Homo Bulla and The Philosophies of Magic

Sit tibi terra levis – May the ground be light on you

“Man is a bubble (Homo Bulla), they say;” writes Varro, the greatest scholar of ancient Rome, in his book on ‘On farming’, “in which case the proverb must be truer for an old man. And I am in my eightieth year, which warns me to pack up my baggage in readiness to journey out of this world.” (Varro, 1912, p. B) From this point on, the philosophies and the thinking I will write about find their best epitaph in these words of Varro.

In other words, “conservatism” now stands apart. [1]. Edmund Burke’s legacy, it seems, single-handedly, with thinkers such as Scruton and Oakeshott, is carried onwards by remaining worthy of the artistic appeal and a feeling necessarily connected with life, i.e., to make a home our dwelling place – enchantment. [2]. The conservatism that is more capable, and which we encounter more in our politics now, of what Nietzsche calls the “corruption of the text”, which in the absence of any deeper thought, appeals to ideas such as ‘the family’, ‘nation’, ‘my kind of people and religion’ and similar things. And, [3]. the conservatism with which I will deal now, the so-called “revolutionary conservatism“, (a denotation which finds its source in the book, and initially the doctoral thesis of the Swiss philosopher, unrepentant fascist and secretary of Ernst Jünger himself, Armin Mohler, “Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932“). While Burke’s conservatism and the latter are similar in at least one way, I will not deal with conservatism caught up in certain ideas because its multiplicity makes it indefinable to deal with it in any meaningful way.

So where is the difference or the sameness between Edmund Burke’s conservatism and the revolutionary conservatism that Mohler testifies to?

I think that the division that Mohler saw between revolutionary conservatives (among whom he counts over 40 well-known thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Ludwig Klages and others), and nationalism-socialism has little or no legitimacy. However, what can be said, and it is not difficult to conclude, is that revolutionary conservatism arose largely as a reaction to the ideas that liberal philosophies pushed forward, as did Burke’s conservatism. But the way how Burke talks to us about the preservation of heritage is different from the defense of the particular tradition of the revolutionary conservatives. To pay heed to Burke’s remedy with the feeling of enchantment as different from the nostrum of the conservative revolutionaries’ defense, this divide seems to be the case on a miniature scale, even in Albanian literature. For instance, Lukë Bogdani and Gjergj Fishta are the preserves par excellence of that which was and still is (especially the Fairy (Zana), the enchantment of which was preserved so without hostility that it has even entered the Albanian translation of the Bible, [Ezekiel, 3:15]), and definitely, Burke would have agreed when they show honor to life regardless of whose life it is by recognizing and honoring other heritages as well. (It is perhaps to show our love, or the lack thereof, of being a Burkean of conservation that we still call Naim Frashërin, a poet intoxicated by the philosophies of Rousseau and Voltaire, as our national poet. Compared to the sublime mysterium tremendum et fascinans verse of Fishta, Naimi sounds like someone who just recently started to write and read.) But when we talk, for example, about the works of Mid’hat Frashëri or even those of Ernest Koliqi (in whom the Fairy (Zana) is now not something to be preserved, but a means to mark the Albanian blood and race, which must be protected according to a certain tradition, always clean of unwanted features), then we are talking about a revolutionary conservatism and thus, a ‘little’ more than a dangerous conservatism. But why?

Burke’s conservatism and revolutionary conservatism agree that they are, ultimately, artistic projects: they use art in a particular way, one hiding itself behind it and the other pushing it forward. But while Burke finds it necessary to speak of a “moral imagination,” just as Oakeshott and Scruton speak of “morality,” they are concerned first and foremost with life – their art, it serves or should serve life. Enchantment is the becoming of the one who is alive. Although revolutionary conservatism started as an artistic project, in political action, it leaves art aside and to use the verses of the poet, whom Mohler considers a revolutionary conservative, and from whom Nazi Germany took concepts such as “the Reich of a thousand years”, “fire and blood” and “Nordic superman”, Stefan George –

“The walls are tapestried with velvet bloom

“– A fashion grown from some ancestral mood (stimmung) –

“Your arm in mine we come into the room

“And tell each other death is good.” (George, 1974, p. 149)

This conservatism is related to the concern, or the request that we lack this concern, about death. They seemed to be heading at the point where, when they talk about the death of the soul and only the body remaining (Klages), about the death upon which new things will flourish (George), being-towards-death (Heidegger) or even with the revival of völkisch movements and the denial of the Christian religion (for the Burkean kind, this religion has been durable and remained and we should be more careful when denying it), they are not afraid of death – but it is precisely this lack of fear in the face of death which, when the political action cleans away their artistic project, they are not afraid to bring it, blessed with Wagner’s music, in Auschwitz and Treblinka.

on-compos mentis – Of unsound mind

I think the conservative mind, the revolutionary mind to defend, and Burke’s mind to preserve are mad (marrëzi). But not in the sense that Mill called the conservative party (“the stupid party“), but in the sense that they are taken (driven mad: të marrë) by a feeling that one can hardly elaborate and that one can hardly live forever without feeling it. Where Burke or Scruton see enchantment in all that is, revolutionary conservatives take only a certain interpretation how things should be and make that the tradition that enchants them. Unlike Mohler and like-minded thinkers, I think that the holocaust is not just an act pushed forward as a result of the violence of Enlightenment ideas on the “soul of the people“. As I have argued, if Burke’s and Scruton’s concern is with the enchantment of the home: something has gone wrong when this home seeks to become the home of the world, for which neither Burke nor Scruton would have agreed; and what’s more, they themselves would say that this “universal [racial or similar of the revolutionaries’ defense] enchantment“, the revolutionary conservatives do not experience somewhere, but rationally create it themselves to respond to a certain tradition they want to protect, a tradition which makes them more similar than more distant to Nazi Germany. It is for this reason that I refuse to call conservatives revolutionaries as such, as Armin Mohler does, and I am of the thought that their designation should be the Philosophies of Magic, while their projects to be called Traditionalism. For if it is to be said, that if these traditionalist magical philosophies had an internal logic and consistency, then this consistency and this logic depends on their conviction that what was had to be affirmed, but only on one condition – if we believe their magic wand that they do not do everything according to the image of a tradition that they themselves created and push forward.

It is true that the liberal philosophies, with their definitions and with their deep traces in almost every constitution of present Europe, perhaps have to admit the hypocrisy and sometimes the same criticisms that they have made for their opponents (the hypothesis of the “natural state” is the groundbreaking hypothesis, that has thrown into the deeps of oblivion the lives of Europe’s best kings and revolutionaries): but in this essay I have not seen it fit to expand on this – because conservatism, although a reaction-to-the-Enlightenment, still calls forth a human feeling which is not a reaction against anyone or anything, except that it is there and we all experience it in the circumstances in which we are wired to encounter it. I think there is still room for this feeling in politics, and the nearer we are to Burke, the nearer we are to being worthy of knowing what we are preserving. But the closer we are to everything else, at least in conservatism, ideas against women, homosexuality or other houses (inhabited by people who also share their own enchantment) or if we accept the ideas from the philosophies of magic with their tradition ready to serve us – I think it is more than dangerous for these ideas to participate in our political and policy-making world. And I think their best place is in art, without the political action. Because in art, what happened to Stefan George is bound to happen now too; to Stefan George, who as the most famous poet and one of the most influential people in Europe of his time, leaves when the Nazis take power – refusing to be part of them. It is not that “revolutionary conservatism” separates itself from art; art separates itself from revolutionary conservatism. And it is this separation of art that leads us to the conclusion that it was the members of Stefan George’s circle who conspired the attempt to assassinate Hitler (Claus von Stauffenberg).

Now, when the more than danger of these nostrums in politics when they cause art to separate itself from them and the concern with death is elaborated, and then when Burke’s meaning stands embodied with life through enchantment, along with the conservatism caught up in ideas that has no idea what it is doing most of the time. I also need to mention that, to return to the beginning, Plato and Heraclitus again speak of a logos; a different logos, but still for a logos. It is Heraclitus, likewise, who speaks against Homer, which does not seem to be acknowledged anywhere by Plato when he mentions them together, but in whichever way the matter may be, in conservatism, Hyponoia does not call a ban on thought. We must also think beyond Burke (he himself would have preferred this rather than his thoughts to turn into a metaphysics of preservation), and we must certainly think beyond what the philosophies of magic try to do with their tradition. And if at all we still find ourselves at the crossroads of giving ourselves consolations for the feeling, or lack of it, of enchantment, I am of the opinion that perhaps we should listen more to Homer than to anyone else—

“παῦροι γάρ τοι παῖδες ὁμοῖοι πατρὶ πέλονται,

“οἱ πλέονες κακίους, παῦροι δέ τε πατρὸς ἀρείους.

“ἀλλ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὐδ᾽ ὄπιθεν κακὸς ἔσσεαι οὐδ᾽ ἀνοήμων,

“οὐδέ σε πάγχυ γε μῆτις Ὀδυσσῆος προλέλοιπεν,

“ἐλπωρή τοι ἔπειτα τελευτῆσαι τάδε ἔργα.”

(“Few indeed are the children like their father: / Most are worse, but few are better than their fathers / But since you will not be worthless or foolish, / Nor is the wisdom of Odysseus that has forsaken you altogether / (This is why you should have) hope that you will succeed in these things.”, Odyssey, Book II, verse 276-280.)

If there was at least one thought that would unite the preservers of the home from Homer, Heraclitus, Emperor Julian, Christianity (the latter one), to Burke and beyond, it is this – when we lose home, the journey to it – is ours and only ours alone. Anyone who starts talking to “us” to comfort us they are showing you a home that isn’t yours. Conservatism, in essence, is an alone and lonely journey. Conservatism is a misopogon (μισοπώγων, misopogon: beard-hater), like that of Emperor Julian to laugh at his own philosopher’s beard while showing others what they are forgetting. If a conservative can’t laugh at the lack of one’s own articulation – then that conservative is not enchanted. But just like in the political world, so in the art world, if one hasn’t translated or preserved the sense of enchantment so that others can at least understand it – one has failed. For by failing to reveal to the other the enchantment you experience, you have thus failed to feel your own enchantment yourself – to feel your own life yourself.

Conclusion

What is conservatism? My intention in this essay was to show not only that this wonder does not send us to a mere compendium or gathering of different views but that it sends us to a common human feeling. The feeling in which our belongings and our dwellings’ places take on a life of their own and become our homes is what Scruton rightly calls enchantment. The reasons why we have different histories about what it means to be conservative are to be found here (Scruton sees English Common Law as the embodied enchantment for the English). I have argued, then, that this feeling is central to understanding Burke and his legacy (which is furthered, single-handedly, by Scruton and Oakeshott) – and that these thinkers relate to each other because their thought is stranded on aesthetics first and foremost.

I have elaborated that we can find the antagonism towards this feeling even in the first drama of rationality and heritage, which Burke’s heirs have not considered enough, with Plato (Socrates) and Heraclitus and Homer. Where on the one side with Socrates, we have unchangeability, the good, the dianoia and the sacred or inner voice spirit (daimon), to achieve happiness, while on the other side with Heraclitus and Homer, we have what is and the deities as in becoming or changing, the hypotonia, the human daimon and the difficulty that in a world of perpetuity flux to have the hopes of embodying a paradise on earth – a paradise defined by those who cannot bestow another paradise except what they know as their own paradise (the regimes of the last century).

On Edmund Burke, I have dwelt more to show his difference with the liberal philosophies of the time, i.e., his thoughts on the social contract and what – here is also to be found why Burke’s legacy is that of enchantment – the nature of man is (art). Starting from his uses of the word art and elaborating on his views, I have succeeded in showing that the “cherishing” of “prejudices” is not wickedness as it is now often understood, but that it is the condition of the enchanted man, who opposes even the king, his kingdom, and the thought of the time – to show and appeal to the feeling of what his home is. The ban on slavery, the opposition to the abuses of the kingdom, the non-taxation of the American colonies, the state not interfering in its citizens’ lives, the non-divine law, and many other things are to be found here. Burke does not talk about power and defending the “status quo”; Burke preserves the enchantment and, thus, the feelings of one’s own home.

My argument why Burke’s philosophy is not an ideology but rather a method of policy-making is to be found in my distinction between heritage and tradition; that gives us two bodies of how they present themselves, that of preservation and defense. Heritage is only those things that remain, which we preserve even and primarily unconsciously, because we are enchanted by them, this is why Burke says that change is possible: given that human nature is art, everything is changeable, as long as we don’t have the confusion that arises when changing things brings old difficulties. Conservation has no enemies: conservation is simply an extension of the feeling of enchantment of things we experience as they are. Tradition is something else, tradition is a certain interpretation of the world, engraved and consciously defended. Tradition must have enemies because otherwise, it cannot exist. Burke speaks of heritage: the so-called “revolutionary conservatives” speak of the tradition.

I have distinguished three types of conservatism: [1]. that of Burke, [2]. that which is more similar to what Nietzsche calls “the corruption of the text”, the conservatism of the ideas of ‘family‘, ‘nation‘, ‘my kind of people and religion‘ and similar things, which refuses to explore its enchantment, [3]. and the revolutionary conservatism. I was not concerned with that conservatism, which refuses to examine itself, and I was more concerned with the distinction between Burke’s conservatism and the conservatism of the revolutionaries. Concluding that conservatism, whatever it may be, is an artistic project and relates more to our (if we are to talk about things through an outdated model) “irrational” than “rational” part. I have gone so far as to call all conservatives taken (driven mad, të marrë). The difference between Burke’s conservatism and revolutionary conservatism is to be found in the way they manifest themselves in policy-making. Burke’s conservatism and the revolutionary one are both artistic projects, but where Burke’s artistic project (with “moral imagination” and similar stable points) serves and is such because it should serve life, the project of revolutionary conservatism is concerned or seeks the mood to lack the concern, about death. I have argued that Auschwitz and Treblinka are not only reactions to the violence of Enlightenment ideas but that they are also artistic projects where art has been detached from them, and they have ended only with their only concern – death. Which they are not afraid to bring or experience.

I refuse to call conservatives revolutionaries as such, and I have labeled their thinking as the philosophies of magic and the compendium of their views as traditionalism, for they seek, by a magic wand, to conceal that they are interpreting what is in the way they think what is should be, and they are defending the tradition just, rationally, created (given what I have just said, one might reconsider putting Heidegger here: all the while, one has to recognize that his political actions, make his thinking more alike than dissipating before this tradition.) I have concluded the whole essay by saying that there is still a place in politics for Burke’s artistic project of life (naming his attitude a remedy), but not the conservatism of revolution or traditionalism with their artistic, nostrum-ridden projects of death. The latter have their place only in art (because art can domesticate them), and to them, as much as I have made a misopogon with Burke’s philosophy towards them, I have also shown them what they are forgetting. – The conclusion of their art (with Stefan George) and the verses of Homer.

References

The post The Remedies and Nostrums of Conservatism: A Misopogon Part II appeared first on The Miskatonian.

The difficulty of “What is conservatism?” is not merely a difficulty to navigate amidst a compendium of summaries and views that preserve or defend something that was and still is. As we have come to see, “conservative” is called from the defense of constitutionalism and legality (Aristotle, Blackstone); the defense of kingship by Divine order (Filmer); past experiences, and the stability to have freedom (Hume, Johnson); the preservation of the heritage against the spoils that rapid change would bring us (Burke); equally form the meaning of conservatism and responsibility (Scruton, Kirk) – to what has been called, without any deep revision with the legacy of the concept, and made famous by the doctorate of the Swiss philosopher Armin Mohler, – “revolutionary conservatism” (Heidegger, George, Klags, Schmitt, and others who were intoxicated by the völkisch and volkstum movements).

But what is conservatism? My intention in this essay is to elaborate not only on the genesis and main features of conservatism but also to show how much of what is called conservative is not at all something that conserves. To fulfill this intention, I have divided my essay into three parts. In the first part, I will write about the “Genesis of Conservatism” – pushing forward, above all, a re-reading that perhaps all that Plato presents against Homer and Heraclitus can help us here. In the second part, I will write about the philosopher who single-handedly laid the most enduring and inspiring foundations for all the “conservatisms” to come – “Edmund Burke and the Preservation of What Is” – with the main question being whether Edmund Burke’s “conservatism” is, in one way or another, merely an ideology for policy-making or something much more. At the very end, in the third part, I will write about conservatism after Burke – “Homo Bulla and the Philosophies of Magic” – where I will try to elaborate what happened to “conservative“, especially German, philosophy in the last century. (Due to space and relevance, this essay will not deal with special cases such as Julius Evola and Yukoi Mishima.)

In this essay, I will also preserve the view that not necessarily everything that is conservative is also political. I think that this has to do with a lack of distinction between defending a thing and preserving a thing. That is, when the emperor Julian preserved the pagan gods and opposed the closing of the temples and the “Christian arrogance,” invoking something close to Tacitus’ attitude to call them “people without a home“: he was invoking what the ancient Greeks – which he thought that the Christians did not honor – had initially pushed forward with the union of the villages in the polis, i.e., συνοικισμóς (synoikismos), in etymology this has the meaning of dwelling together (συν, syn) in the same home (οἶκος, oikos). Thus, conservatism includes our love for those things that must go and be changed, our ‘immature’ feelings when we mourn fragility and loss in the face of decay and death, our common feelings towards those people with whom we share a common home, which we want to preserve and conserve – because it is our home and others are the same dwellers in it as we are.

I think there is no better summary than the verse of Homer, which the emperor Julian knew very well, “οὐ γὰρ ἔπ᾽ ἀνήρ, (. . .), ἀρὴν ἀπὸ οἴκου ἀμῦναι.” (“Is there no man here, (. . .), to remove the harm from the home.” Odyssey, book II, verse 60), to show that condition and state against which conservatism worries and tries to prevent everything from ending there. It is my hope that this will also be the concluding view, which I will elaborate on and ultimately support in this essay.

The Genesis of Conservatorism

Enchantment

“Modern conservatism is a product of the Enlightenment,” writes Sir Roger Scruton, “but it calls aspects of the human condition that can be witnessed in every civilisation and at every period of history” (Scruton, 2017, pre-history). Certainly, what is meant by “product” here means a reaction to what the Enlightenment was. But the most important thing I think we need to look at is in the second part of this sentence. My argument is that Sir Roger Scruton had in mind a particular feeling of the “aspects of the human condition” to which conservatism appeals and calls and which influenced his reading of the history of what it means to be a conservative. This feeling, which is the main “argument” and “theme” (Scruton, 2000, f. 210) in the book where he looks back at England, Scruton calls – “enchantment.”

For Scruton, enchantment is closely related to that which makes something our home. “The enchantment of things in the home,” writes Scruton, “is part of a larger spiritual project.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13) By this, Scruton means that homes have their own customs, routines, rituals, set times, and special places. If not, they’re less of a home and less of a place to look to when, in adulthood, anger and rejection have intervened (Scruton, 2000, p. 13). “All attempts,” continues Scruton, “to find solace and in ritual and faith in some supreme (. . .) love have their origin here, and the enchantment of religion is not to be seen as the cause, but as the effect of another and deeper enchantment, which is natural inheritance of childhood.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13)

We can think of enchantment as a state through which the things in whose presence we wander take on a life of their own. The places that hold enchantment for us are the places we call home – where everything has meaning for us, and we don’t feel pushed to justify why we are drawn or inspired by them. When this feeling is lost or when other things break this feeling, we don’t quite know what arguments to use. We know that something has gone wrong (Scruton, 2000, p. 7). Here is to be found Burke’s “cherishing” of “prejudices” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 346): likewise, here is to be found the chief distinction between the preservation of a thing and the defending of a thing.

When we are enchanted, we do not defend things because we have no known or unknown enemies. The very single-mindedness that we are enchanted with makes us preserve. And in preservation, we have no enemies because everything is in the order of things to be changed (even change is needed in order for something to be preserved) (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 34). But to be changed slowly and not be presented with the difficulties of the things that were maintained (Scruton, 2014, p. 120). If you have to bring it into our daily life, in the smallest case, when we say “good morning,” even in places where we do not mean this exclamation, it is a very good indicator of maintaining the enchantment. We maintain this exclamation, even where we do not mean it at all, unconsciously, for in one way or another, we are drawn and inspired by the enchantment it has over us. (But more on this distinction between preservation (heritage) and defense (tradition), in the section on Edmund Burke.)

For Scruton, “enchantment,” in this sense, “is a personalizing force: it endows objects, customs, and institutions with a moral character, so that we respond to them as we respond to one another.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 13) In other words, it makes them homes: it makes them lives on their own, which we then experience as our dwelling. Except that, I would argue that by “moral character” Scruton means life itself – it is the same feeling that led him to make the modest argument, initially answered with “I don’t know“, for God (Scruton, 1996, p. 85-90), and, even more, a turning point (though not regrettable) from his hard-to-digest books like “The Meaning of Conservatism” or “Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic.”

When Scruton writes about “The English Character ” (Scruton, 2000, p. 43) – most definitely referring to Burke’s famous piece on “national character” (Burke, (vol I), 1865, p. 345) – this feeling of enchantment of England’s dwellers in a common house, is embodied in two things. – “The first,” writes Scruton, “is the instinct for justice and fair play; the second is the institution of common law – law not invented but discovered, through the working of impartial justice.” (Scruton, 2000, p. 55) When Scruton is reading the history of what it means to be conservative, he is reading it from this point of view – the enchantment of the Common Law (granted that the first instinct depends mostly on the doings and becomings of those who are) (Scruton, 2000, p. 10). Of course, Aristotle is a starting point for his defense of the Constitution of course that Johnson and Hume, Simone Weil, and others, which for one sound incomprehensible how a Marxist thinker turns out to be conservative (Scruton, 2017) are preserved by Scruton – as they had penetrated a feeling that if it does not invoke an English Common Law, it does invoke a social conservation. In other words, they had penetrated the feeling of enchantment. This is why Scruton’s story of conservatism and its efforts to thrive on the soil of Edmund Burke differs from that of Russell Kirk or Leo Strauss. Scruton did not go into politics to meet politics, he went in politics translating the feelings, the doings and the attitudes of those who are driven by the very necessity of living in the common home – to come out and argue their positions, even when they cannot articulate themselves properly.

“ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων”

(“ethos anthropo daimon” – “Man’s ethos is its daimon”)

But why enchantment? Isn’t the main feature of conservatism irrational: but why then are they accused of being uncreative?

I think there is no pure rational way to defend conservatism (nor that there is a necessity for there to be such a way), because I agree with Scruton that the fundamental feature that conservatism appeals to is enchantment. Whether this is more “aesthetical” than “ethical“, I cannot say: but the matter seems to be the same with Edmund Burke – whether with the first ironic book in philosophy, with his aesthetic strands, or with the imagined events of the execution of the king and queen of France and with “our natural affections” towards them (though in all three cases, his warnings have been entirely worthy of being considered as history has come to show): again, Scruton with his aesthetic strands, and with the enchantment: Oakeshott’s taking rationalism away from politics – the greatest conservative preservers have never “argued,” to borrow Scruton’s words, for a “change of mind“, but for a “change of heart,” and have done so either through art or by appealing to a feeling that we do not know how to elaborate.

But I think that conservatism if it doesn’t embrace “rationalism against art,” as it did with revolutionary conservatism, we can see how creative its conservation thinking really is. To know this properly, we have to start from what I will argue is the first drama between heritage and rationality (which can then also give us an answer: ‘Why enchantment?‘). That is the confrontation between Plato (Socrates) and the then-Greek heritage (especially Heraclitus and Homer).

. . .

Nietzsche thought that conservatives corrupt the text. In the aphorism below, he was writing more about how Aristotle was defended in France when his philosophy began to be replaced, but I think what Nietzsche wrote there can be said of all conservatives and their thinking –

“Their defenders rationalized these rules,” writes Nietzsche, “and why they ought to exist, for no better reason than not to have to admit that they were accustomed to them and their authority, and no longer wanted them otherwise. And this is what people do and have always done with every prevailing morality and religion: the reasons and intentions behind the habit are always ‘interpolated’ into it when some begin to deny its authority, and ask for reasons and intentions. Herein lies the great dishonesty of conservatives in every era – they corrupt the text.” (Nietzsche, 2019, aph. 60)

Granted, Nietzsche would say that even when these prevailing moralities or religions are questioned, they are questioned by the “artistic instinct” of those who can no longer bear them. For Nietzsche’s philosophy, what decides against Christianity now, for example, is our taste, not our reasons (Nietzsche, 2019, aph. 132). It still remains a wonder why Nietzsche’s strands that “knowledge kills action, because action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion” (Nietzsche, 2008, aph. 29), has not been read by the right in the academia. In any case, what Nietzsche witnesses is precisely the condition of that man when one is under the enchantment of preserving something but is driven to defend it rationally and quickly (as the things one is about to preserve are being attacked) and fails – thereby ending in the protection of thoughts that do not coincide with one’s own inner feelings. It fails because this man’s attitude is primarily internal, rather than elaborating or giving reasons why, it seems, there is nothing else to say but – “because I love these things” or “because that’s how they’ve always been“.

A conservative who does not investigate one’s own enchantment is not so much a conservative as a defender of a particular tradition. The conservator preserves the heritage, that which remains, which can and must change if it means that it can be done further. It is only the traditionalist who responds with “it must be so and only so” (almost all the contemporary “American Conservatives” are dusty traditionalists without a heritage to call forth): it is not at all comforting that today’s conservative is not someone who has sought one’s own enchantment to properly preserves what one conserves, but protects the ‘traditional family‘, ‘nation‘, ‘my kind of people and religion’ – without recognizing the meaning of why it is important or why one should preserve these at all.

When Scruton writes, for example, that we can see conservatism in Hegel (and liberalism in Kant) (Scruton, 2017, part iii): I am of the opinion that all things considered, what is found in Hegel may be a good defense of the “bildung“, but Hegel is too rational – so rational, indeed, that all nature somehow speculates (speculum) (Hodgson, 2005, p. 79) to him the rational through the Spirit – to be a conservative. The reason why, to this day, we still have a conservatism that does not explore its enchantment but a conservatism that defends certain ideas; it shows that conservatism is artistic enough to preserve, however irrationally, ideas that are not so conservative (that Hegel is conservative should be included here as well).

Conservatism is an (artistic) act to protect the things we love from being burned by the philosophies of the “luminous spectrum,” of rationalism, of the more than excessive Western Platonic sun. We can preserve conservatism today through Hegel: or give up like Burke on some metaphysical maxim to explain our doings. However, I will now present the argument that no one shows better what conservatism is than the meaning behind ‘daimon’ and ‘agathos’ in Plato’s division, or as Socrates says against those that “κατὰ μὲν Ὅμηρον καὶ “Ηράκλειτον καὶ πᾶν τὸ τοιοῦτον φῦλον οἷον ῥεύματα κιν-εῖσθαι τὰ πάντα (. . .)” (“according to Homer and Heraclitus and all the same who see everything in the movement of perpetual flux (. . .)”) (Plato, 1921).

When Plato has in mind his state Καλλίπολις (Kallipolis: the beautiful (kallos) city (polis)), he sees it as the highest goal of those who have knowledge (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē) of ideas (εἶδος, eîdos), in which the highest idea is that of the good (ἀγαθός, agathós), which can be reached and is ontologically related directly to the beautiful (κᾰ́λλος, kallos). So, Plato’s politea (πολιτεία, policy-making) is that the most beautiful state (kallipolis), is the state that embodies the idea of agathos (of the good) (Plato, (vol II), 1930). This should be read hand in hand with Plato. This is how we achieve happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudaimonia: soul (δαιμον, daimon), good (εὐ, eû)): the daimon of Socrates, is not simply an argument to defend Socrates that he supposedly believed in the city’s gods. Socrates’ daimon is Plato’s drunkenness to seek eudaemonia through his kallipolis: that is, to seek happiness (the good soul) in the ideal state (the beautiful city).

When Socrates speaks against what was then the Greek understanding and always equates the two, Homer and Heraclitus, we must also remember how Heraclitus understood the daimon. As I will argue that the biggest difference between Plato and Heraclitus is their understanding of the daimon. “ἦθος,” writes Heraclitus, “ἀνθρώπῳ δαίµων” (frg. 119) (“ethos anthropo daimon” – “Man’s ethos is its own daimon.”) For Heraclitus, our daimon was not an inner spirit or voice as in Socrates, but it was the habits or ethos (ἦθος, ethos) of man itself, (ethos in the Greek sense can also be read as what has remained through habit), so the daimon of man was the doings and becomings of the man themselves (and not something outside or within them) (Peters, 1969, f. 33).

Heraclitus was called the weeping philosopher (in Western philosophies, Burke was the first to talk about “positive pain ” (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 102-106)), because Heraclitus did not see an eudaimonia somewhere, since the “daimon” of Heraclitus was the man in becoming (the same opinion that Homer held about the gods according to Plato (Plato, (Theaetetus), 1997)), which preserves a hidden logos that we must listen to (frg. 1). Unlike Dianoia (διάνοια, through (διά, dia), mind (νοῦς, nous)), in Heraclitus we speak, in the sense just related, of a Hyponoia (ὑπόνοια, under (ὑπό, hypo), mind (νοῦς, nous)): a lower knowledge, which Plato makes synonymous with mûthos (μῦθος, myth) (Peters, 1969, f. 121), here is one more reason why when he writes about Heraclitus he always mentions him with Homer. And one more reason why when Heraclitus uses and introduces the word “magic” (from magos, μάγος) to Europe  (J, 2002) – through which we have “magjepsje” (enchantment) in Albanian – he speaks against the people who enter the mysteries mediated (and not going in them by themselves) (frg. 14).

I think it is no accident that conservatives – Burke, Scruton, Oakeshott – do not mix their hands with rationalism (even though there are concessions here and there, or why Chesterton can’t speak to anyone with his Descartes to defend ‘Western thought‘), because they believed something close to or precisely the aphorism-like that man has ethos as its daimon. No matter how much rational calculative philosophy we will do – eudaimonia, or otherwise, that desire to make the earth a paradise, at best gives us a crippled government, and at worst, the regimes of the twentieth century, without exception. Conservatism admits of change, like that of Heraclitus and the gods of Homer; (the good daimon is not in Heraclitus, just as the good, moral, gods are absent in Homer); conservatism admits even the change of gods: the only thing that does not admit of change is whatever is raised by the ideas of Plato – whatever the rational subject comes to be in Western philosophy, in this sense, it is not at all strange that it gives the main seeds for liberalism. A historian of ideas would know this from Plato’s treatment of Heraclitus and Homer. But this should also be known by poets when they read Homer’s verses:

“εἴ γε μὲν εἰδείης σῇσι φρεσὶν ὅσσα τοι αἶσα

“κήδε᾽ ἀναπλῆσαι, πρὶν πατρίδα γαῖαν ἱκέσθαι,

“ἐνθάδε κ᾽ αὖθι μένων σὺν ἐμοὶ τόδε δῶμα φυλάσσοις”

(“If you only knew in your heart / How many difficulties Fate has for you before you reach your homeland / you would stay again, guarding this house with me.” Odyssey, book V, verse 206-208)

The conservator is someone who, even though one knows fully well that Fate has to bring its own difficulties because everything is in the making, still does not stay in someone else’s home. And returns and longs for one’s own home – where enchantment is its own dwelling. The conservative preserves because the conservative has something to lose, the traditionalist, on the other hand, defends – because the traditionalist has nothing to lose, even one’s own life is instrumentalized (it is only a traditionalist who stays in Plato’s house and shows Europe rationalism through rational philosophies to achieve happiness – albeit happiness according to their definitions, not ours).

Edmund Burke and the Preservation of What is

“Man’s nature is art”

It is generally accepted by philosophers and political thinkers that the first sowing of the seeds of conservatism belongs to Edmund Burke. As throughout Burke’s life, policy-making in Europe has changed a lot. While the reaction in essence of ‘conservatism’ was against the demands and hypotheses of the liberal philosophies, in the time we live in, what the world knew as liberal, and what I will elaborate as (Burke’s) conservatism, have come to resemble more of a center in the realm of politics – rather than two corners that spiral in opposition and reaction to one another (Scruton, 2017). But nevertheless, in essence, however much they are now closer to the center in the field of politics, there are key differences that should not be forgotten.

When Burke, for example, opposes the idea of the “social contract“, saying that, unlike liberal philosophies, policy-making is founded on things that are not only present but on the gratitude and participation with those who were, are, and will be (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 359). – (Even Scruton, analyzing the enchantment of the Common Law, we can assume that he had this in mind when he is of the opinion that a liberal constitution is almost always in contradiction with itself when the pronoun “We” in our (liberal) constitutions does not responds only to an individual and not only to those who are now (Scruton, 2017).) And when Burke rejects any attempt to define human nature, writing that human nature is art (Burke, (vol IV), 1869, p. 176) – this definitely brings us to his “cherishing” of those highly misunderstood “prejudices”. For, in the absence of any world Spirit, the general will or human nature that leads to the natural rights of those who are, as liberal philosophies pushed and push forth (here more than anyone else’s philosophy, Burke responds to the dreary and sterile Rousseau’s one): nothing else remains but the things that their endurance over time has been the greatest proof of the enchantment they have over us (thus of our natural need to preserve them, even, as Burke writes, if we do this being ashamed (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 346)).

But perhaps in this manner, Burke is dangerous because he seems to take and halt us away from protecting minorities from majorities in democracies; for example, he prevents us from fighting against imperialist abuses and prevents us from running away from ideas about the abolition of slavery; from the protection of those who live in the colonies when we have our king; the thought that the woman is not just an animal. Well, here is the opposite of whatever “prejudice” Burke tells us about, and it is purely a prejudice of ours that these thoughts are assumed that come only from one corner of political thought: for Burke was among the first thinkers to worry that in democracy (Burke is generally skeptical of democracy), minorities would always be oppressed by the majority and that same majority would fall into the hands of the leadership they voted (Burke, (vol. I), 1865, p. 38); he was among the first, and sometimes the only one, to oppose the king for the taxation of the American colonies and to speak out against the abuses in British India (Burke, vol II, 1869), (Burke, (vol X), 1869): he suggested not only the document to make illegal “the slave trade” (Burke, (vol VI), 1869, p. 254) in a sincere way (although with some misjudgments) in the kingdom then, but it was also Burke who wrote against “the empire of light and reason” of the revolutionary France, that in their reasoning “a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 333). Above all, it is Burke who does not believe that we should have a divine law, and still more, it is Burke again who says that the greatest achievement of the modern era is the state that does not interfere in the lives of those over whom it rules (Bourke, 2000, pp. 632–656).

When Burke talks about cherishing what remains, he does not have a tradition in mind. Tradition is always a bias of consciousness that defends the state of things over an interpretation of how these things should be. Burke speaks of a heritage; of a heritage which from its changeable possibility (“a state without the means of some change,” writes Burke, “is without the means of its conservation” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 256)); we are under its enchantment to preserve it: and change is possible because what Burke is talking about is not how these things ought to be, but how they are. When he writes that the nature of man is art, he is definitely referring to the essential meaning of the word art (lat. “ars“, as he uses it everywhere in the twelve volumes of his speeches, books, and letters, which reminds more than what Heraclitus calls ethos): it is for this reason why now conservatism, at least the Burkean one, is read more as a method than as an ideology (A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (vol I), 2007, p. 285): an ideology has certain foundations that lead to certain conclusions of action, in Burke we do not have something like that, indeed, in Burke we have contempt for such thoughts. In Burke, precisely because this distinction between heritage and tradition can be made, we have the appeal of conservatism to not be something only political, but more of and closer to a specific and particular attitude towards things that are.

If conservatism is only Burkean, liberalism, with its conceptions of human nature, the general will, and whatever corner of rationalism and rights it finds, is more ideological. And it is no coincidence that in essence, Burke’s abandonment of philosophy after his book of aesthetics and his refusal to trust metaphysics or anything but political discourse to preserve things not only gave him the name “the madman” by his contemporaries – but it also gives us a beautiful picture of what it means to be stubborn in your own enchantment. Not to be blinded by what has always been your home, and the lack of fear that even before your king, when the latter seeks to spoil that feeling, to say to him –

“Again and again,” said Burke, “revert to your old principles – seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here to discuss the distinctions of rights, nor to attempt to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it (. . .) Do not burthen them with taxes.” (Burke, (vol II), 1869, p. 73)

This is Edmund Burke even to the philosophies that fueled and billowed the fires of the French Revolution. If there is a summary of Burke’s philosophy – then it is this: “Don’t burden us with things that are your whims and not the way things are“. The same thing can be observed when Burke – here we even can see the point where he exposes all of his enchantment feelings – thinking about the French Revolution concludes:

“As things now stand,” writes Burke “with everything respectable destroyed outside us and an attempt to destroy every principle of respect within us, one is almost forced to apologize for having common human feelings.” (Burke, (vol. III), 1865, p. 337)

Edmund Burke never apologized for his common human feelings, but after him, not everything conservative, in large measure, is what he preserved. Indeed, if it were not for the French Revolution, we would today recognize Edmund Burke as a rhetorician and philosopher deeply concerned with the multiplicity of feelings from within and their expression in policy-making – and we would be talking now about the “defenders” only about those who came after Burke, and then perhaps we wouldn’t read Burke only politically at all. However the case might be, something quite different begins to be understood across the English Channel in the twentieth century as conservative (or at least, named as such), and even further, something quite different begins to be preserved (or rather, here it begins to be defended) besides the feelings of enchantment or human nature as art. Here life ceases to matter, the concern about death begins.

References

A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (vol I). (2007). Oxford: Blackwell publishing.

Bourke, R. (2000). EDMUND BURKE AND ENLIGHTENMENT SOCIABILITY: JUSTICE, HONOUR AND THE PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT. History of Political Though.

Burke, E. (1865). The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (vol. I). Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

Burke, E. (1865). The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (vol. III). Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

Burke, E. (1869). The works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (vol II). Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

Burke, E. (1869). The works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (vol IV). Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

Burke, E. (1869). The works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (vol VI). Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

Burke, E. (1869). The works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke (vol X). Boston: Little, Brown & Company.

George, S. (1974). The works of Stefan George. Chapel Hill: THE UNVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS.

Hodgson. (2005). Hegel and Christian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

J, J. &. (2002). The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Paris: PEETERS.

Nietzsche, F. (2008). The Birth of Tragedy. Nanaimo: Vancouver Island University.

Nietzsche, F. (2019). Gay Science. London: Penguin Classics.

Peters, F. (1969). Greek Philosophical Terms: a historical lexicon. New York: New York University.

Plato. (1921). Theaetetus – Sophist. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Plato. (1930). The Republic (vol II). London: Harvard University Press.

Plato. (1997). Plato, Complete Works (Theaetetus). Indiana: Hackett publishing company.

Scruton, R. (1996). An intelligent person’s guide to philosophy. London: The Penguin Press.

Scruton, R. (2000). England: an elegy. London: Chatto & Windus.

Scruton, R. (2014). How to be a Conservative. London: Bloomsbury Continuum.

Scruton, R. (2017). Conservatism: an invitation to the great tradition. United Kingdom: All point books.

Varro. (1912). On farming. London: G. Bell and Sons, LTD.

The post The Remedies and Nostrums of Conservatism: A Misopogon Part I appeared first on The Miskatonian.

Ugo Stornaiolo S., Associate Editor of the Miskatonian, had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Hörcher and covered topics such as prudence and moderation in the conservative mind, Hungarian constitutional history, and the spirit and aesthetic manifestation of Central European culture.

Ugo – Hello and welcome, Professor Hörcher, thanks for joining us today.

Ferenc – Thanks you Ugo, I’m happy to be with you today.

Ugo – My first question is usually to ask our interviewees to introduce themselves a little bit so our audience knows better who you are and why we’re talking today. As a heads up, I can tell them already that you’re an Hungarian professor, and that you’re well known in circles where the work of Roger Scruton, the famous British conservative political philosopher, is appreciated.

Ferenc – Sure, yes: I am a historian of political thought, a political philosopher, an historian of art and I’m also literary critic and a poet, so I’ve have got a number of interests and I have a long experience of teaching in higher education. For quarter of a century I taught at the Department of Aesthetics of the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, here in Hungary, where I also established a Doctoral School in Political Theory. I then led for six years the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and right now, I am the head of a relatively small research unit at the University of Public Service, here in Budapest, and since this is a research professor’s position, I have the obligation to publish and to have occasions like this one to give an account of my research.

Ugo – Well, it seems you’re a very busy person, and I happen to know some of your academic contributions because you do publish a lot. I think I was first introduced to your body of work with a book you wrote on on the historical Hungarian constitutions, so from that, I was wondering if you have any legal training or if you are somehow connected to the legal profession.

Ferenc – That’s right: I also taught at the law school of the Catholic University and I got an master’s degree in Legal Theory from the Universities of Brussels and Louvain/Leuven, in Belgium, and I taught for some years legal philosophy and the history of legal thought. I don’t know if you are aware of another book of mine on those subjects, because my master’s thesis got reworked and edited into a book format. The title is Prudentia Iuris: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law.

Ugo – Well no, I was not aware of it, so thanks for the heads up. I’ll get to check it soon for my own research, and speaking of which, I mean, I have been in Central Europe for around two years by now and when I first arrived I thought about getting in touch with some likeminded people in our common spheres, and I think I first found you through your book on the Hungarian historical constitution, but also because you have kind of an important presence in in social media, such as in Twitter/X, and there’s a lot of followers of the late sir Roger Scruton who are connected with you because of these links you have with, let’s say, the philosophy of conservatism and aesthetics, as many of your contributions have been in these two areas. My first question in that sense is how did you get involved in conservative political philosophy, where does your connection to Sir Roger Scruton comes from, and what’s your link with the philosophy of aesthetics.

Ferenc – Well, these are three independent questions, so I’ll try to answer them one by one:

First, I was born, you know as far as conservatism is concerned, in a communist country, in communist Hungary in the 60s, in 1964 in particular, so my conservatism is rooted into an anti-communist stance.

I guess it’s my family background which prepared me for that, so its was not a question that I was never really satisfied with my country being occupied by Russian communist tanks so, that’s the origins, but I did not prepare to become a conservative political philosopher per se because of that.

That came later, during my stay in Oxford, England, where I was a visiting graduate at Oral College and where I studied what I thought was a Third Way, beyond this duality of Communism and Western capitalism, but which turned out to be an investigation on conservatism, and in particular, on the work of Edmund Burke.

We could say, thus, that was my initiation into conservatism: through anti-communism and my research in Oxford into the work of Edmund Burke and his Reflections on the Revolution in France, and that’s not far away from Roger Scruton’s own interests, so that leads us to your second question.

Roger Scruton was a Cambridge-educated philosopher of art and political philosopher and he had a special interest in Central Europe, just like you, which is actually very rare, and very appreaciated by us Central Europeans, but basically Scruton was someone like that, and he came over beyond the Iron Curtain already in the late 70s and 80s so that was quite a courageous thing to do and, of course, I could have met him already then but I did not meet him until 1992 when it was already after the fall of the Berlin wall and the Iron Curtain but still decades ago and as I had always found his work relevant, we had a number of occasions to meet and participate in conferences and I even had the chance to respond to one of his lectures, at the University of Warsaw, so there were regular occasions to meet and discuss things.

I also worked as a journalist for some time in the 2000s and I made interviews with him as well, so we were well acquianted, and the result of that was that when he died in 2020, I decided to to write this book about him, Art and Politics in Roger Scruton’s Conservative Philosophy, which got published by Palgrave McMillan in 2022/2023, so that’s the connection to Roger and it also leads to your third question: the philosophy of art, which is also an interest I shared with with Roger, whose primary interest was also the philosophy of art, which is, according to the German tradition, aesthetics: the the study of the sensual perception and in particular the study of beauty, the sublime and other aesthetic qualities.

This plays well with my other interests, as I mentioned I am practicing poet, so I was always interested in literature and the arts and that’s why I gave some time to study the theory of it and as a result of that, I published a history of the of the French, English and German uh early modern aesthetic thought from 1650 to 1800, so from the court of Versailles and Louis XIV up to Immanuel Kant and Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) so that’s that’s that’s my my interest it’s partly historical but also theoretical.

I have a a theory that in fact an aesthetic judgment the ability to make decisions about what is beautiful and what is not is connected or has it the same operational pattern as the judgment that we need in politics or for that matter in legal decision-making: a kind of practical wisdom or practical judgment.

Ugo – The way they actually connected was quite interesting and especially because it creates a train of thought which explains how you ended up working in the topics and the spheres you are, and at the same time it really gives a background into into your work.

I also kind of project myself a little bit into you because we have a similar background at least in our professions and in our interests, so I do understand how that goes.

But I mean, in more practical aspects one of my questions would be what exactly you learned and what exactly made you really feel you know inclined about the political philosophy of conservatism instead of any of the other currents.

I mean we have the misconception that conservatism is just pretty much defending free markets capitalism and know the American version of conservatism, but in British and in Central European thought is something way different and closer to traditionalism actually, so my question, maybe for you to add up a little bit to the first part of of your answer, would be what really made you be interested interested in that instead of just anti-communism and the superficial promotion of free markets and democracy.

Ferenc – Anti-communism for me was not only about free market and and free speech, although these are important things, I would say, but my basic problem with communism was that it was, well, if you want to be kind you can say it was “mistaken”, but if you are stronger you would say it was based on a lie and that mistake or lie concerned its view of human nature: it had a false view of human nature.

I myself was brought up as a Christian, a Catholic, in particular, and that was actually something that was forbidden, or maybe, “not advised”, let’s put it this way, in a communist context, to bring your children up in Catholic doctrine, and of course in Catholic moral theology you are introduced to the idea of the sinfulness of human nature, which is the starting point, so to say, and that was what I was brought up in, and so I saw it very obviously, that the perfectionism and the utopian hopes and optimism that is part of the Marxist ideological smoke screen are not true, so that’s why I thought that I should dig deeper.

With Edmund Burke I found an author who could indeed show me that that there is a political tradition which is based on the assumption that if we take into account the real nature of the human being, then you have to be much more cautious in your politics and after the 20th century I think that lecture or that lesson was even more important than in the end of the 18th century. Of course, the French Revolution, which was the cause of Burke’s Reflections was terrible and the bloodshed together with actually some very nice and very optimistic hopes, but the 20th century was even worse: the totalitarian regimes (nazi, fascist and communist) showed us the most brutal face of politics and the killing machines that can come out of that.

Some of those totalitarian regimes were based on these nice utopian illusionary views of the human being, so I always felt that as a responsible person (and we intellectuals need to be responsible because we have got that privilege that we could spend our time in our youth studying instead of just working for survival) that means that we have to take care of what the public opinion is about or about how the public perception of reality turns, and therefore I always felt it my obligation to try to share that sort of wisdom which comes out from the tradition that I trace back to Aristotle and partly even to Plato and then through the Romans, like Cicero, and the others up to Christianity, such as Augustine and of course Aquinas in particular, then the Renaissance humanists and the early modern thinkers like the Spanish Jesuits and their Italian counterparts as well as the British tradition.

These are all important for me because they all trying to call our attention to the fact that the human being is full of uncontrollable passions, aggression, willpower, and therefore you have to be able to control those passions, and in particular, you have to take care of mass psychology because we are living in a mass democracy and within that context it’s even more important to be able to have the balance and to keep the heat low in order to avoid major outbreaks of violence and terror and war.

Ugo – Taking in particular your last point and before my next question, I have something to ask you because, as you may know, conservatism, at least for some authors and for some thinkers, you included, is a philosophy or a doctrine of prudence and moderation, so I would like you to expand a little bit on that statement and to explain to people who might not be very familiar with that what that means, especially what’s prudence, what’s moderation, how are these virtues, and why do they matter to keep a healthy and a stable society.

Ferenc – Mostly yes: you are right. That’s a very strong historical tradition but I also use those concepts and ideas in my own understanding of political conservatism. I published a volume with the title “The Political Philosophy of Conservatism” and the subtitle “Prudence, Moderation and Tradition“, and I found these three concepts important for me for the same reason our liberal friends tend to start out from the cardinal virtue of justice.

Think about John Rawls, for example, perhaps the most influential 20th century liberal thinker, and his most important book is called A Theory of Justice. And in fact, yes, it tries to work out the conditions for a just society.

But I thought that justice might be important, but there might be something before one can turn towards achieving justice in your society. You need to keep order and peace in your society. You have to find the minimum conditions of cooperation and cohabitation. And for that, justice is too far away. What you need is rather, as I mentioned, to keep down the passions and the uncontrollable motivations for violence and brutality and envy and all those things.

And to achieve that, we know from the Christian teaching that the cardinal virtue of prudence or practical wisdom is crucial because it does not give us a key of the metaphysical truth of our conditions or the human phenomenon, but it provides not simply a technique or a skill, but rather a virtue, a habitus, a kind of ingrained and internalized excellence, which is a virtue of a practical nature, which will help us to make decisions in difficult situations. I usually describe this with the following metaphor or allegory:

Imagine that you enter a Saloon somewhere in the American Wild West in the early 19th century as a cowboy. And you are thirsty, you want to have a drink. But this is a pub which you never entered before. And you have to be aware that there are certain risks when you enter a Saloon or a Pub. You have to be careful about who is in, what are the intentions of those in, and what are the possible risks for you to enter.

And that is, I think, the attitude of the one who has got practical wisdom. It’s an attitude of cautious foresight, of an effort to try to be able to get all the necessary information to make good decisions, what to do next. That’s the most important thing: it’s not necessarily to have long-term strategies, but more of a tactical thing. But you always have to keep in mind the telos, the goal of the whole thing, and it’s not simply survival, but the common good of the community, in fact.

You are not only, as the cowboy who enters the Saloon, interested to save your own life, but you want to have a good time for all of those in there. And that’s the sort of thing, what you need, a practical judgment, the ability to see potential dangers, and also the space for maneuver, and the ability to do good, or at least to avoid to do bad things.

Ugo – I’m going to connect this reply about the meaning of prudence, and of wisdom, and of practical knowledge, which is kind of a staple in conservatism. Empiricism somehow became very, very associated with conservatism, despite not being part of the same tradition at first. This links with both your legal training and maybe the idea of natural rights and natural law.

So I want to ask you, how do you see that in the realm of natural law, since there’s the issue that there’s a lot of thinkers of natural law are either only lawyers, and they just think about it on the legal sphere, or only philosophers, and they don’t really apply it to the legal sphere. So maybe you have the right amount of votes as both a legal scholar and as a political philosopher to explain this to a layman.

The modern renaissance of natural law came after the Second World War, for obvious reasons, i.e. that positivism could not help avoiding the most horrible, anti-human, inhuman decisions by decision makers.

But my problem with the tradition of natural law is that it claims to have those universal standards for once and for all. And I never knew how to make sense of it within the historical dimension of the human being. I thought that there is a learning process, perhaps, here.

And even if these standards are universal, I had the feeling that Adam and Eve in paradise surely were not aware of all of them at once. So my assumption is that human history is actually a learning process, a learning process which comes out of repeated trial and error procedures. Human societies try to solve their practical problems, and the better the solutions are, the longer the society can survive. 

This allows us, on the long run, to find out those standards which help the societies to survive for longer. And that means that my idea of natural law is quite close actually to the concept of common law in the British context, i.e. that we need to see the precedence, we see have to see earlier cases, earlier historical states of affairs and decision-making processes and the results.

And through that we can find those principles and standards which crystallized with time and which we can claim belong to what we traditionally call natural law. So that’s my own understanding of natural law: the principles are universal, but they need to be learned through human history.

Ugo – Speaking of common law, well, as an Hungarian jurist, you know that the history of the Hungarian constitution is quite similar to how Britain has retained an unwritten constitution, and if I’m not wrong, Hungary has not had a proper written, “single document” constitution until, I would say, around 10 years ago?

Ferenc – Well, mid-20th century, in 1946 was the first written version and then the communist constitution was introduced and that was already a written paper.

Ugo – Sure, but I mean a constitution that actually follows the Hungarian tradition, not the communist experiment, and you as a jurist, could take the Hungarian cas, and actually you did in your book (A History of the Hungarian Constitution: Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe), explaining how that developed from centuries of political experimentation and changes in Hungarian history.

I was wondering if there was some connection in your study about Hungarian legal and constitutional history and some of your conclusions about natural law and about conservatism.

Ferenc – Yes, yes, of course, you are on the right track. One’s historical investigations and one’s theoretical reflections should be in harmony. And indeed, although I call myself an Anglophile, someone who appreciates British culture in general and the English common law in particular, and the British parliamentary system and all that, I am a Hungarian, a loyal Hungarian citizen, and as such, I’m very proud to have this long-standing tradition of unwritten or better said, uncodified laws, because there were certain laws which were put down and they adapt that uncodified constitution which we are talking about.

Now, you are asking me about that tradition, which is a centuries-long tradition: Hungary got its state formation 1,000 years ago, or by now it’s a little bit longer, and those 1,000 years of Hungarian history were based on certain Christian and certain local jurisprudential principles, but the basic one which was usually referred to was a collection of customary laws as well as statutes which tried to bring together about 500 years of legal developments, the so-called Tripartitum, the three-part collection by István Verbőczy from the early 16th century.

That means that we had 500 years without such collections, or at least just smaller ones, and mind you, this is not an official collection, it never got the signature of the king for its authorization, but it was accepted as a correct collection of Hungarian laws, partly customary law, but also partly the laws given by our kings.

And the major idea behind that is a kind of an interaction between the country, between the community of the different orders of society, you have to keep in mind that this is a feudal social system, and both the country and the king are part of a higher unit which is called the crown, as the Hungarian crown is the sacred symbol which unifies the king and his country.

And all the procedures of creating new laws are like a dialogue between the country, between the different orders assembled in the national assembly, and the king. They are the two partners to it, and as a result of the dialogues, the laws are born.

And that is, I think, a very nice and early example of how to formalize procedures in a way to ensure that different interests will be taken into account, but also the general interest, i.e. the interest of the country as represented by the assembly, and also as embodied by the king, so the two parts of the discussion unite and through that dialogue comes these procedures resulting in the right decision. And all that centuries-long history of dialogue resulted in certain principles, like the principle that the king should always take into care the good of the country.

Of course in those days “the good of the country” basically meant the good of the nobility, one should be aware of that, but the interest of the general good was the legitimating force behind the activity of the king, and as soon as there was a recognition that that was not the case, the king lost his position quasi by the force of the law, because he did not take into account the interest of the common good, which was the first and the primary interest of his rule.

Ugo – I’m going to make a connection with the next topic, since there’s a lot of historical coincidences, as well as a lot of differences between the constitutional development in Hungary and the one in Poland, in particular the idea of the crown as separated from the figure of the monarch, and the “enfranchised people”, the nobility, with political power that kind of collaborate or are in tandem with the monarch in order to compose the crown.

However, there’s a key difference, and that is that Poland successfully established an electoral monarchy during the existence of its First Rzeczpospolita/Republic, and they had a wider range of foreign and local monarchs, whereas Hungary became part of the Habsburg realm pretty early on, and it stayed as part of their Danubian monarchy until around a 100 years ago, and had their struggles for independence as well quite a couple of times. I think the two most famous ones are Rákóczi’s War of Independence and the Revolution of 1848 that ended up in the compromise of the 1860s, so I was wondering what do you think made these differences in Hungarian constitutional history and in the Hungarian political tradition?

Ferenc – Well, of course, the geopolitical situation of the two countries is different, and that resulted in different turns of their history. Most importantly, the Turks came up from the east-south and south-southern parts of Europe up to take the middle part of Hungary for 150 years, which resulted in the country divided into three parts, and as a result, the Habsburgs could strengthen their power over one part of it, and that became the foundation of the kingdom later on as well.

But it’s not the right formulation to give an account of the Hungarian constitutional situation in the early modern period, is not that Hungary is part of the Habsburg monarchy, because Hungary was always ruled according to the Hungarian constitution, and so from a Hungarian perspective, it was rather the case that we happened to have the House of Habsburg as our kings, but we, the Hungarian kingdom, the geographic locality called the Hungarian kingdom was not part of any other monarchy like the Habsburg monarchy, because this part of the realm was ruled according to different rules than all the other parts of the realm, and it could not be ruled without the support of the orders, the feudal orders, and that meant that no king could be crowned without taking an oath and without being crowned in presence of certain people, by certain persons who were either from the secular or the religious established order of the country.

That means that for all these hundreds of years, when we had Habsburg kings, it was always the case that they could only rule according to the oath that they made, and with the condition that they were crowned in the right presence, by the right persons, at the right location actually. So a number of criteria had to be met, and in fact that was not the case for any other parts of the Habsburg  realm. And as for the settlement of 1867, that was indeed perhaps the high point of Hungarian political wisdom. 

Why? Because Hungary had to realize that by that time, a mid-sized country within the center of Europe, with the Habsburgs and the Germans on the one side, and the Russians and the Turks on the other side, they had to find a modus vivendi, how to rule themselves, and in this way how to save the basic sovereignty of the country, under whatever construction it can be saved.

And the settlement was a dual monarchy. Once again, Hungary is not part of the Austrian monarchy, it’s a construction of a dual monarchy with the same ruler, the same king, but that king was an emperor in the Austrian part, and a king in the Hungarian part, and the settlement was that Hungary will keep on ruling itself according to its own constitutional tradition, so again this dialogue between the Hungarian people, its elites and the king, but the foreign affairs and the military decisions as well as the treasury were to be held together for both Austria and Hungary.

So these are the areas that were not exclusively controlled by the Hungarian government, but that did not meant they gave up their participation in the decision-making process in those fields. And I think that was a very substantial compromise, or rather settlement, because it provided ample opportunity for development, and also to keep the traditions alive, and it defended Hungary from foreign invasions until the First World War.

Ugo – There are two questions I could make from this. The first will stay on this historical development, and if I may play little devil’s advocate in here, because there’s a certain tradition, legal theory, even jurisprudence going in the development of the historical spirit of the law and so on and so forth, but then you also have a more power-based understanding of law which is fairly associated with the thought of German jurist Carl Schmitt.

And I was going to ask you: do you think this constant state of warfare in which Hungary found itself during half of its existence was what really gave the necessity to have these foreign rulers from the House of Habsburg to be pretty much their main military commanders against every other invasion that could be around?

I might be reading too much in between lines, but there’s a certain idea that if you need these powerful figures, usually military commanders, to take the reins of government because the situation is so overwhelming that you need someone with extraordinary, exceptional powers to rule and restore order. And this also happened with Admiral Miklás Horthy later during the years between both world wars. In both cases, there’s the strongman that takes power because the country is in a situation of exception.

Do you think we could apply Carl Schmitt’s understanding of power politics and of the exception of laws as a situation that explains some of the Hungarian political and constitutional development.

Ferenc – We can, of course, but we should tell our audience that on this issue, we have different positions, for I go for a more Aristotelian understanding of the nature of politics, and you appreciate more Carl Schmitt on this point, but of course, Schmitt says that within a geopolitical context, we would call an international law or international relations. 

Nonetheless, my understanding of politics is more about internal affairs, because it’s the Aristotelian starting point where you have a political community and you have to organize the life of that community.That’s my basic assumption, and for that, you might have occasions when you have, you are in need of a strong military leader. These are, for example, the Roman dictators, but otherwise, what you need is practical wisdom and and just a good sense, a sensus comunis, the right understanding of what’s at stake. 

And in that respect, my example of a good ruler in Hungary is not Horthy, who was actually quite successful, I do not want to deny that, but my example is from his period, it’s István Bethlen from 1920 to 1930 roughly, and Gábor Bethlen, who was a prince of Transylvania in the 17th century. 

These two, both named Bethlen, so it’s easy to remember their names, illustrate the idea that to rule, in fact, you need to make compromises, and you sometimes even have to give up certain powers of sovereignty. For example, Gábor Bethlen had to make deals with the Ottoman Empire, as well as with the Habsburgs. But if you make those external compromises, then you can rule your own country within your own borders, according to your standards and your values. I think that’s something very important.

Both Bethlens were regarded quite highly by the European powers in those days because it’s always important for foreign powers, for the great powers, that there is peace in the smaller areas, which they don’t want to deal with.

In this sense, I think you can find a modus vivendi between the requirements or the demands of the great powers around you and your own people. These are the two sides that you have to keep in balance, and in that respect, I think it’s not enough to have powerful military leaders. You also nned t have men of practical wisdom.

Ugo – In the end, it all comes to the distinction between the politics of community and friendship, which would be more in the Aristotelian sense, and a certain politics of friend-enemy distinction and of conflict, which is more of the Schmittian understanding. We somewhat understand who were the historical enemies of the Hungarian polity in history, and there might be some remnants of that, at least in the way how Hungary deals in its affairs now.

Ferenc – Well, there is always a division line within, I guess, most of the countries, but in Hungary especially, and the division line can be drawn along religious or political values. For example, we talked about the Habsburg influence in Hungary, and there were groups who were pro-Habsburg and anti-Habsburgs, and that was a very powerful division line within Hungarian politics for centuries, whether you could accept the Habsburgs or whether you would never accept them as legitimate rulers.

Another division line is the Catholic-Protestant division line, which divided Hungary along the line of the Danube. That was basically the most important geographic division line within the Hungarian kingdom, traditionally, and even today.

And the western part belonged earlier to the Roman Empire and it became early Christianized, and then it became also Catholic and remained Catholic when Protestantism got its time, and the eastern part became Protestant and the Protestants were usually anti-Habsburg as well, so the religious division and your position about a foreign ruler went hand in hand.

Interestingly, I would say that the best parts of our history was when the two sides could play out their roles in a balance.

For example, we had the Rákóczi’s War of Independence in the early first decade of the 18th century, and they failed. They were anti-Habsburg, and in that sense, the revolutionary ones. But then a very good peace treaty was drawn, and as a result, the 18th century is actually quite peaceful and quite dynamically developing in Hungary, which is not something that you learn in school, because in the school you learn your great struggles for liberty and your tragic falls. You don’t learn about the ordinary normal decades of human or national history when things went well, because there are no news in it.

You need to fight for liberty in order to get the settlement, but also you have to get the settlement to get out the best what that fight was for. So the successful periods are when the two things can go hand in hand. And I think that after 1990 with the newly born freedom again, there is a need for balance.

There is a need for those who fight and there’s a need for those who can make the compromises and the settlements. That also points to international relations, and there has always been this link with other countries around.

Ugo – Talking about Austria would be self-explanatory in the Hungarian historical context with the relationship with the Habsburgs, but what about other countries? Hungary has very brotherly relationships with other countries close by, Poland, in particular, or Croatia, maybe.

But I think that there is here also a kind of inferiority complex. Hungary used to be at least a mid-sized country and the country which had very powerful kings for centuries, and at some moment, our kingdom was as big as it was bordered by three seas, so it was quite a huge one. Sometimes Poland and Hungary were even under the same king as well.

But it has a good influence on a public mentality if a country was big and then it becomes small but it has some bad aspects as well. And that bad aspect of this Hungarian historical tradition is that we always complain. We complain that the world is conspiring against us, that we are the underdogs and we are not taken as equal or we are not dealt with in a fair manner. These are the complaints that I think can add up to a kind of an inferiority complex if it’s done without kind of moderation and tact.

So that’s my answer to it: sometimes Hungarians have this feeling that they only have friends in the Poles and perhaps sometimes the Croatians but that’s all. With Italy as well, there were good relations, but that’s it.

And you also have to take into account culture: the Hungarian language is not belonging to the Slavic or the Romance language families, so in that sense, it’s something very exceptional. Nobody else connects to it. The same way, Hungarian culture, in which literature has a very powerful position, is not understood by others, because they don’t speak the language. This means that a lot of things that are important in the Hungarian public mentality are not available for our Western friends, and therefore, they cannot make sense what is actually happening here with these strange guys, these Hungarians.

Ugo – Since you mentioned culture at last, my last question might be about it, and especially coming back to aesthetics, because Central Europe has a very defined identity when it comes to aesthetics. When you come to Central Europe, you feel everything is different, but at the same time, every major city, like Kraków, Budapest, even Zagreb, Prague, Vienna, in some extent as well, they’re very similar. They have like the same vibe. 

It also extends a little bit to the people, and you mentioned that there’s a certain way that Hungarians are, that they complain about a lot and they don’t feel they belong that much to the West. My experience in Poland has been quite similar. And mind you, those are two very different nations, but they’re still, they’re very close and they have always been close and they have very friendly relations in history.

So maybe my last question is about that, about the spirit and the aesthetic expression of that Central European identity.

Ferenc – Yes, that’s crucial for Hungary that we don’t regard ourselves as part of Eastern Europe, but rather Central Europe. And of course, Central Europe is a concept which is much discussed in historical literature. 

I tend to go with those who claim that it’s basically the Central European Habsburg powers, the Habsburg realm in this part of the world that defined this culture. But I also would call attention to this Hungarian historian named Jenő Szűcs, who had this not very novel idea that there are three historical regions in Europe: Western, Central and Eastern, but also claimed that there were different historical trajectories for these regions.

The Eastern model is a kind of monopoly of power or even a tyranny, the Western model is democratization even to the extremes like a mass democracy, and Central Europe is somehow a compromise between the two, like a constitutional monarchy or something like that.

Of course, there is an idealization in this scheme, but there is truth to it as well, that Central Europe could learn from both sides and could appreciate both sides. And in that sense, it has got a certain function in Europe even today, I would say. That’s why the Visegrad Group is an important political initiative.

Ugo – This also shows the aesthetics of the region. Whereas in Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, you have like these grandiose monuments to both mass democracy, like if you go to Brussels or if you go to any other big city in Western Europe, you will see how they try to say “oh, we are the people and this is how the people hold power.” And then in Eastern Europe, you have these monuments to the power of the state, and usually, to the power of the ruler as well. But in Central Europe, you have something that goes in between. You still have big buildings, big churches, big palaces, but they are not massive.

Do you feel the connection between the people and the ruler, between community and those who belong to it and those who run it? This is something that doesn’t happen too much in both East and West, so maybe the aesthetic expression of that idea is something that we could take as a giveaway of how Central Europe really feels and thinks about itself and about its governance.

Ferenc – Yes, I would put it this way, because I’m not in favor of powerful rulers or very strong states because they need their control. That’s the idea of the rule of law. But I think that you have a point if you say that mass democracy, as Tocqueville teaches us, destroys hierarchy and destroys differences. It creates homogeneity and it creates gray areas. Grayness or dullness or a sort of flat and undistinguished landscape.

And in this respect, this is indeed a region of transitions, a region of meeting places, it has got its aesthetic, and by aesthetics, we also mean a certain ethos and a certain way of life, which is so important for conservatives like us.

Ugo – All right. Thank you very much for that, it’s been a pleasure sharing with you. Would you like to say one final message or one final comment to our readers?

Ferenc – I would really like that, and I hope it was not too far-fetched and not something without major interest, but my point is that indeed we Hungarians, we have a long history, have a lot of faults and mistakes, but we are quite friendly people, and all the visitors who come to Hungary usually say that they like to stay here. And we are happy if people are interested in our country and in our region, so Ugo, I’m really grateful for your interest as well.

The post Interview with Ferenc Hörcher appeared first on The Miskatonian.