Interpretation A JOURNAL J.OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Spring 2001 Volume 28 Number 3

187 Jules Gleicher Mordecai the Exilarch: Some

Thoughts on the Book of Esther

201 Laurence Berns Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant

219 John S. Kirby Shadows on the Cave Wall: Platonic Imagery in Lord Jim

Discussion

Three Review Essays of Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom

245 Edward J. Erler Philosophy, History and Jaffa's Universe

259 Steve Sorensen My Country, 'Tis of Thee: Jaffa's Defense of the Noble, the Holy,

and the Just

279 Thomas G. West Jaffa's Lincolnian Defense of the Founding Interpretation

Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Amaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumann Amy Bonnette Patrick Coby Elizabeth C de Baca Eastman Thomas S. Engeman Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Meld Shell Bradford P. Wilson Martin D. Yaffe Michael P. Zuckert Catherine H. Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B. Prochnow

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E Mail: interpretation [email protected] Interpretation A JOURNAL A OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Spring 2001 Volume 28 Number 3

Jules Gleicher Mordecai the Exilarch: Some Thoughts on 187

the Book of Esther

Laurence Berns Putting Things Back Together Again in 201 Kant

John S. Kirby Shadows on the Cave Wall: Platonic 219 Imagery in Lord Jim

Discussion

Three Review Essays of Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom

Edward J. Erler Philosophy, History and Jaffa's Universe 245

Steve Sorensen My Country, 'Tis of Thee: Jaffa's Defense 259 of the Noble, the Holy, and the Just

Jaffa' Thomas G. West s Lincolnian Defense of the Founding 279

Copyright 2001 interpretation

ISSN 0020-9635 Interpretation

Editor-in-Chief Hilail Gildin, Dept. of Philosophy, Queens College Executive Editor Leonard Grey General Editors Seth G. Benardete Charles E. Butterworth Hilail Gildin Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Howard B. White (d. 1974) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell Joseph Cropsey Ernest L. Fortin John Hallowell (d. 1992) Harry V. Jaffa David Lowenthal Muhsin Mahdi Harvey C. Mansfield Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) Ellis Sandoz Leo Strauss (d. 1973) Kenneth W. Thompson International Editors Terence E. Marshall Heinrich Meier Editors Wayne Ambler Maurice Auerbach Fred Baumann Amy Bonnette Patrick Coby Elizabeth C de Baca Eastman Thomas S. Engeman Edward J. Erler Maureen Feder-Marcus Pamela K. Jensen Ken Masugi Will Morrisey Susan Orr Charles T. Rubin Leslie G. Rubin Susan Meld Shell Bradford P. Wilson Martin D. Yaffe Michael P. Zuckert Catherine H. Zuckert Manuscript Editor Lucia B. Prochnow

Subscriptions Subscription rates per volume (3 issues): individuals $29 libraries and all other institutions $48 students (four-year limit) $ 1 8 Single copies available.

Postage outside U.S.: Canada $4.50 extra; elsewhere $5.40 extra by surface mail (8 weeks

or longer) or $ 1 1 .00 by air. Payments: in U.S. dollars and payable by a financial institution located within the U.S.A. (or the U.S. Postal Service).

The Journal Welcomes Manuscripts in Political Philosophy as Well as Those in Theology, Literature, and Jurisprudence. contributors should follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th or later editions "reference-list" or manuals based on them. Instead of endnotes, the journal uses the (or "author-date") system of notation, described in these manuals, illustrated in cur rent numbers of the journal, and discussed in a sheet available from the Assistant to the Editor (see below). Words from languages not rooted in Latin should be trans literated to English. To ensure impartial judgment, contributors should omit mention of their other publications and put, on the title page only, their name, any affiliation desired, address with postal zip code in full, E-mail address, and telephone number. Please send four clear copies, which will not be returned, and double space the entire text and reference list.

Composition by Bytheway Publishing Services Printed by the Sheridan Press Binghamton, NY 13901 U.S.A. Hanover, PA 17331 U.S.A.

Inquiries: (Ms.) Joan Walsh, Assistant to the Editor interpretation, Queens College, Flushing, N.Y. 1 1367-1597, U.S.A. (718)997-5542 Fax (718) 997-5565 E Mail: interpretation [email protected] THE ATTENTION OF CONTRIBUTORS TO Interpretation is called to the following changes in format:

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Mordecai the Exilarch:

Some Thoughts on the Book of Esther

Jules Gleicher Rockford College

Admirers of the Hebrew scriptures are apt inevitably to be drawn to the book of Esther's inspiring tale of how Queen Esther and her resourceful cousin Mordecai foil the plot of the wicked Haman to exterminate the Jews of the

Persian Empire. Students of politics may wish especially to consider it, both as a case study of oriental despotism and for its insights into the prerequisites and the perils of leadership of a community in exile. We begin with a summary of the text.

Chapter I

In the third year of his reign over the extensive Persian Empire, King Aha- suerus holds a six-month feast for all his officials at Shushan, the capital city, which culminates in a weeklong drinking party at the palace. At the conclusion, the drunken king orders his eunuchs to fetch the beautiful Queen Vashti, whom he wishes to show off. But Vashti refuses to come. Angered at her disobedience, Ahasuerus consults with his principal advisors. One of them, Memucan, argues that the Queen's defiance is apt to be contagious, that it will incite all wives in the kingdom to defy their husbands, and that Vashti must therefore be set aside. Ahasuerus follows this advice and decrees that in all the households of his kingdom husbands should exercise absolute rule.

Chapter 2

After a while, Ahasuerus regrets his treatment of Vashti, but his courtiers

commis- contrive a way to divert his attention. They persuade him to appoint

This article draws upon occasional interpretive talks on the Hebrew scriptures given at the Ohave Sholom Synagogue in Rockford, Illinois. I am grateful to Rabbi Elihu Milder, Rabbi William Fertig, and my fellow parishioners for allowing me the privilege of the pulpit.

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 188 Interpretation

sioners in all parts of his kingdom to find the most beautiful virgins, whom the king will sample after they are appropriately groomed. The one who pleases him most will become the new queen. This project keeps him busy for the next four years. One of the maidens whom this process discovers is Esther, a Jewess who lives in Shushan and who has been raised by her cousin Mordecai, whose family was carried into exile from the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians three generations earlier. Esther, whom Mordecai instructed to conceal her Jew ish identity, wins the king's favor and is crowned queen. Mordecai, meanwhile, detects a plot by two of the king's eunuchs to assassinate Ahasuerus. He passes word of it to Esther, who in turn reveals it to Ahasuerus, and the conspirators are hanged.

Chapter 3

Ahasuerus' Mordecai refuses publicly to bow low before Haman, newly ap pointed prime minister, contrary to the king's command. The king's servants, Haman' who know that Mordecai is a Jew, call these facts to s attention. He thereupon seeks to destroy all the Jews in the kingdom. In the twelfth year of Ahasuerus' Jews' reign, Haman determines by casting lots (pur) that the annihi lation should take place eleven months later, in the month of Adar. He then persuades Ahasuerus that they are a disloyal and disobedient people who should not be tolerated. A royal decree is issued, ordering the total annihilation of the Jews and seizure of their property on the thirteenth of Adar.

Chapter 4

Mordecai and the Jews of the kingdom go into mourning when they hear of the decree. He sends a message to Esther, urging her to intercede with the king on behalf of their people. Esther initially hesitates, for to approach the king unbidden is a capital offense. But Mordecai reminds her that even her royal status will not spare her from her people's fate. She resolves to do as he says and tells him to lead the Jews of Shushan in a three-day fast for her sake.

Chapter 5

On the third day Esther approaches Ahasuerus. He extends his gold scepter to her, a gesture of mercy which relieves her from the established punishment, and asks what her petition might be. Even if it is for half the kingdom he will grant it. She asks only that he and Haman attend a banquet she has prepared for them. At the wine feast he asks again what she wishes, and she answers only Mordecai the Exilarch 189 that they come to another banquet the next day, when she will make her wishes known. The joy that Haman feels at being in the queen's favor is spoiled when he leaves the palace and sees Mordecai. He reveals his mixed emotions to his wife, Zeresh, and his friends. They advise him to build a gallows fifty cubits high on which to have Mordecai hanged the next day, and he orders the gallows built.

Chapter 6

That night Ahasuerus, unable to sleep, reads through the royal chronicles and discovers that Mordecai was never rewarded for revealing the assassination plot. He asks Haman, who has just arrived at the palace in order to persuade the king to have Mordecai hanged, what should be done for one whom the king espe cially wishes to honor. Thinking that Ahasuerus is referring to himself, Haman suggests that the man be paraded through the capital in regal splendor with a royal minister proclaiming at his side, "This is what is done for the man whom honor." the king desires to Ahasuerus orders that Mordecai receive this grand treatment, with Haman serving as herald. A humiliated Haman returns home, where Zeresh and his friends begin to despair that his fortunes may now be on the decline.

Chapter 7

At Esther's second banquet Ahasuerus again inquires about her petition. She asks that he save her life and the lives of her people from the annihilation ordered by the wicked Haman. Ahasuerus leaves the room in a rage, and the terrified Haman prostrates himself before the queen's couch to beg for mercy. The king, re-entering the room, sees Haman in this questionable posture and accuses him of trying to rape Esther. Haman is marked for death, and Harbonah, one of the eunuchs, points out the gallows that Haman had built to hang Morde cai, the king's benefactor. Ahasuerus thereupon orders Haman hanged on it, and the order is carried out.

Chapter 8

Ahasuerus awards Haman's estate to Esther and makes Mordecai his new prime minister. Esther again pleads for the Jews, and Ahasuerus issues a second decree, permitting them to defend themselves and to take vengeance on their enemies on the day originally designated for their destruction. Mordecai as sumes the trappings of royal splendor, and the Jews rejoice and prosper. 190 Interpretation

Chapter 9

On the thirteenth of Adar the Jews of the Persian Empire, who now enjoy the king's favor, assail their enemies. They kill 500 men in Shushan, including Haman's ten sons, and 75,000 throughout the empire. At Esther's request the bloodletting in Shushan continues an additional day, and 300 more fall. The fourteenth of Adar in the provinces and the fifteenth in the capital are days of celebration for the Jews, during which they feast, make merry, and give gifts. Mordecai and Esther order the Jews to make the observance of these days a perpetual holiday, Purim.

Chapter 10

In a curious postscript, it is noted that Ahasuerus raises taxes. His and Morde

cai' s accomplishments are recorded in the official annals, for, as second to the king, Mordecai sought his people's good and the welfare of his posterity.

II

Considered as a study of oriental despotism, the book of Esther might well be renamed the book of Ahasuerus, for unlike Mordecai and Esther, who are absent from chapter 1, and Haman, who appears in chapter 3 and is dead by the end of chapter 7, Ahasuerus is ubiquitous. Ahasuerus is thought to be the Persian king Xerxes I, who ruled from 486 to 465 B.C.E. and is best known for his failed war against the Greeks (recorded by the historian Herodotus), though the book of Esther mentions neither the

quarter." Greeks nor this war. (But cf. Esther 4:14: "another Interpreter's Dic tionary, vol. 4, p. 922.) Xerxes became king at the age of 35, so if he and Ahasuerus are the same person, the book of Esther covers the years when he was between 38 and 47 years old. Before becoming king, Xerxes administered Ahasuerus' Babylon for twelve years during the reign of his father, Darius I. initial display of immaturity beyond his years suggests that our author may conflate these two periods, and that Ahasuerus is a rather young king. The hallmark of oriental despotism is absolute power and total irresponsibil ity: the despot is answerable to no one else nor to reason itself. Not surprisingly, therefore, unless he is trained from youth to rule wisely, he likely ends up a slave to his own passions or the tool of his supposed servants. So the questions

Who advises the king? and To what character traits is the advice pitched? are of crucial importance. For Ahasuerus, these questions receive different answers during the three phases of his career, as depicted in chapters 1-2, 3-7, and 8-10. The first phase covers half of the book's total time span and is the princi pal focus in this section. Mordecai the Exilarch -191

As a new king given to youthful overindulgence, Ahasuerus is at first influ enced by several courtiers who are mere flatterers. The banquet he gives in his third year of rule is for all his officials, including, it is noted, the provincial governors and nobility (Esther 1:1-4). While this six-month orgy may be con ceived as a politic act, designed to cement the loyalty of the local chieftains whose support he needs to rule a polyglot empire of 127 provinces from India to Ethiopia, its cost must be a major drain on the royal treasury. And who is actually running the provinces while their aristocrats feast in Shushan? At the concluding weeklong drinking party in the palace garden wine flows "as befits king," a that is, in excess. But one measure of modesty is observed: Queen Vashti and the women feast separately inside the royal palace. They are thus spared from seeing their husbands and fathers at their least dignified, and the men's drunkenness is kept from veering into lechery (Esther 1:5-9). This all changes when Ahasuerus orders his eunuchs to bring Queen Vashti, diadem," "wearing a royal in order to display her beauty (Esther 1:10-11). Does this mean that she is to wear only her crown? (This conjecture is also a mid- rashic [early medieval rabbinical] interpretation. Megillah, p. 46.) Such a com mand, worthy of a boastful fraternity boy, not only breaches the presumption of modesty but would also detract from the royal dignity. It is an impolitic act that the king himself would come to regret when sober and that Vashti properly refuses (Esther 1:12). At this point Vashti's disobedience could still be over looked. The king could rephrase his command, purging it of possible impropri ety, and blame any misunderstanding on the eunuchs. (Isn't that what they are "sages" good for?) Instead, he sees only her defiance and seeks the advice of his (Esther 1:12-15).

It is surely no accident that these principal advisors number seven, like the eunuchs mentioned four verses earlier (Esther 1:14, 10). Even the names of four

eunuchs' of them resemble four of the names: Carshena-Carcas, Shethar-Zethar, Admantha-Abagtha, Memucan-Mehuman. Like eunuchs, these ministers of state are incomplete men: they lack the fortitude (or, as one used to say, the manli ness) needed to tell the king what he needs to hear. The advice of Memucan, which the others approve, plays rather on his hurt pride, with a curious nod in the direction of the public well being: Queen Vashti's insubordination will in spire all wives to disobey their husbands, "and there will be no end of scom

provocation." and She should therefore be banished forever from the king's presence and her office bestowed on someone more worthy, so all husbands

wives' may keep their respect (Esther 1:16-22). The king's political despotism is to be reflected in the domestic despotism of each household. Conversely, each head of household acquires a stake in being the king's slave, namely, his own little piece of absolute arbitrary power. Thus can one man rule a vast multitude of nations speaking different languages and otherwise observing different cus toms (cf. Aristotle Politics 1252bl9).

Ahasuerus takes the advice, but when his anger later abates he begins to 192 Interpretation

regret his action against Vashti. But, like his subjects, he is trapped by his decree's irrevocability (Esther 1:19; cf. 8:8). This is a very dangerous moment him" for his advisors, so the "servants who attended (if not the very same men as before, then others quite like them) propose a royal distraction that again speaks to his ruling passions: Let maidens from every province be assembled by special talent scouts, let them be beautified in the king's harem, and let her who most pleases him become queen (Esther 2:1-4). A later passage clarifies

what this counsel means concretely: After a year of preparation, each maiden spends one night in intimacy with the king and is then consigned to permanent

scouts" concubinage (Esther 2:12-14). The "talent are, in effect, royal pimps. With the officials of each province jostling for preferment, this proposal could keep the king preoccupied for years, while his harem steadily increases by mul tiples of 127, the number of provinces. It is not until the seventh year of his reign, and presumably several hundred virgins later, that Esther gets her turn and wins the king's favor (Esther 2:10, 16-17). The banquet at Esther's royal installation is apparently briefer and more sober Ahasuerus' than the earlier one. Wine is not specifically mentioned. Instead, beneficence consists of remitting provincial taxes and distributing gifts "as befits king," a again, acts bound to take a fiscal toll (Esther 2:18). But it is a political commonplace that for every recipient of official favor there are nine disap pointed and resentful wouldbe beneficiaries (cf. Machiavelli, The Prince, chaps. Mordecai' 3, 16). Thus, the next event is s discovery of the plot against Ahasuerus by two of his eunuchs. Just how does this reach Mordecai's attention? Is he already a person of some influence, who routinely collects information on court intrigues? Mordecai is not immediately rewarded for saving the king's life (Esther 2:19-23). If, by the end of chapter 2, Ahasuerus has grown more restrained, and even somewhat sober, he is still not (and never becomes) fully attentive to affairs

others' of state. If no longer ruled by youthful passions, he will always be ruled by Haman' counsel. The question now becomes, by whose counsel, s or Esther's and Mordecai' s? (Perhaps significantly, Esther reintroduces wine, and thus insobriety, into the king's decision making. Esther 5:6; 7:2; cf. 3:15.) It is evident that Ahasuerus is not an ideal ruler. But Mordecai is prudent enough to be willing to get his hands dirty. He sees that, for the Jews of the Exile, to avoid political involvement with such a flawed prince may be in effect to concede rule to the likes of Haman. Let us, therefore, turn our regard to these two adversaries.

Ill

A talmudic commentary on the book of Esther teaches "that a man is obliged to drink so much wine on Purim that he is no longer capable of distinguishing Mordecai' Haman' " . . between the words 'blessed is and 'cursed is (Kolatch, Mordecai the Exilarch 193 vol. 1, p. 278, citing the Babylonian talmudic scholar Rava [Megilla 7b]). Ko latch offers this further explanation:

This tradition has been explained as referring to a song sung on Purim in tal mudic times. The stanzas of the song ended with the alternate refrain "blessed is Mordecai" Haman." and "cursed is Often, participants in a celebration were so ine

briated they would mix up the refrains. . . The possibility of a mixup, it has been explained homiletically, can also come from the fact that the numerical value of the Hebrew letters of each of the phrases baruch Mordecai ["blessed is Mordecai"] and arur Haman ["cursed is Haman"] totals 502.) (In the Hebraic system of enu meration, values are assigned sequentially to the letters of the alphabet. Thus, alef= \;bet = 2; yud [the tenth letter] = 10; kaf [the eleventh] = 20; kuf [the nineteenth] = 100; and tov [the twenty-second and last letter] =400. The numerical value of a word or phrase is the sum of the values of its letters.)

Whatever amusing and arcane accounts can be offered for this saying, a serious line of thought comes to mind: One should always remember to whom blessings and curses are properly due, for to forget the former shows ingratitude toward benefactors like Mordecai, and to overlook the latter may invite persecution from the Hamans of this world. To drink so much as to lose sight of this vital distinction is surely to overindulge. But to drink somewhat less, just enough to allow oneself to question the goodness of our heroes and the villainy of our mortal enemies, may be an act of instructive confusion, an exercise in free thinking that brings otherwise hidden truths to light. With this thought as our cue, let us ask what Mordecai reveals that we may justly criticize, and what of Haman deserves, if not praise, then perhaps diminished cursing. Mordecai is first introduced, as is customary in Holy Scripture, by his lineage:

In the fortress Shushan lived a Jew by the name of Mordecai, son of Jair son of Shimei son of Kish, a Benjaminite. [Kish] had been exiled from Jerusalem in the group that was carried into exile along with King Jeconiah of Judah, which had been driven into exile by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. (Esther 2:5-6)

The event referred to here is not the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E., but an episode eleven years before, in which the young King Jehoiachin (i.e., Jeco niah in the book of Esther) first rebelled against, then surrendered to the king Zede- of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar deposed Jehoiachin and appointed his uncle kiah in his place, plundered the Temple, and carried into exile the former king and his family and the military and social elite of Jerusalem, plus a supporting cast of craftsmen, to the sum of 10,000 people (2 Kings 24:8-17). Mordecai's would thus likely have been a leading family of Judahite society and of the Jewish community in exile, and he a person of importance and, we may suspect, pride. 194 Interpretation

The names Shimei and Kish recall prominent Benjaminites of an earlier era. Kish was the name of King Saul's father, and Shimei ben-Gera was a kinsman of Saul who, during Absalom's rebellion, reviled King David for having usurped Saul's throne, and who in turn received David's deathbed curse and retribution at the hand of King Solomon (1 Sam. 9:1-2; 2 Sam. 16:5-13; 1 Kings 2:8-9, 36-46). That these echoes of the Saul saga are not mere coincidence is con

Agagite" firmed by the parallel introduction of Haman, "son of Hammedatha the (Esther 3:1). Agag was, of course, the Amalekite king whose life Saul attempted to spare, for which act of clemency the prophet Samuel declared that Saul had forfeited his right to rule over Israel (1 Sam. 15). (The Amalekites had been condemned to total destruction because they attacked the Israelites at a moment when they were especially vulnerable, shortly after the exodus from Egypt. Exod. 17:8-16; Deut. 25:17-19.) The inference seems inescapable that the con flict between Haman and Mordecai is, at least in part, a piece of unfinished business, the settling of a five-hundred-year-old score. Haman' The trouble for the Jews of Persia begins, not with s accession as Mordecai' prime minister to King Ahasuerus, but with s refusal to show him deference and with the explanation offered for his refusal:

All the king's courtiers in the palace gate knelt and bowed low to Haman, for such was the king's order concerning him; but Mordecai would not kneel or bow low. Then the king's courtiers who were in the palace gate said to Mordecai, "Why

order?" do you disobey the king's When they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai's re solve would prevail; for he had explained to them that he was a Jew. When Haman saw that Mordecai would not kneel or bow low to him, Haman was filled with rage. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone; having been told who Mordecai's people were, Haman plotted to do away with all the Jews, Mordecai's people, throughout the kingdom of Ahasuerus. (Esther 3:2-6)

Clearly, Haman is not a nice person. Just as clearly, he does not start out as a Jew hater. It would appear that he knows nothing about the Jews, except that they are the people of this upstart Mordecai who refuses to kowtow to him. Why does Mordecai refuse? This is arguably the pivotal question of the entire

story, and there is no shortage of possible explanations. Despite what we might first presume from the text, there is nothing in Jewish law that would forbid such a gesture of respect to a king or a king's minister or any other person: it is not an act of and there are idolatry, numerous precedents of respectable scrip tural characters doing just that (see, e.g., Gen. 18:2; 23:7, 12; 33:3, 6, 7; 42:6; Exod. 18:7; 1 Sam. 20:41; 2 Sam. 18:21; 1 Kings 2:19; 2 Kings 2:15; 4:37; Ruth 2:10). One rabbinic story concocted to fill in the blank has Haman wear ing the image of an idol fastened to his clothes, so that one bowing before him would also bow before this idol (Megillah, pp. 64-65). The editors of a Mordecai the Exilarch 195

modem translation of the Hebrew Bible explain that "as a Jew he could not bow

king" to a descendant of Agag, the Amalekite (Tanakh, p. 1460). But even this is not obvious. Moreover, it is not clear that the phrase "for he had explained

yhudi]" [or revealed] to them that he was a Jew [ki-higid lahem asher-hu is even supposed to account for Mordecai's refusal to genuflect (Esther 3:4). It might rather refer to his tenacity, to the stereotype of the Jews as stubbornly persistent (cf. Esther 6:13). Whatever the actual explanation may be (and we cannot altogether exclude Mordecai's sense of self-importance as the decisive factor), the account that is offered on his behalf is inadequate and feeds the worst prejudices, of both Haman and the court gossips, that the Jews are a generally headstrong, disobedient, and disloyal people, "whose laws are differ

laws" ent from those of any other people and who do not obey the king's (Esther 3:8).

Does Mordecai not know that to much of the Gentile world the Jewish people are only what they observe of the particular Jews with whom they come into contact, and that each Jew should therefore take care not to act in such a way as to be a scandal in the eyes of the nations, or at least not to invite unwanted attention? This seems unlikely, for he has already cautioned his young cousin and ward Esther, who was swept up in the empirewide talent search for a new wife for King Ahasuerus following his estrangement from Queen Vashti, not to kindred" reveal "her people or her (Esther 2:10). Arguably, this precaution Jews' shows solicitousness for the well-being, lest Esther's attractiveness be come a snare that causes other Jewish maidens to be abducted into the royal harem. Alternatively, it is a stratagem that allows her secretly to gather useful information from within the royal court, although in this respect the isolation of royal wives may actually be a handicap, and Mordecai seems already to have some better, undescribed intelligence network of his own (Esther 2:21-23; 4: 1-8). However this may be, in this matter Mordecai seems quite mindful of the Jewish situation and of his own role in affecting it. But was this earlier conduct too secretive, coy, and mistrustful? If so, his open defiance of Haman, both initially and later, is a deliberate attempt to compensate for the furtive nature of his tactics regarding Esther. (After Esther begins to carry through on her resolve Jews' to intercede with the king on the behalf, Mordecai does not even rise or stir in Haman's presence. Esther 5:9.) Yet another possibility: Mordecai, as a leader of the Jewish community in exile, is making new law for that community. It is evident from Esther's ability to keep her nationality concealed that the Jews of Persia can, if they wish, be a relatively inconspicuous minority. Is this because they have become less reli giously observant? One might contrast Esther's unobtrusiveness with the open ing episode from the book of Daniel:

Then [King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon] ordered Ashpenaz, his chief officer, to

writ- bring some Israelites of royal descent and of the nobility . . . and teach them the 196 Interpretation

ings and the language of the Chaldeans. The king allotted daily rations to them

from the king's food and from the wine he drank. . .

Among them were the Judahites Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah. . .. Daniel resolved not to defile himself with the king's food or the wine he drank, so

he sought permission of the chief officer not to defile himself. .. . The chief officer

said to Daniel, "I fear that my lord the king, who allotted food and drink to you, will notice that you look out of sorts, unlike the other youths of your age and you

king." will put my life in jeopardy with the Daniel replied to the guard whom the chief officer had put in charge of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, "Please test your servants for ten days, giving us legumes to eat and water to drink. Then compare our appearance with that of the youths who eat of the king's food, and do

fit." with your servants as you see He agreed to this plan of theirs, and tested them for ten days. When the ten days were over, they looked better and healthier than all the youths who were eating of the king's food. So the guard kept on removing their food, and the wine they were supposed to drink, and gave them legumes. (Dan. 1: 3-16)

By refusing to bow before Haman, is Mordecai, a century later, establishing a new and obvious barrier to distinguish the Jews from their non-Jewish neigh bors, in order to prevent their total assimilation into the surrounding, all-too- tolerant culture? (Arguably, it was the fear of assimilation that induced one strand of rabbinical commentary to demonize Ahasuerus, in addition to Haman, as a confirmed enemy of the Jews, and to malign the story's other non-Jewish characters. See, e.g., Megillah, pp. 71, 45-46, 53, 69, 105.) Or again, perhaps Mordecai's refusal to prostrate himself has less to do with the Jewish question than with his judgment, as a loyal Persian subject, that such extreme shows of obeisance should be reserved exclusively for the king. Ha man's ministership, let us note, is a period of political innovation, for both good and ill. Previously, Ahasuerus was advised by that odd gaggle of eunuchs and of counselors who sport names resembling those of the eunuchs, whose policy proposals, supplemented with large doses of alcohol, pandered to the king's base passions of anger and lust (Esther 1:10-20; 2:1-4). Haman's rise marks the advent of a new organizing principle, the pre-eminence of a single official Ahasuerus' (Esther 3:1). In this respect it marks a kind of progress in political development. Moreover, Haman's advice, though morally horrific, is tied to a matter of public necessity. He sells his genocidal proposal, to destroy the un named disobedient nation who are scattered throughout the realm, not by appeal ing to the king's lust, but by coupling the proposal with an offer to bring a substantial sum of money into the treasury (Esther 3:1, 2, 8-9). (Haman offers to pay 10,000 talents of silver into the royal treasury in return for the privilege, an amount that has been calculated as the equivalent of 750 tons of silver [Me

p. 70]. The figure be a of gillah, may piece rhetorical exaggeration. In any Ahasuerus just as event, grandiloquently waives the proffered payment, as long Mordecai the Exilarch 197 as the traitorous people is disposed of [Esther 3:11].) He speaks the language of the public interest (but cf. Esther 1:16-18, 20). The horrendous substance of his a policy is also novelty, one that leaves the hitherto tolerant and refined city "dumbfounded" of Shushan (Esther 3:15). When Mordecai succeeds to Haman's office, the primacy of which he preserves, he enjoys power and prestige and is clothed in splendor, but he apparently refrains from requiring public prostration before him. And instead of relying on confiscations, Ahasuerus, under Morde cai's influence, stocks his treasury through the more moderate expedient of rais ing taxes (Esther 8:15; 9:3, 10, 15, 16; 10:1, 3). We can appreciate the wisdom of these reforms without reference to matters specifically Jewish. In his willingness to shed much blood and his attention to finance, is Morde cai like Haman? Haman's edict aims at "all the Jews, young and old, [including]

women," children and and he and his followers would quite likely more than recoup his contribution to the treasury by despoiling the property of the produc tive and prosperous nation they plan to kill off. The edict that Mordecai com poses in the king's name would allow the Jews to deal similarly with their attackers. But when the Jews take their revenge, there is no specific mention of women and children being killed, and, it is three times noted, they do not lay hands on the spoil (Esther 3:11, 13; 8:10-12; 9:6, 10 15, 16; cf. Machiavelli, chap. 17, on the tendency of men more quickly to forget the death of their fathers than the loss of their patrimony). The killing that they inflict, though

enemies' extensive, apparently spares the weaker members of their families. (The text is ambiguous on this point. In Shushan they kill "500 men [hameish ish]" ish]" meios on the first day of engagement and "300 men [sh'losh meios on the second. In the provinces, they are said to kill "75,000 of their foes [b'so-

alef\." neihem hamishah v'shiv'im Esther 9:6, 15, 16.) It also leaves their prop erty holdings intact. Perhaps despite his own initial inclination, Mordecai ends up not pushing absolute power to its limit. (The conspicuous exception to this conclusion is the treatment of Haman's household. His ten sons, who were not previously mentioned as complicit in their father's plot, are killed and their corpses publicly exposed, and Haman's property is given to Esther, who in turn puts Mordecai in charge of it [Esther 9:7-10, 13-14; 8:1-2]. Curiously Ha man's wife, Zeresh, is not said to be killed, even though she actively advised Haman to have Mordecai hanged [Esther 5:14]. Is the execution of his sons part of the text writer's special agenda, to complete the blotting out of the race of Amalek, which King Saul had let slip by allowing King Agag to survive long enough to produce offspring? It would appear that Mordecai himself plays no special role in their execution. Nor does he order that Haman's property be destroyed. Does he thereby repeat Saul's errors? [cf. 1 Sam. 3, 9, 13-22].) In these respects Mordecai may be distinguishing himself not only from Haman but also from the example of another king's chief minister of foreign extraction: 198 Interpretation

So Pharaoh said to Joseph, "... You shall be in charge of my court, and by your command shall all my people be directed; only with respect to the throne shall

you." I be superior to . . And removing his signet ring from his hand, Pharaoh put it on Joseph's hand; and he had him dressed in robes of fine linen, and put a gold

chain about his neck. He had him ride in the chariot of his second-in-command, and

knee!]" they cried before him, "Abrek! [Bow the (Gen. 41:39-43)

Egyptians' Also, by buying the grain cheap during the seven years of prosperity, then selling it back dear at the cost of their status as freeholders during the subsequent famine, Joseph transforms the Egyptian monarchy into an absolute despotism (Gen. 47:13-26). By enslaving the Egyptians to one Pharaoh, he lays Hebrews' the groundwork for the later enslavement to another (cf. Wildavsky, p. 787).

Jews' If the Persian calamity is in part of Mordecai's making, he compen sates for it once installed in high office by avoiding the errors of both his arch- adversary and his Hebrew precursor.

IV

It would be only decent to add a word or two about the character after whom Jews' the book is named, whose position makes her crucial to the deliverance (cf. Esther 4:14). Esther is at first a child of fortune. Deprived of her parents, not even bearing her proper name (Hadassah), plucked from her place by the king's agents and deposited in the harem, where the odds are overwhelming that she will remain shut up for the rest of her life, she must have been frightened indeed (Esther 2: "myrtle." 7). (Hadassah is the feminine form of the Hebrew word for "Myrtle branches were included with other leafy branches for covering the booths at the Feast of Succoth [Neh. 8:15; cf. Lev. 23:40 and numerous references in the

Talmud]" Interpreter's Dictionary, vol. 3, p. 479]. Does Esther shelter the Jews in Exile as would a booth in the wilderness?) Her fate at the outset is to do what others tell her, principally Mordecai, but also the eunuch Hegai, who pro vides her with some unnamed advice on how to win the king's affection (Esther 2:12-17). (Is Esther's success partly a matter of fortunate timing? That is, after sampling several hundred women over the previous four years, has Ahasuerus finally grown weary of this sport? Has the original project become unworkable because of the practical of difficulty remembering just which one of these many women really pleased him the most?) Again, when Mordecai charges her to Ahasuerus' plead for the Jews, she is obviously afraid of incurring displeasure. Her fear is heightened by the fact that the king has not summoned her for the past month, a possible sign that he has tired of her (Esther 4:4-11). She knows the vicissitudes of how things work in the royal harem. But once she is con- Mordecai the Exilarch 199 vinced that the destiny of her people, including her own destiny, is in her hands, she also knows what she must do more or less. She tells Mordecai to have the

Jews of Shushan fast on her behalf for three days. In a marvelous reversal of phrase, the text informs us that Mordecai did "just as Esther had commanded him" (Esther 4:15-17; cf. 2:10, 20). The text is exquisitely ambiguous regarding Esther's state of mind when she speaks to Ahasuerus. Rather than blurt out her petition at the first opportunity, she invites him and Haman to a feast that day and then to another feast the following day. This, despite the fact that the king both times offers in advance kingdom" to grant her request, even if it is "half the (Esther 5:1-8). (It is, of course, possible that this phrase is merely a stock rhetorical formula. On the other hand, Esther may underestimate her husband's genuine affection for her. Ahasuerus would, in this case, have traveled a considerable moral distance from his peremptory treatment of Queen Vashti. Has he learned to deal respectfully with his wife from, of all people, Haman, who includes his wife, Zeresh, among his own confidants and counselors? Esther 5:10-14; 6:12-13.) It is only at the third encounter that she reveals her purpose and condemns Haman (Esther 7:

Ahasuerus' 1-6). Is this double delay a surefooted calculation to engage interest, or does she not get to the point earlier because her nerve fails? Haman has, after all, been advanced above all the king's other officials and been given apparently unprecedented honors and power (Esther 3:1-2, 10-11). The text will sustain either reading. Certainly, the hesitancy in the speech Esther gives at the first feast is consistent with genuine fear:

wish," "My replied Esther, "my request if Your Majesty will do me the favor, if it please Your Majesty to grant my wish and accede to my request let Your Maj esty and Haman come to the feast which I will prepare for them; and tomorrow I bidding." will do Your Majesty's (Esther 5:7-8)

This assumption also enhances the importance of the otherwise seemingly dis tracting story in chapter 6. The vignette which begins with the king's insomnia and ends with Haman's public humiliation arguably gives Esther the moral boost she needs to see her task through to its conclusion. (The book of Esther is the only book of the Hebrew scriptures in which God is not explicitly mentioned [Megillah, p. xxxvi]. The seemingly fortuitous, but at the same time pivotal, nature of the events in chapter 6 invites the speculation that at this point espe cially the hand of the otherwise hidden God is at work in human affairs. Aha

suerus' sleeplessness echoes the divinely implanted dreams that disturb Pha raoh's sleep at Gen. 41:1-7.) Once Haman is disposed of, Esther generally defers to Mordecai in the mak ing of policy (Esther 8:1-2, 9-10, 15; 9:3-4, 20-23). But at certain critical points she takes the initiative or exerts her own influence to back him up. It is she who pleads with Ahasuerus to have dispatches sent that will countermand 200 Interpretation the ones Haman had written encouraging the annihilation of the Jews (Esther 8: 3-6). She requests that the bodies of Haman's ten sons be publicly exposed and that the Jews be allowed to kill their enemies for an additional day in Shushan, where Haman's supporters would presumably have been strongest (Esther 9: 11-15). Most interesting perhaps, she issues an ordinance to the Jewish commu nity of Persia, confirming Mordecai's command that they observe the holiday of Purim in perpetuity (Esther 9:29-32). (The letter containing this ordinance is Abihail" authored by "Queen Esther daughter of [Esther 9:29]. That is, she draws on both her official and her ethnic identity. Does this action signal that Mordecai's credentials among the Jews are not beyond question?) In the end, Esther comes into her own, if not quite as coruler (cf. Esther 8: 7), then as a supportive second to the second in command, and as one of the small company of biblical characters to whom the tradition has accorded the

valor." title "women of (The name of Esther's father, Abihail, means "my father is valor."Esther 2:15.)

REFERENCES

The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990. Kolatch, Alfred J. The Jewish Book of Why. Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Pub lishers, 1995. The Megillah: The Book of Esther: A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic, and Rabbinic Sources. Translated and compiled by Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz. Brooklyn: Mesorah Publications, 1976. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1988. Wildavsky, Aaron. "What Is Permissible So That This People May Survive? Joseph the Administrator," PS: Political Science & Politics, vol. 22, no. 4 (December 1989). Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant

Laurence Berns St. John's College, Annapolis

Any study, including the study of philosophy, usually begins with making distinctions, refining differences. With a comprehensive, precise, philosopher, a philosopher with a system, like Kant, it seems as if one could spend a lifetime just trying to work out the distinctions, without ever coming around to bring together the things that have been distinguished, that have been separated in thought. I would like in this talk to try to account for how some of the major factors distinguished by Kant come together and cooperate within the wholes that they constitute. The lecture divides into two basic parts. Experience and the sciences based on experience, according to Kant, are based on two primary sources, sense intuition and conceptual thought. Concepts without intuitions, he argues, are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind. How do they come together? The contrast with Aristotle's treatment should be revealing. The fundamental question behind this first part is: How to account for the cognition we do experience, how to account for the partial intelligibility of our world? The realm of nature, natural science and experience, according to Kant, is determined strictly by necessary laws of cause and effect. The realm of morality, on the other hand, proceeds in accordance with laws of freedom. Like parallel lines, it would seem, the two realms never meet. Kant speaks of the great gulf that separates these domains, that "completely cuts off the domain of the con cept of nature under the one legislation, and the domain of the concept of free dom under the other legislation, from any influence that each .. . might have

other" had on the (Critique ofJudgment, trans. Pluhar, Introduction, IX, p. 35). The question then naturally raises itself: How are the realm of nature and the realm of morality related or connected in one and the same world? In his long and difficult book the Critique of Judgment, Kant develops the concept of purposiveness, especially the purposiveness of nature, that in some way is intended to bridge the gap between nature and morality. I am not able at this time to do more than touch on that subject. The purposiveness that Kant talks about is not found in nature, but is supplied by the reflective judgment of the investigator whenever the investigator comes across phenomena like those of living organized beings for which the laws of mechanical cause and effect

A lecture delivered at St. John's College, Annapolis, April 14, 2000.

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 202 Interpretation

do not seem adequate. A purpose is defined by Kant as an effect that is possible only through the concept of that effect, the concept that is itself the cause of the effect. Like Thomas Aquinas, Kant argues that ends in nature only make sense when they are thought of as intended by some intelligence. The intending intelli gence can be either in the being effecting the purpose or not. The innumerable complexes of purposive activities operative throughout nature, especially in ani mate nature, in beings not intending them, require some other being that does intend them, namely, God (Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 40, A.3, and Q. 1, A.2. Cf. also I, Q. 2, A.3. Critique of Judgment, sees. 75 and 76). Teleology, Kant argues, finds its consummation in theology. But, unlike Thomas, for Kant this God is not to be assumed to have objective reality. The idea of such a being is produced by us in order to satisfy the subjective needs of our cognitive faculties. These purposive laws are to make sense of the phe nomena as if some intelligent cause, a God, had made them. The realm of the reflective judgment also contains Kant's analysis of the aesthetic judgment, the account of the beautiful and the sublime. The pleasure derived from an object judged beautiful comes from reflection on the free and harmonious play of one's own faculties of imagination and understanding in its judging.

The reflective judgment sometimes seems to be a judgment that possessing an indeterminate particular is on the search for the universal or universal law

under which the particular could be subsumed, which, if found, would transform it into a determinate judgment. Reflection evidently plays a key role in a very important subject not extensively discussed by Kant, concept formation. In his Logic he speaks of concept formation as based on three logical operations of

the understanding: comparison, reflection and abstraction,

the essential general conditions of generating any concept whatsoever. For example, I see a fir, a willow and a linden. In comparing them with one another I notice they are different from one another in respect to trunk, branches, leaves and the like; fur ther, however, I reflect only on what they have in common, trunk, branches and leaves and [then] I abstract from their size, shape, and so forth; thus I gain a con cept of a tree. (Critique of Judgment, Introduction (2), sec. 4; and Logik, AK IX, 94-95; Logic, trans. Hartman and Schwarz, pp. 100-101.)

In this context reflection would seem to be the power in the Kantian system that comes closest to the noesis, or intellectual intuition, of Plato and Aristotle.

The gap between nature and morality also raises another question which is both theoretical and practical, namely, How do nature and morality coexist in one and the same human being?

Almost everyone who aspires to be generally educated in philosophy reads Kant's the Foundations a [Grounding] of Metaphysics of Morals, usually after reading his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics or selections from the Cri- Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 203 tique of Pure Reason. His Metaphysics of Morals is much less read. One is almost bound, it seems to me, to get a distorted picture of Kant's moral philoso phy from reading the Foundations alone. In the Foundations Kant clarifies the ultimate principle of morality, the categorical imperative, by distinguishing it from what others claim are the sources of moral principle. The source of moral principle, he argues, is not nature, not divine revelation, not moral sense or feeling, not pleasure. The discussion usually takes the form of arguing why those plausible alternatives are to be ruled out as sources of moral worth. Kant's view appears as a noble, but narrow, inflexible, formalism: "so act that the law" maxim of your action can be made into a universal period. The chief difficulty for those who have read only the Critiques and the Foun dations is to see how Kant applies the categorical imperative. In ethical and political matters the meaning of principles usually does not become clear until one sees how they work out in practice. The Metaphysics of Morals is devoted entirely to working out how the categorical imperative is applied within the varying circumstances of human life. Despite the formalism, it reveals Kant to be a deep, wide-ranging student of human nature, who is very much aware of the importance for morality of the sources that he rejects as ultimate sources of morality. In the second part of this talk I propose to illustrate how, in the Meta physics ofMorals, Kant tries to make sense out of morality, in part by showing how the moral law comes together with some of the alternative principles that were rejected in the Foundations.

Most discussions of Kant begin with his modifications and deepening of doctrines inherited from Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and others whose philosophies can be associated with modem mathematical physics. By emphasizing those modifications, the premises which these thinkers all share, in particular those premises formed in opposition to the classical Pla tonic-Aristotelian approach, are taken for granted, and as a consequence, are both insufficiently questioned and thereby insufficiently clarified. If there is genuine knowledge, must not that which the knower knows be in some way the same as that which constitutes the object known? In the Meno (72c) Socrates speaks of the form (eidos) as that through which things are what they are and that towards which one looks in order to give an account of what they are. Aristotle speaks of how in sense perception the sense is receptive of the forms of sensible things without their material, just as the wax receives the mark of the signet ring without the iron or the gold. (De Anima, 424a 17-21.

Socrates' sailing," Aristotle joins Plato's "second taking "refuge in speeches beings" 99C- [eis tous logous] to look in them for the truth about the [Phaedo, 100A], by coming around to concentrate on the form [eidos] "according to 204 Interpretation

speech" [kata ton logon]. See Physics, 193a 31 and Posterior Analytics, 100a 1-3, and the whole of chapter 19 of book II.) As Joe Sachs put it, "the same form that is at work holding together the perceived thing is also at work on the

perceiver" soul of the (Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans. Sachs, pp. liii-iv). On the basis of what evidently lies in both prephilosophic and philosophic experience, and on the supposition that genuine knowledge is possible for hu man beings, Plato and Aristotle and their followers argue that human beings are endowed by nature with two interconnected kinds of intuition or insight, sense intuition and intellectual intuition (nous), which open themselves correspond ingly to two kinds of forms, sensible and intelligible forms, the forms implicit in human speech as well as the forms of sense experience. According to the analyses of Plato and Aristotle, the intelligible forms are understood to be pri marily responsible for the way the world and things are as they are. And accord ingly they become objects of the highest kind of inquiry, the study which came to be called metaphysics.

The great early modem opponents of the classical tradition and its medieval offshoots seemed to regard this presupposition of harmony between the mind and discourse of human beings and the nature of things as a naive, if not gull ible, optimism. Nature is not a kind mother, she deceives us: the cognitive equipment she endows us with conceals rather than reveals the true character of things.

Bacon, in book 1 of his New Organon, especially in his treatment of the Idols of the Mind, devotes himself to "the refutation of the natural human rea

son." That refutation includes a refutation and account of those philosophies,

"idolize" especially the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, that or even "idola- trize" natural human reason (Berns, pp. 1-12, especially note 5). The continuity of his great project with that of Bacon is acknowledged by Kant through his choice of a long excerpt from the Novum Organum as the epigraph to The Critique of Pure Reason. Thomas Hobbes was unrivaled for the lucidity with which he stated his oppo sition to classical thought. In his The Elements of Law (Natural and Politic) we read "whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the

only" world, they be not there, but are seeming and apparitions (Hobbes, chap. 11.10). What we are led to think are the characteristics of things in themselves are rather the effects upon ourselves of causes or things which in themselves are utterly unknown to us. As for intelligibles, universals, Hobbes tells us that there is "nothing in the world Universal but Names; for the things named, are Singular" every one of them Individual and (Leviathan, chap. 4). He often criti cizes Aristotle for discourse our mistaking about thoughts and the ordering of our thoughts for discourse about things in themselves. Traditional metaphysics from this point of view is absorbed by logic, if not by psychology. Kant continued and developed this critique. We cannot know things in them he argues. the selves, Science, study of nature, is concerned only with what Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 205 appears to us, with what lies in our experience and, as far as we can know, lies only in our experience. We are led by nature to think that what is present in our experience is of, or refers to, things that exist independently of our experience. And when we speak about our experience, especially in our use of common nouns, we speak as if we possessed a power to intuit intellectually the intelligi ble natures of things in themselves. But, Kant asserts, sense intuition is the only intuition available to us, there is no such thing as intellectual intuition for human beings. To emphasize both the denial and the temptation at the same time, he defines the word noumenon (which he and his readers knew in Greek means object of nous, object of intellectual intuition) negatively, as a word to refer to that which we can in no way know, an unknowable x, the unknowable thing in itself.

Kant seems to have never given an explicit and direct refutation of the intel lectual intuition he so emphatically rejects. Years ago I was puzzling about this with the distinguished Kant scholar Lewis Beck, and Beck finally said that he guessed Kant must have thought that he has given us everything valid that intellectual intuition was thought to have supplied and with more adequate ex planations of its grounds. Beck was referring in part to the fact that although, according to Kant, we cannot go beyond phenomena to things in themselves, we can have objective, universal and necessary judgments about them, that is, about the phenomena that constitute our experience. We can accept Hume's critique and starting point without the burden of his skepticism. In fact, Kant argues, objectively valid natural science, mathematics and moral law, now, on his basis, can be more adequately grounded than they have ever been before. Kant's categories, the pure a priori concepts that ground experience, his substi tutes for Platonic and Aristotelian ideas or forms, have no special purely intel lectual objects of their own; they are valid and meaningful only in application to human experience, meaning sense experience. Reason, the ultimate source of understanding, and its concepts, is not intuitive, for Kant, but legislative: it provides rules for the meaningful organization of sense experience, these rules we call concepts. Despite these fundamental oppositions, there is a deep stratum of concurrence in Kant's approach and the Platonic-Aristotelian approach: both find the mean-

ingfulness of ordinary sense experience fundamentally dependent on what is primarily at home in thought, even in logic. Kant might be thought of as, in his Socrates' own way, joining taking refuge in the logoi. (See the reference to Plato's Phaedo, above, and the Critique of Pure Reason, B 105 or A 79, B 107, and B 370.) The same function of the mind that in discourse determines a certain

meaning- kind of judgment, as a category provides the necessary conditions of fulness that determine particular objects, as objects of sense experience.

laws." Thus Kant can say paradoxically that "Reason prescribes to nature its He must also have been thinking about how Newton in his Principia presents mathematical reason prescribing its laws to nature: that is, after working out 206 Interpretation different general mathematical force laws for bodies traveling in different kinds of geometric orbits (in book I), some two hundred or so pages later (in book

World" III) he determines the astronomical "System of the in a few pages by simply setting down the observational data, the phenomena, and seeing to which of those force laws they conform. (As every history of these matters makes clear, the actual discoveries of the mathematical laws were made very much in interaction with observations of the things governed by them.) But Kant spoke of his critical philosophy and Newton's procedure as part of the more general Copernican intellectual revolution of modem science. Let us take the most important example: we see the sun rise, move across the heavens and set each day. The Copernican hypothesis accounts for the apparent daily movement of the sun by the rotation of the earth, or more generally, by the activity and movement of the observer. Kant accounts for the meaningfulness of sense experience in terms of its conformity to the rules set by our own con ceptual activity. Hitherto, he argues, it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects, but he reverses the priority by asking whether it is not rather that we attain knowledge of objects when those objects, sense objects, conform to the conditions that our concepts and understanding set for all objects of experience. Experimental science too is seen as part of this intellectual revo lution: in the experiment reason approaches nature with fixed laws in mind, and then creates conditions that would never occur in nature's own ordinary course in order to force nature to answer reason's own questions about which laws prevail.

I spoke earlier of how Kant cut off intellectual intuition as one route from experience to things experienced as things in themselves; but what about gaining access to the things themselves that are sensed through sense intuition, the one kind of intuition that Kant asserts we do possess? That avenue is cut off by Kant's notion of what it is that we receive through our senses. Following Hume, Kant agrees that what our senses present to us are impressions, or as later writers who follow this approach say, sense data; not sense objects, but sensations, mere matter for sense objects. (To what extent does this depend on Kant's "Bosco- vichian" "solids" reduction of material to tensions of forces, especially repulsive and attractive forces? See his Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissen- schaften. [Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science], especially chapter 2 Dynamik," on dynamics, "Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der AK IV, 496-535.) Sensation for Kant is not yet sense intuition. For sense intuition of sense objects to occur, the matter must be ordered or formed into appearances and experi ences. The or formative ordering power does not come from the object formed, but lies in the mind a that priori, is, independently of all sensation or experience. "[T]he form of all appearance must altogether lie ready for the sensations a priori in the and hence that form mind; must be capable of being examined apart sensation" from all (Critique of Pure Reason, B 34). The form of outer objects of experience is Space, the form of inner objects of experience is Time. Space Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 207 presents no properties or relations of things in themselves; "it is the subjective

us" condition of sensibility under which alone outer intuition is possible for

sense" (Critique of Pure Reason, B 42). Kant's "outer might better be called

'Outer' the sense of externality. here has less to do with going outside the subject than with the form of space itself. Space, as extended, is quintessential^ that each of whose parts is outside of all the others. (Brann, 1991, pp. 92-93)

As the a priori form of inner sense, Time is the condition of possibility for any intuition or experience of simultaneity or succession. If, as we shall shortly see, all experience itself depends upon synthesizing activities of the subjects of experience, taking place in time, then time is the subjective condition of possi bility for all intuition, for all experience and for all cognition. "Time is the

general" formal condition a priori for all appearances in (Critique of Pure Rea son, B 46, 49-50). How, according to Kant, are intuition and concept brought together to pro duce experience and knowledge? The crucial link is the imagination. The pure imagination, Kant tells us, is

a basic power of the human soul which underlies a priori all cognition. By means

of pure imagination we link the manifold of intuition, on the one hand, with the . . . necessary unity of pure apperception [the source of the categories], on the other hand. By means of this transcendental function of the imagination the two extreme ends, namely sensibility and understanding, must necessarily cohere; for otherwise sensibility would indeed yield appearances, but would yield no objects of an empiri cal cognition, and hence no experience. Actual experience consists in [1] apprehen sion of appearances, [2] their association (reproduction), and thirdly their recogni tion; in this third [element] (which is the highest of these merely empirical elements of experience), such experience contains concepts, which make possible the formal unity of experience and with it all objective validity (truth) of empirical cognition. Now these bases of the recognition of the manifold, insofar as they concern merely the form of an experience as such, are the categories. (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Pluhar, A 124-25. Emphasis supplied)

ends," Kant also spoke about the difference between the "two extreme sensi bility and thought, as the difference between receptivity, the receptivity of blind sense impressions, and spontaneity, the source of all thinking (transcendental apperception). The two are defined in opposition to one another. Understanding, the ability to think an object of sensible intuition is our spontaneity of cognition, that is, the ability opposite to receptivity, the ability to produce mental presenta tions by ourselves, to go through, take up and combine mental presentations in

term," acts of synthesis. "By synthesis, in the most general sense of the he says, "I mean the act of putting various presentations with one another and of com

cognition." prising their manifoldness in one Spontaneity, he asserts, is the basis 208 Interpretation

of the threefold synthesis that brings sense intuition and conceptual thought together. The three syntheses are called (1) the synthesis of apprehension in intuition, (2) the synthesis of reproduction in imagination and (3) the synthesis of recognition in the concept.

The first two syntheses are, if I understand them, under the aegis of what Kant calls the productive imagination. (Critique of Pure Reason, A 118. It can be argued that the second synthesis, as its name suggests, is not under the pro ductive but only the reproductive imagination. Imagination, in general, is de fined in the Critique of Pure Reason, B 151, as "the power of presenting an object in intuition even without the object's being In the B edition the synthesis of apprehension is called the figurative synthesis.) What the first synthesis, of apprehension, accomplishes is the taking together of the received impressions as existing in one ("my") consciousness in time. The individual becomes conscious of a unity of intuition in him or her self, as

me." existing "in It is only when the received appearances are apprehended and combined within a definite consciousness that Kant will call them perceptions.

The next stage, the synthesis of reproductive imagination, depends upon an

association of perceptions brought together so as to produce an image of an

over" object. This depends on a power of the mind "to call (heruberzurufen) a preceding perception to a subsequent perception to form a series of perceptions. The objective ground of the association, Kant says, is the affinity of appearances in the unity of apperception. A non-Kantian might be tempted to ask, "Is this a itself?" surreptitious glance at the outlawed thing in But, Kant argues, this pro cess depends on the unity of consciousness of original apperception and is an a priori synthesis, thereby traceable to the action of the productive imagination (Critique of Pure Reason, A 122 and 123). The third synthesis, synthesis of recognition in a concept, is more familiar to everyone who has read about the pure concepts of the understanding, the catego ries. Here there is a recognition that the manifold of former syntheses is a unity of syntheses according to a rule, that is, according to a concept. We have now reached the pole of thought. We now recognize the former syntheses of appear ances, associated perceptions and finally an image as unified according to a rule, a category, under which they are subsumed and validated as conforming to the conditions of possibility of an object of experience.

At the end of this account Kant is satisfied that he can now say:

Hence the order and regularity in the appearances that we call nature are brought into them nor indeed could by ourselves; such order and regularity be found in ap pearances, had not we, or the nature of our mind, put them into appearances origi nally. (Critique of Pure Reason, A 125)

There are two other important accounts of imagination mediating between sense and understanding that I can only mention briefly. Kant's transcendental deduction of the categories culminates in his discussion of the schematism. A Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant - 209 schema is not an image, but a product of the power of imagination, a rule of synthesis for the imagination that governs the production of images that then will be suitable for subsumption under concepts. (Cf. Brann, 1991, pp. 89-99, especially 93-95.)

Another most important function of imagination is its provision of a priori intuition, the foundation of mathematical knowledge, according to Kant. Kant, like Newton and Hobbes, defines mathematical objects operationally rather than theoretically as Euclid mostly does. A line is what is generated by the path of a moving point, rather than a breadthless length. The intuition is a priori, be cause we, through our imagination, supply it; it is not derived from experience. In mathematics concepts are constructed, that is the universals, the concepts, are operative as rules of construction for the a priori images. The universal is found in the particular. (Euclid, 1.32, the proof that the three angles of any triangle equal two right angles, provides a beautiful example: As soon as you supply the line parallel to one of the sides of the triangle [keeping in mind what you have just learned about equalities between interior, exterior and alternate angles], the conclusion jumps out at you. See Critique of Pure Reason, B 744-45. In B 745 this notion of a priori intuition is shown to embrace also the "symbolic

constructions" of algebra. Cf. Jacob Klein: "A new kind of generalization, which

abstraction,' may be termed 'symbol-generating leads directly to the establish

analytic,' ment of a new universal discipline, namely 'general [algebra], which

'new' science" holds a central place in the architectonic of the [Klein, 1968, p. 125. Cf. pp. 117-25, 163-78 and 192-211].) Construction of concepts is de fined by Kant as the production and exhibition a priori, that is, in pure imagina tion, of the intuition which corresponds to the concept. Because in his mind the geometer produces a circle with every radius exactly equal, "he can demonstrate by means of a circle which he draws with his stick in the sand, no matter how irregular it may turn out to be, the attributes of a circle in general, as perfectly

artist." as if it had been etched on a copper plate by the greatest The production in pure imagination of the intuition corresponding to the concept Kant calls schematic in contrast to the merely empirical intuition on paper or drawn in the sand. (Allison, p. Ill, especially Kant's note [AK VIII, 191-92]. Kant's way of conceiving the object of mathematics is elaborately contrasted with the classi cal Greek way in Lachterman. Lachterman develops and builds on Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra; and "The World of

'Natural' World" Physics and the in Klein, 1985, pp. 1-34.)

In the middle of Kant's account of the threefold synthesis we have just gone through a curious and revealing footnote appears.

That the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself has, I suppose, never occurred to any psychologist. This is so partly because this power has been limited by psychologists to reproduction only, and partly because they believed that the senses not only supply us with impressions, but indeed also assemble these im pressions and thus bring about images of objects. But this undoubtedly requires 210 Interpretation

something more than our receptivity for impressions, namely, a function for their synthesis. (Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Pluhar, A 120)

This criticism of what is evidently a premodem notion of perception seems to beg the question by assuming that what the senses supply are atomistic im pressions, which then would require some other power to assemble them into representations of sensible things. Sensible things, as Kant knows, are what most people think they are perceiving through their senses. Kant was familiar with Aristotle's logic, but evidently not with De Anima (nor with Thomas Aqui

nas' commentary on De Anima and what he wrote on perception and imagina tion in his own name, cf. Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 84, AA. 6 and especially 7 and Q. 85, A 1). Aristotle's account of these matters seems to be much simpler; it remains very close to the ordinary and general experience in which they are found. As

themselves." Joseph Owens put it, he "lets things speak for Aristotle and Kant, it seems to me, are considering pretty much the same phenomena, however differently they account for them. In the beginning of his Metaphysics Aristotle speaks of how all animals by nature come into being with sensation and how, for some, memory emerges from sensation which makes them more intelligent and able to learn. He as sumes that, of course, memory presupposes imagination. An animal remem bers by recalling an image of something which has been perceived in the past and is no longer present, Kant's reproductive imagination. And so, Aristotle goes on,

the other animals live by imaginings and memories, but have little share in experi ence, but the human race lives also by art and reasoning. Experience arises out of memory for human beings; for many memories of the same thing bring the capacity for one experience to completion. And experience seems to be almost like knowl

edge, or science, and art; and knowledge and art come about from experience for hu man beings.

Experience is the link between memory and science and art. Experience, then, arises from when memories, many memories of the same thing are linked to gether in a unity: for example, this cured Smith, it also cured Jones, and Green and therefore it should cure Quinn, Collins as well. The doctor, thinking about Collins' s illness is led by something to call up the images of those former pa tients and their cures. The intelligible character (ennoema: Metaphysics, 981a of the illness of the patient 6) before him recalls that same intelligible character he had noticed in the illnesses of Jones, Smith and so on. The intelligible charac ter of the illness is at work both and in through the perceived patient before him and in the doctor's as well as in mind, and through the images recalled of past patients. Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant -211

Aristotle has a name for the kind of human imagination that works together, that is, cooperates, with thought: he calls it rational (logistike) imagination. It is distinguished from the kind of imagination that human beings share with the other animals, sensible imagination (De Anima, 433b 29-31). Let us recall, however, that experience is cognition of individuals. The intelligible form is working away in the linkage and the unity of experience, but it, so to speak, has not come into its own yet. In science and art when one can say this kind of medicine cures this kind of illness, the intelligibility of the form that was at work in experience is explicitly and fully recognized in speech as a universal. This culminating contemplation of the form as a universal is described by Aris totle in a way that at first seems strange; he describes it as a coming to rest of the soul out of its normal and natural disorder. But it is not the rest of inertia, it is the very active and untroubled calm of natural fulfillment, the gratifying fulfilling of a potency that was there from the beginning (Physics, 247b 5-18 and Posterior Analytics, 1 00a 6). The Kantian account is more technical and impressive. It tells us about all sorts of processes that remained hidden until Kant explicated, or invented, them. The imagination plays a larger role than it does for Aristotle. The sense-data, for Kant, must first be assembled or synthesized by the imagination before we can recognize them as constituents of sense objects. The Kantian account de scribes a world that in its intelligible essentials is of our own making. The Aristotelian account sticks much more closely to given experience; the causal factors it invokes almost seem to be extrapolations from the descriptions.

(Aristotle does distinguish objects of sense that are proper to a sense, like the visible to sight, the audible to hearing, from incidental sense objects like "the

Diares" white thing [that] is the son of [De Anima, 418a 7-26]. What that colored thing is, is incidental to its simply being colored. But for human beings primary sense experience usually includes the what that is part of what consti tutes the object of perception as a sensible thing). It finds intelligibility, perhaps even intelligence, in things and the natural world. We are instructed not so much to grasp or construct it, as to open ourselves to it.

II

Freedom in the sense of autonomy, self-legislation, is the fundamental princi ple of Kantian morality. Rousseau, whom Kant speaks of as a kind of Newton of the moral world (Cassirer, p. 18), was perhaps the first to define freedom as self-legislation, but the idea is already implicit in Hobbes's theory of sover Hobbes eignty and the social contract. We must obey the sovereign, argues, because each of us through the social contract has agreed to allow his will to represent each of our wills. He is our representative. His legislation, because of the social contract, is, legally considered, our own self-legislation. Hobbes also 212 Interpretation formulated the more general principle underlying this conception: "there being no Obligation on any man, which ariseth not from some Act of his own; for all Free" men equally are by Nature (Leviathan, chap. 21). Obligation seems to be something like a contract with oneself. This becomes even more explicit in Rousseau's doctrine of the general will. Freedom in society consists in uniting oneself with all the rest under the general will that declares the law, while at the same time remaining free, that is, self- legislating, in so far as one has contributed to the making of that law, either by taking part in the legislative assembly oneself, or taking part in the election of legislators. The process that makes the will general also makes it moral. Being compelled to express one's will in such a form that it can become a general law, so that it can coincide with the wills of all the others, moralizes the will. For example, I don't like to pay taxes. If I generalize my desire into a law that no one ought to pay taxes, I am compelled to see that then the police, public schools, courts, the enforcement of contracts, and so on, would all disappear. The irrationality of my original desire becomes manifest. This idea is fully developed as a moral principle in Kant's doctrine of the categorical imperative: so act that the maxim of your action can become a uni versal law. The truly free or moral person, according to Kant, bows only to the moral will or practical reason within him or her self, and not to any standard coming from without. The standard of autonomy, self-legislation, is opposed by heteronomy, legis lation by another. The two most powerful and prominent forms of heteronomy that are to be dethroned are the standard of nature derived from philosophy and the standard of God derived from biblical revelation. Pure practical reason is the only source of moral law. Anything, therefore, empirical or sensual in origin is disqualified as a source or standard of moral worth: that rules out moral sense, moral feeling and pleasure. It also rules out happiness as a standard, happiness being understood by Kant as a kind of sum of satisfaction of empirical desire, or as he puts it, of inclination. The rational principle of heteronomy, the concept of perfection, at least does not, as the empirical principles do, undermine moral but emptiness and ity, by its vagueness is "altogether incapable of serving as its foundation" (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, AK IV, 443). With this glance at certain programmatic aspects of the Grounding [Foundations] of a Metaphysics of Morals, we can now turn to the Metaphysics of Morals. The book is divided into two parts that correspond to the traditional division between political philosophy and ethics, the doctrine of right and the doctrine of virtue. Duties of right are defined as externally enforceable obligations, the external enforcer being a just, lawful, or right-protecting political order. Duties of ethical are internal virtue, duties, obligations. Duty is a necessitation or con straint of free choice through the law. The constraint in ethical duties, then, is "self-constraint through the representation of the law alone, for only so can that necessitation (even if it is choice" external) be united with freedom of (AK VI, Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 213

380). Free choice is not indeterminate, free choice is that choice that can be determined by pure reason. (This appears to be an echo, or variant, of Spinoza's conception of freedom. Everything, according to Spinoza, is determined: free dom is the of ability the best human beings to be determined by clear and distinct ideas. [If we are not determined in our actions by clear and distinct ideas, we will be determined solely, or mainly, by natural causes like instincts, emotions and inclinations.] For Spinoza and German Idealism, as a whole, see Strauss, Preface, pp. 15-17.) And just to wrap this up: throughout both parts of "obligation" the book refers to "the necessity of a free action under a categorical

reason" imperative of (AK VI, 222). But before we enter into some of the substance of the book, it is time to clear up one fundamental point. Kant frequently speaks of the unbridgeable gap between the domain of sensible empirical nature and the domain of moral free dom, as our earlier quotation illustrated. Those statements turn out to be only provisional, to help us get clear about where our different principles are coming from. Freedom is a kind of causality. Although the natural causality of the sensible world cannot determine the subject as a moral, supersensible, being,

yet . . . the reverse is possible (not with regard to our cognition of nature, but .

with regard to the consequences that the concept of freedom has in nature); ... this possibility is contained in the very concept of a causality through freedom, whose ef

fect is to be brought about in the world. .. .

Those effects manifest themselves as appearances in the world of sense. (Cri

tique of Judgment, trans. Pluhar, p. 36; AK V, 195, see especially the note on pp. 195-96.) This causality of freedom is another way of talking about how pure reason individuals' becomes practical: This can only happen when reason makes the maxims (subjective principles of action) fit for becoming universal law. And further, since we human beings are under the sway of nature's causality as well as freedom's, that power of reason can be exercised, Kant says, only by its prescribing the moral law in the form of imperatives that command or prohibit absolutely (AK VI, 213-14; Metaphysics ofMorals, trans. Gregor, pp. 13-14). A divine being, with no countervailing natural tendencies to oppose pure practi cal reason, acts in accordance with the moral law as a matter of course, with no need for any imperatives, any commands. (Cf. the distinction between the conti nent man and the temperate man in book 7 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.) Since my general aim here is to illustrate how Kant's sensible natural realm and supersensible moral realm come together in one and the same world, I will concentrate on the doctrine of virtue, because that is where those sources of morality rejected in the Foundations as ultimate principles of morality are done justice to, as important factors in moral life. An end, Kant explains, is an object of free choice, the object of some action, 214 Interpretation and is thereby empirical. The traditional, or classical, procedure of clarifying the rank order of one's ends and then setting one's personal maxims of duty in terms of the rank order of those ends, violates the concept of duty according to Kant. Duty with its categorical ought is rooted in pure reason alone, and thereby must be in control of the maxims by which one sets one's ends. The ends to be sought in ethics then are ends that are also duties.

Although both nature and the concept of perfection seem to have been ruled out as fundamental moral standards in the Foundations, in section viii of the doctrine of virtue we find the end that is also a duty to cultivate one's own natural perfection. As Kant also says in the Foundations, ends that are necessary and objective ends for every rational being, that is, ends in themselves, can serve as moral laws. Rational nature, he declares, is an end in itself. It follows that human beings, being rational natures, are obliged in their own person or in the person of another to always treat humanity as an end, not a means. The end of humanity in our own persons is linked to the duty to make ourselves worthy of humanity by cultivating our natural capacities to realize the ends set forth by our reason. Then Kant goes on, "That is to say, the human being has a duty to cultivate the raw abilities of his nature by which the animal first raises itself being." into a human (Cf. Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, AK VIII, 107-23: Conjectural Beginning of Human History, trans. Fackenheim, pp. 53-68.) Happiness, we remember, was also excluded from moral goals, but, Kant declares, the happiness of others is an end that is also a duty. The argument here is rather interesting; it seems to ground itself on universalizing a not very exalted natural and selfish principle. The reason why we have

a duty to be beneficent is this: since our self-love cannot be separated from our need to be loved (helped in case of need) by others, we therefore make ourselves an end for others; and this maxim can never be binding except through its qualification as a universal law, and hence through our will also to make others our ends. The

happiness of others is therefore an end that is also a duty.

Shortly thereafter Kant again puts his prodigious deductive power in the ser vice of his good sense by qualifying this duty. "How far it should extend de

... on pends what each person's true needs are in view of his sensibilities, and himself." it must be left to each to decide this for For to promote the happiness of another at the sacrifice of one's own happiness (one's own true needs) would be in itself a self-conflicting maxim, if one made it into a universal law (AK VI, 391-94; trans. Gregor, pp. 154-56). In the light of the Foundations, section xii of the Metaphysics of Morals is interesting: outlawed especially feeling and pleasure come into their own. The subject is those "moral endowments" resting on feeling that are required to Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 215 prepare the mind to receive concepts of duty and to act on them. There are duties to cultivate these right dispositions of feeling. Moral feeling is "the susceptibility to pleasure or displeasure merely from the consciousness that our action is either in agreement with or is contrary to duty." the law of Shortly thereafter a remarkable statement follows: "for all feeling." consciousness of obligation depends on this It is this feeling that makes us aware of the constraint that lies in the concept of duty. There is no duty to have or acquire it, because every human being (as a moral being) already has it. The obligation can "only be to cultivate it and, through wonder at its inscrutable it" [unerforschlichen not to be searched into] source, to strengthen (AK VI, 399-400). To lack it is to be morally dead. Kant continues, in appropriately passionate language, "and if, (to speak in medical terms) the moral life-force could no longer excite this feeling, then humanity would dissolve (as it were by chemical laws) into mere animality and be mixed irretrievably with the mass of beings" other natural (trans. Gregor, p. 160). The other great source of heteronomy, both the Foundations and The Critique of Practical Reason tell us, is the biblical God of revelation. Kant ends the Metaphysics ofMorals by speaking of religion as an integral part of the general doctrine of duties, but says that considered as a doctrine of duties to God it lies outside the boundaries of pure moral philosophy. The necessity for religion is stated quite clearly: "we cannot very well make obligation (moral constraint) intuitive [anschaulich] for ourselves without thereby thinking of another's will, namely God's (of which reason in giving universal laws is only the spokes

man)." This duty with regard to God, he goes on, is really a duty to the idea we ourselves make of such a being, it is really a duty of a human being to him or her self, "for the sake of strengthening the moral incentive in our own lawgiving

reason" (trans. Gregor, pp. 229-30). Kant hints that if we would really like to follow up this subject, we could consider his book Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, where the agreements between pure practical reason and the teachings of history and revelation are explored. That book, like the Metaphysics of Morals, is one of those rare places where Kant describes human beings as we know them, whole human beings who are at one and the same time natural and moral beings. It may be fitting to end this talk with some brief remarks about Kant's discus sion of religion. The Critique of Pure Reason established, according to Kant, that we have no knowledge, positive or negative, concerning the existence of God. Religion, Kant argues, is unambiguously subordinated to morality, to moral reason. "Pure moral legislation, through which the will of God is primor- dially engraved in our hearts, is not only the unavoidable condition of all true

religion." religion whatsoever, but is also that which really constitutes such True

affair" religion, he argues, "is a purely rational (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, AK VI, 104; Der Streit der Fakultdten, AK VII, 67, The Conflict of the Faculties, 216 Interpretation trans. Gregor, p. 123). Religion within the limits of reason alone establishes what in the absence of knowledge we are obliged to believe, in order to strengthen our capacities to obey the moral law. Kant had trouble getting his book on religion printed. Permission to publish was withheld because of opposition from officials of the theological faculties at the universities. Morals and religion, they argued, fell under the jurisdiction of the theological faculty, not the faculty of philosophy to which Kant belonged. (This jurisdictional issue was probably not the deepest ground for their opposi tion.) Kant had argued as early as The Critique of Pure Reason that moral theology in answer to the question What may I hope? was an indispensable part of philosophy. After a few years of rejection by some censors and acceptance by others, Kant did get his Religion book published. But the practical and theo retical questions connected with the affair evidently led him to write what be came a part of his last book, The Conflict of the Faculties. I bring this talk to a close with Kant's comments in that book on the tradi tional idea that philosophy is the handmaid of theology (AK VII, 28). He grants

claim," theology's "proud but raises the question: Is she, however, the handmaid that walks behind bearing her gracious mistress's train, or the torchbearer that walks ahead to light the path?

REFERENCES

Allison, Henry E. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Uni versity Press, 1973. Aristotle's Metaphysics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Santa Fe, NM: Green Lion Press, 1999. Nature," Berns, Laurence. "Francis Bacon and the Conquest of Interpretation 7, No. 1 (1978).

Brann, Eva T. H. The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991. Cassirer, Ernst. Rousseau, Kant and Goethe. New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Hobbes, Thomas. The Elements of Law (Natural and Politic). Edited by Ferdinand Ton- nies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928. Kant, Immanuel. Kant's Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe. Preussische Akademie der Wis-

senschaften, beginning in 1902. Citations to this standard text are as follows: e.g., 94-95" "AK IX, refers to volume IX, pages 94-95. Critik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1781. Standard page citations to this edition 79." are preceded by the letter A, e.g., "A The second edition was published in 1787; standard page citations are preceded by the letter B, 105." e.g., "B Critique ofPure Reason. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996. Critik der Urtheilskraft. Berlin: Lagarde and Friedrich, 1790. Critique of Judg ment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987. zur Metaphysik der Grundlegung Sitten, AK IV. Foundations of a Metaphysics Putting Things Back Together Again in Kant 217

of Morals. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and analyzed by H. J. Paton. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Hart- _. Logik. Edited by Gottlob B. Jasche. AK IX, 94-95: Logic. Translated by man and Schwarz. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974.

_. Die Metaphysik der Sitten, AK VI. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Muthmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte, AK VIII, 107-23: Conjec tural Beginning of Human History. Translated by Emil Fackenheim. In Kant on His tory, edited by Lewis Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963. Pp. 53-68. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, AK VI. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960. Der Streit der Fakultdten, AK VII. The Conflict of the Faculties. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. New York: Abaris, 1979. Dual language edition. Klein, Jacob. Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra. Translated by Eva Brann. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 1968. Now available in a Dover Edition

reprint. Lectures and Essays. Edited by Robert B. Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman. Annapolis: St. John's College Press, 1985. Lachterman, David. The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1989. Strauss, Leo. Spinoza's Critique of Religion. New York: Schocken Books, 1965.

Shadows on the Cave Wall: Platonic Imagery in Lord Jim

John S. Kirby Research Capital Corporation

INTRODUCTION: PLATO AND CONRAD

The fascination of Lord Jim has many aspects. The exotic locale, the poi gnant tale of the young seaman haunted by guilt, and the obscure, perplexing character of Jim beguile and intrigue us. The fascination extends to the element of obscurity, even mystery, associated at times with place, character, and event in Conrad's tale. Indeed, the interplay of obscurity and vision are key features of the celebrated impressionism of Lord Jim. The drama of opacity and illumi nation is constructed there from diverse elements that have sent critics in varied directions in attempts to interpret it. Alongside numerous analyses of narrative technique, one encounters interpretations based on psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction. These readings emphasize con temporary points of view which would have been unknown to Conrad himself. Lenor- (Conrad's own view of psychoanalysis may be gauged by a story about mand, the French playwright. He once lent Conrad two volumes of Freud which

meprisante" the novelist considered "avec une ironie and later returned un opened [Zaubel, 1947, p. 13].) Others relate Lord Jim to a wide range of ancient and modem writers. All overlook as have commentaries for the hundred years

since its publication a major, complex source of Conrad's inspiration: the myths of Plato's Republic. This essay will identify the varied and repeated ap pearance of Platonic imagery in Lord Jim and suggest why Conrad used it. Evidence of Conrad's relationship to Plato has long been readily available. The depth and importance of this relationship, however, have not been explored. In December 1 897, Conrad wrote Arthur Quiller-Couch to thank him for a gen erous review of The Nigger of the Narcissus. Conrad employed an elaborate Quiller-Couch' enthusiastic response his work analogy to express his thanks. s to was, he wrote, "a sign that endeavor has come somewhere within sight of achievement, that thought has cast its shadow upon the wall of the cavern and the discriminating eyes of a fellow captive have seen it pass, wavering and dim, forever" before vanishing (Karl, 1979, p. 414.) This passage, with its extended allusion to Plato's parable of the cave, is tale remarkable for several reasons. First, it indicates that Conrad knew Plato's including, as will be demonstrated, some of its more subtle details. Indeed, his

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 220 Interpretation

identification with the shadows of the cave rather than the light of the fire or the sun outside suggests a nuanced and self-conscious appreciation. Second, it points to a fundamental but neglected motif of Lord Jim: Conrad's extensive use of imagery drawn from Plato's Republic, especially from the parable of the cave and the shadows. Third, this passage is remarkable for the completeness with which it has been ignored by Conrad scholars. I know of only one writer ever to mention it. (Karl draws an analogy to this passage in another place, where, somewhat misleadingly, he identifies the captivity of the prisoners with

art" life "without symbolic representation in [Karl, 1960, p. 179].) Other, less conspicuous, platonic hints have been similarly overlooked. When Stein remarks on the miraculous delicacy and harmony of a butterfly's wing, his words suggest a classically Greek notion of balance. "This is nature the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so and every blade of grass stands so and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces this. This won

artist." der; this masterpiece of Nature the great (All page references are to the Watts and Hampson edition of Lord Jim, 1986, p. 195.) This impression only grows if this passage is read alongside Laws 10: "all the grandest and fairest of things are products of nature and chance. Art takes over the grand

formed" primary works of Nature already (889a). Marlow sounds another classically Socratic note when he declares that, de spite the difficulties in seeing and understanding Jim clearly, he felt "bound to knowledge" him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our

(p. 206). His declaration of considered doubt points back to the celebrated So cratic doubt of the Apology. It was said that the oracle at Delphi pronounced

Socrates the wisest man in Athens. In response he insisted that

my advantage over the rest of mankind, and if I were to claim to be wiser than my neighbor in any respect it would be this that not possessing any real knowledge

... I am also conscious that I do not possess it. (29b)

Platonic elements in Lord Jim have, of course, been suspected. Certain re marks of Marlow stand out conspicuously, such as when he considers "absolute

Truth, which, like Beauty, itself floats elusive, half submerged, in the silent still

mystery" waters of (p. 202). when Or he judges "all our illusions only to be dimly" visions of remote unattainable truth, seen (p. 281). Such language might more properly be considered Neo Platonic, as it was, to Conrad's irritation, by one reader of Lord Jim. (In a letter to Edward Garrett in 1908, Conrad fumed

"there is even one abandoned? creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on

that?" earth is p. [Moser, 1968, 455].) Contemporary critics have sensed platonic elements in Jim's conception of himself or in tensions between the dark and the light side, the destructive and creative impulses of Conrad's drama (Yelton, 1968, p. 474). None, however, have been led to consider just how deeply Lord Jim have been indebted to the may imagery of Plato's Republic. This essay will Shadows on the Cave Wall 221 identify the elements of Platonic imagery that appear in the novel and the texts from which they have been borrowed. Finally, it will identify a philosophical perspective on Jim that is suggested by the confluence of this Platonic language.

THE PARABLE OF THE CAVE

Let us begin by recalling the parable of the cave from the Republic (6, 514a- 521e). Socrates asks his companions to imagine people imprisoned from birth in a cave, shackled at the ankle and neck facing the cave wall. Behind the prisoners stands a low wall and behind it a blazing fire. People walk behind the wall, in front of the fire, carrying various objects that cast shadows onto the cave wall. The prisoners, only able to see the shadows of the objects and of themselves, would know these images and these alone as reality. Sounds made by the object carriers would produce echoes that would further confuse the prisoners by presenting them with a distorted, ersatz language that would inhibit rather than enhance their ability to communicate with each other effectively. "What," Socrates asks, "would occur if a prisoner were loosed from his

cave?" bonds and forced to ascend to the mouth of the Undoubtedly he would experience pain as his eyes were dazzled first by the light of the fire and later by the light of the sun. He could only adjust his vision slowly and would have to proceed first by viewing shadows and the reflections of things in water. But as he adjusted to the world of sunlight and the real objects visible there, he would understand his previous realm as a sham of confusion and illusions. He would prefer anything to a return to the shadow world of the cave. If, nonethe less, he were somehow compelled to return, he would have to adjust his eyes again to the gloom and would only recognize the shadowy shapes on the wall with difficulty. He could not compete in the games based on naming the shad ows as he had done before and would thus become an object of ridicule. The prisoners would mock him for his loss of vision and the ascent that caused it. If he tried to release other prisoners, they would lay hands on him and perhaps kill him. But if, despite these dangers, the freed prisoner had had the opportunity to leam the truth about images, shadows, and real objects, he might feel com pelled by a love of the common good to return to assist in enlightening the other prisoners. For otherwise, society his fellows would be abandoned by waking men, to be ruled by dreamers who fight over shadows as if doing so were a great good.

Beauty," The passage cited earlier, mentioning "absolute Truth .. . in fact contains far more than a vague allusion to Plato. Read in full, this passage from chapter 20 actually evokes a picture of Plato's cave and its shadowy images. It occurs at the end of Marlow's reflection on his conversation with Stein.

I saw it vividly, as though our progress through the lofty silent rooms among fleet ing gleams of light and sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering 222 Interpretation

flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to abso lute Truth, which like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. (P. 202)

The impression is confirmed by the immediately preceding paragraphs. As Stein and Marlow move through the house, "the forms of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen for a moment stealing silently across the depths of a

void." crystalline The scene is set in fact in the opening paragraph of the chapter which dramatically depicts a portion of Stein's study, "the comer strongly lighted by a shaded reading lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted

cavern" into shapeless gloom like a (p. 192). And when Jim and Marlow con verse, they do so in a quiet room, "whose shadows huddled together in comers, flame" away from the still (p. 199). Indeed, the imagery actually occurs even earlier in chapter 7, in Jim's description of the seamen's quarters on the Patna: "the peopled gloom of the cavernous place, with the light of the globe lamp bulkhead" falling on a small portion of the (p. 105). And in chapter 1, a "gossip ing crowd, viewed as seamen, seemed at first more insubstantial than so many shadows"(p. 52). Stein, in particular, is depicted as an inhabitant of the shadow world, "passing out of the bright circles of the lamp into the ring of fainter light into shapeless last" dusk at (p. 200). This movement, it seemed, "had carried him out of this

world" concrete and perplexed (p. 199). In this realm his appearance changed

substance." into a shadow figure, "his tall form, [was] as though robbed of its Somehow his words and thoughts were less distinct in the better lit areas of the

element," house. As he finished his famous discourse on the "destructive Mar low noticed that as the setting changed, so did Stein's discourse; "[t]he light

shadows" had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant (p. 200). Stein and Marlow have discussed Jim by firelight in a cave. And Stein's conviction dissipated as shadows were replaced by light. The flickering flames and shadows of Conrad's cave world reappear later in the tale. The imagery of the cave is extended in chapter 24 where the moon

"ghost" floats above Jim's valley. It is described as the imitation, the of the sun, like the fire in the cave. Marlow and Jim "watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen

sunlight" descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead (p. 224). The moon deceives us by misrepresenting the world it illuminates.

It is to our which like sunshine, say what you is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad. It robs all forms of matter domain which, after all is our of their substance, and gives a sinister reality to the shadows alone. (P. 224)

Conrad here binds together a tightly number of Platonic images, some already identified and others still to be considered. The moon as an ersatz sun clearly Shadows on the Cave Wall 223

"shadows" recalls the fire of the cave as do the echoes, the of sounds. In a later light" the of passage, image "false reappears as "starlight . . . that cannot resolve

shapes" shadows into (p. 273). The association of the moon-cave with death

and ghosts looks still further, to the realm of the dead and the afterlife of souls- ghosts into which Conrad follows Plato.

The imagery of moon-shadows-cave is resumed in chapter 34. Marlow con siders the rising moon and the varied shadows it casts on the forest.

I saw part of the moon glittering through the bushes at the bottom of the chasm. For a it as moment, looked though the smooth disc falling from its place in the sky above the earth, had rolled to the bottom of that precipice. ... It threw its level rays

afar as if a and from cavern, in this mournful eclipse-like light ... the heavy shad ows fell at my feet on all sides, my own moving shadow. (Pp. 280-81)

By including here the shadow cast by Marlow himself, Conrad recalls the pris oner in the cave who casts his own shadow on the wall, along with those of the objects carried behind the wall (cf. Republic 515a). Conrad here recalls a detail

of Plato's parable that has, in fact, often been overlooked in the critical literature on the Republic (Planinc, 1991, p. 290). Marlow' The sense of s passage through Plato's cave is continued in the next chapter. Departing the village, Marlow forms a picture of the people and the houses of Patusan by recalling their details like those of a painting grasped

contemplation" firmly "after long (p. 286). As in a meditative apprehension of the Idea of the Good, this picture "remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, light." with its life arrested, in an unchanging But Marlow was leaving Patusan, Jim, and the contemplation of the idea of the good. He was returning, it ap peared, to a realm more like the cave and its shadows. "I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, flickers" light (p. 286). Marlow was, like the freed prisoner in Plato's tale, returning to the shadow world. If Marlow is bound to return to the realm of the shadows, he does so without returning to the state of the cave prisoners. He does so full of a sense of libera tion. As the river on which he had been traveling approached the sea, "... it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had opened

portal" an immense (p. 287). Indeed, Marlow felt every bit the freed prisoner. "I let my eyes roam through space, like a man released from bonds who freedom" stretches his limbs, runs, leaps, responds to the inspiring elation of (pp. 287-88). In Patusan, Marlow had discovered himself somehow to be in a cave. Yet, as he prepares to depart, he knows he has been changed, somehow liberated by his encounter with Jim in the island kingdom. He seems to feel liberated from illusions, but which illusions about mankind in general or about Jim in partic ular he never really says. He may never have known. His sense of transforma- 224 - Interpretation

tion, of enlightenment itself retains a certain obscurity. He certainly announces no revelation, no startling new conviction about Jim or the world. Jim for him "romantic" is still the he was dubbed by Stein, still unwilling or unable to accept the world as it is or his place in it. But Marlow is nonetheless a man changed for having known Tuan Jim in Patusan. The uncertainty surrounding Marlow's outlook is underlined clearly by his uncertain view of Jim. He declared, "he was not if I may say so clear to

me" (p. 173). And again, "I can not say that I had ever seen him distinctly not him" even to this day, after I had my last view of (p. 206). And, to sharpen the

" clearly" point, .. I am forced never to see him (p. 221). Such humility from one of literature's great reporter-interpreters should not be disregarded. Mar- low's description of this obscurity, this opacity, is an important and neglected

"mood" motif. It signals a problem more fundamental than some of skepticism or agnosticism. These declarations or confessions of Marlow concerning the ability to see clearly point to issues at the heart of the parable of the cave. As we have seen, Jim inhabits a world full of shadows. The obscurity of this world is indicated in various ways. Marlow often sees him as through a mist or a fog or under a cloud. (On mist and fog, see pp. 99, 127, 136-38, 140, 206, 208, 338-39. On gloom, see especially p. 213 and also pp. 238, 24, 339.) In a typical scene, he appeared once to Marlow enwrapped in a "gloom that seemed

cloud" to envelop him from head to foot like the shadow of a passing (pp. black" 213-14). In another, Marlow "looked at him distinct and (p. 173). But Jim is not always surrounded by dark obscurity. At other times he was illumi light" nated by "a mysterious (p. 137). Indeed, it seemed to Marlow on another light" occasion that "after all, it was he of the two of us who had the (p. 179). In fact, elsewhere, it was actually the abundance of light that obscured Jim for Marlow: "[my] eyes were too dazzled by the glitter of the sea beneath his feet

clearly" to see him (p. 221).

The curious complex of shadowy gloom on the one hand and brilliant light on the other recalls the experience of the prisoner in Plato's cave. He begins in the shadowy gloom of his imprisonment. On being made to turn first toward "dazzled" the fire and then the sun, the prisoner is by the excess of light (Repub lic 518a. I have used the 515e-d, Bloom translation throughout.). On returning to the cave, however, his vision would suffer as he reaccustomed himself to the darkness and shadows (Republic 517e). Vision is equally disturbed, Socrates reminds us, by being transferred from darkness to light and from light to dark ness. Marlow encounters both of these ocular difficulties in his efforts to get a view clear of Jim. This use of Platonic language extends to Conrad's view of "images" "illusion." as the source of Marlow considers the outlook of young men at sea on his first voyage. He gazes at out the sea "with shining eyes upon that vast glitter of the vast surface which is only a reflection of his own glances fire" full of (p. 137).

one conversation held a During under lightning storm, Jim was illuminated Shadows on the Cave Wall - 225

flickers" by "dazzling of light until a flash briefly blinded Marlow's "dazzled eyes" (p. 173). In a passage in the Republic, immediately preceding the parable of the cave, Socrates discusses the process of learning, which beings with "im

ages" that are "first shadows, then appearances produced in water and in all

things" smooth, bright (Republic 509e-510a, cf. 516a). The night before his leaving, Marlow offers Jim an opportunity to escape his accusers by fleeing to another island. Jim refuses, preferring to face his judg ment. In so doing, he recalls Socrates in the Crito refusing to flee Athens and the execution to which its citizens condemned him. For Jim, like Socrates, is bound to his community, even if its laws are administered unjustly. When, at the same time, Marlow describes their meeting, their "communion ... as un

man" commonly like a last vigil with a condemned (p. 154), he suggests some thing very much like the final conversations of Socrates and his friends that are described in the Crito and the Phaedo. Indeed, the Crito begins with a vigil, Crito sitting quietly next to the slumbering Socrates whom, like the child being watched, he did not wish to wake too soon. And when Marlow adds, almost unnecessarily, that Jim "was guilty as I told myself repeatedly, guilty and for," done one can hear in the solemnity of his pronouncement some small echo of the irony that fills the Apology as Socrates defends the practice of philosophy to the Athenian political operators who will judge his life and work.

away," Despite Jim's refusal to "run Marlow worries about him during the disappear" tribunal "as though I had expected him to (p. 160). But Jim had already assured Marlow that, however, destructive the judgment proved to him, invisible" "[t]he damned thing won't make me (p. 157). The mention of invisi bility recalls another related story from the Republic: the tale of Gyges and his king (359d et seq.). Gyges, a shepherd, discovers a ring that can render him invisible and free to indulge any wish without fear of sanction. The tale enables Socrates to raise questions about the difference between the appearance of virtue and its reality. Would men behave differently if temporarily invisible and free of those ties to society provided by custom and law? For his part, Jim is many "invisible." things throughout his life but, by his own words, never He does of course have a special ring, given him by Stein, that provides social and commercial opportunities. But it is not magical and confers on him

opened for him the door of very limited powers. It was "the talisman that had

success" fame, love and in Patusan (p. 351). It assists in his temporary break connectedness to with one community, but immediately ties him to another. His the the human community is reiterated by the frequent repetition throughout

us" story that "he was one of (pp. 44, 74, 100, 112, 121, 208, 283, 287, 310, 351). Jim remained difficult for those around him to see and his actions difficult to judge, but he is never invisible, he is no Gyges. (Tanner, 1968, p. 460, ap pears to have just this thought when he says that Conrad was "deeply convinced

world." about a man's moral dress even when he was invisible to the rest of the

Tanner's remark was a propos of Conrad's remarks, in a letter to Cunningham 226 Interpretation

Grahame, that most forms of idealism and reformism are "only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men. Conrad strove to distinguish at all times between human appearances and human realities. He had a clear view of the depth and breadth of the power convention exercises over most men.) Brown, on the other hand, approaching the village in preparation for attack, is "invisible in the (p. 338). The theme of invisibility may be connected to the parable of the cave in another way. The cave or chasm is a break or fissure in the earth's surface, a physical rupture of the world with which we are familiar. Invisibility, were it actual, would interrupt the visible connections of the world we inhabit. Caves and grottos have long been regarded as singular, even sacred, places where the powers of the earth or even the gods themselves are closer to men and communi cate with or receive communication from them. Caves and invisibility may also both be said to be associated with the dead. The cave can mark a border, a portal to another realm. It is clearly such a transitional place for the dead buried there who then begin the journey to the next life, itself often located in the "underworld." Such a border is often patrolled by ghosts, the denizens of both realms, whom we shall shortly meet in abundance. Conrad, with Plato as his guide, sketched such a journey through the cave of the underworld and beyond.

THE MYTH OF ER

The second major complex of Platonic images to appear in Lord Jim is bor rowed from the myth of Er's journey in book 10 of the Republic. The tale of Er includes one of Plato's myths of the judgment of the dead, such as those that occur in the Phaedo and the Gorgias, to which the Republic is closely related. Er, a warrior, is killed in battle and journeys to the afterworld, where he leams the fate of the departed souls (614b-621d). He sees how the virtuous are sent to enjoy happiness with the gods in heaven and the evil sent to suffer in the

underworld for their transgressions. Er himself was not judged but was told to observe and to act as a messenger to mankind about all that he learned there.

Er's journey to the underworld began in a great meadow where he came upon a gathering of departed souls, some returning from long sojourns in heaven, some coming up out of the earth after completing long journeys below. through the Moving meadow, they came upon a great column of light reaching from the earth to heaven, around which turned the spheres of the universe to which celestial bodies were attached, all turning in harmony. The Spindle of the Universe turned in the of lap Ananke, Goddess of Necessity. Around it sang her three the one daughters, Fates, singing of what has been, one of what is, and one of what is to come. As they sang they touched the spheres to keep them Shadows on the Cave Wall 227 moving. The traveling souls were given the chance to choose new lives, but had to choose the quality of virtue that would inform them. Virtue, they were re minded, is the subject of no man, but rather, is, according to the measure in which she is honored, the standard by which each is measured. Choices are made freely by each soul and then are sealed by the Fates. With choices made, the souls travel across the stifling Plain of Oblivion and camp by the River of Forgetfulness. Those who drank too much there forgot what they had learned and could later recollect little or nothing. At midnight, as they slept, the earth shook and thunder sounded, and they were carried off like shooting stars to their new lives. Er had, for reasons he didn't know, been prevented from drinking the water and was able to recall what he had seen. His tale was thus preserved and, through Socrates, passed on to mankind as a guide and an encouragement to others to pursue virtue in this life, that they might enjoy happiness thereafter. Conrad evokes the myth of Er in a series of scenes focusing on Marlow's thoughts and recollections. Er's tale is a tale of journeying. Er's soul, when it

journey" departed his body, "made a to the other world (614c). At the opening of heaven and earth he noticed "The souls arriving there appeared to have come journey." from a long They were, in fact, in between previous and upcoming thousand-year journeys (618a-621d). Jim, it must be remembered, is a traveler, as are Marlow, Stein, and Brown. Stein, like the journeying souls of Er's tales,

paths" "had travelled very far, on various ways, on strange (p. 201). Indeed, he

privations" declared, "I took long journeys and underwent great (p. 197). And Marlow, like Er, had explored the mysteries of the underworld; "I had looked

surface" under its obscure (p. 281). Jim, after the tribunal's judgment, was sent to a new life, in a new world where his character (daemon) was tested in a decisive, fateful way. Particularly in chapter 34, Marlow evokes the appearance of Er returning from his journey and recalling what he had learned. At one point, he interrupted his conversation, "got up quickly and staggered a little as though he had been

space" set down after a rush through (p. 279). Gazing at his companions, he "looked at them all with the eyes of a man returning from the excessive remote dream." ness of a His thoughts suggest a familiarity with the workings of An anke and her daughters, the Fates, who distribute the lots whereby souls choose their characters and who then ratify and seal these choices. He says, "[t]here is a law, no doubt and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice." He meditates in oracular fashion on the destiny that includes all of us within itself, "It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, fortune balance." and The the ally of patient time that holds an even unscrupulous Herald of the Fates reminded the assembled souls of the cycle of birth, death and rebirth that repeated itself in time and that, throughout this cycle, "Virtue is without a master; as he honors her or dishonors her, each will have more or

her" less of (617c). Having recalled the dramatis personae and the events of the 228 Interpretation judgment scene, Marlow concludes with words that could easily have been Er's own: "It was as though I had been shown the working of the implacable destiny

tools' of which we are the victims and the (p. 280).

After receiving their destinies, the traveling souls proceeded across the Plain of Oblivion to the River of Forgetfulness, and Marlow did as well. In an earlier scene, he recalled that Stein's words, during their conversation

seemed to open before me a vast uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on

a plain at dawn, or was it perchance the coming of night? . . . Yet for all that, the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls remained very deso late under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light. (P. 201)

"Er" In the scene of chapter 34, Marlow struggled when he attempted to recall, to grasp the events, the individuals, the very reality of Patusan.

All I had lately seen, all I had heard, and the very human speech itself, seemed to

have passed away out of existence, living only in my memory ... I felt that when to-morrow I had left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion. (P. 281)

The desolate plain on which Marlow imagines men wandering in the twilight is partly illumined, but in an odd and unnatural way. It is strangely, "circled flames" with a bright edge as if surrounded by an abyss full of (p. 201). No abyss of flames is mentioned in the description of Tartarus in the Republic, but it does occur in a related text in the Phaedo. There, Tartarus stands across from a chasm, into which flows the River of Burning Fire (133a-c). This river, the Pyriphlegethon, flows opposite the waters of the lake called the Styx. The stream that flowed through Jim's village appeared sometimes to Marlow, under Styx" faint starlight, "as black as (p. 273; cf. Republic 387c). Marlow's plain of oblivion includes its own river of forgetting. Marlow

seems to stand before the pilgrim souls at the river, when, under the moonlight, the village huts appear as "jostling, vague, gray, silvery forms mingled with

black masses of shadow . like a spectral herd of shapeless creatures pressing

stream" forward to drink in a spectral and lifeless (pp. 224-25). The entire

scene is in fact rehearsed earlier, in chapter 2, when the Patna on the ocean

plain" "passed over that leaving a wake "that vanished at once, like the phantom

steamer" of a track drawn upon lifeless sea by the phantom of a (p. 54). The of the days journey seemed to fall "into an abyss for ever open in the wake of

ship" the which trudged on "black and smouldering in a luminous immensity,

pity" as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without (p. 55). During his journey, Er did not know when his soul re-entered his body. He fell a disembodied soul in the asleep evening by the River of Forgetfulness and awoke at dawn back in his body. Marlow recalls the temporal ambiguity of Er's Shadows on the Cave Wall - 229 return. As noted above, Stein's thoughts about Jim's romanticism had an odd effect on Marlow. opened a They dimly lit new perspective, like that of standing

night?" "on a plain at dawn or was it, perchance, at the coming of (p. 201). Er's companions ended their journeys by being reborn into their new lives.

stars" They were carried upward, amidst thunder and earthquake "like shooting birth" (621b). In the Timaeus, each soul was assigned at its "first to a star with

chariot" which it travelled, "as in a throughout the universe to leam the laws of

"rebirth," destiny (41e). Marlow saw Jim's move to Patusan as a and he used most dramatic language to describe it. He declared that Jim's life could not have been changed more "had Stein arranged to send him to a star of the fifth magni tude" (203-4).

Finally, Conrad recalls the conclusion of Er's tale, which is also the conclu sion of the Republic. Socrates reminds his listeners that, because of Er's recol lection, "a tale was saved and not lost; and it could save us, if we were per suaded by it, and we shall make a good crossing of the River of Forgetfulness

soul" and not defile our (621c-d). Marlow assumed a similar role: "my part

shades" was to speak for my brother from the realm of forgetful (p. 276). Socra tes links his philosophy to Er's message by shifting accents and adding "[b]ut if we are persuaded by me, holding that the soul is immortal and capable of

road," bearing all evils and all goods, we shall always keep to the upper thereby achieving virtue and the happiness that accompanies it. Marlow assumes a simi lar posture as he considers his recollections of Patusan. He feels that the reality,

"meaning" the of Jim's life on Patusan may exist only in his memory, where it survives until he too passes into oblivion. "I have that feeling about me now; perhaps it is that feeling which has incited me to tell you the story, to try to hand over to you as it were, its very existence, its reality the truth disclosed illusion" in a moment of (p. 281). Plato concluded the Republic with the myth of Er. By doing so, he located his inquiry and its teaching about justice in a context larger than politics as generally understood. His politics are rooted in a cosmic context that includes life, death, and eternity. Conrad's invocation of Er's myth signals his intention to tell the story of Tuan Jim in terms far larger than those of an individual life. It was somehow more than the tale of a singular man, the story of an extraordi nary life. It was as if "he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind's con

itself" ception of (p. 1 12).

GHOSTS, GRAVES, WANDERING SOULS: THE FACES OF DEATH

Conrad used dramatic imagery from the myths of the cave and of Er to infuse Lord Jim with a cosmic dimension, a hint of eternity. These parables from the Republic indicate some of Plato's fundamental convictions about the destiny of 230 Interpretation

the soul. In the treatment of these themes elsewhere, Plato used other images that, like those from the Republic, found their way into Lord Jim. This imagery is associated with the faces of death. Jim's tale contains numerous references

to ghosts, graves, corpses, and wandering, disembodied souls. This language

highlights an awareness of the problem of death and its importance for under standing the living. In their final conversation, Brown is trapped by the villagers but has Jim in the sights of his own gunmen. Brown suggests the existential context for their

meeting: "Let us agree . . . that we are both dead men, and let us talk on that

death" basis, as equals. We are all equal before (p. 325). Brown announces his view, his threat, with a directness that arises from his simple brutality. His abrupt announcement of death as the context for his conversation with Jim re calls, in its dramatic simplicity, a similar announcement by Socrates in the Gor- gias, that death was the ultimate context of his discussion with Callicles, his adversary. Callicles reminded Socrates that a troublesome philosopher who con tinually challenged society was at risk of violence and even death. Socrates embraced the issue squarely. Conceding nothing to the power worshipers, he made a more radical suggestion than Callicles had imagined. "I shouldn't ... be at all surprised if Euripides were right to say 'Who knows if all this life of ours life?' dead" is death, and death is And perhaps we are all (493a; Polyidus, fr. 7). In the related text of the Phaedo, Socrates suggests, with careful ambiguity,

Hades" "our souls exist in the House of (71e). Plato pursues just this question in the myth of the Judgment of the Dead that concludes the Gorgias. It presents an apocalypse of the soul similar in many respects to the tale of Er. Conrad takes just such a Platonic view of Brown's final declarations, "[the] corpse of

tomb" his mad self-love uprose ... as from the dark horrors of a (p. 326). Brown was a living dead man, whose love of power and capacity for evil had destroyed his soul long before his body died. Conrad sketched this image of the living dead quite colorfully elsewhere in Lord Jim. Marlow, during his reveries the night before leaving Patusan, has a kind of vision of man lost in the world and condemned to futility. "It was a great as earth peace, if the had been one grave, and . . I stood there thinking of the living also, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind,

miseries" still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque (p. 281). Marlow thinks of the living dead also, when considering the conventional orderliness of Jim's family back in England, with its "placid, colorless forms of men and women peopling that quiet comer of the world as free of danger and strife as a tomb" (p. 295). In chapter 21, Brierly expands the motif of the grave by suggest the simple solution to Jim's ing problems after the tribunal: "Let him creep underground," feet there." twenty he says, "and stay To which Marlow adds

sort" him in some (p. "[bury 204, cf. p. 92). Marlow went on to say that, while he did not understand its past, it appeared that "once before Patusan had been used as a grave for some misfortune." sin, transgression or Later in the same Shadows on the Cave Wall 23 1 chapter, Marlow watches the moon rise above the chasm between the sides of

triumph" the two mountains "as if escaping from a yawning grave in gentle (p. 205). And later, the moon rises again above the chasm "like an ascending spirit

grave" out of a (p. 224). And again, when running from Tunku Allang's men, Jim slips in the river and, up to his neck in mud, feels as if he were "burying himself alive"(p. 230).

Imagery of burial and entombment plays a particularly dramatic role in "imprisoned" Plato's anthropology. He sometimes describes the soul as or "en tombed" in a body driven by passions of its own. The passage of the Gorgias cited earlier continues, "I once heard a wise man declare that we are in fact

[sema]." dead here now: the body [soma] is really our tomb With the soma- sema analogy, Plato provides the classical expression of a soul in tension with its earthly body. At Cratylus 400c Socrates mentions that "some call the body

soul." the grave of the And at Phaedrus 250c souls prior to their union with the

untombed" body are described as "pure and (trans, in Voegelin, 1957, p. 41). Conrad's imagery of death-in-life and entombment proves again to have a strik ing affinity for Plato's depiction of the life of the soul. The themes of death-in-life and entombment are related to another spiritual

soul" motif in Lord Jim, the "disembodied and its wanderings. At one point, the moon rising above a chasm between two hills like "an ascending spirit out of a

grave," spirit" like "a disembodied (p. 224). Later, Pearl implores Marlow, an other white man from afar, to explain Jim's mysterious side the impulses she felt sure would someday take him from her. She wished to grasp the power "the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of the

earth" (p. 276). Finally, and most poignantly, in the penultimate paragraph of the novel, Marlow reflects on the peculiarity of his memories of Jim. For these recollections are focused on "a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades"(pp. 351-52).

soul" The "wandering is a familiar figure for students of Plato's Phaedo, "imprisoned" where its movements are analyzed carefully. Souls by bodily de sires and sensations are condemned to wander the world in a fruitless search for knowledge and for happiness (79c-d, 81c-83b). Even death provides no rest as this soul, burdened by its focus on the corporeal, cannot move successfully to the incorporeal realm. It is "dragged back into the visible world through fear

graveyards" ... of the invisible, and hovers about tombs and (8 Id). Stein with his butterflies is described as a wandering spirit. He appeared as a "shadow butterflies" prowling amongst the graves of (p. 200). The butterfly was, of course a familiar symbol for Psyche, the soul, in ancient Greece. For Plato, the souls having neither lived nor died successfully, become unique creatures, inhabiting fully neither this world nor the next. "The shadowy apparitions which have actually been seen there are the ghosts of the souls which have not got clean away, but still retain some portion of the visible, which is why they can 232 Interpretation

seen" be (81d). This passage from the Phaedo is suggested by Marlow's descrip tion of Jim after the tribunal, when he appeared "out of his place of sepulture

. . . only late at night, when he wandered on the quays by himself .. . like a ghost haunt" without a home to (p. 104). It could, as well, easily stand behind Marlow's

thoughts about Jim's death: "blessed finality . . . End! Finis! The potent word that fate" exorcises from the house of life the haunting shadow of (p. 172). These texts recall broadly the mythic imagery used to develop the philosophy of the soul developed in the Gorgias, the Phaedo, and the Republic. The result ing picture is a tapestry of images of the soul in the realm of the dead adapted by Conrad from Plato and embedded in his tale of the life and death of Jim. In doing so, Conrad follows Plato in stressing the presence, the reality of death in the world of the living. He makes explicit the theme of death as the limit of life

that stands behind the other images cave and shadows, judgment and after

life that he has borrowed from Plato. The coalescence of images of death in the account of Jim's drama recalls something like the ancient dictum philosophia ars moriendi, the celebrated paraphrase of Phaedo, 64a. The face of death then is a part of Jim's tale in a manner similar to its part in Plato's dialogues. What exactly, one still wonders, is living in the tale and what is dead?

CONCLUSION: THE ANTINOMIES OF HONOR

The faces of death, like the other symbolisms discussed above, recall broadly and repeatedly mythic imagery from Plato's dialogues, particularly the Republic. Plato used these symbolisms to develop his great inquiries into the questions of truth and justice, wisdom and ignorance, human nature and human destiny. Why did Conrad use them? Did he wish to portray Jim as wise, foolish, or both; brave, cowardly, or both; spiritually healthy, ill, or both? To answer this ques tion fully would require a detailed study of Jim's character and actions in rela tion to these themes. One would wish, as well, to ask how or if Conrad is a Platonic novelist? The answer to these questions is indicated by the way the mythic imagery is connected in the dialogues. It has been said that every assertion by Socrates can be related to the ques tion, What is the right way to live? Each of the symbolisms discussed above illuminates some aspect of the answer to this question. They seek, in particular, to illuminate defective conceptions of virtue in order to highlight the difference between the appearance of virtue and its reality. The Platonic symbolism and the questions to which they give rise coalesce in a sustained consideration of the problem of honor. The question about the nature and the foundation of honor arises in the conspicuously three key passages cited above: the parable of the cave and the myth of Er in the Republic, and the description of wandering souls in the Phaedo. This thread is identified in easily these passages: (1) The clever among those Shadows on the Cave Wall 233 in the cave, those who excel at the shadow games, win "honors, praises and

prisoners" prizes"; they are "honored and hold power among the (516d). (2) Er's myth describes how Odysseus, Homer's great hero, after his adventures, con quests, and failures, prepared to choose his lot for the next life "with memory of his former recovered .. labors [he] had from the love of honor . went around for

business" along time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own (620c). (3) In the Phaedo, Socrates condemns those fathers who, when instructing their sons, "don't praise justice by itself, but only the good reputations that come it" from wise (82c). Truly men actually aspire to virtue in their lives, not merely

power-lovers." its reputation, as do the "honor-lovers and These texts, which we examined earlier for their echoes in Conrad, highlight questions of vision and obscurity, wisdom and foolishness. They touch as well on the love of honor and its relation to the public or visible exercise of power, on the one hand, and the private or invisible indifference to it on the other. They appear in a new light when one recalls Conrad's observation in the preface to the 1917 edition that

honour." Lord Jim is concerned with "the acute consciousness of lost The prob lem of honor is an obvious focus of the tale. The connection to Plato casts it in new light that reveals a previously unrecognized aspect of Conrad's art. Plato's discussion of the love of honor is conducted in rich detail throughout the Republic, occurring in every single book and filling almost the entirety of book 8. Plato examines the foundation of honor in Athenian life, in Homer, and even in the politics of the cave of book 6. He points out how badly men crave it and how many ways there are to find it. Lovers of honor, he suggests, "if they can't become generals are willing to be captains, and if they can't have honor from great, imposing people they are content to have it from common, have" little people, but honor of some sort they will (475a-b). Flattery is a familiar feature of all societies. Plato suggests that flattery may honor others in different ways. A talented, philosophic young man, if he dis plays great abilities, will attract special attention. He may also be seduced by enterprising individuals who, sensing his ability, surround him "begging and honoring him, taking possession of and flattering beforehand the power that is his" going to be (494b-c). Men need not begin life with a love of honor and an appetite for power for these to become central in their lives. Before entering society, a young man may enjoy the example of a modest, sensible father who "flees the honors, the ruling offices, the lawsuits and everything that's to the

taste." busybody's He will contend, however, with other influences as well, perhaps a resentful mother or wife or even servants who feel socially disadvan taged by a modest way of life and urge him to be more ambitious, to assert himself, to exercise authority over others while enriching himself along the way and who will never criticize him for becoming a "haughty-minded man honor" who loves (549c-550b). Socrates agrees with Aeschylus, against Glaucon, that a truly noble man

good" would always wish "not to seem, but rather to be (361b. Italics mine. Cf. 234 Interpretation

seeming," Seven Against Thebes, 592). "The therefore, "must be taken away. For if it should seem just, there would be honors and prizes for seeming to be

such." In which case, one couldn't know whether justice was being practiced honors" "for the sake of the just or for the sake of the gifts and (361b). One

notices, at the same time, observes Socrates, that the virtuous, the lovers of

ruling" honor" wisdom "aren't lovers of or "lovers of and they "aren't willing honor" to rule for the sake of money or (521b, 347b). The politically ambitious, however, will always learn how to get ahead: one does not challenge social authorities, no matter how corrupt their regime, one simply "serves them agree ably with the regime as it is, and gratifies them by flattering them and knowing

them" their wishes beforehand and being clever at fulfilling (426c). Such a man

will be judged by his rulers "the good man ... wise in important things and be

them." honored by But the person who becomes the servant of public opinion, whether in politics or as an artist, will also conspire in his own enslavement. This servitude will result in "making the many his masters beyond what is necessary," and, in turn, by a powerful "necessity . . . will compel him to pro

praise" duce what these men (493d). Plato's intent here is not simply to pillory the sycophant, the craven pimp for power, but to identify a pattern of human behavior that confronts anyone seeking to understand and to teach the doctrine of moral virtue as the foundation of life in society. What, then, does this tell us about Jim? Significantly, Conrad, in the preface to the 1917 edition, observes

honour." that his tale is concerned with "the acute consciousness of lost It is

honour" not simply a story about "lost but one about "the acute consciousness honour." of lost The story is not a report about a seaman who abandoned his ship and suffered censure before going into obscurity. It tells of Jim's actions on the Patna and all that followed from them, to the end of his life, as a drama,

honour." a progressus flowing from "the acute consciousness of lost (Najder, 1968, pp. 1-8, considers the question simply as the loss and attempted recovery of honor. He provides additional historical detail, 1997, pp. 25-48. In neither place does Najder mention Plato.) In doing so, it does not always tell a clear story. Jim, it seems, was difficult

see," to "to even for understand, Marlow, the narrator of the novel and the only source of knowledge anyone has about Jim. As noted above, Jim appeared in mists, fogs, and shadows so that Marlow felt he had hardly ever had a good "seeing" view of him. The difficulty in Jim is exceeded by the difficulty in understanding him. At the heart of the story, Marlow's account of Jim is com even contradictory. plex, Jim's tale is in many respects a grand chronicle of failure both as a seaman on the Patna and as the village defender on Patusan. In the he shot end, is dead by Doramin, the father of his friend Dain Waris, after inadvertently causing the young man's death. But Marlow describes much more than a morbid troubled, failure. True, he had lost all honor in the eyes of his fellow seamen and been banished to life in a tiny jungle village, where he appeared to fail again. while Marlow But, never forgot Jim's failure or failures, Shadows on the Cave Wall 235 neither did he ever consider him a failure. Indeed, he was a kind of hero, in

success" greatness," some ways "an extraordinary (p. 351). "He had achieved

achieved" or, at least, "he was approaching greatness as genuine as any man had (pp. 209, 239). To Marlow, Jim was a singular being, his life an extraordinary event: "as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind's concep itself" tion of (p. 112).

Marlow struggled to articulate this uniqueness, this greatness that was so

affirm," patent to him, but was otherwise so little evident in Jim's life. "I he declared, "that he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in hearing" the telling, or rather in the (p. 209). Marlow doubted the ability of his listeners to grasp much of who or what Jim was. But the difficulty had not to do simply with the disabilities of Marlow's companions. It was something inher ent in Jim. "He was great invincible and the world did not want him, it had him" forgotten him, it would not know (p. 278). Marlow's own struggle to tell who Jim was fills much of his discourse, is much of his discourse. Ultimately, his explication of Jim is, as much as anything, indicated negatively. It takes the form of declarations of what is absent in Jim, what he is not and does not have.

honour." It is a tale concerning "the acute consciousness of lost If the consciousness of lost honor is the moving force of Jim's tale, it is rarely discussed explicitly. Honor, fame, greatness, glamor, and success are all subjects of Marlow's reflections but often casually, sometimes ironically, and often without significance beyond the familiar description of a young man grow honour," ing into adulthood. At times, Marlow declares "[u]pon my word of honour," and "upon my simply invoking a familiar, conventional form of em phasis (pp. 275, 351). But the tone sometimes changes, grows more serious and more pointed, as when he suggests that Jim "captured much honour and happi ness in the bush, and it was as good as the happiness of the streets to another

man' (p. 171). A hint of irony and an intention to scrutinize the nature of honor itself appears in the immediately preceding passage, "the time was coming when I should see him loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess hero." forming around his name as though he had been the stuff of a On one

man" level, Marlow is simply using the language of the "great that was familiar to his contemporaries. On another, the round, fulsome tone of his remarks be gins to parody itself and suggest the limitations of any attempt to portray Jim accurately in the any familiar language. Finally, by so suggesting the inadequacy of this language, Conrad indicates the limitations of its user, Marlow, as he struggles to capture and communicate the reality of Jim. Despite his powerful response to Jim, he cannot fully escape the limitations of those who rely on the conventional language of honor to understand and represent the world they inhabit. The issue is sharpened in a later passage that attempts, if only by negation, once again to locate Jim in our world. 236 Interpretation

The conquest of love, honour, men's confidence the pride of it, the power of it, are fit materials for a heroic tale; only our minds are struck by the externals of such a success, and to Jim's successes there were no externals. (P. 209)

There was something heroic in Jim, Marlow argues; there were successes, but they had no externality, no real visibility. The language of heroism seems here to fail Marlow as much as it serves him, but he must use it because he knows no other. As it fails, breaks down under the mysterious weight, the gravitas, of this man Jim, it points beyond itself to some other measure of human excellence. The perspectives of other characters cast valuable light on Jim's character and the question of honor. The French Lieutenant was fairly explicit. He had no wish to judge Jim himself harshly, but found the whole episode of the Patna and the tribunal deeply disturbing. With evident compassion he acknowledged brave" that no man is "cleverer than the next man and no more (p. 150). There

is a point at which anyone is afraid and this is not of much importance. "But

the honour the honour, monsieur ... the honour that is real that is! And

what life may be worth when . the honour is gone ... I can offer no opin it." ion because monsieur I know nothing of For him the congruence of the world and the world of honor is complete.

Another dimension of the world of honor appears with Captain Brierly. Pos sessed of a top job and all the accouterments of such a position at the age of thirty-two, Montague Brierly was confident, arrogant, superior in his manner, and was utterly self-assured at all times. Successful, self-composed, he was "the

earth" fortunate man of the (p. 85). "The sting of life could do no more to his

rock" complacent soul than the scratch of a pin to the smooth face of a (p. 86).

Indeed, "his self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as hard

granite." as Brierly was the perfect antithesis to Jim. "He had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise and he seemed to be one of those lucky fellows who know nothing

self-mistrust" of indecision, much less of (p. 85). "Acutely aware of his merits rewards," himself" and of his Brierly was "second to none if he said so (pp. 89, 85). Strangely his achievements and status did not much enthrall him. "He him" seemed consumedly bored by the honour thrust upon (p. 86). In fact, his attention may have been focused elsewhere. Despite his exalted status, Brierly did not so much judge Jim, condemn him for his failure to do his duty, as he resented him for submitting to the humiliation of the tribunal, when, like others, he could have left town. simply Brierly resented Jim (and, by extension, Mar low) for the unseemliness of the entire process: "you fellows have no sense of

be" dignity; you don't think enough of what you are supposed to (p. 92. Italics Brierly' mine). Eventually, however, s hauteur gave way to other sentiments. after the tribunal he Shortly concluded, committed suicide, stepping one night, and off the deck of quietly carefully his ship. Something in Jim's case had shaken his own sense of himself. engen- The public inquiry into Jim's actions Shadows on the Cave Wall 237

dered a "silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmiti

guilt" gated (p. 86). Without any public confession, any loss of honor, "he

sea" committed his reality and his sham together to the keeping of the (p. 93). The unimagined tension between the appearance and the reality of Montague Brierly snapped and carried him away. To Marlow this end suggested "the post

splendour" humous revenge of fate for that belief in his own (p. 90).

Conrad's view of the love of honor did not include a portrait of Jim as a saint or a philosopher. He still had enough ambition so that, after the Patna could incident, he be found "deliberating about death .. . because he thought he

night" had saved his life, while all its glamour had gone with the ship in the (p. 138). Fame for Jim proved to be a complex achievement. He was, in Marlow's view, "one of those exceptional men who can only be measured by the greatness fame" of his (p. 244). At the same time, Patusan was "the land he was destined

virtues" to fill with the fame of his (p. 222). His fame was something out of the ordinary. "Its voice was not the trumpeting of the disreputable goddess we all know not blatant not brazen. It took its tone from the stillness and gloom of

past" the land without a (p. 244).

fame" He was something remarkable to Marlow, "an obscure conqueror of (p. 351). To this odd expression, Marlow adds, more than once, that Jim ap fate" peared to have "mastered his (pp. 245, 276, 282). In one case, Marlow follows this enigmatic report with the remark that Jim "had told me he was

satisfied" (p. 282), and in the next few paragraphs, declares repeatedly that Jim "satisfied." was Furthermore, in the conflict with his enemies, he had achieved

recognition" fate" "a kind of (p. 283). He had become "master of his through

fame" "the conquests, the trust, the that followed his exploits in Patusan (p.

too." 225). But "these things that made him master had made him captive This

duality, this coupling of mastery and slavery is again repeated a few pages later.

If Jim took the lead, the other had captivated his leader. In fact, Jim the leader was a captive in every sense. The land, the people, the friendship, the love, were like the jealous guardians of his body. Every day added a link to the fetters of that strange freedom. (P. 236)

The language of mastery and captivity, of recognition and satisfaction catches the reader's attention and not only because of its strange and paradoxical sound. One associates it more with the political theory say of Hegel, Nietzche, or Marx than the novels of the nineteenth century. (The "dialectic of master and

recognition" slave" and the "struggle for are basic features of the philosophy of history of Hegel. See The Phenomenology of Mind, part B, IV, A. "Indepen Bondage." dence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and The de sire for recognition underlies for Hegel virtually all public life. Neo-Hegelian "prestige" "satisfaction" discussion has emphasized the role of and as measures

assess- of social achievement. See the seminal work of Kojeve, 1969, and the 238 Interpretation

ment of Kojeve's interpretation in Cooper, 1984. Conrad's knowledge of Hegel, either at first hand or otherwise, is uncertain. See Karl, 1979, pp. 66, 568. Con rad could have encountered elements of Hegel's thought in Carlyle, who had an

"hero" man" interest in the role of the or "great in history. See Karl, 1979, pp. 82, 512n.; Cedric Watts, ed., Lord Jim, 1986, p. 353. In Youth, Marlow is read Carlyle' ing s Sartor Resartus. As well, Conrad could have been influenced in this respect, as in others, by Schopenhauer, the great adversary of Hegel, whose work deeply impressed Conrad. See Karl, 1979, pp. 66n, 76, 116, 194, 244, 362n, 368, 400, 432, 463, 536.) However he may have acquired it, one detects in Conrad's use of the paired language of satisfaction-recognition and of mastery- captivity an interest in the circularity of the love of honor, the desire for recogni tion, and the behavior to which these sentiments give rise. Throughout the tale, these aspirations and the actions they inspire collide with themselves, encounter antinomies that can be overcome only by moving outside these categories to other modes of thought and expression. This tension or conflict is indicated in several ways. There is the paradoxical description of Jim, who, despite repeated

success" failures to win honor on land or sea, was "an extraordinary who "had

greatness," greatness." achieved whose life "had the stuff of There is the portrait

of Brierly, replete with paradox. "Big Brierly .. had saved lives at sea, had distress" rescued ships in was, indeed, a man who had had "honour thrust upon him" (p. 85). Yet he was appalled that Jim would subject himself to the disgrace

out" of a small-town tribunal, when he could simply have "cleared as the captain "abominable" of the Patna had (p. 91). To show up for this judgment was

cowardice" not brave, "it was a kind of (p. 92). Brierly highlighted his own contradictions by committing suicide out of some unnamed sense of shame or failure shortly after the conclusion of the tribunal. This pattern of paradox run ning through Conrad's account of honor is evident in another, even more funda mental aspect of his tale. It is the perspectivism that underlies Conrad's presen tation of Marlow's entire narrative. For despite his profound admiration of Jim, "greatness." Marlow could never actually describe or name his Indeed he "had distinctly" clearly" not . . ever seen him and was "never to see him (pp. 206, 221). The insufficiency of conventional notions of honor is linked to the insuffi ciency of conventional powers of perception.

conventions" Like Plato, Conrad understood the "merciless pressure of (p.

247). Marlow saw their crushing effect on Jim after a ceremonial and heavy-

handed censure. He lamented Jim's implacable attempt to measure his life against them, "those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what moral his identity should be, this precious notion of a convention,

game" only one of the rules of the (p. 103). Concern for the pervasive effects of social conventions coalesces in Plato into a graphic depiction of the power of public opinion. He describes the opinion-surfer as the keeper of a "great, beast." The keeper learns how to strong approach and handle the creature, noting what calms or agitates what . it, "sounds . . make it tame and angry. When he Shadows on the Cave Wall 239 has learned all this from associating and spending time with the beast, he calls

teaching" it wisdom and, organizing it as an art, turns to (Republic 493a-494b). Such men do not analyze whether these opinions are demonstrably noble or base, just or unjust, but simply use these terms "following the great animal's bad." opinions calling what delights it good and what vexes it It is surely just this view that Conrad sketches in observations from another story from this period.

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character ... are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the com posure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignifi cant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that be

lieves blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. (Watts, ed., 1990, p. 6. Italics mine)

"discourse" Lord Jim obviously contains no on the love of honor such as appears in the Republic. It does, however, repeatedly use language that recalls that discourse. Marlow's attempt to describe Jim's peculiar virtue appears also

beast" to employ such Platonic language. The mob, the crowd, the "great of public opinion has, according to Plato, many ways of turning individuals to its own purposes. This process favors certain types of human natures and aspira tions more than others. The result is the "destruction and corruption of the best

pursuits" natures with respect to the best (495a-b). What Marlow admired in

Jim was a quality of moral courage, a simple firmness of purpose in the face of the temptations, the challenges brought on by "the might of nature and the

men" seductive corruption of (p. 75). Jim could resist, even disdain, the influ

courage" ence of the mob. He had "the instinct of that was not "military cour age, or civil courage or any special kind of courage ... just that inborn ability

pose" to look temptations straight in the face ... without (pp. 74-75). This virtue, in its simplicity and directness, was genuine. It was, according "military" "social" "civic" to Plato, not a or virtue like the virtue that fails the test in the myth of Er. There, certain souls were condemned, despite the appear ance of rectitude, because they had aspired in their former lives only to "an

philosophy" orderly regime .. . participating in virtue by habit, without (Phaedo 619d). In the Phaedo, these souls have only "the goodness of the ordinary citi zen, what is called self-control and integrity, which is acquired by habit and

reason" practice, without the help of philosophy and (83b). The conventional behavior described here was familiar to the French Lieutenant, that "mouthpiece

wisdom." of abstract His antidote to fear was no special form of courage but simply martial conformity: "habit habit necessity do you see? the eye of

voila" others (p. 151).

One detects other fragments of the Platonic discourse of honor in Marlow's description of his recollection of Jim and his deeds. He struggles to recall the 240 Interpretation

"hero," image of his now "blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material (p. 202). Plato's wise man retreats from the violence and destruction that accompanies so

much of political life. He disdains "the madnesss of the many .. he keeps quiet and minds his own business as a man in a storm, when dust and rain are blown

wall" about by the wind, stands aside under a little (Republic 496c-d. Italics mine).

Awareness of Plato's discourse on honor sheds light on Conrad's text in other intriguing ways. Late in the discussion of the cave, Socrates asks if ambi tious men would, like contestants in the cave game, desire all the prizes of political life and "envy those who are honored and hold power, over (516d)? Or would they disdain cave life and its prizes entirely and prefer, like

man" Homer, "to be a portionless on the earth rather than live, even as a king, down below. Plato refers here to the Odyssey, book 11, where Achilles declares his preference for life, however poor and undistinguished, on earth to kingship in Hades among the dead (11. 489-90). The underworld of Homer is populated

shades" by the "flitting of men, whether foolish or heroic, and by the soul of

understanding" Tiresias, the blind poet and seer who "alone possesses (1. 495).

passage," The reference is important. "By quoting this argues Zdravko Planinc, Hades" "Socrates compares the cave of perpetual prisoners to and cave life to

death" "the soul's living (Planinc, 1990, p. 290). Philosophy, the ascent from the shadows to the light, has become something "option" much more than an for the intellectually energetic, it has become the Achilles' new standard of human excellence. appearance in the passage from

Socrates' Homer indicates the true object of criticism: the classical conception of the hero, including his love of glory and the honor this glory is accorded. Plato here replaces the virtue of the hero and the ethics of honor with the virtue of the philosopher and the ethics of the pilgrimage to the light. It is fascinating to see here how Plato used material from Homer's "cave scene" to construct his own parable and what use Conrad then made of both.

Odysseus enters Hades in the Land of the Cimmerians which is a "land of

shadows" world," realm" a dark a "murky (Odyssey 11, 58, 155, 355). It is also fog" "wrapped in mist and (11. 14-15). Now the parable of the cave never men tions mist or fog. Lord Jim, however, does and does so frequently. Fog and mist appear in several scenes, underlining the obscurity both of Jim and the world he inhabited (pp. 99, 127, 339-40, 136, 138, 140, 206, 208). Viewed in isolation this imagery might appear unexceptional, a familiar aspect of Conrad's "impres sionism." Viewed in relation to Plato's parable, it suggests that Conrad may have known the cave tale so well that he also knew details from the Homeric text that stood behind it! (Biographers provide virtually no indication of when Conrad first read may have Plato. Najder, 1983, p. 38, states that the details of his gymnasium years cannot be but specified, that they likely included study of the Iliad, in Greek.) Shadows on the Cave Wall 241

Plato cites the passage about Tiresias again, somewhat more explicitly, in the

Meno. He states there that no statesman has ever been so great as to be able to pass on directly his wisdom to an equally great successor. One who could

might almost be said to be among the living such as Homer says of Tiresias among the dead. . . . that he alone of those in Hades has his mind, the others are flittering shades. In the same way also here on earth such a man would be, in respect of vir tue, as something real amongst shadows. (100a)

This version restates in particularly clear terms the contrast of shadows and reality at the same time that it emphasizes the moral solitude of one who, like Tiresias, retains a discerning eye even when surrounded by shades. It is debat able whether there is a seer, much less a philosopher, in Jim. But it is clear that the tension of shadows and light that pervades Plato's description of philosophi cal insight dominates Marlow's recollection of Jim's life and death.

One must then ask if the Platonic passage through caves, graveyards, and judgments of the dead that is evoked in Lord Jim is not intended to provoke

some of the questions about honor lost and found, about the sources and power

"see" of reputation, about how we virtue and greatness, that so intensely con cerned Socrates. The Platonic imagery of death, burial, ghosts, graveyards, and the underworld evoke the reality of death-in-life, the spiritual decay and corrup tion that are as real in this world as the vitality they sap. Recognition of this dimension of life makes possible, in turn, a view of human affairs "from the

side," other from the point of view of death. What Jim did so conspicuously "die" was to to the life of society which he had failed successfully to inhabit. After the disgrace of the Patna he was buried and disappeared. On Patusan, his achievements were destroyed by Brown, who knew better than Jim how to oper ate with and upon other men and (with Nietzchean vigor) "had overcome them

all" (p. 327. Italics mine). If Jim evidenced a certain detachment from the social world around him, it was in part because he had been detached from it. He had

element" learned "to submit to the destructive of social force as Stein had gno- mically counseled. After his lapse on the Patna he submitted to the tribunal that stripped him of both his seaman's designation and his place in the seafaring community. After his lapse on Patusan he submitted to Doramin, who took his place in the new community and his life. He completed his submission at his execution.

world" Jim had died, he no longer lived "in the with other men. When urged life." by TambTtam to fight for his life, he declared simply, "I have no When asked by Jewel if he will fight, his response was, "There is nothing to fight for lost." escape." possible. no Jim had . . . nothing is Flight was not "There is nothing in the world to fight for, to lose, or to escape because he had no life there. He had passed from the world of the living. Brown had, after all, told him, if somewhat ambiguously, at their first meeting that "we are both dead 242 Interpretation

men." "dead" And they were in different ways, dead to different aspects of reality. Both were dead in principle as each stood in the sights of his adversary's gunmen. Brown, a murderous thug, was dead to the life of the spirit. Jim was dead to society and the outside world after the disaster on the Patna. Jim had pledged his life as a guarantee of the safety of his people, and he kept that pledge. When he failed to keep them safe, he paid with his life. He died in silence. Having sent "right and left at all those faces a proud and un dead" flinching glance ... with his hand over his lips he fell forward, (p. 351). Not only did he die silently, but he called attention to the silence by covering his lips. He offered no apologies or explanations, made no claims. He submitted wordlessly to an execution he had earned for his unwitting negligence toward Dain Waris and Doramin. He died having lost his honor again, this time over Waris' Dain death. But, Marlow conjectures, he may, in that last resolute mo ment, have "beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride,

side." had come veiled to his Did he, at the end of his struggle for honor, for recognition, achieve a goal that had been the real object of his striving? Did he achieve some good beyond honor, some good for which he would receive no recognition? Jim had striven to win honor and, when it was lost, to recover it. And in this effort he failed repeatedly. But he strove also and above all to be

"faithful" to his own conception of duty even when doing so cost him honor (pp. 75, 351). He showed up for the judgment of the tribunal and of Doramin when like others he might instead have fled. Did he not, by so doing, maintain

constancy," "his eternal despite everything else collapsing, in an attempt, how ever flawed, to do simply what was right? Did he succeed in grasping the op portunity to achieve the good that had been somehow veiled by the attempt to win honor? Did he, despite dishonor and death, "prove his power in an itself?" other way and conquer fatal destiny (p. 346). In his faithfulness, his constancy in the attempt to be loyal, and thereby true and good, he wrested honor from dishonor and conquered the destiny of those who lose honor by loving it too well. One wonders. Marlow wondered. At times, he declared, Jim's "eternal con stancy .. the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an force" overwhelming (p. 351). But, "there are moments too when he passes from eyes a my like disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth." Jim remained for Marlow a cipher, a kind of eternal mystery, he sensed the was messenger of some larger truth. "I don't know why he should have

symbolic" always appeared to me (p. 238). Was Jim more real than any other man Marlow had ever known? Or is he a wandering Platonic phantom, unable to depart the of striving this world? Is he a wandering soul who never fully inhabited this world and cannot reach the next? Captain Marlow cannot tell us. But he can tell indeed has told us, us, that Jim was an apparition, an epiphany. And to tell us that tale he needed the soul of Plato and the language of myth. Shadows on the Cave Wall - 243

REFERENCES

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. Norton Critical Edition. Edited by T. C. Moser. New York: Norton, 1968. Lord Jim. Edited by C. Watts and R. Hampson. New York and London: Pen guin, 1986.

Progress." "An Outpost of In Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, edited by C. Watts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Cooper, Barry. The End of History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Karl, Frederick R. A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1960. Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. Kojeve, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Translated by J. H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Honor," Najder, Zdzilaw. "Lord Jim: A Romantic Tragedy of Conradiana I (1968): 1-8. Conrad: A Chronicle. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. "Conrad and the Idea of Honor. In Conrad in Perspective. Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1997. Plato. Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Planinc, Zdravko. Plato 's Political Philosophy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991.

Truths." Tanner, Tony. "Butterflies and Beatles Conrad's Two In Lord Jim, edited by T. C. Moser. Pp. 447-61. Voegelin, Eric. Plato and Aristotle. Vol. 3 of Order and History. Baton Rouge: Louisi ana State University Press, 1957. Jim." Yelton, Donald. "Symbolic Imagery in Lord In Lord Jim, edited by T. C. Moser. Pp. 462-75. Zaubel, Morton, ed. The Portable Conrad. New York: Viking, 1947.

Discussion Review Essay

Philosophy, History and Jaffa's Universe

Edward J. Erler California State University. San Bernardino

Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv + 550 pp., $35.00.

I believe that Harry V. Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom is the book (or nearly the book) that Leo Strauss would have written had his principal concern been the crisis of America rather than the crisis of the West. It is Jaffa's oft- expressed opinion that the crisis of American constitutionalism is the crisis of the West, and I doubt that Strauss would have disagreed. Strauss's principal antagonist in his defense of the West was Heidegger. Jaffa draws a clear parallel between Heidegger's relationship to Nazism and that of John C. Calhoun to the Confederacy. Strauss's critique of Heidegger took place on the highest theoreti cal level; as portrayed by Jaffa, Lincoln's critique of Calhoun took place on the highest level of statesmanship, a statesmanship understood as political philoso phy teaching by example. The forces of nihilism and historicism were no less at work in Calhoun's constitutionalism than they were in Heidegger's thinking. In Natural Right and History Strauss remarked that "[t]he contemporary rejec

nihilism" tion of natural right leads to nihilism nay, it is identical with (p. 5). Strauss maintained that natural right was a possibility coincident with the human political condition. If man is by nature political, then natural right is more or less a part of every political regime. Politics is always concerned with right and wrong, good and evil, and just and unjust. It is Jaffa's considered opinion, as I believe it may have been Strauss's, that the only defense against the contempo rary forces of nihilism available today is contained in the natural law and natural right principles of the Declaration of Independence. Strauss began Natural Right and History with a quotation from the Declara tion of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Happiness." Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Strauss commented that "[t]he nation dedicated to this proposition has now be come, no doubt partly as a consequence of this dedication, the most powerful

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 246 Interpretation

earth." and prosperous of the nations of the Here Strauss invoked the language of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Strauss asked two questions that preoccupied Lincoln during his entire political career: "Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those 'truths to be self (p. 1). This was Strauss's only reference to the Declaration in Natural Right and History. Strauss seemed to be issuing an invi tation or perhaps a challenge to someone to take up the issue of natural right as it appears in the Declaration and the statesmanship of Lincoln. That challenge was taken up by Harry Jaffa, who has spent almost his entire career uncovering and articulating the natural right principles of the American founding. A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War is Jaffa's much promised sequel to Crisis of the House Divided (1959). A New Birth of Freedom, however, is not the sequel that was promised; it is in fact

sailing" a "second of sorts, one that began with the publication of American Conservatism and the American Founding (1984) and is detailed in several sub sequent publications. Jaffa describes the interval between Crisis of the House Divided and The New Birth of Freedom as one that "corresponds closely to the Laws." distance in time that separated Plato's Republic from his Jaffa hastens to add that "[o]ne can claim a resemblance to the great without laying any claim

greatness!" to their (p. xi). One reviewer comments that this statement seems to

indicate that New Birth of Freedom presents a kind of second-best regime to the

regime" "best of Crisis of the House Divided, a diluted version of natural right dictated by political necessity. More probably, however, it indicates a greater awareness on Jaffa's part of what Strauss called the "theological-political pre dicament." Jaffa now understands in greater depth the decisive influence of Christianity for determining the form and shape of natural right. The natural right of the founding is egalitarian natural right, the only form compatible with the Christianity of the founding era. The principle that "all men are created equal" provided the Founders with the only possible access to nature or natural right, and it was the increased awareness of this theological-political predica ment that led Jaffa to see a greater theoretical unity in the founding than he had previously. He is far less inclined now to speak of the Declaration of Indepen

tradition" dence as a document of the "wholly rationalistic or of the necessity

antagonistic," of "a synthesis of elements which in Jefferson remained or even

contradictions" of the "hopeless in Jefferson's thought. The founding, Jaffa once formulation" argued, was vitiated by the "Lockean that gave rights an "egotistic quality" reverence" which tended to be "subversive of for the law. Lincoln was "refounder" "classical" the who imported elements into the American regime to

"classical" counteract those corrosive Lockean elements. But those elements that Jaffa once attributed "refounding" exclusively to Lincoln's are now seen as elements intrinsic to the founding itself, a founding that Lincoln "perpetuated" and extended but without changing its essential character.

Much of Jaffa's new is on understanding based a changed understanding of Review Essays 247

Locke's role in the founding. Locke is still the philosopher of the founding, but understood now the way the Founders understood him. Strauss, of course, re vealed that Locke was a radical modem who rejected both reason and revelation as the foundation of moral and political life. But Strauss discovered the radically modem Locke buried deep in his esoteric message. There is no evidence, how ever, that the Founders read Locke the way Strauss read him. Indeed, there is no evidence that anyone ever read Locke with the care and penetration that Strauss did. If we are to understand the Founders as they understood themselves, it is necessary to read them in the light of the exoteric Locke, not the esoteric Locke revealed by Strauss. And it is through their understanding of the conven tional, exoteric Locke that the Founders understood the laws of nature in a perfectly Aristotelian sense. Thus Jefferson's pairing of Aristotle and Locke in his famous statement that the Declaration of Independence is "an expression of

mind" authority'' the American which draws "[a]ll its from "the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, &c." Sidney, is rendered perfectly intelligible when considered from the point of view of political statesmanship.

Jaffa has written that the Founders were not philosophers, but practically

wise men phronimoi in Aristotle's terminology. From the point of view of

theory, understanding the laws of nature in an Aristotelian sense might seem utterly impossible; but as phronimoi, the Founders were free to pick and choose the elements that contribute to a decent regime, even to combine some elements

on the level of politics that might appear from the perspective of theory to be incompatible. According to Jaffa, what guided the Founders and introduced an Aristotelian element into the regime was prudence: the Declaration embodies an

prudence" "Aristotelian emphasis on the dictates of (p. 433). In 1857, Lincoln

said that the authors of the Declaration

should familiar to meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which be all, and revered by all; constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, its influ constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening ev ence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors

erywhere.

According to Jaffa, Lincoln's conception of the Declaration as a "standard

maxim"

is both teleological and prudential. It is teleological because it is oriented, as is the Declaration, toward the end of human happiness, which according to Aristotle is the prudential ultimate end of the human action, whether individual or political. It is be or cause it measures the goodness of human actions, whether individual political, by advance their consequences. The consequences, in turn, are judged by whether they

or retard happiness. (Pp. 302, 292-93) 248 Interpretation

Aristotelian prudence was never more in evidence than in Lincoln's statesman

like use of the principles of the Declaration. Lincoln's Aristotelian prudence, derived from the Declaration, stands in stark opposition to the corrupt Kantian ism of Chief Justice Taney in Dred Scott and Calhoun's rank historicism (pp. 292-93, 296-97, 301-2, 409, 433). One might say of Jaffa's earlier reading of the Declaration what Strauss said of his own early reading of Spinoza: "I understood Spinoza too literally because

enough." I did not read him literally Jaffa's new literalism has uncovered some thing that has always been in plain sight but difficult to see because we insisted on reading the Declaration as a radically modem document:

After speaking of our unalienable rights, to secure which governments are instituted, the Declaration of Independence goes on to say that "whenever any form of govern ment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abol ish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect happiness." their safety and Notice that in the second institution, or reinstitution of "rights" "ends." "Safety" government, become And these ends are now said to be

"Happiness," and the alpha and omega of political life in Aristotle's Politics.

'rights' This is summarized by Jaffa as the "metamorphosis of Lockean into

'ends' versa)" Aristotelian (or vice which appears not only in the Declaration Founding" but "recurs in many of the documents of the (Jaffa, "Aristotle and Founding," Locke in the American Claremont Review of Books, 1, no. 2 [Win ter, 2001]: 10. This passage contains a luminous summary of A New Birth of Freedom, pp. 382-83; 9, 302.). If the principles of the Declaration were in Aristotle," formed by a "Lockeanized it was no less true that the moral universe supporting those principles was informed by a Lockeanized Christianity. Jaffa writes that "[w]e must understand that the alternatives faced by the American people in 1776 were not between what today would be misnamed humanism' 'secular and divine right. The doctrine of natural law and natural

right" rights enshrined in the Declaration is a doctrine of natural and divine (pp.

122, 146, 403). As such, it is a document of both reason and revelation or at lest reason confirmed by revelation. This made it possible for the Founders to resolve on a political level the theological-political problem that arises from the competing claims made by reason and revelation. The American founding did this by recognizing equally the claims of both. This resolution was made possi "Lockeanized" in large because the ble, part, ministers of the founding era un derstood the separation of church and state as no less a dictate of New Testa ment theology than reason and natural right. By the time of the founding, Lock" Protestant ministers had been basing their sermons on "the great Mr. for more than a half-century, and the public was convinced of the compatibility of true religion and right reason. Jaffa notes that "[t]he most fundamental of the Review Essays 249

assumptions underlying the American political tradition is not set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Rather, it is to be found in the magisterial ex ordium of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, in the assertion that 'Al God hath free.' mighty created the mind When the Declaration says, 'We hold

evident,' these truth to be self it assumes that the minds holding the truths do Statute" so on the basis of that metaphysical freedom asserted in the Virginia (p. freedom" 118). Thus, the "metaphysical of the human mind is the ground both of religious and political liberty. Yet as everyone must know, it is a very short step from the denial of man's metaphysical freedom to the denial of his moral and political freedom. But it is more than that: it is tantamount to the

assumption," denial of man's nature. Without this "fundamental man's nature becomes merely the epiphenominal product of history or simply a self-willed delusion.

Indeed it was the practical resolution of the theological-political predicament that made the election of 1800 possible. As long as sectarian religious issues dominate the political process, majority rule is impossible since no one will accept majority determination on matters of faith. The American Constitution was the first constitution in history that was based on a separation of church and state, and as a consequence the election of 1800 was probably the first in which "the instruments of political power passed from one set of hands to those

vote" of their most uncompromisingly hostile political rivals because of a free (p. 3). Free election the appeal from bullets to ballots failed in 1860, how ever, when the South refused to accept the election of Abraham Lincoln. The South failed to accept the results of the election because, by 1 860, it had rejected the principles of the Declaration and thereby had rejected the ends or purposes for which the regime existed. But, according to Jaffa, it is precisely the agree ment about ends that make free elections possible. Disputes about the ends, as opposed to disputes about the means to achieve the ends, render it impossible for minorities to accept the decisions of the majority. In 1858 Lincoln said that

truth" equal" the "self-evident that "all men are created is "the father of all

principle" moral for Americans. Under the tutelage of John C. Calhoun, the South had separated state rights from natural rights, thus denying, Jaffa argues,

Independence" "any constitutional status to the principles of the Declaration of (pp. xiii; 282-83, 412, 416, 418, 423, 449). According to Jaffa, what most evidently links the Declaration and the Consti

compact," tution is social compact. "The idea of social Jaffa writes,

is the heart of American constitutionalism. It is at the heart of the philosophical

statesmanship that made the Revolution, of which the Constitution is the fruit. In the most fundamental respect, compact is an inference from the proposition "that all

equal." men are created If men were by nature unequal that is to say, if some were bom with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred then it would be naturally right for those with the boots and spurs to ride those with the 250 Interpretation

saddles. It is because there is no such inequality within the human species that legiti mate government arises from compact or consent. (Pp. 37-38, 40, 50, 277, 334, 420-21, 468, 495 n. 76).

The principle that all men are created equal, Jaffa argues, contains "the first

principle of the rule of law and of constitutional government: that those who

live under the law share in making the law and, conversely, that those who law" make the law live under the (pp. 69, 106, 120, 123, 135, 294, 336, 409). Both constitutional government and the rule of law, in turn, are derived from

obligation" compact which provides the ground for "all political (p. 269). Com

pact the voluntary consent of each individual to form civil society supplies both legitimacy to majority rule and limits on majority rule. As Madison argued "Sovereignty" in his essay on (1835), majority rule is a plenary substitute for unanimity and "may do anything that could be rightfully done by unanimous

members." concurrence of the In Madison's account of compact, even unani mous consent must be rightful or just, that is, consistent with the "laws of nature God." and nature's Majority rule is thus binding only to the extent to which it approximates unanimity by guaranteeing the rights of the minority. Social com pact thus cannot be understood apart from rights and obligations. "For both

Lincoln," Jefferson and Jaffa writes, "a regime in which the majority alone may rule is nonetheless a regime sharply circumscribed by a moral order. This moral order, ordained by God and discovered by reason, must be obeyed by the major

govern" ity itself, in order that the power to govern be the right to (p. 70).

sovereignty" Lincoln, of course, confronted Stephen Douglas's "squatter ar gument that the interest of local majorities should decide the issue of slavery with a moral argument drawn from the Declaration of Independence and social compact. In this regard, Lincoln confronted Douglas on the same ground that

Socrates confronted Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Thrasy-

machus had argued, as did Douglas, that justice was the interest of the stronger "stronger." and that the ruling element in every regime was the In a democracy the ruling element is the majority and the majority fashions laws for its own interest. Thus interest alone was to determine the issue of whose rights were to be protected. For Douglas, slavery was not a moral issue but only a matter of whose interests were served. This may have averted the division of the country along uncompromisable moral lines, but as Lincoln knew, it would destroy the soul of the nation; it would destroy the principles that animated and gave pur pose to the nation. Douglas's position was ultimately the prescription for anar chy who could not assert some interest in enslaving another? just as the southern secession argument itself sowed the seeds of anarchy (p. 314). Consent can "rightfully be exercised only within the boundaries of a moral law that gives

consent" consent its validity but whose validity does not depend upon (p. 263). The social compact theory itself may be alien to Aristotle and the classics, Review Essays 25 1 but the morality that informs compact can be understood in Aristotelian terms. Jaffa writes that

[t]he distinction between man, beast, and God, as set forth in the first book of Aris

totle's Politics, remains the framework of the thought of the Declaration of Indepen

dence, and the differences between man and beast, on the one hand, and man and God, on the other, remain self-evident and definitive. For that reason, we know that any attempt of human beings to rule over other human beings, as if the former were gods, and the latter beasts, is wrong. That is why the rule of law ruling and being ruled in turn is the only intrinsically just arrangement by which human beings can rule one another. This is a permanent truth, and one in no way dependent upon its recognition. (Pp. 120-21)

It is this recognition that human beings are neither gods nor beasts that con demns both slavery and divine right of kings. Indeed, Lincoln regarded slavery and divine right of kings as presenting the same affront to human nature. Slavery treats human beings as if they were irrational beasts whose consent is not re quired for rule, and divine right treats human beings as if kings were so elevated above human nature that consent of the governed is not a necessary condition of their rule. It is this recognition of both the divine and natural order of the

universe beast, man, God that informed the thought of Jefferson and Lin coln. Jaffa's account of the divine right of kings is majestic in its sweep. Divine right, of course, had ruled the Christian West for nearly fifteen hundred years before its ultimate demise in the American Revolution. But its fate was preor

Christianity" dained in the "providential history of itself (pp. 136, 142, 148). Some of Jaffa's most memorable passages, in a book replete with memorable passages, involve his use of Shakespeare's history plays as a guide to under standing divine right kingship. Shakespeare, according to Jaffa, seems to accept the necessity of divine right while demonstrating at the same time its utter insufficiency as the basis for politi cal rule. The history of Britain is a procession of constitutional crises occasioned by wars of succession. Divine right held that "political authority descended from the top down, from God to kings and rulers, and that the obligation of the ruled obey." the revolutions in human was simply to But Jaffa argues that "[o]f all consciousness, perhaps none is greater than that by which it came to be perceived that the source of all political authority, properly so called, is the divine right or rights with which each individual has been endowed by his Creator, and that governments have no lawful powers except those granted to them by the gov

erned" (p. 135). Certainly in the economy of nature, as Locke pointed out, the evident than divine appointment. equality of human beings is more But in the Christian world, political obligation is a unique problem because of so did in "[a]s the primacy of law was replaced by the primacy faith, felicity 252 Interpretation

the next world replace felicity in this world as the ultimate human and political

concern. ... With Christianity, the Kingdom of God, a kingdom not of this

concern" world, replaces the empire of this world as the central human (p. 143). Thus the theological-political question took on a new dimension entirely unknown in the ancient world, as universal religion replaced the gods of particu

itself," lar cities. "Christianity Jaffa writes, "had broken the connection between law" the gods and (p. 149). Some ground for obligation had to be found to replace this broken connection. This was supplied by social compact. The differ ences between man, beast, and God which supplies the ground for social con tract is a natural theology consistent with monotheistic revealed theology. Con sent supplies the ground in reason for obligations that otherwise would not be

available in Christianity. The apolitical individualism described in Locke's state of nature is simply a mirror of the idea of the direct relationship, unmediated by any political community, between God and the individual that is the hallmark of Christianity itself. Political obligation in this world results from the free elec tion or voluntary consent of those who are to be subject to the law. There is no other ground for political obligation in this world.

circumstances," It is "only under certain defined Jaffa writes, "that popular sovereignty, rightly understood, could replace the divine right of kings and that

revolution" free elections could replace the exercise of the right or (pp. 153, 125, 135, 141-43). The concatenation of events that produced the American

choice" Revolution and the election of 1800 allowed "reflection and to replace

force" government" "accident and as the ground of "good (The Federalist, No.

event" 1). This experiment in self-government was truly a "world historical (p. 60) which it fell to Lincoln to perpetuate "as the central protagonist in a world-

drama" historical (pp. 237, 257). Lincoln's chief political protagonist in this drama was Douglas, but his most formidable protagonist was John C. Calhoun, "the philosopher-king of the

cause" Southern (p. 282). The final chapter of the New Birth of Freedom pro vides the most comprehensive and penetrating critique of Calhoun's thought ever written. The movement of the book as a whole, Jaffa writes,

as of Lincoln's life, is from the debate with Douglas to the debate with Calhoun. The in difficulty characterizing this conflict is that the premises underlying the thought of Douglas and Calhoun are the premises of historicism, positivism, relativ

ism, and nihilism premises that have become the conventional wisdom of our

time. Lincoln's acceptance of the idiom of natural rights and natural law above all his acceptance of the idea of nature not merely as a record of cause and effect but as a source of moral principles has become alien to us. (Pp. xiii, 47, 86, 90, 429, 471).

The contest between Lincoln and Calhoun was whether the Declaration was to

anchor" remain the "sheet of American republicanism or whether its principles Review Essays 253

were to dangerous." be dismissed as "false and In other words, the contest was for the very soul of America. It has long been Jaffa's thesis that Calhoun's ideas have a greater currency today than Lincoln's. Calhoun's rejection of nature and natural rights as the ground of constitutional government is shared by intellectu als as well as almost all of the members of the current Supreme Court. Cal houn's historicism, as Jaffa meticulously argues, is derived from Rousseau and Hegel and ultimately ends in nihilism: the rejection of natural right. The Civil War was a victory for Lincoln and the principles of the Declaration, but the restoration of those principles was short lived, to be almost immediately over whelmed by the forces of continental thought. What Strauss said of the Allied victory over Nazism applies equally to the North's defeat of the South in the Civil War: "It would not be the first time that

a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political has being, deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by impos thought" ing on them the yoke of its own (Natural Right and History, p. 2). Hitler, in fact, lamented the fate of the southern cause: "Since the Civil War, in which the Southern States were conquered, against all historical logic and sound

sense, the American people have been in a condition of political and popular decay. The beginnings of a great new social order based on the principle of slavery and inequality were destroyed by that war, and with them also the em America" bryo of a future truly great (p. 73). Hitler was the heir, not just of Heidegger, but of Calhoun. In a rare understatement, Jaffa remarks that "it would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of [the] difference between Calhoun, on the one hand, and Aristotle, Locke, and the Founding Fathers, on

other" the (p. 414). Whatever their philosophical differences and they may be profound Aristotle, Locke, and the Founders agreed that nature and natural right in some form was the appropriate standard for politics. Strauss maintained that "wisdom requires unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitution and even to

constitutionalism" the cause of (Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p. 24). And in a remarkable statement in his debate with Kojeve (who was both an eminent

Hegelian and an unapologetic Stalinist), Strauss said that "liberal or constitu tional democracy comes closer to what the classics demanded than any alterna

age" tive that is viable in our (Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 207). I believe that it is Jaffa's view that the constitutionalism of the American founding, and its perpet

people" uation by Lincoln, the "prophetic statesman of a chosen (p. xii), was perfectly in the spirit of classical political thought. It is Calhoun's insistence that the Declaration played no role in American constitutionalism that has survived and dominated present-day scholarship and opinion. Calhoun's political science is premised on a kind of historical necessity

mind" or determinism that denies the "metaphysical freedom of the human which, as we have seen, Jaffa identifies as the fundamental assumption of Amer ican politics and morality. Calhoun's political science can only eventuate in despotism, as any thought which denies man's metaphysical freedom must. Carl 254 Interpretation

Becker's The Declaration of Independence, published in 1922, analyzed the Declaration from the point of view of historicism. Calhoun, of course, was con vinced that, on the basis of scientific determinism, the principles of the Declara tion were false. Becker, on the other hand, argued that it was a meaningless question to ask whether those principles were true or false. Those principles had been rendered irrelevant by the progress of history, which had exposed the reli ance on natural right as simply the delusion of a less enlightened historical era. Becker's thesis, which became the dominant opinion in the American academy, was, as Jaffa demonstrates with devastating thoroughness, theoretically inade quate; it rested on unproven (and unquestioned) assumptions that dominated Becker's own Progressive world view. In spirit, however, Becker's book was indistinguishable from the great theoretical defense of nihilism that was pub lished five years later, Heidegger's Being and Time. Calhoun's historical determinism, of course, reminds us of his younger con temporary, Karl Marx. Both presupposed the truth of the idea of History as

other" Progress, although "upon premises that directly contradicted each (p. 94). Calhoun," "For Jaffa writes, "the human being is so constituted 'that his direct feeling.' or individual affections are stronger than his sympathetic or social This, he says, is a fact 'as unquestionable as is that of gravitation, or any other phe

world' nomenon of the material For Marx, the abolition of private property changes what Calhoun says is unchangeable, in transforming man's innate ego

altruism" tism into (p. 93). Whatever their differences, both Calhoun and Marx adhered to the notion of historical determinism where "[njecessity, not prudence or any of the moral virtues informed by prudence, governs the relationship be

politics" tween cause and effect in (pp. 440, 453, 456). Thus, Calhoun specifi behavior" cally intended "the scientific explanation of political to supersede "the

Fathers" Lockean self-understanding of the Founding (p. 452). Both Marx and Calhoun displayed an unwarranted, and unrequited, optimism in the inevitable

theology" progress of History. But, according to Jaffa, Lincoln's "somber in the second inaugural address was a clear repudiation of this "Utopian belief in prog ress." Neither Lincoln nor the Founders thought that History could ever substi tute for the wise prudence of outstanding men. In 1856 Lincoln said that "our government rests in public opinion. Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much. idea' Public opinion on any subject, always has a 'central from which all its idea' minor thoughts radiate. That 'central in our political public opinion, at the

men'." beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, 'the equality of This central idea, of course, was most forcefully expressed in the Gettysburg address (p. 395), and it is the idea around which Jaffa has structured his entire

necessary," account. "I have found it Jaffa writes, "to lead the argument again and again from the periphery back to the center, to illuminate the geometrical necessity that, in Lincoln's mind, governed the struggle memorialized at Gettys burg" (p. xiii). Jefferson said, as we have seen, that the Declaration was an Review Essays 255

mind." authority," expression of the "American "All its Jefferson claimed, "rests

day." ... on the harmonizing sentiments of the Since the moving principle of just government is the consent of the governed, public opinion will always be central to the authority of the Declaration. This is a necessary inference from social compact itself. The central chapters of Jaffa's New Birth of Freedom thus present a detailed analysis of the state of the American mind on the eve of the

Civil War. As Lincoln intimated, the American mind was divided against itself.

How that mind came to be divided and the consequences of that division are the subjects of Jaffa's spirited (and sometimes polemical, but always dialectical) inquiry. Jaffa details the roles played by James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and Alex ander Stephens in the secession crisis. These were "the three men who repre

crisis" sented the highest political authority of the divided nation during the (p. 169). Buchanan's last message to Congress came three month before Lincoln's first inaugural. His purpose was to calm the roiled political waters that threat ened succession, but he did it in a way that amounted to cooperation with the southern disunionists. Buchanan's singular claim was that the sectional crisis was caused by antislavery agitation. His solution was to urge the free states to repeal their personal liberty laws and stop the moral condemnation of slavery. And while he opposed secession, he claimed that the President and the federal government were powerless to stop it. With the moral issue out of sight, Bu chanan calculated, the South would become less aggressive in pressing its de mands for the protection of slavery in the territories and more vigorous enforce ment of the fugitive slave law. But as Lincoln had anticipated in his Cooper Union Speech in February 1860, the South would be satisfied only when we "cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated.

. . The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to

over." slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles are Bu chanan's failure in this political crisis was precisely his inability, or unwilling ness, to confront the moral issue of slavery. In this respect he did not differ significantly from Douglas. As Jaffa notes, "[fjor Buchanan, the 'slavery ques tion' is simply one of many political questions that excite the passions and disrupt civic friendship. That slavery, unlike any other political question, chal lenges the principles upon which republican government is founded, the princi ples upon which the rights of all the citizens of every state is grounded, seems never to have crossed his mind. This in itself conveys to us the magnitude of Lincoln's task" (p. 203). Buchanan, of course, appeared impotent in the presence of Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, who were working with great diligence, each with distinctive arguments, to turn the American mind away from the principles of the Declaration. Jaffa's exegesis of the speeches of these two architects of the Confederacy follows his inimitable style of bringing together far-flung ideas and 256 Interpretation

sources to bear on the central issues of the secession crisis. Both Stephens and

Davis, of course, derived their intellectual pedigrees, in one way or another, from Calhoun, although neither adhered strictly to the Calhounian doctrine. Both defended slavery as in the course of nature or in the course of biblical injunction. The restoration of the Declaration as an expression of both natural right and

divine right was the monumental task that faced Lincoln on the eve of his first

inaugural," inaugural. "Lincoln's first Jaffa writes,

has many of the qualities of a chorus in a Greek tragedy. It is the voice of reason in a world governed by passion. There would not have been a war if reason and moder ation could have ruled. But they could not. The Civil War was a tragedy precisely because each side saw reason enough to fight and neither could see any ground for compromise in its reason. But it was not only the case that neither could see a ground of compromise: there was no ground of compromise between slavery seen as right and slavery seen as wrong. (P. 168)

Lincoln, of course, would have restored the Union to the position of the Found ers: slavery was in principle wrong and tolerated only by necessity and put in the course of ultimate extinction by the Declaration and the Constitution. Once the South had developed its positive good school of slavery, the position of the Founders was no longer tenable. As Lincoln had said, only praise of the positive good of slavery would appease the South that had been corrupted by Calhoun and his epigones. The crisis of the house divided presented nothing less than the choice between natural right and nihilism. Lincoln surely knew, as does

earth." Jaffa, that America is "the last best hope of The New Birth of Freedom resembles nothing so much as Strauss's account of natural right in Natural Right and History. Strauss, I believe, refuted all claims that natural right had been defeated or rendered completely impotent by modernity. Those who claim that any post-Machiavellian regime must be wholly modern miss what I believe is Strauss's most powerful message, the possibility of natural right is always a potential of the human political condition. Modernity attacked both reason and revelation as the source of morality and politics. Strauss defended both reason and revelation against the corrosive acids of mod em thought. Jaffa's account of the American Founding demonstrates beyond the possibility of cavil that the Declaration of Independence, as both a document of reason and revelation, is the best indeed the only defense against the histori cism and nihilism of modernity that exists today. What may have been true of Machiavelli's on influence the history of political philosophy is not necessarily true of the history of politics. Jaffa is aware, as were Lincoln and the Founders, that the only form that natural right could take in the modem world was the form in which it appeared in the Declaration of Independence. Jaffa's argument is that the cause of constitutional government must proceed in the spirit of Aristotle's contention that natural right is a part of political right, that is, in full Review Essays 257 recognition of the comprehensiveness of political right. This is certainly the spirit that animated the Founders and Lincoln; it is a spirit that is disdainful of

politics" any "unmanly contempt for (Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern, p. 24). It is this spirit to which we should repair without fail.

REFERENCES

Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. On Tyranny. New York: Free Press, 1963. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books, 1968.

Review Essay

My Country, 'Tis of Thee:

Jaffa's Defense of the Noble, the Holy, and the Just

Steve Sorensen Grayson County College

V. Harry Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv + 550 pp., $35.00.

"It is baffling to reflect that what men call honor does not correspond always

ethics" to Christian (Churchill, 1961, pp. 286-87). Jaffa used this expression of bafflement by Churchill as the epigraph to his first book, Thomism and Aristote lianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics. One could understand A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War as an attempt to show how it is the providential destiny of America to make honor and Christian ethics correspond in the Ameri can political religion.

Jaffa is clear from the start that he writes not merely for theoretical reasons,

opinion" but to "promote a climate of (p. xiv; all unattributed page references are to the book under review). He concludes this book by stating that "we must

again." take up the weapons of truth and go forth to battle once This is a polemi cal work. Perhaps the honor of a victory with the weapons of truth corresponds to Christian ethics. Jaffa's work has been described as "occasionally splenetic

vainglorious" and (Kessler, 2000, p. 9), but the nobility of aim and subject matter here serve to raise the tone of the argument above eristics. He has done here once again a splendid job of showing the mistakes of the fashionable think ing on the Civil War, Lincoln, and the founding, but that is not the heart of the book, nor the chief battle. Jaffa once thought an apology, or at least an explanation, was necessary for his polemics. On that occasion he argued it was an ancient maxim that "in the

truth" refutation of error lies the discovery of (Jaffa, 1978, p. 10). One could conclude then that one should be grateful for error as it is the means to truth, but Jaffa describes his work in terms of war, and war is against an enemy, not merely error. Yet if opinions are to change, people must be persuaded and not simply conquered. The question, then, is whom does Jaffa wish to persuade and who is the enemy? Are those he refutes the enemy and those who hear the

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 260 Interpretation

refutation the ones to be persuaded? Will anyone listen besides the already con verted? Jaffa's teacher Leo Strauss was once accused of being fanatical in his defense of political philosophy. He responded, "In scholarship at any rate intran sigence i.e., the habit of refusing to make concessions for the sake of peace fanaticism" and comity is not (Strauss, 1963, p. 153). One can ask whether this is also true in politics. If one can judge from the influence Jaffa and his teacher Leo Strauss have had to date, the primary influence will be on their students. Strauss once made this observation concerning the effectiveness of his interested" teaching: "Only four or five scholars of my generation did become (Strauss, 1959, p. 223). One can well wonder whether that will ultimately be sufficient to change the climate of opinion, and if not, whether Jaffa's students

opinion." will make possible "a new climate of In any case, we shall surely have to wait decades, if not generations, to find out. Jaffa is one of the most prominent in the debate, especially among the stu dents of Strauss, over whether or not America must be understood in simply modem terms. Jaffa is well known for taking the view that while indeed John Locke was the most influential of political philosophers in America, and while Leo Strauss has shown that in Locke one finds that "economism is Machiavelli

age" anism come of (Strauss, 1989b, p. 51), the American founders did not read Locke as Strauss did. (For this argument, see inter alia, Jaffa, 1994, pp. 346-48.) Jaffa frequently quotes Strauss's statement, "The United States of America may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded in explicit

principles" opposition to Machiavellian (Strauss, 1958, p. 13, quoted in, inter alia, Jaffa, 1994, p. 23). Jaffa has been accused of distorting Strauss by not including what Strauss says following that statement: "Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the princi

them" ple of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from (op. cit., p. 14). But then Machiavelli would make such an argument concerning the greatness any political order achieved. One would have to ask then whether greatness is due to cunning deviation from as well as adherence to principle, and has modem liberal democracy exercised that cunning to a greater extent and thus become greater than the ancient polis or even the Roman empire. Strauss has also said that liberal democracy, and one may presume therefore America, "in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modem at all: the premodern thought

tradition" of our western (Strauss, 1989b, p. 98). Even among those convinced such support exists, however, there has been much debate over just what that support might be and how it is to be understood (see, e.g., Anastaplo, 1994). Strauss himself has indicated one possibility. He once said of the English, in contrast to the Germans, that while they originated "the ideals of modem civili zation," the English "had the pmdence to conceive of the modem ideals as a reasonable adaptation of the old and eternal ideal of decency, of rule of law, and of that liberty which is not license, to changed circumstances." Thus "the Review Essays 261

English, and not the Germans, have understood that in order to deserve to exer cise imperial rule, regere imperio populos, one must have learned from a very long time to spare the vanquished and to crush the arrogant: parcere subjectis

superbos" et debellare (Strauss, 1999, pp. 372, 373). America has been referred to as an empire at least since the Federalist Papers. Jaffa quotes from a sermon by the Reverend Samuel Cooper that God's "authority sanctifies only those governments that instead of oppressing . . . vindicate the oppressed, and restrain

oppressor" and punish the (p. 371). One can then argue that America, as did Britain, deserves imperial rule for following the same path as the ancient em pires did. But the ancient empires did not preserve republican liberty. (Cf.

Strauss, 1999, p. 378, fn. 31. In the original manuscript Strauss crossed out the words "only the way of Caesar and Augustus is the road to empire.") America has also always been known as a republic, and the men who took the pseudonym Publius, from the second founder of Rome, had to confront, in their defense of the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, the classical argument that liberty could be preserved only in a small political order. Jaffa argues, "The American history" Founders looked toward an empire of freedom unprecedented in human (p. 375, cf. pp. 376, 392, 405, 465). The peculiarity of the American way, according to Jaffa, is to combine empire, which had always before meant despo tism, with liberty, which had always before required the small republic. But the

"unprecedented" question is how to understand the way the is nevertheless rooted in what is sempiternal.

There is another way in which Jaffa may be said to show that the American political order, or at least the understanding of politics it is based upon, derives support from the premodem way of thinking. In his preface Jaffa describes the present work as a sequel to The Crisis of the House Divided. He then jests that the relation between those two works on the one hand and Plato's Republic and

great." Plato's Laws on the other is "a resemblance to the The Republic of course culminates in the rule of the wise man, and Jaffa in Crisis considered the question of why a wise man would be willing to devote himself to a regime dedicated to the principle of equality (Jaffa, 1982, pp. 213-18). In New Birth Jaffa simply states that Plato's Republic is imaginary "precisely because philos

rule" ophers do not wish to (p. 338). In New Birth Jaffa presents Lincoln as the

hero" War" "tragic in the "tragedy of the Civil rather than as the wise ruler. One is reminded that according to Aristotle the tragic hero is less than the best (Poetics 1453a7-12). Jaffa argues that "the Platonic truth, which Lincoln learned from Shakespeare, [is] that philosophy cannot cause the 'evil in the

tragic" cities' to cease and that politics is the realm of the (p. 280). One is also reminded that according to Plato's Athenian Stranger the city in the Laws they

tragedy," construct in speech is "the truest or rather it is an imitation of the most beautiful and best way of life which is said to be the truest tragedy (Laws 817b). But is history the realm of the tragic? One can be reminded of Thucyd ides' history rather than Plato's Laws by Jaffa's account of the Civil War. But 262 Interpretation

perhaps the model for understanding Jaffa's account of America should be Cice ro's account of Roman history in his Republic and law in his Laws. However that may be, the thought that America must be tragic is not comforting, even if it does mean America is not Machiavellian or modem. Perhaps the necessary relation of the sempiternal to the unprecedented is tragic. But if so, is it good?

The relation between the unique particular and the universal order has been described as the subject of poetry. Aristotle argued that poetry was more philo sophic and serious than history because history deals with particulars while poetry combines the universal with the particular (Poetics 1451b5-8). Jaffa de scribes New Birth as a commentary on the Gettysburg Address, which he com pares also to Aquinas's commentaries. But Jaffa says, unlike the subject of

Aquinas' commentaries, the Gettysburg Address is a speech within a drama which Jaffa compares to a speech by the eponymous tragic heroes Hamlet and Macbeth in their plays. Thus a commentary on the Gettysburg Address requires

process" also commentary on the drama of the "historical of the years preceed- ing it and on the Civil War. In place of the necessity governing a poem and imitated by the poet in his art, Jaffa says in his commentary he imitates the hero." "providential order in history, revealed in the speeches of the tragic Thus Jaffa compares Lincoln also to a biblical prophet of the people of Israel, whose

"failings and sufferings were intrinsic to the uniqueness of their role as a chosen

people" (pp. xi-xii). Jaffa seems to suggest that divine providence makes of history a poem. Yet Jaffa has insisted in another polemic on the absolute differ ence between the Bible and poetry (Jaffa, 1984, pp. 17-19). One can wonder history" what the difference is between a "providential order in and "the neces

poetry." sity in great Must the providential order be tragic? One hopes only in the short run.

That wonder is further aroused by Jaffa's comparison of what Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus calls logographic necessity to the reasons governing Lincoln's choices in his speeches. As Jaffa observes, Strauss, following Socrates in the Phaedrus (264b), said that great books are great works with a certain purpose in which the smallest details are governed by logographic necessity. That larger purpose which governs Lincoln appears in the next paragraph to be to seek equality in the same manner as one is to follow the command of the Savior:

perfect." "Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is Such a command seems to be an impossible basis for politics and thus to guarantee suffering if not tragedy. One is reminded by this of Jaffa's argument in another polemic that the defense of Jewish Orthodoxy may be a form of political philosophy, and that conse quently the defense of morality as such may take the form of political philoso phy on the grounds of a necessary connection between morality and revelation. Jaffa quoted on that occasion Strauss's article on Yehuda Halevi's The Kuzari to the effect that the defense of morality is the defense of "the cause of mankind large," at and said that such a defense is "ultimately indistinguishable in Strauss's mind from the philosophy" practice of political (Jaffa, 1984, p. 20, Review Essays 263 quoting Strauss, 1988, p. 141; cf. Jaffa, 1994, p. 370: "In Strauss, the moral distinctions become the of heart philosophy. And statesmanship thus itself be comes part of philosophic activity, seen in its wholeness."). One can perhaps understand New Birth as a defense of morality and thus of "the cause of man kind."

race" Publius argued the "vindication of the honor of the human is the aim of the Constitution (Federalist 11, end). Jaffa's purpose requires much repe tition (p. xiii). He refers to Lincoln's "Socratic statesmanship,"his "Socratic art," dialectic" and his "Socratic (pp. 368, 399, 326), by which Jaffa seems to mean the defense of the civil religion, or what Farabi called "dialectical theol

ogy" or kalam, an art enabling one "to argue in the defense of the specific opinions and actions stated explicitly by the founder of the religion, and against

actions" everything that opposes these opinions and (Lemer, 1994, p. 61; quot ing Farabi, The Enumeration of the Sciences, chap. 5, found in Lemer and Mahdi, 1963. p. 27; cf. Strauss, 1988, p. 100, fn. 15. See also Lemer, 1994, p.

62: "For the intention . . is defensive; the argument oppositional, dialectical;

own." the object under investigation is one's Lemer refers to Jaffa's Crisis to

"reconstruction" the effect that Lincoln's defense of the founding was a [p. 110, fn. 6, referring to Crisis, p. 328]. Is Jaffa's account of the Civil War a "reconstruction"?) Thus Jaffa's polemics are justified as a philosophic defense of the cause of mankind. The titles of Jaffa's two central chapters, each includ

action," ing the phrase "the argument and remind one of the title of Strauss's commentary on the Laws of Plato, The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws. The epigraph to that work is a passage from Avicenna's On the Divisions of the Rational Sciences indicating the judgment that Plato's Laws treats of prophecy and divine law. It seems clear Jaffa wishes to provide a similar treat ment within the context of America.

Jaffa's understanding of the defense of America's civil religion as the defense of mankind appears also from his description of the role of America in the

altogether." force" transformation of "human government The "effective for this transformation, Jaffa says, quoting Lincoln, is the right of revolution, a right

world" which is "to liberate the (pp. 14, 268). The electoral victory of the Re

event" publicans in 1800 is described by Jaffa as a "world-historical (pp. 43, 60). There was a "change in human consciousness achieved in the American

Founding" drama" (p. 127). The founding presents a "cosmic (p. 25). And the Civil War was a test not merely of whether America would survive or perish, but whether popular government would survive or perish, and so the Gettysburg Address is a reflection not merely on America but on "the whole of human history" (p. 153). The Americans could justify their independence only by justi fying the liberty of all human beings, so the American people claimed not Amer ican rights but universal rights (p. 176). And the nature of the Union is to be determined by universal principles rather than by the particular Constitution (p. drama," 190). The drama which Jaffa presents is a "world-historical and Lincoln

mankind" is to play a role in "deciding the fate of (p. 237). (The epigraph for 264 Interpretation

chapter 4 on p. 237 is incorrectly identified as the same as the epigraph for the previous chapter. The epigraph for chapter 4 is from Lincoln's First Inaugural.) Such language, if it is not to be historicist, must perforce become religious. Jaffa quotes Lincoln's description of the American people as the Almighty's

people" "almost chosen in order to indicate "why the burden of world history

up" was bound with the saving of the Union (p. 257, original emphasis). The history" "providential character of American is to be compared to the story of Exodus (pp. 257, 111). The story of America is the story of "Israel as the Lord's Servant" Suffering (p. 258). And for Lincoln, argues Jaffa, "the moral and politi cal teaching of the Gospels had an apocalyptic fulfillment in the American Founding" (p. 352). One is reminded by these passages of Lincoln's "Reply to Loyal Colored People of Baltimore upon Presentation of a Bible [to the Presi

dent]": "And all the good the Saviour gave to the world was communicated

through this book [the Bible]. But for it we could not know right from wrong.

All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found

it" portrayed in (Lincoln, 1953, vol. 7, p. 542; September 7, 1864). And one is reminded still more of Lincoln's statement in his peroration to his Annual Mes sage to Congress, December 1, 1862: "We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth. . . . The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just a way bless" which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever (Lincoln, 1953, vol. 5, p. 537). God must bless America if she succeeds. The American civil religion makes of America the means to the salvation of mankind

(cf. Anastaplo, 1999, p. 340). The end of America, it seems, would be the end for the earth. This combination of world history with providential history is one example of the way in which Jaffa hopes to combine "the voice of reason in the natural

law" God" revelation" with "the voice of in "divine (pp. 509, fn. 84, 122-23). Is this possible (or good)? Is there not a difference in kind between divine law and natural law? Perhaps one of the consequences of this combination is that one understands philosophy as war. Such an understanding seems modem. Jaffa

good" evil" argues there is "unconditional and "unconditional and man chooses between the conditional good or the conditional evil. This seems to be the

"metaphysical" conclusion of Plato's Laws (cf. p. 127 with Laws 906a). The problem, one can say, is the difference between authority and reason (cf. p. 167 with Strauss, 1953, p. 92. Compare also Jaffa p. 121 with Strauss, 1988, p. 95). Or rather, the question is what are the political effects of combining natural and divine right. Jaffa, in any case, insists that according to Lincoln "the rights of divine" man were both natural and (p. 403). They are knowable by reason and by revelation. It may be that God has revealed what can be known by reason to make it available to the unreasonable (cf. Strauss, 1988, p. 20).

The attempt to combine reason and revelation, or the universal and the partic

people" leads to the great problem of ular, how "one comes to be apart from any other, comes to be this people. George Anastaplo has argued that the problem is due to the "almost fatal difficulty in definition, perhaps even to the arbitrary Review Essays 265

people'" character of the term, 'one (Anastaplo, 1965, p. 396). Yet Anastaplo goes on to comment that the American example and the American insistence on equality have led the world to believe "that almost all bodies of men are equal, it." one to another, if they but choose to insist upon Is this not the consequence of what Lincoln said was to liberate the world the right to revolution? Lincoln exclaims, "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have " the right to rise up . . (pp. 14, 268; quoting Lincoln, 1953, vol. 1, p. 438). That the problem of how a people comes to be is also the great problem of Jaffa's argument is indicated by his connecting the piety of the Gettysburg Ad dress with the "necessary relationship between the liberty and equality that are said to have attended the birth of the nation and that form of government that,

earth" it is said, shall not perish from the (p. 78). Connecting piety and birth together with liberty and equality can be said to be the heart of the book. Jaffa begins New Birth with war and the social contract. The intrinsic connection between these two things is tragedy and the divine law. The title of Jaffa's book makes clear that the task he has set himself is to bring to light the way in which the connection between these things becomes manifest in the new birth of America. This may be the same task as showing how world history is related to the history of this particular people, or showing how one is to understand the providential order in which this people become (almost) chosen. The problem is indicated by Jaffa's comment that Lincoln is compelled in the end "to say

man" that the wisdom of God is not that of (p. 258). One might say that the very uniqueness of God and His people precludes any intelligibility to the choice He makes of them. The truly free choice of an omnipotent God is ultimately and ineluctably mysterious (cf. Jaffa, 2000a, p. 232; Strauss, 1989a, p. 205). freedom" of man (pp. Jaffa many times insists on the "metaphysical 105, 1 19). Jaffa argues that if Lincoln had chosen to support the measure in Congress to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, there may have been no

whether no divine civil war, no new birth of freedom and one wonders also Jaffa argues that providence or world history (and no book by Jaffa) (p. 245). American it is the act of declaring independence from Britain which made the people one people (p. 43). The voice of the people in so acting "can reasonably

God" be thought to be the voice of (p. 89, cf. 43, pp. 350, 351, 395). The freedom of the people seems to imitate that of God, or God manifests His free people. issue is dom through them in transforming many peoples into one This discussed most fully by Jaffa in terms of Lincoln's defense of the indissolubility constitutional right (p. 189). The of union, or the denial that secession is a

moral" Declaration is the "primordial instrument of Union, both legal and (p.

193). America was a union first and then a political order (p. 195). This explains the how it is possible for the people to remain one people while changing from expect Articles of Confederation to the Constitution rather than, as one would nature between in terms of the social contract theory, returning to the state of in (p. 196). Jaffa constitutions and thus to the state of simply free individuals others to the compares the argument for secession made by Calhoun among 266 Interpretation

argument that an individual could leave a social contract (p. 205). The Civil

states' War was not simply between rights and national supremacy, but between two different understandings of the basis of the union (p. 251). The argument

Jaffa says Lincoln made is that the people exercised the right to revolution when they changed from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, but did not for that reason cease to be one people (p. 268). They were one people from the moment of independence (pp. 372, 464). The Union does not change, only the constitution changes, and so the one people remains (pp. 386-87). It may be worth while here to mention something conspicuous by its absence in Jaffa's treatment of the problem posed by secession, the change in constitu tions, and the natural or divine law basis of the social contract. Jaffa never, so far as I can tell, mentions the common law. This is striking because one issue at stake in the two famous cases dealing with American common law, Swift v. Tyson (1842), which interpreted the common law as a discovery of natural law, and the case which overruled Swift, Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins (1938), which declared all law to be positive, is whether or not there is a unitary Ameri can common law, or whether all common law is only local. A unitary common law based upon natural law answers at one stroke the question how the Ameri can people could remain one people irrespective of changes in forms of govern ment (for this argument see Arnhart, 1976, pp. 573, 581-82, fn. 174; see also Stoner, 1992). Perhaps a defense of the social contract theory in terms of natural law precludes turning to the common law based upon natural right as a basis for society independent of the Constitution. Jaffa also emphasizes the revolu tionary break with Britain and the unprecedented character of America, both of immemorial." which are in tension with a common law said to exist "from time

Further, the distinction Jaffa makes to explain the difference between the people and their constitution is between political relations and moral relations, the latter of which include blood and family (p. 384, 386). It seems absent government there can be obligations, but not law, for law comes into being only with the social contract and in order to enforce obligations. Blood and family are cer tainly more private than the common law. This raises the question of the origins of civil society as such in the social

evident" contract. The "first and most rational ground of the social compact, argues Jaffa, is that the body politic can better safeguard each than each can protect himself (p. 45). But of course more is needed if the political order is to be something one is willing to die for. In Crisis Jaffa had argued that Lincoln made the equality of the Declaration something to be aimed at rather than a precondition of legitimacy. Lincoln transformed the nation from a merely ra

calculation" tional social contract into something "beyond all (Jaffa, 1982, pp. 228-31). In New Birth Jaffa argues that Jefferson based the republican cause on the emancipation of reason (p. 66). But the Civil War indicates that Jeffer son's faith in the power of reason was mistaken (p. 71). It turns out that "what

true" is persuasive is not the same as what is (p. 148). Lincoln ultimately speaks Review Essays - 267

transubstantiation" in the "idiom of to unite the Old World immigrants divided family" into of by ethnicity "members the same united by "faith in human equal ity" (p. 151). Jaffa then makes an analogy to his interpretation of what Jesus does: faith" "The family of blood becomes the family of (pp. 150, 354). Yet Lincoln also argued that while passion had supported the founding, the Union now reason" must be based on "cold and sober (p. 345). One cannot but wonder

reason" faith." at the relation between that "cold sober and "the family of One

is reminded of con- Lincoln's description of ". .. Happy day, when all appetites all troled, passions subdues, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and world" move the monarch of the (Lincoln, 1953, vol. 1, p. 279). Jaffa argues that the "role of the superhuman legislator is played by the laws of nature" reason and (p. 424). Is a religion of reason possible? Was Lincoln's encomium to the monarch mind not very ironic? (Does the universality of Lin coln's political religion, both in the sense that it is not specifically Christian [cf. p. and that is 352] it based upon the universal rational principle of equality mean it is more like Rousseau's universalized religion of the conscience than ancient civil religion [cf. de Alvarez, 1976]?) The social contract theory, in Jaffa's interpretation, is even compatible with Aristotle. He argues that for Aristotle the individual, the family, and the village come to be prepolitically, and that the political community requires a deliberate act like the social contract (p. 414). Prepolitical communities may even have government, but they are not political (p. 441). It is human families rather than individuals who found political communities (p. 445). Aristotle argues, says Jaffa, that "the ontological priority of community to individuality is the founda tion of all society and government. Only as one understands the priority of the partnership of male and female in the generation, nurture, and education of the young can one understand the relation of individuality to community in the po

order" litical (p. 448). But "The Hobbesian idea of man's equality in the state of nature, transformed from its Hobbesian origins (in part by Locke and in part by the American reception of Locke), became the characteristic theory of the Revolution" American (p. 449). According to the Declaration there "is no intrin

consent" sic obligation to obey any authority to which one has not given (p. 301). But is the characteristic theory of the American Revolution consistent with Aristotle? Is one not obligated to obey the natural law whether or not one has consented to it? Is one not obligated to obey one's parents? How are these two accounts of the origin of civil society to be reconciled? Jaffa says that property by nature begins with the person of the individual, not the family (p. 25). Yet there is to be no "opposition between the demands of society and the rights of individual" the as long as those rights are subject to the natural law (p. 27). This is in part because rights necessarily mean duties, and even duty to God (p. 49). But the transformation of individuals in the state of nature into a people remains mysterious even if one can argue there is one goal which they share as a com mon good since inevitably that goal, their well-being as a people, ultimately 268 Interpretation

transcends any individual good (p. 383). Certainly Aristotle's account of how the polis comes to be is not free of ambiguities. Perhaps no account can be.

Here we touch on another argument Jaffa has made before and repeats here, namely the necessity of the social contract as a basis for civil society once polytheism has been replaced by monotheism (see especially Jaffa, 1990). The legitimacy of the laws of the ancient city came from their source in the particular god of each city. Once Christianity became the established religion of the Ro man Empire, the divine source of legitimacy for law became universal, and so it implied a universal city. The simple analogy, one God, one empire, one em peror, was embodied in the Roman Empire. Jaffa comments, "It was believed to be Rome's providential destiny to form the universal empire, which was the

religion" necessary preparation for the reception of the universal (p. 136). As such, Jaffa argues, the Roman Empire could not be political for it is universal, and the political is always one of many (p. 137). One can well wonder whether America is headed in the direction of universality, and even has been from the first, in so far as it is based on universal natural law and there is "no people

hearth'" America could not, in principle, 'admit to its (p. 136). The original

history," "end of Jaffa argues, was the end of the Roman Empire (p. 138). (Will the end of America then be another "end of history"?) The universal empire gave way to the divine right of various kings after the fall of Rome. The divine right of kings as a basis for legitimacy, however, made the kings either depen dent on the Roman church for their legitimacy or led to civil war (pp. 143-44, 132). Neither was conducive to liberty. The American innovation is to under stand divine right, the source of legitimacy, as giving to the people rather than king or emperor the right to rule (pp. 135ff). This made it possible for America to solve the problem of combining a universal religion with civil liberty. Jaffa interprets the endowment by the Creator of all men with equal rights and the social contract theory as intrinsically joined together (pp. 37, 413). Equal rights and the social contract are together the solution to the problem posed by Chris tianity for the preservation of liberty and legitimacy. They are also, Jaffa argues, the political version of the Christian or biblical teaching that man is made in the image of God (pp. 151, 172). It is the new dispensation brought about by the American solution to the problem for political liberty posed by Christianity to which Jaffa attributes the unprecedented character of America (p. 127). The corollary to the unprecedented character of America, to the change in human consciousness brought about by America, is that there is no classical parallel. Jaffa thus denies that the question of political obligation as we know it

world." could arise in the "ancient He refers to the Antigone as an example of how the problem of obligation or legitimacy appears in the ancient world. Jaffa argues that in the Antigone the conflict is between the gods of the family and the gods of the city, two different sets of gods rather than the city and God (pp. The problem with 138-39). this assertion is that the gods of the city in Greece were not merely the gods of a particular city, and the issue of burial involves Review Essays - 269

Hades or god the Hades, neither of which belongs to a particular family. Creon's mistake is to the identify city with the family and the gods with the city, so that leaving Polynices unburied is merely dishonor and not pollution; while Antigone identifies the to one's duty family with the duty of burial, which turns out to mean that the family exists in Hades. Jaffa also argues that the advent of philos in Greece did not ophy change the political understanding of the divine as con nected to a particular city rather than as universal. This is indicated, he argues, the answer given in the by Laws by a Cretan to the question asked, by an Athenian Stranger, who is to be held responsible for laws of Crete: "A god,

god" Stranger, a (p. 138; Laws 624a). The whole of the Laws could be under

stood to be a working out of that answer, for the Stranger placed in between the

two references to a god refers to the same question which is at the heart of

God," Jaffa's argument: what is the relation between "Our father's "Land where

died," liberty," my fathers "My country . Sweet land of and "Great God, our king" (Smith, 1832; cf. Sophist, 216a-d; Benardete, 2000, p. 5). The city of Plato's Laws is ultimately devoted to the cosmic god, not to the Olympian gods, and so as such it can ultimately be understood to be as universal as America, and as such faces the same difficulty that America faces, at least in the minds of the men who ultimately rule in and through the nocturnal council and are

therefore not philosophers. Hades is the political equivalent of the cosmic gods in so far as it provides a means to preserve the distinction between body and soul and thus between man and beast (Benardete, 2000, pp. 22, 148). It seems then that according to Jaffa for America the natural law is the political equiva lent of the Christian afterlife. The problem of legitimacy faced by America is not unprecedented, even if its solution is. Jaffa has long argued and argues here that the principle of equality preserves the classical teaching that man is in between God and beast, for it is all men who are equal and not all beings or things (p. 106; Jaffa, 2000a, p. 153). Jaffa states in New Birth that "no experience in recorded history . . . has ever revised in any fundamental way the distinction between the human, the subhuman, and

superhuman" the (p. 120). One is compelled to ask, not even the Incarnation? Does not God becoming man breach the divide between human and superhu man? Is not this the cause of the central problem Jaffa must deal with if he is to defend the American civil religion? That is to say, the Incarnation would be the one truly unprecedented event from the point of view of classical political philosophy, and would thus make politics questionable, for if God can become man, then the distinction between the divine and the human is breached and may no longer be able to be made the basis for the independence of politics from religion. Perhaps the suggestion is that the civil religion can once again be made effective or armed in defense of the political by the right to revolution: "Without the right of revolution, that boundary [which separates the power of hypothetical" government and the liberty of the citizen] remains merely (p. 416, see also p. 421; cf. de Alvarez, 1999, pp. 28-29, 88-89; Mansfield, 1979, pp. 270 Interpretation

48-62; de Alvarez, 1984, p. 177). However that may be, as previously noted, Jaffa argues that equal rights means one must recognize the humanity of all men everywhere. The freedom of one man implies the freedom of all men. Jaffa argues that this equality is something observable by anyone at any time (pp. 63, 68, 80, 106, 176, 333). One is tempted to say it is obvious (cf. Kessler, 2000, p. 10). What is at stake in whether or not equality is obvious is the political

"self-evident." consequences of the meaning of As Jaffa has commented more than once, Aquinas observes that what is self-evident to the wise may not be so to all. That is to say the ability to see depends on education or what Jaffa calls enlightenment (Jaffa, 2000a, pp. 113, 152, 155; Summa Theologica la Ilae qu. 94 a. 2). But in New Birth Jaffa goes further: "The Constitution, adopted by the peo

them" ple, transforms the people by the discipline it imposes upon (p. 351). Has the Constitution transformed, the Declaration enlightened, all of mankind? If so, and if one does not see, is blindness then willful, and immoral? In that case blindness is the same as a refusal to listen and thus to see, as Jaffa argues (p. 82). So then is the proper response not education, but punishment for the willful refusal to see the moral truth of equality? Perhaps the suggestion is that punish ment is a kind of education, and enlightenment is brought about by punishment. But will the one punished see it that way, and if he does not, has he been truly educated (cf. Laws 854d4)? In short, what is the difference between ignorance

truth" and vice? Is truth a weapon? (p. 83). Jefferson called equality a "palpable (quoted by Jaffa, p. Ill, from a letter). Yet some Americans denied it, as had most human beings prior to America. Indeed, America is the first political order ever to be based upon the principle of equality (p. 103). The problem is what to do about those who do not recognize that principle. Jaffa makes clear that

Jefferson was too optimistic in his expectation that truth would necessarily win ideas" in the "free political marketplace of (pp. 70-71). But Jaffa also states quite simply that those who deny the principle of equality are barbarians, and as such fit only for despotism. The difference between barbarian and civilized depends on whether one recognizes in the equality of mankind the "unity of the

species" human (pp. 328ff, especially p. 334, and also p. 422). This recognition, fortunately, is possible both by reason and by the biblical teaching. Men are not required to be simply rational (p. 371), yet the weakness of reason provides the occasion for Jaffa's book. Truth must be armed (p. 71). Jaffa must refute or wage war against the denial by modem philosophy of the truth which is the necessary basis for civilized life. If the war is lost, then barbarism once again takes over the West.

One of the most interesting arguments of the book is that the influence of what

modernity" Leo Strauss has called the "second wave of began long before German scholars emigrated to America, long before the emergence of the Progressive movement in America, let alone World War II (p. 84; cf. Strauss, 1989b, p. 89). forms" Jaffa argues that "German idealism in all its already had a great influence Review Essays 211

in America by 1857. This was due to the transcendental movement in New En gland (pp. fn. 297, 523, 14). Calhoun and Douglas are already influenced by Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. It turns out that Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision is following Kant's categorical imperative when he argues that if the founders had believed slavery wrong they would have abolished it, even if Taney does not fully understand it (pp. 292-93). Douglas then repeats Taney's argument (p. 311). Calhoun follows Rousseau in his understanding of the state of nature (p. 413). In their various ways, whether through positivism or historicism, all these men end up denying that mankind is a single species different in kind from the beasts and God. It is the dominance of these thinkers in academia and the judiciary today above all which Jaffa most hopes to overturn.

Jaffa emphasizes the mathematical character of modem political science.

"Calhoun writes in the modem tradition of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza. He will attempt to give a clear and distinct account an account at least quasi- form" mathematical in (p. 439). Calhoun wishes to establish political science as

a kind of physics in which political necessity operates like gravity (p. 444). There is thus no place for prudence or morality, and therefore no place for

distinctions of kind such as that between man and beast or even stone. Jaffa argues that Aristotle, in contrast to Calhoun, "declared politics to be an inexact

science" (p. 440). Yet Lincoln's arguments are described by Jaffa as achieving

clarity" certainty" "Euclidean (p. 363) and "mathematical (p. 364), and Jaffa "quasi-mathematical" says Lincoln argues in a manner (p. 345). It seems it is

not the mathematical character per se of political arguments which is objection able, but the manner in which they are used. Once the distinction between kinds of beings and thus kinds of rule is made, mathematical clarity can be achieved within the moral and political realm by means of deduction from first principles. One could say there is a moral necessity no less than a physical one, and both can be clarified by mathematics. That raises the question whether natural right or law exists in the same manner as numbers and figures (cf. Strauss, 1988, p. 95). We seem to be again confronted with the problem of divine necessity and human freedom (cf. Strauss, 1975, p. 113). One is led to wonder about the connection between mathematical rigor, tragedy, and statesmanship. Prudence requires a realm in which statesmanship is free to act not merely determined by deductions from universal principles. Can natural law be understood as a body of rational rules? If it is so understood, does that lead to tragedy? That is to say, is not any deduction from first principles mistaken unless one has direct access to God, i.e., a natural theology? (cf. Meno 76e, Davis, 1988, p. 113; if so, is not modem philosophy tragic? cf. Strauss, 1953, pp. 26, 66). If, as previously sug gested, Lincoln in his mathematical arguments is practicing the art of kalam, perhaps the mathematical character of his argument is merely a means to the end set by prudence, and therefore not a deduction from universal natural law meant to determine action. But then one faces the problem that while the argu ments may achieve a clarity which is persuasive, they are in the service of the 272 Interpretation end set by prudence rather than deductions from universal truth. One of the things Jaffa wishes to establish is "the idea of nature not merely as a record of

principles" cause and effect but as a source of moral (p. xiii). But once one has established that the moral or the political is different in kind from the nonpoliti- cal, from the divine or bestial, one is still left with the problem of how they can be put back together. How can the universal standard, which nothing can live up to, determine measures appropriate to each thing not up to its standard, with out imposing its own rule? (Benardete, 1986, p. 126). One wonders whether the problems which have led to the denial of differences in kind can be overcome

truth." by the "weapons of Or is this difficulty the reason why all politics, not just American politics, is tragic? Perhaps it is sufficient if the presentation of American history as tragic persuades the people to support the nation. Tragedy is the most popular form of poetry (cf. Laws 658d). Jaffa argues that the sophisticated modem doctrines taught by the "second

modernity" wave of are barbarian and lead to despotism by denying the irreduc ible character of the political. He further argues that modem barbarism is far worse than ancient barbarism because of the power of technology provided by modem science, (p. 330). Yet Jaffa also says that the limits of reason have not been overcome (p. 333), and so one wonders whether since barbarism is a sempiternal possibility, modem science leads necessarily to the rise of a far worse barbarism. Further, now that the basis for civilization is the universal principle, barbarians can exist anywhere and not just in a foreign place. That is to say, the distinction between civilized and barbarian is now a distinction be tween those who do and do not admit the universal truth of equality rather than between those who are or are not of a particular people, as in the distinction between barbarian and Greek. Barbarians come to be within civilization as well as without. The problem this causes is that one must preserve the understanding of the differences between species, between man and beast, while preventing that distinction from ever becoming attached to other natural differences, such as race or ethnicity. But one wonders if it is not natural for men to confuse ethnoi with species (cf. Statesman 262b-263c). Must not politics be based upon

"kinship" or "herds"? (cf. Strauss, 1975, p. 5). Does the attempt to make public the distinction between species and ethnoi lead ultimately to empire and to des potism? This seems to be the very question at stake in the American experiment.

mankind" Is it not natural for the "cause of to become identified with the cause of some particular political order, and thus for those not citizens of that order to be treated as enemies of that cause? America is said to have a "general

mankind" philanthropy for all (p. 372, quoting citizens of the state of Georgia; cf. Xenophon Cyropaedia cf. 1.2.1; also Xenophon Cynegeticus 3.9). In any

understand" case, Jaffa makes clear that men "must be made to equality: "it

them." cannot be imposed upon The only alternatives to majority rule are "tyr

anarchy," anny and and majority rule requires rule by persuasion. The paradox

wisdom" of a regime based upon "philosophical is that the people cannot be Review Essays 273

wise (p. 338). One must go further, unjust opinion barbarian opinion? may form a part of the foundation of a just regime (p. 340). "Civilization means the

ignorance" recognition of right as distinct from force, fraud, or (p. 419). One must recognize even the right of barbarians, if they are citizens (p. 421). The of problem the tendency of men to identify the cause of mankind with the cause of a particular people may be another version of the problem posed 'country,' by patriotism. Jaffa states at the end of his book, "The word like 'nation' loyalty" . . , implies the highest object of political (p. 470, emphasis mine). One can ask whether treating the country as the highest object of political loyalty does not undermine the dedication to the regime necessary to preserve the regime. Is not the regime more fundamental than the nation? (cf. Strauss, 1964, pp. 47-48). The answer may be that in America the regime and the coun try are one. An America no longer a republic is no longer a nation, or at least this nation, since this nation comes to be only in terms of its dedication to the principle of equality. The Constitution and the nation are one. Loyalty to the Con stitution is loyalty to America. But is not such a unity bound to mean the Consti

tradition" tution is understood as an "authoritative rather than as a means for deliberation (pp. 496 fn. 80)? Does not this understanding lead to tragedy as a result of the impossibility of moderation with respect to the ground of modera tion, and there are constant battles over that very ground (p. 36)? Such tragedy is essential to the political because the true ground of moderation is the good which is beyond being, not any human thing or being, and any political order must have a basis in a particular thing or being. This is the case for the principle that all men are created equal, not withstanding the description of such a princi "transcendent" history" ple as or "outside (pp. 91, 383). Sempiternal is not eter nal. In Plato's Laws, the closest Plato can come to the idea of the good is the nonderivative nature of the soul. Jaffa attempts to provide political support for

that in terms of the principle of equality, which then is the modem replacement for Hades as the means to preserve the distinctions between god, man, and beast (cf. Benardete, 2000, pp. 16, 22). The principle of equality makes for tragedy as much as did Hades. One way this shows up is in the difficulty raised by judicial review. Jaffa emphasizes that a written Constitution means limited government. This justifies, among other things, civil disobedience by individuals and states in the name of those limits as well as judicial review of statute laws which violate those limits

(p. 32). Jaffa treats civil disobedience as part of the deliberative process. He

pursuance"upon" thus rejects Anastaplo's argument that "in means "following

adopted" to" or "made after this Constitution was rather than "in conformity (p. 493, fn. 55, referring to Anastaplo, 1989, p. 207; but the passage quoted by Jaffa is on p. 201). Yet Jaffa also argues there is no assignable limit to what government may do for self-preservation on behalf of those to whose care the preservation of individuals has been entrusted (p. 363). Was not Anastaplo at tempting to obviate this very contradiction between a limited government and 274 Interpretation unlimited power? Or rather, since Jaffa insists the power of self-preservation is constitutional, the question is what branch can be expected to best defend the Constitution. The tragic answer seems to be the judiciary, for it is in judicial review as a means of defending the Constitution that the Constitution must become a sacred text that precludes moderation.

One way in which a Constitution which establishes limited government was defended by the founders is as a means to modem economic progress or capital ism. Limited government is understood as the corollary to property rights. The protection of the unequal faculties of acquisition is the means by which individ ual rights are secured and the equipment necessary for virtue supplied (Federal ist 10). Far from being the highest object of political loyalty protected by a sacred text, the nation can be understood to be merely that which is to be eco nomically developed for individual consumption. From this point of view it may appear to some that the Federal Reserve Board is the best defender of the Constitution. It should be said here that New Birth is only the first of a two-part work. It may be that any difficulties in interpretation of this work may be dealt with by the next. In fact Jaffa has already stated that he is to discuss "Lincoln's concern with the economics of equality-property rights, free labor, self improve

ment" in volume 2, and that these things are dealt with in Lincoln's Annual Message to Congress (Jaffa, 2000b, in response to and quoting Glenn Tinder who was complaining Jaffa had not yet dealt with these things). As already

earth." mentioned, Lincoln there speaks of America as the "last best hope of

This raises the question whether there is a connection between America as the

earth" rights." "last best, hope of and "property Jaffa argues in New Birth that the understanding of property rights in America is intrinsically connected with the issue of slavery. The origin of prop erty rights is the same as the origin of the natural rights of man, namely "the original right that every human being possessed to own himself, and conse labor." quently to own the fruit of his own This position of Lincoln, argues Jaffa, corresponds closely to the labor theory of value in Locke's Second Trea tise of Civil Government. Further, Jaffa argues that Jefferson's Lockean theory built" of property was "the rock upon which [Lincoln's] biblical house was (p. 24). Strikingly, in the passage quoted from Lincoln for evidence of his agree ment with this theory, Lincoln states the wrongness of slavery is "clearly

revelation" proved, I think, by natural theology, apart from (p. 243). But Jaffa later argues that "Madison and Plato agree that the root of faction is private

family" and the root of private property property is the (p. 426). Is the meaning of the origin of the natural right of property in the mixing of man's labor with his property to be understood as procreation (p. 299)? But Locke especially, following Aristotle, argues against the claim that parents own their children because they make them. Yet is it not inevitable, and thus natural, that fathers should regard sons as themselves reborn? Is this not the meaning of achieving through immortality procreation, and is this not a "premodern way of thinking"? Review Essays 275

"nation" And further, is this way of thinking not connected to the status of the as an object of political loyalty? Jaffa points out that in Locke the right to property is part of the right to self-preservation. But Jaffa argues that "in nature self-preservation relates more to the species than to the individual. ... It follows from this that among humans it is the family, rather than the individual, that

survival." seeks And thus "it is human families or their representatives, rather

'abstract' than human individuals, who found or institute political communi

ties." Further, eros is that "in nature, or in the nature of things, by which the

accomplished." preservation of the species is But the "consummation of eros is

union," "overcome" in in which the separateness of the self is (p. 445). This account of eros is surely absent in Locke. One could say that the problem Jaffa must deal with is how the eros of the individual is to be made the eros of the

city. To unify these two kinds of eros one requires a fatherland. But a fatherland cannot be made by a social contract, unless it is a covenant with God. The question then is whether a fatherland can be created by means of a social con tract based upon natural law understood as a covenant based upon divinely revealed law.

The potentially destructive power of capitalism is illustrated by Jaffa's de scription of the end of the ancien regime. Jaffa argues that the end of the old

order, the ancien regime of altar and throne, came about because it could not

revolution." "survive the dynamics of nascent capitalism and industrial The or

archaic" der of the ancien regime was "absurd and in contrast to the emerging

new order (p. 423). This argument raises the question of the relation of the new

science which is dedicated to conquering nature for the relief of man's estate,

which leads to the technological progress of the industrial revolution and capital ism, to that providential order in history culminating in America. The problem same as Aris of the relation of industrial capitalism to morality and law is the totle had indicated when he criticized Hippodamus for offering rewards for in

ventions (Politics 1268b23 ff). Jaffa describes it thus:

sciences The widespread and uncontradicted opinion that the nonhuman natural called are progressive had created a presumption in favor of the view that anything

presumption in favor of claim science is progressive. This in turn had created a any thought. (P. that represented itself as proceeding from progressive scientific 429)

observation that the Su Jaffa refers in a footnote to this passage to Strauss's Constitution (p. fn. preme Court defers to social science rather than the 530,

times" 31). "Modem have "detached our consciousness from the relationship ancestral" belief "that the nonmoral with the (p. 447). This is connected to the

civilization are and progress of science and the moral progress of inevitably linked" originated Rous inextricably (p. 456). Jaffa argues that this belief, by not survive Nietzsche's critique, a critique seau and perfected by Hegel, did Communists. But is that belief differ- borne out in practice by the Nazis and the 276 Interpretation ent in kind from the belief of Madison and Lincoln and Adam Smith, who according to Jaffa believe that "the mainspring of progress is the desire of indi viduals to better their condition"? (p. 458). Jaffa describes this as the "familiar

doctrine." free market Jaffa says that any barriers to the "fluidity of socio

classes" economic will, as Calhoun says, "effectually arrest the march of prog

ress" (p. 459). Jaffa argues in Crisis that there is a direct connection between the end of economic scarcity brought about by the progress of technology due to the new science of physics and the end of slavery. Jaffa there declined to answer the question whether the "hope engendered by the machine . . out

machine" weighs the fears engendered by this same (Jaffa, 1982, pp. 342-46). This question is central to the issue of modems and ancients as Strauss ar gued: "One could say however that it is not inventions as such but the use of science for such inventions which renders impossible the good city in the classi

sense" cal (Strauss, 1958, p. 299). America has abolished the old barriers to individual progress, so that merit, in so far as humanly possible, should alone be the basis for wealth and power (p. 408). Has this not undermined the attach ment to and reverence for the Constitution necessary to preserve the political order? One looks forward to the second volume to solve these problems. Indeed, one can well ask whether, if the ancients are ultimately correct, their writings, to use a modern distinction, are not more descriptive rather than nor mative. That is to say, they bring to light the sempiternal order of things which as such is always effective. Jaffa may be said then to bring to light the way in which America necessarily must imitate that order if it is to succeed, or rather has done so. Jaffa argues that the inevitable collapse of all communist regimes

nature" is evidence of the "power of (p. 426). One can surely say the same for all regimes whatsoever: no regime can long last which is not supported by the power of nature and nature's God.

REFERENCES de Alvarez, Leo Paul S. The Machiavellian Enterprise: A Commentary on The Prince. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. "Poetry and Kingship: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.'' Bucknell Review: The Arts, Society, Literature (1984), pp. 158-84.

Religion." "Reflections on Lincoln's Political In Abraham Lincoln: The Gettys burg Address and American Constitutionalism, edited by Leo Paul de Alvarez. Irving, TX: University of Dallas Press, 1976. Anastaplo, George. Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography. Lanham, MD: Row- man & Littlefield, 1999. The Constitution of 1787: A Commentary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Independence." "The Declaration of St. Louis University Law Journal 9 (1965)- 390-415. Review Essays 277

"Seven for Professor Jaffa." Questions In Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1994. Law." Larry. and Arnhart, "William Crosskey the Common Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 9 (1976): 544-95. Seth. Discover,' Benardete, Plato's "Laws": The of Being. Chicago: University of Chi cago Press, 2000. Plato's Statesman: Part III of The Being of the Beautiful. Translated by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Churchill, Winston. The Gathering Storm. New York: Bantam Books, 1961. Davis, Michael. Ancient Tragedy and the Origins ofModern Science. Carbondale: South ern Illinois University Press, 1988. V. The Jaffa, Harry American Founding as the Best Regime: The Bonding of Civil and Religious Liberty. Claremont, CA: The Claremont Institute, 1990. The Conditions of Freedom: Essays in Political Philosophy. Claremont, CA: The Claremont Institute, 2000a.

_. Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln- Douglas Debates. Phoenix ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. How to Think About the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Celebration. Dur ham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1978.

Strauss." "The Legacy of Leo The Claremont Review ofBooks, 1984, pp. 14-21. Editor." "Letter to the The Weekly Standard, November 21, 2000b. Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1994.

Freedom." Kessler, Charles. "A New Birth of The Claremont Review of Books, Fall 2000, pp. 8-10. Lerner, Ralph. Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics ofEnlightenment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Lemer, Ralph, and Musin Mahdi, eds. Medieval Political Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963. Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953. Mansfield, Harvey, Jr. Machiavelli 's New Modes and Orders. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

Thee," Smith, Samuel F. "America, My Country 'Tis of 1832. Stoner, James R. Common Law and Liberal Theory: Coke, Hobbes, and the Origins of American Constitutionalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992. Strauss, Leo. The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws. Midway Reprint ed. Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. City and Man. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Nihilism." "German Interpretation 26, no. 3 (1999): 353-78. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989a. II." "Replies to Schaar and Wolin: The American Political Science Review 57,

no. 1 (1963): 152-55. Thoughts on Machiavelli. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958. 278 Interpretation

Modernity." "The Three Waves of In An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, edited by Hilail Gildin. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989b. What is Political Philosophy! Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959. Review Essay

Jaffa's Lincolnian Defense of the Founding Thomas G. West University of Dallas

V. Harry Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming the Civil War of (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), xiv + 550 pp., $35.00.

In A New Birth of Freedom, Harry Jaffa presents a powerful defense of the political theory of the American founding. He does it in grand style. Formally, his topic is and Lincoln the Civil War. In fact, the book ranges widely among philosophers, poets, and events, from the distant past right down to the present. It is hard to know how to classify this book. It is not political philosophy in the usual sense of analysis of abstract themes or texts. Nor is it history in the usual sense of a story of a particular person, event, or era. It is philosophical history, in which a single statesman (Lincoln) and political event (the beginning of the Civil War) become the focus of sustained reflection on the enduring problems of life, justice, civilization, and human greatness. And it obliterates the perverse thesis, widely believed by many libertarians and conservatives today, that the Civil War was not about slavery, and that Lincoln represents the victory of tyranny over liberty. Jaffa's achievement for this is an outstanding book was made possible by the work of his teacher, the political philosopher Leo Strauss. It was Strauss who taught Jaffa how to read the writings of the philosophers, poets, and states men seriously, meaning to read them as if they might be true. (I wonder if anyone has ever accorded James Buchanan's speeches such careful and respect ful analysis.) Strauss also taught Jaffa that the problem of our time is the denial of the possibility that human reason can discover enduring truth about how human life should be lived. Consequently, Jaffa's defense of Lincoln is also a critique of contemporary relativism and historicism. Strauss called for "unhesitating loyalty to a decent constitutionalism and even

constitutionalism" to the cause of (1968, p. 24). Jaffa has taken that call to heart. But the question is, What, in our time, best serves the cause of constitutional ism? Strauss did not answer that question explicitly. Some of Strauss's most memorable passages, however, are criticisms of the political teaching of John Locke. But Locke was the philosopher who, more than any other, the Founders looked up to as a spokesman for the principles of constitutionalism. Strauss's

interpretation, Spring 2001, Vol. 28, No. 3 280 Interpretation

statements on Locke might well lead someone to conclude, as the earlier Jaffa, and many other Straussians (including me, until just a few years ago), did con

constitutionalism" clude, that "the cause of needs a stronger foundation than the Lockean doctrine of natural rights. The core of Locke's doctrine, Strauss wrote

in What Is Political Philosophy? was the rejection of virtue as a concern of government. Locke, according to Strauss, turned to acquisitiveness as a substi tute for virtue: "an utterly selfish passion whose satisfaction does not require

all." the spilling of any blood and whose effect is the improvement of the lot of This Lockean doctrine, said Strauss, "This serpentine wisdom, which corrupted by charming and charmed by corrupting, this degradation of man, called forth

protest" Jean Jacques Rousseau's passionate and still unforgettable (1959, pp.

49-50). No wonder the Jaffa of Crisis thought that the "cause of constitutional ism" could only be vindicated if it could be shown to rest on a non-Lockean foundation. In that book, Jaffa believed that he had discovered that foundation in Lincoln's creative transformation of the founding.

But this negative assessment of Locke is not Strauss's last word. In the sec ond chapter of Liberalism, Strauss takes a more benign view. That chapter be gins with the classic case for aristocratic government, which is the claim that

gentlemen," "the those of wealth who have been liberally educated, ought to rule without the consent of the vulgar, with whom, as men of virtue, the gentle men have nothing in common. But Strauss immediately admits that the gentle

"reflection" men's virtue is at best only a of genuine virtue, which belongs solely to the philosophers. In other words, the gentlemen and the vulgar have more in common than one might think. Strauss implies that even on classical grounds, because of the rarity of genuine virtue, there is a strong case for de mocracy. In this context, Strauss says that Locke advocated "the religious educa

people" tion of the and the liberal education of the gentlemen: the religiously educated people would elect the liberally educated gentlemen to public office. Then Strauss remarks: "Not a few points which Locke meant are brought out clearly in the Federalist Papers. These writings reveal their connection with the

Publius" classics simply enough by presenting themselves as the work of one (1968, pp. 15-16).

In this passage of Liberalism, Strauss acknowledges in effect that there is a greater affinity between the classics on the one hand, and Locke and the Ameri can founding on the other, than one might expect if one takes Strauss's appar

modems" ently strict distinction between "ancients and as his last word. Strauss's denunciations of Locke, like the one quoted earlier, are always found in contexts where Strauss is stressing the classics-modems distinction. One might note that this distinction is absent from Strauss's Persecution and the Art

"modem," of Writing, a book in which Spinoza, a is treated with great respect as a philosopher whose models included Plato and Maimonides. Besides, Strauss emphasizes that because our kind of society was "wholly unknown to the clas sics," use." their writings cannot "supply us with recipes for today's Their prin- Review Essays 28 1

tasks" ciples may be true, but "the wise application ... of these principles to our

us" must be "achieved by (1964, p. 11). In A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa has followed that wise advice. Instead of rejecting the compact theory of the founding from the outset, as he had done in Crisis, Jaffa now sees it through Lincoln's eyes, and Washington's and Jeffer son's and Madison's, as both just and noble. That is, instead of imposing an "Straussian" overly simple and therefore inaccurate framework on Lincoln and the founding, as he had done in his earlier book ("ancients good, modems bad"), Jaffa now analyzes the argument of the founding on its own terms. Jaffa's earlier approach had led him to miss the moral and religious heart of the founding in Crisis. Jaffa now applies, more faithfully than he did before, Strauss's dictum that we should try to understand an author exactly as he understood himself before we try to understand him better than he understood himself.

Founders' In Crisis of the House Divided, Jaffa had argued that the idea of the state of nature, as the original source of individual rights, was "completely

thinking" alien to Lincoln's whole way of (1959, p. 322). According to Crisis,

theory," there was a "defect in his [Jefferson's] because although in the state of duties" nature "men have equal and unalienable rights, they have no real (p. Founders' 323). Consequently, Jaffa had said, Lincoln had to transform the

"egotistic" "categorical" theory into a moral imperative, requiring men to op pose slavery because it is morally wrong (p. 327):

Jefferson's attempt to conceive of a remedy for the people's corruption was vitiated by his Lockean horizon [T]here is little beyond an appeal to enlightened self- interest in the doctrine of universal equality in its pristine, Lockean form. Whereas

self- for Lincoln, egotism and altruism ultimately coincide, inasmuch as the greatest satisfaction is conceived as service to others; in the [Lockean] ethics just described wide such altruism as there is is ultimately reduced to egotism [There was a]

spread lack of concern over the moral challenge of slavery ... in the Revolutionary

generation. For this reason we must concede that Lincoln exaggerated the degree in men. (Pp. which the men of the Revolution were concerned with the freedom of all 323-24)

although the The conclusion that Jaffa drew in the earlier book was that American founding was defective, Lincoln's statesmanship and magnanimity turned a doctrine had ennobled it. Lincoln, according to Crisis, had brilliantly Jaffa had of self-interest into a doctrine of moral virtue. In doing so, argued, Lincoln had turned a modem doctrine into a classical one, for the modems, said Lin Jaffa, deny the primacy of duty, while the classics affirmed it. Moreover, Founders' rejected the claim that all men coln, in Jaffa's earlier account, had and Temperance ad- are created equal in the decisive sense. Lincoln's Lyceum 282 Interpretation

considered," dresses, Jaffa had argued in his earlier book, show that "abstractly Socrates' Lincoln was fully in agreement with suggestion that the lawless rule of the wise without the consent of the governed was the best form of govern ment (1959, p. 195). According to Crisis, Lincoln believed that in a profound

genius" sense all men are created unequal. Some men those of "the loftiest

eagle," are of the "family of the lion, or the tribe of the and are therefore

apart" virtually "a species (pp. 210-11). Such men win deathless fame by their freemen." great deeds, either by "emancipating slaves, or enslaving The proposi tion that all men are created equal, in Jaffa's 1959 account, is not a claim that all men share equally in rationality, but rather an inference that great men must draw when they confront the fact that their own highest good cannot be attained through political fame and offices, but only by affirming the superiority of self- restraint over self-promotion (pp. 222, 225). In A New Birth, Jaffa rejects his earlier interpretation of America. Lincoln is still presented as a great man, but his greatness now lies in his brilliant exposi tion and recovery of the founding principles. The simplistically amoral portrayal of the founding principles in Crisis is replaced by an exposition of compact theory that brings out its insightfulness and richness. In particular, the moral Founders' and religious dimension of the political teaching, having been ne glected in Crisis, is now fully articulated, with a real increase of accuracy and Founders' sophistication. The (and Locke's) doctrine of the law of nature, the source of men's rights no less than their moral obligations, is now given its due.

Founders' (One of the most serious distortions of the thought in Crisis was

Jaffa's near-silence on the law of nature.) Also given its due in A New Birth is the religious teaching of the Declaration, with its fourfold reference to God as lawgiver, creator, providence, and supreme judge, and of the founding era in general. Far from being a superficial and degrading doctrine of self-interest applied to the world of politics, the doctrine of the founding is measured in New Birth against the teachings of several of the most insightful political philoso phers in the Western tradition, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Aristotle, and Founders' the theory is not found wanting. I do not mean to disparage Crisis of the House Divided. That book has rightly been celebrated as a magnificent portrayal of Lincoln. Whatever its limits, Crisis was the necessary foundation for Jaffa's later work, just as Strauss's brilliant account of the history of political philosophy was the foundation for Crisis. For it was in Crisis that Jaffa had used the analytical tools of Strauss to reveal the possibility of statesmanship of the highest order in the modem world. We should remind ourselves of how difficult Jaffa's task was. Few scholars in the 1950s outside the Strauss school even had an inkling of what prudence and magnanim ity are, in the sense of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Crisis was a superb beginning in the recovery of that understanding. But it was bought at the ex pense of a severe distortion of the American founding. Jaffa had to work his way forward (into the ravages of historicism, which he now understands far Review Essays 283

more than in profoundly Crisis) and backward (into a more penetrating account of the founding) in order to complete his task. That it took Jaffa most of a lifetime should be no surprise. The wonder is that he was able to do it at all, how considering many scholars, most with far more lustrous reputations, accord to the ing conventions of the modem academy, have tried in vain.

Heidegger once remarked that great can "Everything only begin great. .. The great begins and great, is sustained, as long as it endures, only through a

great" free return of the (1953, p. 12, my translation). Jaffa's new assessment of the founding agrees with this sentiment. In Lincoln, through the crucible of the 1850s and the Civil War, the principles of the founding achieved a "free return," not a mechanical repetition, but a rethinking and thoughtful application to the crisis of that day. In New Birth, the founding principles themselves, and no longer Lincoln the statesman, are the highest thing in the regime. Jaffa proves that it took a great man to sustain a nation dedicated to principles whose greatness he demonstrates.

The first two chapters of New Birth are devoted respectively to natural right and history. These themes are the two poles of the book as a whole. Lincoln

and the Founders represent one pole: natural right. The Southern secessionists, Calhoun, modem historians, and modem liberals and conservatives represent the other pole: history or rather historicism. The two poles around which Crisis of the House Divided had revolved were Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's major political opponent of the 1850s. Douglas supported half of the Declaration's teaching (consent or majority rule) while denying its foundation (the natural equality of all human beings.) Douglas thought he had found a practical solution to the slavery question by denying that there was any principled reason either to support or oppose it. If only

tent" Americans could agree to disagree, to live in a "big in which the people of each state would decide whether to have slavery or not, the national agitation

care" could end. Lincoln opposed Douglas's "don't attitude toward slavery in the name of equal liberty for all. Douglas," Jaffa went to great lengths in the earlier book to make "the case for and then to show that Lincoln was correct to convince his fellow Republicans

care" that Douglas's position of "don't was wrong. Lincoln's, and Jaffa's, case against Douglas was that Douglas's position provided no real defense against the Southern demand for the full legitimization of slavery. Philosophically, Douglas, in Crisis, may be said to have had, incoherently, one foot in the old world of modem natural right, and one foot in the more radical world of legal positivism.

In A New Birth of Freedom, the stakes are much higher. In this book Douglas comes to sight as only one of several vivid and important characters in a drama that has assumed world-historical proportions. Lincoln's deepest antagonist, the 284 Interpretation most formidable defender of slavery, is now John C. Calhoun. And Calhoun, Jaffa argues, is a much more serious, and more radical, thinker than Douglas, who, in the end, was a practical man who disdained theoretical reasoning. Cal houn agreed with Lincoln that the sectional crisis could not be resolved without a correct theoretical understanding of the human condition. Calhoun rejected not only the Declaration of Independence, but the idea of political philosophy altogether. Calhoun, Jaffa argues, is a post-Hegelian historicist, who as such represents the dominant trend of modem philosophy over the past two centuries. For that reason, Jaffa can say that the dominant intellectual position in our time is Calhounite. He can also say that the South may have lost the Civil War, but it has won the battle of ideas, insofar as the historicist rejection of the Declara

freedom" tion has replaced Lincoln's vision of a "new birth of based on a recovery of the founding principles (2000, pp. 471, 86). Lincoln now appears as a defender not only of the idea of equality in the Declaration, but of the idea of natural right going back to Aristotle and Socrates. The Civil War, in this light, is the political manifestation of the great quarrel between the philosophical tradition initiated by Socrates and the modem historicist denial that reason can discover unchanging principles of right and wrong. That quarrel was the theme of Strauss's Natural Right and History, and Jaffa's new analysis of the Civil War finds the struggle between natural right and historicism at the heart of that event.

In the Civil War, the question was, Who was going to prevail, Lincoln or Calhoun, natural right or historicism? Jaffa argues that in today's America, and throughout the Western world, we face the same choice that America faced in the years before and after 1860. Which is to prevail, the natural right tradition of Socrates, renewed in the founding and in Lincoln's speeches and deeds? Or the historicism of Calhoun, denying permanent standards of right and wrong, rejecting the capacity of reason to discover the truth, and replacing them with a naive faith in progress that in the end justifies the master-race theory of the Old South, the master-race theory of Nazism (Aryans) and Communism (the Proletariat), and the whole agenda of the modem administrative state, which seeks to provide for our every want, so that we can indulge our every passion? Lincoln was indeed the savior of the principles of the Declaration of Indepen dence. But more important, Jaffa argues, he was the savior of the Great Tradi tion of Socratic rationalism. Lincoln's statesmanship, leading the original idea of America to victory in the Civil War, made possible America's successful resistance, in the twentieth century, to the two most terrible tyrannies the world has ever seen. America, in Jaffa's view, is the last best political embodiment of

Socratic natural right in the modem world.

A a New Birth of Freedom is big, sprawling book. It is hard to see it as a whole. Although its focus is Lincoln and the beginning of the Civil War, it is Review Essays 285 full of what at first appears to be a bewildering variety of tangents. But in fact, the book has a simple logical structure that falls into three parts.

Part 1 is theoretical, and includes two chapters. As we have already noted, chapter 1 is on natural right, chapter 2 on history. Part 2 (chapters 3 through 6), is practical. Here Jaffa presents a brilliant analysis of the political scene in America in the late 1850s and at the beginning of Lincoln's presidency. His point throughout is that the Civil War was about slavery in the broadest sense, that is, not just the chattel slavery that affected blacks, but the Southern denial of the right of a people to govern itself through free speech and elections. Part 3 (the single chapter 7), returns to theory. Jaffa shows that Calhoun, Lincoln's deepest antagonist, agreed with Lincoln that political justice depends on getting the theory right. But in Calhoun's theory necessity, force, and the Founders' inexorable historical process replace the reason, deliberation, and the natural right of every man to freedom under the law of nature. The first chapter, the unifying themes of which are sometimes hard to follow, analyzes several writings of Jefferson and Madison as an inlet to the core mean ing of the founding principles. Jaffa wants to make several controversial points clear. First, the founding principles are without doubt opposed to slavery in all its forms, whether chattel (personal ownership of another human being) or polit ical (mle without the consent of the governed). Second, precisely because these principles are moral, liberty cannot mean that human beings have a right to do whatever they want. Third, because the social compact requires a people who

others" accept the moral limits of the law of nature ("do not harm being its

most urgent command), there is a serious but unavoidable difficulty built into

compact theory. The based on con any government based on the government, but passion and sent, must refrain from violating the rights of the minority; error, ever present in human nature, will ever provoke bitter quarreling among

those who claim to be injured and those who claim that the government is freedom. Jaffa "Whether mea securing the moral conditions of writes, darkly, Jacobinism or with sures limiting the liberties of alleged sympathizers with Communism are subterfuges to suppress freedom or are expressions of legiti

debate" p. 65). When Jeffer mate concern for security is a never ending (2000, accepted he be son won the election of 1800, and the Federalists his victory, resolve quarrels of came convinced that elections were a sufficient means to

power of truth in the this kind. But, as Jaffa notes, "Jefferson's belief in the ideas" against Lincoln's free political marketplace of was mistaken. "The revolt future of the popular election suggests that Jefferson's optimism concerning the justified" (pp. consensus in favor of Union and republicanism had not been 70-71). tragic character of Jaffa makes clear that Jefferson did not understand the order built on the true of political life, including the politics of a political theory there can be no permanent popular politics. Contrary to Jefferson's expectation, 286 Interpretation enlightenment. This may be a criticism of Jefferson, but it is no criticism of Jefferson's theory. It is simply a fact that no theory, however true, can be the permanent basis of any successful political order. This was the challenge facing Lincoln. This is why Lincoln was not boasting when he said that the task facing him, as he assumed the presidency in 1861, was "greater than that which rested Washington" upon (p. 252).

historians' Chapter 2 begins with today's rejection of the principles of the Declaration. Jaffa traces that rejection to the victory of Hegelian and post- Hegelian historicism. Scholars like Carl Becker and their more recent progeny

rights" simply take for granted that the idea of "natural is an eighteenth-century delusion. This rejection leads directly to our current crisis, in which politicians and intellectuals no longer believe in their country's principles. The conse quence is that they are faithful to the United States Constitution only with half a heart, or, in our universities, considerably less than half. Jaffa has written frequently over the years against historicism, but this part of chapter 2 is perhaps his most powerful presentation of that argument. Using historian Carl Becker as a foil, Jaffa relentlessly exposes the unexamined preju dices and assumptions that lie behind Becker's (and the whole scholarly estab lishment's) facile dismissal of the principles of the Declaration. Becker admitted that the natural rights philosophy of the founding was based on "the idea of

standard," nature as a that is, "the idea of an unchanging ground of changing

experience." Following Hegel and a multitude of other nineteenth-century writ ers, Becker rejected nature in the name of history. That is, Becker denied the existence of an unchanging reality and insisted that everything is always chang ing. There is, therefore, according to Becker, no permanent human nature; there are only varieties of historical manifestations of the human. But Jaffa points out that Becker never attempted to prove his thesis, which "would have to take the form of a demonstration that there is no unchanging ground of human experi

ence" (2000, p. 84). The historicism of which Becker is a gentlemanly academic representative was also the basis of the Marxist Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. In

America, where it predominates in the modem academy, a variant of the same doctrine has become the ground of modem conservatism (as Jaffa illustrates through the example of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, pp. 86-90) as well as of modem liberalism (pp. 95-96).

Part 2 of A New Birth plunges us into the politics of the coming of the Civil War. In a masterpiece of political analysis, weaving together themes theoretical and practical, Jaffa shows the deep gulf that had developed in the American soul between those few who remained faithful to the founding principles and the many who did not. In chapter 3 Jaffa analyzes the climate of opinion of the late 1850s through a discussion of speeches and actions of James Buchanan, Jefferson Davis, and Alexander Stepens. All three gave effectual support to the cause of secession, but only Stepens had a fully coherent understanding of what Review Essays - 287 was at stake in the quarrel. He alone stated the fundamental reason for secession: that America's earlier dedication to equality had been an error, and that what was needed was an affirmation that all men are created unequal, and that slavery is the proper condition of the inferior race, as mastery is of the master race. Jaffa emphasizes the gravity of the quarrel by showing that the agenda of the South before the election of 1 860 was extremely aggressive, in three ways. First, the federal government was to create a slave code for the territories. That is, the territories were not to be free to choose whether to have slavery or not, as Douglas had proposed. Instead, the full power of the federal government was to guarantee full legal protection of slavery against any local opposition. Second, the Southern analysis of the crisis focused on Northern criticism of slavery as an evil. They demanded, and Buchanan echoed them, that all criticism of slavery must cease. A federal sedition law was proposed that would have made it a federal crime to criticize slavery. Third, as the culmination of the whole policy, slavery was to be made legal everywhere in America. This was what Lincoln had charged against Douglas, and Douglas himself had claimed that the Bu chanan administration was involved in a national conspiracy to legalize slavery in every state (pp. 171, 318). The reader will note the complete absence of Southern concern for state rights in the period immediately before Lincoln's election. As long as the South had hopes of dominating the federal government, it insisted on a vast expansion of federal power to legitimize and expand the

institution of slavery. Throughout these chapters, Jaffa shows how every word and action of Lin coln were rigorously, almost geometrically, designed to advance his central pur pose: to defend the cause of freedom. In the 1850s, that cause required Lincoln to focus on the theme of resisting the territorial expansion of slavery. In the First Inaugural Address of March 1861, Lincoln's focus shifted to affirming the Constitution, arguing, persuasively, that secession was at bottom an attempt to overturn a democratic election. In his July 4, 1861, Message to Congress, the cause of liberty required him to mute the slavery theme altogether and instead to focus on restoring the Union. The logical connection of these three themes was this: to stop the expansion of slavery, the Republicans had to win control of the federal government; but once the election was won, the South had to be made to accept that result; and that could only be done by using military force

against the states that refused to accept Lincoln as President. The defense of

slavery had spilled over, as Lincoln had predicted earlier, into an assault against constitutional government. At this point the fight for liberty could be conducted as a fight to restore the Union. The cause of Union, less controversial in the North than the opposition to slavery expansion, was indispensable for Lincoln. It enabled him to establish the broadest possible ground for opposition to seces sion, which he needed in order to win the support of as many Northern Demo crats as possible, as well as the loyalty of the border states who had not yet seceded but where slavery was legal. 288 Interpretation

The third and last part of A New Birth is chapter 7, a return to theory, on

Calhoun's political thought. Jaffa's theme is that this greatest theoretical antago nist of Lincoln had developed a powerful proslavery argument grounded in the rejection of Locke and reason. Calhoun's rejection of Jefferson and the founding principles had been a remote consequence of Rousseau's attack on the Enlight

enment. Jaffa argues that Calhoun was a representative of radical modernity,

Darwinist" partly Machiavellian, but mostly Hegelian, Romantic, "Social (be fore Darwin), and Progressive. In Calhoun's thought, historical necessity and the idea of progress replace reason and prudence. Individual rights are replaced

"minorities," by the rights of but only those minorities who are strong enough to force the majority to accord them recognition. (In other words, there are no minority rights for slaves and others who are too weak to fight back.) Jaffa concludes that Calhoun's rejection of reason and consequent deferring to history means in effect that might makes right, and that success replaces nobility, in Calhoun's post-Hegelian understanding of politics. Such an argument, whether intended or not, opens the way for the limitless violence of twentieth-century tyranny, as well as the redefinition of liberty in twentieth-century liberalism.

The bulk and scope of this book make it hard to see Jaffa's overall argument, especially on the political theory of the founding, although he returns to it again and again. Jaffa's constant repetition of the central themes of that theory may create the impression that his argument is straightforward and even noncontro-

versial. It is not.

Jaffa' Some readers may find useful an overview of s account of the founding principles. I will present it as a response to several common arguments against

those principles.

Objection 1: Locke, the Founders, and Lincoln claimed that all men are created equal. But the classics denied this, for the obvious reason that human beings are unequal in many ways. Some of those ways are politically decisive. Aristotle argues, quite explicitly, that some men are by nature slaves, and it is better for them to be ruled for their own good.

Jaffa's answer: The proof that all are created equal is that although many men are better than other men at the tasks of ruling, it is also true that "all men

nature." have been endowed . . . with a nonangelic That is, "the nature of rulers

same" and the nature of the ruled is one and the (p. 69). Of course, strictly speaking, the natures of men are not the same. The Founders admitted the reality of great inequality among men, but they denied that human wisdom and virtue

can be depended upon when the best men are given absolute power over other

men. Men are never perfectly wise, nor are they ever free from self-interest, so the nature of rulers and ruled is the same in the crucial respect. To illustrate this point, Americans in the founding era frequently compared human to divine Review Essays 289 rule, which they cheerfully admitted was absolute monarchy without the consent of the governed. The reason that the rule of God was acceptable was that He, "being possessed of infinite wisdom, goodness, and rectitude, is alone fit to

power" possess unlimited (statement of the citizens of Maiden, Massachusetts, May 27, 1776, in Jaffa, 2000, p. 122). Finally, even if we admit that there is some tiny number of men who are sufficiently godlike that they could be trusted with absolute power without consent, it would still not establish a politically relevant claim. For "Plato's Republic is imaginary precisely because, according to Plato himself, philosophers do not wish to rule, and anyone wishing to rule is not a philosopher. Anyone who asserts a right to rule on the basis of his claim to wisdom is accordingly condemned in advance as a charlatan by philosophy itself. . . . Philosopher-kings are not possible, and genuine philosophers will al

law" ways prefer a regime of equality under the (p. 339). Jaffa is saying that the classical argument for government without consent is refuted by the classics themselves, leaving us with the conclusion that the esoteric teaching, as it were, of the classics is that all men are created equal! I believe that this conclusion, while highly paradoxical, is defensible. Strauss in fact suggests something simi lar in the passage from Liberalism quoted earlier.

' Objection 2. The Founders doctrine of rights has no substantial doctrine of

' duties. The Founders theory depends on the idea of a state of nature, which by definition is a state in which moral obligation does not exist. Jaffa's answer: This is a gross misunderstanding of the theory of the found ing. "Jefferson's doctrine, which is the American doctrine in its purest form, is

law" a doctrine of natural rights under natural (p. 26). For Jefferson the laws of nature, which prescribe what we must do and not do, are prior to the rights of

nature" nature: as Jefferson wrote, "rights are derived from the laws of (Sum mary View, 111A, in Jaffa, 2000, p. 25). These laws teach us that each person owns himself, and no one may rightfully take away another person's life, liberty, or property except in defense of his own. Jaffa writes, commenting on the differ Founders' ence between today's liberalism and the position:

"bourgeois" Atheistic nihilism transforms the and highly moral individualism of the American Revolution into something entirely different. The older individualism was based on the idea of unalienable rights endowed by man's Creator. Such rights were not unconditional. They were to be exercised only in accordance with the laws of nature and of nature's God, which were moral laws. Rights and duties were in a re ciprocal relationship. But the nature revealed by modern science the unconditional basis of the belief in Progress was that of mindless matter, a source of power to

"rights" be commanded, not a source of morality to be obeyed. From here on,

would be understood as the unconditional empowerment of the individual to do as

he pleased. Self-realization became the code word for the new morality. The human

self, however, was no longer understood to be made in the image of God, since God was dead. Self-realization was in fact only the correlate of the new atheism. As 290 Interpretation

there could no longer be any distinction between man and God a distinction as fundamental to the Declaration of Independence as it was to the Bible there could

be no distinction between base and noble desires. All desires were created equal, since they were all equally the desires of that highest of all authorities, the self-creat ing self. Each human being was to be his own God, obeying only those restrictions that were enforced upon him by the fact that he was not yet himself the universal ty rant. In time however Science would enable everyone to act as if he was the univer

sal tyrant. ... The essence of the new Liberalism was to make each human being, as far as possible, a universal tyrant within his own world, commanding all the plea sures possible in that world, and emancipated from everything except those limits upon his power that Science had not yet conquered. Thus would the return to a Gar

den of Eden but one in which there would be no forbidden fruit be accom plished. (P. 95)

I have quoted this at length to show how far, in Jaffa's mind, the thought of the founding is from that of modem liberalism. Jaffa is fond of quoting Jefferson's law." saying that the people "are inherently independent of all but moral The natural right to liberty is not a right to be immoral. Jaffa is also fond of Wash ington's parallel statement, in his First Inaugural, that "there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advan tage; between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and

prosperity" the solid rewards of public (p. 10).

Jaffa addresses the state of nature question head on in his commentary on Calhoun. That doctrine, Jaffa argues, is not meant to be a claim about the history of primitive man. It is therefore not about premoral or prerational man. "What

hypothetical," man is by nature, or in the state of nature, is in no way Jaffa writes. "The state of nature is then an inference from what we see with our own

eyes. . .. The state of nature was nothing other than the conceptual form of the legitimate" understanding of what made government (p. 413). It is the state in which every man lives when he reaches the age of reason and consent. When he ceases to be a child, he must then decide whether to exercise "a right, which nature has given all men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall happiness" seem most likely to promote public (Jefferson, Summary View, in Jaffa, 2000, p. 9). In short, the state of nature is the condition of man outside of government, in which he has full use of his reason, and is therefore fully law." bound by the law of nature, which Jefferson calls the "moral

Objection 3. The doctrine of the founding is antireligious or indifferent to God. The founding was based on the Enlightenment, which saw religion either as superfluous or as the enemy of human freedom. Founders' Jaffa's answer: It is true that the doctrine requires the separation Review Essays 291 of church and state, although not in the extreme sense in which liberals today understand that phrase. If government is to be guided by the law of nature, and that law says nothing about revealed religion, then it follows that it would be an injury to molest anyone for his supposedly incorrect mode of worship. The doctrine of compact and limited government was developed in part as a response to the religious quarrels that dominated British history in the centuries leading up to the American Revolution. By excluding coercive control over religious orthodoxy from the legitimate scope of government, the adherents of compact theory hoped to solve a problem that had plagued European politics since Ro man times. The doctrine did succeed in driving religious persecution out of Founders' American politics. The principle of religious liberty enabled men of different religions to live together in civic harmony: "No head of state before

1790," President Washington in Jaffa writes, "had ever addressed Jews as equal fellow citizens"(p. 260). The doctrine of toleration might be thought to lead to, or flow from, a denial of the divine. But Jaffa emphatically denies this. There is a theology of the founding, not one that is to be enforced by punishment of unbelievers, but cer tainly one that government has every right and duty to support by its own words. "The doctrine of natural law and natural rights enshrined in the Declaration is a

doctrine of natural and divine right. ... It cannot be emphasized too often that the doctrine of the Declaration requires a people who can appeal truthfully and sincerely to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of their intentions. According to Jefferson and Lincoln, failure to respect the rights of others may disqualify one for the protection of one's own rights and expose one to the

source" wrath of the God who is their (pp. 122-23). Jaffa does not even attempt to demonstrate the truth of this claim. His argument, following Jefferson, is that the natural rights doctrine will only be properly held and understood by a people who believe in a God who favors liberty and justice over slavery and injustice. The political theology of the South, which is a major theme of Jaffa's book, relied on a reading of the Bible that justified slavery as a matter of divine right (God's supposed condemnation of Noah's son Ham and his descendants to permanent slavery). Such a theology is incompatible with the principles of the founding, for it denies the fundamental principle of a free society: all men

are created equal. Perhaps Jaffa's strongest argument in support of the compact theory of the founding is to be found in his analysis, at the end of chapter 2, of Christianity and politics. "Because God or the gods were held to be the ultimate source of all

law in the ancient world, the question of political obligation, as we understand it,

arose" never (p. 138). Whatever the form of government, the gods would be there to support it and demand obedience to the law. This changes with Rome's

destruction of the world of the polis. Now one universal empire replaces the

multitude of cities, and the idea of one God replacing the multitude of pagan deities follows almost naturally. This was the situation at the time of the birth 292 Interpretation

of Christianity. Jesus said, "Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Cae

God's." sar's, and to God the things that are This statement, Jaffa writes,

state." "placed the authority of Jesus behind the separation of church and But it took a long time. "Although Jesus himself, in his response to the Pharisees, clearly distinguishes God's authority from Caesar's, we find his disciples identi

fying the two. . . [In their biblical Epistles,] Paul and Peter do not envisage the least participation in government by the governed, or anything resembling the rule of law. We find, therefore, the complete depreciation of the political as a life" continuing concern of human (pp. 144-45). Given this state of things, the worth of republican government could only be reestablished through a new doc trine of divine right, one that is universal like Christianity, but which teaches that all men are created equal. That was the doctrine of the founding. This view, in turn, became a widely accepted interpretation of the Bible: "That the equality in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal

political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself (p. 151). Jaffa argues that the theory of the founding was a doctrine of divine right the divine right of the people to form their own government. This doctrine was

developed as a means to restore an appropriate latitude for prudent statesman ship in a world where Christian politics had created great disorder: "When church officials seek office, or when offices depend upon church officials, both state and church are corrupted. The purity of religion is defiled and the purpose

perverted" of government is (p. 149). Christianity had created the problem, but "God" Christianity had also pointed to the solution: the separation of from "Cae

sar," church from state. To be effective, that separation had to be understood, not as a rejection of Christianity, but as its fulfillment. For this reason, the preachers of the American Revolution, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish, fully supported the principles of the founding. The Reverend Samuel Cooper of Mas sachusetts, in an important address published by the legislature of that state, spoke as the great majority of Americans of all religions thought:

We want not, indeed, a special revelation from heaven to teach us that men are bom

equal and free. ... These are the plain dictates of that reason and common sense with which the common parent of men has informed the human bosom. It is, how ever, a satisfaction to observe such everlasting maxims of equity confirmed, and im pressed upon the consciences of men, by the instructions, precepts, and examples given us in the sacred oracles; one internal mark of their divine original, and that they come from him "who hath made of one blood all nations to dwell upon the

earth" face of the [Acts 17:26], whose authority sanctifies only those governments that instead of oppressing any part of his family, vindicate the oppressed, and re strain and punish the oppressor. (In Jaffa, 2000, pp. 370-7 1 )

Once that change in the self-understanding of Christianity had occurred, as it had by the time of the American Revolution, Lincoln could make full use of Christian texts and imagery in his defense of liberty (p. 258). At the end of the Review Essays - 293

First Inaugural, and more emphatically in the Second, Jaffa writes, "The Ameri can people are a religious people, whose every thought and action presuppose a

world" God who rules the (p. 349).

Objection 4. The theory of the founding is Lockean, and as such it leads to the degradation of man. It lowers the goals ofpolitical life from virtue (as the classics taught) to mere preservation (as Locke taught). Jaffa's answer: First, the religious dimension of the founding, as well as its doctrine of toleration, elevate political life, paradoxically, by removing from it a leading source of its degradation, namely, torments and persecution arising

one' from aristocratic pride and conviction of s own sanctity. Second, the Found

ers' doctrine elevates politics by announcing a sacred cause, the cause of liberty, which elicits the noble virtues of statesmanship and citizenship. Third, the com pact theory, and the politics based on it, challenge men to live up to its moral demands, which require service to others, not to lower themselves to self-indul gence. Money and commerce are not the highest thing in America, because these things are means to safety and happiness. The latter require virtue and honor.

Those who complain that the Founders reduce life to mere preservation ne glect what the Founders actually say. The purpose of politics, as the Declaration happiness." says, is "safety and These, Jaffa writes, "are the alpha and omega life." of political That is, "liberty and property come to sight as means to the preservation of life, but their enduring worth is in the service, not of mere life, but of the good or happy life. The natural wants of man from which society springs are not random but ordered. And it is the natural order of these wants,

directed toward their corresponding natural ends, that constitute the architectonic

understood" principles of a society arising out of compact, properly (p. 50). The lowness of the immediate purpose of government (security of life, lib service of the high. erty, property) should not be misunderstood. It is in the Jaffa writes:

the law makes it possible for us to have oth By preventing us from injuring others, of others and in not oth ers as friends. In acting consistently with the rights injuring are enabled to be friends of ers, we are habituated to virtue. By becoming good, we indispensable of the means to happi the good, and having good friends is the most

ness. Although surrounded others The tyrant, subjecting others, cannot be a friend. by without life is not who pretend to be his friend, he is without friends. But friends, our well we un worth living. Once we understand this, upon which being depends, against our derstand our interest in the rule of law. We understand as well why it is prevent tyrants from interest to become tyrants as why it is in our interest to ruling is the argument of the us. That is the argument of Plato as well as of Aristotle. It American Revolution, of the Declaration of Independence, of the Gettysburg ad dress. Yet it is an argument held in almost no esteem today. (Pp. 82-83) 294 Interpretation

' Objection 5. The Founders doctrine tries to do away with the need for rea son in political life. Necessity the immediate necessities of life, that do not allow us the luxury of quarreling over the good life replaces reason as the ground ofpolitics. Jaffa makes almost the opposite argument. In his discussion of Calhoun, Jaffa shows that it was he who truly did believe that necessity, the historical process, leading to the growth of true liberty, was the only means by which the good could be obtained. The Founders and Lincoln all believed that reason discovers the true principles of justice, and prudence determines the means by which society should be ordered in accord with those principles (pp. 414, 427, 432, 451). This argument presupposes that reason, merely by observing and thinking about the human condition, really is capable of discovering truth. Jefferson's Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom begins with the statement, "Almighty God free," hath created the mind and Jaffa argues that that assertion is the ground of the whole doctrine of the founding (pp. 42, 120). The truth that all men are equal is "an assertion at once of a necessity and of a freedom inherent in reason and nature. It implies a freedom in the mind to apprehend truth, and a necessity in nature, a necessity external to the mind, that determines what the truth is. In

truth" the last analysis, freedom is the ability to be determined by the (p. 71). Founders' Calhoun rejects the reason and nature. He trusts in necessity because he believes in history and progress. Reason is now understood, as in Hegel, to emerge out of a deterministic historical process, not a faculty of man that en ables him to see things as they are.

Founders' Objection 6. The doctrine is too dogmatic. Its insistence on equal rights for all denies the necessary flexibility for statesmanship and prudence. It was against this doctrinalism that Burke and his successors understandably revolted.

Jaffa's answer: Lincoln's whole action against slavery, starting in 1854, is one long refutation of this claim. The doctrine of the founding gives us, like the classical teaching on the best regime, only the goal to be strived for. The United States Constitution itself, in which slavery had to be tolerated as a necessary evil, shows that the principles did not, and should not, lead automatically to a dogmatically determined outcome. Jaffa writes, "Although the rights of man exist wherever man exists, the existence of a people sufficiently enlightened, and having the courage and the

rare" means to act on them, may be (p. 123). The necessity that a people be a

people," "good one that accepts the moral and divine law stated in the Declara means that just government tion, by consent will probably always be the excep tion rather than the rule in human affairs. The best regime of the founding, and the best regime of the classics, are both elusive, although not impossible. Pru dence is indispensable in this state of affairs, to achieve the closest approxima tion to perfect justice available in the circumstances. Review Essays 295

There is one respect in which Jaffa does not hesitate to criticize the Founders, or at least Jefferson. That is, as we have already noted, his optimism, his En

eyes," lightenment faith that reason would prevail if only the people hear it. "All

man" Jefferson wrote, "are opened, or opening, to the rights of (quoted on p.

111). Lincoln knew better. The dark and tragic vision of the Second Inaugural brings that out forcefully. For Lincoln, the principles of the founding are true, but they will always be challenged by their enemies, unreason and injustice. There is no escape from human ills. Partisanship can never be eliminated from political life, no matter how well a political regime is founded. The best that can be hoped for is some approximation of the best regime by a rare coincidence

people," of a "good prudent statesmanship, and good fortune. One of Jaffa's distinctive themes in A New Birth is his running comparison of the theory of the founding with Christianity. The modem doctrine of social compact had been invented, in part, to solve the problem of religious persecution that plagued Christendom throughout its history. That problem seemed to have been solved by America. But the quarrel leading to the Civil War, and the terrible bloodletting that followed, tell the story of religious warfare renewed. I "religious" say because the doctrine of the Declaration, as Jaffa stresses, is one of divine right, and the disagreement over slavery was partly based on a differ ent reading of the Bible. Jaffa writes, "The doctrines of the Declaration had, in this crisis, become the cause of division, in much the same way that Christian Europe" doctrine had been the cause of division in the religious wars of (p.

352). Lincoln did everything he could, short of adandoning the sacred cause of liberty, when he assumed the presidency, to calm Southern fears and restore the

so," union. He failed. "And writes Jaffa, "a different text proved prophetic for the event: 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have come not to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and daughter against her mother, and daughter in law against her mother in law;

household.' came" and a man's foes will be those of his own And so the war

principles of the (p. 355, quoting Matthew 10:34-36). Jaffa is saying that the Declaration, no less than of Christianity, were then, and always will be, the

nature" source of hatred and warfare among men. The "better angels of our of great passion. The task of exist, but they too often fall silent in moments principles justice will always be hated statesmanship is coeval with man. The of whose imagi by those who believe that they will profit by injustice, or by those or nations have been deluded through the manipulations of sophists dema

gogues.

hard," "Noble things are and a republican government that protects the rights

right," "Divine as Locke of all is among the hardest of noble things. observed,

"natural" expression the eternal "you is more than freedom. It is an of serpent,

eat," selfishness. Freedom is the product of work, I and the doctrine of human Birth shows the difficulty, and the art and statesmanship at its highest. A New

nobility, of the statesmanship of freedom. 296 Interpretation

REFERENCES

Heidegger, Martin. Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953. Jaffa, Harry V. Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. 1959. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. Strauss, Leo. The City and Man. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. Liberalism Ancient and Modern. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Persecution and the Art of Writing. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1952. What is Political Philosophy? Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959. fljjfarati

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Beginning with a survey ofIslamic philosophy and a discussion of its historical background, Mahdi considers the interrelated spheres of philosophy, political thought, theology, and jurisprudence of the time. He then turns to

city," Alfarabi's concept of "the virtuous and concludes with an in-depth analysis of the trilogy Philosophy ofPlato andAristotle.

"This is the magisterial work ofan extraordinary scholar. In Mahdi's presentation, Alfarabi becomes one ofthe greatest minds ofthe Middle Ages, whose original ideas on philosophy and religion, on theology and jurispru discussions."- dence, are relevant to contemporary Joel L. Kraemer

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