Leo Strauss as Poet (A True Story)
Why would the story have been left untold? Because it was absurd? Or…because it did not fit the deep-seated expectations, the lingering prejudices of our times?
The Straussian trademark is exotericism, the overt contrary of esotericism. Leo Strauss (re)discovered exotericism as the practice of the philosophers of ages bygone to hide their messages between the lines of their public works. But is this not what poets have always been up to? Does poetry not speak in riddles? Perhaps, but poets are not usually expected to know what they are talking about. The philosopher is. It makes sense to deduce that for Strauss the philosopher is a poet who knows precisely what he is getting at, the message he is conveying “between the lines”. Now, it just so happens that Strauss has been generally read to suggest that, to speak in blunt terms, there is no message in the bottle, or that the secret of philosophers is that there is no intelligible truth, no beauty, no mecca, no meaningful divine mystery to be discovered beyond the façade of life, beyond “the opinions” of our societies. Strauss’s model-philosophers would then be poets who, upon having investigated poetry, reach the conclusion that, to speak with Nietzsche, God is dead.
Yet modern philosophers spilled the beans, imprudently announcing to the whole world that God is dead. Hence the Straussian peculiar predicament: he seeks to conceal what has been already ubiquitously flaunted. Why bother? Apparently because the Straussian identifies his raison d’être with old philosophy’s practice of concealment. To speak “tongue-in-cheek” would be a virtue, a very “manly” one for some (cf. Mansfield), that makes life worth living.
How is the Strauss usually represented not a sophist in the usual sense of the term? Is he not someone swearing by an abysmal rift between the private and the public, between soul and body? Is Strauss teaching us that, where Athens stands to privacy as Jerusalem stands to public life, in public the Athenian ought to pretend to be a Hebrew, with the understanding that today’s Athenian is a Straussian in a neo-Christian or democratic world, reminiscent of a Marrano living in fourteenth century Spain?
Surely Strauss’s philosophical heroes did not assimilate to public opinion, or to the public certainties of any times; surely, they stood for the primacy of intimacy over all exteriorities, of soul over body. But is this not tantamount to stating that, in practical terms, Strauss was a good Christian living in a naturally pagan world? Yet, does the good Christian not admit that Christian intimacy is none other than the true private life of all men? Is man compelled, then, to conceal his soul upon entering the public sphere, the agora, the polis? Is the City founded by way of betraying the human soul? Is politics essentially violent with respect to human nature? In short, is human nature apolitical? Does the primacy of privacy over convention entail that man is asocial by nature?
Do the formal categories of our ordinary experience—not least of them, those of time and space—break down as we enter into the intimacy of the life of the mind, into the private realm of “pure reason”? Why, is the medieval divine perfecta ratio to be reduced to Kant’s reine Vernunft? Is the perfection of reason equivalent to reason’s purity within a visibly imperfect world? Is the “private life” to be understood in (proto-)Romantic terms as the locus of psychological (“conceptual”) dynamics underlying the “outer” or conventional structure of experience? Is the conceptualist heir of Kantian formalism the necessary complement to sociology?
The most striking discrepancy between the Bible’s divine reason and its Kantian “transcendental” variant pertains to telos or “proper function”: in the former case, there is no order outside of reason’s own activity; in the latter case, reason’s own activity presupposes an order understood as framework, structure, or formal-categorical schema. In the former case, life is ultimately the life of reason, of a rational mind, a demiurgic mind; in the latter case, reason is ultimately limited by inexplicable blinders, compelled thereby to abide by mechanically imposed restrictions, if only under the pretext of serving as humble guarantor for a supra-rational or non-rational sublime divinity (the noumenal).
Today’s dominant conception of the divine is bound to a Kantian conception of reason ostensibly indifferent to the distinction between human and divine reason, as between “this world” and “the Beyond” (transcendence proper). That classical distinction entailed recognition that God’s reason perfects our own, or that our reason’s limitations are relative to our body, rather than being essential to reason, as if reason were inherently imperfect. Hence the relative importance of morality in classical antiquity and, if only to a lesser degree, in the Middle Ages: in both cases, “this world” presupposes another world, a perfect world free from the impediments we are all too familiar with as mortals.[1] The “other” world would be a world of pure spirit, of souls, or more properly speaking, of intellects, minds free from any bodily compulsion and thus from any need for a will (velle), insofar as the will is an authoritative determination of desire (proper course/tending of mind/thought) aimed at ordering what begs to be ordered, in the light of a prior, prototypical order, namely the eternal order of mind itself (cf. Plato’s Timaeus). In this significant respect, the Bible agrees with Plato: both are open, in their respective manner, to an eternal, mysterious order presupposed by a revealed, “outward” order. Whence the classical—both biblical and philosophical—primacy of the Good over all evil, where evil cannot prevail over the Good, even though evil lingers eternally as a possibility.
Once we discard, or at the very least marginalize, the otherworldly from the gravitational center of our moral life, we cannot help but remain trapped on the battlefield of “individual” and “collective” interests. There, the “indivisible” ego of early modern rationalism challenges and is challenged by the demands of a (worldly, secular) Open or “Great Society” (John Dewey) conceived as “higher good,” if not as summum bonum. Yet, the fight is fixed and its outcome is known from the outset: the ego must bow; as Icarus, it must fall before the rise of a new sun, a new order, a New Reign in which all shall embrace death, the death of the ego, as their own fate. At the battle’s end, the freedom extolled by early modernity is exposed as an intolerable egoism yielding unconditionally to mechanically imparted “security”. At the pinnacle of History, we shall all know safety, our new universal salus, salvation as an end in itself.
The “new salvation” comes at a dire price, namely the eradication of all intimacy, now replaced by “violence in private,” or the daily suppression, even raping of natural desire, its systematic crippling and conversion into compulsion, or craving. The natural desire of man is to be expelled, however, so that, over the ashes of the love of a paternal God, North Star of classical civilization, a new love may rise: amor fati. Treading in Nietzsche’s footsteps, we are to embrace “the death of the God-Father” as a fate deserving to be embraced.
The compulsive “love of a fatherless fate”—full realization of a “groundless freedom” and our supposed consummate destiny— cannot but signal a crisis of civilization.[2] We embrace the death of the Father as sign of the Triumph of our own Will, not realizing that amor fati points directly to a hell in which freedom is the foremost curse (in the New Society our rootless “fake” freedom is exposed as foremost evil). Hence the content of the final chapter of modernity’s unfolding; on its last page, freedom is shunned in favor of salvation offered by the foremost manifestation of The Death of God: technology. The triumph of a will “beyond good and evil” turns out to be the triumph of androids over all humanity.
As we exit modernity’s “History,” we enter into a Technoworld or “Metaverse” in which all “natural” compulsions are to be redeemed or “saved” by being sublimated into an Open Network of information-exchanges—the New Schools—framed and channeled by machines, while human bodies vegetate strictly as fuel for machines and their engineering. For the products of technology are mere baits that our bodies are fed on the way to being lured into feeding technology itself and its development. In the technocratic marketplace we do not merely purchase merchandise; we are the merchandise in the act of paying the machinery of technological production with our own bodies, not so as to acquire anything useful to them, but so as to “transubstantiate” our bodies into virtual avatars, digital “ghosts” of our own bodies: so that, to paraphrase Saint Paul in grotesque terms, “not I live, but my digital avatar lives in and off of me”. We thus pay for entry into the Technoworld with our own bodies, our own natural, if only repressed avatars.
Now, long ago, Dante Alighieri warned us about the compulsion of bodies to sell themselves to vice for the sake of securing a place into a hellish underworld. Dante’s Inferno is a funnel-shaped word in which the overarching, reigning principle is determination and in which all indetermination—the very salt of the poetic life—is banished as an evil. Bodies would be systematically alienated from soul, or life, in the respect that souls would lose themselves systematically in their physical projections.[3] Dante’s Inferno is an “inverted” world in which good is evil and evil is good; in which souls die in bodies endlessly, with the understanding that bodies can no longer die back into souls. A world of obsessions governed mechanically by demons signaling souls’ own self-determinations; as in the case of Dante’s Minos, who merely signals the degree to which souls have consigned themselves to hell. But what are souls after, upon entering hell? They are after the inverted-God, the monstrous Beelzebub, consummate determination of life. And so, souls are churned, trapped in vicious circles according to the degree to which the souls have abandoned “the upright way” (diritta via) natural to the human being as such. There are more superficial modes of abandonment and ever deeper ones, until we reach the satanic “point” in which the natural path of the human to the divine is terminally betrayed and replaced with a final stalemate—the hideous, inert passage through which Dante’s poetry rises “to see [its] stars anew”. For not even Satan can prevent the poet from taking advantage of the present.
What representation is more fitting than Dante’s Inferno for the technological hell known as Internet? As in the case of Dante’s precursor, the Internet hosts a panoply of alternative trappings for the mind, positioned in accordance with the dictates of a single, guiding principle of determination—a body that, parroting an Aristotelian adagio, “bodies itself”: a determination determining itself by rejecting the body’s natural desire for soul, by functioning as supreme impostor of life. As in the case of Dante’s Inferno, our Internet can host “exceptions” to an overarching demonic “monetizing” demand; yet these wholesome exceptions are tolerated merely as harmless glitches buried in the smoke of satanic gibberish, under tide waves of totalizing incongruous decrees. Dante’s Hell, as the Internet, is not set up for us; we are supposed to be there for it. The “inverted world” is a sophistic web (Plato), a trap, a formidable setup in which we are the preys.
Inferno has a telos, but it empties itself into a dead-end that strangles all meaning; it has a systematic character, but its system collapses into its monolithic gravitational center; it is hierarchical, but at its “sacred” summit stands the vilest of monstrosities, a stale mockery of all ascents. The proper order of things has been overturned: absurdity has replaced mystery at the beat of a diabolical clock ticking mercilessly as a universal imperative, marking the responsibility of all to conform to Satan’s machine.
In Inferno, then, a diabolical machine replaces, or pretends to replace a divine mind: traditional, poetic morality rooted in the latter is converted into a new “scientific” (sophistic) morality rooted in the former.[4] Time is an inexorable despot centered upon satanic closure to any poetic journey to the eternal. Poetic openness to what escapes the demands of the infernal machine is anathema.
The “center” of our world has been obscured (Inferno 1.1-2), appearing no longer as a pivot of conversion of the material (silva as the Greek hyle) into the divine, but as sign of the ineluctability of vicious circularity, of the collapse of all bodies under the weight of a colossal fraud. Dante’s “center” is at once the pivot, or means (mezzo) of our moral life, suggesting that time is to be understood, not mechanistically as a progressive march, but poetically, as hinge of moral integration of “matter” into “spirit,” of the inanimate into the animate, not, to be sure, in the sense that life is created out of the inanimate (Frankenstein’s dream), but in the sense that the inanimate is redeemed, even resurrected in an animate context.[5]
What is “time,” then, in Dante’s Comedy? It is the “now” (Aristotle’s nun) as pivot of moral life—the living point through which the past and the future can convert into eternity.[6] Dante’s is a classical understanding of time alien to our ordinary linguistic habits and expectations. By way of unsettling those expectations, let us think through “Time” (Tempus), a poem from the Latin Phaedrus’s Aesop’s Fables, as pointing us back to Dante’s long-obscured understanding:
Flying as a bird, suspended on a blade,
bald, hirsute the face, naked body
(if occupying it, hold onto it; once elapsed,
Jove himself cannot retake it),
It signifies the fleeting opportunity of things.
And so that no sluggish delay
would impede accomplishment,
the ancients feigned such an effigy of Time.
Cursu volucri, pendens in novacula,
Calvus, comosa fronte, nudo corpore,
(Quem si occuparis, teneas; elapsum semel
Non ipse possit Iuppiter reprehendere),
Occasionem rerum significat brevem.
Effectus impediret ne segnis mora,
Finxere antiqui talem effigiem Temporis
Occasionem rerum significat brevem. What does the “effigy” called Time, mean? What does “Time” as figure of speech refer to? It refers to “the fleeting opportunity of things”. What are “things” present for? They are there for us to accomplish our task, our effectus. Now, that task is our own alone; not even Jove can dispense us with the challenge of facing it. But “time” is the place we occupy, the now as place, as place for achievement. We are not “in time,” in the modern sense whereby we would be unwittingly lost in History, “thrown into the World” (Heidegger), as in a material flux. We are in time in the sense that we occupy a moral place, a “moment” of choice, the “pivot” (Dante’s mezzo) of our life: we “occupy” the present. Outside of this “moment,” our own place is lost and so are we. For we find ourselves only in that place which is natural to us, which is ours “by nature”. Outside of the “now”—of “time” as the present moment, the time of moral choice—we are lost. In the “point” of our salvation (the point where I find myself anew—Inferno 1.2), however, we are confronted with a choice: to fall back into “time” (to respond to our calling, even our divine calling), or to rise out of it—to take advantage of it, to convert the effigy of things into things themselves.
The effigy of things is to be understood in the context of the fullness of things. Likewise, “time” is to be understood in the context of the poetic telos of man, of the “hunter gatherer” of “matter,” the divine mystery of which the poet discovers in the mirror of poetry. For Phaedrus, poetry does not belong to time; it is time, the constitutionally empty, immaculate now, that belongs to the poet, or to all human beings to the extent that they respond to their natural poetic calling. We occupy the present insofar as we disclose the present through our own presence. Being present—being there—we disclose the present as the place of poetry, of moral life. It would then be absurd to speak of poetry “in time,” and even more absurd for our classics to conceive of man “in History,” as we have been raised, nay trained, to do. Were our classics to consider our “History,” they would regard it in a poetic context, as a certain product of poetry, among others, and as such, as questionable and certainly as surpassable by man as man. By the same token, our classics would not admit the prospect of integrating poetry in History, asking us rather to seek the relevance of our “History” for poetry.
But did our classics not speak of History, or historia? The Greco-Latin term simply means, chronicle, or account, this being one kind of story, or mythos—a “myth”. Is there no essential difference between a historia and mythos? None at all, keeping in mind that a “history” is a subspecies of “story” or mythos (never do our classics speak of history without predicates), even where we speak with medieval Christians of “the” true, sacred story of all things under the sun or in the light of 1. an untold story in the mind of God, no less than of 2. a vulgar story).[7] Myth, on the other hand, is not to be understood as mere myth, or as false. Our classics would reject entirely the postmodern collapse of all stories into a nebulous synthesis of true and false.[8] For our classics, a historia is a mythos written by someone discernable, someone vouching for the story’s integrity. This does not make the “history,” in principle, any more “scientific” than any mythos. The reliable “history” is a story possessing moral integrity, a story someone can be held accountable for; a story that is as credible as its author is honorable. Ultimately, the (hi)story (“his-story,” as it were) has something humanly significant to teach us, a moral or a moral lesson. So, a history is a good story, a good mythos, a story that can guide us, even when the story is overtly about plants and various animals (as in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia). Its veracity will not depend upon any abstract or symbolic “method,” but upon the virtue of its writer. And the story will be true in the respect that it will be able to point the reader to truth; able to enlighten the reader to some truth or other about his world (mundus).
Accordingly, in his Poetics, Aristotle would state that, “while [a history] speaks of things as having came to be [τὰ γενόμενα],” poetry speaks of “what something would be like if it came into being” (τῷ τὸν μὲν τὰ γενόμενα λέγειν, τὸν δὲ οἷα ἂν γένοιτο). And “for that, poetry is more philosophical and important than a history; for indeed poetry speaks more about what is universal, whereas a history speaks more about what relates to the particular” (διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει); and this is what Aristotle says having indicated that poetry speaks of “what something would be like if it came into being and of things that can come into being, either with likelihood, or with necessity” (οἷα ἂν γένοιτο καὶ τὰ δυνατὰ κατὰ τὸ εἰκὸς ἢ τὸ ἀναγκαῖον; 1451a-1451b).[9]
While Aristotle does not distinguish between a history and a story, he does help us see that there is no sense in considering a “history” as more “scientific” than a “story” on the grounds that the latter would (supposedly) be more poetic. Aristotle’s “histories” could acquire a “scientific” (read, philosophical) character only insofar as they become more, not less poetic.[10] Thus, while it would make no sense to Aristotle to speak of a perfectly true history, the Peripatetic could readily speak of a best history among others, with the understanding that the best would be the one that helps us the most awaken to the truth (or true nature) of things, which for Aristotle is, of course, animate (ultimately a “particular” possessing “universal” significance).
Are we, however, to understand truth, or that which renders stories true to some extent or other, as living or as inanimate? Is the ground of our own understanding or awakening (the one represented by Archimedes’ “Eureka!”) subhuman, or superhuman? Is man to be understood in terms of what is higher than him, or in terms of what is beneath him?
Strauss’s formal stance is unambiguous; standing in the company of his ancient Platonist precursors, he swears by the former alternative: to read man in terms of the subhuman is not merely absurd, for it is to invite the rise of a political regime mirroring hypothesized mechanisms supposedly underpinning the constitution of life. If nature is a machine, then the political art imitating nature will function as a machine, too. Which is to say that law will be construed as a mechanical imposition on the supposed biological mechanisms otherwise dominating the human being. Law would be needed lest the biological mechanisms make politics impossible. Law, in other words, would be called for by the need to keep politics and man safe from each other. But is this not what Strauss is teaching when suggesting that nature and society, or truth and virtue are to be kept at some distance from each other?
Yet, is Strauss really advocating this Machiavellian lesson? Did the Strauss invoking classical “natural right” as presupposed by all “positive right,” not warn us against Rousseau’s own bowing to the modern view that truth and virtue are incommensurate, which is to say that it is categorically impossible for there to be a Philosopher King, a man incarnating “positively” what is right “by nature”? If man is by nature pre-political; if human nature is to be finally understood independently of human ends or “natural ideals,” so that the only ends we would have, would be merely contingent “purposes” we attribute (whether freely or not, whether to ourselves, to others, or to “nature”);[11] then the philosophical lover of wisdom—of communion with truth—must constitute a dire threat to political ideals, including virtue. But does Strauss not emphasize the dangerous, even destructive effects of truth in politics? Does he not accept the political need for “noble lies,” including the lie of a nobility that is at once true/natural and politically significant? Does Strauss not teach us that the philosopher’s truth undermines political order, so that truth has no place in civil society unless truth is coated with a sugar making truth palatable even to authoritative haters of truth? The only answer logically compatible with Strauss’s own public exposure of the views in question is negative. Strauss would then not be teaching that man is by nature apolitical, or that the human being as such is to take his bearings from the subhuman (subconscious, unconscious passions, biological impulses or forces, etc.); rather, Strauss would be teaching that given the almost inevitable corruption of politics, truth becomes a widely perceived threat to political order. This is precisely what we find in the case of Socrates who is perceived by most of his contemporary compatriots as a corruptor of Athens, whereas in reality, Socrates is and presents himself as a corrector of Athens, a man who helped Athenians improve as both human beings and citizens. In this sense, Socrates would invite a coincidentia of knowledge and virtue, where knowledge of truth is fully compatible and indeed entails the political exercise of virtue. In other words, to paraphrase the concluding paragraph of Vico’s Principi di Scienza Nuova (1744), there would be no knowledge of truth outside of virtuous life, and so no science outside of poetry, and thus no unethical metaphysics, no unjust philosophy. Unjust philosophy would have to be denounced as unphilosophical, or as being no philosophy at all. Much as Plato had denounced the vulgar poets of his age, so should we denounce materialist philosophers as false philosophers, if only in the act of allowing them to rectify their stance, whether by pretending to be Platonists, or by rising through sincere conversion to the divine-like, or heroic heights of Platonism.
Yet, what does Socrates really mean when speaking of the identity or complete overlap of virtue and truth? Does he not thereby intend to correct our general views about both truth and virtue? Does he not invite us to question our received opinion about both philosophy and politics? And does he not do so most provocatively upon invoking his Philosopher King, glorious image of Socrates himself? Surely, as Strauss reminds us, Socrates is fully aware that philosophy and popular opinion, especially as represented by the most authoritative “defenders of Law and Order,” are not compatible. Even and especially the best philosopher—the Socratic defender of truth itself—will be hated by the most authoritative defenders of “Law and Order”. Why, whereas for the philosophers we are to be guided by desire, for non-philosophical authorities “loving obedience” is to be our rule of life. How could the demands of desire and those of obedience, no matter how loving, ever be at peace with each other?
The Platonic answer—the Philosopher King—is, of course, highly unlikely to resolve the conflict in question, but it definitely will not be able to resolve the conflict in practical terms. There can be no political solution to the conflict between Philosophy and Law, as between desire and authority. Yet, as Strauss would sometimes remind us, for Socrates the solution to our conflict is the Socratic life itself—the Socratic life properly understood and properly lived.
Socrates, we are told, serves Apollo, the One God, the Sun God, the God of order visible during the day. Surely, there is no genuine law contradicting Apollo. Apollo must then want Socrates, indeed all of us, not merely to obey laws, but to investigate their meaning, if only in the act of obeying them. Neither Socrates, nor Laws, but all those who hold that laws are to be merely obeyed, are the enemies of Apollo. Hence the likely conflict. For in our fallen world, almost all of us are prone to obey, to believe, rather than to seek truth. To generously paraphrase Nietzsche, most men would rather believe in anything, rather than expose themselves to truth. Such is the condition of men, one that Socrates could easily discern. Yet, unlike Nietzsche, Socrates draws a distinction between corrupt men and human nature in its integral condition: not man as man, but corrupt man, the man mistaking truth for a mask, is inimical to Socrates; only the man for whom law is de facto the necessary mask of absence of meaning (the mask of an utterly meaningless existence and universe), will oppose, even hate philosophy. Nobody, then, will be a misologist by nature. Man must then be rationis capax (Swift), or capable of testifying in his everyday living to what his nature is prior to its being “obscured” (Dante).
Where do our thoughts leave us vis-à-vis the conflict between desire and obedience? Socrates is incarnating our proper response to Law; he is fulfilling the Law by living out Law’s raison d’être. The Law is given by God so that we may obediently rise back from Law to truth proper, or the mind of God (clearly Socrates’ detractors defend a sham view of obedience). This mind will not be the “geometrical” idol Spinoza set up for us on the way to distracting us from the classical challenge of investigating the nature of divinity.[12] On the other hand, neither can the divinity that Socrates points to be utterly impervious to reason. Socrates would never convert to Islam. In abiding by a divinity that offers itself to the philosopher who seeks it obediently, Socrates will stand between any intransigent monotheism and modern rationalism. He will have not provided a practical solution to the conflict between these two poles, but he will have at least moderated the conflict, by helping monotheists be less intransigent and modern rationalists be more prudent.
What Strauss’s Socrates is engaged in is essentially an exposure of the surface of life to life’s interiority, to “the life of the mind”. He is constantly asking “why” in the face of our daily problems, our daily bread. But the why question is not sought outside of the Socratic “what it is” (ti esti/τί ἐστι) question. To ask why is to ask what something really is. As in John 9’s “parable” of the blind man.[13] The real problem is what we really are and that question is inseparable from the question of ends (hina/ἵνα); for it is in man’s proper end that man is truly found. Once, however, the inner life is obscured, we are left bouncing against each other as balls on a billiard table, where the very possibility of asking as regards interiority is shunned as a form of abuse, as an illicit attempt at violent intrusion. Truth must not be questioned; it can be avoided, or you can tackle it with a Nietzschean hammer, shattering the billiard ball to force the meaninglessness of existence into exposing itself (exploding) in radical disjunction with the requirements of Law and Order, and thus of a peaceful society. Truth is then to be either shunned, or embraced in an exalted manner, as violent rapture.
We are back to the conflict between truth and virtue. Strauss worked hard to show that their modern disjuncture had led to a crisis of civilization, but also that the modern severing of truth and virtue from each other was neither irreversible, nor desirable. Why would it be important to remain virtuous? To be brave, prudent, just? To open one’s eyes? Because prior to and independently of virtue manifesting its works in the light of day (ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστίν; John 9:4), virtue is at work in the night that belongs to God; and there, it is truth.[14]
[1] What is the nature of our bodily impediment? Are we, as moral agents, to approach “the body” as anything more, or other than our shadow? Is the turmoil of our body anything other than the expression of a failed attempt to be soul? Is the body not continuously trying to be alive, to shed the specter of death, of the past, from itself, to emerge out of death without falling back into it, thereby establishing itself in a realm of immortality? But how could “the bodily” ever achieve that much on its own, without moral guidance, which is to say, without being “trained” into becoming a moral, thoroughly human body, ignoring (poetically), pretending, that death, the threat of death, ever was? Does physical survival or “success” not require a willful forgetfulness, the body’s self-blinding, even self-denial or self-negation, even its death, so that it may be raised onto the horizon of poetic glory, converted into a heroic mirror of eternity? In a word, so that it may be us?
[2] See p. 6 of “The Discrete Permanence of the Ancient: Hilail Gildin On and Between the Lines,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 41.1 (Fall 2016): 5-13.
[3] See “Dante in Inferno” (Marco Andreacchio interviewed by Michael Michailidis), Podcast (Dec. 6, 2021), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3dEuyP30q8&t=2270s
[4] On the vain logic of Inferno, see verses 15-18, 25-27, 40, and 74 of Canto 17. “Evil-clawed” demons, the Malebranche, among other monstrosities, mark the “time” in Inferno 21-23 (esp. 21.121-23).
[5] See my “Poetic Soteriology,” in Journal of Italian Philosophy (upcoming, 2022).
[6] See my “Philosophy and the Beyond,” in Voegelin View, Nov. 18, 2021, at https://voegelinview.com/philosophy-and-the-beyond/
[7] Cf. Lucian of Samosata (died after 180 A.D.), True Narratives (Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα), a philosophical satire of all stories claimed to be literally true—as if “the true” could be anything other than a poetic category. On διήγημα (“narrative”), see Chapter 6 (“Narrative”) of Stephan Tilg, Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel, Oxford and New Yord: Oxford University Press, 2010. Chariton was a contemporary of Lucian. Polybius (died c. 118 B.C.) had already referred to διήγημα as a story devoid of truth, where “truth” is what is truly fair, not to what, in the wake of Machiavelli, we might call “scientific facts,” but to the nature of things. See Polybius, Histories (Ἱστορίαι), 1.14 (“so if you take truth away from a history what is left is reduced to a useless tale; οὕτως ἐξ ἱστορίας ἀναιρεθείσης τῆς ἀληθείας τὸ καταλειπόμενον αὐτῆς ἀνωφελὲς γίνεται διήγημα). Lucian’s διηγήματα are “fictions,” then; yet they may be true insofar as they testify to the nature of things (at the very least, they bespeak the impossibility of literally true stories, or of what we would regard as scientific chronicles).
[8] See my “Epistemology’s Political-Theological Import in Giambattista Vico,” Telos 185 (Winter 2018): 105-27. Vico is unearthing the poetic foundations of Aristotle’s distinction between particular and universal (see esp. Aristotle’s Poetics), showing that all “history” is poetic, or that all “histories” belong to a subset of poetry. Cf. Aristotle, De Arte Poetica, ed. Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
[9] My translation exposes a sense partially obscured by otherwise “smoother” or more palatable modern translations.
[10] Cf. Silvia Carli, “Aristotle on the Philosophical Elements or ‘Historia’,” The Review of Metaphysics, 65:2 (Dec. 2011): 321-49. Following a standard modern habit of reading Machiavellian “events that have actually happened” (ta genomena) back into classical antiquity, Carli presents Aristotle as distinguishing “history” from poetry insofar as the former is bound to “the facts” (349). Yet, as ancient “natural histories” make it quite clear, for our classics a history is a chronicle that presents its content primarily as something that has occurred (or that has come to pass)—which is not to say that it “actually has” (to speak with modernity). That would not be a requirement for the good historian, who is good only insofar as his account can help us gain insight into the nature of things, and thus only insofar as the “history” is genuinely poetic or moral.
[11] See Francis Slade, “On the Ontological Priority of Ends and Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts,” in Beauty, Art, and the Polis, ed. Alice Ramos (Mishiwaka, IN: American Maritain Association, 2000), 58-69; and by the same author, “Ends and Purposes,” in Final Causality in Nature and Human Affairs, ed. Richard Hassing (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 83-85.
[12] Cf. Saint Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum (“The Journey of the Mind in God”).
[13] See my “Law and Natural Right in the Gospels: Notes on John 9’s Parable of the Blind Man,” in Voegelin View, January 11, 2022.
[14] Ibid.