Liberal Education and Understanding War and Peace

“The best part of our philosophers having come to despair of our power to ever cure the defects of mankind—which are, as we believe, greater and in greater number than the virtues—and holding as certain that it is more likely that we remake mankind entirely in a new mold, or substitute it with another, rather than amending it, the Academy of Syllographers reckons that it is most expedient for men to be removed from the commerce of everyday life as much as possible and that little by little they yield to being replaced by machines.  And determined to contribute with all its powers to the progress of this new order of things, the Academy proposes for now three prizes to those who will invent the three machines undermentioned.”  (Leopardi, “The Academy of Syllographers,” in Operette Morali [“Minor Moral Works”], 1824-32)[1]

A Platonist’s provocation: in our modern world, “international politics” is a Machiavellian euphemism for warfare thinly veiled by a smokescreen of paperwork (contracts based on mercantile principles raised to quasi or symbolically metaphysical heights).[2] Wherever that smokescreen absorbs war within itself, we have the Global Society, a fiction camouflaging all wars in the context of its own rise.  Conflict is now conceived in terms of the evolving forces of universal integration.  A necessary evil justified by History (Hegel).  Nothing substantive is said here of the ideological cooption of “freedom and equality” as a blinding veneer for progressive tyranny (or the tyranny of progressivism).  The alternatives on the table of official discourse are limited to two hackneyed extremes: the progressive and the reactionary.  By being in line with the tide of History, we are progressives; be being opposed to that tide, we are reactionaries.

Where History is accepted as the context of discussion, the only alternative to “being in line” is one degree or another of opposition understood as lack of integration.  The reactionary “falls short” of appreciating “the larger picture,” which demands adaptation to a world in the making—the Great Society we are building, today, as consummation of all historical strife.

In our new society, old theological and philosophical concerns are replaced by special technical counterparts, so much so that the earlier concerns are now reified in function of the latter.  Philosophy is now a technical discipline.  Pragmatism, at best, but more generally, ideology: linguistic games (laboratory of in vitro hypotheses) or psychological manipulation, as tools for the “transplanting” of life onto artificial grounds.[3] As for theology, what we have left is ex machina “justification” of ideology.  Our new theology provides “purpose” (imagined meaning) for what we are already doing; it confirms us in our ways, thereby offering what our market demands.  To be sure, our new theologians can be “critical” of social trends, but to what effect and on what relevant grounds?  Where our ways—our times—are secular, or anti-theological, our new theology bows to our predicament, resigned to the modest task of embellishing our technological lives with palliative expectations tacitly, but not always, suggesting that all will be well at the end of the road.  For our “theologies” accept that “the Is” is to be understood in evolutionary terms, or that the doctrine of evolution is valid and authoritative even as its believers beg for (indeed, they demand!) a “theological commentary”.  For the meaningless life in unlivable without investment in the production of meaning as entertainment—and as guarantor of sleep.

It would then seem that the modern Machine has coopted all modes of discourse, saturating all channels of understanding, shutting all exits to unfettered communication, and what is more, repressing in us the very doubt that outside of the “sphere of influence” of technocratic, totalizing, globalist “information exchange,” there may be—just maybe—a livable outside, a place for nourishing dialogue, where “the Conversation of Mankind” (Michael Oakeshott) takes place, where the constitutional limits of our Great Society are brought into question and examined.  A place of questioning, shaped by questions: questions as place, as disclosure of life unbound.

Language has its own ways to slide through the minutest interstice, leading us to visions, horizons above, beneath, beyond all expectations, however tightly knit the nets are that cradle our oblivion.  However loud, ubiquitous the thunderous proscriptions of our times, the faintest whispering of innocence—far fainter than the hiss of reptilian connivers—breaks loose, invisible, like soul through clouds, to skies of questions no mortal poet ever dares to dream, to cite the Plato whose poetry tradition extols, divine.

What “voice”—whence would it come—tells us that speech is condemned within the “box” of History?  “Outside,” we are not—no longer—damned to take for granted the hegemony of Evolution as ultimate framework for political life and order.  That framework is itself framed in the context of a pre-Machiavellian, “pre-scientific” life accepting no other frame for itself than a divine mystery transcending absolutely any progressive compulsion, including any “evolutionary force”.

Today we reside in a Castle built on an early-modern blueprint and where everyone is told that outside of the Castle we are all lost (nulla salus); that our only salvation is found within the Castle to the extent that we abide by its rules.  Now, the first Castle rule is to turn away from the quest for outdoors: what is outside is an “old” world, which is long dead.  In attempting to regain access to the outside, to exit our Castle, we would be merely seeking our own demise.  Yet, the Castle’s first rule is first, only in the order of exposition.  The second rule is primordial: we are to be guided by fear, rather than desire.  What the Castle extols is not desire proper, but compulsion, which is a drive responding to fear.  Fear, rather than what should be termed natural desire is to govern our lives in the Castle of modernity.

In Dante’s Limbo (Inferno 4) we find an alternative Castle, which the poet qualifies by the term “noble” (nobile).  That Castle is nestled at the doors of Inferno, Christianity’s hellish underworld.  On the surface of things, Dante’s “noble castle” or “castle of nobility” (nobile castello) is enclosed within an existential vortex rooted in a devilish principle, namely a mindless body (Beelzebub).  Yet, Dante’s castle is one of poetry and the whole Comedy is a work of poetry.  The infernal vortex is bound poetically both to Purgatory and Paradise.  There can be no Inferno without its two counterparts.  Inferno itself is a poetic abstraction out of a poetic whole that includes the three realms.  If poetry hides in Inferno—its castello is a virtuous citadel or “closed society”—it spreads its wings in Purgatory and is glorified in Paradise.  These three “moments” are integral to poetry’s own life, as Botticelli’s Primavera suggests in the persons of wild Chloris, poetic Flora and statuesque Venus/Athena.  Yet, the Castle of modernity rejects the integrity of the poetic life, reducing that life within the confines of new walls, where desire of the good is effectively banned in favor of fear of evil, of evil identified, not as absence of the good (St. Augustine), but as the reminder of that absence discerned in the light of the good.  Evil is now conceived as distraction from the life of the modern Castle: distraction from a life of entertainment.

Poetically speaking, the modern “disintegration” of the poetic life is a mere distraction that poetry is perfectly capable of distracting us from.  When properly inspired, we can appreciate the integrity of poetry as including death, life and the passage from one to another in an endless cycle mirroring the eternity of poetry’s own innermost secret.[4] Yet, not all three “poles” have equal significance, for one among them bespeaks their secret most intimately.  That is the moment of death, of hiding—the one in which poetry best mirrors or imitates its innermost secret.  Yet, death is ill-appreciated aside from birth/life and the passage between birth and death.  This “passage” or “pivot of conversion” that is the “now” (νῦν as adverb) Aristotle speaks of as time itself, is key to our appreciation of death, not as the negation of birth or generation, but as the absence of poetry’s being from birth, a being that hides in death.  What “the now” tells us, what it redirects us to appreciate, is that death is the repository of the meaning of life.  So that, while the “cycle” of time, as the pivoting of “the now,” is the mirror of eternity (as motion is for stillness, or as Dante’s circle is for its center) it is finally in death that the pivoting of the now points us directly to the now’s secret—its “beyond”.

From the standpoint of modernity, the trinitarian integrity of poetry (encompassing present, past and future) is detestable insofar as it mirrors eternity through death, suggesting that what is eternal (the content of eternity, or what abides in eternity) is not mirrored by a movement extolling growth or power, but by one oriented towards death as loss of power.

Modern politics shuns the poetic life in favor of a life-oriented movement, a progressive movement that, rather than pointing to the contents of eternity, points to eternity as framework for advance into the future.  Our modern lives are not lived as mirroring any original contents of eternity, but as producing ever-new contents of eternity.  Eternity emerges effectively as a formal platform, even a grid, for the production of immortal contents, creations escaping death, or situated in a future beyond relapse into the past.  It is towards such an unprecedented future, a terminal future, as it were, that modern man “moves” away from death, no less than from the integrity of poetry and, of course, from the “eternal things” or natural perfections that integral poetry stands for.

Given modern politics’ penchant for power, it is not surprising that it endeavors to present its “inter-national” interstices in positive or legal terms; as if “international law” were anything more than a Machiavellian euphemism for war.  Whence the universal morality of modernity, so magisterially professed by the likes of Immanuel Kant.  That morality and its “absolute imperatives” stand or fall on the assumption of laws governing the interaction between nations, laws defining the limits of war.  These are the very laws that justify the rise of institutions defending “human rights” as universals.  Not Christianity’s “natural law,” but modernity’s “international law” makes our discourse about “human rights” believable.  The very rise of modern Ethics more geometrico (Spinoza) tells us that in the absence of international law there could hardly by any international morality.  The morality of our Open or Global Society—of “democracies” expressive of “will to power” and in which to be moral is to be powerful, where power is sign of the virtue of appropriating speech as “ideal” mask of “real” libido dominandi (“lust for domination” or “dominating lust”)—depends upon laws governing the interaction between nations.  The interstice between particular legal orders or constitutions is then not conceived in terms of a natural wilderness in which only a “pre-legal” virtue can guide us, but in terms of laws making nature and virtue effectively obsolete.  The laws in question are conceived, in turn, as necessities for our integrative advance into the future.

Would the world be torn to shreds in the absence of our international laws, our “laws of war”?  Who dares take seriously, today, the possibility (a temptation, or a challenge?) of letting go of the very notion of international law so as to face once again international politics as a function of martial virtue?  This untimely, unseemly possibility would, of course, entail a “closed” conception of society, or the rejection of the Open Society as an undesirable Chimera.  Who in his right mind would revert to martial virtue as key to the problem of international politics?  Who would dare think of war, not as a Machiavellian “science” (as in Realpolitik), but as a classical art bound to the problem of virtue singulare tantum?

One might argue that modernity has had the advantage of reducing warfare with respect to premodernity, or that modern international law is our safest bet.  Such is the promise of modernity, of course, but in practical terms, modernity does not reduce warfare; it merely “exports” it from the centers of modernity.  Nor does the “marginalizing” of war point to any eradication of war, but to the production of a world in which war strangles an ever-receding oasis of peace from all sides, until peace, or the mirage thereof, is no longer tenable.  The modern “colonial” extradition of war would then lead to the termination of peace: war with vengeance, or “total war”.

Modernity’s peace emerges as a mere façade when exposed as such upon our recognizing “peaceful” nations as violent producers of weapons; militarizing nations at war.  Selling arms to foreign warring nations guarantees a pretense of peace at home.  Until, that is, the world-at-war in the making collapses, as an avalanche over its “peaceful” producers.

It is this outcome, or even only its prospect, that invites us to reconsider martial art as an attractive way to confront the tide wave of war looming over our violent “peaceful” nations.  Properly understood, however, the art of war is inseparable from the art of peace, which is liberal education in its classical sense (per Leo Strauss).  The recovery of the art of war necessarily presupposes the recovery of the art of living in peace.  On the other hand, the art of peaceful living—no “mere science”—requires study, or the studious, rigorous effort to organize our daily life around a center of intelligibility.  The peaceful life must be the rationally concentric life.  But what is the “center” of our life if not the “now” that classical antiquity attests to be originally open to eternity?  To return to a “now” rooted in eternity is to save our present from being buried in existential co-dependence and thus, inevitably, in the dark side of that co-dependence: tribal warfare.

It was closure of the present to eternity that first inaugurated the rise of modernity.  It is the present’s reopening, or rather a return to the permanent openness of the present to eternity that offers a way out of modern peace’s accelerating descent into Armageddon.  For the recovery of a present rooted in eternity invites a life free from compulsion, including the compulsion to seek in fear of violent death, rather than in desire of the Good, the key to life.  This latter compulsion has led modern man to build a new “mechanical” world on the basis of fear, or to “arm” fear with technology, to be understood not merely as value-free or innocent “tool,” but as orientation and ordering of life (Machiavelli’s own modi ed ordini) towards a final “scientific” solution to the problem of war.

The project of ridding the world of war once and for all (through technological integration) bespeaks the modern identification of war with evil itself.  Why is war to be shunned?  Why do we regard it as evil?  Such questions prompt us to seek out what modern man is afraid of, which is to say, what he is afraid of losing.  What does he really care about?  His anti-metaphysical, atheistic, neo-Epicurean “liberal” society provides the answer, insofar as that society embodies purely modern man’s reduction of the problem of evil to that of pain, or loss of pleasure.[5] The “evil” that the modern technological society responds to is pain.  Obsessed with his own feelings—on the one hand his ideal “feeling good,” and on the other, real pain—modern man does not seek the intelligible reason or roots of his problems; instead, he finds or constructs justifications or confirmations of his feelings in empirical ready-at-hand “facts” to be dealt with by our “machines” and thus mechanically.  Our modern machines constitute our only practical response to our problems conceived in effect as diseases.  More precisely, we set up an apparatus of “mechanical explanations” to account for our feelings, ultimately supporting our conviction that our feelings are moral expressions of an ineluctable, cosmic “evolutionary force,” which roughly coincides with what Nietzsche called “will to power” (der Wille zur Macht).  Whence the contemporary appeal to liberation as self-empowerment, a pleasure beyond pain, which is supposed to be guaranteed by the conversion of blind powers underpinning our feelings into technology.  This technology is not to be merely a means to our liberation, but the consummate expression of our liberation and thus our own end (“virtual” pleasure abstracted from all pain).  Our technology arises as the fitting channel for expressing the “morality” of power, but even more importantly as the consummate repository of that morality into which existence itself flows—lest we be overtaken by pain.

Yet, technology fails to provide us with a cure against the “disease” of pain; its portended remedies, its “virtual pleasures” merely expose us evermore radically to the menace of pain.  In social terms, technology fails to guarantee peace, merely projecting war all around us.  So it is that technology delivers the opposite of what it is advertised to deliver, spreading not health and peace, but pain and war, if only by binding inextricably pleasure to pain (the “new” pleasure being preparation for pain) and peace to war (the “new” peace being preparation for war).  Whence the dissatisfaction technology engenders in us, as it leaves us frustrated, disenchanted, bitter, angry in the grips of cynicism.

It is in the face of the blatant failure of technology to foster universal peace, that a return to a pre-technological life—life not yet aimed at establishing Heaven on Earth—emerges as a defensible, attractive answer to war or “international politics”.

What is at stake is not a mere “outward” rejection of technological products, even as a gradual reduction of the direct use of and reliance on them is likely to be beneficial; a return to pre-technological life entails a reorienting of life away from its modern technological trajectory.  Over the long haul this “reorienting” could make modern technology altogether expendable, but such an effect is not of the essence, here (nor would it be practical as long as we abide in a technological society).  What will count is our recovery of a fundamentally concentric life, a life centered upon a present permanently open to eternity.  Such a life will necessarily entail the production of artifacts—indeed, a world thereof—through which alone we could live out our “life of return”.  Art (τέχνη) would be restored in the service of our natural ends (intelligible ends hidden in nature), against the grain of a techno-ideological production of ends alienated from any natural end.  Beyond modern alienation, the concentric life invites a poetic harmony between art and a nature providing art with its means, or the “material” that art will thereupon shape into products beneficial to the concentric life, the life bearing witness to its center and to the light disclosing or illuminating it from within.

Today, the return to, or “rebirth” of the classical art of war cannot take for granted the modern unfolding of technology and its Machiavellian principles.  Properly understood, the art of war is incompatible with the rise of the “science” of war.  That “science” produced the modern conflict between progressives and recalcitrant reactionaries, a conflict that eclipses the real, natural human situation, as well as the nature of politics.  The progressive stance carries within itself a nemesis serving as stepping-stone for advancing the progressive cause: alienation from our political nature.  How does the reactionary function?  It opposes the progressive on its own scientific grounds, upholding “tradition” as means to resist assimilation in the totalizing machine of progress.  Yet, progress itself functions precisely by objectifying “tradition” in a progressive context, thereby contributing to the rise of “tradition” as fuel (viz. storehouse of ideas) for progress.  The reactionary reinforces the historicist sense that the grounds to escape integration into the transhumanist machinery of change depend upon that very machinery.  Once “principles” are reified in traditionalist terms, their capacity to lead us out of transhumanist drives is neutralized.  There, “tradition” offers us a mere dream, a virtual escape from an assumed inevitability.  Whence the conflict between modern “idealism” and modern “realism,” a conflict coinciding with the dynamism of modernity’s progressivism.  For our idealism (throughout its multiple denominations) conceives the very ideals that modern realists set out to realize in the making of “a better world,” a world in which liberty reigns universal: “the Realm of Freedom” (das Reich der Freiheit) to which Marx dedicated so much of his work.

If the “liberal” or “realist” progressive and the “orthodox” or “idealist” reactionary are working towards one and the same goal; if, superficial objections notwithstanding, both poles are integral components of the future-oriented dynamism of modernity; then transcendence of this dynamism and its drive to the Open, totalistic, if not totalitarian Society would seem to require a third pole, an alternative to both Individualism and Communitarianism (not to speak of Communism), to both the Cartesian ego and the socialist visions filling the political void left by the Cartesian ego’s rise.[6]

To be sure, liberal individualism (often labeled as “capitalism”) tries to overcome its communitarian or socialist antagonist by appealing to the open “market of ideas,” the “cosmopolitan spirit,” or the virtue of tolerant dialogue, but all such notions and appeals come to naught given their mercantile premise, or what for an “orthodox” is but a mercenary logic.  Is the modern liberal really committed to anything other than his logic?  Is he the consummate incarnation of sophistry?  Is he not a totalitarian in the making, a “shiny” minister of obscurantism?  And yet, ask the liberal progressive about his modern counterpart and he will invite you to fear the narrowminded and obscurantist tendencies of the reactionary.  Is our orthodox not incarnating all of the evils of the past, the very evils that the liberal progressive sets out to redeem, to domesticate, to neutralize in the context of his cosmopolitanism?  Is our liberal not bent upon liberating the particular from the confines of orthodoxy and into the plains of all-inclusive universality?  In comes the orthodox, who will retort that the liberal has illicitly reduced genuine alterity to difference—that he has framed the Other in terms of “differences” easily digested and traded by the liberal market.[7]

As things stand, neither of our two parties is learning from the other, if not in the respect that each uses the other to foster the rise of the Realm of Freedom, a world free from the vices that the reactionary and the liberal attribute to each other.  For the Realm of Freedom must overcome all objections to it—to its logic.  But how is this possible?  The reactionary responds by appealing to essential differences, for instance, between “civilizations” (cf. Samuel Huntington), where the liberal will appeal to common grounds, or uniformity.  Two readings of difference?  Not quite, insofar as both parties embrace a historical scene in which differences thrive.  Two nuances, two accent variations, but both working hand in hand.  Emphasis on particularity versus emphasis on universality; yet, both parties present human life in terms of conflict between particular and universal.

In a certain respect, the reactionary does approximate classical politics more that his progressive opponent; for the reactionary questions the flat or superficial universality of modern law—especially “international law”—as practical solution to the problem of war, or more precisely tribal warfare.  Yet, on behalf of the liberal progressive, we should admit that he will uphold law as mere guarantor of freedom, rather than as a final solution.  Yet, the implication here is that the burden falls back upon “freedom” as opposed to virtue (in the classical Platonic-Aristotelian sense of the term).  For the modern liberal, law per se is not a solution, but it does tend to eclipse the irreducible importance of virtue in our daily life: once modern law is established, it does not defend our natural capacity to live virtuously—to develop character, to cultivate nobility—but our freedom conceived as self-entitling self-assertion.  The throne that in classical antiquity is attributed to virtue is now occupied by the self-determination of a Cartesian ego, “autonomous self-expression” manifesting what Nietzsche acclaimed as will to power.  By the same token, the role of law has been altered: what used to be a natural defense of virtue is now supposed to be a contractual defense of freedom.  Not accidentally, to be sure, for the “shift” at hand is not merely evolutionary, but revolutionary, intended as it is to subvert a premodern order.

Now, the modern revolution—the unfolding subversion of the role played by law and virtue in the premodern world—produces misconceptions of the nature of both law and virtue, now often conceived in antinomian ways.  Thus do we find intellectuals advocating, today (most notably in “Straussian” circles dominated by certain neo-Machiavellian or neo-Nietzschean readings of Leo Strauss), that religious orthodoxy is incompatible with genuine philosophy; that one cannot be at once religiously pious and philosophically virtuous.[8]

The “standard” premodern conception is the Platonic one according to which religious piety and philosophical virtue are inseparable from one another.  Representing that conception, Giambattista Vico would end his Principj di Scienza Nuova (1744) with the reasoned conclusion that there is no wisdom to be found outside of (religious) piety, even as there is no true piety outside of the study of piety (lo Studio della Pietà) constituting the core of knowledge/science of all that is human.

As long as we identify knowledge (scientia / ἐπιστήμη) as modern “science,” orthodoxy can make sense only as mere or pure belief, thereby feeding into the idealist-realist conflict characterizing the unfolding of the modern project of replacing Plato’s Cave with a new “reified” Cave (to echo Leo Strauss’s metaphor of a “cave beneath the cave”).  Orthodoxy can hardly choose to survive otherwise than by appealing to the ludicrous condition dictated by our scientific society.  In order to escape secular refutation (to say nothing of outright persecution), orthodoxy must present itself as mere-belief, entrenching itself in a realm of wishful thinking or “subjectivity” (if only garbed as “transcendental”); even of culture among cultures, of but one way of life among others.  This does not mean that in our liberal society orthodoxy abandons any claim to universality; yet, it conceals its proper claim beneath the veil of conformity it must wear as price for survival.  And yet, orthodoxy can hardly rest satisfied with its “modern compromise”: if, in our superficially “liberal societies,” orthodoxy can justify itself only by superficially retreating into the sphere of “mere belief,” the thoughtful orthodox spirit cannot but be a rebel in disguise, fully aware that the liberal “ghettoization” of the interiority of life is an extremely precarious “solution” that no mere-belief can stop from turning into a purported final solution.  Even without counting the practical impossibility of holding “pure belief” in a society of “critical thought,” today the orthodox would need to be divided between an official role as “socially integrated” and a concealed role as “social misfit,” not to say revolutionary.  And yet, unarmed as he is in the agora of liberal democracy, the orthodox faces a plurality of competing orthodoxies, equally unarmed, although also equally interested in exposing or vindicating their own true nature in public.  In order to venture “outside of the closet,” every orthodox must arm himself and can do so with the only weapon allowed by the secular “multicultural” society.  That weapon is modern reason.  But here is the problem, for modern reason is in crisis and it seems like only a God could save it, to echo Martin Heidegger.  If any orthodoxy were to rise convincingly above competing ones it would have to do so with a reason that modern reason detects not—a logos that, rather than imposing itself mechanistically on the contents of our daily life experience, rises from within the bosom of experience, bespeaking poetically all that is at once divinely latent in and naturally common to all men.

As the “rational” boundaries of the modern scientific society crumble, we begin to discern a horizon of knowledge vaster than the one defined by early modernity.  Thereupon, the prospect of transcending modern antinomianism reemerges before us not only as viable, but also as most attractive.  Indeed, as Strauss reminds us in “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion” (1965) and of “Why We Remain Jews” (1962), confronted with the bankruptcy of modern reason, man begins seeking an alternative, sustainable reason.

Once modern rationalism faces itself, incapable of escaping the problem of self-justification, it collapses, leaving us questioning the early-modern assault on classical “pre-scientific” reason.  If that assault was not justified, then what other “reason” might we have not to revert to premodern rationalism, or to the premodern intimate interplay between philosophical reason and religious authority?  Here, no longer struggling to define differences between modernity’s “ideals and reality,” we expose ourselves to a horizon of reality that is itself ideal in the respect that it is constituted through discourse, or logos.  Accordingly, our newly recovered discourse will be constitutionally open to and rooted in the “natural principles” of the constitution of our experience, rather than remaining lost in the “evolutionary flux” of things.  The real will not be conceived “scientifically” or “clinically” within the limits of experience; rather, experience will be ordered and understood within the context of intelligible reality, or reality mirrored in and through discourse.

To recover a discourse mirroring reality is to recover a poetic sense of ordinary speech.  It is to discern modern “scientific” or “secular” language in the larger context of a speech defining experience without being defined by it.  Such is the “Platonic” speech that modern political science abandons on its “positivist” way to alienate all speech from ordinary experience.  The return of Platonic speech invites the recovery of our everyday life experience out of the swamp of meaninglessness that the crisis of modern positivist reason left us in.  In rising onto the horizon of Platonic speech, we rise at once out of the swamp of “mere-bodies” (res extensa) produced by the modern abstraction of words from a reality including experience without ever being limited to it.  Such is the challenge before us, the promising dawn disclosed as the sun sets upon modern reason and its representative techno-ideological infrastructures.

The crisis and collapse of modern reason is not overcome by modern reason’s progressive reification.  The upshot of the progress of modern reason points rather to its terminal alienation from ordinary life experience, even as our experience is supposed to be controlled ex machina by the value-free jargon of the technological society.  Though aimed at resolving the conflicts characterizing our everyday life experience, the virtual or symbolic apotheosis of our language in “purely bureaucratic forms” merely obscures our conflicts, distracting us from their proper nature and thus from their roots.  We thereby begin attending to the “effects” or shadows of problems, rather than to problems themselves.  Pretending to address real problems, we merely play word-games, masks bespeaking fear of confronting problems on their own ground.  Imprisoned in the virtual heavens of empty abstractions believed to be real, we lose sight of commonsense, setting the stage for a radical break between speech and experience.

The upshot of modern rationalism’s rise to tyranny is the worst kind of tyranny, which is the anarchy in the face of which we stand nonetheless exposed to a forgotten reason, a reason that calls us out of the swamp of vilified experience, a swamp produced by false or tyrannical laws imposed violently upon nature.  The logos saving our experience from subjection to violence, including violence masked as law, is a discourse coinciding with our experience, a natural discourse through which our experience naturally exposes itself to its original cradle, rediscovering it as permanent horizon of intelligibility.

We stand now in the company of Plato, whose speech is his life, or whose word is alive.  The living word alone still stands where the words of modernity have been stretched so far from and above our lives as to no longer mean anything to us, or as to appear as sheer menaces, threats of impending violence.  Why, the living word is immune to violence, for it knows life without need to depart from it; as life itself knows its word, without need to submit to it.  For the living word is life itself speaking to its source, responding to it, gathering itself into its mystery—showing itself in its very hiding; giving of itself in restitution.

Where do our Platonic evocations leave us vis-à-vis the question of law and of law’s “international” subset?  If the modern dream of the Open Society has burst, then “the living word”—the poetic reason of human life itself, of life properly human—invites us to appreciate that the only society we can live in is a closed society.  Theologically speaking, the only world we can live in will be a pagan or polytheist one.  Yet, monotheism reminds us that we are not condemned to tribal warfare.  Yet, again, we have learned that the progressive “realization” of monotheism’s promise is a dead end.  Hence our turn to a latent Platonic alternative consisting of the education of pagans to virtue, in full recognition that law stands as virtue’s own natural-divine mirror, a mirror that is divine in the respect that it is revealed above human nature, but that is natural to us insofar as it hides at the heart of our everyday life.[9]

Where, in our closed societies, law mirrors virtue, rather than masking it in the act of fostering alienation mistaken for freedom, international law yields to international agreements based on codes of honor, based in turn on moral education understood in the traditional, Platonic sense of education to goodness.[10]

Goodness, the good life, the life bound to what is inherently good, to the center of all appearances of goodness, stands as fundamental point of reference for “international relations,” not as opaque mask of war, but as antidote against forgetfulness that even in war we remain men; that no war can sever our bond to peace; that, as warriors, we are not meant for war, but to seek out peace in the midst of war, to discover light within darkness, and to bear witness to that light, that center—to abide in that very center, even as we fight; especially as we fight.  Because war can never be an end in itself, even if it will never end.

NOTES:

[1] “Disperando la miglior parte dei filosofi di potersi mai curare i difetti del genere umano, i quali, come si crede, sono assai maggiori e in più numero che le virtù; e tenendosi per certo che sia piuttosto possibile di rifarlo del tutto in una nuova stampa, o di sostituire in suo luogo un altro, che di emendarlo; perciò l’Accademia dei Sillografi reputa essere espedientissimo che gli uomini si rimuovano dai negozi della vita il più che si possa, e che a poco a poco dieno luogo, sottentrando le macchine in loro scambio.  E deliberata di concorrere con ogni suo potere al progresso di questo nuovo ordine delle cose, propone per ora tre premi a quelli che troveranno le tre macchine infrascritte” (English translation by M.A. Andreacchio).  Leopardi’s satirical “syllography” echoes the “logic” of Babel’s project.

[2] On the Platonic lesson concerning the permanence of war, see Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws.  Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1975: 4.

[3] The “transplanting” presupposes that life is originally unrooted.  See Giacomo Leopardi, “The Academy of Syllographers,” op. cit.

[4] See my “Unmasking Limbo: Reading Inferno IV as Key to Dante’s Comedy,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 40.2 (Fall 2013): 199-219.  Consider also Saint Teresa D’Avila’s Castillo Interior and Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s cubiculum mentis, or “chamber of the mind” (Proslogium 1), after the ταμεῖον of Matthew 6:6.

[5] On the present reading of politics, modern reactionary societies are impure forms of liberal counterparts.

[6] In his 1924 Magic Mountain (Zauberberg), Thomas Mann notoriously personified the two poles of modernity in the conflicting characters of the “Westerner” Settembrini and the “Asian” Naphta.  In Mann, the conflict does not seem to yield to any positive resolution, or Hegelian synthesis.  See Jill Anne Kowalik, “‘Sympathy with Death’: Castorp’s Nietzschean Resentment”.  The German Quaterly, 58.1 (Winter 1985): 27-48.

[7] See the “Nexus” debate Bernard-Henri Lévy and Aleksandr Dugin sustained on September 21, 2019 in Amsterdam, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x70z5QWC9qs.

[8] See my “Philosophy and Religion in Leo Strauss” (appearing under the title of “An Exchange on Menon’s Strauss”) in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 46.2 (Spring 2020): 383-98 and 405-10.  For a representative neo-Machiavellian reading of Strauss, see my “Zuckert’s Synthesis of Socrates and Machiavelli,” in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, 44.2 (Winter 2018): 295-302.  It is worth noting, however, that not all Straussians fall under the same umbrella.  See Kenneth Hart Green’s Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides.  Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013; and Jew and Philosopher: The Return to Maimonides in the Jewish Thought of Leo Strauss, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1993.

[9] See my “Law and Natural Right: On John 9’s Parable of the Blind Man,” in Voegelin View, January 11, 2022, at https://voegelinview.com/law-and-natural-right-on-john-9s-parable-of-the-blind-man/.

[10] See my “Qu’est-ce que l’éducation morale ? / What is Moral Education?” in Dogma: Revue de philosophie et de sciences humaines, 18 (Winter 2022): 120-26.  Downloadable at https://dogma.lu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Dogma.-Edition-18..pdf.

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