Herewith some comparative remarks on Strauss and Oakshott prepared for last week’s meeting at Baylor University of the Michael Oakshott Association. (Later, if you’re interested, I’ll relate how the homosexual “marriage” issue — or, as I like to say, the advocacy of “sad marriage” — sprung up in this august gathering.)
We begin with the obvious observation that Oakshott seems simply not to be interested in “political philosophy” as Strauss understands it – that is, in philosophy as intrinsically attuned to a fundamental political concern, as inwardly conditioned by political necessities and questions. On the other hand, one might say there is at least a superficial similarity between Strauss’s praise of the serene autonomy of philosophy (in comparison with which all merely human concerns are “ephemeral and paltry,” and all that) and Oakshott’s understanding of philosophy as the (unattainable) wholeness of experience, “experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification” (EM, 2). But of course I have argued that Strauss’s praise of the pure detachment of philosophy from practical concerns must be understood rhetorically, and that the deeper truth is that the detachment of philosophy from practical nobility must be understood as continuous with a pretension of such nobility to a detachment from ordinary, “vulgar” human concerns. Oakshott, for his part, seems to have little interest in continuities between philosophy, or absolute experience, and the world of practice, which is just one among a number of “modes” of experience.

Oakshott’s idea of philosophy is thus very austere, to say the least. Absolute experience seems to be a kind of sheer self-possession and unhindered self-identity. The question of the character of its goodness does not seem to be acknowledged as a pertinent question, and so the problem of the relation of some goodness of philosophy to the goods of practice does not even arise.

How can the question of the good be set aside? Of course Oakshott recognizes the pertinence of the question, but only within a “mode” of experience that is considered altogether distinct from that of the most adequate and comprehensive idea of experience, namely, philosophy. The leading questions of practice, the realm which concerns human agency and therefore the possibility of change from a worse to a better condition, are not considered relevant to the interest in absolute knowledge that governs the pure mode of philosophy. To be sure, the distinction between the realms of eternal and necessary truth and things that can be other than they are is an ancient one that structures Strauss’s philosophical rhetoric as much as it does Oakshott’s. And Strauss no more than Oakshott imagines that theory can dictate directly to practice; both may be said to follow Aristotle’s lead in endeavoring to protect the practical realm against philosophy’s imperialist tendencies. Nevertheless, philosophy emerges for Strauss as the answer to the most pressing practical question, the question how one should live. Even if, as Aristotle himself says (Nichomachean Ethics X), the purely philosophic life, as divine, remains beyond the reach of human faculties, the best humans are invited to strive towards and emulate such a contemplative life. Philosophy rules practice for Strauss, even if he cautions it not to rule directly. And the less salient implication, I have argued, is that practice deeply conditions philosophy. If the practice of the virtues is understood in the light of contemplative wholeness and self-sufficiency, it is no less true that the very good of self-sufficiency is implicitly modeled on an experience or a pretension sustained in practice.

In sum, Strauss’s thought, like Aristotle’s, is finally governed by an interest in sustaining what Tocqueville called a “moral analogy,” a linkage between the a sense of an orderly whole (a cosmic whole prefigured in practical order) of which the individual is a part and the individual’s awareness of his transcendence of any given whole. Philosophy rules, and the very character of philosophy is conditioned by its ruling responsibility. The question of the True never completely leaves the orbit of the Good.

Oakshott, for his part, is resolute in severing the True from the Good. Valuation is confined to the realm of practice, and practice is a mere “mode” of experience, an abstraction from the absolute encountered “without presupposition or arrest.” Is it not fair to ask, though, just where the “abstraction” lies, and what experience or region of human activity advances the strongest claim to standing “without presupposition, reservation, arrest or modification?” Strauss seems to argue that there is no more immediate and primordial and in that sense “natural” mode of existence than that in which we are interpellated by the question of the Good, a question that bridges practical and contemplative experience. This then becomes the ruling, integrating question for Strauss. Oakshott, for his part, begins with an idea of absolute experience inherited (indirectly) from Hegel, but severed from the ruling claims of a theory of History that aims to integrate the contemplative and the practical. Strauss might ask whether Oakshott’s idealism of pure experience and the radical separation of the practical from the philosophical that results are not themselves abstraction, even violent and uninterrogated abstractions from the natural springs of human questioning.

Oakshott’s approach can no doubt be understood and perhaps justified as a response to modern, predatory rationalism, which aims to master and possess reality for human convenience. But Strauss would of course interpret such an abstracting will to separation as part of a “strategy of separations” (of religion from politics, society from state, represented from representative, etc – the term is Pierre Manent’s) inherent in modern rationalism, and which is founded ultimately on the separation of the useful from the good, or, what amounts to the same thing, of the good from the true. And Strauss would thus regard such an abstraction as tending to aggravate the rationalistic disease it is meant to contain, if not to cure. In Strauss’s view, I think, any configuration of theory and practice that does not limit practice by situating it in effect under the (indirect) rule of theory (conceived as the good life of contemplating eternity) is bound to nourish the blind and destructive metaphysical passion of practice to create a world in which its contradictions are resolved – the passion of “technology.” Or, in my formula, adapted from Tocqueville: longings for transcendence that are not oriented vertically (aristocratically) and thus integrated into a scheme of “moral analogy” can only spill over into horizontal (democratic) projects that threaten the human soul.

Now it must be said that such a Straussian diagnosis seems utterly to miss the mark in the case of Oakshott, who never seems to betray any taste for technological projects of any kind. To be sure, Oakshott’s separations seem to lead to a certain constructivism at the individual level, in which a “poetic” conception of the best way of life is associated with a kind of pure (but somehow not aggressive) willfulness. And Strauss would no doubt find his prognosis justified by Oakshott’s insistence that “culture” and “values” are absolutely prior to politics and by no means a matter of or product of political deliberation. This after all quite radical historicism takes a characteristically benign form in Oakshott’s thought, but (as has been noted, for example, by such a discerning and friendly critic Andrew Sullivan, Intimations Pursued) it would seem to leave Oakshott as a political thinker defenseless before the ugliest cultural and ideological assertions. In this sense Strauss would argue that Oakshott’s failure to appreciate the classical rule of reason causes him to throw out reason itself along with modern rationalism and leaves him vulnerable to the leveling, homogenizing power of democracy-technology.

Notwithstanding these Straussian questions that it seems to me Oakshott would have difficulty answering, it is time to grant that there is something attractive, even compelling in Oakshott’s aesthetic or “poetic” appreciation of the immediacy of ordinary life. There is truth in the separation of life from the rule of teleological reflection, because there is a beautiful mystery in the givenness of existence that cannot be referred to “higher” plan of reflection. This attunement to what Charles Taylor calls the sacredness of the ordinary surely points to some truth, and one to which Leo Strauss might seem to be utterly tone deaf. Strauss quite assiduously ignores this truth, because it is ultimately a Christian truth, and because, for Strauss, Christianity, in its appeal to the longings of ordinary human beings, its sanctification of a goodness irreducible to the resigned elevation of classical “reason,” is the real “first wave” of modernity.

I have been gone for a long time; i wrote this last night and posted it also on the weekly standard wesbite this morning. it’s a case of double entry blogkeeping, but i can’t resist.

How low can you go? This is the question confronting the nation in the aftermath of President Obama’s deep bow to the Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko last Saturday.

In contrast to the greeting the President accorded to the King of Saudi Arabia in April, where spooked White House officials dismissed what looked like a full gesture of obeisance as a mere exercise in height adjustment, this time there was no ambiguity. The President executed a clear, full-scale, and unmistakable bow. It was the most transparent act of his presidency—ample, sweeping, and bounteous. Yet contrary to what some malicious bloggers alleged, it was not, by Japanese standards, excessive. For a Japanese person visiting the Emperor, who is the symbol of the state and the highest authority of the Shinto religion, President Obama’s dip, for a man his height, was appropriate according to local custom. His only flaw, commented on by Japanese observers, was to have extended simultaneously his hand. The norm is that one must choose: there is no shaking and bowing at the same time, however athletic such a maneuver might appear.

Though largely correct in form, the President’s act poses some thorny problems for the future. Just how does one decide when and to whom a President should bow? If the President follows local custom in some cases but not others, will not some feel that they have been gratuitously insulted? What must King Abdullah be thinking this week of the (half) bow (half) disavowed that he received, compared to the full monty extended to emperor? Is the House of Saud inferior to the Japanese imperial family, or Islam less honorable than Shinto? And then there is the queen of England, no insignificant figure, who is not only head of state (and of the Commonwealth), but also a spiritual figure in her own right, as leader of the Church of England. Yet Her Majesty did not merit so much as a presidential curtsy, while Michelle touched her on the back. Does a President in this day and age bow to non-Westerners, but not to a white Christian women? Whatever the Queen’s humiliation may have been, one can rest assured she will bear it, in good British fashion, with a stiff upper lip. Besides, she has her presidential ipod, filled with Broadway show tunes, to console her.

It has been widely claimed, although with no confirmation yet by students of the presidency, that Barack Obama is the first American President to have thus lowered himself to a foreign leader. The idea has at least the ring of plausibility. Bowing to a monarch would seem to violate the spirit of the Revolution, which wasn’t wildly favorable to displays of rank, as well as to run counter to our proclaimed self-evident truth of all persons being created equality. But then again, this may be just one of our local customs. President Obama has nuanced our notions of universal truths as instances of America’s assertions of exceptionalism, when, as he reminds us, “Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” When truth is made relative all that remains is the authority of custom.

Another possibility, less theoretical, is that the President has taken to bowing, because he is still a novice in foreign affairs. Either he does not travel with a protocol officer—the State Department does not seem to count for much in this Administration—or, what is more worrisome, he is too confident in his own intelligence to be instructed. His first instinct when dealing with those whom intellectuals deem the “other” has been repeatedly to go the extra mile to display his signs of respect. But what is appropriate for the son of an anthropologist might be wanting for the dignity of “America’s first Pacific President.”

Of course, change can only go so far. President Obama, like other presidents before him, has already had to take into account certain practical considerations. Before beginning his trip to Asia, the President very unceremoniously refused a meeting with the Dali Lama, bowing preemptively to the tender feelings of the Chinese. The meeting will be rescheduled. Of necessity, the current Dalai Lama, who has been dispossessed of his country and lives in exile, has had to relax traditional expectations. In good democratic fashion, he is regularly seen shaking hands with foreign dignitaries or, as he seems to prefer, simply folding hands in a prayer-type greeting. Yet by local custom, the Dalai Lama is typically greeted by Tibetans with a deep bow, or, in a more formal setting, such as at his residence in Dharamsala or in the context of a public ritual, with three or more full prostrations to him. For our young prince, another self-inflicted dilemma may soon be in the offing: To bow or not to bow, that is the question.

So lots of folks here in Rochester are talking about Sarah who will be signing books at one of our local Borders this Saturday. The whole drama following her public life is mostly silly and it’s hard to imagine that she could ever be a serious contender for the GOP’s nomination in 2012 for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she’s simply too politically divisive and, of course, underqualified though one could say the same regarding our current president. Still, the hyperventtilated critiques hurled at Palin from so many quarters is so unhinged and immoderate that it turns out to be instructive in understanding the ways in which so many political disputes today find expression in cultural cleavages. Back in November 2008 I wrote a short article on this for the now defunct Culture11 magazine, which our friends at The New Atlantis have generously reprinted at their own website.

So here’s my American conclusion of my article critical of European depoliticization:

The Americans, as our English friend Chesterton observed with some ambivalence, are the seeming oxymoron, a creedal nation. We are, he memorably said, “a nation with the soul of the church.” America, he added, is all about “the romance of the citizen” and “a home for the homeless” everywhere. The American creed is that all human beings are created equal, because there’s a personal center of significance in the universe that grants each of us significance. Everyone, in principle, can be a citizen of our country who accepts the “dogmatic lucidity” of that national faith.

That faith is about citizens, because it’s the foundation of the way of life shared in our territorial home. But it’s a faith that the foundation of citizenship is not a merely national construction; we’re at home with the thought that the nation is not the real source of the significance of citizens. And so the true foundation of citizenship lies in the truth about the person and the relationship between being politically at home and our truest home. We’ve never shared the French view—or even the view of the ancient polis—that citizens are created out of nothing. Nor have we ever shared today’s European view that the person must be detached from the citizen to display his true freedom.

The American view is that citizenship is only one part—but a real part—of whole human lives; the person experiences himself as both a political and transpolitical being. The romance of the citizen, for us, displays part of the truth about the equal significance we all share as unique and irreplaceable beings. (That means, as Chesterton learned, in part, from Lincoln, that our Declaration’s faith is not merely or most deeply Lockean. There is a foundation for the significance of each particular person in nature itself, and that thought depends at least upon a distinctively Christian sort of Deism that was a product of the Declaration’s legislative compromising of Lockean and Calvinist concerns.)

This view of America, which finds its home among conservative Americans today, is the best explanation of why America can be a nation without succumbing to nationalism, of why we are so comparatively adept in reconciling the particularity of the citizen with the universality of personal principle, of why History (with a capital H) never took firm, depersonalizing root here, of why the most Christian of Americans can be the best citizens, of why there are credible Christian and secular accounts of our founding principles that are in some respects in principle irreconciliable but nonetheless are readily compromisable, and of why we are so confident that the nation is the form by which democratic self-government can and should take root everywhere.

This view of America is arguably weakening in the face of the envy of our sophisticates of the purer or postpolitical morality of the Europeans, but its future may be if not certainly the last—arguably the best—hope for the future of both the person and the citizen—the combination indispensable for self-government in our or any Christian or post-Christian time—everywhere.

America’s persistent, political self-understanding of itself as a nation, as Charles Krauthammer pointed out in a somewhat different way recently, is the main reason why that we continue to fund a huge military establishment capable of projecting our power and influence everywhere. The Europeans have chosen to have minimal military expenditures and increasingly reduced military capabilities. When they need airlifts, the turn to our Air Force, and they rely on our navy for keeping the open seas open. Much of Europe’s relative depoliticization or de-nationalization is parasitic upon one nation in particular.

The Europeans can afford not to do everything required to defend themselves precisely because we choose not to be like them. For us (at least so far), the European life of excessive personal liberation in comfort and safety is decadence based on self-denial. If we choose to live like them, who, in fact, would protect us? We seem stuck with being a nation, and the Europeans, it seems to me, ought not only to praise our distinctiveness, but follow the advice of their conservative or national thinkers–such as Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent–and do what they can to imitate it.

So I’m not endorsing any particular American intervention, but I do think the isolationism of the republicanism of our Front Porcher friends misunderstands who we are and our indispensable purpose in the world in our time. I also think it’s more pagan than Christian, but that’s a story for another time.

Eric Voegelin, in his essay The Gospel and Culture, (Vol. 12, CW) explained that classical philosophy and Christianity share the same “noetic core.” Voegelin explicates the noetic core as the experience of the push-pull of the “golden cord” wherein life is gained, and awareness of existence in the “In-between of human-divine participation,” and the understanding of divine reality inherent in the tension defined as question and answer (the philosopher’s quest).

Voegelin goes on to describe the noetic component of these movements as “…a dynamic of existential knowledge which Aristotle compressed in the formula that human thought (nous) in search of the divine ground of being is moved (kineitai) by the divine Nous who is the object of thought (noeton) of the human nous (Metaphysics 1072a3of.).”

Voegelin also makes two interesting statements: (1) “To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in the society and history,” and (2) “And, finally, since there is no doctrine to be taught but only the story to be told of God’s pull becoming effective in the world through Christ, the Saving Tale that answers the question of life and death can be reduced to the brief statement:

And this is life eternal:

To know you, the only true God,

and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (John: 17:3)”

We are just now coming out of an age of doctrinization that has had the deleterious effect of obscuring the truth inherent in experiential reality and a secular age that has sought to destroy the transcendent pole of a reality defined as nonexistent. Consequently, we are seeking to recapture those symbols whose truth belongs to nonexistent realities and this presents a problem because in an age dominated by empiricism, “rationalism,”and technology it is difficult for us, culturally, to recognize the meditative components of the “engendering reality.” Yet, these truths, Voegelin tells us, found in the symbols act as the “source of right order in human existence.”

The ground of being is revealed in the metaleptic relationship where the divine and being dwell together in the tension of existence is Voegelin’s response to the questions of existence and being found in the philosophy of consciousness. His answer, however, opened his analysis to the problem of subjectivism.

In his paper, Voegelin and Schelling on Freedom and the Order of Existence, Dr. Steven F. McGuire argues that Friedrich W.J. Von Schelling solves Voegelin’s dilemma by showing that “..a philosophy of order cannot be a philosophy of consciousness only: it must be a metaphysicis of the existence that contains consciousness, which means, for Schelling, that it must be a philosophy of freedom.”

Schelling’s insight revealed that (1) “being is prior to thinking,” and (2) “…the Absolute is what makes consciousness possible and therefore can never be contained within it.”

The answer to John’s questions is provided by McGuire when he writes, “Our very existence is constituted by truth,” and in explicating that “Schelling develops this insight in his identity philosophy by arguing for the Absolute as the unity that must necessarily precede the subject-object dichotomy of the finite world.”

On the question of the means of experiencing that truth, Dr. McGuire writes, “Schelling now thinks of freedom as both that which makes existence possible and the principle by which we recognize the order of that which we live within.”

Here’s a short article that outs the truth about the Democrats’ health care strategy. They know the “reform” isn’t going to save money. They also know that it’s a huge leap with unpredictable consequences. But they don’t care, and their moment, they know, is now. For them, the issue is less about quality and cost than about being more equitable–putting everyone in the same boat. And so their goal is creating a huge and irreversible new entitlement that will make the middle class far more dependent on government. That will be permanent good news for the BIG GOVERNMENT party. The reason for the present Republican surge is that this isn’t change that most Americans believe in, although it is change they voted for (at least if any of them gave a moment’s thought to the more or less inevitable policy consequences of their votes for Obama and a Democratic Congress).

I note that, on the Front Porcher site, there’s a divide on this issue. Mark Mitchell wants health care deregulated and decentralized; he’s for localist subsidiarity. But Russell Fox has no objection to the nationalization of health care. He’s a Christian Democrat, after all, and that’s the way they do stuff in the European countries that recently were ruled and socially democratically reformed by Christian Democrats.

National health care is more Christian and loving or less capitalist, the thought is. It’s good to to use government to keep people from having to worry about what health care costs; health care is what every dignified being needs and deserves. But one problem among many is that Europe hasn’t been Christian Democratic for a while. And whatever the virtues of their health care plans, everyone knows they’re not sustainable demographically for much longer.

We Americans, at this point, will be spared the pain the post-Christian and post-democratic Europeans will experience when they’re stuck with weaning themselves off entitlements they’ve become very used to and can no longer afford. There might have been a real argument for us reforming in their direction in, say, 1958. But not now!

The genuinely subsidiarity-minded Porchers should be the most extreme opponents of the Pelosi/Obama health care reforms, even if they voted Obamacon out of anti-Bush spite or misty cultural concerns. Everyone knows that the EU has turned the idea of subsidiarity into a cruel joke for Europeans.

I’m all for subsidiarity as described by our philosopher-pope. And that’s why I’m not big on European cradle-to-grave dependence on government. In our country, for example, people still think, studies show, that old people are primarily the responsibility of their families, while in Europe people think the burden has primarily devolved to the government.

Here Yuval Levin argues that this is precisely what we’re currently witnessing given the Democrat party’s aggressive lurch to the left. Also, our own Peter Lawler points out that, more than ever, Republicans need to clearly and uncompromisingly assert their basic principles, distinguishing themselves from a ruling party that has proven remarkably ideological, unyieldingly partisan, and generally out of touch with the American people, including many of those who voted them into power. However, for those envisioning the kind of Republican resurgence witnessed in 1994 we should note that very little of the opportunity presented to Republicans is a consequence of their leadership, that in fact much of it might be despite an obvious dearth of it, and that such leadership will be necessary to capture the potential gains from Democrat overreach.