On Harvey Mansfield and Jay Gatsby

Last month, Harvey Mansfield, the great Harvard professor and East-Coast Straussian, delivered the 2007 Jefferson Lecture, which is the highest honor the U.S. government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities. It's an absolutely brilliant lecture, and you all should read it if you haven't already.

In the lecture, Mansfield argues for a renewed appreciation of importance of the humanities, and literature in particular, for politics. The problem with modern political science, he says, is that it is far too much of a science, with science's inherent distrust of anything that can't be counted or measured. Our modern thinking about politics, therefore, is too focused on "who gets what, when, and how," with the emphasis (mine added) on the process and the quantity of the getting, instead of on the nature of the who.

But "who is man?" is properly the central question at the foundation of politics, and it is a question to which science--including social science--can only present inadequate biologically-based assumptions as answers. Such agnosticism, Mansfield seems to imply, is what leads to the weak pragmatism that informs our debased and entitlement-heavy modern political discourse. He contends further--and more fundamentally--that our natural understanding of ourselves and our self-importance is something far beyond what science alone can tell us. The way he puts it is that we think in proper names, while science wants to reduce everything to common nouns.

And this is where literature comes in. Social science can help us categorize our behaviors, but it cannot adequately explain why we do what we do. Certainly, there may be evolutionary answers to things, but those answers do not take into account our thumos--our unique sense of self-importance, or the way in which our passions, unlike those of all other animals, are channeled by reason into a broader sense of justice.

Anyway, enough about Mansfield. I won't delve into all the wonderful things in his lecture that flow from his premise. I'll only offer, for those of you that read the lecture, that the deep wisdom of what he uncovers about the human condition through his classical/literary approach is a strong testament to the legitimacy and primacy of that approach.

What I find fascinating, rather, is the way he extracts political wisdom from literature that, for all we know, was never explicitly written to convey such and such a point. He's discussing the origins of justice, and boom!, there's Achilles in Homer's Iliad as the perfect example of what he's talking about. It reminds me of the "Shakespeare's Politics" independent study I did with Harry Jaffa several years ago, in which we would just sit in his office for an hour or two a week and talk about the political philosophy themes in Shakespeare's plays. There was so much interesting stuff that Jaffa was able to squeeze out of them that I half believed that Shakespeare had studied under Leo Strauss as well.

It goes without saying, of course, that Shakespeare had never heard of Strauss, who died in 1973. But I would contend that neither Jaffa nor Mansfield is guilty of anti-historical proof-texting, of tenuously imposing their ideas on the greats of the past. Instead, their expositions point to the power of great literature to express something fundamental about the human condition. Shakespeare may not have been a political philosopher, but he was nevertheless brilliant at observing and comprehending how people interact with themselves and each other, and equally brilliant at putting it all in verse. And if I may be so bold, it strikes me that when we as modern men and women relate on a gut level with Hamlet or Homer, we are adding supporting evidence for the hypothesis (I won't quite say we're proving it) that there exists some kind of distinct and timeless human nature.

But I digress. The reason we relate in the first place, as Mansfield says, is that literature, like ourselves and unlike science, uses proper names. We're relating not to man as a species or a sociological grouping, but to Achilles and Hamlet and Gatsby as individual people. And literature, again like ourselves and unlike science, has to take a stand. All good literature (I don't think I'm exaggerating) makes an implicit or explicit statement about some aspect of who we are. The statement may be surrounded by mystery or confusion (or both--Tolstoy comes to mind) but it's out there in the world of the book being lived.

So then. Science, for all the wonderful things it has given us, needs the special perspective found through literature to understand us fully. In my limited travels, I've found it to be a good maxim that you never really understand something until you understand how it understands itself. And when the object of study is ourselves, I would hope--in fact I would assert, and Mansfield would back me up--that our self-understanding has a strong connection to the truth of who we actually are. And this brings me to the specific piece of literature known as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and to a long conversation I've been having with a worthy companion about the nature of self-deception.

But alas, it's already 2 am, and I'm getting up at 7 to bring my car to the mechanic, so Gatsby must wait for another day--sometime soon, I promise. I also promise posts in the near future that aren't quite so long and obtuse.

I leave with only one closing thought. If the social sciences need the help of literature to reach their ends, might we also say the same about philosophy, or even theology. Friedrich Nietzsche (who, lest we forget, was as brilliant as he was nuts) once said that proper philosophy should be sung. One might respond that proper philosophy should be expected to make sense as well, but I wonder whether he wasn't on to something. Oh well. It was a promising thought when I had it, but now I'm too tired to remember where I was going with this. In any case, don't trust a philosopher who can't tell you his favorite novel. And for all my philosopher friends out there--what's yours?