Narratives of the Lives & Secret Disagreements

Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison, Seth Benardete and Leo Strauss

Hi! This week I uploaded the fourth installment of my series on Ezra Pound’s Cantos. This bunch was more interesting to me than the last two, and there are some musings about polytheism and the esoteric spiritual politics of the late 20th century that I hope you all will find interesting. I also read another one of the great books of the American Nineteenth century, the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the first autobiography by that most-photographed American of the age, and a short essay by Seth Benardete on Leo Strauss.

Why 19th century America?

Why the 19th century? I can hear you asking through the multiple mechanical mediations that separate us from each other. I have been reading so deeply of the American 19th century because it is such a sticking point for both a certain kind of leftist and a certain kind of rightist that this is the *real* America, slaveholding and rapacious, and any other vision of the country is simply a mirage, a potempkin nation cooked up at Langley in 1947 in order to show them commies that we [don't really] have a culture. I happen to disagree with this, thinking that the best of what we became in the postwar period was always latent in these United States, was waiting in the words of the declaration from the foundation, but as noted, the alternative is an extremely durable story which crosses the horseshoe, and as such it makes sense to try to understand this most formative period. Nations probably don't have Spenglerian life cycles, but there probably is something to the idea that they are most elastic, most shapeable when they are in their youth, We are now on the third or forth time around that great American revolution of which the Civil War was merely the most discordant eruption.

Platonic Erudition: Benardete on Strauss on Plato on philosophy

This week I happened to find myself reading the final essay in Seth Benardete's 2000 collection The Argument of the Action, entitled "Strauss on Plato" The essay opens with words I am in complete agreement with:"What philosophy is seems to be inseparable from the question of how to read Plato" I lack the gift of languages Benardete possessed, or the remarkable wisdom with which he approached a classical text, but for me as well all philosophy is Platonic, and I have no doubt that the careful study of a Platonic text is as valuable and likely to provide enlightenment as any text from the nineteenth century or our own time. I had no interest in philosophy at all really until I found plato, the circumstances of which I have described here. I would by no means make any claim to understand Plato, and indeed, I hope that someday I can fail to understand him in the original Attic. Benardete makes several enigmatic and fascinating statements in this essay of which I am barely able to summarize: He appears to make a fascinating assertion regarding an aspect of Strauss's platonism of which much is often made: that is the absence of anything approaching a theory of forms. Benardete's argument is subtle, and I do not claim to grasp it, instead I offer a lengthy excerpt here:

Strauss wrote up his interpretations of Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, Euthydemus, Republic, Statesman, Minos, and Laws. It is not unreasonable to ask whether analyses so heavily weighted in favor of the political can do justice to Plato and do not distort Plato as much as the contemporary tilt in favor of the Phaedo, Theatetus, Sophist, Parmenides, and Timaeus. It turns out, however, that what seems to be the unavoidable bias of the professional put Strauss in a unique position to return to Plato in his entire range through political philosophy. The subtitle of Strauss's course on Plato's political philosophy was "Its Metaphysical Foundations." In his time, political philosophy had decayed so completely as to cease to be a part of philosophy. It had decayed so completely because philosophy itself had decayed so completely. The connection between political philosophy and ontology was not obvious, and the reason was the vanishing of the primary phenomena of the Cave and their replacement by what Strauss called "the Cave beneath the Cave." Strauss had to recover the Cave in all its shadowiness before he could show the way out of the Cave. This entailed the establishment of the fundamental character of the political in its double aspect: the nature of political things and the best form of the city. This double aspect can be said to show the simultaneous empiricism and idealism of Plato. Machiavelli understood the idealism by itself and accordingly failed to understand either its political ground or its philosophic purpose. The starting point for Strauss was simply the two questions Glaucon posed at the beginning of the second book of the Republic; but this starting point does not hold just for political philosophy but for philosophy as such: the nature of the beings, on the one hand, and, on the other, the nature of the good. Forms of these two questions inform all of Plato's writings, and all of human life.¹

Secret Squirrel

and

Julianne Werlin

have both argued that I should write a book about the Straussians, and I fear that at this point I've read so many of them as to have no other choice! In that study I often found that the figures who seemed most compelling to me were those who might be described as heterodox Straussians, those like Benardete or Stanley Rosen, or less famously Harry Neumann, who differed somewhat from the teacher while still being obviously influenced on a deep level by him.² Rosen would perhaps not be happy to be categorized thus, but this is what will inevitably occur after a thinker is gone.

Narrative of the Life: Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and others

Frederick Douglass Series, Jacob Lawrence

It should go without saying that Frederick Douglass was one of the great writers and orators of the first century of the United States, & the Narrative of Frederick Douglass is one of those books I feel like I've been reading excerpts from my entire life. One comes into these texts with all these ideas that have been placed into your head by twentieth century writers, and the experience of reading them is often one of having these ideas dispelled, as Naomi Kanakia was recently noting about Uncle Tom's Cabin. I knew that a later generation came to regard these slave narratives as performance pieces, heavily self-censored for the benefit of prudish middle class whites who couldn't handle the truth, and while I knew Douglass was better than that, at the same time it was what I half-expected. ³ Instead the book is, one imagines probably about as brutal and polemical as could be allowed within the bounds of the era, and the description of enslaved life provided by Douglass is frequently chilling.

The wife of Mr. Giles Hick, living but a short distance from where I used to live, murdered my wife's cousin, a young girl between fifteen and sixteen years of age, mangling her person in the most horrible manner, breaking her nose and breastbone with a stick, so that the poor girl expired in a few hours afterward. She was immediately buried, but had not been in her untimely grave but a few hours before she was taken up and examined by the coroner, who decided that she had come to her death by severe beating. The offence for which this girl was thus murdered was this: — She had been set that night to mind Mrs. Hick's baby, and during the night she fell asleep, and the baby cried. She, having lost her rest for several nights previous, did not hear the crying. They were both in the room with Mrs. Hicks. Mrs. Hicks, finding the girl slow to move, jumped from her bed, seized an oak stick of wood by the fireplace, and with it broke the girl's nose and breastbone, and thus ended her life.

Under the malign influence of the subjects of the middle part of this digest, I found my attention being drawn immediately to the middle chapter of the work, the brief sixth section, in which Douglass describes how his initial instruction in letters was brought to an end by his mater's insistence that literacy ruined a slave, knowledge which would bring the young Douglass forever away from a life of servility.

These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty-to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. It was just what I wanted, and I got it ata time when I the least expected it. Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by the merest aco-dent, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read. The very decided manner with which he spoke, and strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of the truths he was uttering.⁴

Douglass frequently makes a rhetorical maneuver in the Narrative which has become familiar from the nearly two centuries that separate his writing from out time, that (and in the pens of later writers, racism) slavery is a moral evil not only to the abused slaves, but to the white masters, who Douglass presents as being uniformly degraded by their ownership of other persons.⁵ I also appreciated his noting his mother’s literacy against the arguments of those in his time and unfortunately our own, who would attribute his genius to his white paternity. Douglass would eventually write two further autobiographies, and I look forward to reading them.

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Bibliography

Benardete, Seth. “Strauss on Plato.” Essay. In The Argument of the Action, 407–17. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Douglass, Frederick, and John Stauffer. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave. New York, NY: Library of America, 2014.

1. 1. Seth Benardete, “Strauss on Plato,” essay, in The Argument of the Action (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 407–17, 411.

2.

Henry Begler

’s bringing to my attention Straussian winemakers in California is adjacent to the discovery this morning that the great bartender, mixologist, and drinks historian David Wonderich was apparently a student of Benardete’s in the 1990s. What a small, strange world we live in.

3. This is one of the major underlying contentions of Toni Morrison‘s Beloved, and why Stanley Crouch was not entirely wrong (although he and his mentor Albert Murray misjudged the book, and Morrison, who was probably the Great American Novelist of the late 20th century) when he asserted that it was a black holocaust novel in his now-infamous New Republic review. There is an esoteric quarrel between Morrison and Douglass’ tradition, as can be found in the contempt for the black bourgeoisie that runs through her oeuvre. The praise of literacy and self-education in the Narrative might be contrasted with Morrison’s book, the villain of which is called “schoolteacher.”

4. I know I’m I’m too deep with this whole “reading the Straussians” thing becuase while doing this I also began mentally comparing Douglass’s description of his process of self-education in order to disqualify himself from being a slave to the compelling but somewhat eyebrow-raising argument Jaffa makes that Aristotle doesn’t really support slavery for those of sound mind in Crisis of the House Divided and the essay which occupies the Aristotle chapter in the first two editions of the Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy.

5. In a time not quite our own, but certainly closer to ours than Douglass's this was a favorite argument of James Baldwin's, and one which it must be said, I find basically convincing. When I published that peice on the post-left the other week I got a bit of pushback about the centrality of the legacy of slavery to American history and intellectual life, so I suppose I’ll say that I disagree with the fashionable Afropessimism of the 2010s in the sense that it does not seem that the victories of the black freedom struggle over the last two centuries have failed in a way that tradition often seem to think they had. On the other hand, I think they were and are correct to identify the abjection of what Morrison would have called “throwaway people”-often, but not always the descendants of slaves-as an incredibly powerful force in the cultural imaginary of the United States, one that has I think been a degrading influence on our culture, and which should be opposed. We are in what seems unmistakably the beginning of one of the periodic cycles of backlash and apathy, and while mistakes were certainly made in the last decade, I have deep concerns that the baby will be thrown out with the bathwater.