Continued from Part Four

Decadence and Disillusionment

Relativism will be the epitaph on the gravestone of the West. Ironically, the prevalence of relativism is largely a consequence of the West’s greatest intellectual achievement: mathematical physics. The West is trapped in a fundamental dilemma. On the one hand, it regards mathematical physics as the paradigm of knowledge. On the other hand, mathematical physics can tell us nothing about how man should live. The reduction of science to quantitative analysis renders it incapable of telling us anything about moral values.

Although Nietzsche was a relativist, he recognized that relativism is symptomatic of decadence. His paradoxical position may be summarized as follows: Relativism is true but deadly, therefore relativism is false! Why? Because relativism stifles any incentive to pursue a world-historical goal, the psychological precondition of which is belief in the absolute worth of that goal. In other words, relativism undermines the will to creativity on a monumental scale. Hence relativism is deadly, contrary to Life—logically true but existentially false, for Life transcends logic.

Relativism permeates democracy because democracy’s two organizing principles, freedom and equality, lack ethical and rational constraints. The West boasts of democracy, ignorant of how it constitutes a basic cause of western decadence. I define decadence as a retreat from life to death resulting from an inability to confront evil, since evil itself is linked to death. “I have placed before you today life and good, and death and evil …” (Deuteronomy 30:15).   Unless the ethical is derived from the transcendental, there is no escape from Hume’s skepticism and relativistic epistemology.

And so, disgusted with the moral decay of modernity, many people in the West are “returning” to traditional values, either to Christianity or to the “natural right” doctrine of classical Greek philosophy . But modernity is itself the outgrowth of the secular ingredients of the Greco-Christian tradition. The contemporary phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism, to be applauded as a moral force, lacks the fecundity required for a renaissance of Western civilization. As may be seen in contemporary art, music, architecture, economics, literature, the professions, entertainment, Christianity is conspicuous by its absence.

As for the classics, although Jonathan Swift was correct when he likened the ancients to the Brobdingnagians and the moderns to the Lilliputians, the philosophic foundations of the classics are hopelessly obsolete. Newtonian mechanics (fully adequate for macro-objects moving below the speed of light) has relegated to the dust heap of history Aristotle’s organic, teleological, and hierarchic conception of nature—exactly Machiavelli’s own objective. But to refute Aristotle’s conception of nature is to eliminate from serious consideration any return to his source of morality.

If this were not enough, the classics are also burdened by the cosmology of an eternal and cyclical (as opposed to a created and “linear”) cosmology.   In this most crucial respect there is no difference between Aristotle and Machiavelli who also posited an eternal universe.[38] Classical cosmology harbors a fundamental dichotomy: whereas Nature is purposive, History is purposeless. Existentialists also regard history as devoid of purpose. Following the mode of thought inaugurated by Machiavelli and advanced by Nietzsche, existentialism holds that man has no nature, no fixed or permanent nature. Hence there are no immutable standards by which to determine how man should live. Man, i.e., the individual, must choose his own ends or values to endow life with meaning. But this leads to the nihilism deplored by traditionalists who find their (noble but inadequate) standards of criticism in classical political philosophy.

If history is purposeless or meaningless, if humanity is bound to eternal cyclicality, then Plato and Aristotle’s political philosophy is nothing more than a “noble lie,” a myth—as it may well have been so understood by one or both of these intellectual giants. In that case, in the quarrel between ancients and moderns, the moderns have at least the advantage of candor, however deadly the consequences. And what consequences! The road from Machiavelli’s Prince is strewn with innumerable casualties seeking meaning in drugs, sex, violence, cults—anything that may help the liberated self escape loneliness, anomie, angst, madness, and self-destruction.

That torturous road is viewed, however, from the vantage of a Jewish philosophy of history which denies that history is purposeless or meaningless. This philosophy affords no grounds for pessimism, Weapons of Mass Destruction notwithstanding. For while man acts in freedom and pays the consequences, every act and consequence, good and bad, moves the system of history forward to an end ordained by a just and gracious God.

Consistent with Nietzsche’s dialectical philosophy, Rabbi Kook writes: “The arising of contradictions broadens the scope of existence. Good accentuates Evil and Evil deepens Good, delineating and strengthening it.” “Just as wine cannot be without dregs, so the world cannot be without wicked people. And Just as the dregs serve to preserve the wine, so the coarse will of the wicked strengthens the existence of the flow of life …”[39]

Two world wars, the bloodiest in human history, led to the restoration of the State of Israel. A third world war will lead to Israel’s final redemption.☼

 

 

Epilog: To counter the decay of Western Civilization, allow me to recommend my latest book Rescuing America from Nihilism: A Judeo-Scientific Approach (available at Lightcatcher and Amazon books.

[1] All references to The Prince are from the brilliantly annotated and literal translation of Leo Paul de Alvarez, The Prince. The present essay is very much indebted to the author’s teacher, Professor Leo Strauss.

[2] Ibid., pp. 93-94.

[3] Actually, eleven vices are mentioned, since “miserliness” and “rapaciousness” are listed in opposition to “liberality.” See Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, pp. 311n63, 338n139 (cited hereafter as Thoughts). This is by far the most profound work on Machiavelli.

[4] The Prince, p. 108 (emphasis added).

[5] See de Alvarez, pp. xi-xiv; Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 179, 207-208.

[6] A smiling Machiavelli would remind us from the grave that when Mao Tze-tung and Chou En-lai died, Western statesmen and intellectuals praised these tyrants as “great men.” The author of The Prince writes in Chapter 18: “And with respect to all human actions, and especially those of princes where there is no judge to whom to appeal, one looks to the end. Let a prince then win and maintain the state—the means will always be judged honorable and will be praised by everyone; for the vulgar are always taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in this world there is no one but the vulgar.” Among the most notable adulators of Mao Tze-tung and Chou En-lai—the two must be held responsible for the slaughter of millions of Chinese—were an American President and his professorial Secretary of State.

[7] The Prince, ch. 18 (italics added). See de Alvarez, pp. vi-vii.

[8] See Machiavelli, The Discourses, I, 26.

[9] See de Alvarez, pp. ix-x. Founding an entirely new state must be the work of only one man. See note       below.

[10] See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 26, 29. Although the concept of the common good appears in The Discourses, I, 2, Machiavelli asserts that the origin of justice is force. Incidentally, this chapter reveals what Machiavelli thought of Aristotle’s classification of regimes. For a defense of the concept of the common in opposition to behavioral political science, see my Discourse on Statesmanship, pp. 9-14.

[11] See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 26, 29. Note that whereas The Prince is dedicated to a ruler, The Discourses, which does refer to Hiero as a “tyrant,” is dedicated to two subjects. See de Alvarez, pp. xv-xix, and Harvey Mansfield, Jr., Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders, pp. 21-23.

[12] See The Prince, ch. 18. Contrast The Ethics of the Fathers: “Be the tail among lions rather than the head among foxes” (4:20).

[13] See Strauss, Thoughts, p. 26.

[14] The Prince, ch. 9. Machiavelli explains in the sequel that whereas the great want to oppress, the people only want not to be oppressed. By no means does he regard the people as honest per se. “For one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, evaders of dangers [and] lovers of gain …” (ibid., ch. 17). Of course, only a “prince” can found a state; but thereafter Machiavelli takes the side of the people—as he must if he himself is to be a “founder,” that is, of new modes and orders. Accordingly, his best regime is a commercial and imperialistic republic, reversing classical and medieval political philosophy. See The Discourses, I, 6, and Mansfield, pp. 152-155, 243.

[15] See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 312n22, 313n24, 326n183; Mansfield, pp. 32n12, 67n8, 73n9.

[16] The Gematria of a word is the sum of the numerical values of the letters that compose it. For example: the letter Y (yod) represents the number 10; the letter H (hei) 5; the letter V (vav) 6. Hence the Gematria of the Ineffable Name YHVH is 10+5+6+5 = 26.

[17] Machiavelli defends Romulus’ fratricide in The Discourses, I, 9, entitled “To Found a New Republic … Must Be The Work Of One Man Only.”

[18] See Strauss, Thoughts, p. 59.

[19] Leviathan, pp. 82, 83.

[20] Ibid., p. 104 (italics added).

[21] Emanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 80, L. W. Beck, trans.

[22] Ibid., p. 65.

[23] For a discussion of Bacon, see Jerusalem vs. Athens, pp. 176-177.

[24] Shimon Peres still believes there is an economic solution to conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Which reminds me of Orwell’s bon mot: “A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.”

[25] See Strauss, Liberalism Ancient & Modern, p. 244. As Strauss notes, Spinoza hated Judaism as well as Jews, an attitude Hermann Cohen deemed “unnatural” and even as a humanly incomprehensible act of treason.” I mention this in passing because one may find a similar phenomenon among certain Jews in Israel today.

[26] The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza (Dover: 1951), I, 207, 257, 263, 265. As others have noted, Spinoza’s Ethics implicitly identifies God with “nature.”

[27] Demophrenia, p. 30. I refute Marx in ibid., pp. 31-32.

[28] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 12-14.

[29] Whitehead, Science and Philosophy, pp. 165-166.

[30] See Zimmerman, Torah and Reason, pp. 147-151, on which this historical view of slavery is based.

[31] See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II, 104, who attributes the spread of selfishness to democratic individualism:

Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egoisme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of conditions.

[32] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First Discourse, The First and Second Discourses, p. 39, R.D. Masters, ed., J.R. Masters, trans.

[33] Ibid., p. 40.

[34] When Hobbes wrote that “desire and love are the same thing,” and when Freud reduced love to the merely physical, they were cultivating ground prepared by Machiavelli, who writes, “men forget more quickly the death of a father than the loss of patrimony.” Which means that filial affection is weaker than the desire for property. See Leviathan, p. 32; The Prince, p. 101.

[35] Doing good or pleasing others is to be understood simply as a means of gaining reputation and power. No wonder success in achieving the object of one’s desires is the ultimate criterion of praise and blame—a vulgar teaching.

[36] This applies to Jewish movements that have abandoned the Torah.

[37] Breuer, Concepts of Judaism, p. 91.

[38] See Mansfield, pp. 202-203, commenting on The Discourses, II, 5.

[39] Kook, Orot, pp. 110, 195-196. “Formal Logic fails to accommodate the contraries and insists on their separation. In reality, however, opposites combine to fertilize one another, especially in the intellectual context.” Yaron, The Philosophy of Rabbi Kook, p. 87.