Leo Strauss, The Straussians, and the Study of the American Regime by Kenneth L. Deutsch

Author:Kenneth L. Deutsch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781461600671
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-07-11T04:30:00+00:00

The morality of the ancients can be distinguished from that of the moderns by the greater role assigned to magnanimity by the former, a virtue the moderns saw as sustaining a dangerous element of vanity on a foundation of poetry.28

Speaking of Socrates, Cropsey says that he was “distinguished ... from his modern successors by his having kept man’s nobility always in sight as his star and compass.”29 Does nobility here refer to man’s moral nobility, encompassing magnanimity, or to the nobility of philosophy? Far from being simply the same, these two seem to exist in tension as rival forms of human freedom, a tension not unrelated to the tension between philosophy and poetry. Is it possible to banish the highheartedness of magnanimity from political life without at the same time banishing the highheartedness that is the condition for philosophy? It is an open question, though not among the moderns, who allow the deeds of the magnanimous man and the speeches concerning the philosopher-king to atrophy simultaneously.

Whether or not they remain joined of necessity, the nobility of classical political philosophy was not separated from the thought that philosophy is the best way of life. As Cropsey notes, the highheartedness of philosophy is inseparably connected to the philosopher’s knowledge of his own ignorance. The political problem arising from the Socratic view of philosophy as the best way of life stems directly from the ineradicable element of doubt or skepticism involved in that way of life and the ineradicable element of closure or “ethnocentrism” involved in political life.30 Every political community is a particular political community. A skeptical sovereign might be an unsteady sovereign, instilling doubt and uncertainty, not peace and prosperity, in his unhappy subjects. The problem is exacerbated if the skeptical sovereign is a democratic sovereign subject to the influence of demagogues.31 A solution might be found if political wisdom could be made to replace philosophic ambiguity. In contrast to the intellectual modesty of the Socratic Enlightenment, Cropsey speaks of the “ideological characteristic of modern thought,” by which he means “the wish to establish political life directly upon the whole truth about the whole,” a wish he sees as “nearly kin to the aspirations of the Enlightenment.”32 Cropsey ascribes this wish to Hobbes, but he makes it quite plain that Hobbes did not, and knew that he did not, possess the whole truth about the whole. Nor did Hobbes think that he could narrow the gulf between philosopher and non-philosopher by causing the truth that he did know to become the cultural property of all.33 The same can be said for Descartes and other figures of the Enlightenment.34 Hobbes’s “wish” was motivated by his urgent need to compete with a revelation that did in fact claim to have the whole truth about the whole. His solution was to restore secular sovereignty on a foundation of secular science, whose apparent claim to wisdom far exceeded that of philosophy proper.35 Hobbes’s pervasive and “fundamental” conflict with human claims to supernatural wisdom leads him to exaggerate the encouragement Aristotle gives to private judgments of right and wrong.

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