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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Essay Recommendation: ‘The Medieval Content of Raphael’s School of Athens’ by Harry B. Gutman

Ishaan Jajodia
School of Athens
Raphael Sanzio, The School of Athens, 1509–11, Stanza della Segnatura

Reading an essay from 1941 and decrying it to be revolutionary is perhaps not what current academic trends and gatekeepers have in mind when they proclaim the ‘cutting edge’ of art history, its avant-garde, to be prescient and essential. Gutman’s essay 1 is remarkable — and shows how far a good idea, one that can stake claim to the truth of Raphael’s famous fresco cycle in the Stanza della Segnatura in the New Papal Apartments, is in fact outside the bounds of time.

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  1. Harry B. Gutman, “The Medieval Content of Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’”, Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 4 (1941): 420–29. ↩

The Poet, The Historian, and the Philosopher

Ishaan Jajodia

James Boyd White, best known for his imaginative readings of law in The Legal Imagination, makes a spate of interesting observations through close readings of the texts as varied as Thucydides’ History and Jane Austen’s Emma in his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). In his analysis of Plato’s Gorgias 1 , he draws two conclusions which have a particular interest for me: the first on what differentiates philosophy from history and poetry, and the second on what he calls the ‘Platonic Premise’ 2.

✥

Socrates. Alcibiades
Francois-Andre Vincent, Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, 1776.

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  1. ’The Reconstitution of Language and Self in a Community of Two: Plato’s Gorgias’ in James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 93–113. ↩
  2. All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩

Cicero’s ‘O Tempora, O Mores!’

Ishaan Jajodia
Cicero denouncing Catiline
Cesare Maracci, Cicerone denuncia Catalina, 1882–88. Mural in the Salone d’Onore, Palazzo Madama, Rome.

[All translations from Loeb Classical Library editions unless specified.]

For a blog whose name is borrowed from Cicero, it is only fitting that its first entry be dedicated to the memory of Marcus Tullius Cicero, and to the phrase in particular that was trotted out in exasperation and incredulity at those who commit wanton sedition. The instance I want to focus on is the Catiline conspiracy, one of the rare occasions where Cicero was prosecuting and not part of the defence. 1 Lucius Sergius Catilina, whose sympathies lay with the populares, was actively seditious; Mary Beard describes him as “a disgruntled, bankrupt aristocrat and the architect of a plot … to assassinate Rome’s elected officials and burn the place down.” 2 Cicero, as consul, ordered the arrest of Catiline, and then his summary execution — without a trial — on those fateful days in 64 B.C. In In Catilinam (hereinafter IC), he forcefully argues against sedition — sedition prompted by Catiline’s disregard for property rights, as shown by his proposal to forgive debts of both the rich and the poor if he did succeed in his rebellion.

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  1. “Throughout his career Cicero usually represented the defence; this was one of the rare occasions when he prosecuted.” Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003), 77. ↩
  2. Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (London: Profile Books, 2016), 21. ↩