Her questions are rhetorical and exhibit the fallacy of circular reasoning. If they believe in equality amongst equals, and genuine freedom for the few themselves , why would they rule for the good of others? It would be that philosophers must cooperate with non-philosophers in order to survive. However, if there is the slightest kink in their knowledge of the just state, including above all knowledge of different kinds of souls since the state is ordered on that basis , then philosophers who rule will do more damage than good.
They might mistake bronze for gold souls, botch their own marital arrangements, and mistake their utopia for reality. This can be expected to some degree. Human beings are fallible. It is on such occasions that the problems for Platonic philosophers holding office of any kind comes into view.
If their own good is identical to the good of the state, because the just state is an idea they believe they were born to contemplate , philosophers are not likely to admit that something has gone wrong to a public they assume are intellectual ill-equipped to understand them, and in any event are prone to envy.
They love to bring down those who are better than themselves, often in the name of equality. Foreseeing this danger, in The Republic Plato recommended that the rulers lie to the many. Following his advice, in order to preserve the good of the state, i. No one would discount the importance of the intellect in grasping foundations. Bloom cannot be completely wrong. But perhaps the extremities to which a philosophical life is prone is hazardous not only to the body, but to the possibility of learning from experience and changing oneself accordingly.
They are more Platonic than Socratic; more likely to form thought enclaves than to debate anybody. Cavell recommends distrusting the wisdom handed down by the tradition in books insofar as it distracts from experience, and the ways in which experience can correct theories.
In contrast to Bloom, who believes that Americans do not have the depth of character to understand the significance of a life without first principles, she argues that anti-foundationalism is at the heart of the American way. More than anyone else, the peoples of the new world, estranged from Europe, without a strong heritage or sense of history are primed to take on the task Nietzsche proposes.
This is above all evident in the fact that Nietzsche was himself fascinated by America, and in particular by the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
She recounts the affinities the two philosophers had for one another, and traces the impetus for some of Nietzsche's most crucial insights to Emerson. Nietzsche encountered Emerson at a critical turning point in his life.
To recapitulate, for Ratner-Rosenhagen, principles are not enshrined in a constitution, preserved by an education in learning how to reason about Platonic ideas, universal and eternal principles that render intelligible the world of change and capacity to judge it.
Principles are not transcendent to history or human making and studying the works of great philosophers are incidental to performing the ideas of liberty and equality in our daily lives. Least of all is it the educated classes tethered to professorial chairs and the contemplative intellectual life upon whom the future of the nation depends. For Ratner-Rosenhagen, Nietzsche is critical to the preservation and revitalization of foundations precisely because he is the quintessential anti-foundational philosopher.
No one would dispute the importance of enacting foundations, of actually exemplifying principles of liberty and equality in a community of speech and deed.
Ratner-Rosenhagen cannot be wrong. But perhaps the extremities to which the creative will is prone is dangerous. This is close to the people at large becoming those ideas—the very pretense Platonic philosophers require in order to justify their holding public office which entails that they deny making any mistakes. Bloom idealizes foundations as ideas within the grasp of a few and Ratner-Rosenhagen idealizes the will of the people.
Were there nothing more to foundations than the binary opposition they represent, both the person and the nation would be divided against themselves; privately imagining themselves to be perfect while acting brazenly and rashly in public without self-control.
But surely the juxtaposition between the intellect and the creative will is false. Were principles ideas, known exclusively to the intellect, the will to enact them would be impoverished; were principles solely declared in the formation of a shared language, the capacity for critical self-reflection, deliberation and direction of one's endeavors toward an ultimate good would be compromised. This suggests that they have a hidden common ground, albeit a ground about which they are silent, yet nevertheless presuppose.
However much Bloom has a regard for tradition, he is silent about the relation of Christianity to liberal democracy, but at the same time assumes the reason of rulers is informed by faith, otherwise they would become Machiavellian immoralist. Liberal democracy has, as Bloom reminds us, origins in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. However, the Enlightenment moralists were engaged in a secularization of Christian virtue. John C. Bloom does not mention this, nor that Adam Smith was a devout Presbyterian and that The Wealth of Nations, a defense of capitalism, presupposes that everyone else was as well.
Unless one has faith in the goodness of liberty and equality, there is no reason to defend or uphold them other than for self-preservation, which is evident in the rhetoric of Platonists whenever their mistakes are in danger of being exposed.
Ratner-Rosenhagen makes a move toward the truths of democracy being self- evident to all. She believes that natural law is not a body of knowledge that can be known rationally and trusts instead the will of the people.
As Jacques Maritain puts it in Man and the State, the Declaration of Independence is a common formulation of practical conclusions everyone can agree upon before a theoretical justification that tends to pit one person against another p.
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