temperments

In his introduction to The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, Havelock again draws our attention to what I referred to in an earlier post as the epochal structure of history:

"The order of priorities in political thinking had been security and authority, law and order first, and liberty, freedom of choice, individual decision a bad second. When under pressures historical and economic the emphasis began to shift towards the second, it could do so only under the aegis of concepts derived from the first. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the English and French and American Revolutions, introduced a host of new political demands, all of them generally slanted in favour of a greater freedom for man at the expense of an increasing limitation of the political powers placed over man to govern him. But even if we discern in these demands the first programme of a future liberalism, none of them were framed in independence of the previous classic tradition. Human society and the human individual remained ideally fixed quantities. Aspirations for personal liberty, demands for commercial freedom, and rebellions to gain religious and national independence still sought to ground themselves on conceptions of morality and society which derived man and society from a priori principles, outside time and space and historical inspection." (p.14)

Here we can discern a kind of 'fine structure' of epochal, or we could say cultural evolution. The subtle problem that Havelock describes is not so much one of the complete absence of "historical inspection" as of a limitation upon our ability to inspect, located in our obligatory dependence upon the linguistic and cultural (or perhaps syntactic and semantic) structure of historical inheritance. In the burst of intellectual development known as the Enlightenment, radical philosophical, political, and scientific theorists sought to describe and epouse radical new political structures based on freedom and tolerance of diversity, but this development was constrained by the structure of the languages spoken, that "aegis of concepts" which Havelock traces back to Athenian antiquity. Such limitations are not easily shed. They are indicated not so much -or, to be fair, not only- by direct political oppositions that emerge in the form of 'class conflicts' -these do indeed appear to have emerged- but also in the forms of the arguments employed; the intellectual and conceptual and argumentative structures whereby these political battles are fought, or evaded, or deferred. Thus:

"when the cause of liberty was fought for in France and America under banners inscribed with the doctrine of the rights of man, the battle was conducted on behalf of those same convictions about the eternal nature of man's soul. The majestic language of the Declaration of Independence, appealing to the testimony of self-evident truths as before a bar of eternal justice, still used the formulas congenial to men who believed in a natural law written in the heavens and wished to use it to support the equally metaphysical conviction that all men as individuals have innate and inalienable rights. . . . The problems and the vocabulary were still Platonic and Aristotelian." (p.15)

This situation leaves us in a peculiar bind. On the one hand, by studying Platonic and Aristotelian thought, we might be able to identify habits of thought uncritically inherited therefrom, and this might give us an edge in critical scholarship of others in whom we can find these ideas active and but unattributed. On the other hand, the pernicious influences of 'Platonism' seem to be surpassable also by simple, original, and honest inquiry. From a historical perspective, we can identify in this regard many contemporary parallels with pre-Platonic thought; which Havelock suggests, citing the American Pragmatists "are easiest to ceive where the influence of classicism, so-called, has been weakest." (ibid., p.18) We can benefit from good, critical scholarship, but we can also benefit from thinking for ourselves, and following our own intuitions.
This forces us to associate liberal politics, and the enlightened habits of thought that it purports to represent, in an uneasy balance between disciplined study and free thought. In my opinion, this work raises a truly a crucial arguement for interdisciplinary scholarship, conceived as a student-centered mode of contemporary education.