施特劳斯论现代政治

1 LeoLeoLeoLeo Strauss'sStrauss'sStrauss'sStrauss's PerspectivePerspectivePerspectivePerspective onononon ModernModernModernModern PoliticsPoliticsPoliticsPolitics ByByByBy ThomasThomasThomasThomas L.L.L.L. PanglePanglePanglePangle For manifold reasons that I am not competent to explain, the "serious" media in Europe and in America have recently been rife with dramatic surmises about the possible significance of the impact of Leo Strauss’s political theorizing on contemporary American policy makers and policy shapers. The media have become aware of an important fact about contemporary intellectual life: Strauss’s complex philosophical reflections do exercise a quietly growing deep influence, not only in America but abroad, in the East (near and far) as well as in Europe. And the chief good that might conceivably result from the flurry is the spurring of some to a more serious consideration of Strauss’s writings. Unfortunately, however, it does not appear that the journalists who have recently been moved to pronounce in print about Strauss’s teaching have been able to devote much time to a study of his philosophic corpus. At any rate, they have advanced all sorts of extravagant (and even preposterous) claims about what Strauss thought or taught. These assertions have been marked by their lack of substantiation through genuine quotations from, or even through accurate summaries of, what Strauss wrote. In what follows, I would like to try to provide a brief, introductory guide to some of the most manifest ways in which Strauss’s writings may be said to offer a deepening of our understanding of contemporary politics. As goes without saying, I must be selective: I will stress especially those aspects of Strauss’s published reflections that have been most grossly misunderstood in the media. StraussStraussStraussStrauss’’’’ssss RevivalRevivalRevivalRevival ofofofof ClassicalClassicalClassicalClassical PoliticalPoliticalPoliticalPolitical PhilosophyPhilosophyPhilosophyPhilosophy In the massive foreground of Strauss’s lifework stands his resuscitation of classical republican political philosophy. Here Strauss finds the standpoint for a searching and critical, if sympathetic and even somewhat admiring, appraisal of contemporary liberal democracy. Here Strauss finds the key to a recovery of our lost or obscured self-consciousness as moderns. For our civic existence is rooted in a vast cultural revolution-what was called "the Enlightenment," of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--that defined itself in opposition to the previously regnant tradition that took its inspiration ultimately from the citizen-philosopher Socrates. We may circumscribe the heart of Strauss’s reopening of what was once well known as "the Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns" by focusing on the contrast Strauss highlights between ancient utopianism and modern idealism. At the dawn of the modern era, one of the greatest adherents of the ancient outlook, St. Thomas More, invented the neologism "utopia" (Greek for "good place/no place") as a revealing designation for what is the theme of classical political philosophy. For that theorizing is centered on the elaboration of "the best regime," concei clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 高亮 2 ved not as an "ideal" to be realized, or even approached and worked toward, but rather as a subtly playful thought-experiment meant to reveal the limitations on what we can expect from all actual political life. As Strauss puts it, concluding his major analysis of Plato: "Socrates makes clear in the Republic of what character the city would have to be in order to satisfy the highest need of man. By letting us see that the city constructed in accordance with this requirement is not possible, he lets us see the essential limits, the nature, of the city." A bit earlier in the same essay, Strauss stated this "in a manner which is perhaps more easily intelligible today": "the Republic conveys the broadest and deepest analysis of political idealism ever made" (CM, 61, 127, 138). The classical teaching on the best regime as utopia is simultaneously a teaching about human nature. Human nature as understood by the Socratics is characterized by a profound, passionate longing for self-transcending union with the eternal or divine. This "erotic" yearning is inevitably if obscurely at work everywhere in political action; but this deepest need of the human soul cannot find its clarification and hence its true object through political accomplishment. "Man is so built" that his spirit finds its fullest satisfaction only in the life of the essentially private, restless mind, given over to "articulating the riddle of being" (NRH, 75). This contemplative life, which is rooted in an intellectual and spiritual purification of eros, cannot be politicized, cannot animate political ambition or authority. This conclusion carries the parlous implication that the philosopher is somewhat deficient in the virtues or capacities required for self-defense in an essentially political world. The still more somber consequence is that only a very, very few individuals can be fortunate enough to surmount the enormous spiritual as well as material obstacles to this best life of the mind. For humankind is primarily not philosophic; rather--to go so far as Aristotle (Politics 1.2 and 3.6)-"the human is by nature a political animal." In other words, humanity’s deepest, philosophic longing is encased in, penetrated and molded by, a complex concatenation of more immediate physical and spiritual needs, personal as well as social. It is chiefly in response to these sub-philosophic natural requirements that civil society (with its cornerstone the family) and its specific excellences and demands and (partial) fulfillment comes into being. Classical political philosophy is not concerned to rule, but it is concerned to understand, political society--and to share its understanding, in a constructive fashion, with political society, as much as possible. The focus of classical political theory is on illuminating the goals or aspirations that give political society its meaningfulness. Strauss re-articulates the nerve of classical political theory by beginning from the classic contention that the most natural human society is not large, anonymous, and open (the ethnos or "nation") but small and closed: the polis or city, understood as "that complete association which corresponds to the natural range of man’s power of knowing and loving" (NRH, 254). Only in the life of an independent city (which is by no means essentially Greek, or even Greco-Roman) is there a good chance that a substantial portion of the members may participate directly and in a fraternal spirit in the spiritually enlarging responsibilities of shaping the collective destiny--as rulers, but also, and more widely, as ruled citizens. The city at its best is "liberal" in the classic sense of the term: meaning to say, decisively influenced by "the morally serious" (spoudaioi), the "gentlemen" (kaloikagathoi), who possess the clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 3 virtues aimed at (though by no means automatically produced) by a truly liberating or "liberal education." In its original, natural form such an education proceeds by "familiar intercourse" with "elder statesmen," by "receiving instruction from paid teachers in the art of speaking," by "reading histories and books of travel, by meditating on the works of the poets" ("the fountains of that education"), and, "of course by taking part in political life." "All this requires leisure on the part of youths as well as on the part of their elders"; it is the preserve of "wealth of a certain kind: a kind of wealth the administration of which, to say nothing of its acquisition, does not take up much of [one’s] time" (LAM, 10-11). Classical republicanism recognizes that this essential economic basis of the liberally educated (inherited land) implies an insuperable defect in the justice of their rule: "only the accident of birth decides whether a given individual has a chance of becoming a gentlemen or will necessarily become a villain; hence aristocracy is unjust." It does not follow, however, that democracy is more just, for its economic basis subjects it to an even more serious moral flaw: a corruption of justice as the common good of society. Strauss quotes in this connection Rousseau’s Social Contract (3.4): "If there were a people consisting of gods, it would rule itself democratically. A government of such perfection is not suitable for human beings." Democracy means rule by the majority, who in all actual human societies are the unleisured and uneducated, or at best illiberally educated--"because they have to work for their livelihood and to rest so that they can work the next day." In their needy (or even wealthy) lack of experience of a life preoccupied with the striving after virtue, the majority are overwhelmingly prone to make, not virtue or human excellence society’s goal, but instead material prosperity and "freedom as a right of every citizen to live as he likes." The workers when citizens do make a substantial civic contribution. They form the backbone of the militia. They can become vigilant watchdogs against oppression. But unlike the morally serious, the majority (including the rich as well as the poor) tend to "praise virtue as a means for acquiring wealth and honor"; they do not reliably "regard virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake." To be sure, it is also apparent to classical theory that "the existing aristocracies proved to be oligarchies, rather than aristocracies." Certainly "for all practical purposes," the classics "were satisfied with a regime in which the gentlemen share power with the people in such a way that the people elect the magistrates and the council from among the gentlemen and demand an account of them at the end of their term of office." "A variation of this thought" is "the notion of the mixed regime." The mixed regime is far from being perfectly just, but, if well structured, it can repress some of the characteristic vices, and promote some virtues, of rich and poor. But it is crucial that, as much as possible, the small minority of the morally serious, the gentlemen, set the tone (LAM, 4-5, 10-13, 15, 21). There is by no means a harmony, though, between the virtues and demands of the gentleman- statesman’s life, and the virtues and demands of the contemplative life. On the contrary, between the two there exists a mutually dangerous, though not unfruitful, tension. The tension is heightened, paradoxically, by the Socratic philosopher’s appreciation of the evident power in the claims, and especially in the divine claims, belonging to the civic virtues. For his appreciation compels the philosopher to justify his apparently strange way of life, with its inner detachment from civil society and with its claim to transcend the gentlemanly virtues. The only conclusive and therefore satisfying justification must be on the premises of, or shared by, the gentlemen. The clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 4 Socratic philosopher must therefore undertake a severely self-questioning, and therefore necessarily protracted and emotionally trying, argumentative dialogue with the most articulate and openminded adherents and advocates of the political life. The Socratic dialogues take place characteristically with self-selected young--who, despite or even because of their political talents and ambition, still have the free time and the passionate openness that enables them to engage in what, from society’s or their fathers’ perspective, may well appear to be at best a waste of time and energy. The success of the Socratic dialectic entails the "conversion [turning around] of the soul," as Socrates terms it (Republic 518c-d), of a few of these highly promising young. These "conversions" provide decisive evidence that the spiritual purification that Socrates himself once underwent, as a consequence of his thinking through of his own opinions about the noble and the just, was not idiosyncratic. Yet these "conversions" are not welcome to parents or to the authorities of civic education, who are strongly inclined to interpret them as "corrupting the young." "Precisely the best of the non-philosophers, the good citizens," are "passionately opposed to philosophy (Republic 517a)" (CM, 125). This reaction is understandable. For the Socratic critique of civic life does indeed expose serious contradictions in the most authoritative, even the gentlemanly, civic opinions about justice and nobility. The Socratic critique can appear to be a denigration--rather than a transcendence--of civic life. Moreover, Socratic skepticism threatens always to weaken the citizenry’s attachment to authoritative moral and religious opinions, whose deep-rooted, habitual or tradition-grounded, hold on the heart is an essential basis for healthy politics, especially in public-spirited republican society. In short, there is something truly dangerous to society, to rulers and to ruled, in the Socratic inquiry and dialectic; and so it is no accident that there arises, in response, a counter- threat, to Socratic philosophy, from the self-preservative instincts of even or precisely a relatively healthy republican society. Socratic political philosophizing is therefore compelled to respond to this twofold danger, and to take responsibility for mitigating it. The response takes the form of a carefully worked out art of public communication or rhetoric. The aim of this art is to blunt the potentially harmful effects of Socratic skepticism while stressing the constructive contribution Socratic inquiry can make to the edification of the civic virtues. Authentic Socratic writing always proceeds on at least two levels: what Strauss, following modern as well as ancient guides, termed the "exoteric" and the "esoteric." The latter, the "esoteric," is intended to arouse and to initiate--by a process of increasingly more challenging puzzles--a few of the strongest among the young or young at heart. The former, the "exoteric," delivers a message that is meant to illuminate the genuine though limited human greatness of which politics is susceptible; at the same time, the exoteric level of Socratic writing aims to enrich and to enlarge religious faith, through "theology" that conveys something of what philosophy has discovered about the truly eternal or divine; "political philosophy is the indispensable handmaid of theology" (CM, 1). Yet the art of esoteric writing is complicated by a more basic function of such writing--a function made necessary by the unhappily pervasive presence of tyranny in political life. The human aspirations to partake of the divine, to achieve excellence and to live honorably and hence honored, are susceptible to terrible perversions. Tyranny assumes many guises, not always easy to penetrate. In most if not all times and places, the Socratics find themselves dwelling in societies u clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 5 nder the thumb of more or less tyrannical rulers, usually dominating in the name of various narrow and narrowing orthodoxies. The philosopher will need to struggle to elude persecution, while unmasking tyranny--not only or mainly for himself, but especially for all those whom he wishes to reach and to teach by his public communication, both philosophic and republican. Socratic writings intended to live into many unrepublican times and places in the far and alien future are therefore designed to give the exaggerated impression of preaching obedience and conformity--generally, but also specifically (in relation to the powers that be in the writer’s own time and place). Only "between the lines" do such writings disclose ironic critiques of tyrannic orthodoxy, including religious tyranny, in its local but also in its typical or even universal penchants. These covertly subversive critiques are meant to help many readers to begin to learn techniques of writing and speaking by which freedom of critical thinking--not only philosophic, but also civic republican--can survive "underground" (waiting the rare chance to resurface) in all sorts of more or less oppressive regimes. Accordingly, Strauss’s major works that teach about esoteric writing are entitled "Persecution and the Art of Writing," and "On Tyranny." Strauss was led to rediscover the lost art of writing, and thus the forgotten core, of classical political philosophy in part by his early intense study of the great Platonic political theorists within medieval Islam--Farabi, Avicenna, Maimonides, and Averroes. These philosophers helped Strauss to realize that the supreme question for the Socratics is what Strauss called "the theologico-political problem"--which, Strauss declared in one of his pithy published autobiographical statements near the end of his life, "has remained the theme of my investigations" (PHPW). In his major work Natural Right and History, Strauss articulated the "theologico-political problem," in a nutshell, as the "fundamental question," whether "men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation." "No alternative," Strauss continued, "is more fundamental than this: . . . a life of obedient love versus a life of free insight." And, he added, "In every attempt at harmonization, in every synthesis however impressive, one of the two opposed elements is sacrificed, more or less subtly but in any event surely, to the other." TheTheTheThe Anti-ClassicalAnti-ClassicalAnti-ClassicalAnti-Classical FoundationsFoundationsFoundationsFoundations ofofofof ModernModernModernModern IdealismIdealismIdealismIdealism This last brings us into a position to begin to appreciate Strauss’s understanding of the deepest cause of the rebellion by "the moderns" against "the ancients." The philosophers who initiated and elaborated distinctively modern rationalism and republicanism--Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu--were moved by public-spirited dissatisfaction with the utopian conservatism or lack of political ambition of ancient political philosophy. For this left social existence at the mercy of theocracy in one form or another. Still worse, this conceded to the claimants of revelation that the human spirit was so constituted as irrepressibly to long for a transcendence of secular social existence. And this appeared to leave unshaken--nay, even could be used, and was used, to strengthen--the claimed evidence of the experience of divine clidophorus 高亮 现代理性主义与现代共和主义并置。 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 高亮 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 clidophorus 下划线 6 revelations demanding the chastening or sacrifice, the subordination and thus (in the modern rationalists’ eyes) mutilation, of human reason and rational social felicity. The modern rationalists sought and claimed to find a superior resolution of the theologico-political problem. They did so through attempting a wholesale re-conception of the human condition and its prospects--a compre