#straussianism

[raglanphd]

[mouscellany-blog]

25 Years Later, Allan Bloom Is Just as Misunderstood and Necessary as Ever

The man who took the stage looked like he’d stepped out of the darkness and into some great light. In part, that’s a physical description of Allan Bloom one evening in the winter of 1988 at Harvard. No sooner had Harvey Mansfield, a professor of government and the event’s moderator, conclud...

Who can resist a bit of Straussianism? Lord knows I can’t! Especially when it only clocks in at just above 2,000 words. Allan Bloom: he hates a lot of the things you probably like. He wrote that smarty-pants book about how everything in culture is terrible. He’s an unapologetic elitist. Is that more of what the world needs right now? If being an elitist means being right, then maybe. But Bloom definitely sounded like a doofus going on about music (and a few other things), and being an elitist isn’t a necessary precondition to making intelligent decisions. At least he sounded smart while speaking, though. We certainly could use quite a bit more of that these days.

[azurish]

We begin by wondering what we want to know about Hobbes. Those who seek knowledge about Hobbes must first ask how Hobbes understood knowledge. We turn therefore to Hobbes’s account of knowledge in Leviathan chapter 9 and its table of different kinds of knowledge. Men of noble simplicity think this diagram is an error. We are compelled to wonder whether a master of the art of drawing would make such an error. The table is divided into two parts. Hobbes’s plan can be seen by examining the bottom part, separated from the top at the center, roughly speaking. The bottom part is divided into seven kinds of knowledge: optics, music, ethics, poetry, rhetoric, logic, and the science of justice. Hobbes wrote texts on six of these: on optics, the Short Tract (one cannot deny that the handwriting is his); on ethics, De Homine; on poetry, the Answer to Davenant; on rhetoric, A Brief of the Art of Rhetorick; on logic, De Corpore; and on justice, the Leviathan. Why does Hobbes write no book on music? It would be scandalous to say that this was an oversight. But what shall we make of Hobbes’s silence about music? An author may reveal his intentions by the title of his books. Two of Hobbes’s books, and only two, have titles consisting of one word only: Leviathan and Behemoth. The number of books in the Leviathan is five, if we include the ‘‘Review and Conclusion’’; the number of books in Behemoth is four. Five letters in the word ‘‘Leviathan,’’ and four in ‘‘Behemoth,’’ combine to produce the word ‘‘Beethoven.’’ It is of the essence of devices of this kind that they are merely hints. But one is compelled to look for other hints that Hobbes was writing about Beethoven. Hobbes’s manifest blunders reveal his homage to Beethoven. Hobbes writes that Aristotle’s Politics depicts ants and bees as political animals (De Cive 5.5, 71). But Aristotle does not mention ants (Politics 1253a). It would be an injustice to deny that Hobbes has a perfect memory. It is a rule of common prudence to ask what Hobbes intended by this error. Later in the same paragraph, Hobbes uses a sentence with the words ‘‘trumpet’’ and ‘‘thunder and lightning.’’ We do not think it is coincidence that in the only sentence in the Leviathan where ‘‘trumpet’’ occurs, Hobbes again mentions thunder and lightning (Leviathan 40, 324). Yet the intelligent reader will see that the context of these words is entirely different in the two books. Why then does Hobbes identify trumpets with thunder and lightning? Beethoven used an ear trumpet to hear, and it is well known that on his deathbed, Beethoven stirred from his slumber after a burst of thunder and lightning. Hobbes’s intention becomes evident when we read without modern presuppositions. Nor do we believe it to be accidental that the four chapters of De Cive which have the highest density of biblical citations (chaps. 4, 11, 16, and 18) add up to 49 (7x7). The number 7 has long had a mystical significance. Might Beethoven too have thought so? I do not know. But the earliest keyboard sonatas that Beethoven chose to publish, the purest expression of his musical ideas, were not published until 14 (7x2) years after they were first written, when Beethoven could deliberately give them the opus number 49 (7x7). Beethoven wrote only one septet (featuring 7 instruments), but he wrote 7 piano trios, and the first of his opus 70 piano trios (7x10) was nicknamed the ‘‘Ghost’’ trio, a mystical term. It is curious that both Hobbes and Beethoven made sure they stayed alive until the ages of 91 (7x13) and 56 (7x8), respectively. In the manuscript of his last complete string quartet, Beethoven wrote ‘‘Muß es sein? Es muß sein’’ (‘‘Must it be? It must be’’). Hobbes too was a determinist who believed that everything must be for a reason: all things ‘‘have a necessary cause; so that all the effects that have been, or shall be produced, have their necessity in things antecedent’’ (De Corpore 9.5, 123). Must it be? It must be. This is in the fifth section of the ninth chapter. 5 plus 9 is 14 (7x2). Leviathan chapter 7 has 7 paragraphs, and the central paragraph says that in a good argument, conclusions follow necessarily from premises. Must it be? It must be. But Hobbes also makes one, and only one, admission about political conclusions which do not follow necessarily from his premises: the superiority of monarchy, he wrote in the center of a paragraph, is ‘‘the only thing in this book which I admit is not demonstrated [by logical proof] but put with probability’’ (De Cive Preface, 14). As Hobbes elsewhere implies that his conclusions are necessary, and only here implies the opposite, one is compelled to read this as his true opinion: for what is most secret is most rare, and what is most secret is most true, therefore what is most rare is most true, and what is said only once is also true, especially if it is in the center, and also when it is not. Let us recall that there are only two references to music in De Corpore, one of which is in the center of the final paragraph of the final section before a chapter with the heading ‘‘Of the centre of equiponderation’’ (De Corpore 22.20, 349; 23, 350). Hobbes then is telling us to ponder the center of texts or passages. The other reference to music in De Corpore distinguishes between necessary propositions, like ‘‘Socrates is a man,’’ and contingent proportions, like ‘‘Socrates is a musician’’ (De Corpore 5.9, 60). This is in the ninth section of the fifth chapter. 9 plus 5 is 14 (7x2), and this section discusses the last of the 7 ways in which definitions can be combined to produce faulty conclusions. Hobbes is hinting that ‘‘Socrates is a musician’’ is also a faulty conclusion: Socrates, the greatest of philosophers, was a musician, like Beethoven. We shall not shock anyone if we subscribe to the old-fashioned opinion according to which Hobbes was a teacher of music. But we still have to explain why Hobbes intimates that monarchy is inferior to other forms of commonwealth. One should recall Hobbes’s view that only three kinds of government are possible: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy (Leviathan 19, 129–30). He proves that democracy is impossible (Elements of Law 21.5, 120). Hobbes then is defending aristocracy. Beethoven claimed to be aristocratic and dedicated many pieces of music to aristocrats. The careful reader can see that Hobbes is defending Beethoven’s aristocratic links. Why was Hobbes not explicit about Beethoven? Was it because Hobbes lived in an era of persecution? Or was it because Beethoven would not be born until 91 years (7x13) after Hobbes died, such that if Hobbes had talked openly of Beethoven, Hobbes’s contemporaries would have tried to find his time machine? I do not know.

Adrian Blau’s hilarious send-up of Strauss’s hermeneutics from “Anti-Strauss,” Journal of Politics 74.1