Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on Leo Strauss's The City And Man:

The question that used to be put with monotonous regularity to authors was: what book would you choose to have with you if you were marooned on a desert island. One author, a well- known woman who was not immodest about her own literary achievements, insisted that instead of something someone else had written, she would choose to have a paper and pen and write for herself what she would then get to read. With far greater cause for modesty, but with perhaps a better understanding of what life on a desert island really meant, I replied when asked: “Any book with the title: How to Build a Boat.”

This was not fair of me. I should have have taken that question more seriously, imagined that I was never going to get off the island, and that the only book I had to read would have to be one worth reading over and over again. It is a choice that requires more thought than might at first be expected. War and Peace, for example, may well be the greatest novel ever written, but how many times could you read it before the words began to lose all meaning. Plutarch’s Lives, the comparison of famous Greeks and Romans, would allow you to debate with yourself which was the greater: Cicero or Demosthenes, Caesar or Alcibiades, but that would be to devote your life to the outlines of what other people did or tried to do. And how you read it, what you gained from it, would depend on what you had read before.

This is the issue that goes unnoticed. Which one book would you wish to be your only companion depends on what you had you read before, how you had spent your life, or that part of it you had devoted to reading. Did you read to be entertained; reading, for example, mysteries in which the main attraction was the feeling of suspense as you were led through the search for the person or persons responsible for the crime that had been committed until, at the end, you discovered, and were surprised to discover, who the guilty party really was? But, having discovered that, would you really want to read it a second time, much less read it over and over again until your last, dying day? If, on the other hand, you had read to learn, read to study the serious things that attempt to discover what it means to be a human being; if you had studied with close attention the works of Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides; if, that is to say, you had spent years reading the great books that constitute the beginning, and the basis, of Western thought, read them so often that at the bare mention of a phrase in one of their classic works, you remembered, if not the exact words, the main thought expressed on the page, the book you would want, the book you would need, is a book few people have even heard of: The City And Man, written in l962 by Leo Strauss.

Two sentences, the first paragraph of the Introduction, tell you immediately that this is unlike anything you have ever read:

“It is not self-forgetting and pain-loving antiquarianism nor self-forgetting and intoxicating romanticism which induces us to turn with passionate interest, with unqualified willingness to learn, toward the political thought of classical antiquity. We are impelled to do so by the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West.”

The first time I read The City And Man I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago where I had gone to study under Leo Strauss. At the beginning of my first year, enrolled in his seminar on Plato’s Gorgias, I told him I did not think I was getting everything from my reading that I thought I should. He looked at me, nodded and said he would have to think about it. And he did. The next week, in the middle of his commentary on some passage in the dialogue, he suddenly stopped, looked straight at me in the crowd of seventy or more students in a room that could comfortably seat half that number, and said: “So, you see, you have to read, not just what is written, but what isn’t written,” and then immediately went back to what he had been saying to the class.

Little though I knew it, that remark went to the heart of what Leo Strauss discovered about the way some of the greatest writers wrote. In Persecution And The Art of Writing, he explained that because people tend to remember mainly the beginning and the end of a speech or discourse, someone who wants to speak or write of important but dangerous things, might mention, that is to say hide, them somewhere in the forgettable middle. Is that the reason why Plato is in the middle of The City and Man? The first chapter is “On Aristotle’s Politics,’ the second is “On Plato’s Republic,” the third is “On Thucydides’ War Of The Peloponnesians And The Athenians.” Aristotle came after Plato. Did Leo Strauss put Plato in the middle to remind us that Plato is central to everything Strauss thought important about ancient thought?

Whatever the reason, Strauss begins with Aristotle, and Aristotle makes very clear how different the ancient understanding is from our own.

“For Aristotle, political philosophy is primarily and ultimately the quest for that political order which is best according to nature everywhere and, we may add, always.” For Aristotle, “the best life is the life devoted to understanding or contemplation as distinguished from the practical or political life.”

Plato and Aristotle both agree on this. There is a natural inequality among human beings, an inequality that pervades all of nature. There are beings of different rank, and each of us is made up of different, and unequal, parts. “In man the soul is by nature the ruler of the body and the mind is the ruling part of the soul. It is on the basis of this that thoughtful men are said to be the rulers of the thoughtless ones. It is obvious that an equalitarianism which appeals from the inequality regarding the mind to the equality regarding breathing and digestion does not meet the issue.” But this equality is precisely what modern democracy insists upon. For Plato and Aristotle, for ancient political philosophy altogether, the question was primarily and ultimately the political order that was best according to nature always and everywhere. The city - what today we would call, not the state or society, but the country - exists for the practice of virtue, primarily moral virtue; in other words, it exists for the sake of human excellence. And that, in turn, requires liberal education.

No one sees things this way anymore. Instead of democracy understood as the rule of the poor, who, because they lack leisure, meant rule of the uneducated, and therefore, Aristotle was certain, opposition to philosophy, modern democracy “presupposes a fundamental harmony between philosophy and the people, a harmony brought about by universal enlightenment, or by philosophy (science) relieving man’s estate through inventions and discoveries recognizable as salutary by all, or by both means.” The “natural harmony between the whole and the human mind” was replaced by Bacon and Hobbes, Machiavelli and Locke, with a new understanding in which human passion, especially the desire for life, decided what was important; human reason, in the form of modern science, became the means by which to accomplish what the passions required. One man might be more intelligent than another, but everyone was equal in their right to live. Preservation, not human excellence, became the dominant consideration.

Plato and Aristotle thought that because some were better educated and more capable than others to rule with an eye to the common good rather than to their own individual interests, aristocracy, the rule of the best, was far superior to a democracy in which everyone, every citizen, had an equal voice. Athens, after all, was a democracy, and Athens had put Socrates on trial and sentenced him to death because he did not believe what everyone in Athens was expected to believe. But Athens also fought a war with Sparta, a war that lasted twenty-seven years, a war that, among other things, raised the question whether a democracy that was also an empire could conduct a war, the greatest war there had ever been, to a successful conclusion. Thucydides, the Athenian who wrote the history of that war, a history meant to be a possession for all time, was able to write it because, like Plato and Aristotle, he understood that human nature, like nature altogether, never changes and, because of that, what happened in that war held a lesson for anyone who would take the time to read it with the care it deserved.

The central episode, the most important event, in the Peloponnesian war was the Sicilian expedition, the attempt to expand the Athenian empire beyond anything anyone had imagined. Pericles had warned that the one thing that could cost Athens the war was an attempt to increase the size of the empire before the war had ended, but Pericles had died. His nephew, Alcibiades, driven by dreams of glory, insisted that Athens had either to expand or risk losing what it had acquired. The Athenians loved Alcibiades, but feared he might become a tyrant. They insisted that the cautious and conservative Nicias, who had advised against the expedition, be in joint command. Before the expedition sailed, the Hermes statues, religious icons that were placed in front of most of Athens’ homes, were destroyed and Alcibiades was accused of having profaned the sacred mysteries. He was allowed to sail with the expedition, but was then called back to stand trial. Because trial meant certain death, Alcibiades went to Sparta where he thought to help defeat Athens, and then to Persia where he convinced the King to play Athens and Sparta off against each other. Convincing the Athenians that he could get the Persian King to take their side, they called him back to Athens where he gave them what Thucydides thought the best government they had ever had.

The Sicilian expedition ended in disaster. The Athenian fleet was destroyed and nearly all the Athenian soldiers were killed. Pericles’ warning proved tragically correct. The attempt to expand the empire had ended in catastrophe. Pericles was a better, a more far-sighted, statesman than the brash adventurer Alcibiades could ever have been. Or was he? Thomas Hobbes, who translated Thucydides’ history called him “the most politic historiographer that ever writ.” Hobbes explained that “the narrative doth secretly instruct the reader.” And as to what that means, he refers to an ancient author of a Roman history: “Marcellinus saith, he was obscure on purpose; that the common people might not understand him. And not unlikely; for a wise man should not write (though in words understood by all men) but wise men only should be able to commend him.”

Leo Strauss, one of those wise men able to commend, that is, able to grasp the real intention of what Thucydides wrote, could see beneath the surface of things. Pericles had warned that the only way Athens could lose the war was if Athens attempted to expand its empire. But, as Strauss, who had once instructed a young graduate student that it is important to read not only what is written, but what is not written, remarks: “Thucydides never says that Pericles’s views were always sound.” Thucydides, read with care, leaves no doubt that, had Alcibiades been left in charge, the Sicilian expedition would have been victorious.

The City And Man, read with care, reveals how the world was once understood, and how the world can be understood again. Removing the barriers created by the modern attempt to impose an artificial manmade order on the world, the attempt to conquer nature by modern science, we can begin to grasp what Leo Strauss meant when he wrote that man is the “microcosm” of the world and that “there is a natural harmony between the whole and the human mind.” Philosophy, as understood by Plato and Aristotle and Thucydides, is not the acquisition, but the quest, for wisdom, a search that never ends, but a search that with each reading of The City And Man seems to get just a little bit closer to the always elusive truth.

Leo Strauss taught me how to read, but he also taught me how to write. Perhaps more importantly, he gave me something to write about. I wrote about him, or rather, what he might have been like if, instead of being born in Germany where he studied philosophy mathematics and natural science before leaving that country in 1932, he had been born in the United States, and become a judge, a judge who had studied classics in school. Leopold Rifkin is one of the central characters in The Defense. There is a scene, early in the novel, in which Rifkin engages in a brief dialogue with Joseph Antonelli, the defense attorney. Rifkin gets Antonelli to agree to the utterly improbable conclusion that if he knows one of his clients is guilty, the best thing he can do for him is make sure he is convicted so he can receive the correction he needs. Far from original, the dialogue follows closely part of a dialogue in Plato’s Gorgias. It is a permissible form of plagiarism, especially when the author had the great good fortune to have known, and studied under, the wise and generous Leo Strauss.