Month: May 2020

On Augustine’s Letter to Nectarius

Ishaan Jajodia

I shall use this opportunity to reconsider the compatibility of Christianity and Politics through Letter 91, which forms part of a series of prolonged correspondences exchanged between the two in 408 AD. Nectarius, a pagan and civil servant, wrote to Augustine in search of mercy for those responsible for stoning and setting fire to a church in Calama, which is in present day Algeria.1 The letter deals largely with what Atkins and Dodaro describe as “the clash between traditional Roman patriotism (love for one’s own hometown or patria), rooted in civil theology, and Augustinian Christian civic ideals” (242).

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  1. All quotes and references from: Augustine, Political Writings, ed. and trans. E.M. Atkins and Robert Dodaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ↩

Gibbon and Active Citizenship

Ishaan Jajodia

Gibbon’s work on the dying years of the Roman Empire — well, all 1480 of them, from the day Augustus took the reins of the empire to the day the Ottomans sacked Constantinople — is as much a work of complex social science and of political philosophy as it is a work of history. Of major interest, however, are his short sentences, masterfully inserted in the midst of expansive discussions on minutiae of the functioning of the Empire, such as this one:

“In the purer ages of the commonwealth, the use of arms was preserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”1

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  1. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. 1, § Military Establishment of the Roman Emperors. ↩

In Praise of Edmund Burke’s Speech on Fox’s East India Bill

Ishaan Jajodia
Burke
Studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, in the National Portrait Gallery.

Burke’s fascination with France was rather fleeting when compared to the time he spent on Indian affairs. Almost a decade and a half of his parliamentary career was dedicated to the affairs of Warren Hastings, the re-chartering of the East India Company, and in general the subject of what is just in politics. It is from Burke’s speech on Fox’s East India Bill (1783) that we get this familiar and wrenching description of the East India Company’s affairs of a region that Burke defines in a manner not dissimilar to Gibbon’s opening salvo describing the spread of the Roman Empire:

“… an oppressive, irregular, capricious, unsteady, rapacious, and peculating despotism, with a direct disavowal of obedience to any authority at home, and without any fixed maxim, principle, or rule of proceeding ….”.1

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  1. Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Fox’s East India Bill,’ in On Empire, Liberty, and Reform, ed. David Bromwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 282–370, 345. ↩

On Max Stirner’s The False Principle of Our Education (1842)

Ishaan Jajodia

Max Stirner, 1 a student of G.W.F. Hegel, found his niche not in the propagation of Hegelian thought or as a Young Hegelian, but as a progenitor of nihilist postmodernism and egoism, both of which represent rather lethal turn in Western thought following the critical turn of philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century, prompted by Immanuel Kant’s three critiques. In this essay, Stirner issues a sharp rebuke of humanist and realist education alike, emphasising the frivolity of the former and the haughtiness of the latter. Tracing the history of education in Northern Europe from the medieval to the modern period, Stirner examines in broad strokes the nature of education and its oscillations between these two paradigms, both of which he finds ultimately futile because they do not lead to the truth, which he defines solely as “man’s revelation of himself.”

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  1. Max Stirner, ‘The False Principle of Our Education’, The Anarchist Library, 12 February 2009, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-false-principle-of-our-education. ↩

Who was Aristotle?

Ishaan Jajodia
Plato And Aristotle
Plato and Aristotle, or Philosophy. Marble panel from the North side, lower basement of the bell tower of Florence, Italy. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. | Wikimedia Commons.

The historical Aristotle is enigmatic. He does not enjoy the same level of infamy as Socrates, and whilst he is connected with the slightly less enigmatic but grand and popular Alexander, his famous pupil (of that there is no doubt, though there is no certainty as to the contents of his tutelage), he remains a mystery. There are few expressions of his personality, and more information about him comes from rumours and invectives than sources one may consider historical á la Thucydides. My account here is based on my observations whilst reading Carlo Natali’s Aristotle: His Life and School,1 which was the most advanced scholarship I could find and peruse. I will attempt to avoid commonplace observations about him, unless they are inescapable.2

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  1. ed. D.S. Hutchinson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). Page numbers are cited in square brackets inline. ↩
  2. For a good and brief sketch of Aristotle, see James B. Murphy’s chapter on Aristotle in How To Think Politically. ↩

O Miseras Hominum Mentes, O Pectora Caeca!

Ishaan Jajodia
Nash Menin
Paul Nash, The Menin Road, 1919.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides includes a small but revealing note on methodology (1.21–22),1 which concludes as follows:

“It may be that the lack of a romantic element in my history will make it less of a pleasure to the ear: but I shall be content if it is judged useful by those who will want to have a clear understanding of what happened — and, such is the human condition, will happen again at some time in the same or a similar pattern. It was composed as a permanent legacy, not a showpiece for a single hearing.” (1.22)

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  1. All quotes from Thucydides are quoted from: Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. Martin Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↩

Reconsidering Strauss’ ‘Esoteric Writing’ in light of Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ishaan Jajodia
Bust
Bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Capitoline Museums, 1st Century AD, Roman.

One of Leo Strauss’ most controversial revelations — revelations insofar as they rely on a rather imaginative reading of the texts they rely upon — is his ‘discovery’ of ‘esoteric writing,’ which has been applied by all and sundry, without discrimination or context, as a suitable methodological framework. It is my contention here that the biggest challenge to Strauss’ concept of esoteric writing can be found in the works of Cicero, particularly in his dialogues De Republica and De Legibus.1

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  1. All quotes from these two dialogues are from: Cicero, The Republic and the Laws, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). ↩

When Words Lose Their Meaning, Nothing Means Anything

Ishaan Jajodia
JR SOA Parody
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Parody of Raphael’s ‘School fo Athens’, 1751. | A fitting visual characterisation of White’s reading of Burke.

James Boyd White’s study of the relationship between the ‘law’ and the language is fascinating and revelatory in the first part, and meaningless and misleading in the second. The dividing line between the two seems to be the jump from the ancient to the modern; I have written previously here of White’s astute understanding of the roles of the philosopher, historian, and poet — of Socrates, Thucydides, and Homer. But the modern world seems to perplex him, for it is here that language for him seems to truly lose its meaning, and a fealty to reading and comprehension’s basic principles rather evasive. It is his essay on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolutions of France that causes the greatest pain, and reduces Burke’s mastery of the English language to a debased sophistry.

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The Problem of ‘Influence’

Ishaan Jajodia
Cole
Thomas Cole, The Consummation of Empire, 1836 | SPQR: the Senate and the People of Rome, or the Senile, Poor Quacks of Reykjavik?

The three statues of David that I began my last post with are important to this one, too, for they represent the always unresolved problem of ‘influence’ within the history of ideas and of political philosophy in particular. Flights of fancy and tenuous links may lead the far-too-interested observer to think that Verocchio’s David is the translation of a young da Vinci into bronze, a representation of a great artist as a boy. If one is prone to the sordid affliction of busying oneself with the cheap thrills of Dan Brown, one may even be led to think that Gian Lorenzo Bernini was some sort of ‘Illuminati’ master who hid clues all around Rome of the four elements. The first claim — that da Vinci is, in fact, Verocchio’s muse for the David — is as spurious and fantastical as the second, but this has not prevented in any way, shape, or form the spread and popularity of these views in the vox populi and academic discourse. It is the sort of tenuous claim that would give credence even to the sore misgiving that SPQR stood not for Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and the People of Rome, but for the ‘Senile, Poor Quacks of Reykjavik’.

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The Art Historian as Political Philosopher

Ishaan Jajodia

[All translations are from the Loeb Classical Library unless otherwise specified.]

The Three Davids
From L–R: Donatello’s marble David and bronze David; Verocchio’s bronze David.

Tucked away from the courtyard of the Bargello are three statues of David: a marble statue (c. 1409) and a bronze statue (c. 1445) by Donatello, and another bronze statue by Andrea del Verocchio (c. 1475). To the uninitiated, these three are merely different takes on a Biblical figure, aesthetically pleasing, and differing only slightly in form and date. To the art historian, these three statues show how the polis of Florence sought to think of itself as it moved from constitutional rule to a brazen oligarchy to a de facto monarchy (and if we are to believe Piero Soderini, a tyrannical one). Donatello’s marble David is also a potent symbol of how change — the kind that can be appreciated, in any matter — is always a slow, gradual process; it stands on the precipice between the medieval and the modern, the Gothic and the Renaissance, combining with astute skill and genius the slender grace of the figures at Chatres and Reims with the ever-so-slight contrapposto that would prominently feature in yet another marble statue of David, this time by Michelangelo, whose revolutionary republicanism inspired a rather moving image that featured prominently in Florentine imagery. But when did the Gothic end — and when did the Renaissance begin? The tail end of the former and the origins of the latter are almost fungible.

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