138 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS fallibility, Nietzsche is a defender of science so long as its naturalism be seen in the service of a philosophy that affirms existence. Lampert’s discussion of the central section of the JS concerning love and gratitude is instructive. He points out that for Nietzsche the will to power, by that one a it what nature gives rather than attempt to chany id ground new love for naturen the form of ana at -Love e nature" inseparable from Zarathustra, Nietzsche's fullest statement on the meaning of love as strife. As Lampert puts it: “The erotic dance with life leads to the love of life that affirms its eternal return” (p. 381). The celebration of the primacy of becoming, the replacement of “moral” with naturalistic values, signifies that at the core of Nietzsche's moral teaching is loyalty to the earth. ipert rightly observes that Nietzsche’s questioning of the value of alae Fed hien of necessity to pose the question of nature as the sole perspective from which to assess the value of morality, and that nature seen as it is permits Nietzsche to see in it the union of fact and value at the most basic level. The awareness of the will to power as the fundamental fact is thus at the same time an affirmation of the new highest value of its eternal unchanged return. Contrary to Heidegger’s interpretation of the eternal return as inspired by revenge expressing hatred of the finitude of beings, ape bane ed it as representing what Heidegger himself sought: “a human way of being on the earth that permits all beings to be what they are; in Nietzsche's language, the will to eternalize out of love and gratitude” (p. 405). Lampert’s study is both sweeping in scope and detailed in its textual analysis fh persuasively uncovering the teaching of Nietzsche and arguing for a Nietzschean history of philosophy. His account of how for Bacon and Descartes the need for esotericism provides the clue to their public rhetoric regarding the relations between society, science, philosophy, and religion is convincing. This is especially the case regarding Lampert’s discussion of the status of Descartes’s rationalism. He puts his finger on the ultimate problem of Cartesian dualism—the heterogeneity between the orders of knowing and of being. And his anti- -Heideggerian interpretation of the meaning of eternal return is quite plausible since it is linked with his correct understanding of Nietzsche's attempt, in grounding morality and politics on the will to power as the coincidence of the true and the good, to reinstate nature as the standard in the face of the most strenuous objections. WALTER SOFFER POLITICAL THOUGHT BEYOND METAPHYSICS Bernard Flynn: Political Philosophy at the Close of Metaphysics.. (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992. Pp. 234. $49.95.) Political philosophy is at a low ebb today—a fact which stands in stark contrast with its pressing urgency. There are several reasons for this state of affairs. One is the dramatic intensity and rapidity of unfolding events in our Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.REVIEWS 139 time which constantly seem to outpace our ability to offer reflectively seasoned sear Rona ic this lag, and equally damaging, is the prevalent hy yee academic variety) from political life— one transforms the former into the province of technicians or *thoughtexperts” while relegating political accounts to journalism. In slightly attenuated form, the same segregation also characterizes contemporary Continental thought (despite the high political profile of some existentialist thinkers at an earlier time). In many quarters, Continental philosophy in recent years has tended to be reduced to a “worldless” textualism or else an aestheticizing self-indulgence aloof from practical-political concerns. In this situation one must welcome Bernard Flynn's book which seeks to recuperate a properly political mode of philosophizing at the “close of metaphysics” (as the latter phrase has been defined by Continental thinkers). Welcome is bound to give way to delight and intellectual excitement once the reader discovers the wealth of insights and novel vistas articulated in the book ina style which combines floquence and scholarly sobriety. Flynn’s study is broad in , but not in the manner of phil ia perennis: He takes seriously an event or “advent” which marks ot ara from previous periods in the history of Western thought: the event of the “closure of metaphysics” (which is not synonymous with its simple erasure). Regarding the meaning of the phrase, he concurs with Nietzsche and Heidegger in locating the “inaugural gesture” of metaphysics in the bifurcation between fact and idea, or between apparent world and “true world”—with the latter serving as the yardstick and ontological foundation of the former. “By metaphysics,” Flynn states (p. 2), “we mean the Philosophical pretension to penetrate appearance and arrive ata knowledge of reality which is ontologically superior to, a temologically more certain than, appearance.’ fn varying guises and m lalities, this conception formed the bedrock and guiding sstunption of much of tational Western thought—despite the protestations of some pragmatists ready to consign metaphysics to a small band of dreamers and hence to treat its demise as a non-event. Countering the latter view (epitomized by Rorty), Flynn insists with Nietzsche on the theological as well as sociopolitical salience of the fact-idea bifurcation, especially its importance in shaping major regime- forms and institutions governing pre-modern and modern Western societies. To the extent that this is the case, the closure of metaphysics | os tothe political philosopher a new task: the task of conceiving and articulating political life in ostmetaphysical terms and thus of honoring the timeless imperative “to ” in the timely mode “to think otherwise.” Philosophical jection at this point involves a refiguration of worldly appearance ina manner which succeeds “in opening a space in which the novel becomes intelligible, a space of appearance in which the political can give itself” (pp. 6-7). To illustrate the difficulties and possible directions of such a refiguration, Flynn discusses six prominent political thinkers laboring in the twilight zone of metaphysics. Three of these thinkers—Marx, Habermas, and Foucault—are presented as halfway houses on the road to refiguration: Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.140 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS while valiantly seeking to transgress metaphysical premises, ultimatel; succumb again to their lure and end with their Foueecient The other three thinkers—Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Lefort—are more successful in reaching postmetaphysical terrain (with the three figures signaling progressive way-stations of this journey). In the case of Marx, Flynn appreciates the effort to overcome Hegelian idealism, but finds the effort stymied or derailed by Marx's tum to a naturalistic realism evident in Marx's theory of desire (as natural drive), in his distinction of ideology from realist language, and in his treatment of the division of labor (as empirical fact). Against these conceptions, Flynn invokes the notion of the “symbolic order” as articulated, in different shadings, by Lacan, Saussure, and Lévi- Strauss—where “symbolic” means “a mark of radical finitude which disrupts the pretension to an immediate relation to the real, and bars any movement that would attempt to lead from the domain of difference and ambiguity to the realm of transparency and self-presence” (p. 35). In Habermas’s work, Flynn detects a similar backsliding into metaphysics—notwithstanding repeated attacks on the “paradigm of consciousness.” In this case, the backsliding surfaces in Habermas’s notion of general species-interests, in his “egological” reading of Freud, and above all in his subscription to decontextualized validity claims. Although frequently treated as Habermas's radical antipode, Foucault is said to share in this metaphysical backsliding, though for nearly the rae reasons. In Foucault's writings, the retreat operates in the form of an endorsement of the realism of power, an endorsement that subtends or undercuts symbolic representation as well as issues of public legitimacy. “According to Foucault,” we read (pp. 90, 92), “operations of power constitute the unconditioned variables... To the extent that Foucault reintroduces a dichotomy between a domain of essence—a nonapparent truth, namely, power—and its juridical a rance, he the: installs himself within classcal metaphysics.” cht ae Devoted to Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Lefort, the second part of the book has more of an upbeat tone. Flynn strongly applauds Arendt’sendeavor to think without metaphysical “banisters” and to construct a political vocabulary germane to our time (including the notion of “totalitarianism”). Still, while appreciating her general aims, he perceives in her work danger signals threatening to re-erect the same banisters: especially her delight in watertight conceptual distinctions and ultimately her resort to Kant’s theory of judgment (with its built-in problematic of conceptual “subsumption” and its equation of “common sense” with universal, nonpolitical reason). For Flynn, it was chiefly Merleau-Ponty who subverted Kant’s universal- particular, reason-experience dichotomies, thus opening up a space for genuine postmetaphysical thought. One index of this subversion was the notion of “hyper-reflection” articulated in Merleau-Ponty’s later writings, a notion which (Flynn says, pp. 137-38) differs from transcendental or metaphysical reflection in that the latter “attempts to undo our initial insertion into the world by methodologically reconstituting the world as the achievement of the constitutive activity of consciousness.” From the vantage of hyper-reflection, there are neither sheer facts nor subjective interpretations Copyright © 2001. All Rights Reserved.