Reading Notes on Leo Strauss's "Relativism"
On Isaiah Berlin and the Crisis of the West
See our lecture on Strauss’s “Relativism” here. See Strauss’s essay here.
I see two possible ways of organizing the chapter. The one we follow in the recording runs (1-14; 15-28; 29-33; However, I believe there is another reading that runs 1-26;27-33. I put headings in for both accounts. The headings in bold are those which correspond to the layout used in the recording.
--------------------------- Part 1, Berlin ---------------------------
1. Relativism has many meanings. Strauss suggests but doesn’t say why that he will get to the meaning of relativism by examining Berlin’s treatment of “the problem of freedom”
2. For Berlin there are 2 freedoms and 2 selves, which overlap: The negative tends to align with the empirical self and the positive with the true self. [The empirical is what we all see, what people are etc, the self which chooses and sometimes regrets the choice or is unhappy with all available choices whereas the true self chooses correctly]. For berlin, the true self and positive freedom are dialectically superior but human dignity is only given its due when negative and empirical view predominate. Human dignity requires these limits even though reason suggests otherwise.
3. Although Berlin prefers neg freedom – He denies old reasons given by enlightenment philosophers for that freedom – Older view held negative freedom required for “growth of genius” and other important and good things, but Berlin denies any necessary connection between negative freedom and these things. -- In Berlin’s time negative freedom is preferred by a minority of men in the modern West, i.e., Berlin sees it as a very historically/culturally bound ideal, not universal. -- there is no necessary connection between negative freedom and democracy.
4. Evidence for negative freedom: absurdity of alternatives = men can only be free in ideal societies. “presupposes that there is a hierarchy, and therefore a fundamental harmony, of human ends.” Strauss produces several quotes of B denying such a hierarchy and harmony are possible.
5. The observable Is (=variety and disagreement and non-ideal) produces the Ought (no way of adjudicating ends, equality of ends). -- Mill and liberals vs Kant and certain rationalists – Ends defined as more or less just desire.
6. Interference with ends is only legitimate where they conflict; and conflict is inevitable (= even good, non-Criminal ends will conflict). -- Not every conflict should be adjudicated (= made a public question). -- There should be broad room, frontiers that leave a great deal of space for ends to conflict. -- there is no solution: “it would not be sufficient to demand that every man must have the freedom to dream of the pursuit of any end he likes” (it’s not just a matter of not guiding or not forcing men; there is no final mechanism to secure the public good. Rule is unavoidable; i.e., the establishment of a hierarchy and the attempt to harmonize.)
7. The frontiers “entail some absolute stand” – Berlin points out how all Frontiers function … he collapses a bunch of different traditions into “different placements of the frontier, or a frontier tradition: natural rights, natural law, word of God [insert many other ideals/authorities] and the effect is always the same: the frontier he is talking about.
1. (An aside: Berlin’s ability to see a class characteristic amongst these different things is what gave him the courage to write the essay, what led him to believe he could solve the riddle of liberalism.)
8. Berlin’s motive is anticommunism. Berlin opposes anti-absolutism to communism but must at the same time admit an absolute basis for negative freedom. So he has a problem.
9. Other, lesser, inconsistency: negative freedom apparently the ideal of a minority of modern men according to Berlin, but the boundaries and frontiers require mass acceptance according to Berlin—the must be rules that become sacred.
10. Strauss: the death of forgetting of a sacred principle is not really a reason against it; why does Berlin think it is Sacred at all is the question. “Can there be eternal principles on the basis of ‘empiricism,’ of the experience of men up to now?” The very existence of the future would mean, for empiricism, that no commitments are now possible because they might not be eternal even if they have been thus far.
11. The difficulty is making an Absolute Ought from the empirical variety of ideals, both among men now and of course throughout time… This could be solved by a Peak of Experience or an Absolute Moment (ways you can make the “empirical” view into an eternal verity). Berlin does think the sacred is now clear and speaks like maybe the absolute moment has arrived but he also has an OW Holmes view of history—it will never end, progress will never stop.
12. Relative validity of the ultimate distinction between civilized and barbaric. = unwillingness to impose, to violate the dignity of man even in the lowliest
13. Berlin is caught out: he like everyone is subject to requirements of thought to take a stand – and his stand is manifestly wrong.
14. Berlin is a liberal who abandoned or tried to abandon liberalism’s “absolutist basis” – Objection: Berlin just didn’t go far enough; he should have just said liberalism is no better than any other ideology, that negative freedom was just one equal among the variety. Your (Strauss) attack is on an important figure but not against the strongest position. -- Strauss now ceases to talk about the Man named Isaiah Berlin and transitions to speaking about an ideology called Positivism. (I make a big stink about this switch from man to ideology because near the end Strauss will say Existentialism has its origin in the thought of two men but becomes nameless… This is in paragraph 29. If anyone has some suggestions I am all ears. My suspicion is this: the esoteric view of the philosopher in question ceases to operate, only his exoteric political teaching gets taken up when this happens and so the important questions get forgotten. That’s my hunch but I also suspect there might be something more.)
-------------- Part 2, Positivism (14 – 28)/Beginning of Answer to Objection -------------
15. What positivism is: denial that rational conduct is possible (no way of choosing right conduct for right end). It is a “rational” study of non-rational means. -- it denies the possibility of rational ends, but believes men can take better or worse paths to whatever ends they so desire.
16. Strange paragraph tying this problem back to the medieval problem of creation ex nihilo or the eternity of the world. The principle of causality cannot be demonstrated, according to the prevailing or at least a popular view. “… positivistic social science in general is characterized by the abandonment of reason or the flight from reason.” Then: flight from scientific reasoning is the reasonable reply to the flight of science from reason. (No specific statement like this about abandonment, which might be part of the “going around the fortress” strategy Strauss imputes to the modern philosophers…)
--------------------------- Subsection to Part 2 (17-23) ---------------------------
17. [Paragraphs 17 through 23 are about Marxism, which is the core of Positivism.] Marxist historicist criticism of positive social science: no facts without values because there is no value free instrument for evaluating/analyzing facts. (i.e., the typical historicist criticism.) -- Lukacs focuses on the selection of fact: the social scientist selects his facts according to his values (cannot be helped) and therefore the distinction between facts and values is arbitrary, based on non-rational, non-scientific ideals or values (ideals or values that go unrecognized)
18. Objective social science must evaluate each little thing in light of the whole system, which in turn requires understanding the whole historical process.
19. Lukacs: politics must escape western relativism through marxism. [Me: This transition certainly describes how politics in the USA has changed over the past several decades. However, Lukacs is in error: the thought of relativism is superior to Marxism, which, instead of representing an escape from a great ill, actually represents the late phases of that illness; the transition from relativism to marxism is a sign of decline not progress.]
20. Marxist absolutism (and in this essay absolutist is not a dirty word, so the question is whether the marxist version of it rings true). Lukacs explains Marxism is absolute for its time, as the French Revolution was inspired by thought absolute in its.
21. Strauss suggests that the way things developed in the USSR will be the norm for all nations that “progress” this way, i.e., the proletariat might throw of the capitalists but only to be enslaved again “by an ironclad military bureaucracy.”
22. If Marxism is the final truth… same dignity as Darwinism, would justify itself the same way: as an objective or scientific truth, of a fact-based social order without any commitment to values.
23. Marxism would end necessity and therefore human excellence: autonomous herd; loss of all differentiation and distinction (including sex differences insofar as all division of labor must go and this is the most fundamental division… [aside: this ruins gratitude between the sexes and thereby poisons the well so to speak… i.e., women are lacking in gratitude today and of course the men seem only too willing to shrug off all manly burdens])
--------------------------- End of Subsection to Part 2 (17-23) ---------------------------
24. Back to the external manifestation of communism in the noncommunist West: postivism. Positivism is “logical positivism,” -- with “logic” juxtaposed with “psychology”. A psychological positivism would be different than a logical positivism. Positivism today relies on “logical symbolism” and “probabilism” (i.e., is modern Jesuitism (these are Jesuit methods—obscurantist methods for the sake of egalitarian, tolerant, ends)). These replace the older positivism of natural belief and natural instinct that is found in someone like Hume. [Hard to understand what is going on here. I think of it this way: positivism is a sort of “empiricism” made political and the older view was, well we have the empirical facts about man outside of convention and then we build on those facts a purely fact-based, natural society. This is older view. Newer view denies any access to such facts; there is no finding man outside of convention or understanding him as such and therefore all systems built on such things are not factually based, but based on non-demonstrable values. If anyone has a better explanation of this or any paragraph please tell me.]
25. Hume was a political philosopher, still taught universally valid rules of justice and that those rules are not improperly called Laws of Nature. He viewed things in light of man’s unchangeable nature. Strauss quotes Dewey’s critique of Hume, suggesting that here is the Man behind this turn away from the philosophy of Hume or this or that thinker to the ideology or logic of positivism. Both historicism and political philosophy are psychological; positivim avoids this as much as it can. It rejects pure mind and aprioris. Science is useful to the human organism, period, that’s its justification; the meaning of “useful” is evaded, taken as self-evident: again suggesting mere survival…
26. But today no one can see in science the origin of the useful. The atom bomb suggests that science has given man more power than he can use intelligently. And social scientists as well as many others would not say that tribal life is inferior to the life of civilized men. [The times are degraded. Average civilized Europeans before the two wars would not suffer these doubts.] Positivism must ground itself on the useful but cannot do so. A rational judgment becomes necessary but cannot be consistently made.
------------ Objection Answered, Back to Berlin (alt plan of essay: 1-26; 27-33) -----------
27. Back to Berlin – philosophers/scientists who justify science by an appeal to democracy “ignore complications noticed by Berlin,” namely, democracy can reject science and liberalism. -- other option than democracy, pleasant adventure… but this implies history again.
28. Positivism refuses to examine specific men or their context; historicism/existentialism do this.
----------------------- Part 3, Historicism -----------------------
29. Existentialism’s origin is Nietzsche and Kierkegaard … But, while related, as nameless as positivism … except it’s not nameless because there is a “hard core” in the person of Heidegger.
30. “Nietzsche is the philosopher of relativism.” And the one who showed how it could be overcome.
31. Nietzsche saw the coming disaster and the character of historical education (enervating).
32. Truth is deadly and manmade – these are anti-horizon truths that must now be made the foundation of a horizon. Truth is deadly is sexy, it is life giving.
33. Transform relativism into lifegiving truth. Difficulty: Is will to power a mere projection of Nietzsche’s own will to power or is it a teaching about nature. i.e., Nietzsche doesn’t escape the dialectic, or what is elsewhere called “dogma” (a need to make truth claims). Existentialism is then an attempt to correct Nietzsche on this point, to save him from a relapse back into capital T truth, into metaphysics and nature.