion, the hallmarks of free society. The scientist/philosopher recognizes and embraces the inequality of merit as a natural freedom available only to some[7] as opposed to civil society’s conventional equality which is the substitute. For Rousseau, men are not truly social animals. They are bound, but only by the commonality of passion.
Hence in Rousseau’s view, in a sense we are always in a state of nature – which is “the highest possible degree” of independence.This is a repudiation of Hobbes, because it makes freedom superior to safety. Freedom is “virtue itself.” Furthermore, Rousseau always suggested that for some rare individuals the good life “consists in the return on the level of humanity to the state of nature.” For Strauss, this conclusion is a “fundamental defect,” because it means “[t]o have a reservation against society without being either compelled or able to indicate a way of life or the cause or the pursuit for the sake of which that reservation is made.”
The book closes with Edmund Burke. Although Burke too mentioned the notion of a social contract, Strauss sees him as more in the Thomaic tradition. Happiness, Burke says, is only found through virtue, and government is not to be found in “the imaginary rights of men” since the rights to self-preservation and the pursuit of happiness are not necessarily coeval with the right to political power. The right to good government is not the same as the right to self-government.
For Burke, practicality is wisdom as it is embodied in the British constitution. He acknowledged the existence of rights, but frowned upon the dubious wisdom of insisting as a matter or principle on their exercise. Principles are cold and detached, while practice has a warm association with one’s own background. Burke puts the emphasis on “acting man” who is primarily concerned with “what is nearest and dearest to him” and is unconcerned with the chilly, languorous patience of theory[8]. Thus “what is metaphysically true [may be] politically false.”
Burke’s hesitation about reason in favor of traditional law puts him in inevitable tension with the classicists and “founders” of any legal system (including the founders of the American Republic though Strauss does not mention this). It also puts him on the side of the so-called “living Constitution.” These are volatile words in modern American political circles, particularly in light of contemporary American conservatism’s embrace of Burke. But according to Strauss, “[o]ne goes beyond what Burke himself says if one ascribes to him the view that a sound political order must be the product of History.” For Burke, history did not come with a capital H. It was not determinist but accidental. And so although his view might be linked with Rousseau’s notion that humanity (virtue) was also the result of accidental causation and although the two thus combined may have led to the 19th Century revolutionary epiphany about man’s future, Burke would not have been part of that revolution (which for him, of course, was the French Revolution.) And it is unimaginable to me that he ever glanced with admiration at Rousseau.
And yet Strauss reminds us that Burke did retain an admiration for that principle which I have already mentioned to be found in Locke: the utility of “a love of lucre” as an essential – and providential – ingredient of a healthy political order[9]. It was Locke, of course, who remarked that civil society is founded on low but solid ground and Burke, it seems, recognizes that what is “providential” might also be unattractive. I mark this point because Strauss then notes that Burke feared that even the evil French Revolution may have been consonant with a providential decree and hence irresistible. And so, referencing Cato – but I am certain thinking about himself and his own epoch – Strauss dilates on
“the nobility of last-ditch resistance. [Burke] does not consider that . . . ‘going down with guns blazing and flag flying,’ may contribute greatly toward keeping awake the recollection of the immense loss sustained by mankind, may inspire and strengthen the desire and the hope for its rediscovery, and may become a beacon for those who humbly carry on the works of humanity in a seemingly endless valley of darkness and destruction.”
But this is a passing note of regret, not criticism. Struass obviously sees Burke as one who is suffused with appreciation for the soundness of antiquity’s concern with the good and an inherent predisposition with virtue.
The book then ends, more or less as abruptly as this review. I have said that Marx is not mentioned, though it might be said that he is present on every page. And in the early 21st Century we might say that the author’s latent sadness and pessimism as directed toward Communism proved unfounded. Indeed, I have no doubt that today the book would be written with a different emphasis altogether. And yet anyone who makes the effort to understand Strauss as he is striving to understand others will be richly rewarded by reading and re-reading Natural Law and History.
ENDNOTES
1. That was an epoch, it should not be forgotten, in which Soviet Communism was energized and seemingly poised to be triumphant. It had History on its side. And although Strauss barely mentions this looming catastrophe – and never mentions Marx by name – it surely was a reason for writing the book.
2. Strauss says of Max Weber that “he did not hesitate to describe Plato as an ‘intellectual’ without for one moment considering the fact that the whole work of Plato may be described as a critique of the notion of ‘the intellectual.’”
3. He also shows a dry humor about Weber’s writing style, which he describes as 600 pages “covered with the smallest possible number of sentences, as well as with the largest possible number of footnotes.”
4. To understand this is to understand the war that Plato declared on art, meaning Homer and the poets. Artists create things, but what they create are not first things, they are man-made things. Art presupposes nature, not vice versa.
5. Of course, Rousseau saw himself as a member of the philosophy fraternity, one who knew the secret handshake.
6. Judges who find this attractive, beware: “In human affairs, possession passes for a title, whereas there is no presumption in favor of the accepted view in theoretical matters.”
7. At this juncture, Strauss inserts an intriguing passage about “secularization” – “a modification of the traditional belief in Providence” – which he does not appear to attribute directly to either Rousseau, Burke or Kant, each of whom only hover about its margins. It reads as though Strauss is describing to himself a possible Burkean explanation of the emergence of modern political philosophy: self-interest driven by providence.
Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies –
Leo Strauss was such a genius that it would be misleading to assert that he betrays perplexity or puzzlement in this series of essays. As close as I can describe the underlying tone – and this doesn’t quite get to it – is that he suggests a feeling of mild aggravation that the inventors and proponents of modernity have not entirely established their position – a position that he is not willing to state for them.
Furthermore, Strauss’s impatience with the modernists extends to their interpreters. I mention this latter point because much of the methodology which Strauss uses in this volume is to visit the minds of philosophers through recent essays of others on which Strauss comments. This puts him in the position of the ultimate commentator, grading the papers of subordinates. I don’t mean to say that he is unkind or condescending in the task. In fact, he is always careful, respectful, and frequently grateful for their efforts. But the effect is nevertheless magisterial, and ultimately I think it underscores why Strauss is the greatest professor rather than the greatest thinker. In fact, it is probably even more accurate to say that he is the greatest student, meaning the greatest reader.
I hope this does not sound as though I underrate him, for he is the giant in explaining all great political thinkers. No one matches him, though he certainly has an impressive list of acolytes. And yet Strauss himself understands that although one can be both a professor of philosophy and also a philosopher (e.g. Hegel), the one does not necessarily imply the other. I remember Allan Bloom remarking more than once in class that “a professor of philosophy who calls himself a philosopher is like a theologian who calls himself a saint.” Among other things, the philosopher has “passion” and a style. Strauss is always alert to the literary character of the philosophic work which he reviews because it is another way of conveying meaning.
The first time I heard of Strauss was as an undergraduate in the early 1960s. He had been the teacher of my own professors of political philosophy (Allan Bloom, Walter Berns) but was regarded by several of the other professors in the Cornell Government Department as an exotic, a sort of wrong-headed Jeremiah. No one – and I mean no one – was ready to tangle directly with either Bloom or Berns, but Ithaca is a long way from Chicago, and so Strauss himself could be dismissed more easily as a dangerous wizard.
But exactly why Strauss was considered radioactive I cannot say. I am a judge, not a professor, and I don’t read the journals at all, much less for that purpose. If I had to guess, much of my speculation would be put on Strauss’s trenchant criticism of what he calls “historicism” – which surely infected and still infects much of the professoriate – and his supposed elitism. Another possibility, though not likely from that quarter, is Strauss’s emphasis on ideas over institutions, which could eventually put him at odds with the American constitutional experiment. Even today, many in the monolithic academic community recoil from Strauss, apparently because he is regarded as “conservative” (though it is difficult to see how the contemporary understanding of that term has much application to him). And yet as the decades have rolled on, Strauss’s reputation continues to grow and today he is recognized as the father of scores of the most serious scholars of philosophy working today.
The volume I am reviewing here, published in 1959, is a bracing sample of why the man’s thinking continues to be so compelling. It is a series of 10 essays, plus a variety of book reviews. The initial essay (which actually appears to have been a lecture[1]) sets the groundwork for what follows. It points out that all political action, guided by the desire either to prevent change for the worse or to encourage it for the better, must necessarily be founded on some concept of the good, which is seen as knowledge, not mere opinion.
Strauss distinguishes political philosophy from both political thought (politically significant ideas, including firmly held convictions or defense of an “invigorating myth”) and political theology (political teachings based on divine revelation, not the unassisted human mind). More significantly, he identifies political science (and he is being kind) as consisting of “careful and judicious collections and analyses of politically relevant data.” But political philosophy itself, he says, “does not exist any more, except as matter for burial, i.e., for historical research,” for it is “unscientific, or it is unhistorical, or both,” destroyed by both Science and History. And therefore he teaches, “Remember, remember.”
Strauss’s reference to “Science” is to the ethically-neutral positivist heirs of Auguste Compte, who fix upon the How of science and not the Why[2]. And “History” here does not refer to Marx, but Hitler and the people who made him possible. Not surprisingly for the first “Straussian,” Strauss thereupon sets upon the re-birth of political philosophy, the supposedly dead field. His writing is very dense but surprisingly clear – no doubt more clear than I would have found it in my university days. As an example, for me his passing observation on the virtue of moderation, in the context of his discussion of The Laws[3], was very interesting. Moderation, he says, is “[an] obfuscation, [an] acceptance of the political perspective, [an] adoption of the language of political man, [an] achievement of harmony between the excellence of man and the excellence of the citizen, or between wisdom and law-abidingness . . . . For moderation is not a virtue of thought: Plato likens philosophy to madness, the very opposite of sobriety or moderation; thought must not be moderate, but fearless, not to say shameless. But moderation is a virtue controlling the philosopher’s speech.”[4]
From here, Strauss gives a clear and unbiased summary of Machiavelli’s thorough break with classicism and his attendant push to lower our goals: his critique of morality, his re-definition of virtue as being merely relative to the common good, his emphasis on the malleability of man, his recognition of the bad man’s quest for glory through the foundation of a new regime (which leads to the “transformation of badness into boldness”), and his insistence that such bold men can master chance – all of this a repudiation of the “noble goodness” of the classics. Hence Strauss identifies Machiavelli as the first political philosopher who genuinely intended to cause by propaganda the establishment of new regimes beyond his own lifetime. It was Machiavelli, he says, who therefore jettisoned the idea of the classical moral order in favor of institutions. And to summarize odiously, when Hobbes later “corrected” Machiavelli, he boldly substituted “power” for “glory” – “respectable, pedestrian hedonism, sobriety without sublimity and subtlety, protected or made possible by ‘power politics.’” And if Hobbes – whom Strauss later calls a “dry atheist” – was “plain-spoken” (unlike the subtle Machiavelli), his own successor Locke was actually “prosaic” in identifying self-preservation as nothing more or less than the desire for property, a small change focusing on economics whose consequences were enormous in the sequel. It was the most successful effort, entirely bloodless, to substitute Machiavelli’s immorality for classical morality as the basis of civil society – what Strauss calls an “elegant” solution, although it entails the “degradation” of man.
In reaction to this, says Strauss, was Rousseau, who introduced a “second wave” of modernity with a passionate “pre-modern” way of thought called “romanticism” which turned out to be even more antithetical to classical thought. Rousseau introduced the concept of the “general will,” the assumption that everyone subject to the law must have had a role in its making, a transcendence of the natural right (and a troubling deference to History). By thinking of law in this fashion, Strauss says that Rousseau advanced “secular” thinking, replacing the idea of “vertical” limitation of the ideal (i.e. derived from higher principle) with the horizontal” (meaning the license of other men). This would be the weaker judicial as opposed to the stronger moral doctrine – and no doubt the genesis of the “fist-nose” theory of freedom. And then there is the “third” wave of political philosophy attributable to the ardent Nietzche, rejecting historical process in favor of great men who create for themselves irrational horizons leaving an abyss of suffering and emptiness to the rest.
Strauss takes the position that historical knowledge is no more than an auxiliary to political philosophy and that modern “historicism” – the notion that the two are fundamentally fused[5] – is of such danger to political philosophy that it casts a doubt on “the very questions of the nature of political things and of the best, or the just, political order.” Today’s growing number of historical disciplines – though routinely included among the highest academic disciplines – would be completely foreign to classic philosophers who did not even mention history among the subjects worthy of the highest study.
Then giving his own history of “historicism” from the 16th century forward, Strauss concludes that we have come to the point
“that each generation reinterpret[s] the past on the basis of its own experience and to a view to its own future. . . . One has the impression that the question of the nature of political things has been superseded by the question of the characteristic ‘trends’ of the social life of the present and of their historical origins, and that the question of the best, or the just, political order has been superseded by the question of the probable or desirable future. . . . “. . . . Since it is hard to see, however, how one can speak adequately of the modern state, of our civilization, of modern man, etc., without knowing first what a state is, what a civilization is, what man’s nature is, the more thoughtful forms of historicism admit that the universal questions of traditional philosophy cannot be abandoned. . . . [though they caution that the answers must be] ‘historically conditioned.’”[6] (Emphasis supplied.)
But Strauss himself (who edited a famous book entitled History of Political Philosophy[7]) soundly repudiates “historical conditioning.” The “answers” themselves were also intended as universal: the non-historicist’s willingness to take seriously the thinking of the past is a willingness to consider the possibility that it was simply true. But historicism’s flaw is that it purports to understand the thinkers of the past better than they understood themselves – as merely a preparation for what follows. Furthermore, modern political science is dismissive of the “best” political order in deference to its methods of inquiry. For Strauss this is not a critique of such transient phenomena as polling; by methodology he means the distinctions that even the greatest moderns like Hobbes and Rousseau made, between concepts of “states of nature” and “civil states.” Classical political philosophy had no use for such distinctions, because it grew directly out of political life itself. But one who enters political life is not likely to be a philosopher:
“[I]nsofar as the philosopher, owing to the weakness of the flesh, becomes concerned with being recognized by others, he ceases to be a philosopher. According to the strict view of the classics he turns into a sophist. The concern with being recognized by others . . . blurs his vision. This fact is not at variance with the other fact that high ambition is frequently a sign by which one can recognize the potential political philosopher. One of the pleasures accompanying the quest the truth comes from the awareness of progress in that quest.”
To the extent that Strauss comments on Farabi, I sensed a hesitation, possibly growing out of his tentative grasp of Arabic. He seems far more comfortable discussing Maimonides, who he tells us regarded Farabi as second only to Aristotle as a philosophic authority. It is in his discussion of Maimonides that Strauss underlines the distinction between divine and civil law (nomos). It is a “fact,” he says, “while the nomos must indeed be strengthened by myth or by a ‘governmental religion,’ that religion is not part of the primary intention of the nomos and of the association which is ordered by it.” In short, nomos – which is a pagan concept – is relative and divine law is not. And I must not neglect to call attention to a passage in which Strauss is funny, at least to my sense of humor.
“To a generation [he says] which was successfully exposed to the gospels of the blond beast, of the class struggle, and of the redemptive virtue of toilet training, Hobbes must appear as the incarnation of old-fashioned decency.”
Of course his point is serious, because he also says that Hobbes would not be taken seriously “if the progress of modernity were separable from the decay of modernity.”
It was Hobbes, Strauss, says, who “ushered in . . . the modern type,” meaning one with “the will to power.” And it was also Hobbes, Strauss says, who initiated the essential quarrel between the classical tradition and modernity. Hobbes identified the radical deficiency of classicism as a lack of exactness and an overestimation of the power of reason. For Hobbes, the state is all (a rejection of traditional natural law before the moment the state is established), and hence virtue can only be defined as action in favor of the state. Strauss is naturally dubious about the value of Hobbes’s thought for this very reason: Hobbes was an originator of modernity – which means that he cannot be ignored – but modernity has nevertheless begun to rot and Hobbes can be seen to waiver between his political science and his description of natural science.
When Strauss discusses Locke, he returns to one of the fundamental principles that is associated with his approach: understanding the thinker as he understood himself. In the case of an esoteric writer like Locke[8], that can be a daunting task. As he says, sometimes “a man may deliberately contradict himself in order to indicate his thought rather than to reveal it” (my italics). This would be especially true of atheist thinkers in a day of religious orthodoxy[9]. But in the case of Locke, Strauss never seems to solve the frustrations of my undergraduate seminar. He brilliantly draws out Locke’s deliberately hidden doubts about the traditional natural law teaching, but also acknowledges that Locke never elaborated the alternative. Instead “he limited himself to combining a somewhat modified version of the traditional natural law principle with a natural law teaching which follows from the Hobbesian principles rather than from the traditional principles and to alluding to his objections to the traditional principles.” For Strauss, if you are to reason from natural law principles, you must either begin with a Supreme Being of infinite power, goodness, and wisdom, or you will start from ideas of justice, property, and government. In his estimation, Locke failed to come to a satisfactory explanation of either.
In the ninth major essay of this book, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” Strauss outlines his famous approach, including the tension which has always tormented me – the war between knowledge and teaching of the truth (social science) and the requirements of society (specific values and specific myths). Personally, I continue to favor the second camp, probably because I cannot master the former, but that recognition always leaves me feeling slightly melancholy, as though I were one of the callow young men that Socrates talked to so kindly.
Overall, it was a pleasure for me to discover that this dense and closely reasoned series of essays – including Strauss’s often ponderously long sentences – was at the same time readable and so full of insight that I am actually eager to read it again.
ENDNOTES
1. Strauss'swriting also has a compelling, repetitive cadence that would make for an enjoyable lecture. (E.g. "Cato refused to see what his time demanded because he saw too clearly the degraded and degrading character of what his time demanded.") And yet I recall the only time I heard Strauss lecture. On that occasion I wasn't concerned with cadences. I was concerned with trying to make out what he was saying through his very heavy accent
2. Eventually he makes clear that the pre-scientific is the "dialectic," though he also calls it "common sense" knowledge of the sort that every intelligent 10-year-old has, truths only able to be seen "if they are seen with the unarmed eye, or more precisely, if they are seen in the perspective of the citizen . . . ," citing the case of Gulliver and the nurse in Brobdignag.
3. This discussion also includes the fascinating conjecture that Crete, where The Laws takes place, is where Socrates would have gone had he not elected to die in The Apology. I remember when I studied The Laws in college, that Bloom, my professor, said in passing that it was obvious that "the Athenian Stranger" was Socrates -- a conclusion, Strauss vouchsafes, which was previously reached by Aristotle.
4. So it is not a virtue of thought, but one of presentation. Whatever else one thinks of this conclusion, it explains the calculatioin behind the Straussian approach to reading certain great thinkers: their moderation is actually "obfuscation." Strauss is not alone in this conclusion. He summarizes -- for the purpose of emphasizing the latitude such a covert approach gives -- Farabi's meditation on The Laws:
"It became a matter of very common, nay, universay knowledge, that Plato was famous for speaking [by allusive, ambiguous, misleading and obscure speech]. . . . Hence, when he expressed a thought without any concealment, as he sometimes did, his readers or hearers assumed that in these cases too his speech was allusive and expressed something different from, or opposite to, what is explicitly and unambiguously said."
5. Elsewhere in the book he says that the "ruling dogma [is] that the very notion of a final and true account of the whole is absurd." But Strauss does not accept the "ruling dogma" and he makes it quite clear that there has never been an historian "who grasped fully a fundamental presupposition of a great thinker which the great thinker himself did not grasp."
6. In passing, Strauss pauses to exempt Burke (though not by name) from the historicist school. After all, he says, poliiitical philosophers habitually distinguish between philosophical questions and the practical question of whether the answers could or should be repaired to under prevailing circumstances. "[J]ust as it may happen that the members of one nation are more likely to be healty and strong than those of others, it may also happen that one nation has a greater natural fitness for pollitical excellence than others."
7. I seem to recall that when it waspublished in 1963, the title was regarded as a direct challenge to earlier works by Bertrand Russell and George Sabine. Later in this very volume, Strauss deals directly with Sabine's criticism of his approach. I regret to say that Sabine had retired from teaching at Cornell by the time I got there.
8. As Strauss puts it, the esoterics "write between the lines." Why this idea should be so controversial eludes me. There is no question that we are willing to read novelists and poets in such a fashion. Why should we not leave open the possibility that philosophers use the same subtle approach? In fairness, however, Strauss deals with this notion in Sabine's terms: "contrived deceptions." And here I feel the need to permit Strauss to express himself at greater length:
"If a society prevents writers from freely discussing its principles, one is entitled to raise the question as to whether a writer who belongs to such a society and who makes himself the mouthpiece of its principles expresses those principles because he is convinced of their soundness or because he cedes to superior force. The question takes on some urgency if the writer in question is a great mind who expressly says that it is not wrong to reach doctrines which one regards as erroneous. It becomes still more urgent if his writings abound in enigmatic features which one easily overlooks if one is not attentive."
And elsewhere he puts it in this way, using a triple negative:
""[O]ne cannot impute to an author a doctrine which he does not assert, if one does not prove both that the doctrine is the obvious implication of explicit statements of his, and that there were compelling reasons which induced him to refrain from stating the implication explicitly."
9. In other words, thinkers often face a danger because philosophy is "the attempt to replace opinion about 'all things' by knowledge of 'all things,'" and opinion "is the element of society."
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (tr. by Anthea Bell)—
Though not well-remembered today, before World War II Stefan Zweig was an extremely well-known European writer and translator. Personally, I had never heard of him until I went looking for a book on Central Europe in preparation for a vacation. I was thinking about a summary of the Hapsburg history, but this idiosyncratic memoir of the first four decades of the 20th Century suited me just fine.
After about mid-way through the book, however, I realized that Zweig himself didn't suit me just fine. I begin, therefore, with the following specific observation. Within the span of time covered by The World of Yesterday occurred the catastrophe of World War I when Zweig was in his 30s. His recollections of his own peculiar social environment during those years are both vivid and interesting, but viewed in light of what others suffered, it must be said that he lived a life of relative comfort troubled only by the stress of anxiety and the absence of fresh fruit.
It is Zweig's caviling about the shortcomings of others, both at this juncture and even in the later period leading up to World War II, that began to leave me cold. Yes, the first war was a monumental travesty. Zweig was not wrong to see that and to say so. But his picture of wartime Europe is all emotional and self-centered. Except for his condemnation of the ugly and unproductive European nationalism that did not dissipate at Versailles, much of what he writes about this epoch is personal attitudinizing and patting himself on the back for deploring the deplorable. And by 1939 when he began to write this book, Zweig only appears dimly to have suspected that the stakes of a world conflict transcend the perfect tranquility and superiority of his artist community.
Obviously others also were deceived by the initial post-war decade of lies (and murders) of Lenin and Stalin, and Zweig was no different from many others in the 1930s who failed to see that Stalin was no less a beast than Hitler and that there was a death game at hand. But a death game was being played and Zweig, who was smart enough to know it, was also deceptive enough to pretend that he had done what he never did: look it in the eye. Even late in the book when he recounts his viewpoint from his safe Argentinian refuge, he confides that he was "suffer[ing] more than my friends still in the country [Austria] who were deceiving themselves. . . . . They lived happy and carefree, while I saw the situation more clearly . . . ."
Having written that, I now turn to some general impressions of The World of Yesterday, beginning briefly with its second half. Most interesting are the autobiographical parts, not mentioned in much detail in what has gone before. For example, Zweig offers an extended passage about his autograph and document collecting, he recalls a very gratifying result produced by his letter to Mussolini on behalf of the young wife of a condemned man, and he continues to provide several sketches of contemporary personalities, including a personal appreciation of Richard Strauss. Indeed, throughout the book Zweig's observations, when unburdened by his peculiar urge to rhapsodize about lofty things, are sharp and detailed, exactly what I was looking for.
But his point of view and his evidence are often contradictory. Obviously a bracing memoir will have a point of view, Zweig choosing one of regret and disillusionment, played to a melancholy theme of his loneliness as a soit disant "citizen of the world," who has been bypassed by the accumulation of base current events[1]. But this self-regard — while not suffocating — emerges often enough to interrupt his more worthwhile observations. It ultimately left me with a view of him as being vain, unrealistic, and feckless. There will always be men of action to keep a safe corner in the world for dreamers like himself. Zweig was apparently oblivious to this. He will dilate at length about writers like Hertzl, but would never have understood a man like Ben-Gurion.
Overall, Zweig tells his life chronologically, opening with a chapter on the unreflecting "security" of central European life at the end of the 19th Century, proceeding then with recollections of his school days[2], society's developing sexual maturity (a Freudian demarche[3] — but delivered with some wit) — , a quick look at the turn of the century university[4] — drunkenness, hauteur, and the mandatory dueling scar —, his discovery of universal truths, etc. But in retrospect, the business about "security" is why I finally found the world citizen malarkey to be so unintentionally pusillanimous and smug.
For Zweig, born in 1881, "security" apparently comes in two flavors. The first turns out to be no more than what he sees as the blindly cautious way that millions of Europeans like him and his family lived their lives in the years before World War I, satisfied with the present and buoyed by a pleasant anticipation of a predictable future. (This hardly seems unusual.) It was a "golden age," he says, where people were "childishly naive and gullible." But as the book moves on chronologically and Zweig looks back, he realizes that this security was just an illusion. Only the gifted, he implies, could have detected the underlying vanity of the masses and sensed the calamity on the horizon. People felt themselves secure only because of a comfortable deception created by their own parochial cultures.
I do not mean to say that the book is a direct attack on cultures, but Zweig clearly believes that those who can do so will transcend such baggage — and that he is one of them. To his credit, he knows that there is no security when men are obliged to live without the security of laws, but by his lights the laws must be universal ones.[5] After noting the distasteful symptom of growing "mass political ideologies," he identifies the "ultimate" pestilence — nationalism — of which he is but "a defenseless, helpless witness."
Zweig's second sense of security is presented as personal to himself. Although he claims to be an introvert, he confides that he was eventually forced by his talent to appear in public just as growing nationalism began to sweep aside the old stability of reliable and impartial laws. In this new world Zweig discovers that he can nevertheless be free through his personal "cunning and evasion." Now it is his inner freedom which is his "one secure possession."
If only he had left it there. But instead, he then generalizes on what he sees as his own embarrassing parochial culture:
"Unconsciously, something in a Jew seeks to escape the morally dubious, mean, petty, and pernicious associations of trade clinging to all that is merely business, and rise to the purer sphere of the intellect where money is not a consideration."
Well, that's Mr. Zweig all over. We wouldn't want to be "morally dubious" when we can rise to a purer sphere. Thankfully, a "world citizen" can shed himself of unwelcome cultural baggage.[6]
Zweig is of the party that holds that when the going gets tough, the tough write pamphlets. He never really seems to realize how fully he and his correspondents deceived themselves and how risible some of his observations are.[7] After all, he was a man "with genuinely humane feelings." He is utterly convinced that during the Great War he and other intellectuals exceeded their moral responsibility simply by publishing antiwar screeds and smuggling them to each other. It was enough to "forge fraternal links internationally. . . . in favor of the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood crossing linguistic and national borders. . . .These signals of understanding flashed from one side of the border to the other." (And yet world citizens were a sorry lot a generation later when more mettle was required.[8])
But it was for his role as a witness that I consulted Zweig, not his manqué ruminations on nationalism, and not for his pessimistic speculations on the future. In that sense, these memoirs written by a widely-traveled man was a good vantage point for me. Hapsburg history would have to wait.[9] Given his success as a man of letters, Zweig met plenty of prominent people during his life and throughout the book he scatters their names — lots of names. The index to The World of Yesterday is eight pages long and consists of nothing but a listing of the people whom he has mentioned in the text. I was unfamiliar with virtually all of them[10], many of them obviously people of literary and artistic talent, the others notable public officials of varying description. Most of them are referred to in the "and then I said to _____" sense, but with others he obviously had ample contact which he describes in such detail that it was impossible not to get an accurate picture of both the person and the setting for the encounter.
Of these public figures Zweig gives the most extensive praise to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, previously unknown to me. Von Hofmannsthal, only seven years older than Zweig himself, was a poetic prodigy in the German language. If I had ever previously heard his name (but then forgotten it), it was because he was the librettist for Richard Strauss, including Der Rosenkavalier.[11]. Hofmannsthal was also founder of the Salzburg festival. He also provides a nice bridge for Zweig then to address two other subjects intimately associated with the era: the literary press and Theodore Hertzl to whom he devotes several pages.
By contrast, the picture Zweig gives of Rilke is chiefly remarkable because the poet was, he says, essentially "inconspicuous" – and then goes on for two pages dilating on the man's muted anonymity, apparently extracted from only one or two brief encounters with him. This is followed immediately by the author's description of his unscheduled visit to Rodin's studio where that artist, initially cordial to his flattering unscheduled visitor, is suddenly struck with an idea, leaving Zweig — if one can believe this —standing ignored and forgotten watching the master for a frenzied hour of preoccupied creation.
Although The World of Yesterday offers memories from several European locales — Paris, London, Salzburg, Switzerland — Zweig's original and main point of reference is always Austria, specifically Vienna, a pleasant, open-minded, leisurely city of music — but one which he also describes as "culturally passionate" based on centuries of the country's political lassitude and lack of military success. He certainly paints an attractive picture of the city, one even more inviting than the beautiful metropolis I visited for the first time in 2014. For him it is a compliment to say that Vienna is "a supranational, cosmopolitan city of the world" which melds all national and linguistic opposites into itself, "a synthesis of all Western cultures."[12]
I must say, however, that Zweig also delivers a certain unintentional Dionysian undertone of the city. The Viennese, he says, have a "theatrical mania" where "no quarter [is] given." Four or five hundred people, he recalls, once refused to leave a concert hall that was scheduled to close and he also tells of another audience which actually pulled a venue into pieces when it shut down. "[A] Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable" even among "the lower classes." He even attributes this irrationality (which he describes as "grotesque") to the city's Jewish population. This having still been a time of security, however, even the anti-Semites were cordial.[13].
I have been hard on Zweig for what I have identified as the flaws of a slight man. His book makes it evident that it was he who sought out prominent people, not the reverse. The story of Rodin has a whiff of that. So does his memory of attaching himself first to the poet Emile Verhaeren and then the author Romain Rolland — for that matter, so does that ostentatious index of names and the autographs Zweig collected throughout his life.[14]. And yet he is hard on himself, albeit disingenuously. He admits his pleasure in having been found "unfit" for service in World War I, but states that he refused identify himself as a conscientious objector because of the penalties, and he agrees that in sum he was simply "unheroic" and "indecisive" (characteristics which then permit him modestly to compare himself to Erasmus[15]).
And so let me say this in mitigation. Zweig was a talented writer, as this book itself demonstrates. I am guessing that his fiction is even better. So it is clear that he was a member of a very narrow creative fraternity, one created by God and not open to most of us. Such people are blessed and so was he.[16].
And yet Stefan Zweig committed suicide in Argentina in 1942. There was a world war underway. In my view he was hors de combat.
ENDNOTES
1. "Citizen of the world" is one of those undergraduate ideas that most intelligent people recover from as they enter the real world. I remember when I was in high school I went with some friends to an evening rally in an unused movie theater in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the United World Federalists. We sang songs, held hands, and invoked Eleanor Roosevelt. We were all highly intelligent.
2. Zweig recalls his Dickensian schooldays in Freudian terms. "The case histories in psychoanalysts' files show us how many inferiority complexes are the result of this method of education." Fortunately he was able to transcend this menace — although he is obliged to confess that as an adolescent his thirst for freedom and art led to such absurd excesses as sneaking backstage into theatres while playing hooky to get patted on the shoulder by Johannes Brahms who was an exemplar of "the world of security." Fortunately "[y]oung people, like certain animals, have an excellent instinct for changes" — by which he means aesthetic changes of the sort demanded by his fellow avant guard.
3. In the 19th Century, he says, "the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity" (that word again).
4. For himself, Zweig favors the "university of life."
5. There are only fleeting references to Shakespeare in The World of Yesterday and I would not have expected otherwise. But consider the fate of cosmopolitans in Othello and The Merchant of Venice and the uncynical agony of Romeo and Mowbray when facing banishment from what Zweig would think of as their narrow worlds. I'll add my own cynical smile when I found Zweig comparing himself and his small coterie of world citizens as a "band of brothers" — oblivious that the quotation is from Shakespeare's most nationalistic play.
6. Ironically at the end of his book Zweig — who in my view persistently demonstrated a profound confusion about culture and security — offers a third view which emerged from the "insecurity" of having been deprived of his passport owing to by the vagaries of war.
"It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my passport I discovered . . . that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders."
7. While living in Switzerland during the Great War, Zweig became impressed with a woodcut artist's anti-war efforts. Zweig and his friends— though no one seems to have volunteered — envisioned dropping these drawings from aircraft in the combat zones. "I am sure they would have stopped the war in its tracks."
8. "In 1939 no writer's expression of opinion had any effect at all."
9. He does report one personal near-poignant Hapsburg incident: his recollection of standing on the platform of a Swiss border railroad station after the end of World War I as Emperor Karl and his family passed through on their abdication train.
10. The only American names that I recognized among the several hundred contained in the annotation were Jane Addams, Isadora Duncan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Lunt, Sacco and Vanzetti, Walt Whitman, and Woodrow Wilson, none of them but Whitman given much attention.
11. In later years, Zweig himself wrote the libretto for Strauss's The Silent Woman.
12. Whatever Zweig means by this, he routinely uses the phrase Western culture, as he does here. In recent decades, of course, one using that reference would be condemned as both elitist and narrow-minded. In any event, Zweig died too early to benefit from Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.
13. He gives a remarkably neutral description of the anti-Semite Karl Lueger.
14. Zweig's hero-worship of Rolland ("the most important man of our time'") is almost embarrassing. (Rolland himself felt that Stalin was the world's greatest man.) And this precedes Zweig likening himself and his fellow Switzerland-dwellers to those "fighting in the trenches" because they — sitting the while peacefully around a table in Geneva — were in "personal danger" given that "five hours journey away" a combatant might charge at them.
15. Erasmus is then duly noted in Zweig's index of his famous friends. Later Zweig also compares himself to Cassandra and Jeremiah, neither of whom qualified for the index, however.
16. But — like fraternity or tribal members everywhere — such people are remarkably unwilling or unable to take a more ecumenical view of other similar groupings, even when they praise themselves for being so open-minded. Anyhow, the literary fraternity is not always that fraternal, notwithstanding Zweig's faith in what he calls "the unifying power of art." Musicians seem to be generous to each other, but novelists backbite all the time.
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