The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  18. This almost certainly came from the greatest neo-Thomist natural law thinker of the sixteenth century, Francisco de Vitoria, who in the 1530s penned The Recently Discovered Indies, which stated that “there can be doubt that the Indians possessed true dominion both in public and private affairs” and that “there is no case at all for deposing either their rulers or their subjects of their property.” No one listened except, presumably, Las Casas. It was not enough to save the indigenous peoples of Latin America, but it did live on in Las Casas’s arguments at Valladolid. See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 168–69.

  19. Hanke, Aristotle, 55.

  20. Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 170.

  21. Las Casas quoted in Hanke, Aristotle, 112.

  22. Quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981).

  23. Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5, 20.

  24. Bentley Glass, Owsei Temkin, and William L. Straus, Jr. eds., Forerunners of Darwin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959).

  25. Erasmus Darwin, Temple of Nature (1803), quoted in Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World (New York: Norton, 2000), 443.

  26. Ibid., 444.

  27. Darwin, Autobiography, 17.

  28. Gower, Scientific Method, 124–25.

  29. See Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York: Penguin, 1989), 16–17; and Arthur Herman, To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 436–38.

  30. Darwin quoted in Himmelfarb, Darwin, 75–76.

  31. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin called them “savages of the lowest grade” and noted that “the perfect equality” that prevailed among Fuegians doomed them to perpetual savagery. “As we see with those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind.” It would be hard to find a better example of how Aristotle’s concept of the political animal collides with Rousseau’s noble savage: in a clash not over the facts of socialization but over the value of their consequences. Darwin, Beagle, 181, 183.

  32. Ibid., 275, 276–77.

  33. As Himmelfarb notes, he went to write not one but three books on geology in the 1840s, including Geological Observations on South America (1846). Himmelfarb, Darwin, 86.

  34. Darwin notebook, July 1837–February 1838, quoted in Himmelfarb, Darwin, 147, 155.

  35. Darwin quoted in ibid., 151.

  36. A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936; repr., New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 55–58.

  37. Rom Harré, The Philosophies of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 176.

  38. Darwin quoted in Himmelfarb, Darwin, 149.

  39. See Donald Winch, Malthus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  40. Darwin, Autobiography, 54.

  41. However, as the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, Malthus was not just an economist but a keen student of the natural sciences, which included membership in the Royal Society and the Geological Society. His entire model for human population growth came directly from the plant and animal kingdom, where “Nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand; but has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourishment necessary to rear them.” Plants and animals face limits on their ability to expand and grow, Malthus wrote. He believed humanity could not escape from the same “great restrictive law.” Quoted in Himmelfarb, Darwin, 158.

  42. Jacob Bronowski describes the chronology in The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 305–8.

  43. Quoted in Himmelfarb, Darwin, 151.

  44. Darwin, Autobiography, 122.

  45. W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle (1950; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 140.

  Chapter 26: Unseen Worlds: Physics, Relativity, and the New World Picture

  1. Isaac Newton, “Questions from the Opticks,” in Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from His Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (1953; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1974), 175.

  2. David Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom (New York: Free Press, 2001), 78.

  3. George Gilder, Microcosm (New York: Touchstone Books, 1989), 22.

  4. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 353–54.

  5. Maxwell’s full quotation, which leads this chapter, is from Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom, 69.

  6. Ibid., 69–71.

  7. Gilder, Microcosm, 22.

  8. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 417.

  9. Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom, 81.

  10. Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 174.

  11. Bronowski, Ascent, 347–48.

  12. The example appears in Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? & Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 162–63.

  13. Bronowski, Ascent, 348.

  14. Gilder, Microcosm, 182.

  15. Mach quoted in Philipp Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy (1949; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1961), 70.

  16. A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), 4.

  17. Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy, 47.

  18. Otto Neurath, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung der Wiener Kreis (1929), quoted in Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy, 49.

  19. Gilder, Microcosm, 182.

  20. Boltzmann quoted in Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom, 215.

  21. Ibid., 217.

  22. The issue was the mysterious substance known as ether, which physicists since Newton had believed enabled light particles to travel through space. Michelson’s experiment proved the doom of ether as well as Newton; the term still survives in everyday language, as when we talk about a poem or concept as being “ethereal.” See Barry Gower, Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1997).

  23. As described in Bronowski, Ascent, 247–48.

  24. Albrecht Folsing, Einstein: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1997), 208–9. According to Folsing, it was Max Planck who first dubbed it “relativity theory.”

  25. Einstein quoted in Lindley, Boltzmann’s Atom, 207.

  26. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1971), 183.

  27. They included Thomas Hill Green and his disciples at Cambridge, along with J. E. McTaggart, and F. H. Bradley at Oxford. See A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982; repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 20, and Herman, Idea of Decline.

  28. Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 62–65.

  29. Victoria Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).

  30. Georg Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. N. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).

  31. Hegel quoted in Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 740.

  32. Georg Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956); Leonard Krieger, The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Political Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957).

  33. For Hegel’s influence on the so-called Historical School in Germany, see George Peabody Gooch, History and Historians in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1913; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), esp. chapter 8.

  34. For a time after the Franco-Prussian War, West Point dressed its cadets in Prussian-style spiked helmets or Pickelhauben.

  35. Disraeli quoted in Norman Rich, The Age of Nationalism and Reform 1850–1890 (New York: Norton, 1976), 1206.

  36. This thesis was first developed by L.T. Hobhouse in The Metaphysical Theory of the State (191
8; repr., London: Allen & Unwin, 1960).

  37. Barry Smith, “Austrian Origins of Logical Positivism,” in Klemens Szaniawski, The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw School (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 28–29.

  38. Gilder, Microcosm, 25.

  39. Einstein quoted in Folsing, Einstein, 408–9.

  Chapter 27: Triumph of the Will: Nietzsche and the Death of Reason

  1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1962), 4.

  2. Ibid., 31.

  3. Ibid., 52, 54, 69.

  4. Ibid., 68.

  5. Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (New York: Free Press, 1991), chapters 1, 2.

  6. Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in introduction to Tragic Age, 13.

  7. Nietzsche’s view of Socrates was ambivalent. Nietzsche was never consistent; he certainly identified with Socrates’s role as the gadfly and the outsider (for instance, in Genealogy of Morals). However, his characterization of Socrates’s influence, related to but distinct from Plato’s and that of Platonism proper, never softened. See Victor Tejera, Nietzsche and Greek Philosophy (Dordrecht, Netherlands: M. Nijhoff, 1987).

  8. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage: 1967), 271, 223.

  9. Ibid., 154.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Quoted in Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), 99–101.

  12. For example, compare Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 22, with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922; repr., London: Routledge, 1981), 7.0.

  13. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 154.

  14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1954; repr., New York: Penguin, 1966).

  15. Ibid., 288.

  16. Ibid., 327.

  17. Aristotle, Physics, VI 239a–b.

  18. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1971), 116.

  19. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 798.

  20. It is striking how Bergson’s theory of memory overlaps with Freud’s, and how intuition bears a certain resemblance to Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the id. However, Freud knew nothing of Bergson’s work and Bergson read Freud only after World War I. Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 124.

  21. Bergson quoted in Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 796.

  22. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, quoted in Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 118.

  23. Ibid., 119.

  24. Ibid., 170.

  25. Did Nietzsche mean this in a racial, even proto-Nazi sense? Probably not. However, he was an admirer of the Aryan racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau, who also inspired the Aryanist race supremacy myths of Hitler’s mentor Houston Stewart Chamberlain; and he did specifically link the cleansing barbarism in history to an Aryan race. For more discussion, see Herman, Idea of Decline, chapter 3.

  26. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ed. J. Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

  27. “War is the father of all and king of all; some he has made gods and others men, and some bonded and some free.” John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (1892; repr., New York: Meridian, 1958), 136.

  28. Bergson quoted in Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 118.

  29. As described in Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (New York: Doubleday, 1940), 468–69.

  30. Nikolai Sukhanov, quoted in ibid., 469.

  31. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (London: International Publishers, 1940).

  32. Steven E. Ascheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 23.

  33. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

  34. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); and An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Doubleday, 1961).

  35. A. Herman, Idea of Decline, 223.

  36. Croce eventually reversed himself and disavowed Mussolini. Still, the move was significant.

  37. A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), 6–7 (introduction).

  38. Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. G. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 104, 108.

  Chapter 28: Common Sense Nation: Plato, Aristotle, and American Exceptionalism

  1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, abridged ed. (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 163, 143, 58.

  2. Ibid., 48.

  3. Ernest Tuveson, The Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

  4. As summarized in J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).

  5. See Adams’s remarks on America’s fate to be corrupted by its own prosperity, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1969), 570–71.

  6. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 319.

  7. For example, George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 37–41.

  8. Madison, Federalist Papers, 320; Hume, “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth” in David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 529.

  9. Ibid., 321.

  10. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 198.

  11. Ibid., 201.

  12. Ibid., 201–2.

  13. Michael Novak, The Fire of Invention (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 35.

  14. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 52, 42.

  15. Ibid., 154.

  16. Madison quoted in Roger Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 667.

  17. For example, Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, October 13, 1813, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Modern Library, 1944), 632.

  18. Jefferson quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

  19. E.g., Brooks Holifield, Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 175.

  20. See Mark Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Michael Knox Beran, Forge of Empires 1861–1871 (New York: Free Press, 2007), 199–200.

  21. Abraham Flexner, Daniel Coit Gilman: Creator of the American Type of University (New York: Harcourt Brace,1946).

  22. Charles S. Peirce, “First Principles,” in Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 349.

  23. Twain quoted in Alfred Kazin, An American Procession (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 255.

  24. Herman, Idea of Decline, 174.

  25. Charles S. Peirce, Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings (1839–1914), ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Doubleday, 1958), xvi.

  26. Charles S. Peirce “Issues of Pragmatism,” ibid., 214.

  27. Ibid.

  28. William James, Pragmatism and Other Essays, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 10–11.

  29. Ibid., 11, 14.

  30. Peirce’s actual term was “pragmaticism,” but the identification was clear enough.

  31. Charles S. Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” in Peirce, Values in a Universe, 183–85.

  32. William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?” in James, Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Viking, 1987), 1141–5
8.

  33. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (1945; repr., New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 812.

  34. The weather was Chauncey Wright’s favorite example. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), and Peirce, “What Pragmatism Is,” 182–83.

  35. William James, “Pragmatism and Common Sense,” in Bruce Kuklick, ed., William James: Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Viking, 1987), 559.

  36. James, Pragmatism, 27. However, James also saw Socrates as the ancestor of pragmatism, with this restless probing of the meaning of words like courage, justice, and piety in concrete situations.

  37. Ibid.

  38. For instance, Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 683–84.

  39. Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), II, 91–92.

  40. James, Pragmatism, 97.

  41. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; repr., New York: Dover, 1956), 25.

  42. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Random House, 1952), 283.

  43. Philipp Frank, Modern Science and Its Philosophy (1949; repr., New York: Collier Books, 1961), 106–8, and Ayer, Logical Positivism, 12–13. For James’s impact on Wittgenstein, see Russell Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  44. Noted by A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982; repr., New York: Vintage, 1984), 71.

  45. William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” in James, Pragmatism, 239; James quoted Ayer, Logical Positivism, 72.

  Chapter 29: Worlds at War: Plato and Aristotle in the Violent Century

  1. The referendum that approved it by 99 percent was “a genuine reflection of German feeling” in both countries. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Fawcett, 1966), 145.

  2. The eyewitness was Germany’s ambassador Franz von Papen, quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Fawcett, 1960), 473.

  3. Ibid., 477.

  4. Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, quoted in David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 86.