How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

Are the Straussian Fascists Showing that Will Altman Was Right About Leo Strauss?

I have written about Bronze Age Pervert's Bronze Age Mindset (here and here).  So I was interested in the recent essay by Blake Smith identifying Bronze Age Pervert as Costin Alamariu, who wrote a doctoral dissertation--The Problem of Tyranny and Philosophy in Plato and Nietzsche--under the supervision of Steven Smith, a Straussian political theorist at Yale University.  Blake Smith shows how Alamariu's dissertation explains the Straussian philosophic grounding for Bronze Age Mindset.

This connection of Alamariu's Nietzschean fascism to Strauss fits a remarkable pattern of Straussian influence with other contemporary exponents of Nietzschean fascism that I have considered on this blog.  Richard Spencer studied under Michael Gillespie at Duke University.  Michael Millerman studied under Clifford Orwin at the University of Toronto, although Orwin resigned from his dissertation committee after some newspaper stories publicized Millerman's fascist political philosophy.  Alamariu, Spencer, and Millerman were all shaped in their thinking by Leo Strauss's interpretation of Nietzsche's fascism as the best illiberal alternative to liberal democracy.

This seems to confirm what William Altman was arguing ten years ago--in a series of three books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Strauss--that Strauss was the secret theoretician of National Socialism.  Altman presented his "German trilogy" of books as following a tripartite structure suggested by Strauss in his "Three Waves of Modernity."  According to Strauss, the First Wave of modernity came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the Second Wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the Third Wave came with Nietzsche and Heidegger.  If each wave comes through a sequence of three thinkers, who is the third thinker of the Third Wave?  Surely, Altman suggested, it must be Strauss himself.  And if the Third Wave leads to fascism, as Strauss indicated, then this would point to Strauss as the thinker who most fully worked out the theory of fascism or Nazism as the anti-liberal solution to the crisis of liberal democracy.

As I have indicated in my posts on Altman, I have found him to be an insightful commentator on Strauss.  But I do disagree with him on two points.  First, I think he overstates his Strauss-as-a-Jewish-Nazi thesis.  In fact, he implicitly concedes some of the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool.  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

Still, I am persuaded that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger.  Strauss never really offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them--most clearly in his lectures on "German Nihilism" and the "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism."  Significantly, these lectures were not published until after Strauss's death.

My second point of disagreement is that unlike Altman and Strauss, I see Nietzsche in his middle period (Human, All Too Human, Dawn, and the first four books of The Gay Science) as providing an alternative--based on his Darwinian liberalism--to the positions he took in his early and late writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian writings do not suffer from the contradictions that Altman rightly sees in his other writings.  Nor do the Darwinian writings provide any encouragement to the Nazis who appropriated ideas from the other writings.  Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is intellectually, morally, and politically superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism.  Strauss and the Straussians fail to see this as the Nietzschean way to defend liberalism against its illiberal critics.

Smith and Strauss on Bourgeois Liberalism and the Philosophic Life

Steven Smith's Modernity and Its Discontents elaborates the argument of Leo Strauss and the Straussians for the "crisis of liberalism" as showing "the problem of the bourgeois."  The basic idea for Smith's book comes from Strauss's "Three Waves of Modernity"--the idea that the first wave of liberal modernity is theoretically flawed in ways that provoke two waves of illiberal attacks on modernity. This suggests the question of whether Strauss and the Straussians are proposing some illiberal alternative to the bourgeois liberal order. 

Smith's answer is no, because while Strauss was a critic of liberal democracy, he was a friendly critic who saw liberal democracy (like that of the United States) as the best practicable regime for the modern world, despite its weaknesses.  And, therefore, Smith says, Strauss was actually "a classical liberal who believed that present-day liberalism requires the support of certain premodern sources of authority if it is to be sustainable" (292).   Smith is relying on what Will Altman has called the "Golden Sentence" of Straussian apologetics: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."  (Altman points out that Strauss is careful here to use the word "we" rather than "I," and that Strauss says that Maimonides uses the word "we" to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes.)

It's not clear how Smith's claim that Strauss was a friend of liberalism is consistent with Smith's observation that in his lecture on "German Nihilism," Strauss implicitly included himself among those young German nihilists who preferred a "closed morality" that was "based on such old-fashioned virtues as loyalty, duty, honor, and self-sacrifice" as showing a higher level of humanity than an "open morality" that was "divorced from the particularities of nation, race, or class" (250). Smith is silent about Strauss's assertion in "German Nihilism" that National Socialism was "a return to a pre-modern ideal."

We must wonder whether Smith's reading of Strauss as a classical liberal is persuasive.  In particular, given what Strauss said about the supremacy of the philosophic life and about the conflict between philosophy and society, we must wonder whether a bourgeois liberal regime can allow for such a philosophic life.  And if the open society of a liberal regime can be open to philosophy, does that refute Strauss's claim that every stable society must be a closed society that cannot tolerate the skeptical questioning of philosophers?

In order to separate Strauss from the illiberal critics of the Enlightenment, and thus protect Strauss from Will Altman's charge of being a Jewish Nazi, Smith distinguishes between the radical Counter-Enlightenment of those like Joseph de Maistre, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Martin Heidegger, and the moderate Counter-Enlightenment of those like Strauss, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Isaiah Berlin (348-49).

Smith's distinction here between two forms of Counter-Enlightenment is strange for at least two reasons.  First, to put Strauss on the side of Berlin rather than Heidegger ignores Strauss's severe criticism of Berlin as failing in his attempted defense of liberalism and Strauss's fervent endorsement of Heidegger as the one great thinker of our time who has refuted liberalism.  Strauss writes: "All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger" ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," 29).  Remarkably, Smith is silent about this claim by Strauss that Heidegger has refuted any argument for rational liberalism.

The second reason why Smith's distinction is strange is that in assigning Nietzsche to the radical Counter-Enlightenment, Smith is silent about Nietzsche's defense of the Enlightenment and liberalism in Human, All Too Human and other writings from his middle period.  As I have argued in some previous posts, Nietzsche lays out in his middle writings a vigorous defense of Darwinian aristocratic liberalism as superior to the Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of his later writings.

Smith does not see that in order to push Strauss towards Berlin and away from Heidegger, he has to implicitly reinterpret Strauss as a Platonic or Aristotelian liberal who embraces Berlin's advocacy of both liberal pluralism and negative liberty, so that the individual liberty secured by a liberal regime allows a few people to choose the philosophic life as the highest end, while most others choose different lives with a different ranking of ends.  In other words, Smith has to interpret Strauss as being what Michael and Catherine Zuckert have identified as a Midwest Straussian, who believed that bourgeois liberty allowed for the expression of the bourgeois virtues, which could include the intellectual virtues of the philosophic life.

Another way of putting this is to say that Smith has to read Strauss's classical liberalism as based on a liberal interpretation of both Plato and Aristotle.

Strauss is best known for his illiberal interpretation of Plato as arguing that the philosophic life is the only naturally good way of life, and that this philosophic life is necessarily in irreconcilable conflict with society.  As Smith puts it, this can be expressed as a syllogism:

"Major Premise: Philosophy is the attempt to replace opinion, including opinions about political things, by knowledge.

"Minor Premise: Opinion is the medium of society.

"Conclusion: Philosophy is necessarily at odds with society." (304)

If this is true, then Strauss would seem to be saying that a liberal open society is either impossible or a foolish mistake, because no stable society can be open to philosophical questioning.  No society can safely tolerate the philosophic life.  Therefore, philosophers must employ esoteric writing to hide what they are thinking, and thus protect philosophy from social persecution, while also protecting society from subversion by philosophical questioning.  Plato's metaphor of the cave in The Republic shows that society must always be ruled by illusory opinions rather than philosophic enlightenment.  And Plato's Apology of Socrates shows that society must persecute Socratic philosophers who corrupt the young and deny the gods of the city.

But as Smith indicates, Strauss also offers a liberal interpretation of Plato.  While Book 8 of The Republic contains the "severest indictment" of democracy, according to Strauss, it also presents democracy as a "multicolored coat" in which every way of life, including the philosophic life, can be lived.  And, after all, Socrates lived his philosophic life in Athens until the age of seventy, and he could not have lived this life in Sparta (298).  Thus, as Will Altman has argued, Plato might endorse liberal democracy as the regime most open to the philosophic life, because "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (Republic, 562c). 

This suggests the possibility that a liberal open society could overcome the conflict between society and philosophy by creating a free market of ideas, so that philosophers would no longer need to practice esoteric writing.  In fact, Arthur Melzer has pointed to that in his Philosophy between the Lines.  Since about 1800, he observes, the art of secret writing has largely disappeared, because in modern open societies, we no longer see the need for hiding dangerous philosophic ideas.  That's why Strauss's Persecution and the Art of Writing was so novel--and controversial--because he was rediscovering an art of esoteric writing that was common before 1800, but that had been rendered unnecessary by the triumph of the liberal open society over the past two centuries.  Smith suggests the same point when he writes: "It is certainly far from evident that a strategy adopted by Halevi, Al-Farabi, and Maimonides, writing in times of considerable hostility to philosophy, remains applicable in a modern democratic age where the demands for intellectual probity and 'transparency' have become not just private but also public virtues" (308).

Notice the startling implication here.  What often seems to be Strauss's signature idea--the irresolvable conflict between society and philosophy and the necessity for esoteric writing as dictated by that conflict--has been refuted by the success of bourgeois liberalism in creating an open society where the philosophic life can be openly lived in the free market of ideas.  Does that follow from Strauss's liberal interpretation of Plato?

Smith also suggests a Straussian liberal interpretation of Aristotle, although he is not as explicit about this as he is with Plato.  Strauss often asserted the supremacy of the philosophic life as the only naturally good life, in contrast to which the merely moral person appears as "a mutilated human being" (Natural Right and History, 151).  Book 10 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics can be read as supporting this idea of the philosophic life as a purely solitary contemplative life that is superior to the moral life.  From this view, as Smith says, "morality is at most instrumental to the attainment of a kind of contemplative autonomy," in which the philosopher does not need morality or any engagement with other human beings (309).  Here there seems to be no common ground between the moral life of society and the philosophic life of the solitary thinker.  Here Aristotle seems to affirm a dominant end conception of the good life as directed to one end--philosophic contemplation.

But in the books on friendship (Books 8 and 9) of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of the political association (koinonia) as an association of associations in which people pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life in association with others who share their ethical ends, and this includes those who pursue the philosophic life in association with their philosophic friends (NE, 1160a9-31, 1170a13-1170b19).  This conforms to what Smith identifies as Strauss's understanding of philosophy as a way of life, in which the aim is "to create spiritual communities in which the individual members could seek to live freely and in friendship with others who had chosen a similar way of life" (293).  In democratic Athens, philosophical schools could form voluntary private associations (like the Academy and the Lyceum) in which philosophic friends could gather with others who shared their devotion to the philosophic life.  In this understanding of Athens as an association of associations, Aristotle seems to affirm an inclusive end conception of the good as a multiplicity of moral and intellectual goods, with different ways of life organized by different rankings of those multiple goods.

This suggests the possibility, which Smith never considers, that modern liberalism is the expansion of ancient Athenian liberalism.  After all, even Strauss admitted that "the city of Athens was rather liberal" ("The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy," 47).  This would cast doubt on the sharp Straussian dichotomy of ancients and moderns.

Aristotle's inclusive end conception of the human good as supporting a free society in which individuals pursue their diverse ends in association with others of like mind looks a lot like Berlin's understanding of liberal pluralism and negative liberty, in which the negative liberty of an open society allows for the fullest expression of value pluralism in the diverse associations that people form to pursue their differing conceptions of the good life.  We might think that Strauss could not have endorsed this, because he criticized Berlin's value pluralism as a relativism that created the crisis of liberalism by denying any absolutist affirmation of liberalism as conforming to the human good of human nature. 

But as Smith indicates, Berlin denied that his value pluralism was value relativism (277-86).  While Berlin believed that there were many different good ends for human life, and that these good ends were not perfectly harmonious, yet he believed that these good ends were not "infinitely many," because they were all within the "human horizon."  Berlin affirmed both "a common human nature" and "a wide variety of cultural experience" (The Crooked Timber of Humanity, 11).  The pluralism of human nature--that human beings have different natural ends or desires--is an objective truth about human nature, and therefore this pluralism is not relativism.  By virtue of our shared human nature, we all share in the generic goods of human life--such as, for example, self-preservation, family life, friendship, social status, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding.  (These generic goods correspond to what I have called the 20 natural desires of our evolved human nature.)  But how we rank these generic goods will vary across cultures and across individuals.  A liberal open society secures the negative liberty that allows for individuals live different ways of life in association with others in their families and associations, and these different ways of life will manifest different rankings of those generic goods.  Those with the temperament and talents of a Socrates will live a philosophic life that ranks intellectual understanding as higher than the other generic goods.  Others will live different kinds of life with different rankings of the generic goods.

This seems to be what John Locke meant by a free society that would secure the pursuit of happiness for diverse individuals with diverse conceptions of the good life rooted in human nature.  The summum bonum is not by nature the same for all human beings, but all human beings by nature "are both concerned and fitted to search out their summum bonum" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, IV.12.11).  Locke's point seems to be that there is a summum bonum--a highest good--for each person that constitutes the natural standard of happiness for each person.  But there is no single highest good for all people, because different people will rank the generic goods of life in different ways.

Human nature sets the standard for the human good.  By nature the generic goods characterize the human species.  By nature the individualized goods characterize human individuals.

A bourgeois liberal society conforms best to this human nature, because a liberal open society will secure both natural liberty and natural virtue--the liberty of individuals to develop those moral and intellectual virtues that express that ranking of the generic goods of human nature that constitutes the best life for those individuals.  In such a free society, someone like Strauss, who "fulfills the office of philosopher to the highest degree," will be free to live the philosophic life in friendship with other philosophers; and the rest of us will be free to live other kinds of life that best conform to our individual propensities and talents.

Smith concludes his book by declaring that "the narrative of progress is no longer sustainable" (352).  He believes this is true because antibourgeois intellectuals have said that it is true.  He never reflects on the fact that this contradicts the reality of the life that most of us live today in bourgeois liberal societies.  Because of market freedom, cultural pluralism, and the bourgeois virtues, our life today is generally more peaceful, more just, and richer in both material and spiritual goods than has ever been the case for human beings at any previous time in history.  Does Smith really believe that that is not progress?

Strauss, Jonas, and Heidegger's Nazism

As I have indicated in my posts on Will Altman's German Stranger, I see his claim that Leo Strauss was a Jewish Nazi as wildly implausible.  And yet, Altman does point out the strange and disturbing refusal of Strauss to be clear and emphatic in his rejection of those like Martin Heidegger who embraced Nazism.  Strauss could have followed the example of his friend Hans Jonas, who joined the British army in World War Two to fight the Nazis, and who publicly expressed after the war his disgust with Heidegger's support of Nazism and his refusal to recant his Nazism for the rest of his life.  Strauss chose not to do this.  Why?

This contrast between Strauss and Jonas can be seen by comparing Strauss's "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," Jonas's "Heidegger and Theology," and Jonas's "Taking Leave of Heidegger" (chapter 11 of his Memoirs).  Both Strauss and Jonas were Jewish students in Germany who came under Heidegger's influence.  Both left Germany in 1933 and ended up teaching in the United States.  Both had to decide how to respond to Heidegger's joining of the Nazi Party in 1933 and what this meant for the relationship between philosophy and Nazi tyranny.

Strauss was remarkably hesitant about saying much about this in public.  His fullest account of Heidegger was in a lecture ("Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism") that was never published in his lifetime.  It was first published in 1989 in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, as edited by Thomas Pangle.  Pangle reports that the lecture seemed to have been delivered sometime in the 1950s, and that the text found in Strauss's papers was a transcript of a tape recording done by students, with some hand-written corrections by Strauss.  Altman suggests that Strauss intentionally refused to publish this during his lifetime for fear that it would reveal too much about his affinity for Heidegger's thought.

Strauss observes:

"All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger."

"The only question of importance, of course is the question whether Heidegger's teaching is true or not.  But the very question is deceptive because it is silent about the question of competence--of who is competent to judge.  Perhaps only great thinkers are really competent to judge the thought of great thinkers.  Heidegger made a distinction between philosophers and those for whom philosophy is identical with the history of philosophy.  He made a distinction, in other words, between the thinker and the scholar.  I know that I am only a scholar.  But I know also that most people who call themselves philosophers are mostly, at best, scholars. . . ."

 ". . . A famous psychologist I saw in Europe, an old man, told me that in his view it is not yet possible to form a judgment about the significance as well as the truth of Heidegger's work.  This work changed so radically in its intellectual orientation that a long time will be needed in order to understand with even tolerable adequacy what this work means.  The more I understand what Heidegger is aiming at, the more I see how much escapes me.  The most stupid thing I could do would be to close my eyes or to reject his work."

 "There is a not altogether unrespectable justification for doing so.  Heidegger became a Nazi in 1933.  This was not due to a mere error of judgment on the part of a man who lived on great heights high above the low land of politics.  Everyone who had read his first great book and did not overlook the wood for the trees could see the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis.  What was the practical, that is to say, serious meaning of the contempt for reasonableness and the praise of resoluteness except to encourage that extremist movement?  When Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, he delivered an official speech in which he identified himself with the movement which then swept Germany.  Heidegger had not yet dared to mention that speech in the otherwise complete lists of his writings which appear from time to time on the book jackets of his recent publications.  In 1953 he published a book, Introduction to Metaphysics, consisting of lectures given in 1935, in which he spoke of the greatness and dignity of the National Socialist movement.  In the preface written in 1953 he said that all mistakes had been corrected. . . ." (29-31)

In his use of the first person singular pronoun--"I"--Strauss is emphatic in declaring that he cannot cling to the rational liberal philosophic position since it has been shown to be inadequate.  Only a great thinker could develop a defense of liberalism, but "the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger," who is a Nazi.  While Strauss confesses that as a mere scholar--and not a true philosopher--he might not fully understand Heidegger, it would be stupid for him to reject Heidegger's work.

Moreover, in contrast to many scholars who claimed that Heidegger's Nazism was a mistake in his political judgment that had no connection to his philosophizing, Strauss insists that anyone who read Being and Time carefully could see "the kinship in temper and direction between Heidegger's thought and the Nazis."  Strauss thus implies that he saw that kinship from the beginning, and that the philosophizing of the "only great thinker of our time" supports Nazism.  Strauss also notes that even with the changes in Heidegger's thinking after World War Two, Heidegger saw no reason to change his mind about the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.

Jonas agreed with Strauss's assessment of Heidegger as "the most profound thinker of our time" and "the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era."  But in contrast to Strauss, Jonas stated his deep disappointment that Heidegger's philosophizing did not save him from being taken in by the Nazis:

"Given Heidegger's influence on me, his behavior was a cruel and bitter disappointment, not only in him as a person but also in the power of philosophy to arm people against such folly.  In the originality of his thought, Heidegger remains a powerful figure in intellectual history, a pathbreaker who opened up new territory.  That the most profound thinker of our time fell in with the goose-stepping brown-shirted battalions struck me as a catastrophic failure on the part of philosophy, as a disgraceful moment in world history, as the bankrupting of philosophical thought.  At the time I cherished the notion that philosophy could preserve us from such things, could fortify our minds.  I was even convinced that dealing with the most lofty and important matters ennobled human beings and improved their souls.  And now I realized that philosophy had failed to do this, hadn't protected this mind from the error of paying tribute to Hitler. . . . The behavior of all the fellow travelers, the turncoats, the quislings could be blamed on stupidity, blindness, weakness, cowardice, but that the most important, original philosophical thinker of my era fell into line was an unbelievable blow to me--personally and professionally." (Memoirs, 187)

Why did Strauss refuse to write a statement like that?

In contrast to Strauss who saw an intellectual defense of Nazism in Heidegger's Being and Time,  Jonas says he was surprised when some of his friends told him that he should have seen the early signs of Nazism in Heidegger's philosophical writing.  But once Heidegger identified himself as a Nazi, Jonas says that he broke with Heidegger's philosophy, and he refused to meet with Heidegger, until there was a brief meeting in 1969.

Jonas's public break with Heidegger came dramatically in 1964.  An international conference on hermeneutics at Drew University was organized to study the influence of Heidegger's philosophizing on the language of Protestant theology.  Heidegger himself was to give the keynote address, but when he had to withdraw because of illness, the conference organizers invited Jonas to take Heidegger's place, with the expectation that Jonas would speak for Heidegger.

Jonas's lecture--"Heidegger and Theology"--caused an uproar at the conference and around the world, because Jonas warned that these Christian theologians were making a big mistake in not recognizing that although Heidegger's language echoed the language of the Bible, Heidegger's thought was pagan in denying divine transcendence of the world and secularizing Christian language.

Jonas also warned that Heidegger's Nazism was necessarily anti-Christian:

"But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Fuhrer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls--linguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.  But to the believer, ever suspicious of this world, depth may mean the abyss, and force, the prince of this world.  As if the devil were not part of the voice of being!  Heidegger's own answer is, to the shame of philosophy, on record and, I hope, not forgotten." (Phenomenon of Life, 247)

In the footnote to this passage, Jonas quoted from one of Heidegger's speeches as rector at the University of Freiburg: "Not doctrines and 'ideas' be the rules of your being.  The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law.  Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!"

Jonas also warned about the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian implications of Heidegger's claim that man is "the shepherd of being."  "Apart from the blasphemous ring which this use of the hallowed title must have to Jewish and Christian ears: it is hard to hear man hailed as the shepherd of being when he has just so dismally failed to be his brother's keeper" (Phenomenon of Life, 258). 

Jonas's lecture was the subject of a front-page article in the New York Times, which described the international controversy that Jonas had provoked among Christian theologians who wanted to appropriate Heidegger's philosophizing.  Such publicity brought invitations from German universities for Jonas to speak about this.  So he went on a lecture tour around Germany, and Heidegger told his friends that Jonas had betrayed him.

I first heard about this controversy in 1973, when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago.  I audited a course in the Divinity School on Being and Time taught by a Lutheran theologian, who spent most the semester criticizing Jonas's lecture and trying to persuade us that Heidegger's philosophizing should be adopted by Christian theologians.

Strauss could have done something like this.  He could have given public lectures warning people against Heidegger's mistakes.  But he chose not to do this.

Although Jonas offered no assessment of Strauss's response to Heidegger's Nazism, Jonas did claim in his Memoirs that "Strauss had been an early supporter of Mussolini, before he turned anti-Semitic" (161). 

In 1969, Jonas decided that, with Heidegger approaching his 80th birthday, he needed to finally have a personal encounter with Heidegger to try to achieve some reconciliation.  They met for a brief conversation in Zurich.

"Actually our meeting consisted for the most part of a brief exchange of memories from our time in Marburg, while the matters that were of decisive significance to me weren't mentioned.  If I'd hoped that anything would be said about the events after 1933, about the fate of the Jews in Germany, about my mother's death, I was bitterly disappointed again.  With this meeting I put to rest my inner struggle over my relationship to Heidegger, but any clarification on his part, let alone a world of regret, was not to be.  What had come between us for good would remain shrouded in silence." (Memoirs, 193)

Later, George Anastaplo told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Jonas and Strauss in Annapolis, Maryland, sometime after 1969.  He reported that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because he had met with Heidegger.  Anastaplo often told this story to indicate how adamant Strauss was that no one should have any contact with Heidegger because of his Nazism.  But it seems to me that Jonas's repudiation of Heidegger's Nazism was much clearer and emphatic than Strauss's.

Moreover, unlike Strauss, in turning away from Heidegger's existentialism as a Gnostic dualism and nihilism, Jonas turned toward an alternative--an evolutionary biological naturalism in which an understanding of the psychophysical unity of human biological nature constituted a middle ground between materialism and idealism.  Jonas elaborated his philosophical biology in The Phenomenon of Life, which included his "Heidegger and Theology" essay.  In the Foreword to that book, he explained the main theme of his biological naturalism:

"Accordingly, the following investigations seek to break through the anthropocentric confines of idealist and existentialist philosophy as well as through the materialist confines of natural science.  In the mystery of the living body both poles are in fact integrated.  The great contradictions which man discovers in himself--freedom and necessity, autonomy and dependence, self and world, relation and isolation, creativity and morality--have their rudimentary traces in even the most primitive forms of life, each precariously balanced between being and not-being, and each already endowed with an internal horizon of 'transcendence.'  We shall pursue this underlying theme of all life in its development through the ascending order of organic powers and functions: metabolism, moving and desiring, sensing and perceiving, imagination, art, and mind--a progressive scale of freedom and peril, culminating in man, who may understand his uniqueness anew when he no longer sees himself in metaphysical isolation." (ix)

According to Jonas, "Heidegger never brings this question about Being--how it is, namely, that Being contains and maintains the human and what it thereby reveals about itself--into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution" (Mortality and Morality, 48).

Jonas's evolutionary biological naturalism has stimulated much of my thinking as expressed in the last paragraph of Darwinian Natural Right:  

"The idea of Darwinian natural right offers us one way of understanding our human place in nature.  We are neither mindless machines nor disembodied spirits.  We are animals.  As animals, we display the animate powers of nature for movement, desire, and awareness.  We move to satisfy our desires in the light of our awareness of the world.  We are a unique species of animal, but our distinctively human traits--such as symbolic speech, practical habituation, and conceptual thought--are elaborations of powers shared in some form with other animals.  Our powers for habituation and learning allow us to alter our natural environments, but even these powers are extensions of the behavioral flexibility shown by other animals.  So even if the natural world was not made for us, we were made for it, because we are adapted to live in it.  We have not been thrown into nature from some place far away.  We come from nature.  It is our home." (275)

Strauss comes close to this thought in this sentence from "What is Political Philosophy?":  "By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith of the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind" (54).

The New York Times articles on Jonas and Heidegger can be found here and here.

Some of my previous posts on Strauss and Jonas can be found here, here, and here.

Posts on Heidegger's Nazism can be found here and here.

The Religious Longing for Myth in Nietzsche and Nazism

The contradictory and incoherent character of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings arises from his ambivalent stance in the debate between Platonic idealism and Darwinian naturalism. 

The writings of his middle period--such as Human, All Too Human--were largely free from contradiction and incoherence, because he fully embraced Darwinism and rejected Platonism.  But in his earlier and later writings, he was caught in the contradiction of denying the Platonic dualism of Being and Becoming while affirming a Platonic longing for a religious transcendence or redemption of life that goes beyond the Heraclitean flux of the natural world.  So, for example, in The Birth of Tragedy (sec. 23), Nietzsche lamented the "secularization" of modern life, and he hoped for a "rebirth of German myth" that would support a German state rooted in a unified culture of myth that would impress "the stamp of the eternal" on life and thus become "desecularized."  Later, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, he created new myths--eternal recurrence, will to power, the Superman, and the religion of Dionysus--that would constitute the new faith for the redemption of the earth.  Thus, in his earlier and later writings, Nietzsche manifested a religious "need for redemption" that he rejected in Human, All Too Human (27, 141, 222, 476). 

In his recent book--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich--William Altman offers a good study of Nietzsche's self-contradictory longing for Platonic transcendence without Platonic metaphysics (xix, 56-57, 107, 114-15, 129-33, 143, 149-51, 157-58, 164-65).  But Altman does not see how the Darwinian Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human escapes from this self-contradictory position.  Nor does he see that it's the Platonic idealism of Nietzsche's earlier and later writings that was appropriated by the Nazis. 

Nietzsche's life-long struggle with Platonism and Darwinism is illuminated by considering the influence of his reading of Friedrich Lange's book The History of Materialism.  Although there are no references to Lange in Nietzsche's published writings, George Stack's Lange and Nietzsche (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983) has shown the pervasive influence of Lange's book on Nietzsche.  Lange's book includes detailed surveys of the latest scientific research--particularly in cosmology, physics, Darwinian evolution, and neurophysiology--that bears on the debate over materialism and idealism.  One can see here one source for Nietzsche's study of natural science. 

It becomes clear that in his early and late writings, Nietzsche agrees with Lange in rejecting metaphysical Platonism as contrary to empirical science while embracing mythopoetic Platonism as satisfying their religious longings.  And yet the Darwinian naturalism of Human, All Too Human departs from Lange's Platonism, a point that Stack ignores.

Lange initiated the tradition of neo-Kantian philosophy at the University of Marburg.  Adopting what Stack calls "materio-idealism," Lange combined skeptical phenomenalism and mythopoetic idealism, and this same tense combination can be found in Nietzsche's early and late writings.

SKEPTICAL PHENOMENALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY REALISM
Beginning with the atomism of Democritus, materialism assumes that matter alone is real, and therefore the only true knowledge is understanding matter in motion as determined by the causal laws of physical nature.  In telling the history of materialism, Lange shows that a crucial turn was the move from materialism to sensationalism, which began with Protagoras, and this Protagorean sensationalism was a move towards idealism.

The materialist seeks to know the material things that constitute the outer world of nature.  But the sensationalist denies that we can have any direct knowledge of matter as it is in itself, because all that we have immediately given to us is our sensations of the eternal world, and thus we can know the material world as it appears to us in our sensations, but we cannot know how the material world might be in itself independently of our sensations.  Consequently, Protagoras taught, man is the measure of all things: of those that are that they are; of those that are not that they are not.

So while Democritus started from the material objects of external nature, Protagoras started from the subjective consciousness of internal human experience.  Lange sees this Protagorean move as the first step in a tradition of antimaterialism that culminated in Kantian idealism.  Contrary to the claim of the Democritean materialist, we cannot know material objects as things in themselves, because through our sensations, we know only the phenomenal world, the world as it appears to us, and so we cannot know the noumenal world, the world as it really is in itself.

Lange argues that the empirical science of the physiology of the sense-organs confirms the Protagorean teaching that man is the measure of all things.  Hermann Helmholtz and other psychophysiologists have shown that our sense experience is entirely conditioned by the constitution of our sensory faculties.  How the external world appears to us depends upon the organization of our sensory systems, and the same external world would appear differently to different organisms with different sensory faculties.  Consequently, the world as it is in itself is unknowable.

For example, Lange points to the opposition between hearing a tone and the vibrations of the string that occasions it.  That we turn the vibration into a tone arises from the organization of our auditory faculties as setting the a priori conditions for such sensory experience.  If we had no sense but hearing, we would conclude that all phenomena are sound.  Even within this realm of experience, our sensations are limited in that some animals can hear a range of sounds that we cannot.

Similarly, our visual experience is conditioned by the organization of our visual systems--the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual centers of the brain.  We see colors only because our human visual system is organized to divide waves of light into a spectrum of colors.  Other animals with different visual systems see the world differently from the way we do.

Nietzsche adopts this argument in much of his writing to claim that our senses deceive us in giving us an illusory account of the world.  We cannot know the reality of the external world as it might be in itself, because in our sense experience, we must translate nerve stimuli into images that are actually metaphors, and then we translate those sensory metaphors into the linguistic metaphors of language.  Thus we are caught within the web of appearances that we ourselves have created, because we have no direct access to the reality of the external world.  We cannot even know ourselves as we really are, because our experience of ourselves as thinking and feeling beings--as conscious selves--is itself a poetic construction of our brains.  This suggestion that what we think we know about our external and internal worlds is only a fictional creation leads to nihilism.

But if one accepts the evolutionary account of life, as Lange and Nietzsche do, then it is possible to overcome epistemological nihilism through evolutionary realism.  If human cognitive faculties are products of an evolutionary history of adaptations for survival and reproduction, then we can predict that those cognitive faculties have been shaped by an evolutionary process of interaction between human ancestors as physical, active, and perceiving animals and the reality of the physical and social worlds in which they have lived.  Those human ancestors whose cognitive faculties gave them utterly delusional images of the world would have been less likely to survive and reproduce.  And yet we could also predict that cognitive faculties adapted for evolutionary success will be selective in gathering and interpreting information relevant to success in the ecological niche of human adaptation, and thus ignoring information about the world that has no adaptive relevance.  From this, we can predict that our evolved mental capacities will be reliable but fallible. 

Such an evolutionary epistemology supports a hypothetical realism.  Assuming that our evolved mental grasp of reality is reliable but fallible, we can test the limits of our comprehension by testing hypotheses about our evolved psychology.  For example, we cannot see ultraviolent light, but bees can, because bees have evolved a visual system that detects ultraviolent light so that they can navigate by the sun even on cloudy days, which is an evolutionary adaptation for bees but not for human beings.  And yet human beings can use scientific reasoning with experiments and special instruments to detect the full spectrum of light and to uncover the special visual capacities of bees and other animals.

This is what Nietzsche means when he speaks in Human, All Too Human about the perspectival character of knowledge and how natural science can expand our knowledge by uncovering new perspectives.  Even if empirical science cannot give us absolute knowledge of the world, it can allow us to reach ever greater approximations to the truth about things.  Science can even help us to see the world through the eyes of a bee.

Is there any good alternative to evolutionary naturalism?  Will Altman says the alternative is Platonic dualism:  the only true knowledge is reason's grasp of the eternal ideas that belong to the intelligible world of Being, as opposed to the sensory experiences of the momentary impressions that belong to the sensible world of Becoming.

But as Plato indicated in the Parmenides, this radical dualism creates insoluble problems.  Socrates cannot explain how the unchanging, purely intelligible Ideas are related to the changing, sensible experience of mortal human beings.  Either Becoming must take on the absolute fixity of Being, or Being must take on the absolute flux of Becoming.  But that would deny the dualistic separation of Being and Becoming.


MYTHOPOETIC IDEALISM AND EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS
Whenever Plato in his dialogues fails in his efforts to provide an intellectually coherent account of his metaphysical dualism, he turns from rational proof to mythic imagery.  Lange sees this as showing that while Platonic idealism fails as metaphysics, it succeeds as myth; and this mythopoetic idealism captures the true core of religion in a way that is compatible with empirical science.

Would Leo Strauss and the Straussians agree with this--that Plato's Idealism is more a matter of mythic poetry than metaphysical truth?

Lange writes:

"We cannot imagine a lion as such, a rose as such; but we may represent in imagination a definitely-outlined picture of a lion or a rose, wholly free from all those accidents of individual formation which may collectively be regarded as deviations from this norm, as imperfections.  This is, however, not the Platonic idea of the lion or the rose, but an ideal that is a creation of the senses, intended to express the abstract idea as perfectly as possible.  The idea itself is invisible, for everything that is visible belongs to the fleeting world of mere phenomena: it has no forms in space, for the supersensuous cannot be linked with space.  Similarly, nothing whatever positive can be expressed of the ideas without conceiving them in some sensuous fashion.  They cannot be called pure, sovereign, perfect, eternal, without our connecting with them by these very words ideas of sense.  So Plato, in his ideal theory, is obliged to have recourse to mythus, and so, at a single step we pass from the highest abstraction to the true life-element of all mysticism--the sensuous supersensuous.  The mythus is, however, to have only a figurative or metaphorical force.  By its means, what is in itself only an object of the pure reason is to be represented in the forms of the phenomenal world; but what kind of figure can that be of which the original cannot be supplied?" (I, 77-78)

While Lange dismisses the Platonic Ideas as "cobwebs of the brain" and "fabulous," he accepts Plato's mythic idealism as "a poetical exaltation of the spirit" and "not knowledge but poesy," which serves religious and moral ends, and which "often indirectly affords a new impulse to scientific research" (I, 78-80).  As long as this mythic idealism is understood to be "not knowledge but poesy," it makes no metaphysical claims that would contradict empirical science,  And yet it satisfies a spiritual longing that cannot be satisfied by empirical science.  Platonic poesy "is a necessary offspring of the soul, arising from the deepest life-roots of the race, and a complete counterbalance to the pessimism which springs from an exclusive acquaintance with reality" (II, 232).

The spiritual appeal of mythic poetry that does not claim any metaphysical truth is what Lange calls "the standpoint of the ideal."  He writes:

"Pessimism, which likewise clings to the whole, is a product of reflexion.  The thousand contrarieties of life, the cold cruelty of nature, the pains and imperfections of all creatures, are collected in their individual features, and the sum of these observations is contrasted with the ideal picture of Optimism as a terrible indictment of the universe.  A complete picture of the universe, however, is not reached in this way.  Only the Optimist picture of the world is destroyed, and this involves a great service, if Optimism is inclined to become dogmatic and to pass itself as the representative of truth and reality.  All those beautiful ideas of the individual disharmony which is resolved into the harmony of the great whole, of higher, divine contemplation of the world, in which all riddles are solved and all difficulties disappear, are successfully destroyed by Pessimism; but this destruction affects the dogma only, not the ideal.  It cannot do away with the fact that our mind is so constituted as ever anew to produce within itself a harmonious picture of the world; that here as everywhere it places its ideal beside and above the reality, and recreates from the struggles and necessities of life by rising in thought to a world of all perfections." (III, 341)

Lange thinks that Friedrich Schiller's poetry manifests mythic idealism, particularly in his generalizing the Christian doctrine of redemption into the idea of an "aesthetical redemption."  "The elevation of the soul in faith here becomes the flight into the idea-land of beauty, where all labour finds its rest, every struggle and every want their peace and their reconciliation" (III, 345).  This purely aesthetic appeal to our emotional need for redemption cannot be refuted by empirical science.

"Who will refute a Mass of Palestrina, or who will convict Raphael's Madonna of error?  The 'Gloria in Excelsis' remains a universal power, and will ring through the centuries so long as our nerves can quiver under the awe of the sublime.  And those simple fundamental ideas of the redemption of the individual man by the surrendering of his own will to the will that guides the whole; those images of death and resurrection which express the highest and most thrilling emotions that stir the human breast, when no prose is capable of uttering in cold words the fullness of the heart." (III, 360)
 

Nietzsche quoted from this passage in a letter in 1866 expressing his excitement in reading Lange's book.  In his early and later writings,  Nietzsche used his power for philosophical poetry to create new myths that would provide "aesthetical redemption" for humanity.

In his middle writings, Nietzsche recognizes the power of the "need for redemption" that has been satisfied in the past by religion and art.  But he wonders whether the progress in the scientific understanding of human evolution will show that this was an artificial need, and that new institutions might evolve to serve the "common, true needs of all men" (HH, 27, 153, 475-76).  He recognizes that with the modern weakening of traditional religion and metaphysics, romantic artists (like Richard Wagner) will satisfy the religious longings of people who want to feel religious emotions without having to believe religious doctrines.  But he warns that the religious intoxication of romantic art and the romantic worship of artists thought to be geniuses can become delusional (HH, 145-64).

In his later writings, however, Nietzsche himself fell into a delusional state of Dionysian frenzy induced by his mythic belief in eternal recurrence and the will to power as teachings that would redeem humanity.

An evolutionary science of aesthetics might explain our natural desire for making sense of the world through story-telling and the anthropomorphic projection of agency and intelligent design onto the universe.  But determining whether this anthropomorphic belief in cosmic purposefulness is metaphysically true or only mythically appealing is beyond natural science.

In any case, we should recognize the moral and political dangers that can arise from a delusional longing for mythic redemption.

THE LONGING FOR MYTH IN NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Lange was a socialist who worried about the atomistic individualism of liberalism.  In fact, much of his attack on materialism and support for idealism seemed to be directed ultimately at what he saw as the egoistic materialism of the classical liberal political economy initiated by Adam Smith (III, 233-68).

For Lange, Smith's moral and political philosophy was based entirely on a narrow egoism to support the conclusion that government has no proper role beyond maintaining freedom for the selfish competition of interests.  Even Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments is egoistic, according to Lange, because while Smith grounds morality in sympathy, he understands sympathy as merely an extension of one's self-love to embrace one's family, friends, and others to whom one feels some attachment and concern.

By contrast, Lange argues that a sense of moral community requires mythopoetic idealism that will teach a Christian ethic of self-denial and selfless altruism.  This became the basis for Lange's ethical socialism.

Against this, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human declares that "egoism is not evil," because we all act for the sake of what we believe will be desirable or good for us.  The idea of "selflessness" of morality is illusory, because seemingly selfless acts are actually acts in which we sacrifice one part of ourselves to serve another part of ourselves that we love more (57, 101-102).  The Christian need for redemption arises from the illusion of imagining a totally selfless way of thinking and then feeling dissatisfied and imperfect because we cannot attain such selflessness (132-33).

In arguing against the claim that morality requires complete selflessness, Nietzsche defends an egoistic individualism that is similar to the moral thought of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, in which our evolved mammalian tendency to self-love is extended to a sympathetic concern for others to whom we feel some attachment.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defends a liberal conception of the state: "The state is a clever institution for protecting individuals from one another; if one goes too far in ennobling it, the individual is ultimately weakened by it, even dissolved--and thus the original purpose of the state is most thoroughly thwarted" (235).  By contrast, Nietzsche observes, the socialist conception of the ideal state strives for the "destruction of the individual, which it sees as an unjustified luxury of nature, and which it intends to improve into an expedient organ of the community."  Nietzsche foresees that socialism will require a brutal terrorism in striving for "the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed" (473).

Hitler's National Socialism employed a mythic symbolism to achieve this subordination of individuals to the community of the Volk.  Alfred Rosenberg shows this in his Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930).  As an early member of the Nazi Party, he wrote this book as a general statement of Nazi thought.  Echoing the Nietzsche of the early and later writings, Rosenberg lamented that the German people had become "mythless."  What they needed was a "new myth" that would inspire heroic political activity.  He declared: "The longing to give the Nordic race soul its form as a German church under the sign of the Volksmythos, that is for me the greatest task of our century."

The religious myth favored by the Nazis was developed by Ernst Haeckel and the Monist movement.  Daniel Gasman has shown that Haeckel was the primary ideological influence on both National Socialism and fascism.  Haeckel promoted a mystical pantheism of nature that united scientific materialism and religious spirituality.  The fundamental premise of his pantheistic religion was that "there lives one spirit in all things," which is a "divine spirit."  He defended this romantic religion of nature as superior to the dualist metaphysics of Christianity, which denigrated earthly life and the natural world.

Under Haeckel's influence, Hitler promoted this pantheistic religion.  He proclaimed: "Man has discovered in nature the wonderful notion of that all-mighty being whose law he worships.  Fundamentally, in everyone there is the feeling for this all-mighty, which we call God."  This romantic pantheism was a pervasive part of National Socialism (see Robert Pois, National Socialism and Religion of Nature, 1986), and this mythic pantheism echoes the Dionysian myth of Nietzsche.

This same mythopoetic idealism is evident in Martin Heidegger's mythic positing of Dasein and in his Rectoral Address at the University of Freiburg.  Even after the defeat of Nazism, he continued to declare: "Only a god can save us now."

Unlike the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Beyond Good and Evil belonged to an idealist tradition of longing for myth that prepared the way for Heidegger, Hitler, and the Nazis.  George Williamson has shown how Nietzsche fits into this tradition in his book The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (University of Chicago Press, 2004).  Williamson concludes:

"Mythological thought, it must be emphasized, did not create National Socialism or anti-Semitism, nor did it ensure their victory in 1933--here the factors of war, economic blight, and fear of Bolshevism played the dominant role--but in its Wagnerian or volkisch guise myth offered a way of thinking about art, religion, and the nation that was particularly suited to the political fantasies of Hitler and the racist policies of the Nazi state." (293)
 

By contrast, the Darwinian liberalism of Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human gave no encouragement to the myth-making of Hitler and the Nazis. 

Some posts on related topics can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Lyric Opera's "Die Meistersinger": Wagner, Hitler, and the Nightwatchman State

The most striking phrase coined by Leo Strauss is reductio ad Hitlerum.  In National Right and History, Strauss argues that Max Weber's teaching about values leads to nihilism.  Just as he begins to make this argument, Strauss observes:

". . . In following this movement toward its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler.  Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy  that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum.  A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler." (42-43)
 

 As Will Altman has noted, Strauss never again mentions Hitler in the book, which leaves the reader wondering where exactly in the book "the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler."  We might also wonder, as Altman suggests, why Strauss doesn't identify this fallacy as a noble fallacy.  After all, why isn't it good that our scorn for Hitler is so deep that we assume that a view is refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler?

I thought about that Saturday night while attending a performance of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.  This was Hitler's favorite opera, and it was often performed in the Third Reich with Nazi sponsorship.  Consequently, many people have been disturbed by the thought that this opera promotes the anti-Semitism, the German nationalism, and the nihilism that led to Hitler's movement.

Of course, a similar reductio ad Hitlerum has been used to criticize Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche.  Just as Wagner provided Hitler his music, it is said, Darwin provided him his science, and Nietzsche provided him his philosophy.  And thus Wagner, Darwin, and Nietzsche are all refuted by their connection to Hitler.  Even if this is a fallacy, it is surely reasonable to question any view of the world that supports such evil.

As I have argued on this blog, there is nothing in Darwin's writing that leads directly to Hitler.  In fact, as far as I know, Hitler never even mentioned Darwin's name, although he did use some of the phrases associated with Darwin.  Even when Richard Weikart argues that there is a history of movement "from Darwin to Hitler," he must admit that there really is no clear connection between Darwin's writings and Hitler.

By comparison, Hitler's connection to Nietzsche and Wagner seems much clearer.  Even so, as I have been arguing on this blog, the Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human provides no encouragement to Hitler and the Nazis.  And Wagner's Die Meistersinger is his one opera that presents a view of the world similar to that of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.  Neither of these two works support the anti-Semitism, the fanatical nationalism, or the nihilism of Hitler and the Nazis.

It's significant that just as Die Meistersinger is generally the least popular of Wagner's operas among the Wagnerites, Human, All Too Human is generally the least popular of Nietzsche's books among the Nietzscheans.  My view is just the opposite--that Die Meistersinger is Wagner's best opera, and Human, All Too Human is Nietzsche's best book.  It all depends on whether you prefer explosive frenzy, as the Nietzscheans and Wagnerites do, or sensible moderation, as I do.

Die Meistersinger was first performed in 1868.  Of the ten operas of Wagner's mature work, this is the only comedy and the only opera not based on myth.  The story of the opera is set in sixteenth-century Nuremberg.  The guild of Mastersingers in Nuremberg preserves a proud tradition of German singing governed by rigorous rules.  On Midsummer's Day (St. John's Day), they will conduct a song contest.  The contest is sponsored by Veit Pogner (a wealthy silversmith), and he offers as a prize for the winner marriage to his beautiful daughter Eva.  Eva is free to reject the winner if she chooses, but whoever she marries must be a Mastersinger.  Walther von Stolzing is a young man who has recently arrived in town, and he and Eva have quickly fallen in love.  So Walther must win the contest if he and Eva are to marry.  The problem is that although he can sing beautiful love songs in a passionate style, Walther does not know--and does not appreciate--the complex rules for singing enforced by the Mastersingers.  To win the contest, he will need to follow the wise instruction of Hans Sachs, an older man who is equally skilled in making shoes and mastersinging, and who is the most respected man in town.  In fact, Hans Sachs really did exist as a famous poet and singer in sixteenth-century Nuremberg.  (For the Lyric Opera performances, the role of Sachs has been sung by James Morris, one of the greatest Wagnerian singers of our time.) 

Walther's primary challenger in the contest is Sixtus Beckmesser, an older Mastersinger who wants to marry Eva.  While Beckmesser has mastered the rules of mastersinging, his pedantic stiffness lacks the intuitive insight and youthful passion of Walther's singing. 

Although Sachs does teach Walther the art of mastersinging, while helping him compose the song that will win the contest for him, Sach feels some conflict about this.  Sachs has helped to rear Eva from the time that she was an infant.  And now that she is grown up, he has developed romantic feelings for her, which she reciprocates.  Sachs is a widower whose wife and children have all died.  Marrying Eva would give him both a wife and a child at the same time.  After some struggle with himself, Sachs decides that the marriage of Eva to Walther would be best for everyone, and that he must restrain his longings for Eva in serving the greater good of his community through her marriage.

There are at least three features of the opera that have been seen as points of contact with Hitler's Nazism.  First, Beckmesser has been said to be an ugly anti-Semitic depiction of a Jew who earns a humiliating defeat in his German town.  Second, the opera ends with a speech by Sachs warning that German art needs to be defended from Germany's enemies, which sounds like the German nationalistic rhetoric that favored the rise of Nazism.  The third point brings up the deepest philosophical issue of the opera:  Sachs muses darkly about how all of life is ruled by delusion and madness, for which there is no cure except using the noble delusion of art to redeem human beings from the ugly truth that all that seems real to us is only illusion.  This looking into the nothingness of the world seems to be the nihilism that Strauss saw as primary source of Nazism as a product of the Third Wave of Modernity.

On the first point, it's clear that the anti-Semitic remarks by Wagner in his prose writings provided plenty of material for the Nazis.  For this reason, many people have looked for anti-Semitism in Wagner's operas.  But if one were unaware of what Wagner had said in his prose writings, one would not see any clear evidence of anti-Semitism in his operas.  Particularly, in Die Meistersinger, Beckmesser is never identified as a Jew.  Furthermore, even though he is depicted as ridiculously foolish--the sort of fool we expect to find in a comedy--he also elicits some sympathy from us, and he is a respected and honored member of his community.

Similarly, while one can easily find some anti-Semitism in some of Nietzsche's writings, especially in his attacks on the Jewish sources of "slave morality," Human, All Too Human and other writings of his middle period contain passages where he praises the Jews for what they have contributed to the evolution of culture.  Examples of this would be section 475 of Human, All Too Human and section 205 of Dawn. 

The second point--the reference to Germany and its enemies in Sach's final speech--is a more serious problem for the defender of Die Meistersinger.

After Walther has won the singing contest, Pogner offers him a golden chain with three medals.  Walther refuses the chain, because he is still bitter about the earlier rejection of his singing by the Mastersingers.  Sachs grabs him by the hand and exhorts him to respect the Masters for what they do in preserving their art.  Sachs then warns:

"Take heed!  Ill times now threaten all; and if the German folk [Volk] and Reich should fall, and foreigners should rule our land, no king his folk would understand, and foreign rule and foreign ways would darken all our German ways; what's German and true could not abide were't not for German Masters' pride!  I beg of you: honor your German Masters, and thus you will ban disasters!  And if you have their work at heart, though the Holy German Reich fell, there still will remain the holy German art!"
 

Walther then accepts the golden chain.  The Masters pay homage to Sachs with upraised hands, and all join the people of the town in singing praise for Sach: "Heil Sachs!  Hans Sachs!  Heil Nuremberg's poet Sachs!"

This opera premiered in 1868, just two years before the Franco-Prussian War, at a time when a war between France and Prussia was widely expected.  So this final speech by Sachs could easily have been interpreted as an exhortation to German militaristic nationalism.  Similarly, when Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy announced in 1872 a rebirth of tragedy in Germany through Wagner's music, this appeared to be a clear reference to the Prussian victory over France and the proclamation of the Second German Reich. 

At one point in his revising of the libretto, Wagner struck out this final speech by Sachs.  But then he was persuaded by his wife Cosima to restore it.  So Wagner had his doubts about whether this ending to the opera was appropriate.

In any case, one should see that Wagner's patriotism here is more cultural than political, and not at all militaristic.  After all, it's clear in the opera that art is more important for preserving the German nation than is military or political power.

Furthermore, what one sees in Die Meistersinger is a depiction of a self-governing bourgeois city that is organized primarily through the institutions of civil society--family, church, and voluntary associations.  The only sign of governmental force is the minimal power of Nuremberg's night-watchman.  When a violent riot breaks out at the end of Act 2, the crowd disperses when the night-watchman walks through on his rounds.

It was in 1862, only six years before the premier of Die Meistersinger, that the German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle ridiculed the classical liberals for advocating "the night-watchman state"--the idea that government should be limited to punishing violence and fraud to protect property, liberty, and peace.  Some of the proponents of classical liberalism have actually embraced the phrase "night-watchman state" as a good label for their position.  In his book Liberalism (3rd edition, 1985), Ludwig von Mises observed: "it is difficult to see why the night-watchman state should be any more ridiculous or worse than the state that concerns itself with the preparation of sauerkraut, with the manufacture of trouser buttons, or with the publication of newspapers" (37).

In a liberal regime, the cultivation of the arts and of cultural life generally comes from the natural and voluntary associations of a free society that requires only limited governmental intervention.  That's the case in Hans Sach's Nuremberg.

In the same way, Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human endorses a largely liberal view of society and government in which "higher culture" and the excellence of "higher men" is fostered by the freedom of civil society.  Culture is largely free from political regimentation, and culture is more important than politics.  According to Nietzsche, "the state is a prudent institution for protecting individuals from one another," but any ennobling of the state into a "perfect state" tends to bring a dangerous suppression of the individual (HH, 235). 

Just as is the case in Sach's Nuremberg, Nietzsche presents the majority of people as devoted to the ordinary concerns of life, and they display little human excellence, but a few people with higher aspirations and talents can develop their moral and intellectual virtues through the self-regulating order of civil society.

Much of the appeal of National Socialism came from the claim that liberalism is degrading in its bourgeois mediocrity and thus cannot cultivate the heroic human excellence that goes beyond the base materialism of the "Last Man."

Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human deny this claim by showing how a free society can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous cultural activities of art, science, and philosophy.

I will take up the third point about the connection of Meistersinger to Nazism--the apparent nihilism of Sachs--in my next post.

One of the best performances of Die Meistersinger--in 2001 at the Metropolitan Opera with James Morris as Sachs--can be seen as an online video at the "Met on Demand" website.  There's a free seven-day trial that allows immediate access.  You need to be well rested before you watch this opera.  If you take two 30-minute intermissions, the opera will take five and a half hours! 

I recommend watching it with a good bottle of pinot noir.  My wife and I had two bottles over dinner before the opera and snacks during the intermissions at the Pederson Room at the Lyric Opera House.  A very civilized evening indeed.