Theory must rule practice, and yet it cannot. Thinking is called to assume and to represent Being, but thinking is always preceded and exceeded by Being. This very excess of Being with respect to thinking – transcendence — reason necessarily configures along two axes of significance or of free signifying that we may call “vertical” and “horizontal.”

The vertical axis is determined by the self-affirmation of the thinking agent himself or herself: the affirmation of the rule of reason, general and impersonal, merges with the concrete affirmation of the goodness of the thinker’s own concrete being, of his soul. Vertical transcendence enjoys itself and would be satisfied in its superiority over mere necessity and instrumentality; it is good in itself, it is noble. The freedom of this transcendence is the proud rule of reason, its positive affirmation of its own nobility. This freedom is pagan.

The horizontal axis of transcendence emerges from reason’s awareness that it is called by something or someone other than itself, that thinking is responsible to what is irreducibly other. This awareness opens thinking to the claims of all other human beings and to non-representable possibilities or to the possibility of what is non-representable, what cannot be grasped by reason. Horizontal transcendence hungers and thirsts for justice, a justice it does not possess, and therefore does not grasp or represent, a possible unlimited and universal justice projected upon a possible future. The freedom of this transcendence is humble openness to the possibility of a justice it does not claim to possess or represent, and thus its negation of present, concrete, prideful representations and affirmations of nobility. This freedom is biblical.

Neither of these axes of transcendence, vertical and horizontal, can signify without the other; there is no place for meaning in either line but only in some surface opened up by the tension between them. The freedom of self-affirmation would collapse into mute sameness or self-identity without some openness to a possibility it does not already represent, and the freedom of openness to otherness and possibility would be no one’s freedom and have no meaning in any actual world if it were not affirmed by an actual human agent who possessed some sense of his own concrete goodness or nobility as representable within some actual world.

Reason’s responsibility is therefore to hold open some such surface of meaning within the space defined by these axes. Alexis de Tocqueville came to understand this responsibility by reflecting on the threat to meaningful, humane transcendence posed by the modern attempt to synthesize reason’s pride with its openness to universal possibility, to collapse the tension between the two axes of transcendence. He named this threat the abolition of “the laws of moral analogy.”

“All we ask is that decisions be based upon reason.”

The speaker was a political scientist, addressing other political scientists. The subject was the role of the American judicial branch. But the frustrated assertion of the authority of simple reason is a familiar one in contemporary American political discourse.

The assertion is frustrated because “reason” is taken to have a simple meaning. And the meaning of “reason” seems to be simple because it is taken to be simply opposed to mere opinion, to prejudice, and to the mother of all prejudices, revealed religion.

This simplification has roots that go back hundreds of years, to Marsilius of Padua’s truncated Aristotelian response to priestly political claims and to Machiavelli’s separation of “the effectual truth” from the truth simply, or the truth of the soul. In another sense, this modern simplification is prepared by the Christian complication to which it responds, the separation of Ceaser’s realm from God’s. This simplification has certainly served a worthy purpose in enforcing a truce among warring sects, in checking the real or potential claims of popes and priests to political rule over the souls of men, and in channeling rationalized energies towards the “relief of man’s estate.” But the questions of the meaning of reason, of its competence and limitations with respect to human purposes or to what was long called “the soul,” cannot be deferred forever. Modern rationalism’s debt of reflection, after many quite successful restructurings, may be falling due, again, perhaps one last time.

Reason’s responsibility is a problem because the rule of simple reason is as impossible as it is inevitable. It is impossible because a clear and distinct grasp of the meaning and goodness of human existence eludes our natural powers, if only because human beings are naturally aware of being part of some larger whole. Thus an answer to the “practical” question of human purpose cannot be simply separated from the “theoretical” question of the way things are, of the nature or Being of what is highest or somehow ultimate. As Tocqueville saw with great clarity, human existence, considered personally or collectively, depends on “dogmatic beliefs,” and “nothing can prevent” beliefs or intimations regarding what is highest or ultimate “from being the common spring from which all else originates.” [DA II.i.5] The good or goods to which reason is necessarily oriented cannot be produced by reason; the meaning of the good cannot escape contamination from shared and inherited understandings of ultimate purpose and thus of the way things are. Thus reason can never be autonomous in any simple sense, if only because the independence or integrity of practical in relation to theoretical reason is not a given, but, as we shall see, a standpoint that must somehow be secured.

And yet the rule of reason is necessary or inevitable because it follows from our nature as speaking and political beings – as rational but not wholly or simply rational beings. Our most basic and necessary activities: self-preservation, production and reproduction are not governed by instinct but mediated by thinking – by awareness, foresight, and speech. Indeed every recognition of the limits of reason, and therefore of the necessary subordination of human agency to ancestral ways or to a revealed Word, is mediated by reason, as in these very thoughts I am now articulating. If we are flies caught in the web of an understanding of Being that precedes and exceeds us, then we are also spiders who actively secrete meanings by which we more or less knowingly contribute to the production of webs. Perhaps the direct and comprehensive rule of God or of an absolutely comprehensive and unambiguous Divine Law would cancel the necessity of the rule of reason, but such a condition would not be the human condition as we know it, and the beings so ruled would not be what we mean by human beings. As long as we remain human beings, even the sacrifice of the rule of reason would seem somehow at some point to engage reason’s responsibility.

Because the simple rule of reason is impossible – because reason cannot autonomously produce the meaning or purpose with a view to which it might rule, responsible reason necessarily stands ambivalently in relation to commonly held beliefs and assumptions: it negates or questions them at the same time as it depends upon and reinforces them; reason draws its own meaning from mere “opinion” or “prejudice” even as it guides and shapes less rational understandings. The problem of the constitution and character of the elusive public, authoritative horizon (or, if you prefer, of the field of the perpetual renegotiation of authoritative horizons) out of which we assume responsibility for ourselves as individual persons, and the problem of the meaning and status of reason – of our imperfect and ever-renegotiated awareness as speaking, thinking beings of the way things are, an inescapably governing awareness of our being in relation to our surrounding world – these are pervasively, inescapably bound up together. The existential-ethical questions as to who I am and what I am to do are inseparable at once from the political question who we are and from the theoretical or “ontological” question of the way things are.
[To be continued, maybe.]

Astute observations and important reflections by James, Will, and Ivan just below nourish my ongoing reflections on the meaning of reason’s responsibility today. The left’s appeals to “scientific” or otherwise purely “rationalist” reason appear more and more febrile and perhaps desperate, as if it is about to dawn on secular rationalists just how thin is the ice on which they are skating.

I am reminded of a remark I overheard a couple of years ago: “All we ask is that decisions be based upon reason.” The speaker was a political scientist, addressing other political scientists. The subject was the role of the American judicial branch. But the frustrated assertion of the authority of simple reason is one that echoes far and wide in contemporary American political discourse.

The assertion is frustrated because “reason” is taken to have a simple meaning. And the meaning of “reason” seems to those who wield it in this way to be simple because it is taken to be simply opposed to mere opinion, to prejudice, and to the mother of all prejudices, revealed religion.

This simplification has roots that go back hundreds of years, to Marsilius of Padua and to Machiavelli, notably. It has served its purpose in checking the real or potential claims of popes and priests to political rule over the souls of men, and in channeling rationalized energies towards the “relief of man’s estate.” But the questions of the soul, including those of what used to be called “the rational soul,” cannot be deferred forever, and it seems that the debt of reflection is falling due.

A recent, as always vigorous and provocative piece by Mark Steyn on “Why the Fascists are Winning in Europe” calls to mind in its themes (if not in its tone and style) Leo Strauss’s immensely challenging address on “German Nihilism” of 1941. Both address societies in which “reason,” or let’s say the progressive sensibility more generally, has taken on an increasingly negative meaning: enlightened people do not affirm their own interests or “values” but proceed by negating what their own kind stand for (proudly and often angrily, as Ivan notes), as if tolerance of “the other” could be, not the exception in normal political life, but the very rule of human association.

What Leo Strauss had already understood in 1941, having worked through his own “German nihilist” (that is fascist or proto-fascist) temptation, is that if reason is to survive as a moderator of prejudices, it must befriend the honorable prejudices or approximate truths of non-intellectuals who are ready to stand for something. And (as too many Straussians fail to see), to accomplish this political function the philosopher must respect the provenance of goods essential to the order of his own soul that “simple reason” cannot create ex nihilo.

Mr. Poulos, in reference to my recently posted “Draft Manifesto 2.0,” set me to reconsidering the last pages of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli. Whether he suspected how many hours this invitation would cost me, I do not know, but, now that the ordeal is (temporarily) over, I thank him for tempting me. These final pages are wild stuff indeed, and, after numerous re-readings, I’m ready to venture some hunches. File under: “Desperately Seeking Interlocutors.”

Needless to say, my little hermeneutical exercise will not be to the taste of many, probably most, readers. Fair enough – none of this is required for the final exam (as I sometimes say to my students, in order to claim the freedom to talk about something that really interests me). But just in case you, too, are vulnerable to such a temptation, let me offer this prefatory apology for such close attention to Strauss.

Why read and re-read Strauss? Because no one interpellates the founders and foundations of modernity so relentlessly or dissects them so expertly, exquisitely – and no one undertakes the critique of modernity with less confidence than Strauss (despite deliberate appearances) in any known alternative. He both guides us further than anyone and leaves us more responsibility to carry on the quest.

That said, I launch into my little re-reading. Here is Mr. Poulos’ inviting question:

In re 1.1.3, I’m put in mind of the last page of Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli, which purports to reveal the one aspect in which Machiavelli’s political science has a foundation: “The difficulty implied in the admission that inventions pertaining to the art of war must be encouraged is the only one which supplies a basis for Machiavelli’s criticism of classical political philosophy.” Strauss warns that this difficulty, however, is the result of a bad (modern) idea about what science is: “such a use of science is excluded by the nature of science as a theoretic pursuit.” But Strauss goes on to say that Machiavelli’s rather premodern consideration that “natural cataclysms” will snap humanity back from scientific excess and cultural corruption has been “rendered incredible by the experiences of the last centuries.” Strauss drops a footnote here which does nothing I can tell to clarify this incredibly cryptic phrase. And he closes suggesting that classical philosophy must ‘rethink’ “the beneficence of nature” or “the primacy of the Good.” What, in your estimation, gives?

And my reply:

Whenever Strauss uses the word “only” in some decisive statements I see neon lights flashing. For example, the “only” thing Machiavelli owes to Christianity is “propaganda” – which is to say, a whole lot – the very horizontalization of transcendence I would say, in my shorthand. Here: the “only” basis for Machiavelli’s criticism of the classics has to do with the necessity of military technology. (p. 299 – the last.) On the previous page, Strauss has shockingly asked “what essential defect of classical political philosophy could possibly have given rise to the modern venture as an enterprise that was meant to be reasonable.” Does Strauss actually grant the existence of some such“essential defect”? What is the difference between a project that is “mean to be reasonable” and one that is in fact reasonable? If the modern project was only meant to be reasonable, then need there be any “essential” defect in the classical alternative?

Let us pursue what seems to be Strauss’s surprising suggestion, that is, that classical political philosophy is defective and vulnerable in some essential way. Why would it be so decisive an admission for a classical philosopher to recognize that technology must be fostered, if only for the purpose of military defense? Re-reading a few preceding pages, I am reminded that what is fundamentally at stake here, as always for Strauss, is “the nature of science as a theoretical pursuit.” (299) Everything depends upon science or theory or philosophy being understood as a purely disinterested participation in “the realm of necessity” (298), that is, on “the superiority of thinking to doing or making.” (295) Any breach in the barrier separating theory from practice (such as admitting the necessity of military technology) seems to Strauss to threaten the “radical [classical] distinction between philosophers and non-philosophers,” to efface the borders of “the cave,” and thus to undermine the idea of “nature ordered toward fixed ends,” thus leaving humanity to be understood as “infinitely malleable.”

Now, the curious thing about Strauss’s discussion of the relation of theory and practice in this context is that, whereas Machiavelli and the moderns are in one sense accused of collapsing or fusing the categories (“philosophy is to fulfill the function of both philosophy and religion”), it is also true that modern philosophy (parallel, I would say, to extreme interpretations of Christian transcendence, as in certain forms of nominalism and in Calvin) assumes a standpoint more radically removed from practical experience than anything articulated in classical philosophy: “the human in man is implicitly understood to reside in an Archimedean point outside of nature.” Modern transformative “materialism” depends upon a certain (I would say Christian or post-Christian) spiritualism or “idealism” (297) a “jump from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.” (298) For Strauss this leap into “an expanding universe” threatens “the very possibility of human excellence.” But on close inspection of what Strauss calls this “amazing process,” we are given to understand that modern man’s becoming “every more shallow” or materialistic is the underside of his limitless freedom, his idealistic openness to an “expanding universe” which can be contained by no natural figure of human excellence.

All of Strauss’s work, it seems to me, constitutes an attempt, perhaps not a very confident attempt, to check this process of idealistic expansion and materialistic contraction by reviving the classical “philosopher” as a determinate figure of human excellence. To do this Strauss insists, in direct opposition to Heidegger’s abandonment of philosophy to History, and notably to his embrace of the movement of the least wise at their worst moment (1933 – WIPP), on the utter remoteness of philosophical concerns from the “paltry and ephemeral” (Restatement to Kojeve) practical concerns of ordinary human beings. However, as these last pages of Thoughts reveal, Strauss’s intention is precisely to counter the appeal of the “Archimedean point” of extreme and abstract transcendence (cf. Nietzsche’s ascetic star) and to reconnect thinking with practical, moral being. Machiavelli has forgotten “the soul” and thus cannot account for his own greatness (294) because he has forgotten justice or “the sacredness of ‘the common’.” (292) He does not understand that “moral virtue” is not only a “qualified requirement of society” but is more fundamentally “a requirement of philosophy or of the life of the mind.” If he cannot understand “moral-political phenomena in the light of man’s highest virtue or perfection, the life of the philosopher or the contemplative life,” this is because he no longer implicitly understands (as did the classics) the philosophic life in terms of the moral-political phenomenon; Machiavelli (and the moderns who follow him) no longer situate pure theory at the pinnacle of a practical scale of virtue, the anchor of “the stability of excellence.” (295)

Thus it is precisely because and only so long as philosophy does not know itself as “edifying” that it remains “of necessity edifying.” (299 – the very last words of Thoughts). Hence the great dilemma haunting Strauss’s project: he must revive classical philosophy as edifying without insisting upon or even explaining its edifying essence, that is, its intrinsic connection with moral excellence. And this is not only a rhetorical, but in fact a real philosophical difficulty. For it is possible that Strauss understands the ancients better than they understood themselves. The confidence of the ancients in the superiority of theory is inseparable from their contempt for the demos, from the conviction that “the city is necessarily the cave,” that there is an absolute gulf between the demos and the philosopher. But Strauss himself is constantly showing the permeability of this barrier, of the city’s “openness, or deference, to philosophy,” though of course he is less candid about philosophy’s necessary conditioning by this very openness. Strauss’s difficulty is in fact plain in his most characteristic formula: the city is both closed and open to philosophy; his whole project depends on his having things both ways on this decisive question – philosophy is continuous with morality, theory with practice, and it is not – and this despite his apparently absolute allegiance to the principle of non-contradiction.

Strauss’s philosophical difficulty can be stated simply: philosophers are not wholly exempt from the desire to rule, and so the demos is not simply wrong in its distrust of the aristocratic pretentions of the philosophers. The materialism of the demos is not a univocal phenomenon, for, as Christianity will reveal, it is the underside of a telling critique of human pride, a demotion of “the sacredness of the common” politically understood against the standard of a some more rigorous transcendence, a freedom with respect to the human city that flows from an openness to what is somehow at once more truly sacred and more truly common.

I agree with Strauss that this Christian and modern openness is inseparable from the danger of a radical closing, a closing to determinate and livable figures of human virtue, the closing of “technology.” Strauss bids us combat this closing by a return to “fundamental experiences” from which is derived “the notion of the beneficence of nature or of the primacy of the Good.” (299) I do my best to follow him in this most worthy quest. But Strauss himself has taught us – whether despite himself or not, I cannot tell – that there is no more fundamental experience than that of a freedom that cannot be reserved to philosophers alone. And so somehow we must learn to consult both dimensions of the fundamental experience of our humanity.