Manent Studies—Part Deux

1. The the modern nation, at its best, is based on the realistic observations that each of us is a citizen, but more than a citizen. The so-called theological-political problem only exists when we politicize theology or deny the relative but quite real autonomy of political life. We learn from Manent that Pascal was right that Christianity knows man—or embodies in its theology an anthropology that tells the truth about who we are.

2. Pascal is right with a very important exception: Christianity (especially in its Pascalian/Augustinian form) is weak on the pleasures and duties connected with the necessarily but still choiceworthy political dimensions of our lives. Manent follows Tocqueville in his political correction of Pascal, and in his Pascalian correction of Aristotle.

3. We can say, with Manent, that Straussians—especially those he calls his American Straussian friends—exaggerate the so-called theological-political problem. For them, human freedom—the true freedom to be more than a citizen—exists in the philosopher alone.

4. But, Manent asks: Who exactly is this philosopher? Well, we say he’s Socrates, but the Socrates Strauss presents us—one faithfully based on the character in Plato’s dialogues— is someone somewhat unreal, a sort of an abstraction. We remember that the character Socrates is abstracted from the historical Socrates, the real guy, just as the philosopher-king, in his wisdom, is abstracted from the character Socrates. The character is one step removed from reality, and the philosopher king is twice removed.

5. Strauss, Pierre explains, restored to the world the nobility of the possibility of the liberation of the human mind from political domination, but he did so, perhaps, at the price of presenting Socrates or “the philosopher” as too purely mind or not as a whole human being. As Strauss says, from the point of view of this pure philosopher, nonphilosophic lives seem deformed or mutilated or full of desperation imperfectly calmed by diversion.

6. But from even Manent’s surely highly philosophic view, Socrates seems somewhat mutilated in a different way. Philosophy or the philosopher, at a certain point, is separated almost entirely from the real human being. No real human being can or should live in such disinterested detachment from ordinary human concerns. That’s why, Pierre says, he finds more real humanity in the religious person, the person for whom human or relational bonds are of real concern all the way down—or all the way up.

7. Manent remarks that, for him, the philosopher—the figure of Socrates presented, by, say, the American Straussian Allan Bloom—is almost repulsive.