Ted Winslow quoting Leo Strauss:
(1)``All political action is, then, guided by some thought of better or worse. But thought of better or worse implies thought of the good. The awareness of the good which guides all our actions, has the character of opinion: it is no longer questioned but, on reflection, it proves to be questionable. The very fact that we can question it, directs us towards such a thought of the good as is no longer questionable towards a thought which is no longer opinion but knowledge. All political action has then in itself a directedness towards knowledge of the good: of the good life, or the good society. For the good society is the complete political good. this directedness becomes explicit, if men make it their explicit goal to acquire knowledge of the good life and of the good society, political philosophy emerges....
(2)...Political philosophy will then be the attempt to replace opinion about the nature of political things by knowledge of the nature of political things. Political things are by their nature subject to approval and disapproval, to choice and rejection, to praise and blame. It is of their essence not to be neutral but to raise a claim to men's obedience, allegiance, decision or judgment. One does not understand them as what they are, as political things, if one does not take seriously their explicit or implicit claim to be judged in terms of goodness or badness, of justice or injustice, i.e., if one does not measure them by some standard of goodness or justice.
(3) ...Positivism necessarily transforms itself into historicism. By virtue of its orientation by the model of natural science, social science is in danger of mistaking peculiarities of, say, mid-twentieth century United States, or more generally of modern Western society, for the essential character of human society. To avoid this danger, it is compelled to engage in cross-cultural research...
...Reflection on social science as a historical phenomenon leads to the relativization of social science and ultimately of modern science generally. As a consequence, modern science comes to be viewed as one historically relative way of understanding things which is not in principle superior to alternative ways of understanding...
....It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After having reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one among the many forms of man's intellectual orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate...'' blah, blah, blah....
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So Ted you're looking for some arguements? No problema.
It all sounds so reasonable, doesn't it? It is vile. It is the very anathama of an open and democratic society and it is evil.
You laugh. Let's take (1). It is a recasting of Aristotle's Nic Ethics, wherein we are told the political life is directed at attaining the good life. Think on this long and hard. Is that what you mean by a political life---one committed to the polity? I for one don't given one flying fuck for the good. I want a fair life, pure and simple, one that is equal before all institutions. And I am not particularly concerned about whether it is just or not.
But as I considered this concept of fairness, it dawned on me that the founding father's of the US where quite smart in a practical way. They understood nobody can decide in advance what is a good life or what is fair---and they were at least some of them well versed in Aristotle and the classics. Their neoclassicism was that of the Enlightenment.
What they realized was, it was impossible to define the good. And so, in their wisdom they proceeded to creat a process, a system of governmental bodies that would in their intermural contentions, sort out what was temporarily considered a good law, a good policy, a good act, and then they would check it against established law and considered judgement, with another political process, judicial review. And failing all else, well there were elections, and we (eventually most of us became citizens and could vote and) could always throw the bastards out.
This is the practical answer to Strauss and Aristotle on the nature of the good. Strauss wants to cast this discussion in terms of facts and values. Nevermind. What is required is an assessment of ends and means. The good is supposed to be a political end. However, what we have as a polity is a process, a means that can conceivably reach, through a political battle, a concensus. In other words, they focused on establishing the political means to attain some undefined end, possibly the good life.
In terms of a dialectical reason, the means themselves are the abstract good, and there is no other beyond a well practiced process. This is why we consider manipulating, frustrating, deforming, and otherwise violating the political processes of government a crime. It is of course a crime that the necons assiduously practice day in and day, and why so many of the Bush administration are heading to court or Congressional committee hearings to defend themselves (and history willing, someday at The Hague). And rightly so. These bastards have violated every formal political means to achieve their personally held concept of the good.
Hegel takes an even dimmer view of this idea of the good as an end in itself:
``... But if the good heart, a good intention, a subjective conviction are set forth as the sources from which conduct derives, then there is no longer any hypocrisy or immorality at all; for whatever a man does, he can always justify by the reflection on it of good intentions and motives, and by the influence of that conviction it is good. Thus there is no longer anything absolutely vicious or criminal; and instead of the above mentioned frank and free, hardened and unperturbed sinner, we have the man who is conscieous of being fully justified by intention and conviction. My good intention in my action and my conviction of its goodness make it good....(99p PTR)
...What happens here is the same as what happens when the will stops at willing the good in the abstract [Kant's categorical imperiative], i.e. the absolute and valid determinate character assigned to good and evil, right and wrong, is entirely swept away and the determination of them is ascribed instead to the individual's feeling, imagination, and caprice...'' (98p The Philosophy of the Right, Morality, Good and Conscience)
It should be noted, that historically, the pursute of a good life as the essence of a political system, was taken up by the Church during the fall of the Roman Empire and made the basis of an hierachical order of power where the higher ranks of societywere closer to the abstract good, that is of course the life of Jesus Christ, such luminaries as the Pope and his Cardinals, while the lower ranks the laity were seen as further from the beatitude of holy goodness, and in fact tained from birth. This heirarcial moral ordering of society is characteristic of all the Old Testiment religions of the book. That's pretty much were Strauss got the idea, from his readings of Aristotle and the Jewish and Muslim medieval scholastic intrepretations of Aristotle.
Pardon me, but I think we can do better than these dower old fucks.
Let's deal with (2), ``... It is of their essence [political things] not to be neutral but to raise a claim to men's obedience, allegiance, decision or judgment..''
Well, nonsense. The very nature of political things is action, process, argument, and battle. It is Law that requires obedience, allegiance, decision, judgement---violation, disrepect, and possibly rebellion. Strauss is indulging himself in more Torah or Old Testiment nonsense.
We do not live under the laws of God. We live under the laws of men, and the laws of men are both historically bound and mostly arbitrary and capricious. We are not the slaves of our political system. We are its masters, its participants. That's the whole point to democracy, and that was the whole point to the chaos and disorder of the late 60s. ``When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary...'' is a phrase, Strauss evidently never heard.
The essence of political things in our time, in our society, is action, engagement in the means of a political life, pursuing through organizing and advocacy to change the laws and policies that effect us, govern and rule us, and do us harm.
(3) ``...Reflection on social science as a historical phenomenon leads to the relativization of social science and ultimately of modern science generally...''
Yes, and so what? Any scientist will tell you, they hold to a provisional theory, a current dogma that is always considered suspect. So what? We already know we don't know a scientific fact or theory for certain. What we know is based on what Russell called a probable certainty. With each conditioned experiment that probable fact becomes increasingly certain. This is a model of the mathematical limit. We don't know for certain what is the absolute value of a particular real number. All we know is how to narrow the possibilities down to the infinitely small variance, as small as we are pleased to calculate it, and leave it at that. And that is the ideal case, using the ideal model!
And finally, let's deal with Strauss's last point:
``It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist [i.e. Heidegger] in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while it was in its least wise and least moderate mood, and at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The events of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to history or to any other power different from his own reason. (ibid., pp. 354-5)''
What Strauss fails to realize is his own concept of the good, is precisely identical to his most deadly political enemies, who were not Heidegger. In some abstract sense Strauss and Heidegger were pursuing common threads. Idealism which seems to be so natural to philosophy is the problem, that is solved by practice, perfecting the means of political struggle and process, etc, etc, etc. Knowledge of things political comes from the direct engagement where concepts are immediately put to their evaluation in action, and judged accordingly, by masses of people, not experts and philosophers. Knowledge of the political world simply doesn't exist in the abstract. There are no guarranties that any society, no matter how it is structured will not find itself one day faced with the potential of re-enacting the fate of Germany. Many have since and no doubt many more will in the future. And worst of all, there are no guarranties that an atrocious turn will not be the choice of a representative majority within a democratically constituted society. Look at us.
And lastly, there is no escape from historicism, even for science. To be embedded in the chaotic flow of history is the human condition. One interesting thing about doing the history of a scientific subject is that you get a perspective and sometimes a deep perspective on the nature of the common sense of an era long past. For example there is a passage in Galileo's Dialogues where he sets a proportion between the gravitational acceleration of a dropped weight to the ground over a known distance and time, and the extrapolation of this proporition to a accelerated travel distances between the moon and the earth, over an unknown time. He then proceeds to solve the proportion for the unknown time.
What is interesting in this relation is the assumption that one could drop a weigth from the distance of the moon and expect a proporitional travel time. By solving the proporition one figures the unknown time. You see the problem is Galileo did not know that gravitation was inversely proporitional to distance. That was Newton's great contribution. Galileo thought that the rate of gravitational acceleration was constant, constantly increasing with distance.
On the last point, if the Nazis were anything they were what comes from the rule of an elite clique who answered to no one but themselves. Strauss implies that fascism is the consequence of trusting in the chaotic and unruly mob of democracy. Perhaps.
But there is no other alternative, to trust, somehow in the broad appraisal of many different people and many different kinds of people who all have equal access to things political. Well that may be a leap of faith and the more people the better, but it is the only alternative that I can see. I certainly don't trust in the ideal of a ruling elite or that they will have my best interests at heart. They will have their own best interest at heart, like everyone else. It's the process of equalizing those interests and then coming to a concensus or not, that lies at the heart of a political democracy.
``In these essays, he identifies himself with the tradition in both philosophy and political philosophy deriving from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (i.e. with the same tradition to which Marx belongs) and contrasts this sharply and critically with what he calls "historicism" ...''
Notice that Marx sweeps all of this into the category of `idealism' and constrast it with a life lived in practice, in what could be called the means. Under Strauss's system the means are obedience to law, as if we were all following the Torah---that is to say laws given down by some absolute authority. This concept comes from Strauss's early studies in Judaism and Spinoza...
That'll have to do. Back to work... Slaving under the regime of the ruling elite...
CG