Here are some not quite random reflections on Strauss. I know the Wittgenstein inspired bullet point presentation style leaves something to be desired, but just keep in mind it’s not meant to create the impression of any real exactitude.

1. The noetic hetergeneity thesis seems to contradict the centrality of Socratic ignorance to philosophy for Strauss. Knowing parts of the whole as wholes themselves seems considerably more Aristotelian than Platonic. Still, Strauss says its not a full ignorance but rather knowledge of our ignorance of the whole, which he calls mysterious. SO we can know lots of things about the parts without knowing the whole, as long as the parts are also wholes in themselves.

2. BUT then the NH thesis seems to undermine the reason revelation thesis which states that reason is only vindicated against the claims of revelation IF we have an account of the whole. This is philosophically dubious in itself but also inconsistent with NH.

3. Strauss intends NH as a way to vindicate philosophy independent of cosmology-he calls the difference between the human and non-human “essential”. He also describes NH as a return to common sense, and the surface of things. SO NH seems to mean that we can understand human life given its pre-theoretical intelligibilty without  KNOWING the mysterious whole. So Strauss says the cosmos is the home of the human mind whether or not it is eternal or created, meaning whatever fundamental cosmology we choose.

4. HOWEVER, he also writes to Kojeve that he “assumes” an uncreated and stable eternal order that is essential to philosophy. He’s cagey on this-in City and Man he says Aristotle’s physics and politics are entirely separable but completely contradicts this in two other places. Either way, he describes his own cosmological thesis to Kojeve as a hypothesis alone.

5. Strauss sometimes discusses NH as an alternative to the platonic doctrine of ideas-the former is ‘sober” and the later “mad”. But he also says Socratic ignorance is nothing more than knowledge of the fundamental problems which he interchangeably calls “unchangeable ideas”. Both NH and Ideas though are described as an “openness to the whole”.

6. Strauss says in Persecution and the Art of Writing that the highest political task of the philosopher is the defense of philosophy in the city (he repeats this on the Tyranny book). BUT consider: according to Strauss there are very few great or real philosophers (Klein says there are 15). Heidegger, he says, is the only one in our age. But only great philosophers can know other great philosophers and Strauss places his own work on the level of Lessing. Moreover, he says that philosophy is only possible because the great minds disagree but if we’re not competent to identify the greats we surely can’t adjudicate their disputes. And we never know when and where a great philosopher will emerge-maybe the next one in Burma in 2025 he wonders in one essay.

7. My point is this-Strauss’ view of the political defense of philosophy presupposes the dependence of the emergence of philosophy on political circumstance-but its much more random and almost epiphanic than than that in its genesis. The real issue is the defense of the city/political life against the only great philosopher of the age: Heidegger. Strauss’ whole project is conventionally couched as a defense of philosophy against the city but his efforts really move in the opposite direction. This is at the heart of Strauss’ attempt to draw a close connection between philosophy and political prudence while suppressing the madness that is philosophy. NH turns out to be the sober presentation of the doctrine of ideas in this regard.

8. I can only comment briefly on this now but a big problem for Strauss is that the only real philosopher of the age, at least in his estimation, not only throws in his lot with the “least moderate forces” politically but also challenges the possibility of philosophy itself. I should point out that Strauss considered Heidegger to be a philosopher despite the fact that he clearly didn’t believe philosophy amounts to nothing other than Socratic ignorance, or a grasping of the fundamental problems. In fact, Strauss charges Heidegger with “oblivion to eternity” and a contempt for permanencies”.

8. The overarching premise of Strauss’ project seems to be the eternity of the cosmos, which cannot be known or demonstrated, since the cosmos is mysterious. BUT we have a pre-theoretical access to the intelligible surface of our own experience of our contingency, and the intersection, however fleeting, of that contingency with eternity through philosophy. The argument for philosophy then turns out to have a cosmological component in almost Kantian fashion-we have an articulateable experience and so we deduce the conditions that make it possible. Strauss learned that procedure from his Marburg days.

Our hosts at First Things have asked me to pass this request along to our readers:

In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan wonders if a string of failures for the Obama administration counts as mounting evidence not only against his primary claim to rule, executive competence, but also against the undergirding premises of liberal political philosophy. The debate between liberals and conservatives over the proper role of government tends to occur on an oddly philosophical plane, almost ethereal when you consider the tangible stakes of the contest. We get locked at the horns over the definition of the individual, the precise character of human nature, the conditions for a healthy expression of personal liberty, etc. Of course, these are important questions because they are foundational–any reasonably coherent position will have to offer some answer, however tentative, to each. Still, Noonan’s claim is that the liberal position, if it’s a theory that can boast of any practical attractiveness, has to convincingly advocate one practical premise: the competence of government as a superintendent of our lives.

As Yuval levin has argues over at NRO (I already hit my one link quota),  it’s certainly not entirely fair to blame Obama for the BP oil spill catastrophe any more than it’s fair to blame Bush for an act of God. However, both demonstrate the limits of federal government to tame the distasters and dangers that will inevitably visit and revisit us again. I tend to think Obama’s recent rhetoric has been a caricature of the progressive position- he keeps robotically insisting that his response to the spill, whatever that will be and whenever that will occur, will ensure that such a debacle never happens again. In the midst of his own paralysis, and he’s paralyzed because he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do, he stubbornly declares the he will learn to foresee the unforeseeable. He’s been reduced to self-parody, preemptively writing the SNL skits that will surely roast him in the next few weeks.

If big government liberalism is to pass muster then the general competence of American governance has to be demonstrated. We can’t take our bearings by the Swedes or the Finnish–their small scale, demographically homogenous fish bowl republics simply aren’t appropriate models for us. Our own government struggles to function as a well-calibrated machine bacause the public it ministers to is so vast and diverse, its interests so varied and exclusive, its goals so multiple and heterogenous. It has none of the advantages of, say, an American corporation which enjoys the focus that comes with a singularity of purpose and motivation, not to mention the efficiency that is the result of eschewing democratic process. Our government would be much more efficient if it could hire and fire it citizens at will and if its it only inspiration to action was profit. In an unusual way, the proponents of big government liberalism, despite the contempt they often freely show for big business, pine for the same organizational simplicity that makes their success possible.

As goofy as it seemed to many at the time, and any political slogan is a little goofy, the DMV objection to government run universal health care might have some legs. Even if we suddenly conceded the moral argument against big government, that it’s an affont to my dignity as a free individual, there’s still the basic issue of what the government can and cannot do well. I remember angrily insisting when I was a pretty young child to prepare my own lunch for school, precociously assserting my independence from my intrusive parents. I gave that argument up on practical grounds, after I had to eat what I had so freely created. So far Obama’s tenure as president has proven to be unappetizing fare, and as the polls indicate, he’s losing a lot of customers.

I have an op-ed in the Washington Times that attempts to understand the explosive racial and ethnic dimension of the current debate over the new Arizona immigration law. You should read it if for no other reason than it must be the only op-ed ever that mentions both Keith Olbermann and Chesterton.

Here David Brooks makes the argument that Elena Kagan, Obama’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, is reminscent of our elite schools’ “Organization Kids”–bright, disciplined, articulate, and well-meaning junior careerists who do everything necessary to get ahead in their chosen professions but without any real principled passion that transcends and guides their own professional motivations. So in response to Kagan’s nomination, both sides of the political aisle have begun to dig in their heels and prepare for battle, but the fact of the matter is that Kagan has been so circumspect her entire career in communicating her views, and has so meticulously avoided genuinely substantive controversy that no one really knows much for sure about her jurisprudential principles. Even those who seem to know her well consider her studiously elusive.

On the one hand, this could be construed as promising if a lifetime of cultivating this aversion to principled asssertiveness has inoculated her against ideological overreaching. In other words, it would be a good thing if the habit of avoiding offense and controversy translates into the practice of judicial humility. She seems to have approached the few major cases she’s written on with the soul of  a technician–making arguments on the basis of legal minutiae rather than philosophical worldview. This is at least some prima facie evidence that she would see her role as a justice as a high powered lawyer versus a philosopher king. This doesn’t make for inspired legal writing but I’m actually very happy to have less inspiring judges if that brings us what Peter calls a “consistent ethic of judicial restraint”.

However, the protections that come with a lifetime appointment might also have a liberating effect on a careerist–finally free from the consequences of giving offense, she can now give free rein to her political agenda. Again, her nebulousness makes it very hard to say one way or another with any certainty or even confidence. One concern of mine is that her apparent lack of interest in grand foundational issues, the kind that invite consideration within the most provocative cases, means that she has no real coherent jurisprudential view, and that in the absence of any principle or abiding check on her judgment, will have no other guidance than her own idiosyncratic political attachments.

On an unrelated note, a big WELCOME ABOARD to Carl Scott! It took my considerable powers of persuasion, or my special brand of annoying persistance, to convince him to join us.

First Things, our generous host magazine, is now having its annual online fundraising week. This week only they’re offering to their readers a special subscription rate of $19.95 for the print magazine. To get this deal, readers have to go to this page (https://www.firstthings.com/bloggerpromo.php) and type in the promo code for our blog  (“pomocon). That will give them the half-off rate for a year’s subscription. This helps support the magazine which in turn supports us at the blog by ensuring we have a venue for expression. So reach into your wallets and let the generosity begin!

So I’ve been thinking through some of the work I’ve done in the last year on Modern American Technocracy and I’d like to publicly articulate some tentative conclusions. Some of these might be more lucid than others but try to cut me some slack since it’s 4am.

1. The central and distinguishing characteristic of modernity is not technology itself—the Greeks were aware of the fact of invention and reflected on it systematically enough to formulate searching moral and political critiques of it. In fact, our terminology for these things is even of classical origin. Nevertheless, technology wasn’t largely understood by them to be essentially in contradistinction to nature but a mimetic reflection of it, or a consummation or perfection of nature. This means they certainly understood the “technological dimension of freedom”, as Pope Benedict pus it, as a genuine source of reflection about the peculiar character of undetermined human agency but had not yet interpreted that discovery as either the key to plumbing the depths of the being of human beings nor had they thought it prudent to politically and morally liberate human liberty itself from all restraints. Strauss is on to something when he writes that the central and maybe only difference between the ancients and the moderns regarding their respective assessments of democracy is a function of their assessments of technology.
2. This means that technocracy, or the rule of technological reason rather than the empirical fact of technology, is the hallmark of modernity. From a practical-political perspective this means the “mastery and possession of nature”, or the “relief of man’s estate”—the goal is to radically transform the “almost worthless materials furnished by nature” into something useful for man. Technological power both reveals and harnesses or directs our liberationist freedom—the “mastery” of nature is the asymptotic aggrandizement of our freedom in the direction of autonomy. From a theoretical perspective, this means that the tripartite activities of man–knowing/making/loving—has to be collapsed into making. There is a tension one can still discern in Descartes between knowing and making—he simultaneously affirms the primary goodness of knowing and the priority of making—there is a volatile dichotomy that runs through the Discourses between the beautiful and the useful. However, he ultimately tries to effectuate a synthesis of the two since knowing ends up identical to making—we only know what we make. Theory construction is like nature reconstruction—Descartes gives us a theory of practice that really produces a very abstract but un-metaphysical lionization of practice. Loving turns out to be much more resistant to its exhaustion into making or productivity—even making babies is hard to properly spin as form of productivity. Machiavelli ultimately prefers fear over love because fear is an object of rational control—we can make it—but love is mysteriously recalcitrant to a simple summoning (ask King Lear).
3. One great tension in modernity is its persistent difficulty, even utter failure, to forward a credible philosophical anthropology, or a real account of man. This is expressed in the great modern tension between two conspicuously inconsistent pursuits—the elevation of technology and the discovery of the “personal”. One can see this at the level of technology itself—the point is to personalize a cosmos indifferent to our pain and joy by remaking it in our image—we perfect the failed creation project of God. Paradoxically, the personalization of nature depersonalizes human reason and human reasoners—it disconnects human life from a proper reflection on the good, on our true moral condition, and on ourselves as particular beings. David Walsh, in his most recent work, points out that much of modern philosophy is dominated by the attempt to excavate a theoretically unvarnished encounter with existence prior to theory—however, in my view (not Walsh’s) this often counterproductively issues in even greater abstraction. Heidegger is a good example of a thinker who, in aggressively attempting to generate an account of human practice independent of theory is precipitately led into a remarkably theoretical view of practice. He tries to get to Being itself via human beings, the only part of Being open to Being, but ends up over-personalizing Being through its encapsulation by History and depersonalizing human beings by presupposing a kind of a-moral autonomy as his point of departure. For all his aversion to technological nihilism, he ultimately succumbs to it.
4. Heidegger is right that there is a technological dimension to America—one can see that the early American writings are rife with references to technology and the analogy between politics and science. Our whole republic is often discussed as an invention, one which is “unprecedented in the annals of human history”, and Madison even uses the curious phrase “inventions of prudence”. Our success depends upon a “new science of politics” that replaces “accident and force” with “reflection and choice”. I could go one and have elsewhere. However, there is also a preoccupation in the same writings with classical virtue—in other words, that which both provides content to freedom and limits it. One can see this great tension in Adams who sometimes discusses virtue as a requisite condition for the establishment of a good constitution and other times a good constitution as the sine qua non condition for virtue. Our constitution is a technological artifact—we made it—but it is also properly understood as on object of veneration. In other words, the constitution is the most ambitious political attempt to combine the traditional view that the good is connected to the ancestral with the exhilaration and goodness of innovation. America is surely modern but not irreducibly so—but like all of modernity it struggles with the task of putting together modern depersonalizing technology and the modern elucidation of the personal.

I have a lot more to say on all these things but fatigue has finally found me. As Peter often says, more soon.

If they can be found anywhere, it’s certainly in Provo. Our own Ralph Hancock, in conjunction with the brand new John Adams Center, is hosting a conference entitled God and Human Rights: Are Faith or Foundations Necessary? The conference will run events at both BYU and Utah Valley University and feature the formidable David Walsh, Ralph, yours truly, and others speaking on a wide range of subjects April 12-14. If you follow the link above you’ll find a full description of the conference program. If you happen to be passing through Provo, it would be a shame to miss what promises to be a great event. Also, if you click on the YouTube link on the center’s website you can watch videos of previous events which include lectures by Peter Lawler and Dan Mahoney.

So last night our own Peter Lawler debated leading Darwinian Conservative Larry Arnhart here at RIT over the explanatory power of Darwinian evolution to capture to the totality of human experience in general and American political experience in particular. There was an impressive turnout of students who seemed genuinely taken by the two stellar performances. Both agreed something like evolution as Darwin described it is an empirical fact, that dolphins are pretty smart, cute, and lucky not to taste as good or be as stupid or ugly as tuna. Both also agreed that human beings are in some sense special or unique parts of creation or nature but had deep and fecund disagreements over the character or ground of that privileged status.  I’ve had some time to reflect on the debate in between naps and offer a few loosely connected observations here:

1. My students had a hard time understanding that, while Peter likes to say our nation breaks into Darwin deniers and Darwin affirmers, the debate really wasn’t over the fact of Darwinian evolution per se. Peter (like Lincoln and the Pope, among others) concedes that something like Darwin’s understanding of evolution is rightfully accepted as empirically likely, if not simply settled. As Larry pointed out, Peter is no Creationist though one might argue the suspicions Creationists have about the dogmatic claims of Darwinists to explain the whole of human life comprehensively are more empirical than those claims of Darwinists. The real issue is whether or not the fact of evolution itself generates the categories sufficient to exhaustively account for the full panoply of human behavior. Scientists are in general agreement over the fact of evolution but not so much the moral comprehensiveness of Darwinian theory AND one might also point out this is not in itself a specifically scientific question. The inferences Larry and his followers draw from the science of evolution go far beyond what science on its own can confirm, are often remarkably speculative and abstract, and often simply contradict the experience we have of ourselves and of others. One fundamental and Aristotelian point Peter was making is that it is the job of theory to “save the phenomena”—philosophy is an extraordinary enterprise but rightfully begins with and takes it bearings by our ordinary experience and intuitions. Larry’s privileging of science over religion is often really a privileging of theory over experience.
2. Some of the debate revolved around the extent to which American principles could be properly understood as Christian. Larry’s tendency is to consider the deistic founders as microcosmic of the whole—they weren’t so Christian, they made us by intentional design, so we must not be all that Christian at the level of political foundations. Peter offered his now famous view that the Declaration is a compromise between hyper-modern Lockeanism and Calvinism which produces something like an “accidental Thomism”. What further complicates Peter’s view, and he often points out something like this with respect to Jefferson, is that Locke’s anti-Christian project is still deeply parasitic itself on Christian categories, specifically Christian individual freedom. My own tendency is to think that the unstated premise of Strauss’ famous critique of Locke in Natural Right and History is that behind the excessively abstract individualism that reduces human life to the “joyless quest for joy” is a radical and inexorable unfolding of the Christian interpretation of freedom in contradistinction to the absorption of the individual into nature. Strauss’ criticism of Locke is comparable to one he makes of Nietzsche: despite his hostility towards Christianity, he never completely liberates himself from its undergirding premises. Moreover, there is something about Christianity itself that prepares for its own appropriation and subsequent perversion—Strauss’ arguments versus modernity are essentially arguments also proffered against Christianity as well. So America is a complicated amalgam of Christian and modern principle which is to say between overtly Christian and ambiguously Christian sentiments. One might say the goodness of America is a function of the fact that it tempers its anti-Christian Lockeanism with genuinely Christian principles in a way that actually further elucidates the Christian view of freedom. Strauss had lots of criticisms of America but also clearly appreciated it as a force for good, especially in comparison to Communist totalitarianism, which Strauss saw as an irredeemable perversion of Christianity. Strauss is still basically anti-Christian but maybe appreciates the goodness of American Christianity more than either Darwin or Larrry.
3. Darwinism, as both Peter and Larry point out, is a helpful correction to History insofar it opposes the stability of nature to willful Historical creativity. Of course, Darwinian nature is subject to evolution but of the painfully slow variety that provides powerful evidence against a radical transformation of nature or ourselves by ourselves. However, Darwinian evolution only inspires a respect for nature until we discover, as Locke did, that we can expedite and even commandeer the process of evolution, and intentionally direct it by human labor for our own aggrandizement and comfort. Locke is a kind of secular creationist: instead of the creation of the world by the supernatural freedom of God we get the re-creation of the world by the supernatural freedom of man. So there is a line that runs from Darwinian evolution through Locke’s techno-rebellion to the discovery of History as its own ontological category. One big point of Darwinian natural pantheism is to resolve the tension between nature and freedom by making freedom somehow perfectly natural; however, it ends up intensifying that dichotomy by failing to adequately account for human freedom on exclusively natural grounds. Darwinian natural history seems to give way to human History.

Since I work at a technical institute I will tread carefully in my criticisms of the problem an obsession with technology poses to the university. James has already announced this excellent symposium in The New Atlantis but it’s now available in its entirety online. Our own Peter Lawler has a searching contribution that examines the university in light of the nature of human dignity. There are also terrific pieces by America’s leading Porcher Pat Deneen, Shilo Brooks, and Rita Koganzon. I want to say there’s no substitute for purchasing a copy of this handsome journal but free access is pretty close to one. Below is a short excerpt from my own effort:

Conservative commentators proffer two entirely reasonable but not obviously compatible criticisms of the modern university today. First, they admonish administrators and faculty alike for creating an intellectually oppressive environment; instead of inspiring an open exchange of ideas through Socratic inquiry, they impose speech codes, a stifling regime of political correctness, and a heavily politicized program of moral indoctrination designed to recruit students to the favorite causes of leftist activism. On the other hand, conservatives reprimand the same crowd for being excessively permissive, even libertine, when it comes to issues of morality, especially the realm of sexuality. Hyper-liberal universities today are simultaneously too restrictive and too indulgent, seamlessly if incoherently vacillating between the two extremes.

The two criticisms only seem contradictory, though, when viewed in isolation from the modern university’s historical context. Today, the university still claims to champion the perfection of reason, even if the idea of rational liberation, following the postmodern deconstruction of it, has been whittled down to the virtue of nonjudgmental tolerance. Moreover, the university still claims to function as the shepherd of young students’ souls, although its latent Hobbesianism prevents it from using such old-fashioned and overly religious terminology. It still claims the moral authority of in loco parentis, going so far as to radically reform — rather than merely reinforce — the moral teaching provided by inexpert parents. Today’s college administrators actually do break from their intellectual inheritance in no longer being haunted by a worrisome skepticism that their institutions are not properly suited to the tasks assigned to them, or that the tasks themselves are mutually exclusive.

While conservative critiques chastise the university for its opposition to free and unimpaired philosophical exchange, they also censure it for no longer taking seriously its commitment to civic education — the task of inculcating not just the virtue necessary for democratic participation but also the patriotic attachment to the nation that is its precondition. In effect, conservatives are duplicating the Enlightenment tension between authority and rational liberation that generated the precipitous decline of the university in the first place. Essentially, conservatives want to combine the rational and erotic elements of the human soul but often without a clear idea of what this means. They instinctively and rightly understand that the disciplines have become disordered and disconnected, and that, in turn, the curricular requirements at even the best of institutions no longer abide by any unifying principle. However, they are no longer certain what could offer such a unity of either man or the disciplines that would serve him.

Much of the conservative critique’s confusion is a symptom of its intellectual debt to the most influential book written on the topic, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). For Bloom, the dampening of our erotic longings, or the woeful flattening of our souls, can be diagnosed in the symptomatic decay of university life and the crisis of confidence in its general mission. Where Bercier attempts to rescue the medieval Christian version of the university as a conduit of tradition, Bloom’s objective is to defend the Socratic essence of the university against the effects of promiscuous egalitarianism. Despite his influence on the conservative critique of the university, Bloom’s motivation cannot be considered truly conservative: the Socratic university, like Socratic philosophy, is radically detached from political and moral life and so a vehicle of liberation from tradition. For Bloom, the de-Christianization of the modern university would not be evidence of decline per se as long as it resulted in the triumph of the life of reason over faith. In Bloom’s view, the only true community is the community of philosophers — which is tantamount to casting doubt on all real, historical communities, including the university itself.