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Western Classics and Schrodinger's Black Cat Puzzle
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18159 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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11 / 1990 |
3,081 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
Richard Arthur's article is a powerful polemic against Allan Bloom and the Straussians. But possible defects in the Straussian approach to political philosophy fade into unimportance when contrasted with the larger issue Bloom raises: the role of classical Greek thought in the Western cultural tradition and the importance of this tradition in university education.
Strauss and his students have done us all a favor by doing more to keep the study of classical political philosophy alive than have any other group of academics. I knew Strauss and respected his erudition and intelligence but had serious, even fundamental, disagreements with the positions he took. He viewed Hobbes as the critical period - in the break with classic wisdom. I argued that the break was less critical than Strauss claimed, that Hobbes continued to accept Aristotle's concept of theory in science, and that theories provided true predictions because they were derived from necessarily true premises that the mind had a capacity to recognize as such. However, unlike Aristotle, Hobbes believed that theory applied significantly also to the social and political world and not primarily to mathematics and physics.
Hobbes' reduction of reality to mechanics, and the radical nature of his empirical epistemology, were divergent from the greatest examples of the classic position. His departure from Aristotle's position on the scope of theory did run the danger of turning rational philosophy into rationalism, that is, the derivation of the world from a small set of premises. However, the modern world was emerging from the bowels of the classical world as rational philosophy digested advances in empirical knowledge. That apparently revolutionary breaks occurred in this process when critical masses of evidence forced radical revision of previous metaphysical and synoptic worldviews is consistent with the rational philosophical foundations that were inherited from the Greeks. And the rationalism that was potentially inherent in the Hobbesian and Cartesian position was correctable from within the framework of a tradition that was synoptic in scope.
The Fourth-Century Greeks
This capacity to give rise to progressive, and sometimes revolutionary, transformation is precisely where the genius of fourth-century B.C. Greek rational philosophy lay: in its ability to stimulate self-correcting and progressively more powerful inquiry because of the intimate interplay between worldviews and real-world
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