Mike Rand e-mails,
I was interested to see your recent correspondence and post on the radical vs the conservative. I couldn't help but notice that there is a potential parallel between this and a common interest of yours [ours?], the productive tension between Aristotle and Plato. A radical may be liable to point out that it because Plato is prepared to build a state upon rational rather than traditional grounds that he is prepared to consider women as equally well qualified to rule the state on meritocratic grounds (a la Mill), a thesis which is well supported in the contemporary world though unthinkable in ancient Greece. They may also contrast this against Aristotle’s impression of women which appears indefensible in the modern era but natural in his own time, and they may also draw attention to Aristotle’s defense of slavery. The conservative Aristotle on these points alone appears monstrous to a modern audience against the radical Plato. In accord with the recent post, we might very well conclude that the conservative is a reality-based thinker (within his own environment), whilst the radical is a utopian (prepared to look beyond his environment). The conservative in reply would of course draw attention to the realistic and practical view of Aristotle on running a state and compare this to the proto-communist authoritarian and elitist Plato who would construct a state, mentally at least, that would appear equally monstrous to a modern audience.
This is very perceptive. Since I am first and foremost an aporetician keen to isolate and sharpen problems under suspension of the natural tendency to glom onto quick solutions, it interests me and indeed worries me that there may be a tension between my tendency to give the palm to Plato over Aristotle and my conservative tendency. As I said recently:
One cannot be a philosopher unless one believes that at least some important truths are attainable or at least approachable by dialectical and argumentative means. Thus there is no place in philosophy for the misologist, the hater of reason, and his close relative the fideist. Reasoning and argument loom large in philosophy . . . .
But now I must add that to the extent that I favor reason over experience and tradition, the universal over the particular, the global over the local, the impersonal over the personal, to that extent I am in some conflict with my conservative tendency. One of the differences between conservatives and their liberal/left/radical brethren is that they are skeptical aqbout the value of reason in the ordering of political affairs.
Plato is, of course, much more than a utopian, but his powerful reason and argument via the erudite Socrates is clearly able to deflect the objections of those opposed to his reason (although one would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Aristotle was in the Academy). Indeed powerful reason alone tends to fall short of absolute truth and cannot, therefore, be enough to guide political change. The reasoned utopianism of Marx lead to communism and the reason of Parmenides lead to a non-credible metaphysics and the paradoxes of Zeno.
Excellent observations. The Communist experiment in applied dialectics proved to be a bloody one: it issued in the murder of over 100 million people. That's a lot of eggs to break and still get no omelet. But is this the fault of reason, or of reason when it fails to submit itself to critique? You will have noticed that in my metaphilosophical piece I said that "the critique of reason is part of reason's enterprise." The critique of (pure, practical, aesthetic and teleological) reason was Kant's project. Hegel, however, broke loose of the Kantian constraints. And it was Hegel who sired Marx, Marx Lenin, Lenin Stalin. Was the Stalinist upshot inevitable given the starting point? That will be debated til doomsday. For Kant, reason was dialectical in a bad sense when it ventured beyond the bounds of sense. So venturing, it entangled itself in paralogisms and antinomies. But Kant was certainly no misologist. He strove after and in some measure achieved a balanced position, but the underpinnings of his system were shaky and collapse was inevitable. Once the Enlightenment juggernaut gets going, how stop it?
You're right: Parmendies with his trust his reason, with his belief in the 'identity' of thinking and being, leads straight to Zeno and his paradoxes.
Perhaps if we are optimistic, then we might suppose that reason in the end can unfold all the mysteries. Leibnitz and Newton show us how to get past the paradoxes of Zeno, and Hayek explains the errors of the centrally planned state; but the calculus was invented two thousand years after Parmenides and Zeno, and Hayek’s criticism of communism came after the event. The French and Russian revolutions, though prompted by injustice and the ideals of the enlightenment, degenerated into injustice and chaos. In contrast, however, the conservative must recognize that change has, does and will always happen. In contrast to those other revolutions, the American revolution was a success precisely because it made radical change but grounded its constitution in wisdoms accumulated over millennia.
I like that, except that I must disagree on the question whether the calculus gets us past the paradoxes of Zeno. See Zeno's Regressive Dichotomy and the 'Calculus Solution.' As far as I can see, no one has definitively defused Zeno's paradoxes. They are genuine intellectual knots.
Change is a given, progress is the debate.
The radical thesis must be balanced by the conservative antithesis in order to get the appropriate synthesis and hence progress. The challenge is to go in the right direction at the right speed. It will always be too slow for the radical, and it will always be too fast for the conservative. We might question whether the western adversarial system promotes an efficient synthesis; we might question whether we need swings from right to left and back again before the synthesis is realized: do we need to live through the opposing theses? Is it a utopian ideal to think that we don’t? In any case the radical and the conservative need to learn to love each other’s strengths.
The mass of the population sit between the extremes, but that mid-point and the extremes are arbitrarily positioned. The political tide will appear to take a random walk when viewed over the very long term. History shows us these tidal changes, but in a human lifetime we don’t watch the changing of the tide, we stand in the wash of the waves. Wherever that mid-point lies there will be extremes, wherever the mid point lies there will be, by necessity and by the nature of mankind, a radical and a conservative. We must and will walk together, radical and conservative. Can we, will we, walk hand in hand or at opposing ends of a rope playing an eternal game of tug and war?
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