Liberal Education in a Liberal Democracy: The Philosophic Few? The Cognitive Elite? The Excellent Sheep?

In the summer of 2008, The American Scholar published an essay by William Deresiewicz entitled "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education."  He stated his main point in one sentence: "Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers."

Deresiewicz had had an elite education as an undergraduate at Columbia University and a graduate student at Yale University.  He taught English literature at Yale for ten years.  But then he decided that he was part of an educational system that was no longer providing a truly liberal education devoted to thinking about the big questions of life--questions about the meaning and purpose of life.  Instead of this, he saw that education in the elite schools--like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford--had become a purely vocational and technical education to prepare students to enter high-paying and high-status jobs. 

To gain entrance to such elite education, students had been working hard since elementary school to build their resumes, to achieve high GPAs, and to score high enough on the SAT exam to be admitted into the most prestigious schools.  But once they got to those schools, they often could not explain why they were there, except to say that they were building the credentials necessary for careers that would give them the wealth and power of an upper class life.  These students were smart and successful, but also empty and anxious.  Many of these students would find no personal satisfaction in the careers they would enter.  As one student told Deresiewicz, these students had become "excellent sheep."

So Deresiewicz began to wonder whether these students would have been happier--better able to live a meaningful, purposeful life--if they had not had an elite education, but instead had attended some small liberal arts college or public university, where they might have sought a liberal education in which thinking and learning are pursued for their own sake rather than as a means for career advancement.  They might have learned how to find a job doing something they enjoyed doing, a job that would give them a comfortable living but perhaps not great wealth or status.  They might have become inquisitive thinkers rather than excellent sheep.

Deresiewicz's essay gained lots of attention.  He was invited to lecture at many schools--including the elite schools--where he provoked debate over his bleak assessment of American higher education.

Recently, he has elaborated his essay into a book--Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).  This book reminds me of Allan Bloom's famous book--The Closing of the American Mind--first published in 1987, which is also an attack on American higher education for failing to provide the liberal education that would sustain democracy and elevate the souls of students.  In fact, Deresiewicz quotes from Bloom more often than anyone else.  Deresiewicz does not indicate, however, that Bloom's ideas are mostly borrowed from his teacher--Leo Strauss--and that Bloom's account of liberal education is particularly indebted to Strauss's writing on liberal education from the early 1960s. 

Comparing these writings of Strauss, Bloom, and Deresiewicz is instructive for thinking about the role of liberal education in liberal democracy, and particularly for thinking about whether liberal democracy can cultivate human excellence through liberal education, or whether liberal democracy must fail to provide the mental culture necessary for liberal education.

On June 6, 1959, Strauss delivered "What Is Liberal Education?" as an address at the tenth annual graduation exercise of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago.  The Basic Program had been founded in 1946 by President Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler as a Great Books program for adults in the extension division of the University of Chicago.  Like St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, the Basic Program was (and still is) organized around a list of Great Books.  Bloom was a teacher in the Basic Program when Strauss gave his speech, so Bloom was probably in the audience. 

I was a teacher in the Basic Program from 1974 to 1978.  The courses are non-credit, and they do not earn any professional degree.  The students in the Basic Program are older people, with an average age of around 50-55, who want to study the Great Books for the intellectual pleasure of doing it.  They bring to the classroom their experience as mature adults who have had successful careers, and many of whom have raised their children.

Strauss began his lecture by explaining the connection of liberal education to the reading of the Great Books.  "Liberal education is education in culture or toward culture," he observed, and culture is the cultivation of the mind, which requires teachers.  The teachers are themselves pupils; but ultimately there must be teachers who are not pupils, teachers who can teach themselves, and these are the great minds.  The greatest minds are so extremely rare that we are not likely to ever meet one.  "It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time."  Consequently, most pupils have access to the greatest minds only through reading the Great Books that the great minds have left behind.  Liberal education must then consist in studying carefully these Great Books.  In this study, the more experienced pupils help the less experienced pupils (Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 3).

"Education in the highest sense is philosophy," Strauss declared, but "we cannot be philosophers," and therefore we cannot acquire philosophic education.  We can only acquire liberal education, in which we are compelled to read the greatest books written by the great minds.  In doing this, "the mediator between us and the greatest minds" is Socrates, who never wrote books, but he did read books.  "We cannot be philosophers, but we can love philosophy; we can try to philosophize" by listening to the conversation between the great minds that we can generate by studying the Great Books (LAM, 6-7).

"It was once said," Strauss observed, that democracy is the regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue and wisdom who have developed their minds to a high degree, so that a democratic society is "the rational society" and a universal aristocracy.  In such a democracy, all citizens would have a liberal education.  But notice that in saying "it was once said," Strauss does not say this himself.  Far from being a universal aristocracy, modern democracy is actually a "mass culture," which is "a culture which can be appropriated by the meanest capacities without any intellectual and moral effort whatsoever and at a very low monetary price."

In such a society, liberal education cannot be the education of a universal aristocracy.  Strauss explained:

"Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture. . . . Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.  Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.  Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness." (LAM, 5)

After the publication of this lecture, Strauss was asked by The Fund for Adult Education to prepare another essay on "Liberal Education and Responsibility" that would explain what he meant in the preceding passage about liberal education being the effort "to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society."

In this essay, Strauss claimed that according to classical philosophy, there must be a conflict between the city as a cave and philosophy as the life of those few who can ascend out of the cave to see the light of the sun.  There must then be a radical separation between the education of philosophers and the education of nonphilosophers.  The philosopher is capable of a philosophic education.  Among the nonphilosophers, gentlemen need a liberal education, and the people need a religious education.  "The pursuits becoming the gentleman are said to be politics and philosophy."  Liberal education is "a preparation for philosophy," and philosophy transcends gentlemanship (LAM, 13).  Since philosophers cannot rule the city directly, the next best form of rule is the rule of the gentlemen, which is "only a reflection of the rule of the philosophers, who are understood to be the men best by nature and best by education" (LAM, 14).

There is a fundamental conflict between the philosophers and the nonphilosophers, because they aim at different ends.

"The philosopher as philosopher is responsible to the city only to the extent that by doing his own work, by his own well-being, he contributes to the well-being of the city: philosophy has necessarily a humanizing or civilizing effect.  The city needs philosophy, but only mediately or indirectly, not to say in a diluted form.  Plato has presented this state of things by comparing the city to a cave from which only a rough and steep ascent leads to the light of the sun: the city as city is more closed to philosophy than open to it." (LAM, 15)

Similar to this ancient conception of the mixed regime is the modern republicanism manifest in The Federalist Papers.  "In the best case, Hamilton's republic will be ruled by the men of the learned professions.  This reminds one of the rule of the philosophers, but only reminds one of it.  Will the men of the learned professions at least be men of liberal education?  It is probable that the men of the learned professions will chiefly be lawyers" (LAM, 17).

But while classical philosophy saw society as closed to philosophy, Strauss explained, modern philosophy sought to open society to philosophy, which required a new kind of liberal education.

"Just as liberal education in its original sense was supported by classical philosophy, so the new education derives its support, if not its being, from modern philosophy.  According to classical philosophy, the end of the philosophers is radically different from the end or ends actually pursued by the nonphilosophers.  Modern philosophy comes into being when the end of philosophy is identified with the end which is capable of being actually pursued by all men.  More precisely, philosophy is now asserted to be essentially subservient to the end which is capable of being actually pursued by all men. . . . In this respect, the modern conception of philosophy is fundamentally democratic.  The end of philosophy is now no longer what one may call disinterested contemplation of the eternal, but the relief of man's estate. . . . Philosophy or science was no longer an end in itself, but in the service of human power, or a power to be used for making human life longer, healthier, and more abundant." (LAM, 19-20) 

Originally, in the seventeenth century, this modern project of Enlightenment was executed by "the philosopher-scientist" working through "enlightened princes."  (Here Strauss was implicitly referring to Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes.)  But since then, Strauss indicated, philosophy and science have been separated, so that philosophers do not need to be scientists, and scientists do not need to be philosophers.  Science has become supreme in its authority, although it no longer has any essential connection to wisdom.

Finally, Strauss offered his general assessment of liberal education today:

"What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?  What are the prospects for the liberally educated to become again a power in democracy?  We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.  While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence.  No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone. . . . We are indeed compelled to be specialists, but we can try to specialize in the most weighty matters or, to speak more simply and more nobly, in the one thing needful.  As matters stand, we can expect more immediate help from the humanities rightly understood than from the sciences, from the spirit of perceptivity and delicacy than from the spirit of geometry.  If I am not mistaken, this is the reason why liberal education is now becoming almost synonymous with the reading in common of the Great Books.  No better beginning could have been made." (LAM, 24)

Reading Strauss's essays on liberal education brings to mind at least five questions that also come up in the reading of Bloom and Deresiewicz.

The first question is whether liberal democracy really can promote human excellence, including philosophy, through liberal education.  In response to those critics of Strauss who have identified him as an enemy of liberal democracy, perhaps even a fascist, his defenders have quoted the third sentence in the passage above: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy."  Strauss's defenders can argue that while recognizing the problems with liberal democracy, Strauss could also recognize that liberal democratic freedom gives freedom to the human excellence that can be cultivated through liberal education. 

William Altman has responded by questioning the sincerity of Strauss's "Golden Sentence" here.  After all, Strauss says "we" not "I" in this sentence, in contrast to the first three paragraphs of "Liberal Education and Responsibility," in which Strauss uses the words "I" and "my" 29 times.  But, still, we might note that when Strauss says that democratic freedom includes the freedom for choosing human excellence, he is repeating a thought that he has seen in Book 8 of Plato's Republic, where democracy is identified as the only bad regime that allows freedom to choose the philosophic life.  And this is the Platonic teaching that Altman stresses as the Platonic opening to liberal democracy.

In asking whether liberal education can cultivate human excellence, we must wonder what kinds of intellectual and moral excellences it might cultivate.  Can liberal education cultivate the intellectual virtues of wisdom?  Or does liberal education in a liberal commercial society tend to promote analytical and technical forms of intelligence rather than the intelligence of the wise man?  Can liberal education cultivate the moral virtues of good character?  Or does the skepticism and relativism of modern liberal education tend to weaken moral character?

Strauss insisted on a strict separation of intellectual virtue and moral virtue, and he declared that the intellectual life of philosophy was "transmoral," which suggests that he might have seen liberal education as aiming at intellectual but not moral excellence.

The second question is whether the Enlightenment project of modern philosophy has succeeded.  Has modern liberal democracy succeeded in creating an open society in which there is no longer a conflict between philosophy and society?  If so, does that mean that classical philosophy has been refuted?  Or has the openness of the liberal society created a relativistic conception of truth and value that denies the capacity for reason grasping the true and the good, and thus denies the possibility of philosophy and the philosophic life?

The third question is whether the classical philosophers, as interpreted by Strauss, were correct in seeing the philosophic life as the "disinterested contemplation of the eternal," and if so, whether such a life can be achieved through liberal education today.  Some of Strauss's critics have questioned whether his account of philosophy as a purely contemplative activity is adequate.  After all, Socrates and other classical philosophers engaged in discussions of practical or moral topics concerning how human beings ought to live.

Moreover, Strauss is confusing in what he says about the connection between philosophy and liberal education.  On the one hand, he separates philosophic education from liberal education.  On the other hand, he says that liberal education is "a preparation for philosophy."  He insists on a strict division between philosophers and nonphilosophers.  True philosophers teach themselves, and so they don't need liberal education.  Those engaged in liberal education, including Strauss himself, cannot be philosophers.  And yet, Strauss declares: "we can love philosophy; we can try to philosophize."  So does this mean that those who show their love of philosophy in liberal education are somehow in between the philosophers and the nonphilosophers?

The fourth question is whether natural science is part of liberal education.  If philosophy means "quest for the truth about the most weighty matters or for the comprehensive truth or for the truth about the whole or for the science of the whole" (13), then surely philosophy and liberal education must include natural science.  And, indeed, Strauss indicates that for the classical philosophers and for the early modern philosophers, philosophy and science were united.  But now philosophy and science are generally considered as separated, because philosophy belongs to the humanities.  And Strauss suggests that liberal education today must draw more from the humanities than the sciences.  One can see this in the Basic Program's list of Great Books, which is devoted mostly to literature and philosophy, although it does include some selections from Euclid's Elements, Newton's Principia, and Darwin's Origin of Species.

The fifth question is whether Socrates is the true model of philosophy for liberal education and "the mediator between us and the greatest minds."  Strauss, Bloom, and Deresiewicz all point to Socrates as the model for liberal education, particularly in the image of Socrates ascending out of the cave.  But Bloom is impressed by Nietzsche's attack on the Socratic conception of philosophy in proposing a new conception of the philosopher as an artistic and religious creator of new values, which shows the will to power rather than the will to truth.  Similarly, Deresiewicz insists that modern liberal education is best rooted in "aestheticism, the religion of art," in which human meaning and value and purpose arise as artful creations of the human spirit.  So who's the true hero for liberal education today--Socrates or Nietzsche?

To be continued . . .

George Anastaplo, 1925-2014: Two Teachers, Two Themes, Five Texts

George Anastaplo died last night.

He was a distinguished professor at the Loyola University Law School and in the Basic Program in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago.  He was also a professor emeritus at Dominican University (formerly Rosary College).

It was one of the great privileges of my life to have known Mr. Anastaplo for 44 years, since I first met him when he conducted a seminar in 1970 at the University of Dallas, where I was an undergraduate student.  When I went to the University of Chicago in 1971 as a graduate student in political science, I spent a lot of time with him, and he became my mentor in many ways.  We organized an informal study group that included a dozen or more graduate students who met biweekly in Regenstein Library to discuss various texts in philosophy, political science, literature, and theology.  We were teachers together in the Basic Program.  We were also together at the Clearing in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin, where he regularly conducted week-long seminars in the summer.  He became a father-figure to me.  And he was the most remarkable human being that I have known in my life

A son of Greek immigrants, Mr. Anastaplo grew up in Southern Illinois, graduating from high school in Carterville, Illinois.  He served in World War II as a U.S. Army Air Corps navigator, flying bombing missions in North Africa and Europe.  After the war, he entered the University of Chicago, where he earned his B.A. and his law degree.

Although he graduated number one in his class at the University of Chicago Law School, he was refused admission to the Illinois Bar because the Bar's Committee on Character and Fitness was disturbed by his affirmation of the right to revolution as stated in the Declaration of Independence and by his refusal to answer questions about whether he was a member of the Communist Party.  He said that such questions were inappropriate and unconstitutional.  The questions were also unjustified because no one had any reason to believe that he was a communist. 

But this was a time of great fear in the United States about communist subversion.  In 1951, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the Smith Act as constitutional in Dennis v. United States, which allowed for the imprisonment of members of the Communist Party, because they endorsed the right to revolution. although there was no evidence that they were actually plotting revolution.  A few days after this decision was announced, the Committee on Character and Fitness announced its decision against admitting Mr. Anastaplo to the Bar.

When Mr. Anastaplo appealed this decision to the Illinois Supreme Court, he lost.  Some years later, he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and argued his own case before the Court, but once again he lost (by a 5-4 decision).  In this case--In re Anastaplo (1961)--Justice Hugo Black wrote an eloquent dissenting opinion.  Justice William Brennan told Black that his opinion would "immortalize Anastaplo."  As suggested by Black's son, an excerpt from this opinion was read at Black's funeral in 1971 at Washington National Cathedral.  The last line of the opinion was "We must not be afraid to be free."

A good account of Mr. Anastaplo's bar admission case, including comments from some of the members of the Committee on Character and Fitness, is Andrew Patner's "The Quest of George Anastaplo" in Chicago Magazine (December, 1982).

This bar admission case was only the first in a series of tense confrontations provoked by Mr. Anastaplo's challenges to unjustified authority.  While travelling in Russia in the 1960s, Mr. Anastaplo was arrested and then expelled from the country.  When Greece was ruled by a military junta in the 1970s, Mr. Anastaplo publicly criticized them, and at one point he was expelled from that country by the military leaders.

Since he could not practice law, he drove a taxi in Chicago for a few years to make a living.  He then returned to the University of Chicago to work on his doctorate in the Committee on Social Thought and to teach in the Basic Program.  His dissertation become the basis for his first book--The Constitutionalist: Notes on the First Amendment (1971).  This was the first of 20 books that he published.  When he died, he was working to finish up one more.  Much of that written work is now conveniently available at the George Anastaplo website.

Mr. Anastaplo's life was truly a life of the mind.  One way to explain that intellectual life would be to say that it was a life devoted to thinking about two teachers, two themes, and many texts (five of which were most important to him).

At the University of Chicago, he came under the influence of two teachers who shaped his whole life--William Crosskey and Leo Strauss.  Crosskey's classes at the Law School were organized around the meticulous interpretation of the Constitution to find its original meaning, which was often identified by Crosskey as very different from what was assumed in many Supreme Court decisions.  In particular, Crosskey argued that the Constitutional text established the supremacy of the United States Congress in exercising a general legislative power over the nation.  He was best known for arguing that the Constitution gave Congress a national power over commerce that was more sweeping than the power over "interstate commerce" as interpreted by the Supreme Court.  Crucial to Crosskey's argument was his extensive research into the original eighteenth-century meanings of the words used in the Constitution. 

Like Crosskey, Mr. Anastaplo thought that the Constitution was a carefully crafted document that could be understood through a close reading of the text itself, free from the often mistaken interpretations of the Supreme Court.  That's clearest in Mr. Anastaplo's The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary (1989). 

In his constitutional reasoning, he emphasized the importance of freedom of speech in the First Amendment, and here his thinking was much influenced by Alexander Meiklejohn, who had lectured on the First Amendment at the University of Chicago.  One reason that Mr. Anastaplo thought the First Amendment so important was that he saw freedom of speech as providing the protection for appeals to natural right and for the freedom of philosophic thought to enter politics.  Here is where the influence of Leo Strauss became important.

Mr. Anastaplo attended all of Mr. Strauss's classes at the University of Chicago, from 1949 to 1967.  He was attracted by Mr. Strauss's rigor in the close reading of philosophic texts in the history of political philosophy.  There was a methodological similarity between Mr. Strauss's philosophical textualism and Crosskey's constitutional textualism.  Mr. Strauss once said to Mr. Anastaplo that he had heard that there was someone in the Law School who read the Constitution the way Mr. Strauss read Plato.

While many of Mr. Strauss's students identified themselves as political conservatives, Mr. Anastaplo did not.  In 1964, some of Strauss's students publicly endorsed the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, and Mr. Anastaplo indicated that he thought it was a mistake to suggest that Strauss's work in political philosophy supported a politically partisan position.

From Mr. Strauss, Mr. Anastaplo picked up the two major themes that run through most of his writing--nature and prudence.  The idea of nature was discovered by the ancient Greeks when they recognized that there was a rational order in the universe and in human life as part of the universe, a rational order that is universal and unchanging, and therefore distinguishable from the conventional or customary order of particular human groups.  Prior to the discovery of nature, human beings looked to the ancestral customs of their society as the authoritative and even divine guides to life.  The politics, art, science, and religion of the Western world all show the influence of the Greek discovery of nature.  Since nature is universal, there are intimations of nature in every tradition of human thought, but only those traditions influenced by Greece show a fully explicit, self-conscious awareness of nature as distinguished from custom or convention.

From the idea of nature, the Greeks derived the idea of natural right, because in human nature they discerned the enduring natural desires and capacities that set norms of good and bad, just and unjust.  Natural right or justice is that which conforms to human nature and is therefore universal, whereas conventional right or justice is that which has been established by human contrivance or custom in particular societies.

With the philosophic awareness of how the universal and unchangeable order of nature differs from the particular and changeable order of custom, there also arose (particularly in Aristotle's writings) an awareness of the need for prudence or practical wisdom in judging the variable circumstances of action in the light of an invariable or enduring human nature.  What is naturally best for any particular society or individual will vary according to the character of that society or that individual, so that a prudent person must judge what is practicable and what is not for a society or an individual in the circumstances in which they find themselves.  The prudent person judges how best to fulfill the enduring inclinations of human nature within the historical conditions in which he finds himself.

Mr. Anastaplo thought through these two themes--nature and prudence--by seeing how they arise in the great texts of philosophy, science, history, mathematics, theology, art, and literature.  His writings offer careful readings of hundreds of texts.  Five texts were especially important for him--Plato's Apology of Socrates, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the writings of Abraham Lincoln.

Some of Mr. Anastaplo's readers were not satisfied by the style of his published writing, particularly in his many book collections of lectures and essays that don't seem to be tightly organized around a well-developed and unifying argument.  He often said that he wanted to write a short book exploring his idea of nature.  It is regrettable that he never wrote that book, because it might have elaborated and defended his reasoning about nature and prudence as the recurrent themes that tie all of his writing together into one long argument.

My own thinking about "Darwinian natural right" is in some respects a working out of some of the lines of thought that Mr. Anastaplo intimated in his writing.  I have argued that the twenty natural desires of evolved human nature constrain but do not determine cultural traditions and prudential judgments.

Mr. Anastaplo lived his life with unyielding devotion to high principles, even when this was costly for himself and his family.  Many people saw this as his great strength.  Some saw it as his weakness.  Even Justice Black said that Mr. Anastaplo was too stubborn for his own good.

I was fortunate to spend some time with Mr. Anastaplo a few days ago.  He was alert as he talked about his life and intellectual career.  Hundreds of boxes of papers were being collected for delivery to the University of Chicago Library where they will be organized in the Special Collections section.  He was hopeful that people in the future might find some of that material instructive. 

He was calm and thoughtful in preparing for his death.  I was reminded of his essay on death in his book Human Being and Citizen, in which he wrote: "Death, if faced up to--if not concealed by euphemisms and cosmetics--should remind us of the natural terms of living things and hence of nature and of models for a good life, models that do not depend on one's individuation but rather on one's approximation to a standard guiding other men as well."

Although Mr. Anastaplo did not have much interest in David Hume, I have written about what I see as the many points of agreement between Hume and Mr. Anastaplo.  And as I now think about his life and death, I am reminded of Adam Smith's report about Hume's death, which ended thus: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."

I will miss him. 

But he will live on in my memories of him.  He will also live on in my reading of the texts and my thinking about the themes that were important to him, and which should be important to all of us as human beings and citizens.

 

George Anastaplo's Word Processor Has Been Silenced

Altman's Nine Theses on Strauss as the German Stranger

The argument of Will Altman's The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism can be summarized in nine theses:

1. Biblical dualism
2. Biblical liberalism
3. Platonic dualism
4. Platonic liberalism
5. Straussian anti-dualism
6. Straussian anti-liberalism
7. Nazi anti-dualism
8. Nazi anti-liberalism
9. Straussian Nazism

In my comments on these nine theses, there will be some repetition from my previous post on Altman's book.

Altman identifies himself as a Jew, a Christian, a Platonist, and a liberal.  These religious, philosophic, and political commitments support one another, he argues, because the Bible and Plato teach a dualism that provides the metaphysical ground for political liberalism.  Strauss rejects the dualism and the liberalism of the Bible and Plato.  In doing so, Altman concludes, Strauss agrees with the intellectual core of National Socialism--in its nihilistic denial of dualism and liberalism--and thus he became the German Stranger in the United States, seeking to destroy the American enemy of German Nazism.

Altman thus sets a big task for himself.  It's hard to imagine that anyone could provide sufficient evidence and argumentation for all of these claims in one book.  And, indeed, he leaves some of these claims as assertions without much support.

Biblical dualism is one of Altman's less controversial claims.  Given the existence of a transcendent God, reality is divided into "two worlds"--the real world of divinity and the apparent world of ordinary human experience.  This dualistic metaphysics is shared by Judaism and Christianity, because Christianity is originally a Jewish religion.  Here Altman apparently agrees with Nietzsche about the "two worlds" tradition of the Western Biblical culture.

Biblical liberalism is a much more controversial claim.  To support it, he cites only two Biblical verses--1 Samuel 8:7 (on the conflict between the rule of kings and the rule of God) and John 18:36 ("My kingdom is not of this world") (27).  Altman believes that the true solution to the "theological-political problem" is the liberal solution--the separation of religion and politics through religious toleration (527).  It's easier to find this in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, which is why it was easier for Locke to find support for religious toleration in the New Testament than in the Old Testament.  Christian proponents of toleration like Roger Williams contrasted the theocracy of the Jewish polity with the New Testament teaching that Christians were not to expect a legal enforcement of their religion.

In defending Platonic dualism, Altman accepts the traditional interpretation of Plato as teaching "the absolute existence of transcendent Being and the problematic existential status of everything else" (14).  The transcendent peak of Platonic philosophy is the ascent to the Idea of the Good.  This puts Plato in opposition to Aristotle's naturalism.    Plato really is a Platonist, and Aristotle really is an Aristotelian.  Altman elaborates this in his new book on Plato--Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (2012). 

Altman argues that Plato's dualism is found most clearly in the Symposium, the Republic, and the Phaedo.   In the other dialogues, Plato's teaching is challenged in various ways.

In contrast to the true Plato, Altman argues, "Strauss's Plato" (or "Farabi's Plato") is actually the Athenian Stranger of the Laws, which is an anti-Platonic book, with no Idea of the Good and with a political theology that is invented by the Stranger for his political ends.  Strauss distorts the Republic by reading it through the lens of the Laws.  Actually, Altman suggests, the Athenian Stranger is Plato's prediction of Strauss, the German Stranger.

For the student of Plato, Altman's reading of the Republic as Platonic in contrast to the Laws as anti-Platonic is perhaps his most intriguing idea.

Like Clement of Alexandria and Augustine (522), Altman sees Plato's dualism as prefiguring Christianity and the transcendent God of Israel who identifies Himself as "I am that I am" (Exodus 3:14).

So, again, Altman agrees with Nietzsche--Christianity is "Platonism for the common people" (19).

Altman's affirmation of Platonic liberalism is one of his most controversial claims.  Traditionally, Plato has been read as a fervent critic of democracy, and generally modern liberalism is assumed to be fundamentally contrary to Plato's political thought.

Oddly enough, one of Strauss's insights supports Altman's reasoning for Plato's liberalism.  Strauss points out that when Plato gives his history of regimes in Book 8 of the Republic, his sequence of five regimes corresponds to Hesiod's history of the five races of men (CM, 130-33; LAM, 35).  Consequently, democracy as the fourth of five corresponds to Hesiod's divine race of heroes.  So, although Plato presents democracy as a bad regime, he also suggests that it comes closer to the golden age than any other bad regime.  The end of democracy is not virtue but freedom--the freedom of each to live as he pleases by choosing from among all the possible human lives.  This freedom of choice makes democracy the only bad regime in which some people can choose the philosophic life.  Indeed, the conversation of the Republic, in which people are free to philosophize about all the various regimes is possible only in a democracy like Athens.  Even if Socrates is a critic of democracy, he shows his preference for democracy by his action in living in Athens, fighting in its wars, and living by its laws.  So while democracy does not aim at excellence or virtue as such, democracy does secure a freedom of choice that allows people the freedom to choose excellence or virtue, including the excellence of the philosophic life.  If one believes that philosophy is the highest life, as Strauss does, then the openness of democracy to philosophy might lead one to regard democracy as at least the best of the bad regimes.

In his book on Plato, Altman elaborates this Straussian insight into democracy as the best of the bad regimes, and this constitutes his argument for Platonic liberalism.  But then in his book on Strauss, Altman never seriously considers the possibility that such reasoning could have supported Strauss's qualified embrace of liberal democracy.

In his book on Plato, Altman comments on "Plato's characteristically serious joke: despite appearances, Democracy--fourth on Plato's list as the Age of Heroes is fourth in Hesiod--is philosophy's golden age; i.e., the golden age tout court" (349).  The democratic freedom to choose one's own way of life is the precondition for Glaucon's choosing justice and the precondition for the philosophic discussion in the Republic--democracy is the only regime where the philosophic life can be freely chosen.

Altman suggests that those like Karl Popper who see the Republic as a defense of totalitarianism fail to see this Platonic endorsement of democratic freedom, and they also fail to see that the totalitarianism of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws is meant to be a challenge to Plato's teaching.

Altman recognizes that the depiction of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic does offer a comically exaggerated image of democracy's aimless freedom and formless equality.  But he suggests that this very comic exaggeration is part of Plato's pedagogy:

"Attacking 'the democratic man' as a lazy, scatter-brained, selfish, shape-shifter, incapable of any sustained and consistent dedication to fixed principle, should be recognized for what it is: effective pedagogy.  Certainly no effective teacher of adolescent males is unfamiliar with Plato's technique.  Through Socrates, Plato is challenging the freedom-loving reader to prove him wrong by overcoming the typical democrat's directionless drift, a drift that leads to Tyranny.  Encouraged by neither the state nor the prevailing temper of the times, any student capable of shame may yet, under the influence of a good teacher, seek other influences--the influence of Greek philosophy, for example--and practice an internal politics quite different from what prevails.  And there is always the fear of what may follow Democracy: of what may happen if no heroes arise." (354)

Was there something like this in the pedagogy of Strauss--attacking "democratic man" so that his freedom-loving students and readers would be challenged to prove him wrong?  After all, Altman praises Arlene Saxonhouse for recognizing the Platonic argument for democracy, but he does not identify her as a scholar influenced by Strauss (350, n. 142).

Altman might respond by arguing that the Straussians can't appreciate Plato's liberalism because they can't appreciate the dualism in which it is grounded.  But this contradicts what Altman notices about the purely naturalistic grounding of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic.  According to Altman, Socrates states "the single most important truth about democracy" (353) when he says: "anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live" (562c).  If democracy is rooted in natural freedom, it's not clear that this requires any appeal to a supernatural dualism.  Altman writes:

"This is not to say, of course, that Democracy values the Idea of the Good: none of the defective cities do this.  But unlike the false forms of the merely apparent good sought after in Timocracy (honor), Oligarchy (wealth) and Tyranny (absolute power), Democracy's good is merely an indefinite plurality: freedom (cf. 562b10-c2).  Of course, Plato does not regard freedom per se as the Good.  In fact, it is worth repeating the central Idea of Platonism as often as necessary: Plato regards only the Idea of the Good as the Good.  But because the citizens of a democracy (unlike other cities) can agree on no one thing that is absolutely good--other than the freedom to seek after their good--only here is the door left open to philosophy, as 'the bazaar of constitutions' passage indicates." (Plato, 353-54)

Democratic freedom allows for human beings to pursue their natural desires, which includes the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and a few human beings will be inclined by this natural desire to live a life of philosophic inquiry, which might include questioning whether there is an Idea of the Good.  But regardless of what we might think about the Idea of the Good, we can recognize the natural goods of human life as constituted by the natural human desires.   Liberal democracy is naturally good in so far as it secures the freedom that is the condition for the possibility of the expression of those natural human desires.

My point here is that while Altman is surely right about Straussian anti-dualism--the tendency of Strauss and the Straussians to dismiss the metaphysical dualism of Platonism as not truly Plato's teaching--it's not clear that this must lead to Straussian anti-liberalism.

Moreover, I am not convinced by Altman's thesis about Nazi anti-dualism, because as I have argued in another post, many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantian dualists who appealed to eternal values grounded in some transcendent realm of absolute good.

Clearly, Strauss was a critic of liberal democracy.  But the question in dispute is whether Strauss was a friendly or unfriendly critic.  Against Altman's claim that Strauss was an unfriendly critic of liberal democracy, Strauss's defenders can quote what appears to be a clear statement from Strauss: "We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy" (LAM, 24).

Altman identifies this as the "'Golden Sentence' of Straussian apologetics," because it is so frequently quoted to show that Strauss was a friend of democracy (GS, 356).  Altman's commentary on this sentence illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of his argumentation. 

The strength of his argument here is in pointing out Strauss's use of the word "we" in the Golden Sentence, in contrast to his multiple uses of "I," "me," and "my" in the first paragraph of the essay in which the Golden Sentence appears ("Liberal Education and Responsibiliy").  This is significant if one considers what Strauss says about how Maimonides uses the word "we" to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes.

Strauss could have said: "I am not permitted to be a flatterer of democracy precisely because I am a friend and ally of democracy."  I agree that we should criticize Strauss for not speaking in such an emphatic way so that all his readers could recognize him as a friendly critic of liberal democracy.

Nevertheless, the weakness of Altman's commentary is that he fails to note that the immediate context of the Golden Sentence suggests a rather clear but qualified embrace of liberal democracy.  Strauss writes:

"What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy?  What are the prospects for the liberally educated to become again a power in democracy?  We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.  While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence.  No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone. . . . As matters stand, we can expect more immediate help from the humanities rightly understood than from the sciences, form the spirit of perceptivity and delicacy than from the spirit of geometry.  If I am not mistaken, this is the reason why liberal education is now becoming almost synonymous with the reading in common of the Great Books.  No better beginning could have been made." (LAM, 24)

Notice that Strauss evokes the same Platonic argument for democracy that Altman adopts: "by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence."  Moreover, many of those influenced by Strauss--Martin Diamond and William Galston, for example--have developed this idea as supporting the conclusion that liberal democracy can cultivate human excellence by cultivating the "liberal virtues."

Moreover, the conviction that a liberal education through the Great Books can promote excellence, at least among those few open to such an education, underlies much of Strauss's influence in promoting the study of the classic texts of political philosophy as well as the Great Books generally. 

My criticism of Altman here is that in his determination to demonize Strauss as anti-liberal, he fails to acknowledge that he and Strauss ultimately agree in their friendly criticism or qualified embrace of liberal democracy as--in James Madison's words--"the least imperfect" form of government.  In his Plato book, Altman writes: "Indeed, the highest praise Plato has for Democracy is indirect.  Why wouldn't that be?  Everyone who has ever fought for Democracy with intellectual weapons knows that it is the worst form of government except for all the rest of them" (354-55).

One example of this "least imperfect" character of liberal democracy is the liberal distinction between state and society.  To demonstrate "Strauss's ineradicable hatred for Liberal Democracy," Altman quotes this "extraordinary passage":

"To realize that the Jewish problem is insoluble means never to forget the truth proclaimed by Zionism regarding the limitations of liberalism.  Liberalism stands or falls by the distinction between the state and society or by the recognition of the private sphere, protected by the law but impervious to the law, with the understanding that, above all, religion as particular religion belongs to the private sphere.  As certainly as the liberal state will not 'discriminate' against its Jewish citizens, as certainly is it constitutionally unable and even unwilling to prevent 'discrimination' against Jews on the part of individuals or groups. To recognize a private sphere in the sense indicated means to permit private 'discrimination,' to protect it, and thus in fact to foster it.  The liberal state cannot provide a solution to the Jewish problem, for such a solution would require the legal prohibition against every kind of 'discrimination,' i.e., the abolition of the private sphere, the denial of the difference between state and society, the destruction of the liberal state." (Altman, GS, 517-18, quoting LAM, 230)

Altman complains that in affirming this as a "truth" in 1962, Strauss had chosen to blind himself to the truth of his experience in the United States where he had been free to live and work as a Jew without persecution.  What Strauss affirms here as a "truth" was actually something that he had learned in Weimar Germany, and he would not allow his American experience to show the falsity of this truth.  But to reach this conclusion, Altman has to pass over in silence Strauss's explanation that he accepts the "uneasy solution" to this problem offered by liberal democracy.  "There is nothing better than the uneasy solution offered by liberal society, which means legal equality plus private 'discrimination'" (JPCM, 317; LAM, 231). 

Strauss's willingness to accept the "uneasy solutions" of liberal democracy and his failure to endorse any anti-liberal alternative as providing superior solutions refute Altman's thesis of Straussian Nazism.

In fact, Altman implicitly concedes the weaknesses in this thesis.  He recognizes that Strauss regarded Hitler as a fool (GS, 323-26, 451-52, 515-16).  He also recognizes that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society.

And yet, Altman insists that Strauss was "remarkably successful" in his project "to take Germany's western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy's faith in itself" (516).  Where's the evidence for this?  Is there any evidence that Strauss and his students have in fact destroyed liberal democracy's faith in itself?  Clearly, many of those under Strauss's influence have actually defended liberal democracy--Jaffa, Diamond, Galston, Anastaplo, and many more.  Would Altman say that all of these people failed to get the secret message from Strauss?  If so, who did get the secret message that Strauss wanted to destroy liberal democracy's faith in itself?

In his section on "My Personal Encounter with Straussianism," Altman begins with this startling claim: "As is now the case with every American, I came under the influence of Leo Strauss long before I'd ever heard his name" (393).  Really?  Every American has been under Strauss's influence without knowing it?  And consequently, every American has been losing faith in liberal democracy?  Wild claims like this weaken Altman's argumentation.

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 in Strauss's lifetime.

In "German Nihilism," Strauss seemed to admire the "young German nihilists."  Many of the ideas he attributed to them were recurrent themes of Strauss's writing.  For example:

"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 at it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with teh 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." (GN, 358)

In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," Strauss left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberal democracy:

"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." (RCPR, 29)

George Anastaplo has told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Strauss and Strauss's old friend Hans Jonas.  Anastaplo reports that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because Jonas had met with Heidegger once in the late 1960s.  For Anastaplo, this showed Strauss's hatred of Heidegger for his support of the Nazis. 

I am not persuaded, however, that this story shows that Strauss exercised better judgment in his handling of Heidegger than did Jonas. Jonas had publicly criticized Heidegger's ideas.  In fact, his 1964 lecture on "Heidegger and Theology" provoked an international controversy because of the vehemence of Jonas's criticisms, and there was even a front page story in the New York Times about the controversy.  This led to lecture invitations for Jonas from around the world to explain his disagreements with Heidegger.  Jonas wrote to Heidegger demanding that he renounce his Nazism and confess his mistakes.  Jonas was disappointed when Heidegger refused to answer.  Strauss did nothing like this.  Instead, Strauss praised Heidegger--just after Heidegger had reaffirmed his support for Nazism in 1953--as "the only greater thinker in our time."  Anyone who wants to defend Strauss against Altman's charges must explain Strauss's behavior.

Anastaplo on Physics and Religion

George Anastaplo is a remarkable human being--and perhaps the best teacher I had at the University of Chicago. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School at the the top of his class in 1951. But he was refused admission to the Illinois Bar because he refused to answer questions about whether he was a communist. Eventually, he argued his case before the U.S. Supreme Court and lost in a 5-to-4 decision (In re Anastaplo). He became a student of Leo Strauss. In fact, I believe he attended more of the classes Strauss taught during his years at the University of Chicago than anyone else. Since he was prohibited from practicing law, he earned a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago, and became a political science professor at Rosary College (later renamed Dominican University). He also taught--and continues to teach--in the Basic Program in the Liberal Arts of the University of Chicago, a "great books" program for adults that was originally founded by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in 1946. He retired from Dominican and joined the faculty at the Loyola University of Chicago Law School, where he still teaches.

I am bringing up Anastaplo's name only to recommend a short paper he has written on "Yearnings for the Divine and the Natural Animation of Matter," which can be found here.

Anastaplo has noticed that physicists speaking at the University of Chicago--at the weekly Physics Colloquia--have a tendency to use language suggesting that matter has a natural tendency to animation that implies a divine purposiveness. Of course, most of these physicists would surely say that this is only metaphorical language that should not be taken literally. But Anastaplo rightly raises the question of whether this indicates something about the tendency of the human mind to intuit some divine purpose in the order of nature.

Anastaplo also wonders whether physicists really understand what they are looking for. In their search for the smallest and most elementary particles of matter, aren't they looking for the ultron--i.e., the ultimate particle (or principle) underlying all material order? Do they really understand what it means to search for whatever it is that allows the universe to be and to be intelligible?

Anastaplo's questions bear upon the issue of ultimate explanation that has often come up on this blog. In the search for ultimate explanation, we seem to assume some ultimate ground of explanation that itself cannot be explained but only intuited. Religious believers would say this ultimate ground is God as the uncaused cause of nature. Scientific naturalists would say that nature itself must be accepted as a self-contained order that we know as a brute fact of our experience.

The ultimate cause of life--including the life of self-conscious, thinking beings--seems particularly mysterious. Religious believers would say that without assuming a Divine Mind behind the order of nature, scientists could not explain their own capacity for--and longing for--a rational explanation of natural order. Skeptical naturalists would suggest that whatever thoughtful purposefulness there is in the universe is a contingent outcome of evolutionary processes of emergent order that are not themselves thoughtful or purposeful.

Darwinian science must leave these questions open to thoughtful inquiry, because, as Darwin said, "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us."

The Biological Teleology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand

My argument for Darwinian natural right originated as a response to what Leo Strauss had said in his Introduction to Natural Right and History.  Strauss explained: "natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe.  All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them."  This dependence of natural right on a teleological view of the universe was clearly seen by Aristotle, Strauss explained.  The "problem of natural right" today is that "modern natural science seems to have refuted teleology."

I agreed with Roger Masters that Strauss was wrong to suggest that the question of teleology depended on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle's teleology was primarily biological, and so the question was whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature, and whether modern Darwinian biology supports such a teleological explanation of organisms.

My answer to this question was that Darwinian biology really does support Aristotelian teleology.  My thinking here was decisively influenced by my reading of Allan Gotthelf's dissertation at Columbia University--"Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality" (1975)--and some of his other writing (see my Darwinian Natural Right, 238-43).  I was persuaded by Gotthelf that Aristotle's final causality is best interpreted as living nature's irreducible potential for form: the development, structure, and functioning of a living organism manifest the actualization of its potential for organic form, an actualization that depends on, but is not reducible to, the natural potentialities of its material elements.  Moreover, far from refuting Aristotle's teleology, modern Darwinian biology provides an evolutionary explanation for living nature's irreducible potential for form.

I was pleased, therefore, to see that Oxford University Press has recently published a collection of Gotthelf's papers on Aristotle's biology--Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle's Biology (2012).  Although I have read most of these papers in their earlier versions as articles, I had not read the two papers at the end of the book--"Darwin on Aristotle" and "Aristotle as Scientist: A Proper Verdict."  These remarkably brilliant papers reinforce my response to Strauss by showing that Aristotle's teleological biology was an empirically based science, and that this teleological science is deepened by modern Darwinian science.  For me, this provides the biological solution to Strauss's "problem of natural right."

But while my motivation for formulating the idea of Darwinian natural right came mostly from my reading of Strauss, Gotthelf's motivation came from the influence of Ayn Rand.  As a college student, he came under the spell of Rand from reading Atlas Shrugged.   He met and talked with Rand, and he shared her enthusiasm for Aristotle as the greatest philosopher for explaining the rational basis of human existence as part of the natural world, without any need for a Platonic transcendence of nature.

As an epigram for his new book, Gotthelf quotes the following passage from Rand's review of John Herman Randall's Aristotle (1962):

"For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature.  And consciousness is a natural attribute of certain living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action--not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension.  For Aristotle, 'living' and 'knowing' are facts of reality; man's mind is neither unnatural nor supernatural, but natural--and this is the root of Aristotle's greatness, of the immeasurable distance that separates him from other thinkers.

"Life--and its highest form, man's life--is the central fact in Aristotle's view of reality.  The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle's philosophy is 'biocentric.'

"This is the source of Aristotle's intense concern with the study of living entities, the source of the enormously 'pro-life' attitude that dominates his thinking."

This points to Rand's biocentric conception of ethics--that value exists only for living organisms, because it is only for living entities that existence is an achievement--an end or goal--that requires securing the conditions for one's existence and avoiding the threats to one's existence.  Only for living organisms does it makes sense to say that some things are good for them and other things bad for them.  Thus it is that we can speak of what is naturally right or desirable for human beings as that which conforms to their nature in securing the conditions for their life.

Wanting to understand this Aristotelian and Randian conception of biological teleology, Gotthelf decided to study under Randall at Columbia University, where he could write his dissertation on Aristotle's biology, while being close to Rand in New York City.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, John Dewey delivered a lecture on "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy," in which he argued that Darwin exerted his greatest influence on philosophy by refuting Aristotelian biology.  But on the centennial anniversary of Darwin's Origin, Randall delivered a lecture on "The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy."  Contrary to Dewey, Randall concluded that, as a result of Darwin's influence, "nature is once more for us, as for the Greeks, full of implicit ends and ideals."  Randall argued, "When Darwin led men to take biology seriously once more, they had to reintroduce these functional concepts that physicists had forgotten--means and ends, function, teleology, and time."

Gotthelf elaborated Randall's thought in a long intellectual career devoted to studying Aristotle's philosophy of biology.  Along with David Balme, James Lennox, and a few other scholars, Gotthelf has stirred a renewed interest in Aristotle's biology.

The intellectual fruitfulness of this research is illustrated in the last two papers at the end of his new book.  In "Darwin on Aristotle," Gotthelf shows how Darwin recognized Aristotle's greatness as a biological scientist, and perhaps, in particular, Darwin recognized some anticipation of his own understanding of biological teleology in Aristotle's writings.

A few months before his death in 1882, Darwin received from William Ogle a copy of his new translation of Aristotle's Parts of Animals.  As early as 1838, Darwin had written in a notebook a list of things "to be read," which included "Read Aristotle to see whether any my views very ancient."  Many years later, in a letter dated February 12, 1879, he confessed his shame that he had never read Aristotle, but he wrote: "From extracts, which I have seen, I have an unbounded respect for him, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest observers, that ever lived."  And, indeed, as Gotthelf indicates, many of the books Darwin read contained references to and quotations from Aristotle's biological works.  But it was not until he received Ogle's translation that Darwin read Aristotle for himself. 

One month after receiving Ogle's translation, Darwin wrote the following letter to Ogle (on February 22, 1882):

"You must let me thank you for the pleasure which the Introduction to the Aristotle book has given me.  I have rarely read anything which has interested me more; though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper.  From quotations which I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was.  Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle.--How curious, also, his ignorance on some points as on muscles as the means of movement--I am glad that you have explained in so probable a manner some of the grossest mistakes attributed to him--I never realized before reading your book to what an enormous summation of labour we owe even our common knowledge.  I wish old Aristotle could know what a grand Defender of the Faith he had found in you."

Unfortunately, Darwin died two months later (April 19), without leaving any evidence that he had read more of the book or any explanation of what exactly he found so exciting in what he had read.  Gotthelf points out, however, that if Darwin read "a quarter of the book proper," that would include Ogle's Introduction and the first book of the Parts of Animals, in which Aristotle writes about his teleological explanation of animal parts and animal classification.

Gotthelf speculates that what excited Darwin in his reading of Aristotle was seeing that he and Aristotle were in basic agreement about biological teleology.  If so, this would contradict Ogle's understanding of the question of teleology.  In his Introduction to his book and in an earlier letter that he had written to Darwin, Ogle set up a fundamental contrast between teleology and mechanism, with Aristotle and Plato on the side of teleology and Democritus and Darwin on the side of mechanism.  In his Introduction, Ogle wrote: "One group of philosophers there was, who fancied that they found an adequate cause in the necessary operations of the inherent properties of matter; while another sought a solution in the intelligent action of a benevolent and foreseeing agent, whom they called God, or Nature, as the case might be."

Gotthelf argues persuasively that Ogle has misinterpreted both Aristotle and Darwin:

"But, contrary to Ogle's sentiment, Aristotle's natures are not literally intelligent, not literally planners, and arguably the philosopher's genius lies in plotting a third course between these two pictures, and defending it as scientifically legitimate.  This third course involves the postulation not of an 'intelligent Nature' but of inherent natures--that is, of natural capacities (in Greek, dunameis) directed at form, irreducible to the capacities for the production of a living organism of a particular type that are irreducible to the capacities of the elements that constitute such an organism.  From that perspective the isomorphism with Darwin becomes clear, and there is some evidence that Darwin himself saw it" (367).

Darwin seemed to recognize the teleological character of his evolutionary science.  In an article in Nature, Asa Gray wrote: "let us recognize Darwin's great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology; so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology."  In response to this, Darwin wrote to Gray (June 5, 1874): "What you say about Teleology pleases me especially and I do not think anyone else has ever noted that."  So, we can infer, Gotthelf suggests, that when Darwin read Aristotle's explanation of biological teleology, he saw that he really was bringing back into science a teleological conception of living nature that was originally formulated by Aristotle.

Gotthelf's account of the common ground between Aristotle, Darwin, and modern biology on the question of teleology is what I have found most insightful.  For Aristotle, the directiveness and adaptiveness of organisms are basic, irreducible facts about nature.  For modern biology, the directiveness of organisms comes from the DNA program, and the adaptiveness of organisms comes from natural selection (368-69, 389-91).  As an empirical scientist, Aristotle would be open to the modern biological explanations, Gotthelf argues, because for Aristotle determining the most basic level of explanation is an empirical question.  Gotthelf writes:

"These are the conclusions of a theoretical scientist, a student of nature.  Were Aristotle to reappear tomorrow and be presented with the results of the last several hundred years of biochemistry and evolutionary theory, including the evidence which grounds them, my view is that (after recovering from the most awe-filled experience of his life) he would surely retreat from his insistence that the directiveness in nature is a primitive directiveness and the adaptiveness in nature a basic fact.  Facts they would remain, but they would, for him, as for us, no longer be basic.  The determination of what the basic level of explanation is, is for Aristotle ultimately an empirical or scientific matter" (392).

Here then is the solution to Strauss's "problem of natural right":  modern natural science has not refuted natural teleology, because, on the contrary, modern Darwinian biology provides the ultimate explanation for the goal-directed nature of organisms, including human beings, which thus sustains the teleological ground for the idea of natural right.

Some of these points are elaborated in some previous posts that can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  

I was saddened to learn, shortly after writing this post, that Gotthelf died a few days ago.  I did not know him personally.  But I will remember him for a body of intellectual work that has helped me think through some of the deep questions indicated in this post.

Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey": The Platonic Censorship of Homer and the Bourgeois Virtues of Liberalism

 

                                          Surveying the Filmed Adaptations of Homer's Odyssey

In 1956, I was seven years old, and my parents took me to see the new movie Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas starring as Ulysses (the Romanized name for Homer's Odysseus).  I was fascinated by the adventures of Ulysses.  But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with Ulysses's raging violence.

In 1967, as a college freshman, I read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the first time, and I began to understand why I found Homer's heroes disturbing.  I wondered, why did these men think fame and honor were to be earned through cruel violence in war that often lacked any moral justification?

In 1977, I taught a course on The Iliad in the Basic Program in Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago.  I knew Greek well enough that I could check the translation (by Richmond Lattimore) against the Greek text.  So sometimes in the class we would talk about the problems of translation.  

Since all of us in the class had read Socrates' criticisms of Homer in Plato's Republic, some of our discussions were about whether those criticisms were fair, and particularly whether Socrates was justified in arguing that the guardians in the best city should not read Homer's poetry because its models of conduct--the gods and the heroes--were immoral.

So when I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and read about the debates over the movie, I began to think again about the strangeness of Homer's Bronze Age gods and heroes and about how they have been depicted in American popular culture.

I have come to two conclusions.  First, Nolan's movie is actually a Platonic revision of Homer's Odyssey.  Second, the intellectual response to the movie shows how thoughtful--even philosophical--American popular culture can be in considering what counts as a virtuous life.

CENSORING HOMER

As far as I can tell, the movie has been well received by audiences and most of the movie critics.  But I've noticed that the harshest criticisms are from people who have read Homer's poem, and they criticize the movie for how it distorts Homer's poem to the point that the original meaning of the poem is lost.  

Critics have identified four kinds of distortions.  First, while the world of Homer's Odyssey is full of gods, in Nolan's film, people refer to the gods, but the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who appears is Athena; and consequently the story of Odysseus is an almost totally human drama.  

Second, while Homer's Odysseus wins glory through cruel violence without ever feeling guilty for the injustice of what he has done, Nolan has Odysseus confess to Penelope his crippling guilt.  He has an extended flashback to the atrocities that the Greeks committed during the fall of Troy, and he tells Penelope about the guilt he feels for the Wooden Horse episode:

We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home.  We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt.  To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. . . . What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through the fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed . . . what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

In The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn--who is the author of one of the best translations of Homer's Odyssey--observes: "this resounding speech . . . sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer--who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies--but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. . . . Nolan has merely remade Homer's hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus's adventures values utterly foreign to Homer."

The third distortion of Homer's story in the movie comes from what some critics have identified as Nolan's "woke" feminist interpretation of the Odyssey as showing the toxic masculinity of male dominance in war, politics, and marriage.  This biased reading of the Odyssey could have come from Nolan's reading of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and indeed Nolan has stressed the importance of Wilson's translation as an influence on him.  Wilson was the first woman to write an English translation of The Odyssey.  And many readers have seen a modern feminist slant in her commentary on the book and in her translation.

The fourth distortion is in Nolan's changing Homer's story--perhaps most importantly in Nolan's giving the story a new ending.  Homer's ending comes when many of the people of Ithaca start a civil war in rebellion against Odysseus because the suitors of Penelope killed by Odysseus were their sons.  Athena orders the fighters to stop the war.  The Ithacans drop their weapons and go back to the city.  But Odysseus chases after them to continue the war.  Zeus then sends down a thunderbolt, and Athena orders Odysseus: "Odysseus, you are adaptable; / you always find solutions.  Stop this war, / or Zeus will be enraged at you."  Homer then writes: "He was / glad to obey her.  Then Athena made / the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace / for future times" (24.448-549).

For thousands of years, many of Homer's readers have found this ending unsatisfying.  Nolan's alternative ending has Odysseus giving up his throne to Telemachus and leaving Ithaca with Penelope, seeking peace in exile, sailing west to honor the dead.  The pair muse that people will know the Trojan war only as a song, the songs will forget Odysseus' mistakes, and a new civilization will arise to replace the old Bronze Age civilization.

I believe that all four of these distortions in Nolan's movie come from the influence of Wilson's Odyssey--both her translation and her commentary in the Introduction.  I also believe that Wilson's criticisms of the Odyssey ultimately coincide with the criticisms coming from Plato's Socrates in The Republic, which have to do with the immorality of Homer's gods and heroes.  And while I have no reason to believe that Nolan has read Plato, Nolan could have absorbed Plato's critique of Homer from reading Wilson's book, which motivated him to write a script for his movie that is in effect a Platonic revision of The Odyssey that corrects its moral failings.

This would explain why Nolan plays down the importance of the gods.  Wilson says that Homer's gods "are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law" (30).  Nolan probably anticipated that such gods would be confusing to his modern audience, who assume that divine powers must uphold moral law, and so he pushed the gods largely offstage except for Athena.

Actually, as Wilson indicates, many readers of Homer have seen evidence in his poems that the gods--or at least Zeus--generally enforce moral conduct by punishing the bad and rewarding the good.  After all, The Odyssey begins with Zeus defending the justice of his providence before an assembly of the gods.  He points to the example of Aegisthus, who took the wife of Agamemnon and then killed Agamemnon when he came home from the war, but then Aegisthus was killed by Orestes, Agamemnon's son.  Zeus says that he sent Hermes to warn Aegisthus not to take Agamemnon's wife or murder him because surely Orestes would grow up and then take his revenge.  Aegisthus was foolish in rejecting this good advice.  "But now his death has paid all debts" (1.31-45).

Similarly, Odysseus often invokes the justice of the gods in taking vengeance against Penelope's suitors. He tells them: "You did not fear the gods who live in heaven, and you thought no man would ever come to take revenge" (22.37-40).

I am reminded of John Alvis's book Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).  Alvis argued that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter (in The Aeneid) show divine providence in the service of justice.  Alvis saw the principle of divine providential justice explicitly stated by Virgil, and then he tried to find this in Homer, although it is only "barely implied in Homer" (259).  This is an important issue for Alvis because "the gods must be known if human conduct is to be measured against the most authoritative standards" (vii).  I have written about this as posing the question of moral cosmology versus moral anthropology: must the moral law be grounded in a divine cosmic law, or can it be grounded in a human natural law?

Nolan's Odysseus feels guilty for violating that moral law through his unjustified violence against the Trojans.  But this is not clear in Homer's poem.  Wilson directs our attention to a scene in Book 8 of The Odyssey where Odysseus asks Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse.  Inspired by a god, the bard sings the story of the Trojan Horse--of how it tricked the Trojans into bringing the Wooden Horse--full of Achaean fighters--into the city, and of how Odysseus and the others poured out of the horse and slaughtered the people of Troy.  Now, one would think Odysseus would be happy to hear this song of his glorious triumph.  But instead, he weeps!

Odysseus was melting into tears; / his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman / weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around / her husband, fallen fighting for his home / and children.  She is watching as he gasps / and dies.  She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing / upon his corpse.  The men are right behind. / They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life / of pain.  Her face is marked with her despair. / In that same desperate way, Odysseus / was crying.  No one noticed that his eyes / were wet with tears, except Alcinous (8.521-535).

Wilson suggests there are two possible interpretations of this passage:

The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors.  Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but may other towns and settlements.  Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus' responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities (68-69).

Nolan preferred the first interpretation, and so he has Odysseus feeling deeply guilty for what he has done, and the image of the suffering woman who is a victim of war becomes the flashback memory of Odysseus stunned by the cruel desolation that he caused in leading the sack of Troy.  This interpretation supports Nolan's new ending for the story because it shows Odysseus seeking some atonement for what he has done by going into exile from Ithaca and giving up his throne to his son.

This interpretation might also explain why Plato's Socrates in telling the "myth of Er" in The Republic says that in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus "from memory of its former labors had recovered from love of honor," and it had chosen to live "the life of a private man who minds his own business" (620c).  Elsewhere Socrates says the philosopher "minds his own business" (496d).  It seems that Odysseus had learned from his mistakes in living as a glory-seeking warlord, so that in the afterlife he chose the obscure private life of a Socratic philosopher.  At least that was Allan Bloom's reading in his "Interpretive Essay" in his translation of The Republic (p. 436).

And yet Wilson's second interpretation of the simile comparing Odysseus' weeping to the weeping of the woman suffering in war is well supported by the textual evidence--the idea that this simile invites us "to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities."  Alcinous asked Odysseus to "please explain why you were crying, sobbing your heart out when you heard him sing what happened to the Greeks at Troy" (8.576-578).  Odysseus answered him by telling him "my own sad story" of the many ways he had to suffer in his adventurous travels to finally achieve fame and honor.  His storytelling stretched over four books of The Odyssey--from Book 9 to the end of Book 12.  Early in the story, he relates his attack on the Cicones: "A blast of wind pushed me off course towards the Cicones in Ismarus.  I sacked the town and killed the men.  We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us" (9.40-44).  He gives no justification for this act of piracy.  Nor does he express any sense of guilt for this and other acts of piracy.  At the end of the poem, once he has returned to Ithaca and Penelope, Odysseus tells Penelope that he will resume his piracy: "I have to go on raids, to steal replacements / for all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed, / and get the other Greeks to give me more, / until I fill my folds" (23.355-360).  This is not a man who feels any guilt for his life of piracy.

Like Plato's Socrates, Nolan worried that reading, or hearing, or seeing this story on a movie screen of Odysseus' winning heroic glory through immoral conduct would either endorse such immorality or provoke the moral disgust of the audience.  To avoid that, Nolan censored Homer by revising his story so that Odysseus regrets his life of unjustified and cruel violence and seeks atonement for his guilt.

THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES OF AMERICAN LIBERAL CULTURE

As I have indicated, some of the critics of Nolan's movie have complained that he is being dishonest in hiding the true meaning of Homer's Odyssey from the audience.  Moreover, some have argued, the special thrill that comes from reading Homer is in seeing the great gulf that separates our modern moral sensibility from Homer's Bronze Age world of warlords glorified by poets for their brutal cruelty; but Nolan's movie does not allow his audience to have that experience of being provoked by the violence and mystery of Bronze Age life.

That is not a fair criticism, however, because Nolan has talked openly about how he has changed Homer's story, particularly under the influence of Wilson's translation, and he has encouraged his audience to read, or reread, Homer's Odyssey for themselves, and then argue about how the movie differs from the book.  In fact, in recent weeks, Wilson's translation has become one of the top five books on the Amazon and New York Times bestsellers lists.

This refutes the claim of those Nietzschean critics of American popular culture who say that it has become degraded--perhaps to the level of the "last man"--because people watch movies and television, but they don't read books, particularly "great books."  On the contrary, Nolan's movie has spurred many Americans not only to read the Odyssey in translation, but also to read the original Greek text.  Google Trends reports that people searching "learn Greek" has increased by 400% over the past month compared with the same period last year.

I am reminded of my years teaching in the Basic Program of Liberal Education, which is a Great Books program established in 1946 by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, who believed that cultivating human excellence in a liberal democracy required opening liberal education to all adults.

I have written about how Leo Strauss praised Great Books programs like the Basic Program and explained:  "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.  Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.  Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness."

Here we see that what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues" of a liberal social order can include the intellectual virtues of a liberal education for a philosophic life.

In a liberal popular culture like America, popular media like movies and television can complement the liberal education based on reading classic books.  In the Basic Program, we had Fall and Winter Weekends, where we would meet for a weekend at a lodge in a state park.  One classic text of literature, philosophy, history, or science would be the assigned reading for the weekend.  We would have a series of lectures and discussions centered around that text.  But we would also usually have a movie of some kind that was related to that text, so that we could talk about the intellectual questions raised by both the movie and the book.

At this blog, I have written essays on various movies (such as The Lord of the Rings, The Last Duel, Song Sung Blue, Nuremburg, and Disclosure Day) and on various television shows (such as The Good Place, The Big Bang Theory, and Hill Street Blues).  And in each case, I have argued that these filmed productions of popular culture can raise profound intellectual questions and that they can prompt viewers to read some books that might probe those questions at a deeper level.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey does that.  In her review of the movie for The London Review of Books, Emily Wilson recognizes this point:

In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the "death of the humanities," translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.  Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek.  Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments.  Nolan, who studied English at University College London--where students still study The Odyssey as a first year "foundational text"--is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

But except for this one passage praising Nolan, Wilson's review is relentlessly dismissive of his movie--as when she says, "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script." 

As I have said, Wilson's interpretation of Odysseus' weeping in response to Demodocus' singing of the sack of Troy as a sign of his feeling guilt seems to have prompted Nolan's depiction of Odysseus' deep sense of guilt over what he has done.  So as I read her review, I wondered what she might say about this.  I noticed this passage:

The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie's imagined world.  We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it--a very different point.  Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar--but Nolan doesn't.  The Trojans are dehumanized by their masks; we know none of them by name or face.  The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors, or slaves.  During the sack of Troy--which he supposedly organized--Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

So Wilson suggests that Homer's Odyssey is better than Nolan's Odyssey in helping us to reflect on the moral complexity of a world in which warlords pursue glory through cruel violence, because Homer allows us to see the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims, and to see that even if a warlord might sometimes feel guilty about what he is doing, that does not lessen his enthusiasm for his life of glorious violence. 

People might learn this if watching Nolan's movie prompts them to read Homer's book.