It is the sign of an overly active imagination and a restless mind that one focuses more on what ought to be than what is, which is the question we face in the present moment: must we prefer hard ‘facts’ to utopic ‘visions’, the present to the future in its entirety, or the past in all its knowingness, to the detriment of the now and henceforth. The question of escapism, of voluntary renunciation, or of blatant ignorance of the world is a question posed to many in the ivory tower, but is of pressing importance to the philosopher of politics, if only because the very birth of political philosophy was in a heedless utopia, and its most ardent expression in perhaps the most common-sense abstractions (of course, it is not always as dichotomous as this, and certainly Aristotle ought not to have acquired a reputation for various forms of pedantry and didacticism, but that is wholly another matter). What separates the enviable political philosopher from the second-rate thinker? Is it wholly in making compromises with reality, or is the same virtue as that which applies to politics itself — neither an excess, nor a dearth — of some value here? Is methodological neutrality as chickenish as neutral positions often sound, the sign of an insecure individual unable to commit to any one side and reserving the most ‘obvious’ position whilst refusing to think in any way that would endanger his ‘common sense’? This subject is of peculiar interest here not because of Schumpeter’s irritable gestures against Aristotle, which are beyond inflammatory. It is because of a more contemporary debate, one that has taken place for all time and will continue to take place. Does a ‘thing’ have an ‘essence’ or an ‘end’, a telos? Is the teleological mode of thought such a wretched mode of analysis, unsophisticated and brutish, or does it appear to bear some sophisticated manner of thinking that ought to have some relation to the manner in which we think of questions in the first place, even before we examine answers?

It cannot be denied in the first place that the philosopher who owes allegiance to ‘reality’ often sees some monstrous object in front of his eyes, whether it be the budding tyrant of Il Principe or the overwhelming and draconian sea-monster of Hobbes. Most philosophers who seek to traffick in the dark arts of the ‘present’ are not wholly aware of the present because they deign to observe the laws of the non-physical world. In other words, those who seek to show the world for what it is oftentimes forget that the world has not always been what it is today, that the present had some principal agent, a mover and shaker, or more than one, that can bear responsibility through its agency for the present moment, and that the agent(s) upon which responsibility may be thrust are either the ignoble characteristics of man that do not differ from place to place but merely articulate themselves with the smallest of differences in cultural norms and mores, or sometimes objects of the non-physical world that may need elucidation in terms other than that of naked self-interest, vice, violence, or any sort of vicious behaviour that is both sadistic and degrading. The desire for power, for once, is a human impulse, a passion, that manifests itself in many ways — some more ghastly and horrific than others, it must be said — but that does not change its responsibility as an agent and actor in its own right. If politics is the study of the polis, attendant to it is the examination of the nature of power; but such power ought not to be considered unless it is married to a more important end: virtue. Without virtue, power is tyranny. The question of power without bounds, tyrannical, despotic power, is appealing to the realist, who sees only the fallen condition of man but no hope for the future, and no wonder in the past. For those who seek to think along this avowedly realist lines, one thing is sure: they tend to be the sort of individuals who are so scarred within that they possess no faculties worth positively noting and cannot feel the lure of excellence and reason, only passion. They mask their ‘reality’ in ‘rationality’, but this ‘reality’ has nothing to do with the wonders of the world, of its past, present, and future, and this ‘rationality’ has nothing to do with the ‘reason’ that we so prize in our pursuit of philosophy. Perhaps without doubt, the question of realistic thinking is met with the response of certain reductivism and a shallow, negating outlook of the world.

On the other side, we find the idealist, one who seeks to traffick in utopic visions of bliss. His love exists in a lust for the future that dramatically alters the present in a way that makes it rather untenable, and then inevitably countenances all such means that may offer some hope of alleviating the present, for the now lacks value whilst the future is but a blank canvas upon which he can turn to Picasso or Raphael without consideration of the ghastliness of the former or the grace of the latter. The idealist’s proclivities are generally highfalutin, and his prose is a cheap shade of purple. Why is this so? A friend once remarked that the only thing Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini shared in common was their intellectual origins in Hegel, in some form or the other. While this may not be entirely true, it has a degree of correctness that warrants its repetition. Idealism is wholly predisposed to the actualisation of some aim, whether it be ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ or some ‘materialism’ or whatever dialectical form Hegel’s ghost may like to take. Alternatively, the idealist is forced to examine the present and finds a present that is so divorced from his ideal reality that he retreats from the world around him on account of the pain it might cause him, and in that he follows the false steps of Epicurus and his school. In doing so, the idealist rejects civic existence and removes from himself the venerable understanding of man as a political animal. In avoiding pain, the idealist avoids responsibility, and in avoiding obligation and duty he shirks his humanity for some outright and brazen form of hedonism.

The idealist and the realist both countenance tyranny in one form or the other. The former because any regime is better than the present;[1] the latter because he sees it as an inevitable fact of life. The idealist is enchanted by perfection but does not understand man’s fundamental imperfection; the realist thinks man to be far too fallen to be helped by anything but a stern rod. He would rather take the carrot and use it as a stick. The idealist would barter and truck his freedom in this manner with the realist, and turn bedfellows with an aspiring collaborator of tyranny.

Thus, both suffer from fatal flaws. But what of the sceptic? The nihilist is enjoined to the realist, to scepticism here is a more academic form. Take David Hume, for example, or his most famous English successor, Michael Oakeshott, both of whom founded successful philosophical enterprises not on the negation of the formal, ideal world, not on the avowal of the ‘realist’ view, and not on some brazen neutrality that seeks to deny everything and turn it into a broken cassette filled with horror stories from Melos. Even with a healthy dose of scepticism, it is wholly possible to find solace in this world, in the present moment, without decrying the past whilst understanding its shortcomings, and comprehending the nature of change and the human condition in its more intimate details and expressions. This is the enterprise that Michael Oakeshott and David Hume both embarked upon, and it earned the former the ire of Bernard Crick, whose momentary lapse in judgement led him to believe that Oakeshott’s world was a lonely world of nihilism. Now, one ought not to think much of a cheap jab against an opponent in the pages of a magazine, but Crick’s passing ‘realism’ ensured his inability to see the sublimity of Oakeshott’s writing, which formed a cloak that prevented the reader without dedication from piercing through it. The sort of scepticism that must be praised requires thought. Both Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct lack simplicity in style. Their sentences are long and not out of place in the work of Burke, Gibbon, or Pocock. But their message is clear, at any rate to the fluent reader. The idiom of their pronouncement is deceptive, for behind that elegant prose is a simple truth, a guiding, invisible hand that negotiates between the world as it is, the world as it ought to be, and the world of ideas and non-physical objects, all of which have been given their due place, but without infantilization or infatuation.

[1] See my post on Plato’s ‘Noble Lies’, and especially on Plato’s love for tyrants in the Laws: https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/otemporaomores/2020/07/20/a-passing-comment-on-the-establishment-of-platonic-utopias/