Tag Archives: Plato

Irony, Humility, and the Community of the Question: Leo Strauss on Platonic Irony and Being Literary

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One of the things I love about the work of Leo Strauss is his suggestion that we read philosophers or religious thinkers like Plato or Maimonides as one would read a good novel.  One of Strauss’s most important essays is entitled the “Literary Character of The Guide to the Perplexed.”     And the core of his literary method is to make very close readings of the text so as to listen for contradictions and allusions to something other than what is said on the surface.  In other words, he looks for the esoteric by way of paying close attention to the exoteric aspects of the texts.  To be sure, the cracks on the surface always suggests deeper meanings.  And when these deeper meanings compete with the philosophical or religious meanings of the text, the reader is forced to consider which meaning is more important for the author.   Strauss, in truth, believes that true intelligence is to be found in a text that prompts the reader to ask the right questions.   He claims that the person who responds to these prompts in the text becomes a part of a “community.”    And for Strauss the literary device that prompts the most intelligent questions and fosters community is irony.  His reading of irony, to be sure, has us pay close attention to not just what irony is but what it does.  And in doing so, it also makes us play closer attention to his own text with all of its ironies and allusions.  By exposing us to such ironies, he exposes us to a world of rich textual and intellectual possibilities.

A text that demonstrates Strauss’s approach to irony is his essay “On Plato’s Republic,” which appears in his book The City of Man.  At the outset of the essay, Strauss plays the ironist by playing out the question of how one should read Plato.  First he makes a claim, then he negates it; but after doing this, he brings up the claim again, and negates it once again. This process does much to put our assumptions about Plato into question:

Whereas reading the Politics we hear Aristotle all the time, in reading the Republic we hear Plato never.  In none of his dialogues does Plato ever say anything. Hence, we cannot know from them what Plato thought…But this is a silly remark: everyone knows that Plato speaks through the mouth..of his Socrates, his Eleatic stranger, his Timaeus, and his Athenian stranger….But why does he use a variety of spokesmen? He does not tell us; no one knows the reason. (50)

After saying all this, Strauss plays on the reality of how he sounds in front of other scholars and he simply gives up.   He acts as if it makes sense to accept the assumption that Socrates is Plato’s spokesperson when we can clearly see that he is in conflict with this.  And this comes out in the sentence following his decision to conform:

We do not wish to appear more ignorant than every child and shall therefore repeat with childlike docility that the spokesperson for Plato is Socrates.  But it is one of Socrates’ peculiarities that he was the master of irony.  (50)

This “but” changes everything since it suggests that whatever Socrates says is not what appears to be.  So to with our reading of Plato: perhaps Socrates is teaching us is that although he appears to be Plato’s spokesman he’s really not.  Perhaps, Strauss muses, Plato didn’t have “a teaching” and never really “asserted anything”?   But, following this, he says that this can’t be the case.  It is “absurd” to think this.

However, the question lingers even after he states this.

The next paragraph, hinting at this lingering question, is all about irony.  Strauss defines it immediately: “Irony is a kind of dissimulation, or untruthfulness.  Aristotle therefore treats the habit of irony primarily as a vice”(51).  But Strauss doesn’t think that Aristotle is right:

Yet irony is the dissembling, not of evil actions or of vices, but rather of good actions or of virtues; the ironic man, in opposition to the boaster, understates his worth.  If irony is a vice, it is a graceful vice.  Properly used, it is not a vice at all.  (51)

Strauss’s qualification of Aristotle is telling.  It suggests that irony is a neutral term and that it has a “proper” use.   Citing Aristotle against Aristotle,  Strauss argues that “irony is…the noble dissimulation of one’s worth, one’s superiority”(51).  In other words, humility and irony do not contradict each other; in fact, they aid each other.

Strauss goes so far as to equate wisdom with irony and to argue that “it is humanity peculiar to the superior man”(51).  Moreover, irony is selective.  It speaks “differently to different kinds of people”(51).  And, at its best, it evokes questions rather than answers.  However, not everyone is prompted by this or that irony to ask questions; hence, it speaks differently to different people.

For this reason, Strauss suggests that we read Plato’s dialogues not in terms of their philosophical content, alone; rather, one should also read them in terms of who was being spoken to and who was not being spoken to in this or that irony:

One must postpone one’s concern with the most serious questions (the philosophical questions) in order to become engrossed in the study of merely a literary question.  (52)

And by doing this, we realize that there is a deep connection between what he calls the “literary question and the philosophical question”(52).  In other words, literature and philosophy can be brought together by way of the questions evoked by irony.

Strauss goes even further and argues that the “literary question, the question of presentation, is concerned with a kind of communication”(52).  And this communication, through irony, is a “means of living together.”  In other words, irony creates a kind of community of the question (to play on Derrida’s opening to his famous essay on Levinas, “Violence and Metaphysics”).

However, instead of taking this to the next level, Strauss keeps it within academia: “The study of the literary question is therefore an important part of the study of society”(52).  He goes on to argue that this is more than a simple literary question: it is a “quest for truth, a common quest, a quest taking place through communication.”  This suggests that literature and philosophy have a “common quest” for truth.  However Strauss redirects this by arguing that the “literary question properly understood is the question of the relation between society and philosophy.”

This redirection is telling since it suggests that by reading for irony in philosophy we can better address the “question of relation of society and philosophy.”   For Strauss, this implies that there is something about irony that is related to the question of community and truth.

What, in fact, is the true kind of community?

Strauss’s reading of irony suggests that by reading for irony and communicating this irony to others we create a kind of ironic community.  Although he doesn’t use these terms his work suggests a community of the question which is based on a “common quest for truth.”  Moreover, as we saw above, if done “properly,” this community will evince a kind of humility instead of a kind of a snarky kind of arrogance.

What I love about this meditation is the fact that it gives great weight to being a close reader of the text.  To be sure, Strauss gives the act of literary criticism vis-à-vis the religious or philosophical text the highest value possible since it is, for him, the basis of creating a community of the question based on the “common quest for truth.”

I think many of my colleagues and readers should take this lesson to heart since I have never seen a greater vindication of irony and its meaning in any text I have read.  (However, if I am missing something, please do let me know.)   And this bodes well for Schlemiel Theory since the readers of the schlemiel will understand that the ironies of this comic character also seem to be going in the same direction.  To be sure, we don’t read novels, stories, and poems on the schlemiel – with all of their ironies -because they are funny; we read them because we are in search of truth and we are looking to create a community of the question.

Last Words or Last Laughs? Leon Shestov on Death, Philosophy, and Sarcasm

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Before death, what will our last words be?  This is a timeless question which many of the greatest minds have, throughout the centuries, pondered.   Plato is often cited for his meditation on death in his dialogue entitled “The Phaedo.”  Before his impending death, Socrates tells his followers that he is not afraid because he has renounced his body in the name of his immortal soul (nous).  He comes to this renunciation by way of knowledge and suggests that his knowledge (or intimation) of eternal things (ideas) proves his point; namely, that only an eternal thing (his soul) could know eternal things (ideas).   His love for these eternal things inspires him to renounce his body, which he associates with fear.   Socrates goes so far as to liken his last words to a swan song.  His death will release from his body and it brings him joy to know he will be reunited with the source of all wisdom.

Writing on Ibsen, Turganiev, Socrates, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer’s last words on death, Shestov calls their swan songs “senilia.”  And by doing so, he suggests that their last words are warped:

Ibsen and Turgeniev serve the same God as the swans, according to the Greek belief, the bright God of songs, Apollo.  And their last songs, their senilia, were better than all that had gone before.  In them is a bottomless depth awful to the eye, but how wonderful! There all things are different from what they are with us on the surface….There is a way of escape: there is a word which will destroy the enchantment.  I have already uttered it: senilia.  (108, Chekhov and Other Essays)

In yesterday’s blog entry, I noted that Nietzsche thought of Spinoza and Kant as dishonest and misleading by virtue of the fact that they want us to believe in ideas that are antithetical to life.   Nietzsche goes so far as to call their philosophy “hocus-pocus” and argues that it is unhealthy.  Laughing at them, Nietzsche frees himself up for life.

By sarcastically calling the last words of these philosophers “senilia,” Shestov seems to be saying the same thing as Nietzsche:

Turganev wished to call his Prose Poems by this name (senilia) – manifestations of sickness, infirmity, of old age. These are terrible; one must run away from these! (108)

Adding to this, Shestov says that “all men mistrust old age.”   But then he takes a turn that Nietzsche does not: “But what if all are mistaken?  What if senilia bring us nearer to the truth?  Perhaps the soothsaying birds of Apollo grieve in unearthly anguish for another existence; perhaps their fear is not of death but of life”(109).

This possibility haunts Shestov, but it doesn’t surrender himself to it wholly.  In other words, he wishes to entertain both Nietzsche and Socrates; both senilia and its sarcastic rejection.

But this is not his last word. Taking an interesting tactic, Shestov turns to the distinction between the ordinary man and the philosopher and notes something very interesting.   Philosophers, of course, often go against the grain of society which for them, doesn’t think.  After all, philosophy – for Plato – doesn’t happen in the cave of society; it happens outside the cave, in solitude.

Nonetheless, Shestov argues that while Plato and Spinoza were consistent in aligning their lives with their philosophies, there is a more interesting case to be made for the lives of the philosophers which differ from what is in their books.  He takes Schopenhauer as a case in point: “in life, like many another clever, independent man, he was guided by the most diverse considerations”(111).  Shestov, like Nietzsche, finds he has more in common with Schopenhauer than with Plato or Spinoza.  He is more interested in “freedom than in necessity.”

But for Shestov the “principles” of a philosopher are no greater than that of a the everyday man because “the room of the world is infinite, and will not only contain all those who lived once and those who are yet to be born, but will give to each one of them all that he can desire”(112).  Since there are a “plurality of worlds” and a “plurality of men” amongst these “vast spaces of the vast universe.”   This suggests a kind of relativism.

However, Shestov can’t settle for this.  To be sure, he thinks that, when all the chips are down, he can understand why a philosopher – like Spinoza – would turn to creating the perfect philosophical system.  Shestov calls such philosophizing “art for arts sake.”  He notes that even Naploeon turned to philosophy in his last hours.   What matters is the fact that he came to “philosophy with demands and would not rest until he had received satisfaction.”   In the end, this brings together what interests Shestov most: the relationship of self-renunciation to megalomania.  Napoleon’s turn to philosophy at the end of this life brings the two together.

Even so, Shestov finds the case of Heinrich Heine to be more interesting than Napoleon.  As I noted the other day, Shestov finds great insight in the fact that the German’s misunderstood Heine’s self-deprecating humor.  To be sure, Heine’s last words were not senilia; they didn’t bow down to philosophy when the chips were down.

Shestov tells us that his words, for the Germans, didn’t have the ring of “conviction.”  As proof, he brings a line from one of his poems which, it seems, has no interest in the soul:

I seek the body, the body, the young and tender body.  The soul you may bury deep in the ground – I myself have soul enough.  (128)

Commenting on this Shestov argues that “in it, as in all Heine’s daring and provocative poems, may be heard a sharp and nervous laugh, which must be understood as the expression of the divided soul, as a mockery of himself.”(123).  Heine, Shestov argues, was different from the King David whose psalms show us a man who, “when he believed, did not doubt.”    For this reason, they couldn’t understand this new kind of Jew whose piety was tainted by doubt.

Turning to Heine on his death bed, Shestov notes that, even then, Heine was sarcastic (his words didn’t, like Spinoza or Plato’s, become senilia): “His sarcasms every day became more ruthless, more poisonous, more refined”(125).  And “his thoughts of God, his attitude to God, were so original that serious people of the outer world could only shrug their shoulders. No one every spoke thus to God, either aloud or to himself”(125).

Instead of feeling fear and admiration before the thought of death, “Heine has neither prayer nor praise.  His poems are permeated with a charming and a gracious cynicism, peculiar and proper to himself alone”(125). And, according to Shestov, Heine, because of his sarcasm, “”remains as he was in youth.”  He doesn’t want bliss or heaven; rather, he just wants “God to give him back his health.”  This is the novelty.

Shestov paraphrases Heine’s words at death which sound like the words of a stand-up comedian: “He laughs at morality, at philosophy, at existing religions.  The wise men thing so, the wise men want to live in their own way; let them think, let them live.  But who gave them the right to demand obedience from me?  Can they have the power to compel me to obedience (to necessity)?”(127)

To be sure, Shestov’s reflections on Heine can also be applied to Nietzsche’s approach to death.  They laugh at the formulations made by philosophy and religion and sarcastically face their death; they don’t renounce themselves.   But even so, Shestov still entertains the possibility that Heine is wrong:

I am tempted to think that the metaphysical theories which preach self-renunciation, are by no means empty and idle…In them lies a deep, mystical meaning: in them is  hidden a great truth.  Their only mistake is to pretend to be absolute.  For some reason or other men have decided empirical truths are many but that metaphysical truth is one.  Metaphysical truths are also many, but them does not in the least prevent them from living in harmony one with another.  (128)

Given this reading, he doesn’t think the Germans should be annoyed with Heine.  His “sarcasms will not keep them from their lofty aspirations.”  His last words are comical but that’s the point – they are his.  He – and no one else – lives with them and will die with them.

Sarcasm, in other words, is not merely a matter of entertainment; for Shestov it is an existential decision.