Ralph Hancock leads off the thread:
Comment 14 by Ralph
Now a bit of real intellectual reporting: The panel on new books on Strauss (panelists: the Zuckerts, T. Pangle, J. Yarbrough, D. Mahoney), was completely packed, and every Straussian or post-Straussian who is anyone was either in the room or in the overflow in the hallway. The Zuckerts gave a fair, appropriately undefensive account of how their book was intended more to address the public "noise" about Strauss and thus rhetorically different from Pangle's.
There was a very funny moment when, after Michael had spoken and exhibited his high regard for Locke, Catherine was sure to mention in passing that she "is not a Lockean." "Now you tell me!" was Michael's instantaneous reply.
Beyond that, both Daniel and Jean pointed up Pangle's tin ear re. a Christian understanding of transcendence. (Responding to Mahoney, he [Pangle?] accused him [Mahoney?] of being more scholastic than the scholastics -- blurring the line between revelation and reason more than they.) In the Q&A, C.[lifford] Orwin quite poignantly remarked that after 25 years he still had no idea of Pangle's position on the theological question. Pangle was, as usual, very articulate but not necessarily very helpful in responding.
Hadley Arkes and I (and others, no doubt), tried to press the question further from the peanut gallery. I remember best my approach (unsurprisingly): I asked Pangle directly: "Is philosophy noble?" He answered, disarmingly, with one word: "Yes." (OK, that was too easy. But if you look at my exegesis of Pangle in PSR you will see that I don't believe his answer here is candid.)
I gathered myself and pursued: can philosophy fully grasp and master it's own nobility? If it can't, I tried to explain, then the philosophic life's claims to self-sufficiency are not credible, and the openness of the revelation-reason question complicates, even undermines the claims of the philosophic life more than Pangle admits.
Or, addressing the Zuckerts: the philosopher's serene confidence in the goodness of his own activity is not really compatible, after the claims of biblical revelation, with the recognition of the irredeemably "zetetic" character of philosophy. I find in both books (Pangle's and Zuckerts') an attempt to combine a certain absolutism and a certain zetecism that strikes me as incoherent.
I think time elapsed at about this point, so at least I had had my say. The High-Straussian position may be most fruitfully questioned, I think, not by insisting on the reasonable content of revelation (as important as this is), but by pointing up the self-transcendence of philosophy, and therefore its insuperable dependence on moral and religious intimations it shares with non-philosophers.
Link to this Comment | 9/3/2007 3:45 PM
And then Dan Mahoney jumps in:
Comment 20 by Dan Mahoney
Ralph is undoubtedly right that it is best to point out the limitations of High Straussianism(i.e. the position that insists on the radical "autonomy" of philosophic reason) by highlighting the philosopher's "dependence on moral and religious intimations" that he "shares with non-philosophers." I tried to make that same point in my own way.
But I was struck by Pangle's inability and unwillingness to engage an "idiom" other than his own and by his hostility to any suggestion that those intimations might provide some evidence for the truth--or possible truth-- of "revelation." His instinct is to 'circle the wagons' even when faced by friendly criticism. This radical defensiness does not augur well for the future of the Straussian project.
In any case, I gave as well as I got and articulated the multiple grounds for thinking that "reason" and not just blind faith or decision is integral to religious faith. More fundamentally, the philosopher is never truly autonomous because he too must defer to what Aurel Kolnai suggestively called the "sovereignty of the object."
There is something higher than the human will and that fact is knowable in principle by both reason and revelation.
Link to this Comment | 9/3/2007 6:23 PM
Ralph replies:
Comment 30 by Ralph
Dan Mahoney is definitely right that Mr. Pangle is notably lacking in any ability or inclination to attend to idioms other than his familiar "classical rationalist" tongue.
Now, to extend the reportage on the APSA just a bit (at the risk of interrupting the Giuliani/anti-Giuliani fesitivities): The Voegelinian sponsored panel on Voegelin-Strauss-Arendt was very good, and notably irenic between Straussians and Voegelinians (probably no Arendtians were there). Michael Zuckert's discussion of Plato and Aristotle in Strauss was very acute, venturesome -- this man has some range, for a Lockean! Tim Fuller offered a wide-ranging and seasoned meditation on the three authors. Jim Stoner presented a most judicious parcing of the disparities and convergences between Catholicism and Strauss, emphasizing, most prudently, the grounds of an ongoing alliance.
Thus an excellent panel - all three presentations full of insight and even some wisdom.
Link to this Comment | 9/4/2007 2:17 PM
Ivan Kenneally piles on:
Comment 32 by Ivan Kenneally
... I think Mahoney is right to point out that Pangle stubbornly refuses to abandon his peculiar idiom--that stubborness seems to be born out of a not entirely dogmatic commitment to the view that the rational alternative is superior to the revelatory one.
On some level it struck me as odd that Pangle ever wrote that book given that he famously argues elsewhere that the Jewish question for Strauss is not a special case of the tension between reason and revelation; in other words, he argues that the Hebrew Scriptures are just one instantiation of the central tension and one could understand the tension without particular reference to it.
While all of Pangle's book is impressive and much of it is very insightful, a lot of the interpretation suffers from his characteristic rationalism, meaning that he begins with a conclusion somewhat forgone given the overly rationalistic interpretation of the biblical experience of revelation.
Link to this Comment | 9/4/2007 5:48 PM
