The mainstream of our tradition has affirmed the supremacy of the philosophic or contemplative life over the political or active life, the intellectual virtues over the moral virtues. The mainstream of this tradition has not set these way or life, or kinds of virtue, in opposition, but has certainly distinguished them and ordered the lower to the higher. Those thinkers who, even if they do not in any way contradict this hierarchy, give significant attention to depicting or celebrating the political or active life—Xenophon and Cicero come to mind—for many centuries have been regarded as secondary figures, and have been relatively marginalized, or even neglected entirely, even in the “classical education” revival.
Perhaps this neglect has something to do—as cause or effect or a bit of both—with the broader crisis of politics and citizenship in the past century, as self-governing republics have given way to expert-administered states, and the civic and humane virtue of the prudent statesman has been eclipsed by the bureaucratic and increasingly posthuman expertise of the well-credentialed technocrat. An account of this crisis that focused on developments within elite education would note not only the marginalization of the classical historians, moralists, and philosophers who gave the active life its due, but also the clumsy attempt to generate programs of Leadership Studies grounded in the social pseudo-sciences. The latter presupposes the former; there was no need to invent Leadership Studies in a culture that understood elite education as already both civic and liberal in its aims.
Unfortunately, even some “classics” beloved by those dedicated to the “classical education” revival, though they point us to the resources for recovering a more adequate conception of activity and the political, offer us little direct guidance to restoring politics to its rightful and noble place in the hierarchy of ways of lives. Josef Pieper’s Leisure and Worship, for example (typically mistranslated Leisure: The Basis of Culture), is so focused on opposing the “world of total work” of Marx, Weber, and Jünger that it affirms the leisure of the philosophic or contemplative life and its attendant virtues while forgetting, almost entirely, the political or active life. I have the highest respect for Pieper in general and his Leisure in particular. And perhaps it is impossible to restore a proper conception of the active life before we have grasped the contemplative life that reigns above it. But Pieper’s reader is liable to be encouraged, however unintentionally, to fall into a kind of quietism borne of the simple dichotomy between Weberian Worker and Pieperian Philosopher. This political quietism perpetuates the very conditions that imperil political action, self-government, and the actualization of the human being as a political animal. It is tragicomically visible in the political philosophy professor whose decades of teaching and writing on the wisdom of the tradition results in resignation to, or even rationalization of, replacing “the government of persons by the administration of things.”
Where should we turn for a classic exposition and affirmation of the nobility of the moral virtues and the active or political life? Besides the authors mentioned above, we do, certainly, find this affirmation in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. But in those works, the political life is so relentlessly ordered to the philosophical that the reader easily falls into the same quietist error that endangers the reader of Pieper. What we need is a presentation of the active and political life on its own terms. Hence, the appeal of authors such as Xenophon, Cicero, and Plutarch.
But perhaps there is no better text for our purposes than Virgil’s Aeneid, which I assert must have pride of place in any classically-minded “leadership” program today. I might even argue for that assertion someday. For now, consider Anchises’s famous articulation of the “arts of the Romans” to Aeneas in the underworld. Anchises says:
Others will cast more tenderly in bronze
Their breathing figures, I can well believe,
And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble;
Argue more eloquently, use the pointer
To trace the paths of heaven accurately
And accurately foretell the rising stars.
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
Aeneid 6.1145–1154 (tr. Fitzgerald)1
Virgil’s Aeneid is written in the literary tradition of the heroic epic, responding especially to Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. But it is also written in full and almost-explicit awareness of the philosophic traditions that have developed in the previous four or five centuries. Here, Anchises locates the Roman vocation in the very same hierarchy of virtues articulated by classical philosophers such as Aristotle. Some will practice the productive arts (technē) of working bronze and marble, the use of reason to form and re-form the material world. Others will “argue more eloquently” than the Romans; that is, they will cultivate rhetoric, the art of speech, a manifestation of human rationality used in persuading and ruling other humans. Higher still is to “use the pointer / To trace the paths of heaven accurately / And accurately foretell the rising stars”: astronomy, the rational study of the visible yet permanent (natural or divine) beings, the heavenly bodies, that might here stand in for speculative philosophy in general.
Aeneas, apparently, should be aware of these higher uses of reason in order to fulfill his own, distinctly Roman vocation: the active or political life at its best, “To pacify, to impose the rule of law, / To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.” This may be seen as an external manifestation of the moral virtues, by which the rational part of the soul seeks to “pacify” and “impose the rule of law” on the passions, “spare[ing]” those passions which are “conquered” and become submissive to right reason, while “battl[ing] down” those passions which remain “proud” and disobedient to reason. It is only with the self-rule of the moral virtues that right rule over other persons and other peoples becomes possible—a lesson that is always important, but of special urgency to those nations who are destined to “rule / Earth’s peoples.”
At an earlier age, we new Romans (that is, republican Americans) gave great attention to the cultivation of personal and political self-government as a prerequisite for devotion to the productive virtues and, eventually, the intellectual.2 We latter-day Romans (that is, imperial Americans) have given excessive attention to the productive and theoretical manifestations of reason, with the theory (“research”) almost always ordered to the production (“development”), to the neglect of the active and political life and the moral virtues upon which it depends. It is little wonder that our theories and products have become so hostile to our own humanity. Perhaps it is time to “remember,” Roman, the right order of the virtues and of the ways of life, and with them the prerequisites of the political life.
Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.
Virgil, Aeneid 6.847–53
“The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” John Adams to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780
Sorry, Pavlos, it doesn't exactly help you case other than spell out how continually seminal Virgil is, but I can't help myself: 4:42: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OCasoD9P_o&list=OLAK5uy_kXM-1wfUC-W03ScZ2AuO5MeiyqWFneUqk&index=6&ab_channel=BobDylanVEVO Love the linking to that fine Adams quote, BTW, the same one used to such fine effect in one episode of the mini-series.