Leo Strauss and Mother Night

I think the bottom line for Straussianism is that the history of thought is unreachable through the superficially obvious means of reading the texts and reading the histories of them.

Then either the history of thought is irrelevant, or there’s a way of reaching it nondiscursively, or there’s an existential choice to be made that won’t ever be subject to any criticism by any other human ever.

Strauss assumes the ancient or traditional social order is inevitable and that for 99% of the people thought is irrelevant and that forbidding it to them is the best course. It’s really that simple. And then the Mother Night problem doesn’t arise.

From a perspective of decades since reading the novel, a central premise is that, no, you can’t tell. And the unstated concluding moral is, maybe, probably, the best policy really is honesty, in the long run. The stance is that no compromise with Nazis is acceptable, only open and unremitting defiance is truly moral? I suppose a consequentialist approach might ask how it would have worked out if the coded messages had not been sent. But it’s like trolley problem approaches, the “correct” answer requires information unavailable. Requires counterfactual facts not in evidence, to repeat a cliche.

Straussianism, conceived as a textual reading strategy of looking for esoteric meanings, is fundamentally a practical question. First, one has to demonstrate there is censorship, or genuine penalties official and unofficial motivating self-censorship? Second, one has to demonstrate a pattern of deviations incompatible with the manifest content and professed aim? Third, one has to demonstrate the discovered pattern was intentional, not merely the rediscovery of the conventional wisdom or unexamined premises perpetrated unwittingly by a writer not fully in command of the material? There are no commercially available touchstones to distinguish the correct answers. Vonnegut’s Mother Night tells us I think the pursuit of intentions leads down a rabbit hole.

As to the game theoretic, not being a game theorist I’m way too far behind. I am puzzled even by the notion of a communications game where winning is correctly distinguishing Nazis and anti-Nazis. For that matter I don’t even know how one distinguishes the players of a miscommunication game from the players of a communication game. But then I suppose I’m just saying I’ve never understood how game theory can be a universal theory, because there is no universal game. Every potential player can be playing different games.

A classic critique of Strauss is M. Burnyeat’s “Sphinx Without a Secret,” published many years ago in New York Rev Bks.

The Strauss and Cropsey (eds.) History of Political Philosophy gives Straussian interpretations of figures from Thucydides to Heidegger (interesting that the book, at least the 3rd ed., concludes with him).

I think for Strauss himself the issues in the second paragraph of @4 aren’t real ones.

For Strauss there’s no question whether censorship exists, there’s always censorship.

There’s no question for Strauss what a great writer really is saying, they’re all always saying the Truth, which is to say, the same thing.

Great writers who appear to be supporting ideas Strauss thinks are wrong, are actually “deconstructing” those ideas (to coin a phrase). That’s what their greatness inheres in.

In every age, there are ideas that can’t be questioned publicly, but readers in any age can penetrate through these and attain the Truth. The fact that they’re not the Truth doesn’t make those ideas wrong. There’s not much that can be said about them because no age permits criticism of its own ideas, and anyway thinking should be about Truth.

Modern social science, according to Strauss, ignores the Truth because it prefers to manage society to make people happier. It might be ok if it left that kind of thing to lesser folk, but it’s tricked people into thinking that’s what philosophy is about.

“Straussians” if they’re doing practical politics are already those lesser folk, though, surely.

So for Strauss there’s a truth that everyone you know would be disgusted by, or maybe just insulted by, or even simply annoyed by, and it’s a positive good for you to make every effort to find out what that is (assuming your community says it’s an okay way for you to spend your time and doesn’t find out what the details are).

The abstract problem at the end doesn’t require Straussianism, it only requires that people can lie to your face. And no, there’s no way out of that: you can be fooled by liars, however vigilant you try to be. Not even “assumptions” can help you out of this predicament. So there’s not actually any special problems for Straussianism in this area. Everyone has to be aware they might be being hoodwinked. It’s a price of entering conversation at all.

One helpful bit of reading on the topic is Ada Palmer, Was Machiavelli an Atheist.

I think “Straussianism makes it more difficult to reach a separating equilibrium in the communications game, which would allow you to clearly distinguish Nazis from anti-Nazis” is exactly the right observation, but exactly the wrong conclusion. The point of “Straussian” communication is to keep the Truth in circulation, without it being ascertainable that the Straussian believes it.

This is irritating. I’m an anti-Straussian. I was briefly intrigued by Straussianism as an undergraduate, and after a little investigation, concluded that most of Strauss is silly and most of Straussianism is stupid. Time (and meeting a few Straussians) reinforced those conclusions.

But the reason I was briefly intrigued by Strauss as an undergrad is because what Farrell describes as the “protocol” was just common sense to me. I grew up as a racial and sexual minority and not religious in a religious family. I talked according to the “protocol” constantly. I could sense when other people were doing the same. I sought out authors who employed allusion, misdirection, and irony. The Strauss “protocol” had way more in common with real life to me than the way analytic philosophers talk in seminar rooms.

Straussianism is junk but Farrell has completely bungled the case.

The Straussian problem, well one of them anyway, is the addiction to always finding the hidden message that contradicts the surface meaning. But we still need to read the classic texts of the past with the sense that we are not the intended readers and that the author’s imagined audiences will have understandings, expectations etc such that they will readily detects irony, sarcasm, dissimulation etc. which the plain reader to the text centuries later will be minded to miss. All of this is what makes something like Rousseau’s Dedicace to the 2nd Discourse so hard to interpret: does he really mean to praise the rulers of Geneva, or is he taking the piss?

Fletch@14 doesn’t claim to be part of a religious minority, but that seems to me to copy the privileging of religion. Personally old enough to remember older people and writings and movies, I remember how common it was to call out racial bigotry. It was felt necessary to distinguish racial bigotry from the older understanding of bigotry as a disorder of religious people. It seems to me the reduction of “bigotry” to only racial bigotry is a fundamentally conservative reaction to secularism, an attempt to deny religious bigotry is really a thing. The exclusive use of racism is part of an attempt to deny the massive overlap. Reaction has its own perverse intersectionality.

MisterMr@15 seems to be working from a personal definition of democracy, likely enough some notion of an ideal democracy. It doesn’t seem to me far fetched at all to claim Macchiavelli was against a Medici prince for Florence and for a united Italy free from foreign princes. That seems to me to be a plausibly large part of what actually existing democracy was then. Careers open to talent and limitations on individual oligarchs by class collaborating under law in a state seems to me to have a been a good part of actually existing democracy for quite a long time. Seeing democracy as a kind of individual voters choosing policies and personnel the way a consumer bought commodities became more common as that kind of life became more common. Of course Macchiavelli was no more a contemporary democrat than a Jefferson.

“Is there any way to navigate the wilderness of beliefs, meta-beliefs and meta-meta-beliefs, except by assumption, so that expectations might actually converge on some shared truth?”

The non-Straussian answer to this question is “no”, and the Straussian answer would be “don’t threaten me with a good time.” The Straussian practitioner is getting what he signed up for: he doesn’t want a shared truth, what he wants is a truth which is available to him and to a few other select cognoscenti alone, and the reason he’s into Straussianism is that it gives him what he’s after. Straussianism is constructed (meticulously) to produce exactly the impasse you describe. Straussians regard most information-seekers as benighted by nature, not misinformed by circumstance, and it’s not part of their program to place truths (which are valuable) within the grasp of undistinguished people (who are not). That would be insufficiently respectful toward the truths.

If Straussianism makes access to the truth exceptionally dependent on clubbiness and membership in cliques, that would be because it’s meant to. During the phase of the postulant’s journey which takes place while he still worries about the truth, he’s intended to realize that he can’t receive the truth from an enemy but only among friends, and that the distinction between friends and enemies is among the great real distinctions which will always prevail. He can sniff at other lines in the sand but he ought to pay attention to this one. (It’s also a pretty good tactic for keeping out riff-raff and useful in that respect.)

Leo Strauss was no Howard Campbell, because Howard Campbell is a bumbler, and Leo Strauss was not. Howard W. Campbell is incompetent, but Leo Strauss was effective. Howard W. Campbell ends up with a result he didn’t plan for, but Leo Strauss finished with the outcome he desired. Leo Strauss engineered his philosophy so that it would produce the results it does produce — he must have felt contempt for thinkers who entrust the outcome of their thought to mere chance. (And if comes to that, Howard Campbell isn’t even a thinker, is he — he’s just a mouthpiece, poor schlub.)

Some of my best friends are Straussians – or at any rate valued interlocutors, as a classical Greek author I work on (Thucydides) is one of their favourites. On the basis of this limited sample, I would say that a distinction between Strauss and Vulgar Straussianism is insufficient; leaving aside what Strauss himself had to say, there are those who identify with him by emphasising a particular kind of close reading without presupposing what this will find, and those for whom the close reading is simply a means to uncover the kinds of truth which are assumed to be present but concealed.

This more or less maps onto a distinction between those who engage with non-Straussian scholars of the same text, and those who are interested only in talking with one another. The latter can be entirely unintelligible to non-initiates. One of the weirdest experiences of my career was wandering into a panel at APSA on Xenophon, and hearing a series of people talking about familiar texts in a way that made absolutely no sense to me; on the face of it, a series of disconnected banalities. Someone explained to me afterwards that Xenophon has become a favourite of a particular group of Straussians, whose discussions refer only to each other, and the mere existence of a panel on Xenophon should have been enough of a warning sign.

I haven’t interacted with Straussianism before this conversaion, but it reminds me of Schrodingers Douchebag, and I think it merits the same response. Namely, speakers should be on the hook for what they actually say, and no later claims of secret messages should get one off the hook. When they say contradictory things, they should be on the hook for the worst aspects of all the things they say.

It also looks to me like Straussianism as a textual analysis strategy suffers from having cause and effect backwards. I don’t care what Machiavelli (for example) believed. Machiavelli’s writings don’t have value because he was a great thinker. We call him a great thinker because his writings have value. I love a good secret message, but it sounds like a Straussian believes in an almost-Platonic “Truth” that can be only ambiguously conveyed, and once you admit the failure of writing to convey that Truth I see no reason to value the Truth over the writing…

MisterMr@21 says The Prince is Machiavelli’s main work and his model was Cesare Borgia. Yes, it’s Machiavelli’s most famous work. But I am inclined to think Discourses on Livy is his main work, the context for The Prince, not the other way round. For assessing Machiavelli’s social attitudes, his play Mandragola/The Mandrake seems to me to be equally, if not more, useful. Most of all, it seems to me if Cesare Borgia was the model for the prince (who would save Italy) it was a kind of literary conceit, a strategy of flattery. Cesare Borgia is better seen I think as the target, not an intervention aimed at inspiring an appreciation of Cesare Borgia among the public. (Especially since it’s not clear there was a public in the sense we assume today.)

This may just show that a US citizen doesn’t understand Italian history, I suppose. Or any history in MisterMr’s view? The notion that national unity and independence in the face of foreign interventions is not part and parcel of “democracy” strikes me as quite wrong. Thus, “with the purpose of having a single guy take power and unify Italy as a dictatorship…” seems to me to concede the point, because 1)Cesare Borgia was guaranteed to die eventually while a unified and independent Italy would not and 2)Cesare Borgia was not the Pope, who could also have been the single dictator. Rhetorical question: If Machiavelli just wanted a dictator to unify Italy, why not him?

The moral to me is, actually existing democracy is not ideal democracy, never has been, never will be. And the necessarily idiosyncratic nature of ideal schemes makes them risking. If there ever was a work that called for a reading that looked for irony, covert agendas, hidden positions (a “Straussian” reading?) it is in my opinion The Prince.

stj @26
If The Prince has “a target” (i.e., an addressee), it is, in the first and most concrete instance at any rate, the person to whom the book is dedicated: Lorenzo de Medici (1492-1519), grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

MisterMr@29 The sentence before the “him” mentioned the Pope and that’s the him who I meant.

The point by MisterMr and LFC about the date of Cesare Borgia’s death makes me realize the practice of circulating manuscript copies before publication at large may have been common, but I shouldn’t have thoughtlessly assumed that. Lorenzo de Medici as the target of sincere advice?

The movie’s pretty blah but Sheryl Lee is amazing in it

Something I see in Mother Night that doesn’t get excavated much, and somewhat relates to the Strauss discussion, is:

“relating to an epistemic frame in the face of uncertainty is inevitable, and whatever you choose will destroy you”

Howard Campbell is a hysteric: he doesn’t know how to define himself / pick an epistemic frame. This destroys him.

The climax of the plot is an American nationalist who’s come to murder Campbell. He’s a paranoiac: he knows exactly who he is and how he relates to things through an elaborate fantastical frame he’s created. Campbell destroys him; spiritually through a great speech demolishing that fantastical frame, and physically by shattering his kneecap with a wrench (which he’s easily able to do, because the American’s fantasy didn’t take into account the American is much older and feebler).

There’s no escape into love, either. Howard’s intense and perfect romance (which is both lower- and upper-r) falls apart because it was based on an epistemic frame that couldn’t survive reality; when reality intrudes, as it must, the Romance then collapses

(The closest thing to a way out from this dilemma the novel points to is in the small consolations of a thin and complicated humanism, typical of Vonnegut, in Campbell’s speech to the American: “don’t hate unreservedly so that you find yourself excusing murder”)

Straussianism might be a technique for being an intellectual actor in this environment of radical epistemic uncertainty where choice is both inevitable and will destroy you: present different frameworks to different people/environments in the hope of escaping specific destructions or shaping specific ends.

Interestingly, this is what Campbell seems to choose to do in the novel: he is constantly serving different presentations of himself/the world to different audiences, in the hope of avoiding calamity or gaining something.

For the most part he is successful, and the final pages consist of an opportunity to simply allow an outside actor to present a new version of himself to the public one last time. By telling the truth, even.

But social life can’t be lived that way, and he can’t go through with it, and he kills himself.

“And this must be taken as a general rule: that never or rarely does it happen that any republic or realm is well-ordered from the beginning, or altogether reformed from its old order, if it is not ordered by one… but a prudent orderer of a republic, if he has this will to benefit not himself but the common good… has to arrange to have this authority alone; nor will a wise mind take issue with any extraordinary action necessary to order a realm or constitute a republic…. [But] if one is appropriate to order things, the order will not last long when it remains on the shoulders of the one, but very well when it remains in the care of many, and when it is up to many to maintain it. Because just as many are not suited to order a thing, due to not knowing its good because of the diverse opinions among them, so once they know it they cannot agree to abandon it.” Discourses, book I, chapter IX.

… according to my “death of the author” principles said hidden motives are not relevant for the literary Machiavelli, who comes out from his texts.

Do you think in terms of a single literary Machiavelli, who is deteremined by the aggregate of all his works, or multiple literary Machiavellis, one for each text?

The Prince is the only one I have read, but I do remember that near the beginning he mentions that he’s not going to discuss republics in that book because he’s dealt with them elsewhere. Doesn’t this mean that a literary Machiavelli based solely on the text of The Prince alone is somebody who has no view about republics one way or the other?

Chapter I of The Prince begins like this: ‘All states, all powers, that have held and hold rule over men have been and are either republics or principalities.’ Chapter II begins like this: ‘I will leave out all discussion on republics, inasmuch as in another place I have written of them at length, and will address myself only to principalities.’

I think that makes it clear that the text of The Prince tells us, of itself, that it reveals nothing about the author’s opinions about republics and that if you want to know what the author thinks about republics you must look elsewhere.

“But [Machiavelli] lived in a period where democracies existed but were not the norm, and also our egalitarian idea that every citizen has the same rights (which is the reason we prefer democracies) wasn’t really common either.”

My personal ignorance defeats me again, and I can’t think of any contemporary democracies whose practice Machiavelli might have observed. Further, “our” supposed egalitarian ideas about the equality of citizens omits that the equal right to property of all citizens is a guarantee of inequality in practice. Such issues are still contentious. Projecting a preferred personal notion of ideal democracy back onto Machiavelli, regardless of whether you judge him a proponent or an enemy, is questionable I think.

Another thing, the question “Who is a citizen?” is essential. For Machiavelli, judging from his political career and more of his writings than The Prince, there was a sense in which all the Italian people were “citizens.” The notion that “democracy” means equal rights even of citizens by the way forgets that women and children were commonly held to be citizens of a sort yet without equal political rights, so even that assertion is riskier than may seem.

To repeat myself in different words, the notion that the people can be free when their country/city is not, is an absurdity. National liberation and national unity are democratic, and essential to “democracy.” Not ideal democracy as currently avowed (which is modeled in practice I think on notions of politics as a market, with voters as consumers) but such ideals tend to be idiosyncrasies, individual mental phenomena not truly observable to others. That’s why so much of political discourse on texts starts (and sometimes ends?) with heated debate on what someone meant to say, perhaps.

Even in terms of formal political rights accorded to full citizens, Machiavelli’s apparent refusal to advocate for papal rule is very much a repudiation of that openly hierarchical system, no? It makes very much difference if it’s the Pope. The Borgia project was in the end for one thing about replacing the papacy with a secular system, a principality (that united Italy.) It’s not an ideal democracy, but then, like ideal socialism, it’s the actually existing democracy that ultimately matters. You can presume your personal version of democracy and put any actually existing “democracy” in scare quotes at will, but it is not at all clear this is substantive, much less conclusive. But then, I confess I see a democratic element to the Lollards and the Hussites and the Protestant Reformation too, so take that for what it’s worth.

Machiavelli’s secular world view, which sees an intelligibility of politics beyond the prevalent at that time moralizing, played its part even in the emergence of democracy I believe. (Discourses on Livy could be considered an early essay in political science/sociology/history as a science rather than one of the humanities?)

Last, on the death of the author: “The problem of assuming an hidden meaning is that we tend to project our own opinion on others…” This is true of all fiction and all texts of any sort, including Mother Night. “Our” opinion that Nazis were an extraordinary evil is projected into our reading of the novel. There’s no novel is collaboration of any kind, even a pretense of collaboration, is morally wrong, if I remember correctly.

My belief based on decades old memory is that Vonnegut shared that common belief, widespread (not universal) then and now. I don’t recall any distinct excursus in the text affirming this openly however…. The issue of when a reading of the intent of the author is a bad reading, defying the manifest content in the name of an imputed reading, is not even addressed by a mere assumption that the text is a complete universe, so to speak, self-contained as an entity. I don’t know whether assuming an oeuvre is a literary cosmos serves either, but I suspect not. Criticism, deep criticism at least, of texts is also deep criticism of the readers. Look at the arguments between fans! Criticisms of taste is criticism of persons too.

The problem with the death of the author thesis is the assumption that the author has put only their intentions into the text, and only them. But could they have inadvertently put in commonplace ideas they never meant consciously? I don’t see how they could avoid it! In Mother Night, is Campbell truly a significant figure, whose fate is a moral tragedy, or another victim of war, more pathetic than heroic or villainous? Is Campbell somehow a commentary on John W. Campbell? If so, what does that say and why does it matter?

How would Machiavelli have adapted Mother Night as a play?

@steven t johnson 40

Perhaps we are speaking past each other.

“The problem with the death of the author thesis is the assumption that the author has put only their intentions into the text, and only them.”
No, the “death of the author” logic is that only what the author says in the text counts, not that these are the real intentions. For example, if Dante says in the comedy that he loved Beatrice, we have to assume that he really loved Beatrice, even if we can’t know this for real. The only exception is if culturally in that narrative genre there was a known convention of speaking of imaginary angelicized women (so the cultural context does count in the death of the author thesis).

Depending on what you mean by “democracy”, Florence, Siena, Venice were more or less democracies, with a limited part of the population that could participate in the democratic process. Perhaps in modern terms we could call those “oligarchies”, but generally an “oligarchy” is supposed to be one where only the “grandi” (nobles or literally “big” citiziens) count. I think that many italian “comuni” of the times would be better understood as limited democracies, like the form of democracy where only the ones who own land can vote or similar.

“Machiavelli’s apparent refusal to advocate for papal rule”
He doesn’t call for papal rule but he doesn’t exclude it explicitly, plus he lived in Florence, he couldn’t say “hey I want the guy from another italian ministate to conquer us” because it would have been literal treason.

“It makes very much difference if it’s the Pope. The Borgia project was in the end for one thing about replacing the papacy with a secular system, a principality (that united Italy.)”
The Borgias got into power because one of them was a Pope so I don’t really follow you here (it is in the link you gave before?), plus yes, the “Prince” is not an aristocratic prince, more like a dictator. But this was already the norm in italian “comuni”: originally and formally those were sort of limited democracies, however as society evolved some (non aristocratic) families got really a lot of money, with which they managed to control these comuni and took away much of the real bite of the sorta more or less democratic power of the guilds. They also bough aristocratic titles.
But when Machiavelli writes about monarchy he is not thinking in terms of divine rights of the king, he is thinking of one “big” citizien who manages to get enough power to lord over the others, like Julius Caesar or Augustus (or the Medicis).
The problem is not between secularism and feudal style right of the kings, it is between a secularist limited democracy and a secularist autocracy (that technically is a form of monarchy).

” For Machiavelli, judging from his political career and more of his writings than The Prince, there was a sense in which all the Italian people were “citizens.” ”
Yeah, but please note that in M times Florence, Siena, Rome, Venice etc. were different states, so he is asking for a “prince” to take away this sort of local citizenships and unify them in a bigger unit, on the (correct, it turned out) assumption that if they didn’t unify they would have been conquerd by foreigners. He wanted the Prince to conquer these people (who were already “free” in the limited sense you mean) because he believed that in the future they would not have been “free” anymore, something that really happened.
If we stretch a bit the comparison, it would be like someone who asks one politician of an EU state (say Meloni because he would have been italian, but it could have been a lefty too) to subvert the EU and turn it into an autocracy, and merge the unruly EU nations together, because otherwise the Chinese (or the Indians or maybe even the Americans) will come and kick our collective asses.

I didn’t read the “discourses” …

Then you don’t know what Machiavelli thought about republics. That’s all I’m saying.

@J-D 44
If I read a book by someone who says “wow an autocrat should really conquer a lot of small semi democratic republics, it would be cool” then I think I’m justified to say that this guy is pro dictatorship, whatever else he wrote before.

That said, I read the first few chapters of the Discourses and he seems to think that:
There are three brands of governments, by “princes”, by “optimates” (he uses this latin term in italian, not nobles or aristocrats), and by the people in general; the three forms tend to degrade so an ideal state should have all three balancing each others. He counts roman consuls as “princes” so perhaps he would be ok with presidential republics (?) but then he thinks that Sparta was much better than Athens because Athens was too democratic.

Nothing in what I read tells me that M tought that democracy was in line of priciple morally superior to a dictatorship, only that dictatorships can be bad if the dictator act as an ass (but then this is equivalent to democracies becoming too lenient).

If I read a book by someone who says “wow an autocrat should really conquer a lot of small semi democratic republics, it would be cool” …

I don’t recall that from anywhere in the text of The Prince. Where are you finding it?