Stanley Rosen may be every anti-Straussian’s favorite Straussian. Never mind that he denies his own paternity and affirms to his friends and critics: “I am not a Straussian.” Like the postmodern anti-Platonists he describes in his collection of essays, Rosen draws heavily on the school of thought he claims to transcend. One problem among the Straussians, which I believe can be traced to Leo Strauss as the unwitting source, is that they associate antiquity too closely with present day American society. Some do it naively; others with an eye toward conferring an ancient pedigree on their own political agendas; but all Straussians indulge in the same vitium principale. They seek to project their own preferred values—which are secular and rationalist—onto long-dead thinkers. And they try to make this enterprise plausible by limiting their ancients to a handful of Greeks and by treating those Greeks as clever skeptics.
Thus Strauss and his disciples challenge the notion that Plato believed either in divinity or in eide akineta kai aidie (immovable, eternal ideas). Putting aside his references to the divine, they insist that as a philosopher Plato was also a religious skeptic, but like themselves obliged to feign fidelity to public orthodoxy. When all else fails, Straussians will also claim that their favorite authors wrote esoterically. Though at bottom rationalists like themselves, it is argued, these authors were forced to hide their innermost thoughts and doubts in order to avoid indiscretion or ruin.
There is one side of the Straussian doctrine that is provable beyond doubt: the stress on the gullibility of pious patriots, many of whom do believe the “noble lies” that Straussians tell about themselves and the ancients. Straussians have convinced others—others being simpleminded conservatives rather than trained scholars—that what they do is both morally uplifting and intellectually rigorous. In point of fact it is neither. At their worst they engage in cynical con games, and at their best they are often automata, repeating fictions (such as Aristotle’s alleged support in the Politics, Book One, of sexual and racial equality) that they themselves have begun to believe.
Rosen is different from most students of the late Leo Strauss because of his relentless, uncompromised honesty. His books on Plato’s Sophist and Symposium show the marks of Strauss’s reading of the same thinker. Rosen is also scornful of attempts by, among others, Eric Voegelin to present Plato as a mystic paidagogos eis Christon. His Plato is Strauss’s Plato: a political philosopher and epistemologist who, like his teacher Socrates, kept a critical distance from the conventional pieties of the city. One is free to disagree with the sweeping judgment that is both explicit and implicit in this reading. But Rosen does approach Plato’s dialogues through exhaustive, tightly reasoned explications de texte.
Rosen’s honesty comes through in his newest anthology no less than in his earlier books. Unlike other Straussians, he does not attribute to Plato and Aristotle the 18th-century rationalism that he embraces for himself (albeit with some reservations). He also mocks the attempt to find a fit between Plato’s and Aristotle’s politics and modern liberal values. He knows that the two are basically irreconcilable—particularly Plato’s concern over virtue and a “radically defective human nature,” which requires “the steady transformation of the city into an armed camp.” It is moderation as compromise, not Platonic sophrosune as discipline, that Rosen holds as the chief strength of the liberal epoch. (By liberal he is referring to something closer to 19th-century Europe than to the Democratic Party of Michael Dukakis.) Rosen praises the willingness of the liberal West to shun paradigms of political perfection. He defends the ideal of “moderate Enlightenment” against the Utopian rationalism that he associates with the French Revolution and with modern revolutionary movements. One is based on the possibility of philosophical discourse in a society that makes compromises with Virtue and Justice. The other form of Enlightenment, by contrast, demands that the world be reconstructed for the sake of a particular scheme of human perfection.
Rosen’s two Enlightenments bear remarkable resemblance to other attempts at distinguishing two streams of reform descending from the 18th century. One is said to have produced liberal institutions, and the other revolutionary violence. This taxonomic division pervades Jacob Talman’s comments on liberal and totalitarian democracy. It also results in distinctions being made between the English-Scottish and French Enlightenments, one leading to capitalism and constitutional republicanism, and the other to the French Reign of Terror. Alas, such distinctions are too often contrived. Thus David Hume, an avowed Tory and a father of historical conservatism, is seen as a precursor of liberal reform because of his skeptical, analytic philosophy. The same honor is sometimes extended to the French aristocrat Montesquieu, an Anglophile who attracted admirers in early America. Enlightenment has also been attributed to Edward Gibbon, a rationalist skeptic and devotee of pagan antiquity, but politically a high Tory. Distinctions of this kind are often tortured attempts to turn classicism or Whiggery into a benign variant of the French revolutionary ideology.
It may be argued that Rosen is not defending the Enlightenment after all, and that this may be one more distinction between himself and conventional Straussians. He is a European liberal who admires Hegel, the philosopher whose ideas run through many of Rosen’s own writings. He turns to Hegel’s view of consciousness as self-knowledge in defining Platonic Eros; and he pays tribute to the same thinker in his political statements. Rosen’s “moderate Enlightenment paradigm” is Hegel’s Protestant, Germanic civilization—the final phase in the reconciliation of subjectivity and political order. But Hegel fleshes out as history what Rosen presents through provisional, often paradoxically stated arguments. Unlike Hegel, he does not go beyond abstract argument into recognition of the historically concrete, particularly the link between culture and politics.
On the positive side, Rosen makes his arguments with literary flair and erudition. His essays on Nietzsche, Fichte, Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, and Richard Rorty indicate an impressive command of original sources including those in Greek and Latin. Rosen’s study of Cartesian dualism is one of the most illuminating that I’ve seen. He shows that the gap between thinking and the world of activity created by Descartes’s method of inquiry contributed to the contradictory tendencies of idealism and materialism. At his best, Rosen embodies Hegel’s ideal of modernity as the self-consciousness of antiquity. Would that others achieved or even aspired to the same!
[The Ancients and the Moderns: Rethinking Modernity, by Stanley Rosen (New Haven: Yale University Press) 272 pp., $22.50]
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