The Hedonism of John Locke

Portrait of John Locke 

In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss characterizes John Locke as a Hobbesian thinker and concludes that Locke is a hedonist. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5, “Modern Natural Right”:

"Locke is a hedonist: "That which is properly good or bad, is nothing but barely pleasure or pain." But his is a peculiar hedonism: "The greatest happiness consists" not in enjoying the greatest pleasures but "in the having those things which produce the greatest pleasures." It is not altogether an accident that the chapter in which these statements occur, and which happens to be the most extensive chapter of the whole Essay, is entitled "Power." For if, as Hobbes says, "the power of a man ... is his present means, to obtain some future apparent good," Locke says in effect that the greatest happiness consists in the greatest power. Since there are no knowable natures, there is no nature of man with reference to which we could distinguish between pleasures which are according to nature and pleasures which are against nature, or between pleasures which are by nature higher and pleasures which are by nature lower: pleasure and pain are "for different men ... very different things." Therefore, "the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue, or contemplation?" In the absence of a summum bonum, man would lack completely a star and compass for his life if there were no summum malum. "Desire is always moved by evil, to fly it." The strongest desire is the desire for self-preservation. The evil from which the strongest desire recoils is death. Death must then be the greatest evil: Not the natural sweetness of living but the terrors of death make us cling to life. What nature firmly establishes is that from which desire moves away, the point of departure of desire; the goal toward which desire moves is secondary. The primary fact is want. But this want, this lack, is no longer understood as pointing to something complete, perfect, whole. The necessities of life are no longer understood as necessary for the complete life or the good life, but as mere inescapabilities. The satisfaction of wants is therefore no longer limited by the demands of the good life but becomes aimless. The goal of desire is defined by nature only negatively--the denial of pain. It is not pleasure more or less dimly anticipated which elicits human efforts: "the chief, if not only, spur to human industry and action is uneasiness." So powerful is the natural primacy of pain that the active denial of pain is itself painful. The pain which removes pain is labor. It is this pain, and hence a defect, which gives man originally the most important of all rights: sufferings and defects, rather than merits or virtues, originate rights. Hobbes identified the rational life with the life dominated by the fear of fear, by the fear which relieves us from fear. Moved by the same spirit, Locke identifies the rational life with the life dominated by the pain which relieves pain. Labor takes the place of the art which imitates nature; for labor is, in the words of Hegel, a negative attitude toward nature. The starting point of human efforts is misery: the state of nature is a state of wretchedness. The way toward happiness is a movement away from the state of nature, a movement away from nature: the negation of nature is the way toward happiness. And if the movement toward happiness is the actuality of freedom, freedom is negativity. Just like the primary pain itself, the pain which relieves pain "ceaseth only in death." Since there are therefore no pure pleasures, there is no necessary tension between civil society as the mighty leviathan or coercive society, on the one hand, and the good life, on the other: hedonism becomes utilitarianism or political hedonism. The painful relief of pain culminates not so much in the greatest pleasures as "in the having those things which produce the greatest pleasures." Life is the joyless quest for joy."

According to Strauss, Locke’s hedonism is quite pessimistic because it aims at avoiding pain which cannot be avoided, because life is not only without virtue but it is aimless, possessive, hopeless and miserable. The essence of Locke’s ethics is that “life is the joyless quest for joy.”

On The Impact Of Language On Sensations

Henri Bergson points out that language gives a fixed form to the fleeting sensations that we experience. Here’s an excerpt from his book Time and Free Will (Chapter 2, “The Idea of Duration”):

Our simple sensations, taken in their natural state, are still more fleeting. Such and such a flavour, such and such a scent, pleased me when I was a child though I dislike them to-day. Yet I still give the same name to the sensation experienced, and I speak as if only my taste had changed, whilst the scent and the flavour have remained the same. Thus I again solidify the sensation; and when its changeableness becomes so obvious that I cannot help recognizing it, I abstract this changeableness to give it a name of its own and solidify it in the shape of a taste. But in reality there are neither identical sensations nor multiple tastes: for sensations and tastes seem to me to be objects as soon as I isolate and name them, and in the human soul there are only processes. What I ought to say is that every sensation is altered by repetition, and that if it does not seem to me to change from day to day, it is because I perceive it through the object which is its cause, through the word which translates it. This influence of language on sensation is deeper than is usually thought. Not only does language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sensations, but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature of the sensation felt. Thus, when I partake of a dish that is supposed to be exquisite, the name which it bears, suggestive of the approval given to it, comes between my sensation and my consciousness; I may believe that the flavour pleases me when a slight effort of attention would prove the contrary. In short, the word with well-defined outlines, the rough and ready word, which stores up the stable, common, and consequently impersonal element in the impressions of mankind, overwhelms or at least covers over the delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness. To maintain the struggle on equal terms, the latter ought to express themselves in precise words; but these words, as soon as they were formed, would turn against the sensation which gave birth to them, and, invented to show that the sensation is unstable, they would impose on it their own stability.

According to Bergson, the language that we use to analyze and describe our feelings leads to a distortion of the same feelings. We discern a certain kind of feelings as violent love or a deep melancholy because our immediate consciousness is overwhelmed by our language.

On Political Hedonism and Political Atheism

Leo Strauss notes that Thomas Hobbes is the creator of political hedonism and political atheism. In his book Natural Right and History, (Chapter 5, “Modern Natural Right”; Page 168-169), Strauss writes:

Hobbes rejects the idealistic tradition on the basis of a fundamental agreement with it.  He means to do adequately what the Socratic tradition did in a wholly inadequate manner.  He means to succeed where the Socratic tradition had failed.  He traces the failure of the idealistic tradition to one fundamental mistake: traditional political philosophy assumed that man is by nature a political or social animal.  By rejecting this assumption, Hobbes joins the Epicurean tradition.  He accepts its view that man is by nature or originally an a-political and even an a-social animal, as well as its premise that the good is fundamentally identical with the pleasant.  But he uses that a-political view for a political purpose.  He gives that a-political view a political meaning.  He tries to instill the spirit of political idealism into the hedonistic tradition.  He thus became the creator of political hedonism, a doctrine which has revolutionized human life everywhere on a scale never yet approached by any other teaching. 

The epoch-making change which we are forced to trace to Hobbes was well understood by Edmund Burke: “Boldness formerly was not the character of atheists as such. They were even of a character nearly the reverse; they were formerly like the old Epicureans, rather an unenterprising race. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.” Political atheism is a distinctly modern phenomenon. No pre-modern atheist doubted that social life required belief in, and worship of, God or gods. If we do not permit ourselves to be deceived by ephemeral phenomena, we realize that political atheism and political hedonism belong together. They arose together in the same moment and in the same mind.

According to Strauss, Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy is a typically modern combination of political idealism with a materialistic and atheistic view of the whole.

The Road to “Neoconservative” Serfdom

I realized how alarming the political thinking of the neoconservatives is in 2007 when I read George Will’s book Statecraft as Soulcraft.

You would expect the conservatives to stand for small government, lower taxes, and better rule of law, but the neoconservatives have the overarching agenda of propagating their own brand of morality—like the medieval mystics, they want to whip people (the lesser mortals) into becoming “better” souls. Will is of the view that instead of trying to cut the size of the government, the conservatives should actively use government’s powers to spread “better” values in society.

In his article, “The Road to Conservative Serfdom,” (Published in Reason magazine, December 1983 issue), Prof. Douglas B. Rasmussen has identified the problems in Will’s political thinking. Here’s an excerpt from Rasmussen’s article:

There is for Will only one "first question" of government: "What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?" Ethics and politics are welded together, he maintains; liberal theorists have attempted to separate them, but such attempts are inherently futile. Government necessarily legislates morality—by enacting laws, it not only proscribes and prescribes human behavior; it affects in numerous ways the habits, dispositions, and values of the citizenry. So the idea that government cannot and should not become involved in the so-called inner or private life of its citizens is radically wrong. The essence of government is not coercion, but authority, and its task is to use its authority in ways that will help to develop human excellence. 

Man is, after all, a social and political animal, notes Will, not some isolated individual who begins life in some state of nature. Hence, he argues, "reflection about how the individual should live is inseparable from reflection about the nature of the good society." Moreover, the effects of one's actions are not easily confined. "Society is like a Calder mobile. Touch it here, it trembles over there." Thus, Will believes that statecraft is, by its very nature, soulcraft. It follows, then, that the basic problem with current political philosophy—be it "Manchester or Massachusetts liberalism"—is its failure to recognize the state's true function: developing good human beings.

Rasmussen is correct, when he says:

Trusting politicians will, however, not do. Without a clearly understood basis for distinguishing between what ought to be (moral standards) and what must be (political standards), appealing to a sense of "national purpose" will not provide any principles for government policy. Instead, government policy will be up for grabs. Interest groups from both "left" and "right" will seek to determine policy through various forms of pressure; or, and this is usually worse, the politicians will every now and then "get religion" and seek to force some moral principle, legitimate or not, down the electorate's throats. Principle will be the last thing to guide government policy.

In this article, Rasmussen is calling Will a conservative. But I think most ordinary conservatives have a much better political opinions than people like Will. He is not a conservative—he is a neoconservative. I know that he has ranted against the neoconservatives in a few articles written after 2007, but has always been very close to the neoconservative camp.

Two Sources of Morality and Religion

In his 1932 book Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Henri Bergson notes that the most human societies are “closed” like a hive or an ant-hill. In closed societies, men are motivated by instinct and are indifferent to each other, and they are always ready to attack or defend themselves. In an “open society,” on the other hand, men are motivated by intelligence and are capable of embracing all humanity. From this definition, Bergson draws the analogy between a “closed morality,” which is a social morality that does not extend to all human beings but only to the group, and “open morality,” which embraces all humanity.

On religion, Bergson says that there has never been a society without religion, and he differentiates between a "static" and "dynamic" religion. He also draws a distinction between a “closed soul” and an “open soul” and gives the example of Socrates as an open soul who is concerned about entire humanity. He writes, “There was irony running through Socratic teaching, and outbursts of lyricism were probably rare; but in the measure in which these outbursts cleared the road for a new spirit, they have been decisive for the future of humanity.”

Here’s his description of the relationship between the closed soul and the open soul:

“Between the closed soul and the open soul there is the soul in process of opening. Between the immobility of a man seated and the motion of the same man running there is the act of getting up, the attitude he assumes when he rises. In a word, between the static and the dynamic there is to be observed, in morality too, a transition stage. This intermediate state would pass unnoticed if, when at rest, we could develop the necessary impetus to spring straight into action. But it attracts our attention when we stop short - the usual sign of insufficient impetus. Let us put the same thing in a different way. We have seen that the purely static morality might be called infra-intellectual, and the purely dynamic, supra-intellectual. Nature intended the one, and the other is a contribution of man's genius. The former is characteristic of a whole group of habits which are, in man, the counterpart of certain instincts in animals; it is something less than intelligence. The latter is inspiration, intuition, emotion, susceptible of analysis into ideas which furnish intellectual notations of it and branch out into infinite detail; thus, like a unity which encompasses and transcends a plurality incapable of ever equalling it, it contains any amount of intellectuality; it is more than intelligence. Between the two lies intelligence itself. It is at this point that the human soul would have settled down, had it sprung forward from the one without reaching the other. It would have dominated the morality of the closed soul; it would not have attained to, or rather it would have not have created, that of the open soul. Its attitude, the result of getting up, would have lifted it to the plane of intellectuality.”

Eric Voegelin has criticized Karl Popper for making an ideological rubbish out of the expressions like “Closed Society” and “Open Society,” and also “Static” and “Dynamic Religion” which Bergson had developed. In his April 18, 1950, letter to Leo Strauss, Voegelin said: “Popper’s book [The Open Society and Its Enemies] is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless.”

On The Weaponization of Philosophy

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss condemns the weaponization of philosophy in his book Natural Right and History (The University of Chicago Press; 1953). On page 34, he says, “Originally, philosophy had been the humanizing quest for the eternal order, and hence it had been a pure source of human inspiration and aspiration. Since the seventeenth century, philosophy has become a weapon, and hence an instrument.”

Lending a note of credibility to his argument, Strauss differentiates between the intellectuals and the philosophers, insisting that it is the intellectuals who are responsible for the weaponization of philosophy, and not the philosophers:

“It was this politicization of philosophy that was discerned as the root of our troubles by an intellectual who denounced the treason of the intellectuals. He committed the fatal mistake, however, of ignoring the essential difference between intellectuals and philosophers. In this he remained the dupe of the delusion which he denounced. For the politicization of philosophy consists precisely in this, that the difference between intellectuals and philosophers… becomes blurred and finally disappears.” (Page 34)

But the irony is that Strauss’s own philosophy was politicized and weaponized by his followers. Several years after his death, they established him as the intellectual pope of neoconservatism. I think Strauss is a good philosopher; he is the author of several inspiring and informative books and essays. But neoconservatism was (and is) a great misadventure of political philosophy—it has caused great distortions in conservative thought. The great victim of neoconservatism is genuine conservatism.

Socialism Versus the Family

Edward Feser’s lecture has three parts.  In the first, he explains what socialism is (and what it isn’t), and how it can come in degrees.  In the second, he discusses what the family is, and in particular the core notion of the family that underlies the diverse arrangements that have existed in different societies, the general moral outlook that has traditionally governed it in these different societies, and the way evolutionary psychology and social science support the judgment that the family is a natural rather than artificial institution.  In the third, he explains how socialism and the basic structure of the family are incompatible, and how liberal individualism has eroded the family and paved the way for socialism. He argues that if conservatives are effectively to oppose socialism, they must also oppose the liberal individualism that opens the door to it.

Technology and the Possibility of Tyranny

In his discussion of the problems in the historical approach (historicism), Leo Strauss makes the following point on Aristotle’s view that technology should be under moral and political control (Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss; Page 23):

It is obviously untrue to say, for instance, that Aristotle could not have conceived the injustice of slavery, for he did conceive of it. One may say, however, that he could not have conceived of a world state. But why? The world state presupposes such a development of technology as Aristotle could never have dreamed of. That technological development, in its turn, required that science be regarded as essentially in the service of the "conquest of nature" and that technology be emancipated from any moral and political supervision. Aristotle did not conceive of a world state because he was absolutely certain that science is theoretical and that the liberation of technology from moral and political control would lead to disastrous consequences: the fusion of science and the arts together with the unlimited or uncontrolled progress of technology has made universal and perpetual tyranny a serious possibility. Only a rash man would say Aristotle's view—that is, his answers to the question of whether or not science is essentially theoretical and whether or not technological progress is in need of strict moral or political control—has been refuted. But whatever one might think of his answers, certainly the fundamental questions to which they are the answers are identical with the fundamental questions that are of immediate concern to us today. Realizing this, we realize at the same time that the epoch which regarded Aristotle's fundamental questions as obsolete completely lacked clarity about what the fundamental issues are.

Strauss goes on to reject radical historicism by noting that history seems to prove “that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental  problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles…. If the fundamental problems persist in all historical change, human thought is capable of transcending its historical limitation or of grasping something trans-historical.” This, I think, is a clear articulation of Strauss’s dialectical and skeptical philosophy.

A Philosopher Must Have a Good Memory

Richard M. Weaver has contributed to the strand of libertarianism that is overtly conservative in nature. He is a great critic of modernity. He equates modernism with provincialism. Here’s an excerpt from his book Ideas Have Consequences (Page 68):

“Indeed, modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as the countryman may view with suspicion what­ ever lies beyond his county. There is a strong reason to group this with psychopathic phenomena because it in­volves impairment of memory, which is known to be one of the commonest accompaniments of mental pathology. It is apparent, moreover, that those who are in rebellion against memory are the ones who wish to live without knowledge; and we can, in fact, tell from their conduct that they act more than others on instinct and sensation. A frank facing of the past is unpleasant to the tender-minded, teaching as it does sharp lessons of limitation and retribution. Yet, the painful lessons we would like to forget are precisely the ones which should be kept for reference. Santayana has reminded us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and not without reason did Plato declare that a philosopher must have a good memory.”

On Character and Intelligence

Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, notes that for Aristotle character is inseparable from intelligence. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 12, “Aristotle’s Account of Virtues” (Page 154-155):

“According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness. Moreover genuine practical intelligence in turn requires knowledge of the good, indeed itself requires goodness of a kind in its possessor: '... it is clear that a man cannot have practical intelligence unless he is good’.”

He goes on to note that modern social practice and theory follows Kant rather than Aristotle at this point. “It is indeed difficult to envisage the exaltation of bureaucratic expertise in any culture in which the connection between practical intelligence and the moral virtues is firmly established.”

The Metaphysics of Conservatism

Le Penseur

Edward Feser, in his essay “The Metaphysics of Conservatism,” shows the relevance of metaphysics to modern conservative thought. He regards Plato and Aristotle as the originators of the theory of metaphysics which motivates the best strand of modern conservatism (which Feser calls Realist Conservatism).

According to Feser, modern conservatism can be divided into three broad metaphysical categories: Realist Conservatism, Reductionist Conservatism, and Anti-Realist Conservatism.

Realist Conservatism, Feser says, “affirms the existence of an objective order of forms or universals that define the natures of things, including human nature, and what it seeks to conserve are just those institutions reflecting a recognition and respect for this objective order. Since human nature is, on this view, objective and universal, long-standing moral and cultural traditions are bound to reflect it and thus have a presumption in their favor.”


Reductionist Conservatism, he says, “might be defined as a variety of conservatism that agrees with Realist Conservatism in affirming that there is such a thing as human nature and that it is more or less fixed, but which would ground this affirmation, not in anything like an eternal realm of Forms, but rather in, say, certain contingent facts about human biology, or perhaps in the laws of economics or in a theory of cultural evolution. The Reductionist Conservative is, accordingly, more likely to look to empirical science for inspiration than to philosophy or theology. He is also bound to see grey in at least some areas where the Realist Conservative sees black and white, since facts about economics, human biology, and the like, while very stable, are not quite as fixed or implacable as the Forms. But he is less likely to see grey than is the Anti-Realist Conservative…”



An Anti-Realist Conservative, he says, “might be characterized as someone doubtful that any relatively fixed moral or political principles can be read off even from scientific or economic facts about the human condition. Whereas Realist and Reductionist Conservatives value tradition because there is at least a presumption that it reflects human nature, the Anti-Realist Conservative values it merely because it provides for stability and order.”

Feser notes that Realist Conservatism must be supported because it is a true form of conservatism. He rejects Reductionist Conservatism and Anti-Realist Conservatism—noting that these two are not really versions of conservatism at all, any more than nominalism or conceptualism are versions of realism. He writes: “For the Anti-Realist Conservative, as I've said, does not really oppose liberal measures per se, but only their overhasty and excessively disruptive implementation. Historically, the pragmatists, politicians, and others who exemplify Anti-Realist Conservatism have merely served to consolidate the gains of liberalism.”

Only the Realist Conservatives are capable of opposing liberalism. “Communists, it used to be said, are liberals in a hurry. Conservatives need to be wary lest their creed degenerate into something indistinguishable from a leisurely liberalism.”

On The Role of Senses and Freedom of the Mind

In his essay, “Good Sense and Classical Studies,” (Henri Bergson: Key Writings; page 422), Henri Bergson says:

"The role of our senses, in general, is not so much to give us knowledge of material objects as to signal their utility to us. We taste flavours, we breathe odours, we distinguish hot and cold, darkness and light. But science tells us that none of these qualities belong to objects in the form that we apprehend them; they only tell us in their picturesque language the inconvenience or advantage that things have for us, the services they could render us, the dangers they could lead us into. Our senses thus serve us, above all, to orient us in space; they are not turned towards science, but towards life. But we do not only live in a material milieu, but also in a social milieu. If all of our movements are transmitted in space and thus disturb part of the physical universe, by contrast most of our actions have their immediate or far-reaching consequences, good or bad, first of all for us, then for the society that surrounds us. Foreseeing [prevoir] these consequences, or rather having a presentiment of them [pressentir]; distinguishing the essential from the inessential or indifferent in matters of behaviour; choosing from the various possible courses of action the one which will produce the greatest amount of attainable rather than imaginable good: this is, it seems to me, the role of good sense. It is thus indeed a sense in its own way; but while the other senses place us in relation to things, good sense presides over our relations with persons." (This essay is an address delivered by Bergson at the Great Ampitheatre of the Sorbonne, July 30, 1895.)

The comments that Bergson makes on freedom of the mind are also quite perceptive. He says:

"One of the greatest obstacles, we were saying, to the freedom of the mind, are the ideas that language gives to us ready-made, and that we breathe, so to speak, in the environment which surrounds us. They are never assimilated with our substance: incapable of participating in the life of the mind, they persevere, as truly dead ideas, in their stiffness and immobility. Why then do we so often prefer them to those which are living and vibrant? Why does our thought, instead of working to become master of itself, prefer to exile itself from itself? It is firstly through distraction, and by dint of amusing ourselves along the road, we no longer know where we wanted to go."

On The Meaning of The Comic

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson’s 1911 book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is a collection of three essays which explore why people laugh and what laughter means, especially laughter that is caused by comical acts. Here’s an excerpt from the first essay, “The Comic in General — The Comic Element in Forms and Movements — Expansive Force of the Comic”:

The first point to which attention should be called is that the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human. A landscape may be beautiful, charming and sublime, or insignificant and ugly; it will never be laughable. You may laugh at an animal, but only because you have detected in it some human attitude or expression. You may laugh at a hat, but what you are making fun of, in this case, is not the piece of felt or straw, but the shape that men have given it,—the human caprice whose mould it has assumed. It is strange that so important a fact, and such a simple one too, has not attracted to a greater degree the attention of philosophers. Several have defined man as "an animal which laughs." They might equally well have defined him as an animal which is laughed at; for if any other animal, or some lifeless object, produces the same effect, it is always because of some resemblance to man, of the stamp he gives it or the use he puts it to. 

Bergson is of the view that laughter is a social gesture which inspires people to avoid eccentricity and be normal. In the first essay, he notes: “By the fear which it inspires, it restrains eccentricity, keeps constantly awake and in mutual contact certain activities of a secondary order which might retire into their shell and go to sleep, and, in short, softens down whatever the surface of the social body may retain of mechanical inelasticity.”

Is Ayn Rand a Platonic or Aristotelian Thinker?

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand has founded a school of philosophy called objectivism, but she has not written a single philosophical treatise on any area of philosophy. As far as I know, objectivism is the only school of philosophy in the last 400 years whose founder was primarily a fiction writer.

Much of what goes under the banner of objectivism is an interpretation by scholars who are Rand’s followers of what she has said in her fiction novels, short articles, and lectures and interviews. But it is possible that other scholars, who are not Rand’s followers, may examine the same writings by Rand and come up with a different interpretation of her philosophy.

Prof. Roderick T. Long has his own way of looking at Rand’s philosophical thought. In his interesting monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand, he questions the objectivist claim that Rand was an Aristotelian thinker. In the beginning of the monograph, Long says:

Rand’s Objectivist philosophy proclaims itself a version of Aristotelianism. It is also a philosophy that places a premium on rationality. So my question here is: How far does the Objectivist account of rationality succeed in capturing the crucial insights of the Aristotelian approach? My answer, to give the game away, is that Rand unfortunately adopts a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian conception of theoretical rationality; that this in turn leads her to adopt a Humean rather than an Aristotelian conception of practical rationality; and that this leads her to adopt a Hobbesian rather than an Aristotelian conception of the relation between self-interest and morality— all of which tends to undermine her basically Aristotelian inclinations and sentiments. Hence, I would maintain, Rand’s admirers may still have something important to learn from their teacher’s first teacher. 

Long makes the case that Rand’s philosophical writings contain not only Platonic elements but also the elements of Humean, Hobbesian, and Kantian thought.

William James and Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson

Harvard professor William James and the French philosopher Henri Bergson were great friends. James (who was senior to Bergson by 17 years) did a lot to promote Bergson’s work.

In his 1909 book The Pluralistic Universe, James said: “If I had not read Bergson, I should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately, in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet, and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted laws of the logic of identity. It is certain, at any rate, that without the confidence which being able to lean on Bergson's authority gives me I should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience.”

James’s high opinion of Bergson’s work is also clear from the letter that he wrote to Bergson on June 13, 1907 (The Letters of William James, Edited by his son Henry James; Page 290-294). Here’s an excerpt from James’s letter:

O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy, making, if I mistake not, an entirely new era in respect of matter, but unlike the works of genius of the “transcendentalist” movement (which are so obscurely and abominably and inaccessibly written), a pure classic in point of form. You may be amused at the comparison, but in finishing it I found the same after-taste remaining as after finishing “Madame Bovary,” such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim. Then the aptness of your illustrations, that never scratch or stand out at right angles, but invariably simplify the thought and help to pour it along! Oh, indeed you are a magician! And if your next book proves to be as great an advance on this one as this is on its two predecessors, your name will surely go down as one of the great creative names in philosophy. 


There! have I praised you enough? What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise — although the philosophers generally call it “recognition”! If you want still more praise, let me know, and I will send it, for my features have been on a broad smile from the first page to the last, at the chain of felicities that never stopped. I feel rejuvenated. 

As to the content of it, I am not in a mood at present to make any definite reaction. There is so much that is absolutely new that it will take a long time for your contemporaries to assimilate it, and I imagine that much of the development of detail will have to be performed by younger men whom your ideas will stimulate to coruscate in manners unexpected by yourself. To me at present the vital achievement of the book is that it inflicts an irrecoverable death-wound upon Intellectualism. It can never resuscitate! But it will die hard, for all the inertia of the past is in it, and the spirit of professionalism and pedantry as well as the aesthetic-intellectual delight of dealing with categories logically distinct yet logically connected, will rally for a desperate defense. The élan vital, all contentless and vague as you are obliged to leave it, will be an easy substitute to make fun of. But the beast has its death-wound now, and the manner in which you have inflicted it (interval versus temps d'arrêt, etc.) is masterly in the extreme. I don’t know why this later redaction of your critique of the mathematics of movement has seemed to me so much more telling than the early statement — I suppose it is because of the wider use made of the principle in the book. 

In this letter, James is talking about Bergson's new book Creative Evolution. He goes on to inform Bergson of his own book Pragmatism: “You will be receiving my own little “pragmatism” book simultaneously with this letter. How jejune and inconsiderable it seems in comparison with your great system! it seems in comparison with your great system! But it is so congruent with parts of your system, fits so well into interstices thereof, that you will easily understand why I am so enthusiastic. I feel that at bottom we are fighting the same fight, you a commander, I in the ranks.”

On Debroy’s Translation of the Vedas

The Holy Vedas by Bibek Debroy and Dipavali Debroy is a fine overview of the four Vedas: the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda, and the Artharva Veda.

The authors have not translated all the vedic hymns, and they do not cross-reference to the original vedic verse, which makes it difficult to find out to which vedic verse a particular paragraph in the translation is referring to, and I believe that the placement of some of the verses in the book could have been better. But overall this book manages to give a fine sense of what is in the Vedas.

The Sanskrit word “veda” is literally means knowledge and is derived from the root vid—“to know.” In his 1898 book The Arctic Home of the Vedas, Bal Gangadhar Tilak suggests that the vedic literature was composed around 6000 B.C. But most modern scholars date the Vedas between 1700 B.C. to 900 B.C.

Enlightenment Endangers Philosophy

Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates
by François-André Vincent (1776) 

Allan Bloom in his “Interpretative Essay,” (The Republic of Plato; Page 392) writes:

“Socrates teaches that wisdom and political power are distinct. Their coming together can only be due to the coincidence that a man who is wise happens also to be a ruler, thus uniting the two things; nothing in their two natures leads the one to the other. Political power serves the passions or desires of the members of a city, and a multitude cannot philosophize. It may use the results of science or philosophy, but it will use them to its own ends and will thereby distort them. Moreover, the wise man by himself is more of a threat to a regime than a helper. Intellectual progress is not the same as political progress, and, because there is not a simple harmony between the works of the mind and the works of the city, the philosopher without power must remain in an uneasy relationship with the city and its beliefs. Enlightenment endangers philosophy because it tempts philosophers to sacrifice their quest for the truth in favor of attempting to edify the public; in an "enlightened" world, philosophy risks being made a tool of unwise and even tyrannical regimes, thus giving those regimes the color of reason and losing its function as the standard for criticism of them.”

On The Politics of Philosopher Kings

In Plato’s the Republic, Socrates says: “Unless the philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings and chiefs genuinely and adequately philosophize, and political power and philosophy coincide in the same place, while the many natures now making their way to either apart from the other are by necessity excluded, there is no rest from ills for the cities, my dear Glaucon, nor I think for human kind, nor will the regime we have now described in speech ever come forth from nature, insofar as possible, and see the light of the sun.” ~ (Allan Bloom’s translation in The Republic of Plato)

In his "Interpretive Essay," (The Republic of Plato; Page 390), Allan Bloom writes: “we are in some sense the heirs and beneficiaries of Socrates' work, even as we are the children of the Enlightenment which radicalized that work. Partly because Socrates and Plato were so effective in arguing the usefulness of philosophy to civil society, and partly because the meaning of philosophy has changed, we no longer believe that there is a tension between philosophy and civil society. Although we might doubt whether philosophers have the gift of ruling, we do not consider the activity of philosophy to be pernicious to political concerns. Hence the notion of philosopher-kings is not in itself paradoxical for us. But, precisely because we take it for granted that the hatred of philosophy was merely prejudice, and that history has helped us to overcome that prejudice, we are in danger of missing the point which Socrates makes here.”

Socrates is taking the position that a just city is not possible unless philosophy is tolerated and encouraged. Without philosophy the regime cannot find impartial rulers. Only the philosopher is capable of devoting his attention to the whole—only he can make a fair distribution of the good things that the city has to offer. Bloom notes that “Philosophy is a rare plant, one which has flourished only in the West; it is perhaps the essence of that West. Its place is not simply assured everywhere and always as is the city's. The writings of Plato and a few others made it respectable. The Republic thus represents one of the most decisive moments of our history. In this work Socrates presents the grounds of his being brought to trial and shows why philosophy is always in danger and always in need of a defense.” ("Interpretive Essay"; Page 390)

Allan Bloom on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

Plato's Allegory of the Cave by Jan Saenredam (1604)

In his interpretive essay on Plato’s the Republic, Allan Bloom offers an interesting interpretation of the Platonic Allegory of the Cave. Here’s an excerpt:

“After initiating Glaucon into the mysteries of this divine beauty, Socrates turns to an elaboration of the relationship of the philosophic soul to the city. The divided line described the soul's progress from its lowest level of cognition, imagination, to trust, thought, and finally intellection, its highest level. But now Socrates makes clear that this is not a simple movement depending only on talent and effort. There are powerful forces that stand in the way of the philosophic quest. The discovery of that quest has the character of a liberation from bondage. In the most moving of all his many images, Socrates compares our situation to that of prisoners in a cave. We are surrounded by darkness, our only access to ourselves and the world coming from the observation of shadows on the wall. But, although there is darkness, there is also a light in the cave; the pale shadows we possess are made possible by that light. Moreover, a few human beings can emerge from the cave. Our lives are a combination of ugliness and sublime possibility. The Enlightenment, taken literally, believed that the light could be brought into the cave and the shadows dispelled; men, in that view, could live in perfect light. This Socrates denies; the philosopher does not bring light to the cave, he escapes into the light and can lead a few to it; he is a guide, not a torchbearer. The attempt to illuminate the cave is self-defeating: a part of man craves the shadows. The light would be dimmed and distorted; it would not provide real clarity within the cave. And, at the same time, those who have the urge to ascend to the light would be discouraged from the endeavor by the myth, apparently based on reason, that there is no other light to which they can ascend. Thus the only source of liberation and inspiration would disappear from the cave. The Enlightenment teaches that the cave can be transformed; Socrates teaches that it must be transcended and that this transcendence can be accomplished only by a few.” ~ (“Interpretative Essay”; The Republic of Plato by Allan Bloom; Page 402-403)

On Nietzsche’s Last Man

There is a resistance to transforming into an Nietzschean overman. Most men will not accept the challenge. They will prefer to live as the as an antithesis to the overman, the Nietzschean Last Man. Eric Voegelin offers a perspective on the “Last Man” in his 1944 essay, "Nietzsche, the Crisis, and the War," published in the Journal of Politics. Here's an excerpt:

The refusal of the challenge can assume various forms which, in part, are determined by the time position of the evading person. A first form has been characterized by Nietzsche himself in the symbol of the “Last Man.” Zarathustra preaches the gospel of the superman to the people, and the people are silent. He then tries to arouse them by an appeal to their pride and draws the picture of the most contemptible, of the Last Man, whom they will be unless they overcome their present state. The Last Man is the man without creative love, without creative imagination, without a desire for anything that is more than himself. “What is a star?” asks the last man, and he is satisfied with his little pleasures and the comforts of his existence. What he wants is: some warmth, some neighborliness, not too much work, protection against disease, a sufficient measure of drugs to create pleasant dreams (liquor, movies, radio), no poverty but not too much wealth. He wants to know what is going on and to thrash it out; all want the same and want to be equal; he who feels different goes voluntarily into the insane asylum; “formerly all the world was insane”—say the most subtle and leer; one has a pleasure for the day and a pleasure for the night— but with restraint, for the last man is concerned about health and wants a long life. “ ‘We have invented happiness’—say the last men and leer.” At this point of the speech the audience breaks out in enthusiasm: “Oh, give us this last man—make us these last men. You can have then your superman!” and they laughed. “But there is ice in their laughter,” adds Nietzsche, having diagnosed correctly the schizophrenic touch of the man who is last because he is lost spiritually.

Voegelin notes that the popularity of the Last Man leads to despiritualized existence or nihilism which can be a cause of brutality and war. He writes, “The evasion of the challenge through derision and through acceptance of the despiritualized existence is, however, a short-lived possibility. When the organizing power of the spirit becomes weak, the result is not a peaceably happy despiritualized society, but a chaos of instincts and values. Despiritualized happiness is the twin brother of despiritualized brutality; once the spiritual order of the soul is dissolved in happiness, it is only a question of time and circumstance when and from which quarter the attack on an order without dignity will begin.”

In his Will to Power, Nietzsche predicted a great war: “There will be wars, as there never have been wars on earth.” On Nietzsche’s prediction, Voegelin says, “This prediction is to be understood, not as hyperbole, but as a statement on the level of empirical description. The wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were dynastic and national wars with limited political purposes. The wars predicted by Nietzsche are “immense” because the framework of political ordinates—the dynasties, the nations—which determined the purpose, and with the purpose the limits of war, is breaking down.”

Žižek Won, Peterson Lost

If you want to know why the rightist intellectuals are no match for the leftist intellectuals, you should watch the debate between Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson. Žižek makes point after point for which Peterson has no answer. Peterson seems out of his depth throughout the discussion; he can’t get Marxism and postmodernism out of his head. He keeps making incorrect assertions about Marxism and postmodernism, while Žižek keeps correcting him.

Peterson opens with the debate with a monologue on Karl Marx—he confesses that he has very little knowledge of Marx because he read only one book by Marx The Communist Manifesto. But then he goes on to offer a cliched critique of Marxism. Why focus so much on Marxism when you have so little knowledge of the work that Marx has done?

Žižek, on the other hand, dwells on contemporary issues, issues that are of importance for people today and he comes out as a much stronger intellectual. On Donald Trump, Žižek makes this interesting point: “Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No. His conservatism is a postmodern performance—a gigantic ego trip. In this sense of playing with traditional values… Trump is the ultimate postmodern president. If we compare Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is the postmodern president at its purest while Sanders is a rather old fashioned moralist.”

When Peterson uses the term ‘postmodern neo-Marxism,’ Žižek responds that he understands what Peterson refers to when he uses this term. But he points out that this term is incorrect because the true Marxists focus on political economy, while postmodern thinkers and identity politics people focus on culture—they are not Marxists.

I think Žižek is right, the term ‘postmodern neo-Marxism’ makes no sense. I have no idea from where Peterson got the idea that the postmoderns are neo-Marxists. Žižek notes that the postmodern thinker Michel Foucault was not a Marxist. He says, “Foucault’s main target was Marxism.” The worst point in the debate for Peterson is when he is unable to name a single intellectual who represents the “post-modern neo-Marxist” camp that he regularly rails against.

Here’s the YouTube video of their debate (the video starts 38 minutes in):

Exercise of Reason Preceded the Philosophy of Reason

Brand Blanshard notes that mankind has been exercising reason for at least five hundred thousand years before men had any understanding of what being reasonable meant. Here’s an excerpt from Blanshard’s book Reason & Analysis (Page 52):

“Indeed men seem to have been exercising the reason we have just described for at least five hundred thousand years before they had anything like an adequate idea of what being reasonable meant. Aristotle, who struggled long to achieve such an idea, pointed out that what was first in order of nature may be last in order of recognition; and he would certainly have agreed with Locke’s remark that ‘God has not been so sparing to men, to make them barely two-legged animals, and left it to Aristotle to make them rational.’ But while rational practice may be developed independently of theory, the theory of reason does depend on a developed practice; it is only with instances of an accomplished use of reason before them that philosophers have ever succeeded in giving an account of that use. The great advances in understanding what reason means have accompanied or shortly followed bursts of reflective activity."

I am convinced by Blanshard's view of reason. I think reason is trait that human beings have developed during the course of evolution; it is not something that we have learned. In the next passage, Blanshard points out: "When man escaped from the animal mind, his use of reason seems to have been concentrated for some hundreds of millenniums on the connection of means to end.” (Page 52) This means that thought arose as the instrument of practical need.

On the Absence of Dogmatism in Socrates

Marble head of Socrates

Socrates is not an agnostic or a skeptic, but there is not a whiff of dogmatism in him. He is a remarkably tolerant and open-minded thinker. In the dialogues in Plato’s the Republic, he is always willing to hear the other side. He listens to objections, gives others a chance to express their ideas, and often points out that it is important go on learning.

Here’s an excerpt from Allan Bloom's “Interpretive Essay,” in his book The Republic of Plato (Page 331):

"The intellectual voice of the city can become tractable as the city never will. The Republic, a book about a perfect city, is characterized by having perfect interlocutors, that is, men without whom a city could not be founded and who are, at the same time, persuadable, whom argument can convince to adapt to a new kind of world which is contrary to their apparent advantage. Just as one must have almost unbelievable conditions to found the best city in deed, so one must have exceptional interlocutors to found it in speech."

Eric Voegelin on Karl Popper: Rascally, Impertinent, Loutish

Karl Popper

Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin were contemptuous of Karl Popper’s work on political theory, The Open Society and Its Enemies. They thought that Popper’s depiction of Plato as a philosopher of totalitarianism was scandalous and a complete fabrication. In the 1950s, Popper was auditioning for an appointment at the University of Chicago, this alarmed Strauss.

In his letter dated April 10, 1950, Strauss writes to Voegelin:

May I ask you [Voegelin] to let me know sometime what you think of Mr. Popper. He gave a lecture here [at the University of Chicago], on the task of social philosophy, that was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think "rationally," although it passed itself off as "rationalism" -- it was very bad. I cannot imagine that such a man ever wrote something worthwhile reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his productions. 

Voegelin replied in just 8 days. In his letter dated April 18, 1950, he writes:

The opportunity to speak a few deeply felt words about Karl Popper to a kindred soul is too golden to endure a long delay. This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the “open society and its enemies” is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though I would otherwise not have touched it. You are quite right that it is a vocational duty to make ourselves familiar with the ideas of such a work when they lie in our field; I would hold out against this duty the other vocational duty, not to write and publish such a work. In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal, but it is still possible to lift out a few main annoyances. 

Voegelin lists four major flaws in Popper’s work. The complete letter can be read here. He sums up his argument against Popper with these lines:

Popper’s book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless.  

It took Strauss a few months write a reply. He thanked Voegelin for the detailed letter on the problems in Popper’s thesis and also revealed that he had taken the liberty of showing Voegelin’s letter to an in influential colleague “who was thereby encouraged to throw his not inconsiderable influence into the balance against Popper’s probable appointment here [at the University of Chicago]. You thereby helped to prevent a scandal.”

Allan Bloom on Karl Popper’s Open Society

The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David

Karl Popper has taught that the city that Socrates and his friends imagine in Plato’s the Republic is a totalitarian monstrosity. He regarded Plato as the philosophical champion of a closed society.

But Allan Bloom’s reading of Plato’s the Republic stands in marked contrast to Popper’s views. In his The Republic of Plato, Bloom presents Plato as an anti-totalitarian philosopher. He doesn't see Plato as an enemy of open society but as a resource for it. Bloom makes one mention of Popper in his Preface to the Second Edition of The Republic of Plato. Here’s an excerpt:

The republic becomes peculiarly attractive and repulsive because no book describes community so precisely and so completely or undertakes so rigorously to turn cold politics into family warmth. In the period just after World War II, no criticism of what Karl Popper called "the open society" was brooked. The open society was understood to be simply unproblematic, having solved the difficulties presented by older thinkers. The progress of science was understood to be strictly paralleled by that of society; individualism seemed no threat to human ties, and mass society no threat to meaningful participation. The softening in this narrow liberal position can be seen in the substitution in common discourse of the less positively charged term technology for science, the pervasive doubt about whether the mastery of nature is a very good idea, and a commonly expressed sentiment of lostness and powerlessness on the part of individual citizens.  

In the days of thoughtless optimism, Plato was considered irrelevant and his criticism was not available to warn us of possible dangers. Now it is recognized that he had all the doubts we have today and that the founding myth of his city treats men and women as literally rooted in its soil. Everybody is sure that Plato knew something about community, but he makes today's comfortable communitarians uncomfortable by insisting that so much individuality must be sacrificed to community. Moreover, they rightly sense that Plato partly parodies the claims and the pretensions of community. The uninvolved Socrates, distrustful of neat solutions, does not appear to be a very reliable ally of movements. Plato, criticized in the recent past for not being a good liberal, is now shunned for not being a wholehearted communitarian. He is, however, back in the game. 

Leo Strauss, under whom Allan Bloom had studied, has dismissed Popper as an incompetent reader of Plato.

On Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is the story of a group of genetically-engineered children who have been reared at the Hailsham House to serve as organ donors. The purpose of the Hailsham House is to prepare them for their future — by keeping them (their organs) healthy through regular medical checkups, preventing them from smoking cigarettes, and installing in them the methods of self-repression and denial that will keep them steady and dependable from one organ donation to the next.

The novel is narrated by Kathy H., who on the first page announces that she has worked for more than 11 years as a “carer," performing the task of assisting the people who are serving as “donors.” The “donors” are constantly in pain as they are giving up one organ after the other. They have to be kept doped up on drugs to keep them alive for their next donation. Kathy reminiscences the years that she had spent at the Hailsham House with her two closest friends, Ruth and Tommy. Here are the opening paragraphs of the novel:

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year. That’ll make it almost exactly twelve years. Now I know my being a carer so long isn’t necessarily because they think I’m fantastic at what I do. There are some really good carers who’ve been told to stop after just two or three years. And I can think of one carer at least who went on for all of fourteen years despite being a complete waste of space. So I’m not trying to boast. But then I do know for a fact they’ve been pleased with my work, and by and large, I have too. My donors have always tended to do much better than expected. Their recovery times have been impressive, and hardly any of them have been classified as “agitated,” even before fourth donation. Okay, maybe I am boasting now. But it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying “calm.” I’ve developed a kind of instinct around donors. I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say, and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it. 

Anyway, I’m not making any big claims for myself. I know carers, working now, who are just as good and don’t get half the credit. If you’re one of them, I can understand how you might get resentful—about my bedsit, my car, above all, the way I get to pick and choose who I look after. And I’m a Hailsham student—which is enough by itself sometimes to get people’s backs up. Kathy H., they say, she gets to pick and choose, and she always chooses her own kind: people from Hailsham, or one of the other privileged estates. No wonder she has a great record. I’ve heard it said enough, so I’m sure you’ve heard it plenty more, and maybe there’s something in it. But I’m not the first to be allowed to pick and choose, and I doubt if I’ll be the last. And anyway, I’ve done my share of looking after donors brought up in every kind of place. By the time I finish, remember, I’ll have done twelve years of this, and it’s only for the last six they’ve let me choose. 

And why shouldn’t they? Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural. There’s no way I could have gone on for as long as I have if I’d stopped feeling for my donors every step of the way. And anyway, if I’d never started choosing, how would I ever have got close again to Ruth and Tommy after all those years?

Allan Bloom’s Interpretation of Plato’s The Republic

In his Interpretive Essay (The Republic of Plato by Allan Bloom; Second Edition; Page 305 to 436), Allan Bloom presents Plato’s the Republic as a guide to the problem of human happiness, and the question of how a human being should live in a city or society. He views Socrates as the founder of political philosophy. Here’s an excerpt from Bloom’s Interpretive Essay:

The Republic shows us why Socrates was accused and why there was good reason to accuse him. Not only does he tell us about the good regime, but we see his effect on the young men he was said to have corrupted. Socrates, in leading them to a justice which is not Athenian, or even Greek, but is rather human, precisely because it is rational, shows the way to the truth about political things and develops the extremely complex relationship of that truth to civil society. These questions are most relevant to modern man, although they are perhaps harder for him to understand than for men of any previous generation. They are relevant to him because he admits his need for "values" and because the progress of publicly useful science now threatens him with destruction; they are harder for him to understand because he has been taught that "values" cannot be established by reason and that science is simply salutary for society. 

For these reasons it behooves us to study the Republic. For it is the first book which brings philosophy "down into the cities"; and we watch in it the foundation of political science, the only discipline which can bring the blessings of reason to the city. We will learn that the establishment of political science cannot be carried out without sacrifice of the dearest convictions and interests of most men; these sacrifices are so great that to many they do not seem worthwhile: one of the most civilized cities which has ever existed thought it better to sacrifice philosophy in the person of Socrates rather than face the alternative he presented. This is why philosophy needs an apology; it is a dangerous and essentially questionable activity. Socrates knew that his interests were not, and could not be, the interests of most men and their cities. We frequently do not see this and assume that his execution was a result of the blind prejudices of the past. Therefore we do not see the true radicalness of the philosophic life. The Republic is the best antidote to our prejudice. The proper starting point for the study of Socratic philosophy is the nonphilosophic orientation of the city within which philosophy must take its place. Hostility to philosophy is the natural condition of man and the city. Socrates, in admitting his guilt, will show what higher concerns pardon him for it. 

I think Bloom offers any interesting way of looking at Socrates and Plato. Bloom begins his Preface to the Second Edition of The Republic of Plato with these words: “When I teach the Republic now, the reactions to it are more urgent and more intense than they were a quarter-century ago when I was working on this translation and this interpretation.”

On Nationalism

In his essay on philosophical and political thoughts of Karl Riezler, (Chapter 10, “Karl Riezler,” What is Political Philosophy? by Leo Strauss), Leo Strauss makes the following comment on nationalism (Page 238):

While nationalism is as such theoretically unsatisfactory, it may still supply us with the best available framework for understanding the present political situation and for enlightening political action within a world that is dominated for all the foreseeable future by nationalism. Nationalism is certainly superior for these purposes, not only to the constructs of the legalists, but likewise to a certain sociology which is guided by the notions of “society” and “growth.” For that sociology is apt to make us forget two things which the nationalist never forgets. Societies are still, and for the foreseeable future, national or imperial societies, closed off from other societies by unmistakable and formidable frontiers which have been established by wars rather than by other means; and if societies “grow” there is no guarantee whatsoever that they will not take away the light of the sun from others: he who preaches “growth” without thinking of the term of growth, of the peak beyond which there cannot be growth, preaches war. 

Strauss points out on page 237 that “Riezler’s decision in favor of nationalism rested entirely upon experience, on the experience of the power of nationalism in the present and in the past, and the experience of the low character of actual cosmopolitanism.”

Persecution and the Art of Writing

Leo Strauss

Leo Strauss has an interesting perspective on the influence that persecution and censorship can have on the art of writing. Here’s an excerpt from his essay, “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” (Chapter 2; Persecution and the Art of Writing by Leo Strauss):

Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only. It has all the advantages of private communication without having its greatest disadvantage—that it reaches only the writer's acquaintances. It has all the advantages of public communication without having its greatest disadvantage—capital punishment for the author. But how can a man perform the miracle of speaking in a publication to a minority, while being silent to the majority of his readers? The fact which makes this literature possible can be expressed in the axiom that thoughtless men are careless readers, and only thoughtful men are careful readers. Therefore an author who wishes to address only thoughtful men has but to write in such a way that only a very careful reader can detect the meaning of his book. But, it will be objected, there may be clever men, careful readers, who are not trustworthy, and who, after having found the author out, would denounce him to the authorities. As a matter of fact, this literature would be impossible if the Socratic dictum that virtue is knowledge, and therefore that thoughtful men as such are trustworthy and not cruel, were entirely wrong. 

Another axiom, but one which is meaningful only so long as persecution remains within the bounds of legal procedure, is that a careful writer of normal intelligence is more intelligent than the most intelligent censor, as such. For the burden of proof rests with the censor. It is he, or the public prosecutor, who must prove that the author holds or has uttered heterodox views. In order to do so he must show that certain literary deficiencies of the work are not due to chance, but that the author used a given ambiguous expression deliberately, or that he constructed a certain sentence badly on purpose. That is to say, the censor must prove not only that the author is intelligent and a good writer in general, for a man who intentionally blunders in writing must possess the art of writing, but above all that he was on the usual level of his abilities when writing the incriminating words. But how can that be proved, if even Homer nods from time to time?

On The Proliferation of Mass Graphomania

Milan Kundera in 1980

Milan Kundera, in his fascinating novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, talks about the proliferation of mass graphomania in the modern world. Here’s an excerpt (Part 4: “Lost Letters”; Page 106):

Graphomania (an obsession with writing books) takes on the proportions of mass epidemic whenever a society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions:

1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities;

2. an advanced state of social atomization and the resultant general feeling of isolation of the individual;

3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (In this connection I find it symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel. Bibi was absolutely right when she claimed never  to have experiences anything from the outside. It is this absence of content, this void, that powers the motor driving her to write.)

But the effect transmits a kind of flashback to the cause. If general isolation causes graphomania, mass graphomania itself reinforces and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.

The proliferation of mass graphomania among politicians, cab drivers, women on the delivery table, mistresses, murderers, criminals, prostitutes, police chiefs, doctors, and patients proves to me that every individual without exception bears a potential writer within himself and that all mankind has every right to rush out into the streets with a cry of “We are all writers!”


The reason is that everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it’s too late.


Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.