We’re not really sure what to make of this post by Stan. He covers the MR site redesign in relatively complimentary terms, and he certainly alludes to some very nice compliments. On the other hand, he very clearly implies: (a) that there might be a bit of egotistical self-reference in our new banner of famous Greek minds and (b) that we play ball like a girl.
The second charge is too hurtful to discuss in public. That will be resolved over drinks in Pittsburgh. With the help of Stanley’s credit card.
The first accusation is a little more manageable. It turns out that we settled on this Raphael painting for exactly the opposite reason: exactly because it doesn’t focus on any one philosopher or philosophy. We actually chose it over another Renaissance work of another event in Ancient Greece precisely so that it didn’t seem like we were saying “that guy” (painting) is like “this guy” (MR). We figured that the School of Athens is a safer choice because it’s about a bunch of philosophers and not just one.
And it’s not as if one can go wrong with the School of Athens.
The painting is a near-perfect expression of perhaps the only essentially human moment in all of history: the emergence of the life of the mind – a link across time in the small space of the city. The Athenian polis saw vastly different systems of thought emerge into the light, one right after the other. But instead of creating a chaotic din, these systems were harnessed, disciplined by, and expressed through arguments. Deliberation becomes a bootstrap – the product of people building walls and the mediating force that allowed those walls to be planned, justified, and built.
French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio says many, many silly things. But his elaboration of human history as the history of the city is both formidable and suggestive. Any healthy society has to make a fundamental gamble: disagreements can be worked out if brought into tension, but any tension risks exploding into open force. The gamble is that the destruction wrought by the clash of ideas can be kept more or less within the realm of ideas.
Notice that we’re already far, far a field of the vulgar multiculturalists who claim that they want dialogue and human expression just like we want. They want expression, sure. Even expression of different ideas. But that doesn’t mean that they want a clash of ideas. They want the opposite. Their ideal “debate” is a series of public monologues. You get up, narrate your unique experience, and sit down. Then the next person gets up, narrates their experience, and sits down. And even if those two experiences imply totally opposite things about the world, the multiculturalist doesn’t think that’s a problem – after all, you have your experience, they have their experience, who’s to judge? This isn’t an introduction of ideas, and it’s even less of an argument. It sounds a little bit like those things, but the purpose isn’t to test the validity or strength of ideas. It’s a public performance meant to create a kind of bubble around each individual, where their own special and unique identity gets to stay and never be challenged because “that’s just how they feel”.
This is the farthest imaginable thing from the distilled essence of learning and disputation that is the School of Athens. Arguments conducted honestly must have winners and losers. Without a challenge – without a “what have you got to go on” – there can be no argument. Once a challenge is introduced, however, it must be either succeed or fail (or be deferred, but repressed arguments have a nasty habit of insisting that they get attention). So it must either succeed or fail – there must be a winner and a lost. But so what? As Plato is no doubt pointing out to Aristotle in the center of the painting, so much the better for the loser who has been disabused of his nonsense.
Students of human thought and historical tension are absolutely justified in mentioning Raphael in the same breath as Plato or Nietzsche. If we knew nothing else about him, his patent recognition and expression of the School’s sublime centrality would justify this company.
But Raphael is not Raphael because he squinted through the fog of the Dark Ages and perceived the outlines of ancient Greece and Rome. There were not a few great thinkers who were doing the same at the same time, and most of then are not on his level. It’s not just the ability to grasp how overwhelmingly central and critical this impulse is, or even to locate it in the birth of the polis. Raphael is Raphel not because he saw what was so important in human society, but because he was able to do justice to it.
Previously: Changes at MR (1), Resentment and Hatred On the Anti-Israel Left, This Will Not Be Our Last Bow
