Ranasinghe, Nalin. Logos and Eros: Essays Honoring Stanley Rosen.

Merrill, Thomas W.

RANASINGHE, Nalin. Logos and Eros: Essays Honoring Stanley Rosen. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2006. 271 pp. Cloth, $45.00--According to Stanley Rosen, philosophy is aporetic but not impossible. By virtue of its nature, philosophy attempts to think the whole. But all attempts to exhaust the whole through language fail. Stated with maximum brevity (as Rosen himself might put it), there is a fundamental disjunction between discursive logos and the inarticulable vision of the whole that grounds speech. As rational animals we speak and must speak. Yet according to Rosen, all such discursive schemes are artifices ultimately rooted in a prediscursive intuition or perception of some thing beyond themselves, the whole or being. While indispensable for our speech, that vision can never be pulled fully into speech, never be made fully articulate and hence never simply at the disposal of the human will. The orienting moment of vision is not, however, to be thought of, on Rosen's account, as somehow the preserve of some few geniuses alone (although the ability to translate that vision into speech may well be). Rather such pretheoretical vision underlies all of human life; as Plato's Socrates puts it, one cannot even be human at all without having had a prior Vision of the ideas.

Rosen's mode of getting at this dimension of human life is what he calls ordinary life. Philosophy must therefore turn around to examine the pretheoretical roots of theory; not being able to achieve final discursive clarity about the whole, philosophy instead pursues the intimations of wholeness already present in ordinary life. Thus conceived, philosophy must take as its object the tacit reliance on vision that runs through ordinary life; in its self-presentation, philosophy must become poetic, able to point toward what it cannot say. Rosen's turn to ordinary life is a close cousin to Socrates' turn away from the attempt to apprehend being directly to the investigation through logoi--the so-called second sailing-as well as to Leo Strauss's turn to political philosophy.

Both the richness and breadth of Rosen's work is on display in this festSchrift. This volume brings together a variety of philosophical, personal, and poetic engagements with Rosen's thought from a number of distinguished colleagues and students. Alasdair MacIntyre, Drew Hyland, Laurent Jaffro, Herbert Mason, and Nalin Ranasinghe contribute essays on Rosen himself; Geoffrey Hill offers a poem; Eva Brann, Waller Newell, Robert Pippin, Richard Rethy, Sharon Rider, Richard Velkley, and Donald Verene give us essays on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein; Michael Davis, Ronna Burger, Charles Griswold, Clifford Orwin, David Roochnik, and Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic interpret Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus. Most of these essays reveal an indirect but nonetheless real dialogue with Rosen himself in addition to being of much interest by in their own right. As a whole and in its parts, this volume will serve as a useful supplement for those interested in and perplexed by Rosen's body of work.

Faced with the breadth of topics and thinkers broached here, it might well seem arbitrary to single out one question as most important. Yet the question of how politics stands with regard to Rosen's "metaphysics in ordinary life" is raised in various ways by MacIntyre, Griswold, Orwin, and others, and it does not take much imagination to see that question lurking behind many of the other essays as well. One might therefore ask: does Rosen's turn to ordinary life point to, or culminate in, a political philosophy? The authors here pursue that question by asking about the relationship of phronesis to law, as MacIntyre does; by wondering whether Platonism is compatible with a recognizably liberal politics, as Griswold does; or by speculating about whether Kantian or Hegelian self-legislation can provide us with a source of normativity in the absence of a stable account of the whole, as Pippin does.

This line of reflection also raises the inevitable question of Rosen's relationship to his teacher, Leo Strauss, to whom Rosen dedicated his book on Plato's Republic. I am inclined to think that a pivotal thought of Strauss's Republic interpretation is this: "even the transpolitical cannot be understood as such except if the city is understood" (City and Man 138). The political is both the condition of and the obstacle to our access to the whole. If I understand him correctly, Rosen would agree with this claim. Transposed into suitably Rosenian language, Strauss's claim would read: even the extraordinary cannot be understood except if the ordinary is understood. Despite his well-known criticisms of Strauss, does Rosen then end up rediscovering Strauss's insight, if from a somewhat different angle? Whether or not this is the case, and even what such a claim can mean, are open questions. But among his other services to us, Rosen does not allow his readers to forget that, whatever its tactical guises and whatever the necessity of its concern with ordinary life, philosophy is by its nature directed toward the extraordinary.--Thomas W. Merrill, St. John's College, Annapolis, and the President's Council on Bioethics.