The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Elsewhere, artists and writers willing to toe “the party line” would find a similar ally in Stalin’s Communist Party. They included Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, George Grosz, Pablo Neruda, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Ben Shahn, Langston Hughes, Aimé Césaire, Malcolm Cowley, J. D. Bernal, Stephen Spender, and Jessica Mitford. On the fascist side, the list is shorter but equally dismal: Emil Nolde, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Carl Schmitt, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Hendrik de Man and his nephew, later founder of Deconstructionism Paul de Man, William Butler Yeats, Thierry Maulnier, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Philip Johnson, and Günter Grass rounded out the list. The traditional idea, so dear to the Romantics and dating back to Plato’s portrayal of Socrates, that intellectuals are the natural foes of tyranny proved fatally flawed.

  Indeed, from Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station until the Munich conference in 1938, the forces of illiberalism seemed to sweep everything before them. The Hegel Line was morphing into the Nietzsche Line, as the philosopher of nihilism displaced the philosopher of the Absolute as Germany’s most potent original thinker. Sociologist Georg Simmel even pronounced Nietzsche’s philosophy as important a revolution in thinking as Copernicus’s theory of the solar system.32 Yet its impact ran in the opposite direction. The disillusioned author of the Weimar Constitution, Max Weber, complained that Nietzsche had killed the Western faith in science and with it sealed the doom of democracy.33

  Then Martin Heidegger at the University of Freiburg did Nietzsche one better. He claimed to find in Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics a doctrine about existence “not for every man but only for the strong”: a radiant truth reserved for those who were willing to throw themselves without hesitation into the ceaseless flux of Being.34 Heidegger’s message would carry his students directly into the heart of Hitler’s Nazi revolution.

  Meanwhile in Italy, a young socialist agitator named Benito Mussolini had read Sorel’s Reflections on Violence and translated its political program into the creed of fascism.35 Hegelians like Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile quickly shifted allegiances and hailed fascism as the next great stage in human history.36 In France, every thinker or writer wanting to make a name for himself crowded either to the extreme left with Marx, Lenin, and Sorel or to the extreme right and its heady brew of Nietzsche, Heidegger—and Sorel.

  In England, occasional exponents of the new irrationalism were also popping up, like Wyndham Lewis, the founder of Vorticism, and Oswald Mosley; while Marxist communism found passionate support in a generation of university students. But most intelligent men and women watched what was happening on the Continent with deep foreboding.

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,…

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): He saw Nietzsche’s will to power reflected in what he called “the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism.”

  By 1932, as depression swept the industrial world, those words by William Butler Yeats seemed watchwords of an even more terrible catastrophe to come.

  Three years earlier, the Logical Positivists held their first international conference in Prague. Although they now called themselves the Vienna Circle, the meeting was the first of a series that would draw attendees from around the Western world. Many came from the countries of eastern Europe, recently made free and independent in the aftermath of World War I. From Vienna there were Hahn, Frank, Moritz Schlick, and Herbert Feigl; Prague’s contingent was led by Rudolf Carnap, professor of natural philosophy. From Poland came the logicians Alfred Tarski, Jan Łukasiewicz, and Stanisław Leéniewski; from England, the philosopher A. J. Ayer; from America, W.V.O. Quine and Charles W. Morris. There was even a contingent from Berlin led by Hans Reichenbach and Carl Hempel.37

  By 1929, Logical Positivism’s proponents had reconciled themselves to the new physics, including relativity, while still holding out hope that their belief in the power of reason and science could still set the human mind free from ignorance and dogma. Reinforcing that view was the new book on logic by their fellow Viennese, Ludwig Wittgenstein, which asserted that “a proposition can be true or false only in virtue of being a picture of reality.”38 Logic, Wittgenstein had concluded, forms the essential frame for our picture, within which we group observations into true statements, including scientific observation.

  Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosopicus (to give the book its full ponderous Latin title) had at last brought together the two halves of Aristotle’s living legacy—his logic and his empirical science—and shown that they are inseparable, indeed that they define our world. Because “what we cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus’s last sentence, meaning what can’t be verified by empirical observation, “we must pass over in silence.” Three thousand years of fuzzy thinking and foggy logic, from Parmenides’s problem of Being to Hegel’s dialectic and Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence, had been neatly broomed away.

  But it was too late. The scholars who met in Prague saw themselves as exponents of a Western tradition of science and rational thought and the heralds of a new era of intellectual freedom. Their opponents, however, were closing in from both east and west. Teaching human beings to think clearly was no longer enough.

  In 1932, Adolf Hitler swept into power. As rector of the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger would dismiss all Jewish faculty, and in his rector’s address in May 1933, he urged his students to throw themselves into the great adventure of National Socialism: “Our nation realizes its own fate by risking its history in the arena of world power in which all human existence is affected and by continually fighting for its own spiritual world … and no one will prevent us from doing that.” At the end, Heidegger quoted Plato’s Theaetetus, “All greatness stands firm in the storm,” raised his arm with a “Heil Hitler!” and stepped down to thunderous applause.38

  In 1934, Left and Right clashed in the streets of Paris as French politics settled into a simmering hatred and resentment that would paralyze Europe’s biggest democracy in the face of a rising Nazi Germany. “The only way to love France today,” poet Pierre Drieu La Rochelle wrote, “is to hate it in its present form.” Both Fascism and Communism found a new congenial home in the country of Voltaire—but also of Rousseau and Robespierre. Meanwhile, democracy in Poland and Austria was submerged under authoritarian dictatorships. In 1936, Moritz Schlick was murdered in his class at the University of Vienna by a demented student while civil war broke out in Spain. Two years later, Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich. A year after that in 1939, German tanks rolled into Prague and then into Poland.

  Men of intellect and science, and not only Jews, fled. Einstein, Freud, Carnap, and the surviving members of the Vienna Circle; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin; conductors Otto Klemperer, Arturo Toscanini, and Bruno Walter; physicists Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd: These are only the best known. A curtain of intellectual darkness had descended across the heart of Europe.

  What would lift it? The answer came from many thousands of miles away, from a place that hitherto had played a fairly marginal role in the cultural history of the West. However, it would soon pour out its resources of mind and matter like a sheet of revivifying water across a parched and embattled landscape.

  * * *

  * See chapter 2.

  † Nietzsche certainly knew that Raphael had depicted Apollo as the patron god of Plato and his companions in The School of Athens.

  ‡ Nietzsche did not live long enough to see Einstein’s theory of relativity, but it would have added to his sense of morbid excitement.

  § Here Nietzsche was not thinking of man in a generic sense. Like his master Schopenhauer, he had a low opinion of women. Schopenhauer called them long on hair and short on ideas. Nietzsche said their job was “to wait upon the warriors at the feast.” He cer
tainly considered the rise of the women’s suffrage movement one of the key indicators of Western decadence.

  ‖ Yes, there actually was a time when high school students (at least in France) studied Greek philosophy.

  a See chapter 24.

  b And eventually the Mensheviks. Chkheidze mistakenly believed the Communist revolution would bring freedom to his native Georgia. Instead, he would narrowly escape execution and die in exile in Paris in 1926.

  Twenty-eight

  COMMON SENSE NATION: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

  America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius … which arouse the best of feelings of man, which call him into action, which substantiate his freedom, and conduct him to happiness …

  —Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)

  The whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite difference it will make to you or me, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

  —William James, Pragmatism (1907)

  “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.”

  When Alexis de Tocqueville published this sentence in his Democracy in America, it was the heyday of Hegel, August Comte, Victor Cousin, and half a dozen leading lights of classical liberalism in both Scotland and England, including Tocqueville’s twenty-five-year-old friend John Stuart Mill. Compared to the heady debates being waged in lecture halls, periodicals, and bookstalls, intellectual life in the young republic must have seemed very placid—and far removed from that great tradition reaching back to Plato and Aristotle.

  Yet America was Aristotle’s offspring in more ways than one. Born in the age of Sir Francis Bacon, it grew under the double engines of commerce and slavery in the era of John Locke and achieved independence under the tutelage of the Enlightenment. The most famous saying from America’s most important constitutional architect, James Madison—“If men were angels, no government would be necessary”—is a sentiment torn from the pages of Aristotle and Machiavelli if ever there was one.

  Tocqueville himself noted that “Americans are more addicted to practical than to theoretical science,” and that “they mistrust systems” of the usual Platonic-Hegelian pattern. “They adhere closely to facts, and study facts with their own senses.” In fact, Tocqueville concluded that they had invented their own philosophical method without realizing it, one that “accepts tradition only as a means of information and existing facts only as a lesson to be used in doing otherwise, and doing better.” In short, a bias toward progress was built into the American character, along with a love of liberty both political and personal, in which the American “is a subject in all that concerns the duties of citizens” in a self-governing republic, but “is free, and responsible to God alone, for all that concerns himself.”1

  On one side, “I know of no country,” Tocqueville wrote, “where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the attention of men,” but on the other, none where reverence for religion was so widely and evenly spread. In America “liberty regards religion as its companion in all its battles and triumphs—as the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims.” Indeed, “it considers religion as the safeguard of morality, and morality as the best security of law, and the surest pledge of the duration of freedom.”2 Certainly since 1789, the relations between liberty and religion in Tocqueville’s own country had been very different. Yet on nearly every issue that seemed to split Europeans apart—democracy versus aristocracy, religion versus science, commerce versus established tradition—Americans seemed to have struck a harmonious balance.*

  For America was born under the shelter of Plato’s legacy as well. From the moment the first Pilgrims alighted at Plymouth Rock, it was the stepchild of the Reformation and became home to a peculiarly fervent evangelical Christianity. The utopian hope of making America a “shining city on the hill” and one nation under God—a historically grounded version of Augustine’s Heavenly City—has supplied as much drive and energy to America’s development as its more practical Aristotelian side.3

  But at its core was that practical desire “to tend to results without being bound to means,” said Tocqueville, “and to aim at the substance through the form.” Although the Frenchman noted that Americans had no philosophical school of their own, they certainly had a philosophical method—one that a pair of American thinkers in Gilded Age Boston would sum up as Pragmatism. Often abused, and just as often misunderstood, the Pragmatism of William James and Charles Sanders Peirce was in fact an attempt to capture that peculiar balance that is the heart of what is called American exceptionalism—and that forty years later would be summoned forth to save the rest of Western civilization.

  This, indeed, is what makes America so striking. More than any other Western nation, its history has been characterized by a dynamic, if often unstable, balance between these two conflicting legacies. That balance lies at the core of the American “genius” for high-minded purposeful action that Jefferson noted; that caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville some fifty years later, when he pronounced America “a land of wonder”; and that has dazzled, puzzled, and exasperated foreign observers ever since.

  Balance was of course the leading hallmark of the American Constitution itself—and the goal of all self-governing polities since Aristotle.

  It’s worth recalling the sharp contrast between Aristotle’s view of governance and the one embodied by the Platonic tradition. The focus was not on the One (or the Absolute) but on the One balanced by the Few and the Many. There is no Philosopher Ruler or king standing in the image of God’s plenitude of power. He is sent packing to the realm of the perfect Forms—and out of the realm of reality.

  What rules instead are concrete constitutional arrangements based on real-life experience, distilled into a code of laws. Politics is above all a real-time partnership, requiring people’s participation more than obedience, one in which the good life is found in living the process, not necessarily in the final result.

  It was this view of constitutional “mixed” government that the Founding Fathers inherited from their Florentine and British forebears.4 Achieving that classic balance between the One, the Few, and the Many, however, had always implied the goal of stability. If the mixture was allowed to change in any way, then Polybius’s and Machiavelli’s cycle of decay and doom would kick in—and change was the one thing Western man could not avoid. Even in the age of Enlightenment, men like John Adams sensed that liberty, no matter how desirable, was still fated not to last.5

  William James (1842–1910). “There is absolutely nothing new in the pragmatic method,” he wrote. “Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically.”

  The genius of the Constitution’s chief author, James Madison, was to conceive of this constitutional balance as dynamic, not static. In Madison’s vision, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of American government would have their powers separated out, so that instead of cooperating they would be locked in permanent but dynamic competition. No group of cunning and unscrupulous men could seize control of one branch to dominate the others, as the Medici had in Florence (and as, many Americans felt, King George’s ministers had taken control of the Parliament in Britain), because other groups of cunning and unscrupulous men would naturally use the other branches to fight back.

  It was in its way, a breathtaking proposition. But “ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote. In this way, “through supplying opposite and rival interests,” the separation of powers in the federal Constitution would “supply the defect of better motives”—a phrase that landed him in trouble with those, like John Adams, who preferred a more high-minded approach to republican government.6 Indeed, it still provokes some resentment from those who believe that government, even in a free society, still has some Platonic duty to cultivate the virtues of it
s citizens.7 Madison, however, was an admirer of David Hume as well as Aristotle. He understood better than some other Founding Fathers the tenacity of self-interest—and the lack in real life of enough better motives to go around.

  In what David Hume had called the “perpetual intestine struggle between Liberty and Authority,” Madison had concluded that the best way to preserve liberty in a modern society like America was to hobble authority through what he called countervailing interests. We have another term for it: gridlock. Through gridlock, Madison predicted, “the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights.…” In this way, he wrote, it will be “very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry … any measures against the public interest.” Except the “he” in this case wasn’t Madison, but Hume himself.8

  Madison saw the same healthy gridlock emerging in the looming battles between the federal government and the separate states, as well as between the new states and the old. In fact, in Madison’s mind, the more the better. As settlers began moving beyond the Appalachians to the Mississippi and Great Lakes, and new states like Kentucky and Tennessee and Ohio came into the Union, the growing diversity of sectional interests would work in favor of everyone. “The society will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens,” Madison explained in The Federalist Papers, “that the rights of individuals, of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.”9