Critics Of Enlightenment Rationalism [1st Edition] 3030425983, 9783030425982, 9783030425999

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Notes on Contributors......Page 8
Chapter 1: Introduction......Page 13
1......Page 27
2......Page 29
3......Page 30
4......Page 33
5......Page 34
6......Page 38
7......Page 39
8......Page 40
A Science of Freedom......Page 44
On the French Question......Page 46
Democratization and the Authority of Science......Page 49
Reason and Freedom in America......Page 51
On Friendly Terms......Page 54
Chapter 4: Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism......Page 58
Chapter 5: Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello......Page 72
The Oracle of Reason......Page 74
What the Oracle Says About the Human Person and Politics......Page 77
What the Oracle Is......Page 81
Overcoming the Oracle?......Page 82
Chapter 6: “Pagans, Christians, Poets”......Page 90
A Concluding Venture......Page 100
Introduction......Page 105
Language-Games......Page 106
Rule-Following......Page 109
Forms of Life......Page 111
Conclusion......Page 112
Bibliography......Page 115
Chapter 8: Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity......Page 116
The Appearance of Objects in Science......Page 117
Transcendental Logic......Page 119
Transcendental Objects......Page 121
Causation and Freedom......Page 125
Technological Thinking......Page 128
Chapter 9: Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems......Page 133
Chapter 10: Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism......Page 146
Polanyi and the Enlightenment Roots of Twentieth-Century Political Extremism......Page 148
Historical Setting: The Rise of a Science Misconceived......Page 150
Correcting the Excesses of Scientific Rationalism......Page 152
Personal Knowledge and Tacit Knowing......Page 153
Interpretive Frameworks, Discovery, and Non-Skeptical Fallibilism......Page 155
Emergent Being and Indwelling......Page 157
Reality, Morality, Science, and Society......Page 160
Conclusion: Progress via Dynamic Orthodoxy......Page 161
Chapter 11: C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man......Page 166
“Looking At” Versus “Looking Along”......Page 171
Transposition......Page 173
The Metaphor of Light......Page 176
The Model of the Universe......Page 177
The Abolition of Man......Page 180
Conclusion......Page 181
Chapter 12: Hayek: Postatomic Liberal......Page 186
The Rationalist Worldview......Page 187
Rationalism’s Discontents......Page 188
The Hayekian Alternative......Page 189
Epistemology and Ontology......Page 190
Economic and Social Theory......Page 192
Political and Legal Theory......Page 195
Legacy and Future......Page 196
Introduction......Page 200
Lost Truth and the Human Sciences......Page 201
The Early Heidegger......Page 204
The Historicity of the Good......Page 207
Conclusion......Page 210
Chapter 14: Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism......Page 217
Pseudo-Spirituality......Page 221
The Irrationality of the Enlightenment and the Problem of Method......Page 225
Helvétius, D’Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, and Comte......Page 227
Conclusion......Page 230
Chapter 15: Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism......Page 233
Bibliography......Page 241
Introduction......Page 242
Monism and Its Iterations......Page 243
Monism and History......Page 244
Monism and Philosophy......Page 246
Monism and Politics......Page 248
Appraisal and Conclusions......Page 250
Introduction......Page 255
Reason’s Limits......Page 257
Truth, Tradition and the Sword of Imagination......Page 259
Conclusion......Page 264
Urbanization and Its Problems......Page 266
“Rationalist Constructivism”1......Page 267
Border Vacuums......Page 270
Cataclysmic Money......Page 271
Visual Order......Page 272
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903)......Page 273
Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928)......Page 274
Charels-Edouard Jeanneret a.k.a. Le Corbusier (1887–1969)......Page 276
Concluding Thoughts......Page 279
Bibliography......Page 281
Chapter 19: Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Moral Philosophy......Page 282
The Critique: Modern Moral Philosophy and Emotivism......Page 284
MacIntyre’s Neo-Aristotelian Alternative......Page 289
Conclusion......Page 294
Index......Page 298

Citation preview

Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism Edited by Gene Callahan · Kenneth B. McIntyre

Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism “Callahan and McIntyre have brought together a distinguished and cosmopolitan array of contributors who have produced a lively and provocative collection of essays exploring and analyzing the modern phenomenon of Enlightenment rationalism, whose distinguished critics range from the historically important Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to our near contemporaries Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin and Michael Oakeshott. The connecting and fascinating thread that runs through the volume is a relentless critique of a style of thinking that prioritizes the pursuit of certainty, and a blind belief in the powers of instrumental reason to overcome all adversity.” —David Boucher, Professor of Political Philosophy and International Relations, Cardiff University, UK “This volume could not have arrived at a better time. McIntyre and Callahan have given us an excellent set of essays that speaks directly to the fetishization of human reason. Each of the thinkers examined reminds us of the fallibility of human beings—a lesson we sorely need to revisit every generation or so.” —Richard Avramenko, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA “This is a remarkable and remarkably comprehensive collection on thinkers who questioned enlightenment rationalism, both in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The list is impressive: Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Burke, Nietzsche, Eliot, as well as Oakeshott, Hayek, Alasdair MacIntyre, and a number of others equally stellar, and equally deep and complex. The essays are by accomplished scholars, and show that the opposition to enlightenment rationalism was both diverse and strikingly coherent, and a treasure trove for thinking beyond the enlightenment. It will be especially valuable for those with interests in one of these thinkers to see them in the context of the larger fraternity to which they belong.” —Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of South Florida, USA “The variety of topics considered, the range of thinkers included, the striking and ultimately illuminating juxtaposition of approaches combine to cast, not a spotlight, but indeed multiple of points of light on a rich selection of important thinkers from the later-modern period. Scholars and students interested in modern critics of modernity will benefit from the range of figures treated here and the depth of the commentaries on them.” —Alexander S. Duff, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of North Texas, USA

Gene Callahan  •  Kenneth B. McIntyre Editors

Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism

Editors Gene Callahan New York University Brooklyn, NY, USA

Kenneth B. McIntyre Sam Houston State University Huntsville, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-42598-2    ISBN 978-3-030-42599-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sam Houston State University for its financial support and for granting me a sabbatical in which to complete the project. I would also like to thank The Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy at The University of Wisconsin for inviting me to spend the 2019–2020 academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the Center, and providing financial support for the year. Thanks to my mother and father for all of the support over the years. I want to thank my two daughters, Flannery and Julie, who rarely agree with me, but, at least, find me occasionally humorous. Finally, thanks to Maria for taking care of things. Kenneth B. McIntyre 4 September 2019 Madison, WI Many thanks to the patience of my wife, Elen, to the support of my children, Eamon, Emma, and Adam, to Leslie Marsh for encouraging us in this project, and to David Boucher for his mentorship. Selah. Eugene Callahan 5 September 2019 Brooklyn, NY

v

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre 2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15 Ferenc Hörcher 3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between Reason and Freedom 33 Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin 4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47 Robert Wyllie 5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61 Justin D. Garrison 6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79 Corey Abel 7 Wittgenstein on Rationalism 95 Daniel John Sportiello 8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107 Jack Simmons vii

viii 

Contents

9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125 Steven Knepper 10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139 Charles W. Lowney II 11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159 Luke C. Sheahan 12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179 Nick Cowen 13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical Tradition: Situating Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics”193 Ryan R. Holston 14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211 Michael P. Federici 15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227 Wendell John Coats 16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237 Jason Ferrell 17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251 Nathanael Blake 18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263 Sanford Ikeda 19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Moral Philosophy279 Kenneth B. McIntyre Index295

Notes on Contributors

Corey  Abel studied the history of political thought at The London School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned an MSc., and The University of Chicago, where his Ph.D. was on the thought of Michael Oakeshott. He has taught in both political science and interdisciplinary humanities at The United States Air Force Academy, The University of Denver, Metropolitan State University, The University of Colorado, and The Colorado College. He is the editor of Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott and The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism. Nathanael  Blake  earned a PhD in political theory from the Catholic University of America, and has written for a variety of scholarly and popular publications. He resides in Missouri. Gene Callahan  has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University and a Master’s in the philosophy of the social sciences from the LSE. He is the author of Economics for Real People, Oakeshott on Rome and America, and co-editor of Tradition v. Rationalism. He teaches at New York University. Wendell John Coats  is Professor of Government at Connecticut College where he teaches courses in the history of Western political theory, ancient, medieval and modern. He is published widely in the field of political theory, especially with regard to the work of the twentieth century, English philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott.

ix

x 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nick  Cowen  has a PhD from the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, and degrees from the University of Oxford and University College London. He has written for the American Journal of Political Science, Critical Review and the Review of Austrian Economics. Michael  P.  Federici  is professor and chair of the Political Science and International Relations Department at Middle Tennessee State University. He received his B.S. in economics from Elizabethtown College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from The Catholic University of America. He is the former president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and the author of three books and three edited volumes: The Political Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, The Challenge of Populism, Eric Voegelin: The Search for Order, The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and Politics: The Modest Republic, Rethinking the Teaching of American History, and The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson. Jason Ferrell  currently teaches political theory at Concordia University, having also taught McGill University and Mount Allison University. His research interests include the thought of Isaiah Berlin, value pluralism, and distributive justice. His articles have appeared in Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy. He has also authored a “Glossary of Names” for the second edition of Isaiah Berlin’sRussian Thinkers. Justin D. Garrison  is an associate professor of political science at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is a political theorist who researches the relationship between politics and the imagination. He is the author of journal articles, book chapters, and the book An Empire of Ideals: The Chimeric Imagination of Ronald Reagan. He is also co-editor of the book The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-­Constitutional Age. Ryan R. Holston  is Professor and holder of the Jonathan Myric Daniels ‘61 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute. He is also an Associate Editor at the journal Humanitas. His published work has appeared in History of Political Thought, Telos, and Harvard Theological Review, among other places. He is currently writing a monograph, whose working title is Tradition and the Deliberative Turn, and is co-­editor of a forthcoming book entitled The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020).

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xi

Ferenc  Hörcher is a political philosopher and historian of political thought. His PhD was on the Scottish Enlightenment. He is research professor and director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the National University of Public Service in Budapest. He is senior fellow and earlier director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His publications include Prudentia Iuris: Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law (2000) and the coedited volume: Aspects of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Politics, and Religion (2004). Most recently he co-edited an co-authored the volume: A History of the Hungarian Constitution. Law, Government and Political Culture in Central Europe (2019). A Political Philosophy of Conservatism, Prudence, Moderation and Tradition is in print with Bloomsbury, scheduled to get published in 2020. Sanford Ikeda  is Professor of Economics at SUNY Purchase. He is an internationally recognized scholar of Jane Jacobs’ work, and the author of Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. Jin Jin  is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his B.A. with honors in Political Science from Concordia University in Canada, winning the Renée Vautelet Prize as the most outstanding student in his program. His honors thesis, entitled “The Seas to Rove and the Sea of Roving Men: Self-Awareness in Tocqueville’s Recollections and Fortnight in the Wilderness,” discusses Tocqueville’s self-awareness as a pathway to his thought on human nature. Steven Knepper  is an assistant professor in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His research interests include American literature, tragedy, and aesthetics. His writings have appeared in Telos, The Robert Frost Review, The Cormac McCarthy Journal, Religion & Literature, and other journals. He is currently writing about the philosopher William Desmond’s approach to literature. Charles W. Lowney II  is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia, USA. He received his masters in philosophy at Boston College, where he studied Continental Philosophy, and his doctorate at Boston University, where he studied Analytic Philosophy. He is interested in applying the concepts of emergentism and tacit knowing to ethics, society, and religion, and has done so in articles such as “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity” (2009), “From Science to Morality” (2009),

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

“Morality: Emergentist Ethics” (2010), “From Morality to Spirituality” (2010), and in a chapter, “Four Ways of Understanding Mysticism” in Mysticism and Silence (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, Laura Weed, ed.). Lowney is also the editor of Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions (2017). Kenneth B. McIntyre  is Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Michael Oakeshott on Civil Association, Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics, and has also written essays on the philosophy of history, ordinary language philosophy, American constitutionalism, and practical reason. He is currently working on a book on value pluralism, liberty, and the rule of law. Luke C. Sheahan  is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of Pennsylvania. He researches the intersection of First Amendment rights and political theory. Sheahan’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared inThe Political Science Reviewer, Humanitas, Anamnesis, and The Journal of Value Inquiry He has lectured widely on religious liberty, freedom of speech, and freedom of association. His book Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism is forthcoming from the University Press of Kansas. From 2018–2019, Sheahan was Associate Director and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Freedom Project at Wellesley College and from 2016–2018, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He received a PhD and MA in political theory from the Catholic University of America and a B.S. in political science from the Honors College at Oregon State University. Sheahan is a five-­ time recipient of the Humane Studies Fellowship, a 2014 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, and a 2018 recipient of the Leonard P. Liggio Memorial Fellowship. Jack  Simmons is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Southern University, in Savannah, Georgia. His research focuses on discourse ethics and hermeneutics, leading to publications in bio-ethics, film, television, technology and science.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

Travis D. Smith  is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal. he has published on Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon, and is the author of Superhero Ethics (Templeton, 2018) and co-­ editor (with Marlene K. Sokolon) of Flattering the Demos (Lexington, 2018). Daniel  John  Sportiello  is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Mary in North Dakota. He has published several book reviews with the Notre Dame Evolution Working Group; he also contributed a chapter on Eric Voegelin to Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others. Robert Wyllie  is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses upon Spinoza’s moral psychology as a pivot in the modern understanding of envy. His work, which includes several articles on the political theory of Kierkegaard, has appeared in Perspectives on Political Science, Res Philosophica, Telos, and other journals.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre

Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the writings of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and to have come to self-­ awareness in the works of the French philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and d’Alembert), and their allies, such as Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Paine. But almost contemporaneously with the birth of this movement, it attracted critics. The aim of this project is to provide an overview of some of the most important of the many critics of “Enlightenment rationalism,” a term we use in an historically loose sense, to cover not just leaders of the Enlightenment itself, but also latter figures whose model of what is rational closely resembled that espoused during the Enlightenment.1 The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place him in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history. Some may wonder at the mixed bag of thinkers we address: poets, G. Callahan (*) New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA K. B. McIntyre Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_1

1

2 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is unity in this diversity. Although these authors worked in a variety of forms, they all sought to demonstrate the narrowness of rationalism’s description of the human situation. It is our hope that surveying the variety of perspectives from which rationalism has been attacked will serve to clarify the difficulties the rationalist approach to understanding faces, rather than dispersing our critical attention. In other words, we hope that these divergent streams flow together into a river, rather than meandering out to sea like the channels of a delta.2 The subjects of the volume do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. In epistemology, this scientistic reductionism lends itself to the notion that knowing things consists in conceiving them in terms of law-like generalizations that allow for accurate predictability. In moral philosophy, scientism leads to the common notion among modern ethicists that any worthy moral theory must produce a single decision procedure that gives uniform and predictable answers as to what is moral in any particular situation. While the subjects of the volume are united by a common enemy, the sources, arguments, and purposes of their critiques are extraordinarily various and, though they often overlap, they often contradict one another. There are epistemological pluralists like Gadamer, Oakeshott, and Berlin who draw sharp distinctions between scientific, aesthetic, historical, and practical modes of discourse, and, thus, reject the Enlightenment rationalists’ claims concerning the superiority of scientific explanation. There are religious believers like Kierkegaard who criticize the “faith” in human reason exhibited by Enlightenment rationalists (this group of critics tends to be Augustinian Christians). There are aesthetes like Eliot, Lewis, and Kirk who decry the insipid and desiccated conception of humanity put forward by the Enlightenment rationalists. There are critics of modernity itself like Heidegger and MacIntyre who deplore not merely Enlightenment rationalism, but other forms of modern rationalism associated with many of the other subjects of this collection. And there are those who attack the Enlightenment rationalists’ understanding of scientific activity and explanation, like Polanyi and Hayek. Other than Nietzsche, we have not included thinkers who are deeply skeptical of any form of human reason, and who view human interactions

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

almost solely as the result of power relations or unconscious desires, motives, or beliefs. So the variety of postmodern thought that owes such a great debt to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is not included (Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, et al.), though all are highly critical of Enlightenment rationalism. Additionally, due to limitations on space and time, we were not able to include a number of other figures within our bailiwick, such as Herder, De Maistre, Carlyle, Coleridge, Spengler, Arendt, Gray, and Scott. We hope to produce a second volume that can remedy these omissions. Having looked at our criteria for selecting what thinkers to include, let us now turn to the thinkers themselves. In his chapter on Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Ferenc Horcher argues that Burke’s critique of the French Revolution focuses specifically on the inappropriateness of the philosophes’ and revolutionaries’ attempt to apply an abstract and rationalistic blueprint to the messy complexities of French political life. According to Horcher, Burke is justly understood as the founder of a political tradition which might with good reason be labelled as British conservatism. One of the central features of Burke’s position is his skepticism about the usefulness and applicability of theoretical abstractions in political affairs. Horcher notes that Burke’s criticism of the French philosophes centered on the practical destruction caused by their “social engineering,” and on the ever more radical (and more bloodthirsty) revolutionary regimes created by such “social engineering.” Further, Burke argued that the nature of politics is exceedingly complex. (As Jane Jacobs, discussed later in this volume, would have put it, it is a matter of organized complexity, rather than simple order or pure randomness.) Thus, the optimism characteristic of enlightened intellectuals when they enter the political arena is not only logically unfounded, but also politically counterproductive and often pernicious. Horcher focuses his attention on those parts of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France which helped to identify a less optimistic, but more realistic view of politics which has characteristic British traits, the most significant of which is a belief in the value of such non-instrumentally rational political institutions as precedents, custom, and political experience. Travis Smith and Jin Jin discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805–1859) nuanced criticism of rationalism by examining his views on the relationship between philosophy and politics in Democracy in America and Recollections. According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville claims that the preservation of liberty requires a new political science to educate the

4 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

ineluctably emerging democratic social state. Tocqueville argues that the ascendant political science of the Enlightenment, which aimed at wholesale social engineering, is actually an unscientific and partial ideology that is oblivious to certain aspects of the human condition, and obliterates other parts. For Smith and Jin, Tocqueville’s recognition that both ethics and politics require educated virtue means that reason and political liberty are inherently complementary. However, Tocqueville notes that the kind of rationalism espoused by the French philosophes depends on assuming ever more control over people’s lives. Smith and Jin observe that Tocqueville witnessed at firsthand multiple attempts to implement rationalistic systems following the end of the Old Regime, and his more realistic science of politics explains why they necessarily failed to produce the supposedly just society or free people they were purportedly designed to construct while succeeding instead at fostering ever more dehumanizing injustices. According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville insists that political freedom requires virtue, and virtue requires reason, but reason is best developed when human beings are given the freedom to meet their greatest potential. Politics dominated by uncritical veneration of reason, especially an Enlightenment conception of reason that is simultaneously excessive and deficient, undermines virtue and freedom alike. While Tocqueville focused on the political and social consequences of the spread of Enlightenment ideas, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), often considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, turned his attention primarily to the theological and ethical conflicts following in their wake. Nevertheless, he addressed political matters as well, as noted by Robert Wyllie in his essay on the Dane: “Kierkegaard is a famous critic of rationalism, though less well known as a critic of political rationalism”. Kierkegaard condemned what he saw as his era’s tendency to replace decisive action with political “talkativeness, chatter, or chit-chat”: such a trend betrayed a lack of passion on the part of citizens. The age, he believed, “lets everything remain, but subtly drains the meaning out of it”. Wyllie draws a connection between the object of Kierkegaard’s critique and the concept of the rationality of the public sphere in the work of Habermas. As Wylie portrays it, Kierkegaard could be viewed as offering a century-in-­ advance takedown of Habermas. For Kierkegaard, politics, at least as practiced in his age, was a distraction from fixing one’s own character. The rationalism he criticizes consists in the belief that endless palaver about the

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

“reasons” such-and-such should occur can take the place of true, ethical commitment to an ideal of life. Justin Garrison offers an account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900) critique of Enlightenment rationalism which is unique in this volume in that, according to Garrison, Nietzsche rejects not only Enlightenment rationalism, but even the idea of rational discourse itself. Garrison offers us Thomas Jefferson, rather than the French philosophes, as his primary foil. Of course, Jefferson was a great admirer of the philosophes specifically and the Enlightenment generally. As Garrison notes, Jefferson consistently proclaimed the innate goodness and rationality of human beings, and believed that governments propped up by irrational claims of authority, particularly the “monkish ignorance” of religious authority, had subverted these qualities too often. For Jefferson, a new science of politics, one grounded in reason rather than superstition, offered hope because it allowed for the discovery of a rational foundation for government worthy of the people it would serve. Per Garrison, Nietzsche would find Jefferson’s political thought naïve and unphilosophical. Nietzsche argued instead that Enlightenment rationalism did not inaugurate a break from the religious past so much as it re-packaged pre-existing ethical and political beliefs in verbiage stripped of many pre-existing theological and metaphysical associations. Thus, modern rationalism was not a new thing under the sun, but was instead an example of a serious problem Nietzsche believed he had already identified in Christianity: nihilism. Garrison explores Nietzsche’s understanding of reason, morality, equality, Christianity, and democracy, and applies Nietzsche’s analysis to those elements in Jefferson’s political thought. By borrowing Nietzsche’s hammer to “sound out” Jefferson’s mind, Garrison suggests that Jefferson’s oft-celebrated democracy of reason is tinged with misanthropy and world hatred. In other words, such a vision is a manifestation of the ascetic ideal and thus is ultimately nihilistic. Because many see Jefferson as a paradigmatic figure in the American Founding, even as an incarnation of the American spirit, the chapter has broad implications for interpreting a fundamental dimension of the American political tradition. Corey Abel grapples with the conundrum of how T.S.  Eliot (1888–1965), one of the paradigmatic “modernist” writers, could also have been a staunch defender of tradition. Abel quotes Eliot arguing, “The sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe,” and describes the quote as “a vivid image of Eliot’s modernism”.

6 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

So, for this paradigmatic modernist, what, exactly, is the value of tradition? Abel argues that Eliot actually had a nuanced view of culture and art grounded in a robust conception of tradition. He interprets Eliot as believing that, “from the poet’s standpoint, a tradition provides buoyancy… Tradition, for the artist, is the gift of form”. When poets are writing within a tradition, each poet has less work to do to express themselves than does any poet who attempts to abandon all traditions. (Of course, as Oakeshott demonstrated, such an abandonment is never really possible.) Abel suggests that Eliot’s sensibility provides a view of tradition that powerfully challenges modern ideological habits of thinking. Daniel Sportiello, in his chapter on Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), examines how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy brings into question many of the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, especially its focus on quasi-mathematical reasoning. According to Sportiello, the focus of Wittgenstein’s critique of rationalism was his rejection of the thesis that there is a single right way to do whatever it is that we do, and that way can be discovered by the use of an abstract faculty called reason. Sportiello observes that, for Wittgenstein, our words and deeds are justified only by the rules of particular language games, but these language games are themselves justified only insofar as they meet our needs; certainly none of them need be justified by reference to any of the others. In claiming this, Wittgenstein is something more than a pragmatist since he believes that the rectitude of all of our discourse is a matter of its use (for whatever ends we happen to have). Taken together, our language games constitute our form of life, though this form of life is not entirely arbitrary, as some of its features can be explained by reference to our nature. Nonetheless, per Sportiello, Wittgenstein claims that our form or forms of life could be different in many ways. Indeed, the forms of life that have characterized human communities have been and will continue to be marked by significant differences. Thus, for Wittgenstein, the failure of Enlightenment rationalism lies in its attempt to reduce the variety of language games and forms of life to a single, abstract, rational unity. Sportiello suggests that Wittgenstein reminds us that, on some level, we all know this. Philosophy at its worst is the attempt to forget it; philosophy at its best is, therefore, the attempt to remember it. The work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jack Simmons says, can be understood largely as a critique of scientism. As he writes, “Science sees the world scientifically and Heidegger contends that this method of revealing the natural world conceals non-scientific ways in which the world

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

might appear to us, ways that might represent a more authentic encounter with the world”. As Simmons notes, the supposedly timeless “natural scientific reasoning” is itself an historical phenomenon, and has no valid claim to resist being evaluated as such. And, in fact, “The reductionist approach of modern, scientific reasoning makes it well-suited to a utilitarian worldview Heidegger calls technological thinking”. Here we might note the similarity to both Marcel’s and Oakeshott’s attacks on “the tyranny of technique.” According to Simmons, the relevance of Heidegger‘s critique of technological thinking is demonstrated by “Our current affinity for STEM education, wedding science to technology, engineering and mathematics, in order to satisfy the needs of the community as determined by a reductionist, economic theory, and reducing the student to an economic resource”. Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), notes Steven Knepper, hosted one of the most important salons in Paris both before and after the Second World War, attended by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Levinas, and others. As such, he influenced several major intellectual movements, such as Catholic personalism and existentialism. He would doubtlessly be better known today if he had chosen to align himself with some such movement, and adopt a “doctrine” which could have yielded him “followers.” However, Knepper argues, “Marcel worried that such labels distort or lead to assumptions”. Philosophy should be an open inquiry that did not imprison him in a “sort of shell”. Nevertheless, an attack on “technocratic rationalism” is a continuing theme in Marcel’s work. Marcel’s concern with the “tyranny of technique,” which “drowns the deeper human in a conspiracy of efficiency and a frenzy of industry” closely echo Oakeshott’s criticism of the “sovereignty of technique,” and Heidegger’s attack on “technological thinking.” The focus on technique tended to turn life into a technological problem to be solved, and other human beings into resources to be possessed for the assistance they might provide in solving life‘s problems. (As evidenced by the ubiquity of “human resource” departments.) Mystery is drained out of existence: death becomes a tricky biomedical challenge to be handled as discreetly as possible, and love is a matter of achieving as high a “relationship rating” as possible in some romance “app.” This solution to this problem, for Marcel, was not to abandon technique, or reject technological progress. Instead, he argued, “What I think

8 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

we need today is to react with our whole strength against that disassociation of life from spirit which a bloodless rationalism has brought about”. Charles Lowney’s essay on Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) argues that Polanyi’s work demonstrates that the Enlightenment’s standards defining knowledge contain distortions that often have destructive effects, and in a variety of ways. According to Lowney, Polanyi was a sympathetic critic of the Enlightenment, which makes sense given Polanyi’s own success as a natural scientist. Polanyi admired the Enlightenment’s political ideals, but its rationalism led to a misunderstanding of the character of science, a misunderstanding that Polanyi called “scientism.” Lowny notes that, for Polanyi, this ideological “scientism” tended to reject the objectivity of anything not based on physics and chemistry, thus relegating human values to the realm of the purely subjective. Lowney claims that Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy revises Enlightenment standards to more accurately reflect the limits of knowledge and how science actually proceeds. This involves critiquing (1) the viability of complete objectivity, (2) the adequacy of Cartesian explicit analysis to simple self-evident truths, (3) the concomitant reductive analysis of reality to smallest physical components, and (4) reductive dichotomies between mind and matter, and between fact and value. Polanyi accomplishes this with his conceptions of (1) personal knowledge, (2) tacit knowing, (3) emergent being, and (4) discovery and indwelling. For Lowney, Polanyi’s work undermines the traditional conception of scientific knowledge, and shows that, instead, science moves toward truth, and better contact with reality, by using the same tools of practical knowing that produce understanding in those cultural and religious traditions that are open to dialogue and discovery. Values, and not just physical facts, can be real discoveries about the world. Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology thus provides a non-skeptical fallibilism that goes beyond simple dualisms and reductionism, forestalls a regression into nihilism, and renews hope in human progress. C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), notes Luke Sheahan, may seem an unlikely candidate for inclusion in a book on anti-rationalists. After all, in a series of books, he used reasoned arguments to defend the Christian faith. But he believed that the effectiveness of such arguments “depended upon a deeper mode of knowing”. Lewis is considered one of the most prominent Christian apologists of the twentieth century. But he held a deep distrust of the work of the rational faculty that was not properly oriented by the imagination, which explains in large part his turn to writing imaginative

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

fiction later in his life. Through his fiction Lewis was trying to demonstrate, rather than rationally explain, what the world would look like if Christianity and the broader moral worldview in which it exists were true. Lewis explains this understanding of the imagination and its importance for right thinking in a variety of essays and in his two most profound books, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image. F.A.  Hayek’s (1899–1992) anti-rationalism, argues Nick Cowen, is founded upon a revival of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism combined with a psychology that rejects a correspondence between human orderings of experience and “reality.” Despite the epistemic restrictions this view apparently imposes, Hayek believes that humans can use their capacity for “pattern recognition” to generate and sustain cooperative social orders through a process of trial and error. Institutions that allow this cooperative order to emerge centrally include private property, voluntary contract, and the rule of law. Unlike many utopian theorists, Hayek does not rely upon fundamental normative claims for his political ideas. Thus, Cowen argues, his ideas are compatible with a cosmopolitan order made up of people with varied conceptions of morality. He connects Hayek’s argument against rationalism to other such critiques, which often rely on a distinction between the concrete and the abstract, when he notes that: “A necessary feature of concrete orders is that they always have more dimensions and features to them then we have apprehend. They are irreducibly complex. Abstract orders, by contrast, are the simplified models and categories that we use to make sense of our experience and communications with others”. In his chapter on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Ryan Holston explores Gadamer’s ambivalent relationship to Martin Heidegger (the subject of his own chapter in the current volume) and the unusual way in which Gadamer combined Heidegger’s historicism with the tradition of Western metaphysics that was the very target of Heidegger’s own critique of Enlightenment rationalism. According to Holston, Gadamer, while acknowledging his deep indebtedness to Heidegger, moves beyond Heidegger’s relativistic historicism to a position that is more deeply indebted to the long tradition Western philosophy beginning with Plato and Aristotle. For Holston, Gadamer’s achievement is to offer an alternative account of human epistemology which grounds human knowledge in the facticity of human ontology. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics collapses the fact-value division which is characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism,

10 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

and, as such, combines a descriptive and normative epistemology. Holston suggests that Gadamer has described what is fundamental to any true, authentic, or genuine interpretation/understanding. To put it differently, one might say that he is describing a normatively positive category of human experience which encompasses understanding the human world in a way that abstract “scientism” cannot. According to Holston, Gadamer’s critique of modern rationalism arises from his concern about the forgetfulness of being, and he sees that forgetfulness as characteristic of scientific inquiry (understanding “from a distance”) in which the observer is conceived as not part of the reality being observed. By calling attention to the ubiquity of “application” to present circumstances that is part of all understanding, Gadamer aims to remind us of our continuous involvement in a reality that transcends both “subject” and “object” of interpretation. That inescapable involvement of the interpreter in the reality that interpreter attempts to describe was also a key theme of our next thinker. Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) is a hard theorist to summarize, as his 34 volumes of political philosophy include “multiple changes in focus and emphasis,” according to Michael P. Federici. Federici notes that Voegelin was not focused in his writing on “the Enlightenment itself but a broader intellectual genealogy of which the enlightenment was a part”. Voegelin was concerned “primarily with the rise of political religions [which were] the outgrowth of existential closure to the truth of existence”. Enlightenment rationalists were “interesting to Voegelin in so far as they contributed to the development of... the western crisis of order that inspired his work”. As Federici puts it, “Enlightenment thought has been described as the religion of reason and the religion of humanity, language that conveys Voegelin’s characterization of the enlightenment as apostatic revolt”. Similarly to Michael Oakeshott, Voegelin understood Enlightenment rationalism to be irrational, “because it is reductionistic”. For Voegelin, Federici writes, Enlightenment rationalism, following the lead of Voltaire, takes “a part of human experience... the animal basis of existence... as its whole” so that “man’s participation in transcendent reality is eliminated from consciousness”. “Removing consciousness of... transcendent structures from the life of human beings and human civilization eliminates the very source of order on which the ends of politics depend”. As Federici puts it, “a just political

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

and social order, including rational discussion on which it depends, are only possible if human beings are open to transcendent reality”. Wendell John Coats, Jr. contends that the works of Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990) on rationalism, from the 1940s and 50s, “develop in detail the implications of a view of human knowledge and experience articulated initially in the more philosophic Experience and Its Modes”. The earlier work sets out a case that arguments from various “modes” of experience, such as science, history, and practical life, are mutually irrelevant to the advancement of other modes. For instance, a practical argument suggesting that we would be better off if we could travel faster than the speed of light should have no impact on a scientific case for whether or not such a thing is physically possible. Coats says that “Oakeshott’s fundamental critique of [rationalism] as an approach to human activity and conduct is its partiality in the definition of ‘rationality’”. The rationalist misses the essentially poetic, and not prosaic, character of human experience. In other words, Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism is essentially an ontological one. Jason Ferrell’s essay on Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) focuses on the various ways in which Berlin deploys the term “monism” as a critique of a variety of reductionist forms of theorizing. Ferrell notes that, though Berlin associates monism with one of the primary historical traditions in Western philosophy, Platonism, Berlin extends this critique of monism to the kind of modern conceptions of moral philosophy and scientific rationalism associated with the Enlightenment. According to Ferrell, Berlin’s understanding of monism manifests his pluralist and anti-reductionist conception of the character of human experience, and is best understood as consisting of three claims. Berlin avers that monists of various stripes claim that, first, all questions have one and only one genuine or correct answer; that, second, there is a means of determining these answers; and, third, that the answers to all of the questions are compatible with one another. Ferrell then examines three different ways in which Berlin contrasts monism with richer, more pluralistic conceptions of human activity. First, he offers an account of Berlin’s critique of the attempt to apply the methods of the natural sciences to the human sciences, especially history. Ferrell explains both Berlin’s critique of scientism and determinism in the study of human action as connected to a conflation of the notion of causality in the natural sciences, which is a logical and empirical notion, and causality in the human sciences, which is a question of making actions intelligible.

12 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

Second, Ferrell surveys Berlin’s account of the character of philosophy and why monist approaches to that subject tend to get things wrong. According to Ferrell, Berlin takes philosophical questions to be those which cannot easily be classified as empirical or logical, and claims that the error of philosophical monism, especially modern “scientistic” monism, is to attempt to reduce all questions to the empirical or logical. Finally, Ferrell offers an account of Berlin’s critique of political monism, which once again focuses on its fatal reductionism and its ignorance of human moral and social plurality. Nathaneal Blake, commenting on Russell Kirk (1918–1994), seeks to place him in the context of the American conservative movement of the mid-twentieth century. Blake claims that Kirk’s great achievement lies in his steady insistence on the fundamental limitations of human rationality, especially when that rationality is applied to social or political activity. Blake notes Kirk’s Burkean opposition to schemes for collectivizing property and centralizing power, and connects that opposition to his contention that such rationalist plans fail to account for the limits of human knowledge and goodness. When implemented, they brought and continue to bring misery to millions. Against the rationalist confidence of the central planners, Kirk set tradition, which he saw as a repository of human experience and the tried and true wisdom of the past. Blake also notes that Kirk’s most famous work, The Conservative Mind, brought about a revival of interest in Edmund Burke and solidified Burke’s reputation as the founding figure of modern conservative political thought. According to Blake, Kirk also offered unique insight into Burke’s blend of natural law thinking and historical consciousness, and this blend offers valuable insights into the real working of political communities. There are real moral obligations upon us, but the mystery of human existence prevents us from delineating once and for all a perfect system of moral philosophy, or an ideal political system. Finally, Blake points out that, for Kirk, truth, whether moral, cultural or political, is apprehended as much by the imagination as by reason. Sanford Ikeda, in his essay on Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), ties her critique of rationalist urban planning to Hayek’s analysis of the problems facing any such planner, whether they are attempting to plan a city, an economy, or an entire social order. (This, by the way, justifies Jacobs inclusion in this volume: her concern was not merely with urban planning, but also with broader questions of the nature of social order.) Ikeda notes how Jacobs understood rationalist urban planners to be under a similar

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

egophanic spell as other prophets of utopia: “As in all utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge”. Ikeda makes clear the utopian character of Jacobs’ targets in a series of sketches of their ideas; for example, Ebenezer Howard is quoted as boasting that his schemes would create “garden cities” “in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, withal the beauty and the light of the country, may be secured in perfect combination”. In common with all utopians, Howard seems to lack any sense that life might involve inescapable trade-offs: he suggests we can live in a place as lively as London and as serene as the Lake Country. One wonders that he did not also promise that his garden cities would be both as warm as the Congo and as cool as Antarctica! Similarly, Ikeda quotes Frank Lloyd Wright’s claim that implementing his planned communities would “automatically end unemployment and all its evils forever”. And the arch urban rationalist, Le Corbusier, sought to create a “theoretically water-tight formula to arrive at the fundamental principles of modern town planning”. Again, the rationalist seeks to replace practical experience with a theory. As Ikeda concludes, all of the urban rationalists “do not appreciate the nature of a living city as an emergent, spontaneous order”. In his chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–), Kenneth McIntyre (no relation) examines MacIntyre’s critique of modern rationalist moral philosophy and his attempted resuscitation of the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics. According to McIntyre, Alasdair MacIntyre offers not only a critique of Enlightenment rationalism, but a critique of modern moral philosophy as a whole. MacIntyre proposes a revitalization of Aristotelian and Thomistic ethics as an alternative to what he takes to be the desiccated and deracinated nature of modern deontology, utilitarianism, and emotivism. What went wrong during the Enlightenment, according to MacIntyre, was that philosophers jettisoned the anchor that tied moral rules to substantive human results, leaving practical reasoning and moral judgments unmoored to any conception of human flourishing. As McIntyre notes, for MacIntyre, as for Michael Oakeshott, the rationalist conflates practical and theoretical/scientific reasoning. For MacIntyre, this is an outcome of the modern rejection of Aristotelian teleology. As an alternative, MacIntyre offers an account of human practical knowledge which rejects the modern scientistic account of human reason as primarily instrumental and technical instead of insisting that it is acquired only by an engagement in the variety of specific human practices themselves. Since to know a practice is to understand the history of that practice, a notion MacIntyre adopts from

14 

G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE

R.G. Collingwood, there is an inherently traditional aspect in human rationality. McIntyre offers a sympathetic account of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral rationalism, emphasizing the importance of MacIntyre’s recognition of the teleological character of a significant part of human activity, while also suggesting that his critique owes a great deal to other modern critics of moral rationalism, like Hegel and Collingwood. McIntyre also suggests that the primary weakness of MacIntyre’s version of virtue ethics is that it does not adequately answer the challenges posed by modern moral pluralism to a unified conception of the human telos.

Notes 1. We are not concerned with delineating a specific historical event or series of events in the manner of an intellectual historian, nor are we interested in offering a rationalized version of the “philosophy” of the Enlightenment or a cultural history of the Enlightenment. For academically significant examples of each, see respectively J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial history of Enlightenment historiography Barbarism and Religion, Volumes One, Two, and Three (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 1999, 2003); Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Fritz C.A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volumes One and Two (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, 1969). 2. We are also not involving ourselves in the ongoing historical debate about the Counter-Enlightenment. Whether the Counter-Enlightenment is best understood as a discrete and internally coherent tradition of criticism of Enlightenment thinkers and their ideas or whether it is best understood in a pluralistic way as composed of a group of thinkers without a single target or a unified argument is beyond our remit in this volume. The thinker most often associated with the notion that the Counter-Enlightenment constituted a coherent and directed attack against the Enlightenment is Isaiah Berlin, though this line of argument has been supported in recent years by thinkers like Zeev Sternhell. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder, Second Edition, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) and Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-­ Enlightenment Tradition, David Maisel, trans. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

CHAPTER 2

Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State Ferenc Hörcher

“Il faut… tout détruire; oui, tout détruire; puisque tout est à recréer.”1

1 One of the most sophisticated minds of twentieth century political philosophy seems to have completely misunderstood Edmund Burke’s frame of mind. In his magisterial work, Leo Strauss presented Burke as a historicist–relativist–particularist, almost a post-modern thinker, who did not have any long-term values, but used political rhetoric for his own purposes. He argued for the complete lack of natural law in Burke.2 In fact, he found him lacking in rationality. He claimed that Burke “parts company with the Aristotelian tradition by disparaging theory and especially metaphysics. He uses ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysician’ frequently in a derogatory sense.” His “opposition to modern ‘rationalism’ shifts almost F. Hörcher (*) Research Institute of Politics and Government, National University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_2

15

16 

F. HÖRCHER

insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such”.3 Here we have Burke presented as the prophet of irrationalism. There is another possible, even characteristic, opposite misunderstanding of Burke by those, who—starting out from his fierce opposition to the ideas, and even more the practice of the French Revolution—thought that he was a dogmatic thinker.4 It is argued that he is an old-fashioned religious reactionary. An advocate of religious superstition and an unsubstantiated Natural Law, he is claimed to be determined to fight against social justice and progress. This is Edmund Burke, the dogmatic ideologist of religious reaction and doctrinaire natural law thinker. This paper does not want to argue against Strauss’ interpretation of Burke, or address the problems of presenting Burke as a religious dogmatic. It simply takes it for granted, that neither was Burke a scholastic crypto-Catholic, nor a thinker of almost post-modern, or at least romantic irrationalism, who did not trust reason at all, and therefore urged his readers to set free irrational political passions.5 Rather he is going to be taken here as someone convinced of the use of a constrained activity of reason in politics, and who did himself believe that practical wisdom could—on the long run—lead us to recognize those truths, which are generally labelled as the precepts of natural law. I will argue that this Burkean approach to politics is genuinely conservative (even if he himself was a Whig), or not to become anachronistic, that it is in harmony with a sceptical, British type conservatism. I will also argue that this sort of pessimistic, practical rationality is derived from the Aristotelian account of phronesis, which was transformed into the Roman and later Christian virtue of prudence. Finally, I will show the parallel between the prudence attributed to the successful individual human political agent, and the reason of state attributed to the early modern state. To prove these claims I will rely on Burke’s reaction on the French Revolution, famously elaborated in the Reflections, his most influential political work, and will concentrate on his use of the term reason and rationality. As it will be seen, I was influenced by two classics of Burke scholarship, most importantly by the relevant works of J.G.A. Pocock, and of Francis P. Canavan, S.J., to whose positions my own is perhaps the closest.6 Yet I will not try to overcome Pocock’s magisterial historical scholarship. Instead, I will try to read Burke with the intention to make him useful for our present day concerns. As for Canavan, the present chapter will position Burke closer to the British conservative tradition, more embedded in the particularities of the common law tradition and less in the Thomistic and scholastic discourse, while keeping the basic elements of a Christian Aristotelianism, that Canavan uncovered in his thought.

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

17

2 In his fierce political pamphlet, written in the form of long letters, published under the title Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790, Edmund Burke tried to make sense of the fresh news about the revolution in France. Or to put it in a more precise way: he was shocked by the news of the events over the channel, and felt obliged to reflect on the possibility whether the strange French disease can put its head up in his own country. By giving his thoughts expression, the British Whig politician was able to stir up a huge public debate about the situation, and about the necessary measures to react upon the urgent challenges. What he was doing was not much more than comparing the rhetoric of the French revolutionaries with their own deeds, in order to show how much they were misleading not only themselves and their own population but also the international community. His strategy was a kind of dissection of revolutionary communication, a rhetorical deconstruction, in order to reveal the actual political stakes involved. Perhaps the most important linguistic struggle in the Reflections went around the notion of rationality. The revolutionaries claimed that the political structure of the Ancien Régime had become anachronistic by their day, and therefore it was irrational to sustain it any longer. Their argumentation was based on the enlightened ideas of rationality recently promulgated by people like Kant, who famously claimed that the Enlightenment is not much more than the ability to “Sapere aude!” (appr. Dare to know!, or Dare to think for yourself!). This trust in the potential of human reason gave the name to the age: enlightenment, meaning a kind of secular revelation induced by reason, or simply the Age of Reason. This latter term was popularized by Thomas Paine, in his The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in 1794. Paine’s work, undoubtedly the most influential attack on Burke’s Reflections, was a defence of Deism, an intellectual movement believing in a passive God, influenced by early eighteenth-century British Deism. Burke’s work was attacked by Paine partly because Burke himself criticized with strong words such famous contemporary dissenters as Richard Price and Joseph Priestley for the political theology they preached. One should certainly ask, on what grounds Burke attacked these firm, and most of the time worthy believers of human reason? Well, to be sure, not on the grounds of irrationality, either in the sense of a religious mysticism or of a Romantic form of it. I would argue Burke himself is to be

18 

F. HÖRCHER

construed as an enlightened thinker, not an obscure believer of secret dogmas. His doubts in the power of reason in politics are not rooted in religious or other forms of irrationalism. His anti-rationalist argument is limited in the Reflections to social and political issues. As he sees it, contrary to what is propagated by the “new conquering empire of light and reason” the reason of an individual human being is not necessarily reliable when it comes to the creation of new social or political systems.7 He proposes that we should not rely solely on its power; on the contrary, we need “to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” in these spheres.8 As it turns out he thinks that in social and political matters individuals lack the experience required to collect the empirical data which can help to build up general principles of politics. “The science of government… (is) a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be.”9

3 Burke seems to have learnt a lot from his contemporary, the Scottish-born British philosopher and historian, David Hume. It was Hume, who in his essay Of the Perfect Commonwealth argued that “the bulk of mankind” is “governed by authority, not reason”, and therefore it is better to rely on a power that is established, than on experimenting with new solutions.10 He was criticizing Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, works, which aimed at great political transformations, but whose plans—when more closely inspected—proved to be nothing more than plainly imaginary. Philosophers should avoid, so argued Hume, to get directly involved in the affairs of the state, as their theories might have very negative side effects (the famous unintended consequences of the Scottish Enlightenment) which they cannot control from the far distance.11 Philosophers should also take into account, warned Hume, that in human nature “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”12 And it was Hume who famously left his cell when he felt that his “reason is incapable of dispelling” his “philosophical melancholy and delirium”, and let nature solve the problem left unsolved by philosophical reason: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends, and when… I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous.”13 I would like to argue that Burke shares this scepticism concerning the intrusion of philosophy into common life, and it might have been actually

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

19

influenced by Hume—but this is less important for us here. The more important fact is that Burke distinguished his own position from that of a metaphysically inclined philosopher: while the latter had a role “to mark the proper ends of government”, “(it) is the business of the politician, who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those ends, and to employ them with effect.”14 The important thing for us here is that after his own early efforts to write philosophy Burke lost his illusions about philosophy’s practical use. To put it more precisely: he seems to have lost his belief in the capacity of philosophy to transform (to make better) politics and society. An important part of this disillusionment must have been his decision to become an active politician. The decision to become one was in a way a necessary one. As it is argued, “Need for a secure income led him into political service.”15 But interestingly as well as importantly, the way to politics led him first to become a writer of works of philosophical interest (Vindication (1756), Philosophical Enquiry (1757)) and a public figure.16 The young Burke became the editor of the brand new, but soon influential Annual Register, an annually published organ both cultural and political, originally bearing the subtitle “A View of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year…”, and published by his earlier publishers. Due to the fact of receiving a well-founded education at Trinity College Dublin first, and then a legal apprenticeship at the Middle Temple in London, he had no problem in joining public debates in Doctor Johnson’s London.17 As a result of his public recognition and his success as editor he became an MP in 1765 and remained in the Westminster in that position—except for a short interval—for almost 30  years, until he withdrew from politics in 1794. Although he was an intellectually minded person who was unable to achieve political success as a political leader, he soon became a distinctive voice in the Parliament, arguing for a number of rather different cases with a rhetorical skill hardly paralleled in his time. His success depended on a personal combination of his intellectual inspirations: on his belief in God and the responsibility of the educated, on his earlier philosophical interests both in Berkeley-like scepticism and in Lockean empiricism, and his political experience in the British Parliament, as well as his familiarity with the great Aristotelian– Ciceronian tradition of political and moral philosophy. It is his remarkable achievement to create from this colourful intellectual baggage his very characteristic political convictions and his particular Burkean manners. As far as the conceptual distinction between rationality versus rationalism is concerned, Burke’s main intention in the Reflections is to show that

20 

F. HÖRCHER

both the French revolutionaries and their British advocates have a specific understanding of the relationship between reason and politics, and this understanding is based on a misconception of the nature of politics, and of the possibility of philosophical ideals to get realized. As he sees it, the philosophes—he often uses the term sophisters, comparing them to the sophists of ancient Greece—think that their philosophical ideals can directly be planted into the practical field of politics. In other words, they do not recognize the difficulties, indeed the risks of efforts to change the social and political machinery, and the difference in nature of the terrain of philosophy, often identified by Burke as metaphysics, and that of practical politics. This is, in fact, a philosophical mistake on their part, a conceptual confusion of the two realms. Burke in a famous quote sharply criticizes this confusion of reality and the ideal world of philosophical concepts: “The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.(…) Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.”18 The extremity Burke refers to, here, is, of course, philosophical extremism: pushing your point too far. In certain cases, this strategy pays well in philosophy. But in politics it is by definition dangerous. Apparently, Burke finds similarity between such radical thought and religious enthusiasm. His criticism of Priestly and Price is formulated in the British enlightenment discourse on enthusiasm, as it was analysed most prominently by Pocock. This discourse had the Glorious Revolution as its political background, based on a compromise between opposing camps both in theology and in politics, which is only possible if moderation (both in religion and in politics) is taken seriously. The revolution settlement which covered the whole eighteenth century until the time of the French Revolution “had come about without civil war, without a dissolution of the government, and without any interlude of rule by plebeian religious fanatics”.19 Pocock went so far as to argue that in the age “English and Scottish political thought was deeply antirevolutionary”, which is quite close to his further conceptual innovation of a Conservative Enlightenment. As Pocock points out the motivation behind the characteristic language of political theology used by Burke is not primarily motivated by religion or even by a reactionary attitude. Rather, it is the result of sensing an attack on the terms of the revolution settlement of the Glorious Revolution by the radical dissenters. The point

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

21

is illustrated by a reference to the similarity of the argumentation of Burke’s and Gibbon’s respective criticism of Priestley: “Both the pious Burke and the sceptic Gibbon pointed to this passage from Priestley’s writings as evidence that the wild fanaticism (or ‘enthusiasm’) of the seventeenth-­century sectarians was not extinct.”20

4 One point still needs clarification. Burke did not discount passions from political and social affairs, as a radical Stoic would do. Rather, what he suggests is in fact a balance between the passions and reason: a rational control of passions, and (natural) passions controlling the dogmatism of reason. “It is true indeed that enthusiasm often misleads us. So does reason too. Such is the Condition of our Nature… But we act most when we act with all the Powers of the Soul; when we use Enthusiasm to elevate and expand our Reasoning; and our Reasoning to check the Roving of our Enthusiasm.”21 This demand for an equilibrium between passions and reason (as opposed to Hume’s hierarchy between the two) is fairly easy to understand even today for those who are familiar with the specific development of the Ancien Régime in Britain. The possibility of the birth of a commercial society in Britain was created by finding a modus vivendi between the opposing social camps of the higher nobility and the middle classes, and it was something the Whig oligarchy had to defend, and could defend successfully only, if religious debates were not opened fully in political contexts, even if it was a rather shaky compromise, as pointed out by Jonathan Clark in his influential account of the Ancien Régime.22 But one should question what exactly has this to do with the French affair. After all, British deists did not share the radical sceptical epistemology of the French philosophes. Priestley’s sermon of 1789 made Burke recognize that there were parallel tendencies in both societies to deconstruct the political edifice of Church and State which guaranteed the success of eighteenth-century British politics. Pocock underlines this parallelism the following way “In England, there was now a militant (and anti-Trinitarian) movement with goals extending as far as a separation of church and state; in France, there was a revolutionary movement, attacking monarchy and aristocracy, aiming at the reduction of the Church to a branch of the national government, and employing the rhetoric of an anti-Christian philosophical deism.”23 When Burke, therefore, mentions French sophistry and

22 

F. HÖRCHER

metaphysics, he is in fact attacking this effort on the French side, built on a politically radicalized philosophical vocabulary, as one could see in the writings of people like Voltaire to Rousseau, but influencing people, like Priestley and Price, in Britain, too.

5 If rationalism in the French Enlightenment style is dangerous for the political equilibrium of late eighteenth-century Britain, what has Burke on offer as an alternative? There are interpreters who suggest that in fact he has no alternative but either reactionary slogans, or empty rhetoric which has nothing to help a Britain on its way through industrial revolution in industry to global commerce in business and to global power in international relations. In fact there are two interrelated answers to the above seemingly difficult question I would like to refer to. One is that, against the philosophical radicalism of the French Enlightenment intent on working out an apolitical idea of a priori reason which can radicalize the whole Europe, Burke is dedicated to work out a discourse of “reason of state”. This interpretation of Burke is by now well developed, as we can see from the publications of people like Armitage, Whelan and Richard Bourke. The argument here is that in fact Burke belongs to that European trend of political thought, which appeared on the scene in the late sixteenth century, and tried to provide ideological support for the newly emerging centralized, territorial or national state before, and, even more, after the birth of the Westphalian system. In accounts like those of Richard Tuck and Maurizio Viroli we have sweeping narratives of this development in political theory. Although they present the new vocabulary as an alternative to the traditional discourse of political virtue, I would like to underline the continuity between the two, at least in Burke’s understanding of the term. But there is an alternative answer to the question of Burke’s alternative. This is provided by those theorists who regard Burke as a late Aristotelian– Ciceronian thinker, who keeps moving within the rhetorical orbit of a discourse of prudence or practical reason. In what follows, I will do two things. First, I will show that this second interpretative strategy has a very strong and convincing potential. Secondly, I will try to prove that in fact the central concept of practical reason understood as a virtue is in fact closely connected to the reason of state discourse mentioned before. In other words, I will argue that the two answers are connected because

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

23

Burke indeed was an advocate of the virtue of prudence understood as practical political reason, and that his references to reason of state in fact belong to this very discourse. That Burke could connect the discourse of prudence and the discourse of reason of state, I will argue, is a great achievement not only of his rhetorical skills, but even more importantly of his political vision of post-Westphalian Europe. As I see his Reflections, it is the result of his recognition that the novelty of the French Revolution endangers that vision. The main aim of Burke in this situation is nothing less but to defend the Westphalian system of national sovereignty against the discourse of universal political rights, which radicalizes European societies, and threatens the European equilibrium. To achieve this, however, he in fact introduces the basic elements of a new ideology in the Reflections: that of modern Conservatism. To prove this thesis, I will rely on Canavan. He shows how political reason in general, and prudence in particular is presented in Burke’s Reflections. Burkean political reason, he claims, does not look for universal truths. Rather, it is interested in policy formation and decision making.24 First of all, the aim of political action should be “the good of the commonwealth”.25 But this is a good which is concrete, practicable, complex and imperfect good. Canavan convincingly showed that indeed Burke’s focus is on this non-ideal components of the political good. He quotes Burke claiming that “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity.”26 Canavan’s Burke does not believe that philosophers or metaphysicians can simplify this complex, on the contrary, as he sees it, if they try to do so, they can cause even more serious problems: “Indeed, all that wise men even aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst. Those who expect perfect reformations, either deceive or are deceived miserably.”27 This minimalist account by Canavan of the chances of pure reason in Burke’s account of politics does not mean, however, giving up the human capacity to reason. It is only a recognition by Burke that human rationality is seriously limited in this realm. But there is a chance to learn, and to acquire skills which might help to make decisions which will help to draw rational conclusions that would avoid the worst scenarios. Burke’s downscaled political reason is, therefore, not radical scepticism; neither is it nihilism or a form of post-modern anything goes. When it is acquired through experience and through learning from earlier examples, Burkean political reason can in fact come close to Aristotelian–Ciceronian prudence. Canavan, as we saw, identifies the practical concerns of Burke’s

24 

F. HÖRCHER

political thought with the traditional idea of prudence. Instead of affirming a priori reason in human affairs, the wise statesman acquires prudential skills. Burke’s prudence is the result of a certain self-fashioning on the part of the political agent—to learn to live together with the infirmities of human social and political life. It means to give up the hope to solve political problems, even more to solve them universally—prudence cannot help to find generally valid rules and norms: “The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact; never universal.”28 Rather they can lead—but only imperfectly—to practical solutions in given hard cases. Burke imagines prudence along the lines of the moral sense of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and the Scottish school: political wisdom is an ability to find the proper (or the least improper) judgement in a given case—but not by deducting it a priori, not even by building it up inductively from empirical data. Rather, it is found by something like a skill, which is the result of practice, like the ability of swimming or riding the bicycle, habituated, but most often not reflected. “No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They are a matter incapable of exact definition…” the British thinker cautions his readers already in 1770, but, he adds, they will help “a prince to find out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will give a great degree of content to his people; without any curious and anxious research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which while he is seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are in his power without any research at all.”29 Canavan’s point about Burkean prudence as a practical skill is backed by the fact that since the Glorious Revolution the British political elite has accumulated a reservoir of political experience on which individual players could build their own strategies. This experience had the ideas of balance and compromise in its centre. This striving for compromise, argued Burke, enforced by human selfishness as well as by the nature of political reason, has been the great lesson which is neglected by political Platonists, Kantians and other universalists, like dissenter British or philosophical French Deists. “For you know, that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.”30 It is here, that we can search for Burke, the founding father of modern British conservatism. After all, what he claimed was that the tradition of British politics, built up in the revolution settlement and afterwards in the eighteenth century and covered by the term of the

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

25

ancient constitution, is worthy to preserve. And this preservation can be a maxim of politics, which, however, does not exclude, in fact encourages smooth, step by step reformation. But Canavan has a larger point as well. He wants to point out that the British form of cautious compromise, favoured by Burke, is not simply advocating unprincipled, or even sometimes immoral political dealing. Rather, the prudence which is referred here, is in fact the traditional Christian virtue of prudentia. Through it, Burke connects his theory of compromise, balance and other prudential considerations to the Christian natural law doctrine. According to Canavan, Burke’s theory this way is grounded not only in traditional Christian moral theory, but also in its metaphysical basis, that of a created universe of order. After all, Christian prudence was not a denial of eternal truths or the natural law. Neither did Aristotle deny the metaphysical teachings of Plato, when he worked out his practical philosophy. He only tried to work out a more elaborate system of application between universal rationality and practical reason. It is in this context that one should understand Burke’s famous passage of social contract, as a metaphysically enlarged version of “partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” In Burke’ vision of natural order a politically right practical decision will be in harmony with the precepts of a universal order, because “(e)ach contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.”31 It is this created order which ensures that prudence rightly conceived will never lead us against the basic moral values. In other words, Burke seems to claim that there is an order between the principles of external order and the demands of our human conscience, such that “acting in accordance with the natural law, man obeys God, but is at the same time most true to himself.”32 As Canavan presents it, Burke’s use of the concept of prudence was meant to bridge the distance between invariable general principles, which cannot be expected to purely prevail in political life, and the constantly varying circumstances which threaten us with moral relativism in a Machiavellian sense. “Circumstances perpetually variable,

26 

F. HÖRCHER

directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which never vary, must alone prescribe a conduct fitting on such occasions.”33 In this mediating function, Burke’s prudence, which always has the right aims, cannot adhere to the unconditionality of logic, as a guide of human action: “The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematicks. They are broad as deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logick, but by the rules of prudence.”34

6 If Canavan is on the whole right in his appreciation of Burke’s concept of political reason or prudence, there is one more step one can make in this direction. One should realize that the Christian understanding of the cardinal virtue of prudentia belongs, in fact, to the great Aristotelian– Ciceronian tradition of political thought.35 In this tradition, prudence is not a Machiavellian skill, or a source of moral relativism. Rather, it is a key virtue for the human being, who is understood as a zoon politikon, a political being. To understand the full relevance of what this tradition teaches about the proper prudential action in the political community, one should look at the definition of phronesis in the 6th book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Or better to say, one should realize the significance that Aristotle distinguishes between practical wisdom (phronesis), craft knowledge (techné), scientific knowledge (epistemé) and theoretical wisdom (sophia) or understanding (nous). But the relevant point of Aristotle here with the distinction is not that these forms of knowledge should be interpreted along a hierarchy from the one whose share of reason is the smallest proportion to the one which is fully immersed into it. Rather, these are all different forms of knowledge—in other words even practical wisdom is also fully reasonable. The difference lies partly in what is known by the given sort of knowledge, and what function (sort of activity) is expected as a result of it. Without going into finer details let us recall how he defines practical wisdom. It is knowledge of human things, in order to prepare deliberation to act properly. In other words, it is “a true state involving reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human being”.36 It is very telling that after this definition, he offers Pericles and people like him as examples of those people who are practically wise “because they have a theoretical grasp of what is good for themselves and for human beings, and we think household managers and politicians are

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

27

like that.”37 If practical knowledge is about human beings, whose action can be otherwise, this knowledge cannot be universalized in the way scientific knowledge, for example, is universalizable. Scientific knowledge is about the parts of nature whose starting-points do not admit of being otherwise. Practical knowledge, however, is only probable, as we would say today, according to Aristotle. The point to be made here is that Burke’s criticism of rationality is not a criticism of the use of reason as such. Rather, it analysis those typical sorts of mistaken uses of reason which can cause more problem than what they actually solve. His fierce judgement of metaphysicians and sophistry is a criticism of those who think that what they claim is true metaphysically should be realized in practice, and possibly right now. Burke’s criticism is a rational criticism of rationalism, in the sense of Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom (phronesis), claiming that in politics this is the form of knowledge one should rely on.

7 By now I take it to be established that Burke’s prudence is to be interpreted as belonging to the Aristotelian–Ciceronian account of virtues, also taken over by Christianity. I also claim that Burke’s reference to reason of state should be understood in this Aristotelian–Ciceronian and Christian context. If Canavan is right, and order (ordo) is a key principle of the created universe, then it seems that his views of reason of state should be interpreted in the context of an international order. This supposition, which we do not have time here to fully verify, is supported by the insight that balance was a key notion for Burke in internal affairs, and the concept of “balance of power” is well known to be his guiding principle in international affairs.38 And as balance and compromise did not mean in his views of internal British affairs a denial of conflict and competition, his balance of power and reason of state are only two poles of the same equilibrium, and not a means to universal peace à la Kant. A state in the international arena is subject to the same sorts of constraints as the individual human agent or the statesman in the internal affairs of the political community. If prudence explains the rationale of the individual political agent, something similar should be expected from the state as well, as a political agency. Prudence in the internal context is, therefore, something similar to reason of state in the international one. If prudence does not conclude in moral relativism, neither should a reliance on reason of state mean simply the

28 

F. HÖRCHER

affirmation of the common place that might is right. As compromise and order are the most important values in internal affairs, so a balance of power is required in the international arena to keep order. This is why it seems Armitage is right, when he claims in connection with Burke’s understanding of reason of state: “The opponent of ‘Machiavellian’ expediency could equally well be the proponent of Ciceronian ‘necessity’”.39 Armitage also points out convincingly that Burke’s recognition of a French threat to European peace was based on notions of prudence, reason of state, and international order. “As Burke showed with an appendix of extracts from Vattel, intervention against France would be a ‘prudent precaution’ for all European states precisely because the French republic presented an unprecedented threat to their natural reasons of state—their interests, their security, and above all their shared political maxims as partners in the commonwealth of Europe.”40

8 To conclude: in this paper I argued that by his full blown and sometimes rather violent attacks on French “sophistry” and “metaphysics” Burke did not become a prophet of irrationality or a moral relativist. Rather, I claimed, he criticized the radical use of universal metaphysical claims (like those of the new human rights of the French philosophes and of their British dissenter sympathizers) in the realm of politics as a form of enthusiasm, which reminded him of earlier British debates of political theology which lead to long-lasting conflicts and political disorder in the seventeenth century. His offer, instead of such sophistry and metaphysics, was to rely on the practical knowledge of practising politicians which had been accumulated by generations of the British political elite by his time, and which he describes as a form of practical virtue or prudence. Prudence, as he understood it, aimed to preserve what proved its usefulness, but not in an unprincipled way. Rather, prudential action aims to preserve order, and it was for this purpose that it was ready to accept compromises and even reforms, when really necessary. While prudence described the rationale of the action of the individual human agent, the term reason of state describes the same sort of principled, yet flexible sort of rationality on the level of the state. It does not exclude exceptional measures when necessity requires it, as it was accepted also in the prudential paradigm of the Aristotelian–Ciceronian tradition. By relying on this acclaimed reason of state, states did not behave

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

29

irrationally or immorally. On the contrary, their aim was to serve the common interest of their own community and the international community. In both of these realms, the rational aim was to preserve order, which was made possible in those contexts not by realizing universal truths, but by accepting the balance of powers and conserving the compromised results of political experience.

Notes 1. Rabaud de St. Etienne, quoted by Edmund Burke: Revolutionary Writings. Reflections on the Revolution in France and the first Letter on a Regicide Peace, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014, 171. (All further quotations of the Reflections are from this edition.) 2. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1953, 300–314. 3. Ibid., 311, 313. 4. For this position see for example: Albert O.  Hirschman: The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.; Corey Robin: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011. 5. As for his relationship to Catholicism, Pocock reminds us that “it is probable that the families of both /of his parents/ had only recently converted from Catholicism.” He also adds, however that “he was a baptized member of the Church of Ireland and a vehement defender of the Church of England.” Both of these quotes in: J.G.A. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, in: Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. with intr. and notes by J.G.A. Pocock, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/ Cambridge, 1987, vii–xlviii, ix. 6. Pocock’s position was first formulated in his book on The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957). Its more elaborate version is to be found in his own edition of the Reflections, for details see above. Canavan’s relevant piece is: Francis P. Canavan S.J.: Edmund Burke’s Conception of the Role of Reason in Politics, The Journal of Politics, vol. 21., No. 1, Febr. 1959, 60–79. 7. Burke: Reflections, 79. 8. Burke: Reflections, 35. See also his statement: “There is, by the essential fundamental constitution of things, a radical infirmity in all human contrivances.” The Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (4 vols., London, 1844), III., 117. 9. Burke: Reflections, 62.

30 

F. HÖRCHER

10. David Hume: ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in his: Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Liberty Fund, Minneapolis, 1985, 512. 11. Craig Smith: The Scottish Enlightenment, Unintended Consequences and the Science of Man, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, vol. 7., No. 1, March 2009, 9–28 12. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature – Reprinted from the original edition in three volumes and edited, with an analytical index, by L. A. Selby-­ Bigge, Revised by P.  H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, 415. 13. Hume: Treatise, 269. In this interpretation of Hume’s scepticism of solving metaphysical dilemmas, I rely on Donald Livingston’s works on Hume, most importantly on his Hume’s Philosophy of Common Sense, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1984, and his Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1998. 14. Edmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols., the Rivington edition, London, 1803–1827, II. 335. 15. Iain Hampshire-Monk: ‘Editor’s introduction’, in: Edmund Burke: Reflections, xi-xxxvi., xi. 16. For a short account of his life, see: Ian Harris: Edmund Burke, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = 17. For Burke’s early education in Dublin, we have by now Lock’s and Bourke’s detailed biographical monographs. See F. P. Lock: Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. and F. P. Lock: Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006. Richard Bourke: Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015. For an early effort to take Burke’s educational background into account, see Francis P. Canavan: S.J.: Edmund Burke’s College Study of Philosophy, Notes and Queries, N.S.  IV (1957), 538–543. Both Johnson and Burke were founding members of The Club proposed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1764. Yet their political positions were much of the time antagonistic, as they were the spokespersons of the Tory and the Whig cause, respectively. 18. Burke: Reflections, 63. 19. Pocock: Introduction, xi. 20. Pocock: Introduction, xviii. 21. Edmund Burke: Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine, Notebook, 68–69. Quoted in: Richard Bourke: Empire, 102.

2  BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 

31

22. Jonathan Clark: English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985. 2nd (revised) ed. English Society 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. 23. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, 27. 24. See Canavan: Edmund Burke, 62. 25. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 63, quoting: Burke: Letter to Sir Hercules Langriske, 3 Jan. 1792, Works, VI, 318. 26. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 64, quoting: Burke: Reflections, 62. 27. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 65, quoting: Burke to Shackleton, 15 Aug 1770, Correspondence, I, 231. 28. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), Works, VIII, 87. 29. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68–69, quoting Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), Works, II, 269. 30. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting Letter to Sir Hercules Langriske (1792), Works, VI, 309. 31. Burke: Reflections, 101. 32. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 74. 33. Burke: Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), Works, VII, 197–8. quoted by Canavan: Edmund Burke, 76. 34. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 77., quoting Burke: Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Works, VI, 97. 35. For a full blown elaboration of this argument see my A Political Philosophy of Conservatism. Prudence, Moderation and Tradition, Bloomsbury, London etc., 2020. 36. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, tr. by C.D.C.  Reeve, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, Cambridge, 2014, 1140b1, 102. 37. Ibid. 38. Burke wrote: “The balance of power had been ever assumed as the common law of Europe at all times, and by all powers.” Burke: Third Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), Works, IX, 338. 39. David Armitage: Edmund Burke and reason of state. Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 61., No. 4, 2000, 617–634., 620. 40. Armitage: Edmund Burke, 631. Armitage’s reference is to this work by Burke: Edmund Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), in Writings and Speeches, ed. Mitchell, VIII, 474; the “Appendix” of extracts from Vattel is inexplicably omitted from this edition. For a fragment of Burke’s working notes on Vattel see Sheffield City Libraries Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, 10/27, (passage transcribed from Vattel, Droit des Gens, II. 12. 196–97, printed in Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies [London, 1793], 207–9).

CHAPTER 3

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between Reason and Freedom Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin

A Science of Freedom Free persons and societies depend on the confident exercise of human reason. Our capacity to gain significant understanding of ourselves and the world, and our ability to take actions that improve our lives and society, are worthy of some pride. Despotism flourishes when people are convinced that reasonable people can accomplish little through their own efforts. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) worried that individuals in modern democracies would allow their freedoms to fall fallow in the belief that irresistible historical forces govern their lives. It was an audacious variety of rationality that engendered this fatalistic attitude, however. “New kinds of slavery” follow, Tocqueville finds, when reason becomes “insolent” (OR 300n53; see also DA 641, 662; Rec. 62).1 Having divined our collective destiny, Enlightenment thinkers derived an imperative to

T. D. Smith (*) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] J. Jin University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_3

33

34 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

realize it through ambitious innovations in social engineering. Those who claimed to be qualified sought authority to execute this plan.2 Unimpressed by ordinary personal and political liberties, they promised emancipation and equality (especially equality!)3 for all, armed with the rectitude and certitude that only a truncated conception of human nature can bring. In pre-Revolutionary France, the abstract theories of intellectuals who had little actual political experience paved the way for rationalistic ideologies and political institutions premised on them (OR 197). Democratic souls, Tocqueville observes, make recourse to general ideas and causes in explaining the world. They imagine that systems are readily transformed by the imposition of abstract principles and universal rules (DA 411, 415), without being particularly solicitous of specific persons or complex particulars (DA 456–57). Proceeding apace from the top, the reconstruction of society shall penetrate the foundations of society (OR 196–97). French philosophes were hostile toward the biblical tradition, yet their ideologies affirmed absolutes and resembled religious crusades (OR 99). Their followers who sought power exhibited a “rival’s pride” toward God and a “parvenu’s pride” toward human beings (OR 300n53). Tocqueville is a modern liberal,4 and his ideas are largely informed by Aristotle. He recognizes that politics should not be mistaken for what is highest in human beings. As political animals, exclusion from political participation is dehumanizing, but so, too, is being totally dominated by political priorities. We are also rational beings. Philosophical or scientific inquiries inherently exceed politics and cannot be subordinated to political purposes without serving prejudice and power rather than truth. Tocqueville’s political philosophy recommends distance between politics and philosophy for the sake of both—or rather, for our sake, as free actors, and to prevent “stagnation of thinking” (DA 410). Through our reading of Tocqueville, we discern that politics and philosophy have an uneasy friendship because reason and liberty are indispensable to each other and yet in tension. Intellectual integrity and discovery require freedom, and freedom requires reason so as to avoid descending harmfully into license.5 Excessive rationalism, however, is the enemy of freedom of action and thought alike (DA 12)—both in the minds of those who adhere to it, and in the lives of those subjected to it. Human beings reach their potential only through responsible voluntary activity, in imperfect circumstances with incomplete information, in association with others who are likewise imperfect but free and reasonable, settling for results that are less than ideal. Political rationalism assumes

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

35

thoroughgoing responsibility for setting things straight in a way that relieves individuals of responsibility for developing the qualities of mind and character needed to live well themselves.6 It pretends knowledge of what is, and what is to be done, saving individuals the need to judge and act for themselves. Scorning negotiation and compromise, the techniques of rational experts require only acquiescence and compliance. Like Aristotle, Tocqueville maintains that political science should both study and benefit society.7 Tocqueville holds that the preservation of human liberty requires a new political science to correct the pretentious and contentious science behind the French Revolution that threatens to dominate modern democracies moving forward (DA 7, 12). Enlightenment rationalism is actually a partisan perspective that disregards and suppresses aspects of the human condition. It pretends to be aloof and objective, but its motivations are more psychological than purely logical.8 Preoccupied with techniques of control and central planning, it renders human beings childlike, dependent, and irresponsible (DA 663; OR 124). For the sake of achieving systemic justice, it is systematically unjust toward individuals and destructive of their communities. Freedom distinguishes men from beasts. It brings citizens into contact with each other. It directs people toward goods beyond those of the body (OR 88). An emphasis on freedom reminds us that society exists for the sake of people, not vice versa. Emancipating people from the burdens of deliberation, judgment, and action may seem well-intentioned, but it abolishes the distinctions between us and beasts,9 who can be kept as pets but are often only chattel or prey. The more Enlightenment rationalism succeeds at approaching its goals on its own partial terms, the more it distorts us (DA 410). Risk, uncertainty, conflict, and disorder come along with freedom, but denying or ducking them—as if we could “banish chance” (DA 524)—is untenable and detrimental.

On the French Question The Old Regime in France collapsed from within well before the Revolution finished it off, Tocqueville argues (OR 162–63). A vast and centralized administrative entity, headed by a royal court abetted by a priestly class, its regime was short on politics properly so-called. Having surrendered and abandoned their traditional responsibilities, the old aristocrats had become mere oligarchs, or as Tocqueville calls them, “a caste” (OR 156). Withdrawing from public life, they retained their

36 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

socioeconomic status by convention alone. Politically inept, arrogant, and indolent, unable to justify their own privileges, they delegitimized themselves (OR 117–18, 222).10 Peasants gained land ownership opportunities but on unequal terms with aristocrats. Evidence of arbitrariness abounded through exceptions and privileges, while “the most natural and necessary guarantees for all citizens” were not secure (OR 179). People had many grievances but neither political experience nor reliable recourse (OR 158, 182). Feudalism was neither abolished nor intact; political obligations dissolved but their odious material residue remained. A bureaucratic class performing the tasks of public administration beneath the dignity of aristocrats supplanted them, and they became dependent on its favor. Upon Revolution’s arrival, France was populated by apolitical people at all ranks. The men of action who led the Revolution or ruled in its wake were people in whom the virtues of the active life had not been cultivated by custom or profession (OR 162–63). They relied mainly on theories and speculations propelled by vision and determination (OR 196–97, 200, 202). What noble forms of responsible freedom and greatness of spirit Tocqueville attributed to the old aristocracy at its best were ancient history. The Revolutionary movement “alienated” and “slaughtered” the nobility (OR 173), eliminating the possibility of establishing a stable mixed regime. Vacillating between republican absolutism and sundry autocracies during Tocqueville’s lifetime, French politics neither nurtured nor rewarded statesmanship. Despite their “faults and prejudices,” Tocqueville advises the  post-Revolutionary French to look toward  their ancestors in the Old Regime to recover “a little of their greatness” (OR 179). Men then exhibited love and faith toward God and king and were less enamored with coercion. Too proud to casually abuse their responsibilities, they desired glory and to be worthy of it (OR 179). Even the lives of the peasants in the Old Regime were less regulated and regimented than the subjects of the Republic or the Emperors (OR 114, 131, 179, 183, 192). If Tocqueville romanticizes the old aristocracy, it is only to correct the prevailing calumnious caricature of it. He harbors no illusions about the possibility of restoring aristocracy (DA 666). If Tocqueville doesn’t praise democracy enough it’s only because it already enjoys an abundance of vocal partisans (DA 400). He exhorts people in democratic times to live in a fashion befitting dignified free persons. But those who have not known freedom are most easily made to spurn it. The conjunction of reason and

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

37

freedom can only be learned by being lived; but lacking that, instances of it from the past are better teachers of it than abstract systems of thought promising it in the future. Uniform, centralized, and calculated statecraft emerged before the Revolution thanks to the theories of the physiocrats (OR 196). During Tocqueville’s time, the doctrines of Auguste Comte epitomized this approach to governance.11 The very goal is to render prudence, debate, and judgment unnecessary. Indeed, anything that “hinders their plans” is deemed by them “worthless” (OR 210). These frameworks form the basis of modern theories that emphasize material interests and prescribe and delimit action in terms of what a rational person would do, without needing to consult or persuade actual people—proceeding then to rule everybody so they’ll behave accordingly. Tocqueville sees in these attempts to transcend politics an “immense public evil” (OR 208; cf. DA 408) that tramples upon human nature. A positivistic approach that treats economics as king is practically heaven-sent for popular dictatorships, rejecting limited government in order to do whatever they declare materially necessary in the name of the people. Fortunately, the “spirit which animates” laws remains more powerful than laws themselves, and it is “superficial” to regard laws themselves as independent causes (OR 221); thus, imposing tyranny upon a free people is not so straightforward. After the disorder and disappointment of the Revolution, people began to search for a new master.12 Through several rapid alterations of regime, centralized schemes for public administration found immense opportunities for continuity and growth (OR 245). “[L]ike some rivers go underground only to reappear” as “the same stream between different banks” (OR 85), the centralizing tendencies of pre-Revolutionary France rapidly resurfaced and continued to flow in what followed. People clamored for the state to do what they could not do for themselves (DA 88), thanks to what they had done to themselves, not understanding that what had been done to them previously left them ill-equipped to accomplish what they initially envisioned. Under the Old Regime, administrative centralization had already eroded the authority of noble lords and made provisions for the poor a micromanaged, nationalized operation (OR 121, 123). Generally seeking policies “equally applicable over the entire kingdom” (OR 123), according to Tocqueville, “the government already exchanged the role of sovereign for that of guardian” (OR 124) well before later regimes expanded and consolidated matters.

38 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

Democratization and the Authority of Science The French Enlightenment spawned a larger literate population. Its intellectualized elite regarded it as its responsibility to assume ruling offices rather than to create the conditions under which the French people could learn self-rule.13 The people were furthermore seen as in need of major renovation to become suitable for enlightened society (DA 188, 340; OR 245). As a scholar and a statesman, Tocqueville observed multiple attempts to implement rationalistic systems after the Old Regime fell. His political science endeavors to explain why those efforts necessarily fail (Rec. 68). Little effort is required to convince souls conformed to democratic mores that inequalities are unjust. That principle is easy to apply, and it gratifies (DA 482). To them, expertise in the applied science of equality in an exception; they who possess it may enjoy legitimate advantages and authority. But equality is a quality of the relationships between people. Tocquevillian political science is instead concerned primarily with the qualities that individual persons’ souls possess, and how they acquire them, rather than with conforming people’s lives to the exigencies of a theoretically preferable system. Whereas late-modern democracies tend to be consumed with consternation for and veneration of society as a whole, Tocqueville attends principally to individuals and their rights (DA 641). Happily, arrangements that promote personal self-development and self-­ interest properly understood encourage and reward sociability and generate conditions of interdependency (DA 502, 648). Tocqueville’s political science theorizes on the basis of empirical evidence, observing the effects that beliefs, behaviors, customs, and institutions have on people’s lived lives,14 offering practical counsel regarding these. It looks to inform particular communities of people about the conditions under which they are better able to govern their own lives. It’s concerned with the justice of treating people as human beings—as responsible agents capable of engaging in reasonable and decent voluntary action—not as units to be coordinated in achieving some ideal configuration. Efforts to engineer justice systematically treat actual human beings unjustly, as less than they are or should be. Regarding people as beings of a sort that they are not in order to attempt to transform them into beings they cannot and oughtn’t be, by means that won’t work, however much we wish they would and however hard we try, is unscientific.15

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

39

Tocquevillian political science recognizes that causal factors in society are irreducibly complex, whereas tidy rationalist theories demand parsimony. They have a certain destination in mind, even if the manipulations they enjoin are vast, endless, and require constant retuning. Tocqueville knows you can only understand the present and predict the future with an appreciation of past ideas and arrangements (see Rec. 66). Enlightenment rationalism, zealously meddling in the present to realize the future, thinks the only reason to look to the past is to disavow it (OR 106). One can imagine the socialist leaders of Tocqueville’s time, inheritors of eighteenthcentury rationalism—depicted as fools in his Recollections (Rec. 101)— shouting “But it’s 1848!” as if that sufficed to validate their views and propel their program forward.16 Democracy renders people susceptible to ideologies masquerading as science, peddling general ideas, profiting from ignorance, preying on sentiment, engaging in flattery, and raising false hopes. “[T]he intellect of democratic peoples receives simple and general ideas with delight,” Tocqueville observes, adding, “[c]omplicated systems repel it, and it is pleased to imagine a great nation in which all of the citizens resemble a single model and are directed by a single power” (DA 640). Modern democracy prepares people for replacing God with government, and Providence with progressive public policy (DA 421; OR 144).17 Tocqueville knows that democratic people are disinclined to heed his appeal to appreciate and cultivate nobler qualities and embrace political forms that require and respect them (DA 669). Their love for equality is fanatical (DA 480, 513). They regard universal, indiscriminate compassion as virtue (DA 538, cf. 409). Distrustful of other people’s freedom, democratic individuals are ready to surrender their own. They would rather be freed from responsibility than free to exercise it. Instead of personally developing and depending upon their own reasoning skills, they would rather see society impersonally rationalized on their behalf. Even if they’re not overtly tyrannized over, however, they become thereby uneducated and “abandoned” (OR 183). A diminution of humanity follows from a mutually contemptuous divorce between reason and freedom and the concomitant disdain for the virtues that require both. Rationalist techniques and technicians are inherently partial, treating people as less than the fully developed creatures they could be in order to manipulate them more easily. Whatever belongs to the human spirit that resists reengineering they disregard, discourage, and dispense with. Democratization, which Tocqueville calls providential (DA 6–7), gradually affects human beings so that its premises in time become increasingly plausible and its explanations

40 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

increasingly accurate (DA 408, 410). Masses of equally weak individuals who are dependent on the constant, comprehensive care of distant massive powers really do seem at the mercy of general causes, unable to manifest meaningful agency in their lives. Tocqueville charges himself with theoretically articulating which institutions, customs, measures, behaviors, and mindsets must be maintained in practice to ward off democratization’s advancement toward its furthermost ends. Incorporating aristocratic qualities or proxies into the institutions of a democratic order and values of a democratic people is like trying to introduce elements of a mixed regime. But all regimes, democracy included, endeavor to see their principles proved altogether right by extending them everywhere and seeing them thoroughgoingly realized. Mixed regimes are hard to keep because the few and the many alike are always each trying to seize absolute power over the whole. Technocratic democracy is freakish because it allows both sides to do so apparently simultaneously. From the perspective of the social engineer, whether he fancies himself a philosopher or policymaker, mixed regimes look too messy, unfinished and impure. They look irrational. Wishing to dispense with the need for phronesis, modern social science is techne dressed up as episteme (see DA 199, 291) (except not really—in order to be genuine techne it would have to successfully produce what it aims at manufacturing). What passes for prudence among political engineers is only cleverness and shrewdness in disguising or denying their utmost ends for the sake of winning partial victories that keep the ball rolling down its preordained path.

Reason and Freedom in America Democracy in America contains Tocqueville’s reflections on how the American republic contains features that teach ordinary citizens how to participate in self-governance, gaining experiences that help them to combine freedom and reason in their individual lives and within their communities. American democracy was born without having to stage a revolution against an aristocratic order (DA 67, 485), but it happens to cultivate in Americans nobler qualities as they participate regularly in the demands of the active life. Even while they were still colonists under the authority of a distant crown, they developed many of the habits and structures of self-­ government that would serve them well in erecting and sustaining a republic.

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

41

Americans tend to be focused on material concerns in their education and everyday business. As the religious believers Tocqueville observed them to be,18 however, they are attuned to non-material goods (DA 42–44, 275), which makes them better citizens, since citizenship requires attentiveness to obligations that exceed economic interests (OR 206). The American regime is not formally mixed, but its federal system, separation of powers, heavy dependence on local governance, political and civil associations, and free press get many people involved in many ways large and small (DA 64–65, 274). Thus, America lacks the concentrated central government and desiccated civil society of France. Tocqueville offers America as a model to the French for restoring freedom within a democratic framework. Imagine a Frenchman telling the French that they have anything to learn from Americans! At the same time, Tocqueville frets that American society might refashion itself along the lines of the French model,19 descending into what he calls “mild despotism” should its mechanisms for moderating democratic excesses dwindle and deteriorate (DA 662–63). Tocqueville’s concept of self-interest well understood stresses that it is not ultimately in an individual’s self-interest to always focus only narrowly on one’s material self-interest (DA 519, 522).20 Sharing the burdens and sacrifices that are associated with engaging in public life, getting involved in one’s community, participating in decision-making offices and processes, not to mention maintaining a religious association (DA 42; Rec. 65), all redound to one’s self-interest, and freedom, in the long run. These activities ennoble one’s soul too, but you have to appeal to democratic people with materialistic prejudices on terms they will  appreciate to get them to attend to concerns they would otherwise neglect to their detriment.21 Even if it’s questionable that every single individual’s personal self-interest is directly and measurably benefitted by attending to concerns that seem outside and above it, the overall prosperity and character of Americans generally is indirectly improved by having more people, across the country, involved in the practices of self-governance at all levels, rather than delegating those powers away. Restless activity in free association forestalls the advent of despotism (DA 9). The result is a moderately enlightened general population sporting some know-how and a can-do spirit, confident that great things may be accomplished together—even though there is always disagreement and contestation and only ever partial and temporary solutions. Americans are not great philosophers or artists, but they are tremendous businesspeople, technological innovators, and passionate citizens (DA 461, 525, 528).

42 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

Their skepticism regarding philosophies other than those that recommend figuring things out for oneself using one’s own brains (DA 403) means that intellectuals lack overt authority among them (DA 46, 50).22 Their mindset is practical, and they are busybodies rather than passive recipients of boons. Because they get involved and pay attention, they acquire fair judgment and the ability to do business with each other with respect to private and public matters alike. They don’t rely on experts to tell them what to do or think. They have a free press, but they are smart enough to know that journalists are mostly vulgar “charlatans” (DA 189, cf. 178). Americans are the beneficiaries of a political system of government that is not excessively systematic, founded by statesmen who understood that those occupying ruling offices have great but nonetheless limited responsibilities. Their regime “was produced by a mature and reflective taste for freedom,” accompanied by “a love of order and of legality” (DA 67). It allows people to learn from their own mistakes rather than preventing them from making any (DA 215–16). Individuals are best left free to mind their personal priorities, and future generations need opportunities to make society more perfect.23 The founders cemented a system that encouraged and depended on widespread, regular political activity without trusting or exalting political powers. They were not even certain that the regime they established would last, on account of its demands and open-endedness. Neither uniformity nor inflexibility of views or behavior could be presumed upon; no one right way of thinking or doing things could be indefinitely imposed (DA 87). Freedom is inherently perilous and precariously perched, but it’s more reasonable to endeavor to sustain popular liberty than to imagine we’ve become smart enough to forego it, especially when not everybody’s equally enthusiastic about enlightened leadership. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an attempt to theorize why a non-theoretical people live a preferable life in practice compared to people who adore theory and theorizers. The practices of the Americans correspond to a theoretically superior understanding of human nature— even though it, too, is flawed and partial in ways that will probably undermine it in time. By happy combination of design and accident (drawing on its received customs and given its material resources and parameters), the American regime is more theoretically sound, despite its intellectually unsophisticated population. It is even more democratic for being less theoretical.24 And why should people philosophize more when peoples who over-philosophize about politics live less well or fairly by comparison, in body and in spirit alike?

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

43

On Friendly Terms Tocqueville recommends being reconciled to uncertain knowledge.25 Modern rationalism in politics, however, is premised on the view, derivative of the premises of technologically oriented modern natural science, that it is irrational to say in advance that anything is definitively impossible.26 Upon that premise, a false inference is made that it is irrational not to believe we can do whatever we put our minds to, given sufficient means and resolve. Doubting our ability—nay, our obligation—to fix the world seems not only unimaginative and complacent, but also complicit with the suffering that continued imperfection brings. From the perspective of practical reason, however, the rationalist’s attitude constitutes wishful thinking, both reckless and cowardly. So fearful of and frustrated with reality, it rails and rebels against it—proceeding often methodically and mechanically but sometimes intoxicatedly, but in any case, insolently. The combination of democracy and materialism, however, lends itself to adopting that faith,27 assuring its devotees of their righteousness. Meanwhile, the moderate person who hesitates to confess, submit to, and work toward it, looks ignorant and uncaring. Tocqueville has his work cut out for him, reminding people that unless we acknowledge our limitations and insist on freedom—even the freedom to err, compete, and disagree—the political enforcement of the rationalistic pretense will continue to undermine the social fabric and impoverish our souls.

Notes 1. Page references to Alexis de Tocqueville’s principal works are cited in this chapter as follows: DA Democracy in America, trans. and eds. Harvey C.  Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). OR The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume One, eds. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. Alan S.  Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Rec. Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, eds. J. P. Mayer and A.  P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987). 2. For significant treatments of Tocqueville’s criticism of rationalism in politics, see Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Volume One (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); Richard Boyd and Conor Williams, “Intellectuals and Statesmanship? Tocqueville, Oakeshott, and

44 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

the Distinction between Theoretical and Practical Knowledge,” in Alexis de Tocqueville and the Art of Democratic Statesmanship, eds. Brian Danoff and L.  Joseph Hebert, Jr., 117–36 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010); James Ceaser, “Alexis de Tocqueville on Political Science, Political Culture, and the Role of the Intellectual” The American Political Science Review 79, no. 3 (1985): 656–72; Peter Augustine Lawler, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), and “Tocqueville on Pantheism, Materialism, and Catholicism,” in Democracy and Its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler, 31–48 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004); Jacob T.  Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Daniel J.  Mahoney, “Tocqueville and Socialism,” in Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty: Current Essays, eds. Peter Augustine Lawler and Joseph Alulis, 177–202 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993); Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Harvey C.  Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” American Political Thought 5, no. 2 (2016): 250–76; Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s New Political Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Cheryl B. Welch, 81–107 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Joshua Mitchell, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). 3. Ralph C. Hancock, “The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral Analogy,” in Democracy and Its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 56. 4. See Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 212. 5. On abuses of liberty, see OR 88, 179. 6. For more on the subject of “political rationalism” in Tocqueville, see Ceaser, “Tocqueville on Political Science,” 658ff. 7. Mansfield and Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s New Political Science,” 81. 8. Lawler, “Tocqueville on Pantheism,” 35. 9. Ibid., 45. 10. See Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 216–17. 11. See Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 2. Tocqueville never explicitly acknowledges Comte in his writings. See Aron, Main Currents, 201. 12. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 6, 36. 13. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” 265.

3  ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 

45

14. Tocqueville’s method principally attends to what he calls the “social state.” See DA 45. 15. That said, under ever more meddlesome laws governing the minutiae of their everyday existence, people may “renounce the use of their wills,” causing their “faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting by themselves” to shrivel, leaving them “gradually falling below the level of humanity” (DA 665). 16. See Mahoney, “Tocqueville and Socialism,” 184. 17. See Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom, 228; cf. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” 255. 18. What really reigns in the minds of Americans is public opinion (DA 409, 424), and in Tocqueville’s time that just happens to be Christian, if only by received tradition (DA 279, 406). Democratization, however, eventually turns people against tradition (DA 405), and Tocqueville already observes among Americans “distaste for the supernatural” (DA 404). Tocqueville anticipates that a less religious America will prove less moral and less free (DA 279–82). 19. Hence his concern about the tyranny of the majority (DA 241). Remember, the majority of people are peaceful and well-meaning (DA 165). See also DA 145. 20. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” 264–66. On the distinction between “self-interest properly understood” and “rational calculation of self-interest,” see Richard Avramenko, Courage: The Politics of Life and Limb (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 219–20. See also Peter Augustine Lawler, “Tocqueville on the Doctrine of Interest,” in Homeless and at Home in America, 152–67 (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007). 21. Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 22, 113. 22. Tocqueville says that Americans follow Descartes without really knowing it (DA 403), implying that they don’t really think entirely for themselves. But no human being—including Descartes himself, who never was as rationalistic as rationalists want to insist (DA 405)—escapes dependence on a bunch of dogmatic prejudices (DA 407–8). Rationalists who pretend otherwise are fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Tocqueville traces the dogmatic imperative to judge everything for oneself that Americans habitually heed from Luther through Bacon and Descartes to Voltaire and beyond (DA 405), suggesting thereby that the Reformation proves ultimately, if inadvertently (and if not providentially), corrosive of religious faith (cf. DA 285, 418). Moreover, when democratic people think they’re thinking for themselves they’re mainly just following their feelings (DA 214, 219). 23. Lawler, Restless Mind, 138, 153.

46 

T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN

24. Boyd and Williams, “Intellectuals and Statesmanship?” 118–19. 25. “Concerning the immense majority of points that it is important for us to know, we have only probabilities, almosts. To despair of its being so is to despair of being a man.” Alexis de Tocqueville, “To Charles Stoffels, October 22, 1831,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64. Quoted in Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom, 215–16. 26. See OR 299–300; see also Ceaser, “Tocqueville on Political Science,” 660. 27. See also Lawler, “Tocqueville on Pantheism,” 45.

CHAPTER 4

Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism Robert Wyllie

Søren Kierkegaard is a famous critic of rationalism in philosophy, but less well known as a critic of political rationalism. It might have surprised him to learn how little he is appreciated as a political theorist today. As the bread riots of 1847 crescendoed towards the Märzrevolution, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, “It all fits my theory perfectly, and I dare say it will come to be seen how exactly I have understood this age.”1 Few scholars appear to regard this as more than an idle boast. What “theory of the age” is Kierkegaard talking about? Kierkegaard’s account of “the age” can be found in his Two Ages: A Literary Review, published in 1846. It presents a critical view of public “reasoning” in a political age that lacks the passion for decisive action.2 Like Michael Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in politics, Kierkegaard arraigns the “the enemy of authority” who weighs public arguments “fortified by a belief in ‘reason’ common to all mankind.”3 However, the specific “rationalist” assumption that politics is a domain of technical expertise, so irksome to Oakeshott a century later, is still on the horizon in the

R. Wyllie (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_4

47

48 

R. WYLLIE

1840s. Kierkegaard sees only the dawn of an age of political ideology.4 Amid the revolutions of 1848, Kierkegaard journals, “Everything that looked like a religious movement became politics.”5 Accordingly, Kierkegaard pivots from his better-known critique of rationalism in theology to a more directly political critique of rationalism. Kierkegaard’s earlier critique of rationalism in his mostly pseudonymous writings (sometimes called his “first authorship”) is only political by extension: it focuses mainly upon rationalism in theology. Kierkegaard is especially annoyed by Hegelian theologians’ expansive concept of reason.6 In Fear and Trembling, for example, his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio attacks Hegel’s doctrine that political institutions, laws, and practices contain some kernel of rational “actuality.”7 Kierkegaard emphatically rejects the idea that following the norms of a given society, even those that can be universalized like Kantian maxims, puts Christians in the right relation with God automatically. Indeed, rationalizing that one is a Christian simply by virtue of conforming to social conventions is, for Kierkegaard, a great obstacle to the life-changing conversion which faith demands. Using Abraham’s binding of Isaac as an example, Fear and Trembling defines the “religious” as the category that raises the individual above the universal.8 Kierkegaard spent his whole life driving a wedge between mere participation in the state church and the true “religious.” But his analysis of the obstacle to the “religious” underwent an important change in 1846. As the critique of theological rationalism in the first authorship neared its completion in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard planned to retire to the quiet life of a country parson.9 However, at the same time, he became embroiled in a nasty public dispute with the political and literary magazine The Corsair. It started when literary critic P. L. Møller, an editor of the magazine, criticized Kierkegaard’s 1845 book Stages on Life’s Way. Kierkegaard fired back ad hominem, claiming that Møller cared only to curry the favor of the Copenhagen elite. In response, The Corsair lampooned Kierkegaard for the first several months of 1846. The “Corsair Affair” seems to have caused Kierkegaard to consider the public sphere itself as an obstacle to religious existence.10 He took up this problem in Two Ages. Two Ages is a critique of political rationalism in a broad sense, or the view that political endeavors and political reflection are at least potentially rational activities.11 Even Oakeshott rates as a “political rationalist” in this broad sense, since he insists that it belongs to practical reason to be conversant with belief- and value-based traditions of political discourse.12 Of

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

49

course, Oakeshott targets political rationalism in a narrower sense, namely, the view that politics reduces to universal and transmissible empirical knowledge for technical experts. Kierkegaard, however, attacks the rationality of political endeavors, at least in the present historical period. Outstripping Oakeshott,13 Kierkegaard insists that reasonableness in modern, mediated political discourse only veneers a deeper psychology of passionate conflict. What I have called the “broad” and “narrow” (or Oakeshottian) definitions of political rationalism ought to be held separate. Spinoza offers an exemplary disjunction. The political techniques in the Political Treatise are based on a universal and transmissible science of irrational, conflicting passions described in the Ethics.14 Spinoza is no political rationalist in the broad sense; he turns to non-rational passions to explain political behavior. Yet Spinoza is a political rationalist in the narrow Oakeshottian sense because he purports to offer practitioners universally valid political techniques with a theoretical, scientific basis. Kierkegaard is not a political rationalist in any sense of the term. Anticipating today’s agonist and neo-­ realist critics of political rationalism, Kierkegaard argues that the apparent rationality of political discourse in the present age is a sham.15 The birth of the nineteenth-century public sphere is often identified as a watershed in rational politics, ideally representing an open-access political community where anyone’s “force of reason” can sway public opinion and affect government policy. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere argues that inclusive notions of humanity cultivated in the bourgeois intimate sphere generated the basis of a new rational politics.16 For Habermas, the nineteenth-century public sphere represents a “communicative domain” of formal and informal channels of rational criticism or critical publicity.17 Broadband media like newspapers and novels shaped inclusive sentiments and political reasoning about the welfare of all.18 However, one artifact of this new public sphere, Kierkegaard’s report in Two Ages, complicates our understanding of the new communicative domain. It may make us skeptical of the very idea of a communicative public sphere that “guarantees rationality.”19 Two Ages is (at least initially) a review of a Danish novel, anonymously written by Thomasine Gyllembourg, entitled A Story of Everyday Life. A literary review may seem like an unlikely genre for political theory. However, Kierkegaard argues that reviewers do not address a political opponent, but instead an entire “age, a reading public.”20 Literary criticism is then an apposite medium to question the consensus of a particular

50 

R. WYLLIE

time, and to make a historically bounded critique. Skeptical of the intellectual fashions that have come in with his own cohort, and which valorize participation in public life, Kierkegaard intervenes to defend the older author of A Story of Everyday Life from the “incredible cruelty of the young” who speak “in the name of the age.”21 What attracts Kierkegaard to A Story of Everyday Life is its reflection of political times in the lives of two individuals. Both are women in the extended Waller family of Copenhagen merchants. The revolutionary upheaval of the 1790s is reflected by Claudine’s passionate love affair with a dueling Frenchman, Lusard. Decades later, the Vormärz status quo is reflected in Mariane’s patiently suffering the hesitations of her beloved Ferdinand, whose money considerations keep him from marriage. Both Claudine and Mariane remain steadfast in love; Kierkegaard writes, each is “faithful to herself.”22 Claudine does not repent of her youthful enthusiasm for her French lover when he leaves her to go to war. Mariane, likewise, remains patient in her unrequited love for the money-conscious Ferdinand. The two ages produce two different kinds of male lovers, but the women are constant. According to Kierkegaard, the author would persuade “his” (in fact, her) readers that “the demands of the times” are a distraction from the real business of life—“the pain and suffering and peril of one’s life are not always where the shrieking is.”23 Kierkegaard thinks of politics in the present age as an esthetic realm of spectators with ever-­ changing temporary concerns, distracted from ethical concern with problems of love and personal commitment. While the men engage in war and commerce, the women that remain steadfast in love are where the real action is. In his retelling of A Story of Everyday Life, Kierkegaard emphasizes not only how politics can distract from real passions, but also how political concerns can mask deeper ulterior motives. For example, when the attorney Dalund (who is Mrs. Waller’s lover) defends the permissive ideals of the revolutionary age, it is only out of envy of the libertine Frenchmen and as a self-justification for his relationship with his friend’s wife.24 Later Ferdinand, who is “carried away with the bold possibilities life offers,” gives any number of reasons for not marrying. But like the present age as a whole, behind the public reasons he gives for his actions is Ferdinand’s weak character: he lacks the passionate strength, Kierkegaard writes, to actualize any higher ideal.25 His all-too-typical desire for money, for instance, is aroused because it signifies any number of better possible lives.26 A Story of Everyday Life, through the lens of Kierkegaard’s

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

51

criticism, unmasks psychological motivations that belie the reasons characters give publicly. The weakness and hypocrisy of the political statements in A Story of Everyday Life supply the grist for Kierkegaard’s long critique of the present age, an excrescence longer than the review itself. This selection of Two Ages has been translated and published separately—notably into German by Theodor Haecker in 1914, which partially explains the uptake of Kierkegaard among Weimar-era critics of political rationalism.27 Kierkegaard dismisses the exchange of reasons in the public sphere as mere talkativeness, chatter, or chit-chat [snakke] that supervenes psychological paralysis. The “whole age” becomes “a committee,” unable to act decisively (Carl Schmitt repurposes this aphorism), that stifles individuality, passion, and excellence.28 The present age demands no passionate commitment; in fact, it does not tolerate them. Kierkegaard argues that the age is characterized by amorphous envy, a “negatively unifying principle” that degrades excellence and “takes the form of leveling” (Martin Heidegger takes over this idea).29 The participants in political life “shrewdly transform themselves into spectators” who feel no responsibility for the events they read about.30 While they clamor for newspaper exposés, they do not feel responsible when the press hounds and smears the victims of the news cycle. For Kierkegaard, modern pieties like “transparency” and “informed citizenship” are the self-deceptions of resentful tabloid readers, who just want to see others torn down. Public opinion is a great abstraction that immunizes them from moral censure or ethical self-reflection.31 Kierkegaard’s theory of the age makes him cynical about political debates in the Danish newspapers, but not all of them were transitory entertainments for a resentful tabloid audience. In the 1840s, Danes were debating the abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies—a day which finally came on July 3, 1848. Of all Kierkegaard wrote in this period, and for all the concepts he furnishes Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cornel West, and others to describe the absurdity and despair of living in racist societies, there is not a sentence in Kierkegaard’s vast corpus (diaries included) about slavery and emancipation in his day.32 For all we may grant to Kierkegaard’s unmasking of the “reasoning public,” he fails to recognize the urgent political issues right in front of him, in his newspapers. Yet his cynicism about the politics of the present age, however exaggerated, is not tantamount to a rejection of politics in any age. Although Kierkegaard is sometimes maligned as an anti-social thinker concerned only with individuality, his attack on the “public” is not an

52 

R. WYLLIE

attack upon social or political life, but upon the historical phenomenon that he observed divorcing the world of speech from the realm of action. Like Alasdair MacIntyre (otherwise a great critic of his),33 Kierkegaard criticizes the possibility of political rationality under present historical circumstances, where reasoned debate only supervenes emotional conflict. In Kierkegaard’s public sphere, one wishes to be seen displaying fine opinions, or to be heard making witty remarks on the topic of the day, as an end in itself. Unlike the Greek citizen in the agora, who must act upon his words, Kierkegaard’s spectator lacks the intention (or “passion”) to do so.34 Kierkegaard compares the press to an ownerless dog—no one is responsible when it hurts someone—and the public to English lords that wager on if and when a man riding an out-of-control horse will fall.35 Members of the newspaper-reading public do not feed the hungry, in Kierkegaard’s unflattering portrait, but rather preen to announce their sympathy with the starving, or scour to find someone to blame for famine, or incite bread riots.36 Though it may have dangerous consequences, reason-­giving in the public sphere is mere chatter that supervenes real motives of middle-class envy and rivalry for reputation. Thus the Revolutions of 1848 are not truly revolutionary, Kierkegaard argues (long before Marx comes round to the same conclusion) because they lack passion. Unlike real revolution, the mediated political realm demands no passionate commitment. What does it mean to reason [at raisonere]?” Kierkegaard asks, answering, that reason “is the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity.”37 Dispassionate, talkative reasoners leave everything open to criticism: in other words, they lack the passion to take up any “objective” ideas that stamp their subjectivity. Thus a Ferdinand lacks a Claudine’s moral character and remains formless, Kierkegaard writes, like the sea.38 He describes the present age as a “dialectical tour de force: it lets everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it.”39 The monarchy is not abolished, for instance, “but if little by little we could get it transformed into make-believe, we would gladly shout, ‘Hurrah for the king!’”40 The politics of the present age is not a politics of passionate upheaval, because citizens devalue everything except their own opinions. Kierkegaard criticizes the politics of an age that cannot act upon its ideals, or which lacks ideals entirely. In contrast to both the revolutionary and the present age, Kierkegaard does briefly adumbrate a normative model for social life.41 He describes a community united by common objects of love, albeit in a particular way42:

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

53

“When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together are essentially related to an idea, the relation is optimal and normative.”43 There is “ideal distance” because each possesses their passion individually, which Kierkegaard compares to harmonious music. (He echoes Augustine’s Ciceronian description of “musical” concord in a city, where different orders of society are “balanced by reason as though they were voices”).44 Collapse the commitments of each and all to the ideal to simply all, though, and riotousness ensues.45 Revolutionary ages flirt with this danger. Uncouple ideas from passionate action, however, and one is snared in the endless reflection of the present age.46 In Kierkegaard’s ideal political theory, these unspecified ideas (or “springs of ideality”) are eternal and could motivate a single individual at any time. To explain the sudden emergence of an age obsessed with politics, Kierkegaard offers a psychological explanation rather than an analysis of technological or social history. Barriers to envy, he thinks, have broken down. According to Kierkegaard, most people experience the world through esthetic categories47: selfish, sensual, desirous of possibility, skeptical, and escapist. The political reinforces the esthetic against the ethical because citizens typically direct accusations against others rather than (ethically) against themselves.48 Envy, then, is the other-directing psychological cause of the present political age: it causes citizens to doubt one another, prevents citizens from enthusiasm, and traps society in reflection.49 Politics offers enviers an escape; instead of interrogating the base motives that make them pick up the newspaper, citizens fling themselves at ever-new transitory goals. The public sphere is a formless sea of envy; this is its “negatively unifying principle” that dissolves individuality.50 Everyone cares about the same things, at least for a news cycle. “[L]eveling is powerful with respect to the temporary,” Kierkegaard writes, and “reflection is a snare.”51 Kierkegaard warns of the Baudrillardian consequences: [W]hen a man essentially puts his whole personality into communication… eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction— there will be no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, as abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous...52

Kierkegaard goes on, warning that even love and education would become depersonalized and technical pursuits, which no longer require passionate commitments from individuals. We will criticize everyone except ourselves and evaluate only what others can do for us.

54 

R. WYLLIE

This critique of political reasoning in Two Ages seems at first to have little in common with Kierkegaard’s earlier critique of theological rationalism. Spectators in the public sphere need not be speculative “Hegelians.” The abstraction of public reason is conjured negatively, as nobody trusts any other, or any higher, ideal. But the two critiques are connected on a deeper level. Modern philosophical rationalism, long before peaking in Hegel’s presuppositionless system, encourages people to doubt received wisdom and traditional belief. Kierkegaard’s unfinished Johannes Climacus suggests a connection that later critics of political rationalism make also: political rationalism is the vulgarized legacy of Descartes.53 But while Oakeshott emphasizes the formal supremacy of method or technical knowledge in Cartesianism—he points to his more precise construal of twentieth-century political rationalism—Kierkegaard proposes that Descartes gives an imprimatur to doubt, with far-reaching effects.54 Kierkegaard’s “optimal and normative” political community requires sharing admirable ideals that are asphyxiated by the modern predilection to doubt. No less a student of the modern collapse of authority than Hannah Arendt called Kierkegaard’s slender unfinished book the “deepest interpretation” of Cartesian doubt.55 Post-Cartesian philosophy embarks on a quest for certainty that demands knowledge of efficient causes for how political ideals, or anything else, come to exist. Like his hero J. G. Hamann, Kierkegaard argues that reason is powerless to answer such questions: we can only reason about what we first experience. (The same argument from Hamann is taken up by Isaiah Berlin’s critique of political rationalism.)56 In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus protests that reason [Fornuft] is out of bounds in modern thought: one cannot “reason in conclusion to existence,” one can only “reason in conclusion from existence.”57 Ancient philosophy that begins in wonder could begin from existing opinions or phenomena, but modern post-Cartesian philosophy can only doubt the arbitrariness of any “point of departure” for action.58 The same “negative principle” animates both modern philosophical rationalism and political rationalism, transmuting the ideals of former ages into “make-believe,” so that only the illusion of shared reason remains.59 Kierkegaard identifies envy as the opposite of wonder, and the passion that supplies modern philosophers’ motivation to doubt.60 Envy also motivates citizens to doubt their fellows, embrace skeptical philosophy, and void

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

55

powerful ideals from the public realm. After leveling, twentieth-century critics identify specific positive formations that fill the vacuum, like Oakeshott’s sovereignty of technique or Eric Voegelin’s “gnosticism.”61 Kierkegaard describes an earlier development, but perhaps a more lasting one. He envisions something like a “postmodern” age where words change their meaning and no longer connect to reality.62 And Two Ages seems especially relevant today, amid broad concerns that the Internet and social media have had deleterious effects upon political communication. We still live in the present age. Ultimately, Kierkegaard is less concerned with explaining the origins of the present age, and more concerned with developing an exit strategy. How can one jolt citizens out of the mode of public reasoning, and into ethical and religious existence, spheres of life that afford the passionate ideals that unite communities? Kierkegaard brusquely rejects the idea that a more systematic political philosophy is necessary for this task: “Instead of all these hypotheses about the origin of the state, etc., we should be more occupied with the question: given an established order, how can new points of departure be created religiously?”63 Kierkegaard recommends silence and suffering as points of departure, and his second authorship would make a major theme of the imitation of the suffering Christ.64 However, by example, Kierkegaard shows how poetry, literature, and literary criticism create points of departure as well. A Story of Everyday Life might show us our reflection in Dalmund or Ferdinand. Although Kierkegaard at times adopts an apocalyptic tone, the situation is far from hopeless: For the younger person, however firmly he adheres to what he admires as excellent, who realizes from the beginning that leveling is what the selfish individual and the selfish generation meant for evil, but what can also be the point of departure for the highest life, especially for the individual who in honesty before God wills it—for him it will be genuinely educative to live in an age of leveling. In the highest sense contemporaneity will develop him religiously as well as esthetically and intellectually, because the comic will come to be radically evident. For it is extremely comic to see the particular individual classed under the infinite abstraction.65

Kierkegaard sees a silver lining. The present age cannot appear serious to those who honestly desire to live ethically or religiously.

56 

R. WYLLIE

Notes 1. Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer I-XI, eds. P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–48), VII, A 84, n.d. 1847. Hereafter “Pap.” 2. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age, trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 103. Hereafter Two Ages. 3. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5–42, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essay (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 6. 4. It is also the twilight of the “theocentric” (early) nineteenth century. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. 1, trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 16. 5. Pap. IX, B 63, n.d. 1848. 6. See William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2003), 206; Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 345. 7. The doctrine is summed up in the Hegelian motto, “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.” G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.  B. Nisbet, ed. Allan Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20. 8. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V.  Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 70. 9. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 412. 10. Bruce Kirmmse, “Kierkegaard and 1848,” History of European Ideas 20.3 (1995): 173. 11. For this definition of political rationalism, see Peter J.  Steinberger, “Rationalism in Politics,” American Political Science Review 109.4 (2015): 750–763. 12. Oakeshott calls these traditions sufficient “to persuade but not to prove.” Michael Oakeshott, “Political Discourse,” pp.  70–95, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essay (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 80. 13. Steinberger argues that Oakeshott’s approach is “profoundly consistent” with the broad ‘post-Kantian’ sense of political rationalism he defends: a “conception of human reason understood as a socially located process of rational reconstruction.” Peter J.  Steinberger, “Rationalism in Politics,” American Political Science Review 109.4 (2015): 750–763, 759. 14. Baruch Spinoza, The Collected Works of Baruch Spinoza, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

57

15. Chantal Mouffe, whom I take to be a representative agonist, bucks the “rationalistic framework” by arguing that that politics is a matter of “collective passions” mobilized against adversaries. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 60 and 102–3. 16. Later, Habermas would seek new grounds for political rationalism, leading him to develop his theory of communicative action in the 1970s. Habermas also regarded this communicative domain as a fragile one, soon to be coopted by managed opinion and manufactured publicity. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 46–47, 48, and 56. 17. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 246–248. 18. Historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the origin of human rights discourse should be located in these reading publics. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 19. The early Habermas offers the most famous articulation of a critical concept of the public sphere that at least guarantees rationality in principle. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 238. 20. Two Ages, 9. 21. Kierkegaard’s motivations are a little more complex. He wishes to offer a superior criticism of the work than the authorial preface in order to defend the author, as a man experienced with the mud of the street is crestfallen to see “a young girl” unsuccessfully avoid being splashed by a carriage (ibid., 60). Thomasine Gyllembourg, the “young girl” in this case, is the mother of Kierkegaard’s rival P. A. Heiberg, to whom he sent two copies of his glowing review as well as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in order to provoke a response. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 358. 22. Two Ages, 30. 23. Two Ages, 7 and 20. 24. Two Ages, 47. 25. Two Ages, 52. 26. Two Ages, 75. 27. Leo Strauss suggests that Kierkegaard’s popularity in this period had to do with a crisis of faith in liberal democracy. Kierkegaard was not only popular among right-wing figures; Karl Jaspers, notably, appealed to him as well. Peter Gordon has recently emphasized the importance of Kierkegaard to Theodor Adorno. Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas

58 

R. WYLLIE

Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 39. Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–36. See also Allan Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner: A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the German-­speaking World,” International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two Ages, ed. Robert L.  Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1984); Heiko Schulz, “A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,” Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Northern and Western Europe, ed. Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), 346–47. 28. Two Ages, 79. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 62. 29. Two Ages, 81 and 84. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 119. 30. Two Ages, 72. 31. See Gordon D. Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001), 18. 32. Kierkegaard’s nemesis N. F. S. Grundtvig, who led a revival of the Danish church that embraced liberal politics, was a leading abolitionist. Nigel Hatton, “Justice the Carribean: Transfer Day and the Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass and Søren Kierkegaard,” conference paper presented at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference, 31 August 2017. For Kierkegaard’s influence on Wright, King, and West, see the respective entries by Jennifer Veninga, Hatton, and Marcia C. Robinson in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Socio-Political Thought, ed. Jon Stewart (London: Ashgate, 2011) 33. MacIntyre sharply criticizes Kierkegaard’s concept of a “criterionless choice” of taking up an ethical life. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, third edition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 41–45. For a nuanced defense of Kierkegaard that insists the choice of the ethical is telic, but which admits some force of MacIntyre’s critique, see Gordon D. Marino, “The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics,” Kierkegaardiana 18 (1996): 49–64. 34. A similar lament can be found in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 12ff. and 110. 35. Two Ages, 105. 36. Kierkegaard’s journals evince a hatred of the press that can verge on the conspiracy. For example, he claims that the press governs by intellectually spiritually “buttering up” the middle class. Pap. X, A 690, n.d. 1850; Pap. VII, A 134, n.d. 1847. 37. Two Ages, 103. 38. Two Ages, 77–78. 39. Two Ages, 77.

4  KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 

59

40. Two Ages, 81. 41. M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 119. 42. The image is basically Augustinian. See Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 25. 43. Two Ages, 62. 44. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R.  W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 77. 45. Two Ages, 63 and 21. 46. Two Ages, 89. 47. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 43. 48. Kierkegaard describes “two changed persons who in a new misunderstanding continue their association, each as the accuser of another, instead of each one accusing himself and finding understanding.” Two Ages, 7. Like Vico’s “barbarism of reflection,” the terminal phase of the cycle of regimes in The New Science, Kierkegaard describes citizens trapped in reflection as enervated, weak, and egotistical. Although Kierkegaard is describing a nineteenth-­century historical phenomenon, the rise of the press public sphere, some basic contours of this critique of political rationalism are a century older. See Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 1106; Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 104. 49. Two Ages, 82. 50. Two Ages, 81. 51. Two Ages, 89. 52. Two Ages, 103. 53. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 135. 54. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5–42, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essay (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 20. 55. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 275 n32. 56. Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 354. 57. Two Ages, 40. 58. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 145. 59. Two Ages, 103.

60 

R. WYLLIE

60. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 146n. Ironically, Descartes accused his own opponents of envy, claiming that this was their only motivation to doubt his method. René Descartes, Letter to Dinet, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 387–388. 61. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), Ch. 4. 62. See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “Modernity, Mass Society, and the Media,” pp.  23–61, in The Corsair Affair, International Kierkegaard Commentary 13, ed. Robert L.  Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990), 49–56. 63. Søren Kierkegaard, Pap. X, A 72, n.d. 1851. 64. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 98 and 109. 65. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 88.

CHAPTER 5

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello Justin D. Garrison

For I have sworn upon the alter of god, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. —Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1082. If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled! —Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Inc., 1989), 95.

What is the meaning of reason and its relationship to American democracy? Since the beginning of the United States itself, Thomas Jefferson has been celebrated by many political leaders, scholars, and average people as a figure who defines the highest American ideals. Statements from Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama can serve as representative examples of this understanding of Jefferson. In July of 1987, Reagan announces his

J. D. Garrison (*) Roanoke College, Salem, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_5

61

62 

J. D. GARRISON

program for an Economic Bill of Rights. While encouraging Americans to pursue his vision of economic progress, he says the last words of John Adams, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” are factually false but symbolically true. Reagan argues that throughout their history Americans have committed themselves to Jefferson’s dream of “keeping this a land of liberty and justice for all [ensuring] that this country remains a bastion of freedom, the last best hope for mankind.”1 Almost thirty years later, Barack Obama frames his 2016 White House Science Fair as continuing an American tradition of support for science and progress. He says Jefferson, like many of his fellow Framers, is a child “of the enlightenment.” By this he means that Jefferson and those like him “had come of age when all the old dogmas were being challenged. And they had this incredible faith, this belief in the human mind, and our ability to figure stuff out.”2 In the American political tradition, it is not possible to think seriously about topics such as equality, rights, limited government, reason, science, democracy, and progress without becoming aware of the fundamental ways in which Jefferson sets the tone for valuing and imagining them. When considering Jefferson’s legacy, Reagan seems to have it right when he said, “we’re still Jefferson’s children.”3 At the same time, these words from Reagan and Obama already hint at some dimensions of Jefferson’s way of thinking that will be explored below. Obama uses the phrase “incredible faith” to describe Jefferson’s commitment to scientific reasoning. Reagan’s words “last best hope for mankind,” which he borrows from another Jefferson admirer, Abraham Lincoln, are a prophetic statement about the fundamental meaning of the American political experiment in democracy. To examine these and other components of Jefferson’s political thought, and thereby to see what reason and democracy might ultimately mean for the United States, this chapter will draw upon the insights of one of the greatest modern critics of reason and democracy—Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s view of reason could be the most radical in this volume. Thinkers treated in other chapters tend to argue modern rationalists have incomplete understandings of reason that could be improved if other things, for example, history or tradition, were taken into account. For both modern rationalists and such critics, disagreement is usually over how best to reason; the idea that reason of some kind or another can locate objective truth does not seem to be in dispute. As will be shown below, Nietzsche sees truth itself as a value and therefore rejects the notion that value-free, that is, disinterested reasoning is possible.

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

63

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes his way of thinking as philosophizing with a hammer. By sounding out idols contemporary and eternal, he wonders which ones will begin to fall apart, giving him “as a reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails.”4 With Nietzsche’s hammer in hand, the American idol of rational democracy will be struck “as with a tuning fork.”5 The vibrations from this hammer blow will show that for Nietzsche, Jefferson’s sense of reason, and the concepts of morality, equality, democracy, and progress it articulates, sings Christianity in a different key. Because he is repackaging rather than repudiating the “old dogmas,” Nietzsche would see Jefferson’s rationalism and the vision of politics it generates as a manifestation of the paramount crisis of modernity—nihilism.

The Oracle of Reason Jefferson sees a real relationship between reason and Christianity. In a letter to Benjamin Rush he explains, “I am a Christian, in the only sense [Jesus] wished any one to be.”6 His Christianity is a contrast with and improvement over the pervasive ignorance, superstition, and oppression generated by historical or “Platonic Christianity.”7 For Jefferson, Plato is a “Sophist” who creates “mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind” and hence cannot pass “the test of reason.”8 Jefferson believes that Plato, like other metaphysical charlatans, would have been consigned to the ash heap of history had it not been for a particular stroke of good luck centuries after his death. Jefferson claims Jesus’s early followers are “the most unlettered & ignorant men.”9 In Jefferson’s mind, a few centuries after the historical events of Jesus’s life, Christian clergy realize they will be displaced unless they can convince the masses that the truth about Christianity is far too complicated for the average person to discern without guidance. Enter Plato in an omophorion. Jefferson writes, “the Christian priesthood … saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it’s [sic] indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power and pre-eminence.”10 The institutional church creates a variety of complex and unnecessary dogmas not to edify but to fog the minds of believers and tyrannize over them. According to Jefferson, reason can discern the truth about all of reality when it is freed from the constraints of “monkish ignorance.”11 Thus it has

64 

J. D. GARRISON

the power to transcend the limitations of Platonic Christianity, allowing individuals finally to decide spiritual questions for themselves. In a letter to Peter Carr, Jefferson explains reason “is the only oracle given you by heaven.” To discover his personal religious convictions, Jefferson encourages Carr to “shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.”12 As Jefferson states, Carr will be accountable to God only for the “uprightness” of his use of reason and not the “rightness” of his conclusions.13 This will be so because reasoning is an exercise in disinterested investigation. When reason errs, it makes honest and correctable mistakes of logic, method, data collection, or interpretation of materials. When used rightly, reason leads to the truth, whatever it may be, that should be accepted by all other rational beings. Following his own advice, Jefferson argues reason demonstrates the true Jesus is the definitive moral instructor in human history. On his telling, Jesus’s rational message builds upon the insights of ancient philosophy and Judaism. Jesus improves the human understanding of God to reflect “the principles of a pure deism,” brings the common human code of ethics up to “the standard of reason, justice & philosophy,” and reaffirms, on the basis of these revisions, the “belief of a future state.”14 In morality, the most significant progress Jesus makes over all previous religious and philosophical systems is “inculcating universal philanthropy … to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love, charity, peace, common wants and common aids.”15 Using reason to interpret the evidence he derives from his senses, Jefferson feels he successfully defends his “creed of materialism” against the rival claims of supernaturalists.16 Like Jefferson, Nietzsche sees a very close connection between Christianity and Plato, calling the former “Platonism for ‘the people.’”17 Nietzsche agrees with Jefferson that Christianity is taken in a bad direction in its distant past, but he goes even further than Jefferson when he locates the demise of the religion at its beginning, specifically in the preaching of St. Paul. Such similarities notwithstanding, Nietzsche would be critical of Jefferson’s conception of reason. Jefferson believes a difference between traditional Christianity and a rational Jesus truly exists and that the latter can be extracted from the former. For Nietzsche, what Jefferson wants to do under the guidance of reason is not possible. In Twilight of the Idols he writes, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

65

self-evident.”18 Christianity is a complete system; to reject any particular part, even on allegedly rational grounds, shatters the whole. Further, Nietzsche would object to Jefferson using the language of reason to make Christian morality synonymous with morality as such. Moralities based on principles different from and incompatible with Christianity are not only possible but have historically existed. In the first essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains Christian morality is neither natural nor universal. It is the historical culmination of a reaction of the base character against an older set of morals practiced by the noble or aristocratic person. Driven by hatred for the nobles, what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, the lower type in aristocratic society becomes creative. Desiring to remake the world so it testifies to the universal truth and goodness of their weakness, those consumed with ressentiment take “imaginary revenge” upon their oppressors and launch a moral rebellion by creating new values.19 Ressentiment and will to power lurk underneath the Christian moral revaluation that creates ostensibly loving values such as equality, humility, compassion, other-worldliness, and asceticism. What counts as good is simply the opposite of noble morality. Unlike Jefferson then, Nietzsche sees Christian morality as a historical creation serving the interests of a specific kind of person. It is not a discovery of universal values by dispassionate reason. As will be shown below, Nietzsche also finds the substance of this new moral orientation particularly disturbing. In addition to criticizing Jefferson’s confusion on the relationship between rational morals and Christian morals, Nietzsche would conclude Jefferson does not know what he is doing when he is reasoning. Nietzsche believes all claims to truth are determined by the perspective of the person making the claim. Thus he is often described as a “perspectivist” whose method of interpretation is “perspectivism.”20 In The Gay Science, he writes, “the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.”21 What specifically determines a person’s perspective? In a word, his or her values. For Nietzsche, all people either create or adopt values. Those values filter in what a person accepts as objective and true, and they filter out what one sees as subjective and false. There are many areas of life where such a claim causes little trouble for most people. For example, everyone has had a conversation about a song, a novel, or a movie in which friends disagree about its meaning. Sometimes someone insists upon the truth of his or her interpretation, becoming angry when challenged or criticized, but most people in these circumstances can live with the existence of multiple points of view.

66 

J. D. GARRISON

Perhaps shockingly to some, Nietzsche extends comfort with ­subjectivity and multiplicity in discussions of the beautiful to those of the good and the true. In Beyond Good and Evil, he argues most philosophers claim to discern the truth about something through the exercise of “cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic.”22 In reality, the intellectual productions of an allegedly value-neutral reason are justifications of pre-existing desires. Nietzsche even rejects what most modern people take as the only truth available—truth generated by the modern natural sciences. He claims, “We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science ‘without presuppositions.’”23 There is no position of interpretive privilege, no dispassionate realm a person can enter into and see things as they “really are.”24 Nietzsche never separates the question of value from the question “for whom?” If no value-free perspective is available, then there can be no universal truths binding upon all peoples in all situations, places, or times. One set of values may be good for a person or people in a given set of circumstances, but those same commitments would be dangerous or destructive for a different person or people. As these comments about perspectivism suggest, Nietzsche’s way of thinking is rather different from those of his predecessors, especially those in the traditions of ancient and modern rationalism. Because he focuses on multiplicity, subjectivity, and becoming, he is skeptical, even contemptuous, of philosophies and religions that emphasize unity, objectivity, and being.25 With this in mind, one can see more clearly what Nietzsche would find inadequate in Jefferson’s kind of reason. First, Jefferson sees reason as an objective truth-finding faculty when it is really a subjective value-defending faculty. Second, Jefferson’s misunderstanding of what reason is and what it does inclines him to believe reason’s truths oblige all. The presence of these errors in Jefferson’s account of morals has been addressed above. When examining other elements of what Jefferson’s reason takes as true and authoritative, Nietzsche’s likely criticisms become more intense.

What the Oracle Says About the Human Person and Politics For Jefferson, reason is also essential to understanding the human person and politics. Reason shows the abstract individual is equal to all others, rational, industrious, charitable, and naturally virtuous. This is especially true of farmers, whom Jefferson’s thinks may be “the chosen people of

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

67

God.”26 In politics, reason points directly and exclusively at democracy. If a sufficient mass of rational people is allowed to govern itself on the bases of equality and popular participation, little can go wrong. He explains, “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man … that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.”27 Historically, it is these views that justify the claims in the Declaration of Independence that human equality, natural rights, and the right to majoritarian self-­government are self-evident truths, that is, the fruits of reason unencumbered by “the laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry.”28 Since 1776, American practice has proven “the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human affairs and that the will of the majority, the Natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.”29 With this confidence, Jefferson exhorts others to “for ever [sic] bow down to the general reason of the society.”30 Reason explains egalitarian democracy is the only form of government capable of providing for full human flourishing. Such claims about human nature, the purpose of politics, and the foundations of political legitimacy are obvious truths available to all who will but use their reason. Jefferson’s zealous defense of the people and democracy makes it difficult for him to be charitable toward those who do not share his views. His deep and uninterrupted loathing of Alexander Hamilton is well known, as is his deep but temporary rift with John Adams. Hamilton, Adams, and others of similar mind tend to have more reverence than Jefferson for the wisdom of tradition and the teachings of history. They are also more skeptical of claims regarding human reason and natural goodness. To Jefferson, those who hold such different views are not good people with bad ideas. They are members of a heretical sect, “monocrats” who have been seduced by “the glittering of crowns & coronets.”31 Americans who have more favorable opinions of Britain than France, especially in the 1790s, are also heretics as well as part of an “Anglican monarchical, & aristocratical party” who have “had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”32 In a letter, he counsels his friend John Taylor to persevere in the midst of the sufferings inflicted upon the American people by the Adams administration. He writes, “a little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over us, their spells dissolve.”33 Nietzsche sees the Christian values described in the previous section of this chapter, especially compassion and equality, as the foundation for various modern political movements, including democracy.34 In the Genealogy, he has a “free spirit” of his time say about this seemingly odd situation “it is the church, and not its poison, that repels us. — Apart from

68 

J. D. GARRISON

the church, we, too, love the poison. —”35 Elsewhere he states, “the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.”36 Whereas Jefferson sees reason making a much-needed break with oppressive traditional religious convictions, Nietzsche would interpret his claims about rational democracy as an articulation of political morality for the base herd of humanity. Jefferson’s democracy of reason is a politicized Christianity unaware of its Christian paternity. For this reason, Nietzsche would end up finding more sinister undercurrents in Jefferson’s vision. In a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra titled “On The Tarantulas,” Nietzsche locates commitments to equality, so prevalent in Jefferson’s mind, in a deeper desire for revenge. The tarantulas scream, “what justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge … We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not.”37 For Nietzsche, this vengeance pretending to equality is directed against any people who possess and display unusual talents beyond the reach of most ordinary individuals. In politics, this requires leaders to avoid speaking and acting on the basis of individual authority and superior competence. To prevent political disenfranchisement and social ostracism, leaders of genuine merit are coerced into pandering, branding themselves as citizen-politicians, servants of the people, and instruments of the popular will. This insight might shed some light upon the motivations behind Jefferson’s populist rhetoric of appealing to the common man. At the same time, even though Jefferson is often at the pinnacle of power, tremendous, “tarantula” bitterness is on display when he characterizes his opponents. In Jefferson’s democracy of reason, there still is room for angels and demons. Underneath vows to provide and defend equality, freedom, other natural rights, and self-government, Nietzsche sees democracies driven by the spirit of ressentiment. Reason is what gives Jefferson his hope for democracy’s future. In a letter to Roger Weightman he predicts the following: All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.38

He believes he and his fellow Framers have played a pivotal role in this historical drama. He encourages those who, like him, cherish the freedom

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

69

to think and publish to defend these liberties when they come under attack, becoming martyrs if necessary.39 Even in the midst of spectacular suffering, Jefferson’s optimism about the power of reason and the inevitability of global democracy is not shaken. He believes the violent turn of the French Revolution in the early 1790s is truly lamentable, but instead of seeing it fail in its efforts to achieve equality, freedom, and democracy, “I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than as it now is.”40 Jefferson never repudiates his conviction that violence suffered or committed in the pursuit of democracy can be justified to the degree that it ultimately redeems the world. Beyond his contempt for the regime itself, Nietzsche would find Jefferson’s frequent and fervent predictions about the future of democracy and reason concerning rather than inspiring. Again, there is equivalence between Jefferson’s thinking and the older Christian tradition Jefferson thinks he has progressed beyond. Most Christians believe if they act according to godly values, repenting and asking for God’s forgiveness when they fall short, they will inherit the kingdom of heaven. This world to come is the “true” world for Christians. It is beautiful and desirable because it is free from the suffering, injustice, change, and decay that define the false, “apparent” world in which people live.41 Over time, Nietzsche claims, belief in the true world of Christianity has become incredible. Even as belief in God declines, the disappointment with earthly life Christianity generates remains with many people.42 As noted above, Jefferson makes it clear that belief in a future state of rewards is an essential component of a rational system of ethics. When this idea is interpreted through the lens of his predictions of a democratic future, it becomes clear that the future state he has in mind is not found in some realm radically separated from this world, as is the case with traditional Christianity, but is instead located in this world, one that is supposed to be politically, rationally, and spiritually transformed by human hands. His prophesies about democracy refer to an immanent rather than transcendent paradise. With this eschatological orientation, it is easier to see why his enemies are heretics and why those who die trying to save the world for democracy are martyrs. The endurance of otherworldly thinking in Jefferson’s mind would trouble Nietzsche because the tension between this world and the next generated by Christian values is a central component in the irruption of nihilism. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche explains, “A nihilist is a man who

70 

J. D. GARRISON

judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it does not exist.”43 Such a judgment about these two worlds is made when the actual experience of living leads a person to conclude his or her values cannot be realized. Rather than discarding the values in question, the world itself is demoted to a contemptible location for a life that cannot end soon enough. Jefferson’s thought agrees at least with the first half of this definition of a nihilist. As far as he is concerned, the world most certainly is not how it should be. Although there are hints that Jefferson occasionally loses confidence in a future of reason and democracy, he does not seem to have fallen into the type of despair Nietzsche associates with fully formed nihilism. It is true there are many substantive differences between Jefferson and Christianity on the end of history. Here it is enough to note that for Nietzsche, Jefferson’s belief in a rational democratic apocalypse and a Christian’s belief in the Second Coming amount to the same life-denying thing.

What the Oracle Is One might wonder why a person or a nation would live according to ideas where ressentiment and hatred of the world underpin seemingly cheerful statements about the progress of reason and democracy. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche spends a great deal of time analyzing the meaning of what he calls ascetic ideals. In the most general sense, an ascetic ideal is something one holds forth as a goal for which tremendous sacrifices will be made. Especially in Christianity, the ascetic ideal is powerful because it gives the weak, the “whole herd of the ill-constituted, disgruntled, underprivileged, unfortunate, and all who suffer of themselves,” a meaning in life that calls forth action and staves off suicide.44 Thus, the change from noble to base morality is not merely an act of revenge. It is an expression of the instinct for existence. Even though the ascetic ideal is nihilistic, it is still a manifestation of will to power. For Nietzsche, then, the appeal of such a notion, at least for the weak personality, is not hard to understand. He writes, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”45 Nietzsche’s assessment of the meaning and appeal of the ascetic ideal further clarifies his perspectivism. He claims the ascetic ideal does not necessarily decline along with the demise of Christianity. He writes, “from the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem arises: that of the value of truth.”46 Lingering faith in the Christian value of the truth has allowed the ascetic ideal to shape the modern reason and science that rejects the dogmatic beliefs of Christianity. How else do

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

71

modern sciences, guided by reason, understand themselves except as committed to revealing the truth about the world that has been obscured or suppressed by religious authorities? Jefferson sees modern political thought, also guided by reason, as pursuing a different part of this broader project of liberation from the backward past. Thus, for Nietzsche, Jefferson’s political rationalism would also be an expression of the will to truth. It would also be a carrier of the ascetic ideal. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche invokes his perspectival method and explains “the more eyes, different eyes” one uses when examining a given topic “the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’ be.”47 Following this advice, this chapter has considered various aspects of Jefferson’s political thought. For Nietzsche, it would be clear that Jefferson does not derive his most deeply held views from the exercise of some kind of objective rationality. In valuing reason, truth, equality, and democracy, Jefferson is offering an “interested” interpretation rather than a disinterested description of existence. Applying Nietzsche’s tools, wielding his hammer, has also illuminated the darker places of Jefferson’s thought where resonances with ressentiment, ascetic ideals, and nihilism are found. Nietzsche would not be interested in answering a question like “Is Jefferson’s political rationalism good or bad?” That is the kind of thinking Nietzsche’s perspectivism tries to avoid. When the Nietzschean “for whom?” is recalled, it is clear that Jefferson’s democracy of reason is good for, that is, has worked for, the same people who have thrived under other forms of the ascetic ideal—the weak. Politically speaking, Jefferson’s kind of democracy is the one best equipped, at least for a time, to perpetuate their survival. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche states, “If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.”48 Something like Jefferson’s democratic rationalism has been a “why” for the masses in American democracy for some time. It is at the heart of U.S. continental expansion, economic progress, technological innovation, and global militarism. But, since such a perspective ultimately culminates in nihilism, what might Americans need to consider when the political equivalent of the death of God begins?

Overcoming the Oracle? At the time of writing this chapter, Jefferson’s reputation in the minds of Americans seems to be deteriorating. Mainly as a result of his status as a slave owner, calls have been issued to remove his name and statues of him

72 

J. D. GARRISON

from various places. His home county of Albemarle no longer officially celebrates his birthday. While there is nothing wrong with providing an interpretation of Jefferson that accounts for the abhorrent aspects of his life, one wonders if the ambition to erase Jefferson and other historical figures from the American past also suggests faith in the American democracy of reason is collapsing.49 Nietzsche would not be surprised if it is. If Jefferson’s vision of reason and democracy is Christianity in a different key, then America’s disintegration is a political chapter in the civilization implosion Nietzsche describes as emanating from the death of God. In The Gay Science, a madman declares “God is dead … and we have killed him.”50 His atheistic audience is indifferent to this revelation. After all, cannot the relevant political institutions and moral commandments survive without the religion that gave birth to them? Nietzsche’s answer, discussed in a different context above, is “no.” From his point of view, then, the institutions and norms of American life cannot continue in the absence of America’s democratic faith. What to make of the possibility of such an American future? For Nietzsche, things are not likely to get better for those who belong to the base majority of people. Especially among such people, suicides, drug addiction, poverty, and despair are rising. Civic engagement, meaningful employment, confidence in institutions, genuine love of country, and hope for the future are in very short supply. Although Nietzsche is no advocate for Christianity, he recognizes that most people need something like it because such a structure is the only means by which they can survive. He writes, “the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.”51 Without the commanding presence of faith in reason and self-government, the base masses will be at sea and likely look to more radical and even violent political and social formations to channel their ressentiment. With this in mind, those who advocate for the dismantling of the values that have sustained America, those who, in other words, want to smash the idol they despise, are as smug and naïve as the atheists in Nietzsche’s aphorism. If there is any hope for most Americans, it probably lies in rejuvenating a god who can save them. For those few who have the potential to command, and such people are Nietzsche’s primary audience, there might be a different and genuine hope. The environment that degrades the masses is also one that can “give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

73

quality.”52 Nietzsche gives such people no new values, no new method of abstract reasoning. To do so would invalidate his project. Instead, he seeks to inspire others to undertake responsibility for the adventure of creating distinct lives. It is to those “who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome,” that Nietzsche provides the advice to seek life’s greatest joy in living dangerously.53 How will such dangerous people know when they are giving “style to one’s character”?54 In The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks whether or not the reader could bear the possibility that his or her life, exactly as it had been lived, would recur with “every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life.”55 The goal for the free spirit is to construct a life that will enable him or her to say “yes” to this prospect, to what Nietzsche calls the eternal recurrence.56 In the contemporary American context, the people capable of and willing to experience the exhilarations and sufferings of real freedom and independence must first overcome faith in the democracy of reason. For those who can, Nietzsche would say it is time to pick up the hammers, leave Monticello, and create lives “in the horizon of the infinite.”57

Notes 1. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing America’s Economic Bill of Rights, July 3, 1987,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan: 1987 (In Two Books), Book I—January 1 to July 3, 1987 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1989), 744. 2. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the White House Science Fair, April 13, 2016,” accessed July 22, 2019, https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/13/remarks-president-whitehouse-science-fair 3. Reagan, “Remarks Announcing America’s Economic Bill of Rights, July 3, 1987,” 740. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 465. 5. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 466. 6. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1122. 7. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1813,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1302.

74 

J. D. GARRISON

8. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1341; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Short, October 31, 1819,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1430. 9. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1124. 10. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1124; Jefferson “Letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814,” 1342. 11. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Roger C.  Weightman, June 24, 1826,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1517. 12. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 904. 13. Jefferson, “Letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787,” 902. 14. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Joseph Priestley, Apr. 9, 1803,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1121. 15. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1125. 16. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1443. 17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1989), 2. 18. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 515. 19. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 36. 20. There are several interpretations of Nietzsche’s perspectivism in the scholarship. Deleuze and Nehamas understand it as a component of the broader aesthetic project that is Nietzsche’s philosophy. On their views, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and its relationship to the creation of values, is consistent throughout his writings. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) and Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985). Clark and Leiter interpret Nietzsche’s perspectivism as part of a developing notion of truth in his philosophy that culminates in his affirming the truth of sense experience and empirical reasoning in his last publications. See Maudmarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990) and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015). 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1974), 336.

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

75

22. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 12. 23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 281. 24. Disagreement over the meaning of such statements about modern science exemplifies the differences between Deleuze and Nehamas on the one hand, and Leiter and Clark on the other. For example, Deleuze interprets such claims as representative of Nietzsche’s consistent view and writes, “What [Nietzsche] attacks in science is precisely the scientific mania for seeking balances, the utilitarianism and egalitarianism proper to science. This is why his whole critique operates on three levels; against logical identity, against mathematical equality and against physical equilibrium.” Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, 45. In contrast, Clark draws upon her privileging of Twilight of the Idols and Antichrist and argues, “[These works] contain no hint of the view that human truths, science, logic, mathematics, or causality falsify reality. Instead, they exhibit a uniform and unambiguous respect for facts, the senses, and science.” Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 105. 25. About this part of Nietzsche’s thought, Deleuze explains, “Pluralism is the properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy; the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of a violent atheism.” Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, 4. 26. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D.  Peterson (New York: The Viking Press Inc., 1975), 217. 27. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Diodati, August 3, 1789,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D.  Peterson (New York: The Viking Press Inc., 1975), 444. 28. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D.  Peterson (New York: The Viking Press Inc., 1975), 578. 29. Thomas Jefferson, “Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12, 1790,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D.  Peterson (New York: The Viking Press Inc., 1975), 259–60. 30. Jefferson, “Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12, 1790,” 260. 31. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to George Mason, Feb. 4, 1791,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 972; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, Dec. 28, 1794,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1015. 32. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Philip Mazzei, Apr. 24, 1796,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1036, 1037.

76 

J. D. GARRISON

33. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1050. 34. Detwiler elaborates upon this relationship and Nietzsche’s interpretation of its meaning when he argues, “[Nietzsche] might argue that contemporary Christianity (with its emphasis on compassion and love of humanity), contemporary liberalism (with its emphasis on toleration), and democracy (with its emphasis on equality) are all in important respects nihilistic to the core. They are all the products of a skeptical, relativistic age that accepts everyone and everything without distinction because it has strong convictions about nothing.” Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 71. 35. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 36. 36. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 116. 37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 212. 38. Jefferson, “Letter to Roger C.  Weightman, June 24, 1826,” 1517. Jefferson makes a similar statement a quarter of a century earlier when he writes, “I join with you in the hope and belief that they will see, from our example, that a free government is of all others the most energetic; that the inquiry which has been excited among the mass of mankind by our revolution & it’s [sic] consequences, will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe.” See Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Dickinson, Mar. 6, 1801,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1084–1085. 39. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1065–1066. 40. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Short, Jan. 3, 1793,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1004. 41. About Nietzsche’s sense of the world Nehamas states, “the ultimate nature of the world is to have no orderly structure: in itself the world is chaos, with no laws, no reason, and no purpose.” Rather than driving people to despair, this insight should inspire them to create values by which to live. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life and Literature, 42–43. 42. Reginster explains, “As Nietzsche himself recognizes, nihilism is a pressing problem for those who are still in the grip of this [Christian] worldview, in so far as they believe, for example, that without the hope for another life this one has no meaning.” As this chapter shows, a person can be in the “grip” of such a vision without being an orthodox Christian. Bernard

5  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 

77

Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 8. 43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc., 1967), 318. 44. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 120. 45. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 163. See also Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 12–14. 46. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 153. 47. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 119. Such a statement from Nietzsche is where Clark’s and Leiter’s interpretations of his perspectivism start to take shape. For example, Leiter writes, “It bears emphasizing that there is nothing in the optical analog Nietzsche invokes … that requires him to deny the existence or possibility of objective knowledge: after all, GM III: 12 is, itself, a passage about the right way to think of both ‘knowing’ and ‘objectivity,’ not a repudiation of either.” Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 219. Clark goes further and claims, “a philosopher can oppose the ascetic ideal only by commending an opposed ideal to universal attention. Otherwise, the philosopher will still be working in the service of the ascetic ideal.” Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 201–202. These interpretations seem grounded in pre-existing beliefs in truth and the perpetual but incremental progress of science that are difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s thought. Perhaps Nehamas has the best response to this peculiar line of interpretation. He states, “Nietzsche [is] not interested in providing a theory of truth.” Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life and Literature, 55. 48. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 468. 49. About the death of God, Detwiler writes, “Modern man no longer believes in God, but he is oblivious to the untoward consequences of his disbelief. He does not see that his irreligion will gradually dissolve the horizon, the moral firmament of ideas and aspirations, that has made possible all that is worthy in the Western world.” This insight is worth considering as more and more evidence points to the decline of America’s democratic faith. See Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Rationalism, 72. 50. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181. 51. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 289. 52. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 176. 53. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 228. 54. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 232. 55. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 273–274. 56. The mercilessness of the eternal recurrence is one reason Nietzsche thinks few people will be capable of living as “free spirits.” Reginster elaborates

78 

J. D. GARRISON

upon the relationship between revaluation and the eternal recurrence when he argues, “This is a demanding ideal, which is presumably achieved only rarely. But it is achievable in the first place only if I hold no lifenegating values, for if my life were assessed by the light of such values, it would necessarily leave something to be desired. This is why a revaluation of these values is a condition of the very possibility of the affirmation of life.” Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 227. 57. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 180.

CHAPTER 6

“Pagans, Christians, Poets” Corey Abel

In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T.S. Eliot was at least as learned as people say, but he was not half so dogmatic as many critics take him to be. Let me start with one notorious example: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” You have heard it even if you have never read Eliot’s prose. Everyone quotes it. Few quote what follows: “I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily leads itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.”1 I would like to notice Eliot’s peculiar decision to use flawed terms of self-description, and his tactic of distancing himself from them by very rough qualifications. Although Eliot could indeed “sound deceptively magisterial,”2 this strategy of undercutting his own gestures of extremism is visible in much of his social and literary criticism.3 Eliot’s thrust and retreat rhetoric reveals a deep “philosophical caution,”4 and ties in to his “political modesty and self-restraint.”5 Against Scott and others, I will argue that this modesty

C. Abel (*) Independent Scholar, Denver, CO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_6

79

80 

C. ABEL

and self-restraint is visible even in what Scott calls Eliot’s most “exclusionary” and even “pathological”6 work, After Strange Gods, as well as in his early criticism. I will limit this essay primarily to The Sacred Wood and After Strange Gods, and focus on Eliot’s view of tradition. Classicism, royalism, and anglo-catholicism are tropes of a dramatic stand against romantic sentimentalism, mass-society-as-democracy, and secularism or “paganism.”7 Eliot, however, was a modernist. By this I do not intend to join debates in literary criticism, but rather name Eliot’s broad sensibilities. He repeatedly insists both that he is not undertaking the impossible task of bringing back the past, and that all new cultural creation must be a recreation and reinterpretation of the past, not merely a repetition of it. There is no “reaction,” though there is much dissatisfaction with modernity, meaning the wide-ranging changes that reshaped life in Western nations from about 1600 to the present. Tradition underlies Eliot’s literary criticism, his social criticism, and his view of religion and heresy. Tradition is the key to understanding how the deliberately controversial terms—classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic—could illuminate Eliot’s “own mind,” and possibly ours. While it is mistaken, I think, to call Eliot “reactionary,”8 he seriously rethinks modernity’s relation to the past. However, despite the provocations of his self-description, ce n’est pas une querelle. Eliot was not an ideologue. He did not find the coherence of life in the rationalistic “consistency” of a doctrine. The unfortunate tendency of critics is to assume that Eliot had a Christian ideology, that he had a “program.” He had no such thing. Eliot had decided views, but they hang together as a sensibility, as a “consistent style or disposition of thought,” rather than a “settled doctrine.”9 This makes him hard to pin down in “formulated phrases” as we moderns like to do. It also gives his mind a suppleness that the ideologue can neither understand nor enjoy. Tradition enfolds Eliot’s classicism, royalism and anglo-catholicism, and most radical of all, perhaps, reveals the operation of a “catholic” “sensibility.” In The Sacred Wood, tradition is invoked for the sake of educating critical sensibilities, including, especially, assessing the value of poets and poems. Indirectly, it is also tied to the process of poetic creation, though he maintains that a writer gains nothing and likely loses, by trying self-­ consciously to write as a “classicist.”10 Poetic creation comes not from the self-conscious pursuit of an ideal, but from the assimilation of a culture, which is then revealed in one’s writing. The Sacred Wood, Eliot’s earliest volume of criticism, opens with his assent to Arnold’s view of the weakness of the Romantics. In Arnold’s

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

81

blunt phrase, they “did not know enough.”11 This relates to the issue of erudition, which I will touch upon later. Eliot takes up Arnold’s notion of the “current of ideas,” which runs stronger and deeper in certain eras, to defend the cause of “second order” minds. He is careful to point out that “second rate” would be too derogatory. The second-order minds are crucial to Eliot’s view of tradition as a continuous stream of living ideas and images, a close, almost familial proximity of persons and the works they produce. The second-order mind is one piece of Eliot’s larger attack on the cult of Genius. There is no communication from mountaintop to mountaintop, as in so many defenses of the “canon” of “Great Books.” While the phrase “minds of the second order” emerges in the immediate context of criticism, the larger context is Eliot’s undermining of the simple separation of critical and creative activity. The unity—not identity—of critical and creative activity is an important part of the larger theme of the unity of tradition and Eliot’s sense that not only has “sensibility” been dissociated, so that “we find serious poets who are afraid of acquiring wit lest they lose their intensity,”12 but society at large is dangerously specialized.13 Eliot’s ability to see tradition as a living whole, and the combination of critical and creative energies in his own sensibility, allow him to make nuanced judgments on what we might call “second level” poets. For example, he says of Marvell, that “There is an equipoise, a balance and proportion of tones, which, while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of Dryden or Milton, extorts an approval which these poets do not receive from us, and bestows a pleasure at least different in kind from many they can often give. It is what makes Marvel, in the best sense, a classic.”14 This passage illuminates Eliot’s idea that “the main current does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.”15 Eliot’s judgment of Marvel is multi-faceted—his level, the approval he extorts (a Spinozan assent would be more felicitous), the pleasure he gives, and his status as a classic, drawn less from his “level” than the richness and balance of feeling in his work. Later I will also notice the catholicity of Eliot’s literary judgments in relation to his views on orthodoxy. I would like now to take up these three issues—the living character of tradition, the unity of criticism and creation, and Eliot’s evaluations and judgments—in order to explore Eliot’s view of tradition in greater detail. Tradition involves “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence…a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [one’s] own

82 

C. ABEL

country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”16 Presence, whole, and simultaneous strike me as far more important words here than “order.” Eliot calls the “historical sense” of tradition “a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together.”17 If the historical sense is a sense of the timeless, we cannot agree with Shusterman’s claim that Eliot has a “hermeneutic historicism and pluralism,” which “points to the inexorable change of beliefs, aims, methods, vocabularies, and standards over the course of time.”18 Eliot’s position is closer to Bradley’s idealism, or perhaps to Plato’s view of the temporal as a “moving image of the eternal” than to historicism. Eliot the poet must live “in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past,” and be “conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”19 There is a curious inversion here. The writer lives in “the present moment of the past”—he lives in the past, but in a present moment “there.” The figure brings home the two-sidedness of our conformity with tradition—it also conforms to us: “The existing monuments form an ideal order…which is modified by the introduction of the new…work of art…the past [is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.”20 If the poet is conscious of “what is already living” in the “present moment of the past,” a vital connection exists that may be either maintained or lost. We become aware of “items” of a tradition when “they have begun to fall into desuetude,” like autumn leaves falling off a tree. “The sound tree,” Eliot says, “will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put to the axe.”21 This is a vivid image of Eliot’s modernism. He warns against “clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to re-establish one, of confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the sentimental.” A related danger is “to associate the traditional with the immovable.”22 Present, whole, timeless and temporal, living, real, and movable—these are the characteristics of tradition, of what he calls “the habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’.”23 Eliot cannot not mean by “habit,” “place,” or “people” quite what is commonly meant. He supplements the stereotypic picture of the old couple on the porch surrounded by obedient progeny with enlivening details: the grandson is reading Lawrence or Baudelaire; in the background is a new Corvette: it is grandma’s.

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

83

I shall return to the grandson when I take up the third broad theme— Eliot’s catholicity of judgment. Now I would like to point out that in poetry, at least, Eliot sees the “obedient progeny,” as under their own compulsion—there being no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own—and not the rod of hierarchical discipline. As he says in The Sacred Wood, the poet is judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics…And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test…which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.24

There is a sense in which tradition means a discipline—standards, rigor, and tests. But Eliot shows here that he is not concerned to legislate and rank—it is not that simple, and that is not the real issue. From the poet’s standpoint, a tradition provides buoyancy. One floats on a current of ideas; without it, one may still walk down the dry riverbed, which is both taxing and unpleasant. Tradition, for the artist, is the gift of form. Eliot writes, “no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and perfect it too.”25 The point is that a form is much more than the techniques of poetry. “The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling.”26 Eliot tauntingly points out that where there is form in this sense there can be many good poets, not because talent flourishes, but because less talent is wasted. We become aware of “how little each poet had to do.”27 Not the way we usually think of the classics: Giants on the shoulders of dwarves. Eliot’s argument makes sense, and may be more palatable if we apply it to a more neutral sphere. A climber visiting an unfamiliar crag will have a harder time finding his way to the crag’s base because he does not know the terrain. He may also be unfamiliar with the type of rock, and may be out-­performed by a “lesser” local. How much worse if he finds himself in the wasteland of a “formless age”! There will not even be anything to climb. For a poet with a tradition, his creative activity will involve a dialogue, though not necessarily a conscious, deliberate one, with that tradition. Eliot says that the poet’s mind is the site of a “concentration of diverse experiences into ‘a new thing’.”28 The “concentration” of experience in the poet’s mind leads to the well-trodden terrain of the “impersonal”

84 

C. ABEL

theory of poetry. Much has been made of Eliot’s comments on the “extinction of personality,” but little of the fact that Eliot’s psychology rests on the emotions and on the unification of thought and feeling. What he is against is the “perpetual heresy” of celebrating the emotional and personal aspect of the creative genius of the “Great Man.”29 Eliot writes that in contrast to the “sentimental person, in whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions [which are] accidents of personal association…in an artist these suggestions…which are purely personal, become fused with a multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and the result is the production of a new object, which is no longer purely personal.”30 The undesirable thing is what is “purely personal.” I think Eliot is on the mark. Why should I care if a man in a four-piece suit took a stroll in the slums? Yet how could there have been any “burnt-out ends of smoky days,” or any “visions of the street as the street hardly understands” if he had not? The street does not understand. A constant temptation exists to focus on the fact of Eliot’s having walked the back streets and to confuse these with “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent.” In fact, he may never have gone down such a street. Very few people, Eliot says, understand “when there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the life of the poet.”31 Again, “the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The [ordinary man] falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking.” This is in contrast to poets who “feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”32 I am not sure how many ordinary men read Spinoza and type while the cooking is on. I do know, however, that the “dissociation of sensibility,” the severance of thought from feeling, is at the root of the modern “heresy” of personal expression, genius, and “individualism.”33 When we have come to a point at which we can speak of “two cultures” we have, I think Eliot would say, no culture. Eliot rejects firmly the myth of the artist’s alienation and the retreat of the poet into a “dream world,”34 and spurns the merely sentimental attachment to tradition.35 Eliot encourages learning, though not “erudition.” The poet, far from retreating into a culture defined in terms of emotion or sentiment or “the humanistic,” should embrace as wide a range of learning as he can digest. “The possible interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests; our only

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

85

condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on them poetically.”36 In discussing the “wit” of Marvell, Eliot shows the connection between deep and intimate learning within a defined, that is not to say fixed, tradition, and the poetic transmutation of emotion. Wit is “a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace.” It allows Marvell to “play with a fancy”; it “is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination”; it gives a “bright, hard precision,” to the expression of emotions in his poem “Nymph and Fawn,” which, though “slight” in theme has the “suggestiveness of true poetry…the aura around a bright clear center.”37 Wit is neither erudition nor cynicism. It has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an educated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with ­cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience. It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.38

The richness in generations of experience, the recognition of other kinds of experience, and the constant criticism of experience all bring us to the third major issue: Eliot’s evaluations and judgments of writers, and his views on heresy, blasphemy, and the “intrusion of the diabolical into modern literature.”39 After Strange Gods is presented as an attempt to apply “moral principles to literature quite explicitly.”40 Although The Sacred Wood had claimed that aesthetic enjoyment is “an experience different in kind from any experience not of art,”41 it also argued that tradition implies the inseparability of artworks from the modes of thinking, feeling, and perceiving of specific cultures. The application of a conscious criticism (orthodoxy) to the feelings and habits of a culture (tradition) is only a partly new direction in Eliot’s thinking. Eliot’s orthodoxy is qualified by a modernist, even vaguely liberal claim that “tradition by itself is not enough; it must be perpetually criticized and brought up to date under the supervision of what I call orthodoxy.”42 Earlier, the critical element was conceived as within tradition itself, but there was the same duality. The critical element applied to the creation and evaluation of artworks in a more strictly aesthetic sense, but not exclusively. The sensibilities of poets, their wit or lack of it, spoke to their grasp of human reality. For example, Shakespeare

86 

C. ABEL

“shows his lovers,” in Romeo and Juliet, “melting into incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the process of forgetting itself.”43 It is easy to peg Eliot’s Christianity at 1927. This “watershedding” of Eliot’s career may lead us not to see the religious at work in the earlier literary criticism—his engagement with Dante is early— and perhaps also to exaggerate the religiosity, the Christianity, of the later work. In After Strange Gods, we find an extended exercise in thrust and retreat rhetoric. Its Preface seems to promise an orgy of inquisitorial judgment. What we get is a curiously liberal definition of orthodoxy. What we get is a well-developed sensibility and catholicity of taste. Eliot’s concern in After Strange Gods is heresy as it applies to modern literature. He identifies Lawrence as “an almost perfect example of the heretic,” and Joyce as “the most ethically orthodox” writer of the time.44 What grounds the judgment is that in Lawrence’s “The Shadow in the Rose Garden,” the characters, “who are supposed to be recognizably human beings…betray no respect for, or even awareness of, moral obligations, and seem to be unfurnished with even the most commonplace kind of conscience.”45 Interestingly, Eliot identifies the lack in Lawrence. However, with Joyce, he does not identify what is present in “The Dead” that would make it orthodox. He provides a two-third-page summary that includes a paragraph of quotation from what Eliot takes to be the key moment in the story.46 The characters’ concern with conscience and obligation may be assumed, since this is what Eliot found lacking in Lawrence, but Eliot’s method here seems to say that the “orthodox” is best shown, exemplified rather than stated in terms of abstract rules. This withdrawal seems significant, especially if it is paired with a key statement on orthodoxy in writers and a discussion of the dangers of the cult of genius for readers, which come before his discussing the stories: I do not take orthodoxy to mean that there is a narrow path laid down for every writer to follow. Even in the stricter discipline of the Church, we hardly expect every theologian to succeed in being orthodox in every particular, for it is not a sum of theologians, but the Church itself, in which orthodoxy resides. In my sense of the term, perfect orthodoxy in the individual artist is not always necessary or even desirable.47

This passage shows Eliot to be cautioning against the application of any rigid “rules.” We are reminded that the point of traditional criticism is to “judge,” but not to “amputate” a poet. This passage also looks forward to

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

87

Eliot’s qualified recuperation of the great heretic, Lawrence, as well as his praise, here and in two essays on Baudelaire. The next thing to notice is that Eliot hopes a “right tradition” will not stifle creativity, but “keep eccentricity to manageable limits.” The danger, in a formless age in which “personality” is celebrated as an end in itself, is that readers might “cherish the author of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.”48 Earlier he had deplored the error of “eccentricity in poetry [of seeking] for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.”49 Eliot notes that it is “fatally easy” in modern times “for a writer of genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah.”50 Although this may sound outlandish, we have only to think of Hegel, or much more darkly, of the political messianism of Hitler and others in the twentieth century, or more bizarrely, a full page ad in The Rocky Mountain News (some years ago before it went out of business), taken by the leader of the Moonies, declaring that during “a special ceremony… in the spirit world” the leaders of five major world religions and four communist countries had declared and upheld by oath that Moon is the Messiah and the “True Parent” of all humankind. Eliot worries about the possibility of a pagan revival or of strange gods being adopted in the West, as Irving Babbitt had delved into Buddhism, and developed a humanism that was meant to stand independently of Christian religion. Eliot was not opposed to other traditions, nor a purist about his Christianity. He has reasons for declining exotic spiritual invitations. Language, sentiment, and categories of thought make it unlikely that a European can absorb Buddhism except “through romantic misunderstanding.” Pace, Boulder, CO, and other centers of easy-going spirituality. He notes that after two years of study “in the mazes of Pantanjali’s metaphysics” he failed to gain real purchase. Eliot goes on to criticize the shallowness of Pound’s Hell, Yeats’ search for a personal religion, and others. Some would characterize Eliot as “exclusionary” and narrow-minded here.51 It may seem that he is abusing non-Western cultures, and even the heterodoxy of Pound’s medievalism. What I think he is doing is disabusing Westerners of the idea that taking up a religion is a simple thing: a mere choice. Eliot confesses, “I am willing to believe that Chinese civilization at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem crude.”52 Yet, Eliot goes on to say that he doubts he could come to understand Chinese civilization well enough “to make Confucius a mainstay.”53

88 

C. ABEL

We should attend to the humility here as well as the seriousness: a man intimate with the Western tradition, and knowledgeable of Indian philosophy, and the findings of modern anthropology declares his limits. This is not a dismissal. Eliot’s idea of tradition has a depressing effect on modern sensibilities. In a time when many people assume that “the mere accumulation of ‘experiences,’ including literary and intellectual experiences as well as amorous and picaresque ones, is—like the accumulation of money—valuable in itself,”54 it is hard not to feel limited by the seriousness with which Eliot points out that to understand Buddhism takes generations. Just as we are more limited by not knowing a language, and just as we would be unashamed to seek expert instruction in a new sport and submit to its discipline, we cannot avoid the disciplines and grammars of our culture. As mastery of a language opens up means of expression, greater knowledge within the “confines” of tradition enlarges the very self we would express. With two examples of Eliot’s catholicity—his judgments of Lawrence and Baudelaire—I would like to conclude this essay. We have seen Eliot call Lawrence the exemplar of heresy. However, Eliot returns to Lawrence, after dicing his way through the thicket of strange gods appearing in his generation, and makes some positive remarks. I do not say praise; the comments are too tepid. While Lawrence’s vision is said to be “spiritual, but spiritually sick,” he is acknowledged at least to be awakening people, albeit irresponsibly, to the spiritual. This irresponsibility is a grave matter, but to be capable of good and evil is, for Eliot, a sign of life. In connection with Baudelaire, he says that the glory of man is in both his “capacity for salvation” and his “capacity for damnation.”55 Eliot ends one paragraph deploring the barbarous sexuality of Lawrence’s novels by calling him “a very sick man indeed.” We come back to the grandson on the porch. Eliot’s next paragraph opens: “There is, I believe, a great deal to be learned from Lawrence.” The catch: how well has the grandson been initiated into the tradition? The sentence finishes, “though those who are most capable of exercising the judgment necessary to extract the lesson, may not be those who are most in need of it.”56 Perhaps the boy should read Baudelaire instead. Eliot fears that Lawrence, who has a limited but positive value as a critic of the modern world and as a proponent of Life, will appeal not to what is healthy in readers, but to what is “sick and debile and confused.”

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

89

Eliot is not fearful of Baudelaire having a bad effect. He describes him as a Christian because “the notion of Original Sin came spontaneously to him; and the need for prayer,” and because he “came to attain the greatest, the most difficult, of the Christian virtues…humility.”57 In a longer piece, Eliot expands on this idea, noting that Baudelaire fell short of a clear, positive account of the Good, but achieved a redemptive awareness of Sin and the need to overcome it. “The recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation—of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some significance to living.”58 There is a startling negativity in this view of Christianity. Eliot makes merely the recognition of Sin sufficient for—or identical with— “New Life.”

A Concluding Venture A Baudelairean Christianity is, of course, far from the whole picture. If we examined Eliot’s later writing on a Christian society, we would see a somewhat more positive account of Christianity and culture. His “idea of a Christian society” does suffer from a Rationalistic bent toward orthodoxy in the very sense he rejects. However, we would also see less the operation of a dogmatist, or even apologist, than a searcher for a religious sensibility. At times Eliot so thoroughly mediates art, culture, and religion that one asks whether he loved art or religion more. But this is Puritanical distrust of images. Eliot knew how Dante’s Commedia mapped on to human experience. The intense appreciation of art, which early on and sometimes later resembles Arnold or Pater, becomes that supreme catholicity which makes room for much that is outside the Book.

Notes 1. Eliot, T.S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., Inc., 1929, pp. vii–viii. (FLA) Russell Kirk, in a speech to The Heritage Foundation, mentions the second qualification, and goes onto say, “The Conservative Party of England was not nearly conservative enough for T.S.  Eliot.” Kirk, “The Politics of T.S. Eliot,” Lecture Number One Hundred Eighty Two, February Ninth, 1989, and http:/www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk182.html

90 

C. ABEL

2. Kearns, Cleo McNelly, “Religion, Literature, and Society in the Work of T.S.  Eliot,” in The Cambridge Companion to T.S.  Eliot, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 77–93. (CCTSE) p. 80. 3. Eliot’s warning against the “temptation to legislate,” surely applies to himself; he is saved only by his skepticism and catholicity of taste. See, Eliot, The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays, Mineola, New York: Dover Pub., Inc., 1998, p.  7. (SW) Cf., Eliot, T.S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy: The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1933, p. 27, fn. 1. (ASG) In the text, Eliot rejects the confinement of taste to the simple categories Romantic and Classical: “For instance: two of my own favorite authors are Sir Thomas Mallory and Racine.” 4. Kearns, CCTSE, p. 83. 5. Scott, Peter Dale, “The Social Critic and His Discontents,” in CCTSE, pp. 60–76. p. 73. 6. Scott, CCTSE, p. 62, passim, 68. 7. Eliot regretted the errant rhetoric of the Preface of For Lancelot Andrewes. In After Strange Gods, he calls his former statement “injudicious. It may suggest that the three subjects are of equal importance to me, which is not so; it may suggest that I accept all three beliefs on the same grounds, which is not so; and it may suggest that I believe they all hang or fall together, which would be the most serious misunderstanding of all.” ASG, pp. 27–8. The irony of Eliot’s having just said something far more injudicious than “classicist, royalist, anglo-catholic” is not to be missed. Because of the inevitable scandal attached to ASG, I feel compelled to say something about the single most notorious phrase in Eliot’s prose: “free-thinking Jews.” I can scarcely enter into this controversy here. Too briefly, I would only point out that the context makes clear that free-thinking is Eliot’s real concern. Of course, he might have said simply “free-thinkers” or he might have displayed another form of bigotry—free-thinking women, peasants, Poles, who knows—but did not. He expressed the form he had, and his recklessness is much to be regretted. I leave aside the poems. 8. Harrison, John, The Reactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic Intelligentsia, New York: Shocken Books, 1967. 9. Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics, Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991. Preface to the First Edition, 1962. 10. ASG, pp. 25–26. 11. SW, p. iv. 12. SW, “Andrew Marvell,” p. 111. 13. See, “Literature of Politics,” TCC, where Eliot worries about the too radical separation of speculative and literary thought from politics, and “Notes Toward the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture, New York:

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

91

Harcourt Brace, and Co., 1976, (CC) where Eliot argues against Mannheim’s idea of elites on grounds of their lack of social connection. 14. SW, “Andrew Marvel,” p.  110. (My edition is “SW and Major Early Essays.”) 15. SW, p. 29. 16. SW, p. 28. 17. SW, p. 28. 18. Shusterman, Richard, “Eliot as Philosopher,” CCTSE, pp. 40–41. This is not to say Eliot would not sympathize with Gadamer’s concern for the living connection to tradition that modern conditions have severed. Gadamer is too accepting of “critical history,” and tries to tame it by binding it to our practical present. Eliot, I think, strives to see the whole of human experience under the category of eternity. For an excellent study of Eliot’s relation to Bradley, which differs from Shusterman’s view, see Mallinson, Jane, T.S.  Eliot’s Interpretation of F.H.  Bradley, Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 2001. 19. SW, p. 28, p. 33. 20. SW, p. 28. Many critics seem to take the word “ideal” to have a normative force, but I think Bradley means something closer to “ideational.” Hence, it is not that we face a past invested with an automatic prescriptive claim; rather, we face a past that is structured in terms of our understanding, thus “notional.” One reason for denying Shusterman’s view is that Eliot did not devote his energies to theorizing the complexities of this relationship. He exhibited his understanding in his poetry and criticism, where a perfectly consistent theory is less important than standing ‘in the hard, Sophoclean light/ and tak[ing] your wounds from it gladly.’ 21. ASG, p.  18. A striking image, and possibly—this is a guess—a nod to Thomas Jefferson, founder of The University of Virginia, where the lectures were delivered, and who espoused the need for periodic revolution to renew the tree of liberty. 22. ASG, p. 18. 23. ASG, p. 18. 24. SW, p. 29. My italics. 25. SW, p. 35. 26. SW, p. 36. 27. SW, p. 36. Eliot’s italics. 28. Shusterman, I believe, is misled by Eliot’s use of the word “object,” and his sly praises of science, and so over-emphasizes Eliot’s debt to Russell. When Eliot speaks of this “new thing” or about the “object” that poetry creates and contemplates, he is speaking about emotional experiences, some the poet’s (as ‘the man’) and some observed in human experience. Poetry is “a presentation of thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of

92 

C. ABEL

events in human action or objects in the external world,” SW, 36. The “object” is connected with some human, emotional experience. Eliot retains a distinctly idealist stance when he writes that “in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,” SW, p. 127, and passim. It is true that Eliot uses the quasi-scientific language of detachment to describe the “objects” of poetry, but it remains the case that the object is seen in its clarity in order to be “transmuted” and brought into coherence with a body of systematically related experiences. “The true generalization is not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement of this structure; it is the development of sensibility,” SW, pp. 8–9. 29. SW, p. vi. 30. SW, p. 4. My italics. 31. SW, p. 33. Eliot’s italics. 32. SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 127. 33. Like Tocqueville, Eliot uses “individualism” for a specific—though different from Tocqueville’s—cultural and psycho-social malady, but certainly refuses to take up any “anti-individualist” stance that would submerge the individual in collective experience, or deny liberty. Eliot’s individualism comes through in lines like “only those who know what it means to have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things,” SW, p. 33. 34. SW, “Andrew Marvell,” pp. 108–109. 35. ASG, p. 19. 36. SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 128. 37. SW, pp. 102–108, passim. 38. SW, p. 111. 39. ASG, p. 56. 40. ASG, pp. 11–12. 41. SW, p. 31. 42. ASG, p. 62. Perpetual criticism is not what the word “orthodoxy” usually calls to mind. 43. SW, p. 47. 44. ASG, p. 38. What I mean by suggesting a liberality at work even in the midst of severe and unsparing judgments of Lawrence and others, is that Eliot was surely clever enough to see the ironies of placing Joyce, whose Ulysses was banned and censored, as the most orthodox writer of the time. That work, like Lawrence’s, was seen as obscene. 45. ASG, p. 37. 46. ASG, p. 37.

6  “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 

93

47. ASG, p. 32. We could think of Eliot’s “tradition/orthodoxy” as “spirit,” if we took the term simultaneously in the senses of the New Testament, Montesquieu, and a non-progressivist Hegel. The relation between the individual—writer, theologian, or plain man—and the civilization is quite close. For example, in “Andrew Marvell,” (SW, p. 101), Eliot progresses from defining the “perennial task of criticism” as “bringing the poet back to life,” to a different metaphor, of “squeezing some precious liquor” from a few poems, to finding that this “essence” is “a quality of civilization, of a traditional habit of life.” N.B. the progression: The poet, the works, the civilization—the corpse, the corpus, the spirit? 48. ASG, p. 33. 49. SW, p. 33. 50. ASG, p. 33. 51. Scott, CCTSE, pp. 62–69, passim. 52. ASG, p. 40. 53. It is in this context that we can make sense of his criticism of Babbitt’s humanism. It misses out on the “ancestral” and “cultivated” aspects of ­religion. These are at least as important as the doctrinal, and may be more so: “Is [Babbitt’s humanism], in the end, a view of life that will work by itself, or is it a derivative of religion which will work only for a short time in history, and only for a few highly cultivated persons like Mr. Babbitt— whose ancestral traditions, furthermore, are Christian, and who is, like any people, at the distance of a generation or so from definite Christian belief?” Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, p. 472. 54. ASG, p. 34. An analogy and not merely a swipe: Money is a means—so too, “experience” is the currency of meaning, but only if one pays the price. 55. SE, p. 344. 56. ASG, p. 61. 57. FLA, pp. 104–5. 58. SE, pp. 342–342.

CHAPTER 7

Wittgenstein on Rationalism Daniel John Sportiello

Introduction “Rationalism” is said in many ways.1 But if it is right to call Ludwig Wittgenstein a “critic of rationalism,” then “rationalism” refers to the thesis that there is a right way to say or do whatever we say or do—a way that we, with our reason, can discern. If this sounds vague, then it is only because Wittgenstein means to articulate an alternative that is quite radical: Wittgenstein insists that, in some sense, we are justified in nothing that we say or do—but also that this is okay, since the search for justifications is in some sense a confusion. Now, philosophy is often seen as a search for justifications—epistemology tells us how we ought to think, for example, while ethics tells us how we ought to act—and so it may seem that Wittgenstein means to criticize philosophy itself. But it is more accurate to say that, in his mature work, Wittgenstein hopes to initiate another way of doing philosophy—one that he compares to therapy: if philosophy done wrongly is the search for justifications, then philosophy done rightly is the revelation that this search is neurotic—that it originates, in other words, in anxieties that it cannot relieve. There may be a paradox somewhere in the vicinity. (If nothing that we say or do is wrong—at least in some sense—then how can it be wrong to

D. J. Sportiello (*) University of Mary, Bismarck, ND, USA © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_7

95

96 

D. J. SPORTIELLO

deny this?) But the more immediate issue is that Wittgenstein seems to be at odds with the entirety of the history of philosophy—and so he may seem to be entirely mad. In what follows, though, I’ll argue that he is entirely sane—indeed, that he reveals to us something crucial about ourselves.

Language-Games In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks us to consider some of the many ways in which we use language—ways that he calls “language-games”: Giving orders, and acting on them— Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements— Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)— Reporting an event— Speculating about the event— Forming and testing a hypothesis— Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams— Making up a story; and reading one— Acting in a play— Singing rounds— Guessing riddles— Cracking a joke; telling one— Solving a problem in applied arithmetic— Translating from one language into another— Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.2

Wittgenstein compares these various language-games to the various tools in a toolbox: “There is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.”3 This seems an apt metaphor for at least two reasons. First, the presence of each tool is justified only insofar as it meets one of our needs. Just so, each language-game is justified only insofar as it meets our needs. And, second, there is no sense in which the usefulness of any particular tool is reducible to the usefulness of any other. Just so, whether or not one language-game meets our needs has nothing to do with whether or not any other language-game does. This is not to say, of course, that there is no interchange among our various language-games:

7  WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 

97

The symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus… are, so to speak, suburbs of our language… Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.4

Different “neighborhoods” of our language—that is, different language-­ games—were “built”—that is, constructed or adopted—at different times. As such, their “streets”—that is, the rules that define them—were laid out with greater or lesser degrees of reflection. However, even the oldest neighborhoods are continually modified by “commerce” with—that is, conflict with or reinforcement by—other neighborhoods: How many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and command?—There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the things we call “signs,” “words,” “sentences.” And this diversity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-­ games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten.5

As our needs change, so do our tools and our neighborhoods—and, for that matter, our language-games. Wittgenstein offers mathematics as an example of a language-game that has changed in this way: “We can get a rough picture… from the changes in mathematics.”6 It seems that Wittgenstein suggests mathematics as a picture, however rough, of linguistic change because the history of mathematics is so transparent—indeed, is mirrored in the way in which we are taught mathematics. Calculus, for example, was an extension of analytic geometry, which was an extension of algebra, which was an extension of arithmetic; each, at its introduction, prompted the reinterpretation of existing mathematical practice. We experience these reinterpretations as we extend our understanding from arithmetic to algebra to analytic geometry to calculus; our final understanding of mathematics is as it is only because of the history—simultaneously ontogenetic and phylogenetic—that has wrought that understanding. In one way, the history of mathematics is like the history of any other language-game: its course was neither inevitable nor arbitrary. Just as chess could have developed without bishops—without any alteration of its other rules—mathematics could have developed differently: mathematicians could have ignored the calculus of Newton and Leibniz without changing

98 

D. J. SPORTIELLO

the rules of arithmetic, algebra, or analytic geometry. But just as there was a reason that chess developed with bishops—the game would have been less interesting without pieces that could move indefinitely far, but only diagonally—there were reasons that mathematics developed as it did: once one can represent geometrical constructions algebraically—that is, abstractly—an equally abstract way to compute their areas becomes profoundly useful. Without bishops, chess would have been less useful for entertainment— would have been, that is, less interesting. But things are not interesting or uninteresting in themselves: they are only interesting or uninteresting to us. Had we achieved only the intelligence of young children, chess would have developed to look rather more like checkers—without, that is, any differences among the pieces at all. Just so, were we pelagic like whales, any game played in merely two dimensions might have seemed hopelessly childish—rather as checkers does to us. It is the task of the philosopher, Wittgenstein suggests, to offer this kind of explanation—to explain how our language-games are by reference to how we are: What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; not curiosities, however, but facts that no one has doubted, which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.7

That almost all of us have ten fingers is such a remark on our natural history: that most of us count in decimal rather than binary is clearly not arbitrary, but it is also could have been different—had we been different. For all of its obviousness, however, the link between having ten fingers and counting in decimal has often been overlooked—as the millennia of numerological significance attributed to the number ten attests. Counting in binary would not, of course, have been dramatically different from counting in decimal: the decision of arithmetical base is mathematically arbitrary. Nonetheless, it might be that mathematics has the least arbitrary history of any of our language-games: for mathematics to be radically different—for addition not to be associative, for example—we would likely have to be so different that we would have trouble recognizing ourselves at all. In one way, Wittgenstein blurs the distinctions among language-games: mathematics, joking, and singing are not different in kind, insofar as they are all equally paradigmatic examples of language in use. In another way, however, Wittgenstein sharpens the distinctions among language-games:

7  WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 

99

mathematics, joking, and singing are different in kind, insofar as each is, well, a different language-game—one defined by rules peculiar to it alone. There is in this no contradiction: since our language-games are all equally paradigmatic examples of language in use, no language-game depends for its justification on others. Mathematics offers only a rough picture of linguistic change because certain extensions of mathematics—especially those initiated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, the teachers of Wittgenstein—are often taken to be justifications of previous mathematics. (It is as though we were not really sure that two and two make four until Peano articulated for us his axioms.) On the contrary, Wittgenstein insists, to articulate the grammar of any language is to offer a clarification, not a justification, of that language. Thus the “foundations” of mathematics are a clarification, not a justification, of mathematics: The mathematical problems of what is called foundations are no more the foundation of mathematics for us than the painted rock is the support of a painted tower.8

Mathematics is—like all of language—our construction: it has the rules that it does because we decided, consciously or not, that it would. Though our decisions were not arbitrary, they are only justified insofar as their product meets our needs: since mathematics was our construction, there is no other authority to whom to appeal. And whether or not arithmetic can be derived from some set of axioms is not relevant to whether arithmetic meets our needs.9

Rule-Following When playing a language-game, what makes certain moves right and others wrong? Why is it, for example, that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2” and not “3”? Well, one might respond, that is just what the rule of addition demands! Indeed—but who is to say that what we have been calling “addition,” the way we have been interpreting “+,” is not in fact schmaddition—a language-game quite like addition, except that the answer to “1 + 1” is, at least on this occasion, “3”? More generally, who is to say that any of our “mistakes” are not just the results of correctly following different rules—or that our “successes” are not just the results of incorrectly following different rules? Normativity seems to evaporate before our very eyes:

100 

D. J. SPORTIELLO

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule. The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.10

It may seem that what we need is a meta-rule that tells us how to play the relevant language-game: when you see “+,” the rule might go, interpret it as addition rather than schmaddition. Yet could one not interpret this new rule in more than one way? In response, we seem obliged to offer a meta-­ meta-­rule. Yet could not one interpret this new rule in more than one way? A vicious regress—one of our own creation—suddenly threatens us: That there is a misunderstanding here is shown by the mere fact that in this chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another lying behind it.11

If to follow a rule is to follow the meta-rule of how to follow that rule, then to follow the meta-rule would be to follow the meta-meta-rule of how to follow that meta-rule… and so on. Stepping back, it seems that there would be nothing that it is to follow a rule—nothing, in other words, that it would be to be right rather than wrong.12 This skeptical conclusion shows only, Wittgenstein suggests, that something has gone wrong: What we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it.”13

Normativity dissolved under the vicious regress of interpretations because the limitless interpretability of every rule showed that the difference between right and wrong was an illusion. But this hints at another solution to the vicious regress: “‘Following a rule’ is a practice.”14 Our words, including our mathematical words, operate according to rules—but these rules are not such that we can succeed or fail in discovering them. Rather, they are created by communal agreement: everyone insisting that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2” just is what makes it true that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2.” A word gets its meaning through its use—that is, through the way that we use it:

7  WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 

101

To think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow a rule “privately”; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing as following it.15

Publicity, Wittgenstein insists, is essential to normativity: normativity demands fallibility, while fallibility demands publicity. Language is therefore inevitably public: in language, as in morality, the only reason that distinguishing right from wrong matters is so that we might do justice, broadly speaking, to one another.

Forms of Life Of course, this insight runs the risk of profound misinterpretation—regarding both language and morality. True, we would have neither language nor morality were we not intrinsically social: alone, one cannot learn to speak—or, for that matter, to act—rightly. But this does not mean that, having learned to speak and to act rightly, one cannot talk to oneself—or, for that matter, do right by oneself. For to learn to speak and to act rightly is to rebuild within oneself the community that teaches one to speak and to act rightly. It is to make of oneself a multitude—to divide oneself into legislator and subject.16 Recall that, for Wittgenstein, everyone insisting that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2” just is what makes it true that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2.” One might conclude from this that nothing more than communal agreement distinguishes right from wrong—such that, alone, one can neither speak nor act rightly. This is not, of course, an especially robust sort of normativity. Indeed, it reduces the normative to the descriptive—to certain facts about how people in fact respond: “1 + 1 = 2” just means, if the reductionist is right, that “most agree, most of the time, that ‘1 + 1 = 2.’” But Wittgenstein is clear that this is not his doctrine: “So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?”—What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.17

It is possible—albeit not particularly likely—that everyone could one day make the same mistake, could decide for example that the answer to “1+ 1” is “3.” But this would still be a mistake: the answer to “1 + 1” would still be “2.”

102 

D. J. SPORTIELLO

Why is this? Well, our rules for arithmetic are deeply embedded in the language that we have created over our history. We could have created a very different language—one in which, somehow, the answer to “1 + 1” was “3”—but we have created this language, this form of life. And this form of life determines that the answer to “1 + 1” is not “3” but “2.” Language takes on a life of its own: we construct it, but then it constructs us. Of course, we can alter our language—including the mathematical aspects of our language. This is exactly what would happen if everyone began answering “3” to “1 + 1”—and continued to do so indefinitely. The paradox in this is merely apparent: It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agreement in judgments that is required for communication by means of language. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so.—It is one thing to describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results of measurement. But what we call “measuring” is in part determined by a certain constancy in results of measurement.18

Words mean what they do because of how we use them: “meter” has the meaning that it does because most of us agree, for most things, how many meters long those things are. I cannot change, by myself, on a whim, what “meter” means—but we can change, together, over time, what “meter” means: we need only start measuring in a different way. Just so, I cannot change, by myself, on a whim, what “+” means—but we can change, together, over time, what “+” means: we need only start adding in a different way. Again, it is doubtful that we—the species that we are, living in the world that we do—could start adding in a way as different as this. But the point is a general one: certainly many of our language-games that are at least somewhat open to revision—the best evidence of which is that we have in fact spent our history revising them.

Conclusion Particular thoughts and actions—that is, particular moves in particular language-games—are justified by the rules of those language-games. But those rules—that is, those language-games themselves—are justified only insofar as playing them meets our needs; certainly none of them must be justified by any of the others. In some cases, it seems, we had to play the

7  WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 

103

particular language-games that we did; in these cases, we can explain— though in no nontrivial sense justify—our playing of these particular language-­games by reference to our nature. In other cases, it seems, we did not have to play the particular language-games that we did; we could have chosen—and may yet choose—to play otherwise. Perhaps, over time, all of us will converge on a particular set of language-­ games—that is, on a particular form of life; presumably, this form of life would be explained—though only in a trivial sense justified—by the unchangeable aspects of our biology. In the meantime, though, it seems that we ought to agree with Wittgenstein that rationalism—that is, using mere reason to prove justified a particular form of life—is doomed to failure: “How am I able to follow a rule?”—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do.”19

Why, since it is doomed to failure, is rationalism so appealing? After all, Wittgenstein sometimes seems to identify the search for justifications with the entirety of the history of philosophy—and we have been doing philosophy for a while now! It is not obvious that Wittgenstein ever answers this question himself—but perhaps the answer was unsaid because it was so obvious: we search for justifications because we are afraid. We want to prove that our form of life will not change again—even though we know, on some level, that it will. And so we tell ourselves stories wherein we have at last gotten it right: we tell ourselves stories that guarantee that there won’t be any more scientific or political revolutions—even though we know, on some level, that there will be. Wittgenstein therefore seems right to compare his way of doing philosophy with therapy—for the alternative way of doing philosophy seems, when explained in this way, neurotic indeed. If there is anything to be said for the history of philosophy, then perhaps it is that it has been—at its best—always already therapeutic. Though they are often called “rationalists,” what else are Plato and Immanuel Kant trying to tell us but that there are inevitable limits on what doctrines we can prove justified? But perhaps this is a topic for another essay.

104 

D. J. SPORTIELLO

Notes 1. See my “Rationalism in Eric Voegelin,” in Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others, ed. Lee Trepanier and Eugene Callahan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 51–61. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), § 23. 3. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 11. 4. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 18. 5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 23. 6. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 23. 7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 415. 8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, revised edition, ed. G.  H. von Wright, R.  Rhees, and G.  E. M.  Anscombe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), § 7.16. 9. Mark Steiner points out that Wittgenstein—in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, a work philosophically continuous with his Investigations—is wrong to attack Gödel’s Theorem. For Gödel proved only that, within mathematics, a certain proposition is such that neither it nor its denial can be proven, but Wittgenstein apparently misinterpreted Gödel’s proof as somehow depending upon Gödel’s controversial interpretation of it—that, within mathematics, a certain proposition is true and nonetheless not provable; Wittgenstein insisted only that “truth” had no meaning in such a context—because it had no use. Ironically, Steiner notes, Gödel’s Theorem—stripped of Gödel’s own interpretation of it—is profoundly congenial to the doctrine of Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein insists that mathematics need not be derived from any foundation, while Gödel proved that mathematics cannot be derived from any foundation. See Mark Steiner, “Wittgenstein as His Own Worst Enemy: The Case of Gödel’s Theorem,” Philosophia Mathematica 9, no. 3 (2001): 257–279. 10. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 201. 11. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 201. 12. Obviously, my presentation of this paradox owes much to that of Saul A.  Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). It is less obvious to what extent my solution to the paradox is similar to his: Kripke is usually taken to offer a solution to the paradox—what is often called the “skeptical solution”—that is fairly unsubtle, but it seems to me that he might be interpreted more charitably than he usually is. 13. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 201. 14. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 202.

7  WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 

105

15. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 202. 16. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136–138. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 241. 18. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 242. 19. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 217.

Bibliography Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kripke, Saul A. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sportiello, Daniel John. 2018. Rationalism in Eric Voegelin. In Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others, ed. Trepanier Lee and Eugene Callahan, 51–61. Lanham: Lexington Books. Steiner, Mark. 2001. Wittgenstein as His Own Worst Enemy: The Case of Gödel’s Theorem. Philosophia Mathematica 9 (3): 257–279. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1983. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe, revised ed. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. and trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 8

Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity Jack Simmons

In the hands of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, phenomenology became a way of reflecting upon the rigor of philosophy and science. While Husserl aimed at adding rigor to philosophical investigation, Heidegger criticized scientific rationality for being overly reductionist and as having fallen under the sway of technology. In her book, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science, Trish Glazebrook suggests that we can read all of Heidegger’s philosophy as a critique of science.1 If we understand Heidegger as offering a Hegelian styled rejection of the reductionism of modern science, then the suggestion is fairly defensible (though Glazebrook does not herself see the need for the connection) and Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 helps illustrate this point. In the encounter between these two important German thinkers, Heidegger accused Cassirer and the neo-Kantians of carving up the world into domains designated by each of the natural sciences, and that each of the sciences should maintain authority on all matters concerning its domain. Heidegger then asks, “what still remains of

J. Simmons (*) Georgia Southern University, Savannah, GA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_8

107

108 

J. SIMMONS

philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided up under the sciences? It remains just knowledge of science, not of beings.”2 This observation neatly captures the essence of Heidegger’s critique of scientific reasoning. The sciences divide up the realms of the world among themselves. Each science addresses itself solely to those entities that appear within its realm, and understands those entities according to the parameters of the rational instruments it wields. Those entities must then appear according to the rubrics and parameters of the sciences that study them, and as such, these entities will manifest as objects of study: objects of physics, objects of biology, objects of chemistry and so on. As a result, the method of the modern natural sciences transforms all of the phenomenon of the world into objects of science and offers us revelations, calculations and assertions about those phenomenon, validated according to the limits of the science governing the domain into which the phenomenon are relegated. Science sees the world scientifically and Heidegger contends that this method of revealing the natural world conceals non-scientific ways in which the world might appear to us, ways that might represent a more authentic encounter with the world. To understand the implications of Heidegger’s accusation, we must understand his multi-layered criticism of science, and what might count as a more or less authentic encounter with the world. We begin with a fairly straight-forward characterization of the way in which objects change in accord with changes in science, to make a simple illustration of Heidegger’s point. We will then look more carefully at three modes of scientific reductionism and conclude with a brief description of the technological thinking that results from overly reductionist thinking.

The Appearance of Objects in Science After the work of Carolus Linnæus in the eighteenth Century, fauna appeared to zoologist within a fixed genus and species, a genus and species that would remain unchanged forever. And because of the similarities in physical appearance and method of reproduction, Linnæus placed humans in the same order as primates. Although the idea that species might change over time existed before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it was not until Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a framework for how species might change that we could begin to think of the evolution of species. Within

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

109

this new scientific theory, humans appeared to zoologists as a species in a long chain of evolutionary history. Changes in the accepted mode of scientific thinking result in a change in our understanding of objects (humans). Darwin’s theory moved humans into direct line with other animals and shifted the study from physical appearance and method of reproduction to genetically and environmentally determined phenotypical traits. These distinct interpretations of biological entities represent advances in biology, and as such, the natural sciences replace earlier explanations of entities with improved explanations. This is scientific progress, the constant transformation of entities in accord with the new discoveries and revelations. At Davos, Heidegger expressed concern that the methodological formalism of neo-Kantian theories of science had contributed to a ridged scientism that, since 1850, privileged mathematical–physical theory of knowledge as the unique paradigm for all human understanding.3 As Trish Glazebrook puts it, “natural science consists in the mathematical projection of nature.”4 So, where as humans appear to Linnæus as an unchanging species, and to Darwin as an evolving species, they are described in the Oxford Journal of Human Molecular Genetics as: “just 20,500 genes,”5 a code or information sequence that dates back millions of years and shared by countless other biological entities, including star fish and bananas. In 2005 the Human Genome Project, which had been working on isolating the human genome for 15 years, declared its task complete: A genome is an organism’s complete set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a chemical compound that contains the genetic instructions needed to develop and direct the activities of every organism…about 20,000 different BAC clones…contain the 3 billion pairs of bases of the human genome …the gene-containing portion of the genome is complete in nearly every functional way for the purposes of scientific research.6

In privileging math-based methodologies, humans appear to biology in discrete, measurable units of DNA. As per Thomas Kuhn, objects of scientific inquiry change according to the dominant scientific paradigm. Humans transition from being understood as a fixed, biological form, to evolving animals, to biochemical data.

110 

J. SIMMONS

Scientific Reductionism The method of the modern sciences reduces our understanding of the phenomenon in the world to ideal, quantifiable modalities, and it leaves philosophy with no purpose other than to furnish a theoretical groundwork for natural-scientific knowledge. These were both conclusions that Heidegger found unattractive, the first because it obscures the world and the second because it distracts philosophy from uncovering a more authentic relationship with the world. He placed the blame for the development of these math based methodologies on a reductionist approach that I will describe here in three moves: . Transcendental logic: atemporal science and atemporal objects. 1 2. Transcendental objects: objects as purely independent entities. 3. Causation and freedom.

Transcendental Logic Heidegger sees in natural science since 1850, an attempt to create a logic that transcends history and establishes an instrument for identifying ahistorical truth: objective truth. He points to the neo-Kantians for an interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that privileges modern scientific reasoning and relegates all other modes of thinking to the role of handmaiden to the mathematical-physical sciences.7 Where the neo-Kantians see Kant’s work primarily as epistemology, providing support for the formal-­methodological foundations of natural science, Heidegger views it as ontology: the study of the nature of being itself. I understood by neo-Kantianism that conception of the Critique of Pure Reason that explains the part of pure reason that leads up to the Transcendental Dialectic as a theory of knowledge with reference to natural science. For me, what matters is to show that what came to be extracted here as a theory of science was nonessential for Kant. Kant did not want to give any sort of theory of natural science, but rather wanted to point out the problematic of ontology.8

Heidegger sees in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, not an epistemology of natural science, but a metaphysics attempting to unravel the appearance

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

111

of objects. The problematic of ontology he references here is the problem of appearance itself, “is appearance [of objects] just a matter of fact that we state, or must the entire problem of reason be apprehended in such a way that we grasp from the beginning how appearance necessarily belongs to the nature of human beings?”9 When Heidegger speaks of grasping “from the beginning,” he means that we must understand how objects have appeared, from the beginning of philosophy to the present. As we saw with the appearance of humans in the history of biology, objects appear to us relative to their historical situation, and that situation includes the privileged methodologies for human understanding at that time. Setting aside the accuracy of Heidegger’s account of Kant’s purpose in the Critique, we see a striking similarity between Heidegger’s account of Kant and the Hegelian passage Heidegger twice includes in his much later work, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, “But science, in making its appearance, is an appearance itself.”10 Modern science governs the way objects and/or ideas appear to us, but modern science is itself an object/idea that appears within history, and appearance that evolves in accord with the same cultural pressures that apply to all human endeavors. Philosophers have long sought foundations for objective truth, so the neo-Kantians took Heidegger’s criticism as strange, and accused him of relativism.11 But like Hegel, Heidegger sees the effort of natural science to extract itself from history and recognize no authority other than its own methodology as a sort of vanity.12 It accomplishes this by portraying itself as an instrument of knowledge, an instrument that engages a transcendental epistemology, capable of independently deciding the validity of all truth claims. Following Hegel’s description in the Phenomenology of Spirt, Heidegger portrays this science as an appearance within history, and therefore subject to the scrutiny that its hopes to avoid: historical criticism. Natural scientific reasoning is itself part of the historical dialectic. It is not a value neutral tool for understanding reality, but is itself too an object of study in ontology, which we might now more accurately define as the study of the appearance of being. Heidegger sees in Kant’s effort to work out das Problem des Scheins (the problem of appearances, which may also be translated as the problem of illusions),13 a quasi-Hegelian approach to ontology that not only participates in the dialectic of philosophy but considers the appearance of objects, and their truth, as part of a grand historical narrative. The neo-Kantians reading of Kant offers an ahistorical epistemology that resolves the problem of how objects appear so that they may be studied according to the

112 

J. SIMMONS

standards of inquiry specific to each discipline. By ignoring its historical situatedness, the logic of the natural sciences engages in a mode of self-­ deception: imagining itself to be something that it is not. This self-­ deception is manifest in scientific empiricism. Scientific reasoning asserts ahistorical validity on the basis of its empirical testing, but the logical structure of hypothesis/experiment/observation/conclusion still places the idea first (hypothesis) and last (conclusion). The hypothesis/experiment structure of scientific reasoning places the idea before nature, such that the natural/objective world serves as a confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis.14 The observation/conclusion structure reconfigures the experimental event according to the parameters of human observation, which are themselves quite naturally governed by the historical conditions in which the observation occurs. So, not only does the scientific method fail to transcend its historical situatedness, it imitates Platonic idealism, in which nature is judged according to the extent to which it participates in an idea.15 Heidegger concludes that ancient idealism is built into the methodology of modern scientific reasoning, the idealism that its empiricism was designed to avoid. Despite its empirical credentials, modern science begins and ends with an idea. As such, it maintains a subjective metaphysics of representation: that the natural world manifests to science as an idea, or representation.

Transcendental Objects Heidegger argues that the special validity claimed by scientific reasoning is ultimately grounded upon the appearance of objects in nature. Scientific rationality remains indifferent to accusations of idealism by asserting the absolute certainty of objective reality: that the methodology of science allows objects to appear as they truly are, and therefore transcending historical prejudices. As such, natural science enjoys the luxury of ignoring Kant’s metaphysical das Problem des Scheins, which questions, why do objects appear as they do? But Heidegger suggests that das Problem des Scheins is an ancient one, and that scientific reasoning demonstrates a metaphysical naiveté in ignoring it. In Being and Time, Heidegger points to two ways in which objects appear: present at hand, as an object observed or studied, and ready to hand, an object used.16 So, the glasses sitting on my nose are ready-to-hand, as I use them to observe the picture on the wall, which appears present-at-hand.17 That an object may appear in these different fashions, speaks to our personal and historical relationship to

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

113

them. This is das Problem des Scheins, that objects do not simply appear in an “objective” or “true” form, but instead objectivity itself is a mode of appearance. Heidegger suggests that the appearance of objects has been the primary concern of philosophy since the pre-socratic philosophers, and that this concern persists in ancient and medieval thought. It was the scientific revolution, and Cartesian philosophy, that conditioned us to ignore das Problem des Scheins. Although the medieval “Schoolmen”18 took Das Problem des Scheins seriously, the problem is subtle and closely related to theological concerns, so when Descartes ignored the problem for the sake of establishing something firm and lasting in the sciences,19 this oversight was easily set aside and Descartes’ definition of the appearance of objects became the foundation for modern scientific reasoning. For Descartes, an object is defined as exhibiting extension. Heidegger calls this substantiality. The object demonstrates extension by appearing in three dimensions. Objects are “things which ‘are in need of no other entity,’”20 and therefore stand out as a thing possessing independent existence. Objects maintain a transcendental existence, independent of human activity. Hence, the truth of an object, revealed by science, transcends its historical situatedness. The difficulty with this notion of objective existence arises when Descartes asserts that “God is” and the “the world is.”21 Heidegger explains that Descartes applies the same conception of being to God and the world. Both are independent, transcendental entities. But Heidegger suggests that this is a mistake; they cannot be independent in the same way. God, as infinite and perfect, creator of all things, cannot exist in the same way in which objects of creation exist. This is the distinction that the Schoolmen took seriously, that Descartes evades.22 What is the nature of existence (of Being), such that God and objects exist? What does it mean for a created thing to exhibit independent existence? Why does a created thing reveal itself to us in a fashion distinct from its creator? Rather than address the question, Descartes suggests that the concept of extension itself is inaccessible to us, that it cannot be perceived.23 Heidegger accuses Kant of repeating the Cartesian error of extended being when he asserts that “Being is not a Real predicate.”24 In this way, both Descartes and Kant ignore das Problem des Scheins, the very question Kant raised. Operating on the Cartesian idea of an object, modern science takes that which is present-at-hand as the truth of being, and thereby repeats the error of Descartes and Kant: overlooking the problematic of the appearance of objects. Heidegger explains that,

114 

J. SIMMONS

the ontological grounds for defining the ‘world’ as res extensa have been made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains unclarified in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed off as something incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular substance.25

Heidegger distinguishes between “being” (the objective existence of objects) and “Being” (the event that unites the appearance of objects to humans). In scientific rationality, the concept of existence (Being) is reduced to the substantial properties of that which is present-at-hand, which assumes that being present-at-hand is the real mode of being. This assumption amplifies the equivocation regarding the use of the word “is” because God does not appear as present-at-hand, and it cannot account for the appearance of objects as ready-to-hand. Modern scientific reasoning would need separate definitions of “is” or existence, to explain that which is present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and God. Heidegger’s criticism is explained away simply enough by scientism. Scientific thinking is the process by which we consider objects (present-at-­ hand). The common characteristic of objects is extension. Therefore, objects are defined as having extension. When we turn our scientific attention to those entities that manifest as ready-to-hand, they become present-­ at-­hand, and because there is no evidence that the entity has changed under scientific scrutiny, we may assume that the qualities it demonstrates as an object present-at-hand, extension, persist when it is ready-to-hand. As to the question of God’s existence, natural scientific reasoning simply takes a pass. Kant reminds us that it is not so extraordinary that a science should demand and expect satisfactory answers to all the questions that may arise within its own sphere,26 and ignore those that are outside of it. Hence, we might interpret Kant to mean that if objects appear to the scientific method as present-at-hand, then the answers to scientific investigations should not require metaphysical solutions that exceed scientific reasoning and question other ways in which objects might appear, or why the objects appear as they do. This is more or less the position of scientism, the position Heidegger attributes to the neo-Kantians, though perhaps unfairly, but a position very much supported by the pragmatic success of the natural sciences since 1850.27 The remarkable results generated by the natural sciences make for a robust utilitarian argument in its favor. We may readily point to rolled

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

115

toilet paper, television and microwave ovens as proof of the efficacy of modern science, but Heidegger’s suspicion is difficult to dismiss because it references the foundations of scientific reasoning. Recall that Descartes himself opens his Meditations on First Philosophy with doubts regarding the foundations of the natural sciences, specifically, the question of whether or not objects truly exist, and if they do, whether or not they exist as we perceive them.28 For Descartes, the veracity of our perceptions requires God’s existence,29 which Heidegger sees as an acknowledgment that objects cannot exist independently. In his essay, On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger reminds us that the correspondence theory of truth upon which modern science is based is derived from the medieval proposition: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus; truth is the approximation of thing to intellect.30 But this medieval notion of intellect is a divine intellect, not a transcendental [human] ego. So where Kant defines truth as the conformity of objects to our perceptions, the medieval thinkers define truth as the conformity of objects to divine intellect.31 For the medieval thinker, it is the divine that establishes a creative order such that everything in the world appears as a unified whole that can be understood. Modern scientific rationality, proceeding from Descartes and Kant, eliminates God as an unnecessary encumbrance to modern science, which begs the question: how do we account for the unity of experience such that a proposition might meaningfully correspond to a thing? The unity of experience cannot be explained by the existence of independent objects. If their existence is, by definition, independent, then reducing science to the experience of independently existing objects leaves it unable to explain how those objects relate to one another or to us. Nor can the transcendental ego, provide the unity of experience necessary to ground modern science. Even Kant rejects the radical idealism, fearful that such a move would destroy the existence of things, but in so doing, admits that “the predicates [of external things] may be said to belong, not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representations.”32 Heidegger emphasizes Kant’s development of a metaphysics to account for the “appearances” of things, while accusing the neo-Kantian’s of ignoring Kant’s metaphysics and supporting a “mathematico-physical theory of knowledge,” which alone can only provide a knowledge of science, not of beings.33 By asserting a transcendental ego and a transcendental object, natural science creates a subjective metaphysics of representation, in which truth is expressed as a correspondence between a propositional representation

116 

J. SIMMONS

of an independent object and the independent object, without explaining how the correspondence of two unlike things expresses the truth of the natural world. In re-asserting Kant’s das Problem des Scheins, Heidegger reminds us of Hegel’s conclusion that science, having ignored the parousia [appearance] of the Absolute, violates most flagrantly that very claim of certainty which it pretends to meet.34

Causation and Freedom The final reductionist move we will consider here is the reduction of all causation to a single mode: the efficient cause. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle identified four types of causation: material cause, formal cause, final cause and efficient cause. The material cause suggests that what a thing is made of causes it to behave in a particular fashion. Similarly, Aristotle suggests that things behave according to the form that they take. The final cause references the telos of a thing: what is its end. So if we accept, along with Aristotle, that the human end is happiness, we can expect humans will generally behave so as to affect happiness. In modern science, these three causes are subsumed by the efficient cause: what Kant calls the mechanism of nature.35 A detailed account of how science manages this exceeds the parameters of this chapter, but this notion of causation vitiates human freedom. That is, if we understand every event (effect) as having a cause greater, and that cause must be greater than or equal to the event (effect), then we reduce all human behavior to causes that can be isolated and quantified.36 Kant acknowledges that the mechanism of nature leaves no room for human creativity or free will, because every action, including an act of will, would be the product of an identifiable cause, and the causal stream would go back ad  infinitum.37 All events (animal, vegetable and mineral) will be subject to a strict determinism, a determinism that traces its lineage back to the time of the big bang. To avoid this strict determinism while maintaining the logic of cause and effect, Kant posited rival conceptions of the world and our relationship to it: receptivity and spontaneity.38 Receptivity dictates that human perception conforms to external laws, and therefore we may rightly perceive in the world only the unbroken causality of nature.39 Accordingly, the human mind is merely receptive to what is given in our experience of the world, an experience that must conform to the determinism of cause and effect and leaves no room for freewill.40 The neo-Kantians define spontaneity as a productive understanding of the world, whereby humans

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

117

are free to impose upon the world the logic of the natural sciences and thereby capable of altering the stream of causation by virtue of internal, logical reasoning.41 The two Kantian principles appear to be at odds, but Peter Gordon suggests that Kant, “brought these two concepts into a more harmonious relation,”42 as is demonstrated in Kant’s attention to ethical reasoning, wherein Kant argues that human freedom results from a transcendental ego, “conscious of his own existence…views his existence so far as it does not stand under temporal conditions, and to himself as determinable only by laws which he gives to himself through reason.”43 Under the conditions of receptivity we are bound by the logic of material determinism; under the conditions of spontaneity we are bound by transcendental, human logic. In contrast, Heidegger argues that by 1850, the neo-Kantian emphasis of spontaneity had bound science to a subjective metaphysics of representation that allows for neither freedom nor provides direct access to the natural world. Under the conditions of spontaneity, truth occurs within a debate about the scientific characterization of the world. The subjective metaphysics of representation reduces that world to the strict, math-based methods deployed in the natural sciences, methods that require every effect to fall neatly within the perfectly isolatable and quantifiable string of efficient causes. Hence, the neo-Kantian understanding of spontaneity reaffirms a strict determinism, rather than rescuing us from it. Heidegger’s reconsideration of spontaneity and receptivity offers a new conception of freedom and undermines the validity of the subjective metaphysics of representation. Heidegger emphasizes Kant’s receptivity, though in a form that Peter Gordon describes as transfigured beyond all recognition.44 Heidegger understands receptivity as a freedom that allows us to stand back from the world and see it in all its possibilities. To be receptive to the world means to experience the world historically, to find ourselves in a place and time, connected to every other place and time. In this encounter with what-is-­ in-totality, we experience possibility, the possibility that objects may manifest in different ways: that we may encounter divinity, the present-at-hand, the ready-to-hand, and so on, and that in the “letting-be” of the world, we come in contact with the possibility of a world, which is freedom itself.45 Thus, receptivity, allows for an experience of the world that transcends the limited experience offered by scientism: of objects present-at-hand.

118 

J. SIMMONS

Heidegger’s notion of freedom should be distinguished from both the common sense understanding of freedom, as “the random ability to do as we please” and the Kantian approach, “a mere readiness to do something requisite and necessary.”46 Freedom is not the possibility of this or that, whether random or logically determined, but rather the receptivity to and subsequent possibility of being-as-a-whole, that humans do not merely react to their experiences in the world, but experience the world as a world, as a unified whole that can be understood. In this possibility, the possibility of propositional, scientific truth arises. But as Kant’s das Problem das Scheins suggests, objects may appear as they are not. Heidegger calls this a semblance.47 That objects appear in the world, and that they may appear one way or another, is an expression of Being, what Gadamer calls the horizon, what Husserl calls the co-present margin, or what we might simply call: context. Truth is not, therefore, simply a correct proposition made by a human subject about an object, that is, the tree is an olive.48 This sort of propositional truth, attempts an approximation between two things unlike in kind: an object (the actually tree) and a statement that the tree is an olive. The nature of the approximation is determined by the kind of relationship obtaining between the statement and the thing.49 Hence, even the possibility of propositional truth, favored by scientific reasoning, requires the contextual truth that links objects in the world in a meaningful way, and allows for a meaningful relationship between language and those objects. Heidegger contends that this “relationship remains indeterminate and its nature unfathomed.”50 Heidegger describes this largely unfathomed indeterminate as Being, whose character is not identical to the sum of known actualities.51 On the contrary, it is just where few actualities are known or where they are known hardly at all by science or only very roughly, that the manifest character of what-is-in-totality can operate far more essentially than where the Known and always Knowable has become impossible to survey and can no longer resist the activity of knowing, because the technical control of things seems limitless in its scope.52

Here we see a reference to Plato’s notion of philosophy as wonder,53 where freedom is a sort of attention and attunement to what-is-in-totality, and represents the starting point of philosophy. In the hands of a reductionist philosophy of science, freedom is reduced to a set of scientific hypotheses or decisions, this or that. A scientific hypothesis is detached from the

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

119

object, and Heidegger suggests that it is in this detachment that we experience both security and freedom from the objective world.54 This detachment is the freedom of spontaneity. As such, philosophy and science become fixated on making correct hypotheses and decisions, and therefore focused on the technical control of things and the standardization of knowledge. This reduction of freedom to a choice then judged, true or false, reduces our experience of the world to conditions that conform to or contradict scientific propositions, and conceals the mystery of what-is-­ in-totality in favor of practical concerns and calculations. It is precisely this proliferation and standardization of knowledge, this desire to know everything, that causes the manifest character of what-is to sink into the apparent void of indifference or, worse still, oblivion…This “in-­ totality” appears, in the field of vision of our daily calculations and activities, as something incalculable and incomprehensible. It cannot be understood in terms of what manifestly “is,” whether this be part of nature or of history. Although ceaselessly determining all things, this “in-totality” nevertheless remains something indeterminate and undeterminable, and is thus generally confused with what is readiest at hand and most easily thought of.55

Technological Thinking The affinity we developed for the revelation of what-is-in-totality unwittingly conceals what-is-in-totality, insofar as it gives precedence to a “world” humanity builds up out of the projects and plans that happen to be the most immediate, causing a continual forgetting of the mystery so that our relationship to what-is-in-totality vanishes entirely.56 One way to understand Heidegger’s critique of enlightenment reasoning is to think of it as a critique of a utilitarian logic, a science that sees the world of objects as resources, and ideas as tools, and the combination of the two as machines to satisfy needs. Heidegger suggests that all revealing involves a concealing. That is, the process by which we come to understand nature always conceals something about it, but there are more or less authentic ways of being in the world, which involve different forms of concealing. The reductionist approach of modern, scientific reasoning, makes it well suited to a utilitarian world view Heidegger calls technological thinking. To generalize in the extreme, technological thinking involves systematizing the means by

120 

J. SIMMONS

which we arrive at some end, by which the systematic itself involves an enframing: an all-inclusive rubric designating the way in which everything appears to us. The reductionist thinking of science allows everything to appear in the light of cause and effect, and as the ends present themselves as the correct results within the calculable complex of the effects of causes,57 enframing characterizes the entire system by which ends and means appear. Enframing closes off all possibilities that lie outside the system, such that thinking and objects secretly lose their independence (for Heidegger, autonomy), and what-is-in-totality appears only within the system: “the ordering of the orderable.”58 Through its fixation on the ordering of the orderable, technological thinking forces science into its service and eliminates the real possibility of freedom by closing us off from any alternative relationship to what-is-in-totality. All possibilities independent of the scientific/technological agenda are nonchalantly swept aside with the wave of Occam’s razor. Heidegger concludes that science is the metaphysics of modernity. Under the sway of technological thinking, a reductionist science appropriates the world in service of technology: thinking of the world as a system of means and ends. As such, we no longer stand open to, or in wonder of, nature. Rather, we perceive the natural world as standing-in-reserve for some purpose.59 The metaphysics of modernity even reduces human existence to its utilitarian parameters, so that to be human means being an object of a fully mathematized technological science60 and thereby constrained by the material determinism foist upon objects by a technological science. We need only consider our current affinity for STEM education, wedding science to technology, engineering and mathematics, in order to satisfy the needs of a community as determined by a reductionist, economic theory, and reducing the student to an economic resource. Under these conditions the truth of nature is replaced by the truth of practical experience, economic calculation, political shrewdness, scientific research, religious belief or art.61 Everything in its place, according to its discipline, so that the wonder of Plato, needed to drive science, is lost. Technological thinking becomes not only the means, but also the end, having eliminated all other possibilities. “From these in their turn [scientific] man, having forgotten what-is-in-totality, adopts his measures.”62

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

121

Notes 1. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science (Fordham University Press: New York, 2000), 4. 2. Martin Heidegger, cited in Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010), 139. 3. Gordon, Continental Divide, 139. 4. Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science, 14. 5. Iakes Ezkurdia et al., “Multiple evidence strands suggest that there may be as few as 19 000 human protein-coding genes,” Human Molecular Genetics, 2014 Nov 15; 23(22): 5866–5878, accessed March 23, 2019, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204768/ 6. Human Genome Project FAQ, November 12, 2018, accessed March 23, 2019, https://www.genome.gov/11006943/human-genome-projectcompletion-frequently-asked-questions/ 7. Gordon, Continental Divide, 139. 8. Martin Heidegger, cited by Gordon, Continental Divide, 142. 9. Gordon, Continental Divide, 142. 10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, cited by Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by Kenley Royce Dove, (Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco, 1970), 12, 42. 11. Gordon, Continental Divide, 151. 12. Hegel, cited by Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 15. 13. Gordon, Continental Divide, 143. 14. Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science, 65. 15. Ibid, 230. Although Heidegger concedes that Plato still generally conceives of nature as prior to the idea. 16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1962), 115. 17. Ibid, 141. 18. Ibid, 125. Heidegger refers to the medieval scholastic philosophers, that is, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. 19. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd Edition, translated by Donald A. Cress, (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1993), 13. 20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 125. 21. Ibid, 126. 22. Ibid, 126. 23. Ibid, 127. 24. Ibid, 127. 25. Ibid, 127.

122 

J. SIMMONS

26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1965), 433. 27. Gordon, Continental Divide, 139. 28. Descartes, Meditations, 14. 29. Ibid, 52–53. 30. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” translated by R. F C. Hull and Alan Crick, appearing in Existence and Being (Gateway Editions, LTD, South Bend, 1949), 296. 31. Ibid, 296. 32. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, revision of Carus translation by Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, 1950), 37. 33. Heidegger, cited by Gordon, Continental Divide, 139. 34. Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 40–41. 35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1956), 100. 36. Descartes, Meditations, 28. 37. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 101. 38. Gordon, Continental Divide, 362. 39. Ibid, 362. 40. Ibid, 362. 41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1998, p. A446/B474. 42. Gordon, Continental Divide, 362. 43. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White Beck (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1956), 101. 44. Gordon, Continental Divide, 362. 45. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 306. 46. Ibid, 308. 47. Heidegger, Being and Time, 51. 48. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 309. 49. Ibid, 300. 50. Ibid, 300. 51. Ibid, 311. 52. Ibid, 311–312. 53. Plato, “Theaetetus,” in The Dialogues of Plato, Volume IV, translated by B. Jowett (Oxford University Press, Humphrey, 1924), 210. 54. Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 39. 55. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 312. 56. Ibid, 314–315. 57. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” edited by David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, Publishers, New  York, 1977), 307–308.

8  HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 

123

58. Ibid, 299. 59. Ibid, 299. 60. Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990), 156. 61. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 292. 62. Ibid, 316.

CHAPTER 9

Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems Steven Knepper

For many years, both before and after World War II, the French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel hosted Friday night salons in his Paris flat.1 Miklos Vetö recalls visiting them as a student in 1959: “Each Friday, from 5 to 7pm a large and very heterogeneous group of people, students, philosophy teachers, society women, freaks, monks, Christian or Buddhist, turned up to talk about a wide selection of philosophico-social themes.”2 Many prominent philosophers and literary figures attended at one time or another: Jean Wahl, Nikolai Berdyaev, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Du Bos, Emil Cioran,  Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. Emmanuel Levinas met Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time at one of Marcel’s gatherings.3 Paul Ricoeur, who visited Marcel’s salons as a student, later hosted similar gatherings of his own.4 Unsurprisingly, given this place in the Parisian milieu, Marcel shaped some of the major movements of these tumultuous decades. His account of relational humanity influenced the Catholic personalism of the 1930s.5 Likewise, his rejection of abstract systems and his attention to concrete,

S. Knepper (*) Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_9

125

126 

S. KNEPPER

first-person experience helped launch French existentialism.6 Yet Marcel did not want to be known as a personalist, and he bristled when Sartre called him a Christian existentialist.7 Marcel worried that such labels distort or lead to assumptions. He even worried about being hemmed in by his own work. He claimed to cringe when someone asked him to sum up his philosophy. Marcel perceived this as an attempt to “imprison” him in a “sort of shell.”8 Marcel wanted to maintain the sense of his philosophy as an open inquiry, as an ongoing quest. Still, there are consistent themes in Marcel’s work. He was concerned, for instance, with how technocratic rationalism increasingly pervades modern life.9 This rationalism relies on generalizable techniques and technical solutions. Marcel was no luddite. He claimed “only a lunatic” would deny the usefulness of much technological progress, the ways in which it has eased material hardships for many.10 He also noted how the scientist can model certain human excellences, such as precision and accuracy. He applauded the “purity and soundness of the joy which goes with technical research when it results in a discovery.”11 Yet the twentieth century had thoroughly discredited technological utopianism for Marcel. He was born in 1889 and died in 1973. He lived through both world wars and some of the tensest moments of the Cold War. He denied a necessary or even likely link between technological progress and social or moral progress. Technological research yields life-saving medical advances, but it also yields nuclear weapons. In his later writings, Marcel claimed that we live in “the eschatological age” because of the threat of nuclear annihilation.12 More controversially, Marcel held that a pervasive technical ethos reshapes how we see the world. He warned “there is a danger of the technical environment becoming for us the pattern of the universe, that is to say, the categories of its particular structure being claimed to be valid for an objective conception of the world.”13 Generalized techniques involve a reductive abstraction. The environment to which they are applied is abstracted out of its particularity and treated as malleable material. Such techniques, when “embodied,” seek “to reconstitute the world, moulding it to [their] own image.”14 This calls to mind Heidegger’s account of how modernity reduces the world to a “standing reserve” of exploitable resource, as well as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason. One of Marcel’s primary examples of this reductive abstraction is the modern city. (Here the resonances are with Jane Jacobs.) In “the past a city moulded itself on the natural structure or pre-structure, as if it were fulfilling it,” whereas now “we are likely to see larger and

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

127

larger agglomerations piling up without the slightest regard for the natural pre-formation. There is not the least hesitation in doing violence to nature to carry out an abstract plan.”15 Marcel predicts that such an approach will leave cities, and the products and processes of abstraction in general, more vulnerable to “crises, catastrophes, even natural upheavals.”16 But cities also lose their distinctiveness and their charm. They become increasingly generic, interchangeable. Marcel’s main concern was how this pervasive ethos reshapes our conception of the human: “It is impossible for man not to consider himself as part of this cosmos—or of this a-cosmos—planned and dissected by the technicians; as a result, he inevitably becomes a target for those techniques which, in principle, are legitimately applicable only to the outward world.”17 Humans are increasingly viewed in terms of their functions. Marcel saw “mass transfers of populations” within communist countries as revealing this underlying ethos of reductive abstraction.18 Humans are lifted out of their concrete relationships to a place, a community, a shared past. They become discrete units that can be repositioned according to an abstract economic logic (or for the political aim of sheering those very relationships, of creating discrete units). At an extreme, a society that manages its populations in such a way conceives of life “in bio-sociological terms, that is to say, as a process whose physico-chemical conditions are claimed to be strictly and objectively definable and which exists in view of a given task which relates to the collectivity.”19 Here, Marcel anticipates something like Michel Foucault’s critique of biopolitics. Marcel argues that the logic of functionality is pervasive throughout the modern world, in ways both subtle and explicit. Marcel saw the technical ethos spreading primarily through bureaucracies. He noted the bureaucratic tendency to reduce humans to a datum or a case file. Marcel’s experiences during World War I were formative in this regard. Marcel did not serve in the trenches, but he did direct the Red Cross Information Service in Paris. His job was to track down information about soldiers missing at the front and then to relay it to inquirers. When Marcel researched a missing soldier, he dealt with a name and a few bits of information on an index card. For the inquirers who came to the Information Service, though, the missing soldier was a son, brother, fiancée, husband, or friend. The experience taught Marcel much about the dehumanizing potential for bureaucracies. He realized if he had only been researching and not also reporting to inquirers, he could have easily turned “the war into an abstract schema.”20 Even still, he could have played the part of the reserved bureaucrat, simply stating the facts. Marcel later saw

128 

S. KNEPPER

how the Nazis, in World War II concentration camps, utilized this potential for bureaucratic dehumanization to horrifying effect through “techniques of degradation” designed to psychologically manipulate detainees, to make them see themselves as valueless.21 Marcel was also sensitive to techniques of degradation at work in the Soviet  gulags, to how subtle forms of propaganda and surveillance were spreading in the liberal West. Marcel noted how “techniques of degradation” often bring together a bureaucratic rationalism and an ideological irrationalism, both reductive. In the latter, political passions yield distorting stereotypes and simplifications.22 He saw this at work in modern ideologies, and in particular in fascism and communism, with their propaganda and caricatures of enemies.23 Marcel referenced C. Virgil Gheorghiu’s World War II novel The Twenty-fifth Hour, in which a young man is accused of being a Jew and sent to a deportation camp, only to be deemed an example of the “pure Aryan type” by a Nazi leader and sent to a S.S. training camp.24 The young man escapes to the Americans, who at first welcome him but then put him in prison because “Rumanians are enemies; ergo…”25 In each of these cases, ideology reduces the singular, complex young man to a cipher. Marcel claimed that a technocratic ethos ultimately reshapes how we see ourselves, how we try to navigate our lives. This brings Marcel’s existentialism to the fore. Marcel frequently makes a distinction between problems and mysteries. A problem is something external to us that can be determinatively understood and solved with a generalizable technique. A mystery, on the other hand, is something in which we are inextricably involved. It has roots deep within us, but it also reaches beyond us. While a problem can be solved, a mystery can only be navigated in light of the concrete situation and the people involved. As Jill Graper Hernandez points out, “Marcel does not mean to bring a vague literary floweriness to the discourse on mystery; rather the mystery of our being involves the active situation that we are concerned with—our experiences—and so, is one whose true nature can only be grasped, acknowledged, or recognized from the inside.”26 Marcel claimed that the modern facility with techniques encourages the reduction of mysteries to problems. Death is no longer an inevitable mystery to be confronted but a biomedical problem to be delayed as long as possible and thought about as little as possible. Love becomes “the will to live, the will to power, the libido, etc.”27 The mystery of being itself is either forgotten (as Heidegger noted) or misunderstood as a physics problem.

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

129

Marcel pointed out that techniques do not simply work for us. They also rework us. Iris Murdoch, who was influenced by Marcel, sums up a similar concern in an aphoristic line: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”28 Marcel claimed moderns are becoming less articulate about mysteries. They find themselves without the words to talk meaningfully and non-reductively about love or death. They struggle to express feelings of wonder and gratitude when they irrupt into their lives at, say, the birth of a child or the start of a new relationship or when they behold natural beauty. The sentimental and the trite often move in to fill the void. Marcel feared this diminishment of mysteries actually  makes us less present to others, less able to care for them in a holistic way. Marcel claimed, for instance, that we are losing our ability or willingness to accompany others as they approached death. He worried that medicine itself was becoming increasingly reductive, with hospitals serving as “the inspection bench or the repair shop.”29 If we see love as inherently selfish then we may be more likely to act in selfish, exploitative ways or to avoid entering into relationships for fear of being exploited. Marcel noted that modern educational bureaucracies mostly teach students to solve problems rather than to navigate mysteries. Indeed, the students themselves become problems. Education is not a matter of paideia or Bildung but the application of the correct generalizable pedagogical technique to students, the teaching of students to apply techniques in turn. Marcel quipped that Charles Dickens’s Gradgrind is a caricature of modern educational theories but a telling one nonetheless.30 Fundamentally, we lose our sense of ourselves and others, their lives and our own, as mysteries. We increasingly think of ourselves and others in terms of functions. William Desmond points out that for Marcel, many modern malaises have their roots in this reductionism: “The tyranny of technique drowns the deeper human in a conspiracy of efficiency and a frenzy of industry. It may erect a house but cannot make us a home.”31 The marginalization of religion is important for Marcel in this regard. The language and rituals it provides for orienting ourselves within mysteries have been largely displaced. The question “Who am I?” is no longer answered with the mysterious “an image of God” but with an occupation, a function, a set of basic biographical facts. Life is no longer lived out as a dramatic journey, quest, or pilgrimage but as a series of workweeks and weekends unto retirement.32 The marginalization of religion is bound up with the loss of communal wisdom, a sensus communis, that at its best is

130 

S. KNEPPER

neither abstract nor reductive but responsive to human particulars.33 For Marcel, the great task of philosophy is to restore awareness of mysteries, to provide or renew a language for talking about them and the wisdom for navigating them. Marcel claimed philosophy should especially help recover a non-­ reductive sense of human relations. This brings us to another of Marcel’s key distinctions, the distinction between “having” and “being.” Having involves appropriation and consumption. In terms of human relations, it involves considering “a certain person as a mineral from which I can extract a certain amount of usable metal.”34 This can take overtly exploitative forms, but it can also be subtle, such as when interactions are structured by an unconscious egotism or instrumentalism. According to Marcel, there is no true communication in such interactions, no open, ongoing reciprocity. They are a means of extracting “the responses I want.”35 We interact with others to get something we desire—help, information, affirmation, sex—and then draw back into our self. Paradoxically, the stance of having, even though it is defined by appropriation, can lead to a sense of emptiness. It involves closing oneself off, at least partially, from the fullness of being, from a true encounter with the other. Marcel suggests that it is like secreting a carapace. As we have already seen, Marcel feared that a society dominated by a technical, problem-solving ethos will subtly encourage relations of having. Marcel juxtaposed interactions structured by having with relationships of “being.” These transcend instrumental calculation. They involve opening oneself to the other. In them “I” am no longer pitted over against “you.” “We” are on a different ontological plane, the plane of the “intersubjective,” the plane of “communion.”36 By opening ourselves to others, we also open ourselves to being in its inexhaustible depth. The proof of this is experiential for Marcel. In healthy relationships—with family, friends, or spouses, for instance—we experience a dynamic richness and sense of depth that we do not experience in more guarded interactions.37 For Marcel, this distinction between having and being is also ethically charged: Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism exterior to my own ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or manner of working […] I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of his real being?”38

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

131

Intentionally or not, this ultimately “degrades him.”39 This may seem like a reformulation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Having entails treating humans as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Yet Marcel was less concerned with a rational ethical imperative than with the concrete encounter with a specific other.40 Marcel argued that the “we” is ultimately more basic than the “I,” that openness is more basic than closure. This is anchored in the realities of human childhood, which of course entail extended dependence. It is also anchored in the continual experiences of irruption—in wonder and beauty, for instance—that reopen us to reality and that could “only occur in a being who is not a closed or hermetic system into which nothing new can penetrate.”41 Still, Marcel acknowledged that it is easy to be “misled” by “a false atomism”: It can easily happen that, in general, I feel opaque, non-permeable, and this state can be attributed to a number of different causes (fatigue, moral deterioration, the habit of concentrating on myself too much; intimacy with oneself, like any other relation or liaison, can degenerate and become vicious).42

We slip easily into “egotism,” into assuming that we are the center of the world. Such egotism distorts how we see others: “From the very fact that I treat the other person merely as a means of resonance or an amplifier, I tend to consider him as a sort of apparatus which I can, or think I can, manipulate, or of which I can dispose at will.”43 We ultimately project an idea that “can become a substitute for the real person, a shadow to which I shall come to refer my acts and words.”44 We are always capable of subtle self-delusion, of substituting a counterfeit for the real encounter with the other. Marcel’s remarks on such delusion skirt close to Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of “bad faith,” and Marcel did acknowledge that his fellow dramatist-­ philosopher was often an insightful diagnostician of relational ills.45 Marcel’s own plays are full of egotism, manipulation, instrumentalism, and indifference. They testify more readily than his philosophical works to how we may retreat into self-enclosure to protect ourselves from this. Openness entails vulnerability, which can lead in turn to ill treatment, abuse, and heartache. Marcel did not quarrel with Sartre’s analysis of antagonistic and agonistic relationships, then, so much as reject Sartre’s penchant to see bad faith everywhere. Sartre recoiled from the

132 

S. KNEPPER

fundamental relatedness of concrete existence. He greatly circumscribed, and thus in Marcel’s view greatly distorted, the reality of love. For Sartre, freedom and authentic existence require a disentangling from relations. Contra Sartre, Marcel argued that we must cultivate a radical openness to others, an alert readiness to attend to them.46 He called this openness disponibilité.47 Again, this is both an ethical mandate and the path to fulfillment for Marcel. Healthy relationships within marriages, families, friendships, and communities involve a “creative fidelity” based on such openness. Marcel insisted that true fidelity involves continual re-­ attunement and responsiveness. It is dynamic, “creative.” Marcel distinguished such fidelity from mere constancy, which may not be dynamic or responsive at all.48 During the Nazi occupation, Marcel famously offered a philosophy of “hope” as a state of open expectancy, a sort of disponibilité toward the present and future, one ringed round by the possibility of despair.49 Marcelian hope transcends hope for particular things. This distinguishes it from shallow optimism and allows it to persevere through setbacks. Marcel feared, then, that modern life was becoming increasingly atomistic, lived in the realm of problems and having rather than in the realm of mystery and being. He argued that this was a recipe for widespread dissatisfaction and unhappiness since we have an ontological need or exigence, a desire for true communion with being in its depth, a desire for fullness that remains even if it is greatly dulled.50 Moderns often try and fail to meet this need via having, via consumption and dreams of consumption. Yet this provides only fleeting satisfaction. Marcel could offer a dystopian and perhaps hyperbolic picture of “problematic man.” While he recognized the “positive value of technical progress,” he gave far more attention to the ills he saw in it.51 We may wonder whether he still paints with too broad a brush and thus fails to draw enough distinctions between different sorts of techniques. This was Murdoch’s concern about his project.52 Within the domains he identifies—applied science, urban planning, medicine, education—there have always been counter-movements against reductive tendencies. Again, though, Marcel is neither a crank nor a pessimist. He always remained a philosopher of hope. Relationships of “communion” continue to form all the time, even in the most inauspicious of environments, and a wider renewal remains possible. Marcel claimed there was no turning back

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

133

to “a pre-technical age. The burden of technics has been assumed by man and he can no longer put it down because he finds it heavy. The consequences of such an abdication would be catastrophic.”53 He held we should not abandon technics, but we should react against the reductive ethos that can animate them and that increasingly pervades the wider culture. “What I think we need today,” he wrote, “is to react with our whole strength against that dissociation of life from spirit which a bloodless rationalism has brought about.”54 Marcel’s major  philosophical  writings are more concerned with the existential predicament of his readers and their societies than with political movements or the architectonics of political theory. In terms of politics, though, Murdoch claimed that Marcel “may remind us a little of Burke— and, to come nearer home, of Michael Oakeshott, who uses the word ‘technique’ in the same pejorative sense as Marcel.”55 Marcel concurred with his friend Gustave Thibon “that atomisation and collectivisation are two sides of the same and indivisible process which could be described both as devitalising and as de-spiritualising.”56 Both hollow out the intermediate associations of civil society.57 Still, if Marcel was something of a traditionalist, he was hardly a hidebound one. The emphasis repeatedly falls on the “creative” work of readjustment and renewal. Marcel was a staunch critic of communism, but he also claimed that “Marxism is right to denounce the mystifying tactics employed by those who bring in spiritual considerations inopportunely in order to veil realities which they have not the strength or the courage to face in their nakedness.”58 In particular, he called out a tendency to veil the struggles of the poor, the “disinherited.”59 Marcel’s philosophy ultimately cuts across the politics of Left and Right. Marcel’s social critiques remain relevant in our world of Big Data and the digital panopticon, of screen addiction and pervasive loneliness, of social credit and opioids. Yet he is perhaps most timely in that he offers perennial wisdom as an antidote to these malaises. He challenges us to open ourselves to others, to seek out true communion, to pursue a life of creative fidelity. He calls us back to the concrete. Against the notion that “our thinking nowadays is only valid if it is on a world-wide or planetary scale,” Marcel claims that it is “the sense of the neighbour that needs awaking, for it is the only safeguard against calamites which indeed are certain to be world-wide.”60

134 

S. KNEPPER

Notes 1. A few lines in this chapter are adapted from Steven Knepper, “From Problem to Mystery,” Commonweal, 147.3 (2020): 20–22. Those new to Marcel are well served by A Gabriel Marcel Reader, ed. Brendan Sweetman (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011). Kenneth T. Gallagher’s The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Fordham UP, 1975) offers a concise, clear overview of Marcel’s major concepts and concerns. 2. Miklos Vetö, “Personal Memories of Gabriel Marcel,” Marcel Studies, 3.1 (2018): 51. 3. See the interview with Levinas in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), 53. Marcel was an important influence on Levinas’s thought. See Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate (New York: Fordham UP, 2006). See also William Desmond, “Philosophies of Religion: Marcel, Jaspers, Levinas” in Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy¸ ed. Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1994), 131–174. 4. See Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 17. 5. See Juan Manuel Burgos, An Introduction to Personalism, trans. R.T. Allen (Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 2018). 6. On the importance of the concrete situation in Marcel, see Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 13–29. 7. Sartre calls Marcel and Karl Jaspers Christian existentialists in Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 20. Marcel did accept the existentialist designation for a while, albeit reluctantly He assented, for instance, to its use in the title of an essay collection edited by Étienne Gilson: Existentialisme Chrétien: Gabriel Marcel (Paris: Plon, 1947). From midcentury onward, though, Marcel sharply rejected the label, claiming that it had become associated with Sartre’s philosophy. F.H. Heinemann suggests that Marcel may have been influenced by Pope Pius XII’s critique of existentialism in the 1950 encyclical Humani generis. See Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 150. 8. Marcel, “An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy” in Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964), 60. 9. For a study that forefronts this aspect of Marcel’s thought, see Jill Graper Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God and Virtue (London: Continuum, 2011). 10. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization” in The Decline of Wisdom, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 8. 11. Ibid., 9.

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

135

12. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G.S.  Fraser (South Bend: Gateway, N.D.), 76. 13. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Society,” 13. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 14. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Ibid. 20. Marcel, Awakenings, trans. Peter S.  Rogers (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette UP, 2002), 93. 21. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 37–75. 22. In his youth, Marcel was struck by this in the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair. 23. We might also think of racism broadly. See Dwayne Tunstall, Doing Philosophy Personally: Thinking About Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack Racism (New York: Fordham UP, 2013). Tunstall explores the affordances in Marcel’s philosophy for a critique of racism but also criticizes the relatively scant attention that it receives in Marcel’s own writings. 24. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, trans. G.S. Fraser (Chicago: Gateway, 1960), 35. See also C. Virgil Gheorghiu, The Twentyfifth Hour, trans. Rita Eldon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950). 25. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1, 36. 26. Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, 12–13. 27. Marcel, “On The Ontological Mystery” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973), 20. 28. Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York: Penguin, 1999), 75. Murdoch reviews Marcel’s The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1 in “The Image of Mind” in Existentialists and Mystics, 125–129. 29. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 11. 30. See Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1, 24. 31. Desmond, “Philosophies of Religion,” 137. 32. On Marcel’s conception of the human as homo viator, see Terence Sweeney, “Against Ideology: Gabriel Marcel’s Philosophy of Vocation.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 16.4 (2013): 179–203. 33. See Marcel, “The Breaking Up of the Notion of Wisdom” in The Decline of Wisdom, 37–56. 34. Marcel, “An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy,” 71. 35. Ibid. 36. Marcel has much in common with Martin Buber in this regard. See Marcel, “Martin Buber’s Philosophical Anthropology” in Searchings (New York:

136 

S. KNEPPER

Newman Press, 1967), 73–92. See the chapter on Marcel and Buber in Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human Person, the Transcendent (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 135–151. See also Robert  E.  Wood, “The Dialogical Principle: Buber and Marcel” in The Beautiful, the True & the Good: Studies in the History of Thought (Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 2015), 417–433. 37. Marcel argued that the experience of inexhaustible ontological depth in love points the way to God. There are echoes of St. John: “God is love.” While Sartre’s god was a tyrannical threat to freedom, Marcel’s was the liberating wellspring of love. There are deep Christian resonances throughout Marcel’s project, though he did not convert to Catholicism until he was forty, and he never wished to write for believers alone. 38. Marcel, “The Ego and its Relation to Others” in Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 23. 39. Ibid. 40. Furthermore, while Marcel admired Kant for putting human dignity at the heart of his philosophy, he was highly critical of the modern emphasis on autonomy. He thought it failed to account for how true freedom is found in an immersion in reality. See Marcel, “Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having” in Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 173. 41. Marcel, “Belonging and Disposability” in Creative Fidelity, 48. 42. Ibid., 51. 43. Marcel, “The Ego in its Relations to Others,” 17. 44. Ibid., 17–18. 45. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E.  Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992). See Marcel’s review in Homo Viator, 166–184. Marcel also offers an extended critique of Sartre in “Existence and Human Freedom” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, 47–90. 46. Sally Fischer approaches Marcel’s philosophy as an ethics of care in “Reading Marcel’s Philosophy of Dialogical Inter-subjectivity in a Contemporary Light” in Living Existentialism: Essays in Honor of Thomas W.  Busch, eds. Gregory Hoskins and J.C.  Berendzen (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2017), 24–44. 47. See Marcel, “Belonging and Disposability,” pp. 38–57. Marcel was frustrated by English translations of this word. “Disposability” can suggest the entirely different (and negative) sense of getting rid of something. “Availability” is perhaps better but doesn’t connote the dynamism that Marcel wishes to convey. 48. See Marcel, “Creative Fidelity” in Creative Fidelity, 147–174.

9  GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 

137

49. See Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope” in Homo Viator, 29–67. 50. On the ontological need, see Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 2: Faith & Reality, trans. René Hague (Chicago: Gateway, 1960), 37–57. 51. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization,” 8. 52. See Murdoch “The Image of Mind,” 129. 53. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization,” 19. 54. Ibid. 55. Murdoch “The Image of Mind,” 129. 56. Marcel, “The Notion of Spiritual Heritage” in The Decline of Wisdom, 27. 57. For Marcel’s writings on the family, see “The Mystery of the Family” and “The Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood” in Homo Viator, 68–124. 58. Marcel, “The Notion of Spiritual Heritage,” 34. 59. Ibid. 60. Marcel, “The Breaking Up of the Notion of Wisdom” in The Decline of Wisdom, 56.

CHAPTER 10

Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism Charles W. Lowney II

The ideas of the Enlightenment bred scientism and romanticism in a multitude of connected forms. The revival of the liberal tradition can be assured only if we can establish it on a new, conscious understanding of its foundations, on grounds which will withstand modern self-doubt coupled with perfectionism. —Michael Polanyi (TD 83, 86, 87.) To economize, references to Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), are noted with TD, references to Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958) with PK, references to “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” [Minerva 1(1962): 54–74] with RS, and references to Marjorie Grene (ed.) Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969) with KB.

Michael Polanyi had a mixed relationship with the Enlightenment. As a scientist, he valued the light and knowledge that reason and rigorous C. W. Lowney II (*) Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_10

139

140 

C. W. LOWNEY II

method could provide, but he also realized that the critical standards for knowledge that the Enlightenment emphasized could promote dangerous distortions. While he cherished many Enlightenment values—especially the freedom that it had brought to formerly repressive societies—he saw that its critical program could not legitimize even its own humanist and political values. He saw that excessive skepticism and rationalism, which challenged traditional authority to topple monarchies and shake religious institutions, could ultimately lead to forms of nihilism that ushered in fascist and totalitarian regimes. As a practicing scientist, he saw that some problems in Enlightenment thinking were rooted in misconceptions surrounding how we discover and affirm scientific knowledge, and so, as a philosopher, he worked to correct the epistemological mistakes behind a “scientism” that could distort how we understand reality, human beings, and human values. In contrast to the modern idea of objective knowledge that is passively engaged and discovered, Polanyi put forward the idea of personal knowledge.1 In contrast to the ideal of critical rationalism, which would have all knowledge be founded on an explicit analysis to immovable foundations, Polanyi put forward the ideas of tacit knowing, interpretive frameworks, discovery, and fallibilism. And in contrast to substance dualism—and the growing materialist views that the really real consists solely of matter in motion, the human mind is fully reducible, and all meaning and value is merely subjective—Polanyi put forward the ideas of emergent being and indwelling. Through these facets of his post-critical program, he affirmed our contact with reality and our ability to discover true values. Rather than reject the Enlightenment, Polanyi charts a course for revising the Enlightenment’s notion of discovering truth through rational inquiry. His basic concepts work to balance the Enlightenment’s excesses. In this, he hoped to avoid the recidivisms of analytic philosophy, the repudiations of postmodernisms, and the reactionary entrenchment of closed traditions. His approach provides hope for cautious progress in a society that both recognizes the value of its traditions and is open to change. The momentum of the Enlightenment’s influence, however, is difficult to restrain. It is still a common conception in the twenty-first century that science, in opposition to religion or tradition, can provide all the answers that we need. According to the Enlightenment story, science and its method have liberated us from the dark ages. Its critical reason overcame the oppression and distortion that religious and political powers enforced. By the light of reason, the story goes, we find our freedom and our true

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

141

human value… but all that seemed to fall apart amid the horrors of revolutions, wars, and economic depressions.

Polanyi and the Enlightenment Roots of Twentieth-­Century Political Extremism Michael Polanyi was a physician, a physical chemist, a social scientist, and a philosopher.2 Born in Budapest in 1891, he served as a medical officer during the World War I. Soon after the Red Army came to Budapest and first established a Russian influence in Hungary, Polanyi immigrated to Germany. There he established himself as a leading scientist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. When the Nazi party rose to power, however, Polanyi— being of Jewish descent—left Germany for England. There he continued doing research in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester for 15 years, but subsequently he exchanged his chair in chemistry for one in social studies. This allowed him more time to develop deeper and broader cultural criticisms and a philosophy of science that challenged mainstream views. During his life, he believed he saw some implications of Enlightenment thinking play themselves out in the social and political arenas. He believed that the Enlightenment’s noble ambitions and scientific rationalism, while “a major influence toward intellectual, moral and social progress,” could also produce “moral doubt…frenzied by moral fury” and “armed by scientific nihilism”—a combination that led to violent and totalitarian governments (TD 57, 60). Polanyi asked, “Why Did We Destroy Europe?”3 His answer was that the way science had come to be interpreted in modernity helped foster the great wars of the twentieth century. The ideal of critical reason that Enlightenment thinkers promoted could not sustain the values that Enlightenment thinkers held. If everything needed to be proven scientifically before it could be accepted as true, not only could traditional religious and aristocratic powers fall, but so also could ideals of political liberty and the free pursuit of knowledge. The demand that knowledge be fully explicit and objectively verifiable was unachievable and unlivable, and it fostered a backlash against rationality and truth. The misguided epistemic ideals not only produced a stronger dichotomy between faith and reason—charging up a reactionary conservatism—it also produced antithetical postmodernisms that followed Romanticist trains. So Nietzsche and Marx, with their suspicion of reason

142 

C. W. LOWNEY II

and traditional values, were natural outcroppings for democratic and classically liberal values to crash upon. Polanyi believed he witnessed the ill effects of the Enlightenment’s conception of knowledge and science when he saw the Russian Revolution commandeered by Stalinism, and National Socialism steered by Hitler into violence and death camps. Critical rationalism led to a nihilism that could not reasonably ground any values, but losing the foundations for meaning did not negate human moral passion. The utopian moral ambitions of Enlightenment thinking could thus motivate what Polanyi called a “moral inversion” (KB 14). This inversion is a “dynamic coupling” uniting a moral skepticism, which saw rational argument about morality as unfounded or ineffective, and an unchecked moral passion. In this “inversion,” violent and immoral acts became permissible and sometimes even obligatory, so long as they were accomplished in the service of a greater humanitarian vision. Polanyi saw this nihilistic play acted out fully in Central and Eastern Europe, but thankfully, according to Polanyi, a lack of consistency between thought and action in Britain and the United States stalled its progress (KB 23). Anglo-American culture, in spite of romantic rhetoric about individual freedom from authority and skepticism of traditional values, was still guided by its traditional institutions and practices, embodied, for instance, in the precedents of Common Law. This, according to Polanyi, kept the dangerous combination of perfectionist rationalist imperatives, moral skepticism, and moral passion from actively steering political policy toward destruction, as it had done earlier on the continent beginning with the French Revolution. But although the effects of the Enlightenment in Anglo-American culture were different, they could still be pernicious. Philosophers often attempt to carve different areas outside the purview of scientific method to make room for faith and higher values. But in a culture that idolizes science—our sort of culture—what cannot be shown to be true scientifically can become devalued, if not consciously then unconsciously; the plausibility of the justifications for nonscientific and moral beliefs can become undermined by the epistemology we affirm. There is thus an eventual crowding out of faith and values as they lose their justification. So, the rational consistency that took effect more quickly and with explosive effects in Continental Europe sowed its effects more slowly and insidiously in the Anglo-American world. Like the frog that sits in gradually heated water and boils, we never recognize the need to jump out of the pot.

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

143

Historical Setting: The Rise of a Science Misconceived The importance of Polanyi’s post-critical approach is better seen when one puts his ideas in their historical context. Then one sees, perhaps more clearly than he did, how his basic conceptions work to counterbalance trends in modern philosophical thought. Key figures in modern philosophy, such as Descartes, sowed assumptions about scientific knowing and the nature of being that the Enlightenment endorsed in its conception of scientific progress. Descartes encouraged us to doubt everything that could not be put on secure and unquestionable rational footing. Such a foundation was thought to be open to view by everyone, regardless of their history and training, and so were the rational steps that move us from truth to truth. This advanced the ideals of critical reason and an impersonal objective stance, a God’s eye view, that in principle anyone could attain. All existing beliefs could now be subject to this corrosive, hyperbolic doubt, no matter how sacred or well-affirmed by purported experts. The only authorities Descartes recognized were the unquestionable intuitions that were revealed by the light of reason. The project was to take apart any claim to knowledge and analyze it down; then we could rebuild knowledge up on secure and common foundations. In this conception, the notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, becomes a mystifying charade and the knowledge of any true expert is considered fully explicit and rationally accessible to anyone. Descartes’ method emphasized analysis and explicit knowledge. Complex ideas were deconstructed into simpler and more assured ideas. Correlatively, this epistemic method extended into our ontological understanding. Complex beings were understood in terms of their simpler parts. For the material world, this secure ground was found in material substance and causes. The body and anything physical was thought to operate like a machine, which was conceived as a complex whole that reduced down to the smallest parts and their laws for combining together. This materialist conception led to the notion that all the sciences were reducible to what physics studies, for example, biology was built on chemistry, and chemistry was built on physics and whatever smallest bits produced the objects of perception. This reductive materialism on its own might encourage nihilism but, for Descartes, the nihilism did not yet emerge as a problem. Since his dualism distinguished between material and spiritual substance, it allowed for

144 

C. W. LOWNEY II

meaningful values beyond the material. While our bodies and animal passions reduced down to material causes, our higher values could be independently preserved. Descartes’ bifurcation between spirit and matter was reproduced in Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Kant’s development of Descartes’ dualism included the provision that any phenomenal entity or event would always be explicable in terms of causal laws, hence, everything that we could possibly experience and understand could be explained by science. This bolstered faith in the progress of science to explain not only biology and living organisms but also psychology and social phenomena. But while scientific study now included meaning and values, those values could be considered constructs that were more fully explicated by lower level chemical and physical laws, where their ultimate causes would be discovered. While Descartes endorsed a spiritual reality (beyond the material) to preserve values, Kant endorsed a moral reality (beyond the phenomenal). Kant saw the moral law as noumenal, but also as something we could rationally grasp. But as the skeptical method of Descartes’ philosophy morphed into the critical rationalism of the Enlightenment, natural science more and more seemed to do away with any independent foundation for spiritual or moral meaning. The subject matter of science, matter/ phenomena, was supported by hard evidence and explained our experience; the spirit/noumena, in contrast, was seen as accounting for nothing tangible. So the spirit/noumena half of the dualism came to be rejected as intellectually suspect. The scientism that demands a reduction of all knowledge to science, and science to physics, could then become the full philosophical ideal. The slippery slope was greased. All values and meanings were thought to reduce to sociological or psychological causes, those reduced to biology, which reduced to chemistry, which in turn reduced to physics. Set in the context of scientism, this reduction and causal determinism left no room for freedom and responsibility to real values—these became epiphenomena or illusions. The ontological force of this development can also be traced back into the analytic and reductive metaphysical prejudices of Descartes. He not only held that what is complex is explained by what is simpler, but that what is most real is what is causally prior: “[F]or where else can something derive its reality?”4 This metaphysical assumption dovetailed with Descartes’ proofs for God’s existence. But, ultimately, when only one half of Descartes’ dualism had scientific credence and analysis is the rule, then

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

145

what is really real is not God but the smallest and earliest material parts and their causal relations. The natural conclusion is that values aren’t really real. And as Nietzsche’s wiseman predicted, the implications of Descartes’ epistemology and its corresponding ontology, like the light of the stars, took time to manifest in our thought and actions. According to Polanyi, the light of the stars hit us when logical positivism emerged, nihilism took hold, and moral inversion was blatantly displayed in twentieth-century political movements. On the continent, where the ill effects of Modern and Enlightenment thinking were most pronounced, postmodernists generally reacted against science and scientism, claiming instead that there was no neutral objective stance, and reason itself was in the service of power rather than truth. All ideas and values were effects of wills to power, or eddies in the fluid play of historical circumstance. This rejection of scientific validity and celebration of subjectivity or power went too far for Polanyi; he believed that the reactions against science were just as mistaken as scientism. He strove instead to correct analytic, reductionist, and dualist excesses rather than reject them.

Correcting the Excesses of Scientific Rationalism Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy emerged from his worries over two attitudes toward science. First, the attitude that subjects scientific truth to the will of political power. This undermines the scientist’s call to follow clues wherever they lead in the pursuit of truth. Thus, he reacted against the USSR’s five-year plans and programs in Great Britain that would subjugate scientists’ goals to political aims (See RS). But as we have seen, Polanyi also worried about scientism, that is, the idea that science is the only real source of truth and that it provides a purely objective approach that overcomes all prejudice and distortion. This second attitude encouraged efforts to unify science in a reductive account centered on physics as the most basic science. This reduction characterized logical positivism, and other efforts to unify science via analytic philosophy, into the 1950s and beyond. We see it today in “eliminativists” who claim human minds are fully reducible and are nothing but neurochemical processes. The second attitude (analytic scientism) feeds into the first (which aligns with postmodern skepticism) by undermining a foundation for moral values. As a scientist himself, Polanyi saw that science did not proceed in the way that lay people and philosophers of science imagined that it did. The

146 

C. W. LOWNEY II

glamorized view of science that culture, history, and philosophy promoted was a distortion. The ideal of objective knowledge, passively affirmed by an impartial observer, was a myth. Science operates more like a tradition itself. It relies on the indoctrination of apprentices, who are taught to use equipment and taught to see in various ways (e.g., in reading an X-ray, or understanding the significance of a protein immunoblot). The mutual agreement of the community of scientists also acts like a traditional authority. Polanyi saw that science itself relies on knowledge and values that it cannot justify fully or explicitly. Polanyi thus saw that our best claims to knowledge are better described neither as purely objective nor as merely subjective, but as personal. Science made discoveries by relying upon both explicit and tacit commitments. And although these commitments cannot be fully justified explicitly and are subject to revision, they are held with what Polanyi calls “universal intent” (TD 78).5 By contrasting tacit knowing with the ideal of explicit analysis, and contrasting ontological emergence with the notion of reduction, Polanyi mobilized a view of knowledge that rejected both scientism and postmodernism. Instead, he endorsed a non-skeptical fallibilism that gave degrees of autonomy to different fields of inquiry. His approach allows values to be real again, both as transcendent ideals and as emergent properties discovered by human societies. Personal Knowledge and Tacit Knowing How knowledge is personal, but not merely subjective, can be seen in how knowing works and how discoveries are achieved. There is nothing wrong with efforts to analyze and reduce knowledge to components, but that cannot be the whole story. There are inherent limits to analysis, and what now acts as our firm ground may shift in the future, hence Polanyi argues “[t]he pursuit of formalization will find its true place in a tacit framework” (KB 157). Polanyi saw that we always attend from some unspecifiable background when we attend to something focal. Whereas Franz Brentano (TD x) emphasized that there is always an object at the distal end of intentionality, Polanyi emphasized that there were always tacit clues at the proximal end. This from-to vector of intentionality was the key to understanding that there is a tacit dimension to all knowledge. The background clues are integrated together into a focal awareness or meaning, but during the act of knowing we are not directly aware of the clues or context that we are

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

147

seeing from. There is thus a dichotomy between a tacit awareness of background clues and the focal awareness that goes into the formation of our explicit knowledge. Polanyi marshals many examples from perception, skills, and linguistic cognition to show general features of the from-to knowing process, and how the from-to dynamic can build in layers, that is, the to can become a from in a further focal integration (KB 128, 154). Seeing in 3D shows how the to is a “joint comprehension” of tacit clues that displays new qualities. We attend from the two-dimensional pictures that each eye provides, and together they give us a focal image that includes the emergent feature of depth perception. How clues fade into the background to operate tacitly can be seen in learning to use a stick as a probe. The muscles manipulating the stick and the nerve endings in the hand all fade as our attention and feeling move to the end of the stick and what it is touching; the stick becomes integrated into our bodily background clues as we learn to feel the dimensions of a dark room. When we develop a skill, Polanyi would say, we “dwell in” the clues in order to become aware of their joint meaning. The tacit clues that we pick up on and distinguish are not all explicitly available. We recognize a face among millions of others, but we can’t say precisely how (TD 4). According to Polanyi, the tacit dimension is at best only marginally accessible. To shift one’s focus to tacit clues disrupts the focal integration. For instance, Polanyi notes that in playing the piano one is focused on the music as the end of the production. The trained motions of the fingers act as tacit clues. If one shifts one’s attention from the music to a direct awareness of the fingers as focal, it throws off the integration of the clues and the music stutters or stalls. We see this from-to structure in our use of signs as well. We look from the letters “c,” “a,” and “t” when we look to the joint meaning toward which they point, that is, the word “cat.” The individual letters form the background clues to a new meaning. Similarly, if we take the words “cat,” “is,” “on,” and “mat,” their joint meaning is different than when we take the words individually. At the next level of integration, the sentence is a clue, together with other sentences, toward a more comprehensive meaning (we can then know if the sound “mat” refers to a small carpet or a person). If we look at the word or letters in isolation, then we lose our awareness of their joint significance. Instead of looking from the letters and to the words, and from the words to the meaning of a sentence, we

148 

C. W. LOWNEY II

would instead attend from other clues, for example, isolated sounds, or dark marks on a light background, to see focally the shape of the letters. The clues that we can uncover are inexhaustible and to a large extent unspecifiable. Polanyi saw that a tacit background can never be made fully explicit for several reasons (KB 124). We attend from it, but when we turn to look at or to it we inevitably miss something, and we cannot be aware of what we are missing. Also, the function changes: when we look back to the from, it is now the to and is no longer operating as it does when it functions as the from. So the pupil, eye, optic nerve, and so on are all tacit clues to seeing a cat, but when we look at the eye, etc., we do not see the seeing, since we are no longer dwelling in the physical and mental clues in the way we do when we see the cat. We learn by doing, and we can gain skills, like walking or being able to recognize a face, without being able to explicitly break down all the clues and steps involved in performing the skill. We often gain knowledge by interacting in the world, for example, by “subception,” where we are not aware of how we gained knowledge from experience (TD 7, 8). All explicit knowledge is based on skills and tacit knowing, but that does not delegitimize the knowledge that we gain, it just means that we cannot always fully account for what we do know. Making room for faith, like partitioning off an insensible spirit world, merely undermined it. But Polanyi saw that the assumptions behind that strategy were all wrong. Instead of making room for faith in an epistemology dominated by critical rationalism, Polanyi showed how faith was interweaved even in our most certain beliefs. In Personal Knowledge (1958), he moved against the ideals of objective knowledge, explicit analysis, and ontological reduction that had been brewing in our culture since the dawn of modern thinking. There is always a side to knowledge that we must take on faith—a personal side—even in science. Interpretive Frameworks, Discovery, and Non-Skeptical Fallibilism In practicing skills and in comprehending texts, the tacit background becomes marginal and often invisible to us. Similarly, we are not fully aware of the background interpretive frameworks by which we understand the world. This is why Polanyi says “all knowledge… is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge” (KB 195) and “formalizing all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating” (TD 20). We can see how the

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

149

background functions as a tacit from, and how some traditional knowledge, learned by apprenticeship or subception, forms an “inescapable framework” for Polanyi by looking at how scientific discovery works (TD 63). Discovery involves personal commitment and a reliance on a tacit interpretive framework. To even see a problem in science one has to have sufficient immersion in a background theory. Only then can one recognize gaps or notice that some observations don’t quite seem to fit. Polanyi related this searching to a problem in Plato’s Meno. Socrates posed a paradox: If we don’t know what we are looking for, how do we know when we find it? And if we are able to recognize it, doesn’t that mean we knew it already and did not have to search? The tacit dimension of knowledge was the solution (TD 22–25). A scientist’s tacit sense of the background not only makes her aware of a problem but can help guide the search in a productive direction. The solution is recognized when the background clues come together in a focal comprehension that is tacitly more consistent with the interpretive framework and thus more satisfying than other alternatives. Each discovery shifts or enriches the background framework. In making an important discovery, one might need to shift an interpretive framework in a radical way. (This is what Thomas Kuhn would later call a “paradigm” shift.) Polanyi follows Poincaré in laying out the stages of discovery (PK 121–131). First the question arises; then one searches, exploiting all the resources one has available. One is driven by a passionate commitment to finding a solution. If it is an important problem that cannot properly be solved inside the current conceptions, one might then hit a wall and experience a “dark night of the soul.” In this dark night, the interpretive framework through which you normally understand the data breaks down. The factual observations no longer seem to make any sense. Then “Eureka!” a solution may arise, which involves understanding things in a radically different way. “Intuition” has tacitly integrated clues together into a satisfying conception. This solution is first affirmed by a feeling of validation, but then might be better verified in more explicit terms (PK 121). The personal commitment of the inquirer, along with his or her personal, cultural, and theoretic background, are indispensable for knowledge and its progress,6 but this does not make the knowledge acquired “merely subjective.” We recognize that there may be new discoveries in the future and we may find better theories, but this does not make our

150 

C. W. LOWNEY II

current best theories “simply wrong.” Just because there will be better ways of understanding our observations does not mean “anything goes” regarding theories and truth. We get closer to the truth, and we act on our commitments, even though tacit knowing is ineliminable and Cartesian certainty is impossible. We thus act with the “universal intent” of our current best knowledge, while attempting also to be open to new information and ideas. We acknowledge our fallibilism even as we acknowledge the progress of knowledge. Emergent Being and Indwelling Just as focal meanings cannot be fully reduced to tacit clues, some emergent wholes cannot be fully reduced to their subsidiary parts. For Polanyi, emergent beings can gain an independence from the conditions they relied upon to come into existence. Here Polanyi reverses the machine metaphor that is typically associated with reduction.7 Polanyi noted that a machine has principles or laws that govern its operation that are not reducible to the principles or laws of chemistry or physics. The machine does not violate the lower level laws, but it must be identified and understood in terms of a higher level context and its laws. This is what Polanyi termed “dual control”: the subsidiary lower level sets necessary conditions, but the emergent higher level can commandeer parameters left open by the lower level to effect its own control (hence I can raise my arm, but I cannot make it grow to the size of a submarine). So, the principles of physics and its elements were necessary but not sufficient to the understanding of the mechanical principles of a machine. By the light of the meanings of physics and chemistry alone, Polanyi noted, one could not distinguish between a working steam engine and a broken one (KB 176).8 Rather than a materialist reduction in which all levels of inquiry reduced down to the lowest level, Polanyi envisioned a hierarchy of dual control relations in which a lower level and its laws were not violated, but higher-­ level constraints could define new real beings with emergent qualities. So that which physics and chemistry studies is subsidiary to biological organisms, and that which biology studies is subsidiary to psychology and sociology. Reality was no longer identified with the lowest, simplest, and earliest; instead, emergent and complex entities could also count as real. Similar to C.S. Peirce, Polanyi rooted reality in the notion of the effects something can have in the world; something real had “the power for

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

151

manifesting itself in yet unthought of ways in the future” (TD 32). Minds could be more real than cobblestones (TD 33). The epistemology of tacit knowing and the ontology of emergent being come together in that we often know and understand wholes focally by attending from their parts and operations as tacit clues; we dwell in the parts to understand a whole “comprehensive entity” (TD 18–21).9 Similarly, Polanyi says that we understand the mind of a person by dwelling in the behaviors and words of that person. Polanyi’s view here is similar to Gilbert Ryle’s or Merleau-Ponty’s in that we dwell in the body to experience mind (KB 222). Polanyi, however, distinguishes his view from theirs because he wants to forestall a collapse of the expressions of mind or the actions of the body into an identity with mind.10 An identification leaves open the possibility that the mind might be reductively considered “nothing but” bodily actions. Instead, Polanyi is careful to emphasize the structure of knowing and being and distinguish between clues and subsidiary conditions, on the one pole, and the independent reality toward which they point or gather, on the other. Just as we can gain a glimpse into a chess player’s mind by watching the moves he makes on the board, we can get a glimpse into a person’s mind by dwelling in a person’s words and behaviors (KB 215). But minds, for Polanyi, are not only the joint meaning of the body, they are active centers (KB 135) emergent upon the body and its physical and cultural environment—an integral part of a comprehensive entity. Descartes’ matter-spirit substance dualism is a misapprehension of the subsidiary-emergent relation of body to mind. This dualism is also encouraged by the subsidiary-focal or from-to trajectory of intentionality. As we saw, there is a gestalt switch in the shift from looking from the clues to looking to those clues. When we look from the clues to the focal meaning, the subsidiary clues become invisible to us (the music appears to exist on its own, unproduced; we forget about our fingers); and when we look to the subsidiary clues, their focal meaning disintegrates into nothing (the music disappears when we focus on our fingers). For Polanyi, the body provides the subsidiary base for the mind; body and mind are two levels in a dual control system and not two separate substances. We are comprehensive entities, but since attention to the focal meaning neglects the tacit or subsidiary structures, focusing on meaning and ideas (the stuff of mind/spirit) makes us forget their dependence on the from (material subsidiaries) that form their tacit, supporting conditions (we forget about our fingers; the individual letters become

152 

C. W. LOWNEY II

transparent when we focus is on the meaning of a word). This makes it easy to imagine that the “spiritual” can exist independently from anything material. Similarly, when we focus on the material or subsidiary base as the to (as we do in scientific investigation; we look at the letters in isolation and their rules for combining) rather than dwell in them as the from, we get the impression that the meaning and ideas (meanings; mind/spirit) are ephemeral and illusory. This makes it easy to imagine that all that is really real are the “material” subsidiaries. It is easy to forget that we always dwell in clues and subsidiaries when we experience meanings and focal wholes. So substance dualism—and the monisms that take one half of Descartes’ dualism and deny the other (materialisms or idealisms)—are easy mistakes to make. Polanyi parses out the significance of Descartes’ material-spiritual dualism in terms of the dynamic of from-to awareness; that we dwell in a body and experience value and meaning as emergent creatures with minds already breaks down the matter-meaning and fact-value dichotomies that scientism endorses. Emergence and indwelling also overcome any deep or impassible gulf between me-in-here and the world-out-there.11 We see this gulf incipiently in John Locke’s philosophy, and it is made fully manifest in Kant’s. The chasm between mind and world can lead to representationalist views, according to which I can only know my own perceptions, concepts, or signs—and whatever they are meant to grasp or symbolize “out there” is too foreign to comprehend. This dichotomy between inner and outer leads to a radical skepticism about the world’s existence and to the problem of knowing whether or not there really are other minds like mine. The notion of indwelling bridges theses gaps. Our tacit clues, signs, and ideas are, as Aquinas said, “that by which” we understand and not merely “that which” we understand.12 Rather than the endpoint on the nearside of the chasm, they are the bridge. Representations and ideas become clues to our experience and understanding of the world. Just as a microscope or a telescope becomes a tool by which we can better grasp a focal awareness, and just as our bodies and their extensions can bring us an awareness of something real, so our concepts and conceptions act as tools that can allow us to better grasp reality.13 According to Polanyi, we make contact with reality, and we make discoveries, but reality will always continue to surprise us in its possible future manifestations (KB 133).

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

153

Reality, Morality, Science, and Society While analysis and synthesis can indeed enrich knowledge (KB 125, 130), a fully explicit analysis and justification of knowledge is impossible. We always rely on tacit background knowledge which constitutes what Polanyi called “the tacit dimension.” And just as we cannot always have a full analysis to simples in knowing, we cannot always have a full reduction to constituents in being. Polanyi challenges Cartesian assumptions that were the root source of Enlightenment rationalism. In doing so, he also challenges naive cultural assumptions about how science validates knowledge and progresses. But he also challenges postmodern skepticisms. Polanyi shows that knowledge is not purely objective, but neither is it merely subjective. Instead knowledge is personal and must be affirmed with universal intent if one is to advance toward further discoveries. Polanyi thus re-envisions a role for faith and values in a world impressed with the advances of science. His understanding of tacit knowing and emergent being lead him to a Neo-Platonism of sorts, like that of the pragmaticist C.S. Peirce, in which universals are real, since they, like minds, can show themselves in “indefinite future manifestations” (KB 167, 168). There can thus be ideals such as Truth, Beauty, and Charity that emerge and gain a transcendent status. These “transcendentals” can help guide our actions and our progress.14 In addition to re-imagining transcendent values, Polanyi, via his conceptions of discovery and an emergent world, can encourage a notion in which new moral values emerge. As new entities emerge, they interact at a different ontological level than their subsidiary parts and have their own emergent laws. This allows for the possibility of emergent moral realities. Just as we can make scientific discoveries, we can make discoveries about better ways of being, and better ways of being together.15 I believe Alasdair MacIntryre’s work here is consistent with a Polanyian notion of emergent value. MacIntyre sees traditions of enquiry as essential for rational discussion, and he sees valid moral claims emerging from the practices of cultures and traditions.16 New values can emerge as people and societies discover new and better ways of being together in response to existential problems.17 Some of those new, important, and true values emerged with the Enlightenment, but some, as Charles Taylor says, can take on “degenerate forms.”18 Hence Polanyi says, “I will not resist in any way the momentum of the French

154 

C. W. LOWNEY II

Revolution. I accept its dynamism. But I believe that the new self-­ determination of man can be saved from destroying itself only by recognizing its own limits in an authoritative traditional framework which upholds it” (TD 62). Polanyi opposed scientism, but he saw in the operation of the scientific tradition a model for how democratic institutions might work. The scientific community is both conservative (vetting papers, marginalizing crackpots) and liberal (valuing novelty and discovery). The institution of science was composed of free equals that advanced by cooperation, criticism, and “mutual control” (TD 74). People in science must responsibly (77) advance ideas with universal intent (78) for the consideration of the community. Polanyi, like F.A. Hayek, relied (perhaps a bit too much19) on the notion of “spontaneous order” in which the free actions of individuals could produce a stable yet open system.20 Direction should not be imposed solely from the top down by one central agency, but should emerge from the ground up through the combined efforts of free individuals and their emergent institutions. Science functions and grows best when scientists are free to pursue questions that interest them. Similarly, Polanyi endorses a political pluralism in which people are committed to their individual views but exercise a mutual control as they engage each other in an effort to come to new and better views.21 The political, for Polanyi, needs to be guided by the moral and not merely the economic. The political-economic order thus has the markings of a dual control system. Polanyi says “Society, as an organization of power and profit, forms one level, while its moral principles lie on a level above it” (TD 86). From his perspective, a capitalist economic system was important for the creation of wealth, but its operations should be guided toward moral outcomes with the help of higher-level moral constraints—just as a steam engine does not simply drive a ship forward, but its power is constrained and steered in worthwhile directions.

Conclusion: Progress via Dynamic Orthodoxy Polanyi’s understanding of personal knowledge and tacit knowing sets the basis for trusting our knowledge without the need to reduce everything to the demands of explicit scientific evidence. It allows the possibility that traditional and religious values can be responsibly upheld. His notion of emergence also allows minds, people, and values to be real.

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

155

Polanyi was a critic of scientism, but he was also an advocate of science and scientific truth. Similarly, Polanyi was a critic of rationalism and Enlightenment thought, but was also an advocate of the use of reason and Enlightenment values. With a better epistemology and ontology correcting the distortions that the Enlightenment’s rationalism promoted, Polanyi hoped the danger of nihilism and moral inversion could be averted and the European liberal tradition—which valued individual and political freedom—could grow. While our society, as a legacy of the Enlightenment, is far from perfect, Polanyi held hope for continued improvement. He thus firmly upheld the Enlightenment value of progress and saw it as an important ideal for both science and society. He says, “Any tradition fostering the progress of thought must have this intention: to teach current ideas as stages leading on to unknown truths which, when discovered, might dissent from the very teachings which engendered them” (TD 82). According to Polanyi, this progress relies on a “dynamic orthodoxy” in which both stability and change are important. While building on the values of traditions, we should be open to competing views and make an effort to discover new truths together.

Notes 1. To economize, references to Polanyi’s work to Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1958) will be noted with PK; The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967), with TD; references to “The Republic of Science: Its Political and Economic Theory” [Minerva 1(1962): 54-74] with RS, and references to Marjorie Grene (ed.) Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), with KB. 2. For more on Polanyi’s life, see William Scott and Martin Moleski, Michael Polanyi, Scientist and Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. [1967] in R.T.  Allen (ed.) Society, Economics & Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2017) 107–118. 4. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1968) 119. 5. “A person speaks with universal intent when convinced of the truth of what she or he says. ‘I speak not of established universality, but of a universal intent, for the scientist cannot know whether his claims will be accepted’ (TD 18)” (Quoted from Walter Gulick, ed., Recovering Truths: A Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi’s Writings, Glossary, 17, available with permission at polanyisociety.org).

156 

C. W. LOWNEY II

6. Compare here Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion that rational thinking can only take place in the context of a coherent tradition of inquiry in his After Virtue (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Also note that MacIntyre studied at Manchester University while Polanyi taught there. 7. See Charles Lowney, “Rethinking the Machine Metaphor since Descartes: The Irreducibility of Bodies, Minds and Meanings” Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 31, no. 3 (2011): 179–192. 8. There are different sorts and strengths of emergentist theory. Since downward constraints can be construed as downward causes, Polanyi’s emergentism falls somewhere between a weak and a strong emergentism (as characterized by Mark Bedau in Emergence: Contemporary Readings in Philosophy and Science, M.  Bedau and P.  Humphreys, eds., Cambridge: MIT Press 2008, 157–161). It does not violate the laws of physics, but it also does not affirm the causal closure of physics. Some friends of physicalism, such as Tihamér Margitay, thus believe Polanyi’s emergentism was too strong and blame some of its faults on too strongly associating the structure of tacit knowing with the structure of emergent being [“From Epistemology to Ontology: Polanyi’s Arguments for the Layered Ontology” in Tihamér Margitay, ed., Knowing and Being: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 128–140]. I reply to Tihamer’s concerns in “From Epistemology to Ontology to Epistemontology” [Tradition and Discovery 40 no. 1 (Fall 2013) 17–31]. 9. For the importance of this notion see, Phil Mullins, “Comprehension and the ‘Comprehensive Entity’: Polanyi’s Theory of Tacit Knowing and Its Metaphysical Implications” Tradition and Discovery 33 no. 3 (2006–2007): 26–43. 10. Marjorie Grene, a strong advocate of Polanyi’s work, sees in the end a greater advantage to Merleau-Ponty’s approach to emergent pluralism. While Polanyi’s emergentism is more hierarchized, Merleau-Ponty’s is more “centrifugal.” [See Grene’s “Merleau-Ponty and the Revival of Ontology” Review of Metaphysics 29 no. 4 (June 1976): 605–62.] In contrast, I attempt to show how Polanyi’s approach, while less philosophically nuanced, might be the more useful and necessary (Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 159, 179–180). Further discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of these two pluralisms can also be found in Lowney, “Robust Realism: Pluralist or Emergent” in  Charles W.  Lowney II, ed., Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 235–270.  11. See Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 162. 12. Polanyi’s move here is similar to C.S. Peirce’s notion of triadic semantic structures; see Polanyi’s “Sense Giving and Sense Reading” in KB,

10  MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 

157

181–210. For more on Peirce and Polanyi see Phil Mullins, “Peirce’s Abduction and Polanyi’s Tacit Knowing” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16 no. 3 (2002): 198–22; and also Mullins, “Comprehension and the ‘Comprehensive Entity,’” op. cit. 13. Polanyi’s notion of dwelling in technical clues anticipates Andy Clark’s “extended mind” in Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14. One can relate these “transcendentals” to telic goals that draw us forward to new possibilities for being. See TD 88–92 and also D.M.  Yeager’s “Taylor and Polanyi on Moral Sources and Social Systems” for a discussion of the significance of Polanyi’s transcendentals in a socio-political context (in Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 189–214). On how concepts and platonic ideas such as Beauty are formed, see my “The Tacit in Frege” [Polanyiana 17 no. 1–2 (2008): 19–37]. For more on the difference between teleological notions and Polanyi’s conception of telic, see Richard Gelwick’s “Michael Polanyi’s Daring Epistemology and the Hunger for Teleology” [Zygon 40 no. 1 (2005): 63–76]. Part of Gelwick’s interest here is to show how it is illegitimate to use Polanyi’s notion of “telic fields” in a theological argument for intelligent design. 15. In “From Science to Morality: A Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009): 42–54] and in “Morality: Emergentist Ethics and Virtue For Itself” [TAD 36 no. 3 (Summer 2010): 52–65], I show how different moral theories— deontological, utilitarian, virtue, and sentiment based—each catch part of a moral reality that is better understood as emergent rather than pre-existent or rooted in some totally other dimension. Even purportedly simple moral “intuitions” have their tacit subsidiary support in lived experience. See also Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit. chapters 8 “Overcoming the Scientistic Imaginary” (143–168) and 9 “On Emergent Ethics, Becoming Authentic, and Finding Common Ground” (169–187). 16. MacIntyre, 1984, op. cit. For more on how Aristotelian philosophy connects with Polanyi’s philosophy, see my “From Science to Morality: A Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009): 42–54], which links together tacit knowing and phronesis; or my “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity,” which connects Aristotle and Polanyi in understanding the development of telic goal/ideals (2017, op. cit., 71–92). Also see D.  Hoinski and R.  Polansky, “The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s Search for Truth against Nihilism” in A. Greenstine and R. Johnson, eds., Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017): 180–201.

158 

C. W. LOWNEY II

17. See Lowney, “Morality: Emergentist Ethics” op. cit. and Lowney “From Morality to Spirituality: Society, Religion and Transformation” Tradition and Discovery 37 no. 1 (Fall 2010): 19–38. 18. See Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). For more on authenticity as an emergent value, see my “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of Modernity” (2017, op. cit., 71–92). 19. See D.M. Yeager, 2017, op. cit. 20. See Richard T. Allen, Beyond Liberalism: The Political Thought of F.A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi (Rutgers, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016) or Struan Jacobs and Phil Mullins, “Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in Correspondence” in History of European Ideas 42 no. 1 (2016): 107–130. 21. See my chapter 12, “Robust Moral Realism: Pluralist or Emergent?” in Lowney ed., 2017, op. cit., 235–270.

CHAPTER 11

C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man Luke C. Sheahan

The inclusion of arguably the foremost Christian apologist and dialectician of the twentieth century in a book on anti-rationalist thinkers may seem at the outset ridiculous. If anyone put his faith in the rational faculty, it was the esteemed Oxford don C.S. Lewis, the one for whom it could be said, “The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.”1 One biographer writes, “His rhetorical temper provided a compulsiveness and a posture which could be resolved only in argument. Training, taste, and talent equipped him for an academic and apologetic career, to the exclusion of nearly all others.”2 But he was also the author of the children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia and the science fiction Ransom Trilogy and a famed scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. While he certainly made use of the rational faculty, it was in the imagination that he put his faith. Lewis wrote several famous works of Christian apologetics including The Problem of Pain (1940), Miracles (1947), and Mere Christianity (1952). But he found that their efficacy depended upon a deeper mode of knowing. Through science fiction and children’s fantasy, Lewis engaged in

L. C. Sheahan (*) Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_11

159

160 

L. C. SHEAHAN

what McGrath calls “imaginative narrative apologetics.”3 Lewis believed in the rational soundness of his faith in that he believed that Christianity made claims that were historically and philosophically true, but he further believed that the imagination, not the rational faculty, was the key to understanding reality, including the reality of the Christian religion. Rationalism contributes to understanding truth insofar as it is shaped by a healthy imagination. Rational apologetics has a place in the arsenal of the Christian, but it is not of prime importance because it is inadequate to capture the full truth of the Christian faith, or anything else for that matter. Lewis scholar Michael Ward writes, “Lewis was of the opinion that rational argumentation was too rudimentary for the task of conveying Christian truths.”4 The imagination is not irrational or sub-rational, but supra-rational. It transcends rational argument, undergirds it, providing the groundwork that enables rational arguments to make sense. As an academic Lewis certainly valued reason, but he looked askance at a thin rationalism, one that held that human syllogizing could provide better insight into reality than imaginative narrative. Where the rationalist sees only “theorizing” as rational, Lewis believed that truth could be perceived through other faculties such as the imagination. He believed in the “epistemological reliability of the imagination, especially when realized in the forms of metaphor, symbolism, and myth, to establish meaning, the antecedent of truth.”5 Reason did have value for Lewis and it was certainly one way in which a person could access truths. But reason’s ability to yield insight into reality was limited because reason itself is in large part determined by the imaginative backdrop, by the model of the universe that underlies it. The structure of one’s imagination determined in advance how one will reason. It is not so much that rationalism is a failure as a means of inquiry, it is that to Lewis rationalism is woefully inadequate to grasp the fullness of reality compared to the imagination.6 This chapter explores various ways that Lewis prioritized the imagination over the rational faculty in his work. This is significant for a proper understanding of the fundamental thrust of Lewis’s writing throughout his career.7 One scholarly account holds that Lewis believed reason to be the key to understanding truth throughout his early life, but that he fled to the imagination when his faith was publicly demonstrated to be unreasonable in a 1948 debate with the noted philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.8 Anscombe attacked Lewis’s argument in a chapter of his book Miracles titled “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” published the previous year. There Lewis argues that naturalism is self-defeating because it

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

161

simultaneously holds that the human mind is a product of chance and survival instinct and that the mind may grasp truth. How, he asked, could an organ that was the product of chance and survival instinct be trusted to reason to truth? This could only be true if the human mind was capable of grasping truth independent of its need for survival. Our trust in reason to discover truth is predicated on our belief that it participates in the Divine Logos, the eternal truth. But this implies that it has been created for the purpose of grasping truth, which naturalism denies.9 Anscombe disagreed with the structure of Lewis’s argument, but not with its conclusion. As a devout Roman Catholic, she too found naturalism untenable, but not for the reasons Lewis gave in that chapter of Miracles. She argued that a rational thought may derive from “non-­ rational” causes (such as the accidental development of the brain). One is not required to reject the possibility of rational thought for the reason that it emerged from a brain that arose by accident. Anscombe’s critique was based on a distinction in Wittgenstein’s philosophy between reasons and causes, an internal debate among Wittgensteinian scholars in analytic philosophy of which Lewis was not aware.10 In response to Anscombe’s critique, Lewis rewrote the chapter and it appeared in the 1960 edition of Miracles under the title “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism.” Some of Lewis’s biographers interpreted this event as traumatic, a watershed psychological event that convinced him that the Christian faith could not be rationally defended or was somehow fundamentally irrational.11 Out of emotional distress he retreated into children’s fantasy as a sort of psychological crutch to his wounded faith. Anscombe herself scoffed at such depictions of Lewis as “projection” on the part of their authors, noting that his rewrite of the chapter in question demonstrated the seriousness with which he took his work.12 As Lewis biographer Alistair McGrath writes, “There is no evidence of Lewis retreating into some kind of nonrational fideism or reason-free fantasy as a result of this encounter.”13 As an academic he was used to such criticisms, receiving them regularly from his fellow writers, the Inklings, his editors, and the like. Furthermore, he did not cease his apologetic writings. He published Mere Christianity in 1952, four years after the debate. While based on radio addresses delivered during WWII, he did not edit them to abandon reasoned argument. So it would be wrong to say that Lewis relinquished belief in reason or the reasonableness of Christianity for the imagination after the debate.

162 

L. C. SHEAHAN

More importantly for our argument here, Lewis engaged in imaginative discourse before the debate. He had published Out of the Silent Planet, the first of his science fiction Ransom Trilogy, in 1937, more than a decade before his debate with Anscombe and he had been publishing poetry since at least the 1920s. Even the beginnings of what would become Narnia had been percolating in his mind since he was sixteen14 and he had a rough sketch of the basics for a story of four children staying with a professor during the London bombing around 1939–40.15 Through science fiction, as he later did through children’s fantasy, Lewis engaged in what McGrath calls “imaginative narrative apologetics,” and he had been doing this long before his debate with Anscombe. McGrath writes, “Lewis was thus already persuaded of the importance of the use of narrative and the appeal to the imagination in apologetics.”16 Lewis believed in the rational soundness of his faith in that he believed that the Christian faith was true, but he further believed that the efficacy of reason was dwarfed by the importance of the imagination. The imagination, not the reason, was the key to understanding reality. Rationalism was only valuable insofar as it was shaped by a healthy imagination. The debate with Anscombe underscored in Lewis’s mind this truth. Lewis scholar Michael Ward writes, “Anscombe reminded Lewis of the generic deficiency of apologetics, that rational argumentation can never convey the concrete realities of spiritual experiences.”17 Rational apologetics has a place in the arsenal of the Christian, but it is not of prime importance because it is inadequate to capture the full truth of the Christian faith, or anything else for that matter. Ward writes, “Lewis was of the opinion that rational argumentation was too rudimentary for the task of conveying Christian truths.”18 The imagination was not irrational or sub-rational, but supra-rational. It transcends rational argument, undergirds it, providing the groundwork that enables rational arguments to make sense. That said, his apologetic output did decline after the debate. Miracles is the only strictly apologetic polemic in his oeuvre and The Problem of Pain (1940) and Mere Christianity (1952) are the only others that present rational arguments for Christianity. All three were substantially written before the Anscombe debate. While published later as a book, the substance of Mere Christianity was written as radio addresses during WWII. McGrath gives three reasons for the decline. First, Lewis found apologetics emotionally and spiritually draining. He simply didn’t like it.19 He did it because he thought it necessary. Second, those closest to him were unconvinced by his arguments. His lifelong friend and confidant

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

163

Arthur Greeves left orthodox Protestantism for Unitarianism in midlife. The older woman he lived with and cared for, Mrs. Moore, remained hostile towards Christianity throughout her life. Even Warnie Lewis, his own brother and a Christian convert, found the argument in The Problem of Pain unconvincing. Third, the debate with Anscombe indicated that there were others better situated to defend the Christian faith on rational grounds. Lewis even suggested that Anscombe speak again at the Socratic Club after the debate, writing in 1950, “Having obliterated me as an Apologist, ought she not to succeed me?”20 This chapter explains Lewis’s conception of the differences between imagination and reason and how he related one to the other. It proceeds as follows. First, I examine Lewis’s idea of “looking at” versus “looking along.” This idea is reflected in the dichotomy between his apologetic works (full of rational argumentation) and his narrative fiction. Lewis nuances and elaborates on this fundamental distinction elsewhere his work. Second, I turn to his idea of “transposition.” He believed that the translation of higher truths cannot be expressed or explored easily in rational discourse due to rationalism’s limited “vocabulary.” Our rational faculties are inherently inadequate to account fully for at least some truths grasped imaginatively. These two sections lay the groundwork for how Lewis differentiated between the imagination and the reason in terms of grasping experiences. Third, I discuss Lewis’s use of the metaphor of light to demonstrate the necessity of an outer source of illumination for reason. Fourth, I turn to how this applies to his understanding of the influence of the prevailing model of the universe, grasped through the imagination, upon the ability of the rational faculty to understand the nature of that universe. Both sections demonstrate how Lewis not only prioritized the imagination over reason, but how he cast the imagination as forming the backdrop against which the reason must work. Reason is not only inadequate to fully grasp what is perceived by the imagination, but the imagination shapes the very context within which reason operates. Fifth, I conclude by examining what Lewis believed to be the high stakes of the proper ordering of imagination and reason. Lewis adhered to a Platonic understanding of the “chest” as the seat of the emotions through which the rational faculty rules the appetite. Whatever value reason may have, it is consequential insofar as a man’s sentiments are rightly ordered by the imagination. The rationalists’ devaluing of the imagination is dangerous because it abolishes the center of man and, ironically,

164 

L. C. SHEAHAN

compromises the efficacy of reason itself. Like Irving Babbitt, Lewis believed that the imagination was the real key to human understanding and, subsequently, human action.21 Claes Ryn writes of Babbitt’s conception of the imagination, that it “gives man a sense of the very essence of life, most importantly the moral order of existence.”22 The very same could be said of Lewis’s conception.

“Looking At” Versus “Looking Along” Lewis believed narrative fiction better at conveying truth than rational argument by making truth experiential, helping the rational faculty to “look along” Christian beliefs, rather than to “look at” them. Lewis explained the difference between “looking at” and “looking along” as two types of cognitive experience in a brief essay titled “Meditations in a Tool Shed.” He begins the essay describing himself standing in a toolshed with a sunbeam coming through a crack in the top of the door. Specks of dust drift through the shaft, but all else is mostly dark. Lewis writes, “I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.”23 But then he moves and stands in the shaft. Immediately the specks of dust disappear and he sees through the crack above the door to the world outside. He sees green leaves against the blue sky and, beyond that, the sun. He is now looking along the beam. He writes, “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.”24 Lewis follows up with a few poignant examples of how this distinction functions in cognition. A young man falls in love. To him, a few minutes of light conversation with this girl is better than a thousand favors from any other. The young man is “looking along” the experience called “being in love.” A neuroscientist looks at the young man and says that the experience is due to his genetic makeup and hormonal responses to the biological need for sex and procreation. The latter figure is “looking at” the young man’s experience from the outside. “That is the difference between looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it,”25 Lewis writes. Another example includes a mathematician who contemplates figures and the neuroscientist who notes that what the mathematician thinks is a matter of “timeless and spaceless truths about quantity” is really just electrical pulses in his gray matter.26 These two types of experiencing the same phenomenon raise a question. “Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you the most about the thing?”27 The idea of “looking at” is associated with science and

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

165

reason and the experience of “looking along” is associated with the imaginative and poetic interpretation of real experiences. Lewis is making two points here. The first is that, contrary to what many think, both ways of “looking” are means of grasping reality. Both are telling us true things. We do not necessarily need to choose between them. The second is a subtler point. It is that “looking along” is the more fundamental experience, the more essential point. The experience of “looking at” is only relevant because the “looking along” has occurred. The neuroscientist is only interested in what is happening in the smitten young man’s brain because he has already been felled by Cupid’s arrow, or in the mathematician’s because the mathematician has already done figures. The primary thing that is being “looked at” is one of concrete experiencing grasped through the imaginative narrative of the one who is “looking along” the experience. Now certainly the imaginative experience of “looking along” has led many astray. Many have fallen in love with an unlovely person, or been drawn away from accurate academic assessments by what turns out at bottom to be a psychological bias. But the whole point of “looking at” something, reasoning about it, is to think more accurately about that thing, as a check on the primary experience of the imagination. But it doesn’t follow that the primary experience itself is therefore invalid. In fact, the second type of looking, Lewis points out, is still a type of seeing. “Looking at” also depends upon a fundamental belief in the accuracy of sight, just as “looking along” does. If the neuroscientist points out that the calculations of the mathematician are not a reflection of reality but only electric pulses in the mathematician’s brain, a second neuroscientist could come along and say the same about the first neuroscientist, that his analysis of the mathematician’s brain is not an accurate assessment, but only the result of electrical impulses in his gray matter. And of course, a third neuroscientist would have to say the same about the second, and so on in perpetuity. Lewis asks, “Where is the rot to end?”28 His answer is, “that we must never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything.”29 Reason and imagination are not at odds but two mutually reinforcing ways of approaching truth. Nonetheless, it is the imagination that takes precedence. In many ways Lewis’s work can be categorized as either “looking at” or “looking along” his own beliefs, approaching subjects both through fiction and non-fiction, giving his readers an exposition of a subject by

166 

L. C. SHEAHAN

“looking at” it in a scholarly or apologetic treatise as well as the experience of “looking along” the same subject through narrative fiction. He says this explicitly in the preface to That Hideous Strength (1945), the third installment of the Ransom Trilogy, writing that the book is making the same points through fiction that he made in his non-fiction work The Abolition of Man (1943).30 Something similar could be said about his arguments in Mere Christianity and Miracles and the fantastical storytelling in The Chronicles of Narnia. The narrative fiction helps his readers “look along” his Christian beliefs and the apologetic pieces help them “look at” them.

Transposition A similar approach Lewis takes, and one that also demonstrates why rationalism as such is less adequate to fully grasping reality than is the imagination, is explained in his essay “Transposition.” Lewis is writing about the difficulty in translating higher theological realities, those of heaven, into the language of lower realities, our common experiences on earth. He is describing how “looking at” something may be not only different from “looking along,” but inferior in an important sense. Lewis writes, “The transposition of the richer into the poorer must, so to speak, be algebraical, not arithmetical. If you are to translate from a language which has a large vocabulary into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense.”31 Experiences of aesthetic delight, for example, are often described in terms of physical sensations, even nausea. But, of course, positive aesthetic experiences are not like getting sick but they do bring with them an unsettling of the diaphragm, which is also part of the experience of nausea.32 When we contemplate the higher experience of aesthetic delight we must translate the experience into language that is not quite up to the task, that does not have the breadth of meaning appropriate to these higher pleasures. Lewis uses the metaphor of languages and music to demonstrate this point.33 If one language has twenty-two vowel sounds and it is written in an alphabet with only five vowels, then to express the same sound one must use one vowel in the written alphabet to represent several in the spoken. Or if a click language with dozens of consonant sounds is written an alphabet with far fewer, then some of the consonant sounds are simply lost. One consonant sound in the new alphabet must stand for several in the old. If music written for an orchestra is only played upon a piano, the piano rendition must necessarily transpose the music written for a

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

167

multitude of wind and string instruments into music played with only ten fingers on only one instrument, condensing a larger musical experience into a more limited medium.34 What results may be the same score, but the fullness of the musical experience will not be completely realized. Where there was to be a violin or a flute there will be only the piano and where there were dozens of instruments there will only be one. It may be the same notes and the same melodies, but it isn’t the same musical experience. The rational faculty operates on a sort of lower level, a smaller vocabulary, a more limited vowel and consonant system, a single instrument instead of a whole orchestra. It cannot capture the fullness of reality, especially regarding the ultimate reality of the Christian faith. To communicate these higher realities one must use symbols and metaphors, lower things signifying the higher.35 The rationalists who value reason above all else present another problem for Lewis. They are like the person hearing a musical score on a piano who is unaware that the score was intended to be played by an orchestra and, what’s more, doubts that such a thing as an orchestra exists. He cannot imagine the violins, flutes, and trumpets executing the score in harmony and, furthermore, he does not know that such instruments exist or how they differ in sound from the piano. Or like someone who reads a passage written in an alphabet with five vowels but is intended to be spoken in a language with twenty-two vowel sounds, but who is unaware of a language with more than five vowels and cannot imagine that such a thing exists. Those who adhere to this thin sort of rationalism cannot explain the higher realities that we experience. The fact that we struggle to translate these experiences into communicable concepts does not mean that they are not real, but that they are beyond the grasp of our rational capacity. To be contemplated these experiences must be transposed into a lower medium with a more limited vocabulary that is not entirely adequate to a full expression of those realities. For Lewis, the remedy is not to contemplate these truths per se, but to help people experience them or something like them, demonstrate through symbol and metaphor the reality of the orchestra or the twenty-two letter vowels sounds. Lewis’s appeal through both his apologetic work and, more effectively, through his imaginative fiction is to present his readers with other possibilities, with a vision of the world where Christianity is true, but not explicit, experienced, but not contemplated. By presenting this greater whole the non-rational but real experiences of ordinary life begin to make sense within a larger imaginative framework, which for

168 

L. C. SHEAHAN

Lewis included the Christian worldview. This is what Charles Peirce called abduction,36 “the process by which we observe certain things, and work out what intellectual framework might make sense of them.”37 This abductive process reveals “the role of the imagination in generating possible schemes of things within which experience and observation might be accommodated.”38 Needless to say, the imaginative constructs may be inaccurate. But it is only through these constructs that the right imaginative construct, one that actually grasps reality in its fullness, can be presented. Lewis’s own faith in Christianity began because he believed it made sense of what he and other human beings actually experienced in the world.39 His fiction from Out of the Silent Planet (1937) to The Chronicles of Narnia to Till We Have Faces (1956) can all be understood as being written in this vein. These works are not arguments for Christianity, but an abductive presentation, an imaginative rendering of what a world might be like were Christianity true. Lewis’s idea of transposition is closely related to his discussion of “looking at” and “looking along.” To put transposition in those terms, “looking at” some truths, especially theological or spiritual truths, is not just different from “looking along” the same truths, but it may be intrinsically poorer because the medium of communication is less precise, poorer in some way. In “Meditations in a Tool Shed” Lewis is merely pointing out that the two experiences are not mutually exclusive in grasping reality. But in “Transposition” he is going further to explain the inferiority of “looking at” to “looking along,” especially in the highest realms of knowledge and experience, such as aesthetics, love, and theology. Both Lewis’s concepts of “looking at” and “looking along” and “transposition” between higher and lower modes of knowing bear a resemblance to the distinction Eric Voegelin makes between the “engendering experience” of order and the symbolization of that experience. The “engendering experience” is the original experience of divine order. These experiences are rare in human history, taking place in the revelation of Israel and the advent of Athenian philosophy, so they must take symbolical form to be preserved for future generations.40 Voegelin describes symbolization as “the attempt at making the essentially unknowable order of being intelligible as far as possible through the creation of symbols which interpret the unknown by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known.”41 The rational faculty symbolizes through language what the imagination perceives through the primary experience. But the process of symbolization can be confusing, incomplete, and even distorting,42 especially when the

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

169

symbols—mere descriptions of the primary experiences of order—are mistaken for the reality of order itself.43 Any symbolization is inadequate to the full expression of the engendering experience, but the attempt must be made nonetheless to preserve the original experience of order for future generations. To be effective in connecting the person to the engendering experience, the symbolization must imaginatively relay the grasp of the experience, communicating its meaning.44 Both “symbolization” and “transposition” are terms that denote the attempt to describe participation in being in terms that are second order realities, but that attempt to capture the original experience, even to recreate it. Lewis and Voegelin both perceived inadequacies in such attempts. When we are “looking at” something through symbol, myth, or doctrine, we must remember that that is the secondary experience to “looking along” the same truth, the same primary experience.45

The Metaphor of Light Through the discussions in “Meditations in a Tool Shed” and “Transposition” Lewis is demonstrating that reason and imagination are not mutually exclusive in their grasp of truth and that the imagination may in some circumstances be a superior mode of knowing, especially in grasping the most important things, although elsewhere Lewis depicts the imagination as even more fundamental to reason than what has been described so far. For Lewis, the imagination conceives the backdrop against which reason must work, producing the bundle of assumptions that forms the substance of our perception of the world about which we reason. We will examine this rather difficult aspect in Lewis’s work through a discussion of his use of the metaphor of light and his understanding of the model of the universe. Lewis explores how the imagination functions in relation to reason through the metaphor of light.46 He famously writes at the end of his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”47 There is a difference for Lewis between seeing something and the thing by which one sees, which demonstrates in another way how he believed reason to be the junior partner in the search for truth. McGrath writes, “The image of light allowed Lewis to emphasize the derivative ability of the mind to comprehend.”48 Reason helps us to see things, to understand them. But just like the eyes require light by which to see, so

170 

L. C. SHEAHAN

reason requires a source of illumination by which it may behold the truths of reality. Christianity, for Lewis, provided the central light that allowed him to see, to make sense of the world around him. There are, of course, other ways by which one may attempt to see other sources of light besides Christianity. But there is only one sun. Lewis’s approach to apologetics reflects the understanding that the light cast by these other stars does not make sense of the world in the way that Christianity does. The metaphor of a source of light separate from the activity of “seeing” demonstrates that pre-rational source of intellectual illumination. Sure, we need eyes to see, but our eyes are irrelevant if we do not have a light by which they may behold the things around us. Furthermore, the quality of the source of light will greatly affect the ability of our eyes to perceive. The rational faculty will not operate effectively, will not behold reality accurately, unless the light by which it sees is from a reliable source, the true sun rather than a false star with a partial spectrum that limits what the rational faculty may apprehend. To see things rightly, one must be seeing by the right light. McGrath writes, “[T]he ability of reason to illuminate things is itself a consequence of it already having been illumined by the Divine reason. Reason is not autonomous, especially in relation to the things of God. It must be enabled to see; otherwise, it sees only dimly, if at all.”49 This understanding of reason is sharply contrasted with the movement that more than any other claimed the ocular metaphor: the Enlightenment. For Lewis, many Enlightenment thinkers were blinded by their reliance upon an abstract rationalism, conceiving reason as independent of culture and tradition as well as authoritative above all other means of perceiving truth. This type of rationalism “reduces reality to abstractions in order to master it [rather than] see[ing] something as it really is.”50 Reason was important to Lewis, but his conception of it was contextualized within a deeper understanding of how one must grasp reality. “Lewis was concerned to affirm the importance of reason, while avoiding the aesthetically bleak and metaphysically austere vision of reality resulting from an exaggeration of reason’s power and a failure to comprehend the importance of other human mental faculties—above all, the imagination.”51

The Model of the Universe Lewis’s use of the metaphor of light was derived from his realization that “what he was able to ‘see’ was shaped “by a controlling worldview which, in effect, determined what he saw.”52 Lewis writes that the “interpretation

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

171

of experiences depends on preconceptions.”53 Those preconceptions are shaped by the fundamental model governing the mind’s perception of the universe. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, “[I]n every age the human mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe.”54 Every age has a model, the “backcloth of the arts” that shapes the imagination and the emotions of all who live under it.55 Ours is shaped by Freud and Einstein. We live in a universe that is empty and silent. The heavenly bodies are “pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity.”56 But medieval man lived in a universe that was warm, full of life and music. Rather than empty space, the universe was composed of spheres, each governed by its own intelligences that in turn were driven to their circular rotations by a love that sought to participate in its object by imitating it. The regular rotation in a circle is the most perfect shape, one that mimics the perfection of God.57 The model of the universe cannot help but to have a profound emotional effect on those who believe in it. Medieval man who looked up at the stars and wondered at the nature of the universe was “like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea.”58 To the medieval mind, morality and theology were knit into the very structure of the universe. Each of the spheres was oriented by its love of God and indeed the whole universe was surrounded by the outer sphere which was itself where God dwelt. All higher intelligences were oriented toward God and not toward the earth. The earth was at the center of the universe but the universe was conceived as sort of funnel, with the center at the bottom. When man looked up, he was indeed looking up in a definitive sense, up a stairway to a majestic spectacle towering above him.59 Lewis writes, “Man looked up at a patterned, populous, intricate, finite cosmos; a builded thing, not a wilderness; ‘heaven’ or ‘spheres,’ not ‘space.’”60 Looking up at the stars was to behold a feast, an opera, or a dance.61 In such a universe, disbelieving in God was nearly imaginatively impossible. How could He not exist when one looked up and saw the entire universe encompassed by His existence and ordered toward His will? Contrast this to modern man who looks up to see the vast coldness and emptiness of space, infinite in its chaos, with no center as such and no order. The planets move in imperfect elliptical rotations for reasons that have nothing to do with divine order and morality, let alone love. Man beholds his place in the universe with terror and bewilderment, perceiving no meaning in the vast coldness and emptiness of space, populated only by planetary debris and balls of burning gas that would kill him if he were even capable of coming within millions of miles of them. Such a model

172 

L. C. SHEAHAN

cannot help but to make his life seem meaningless, rather than moral. In such a universe, believing in God is imaginatively difficult. How could one maintain belief in God’s existence when one looks up and sees the vast emptiness of space with no moral order and with no apparent place or need for Him? Of course, the new model is more accurate as far as physical observations go. But for Lewis, it may be less accurate in its depiction of the moral nature of the universe and humanity’s place within it. The benefit of the old model is that it provided a backdrop which made sense of the actual experience of human beings with each other and with God. The new model affects the emotions in a way that may lead to distortion of moral reality rather than a more accurate grasp of it. While we can no longer believe the literal physical medieval model of the planets, it may yet serve as a constellation of permanent spiritual symbols that help us to understand the moral nature of the world around us.62 The preservation of permanent spiritual symbols is the key to understanding all of Lewis’s imaginative works. Michael Ward presents a strong argument that The Chronicles of Narnia was Lewis’s attempt to help moderns live in, to experience, to “look along,” a universe that is oriented toward God according to “the discarded image” of the medieval model of the universe.63 According to Ward, in each Narnia book Lewis is attempting to show the readers what it feels like to believe in such a thing by depicting a world imbued with the qualities of each of the planetary spheres. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis helps his readers to “look along” the Jovial spirit,64 in Prince Caspian the Martial, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader the Solar, and so on. While we do not have space to explore fully Ward’s case, our point here is one that is widely accepted in Lewis scholarship: Lewis believed that one’s imaginative backdrop would dispose one toward moral truth or away from it. Like Babbitt, Lewis understood that the imaginative backdrop could prove illusory as well as illuminating. Reason tends only to prove postulates that one is already predisposed to accept. Ryn writes, “Reasoning that builds on distorted imagination may be formally brilliant but will present illusions.”65 But Lewis believed literature can shape the imaginative backdrop and good literature can make moral reality palatable to reason. Lewis writes, “Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors,”66 by which he means that literature is a way to see truth and even to enter into it. An imaginative tale can give one the experience of truth, even if that truth is contrary to one’s professed beliefs. By providing the true meaning of the

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

173

world in a deeper imaginative sense literature can prepare it to accept propositional truths. Lewis pointed out that in his own childhood he rejected religion at least partially because he was told he ought to believe it. Being told one ought to show reverence for something is a good way of making someone, especially a child, withhold the required reverence. But through fairy stories, Lewis thought, he might “steal past those watchful dragons,” to communicate the true meaning of the world and what he believed to be the truth of Christianity to those predisposed to reject Christian theological propositions.67 These stories could give the experience of living in a world where the medieval planetary scheme is true in a moral sense and where Christianity is true in a theological sense. A person under that influence would then be more open to the propositional presentation of moral and theological truths.

The Abolition of Man We have explained above what Lewis thought about reason and its limited ability to grasp truth. But his concern is not merely academic. Exalting the rational, over what I have called here the imaginative strikes to the very heart of what makes man, man. In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis examines a trend in education that denigrates the tendency to insist on correct emotional responses to certain things or to certain pieces of literature. It is not, this view holds, that a sunset demands a response of reverence for its sublimity, it is that any sublime feelings are simply the subjective response of the viewer. According to this view, to encourage students to feel rightly, they will inevitably be weakened in their ability to think rightly. But, Lewis writes, “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”68 Rather than irrational as such, some sentiments are appropriate for some things. They are signposts directing us toward truth and the real meaning of the universe. Maybe a sunset really does demand an emotional response that regards such a thing as sublime. The rejection of this view in general is to reject truth and goodness as such. Lewis calls this body of fundamental truths and primary goods the Tao. This tendency to quash sentiments derived from the imagination is to bereave persons of the ability to control their appetites. While Plato may

174 

L. C. SHEAHAN

have been right that Reason ought to rule, it only rules through the chest, the imaginative seat of the emotions. Lewis writes, “[I]t is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.”69 The result of such an education is to produce “men without chests,” men who do not have this middle element, this ability to control their appetites. It is wrong to call them intellectuals, Lewis writes, “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out.”70 If we extirpate this essential element, what we get is not a more reasonable populace, but one that cannot be governed by reason at all. In the final analysis to reduce everything to reason by eliminating the seat of emotion and imagination is to abolish the ability of the rational faculty to rule, which simply allows the appetite full reign. When we have eliminated the emotive power of Justice and Goodness we are left with only “I want.” We are left only with the rule of appetite, the part of the man that he shares with the beasts. Focusing only upon the rational side of man abolishes man as man, depriving him of the very ability to be rational. In other words, focusing only on “looking at” rather than “looking along” destroys the ability to even do that.

Conclusion Lewis writes in “On the Reading of Old Books,” “Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes.”71 The rational faculty operates in each age to affirm the spirit of the age and it is rejected when it works against it.72 Rather than guiding the search for truth, reason relies upon an imaginative framework which determines what it reasons about and prejudices its conclusions. This is the difference in priority that Lewis posited between “looking at” and “looking along.” Our reason is constricted to “look at” what the model of the universe has determined our imagination must “look along.” And the light by which we see, by which we are able to “look along” will to a great extent determine what we see. McGrath writes, “This is one of the reasons why Lewis appealed to the imagination—not to retreat into irrationality, but to escape the austerity of a purely rational view of reality, which could only offer a partial and inadequate account of things.”73 Lewis’s friend, Austin Farrier described reading Lewis thus, “We think we are listening to an argument; in fact, we are presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction.”74

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

175

Notes 1. This comment was written about W.T.  Kirkpatrick, the tutor of Lewis’s youth, but it applied equally to him. James Como, Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C.S. Lewis (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), 40. 2. Como, Branches, 140. 3. Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), 255. 4. Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219. 5. Como, Branches, 169. 6. Alister McGrath, The Intellectual World of C.S.  Lewis (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley and Sons, 2014), 134. 7. I provide a similar account of this incident and its importance to Lewis scholarship in Luke Sheahan, “The Intellectual Kinship of Irving Babbitt and C.S.  Lewis: Will and Imagination in That Hideous Strength,” Humanitas Vol. XXIX: Nos. 1&2 (2016), 11–13. 8. For scholars who argue this perspective, see A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography, (New York, NY: W.W.  Norton & Company Inc., 1990) and George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988). 9. Lewis was here picking up on an argument by J.B.S. Haldane, a leading naturalist of the day, who was discomfited by the idea that his own thoughts were the product of random chance and therefore, logically, untrustworthy. McGrath, Lewis, 252. 10. This is according to Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas who played the part of Lewis in a repeat of the debate over naturalism with Anscombe in the late 1960s. He further noted that Lewis was too much of a gentleman when dealing with a “bully” like Anscombe and that he (Lucas) knew how to take her to task. McGrath, Lewis, 256. 11. A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 220. “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into childhood by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic Club.” Wilson also holds that the White Witch was based on Anscombe. A view for which he provides no support and one that has been explicitly rejected by later biographers. See, for examples, McGrath, Lewis, 255–6, and Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S.  Lewis (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005), 231–6. 12. Jacobs, Narnian, 232. 13. McGrath, Lewis, 255. 14. C.S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1982), 79.

176 

L. C. SHEAHAN

15. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to C.S.  Lewis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 266. McGrath, Lewis, 265–6. 16. McGrath, Lewis, 255. 17. Ward, Planet Narnia, 221. 18. Ward, Planet Narnia, 219. 19. Lewis writes in an essay titled “Christian Apologetics,” “nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.” C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. by Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 103. 20. Quoted in McGrath, Lewis, 260. Lewis wanted Anscombe to speak on the topic “Why I believe in God.” 21. See generally Sheahan, “Intellectual Kinship.” 22. Claes G. Ryn, Will, Imagination & Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 152. 23. Lewis, God in the Dock, 212. 24. Lewis, God in the Dock, 212. 25. Lewis, God in the Dock, 212. Emphasis in original. 26. Lewis, God in the Dock, 213. 27. Lewis, God in the Dock, 213. 28. Lewis, God in the Dock, 215. 29. Lewis, God in the Dock, 215. 30. C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc., 1965), 7. 31. C.S.  Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1980), 99. 32. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 96–7. 33. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 99. 34. Lewis, God in the Dock, 100–1. 35. Lewis, God in the Dock, 102. 36. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Peirce’s primary discussion of abduction can be found in volume 5, pp. 171–94. McGrath makes the connection between Lewis and Peirce’s approach, although we don’t have evidence that Lewis was familiar with Peirce’s work. See McGrath, Intellectual World, 119–20. 37. McGrath, Intellectual World, 120. 38. McGrath, Intellectual World, 120. 39. McGrath, Intellectual World, 122. 40. Voegelin sees the two great symbolizations as microcosmos and macroanthropos, which describe roughly the experience of men in society as “the cosmos writ small” or as “man writ large.” Eric Voegelin, Order and

11  C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 

177

History, Vol. 1: Israel and Revelation (Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 5–6. 41. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 5. 42. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 8. 43. Such as when symbols become ideological creeds. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 30. 44. Michael Federici, Eric Voegelin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 104–5. 45. As Michael Federici points out in his essay on Voegelin in this volume, Voegelin believed that these second-order realities were dangerous distortions of reality. 46. This is an under-studied aspect of Lewis’s thought. McGrath, Intellectual World, 83. “Curiously, Lewis scholarship has paid surprisingly little attention to the way in which Lewis privileges metaphors relating to sun, light, vision, and shadows in his writings.” 47. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 140. 48. McGrath, Intellectual World, 95. Italics in original. 49. McGrath, Intellectual World, 95. 50. McGrath, Intellectual Worlds, 95–6. McGrath is comparing Lewis’s understanding to that of David Michael Levin. See David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York: Routledge), 1988, 440. 51. McGrath, Intellectual Worlds, 95. 52. McGrath, Intellectual World, 40. 53. Lewis, God in the Dock, 26. 54. C.S.  Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 222. 55. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 14. 56. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 111. 57. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 114. 58. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 100. 59. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 185. 60. C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. by Walter Hooper (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7. 61. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 59–60. 62. Ward, Planet Narnia, 30. 63. Ward gathers an impressive array of sources from Lewis’s scholarship, poems, and fictional accounts to demonstrate the planetary schemes throughout his work. 64. Ward, Planet Narnia, 72. 65. Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason, 222.

178 

L. C. SHEAHAN

66. C.S.  Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 138. 67. C.S. Lewis, Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70. 68. C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1974), 13–14. 69. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 25. 70. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 25. 71. Lewis, God in the Dock, 202. 72. McGrath, Intellectual World, 45. 73. McGrath, Intellectual World, 138. 74. Quoted in McGrath, Intellectual World, 139.

CHAPTER 12

Hayek: Postatomic Liberal Nick Cowen

I believe F. A. Hayek was the most important social theorist of the twentieth century. Yet his work was premised on a rejection of the rationalist trend prevalent during his lifetime. Hayek wrote remarkably broadly across several disciplines.1 His social theory harks back to the Scottish Enlightenment while his political views align with nineteenth-century liberalism. Nevertheless, I will argue, his epistemology and ontology have more in common with the post-modernism, systems theory and complexity theory of much contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship. In what sense is Hayek an anti-rationalist? Hayek might appear moderate in the anti-rationalist tradition. While more verbose than contemporary economists, he often avoided emotive rhetoric for abstract argument and technical analysis. His political theory includes a general commitment to the rule of law (at least with respect to any large-scale social order), voluntary contracting and private property. This limits space for local particularism. His chief intellectual opponents are not Kantians (from whom he draws inspiration himself) but the constructivist rationalism of Russell, Wells, Saint-Simon and Comte who have few explicit supporters even among contemporary socialists.2 His key political enemies are generally

N. Cowen (*) School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_12

179

180 

N. COWEN

not piecemeal reformers but revolutionary socialists, authoritarian nationalists and central planners. Although this latter view is defensible, in this chapter, I indicate some of the ways in which Hayek’s approach offers a deeper conceptual critique of rationalism than is often assumed. I begin with a sketch of the rationalist worldview and some critiques that bear a family resemblance to Hayek’s. Then I outline Hayek’s alternative vision through his psychology, epistemology and ontology, economic and social theory, and his politics. I end with some indications about where this paradigm takes contemporary Hayekian research.

The Rationalist Worldview Let us begin with a slightly gross description of how the common-sense, practical, rationalist philosopher goes about fitting her normative theory to social reality. The origins of the standard view lie in the philosophic radicalism of the nineteenth century, the birth of professional philosophy and economics among self-appointed destroyers of dogma and stale orthodoxy. On this account, there is a mind-independent universe composed of physical objects based on consistent laws of nature that become progressively more accessible to human understanding through scientific analysis. This is a deterministic universe of facts that corresponds with reasonable regularity to our experience and shared language, especially when we allow our fallible individual perceptions to be corrected as needed by the scientific method. Some of these objects are bodies endowed with life, and the capacity to feel and act. While still subject to natural laws, these experiencing beings are the ultimate and only source of moral concern. Human agents are normally taken to be the most important sources of value either absolutely or to be generally prioritized because of their capacity for rational thought and moral agency. We impute value to objects in the physical universe based on the interests living beings have in them. As physical objects stand in a deterministic relationship with each other, so do rational agents stand in a moral relationship with each other. Moral agents have the capacity to do each other right and wrong. While debates rage within the rationalist tradition as to whether deontological, contractualist or consequentialist meta-ethics are better accounts on which to ground morality, they share this common notion that what matters is a distinct category of living subjects in an otherwise lifeless world.

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

181

Mediating the physical reality of objects and the reality of rational persons endowed with moral worth, there lies social reality: the norms and institutions through which persons interact. These social facts have their own generalizations and logical structures, although they are blurrier and more contestable than facts of nature. Moral progress is found in the evaluation and reform of these social relationships so that they can better serve the fundamental interests of individuals. What rationalism offers is a distinct division of epistemic labor with natural scientists establishing the objective conditions within which society must operate, social scientists examining the outcomes of social arrangements and public policies, and ethicists evaluating the conduct of individuals and the overall aims of social institutions. Rationalism’s Discontents There is pushback against this account. Wittgenstein (incidentally Hayek’s second cousin) showed that language cannot refer to discrete features of the world but only to family resemblances that are elaborated through language games.3 Catholic philosophers, such as Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, reject the idea that a science of human behavior can be modeled on natural science and try to locate value in organic, social practices and community relations rather than individual subjective experience.4 Judith Butler peels back the edges of social and naturalistic distinctions, particularly Beauvoir’s binary between biological sex and socially constructed gender, to argue that common scientific understandings of biological distinctions do not follow naturally from neutral scientific analysis but are the result of social relations and power dynamics.5 Pragmatists and anti-foundationalists like Richard Rorty reject the fact/value distinction, proposing that all social scientific practices are value-laden.6 Despite these criticisms and concerns, the rationalist worldview prevails because it is tractable for students and attractive to the class of intellectuals that wish to make a positive mark in the world of public affairs. It sets up an informal binary between an educated, progressive, scientifically informed class of people active in public policy and the relatively less-­ informed masses who can be presumed to cling to various illusions and emotions. Nevertheless, on reflection, the rationalist worldview is rather odd. It asks us to imagine that reality is constituted by a disenchanted material world that contains within it pockets of fundamental normative significance, the most important contained within the skulls of a subset of

182 

N. COWEN

living hominids. This is not exactly Cartesian dualism, but it looks suspiciously like a derivative of it. What if it turned out these foundations were as contestable and subject to historical contingency as discourses founded in mythology or theology? Moreover, it is easy for the disenchantment inherent in the description of the supposed physical universe to spread and undermine the conceptual foundations of morality. The more deterministic explanation of human behavior we find and accept, the less responsibility, individuality and vitality we appear to be able to attribute to people. All individual attributes, habits and decisions seem ultimately subject to rational deterministic explanations founded in genetics, nurture and arbitrary external forces. Pushed to a logical conclusion, one struggles to identify what exactly is supposed to be special about human agency. In modern philosophy, free will appears more like an epiphenomenon or an illusion, leaving only our passive experiencing selves as supposedly valuable sites of moral worth. With such tenuous metaphysical foundations tethering human values to supposed physical reality, it is unsurprising that philosophers may ultimately succumb to an empirical realism, hard determinism and moral relativism. Developments in natural science also challenge the warrant for accepting this rationalist worldview. New insights from quantum physics suggest the search for observer-independent fundamental entities in nature may ultimately fail.7 The observer, for the time being at least, is back in the model of fundamental physics. In the following, I try to show how Hayek’s skeptical perspective can cope with this apparent lack of foundations for our most basic beliefs.

The Hayekian Alternative Hayek offers a way of fighting the monster of Rationalism while avoiding becoming an inscrutable monster oneself. The crucial move, and in this he follows Hume,8 is to recognize the non-rational origins of most social institutions, but treating this neither as grounds for dismissal of those institutions as unsound, nor an excuse to retreat from reason altogether. Indeed, reason itself has non-rational, emergent origins but is nevertheless a marvelous feature of humanity. Anti-rationalist themes that appear throughout Hayek’s work include an emphasis on learning by processes of discovery, trial and error, feedback and adaptation rather than knowing by abstract theorizing and the notion that the internal processes by which we come to a particular belief or decision is more complex than either a

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

183

scientific experimenter or our own selves in introspection can know. We are always, on some level, a mystery even to ourselves. Psychology A key to understanding Hayek’s perspective lies in The Sensory Order and The Counter-Revolution of Science.9 Published in the middle of Hayek’s life, these pieces critique the possibility of a direct parallel between a physical stimulus and a state of consciousness. This assumption lies at the core of the psychological school of behaviorism, a positivist doctrine that insists that only directly observable phenomena are capable of systematic analysis, and that the only features of psychology that can be studied are responses to external stimuli. This was at the time one of the animating justifications for Scientism that allows social scientists and philosophers to claim that they can reform society based on provable scientific laws.10 The behaviorist mistake is assuming that human perception can be treated as if it was made up of simple experiences that can be identified as primitive sense-data to be deployed experimentally, for example, the experience of seeing a red dot. Hayek’s argument was that even the most apparently simple concepts as ‘red’ and ‘dot’ are not really primitives that pop into one’s brain as a result of initial perception but rely on categories hewn through memory, childhood training, education and ultimately shared language. The growing, learning mind takes the unpredictable, holistic, multi-sensory stream of experience and incrementally separates it into cognizable patterns that allow us to impose some order and predictability on sensation.11 People’s responses to stimuli are mediated by the coincidence of other stimuli (no stimulus is ever present in total isolation), their previous patterns of experience and their approach to categorization. Because of the adaptive, experiential origins of these categories, they are open to revision should the predictiveness of existing patterns break down. They do not correspond to objective, mind-independent facts. Epistemology and Ontology The implications of this critique are substantial for epistemology more generally. It implies that we can only apprehend the world through the imposition of theoretical categories. This radicalizes the position of Hayek’s intellectual forebears in the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith showed that everyday morality, as essential as it was for social

184 

N. COWEN

coordination, was grounded in sentiments (equivalent almost to an aesthetic sense) that were subject to subjective distortions and could not be expected to reflect a systematic underlying moral relationship.12 Hayek’s contribution is more fundamental, showing that our everyday sensory perception is deeply rooted in our collective and individual adaptations as embodied beings. Our entire sensory experience is constitutively tuned to pick out what our experience thus far has found to be relevant features of the world, presumably including features that make us better fit for individual and communal survival. Our models of the world are functional for certain purposes, but we have no warrant to believe the patterns and categories that make up our shared human world reflect a fundamental mind-independent universe. Even our category of the physical itself is the result of intersubjective engagement rather than identifying an objective world with clarity and certainty. From this austere standpoint, what can sensibly be discovered and known? For this, Hayek believes that we can leverage our capacity for pattern recognition. While we cannot ever have true knowledge of physical objects, or their constitutive elements, we can gain substantial knowledge about the structure of phenomena that we experience and perceive. We can come to understand temporal orderings, one phenomenon following another, as well as structural orders, the way that certain elements of our experience must be in place together in a pattern to produce another phenomenon. In one later paper, Hayek makes a helpful distinction between concrete and abstract orders.13 Concrete orders are those we experience and encounter, while abstract orders are the categories and models that we develop that help us make sense of these encounters. A necessary feature of concrete orders is they always have more dimensions and features to them than we can apprehend. They are irreducibly complex. Abstract orders, by contrast, are the simplified models and categories that we use to make sense of our experience and communications with others. We can explain this distinction with a suitably mundane example. We feel like we have a firm idea of a blade of grass, certainly enough to spot one adequately in the contexts in which we are likely to find one, whether it is in a field or crumpled in our hair after a picnic. Nevertheless, we may not so easily recognize grass in an unfamiliar context such as in a soup. Unless we have botanic expertise, we will struggle to differentiate a sedge or rush stem from a blade of grass. Each blade has different dimensions, shapes and colors and each structure is unique on cursory inspection and more radically so if we cared to look at the cellular structure. The most

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

185

accomplished botanist cannot fully understand just one blade because it is irreducibly complex. Our firm idea is an abstract order of various phenomena that are ordinarily adequate to recognize grass for our purposes. Grass is not a real object but an intersubjectively determined category that indicates certain phenomena. This has implications for the sort of deliberate interventions we can make too. We can cultivate a lawn in the sense that we can learn how to order the basic conditions that will allow an example of a pattern that fits our category of lawn to grow. What we cannot do is determine the precise arrangement of the blades of grass constituting the lawn or the precise formation of any individual blade. Departing from Cartesian assumptions of atomistic individualism,14 this account can seem solipsistic. When we are in the mode of thinking of ourselves essentially as separate minds that relate to others through interactions in a material world, then it feels important that we share that world and are capable of clear communication about it and ourselves in order to share a genuine connection with others. Otherwise, we are each in our separate worlds of illusion. From a Hayekian skeptical standpoint, the mind’s eye can seem to be a narrow slit through which shadows of an external world make shallow, distorted impressions on a remote psyche. Fortunately, this is not the implication once we dispose of the supposedly foundational subject/object distinction. We can recognize subjecthood as an abstract category, a product of a philosophy laden with abstruse theological baggage. The category is no more real than the blades of grass but a perspective that happens to come to mind more easily in a philosophy seminar. During most of our everyday experience, when we are not primed to be so self-conscious and self-centered, the phenomenal experience of ourselves and the environment is more continuous, flowing and irreducibly social in the sense that the categories that we use for interacting with the world are constituted and remade through interactions with many other minds. Economic and Social Theory What does this skeptical standpoint mean for understanding human society? Like concrete orders more generally, human social arrangements and practices are irreducibly complex, impossible for any individual to comprehend in detail. What makes them interesting is that they are constituted by the physically unconstrained activities of human beings but nevertheless

186 

N. COWEN

take on the form of systematic orderliness. Both the rationalist and the social critic alike observe such orderliness and structure and presume that society persists, both for better and for worse, through the exercise of force, legal authority and other more subtle forms of power and ideological influence. Hayek offers an alternative account, again drawing on insights from the Scottish Enlightenment. Most features of society are spontaneous orders: social institutions and structures that are the result of human action but not of design. These spontaneous orders, or emergent institutions (including language, property, law and money), have all developed piecemeal through individuals attempting to cooperate to solve various practical problems. These unintentionally generate more systematic patterns of conduct that are accepted initially because they solve coordination problems and thereafter because they become part of the background moral and practical understandings of the people participating in them. Hence these complex orders are typically established through unguided processes rather than rational design. The most that a reasoning agent can do is influence some of the background conditions and inputs that make a pattern of such an order more likely to emerge. These various institutions combine to create an environment in which individuals can make use of knowledge that they do not personally possess.15 These institutions harness human capacity to recognize and follow patterns of behavior to create a social order that expands the scale, scope and complexity of cooperation among people who may otherwise be operating with profoundly different categorical models of the world. These institutions include language but also more specifically classical liberal elements such as alienable property, voluntary contract and the price system.16 Property rights impose negative duties not to use a resource or interfere with a bounded environment. This gives property owners the capacity to work, manage, reconfigure and develop property for their own use. With immunity from arbitrary seizure, the owner can specialize in getting the most out of the environment over which they have exclusive control. This specialization can take the form of traditional knowledge and practical know-how as well as trial and error with feedback generated by the owner bearing the costs of failure. Alienable property allows for it to be exchanged, sub-divided or merged, allowing those most able to make use of an area or resource to come into its legal possession. The addition of voluntary contracting allows exchanges of property, goods and services to be made over distance and time. One way of looking at this is to say that property and

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

187

contract institutions take the daunting complexity of the world and divide it up into modules for which people can sensibly take responsibility using the various categories of thought they have available to them. For successful cooperation across a whole community, a society needs, in addition, an open-ended scheme of market exchange with a price system. Prices play two main roles in Hayek’s framework. The first is discernible within the more mainstream neoclassical economic model. They are public announcements of the going rate for goods and services, and especially standardized commodities across an economy. This is what allows consumers and producers operating within their own sphere of responsibility to appropriate resources produced elsewhere while economizing based on the knowledge of scarcities as embedded in prices. The second is as signals of potential profit opportunities. Producers do not have to treat prices as given but as standards that can be surpassed if they can figure out a way of acting more efficiently or creatively, often by utilizing local or tacit knowledge that other market participants do not possess.17 Allowing the pursuit of profit opportunities has a familiar incentive role. However, the fundamental role of realization of profit and loss is to provide practical feedback that causes patterns of socially beneficial conduct to expand and be imitated while causing poorly performing practices to shrink and stop. The trappings of rationality (such as foresight, alertness and prudence) certainly help individual ventures to succeed but the process is ultimately evolutionary: trial, error, selection and filtering. The result is that from remarkably irrational starting assumptions, patterns of conduct that look as if they were designed for their purposes can emerge.18 In fact, they are far too complex, adapted and orderly for any actual rational agent to have successfully implemented them. Contemporary economic research often treats the core puzzle to be ‘given human beings are fundamentally rational, why do so many act so dumb?’ The natural implication, once answered, is that a great deal of human conduct benefits from discretionary correction to make it more appropriately rational.19 The Hayekian standpoint inverts the puzzle.20 It asks, ‘given overwhelming limits to individual rationality and knowledge, why is it that humans can end up acting as if they are so smart?’ It is the marvel of widespread social cooperation one sees in a peaceful civil society that requires explanation, not the individual mistakes and deviances within it. Hence from a condition of profound ignorance and very limited rationality, a spontaneous order based on cooperation and free exchange, what Hayek calls catallaxy, emerges.

188 

N. COWEN

Political and Legal Theory From these theoretical foundations emerge Hayek’s controversial political theory and praxis. His most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, was a warning in the aftermath of World War II that the Western world could slide into Soviet-style authoritarianism through the introduction of a planned economy within a formal democracy.21 What distinguished Hayek’s argument was his reliance on the epistemic limits of democratic institutions rather than the typical conservative fear that the voting masses will simply vote to expropriate the wealthy, leading to poverty once people stop producing in the absence of incentives. Hayek argues that the nature of tacit knowledge means that a great deal of relevant information cannot be utilized through anything other than a market process. Hence, the replacement of market processes even with democratically accountable state-run economies will rapidly disappoint and impoverish citizens even in the ideal scenario where politicians and administrators act purely with benevolent intent. Citizens will be faced with a difficult choice of returning to the apparent disorder and uncertainty of markets and private property, or putting their faith in an economic dictator. Only at this point would the more unscrupulous individuals rise to the top as leaders as only the most deceitful would be willing to promise prosperity for all just so long as they were handed more personal power. Hayek’s strident critiques of the very notion of social justice kept him on the periphery of political philosophy.22 Hayek’s description of the rule of law, freedom from arbitrary commands, penetrated mainstream legal theory and his account is often treated as compelling enough to be included as canon.23 Nevertheless, most liberals tend to see the rule of law as one important political value among several others, with the likelihood that it may frequently have to play second fiddle to the substantive aims of the state such as the pursuit of equality or welfare. Liberals see Hayek as too concerned with legal formalities rather than real interests. From their perspective, the rule of law is an important constraint on state power but that tying the hands of the state can equally threaten individual interests in other ways, so it is a matter of judgment and discretion when the rule of law should be privileged. This misses Hayek’s distinctively epistemic basis for the rule of law and the context of the more substantive aims of his liberal order. The rule of law is not merely a formal constraint on state action but an objective to achieve a state of civil society where there is a large private sphere allowing

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

189

people to act and plan on the basis of their own ends rather than on the basis of the arbitrary decisions of others. While these conditions are subjectively pleasant, at least for people who dislike coercion in private life, what is more significant is that it is only in these conditions where the spontaneous experimentation, competition and imitation of catallaxy persist. Without this sphere, cooperation at the scale of a society breaks down altogether.

Legacy and Future What is the practical legacy of Hayek’s critique of rationalism? In the twentieth century, Hayek’s views made him a decisively ‘rightwing’ figure. He was a cold-war liberal implacably opposed to the Soviet Union who inspired Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms in the United Kingdom and defended Pinochet’s violent coup against a democratic socialist government in Chile.24 But history shows that political categories are subject to revision. In the twentieth century, the political spectrum aligned on the issue of state management of the economy with the right taking the broadly anti-statist side. In the twenty-first century, the big divide may turn out to be between a statist nationalism (more easily associated with the right) and an open-ended cosmopolitanism. In this context, Hayek’s anti-nationalism, more than his anti-socialism, may come to be more salient.25 Hayek’s skepticism of applying rigid categories to concrete situations is more compatible with shifting plural identities of an open-ended society (with permeable borders) than one predicated on abstract identities. Although Hayekian insights resist formalization, Levy helps cast light on the link between Hayek’s epistemology and political economy by comparing robust statistics to robust institutions.26 Robust statistics sacrifice the precision of statistical estimates in order to reduce the scope for error based on mistaken model assumptions. Similarly, robust institutions sacrifice the capacity to make optimal decisions in individual cases in order to minimize costly errors across many cases. Preferring robust analyses and decision processes at the expense of pin-point accuracy reflects Hayekian skepticism of both the abstract assumptions and empirical data that go into a model. If data is always tentative and subject to revision, then a process that relies as little as possible on accurate inputs is less likely to steer us wrong. Levy’s approach has helped to inspire the robust political economy research agenda, the comparative analysis of institutions on the basis of their capacity to deal with knowledge and incentive problems.27

190 

N. COWEN

In political philosophy, Gaus is the most prominent contemporary developer of Hayekian ideas.28 Compared to many of his peers in the discipline, Gaus emphasizes the risks, more so than the opportunities, of attempting to implement utopian social theories based on abstract models, especially in circumstances where there are numerous different moral cognitive styles that individuals have within the same communities. Without denying a role for evaluative judgments, this mode of theorizing is more comfortable with the deep diversity of moral frameworks and the complex cultural adaptations that one sees in the variety of human societies. Following the tolerant Kukathas,29 Gaus offers a promising research agenda for a social morality suitable for a globalized world where remarkably different cultures and mores are expected to find ways of peacefully cooperating.

Notes 1. Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge an Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Peter J. Boettke, F. A. Hayek: Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy, Great Thinkers in Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 2. Jeffrey Friedman, “Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and Politics of Ignorance,” Critical Review 17, no. 1–2 (2005): 1–58. 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968). 4. Alasdair C.  MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics 25, no. 1 (1971): 3–51. 5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2006). 6. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1. paperback print (Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press, 1980). 7. Bernard d’Espagnat, “Quantum Physics and Reality,” Foundations of Physics 41, no. 11 (November 2011): 1703–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10701-011-9582-z; Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1950). 8. Donald W.  Livingston, “Hayek as Humean,” Critical Review 5, no. 2 (March 1991): 159–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/08913819108443220 9. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1952);

12  HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 

191

The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, 2d ed (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979). 10. Bruce Caldwell, “Some Reflections on F.A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order,” Journal of Bioeconomics 6, no. 3 (2004): 245, https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10818-004-5505-9 11. Joaquín M.  Fuster, “Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Advances in Austrian Economics, ed. Leslie Marsh, vol. 15 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011), 3–11, https://doi.org/10.1108/S15292134(2011)0000015006 12. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.  D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982); cf. Maria Pia Paganelli, “The Moralizing Role of Distance in Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments as Possible Praise of Commerce,” History of Political Economy 42, no. 3 (September 1, 2010): 425–41, https://doi. org/10.1215/00182702-2010-019 13. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Kinds of Order in Society,” New Individualist  Review, 1981, http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2493/ Hayek_KindsOrder1964.pdf 14. Tibor Machan, “Liberalism and Atomistic Individualism,” in Liberalism (Springer, 2000), 79–99, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/ 978-94-015-9440-0_5 15. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30. 16. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Rules and Order, Reprinted 1993, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1973). 17. Israel M. Kirzner, “Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Competitive Market Process: An Austrian Approach,” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 1 (1997): 60–85; Don Lavoie, “The Market as a Procedure for Discovery and Conveyance of Inarticulate Knowledge,” Comparative Economic Studies 28, no. 1 (1986): 1–19. 18. Vernon L Smith, “Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics,” American Economic Review 93, no. 3 (June 2003): 465–508, https://doi. org/10.1257/000282803322156954 19. Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness (London: Penguin Books, 2009). 20. Peter J. Boettke, W. Zachary Caceres, and Adam Martin, “Error Is Obvious, Coordination Is the Puzzle,” in Hayek and Behavioral Economics, ed. Roger Frantz and Robert Leeson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), http:// www.palgraveconnect.com/doifinder/10.1057/9781137278159.0009

192 

N. COWEN

21. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents, Definitive ed, The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, v. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 22. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. 2, the Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Andrew Lister, “The ‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls,” Critical Review 25, no. 3–4 (2013): 409–444; Adam James Tebble, “Hayek and Social Justice: A Critique,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (December 2009): 581–604, https://doi. org/10.1080/13698230903471343 23. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago [Ill.]: University of Chicago Press, 1960); Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty; Joseph Raz, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue,” in The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1979), https://doi. org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198253457.001.0001 24. Bruce Caldwell and Leonidas Montes, “Friedrich Hayek and His Visits to Chile,” The Review of Austrian Economics 28, no. 3 (September 2015): 261–309, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-014-0290-8 25. Aris Trantidis and Nick Cowen, “Hayek versus Trump: The Radical Right’s Road to Serfdom,” Polity (April 2020), https://doi.org/10.1086/707769 26. David M. Levy, “Robust Institutions,” The Review of Austrian Economics 15, no. 2–3 (2002): 131–142. 27. Peter J. Boettke and Peter T. Leeson, “Liberalism, Socialism, and Robust Political Economy,” Journal of Markets and Morality 7, no. 1 (2004): 99–111; Nick Cowen, “Why Be Robust? The Contribution of Market Process Theory to the Robust Political Economy Research Program,” in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Market Order: New Applications of Market Process Theory, ed. Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne, and Virgil Storr (London: Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd, 2017), 63–85; Mark Pennington, Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy, New Thinking in Political Economy (Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2011). 28. Gerald F. Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Gerald F.  Gaus, “Self-Organizing Moral Systems: Beyond Social Contract Theory,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics, August 29, 2017, 1470594X1771942, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X17719425; cf. Gerald F. Gaus and Keith Hankins, “Searching for the Ideal,” in Political Utopias, ed. Michael Weber and Kevin Vallier (Oxford University Press, 2017), 175–202. 29. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford University Press, 2003), http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/019925754X. 001.0001/acprof-9780199257546

CHAPTER 13

“Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical Tradition: Situating Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics” Ryan R. Holston

Introduction In what sense can it be said that Hans-Georg Gadamer is an “anti-­ rationalist?” Answering this question requires clarity about the particular strain of “rationalism” that is the focus of much of his thinking and is, ultimately, the impetus for the critique mounted by his philosophical hermeneutics. It is worth noting that Gadamer wrote his habilitation dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) under Martin Heidegger, whose concerns about the historical development of Western metaphysics, particularly the moral and social implications of modern rationalism, had a deep and lasting impact on Gadamer’s thinking. In light of his explicit appropriation of a number of Heidegger’s philosophical insights, one might be tempted to identify Gadamer as a representative of an extreme variety of anti-­ rationalism, insofar as he is seen as the inheritor of Heidegger’s radical historicism and the moral relativism that is attendant to it. In particular,

R. R. Holston (*) Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_13

193

194 

R. R. HOLSTON

the emphasis on the historical nature of human understanding in Gadamer’s writing, most prominently in Part 2 of Truth and Method, has led a number of interpreters to conclude that he denies all possibility of transcending the finite boundaries of our temporal experience.1 However, not only did Gadamer reject the charge of relativism throughout his career, but his relationship to the metaphysical tradition, particularly that of Plato and Aristotle, runs deep. Indeed, in Gadamer’s later work, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, one witnesses the development of his own moral philosophy, and much of his other writing—particularly his work on language and hermeneutics in Part 3 of Truth and Method—has deep roots in the metaphysical tradition that runs from the Presocratics through Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonism, Augustine, and Hegel.2 This essay aims to shed light on the particular variety of “anti-rationalism” that belongs to Gadamer in light of the prima facie tension in his thinking between these historicist and metaphysical influences.3 It will do so through a discussion of Gadamer’s concerns about methodologism in the humanities, his ambivalent relationship to the philosophy of Heidegger, and the historically informed account of transcendence underpinning his life’s work. In light of this discussion, it will be argued that what Gadamer opposes is a distinctly modern form of rationalism, which he believes the ancients—far from being complicit in its distortions—offer us resources for confronting. Lost Truth and the Human Sciences The central concern of Truth and Method is the recovery of an experience of truth that has been threatened by methodologism in the humanities or modern “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), whereby texts and other cultural phenomena are seen as historical artifacts, whose meaning is understood in terms of an objective retrieval and exposition of information, i.e. the ideas in the minds of the individuals from whom such artifacts originated. Gadamer traces the lineage of this approach to the study of the humanities back to the post-Kantian tradition, showing how Dilthey had drawn heavily on subjectivist epistemological foundations in Schleiermacher in order to establish a positive science of interpretation, which represented a new meaning and purpose for the classical field of “hermeneutics.” What Gadamer terms “aesthetic consciousness” and “historical consciousness” is essentially the distantiated attitude of the modern interpreter of such cultural phenomena, which no longer treats the latter as offering insights

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

195

into the nature of human life and the choices with which the interpreter, himself, is confronted. Instead, this subjectivist epistemology bolsters the notion that ideas can be treated as data, accessible to the neutral observer of historical life, whose approach to the social world parallels that of the natural scientist, given the requisite detachment from the prejudices (Vorurteile) of his own historical situation.4 The understanding of the work of art or the historical text as having significance for the life of the interpreter by virtue of an application to present circumstances has, for Gadamer, essentially been lost or sacrificed to the idea that the ultimate reality of such works is the fact of their expression, as representations of the minds within their historical period.5 Consequently, the normative purpose at the heart of Truth and Method is the recovery of the possibility of truth, which Gadamer believes is under assault due to the methodologism or “rationalism” of the modern human sciences.6 The threat that Gadamer sees “method” posing to “truth” is thus the understanding of historical life as mere data, which is no longer capable of shedding light or insight onto the situation of the present. The notion that individuals’ utterances are facts to be observed and recorded entails the “nominalist presupposition” that reality is merely the neutral or value-free account of the social scientist, which fosters a “relativist skepticism” about the idea of truth.7 The lynchpin supporting this entire approach to the past, on Gadamer’s account, is the subjectivist epistemology of historical consciousness. The human word cannot be objectified in the manner of the modern social sciences, as it were, unless the observer is conceived as somehow autonomous and thus more or less than human— either a god or a beast, in Aristotle’s terms—insofar as he is outside of any community. In other words, only the abstraction of an isolated subject who is a spectator, not a participant, vis-à-vis the “reality” of facts being observed can sustain this relativization of the truth claims of each historical culture. It is for this reason that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics prioritizes a “rehabilitation of authority and tradition,”8 which is aimed at restoring a view of interpretation as fundamentally dependent upon an historical life and community of interpreters. In other words, the importance that Gadamer attaches to the role of “prejudice” in understanding is rooted in his critique of the idea of an autonomous subject who stands apart from the reality he observes. That our prejudices facilitate as much as they occlude meaning is thus of profound significance from the point of view of preserving truth over against the view that reality is merely

196 

R. R. HOLSTON

historically observable expressions of mind. For Gadamer, coming to see truth no longer in propositional terms, i.e. as descriptions of a static reality of “things,” but as an “event,” in which past and present are continually mediated by the prejudices that constitute one’s identity, thus serves the purpose of “the rehabilitation of the possible truthfulness of belief.”9 Without such mediation, one alienates the past, standing over and apart from one’s history as a distantiated observer, who objectifies and truncates the latter’s meaning. In Gadamerian terms, such an approach silences or turns a deaf ear to a partner in a dialogue, and we become closed off to the truth claims that the past would otherwise make on us. But what does it mean for truth to be understood as an “event,” instead of in propositional terms? Is not truth the speech that accurately depicts a state of affairs or set of verifiable phenomena in the world? Rather than understanding truth as a descriptive claim about a reality of things that are “out there,” objects to be documented by an observer or autonomous subject, Gadamer collapses the subject-object divide of modern Cartesian thinking to reorient us to the idea of truth as an experience one undergoes, since the event of truth is always for one who is a part of, or participant in, reality. In his account of Gadamer’s critique of historical consciousness, Jean Grondin refers to the “lost metaphysical experience” of the humanities, which entails more than a mere loss of information from the past, but the neglect or absence of an important relationship with our history: “the humanities teach us truths and real-life lessons, in the sense that history used to be seen as a magistra vitae.”10 Like the metaphysical experience of beauty, which is purposefully chosen in Part 1 of Truth and Method to provide a palpable example of the transcendent as an event one undergoes,11 the historical texts of the humanities are able to speak to the life of the present, bringing the interpreter “in play” as a participant in a dialogue with the past, who experiences truth as a “revelation and an increase in Being.”12 Such knowledge actually changes the person who is part of the encounter with the past, expanding their horizon of understanding and providing a greater depth of experience (Erfahrung) that prepares one for further encounters. Consequently, the hubris of a ruler like Kreon in Sophocles’ Antigone, or the fidelity to community of Socrates in Plato’s Crito, each bear a particular revelation—in the literal sense of a revealing or disclosure—regarding a life well-lived that offers guidance to the interpreter in the present. Again, this is not as a static body of information, but a relatable insight into reality that actually changes one’s perspective and judgment. To be

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

197

sure, not all such engagements with historical texts are of a metaphysical character and thus, not all texts are capable of transcending their time in this way. Certainly, Gadamer is well aware that the potential for the enlargement or deepening of one’s horizon of understanding is not equal among all such historical works. It is in this spirit, in fact, that Gadamer points to the existence of a group of texts, which he refers to as “classical,” that emerge as the “work of history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) and, he believes, prove their transcendent quality within history by repeatedly speaking to the life of the present, shedding light on the choices (prohairesis) individuals continually confront as part of a shared reality across time.13 For Gadamer, this enlargement of the horizon of the present or increase in being—in short, the event in which such truths are experienced—is inconceivable without the very historicity of the one whose particular life is ultimately shaped by their insight.14 The Early Heidegger Much of what has been said thus far pertains to Gadamer’s concern regarding the status of truth at the hands of the modern human sciences. But it does not begin to address Gadamer’s relationship to Heidegger and the nature of his influence, which may now seem particularly puzzling in light of the radical historicism and moral relativism often associated with Heidegger’s thinking. What is essential to reconciling this central concern of Gadamer with the experience of truth and the importance of Heidegger to his philosophy is understanding the difference between the early Heidegger, whose work sought to recover vital insights from the metaphysical tradition and informed the early direction of Gadamer’s thinking, and the later Heidegger, whose radicalization and dismissal of the metaphysical tradition after the self-described “turn” (Kehre) in his thinking were flatly rejected by Gadamer.15 For it is the later Heidegger alone who sees the history of metaphysics as inevitably leading to nihilism and thus needing to be overcome or moved beyond, a position Gadamer finds to be both phenomenologically and normatively dubious.16 However, as Brice Wachterhauser notes, the early lectures of Heidegger, prior to the 1930s, reflect “an open[ness] to metaphysics and its potential for ‘fundamental ontology,’”17 which Gadamer finds helpful in beginning to address some of his own concerns about modernity and how it undermines the experience of truth. At this early point in his career, one sees a Heidegger who “understood himself as a philosopher who sought a better way to do

198 

R. R. HOLSTON

metaphysics,”18 and it is this Heidegger whose insights into the nature of human knowing serve Gadamer’s purpose of reorienting us toward a more embedded and dynamic conception of truth. It is impossible in a short essay to identify all of the ways in which Gadamer is indebted to Heidegger, but two of the most prominent features of Gadamer’s thought that are appropriated from Heidegger are worth discussing here.19 First, Gadamer is in certain respects amenable to one of the principal aims of the pre-Kehre Heidegger, which is to “dismantle and reconstitute the metaphysical tradition in order to infuse it with new life,”20 by recovering an ancient understanding of truth that avoids what Frederick Lawrence describes as “picture thinking,”21 i.e. the model of human understanding according to which truth is known in a manner resembling vision of objects in the world. Heidegger’s Destruktion (destructuring)22 of metaphysics—the purpose of which is to disentangle or recover original meanings from their present ones, in order to creatively see new possibilities or directions for them—leads him to identify an alternative view of truth (aletheia) held by some of the ancients, which conceives of the latter as a process of unconcealment and concealment through which we come to know reality. On this view, truth is understood in terms of movement or motion, in which what is known is never seen before one in its entirety, as from an Archimedean standpoint, but is characterized by a process of emergence and withdrawal, advancing and receding, of what is known.23 Gadamer’s questioning of the subject-­object divide mentioned above is therefore facilitated by Heidegger’s retrieval of this alternative conception of truth as in-motion and underway, since it is better suited to human life, which is always historically situated. It is to Aristotle, therefore, that Heidegger turns in order to resuscitate this view, since his critique of the Platonic eidos is based precisely on this neglect of development or emergence in time regarding what is known.24 According to Gadamer, “Aristotelian philosophy was at that time much more than a mere countermodel for Heidegger; it was a real vindicator of his own philosophical purposes,” even, as Gadamer notes, if Aristotle later “became suspect” for Heidegger.25 A second important feature of Heidegger’s thinking for Gadamer— obviously related to the first, but worth mentioning in its own right—is his “hermeneutics of facticity” or insight into “the existential structure of understanding,” which again elevates the significance of Aristotle for both thinkers, albeit for different reasons.26 Heidegger’s aim of recovering “the effective reality of the existential factum” is related to his overarching

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

199

concerns about the question of being.27 However, Gadamer’s interest in Aristotle and Heidegger’s reading of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics takes a different direction, one which endures until late in Gadamer’s life.28 The significance of this investigation for Gadamer is related to Aristotle’s account of phronesis, or practical wisdom, which serves purposes related to both Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and his incipient moral philosophy, whose early intimations can be seen in his Habilitationsschrift.29 In Truth and Method, the principal purpose of phronesis is to provide an illustration or analogy to elucidate the nature of genuine interpretation, which Gadamer sees as sharing in the same fundamental structure as practical wisdom. One’s approach to the meaning of a text, according to Gadamer, must always entail anticipations of meaning based on the application of prior experience to present circumstances; that is, it is never abstract reflection for the sake of theoretical or scientific knowledge, but an inquiry by a concrete knower whose ultimate concern is with human praxis. In the Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, Gadamer employs phronesis in a more straightforward manner for the purposes of an account of ethical decision-making. What guides the search for the good in the situation of choice (prohairesis), Gadamer argues, is not a general principle which must be applied to particular circumstances, but ethos or Sittlichkeit—the concrete ethical life and customary norms that have shaped the person one already is and one’s predispositions (hexeis) for acting in the world. It is only within and by virtue of this experiential context that the ethical decision-maker acquires the reasonableness (phronesis) that allows him to choose well in new circumstances. However, in spite of this deep indebtedness to Heidegger, which Gadamer is always quite explicit about, there is nonetheless a clear rejection by Gadamer of Heidegger’s attitude toward the metaphysical tradition after the Kehre.30 Increasingly, one witnesses the disappearance in Heidegger’s thinking of the concept of Destruktion and its attempt to recover resources from within the metaphysical tradition itself. Instead, one sees an attempt to overcome metaphysics, which is now seen as a regrettable error that must simply be moved beyond.31 The problem, for Heidegger, is what he sees as an almost inevitable tendency toward forgetting the “ontological difference,” which refers to the obliviousness and subordination of our concrete “Being” to the idea of our being “human beings,” that is, autonomous agents with goals or projects, culminating in the radical subjectivity of Nietzsche and nihilism with respect to ultimate

200 

R. R. HOLSTON

ends.32 However, Gadamer has serious concerns about Heidegger’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, and he questions not only the inevitability of such a complete forgetfulness of being, but the threat that Heidegger’s philosophy of history poses to all normative inquiry and ethical discourse.33 Consequently, Gadamer’s account of the nature of language (the logos where truth is recognized) and his belief in the implicitness of metaphysical questions in all speech is designed partly to confront and reject such claims about the end of metaphysics by Heidegger. Furthermore, Gadamer’s remark near the end of Truth and Method that hermeneutics “leads us back into the problems of classical metaphysics” indicates his belief that it is possible to circumvent the dead end of modern subjectivity,34 and it points forward to the complexities that he sorts through in dialogue with the ancients in his later work. The Historicity of the Good When Gadamer refers to a return to “classical metaphysics,” he specifically has in mind “the Platonic tradition that saw in the transcendental predicates of the One, the Beautiful, the True, and the Good first and foremost traits of Being and not only of the thinking that stands in front of Being.”35 In other words, these “transcendental predicates” are not simply conceived as the framework given by language to capture the essence of an independent “reality,” but are features of reality itself, since the modern division between speaker and thing, subject and object, has been called into question by philosophical hermeneutics. It will not do, then, to conceive of these transcendental predicates as the articulation of forms (eidos), knowable to a rational subject, since this would merely repeat the mistake of objectifying their being. Rather, Gadamer must find alternative resources within classical metaphysics for repairing the severance of the noetic from the sensory, and then, working through the “problem” of the one and the many, he must—without resorting to a reified division—explain how reality possesses both of these seemingly antithetical qualities. For the purposes of this essay, it is worth noting that when Gadamer works his way through this problem in The Idea of the Good, he is clearly dealing with an ontological relationship that pertains as much to the true and the beautiful as it does to the good. In other words, Gadamer’s account of the good in this work speaks to the broader question of transcendence within the immanent reality or flux of human life, which arises for all three of the ideals in this classical trinity. Consequently, the question

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

201

of the one and the many is—for Gadamer as it was for Plato—about the meaning of the unity within the diversity of all things, or how transcendence ought to be conceived in light of the apparent temporality of our existence. Once the early Heidegger’s insights into our historicity and facticity have been adopted by Gadamer, it becomes necessary to revisit this question and, Gadamer believes, to look for alternative resources or insights for confronting it among the ancients. Otherwise, one risks the same radical historicism that befalls the late Heidegger’s thinking vis-à-vis the entire metaphysical tradition. One of Gadamer’s main tasks in The Idea of the Good, therefore, is to refute the post-Kehre Heidegger’s distortion of Plato,36 which Gadamer believes overemphasized the metaphysics of “presence,” and resulted in the exaggerated conclusions at which Heidegger had arrived with respect to the fate of metaphysics. According to Gadamer, Plato’s various metaphors and locutions regarding the separation (chorismos) of the good from the world of experience gave rise to a misinterpretation—for which Aristotle, himself, was partly responsible—that comprehends Plato as asserting the forms in the most literal terms as independent entities, a part of reality that is severed from the material world, resulting in the metaphysical dualism for which Plato has become so widely known. However, Gadamer argues, while there is undeniably something “separate” or distinct about good, right, or just behavior, Plato does not—notwithstanding the tendencies of his Neoplatonist progeny—subscribe to an objectified understanding of the good: “The complete separation of a world of the ideas from the world of appearances would be a crass absurdity.”37 On Gadamer’s reading, Plato is in fact much more concrete or “Aristotelian” in his thinking than most of his interpreters recognize, a misconception fueled by Aristotle’s deliberate construal of his mentor in intellectualist terms for the purposes of his critique and to present a contrast with his own thinking. In fact, says Gadamer, Plato never actually speaks of the “eidos tou agathon (form of the good)” but always the “idea tou agathon (idea of the good),” and while eidos and idea are interchangeable in the Greek, Gadamer interprets this as Plato’s avoidance of objectification, since the latter implies “looking to the good” rather than a “view of the good.”38 In contrast to Plotinus’ subsequent separation of the good from all being, Gadamer argues that in Plato, the good is presented as the unifying oneness within the many.39 It is with this in mind, he argues, that Plato coins the term methexis, in order to evoke the idea that the one actually “participates” in the many. The good is the power (dynamis) that unifies

202 

R. R. HOLSTON

all that is good in the concrete world of experience and consists only of all of the good things in that world.40 Consequently, our knowledge of the good is indirect and analogical, since the good is co-present in particular things that we relate to one another in context, not an object or entity that may be directly perceived in-itself.41 Although its manifestations are therefore diverse or plural, Gadamer reads Plato as pointing to the unity, integrity, or coherence that characterizes all of these particular instances of the good in context, which makes them, in a sense, one with each other. It is, Gadamer tells us, the harmony that defines this way of being in the world for both persons and societies, a harmony that is first lived concretely in deed (ergon) but then capable of being articulated to one another with the reason (logos) that takes place in dialogue.42 And, though these particular instances of the good are not defined by their conformity with an abstract principle, all have this quality of adhering or holding fast to an enduring unity or constancy in the face of impulses that serve momentary desires, which literally disintegrate both individual and community.43 Although we may never have a clear, stable grasp of the good without it being contingent vis-à-vis a particular context, there is nothing relative or arbitrary about such an encounter. For Gadamer, “reality is not an anarchy without principles, but a principled structure. … Reality is an internally differentiated whole that allows us [to] discern its own internal order.”44 In the case of the individual, the contours of this internal order are not to be found in a set of a priori principles, but in the development over time of the character of the spoudaios. As is the case with the truth that is demonstrated in classical texts over time, what Gadamer calls the “work of history” or “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) is the process by which experience (Erfahrung) is built up and proves what is in conformity with the order of reality concretely over time. Only here, in the case of the good, it is not the message of a text, but a kind of person or character type, constituted by certain ways of living, whose value is proven through the work of history. The norms that are capable of transcending history are, in this case, exemplified by the very persons themselves, these spoudaioi, who become concrete instantiations of human virtue, elucidating the characteristics or qualities that ground judgments of rightness and wrongness.45 Such characteristics, varying as they do over a life and diverse circumstances, are often imprecise, giving at best a “schemata” of the good.46 However, as such experiences build up in a number of lives over time, their criteria become “more determinate”47 and, when shared within a

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

203

community, they become embedded in an ethos, which precedes and makes less essential such reflective precision for choosing rightly.

Conclusion Certainly, Gadamer’s thinking may be characterized as “anti-rationalist,” but it is of a variety that opposes the distinctively modern “rationalism” manifested in the methodologism of the modern human sciences. His principal concern is the threat that this poses to our dialogue with the past and the truth or insight that once constituted the purpose of the humanities. The early Heidegger’s retrieval of aletheia helps Gadamer to resist the distortions of modern rationalism by articulating anew a more dynamic conception of truth, appropriate for historically situated beings; his recovery of Aristotle’s attunement to the facticity of human life points Gadamer to the concrete knowing of phronesis, whose embeddedness within ethos stands in contrast to the abstraction of “method.” It is therefore the pre-­ Kehre Heidegger, himself seeking to infuse the metaphysical tradition with new life, who shapes Gadamer’s thinking regarding the nature of human knowing. As such, philosophical hermeneutics does not call into question the entirety of the Western metaphysical tradition—as one sees in the post-­ Kehre Heidegger—but targets specifically modern rationalism, whose objectivizing gaze relativizes our conception of truth. Yet, Gadamer believes, we need not despair of this consequence of modern subjectivity. Rejecting the post-Kehre Heidegger’s reading of Plato as the forebear of such modern distortions, Gadamer mines an understanding of transcendence within ancient metaphysics that does not succumb to the tendency toward objectification. In the Idea of the Good, Gadamer shows an alternative strain of ancient thought, according to which the good, the true, and the beautiful are never encountered “in-themselves” but come to be known through their participation (methexis) in our concrete, historical reality.

Notes 1. See, for example, Richard Rorty’s highly selective reading and appropriation of Gadamer in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), as well as the attempt to distill anti-­ foundationalist implications from philosophical hermeneutics in Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern

204 

R. R. HOLSTON

Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); see also Leo Strauss’ interpretation and criticisms of Gadamer in their correspondence, which can be found in Gadamer and Strauss, “Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12. I have examined difficulties associated with these criticisms in Holston, “The Poverty of Antihistoricism: Strauss and Gadamer in Dialogue,” Modern Age 58, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 41–53. 2. Brice Wachterhauser, “Gadamer’s Realism: the ‘Belongingness’ of Word and Reality,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice Wachterhauser (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 150. 3. Jean Grondin acknowledges the appearance of such a tension in Gadamer’s thought as well when he remarks that “hermeneutics would [seem to] contain or imply a repudiation of metaphysics (as appears evident in the work of Heidegger, for instance).” Since Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics sees reality as accessible to human beings through a variety of interpretive frameworks of understanding, an ultimate account of being would appear to be problematic, “which would signify the end of metaphysics, understood as a reflection on Being and its ultimate principles.” Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes, eds. Saulius Geniusas and Paul Fairfield (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 125. Grondin’s essay, however, demonstrates the various ways in which Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics entails or implies metaphysical aspects of being. 4. Gadamer famously refers to this insistence that knowledge of reality requires the removal of all prejudices as the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice.” See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.  Marshall (New York: Continuum Books, 2004), 273. 5. In contrast to this approach, Gadamer’s model of authentic interpretation is that which has traditionally been practiced in the fields of theology and law where scripture and statute, respectively, are thought to achieve their meaning by virtue of an “application” to the life and circumstances of the interpreter. See Ibid., 310. 6. In the decades following the publication of Truth and Method, Gadamer claims that the purpose of his text was strictly phenomenological or descriptive with respect to its account of interpretation, rather than normative. I have argued that such remarks must either be taken as highly qualified, in the sense that Gadamer was describing genuine or authentic interpretation, or render Truth and Method guilty of having committed a performative contradiction. See Holston, “Two Concepts of Prejudice,” History of Political Thought 35, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 174–203. A similar critical observation is made by Alasdair MacIntyre in his review of Truth and

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

205

Method when he says that Gadamer’s avowal to have been purely descriptive in that text is a t­estimony to the power of the views against which Gadamer, himself, had written, and therefore, that “Gadamer partially misunderstands his own book.” MacIntyre, “Contexts of Interpretation: Reflections on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” Boston University Journal 24, no. 1 (1976): 41–46. Lawrence Hinman, for his part, has argued that Gadamer’s retrospective account of Truth and Method would render the text entirely irrelevant, since describing what one always inevitably does whenever one understands or interprets anything excludes the possibility of acting otherwise. See Hinman, “Quid Facti or Quid Juris? The Fundamental Ambiguity of Gadamer’s Understanding of Hermeneutics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 4 (1980): 512–35. Frederick Lawrence appears to echo, at least in part, the interpretation I have given to Gadamer’s remarks when he broadly characterizes the quaestio facti, which Gadamer claims to be his exclusive focus, as asking the question, “what are we doing when we are being authentically human?” Frederick G. Lawrence, “Hans-­Georg Gadamer: Philosopher of Practical Wisdom,” Theoforum 40 (2009), 270. Emphasis added. 7. Ibid., 263. 8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 278. 9. Lawrence, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Philosopher of Practical Wisdom,” in Hermeneutic Rationality, eds. Maria Luísa Portocarrero, Luis António Umbelino, Andrzej Wierciński (Berlin: Lit, 2012), 270. 10. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” 128. The reference is to Cicero’s De Orate, which reads, “Historia magistra vitae est,” or “History is life’s teacher,” and it expresses the notion that the past serves as a guide and as a source of wisdom for the present. 11. See Daniel L. Tate’s excellent discussion of the importance of beauty in this regard for Gadamer. The ontological affinity between beauty (kalos) and truth (aletheia) is this movement by which the transcendent comes to be known while at the same time receding or withdrawing from view. Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea of the Beautiful,” Epoche 20, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 21–41. 12. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” 129. 13. Ibid., 129–30. 14. Ibid. Objections have been raised against Gadamer that the acknowledgment of such historicity or context dependency renders the truth of whatever insights are encountered merely relative. Ronald Beiner, addressing such charges by those, such as Jürgen Habermas, explains, “The issue is not one of truth versus relativity, as Habermas tends to present it, nor of validated knowledge versus unvalidated opinion; the issue, rather, is one of the truth of generality versus the truth of specificity, that is, truth at the

206 

R. R. HOLSTON

level of abstract principles versus truth embedded in immediate circumstances. … What is intended is not an attenuation of moral reason, but its confrontation with an alternative account of moral reason—its ‘localization,’ one might say. … To use Gadamer’s terms, the choice is between judging ‘from a distance’ and judging from within ‘the demands of the situation,’ so it is not a question of whether moral truths exist but of whether one gains access to these truths ‘from the inside,’ or whether they are imposed from ‘outside’ shared moral experience.” Ronald Beiner, “Do We Need a Philosophical Ethics? Theory, Prudence, and the Primacy of Ethos,” The Philosophical Forum 20 no. 3 (Spring 1989), 236–7. 15. For a nuanced account of Gadamer’s intellectual relationship to Heidegger with a particular focus on their respective attitudes toward the metaphysical tradition see Brice R.  Wachterhauser, Beyond Being: Gadamer’s PostPlatonic Hermeneutical Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 166–199. 16. See Gadamer’s correspondence with Strauss in which he denies Strauss’ imputation to him of belief in Heidegger’s “world-night,” the alleged condition of modernity in which Western metaphysics has come to an end. Strauss and Gadamer, “Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” 10. See also Gadamer, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Metaphysics,” trans. A.  Greider, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 25, no. 2 (May 1994): 108–9. 17. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 168. 18. Ibid. 19. A more comprehensive account of Gadamer’s indebtedness to Heidegger would, at a minimum, need to include the concept of the hermeneutic circle, for which Gadamer is so well-known. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 268–278. Another prominent feature for which he is clearly indebted to Heidegger is the idea that “language is the House of Being,” which is strongly echoed in Gadamer’s close identification of language and reality. See Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 167 and, in general, Part 3 of Truth and Method. The features discussed in the section above are selected based on their helpfulness in illuminating Gadamer’s relationship to the metaphysical tradition and the nature of his convergence with the early Heidegger in that regard. 20. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 170. 21. Frederick Lawrence, “Ontology of and as Horizon: Gadamer’s Rehabilitation of the Metaphysics of Light,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 56, Fasc. 3/4 (Jul – Dec, 2000), 396. 22. In Being and Time, Heidegger is clear that he does not mean a “pernicious relativizing” or “negative … disburdening” of acquired meanings by this term, but that he aims to “stake out the positive possibilities” in our tradi-

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

207

tion. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 22. Emphasis in the original. The negative sense of “Destruktion,” therefore, should not be overemphasized. Gadamer, himself, interprets the meaning of “Destruktion” as “dismantling to discover” (“Abbau zur Freilegung”). See Concill-Sancho, “The Experiential Hermeneutic Nature of Practical Reason,” 285 n. 3. 23. Gadamer’s appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia is not, however, without modification. Robert J.  Dostal argues that while Heidegger characterizes this unconcealedness of the event of truth as a “flash of lightning” or flash of insight, Gadamer understands truth’s emergence to be more gradual, and his model is the conversation. See Dostal, “The Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and Sudden Lightning,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 47–67. 24. Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty,” 24. It is important to note, however, that Heidegger also saw it as necessary to dissociate Aristotle from Scholasticism’s interpretation of him as carrying forth Plato’s correspondence theory of truth. See Andrew Fuyarchuck, Gadamer’s Path to Plato: A Response to Heidegger and a Rejoinder to Stanley Rosen (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 87–92. Though Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is transformative for Gadamer, he nonetheless rejects Heidegger’s interpretation of Plato in this regard, arguing that motility or motion rather than stasis can be seen in Plato’s ontology. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 180, 189. 25. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 536. 26. Jesús Concill-Sancho, “The Experiential Hermeneutic Nature of Practical Reason,” 286. 27. Ibid. 28. Gadamer is known to have attended the seminar given by Heidegger in 1924, whose particular focus was Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Not only has Gadamer written about this subject in a number of places throughout his career, but he was working on an annotated translation of the Ethics until late in his life. See Andrzej Wierciński, “Phronesis as the Mediation between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility,” in Hermeneutic Rationality, 77 n. 10, 83 n. 33. For Gadamer’s explicit engagements with Book VI of Aristotle’s Ethics, see “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed. Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007) and “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 29. Gadamer’s habilitation dissertation was later published as Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [1983]). Although princi-

208 

R. R. HOLSTON

pally a study of Plato’s Philebus, Gadamer begins to articulate his rather Aristotelian account of Plato’s thinking about the ethical life. In this regard, it is worth noting that Gadamer’s initial inclination for this project was to foreground a study of Aristotelian ethics. Richard Palmer brings this insight of Jean Grondin’s to bear in his prefatory remarks to Gadamer’s essay, “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” in The Gadamer Reader, 274. Furthermore, Gadamer’s later work develops a synthesis that interprets each thinker substantially in the light of the other, as is indicated in the title of his book, which refers to “Platonic-Aristotelian” philosophy. 30. To be sure, Gadamer does not deny that the later Heidegger can be insightful. The problem, for Gadamer, is Heidegger’s belief that it would be possible for him to get “beyond metaphysics.” In contrast, Gadamer believes that language and the discourses in which language embeds us both imply and give rise to metaphysical questions. To reinforce this point, Gadamer frequently calls attention to connections between the thinking of the later Heidegger and the metaphysical tradition, which Heidegger was unable to appreciate. Wachterhauser, 170–1. Dostal provides a remarkably lucid account of Gadamer’s complex relationship with the early and later Heidegger. See Dostal, “Heidegger’s Hermeneutics, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutical Heidegger, eds. Michael Bowler and Ingo Farin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 285–303. 31. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 168–9. 32. Ibid., 169. 33. Ibid, 172. 34. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimensions of Hermeneutics,” 125–6. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 456. 35. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimensions of Hermeneutics,” 134. 36. I am indebted to Ronald Beiner for this insight. 37. Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 16. 38. Ibid., 27–8. Emphasis added. 39. Ibid., 28. 40. Ibid., 10–11, 118. 41. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 187. 42. P.  Christopher Smith explains that on Gadamer’s view, “Ethical understanding is … a function not just of mind but also of who we are. There is no logos without ergon, which is to say, no reason and reasoning without deed; that we have already learned from Plato’s characters, Socrates and Callicles, whom he uses to present his argument for the choice (prohairesis) of the philosophical life over the life of pleasure and the pursuit of power.” Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude, 230–1. Emphasis in the original. The reason (logos) of the soul that would seek the common good, in other words, must be preformed by a certain way of living, i.e. concrete

13  “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 

209

norms that point toward civilized life as opposed to the fulfillment of ­individual appetites. Living within and having been formed by such norms of an ethical community thus precedes logos, and it is no mere coincidence that the sophists, who live as itinerants outside of any community, are portrayed by Plato as incapable of such cooperative dialogue with Socrates. 43. Gadamer draws on Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthete and the ethical person here and the idea that the former’s impulse and pursuit of momentary pleasure is incapable of such integrity, while the latter’s steadfastness demonstrates a consistency and unity of the self over time. See ibid., 202–3; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82–3. 44. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 192. This same internal order is what characterizes the beautiful, which is not merely a superficial symmetry in an appearance of something, but a harmony and proportion that parallels that of the concrete instantiations of the good. In his reading of Plato’s Philebus, Gadamer echoes what is indicated above with respect to the good when he says that the beautiful is defined by a “unity and integration,” and that it exists only within what is concretely beautiful, but not anywhere in-itself. Also, similar to the good, Gadamer sees this relationship as one of participation (methexis) not separation (chorismos). See Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty,” 32–4. 45. Lawrence, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy,” 210. 46. Ibid. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 318. 47. Lawrence, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Aristotle’s Practical Philosophy,” 210.

CHAPTER 14

Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism Michael P. Federici

Explaining Eric Voegelin’s (1901–1985) analysis of Enlightenment rationalism presents difficulties for the author of a brief essay. Voegelin’s political theory is philosophically dense; it includes multiple changes in focus and emphasis; and it encompasses 34 volumes. The Enlightenment is a large and complex topic, and like most epochal/school of thought designations its philosophical and historical boundaries are somewhat indistinct, variegated, and subject to disagreement. In Henry F. May’s The Enlightenment in America, he organizes the Enlightenment into four categories that converge in some ways and diverge in others.1 Voegelin’s critique of the Enlightenment focuses on what May classifies as the “Revolutionary Enlightenment” and what others have called the “Radical Enlightenment.” Unlike May, Voegelin was not interested in giving a rounded and balanced analysis of the Enlightenment because his focus was not the Enlightenment itself but a broader intellectual genealogy of which the Enlightenment was a part. Much of Voegelin’s political theory is an effort to trace the development of political and social thought to its spiritual origins as a way of

M. P. Federici (*) Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_14

211

212 

M. P. FEDERICI

understanding the modern crisis of order. He was concerned primarily with the rise of political religions, secular/pseudo-spiritual ideologies, and political movements that were the outgrowth of existential closure to the truth of existence. Like the sophist Protagoras, such ideologies and political movements substituted man for God as the source of existential, political, and social order and the measure of morality, meaning, and reality. The Enlightenment fit into a pedigree of modern political thought that Voegelin classified as “apostatic revolt.”2 In short, the Enlightenment and its breed of rationalism were interesting to Voegelin insofar as they contributed to the development of immanentizing ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, and progressivism (i.e., utopian ideologies that claim the ability to bring the Christian eschaton, heaven, into history). The appearance of these ideologies marked the height of the Western crisis of order that inspired his work. The task at hand, then, warrants definition of Enlightenment rationalism while acknowledging that some degree of simplification is necessary for the sake of clarity and succinctness. The Enlightenment was an intellectual, political, and cultural movement that Peter Gay describes as “a family of philosophies, …a cultural climate” that was characterized by rebellion against traditional ideas and organized Christianity in particular.3 It tended to embrace the rationalism of modern science to the exclusion of revelation, myth, tradition, and the synthesis of faith and reason. It inspired the belief that the progress of the natural sciences would result in moral progress and the dramatic improvement of social, political, and economic life. The Enlightenment was a reaction to the perceived darkness of the Medieval era, the suppression of reason; it celebrated the exploration of ideas that questioned the authority of existing political, social, and religious elites. Alexander Pope wrote an Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton that conveys the common view of the transition from Medieval darkness to enlightenment: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Enlightenment thought has been described as the religion of reason and the religion of humanity, language that conveys Voegelin’s characterization of the Enlightenment as apostatic revolt. The new religion of reason replaces the old religion of superstition and priestcraft. Thomas Jefferson was true to Enlightenment principles when he revised the Bible with a knife removing descriptions of metaphysical experiences (e.g.,

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

213

miracles) unverifiable by scientific or natural reason. Thomas Paine referred to the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason, the title of his 1794 book. Both Jefferson and Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as the application of Enlightenment ideas to political and social life. The revolutions were part of a global democratic movement inspired by the liberation of reason from the constraints imposed by the church, monarchs, and aristocratic privilege. While secular in some respects, Enlightenment thinkers like Auguste Comte (1798–1857) were deeply spiritual in a way that contrasted with traditional religion. They radically immanentized (brought into history) the Christian eschaton (the trans-historical fulfillment of human existence in an afterlife). Voegelin was especially interested in apocalyptic expectation and its relation to politics. While he recognized that aspects of the Enlightenment had secular characteristics, he identified its religious and spiritual tendencies, including Comte’s Religion of Humanity, as its most significant feature because of its effect on the Western crisis of order. In fact, Voegelin attributed the secularism of Enlightenment rationalism, including positivism, to religious desires. The Enlightenment developed, formed, and declined over the course of centuries; its paradigmatic age was the eighteenth century and its most fertile ground was France. Scholars continue to write about it because it has influenced political, economic, social, and religious life long after its cultural peak. It has been the source of heated and ideologically driven debates about enduring questions including: What is human nature? and What is the best political regime? Locke, Jefferson, and Paine answer the latter question based on their answer to the former question. Human beings are rational by nature and, therefore, forms of government, like monarchy, that reject popular consent are illegitimate. They opposed the divine right of kings and in its place, they posited the self-evident, rational natural right of the people to rule themselves. In their view, consent of the governed is the only reasonable basis for government’s legitimacy.4 The Enlightenment’s contributors include Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Ben Franklin, Nicolas de Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Auguste Comte, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude-Henri Saint Simon, and Charles Louis Montesquieu among others. It influenced or was influenced by the Renaissance, the Reformation and Protestantism, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Freemasons, Unitarianism, Utilitarianism, Deism, positivism, democracy, capitalism, and Marxism.

214 

M. P. FEDERICI

The focus of this volume is on one aspect of the Enlightenment, its conception of human rationality. My essay explains Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism that is part of his larger analysis of modernity and the Western crisis that culminates in the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century. He considers totalitarian movements like Nazism and communism as well as socialism, positivism, and humanitarianism to be the “ideological offspring of the Enlightenment.”5 Voegelin’s primary work on the topic is From Enlightenment to Revolution, republished in his collected works as Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man.6 After its initial publication in 1975, the eighteenth-century thinkers and movements that comprised the Enlightenment and figured prominently in the book faded into the background of his work. His philosophical diagnosis of the Western crisis is the foundation for his prescriptive response: restoration of pre-modern symbols and experiences of order to memory so that they can become a living force with which to oppose the disorder of the present age. Voegelin has much to say about the Enlightenment. The analysis here will focus on his core contention that Enlightenment rationalism substitutes a false spirituality for authentic religiosity and Classical philosophy. False spirituality stems from a loss of the balance of consciousness between mundane and transcendent existence, between mortality and immortality. The balance is achieved by Aristotle’s bios theoretikos, the contemplative life, and lost by Enlightenment thinkers like Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783) who replaces it with the process of acquiring scientifically derived useful knowledge. For d’Alembert and other Enlightenment thinkers, reason was an instrument with which to acquire useful encyclopedic knowledge. Classical Greek philosophers, however, differentiated reason as man’s participation in divine nous, that is, man responds to a divine attraction or pull (helkein) that is in tension with the counterpull of passion. Knowledge (episteme) is the outcome of following the divine pull. Doxa (opinion) and ideology are the consequence of following the passions. Moreover, in following the divine pull man inches toward immortal life. In articulating this experience of reason, Plato and Aristotle gained a deeper understanding of the meaning of human existence. This differentiation of reason/nous as the sensorium of transcendence is an historical event, what Voegelin called a “theophanic” event. It is not a theory, an idea, or a tradition. Unlike most Enlightenment philosophers, Voegelin argued that the “life of reason is not a treasure of information to be stored away” but an effort to participate in divine reality and resist the forces of disorder in all aspects of historical life, personal,

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

215

social, and political.7 Three corollary points will be incorporated into the analysis: (1) Enlightenment rationalism elevates method above philosophical substance and historical experience; (2) Enlightenment rationalism is irrational because it is reductionistic; it is unwilling “to recognize the ratio of ontology and philosophical anthropology”8; and (3) Enlightenment rationalism embraces a progressive historicism that claims to know the meaning of history thus ending the search for meaning in history.

Pseudo-Spirituality From his earliest publications, Voegelin insisted that philosophers must account for the full range of human experience including participation in divine reality. The story of human experience with divine reality is what St. Augustine deemed sacred history to be distinguished from profane or secular history. In Voegelin’s analysis of the Enlightenment, Voltaire is an important figure because he dissolves Augustine’s notion of sacred history and replaces it with a new sacred history based on “inner-worldly religiousness” and the “intramundane spirit of man” rather than “the transcendental pneuma of Christ.” The human spirit is the focus of history. The transition from a Christian anthropology to a secular anthropology is possible because of the deification of reason and the eventual “deification of the animal basis of existence.”9 Voltaire’s rejection of Augustine’s sacred history narrows the horizon of philosophical inquiry by eliminating sacred history from the search for the truth of existence. A part of human experience (e.g., the animal basis of existence) is taken as its whole. Historical consciousness is becoming secularized. The Enlightenment imagination of Voltaire conceives of historical participation as strictly mundane; man’s participation in transcendent reality is eliminated from consciousness. Helvétius (1715–1771) is part of the movement toward the reduction of man to his animal basis. He asserts that “In man all is physical sensation” and that “man is under the direction of pleasure and pain.”10 Hobbes articulated such a view in Leviathan. While Locke does not push the point as far as Helvétius, he embraced a hedonistic morality. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke states that “Good and evil are nothing but pleasure and pain.” Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith assert that selfish, pleasurable desires are beneficial to humanity.

216 

M. P. FEDERICI

In Voegelin’s view, reality was not limited to the animal basis of existence, what was experienced through sense perception or determined by a particular method of investigation. It encompassed a vast horizon of historical experience that was beyond the comprehension of any one individual. He used “Second Reality,” a concept borrowed from Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, to refer to ideological abstractions and “ismic constructions” that claimed a part of reality to be its whole. He insisted that the metaxic (in-between) structure of reality was unchanging and that human reason was limited in its understanding of reality. He was sensitive to and critical of efforts—like Voltaire’s conception of history—that truncated, inverted, or eliminated the open search for the truth of existence. Because modern ideologies are the consequence of varying degrees of existential and intellectual closure to divine reality, they are apt to identify the source of order in man’s revolt from God, including the secularization and instrumentalization of reason. In his early scholarship on political religions, Voegelin stated that the Western crisis was a consequence of “the secularization of the soul.”11The crisis included efforts to either ignore man’s spiritual nature, as was the case with Max Weber’s value-free positivism,12 or substitute a radical immanence for transcendence as evidenced in the works of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx. Such thinkers lost the tension and balance between immanence and transcendence which exist not as unconnected spheres of existence but as integrated (metaxic) aspects of human experience. The loss of the tension between immanence and transcendence indicates a loss of the balance of consciousness13 as individuals imagine a new pseudo-reality (Second Reality) that is void of human-divine participation. It is in this intellectual milieu that reason is detached from its transcendent moorings. A universe governed by natural laws can be controlled by humans once they unleash the potential of scientific knowledge, the derivative of enlightened reason. Control of natural law gives humans a creative power with which to remake the world. Thus, Francis Bacon claimed that knowledge is power. Scientific knowledge can be used to transform human nature itself and with it the conventions and institutions that are obstacles to progress and perfection. The growing confidence of human beings, inspired in part by the accomplishments of modern science, leads to the construction of ideological movements that aim to radically transform man and society. Before the new visions of human nature and politics can be imagined, the philosophical anthropology of ancient and JudeoChristian thinking must be rejected or radically reinterpreted as was done

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

217

by Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers. Voegelin starkly separates the older Western tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas from the Enlightenment thinkers who develop irreconcilable theories of human nature and politics and who pull reason away from its transcendent roots. The New Science of Politics is an effort to restore political science to its older foundations by exposing the reductionism of Enlightenment rationalism, positivism, and modern political ideologies. The ideas of Helvétius, D’Alembert, Turgot, Comte, and Condorcet, among others, prepare the way for the great, utopian ideological movements of modernity. The French Revolution is formative in the development of these ideological movements because for the first time “the apocalypse of man is driving…toward the deification of intramundane society.” The consequence is “the destruction of Western Christian civilization” and “the tentative creation of a non-Christian society.”14 Voegelin calls this desire to replace Christian civilization “the consciousness of epoch,”15 a deliberate effort to circumvent the existing cultural order.16 Hobbes is an important figure in the Western crisis because he responded to the rising conflict between religious sects by attempting to depoliticize religion and solve a spiritual problem with institutional structure, absolute rule. The summum bonum of the ancients and Christians is replaced by Hobbes with the summum malum, the fear of violent death. The absolute ruler, the Leviathan, is a mortal god who, like Machiavelli’s prince, can manipulate power in accordance with natural law and the needs of order without attunement to a transcendent truth. Yet, as Voegelin notes, “Hobbes countered the gnostic immanentization of the eschaton which endangered existence by a radical immanence of existence which denied the eschaton.”17 Removing consciousness of the eschaton and its transcendent structures from the life of human beings and human civilization eliminates the very source of order on which the ends of politics depend. Once the transcendent source of order and community is removed, Hobbes is left with the problem of forming a society out of individuals who are united by nothing more than a common passion to avoid violent death. The problem of political order has been reduced to managing the animal basis of existence. The internal logic of Hobbes’s social contract theory is only rational if his assumptions about the summum bonum and natural law are accurate. Yet, Voegelin considers Hobbes’s assumptions, and social contract theory generally, to be irrational because they are based on ahistorical abstractions, the consequence of unnecessarily confining theoretical boundaries to utilitarian knowledge. Hobbes, like so

218 

M. P. FEDERICI

many Enlightenment rationalists, revolts against the classical experience of reason. Here lies the crux of Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism. He contends that a just political and social order, including the rational discussion on which it depends, are only possible if human beings are open to transcendent reality in whatever form it takes. Openness requires movement or turning toward (periagoge) the divine light (aletheia) as described in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Enlightenment rationalists operate from contrasting assumptions. They either, like Hobbes and Weber, assert that competing notions of transcendent reality are the cause of disorder and must, then, be depoliticized or they, like Comte, recognize the necessity of existential attunement to a spiritual ground but they immanentize the ground and divinize man and/or the state. In either case, the balance of consciousness has been lost; the metaxic structure of reality has been deformed in the consciousness of the rationalist and ideological revolutionary. In short, humans are capable of self-salvation; they have no need for transcendent intervention. Nature has equipped them with reason with which they can create new sources of order, for example, natural rights, the great leader, the masse totale, the general will. To be rational, however, political theory must account for human participation in divine reality. Hobbesian political theory becomes possible once modern science, and Christianity before it, de-divinizes the cosmos. What is left is a radical separation of transcendent reality and immanent-world reality. The consequences of this de-divinization of the cosmos include the movement toward a secular politics and a narrowing of the horizons of consciousness. De-divinization is followed by the re-divinization of politics. In the latter case, Second Realities are created that substitute man for the transcendent ground of being. Comte unites these two parts of modernity in his religion of humanity. He is a positivist who claims to be the messiah; he is what Voegelin calls an “intramundane eschatologist.”18 Once the world-­transcendent God is replaced by the great leader, the state assumes the position as the ground of being. Moral resistance to the state is impossible because it has become the highest authority, the embodiment of Turgot’s masse totale and Condorcet’s superman. The new religion of humanity rejects “the creation of man by God” as superstition. It “now returns as the creation of the superman through Condorcet.”19 As the state is led by and gives birth to the superman, it increasingly represents the masse totale; history progresses toward its perfection; the progressive philosophy of history is born.

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

219

Progressive Historicism Voegelin was a philosopher of history as well as a political theorist. He insisted that while meaning can be found in history, human knowledge of history was limited. In particular, the end of history was a mystery. Enlightenment rationalism inflates the capacity of human understanding to include gnostic claims about the progressive unfolding of history and its end. Such “stop history” ideologies are the consequence of losing the balance of consciousness. Human beings participate in a reality that includes divine-human encounter. As noted, Voegelin used the term metaxy to denote the in-between of human existence, for example, immortal-mortal, divine-human, transcendent-immanent, reason-passion. Voegelin states that “the problem of human history is precisely the tension between the historical existence of man and his transcendental destination” (FETR 158). The metaxic structure of reality is permanent. Human nature is part of this historical structure and, thus, is unchanging. Ideologies that claim the ability to transform human nature have lost consciousness of the metaxic structure of reality or are in rebellion against it. They claim the ability to transgress the limits of historical life by using political power to bring history to its culmination. In the unfolding of history, traditional obstacles to progress are eliminated, and in their most radical forms the ideologies purport the perfection of both man and society.

The Irrationality of the Enlightenment and the Problem of Method One of the primary characteristics of the Enlightenment is its rejection of “irrational” sources of knowledge such as tradition, revelation, religious dogma, and metaphysics. Voegelin considers this proposition to be reductionistic and irrational itself because it contracts the field of scientific inquiry and eliminates from philosophical inquiry centuries of work by philosophers who provided insights into human nature.20 For the purposes of philosophical analysis, he was opposed to the reification of truth into dogmas and doctrines because it separated the engendering experiences of order from the symbols used to articulate them. He used the term “logophobia” to refer to the unwillingness and fear of philosophy, the open search for truth. In Voegelin’s more expansive view, science

220 

M. P. FEDERICI

is a search for truth concerning the nature of the various realms of being. Relevant in science is whatever contributes to the success of this search. Facts are relevant in so far as their knowledge contributes to the study of essence, while methods are adequate in so far as they can be effectively used as a means for this end.21

Why do many Enlightenment figures wish to narrow the horizons of science and reason? Voegelin claims that religious motives are ultimately the cause. What are these religious motives? Radical thinkers like Turgot and Comte exhibit at least some gnostic tendencies. They are not only dissatisfied with the world as it is, but they suffer from what Voegelin terms pneumopathology, a sickness of the soul that causes a desire to escape from the world as it is. In the de-divinized world, the anxiety of existence is heightened making it more difficult for humans to cope with the tension of existence including the problem of mortality. The temptation is great to short-circuit the process that ends in death and immortality. The instruments of escape from heightened anxiety are gnostic myths about the perfection of human beings, human society, and the end of history. From the Enlightenment forward, there is a proliferation of gnostic ideologies that purport to contain the secret knowledge that when operationalized will transform human existence. Such gnostic ideologies are political religions based on the pretense of science (e.g., National Socialism, Communism, positivism). They theologize about the meaning of human existence and the ultimate destiny of man. They are irrational because they close off philosophical inquiry when it encounters evidence of metaxic reality and the limits of human progress. In other words, appeals to the historical reality of the limits of human nature and politics are rejected as unscientific and irrational. Gnostics lack the spiritual strength to come to grips with life in the metaxy including its many injustices that limit the possibilities of politics and human life generally. Man’s ultimate destiny, the older tradition proclaims, is not in the historical world of politics but a transcendent beyond. Man must, then, balance the demands of mundane, immanent existence with his transcendent destiny. Unable to accept this reality, gnostics are intent on immanentizing the Christian eschaton by bringing heaven to earth, an aspiration typically connected to progressive historicism. Given the reality of the metaxy, the transformation of human nature and society is impossible. Attempts to accomplish the utopian end of history characterize the horrors of the twentieth-century totalitarian

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

221

movements. Voegelin provides the theoretical genealogy of revolutionary and totalitarian movements. The Enlightenment plays a prominent role in the genealogy because it helps to develop three essential characteristics of modern revolutionary movements, the rejection of the classical experience of reason, pseudo-spirituality, and progressive historicism.

Helvétius, D’Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet, and Comte Voegelin’s conclusions about the Enlightenment, and modernity generally, stem from his analysis of thinkers who contributed to the theoretical ground on which modern ideologies and revolutions have been constructed. Helvétius is a key figure for Voegelin because in his rejection of Christianity he inverts the direction in which human beings find the source of reality and order. Christianity directed man’s philosophical and religious gaze to the heavens toward the realm of his ultimate destiny. Helvétius, like Hobbes, explained the “internal structure of man” using utilitarian criterion, sensory perception and a pleasure-pain calculus. This inversion is combined with the notion that human passion is not the source of disorder, as Plato and Aristotle argued, but the “fundamental force on which all order in the conduct of man has to rely.” Voegelin calls this new view of human passion “the instrumentalization of man.”22 In the older tradition the spiritual center of man, that which orders his life in accordance with a divine will, was the soul; reason, or nous, was the sensorium of transcendence. The new man’s reason is limited to calculating self-interest and the pleasure-pain calculus. The new man is an instrument to be manipulated by the legislator, in the case of Hobbes by the Leviathan. Rousseau’s social contract empowers the state to force those who refuse to follow the general will to be free. Man is no longer an end in himself but an instrumental part of the collective whole of humanity. The meaning of his existence is now tied to his participation in Turgot’s masse totale. The change in meaning marks “the externalization of processes of the soul” and the “perversion” of the life of the soul. As Voegelin explains, the “growth of the soul through an internal process, which is nourished through communication with transcendent reality, is replaced by a formation of conduct through external management.”23 As Walter Lippman notes, among the consequences of this inversion is a politics based on passion and interest in which mass communication is used to

222 

M. P. FEDERICI

manipulate public opinion.24 What is lost is the primacy of character and virtue as necessary prerequisites for the right conduct of statesmen. Political leaders take on new importance because they embody and represent the externalized life of the soul. Helvétius contributed to the idea of social evolution measured by the conformity of private interest to the public interest. The evolution of society makes little sense unless its end is identified, and it eventually stops moving toward that end. Helvétius understands this problem and is one of the first modern thinkers to “take his jump into eschatology” and suggest the end of history. Once the objective of history and human existence has been identified, all that remains is its realization. Comte, a positivist, provides a more developed philosophy of history that is based on his formation of a political religion, the religion of humanity. Comte’s positivism builds on Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a collection of knowledge that was useful to the progress of human society. D’Alembert wanted to reorient the universe to the scientific methods of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considered himself to be part of the “revolutionary expansion of the horizon of knowledge.”25 Useful knowledge, however, excludes the life of contemplation lauded by Aristotle, the bios theoretikos, and the ancient focus of philosophy to search for knowledge about human nature that enlivened the life of virtue. Voegelin considers these Enlightenment attitudes to be contrary to the humanistic tradition but central to the idea of progress characteristic of Enlightenment theory. Progress is measured by the advancement of scientific knowledge and its application to society, not by a deeper understanding of the human condition and the process by which man participates in divine reality. Virtue is no longer the telos of politics; improvement in material condition and expansion of natural rights are the new ends of politics. In addition, d’Alembert wished to create a new, autonomous moral code to guide the application of useful knowledge. He was convinced that radical material inequality was contrary to justice, but he did not take the Benthamite step declaring the greatest good for the greatest number to be the foundation of morality. What does begin to take shape is that justice requires a redistribution of wealth and that a planned society is the instrument for its realization. To support the legitimacy of this vision of scientific knowledge and the progress of society toward equality, d’Alembert creates the principle of “the authoritative present,” “the assumption that the situation of the moment, or a situation that is envisaged as immediately impending, is superior in value to any prior

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

223

historical situation of fact.” The principle establishes the superiority of the present over the past, but it does not explain its relationship to the future. Will one authoritative present be replaced by another? The authoritative present remains authoritative into the future because it marks the end of history which Helvétius establishes by a “jump into eschatology” declaring the present to be the final phase of history. The future is an age of progress but the principles that engendered it cannot be surpassed. The idea of the authoritative present bestows “grace on the present” and “is needed for the adequate expression of intramundane religiousness in politics.” Voegelin responds to these claims by stating that “This act of grace, bestowed by the intellectual leaders of Enlightenment on themselves and on their age, is the source of the genuine revolutionary pathos that animates the idea of progress.”26 Man no longer needs a transcendent god to save him. Voegelin identifies Comte and Marx as indicative of the spiritual disease that combines self-divinization and self-salvation. They both substitute “an intramundane logos of human consciousness” for “the transcendental logos.”27 Turgot recognized that the new meaning of history must surpass or at least equal the universal, Christian meaning. The masse totale provides historical meaning as mankind moves toward perfection. Individual human beings cease to have historical meaning, but mankind in the lump carries historical meaning. The masse totale is “the tentative evocation of a new worldly divinity.” Comte creates the new worldly god and, with other thinkers, he has “mutilated the idea of man.”28 Condorcet adds to the authoritative present the notion of predictability in social and political life that assumes similarity between it and natural science. If the laws of both natural and social science are fixed and knowable, then outcomes are predictable as well. Condorcet develops a plan to direct the destiny of mankind that contains three primary objectives, ending the inequality of nations (regarding wealth and the development of rationalism), ending the inequality of individuals, and the perfection of human beings including the end of death itself. The first objective requires the intervention of enlightened nations in the affairs of less enlightened nations. The second objective is accomplished, in part, by the creation of compulsory social security programs that eliminate great gaps between rich and poor and bring everyone into the middle class. The final objective of the plan requires the transformation of human nature, the creation of a superman. Condorcet rejects the Christian dependence on revelation, grace, and God’s mercy for salvation in favor of self-salvation. Voegelin comments that:

224 

M. P. FEDERICI

This program of Condorcet seems to be the first systematic project, elaborated by a Western totalitarian, for the radical destruction of all civilizations of mankind, the high civilizations as well as the less differentiated native civilizations, and for transforming the surface of the globe into the habitat of a standardized mankind that is formed by the ideology of a handful of megalomaniac intellectuals. There is hardly any difference discernible between the totalitarian Progressivist and his Communist and National Socialist successors.29

Conclusion Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism focuses on the spiritual and religious aspects of the thinkers who comprise the historical and philosophical movement. Although it has the reputation for being secular, Voegelin identifies the religious characteristics of a variety of Enlightenment thinkers. The development of a new religion is intended to replace the existing Classical and Christian philosophical anthropology. Because it narrows the scope of philosophical inquiry, Voegelin considers the positivism of the Enlightenment to be irrational. He noted the tendency in a variety of Enlightenment thinkers to reject the Classical experience of reason by divorcing it from participation in divine reality. These thinkers lose the balance of consciousness when they reduce reason to a strictly mundane experience. The result is not a rational, secular politics but the introduction of political religions that substitute for Christianity and claim an ability to transform the human condition. Voegelin is especially attentive to the tendency in Enlightenment thought to immanentize the Christian eschaton and substitute an intramundane logos for a transcendent logos. The consequences of Enlightenment rationalism are revolutionary and manifest in the radical and totalitarian movements that are part of the Western crisis of order. Restoration of order begins with realization that Enlightenment philosophy is far more radical than is typically thought and that it represents a paradigm shift in political thinking that aims to obliterate the classical and Judeo-Christian tradition on which the Western order depends.

Notes 1. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). 2. Revolution and the New Science, ed. with an introduction by Barry Cooper in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 26 (Columbia, MO: University

14  ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 

225

of Missouri Press, 1999), 9. (hereafter CWEV) (FETR 3). Please note that From Enlightenment to Revolution. From Enlightenment to Revolution will henceforth be mentioned as FETR. 3. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), x–xi. 4. Paine went so far as to suggest the infallibility of the people. 5. CWEV, vol. 5, Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000): 13. 6. From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. by John H.  Hallowell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975) and Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man, ed. with an introduction by David Walsh in CWEV, vol. 26 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999). 7. CWEV, vol. 12: 288. 8. CWEV, vol. 5: 106. 9. CWEV, vol. 24: 41–42. (FETR 10–12). 10. CWEV, vol. 26: 47–48. 11. CWEV, vol. 5: 24. 12. Voegelin classified Weber’s positivism/value-free science as “modern irrationalism.” See CWEV, vol. 5: 105. 13. The loss of balance between immanent and transcendent concerns is present throughout human history. The prophet Isaiah as well as St. Paul are included among those who Voegelin identifies as having lost the balance of consciousness. See The Ecumenic Age, chapter 5 “The Pauline Vision of the Resurrected.” 14. CWEV, vol. 26: 214. (FETR, 176). 15. CWEV, vol. 24: 31. (FETR, 3). 16. Consciousness of epoch is not limited to Enlightenment thinkers. Voegelin identifies the twelfth-century thinker Joachim of Fiore as the first of many modern thinkers who articulate a consciousness of epoch. 17. CWEV, vol. 5: 234. 18. CWEV, vol. 26: 174. (FETR 145). 19. CWEV, vol. 26: 158–159. (FETR 134). 20. Michael Oakeshott expresses a similar criticism of rationalism is his January 28, 1948 letter to Karl Popper. Hoover Institute Archives (Collection title: K. Popper, box number: 332, folder ID: 17). Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership provides a criticism of English rationalism, especially Hobbes and Locke. See Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1924), 64–71. 21. CWEV, vol. 5: 91. 22. CWEV, vol. 26: 82–83. (FETR 69). 23. CWEV, vol. 26: 83–85. (70–71). 24. See Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, Public Opinion, and The Good Society.

226 

M. P. FEDERICI

25. CWEV, vol. 26: 87, 89. (FETR 76). 26. CWEV, vol. 26: 99–100. (FETR 83–85). 27. CWEV, vol. 26: 343. (FETR 276). 28. CWEV, vol. 26: 114. (FETR 94–95). 29. CWEV, vol. 26: 156–157. (FETR 132).

CHAPTER 15

Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism Wendell John Coats

This essay lays out the critique of modern Rationalism by the twentieth-­ century English philosophical essayist and political theorist, Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), and then attempts briefly to assess its general cogency as well as its practical implications for especially political and moral life. It draws largely upon two of Oakeshott’s works—Experience and Its Modes (1933) and Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (1962). It will become evident to those who have familiarity with these two works that the popular essays of the latter work develop in detail the implications of a view of human knowledge and experience articulated initially in the more philosophic Experience and Its Modes.1 And although Oakeshott (like Plato’s Socrates and Chinese Daoists) occasionally resorts in his expositions to the use of everyday skills such as cookery and pottery, we shall find that his central concerns are with the effects of what he calls modern Rationalism in the political and moral life of Western civilization of the past four centuries or so. In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott presents a view of the relationship obtaining among various forms of knowing and doing as they present W. J. Coats (*) Connecticut College, London, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_15

227

228 

W. J. COATS

themselves in human experience over time. He says his viewpoint owes much to the Idealist philosophers Hegel and Bradley, and we can observe it certainly would fall within that school insofar as it begins from the “whole” of which something less than the whole is predicated in various forms of thought and action. This is a complex and lengthy work which goes into much detail on various, settled “modalities” of experience such as “history,” “science,” and “practice,” but here we will only look at those of its arguments which Oakeshott subsequently develops in some detail in his critique of modern Rationalism. Arguably, the most important point relevant to his subsequent critiques of “rationalism” is the anti-realist claim that there is no common subject matter in human experience. (“there is never in experience an it”, Oakeshott 1933, p. 31) Rather, each particular settled way of experiencing, creates its own subject matter in the tension between how and what is experienced. (Or, as Oakeshott sometimes says, every subject matter is “correlative to” the distinctive method of experiencing which creates it.) For example, the scientist does not study a falling apple; rather the scientist first resolves the apple into an abstraction (called “mass”) with universal proprieties before plugging it into a formula such a d = 1/2gt2 and so on. (Science, on Oakeshott’s account, is experience under the category of “quantity” or quantity-like). Or to take another illustration, the historical past (created by the principle of continuity) is not the same subject-matter as the practical past, the realm of value and desire; the former looks at the past for its own sake, the latter for useful lessons. (It has been suggested that Oakeshott developed this general view as a young man when trying to mediate between the claims of religion and science.) Owing to the absence of a common subject matter to address, Oakeshott is often critical of various settled modalities of experience from the standpoint of logical irrelevance (ignoratio elenchi), for attempting to give advice to one another, as though they were all addressing the same subject matter. Attempting to derive practical implications from a poetic image would be an illustration of this logical error on Oakeshott’s view.2 A related point for our exploration of Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism is that “truth” for Oakeshott is a matter of logical (and ontological) coherence, not realist correspondence between an idea and a something “out there.” On Oakeshott’s view, the coherence theory of truth comprehends the correspondence theory, not the other way round. To take a contemporary example (clearly not Oakeshott’s), the laws of Newtonian physics are still considered valid by the scientific community even in the wake of

15  MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’S CRITIQUE OF MODERN RATIONALISM 

229

the post-Einsteinian discovery of the curvature of time and space, so long as the context for Newton’s laws is not subject to conditions of extreme speeds (e.g., the speed of light) and extreme gravitational pulls (e.g., that of “black holes”). Oakeshott would have called this accommodation of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics a matter of increasing coherence within the mode of science. To rehearse thus far, we have taken and summarized a few arguments from Experience and Its Modes as a preface to our exposition of Oakeshott’s critique of modern Rationalism. These are: that there is no common subject matter in human experience; that distinctive subject matters are created in the tension between a how and what of experiencing; that it is a logical error to pass from different subject matters as though they were the same and that truth is a matter of the increasing coherence of a settled field of thought and activity, rather than realist correspondence to a common-sensical reality. In the popular essays of the 1940s and 1950s collected in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, Oakeshott defines modern Rationalism as a mode of thought appearing over the past four centuries, and characterized by a belief in the “sovereignty” of technique, to the exclusion of practical knowledge of timing and judgment acquired in a patient apprenticeship. Although he sees this development as a potential in both Platonic rationalism and medieval rationalist theology, he sees it as crystallizing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saliently in the thought of Francis Bacon and René Descartes. Oakeshott’s fundamental critique of it as an approach to human activity and conduct is its partiality in the definition of “rationality.” In brief, it fails to grasp the full context for its own thought, “like a man who turns off the light and then complains he cannot see.” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 32) In its quest for certainty and in its belief that the only true knowledge is that of a technique which can be written down and put in books, it resolves human activity into a series of problems with distinct starting and ending points amenable to “rational” solutions, and loses the balance and comprehensive judgment of traditional knowledge acquired in patient apprenticeships. A related blindness it engenders as it spreads in a culture is the misguided belief that there are universal techniques which can be abstracted from one particular skill or profession and applied directly in others without loss of skill and balance. And as it creates new crises (saliently wars) and problems through destruction of genuine skill and moral balance, it becomes even more “rationalist” in the illusory search for more “rationalist” solutions, only compounding the problems facing it.

230 

W. J. COATS

This entire critique is based in turn upon Oakeshott’s view (not yet developed in Experience and Its Modes) that modern Rationalism proceeds from an erroneous theory of the mind, viewing it as a neutral instrument existing in advance of the human activity it directs. As he explains in the 1950 essay “Rational Conduct,” this erroneous view is based upon “the supposition that a man’s mind can be separated from its contents and its activities.” (Oakeshott 1962, p.  86) In its place, Oakeshott offers an account of the “concrete” mind, which arises from, and in, apprenticeship to a tradition of behavior and consists in knowing how to behave in some particular idiom by pursuing its coherence and intimations (and not in the illusory belief that it is pursuing antecedently existing ends.) For Oakeshott “rational conduct” has no meaning outside of a particular idiom of conduct (including that of scientific research); there are no universal methods because there is no universal subject matter—each subject matter arises in the tension between a something given identity and the method creating it. By way of more detailed illustration of Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism let us look at what he has to say about the corruption of Western political and moral life of the past four centuries or so, as it has come increasingly under the spell of the Rationalist illusion that not to have a ubiquitously applicable and abbreviated technique or code or ideology, is not to be serious. Let us start with Oakeshott’s account of a healthy morality, and how it is corrupted by the “Rationalist” illusion, and then go on to his critique of Rationalism in politics. In the 1948 essay, “The Tower of Babel,” Oakeshott says that “our morality appears to be a mixture of two ideal extremes,” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 61) the character of the mixture depending on which of the two is dominant as the spring of belief and conduct. One is a morality of habits of feeling and conduct, the other of reflection. The first is acquired “by living with people who habitually behave in a certain manner,” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 61) and the second by reflection upon either moral ideals or moral rules and laws in deciding upon a course of action. He suggests that all existing moralities subsist as a mixture of these two pure cases and that Western morality since about the fourth century has been a mixture (owing to the disarray of both classical and early Christian traditional morality in the face of the barbarian invasions) in which the “rationalist” or reflective element is dominant in conduct, that is in which choice of action is determined by (apparent) antecedent application of a moral ideal or a moral rule or law. He goes on to suggest that a healthy or balanced and skillful morality arises in the

15  MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’S CRITIQUE OF MODERN RATIONALISM 

231

opposite mixture, one in which the role of reflective intellect is subsidiary in the choice of conduct to a habit of behavior, and in which its proper role is as critic and protector of habitual morality during crisis or emergency, not as the normal spring of action, so to speak. By implication, Oakeshott’s account has it that the continual progression of Rationalist morality and ideology from self-induced crisis to crisis, and the continued loss of balance and acquired skill, leaves little hope of a Rationalist escape from this imbalanced moral “mixture.” Arguably, the central insight on which Oakeshott’s argument here is based (with Daoist3 and Hegelian4 influences) is that the implicit (an sich) is normally stronger than the explicit (für sich) the latter of which is best restricted to times of crisis and emergency, when normally healthy moral and intellectual ambiguity becomes a liability. (An illustration of this—not Oakeshott’s—might be the Roman Catholic resort to rationalist Aquinian theology to defend itself from criticisms of the Protestant Reformation.) In the 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” Oakeshott turns his attention to the expressly political errors of modern Rationalism. Having defined it as a belief in the sovereignty of technique (as we have seen), Oakeshott goes on to explore its expressly political manifestations. He calls its myth “the assimilation of politics to engineering” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 4) and says that it resolves politics into a series of “felt needs” and crises to be solved by the application of perfectionist universal techniques and that the “modern history of Europe is littered with the projects of the politics of Rationalism” (Oakeshott 1962, p.  6), giving as examples, among others, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, national or racial self-determination, open diplomacy, a single tax, Federalism, and the World State. When Oakeshott’s turns to the provenance of this “intellectual fashion in the history of post-Renaissance Europe,” he starts with the circumstance under which a series of slowly mediated changes emerged unmistakably in the seventeenth-century investigation into the conditions necessary for the achievement of human knowledge of both nature and civilization, by dispensing with the presuppositions of Aristotelian science. Oakeshott focuses in this context on the attempts of Bacon and Descartes to formulate universal methods of inquiry capable of “certain and demonstrable knowledge” of the world, applicable to all subject matters, and capable of being applied by persons of average intelligence (the new method placing “all wits nearly on a level” in Bacon’s words). He suggests that the advance of the doctrine of the certainty and sovereignty of

232 

W. J. COATS

technique into the realm of politics came largely by way of the needs of the “inexperienced” in politics—that of the new ruler, the new ruling class and the new political society, all searching for a “crib” or ideology to fulfill their newly acquired functions. Machiavelli’s Prince (in advance of Bacon and Descartes5) speaks to the needs of the first; Locke’s Second Treatise to the needs of the second and the work of Marx and Engel (“the most stupendous of our political rationalisms”) to the needs of the last (Oakeshott 1962, p.  26). This invasion of Rationalism is illustrated especially well, Oakeshott thinks, in the views of the American founders, who, thinking they were beginning government anew by basing it on the natural rights discerned by Locke, merely re-articulated the historic rights of Englishmen which Locke had abbreviated as the (Liberal) ideology of the Second Treatise: The Declaration of Independence is a characteristic product of the saeculum rationalisticum. It represents the politics of the felt need interpreted with the aid of an ideology. (Oakeshott 1962, p. 28)

Before turning to an assessment of Oakeshott’s critique of modern Rationalism (in especially politics and morals), let us rehearse briefly its main features. We might summarily say that (1) Oakeshott has presented us with a constructivist6 (“reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own”), neo-Kantian7 account of the relative autonomy of various modalities which make up the conditional plurality of human experience (less any account of a noumenal realm) and (2) which also shows influences of the ancient Chinese Daoist view of right action flowing from implicit pursuit of what is appropriate in any particular idiom of activity at any particular moment (versus the illusory application of distracting moral ideals and precepts, a la Confucius). Oakeshott’s rather original formulation of this general viewpoint we have seen expressed as the claims that (1) there are no universal methods because there is no common subject matter in human experience; (2) therefore, it is a mistake to take methods achieved in one settled idiom of activity and apply them indiscriminately in another such idiom and (3) since “mind” is not a neutral instrument existing in advance of, and detachment from, its acquired contents, political and moral activity especially are mis-conceived (with disastrous effects) when viewed as the application of antecedently existing codes and ideologies to particular cases or

15  MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’S CRITIQUE OF MODERN RATIONALISM 

233

problems. By way of assessing the cogency of these Oakeshottian claims, let us attempt very briefly to analyze these claims critically. Arguably, an intelligent way of assessing the cogency of Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism is to start with those of its claims which appear most indisputable. Arguably, doing so requires finding the level of generality at which Oakeshott first conceived it, which appears to be neither at the level of particular crafts, nor at some grand epistemological or ontological level, but rather at the level of the “theory-practice” problem, that is, at the level of political and moral analysis (which Aristotle calls praxis). This approach would allow us to bypass rehearsing the various philosophic debates between, for example, Idealism and Realism, coherence theory of truth and correspondence theory of truth, Hegelianism and Cartesianism and Aristotelianism, and so on. To say this differently, let us try to find those of Oakeshott’s claims which appear the soundest at first blush, and which have the most explanatory “force” in making sense of political and moral events. Arguably, these are two—(1) the claim that there are no universal methods because each settled activity arises in the tension between its distinctive how and what, or form and content of activity; and hence, (2) it is a mistake which results in loss of balance and skill to attempt to export, wholesale, methods from one settled activity to another as though they had a common subject matter (a mistake implied in the old adage, “constitutions, like wines, do not travel well”). Or to say this latter point differently, each method creates, or is correlative to, its own subject matter (a constructivist approximation to the realist Aristotelian claim in the Ethics that an educated person will choose a method appropriate to the subject matter, neither too precise nor too rough) (Aristotle 1936, p. 9). This is not the forum for a careful policy discussion, but consider momentarily, by way of illustration, the baleful effects of the of the ongoing, misguided twentieth-century attempt to export the quantitative methods of corporate business management into the academic and military professions. In the former case, “general education” is reduced to vocational training as measures of successful teaching are reduced to those criteria which can be quantified (number of books written, number of students taught, number of students placed with employers, etc.) In the latter case both tactical military skill and moral balance generally are lost as the measures of success are quantified (e.g., body counts, number and tonnage of bombs dropped) to the exclusion of achievement of strategic and tactical goals insusceptible of quantification.

234 

W. J. COATS

Arguably, in both instances, academic and military, the effect of this corporate import is really the creation of a new activity only nominally akin to what preceded it and deficient in performing the functions required of it. Viewed as supplements to the formulations of this middling level of generality, Oakeshott’s sometimes rhetorically hyperbolic8 ontological and epistemological claims find their appropriate fit and full explanatory force. Concerning Oakeshott’s political tastes, we might simply observe in conclusion that his writing shows a clear preference for loose, general arrangements (such as civil association and markets) which mirror the creative or “poetic” structure of experiential reality by allowing spontaneous orders to arise and function with minimal, prosaic centralized direction. However, that theme would be the subject of another paper.

Notes 1. For more on this subject, see Coats (2000), Coats and Cheung (2012) and Callahan (2018). 2. In his lengthy 1959 essay, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” Oakeshott presented the view of poetic or aesthetic experience as a separate modality of experience, detached from practical experience. 3. For development of the parallels between Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism and Chinese Daoist thought (especially the Zhuangzi) see Coats and Cheung (2012). 4. According to Oakeshott biographer Robert Grant (in private correspondence) Oakeshott read and discussed Emile Hovelaque’s 1923 book China which is keen on similarities between Hegelianism and Daoism. Also, Oakeshott’s essays from the 1940s and 1950s are peppered with footnotes quoting Daoist and Confucian texts. 5. Oakeshott says that Descartes himself never became a “Cartesian,” but for the view that Oakeshott is too kind to Descartes on this point, see my essay “Oakeshott’s Descartes, Vico’s Descartes,” in Coats (2019). 6. There are limits to the degree to which Oakeshott’s account of experience may be called “constructivist” since he asserts an abiding structure in the emergence of settled modalities of experience arising in the tension between their form and content. (The quotation is from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 1965, p.  20, where Kant is explaining his own subjectivist “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics by exploring the possibility that the objects in experience “must conform to our knowledge” (p. 22) rather than the other way round.) 7. For development of the parallels between Oakeshott and nineteenth- and twentieth-century German neo-Kantianism (especially that of Simmel and

15  MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’S CRITIQUE OF MODERN RATIONALISM 

235

Rickert), see Podoksik (2013). For the view that Podoksik goes too far in characterizing as “fragmentationist” Oakeshott’s account of modern plurality, see Coats (2019, pp. 20–35). 8. For examples of Oakeshottian hyperbole consider the claims that philosophy has no bearing on the practical conduct of life; that the human mind is incapable of functioning as a “neutral instrument” even when conducting operations of formal logic; that no skills are transferable from one idiom of activity to another; that to know the gist of something is to know nothing at all, and so on.

Bibliography Aristotle. 1936. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H.  Rackham, 9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Callahan, G. 2018. Hayek and Oakeshott on Rationalism. In Tradition V. Rationalism, 211–230. Lanham: Lexington Books. Coats, W.J. 2000. Oakeshott and His Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine, Hegel, et al. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. ———. 2019. Oakeshott’s Descartes, Vico’s Descartes. In Michael Oakeshott as a Philosopher of the “Creative” and Other Essays, ed. W.J. Coats, 53–65. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Coats, W.J., and C.  Cheung. 2012. The Poetic Character of Human Activity. Lanham: Lexington Books. Oakeshott, M. 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen and Co. Podoksik, E. 2013. From Difference to Fragmentation. In Praxis und Politik  – Michael Oakeshott im Dialog, ed. M.  Henkel and O.  Lembcke, 101–104. Tubingen: Möhr Siebeck. Smith, N.K., ed. 1965. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 20, 22. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

CHAPTER 16

Isaiah Berlin on Monism Jason Ferrell

Introduction Of the many things written about Isaiah Berlin it is surprising to note the relative dearth of studies that have taken monism as their singular subject. Compared to his studies of particular figures in intellectual history or his essays in political philosophy, the attention given to his claims about monism seems rather subdued. Generally when the topic of monism arises in the scholarly literature on Berlin, it is prefatory to other considerations. Monism is effectively a vehicle for the discussion of other, apparently more important, concerns. Given the controversies some of Berlin’s writings have generated—such as whether value pluralism can be distinguished from moral relativism—it is perhaps not surprising that his thoughts on monism have been treated this way.1 An initial glance at what he wrote on the subject does not immediately strike one as controversial. Monism, according to Berlin, embodies the central tradition of Western rationalism from the time of Plato until the contemporary moment.2 Generally characterized as the belief that all questions have one true answer, Berlin often associates monism with the Enlightenment and its assumptions about the primacy of reason, and calls into question whether such a belief is true. For J. Ferrell (*) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_16

237

238 

J. FERRELL

him it is clear that figures such as Hobbes, Locke, and Voltaire are less interesting than writers like Herder, de Maistre, and Vico. Indeed, Berlin’s reputation is tightly tied to his studies of the opponents of the Enlightenment, as well as his investigations into anti-rationalist movements like Romanticism. Since this is where his originality is taken to lie, the impetus is to highlight those things and relegate monism to the background. What, then, is there to discuss? As with so much in Berlin’s oeuvre, a reconsideration of what at first appears unambiguous leads to the realization that his views are quite nuanced. Monism frequently appears in his work, but it also varies when it occurs, much like a musical improvisation performed on different evenings. These variations highlight different aspects of what is often treated as a settled concept, and indicate dimensions to Berlin’s discussion that are easy to overlook. While he does define the term in a clear-cut way, his treatment of monism is multifarious. Ostensibly, his concern is to illuminate the various forms of monism, and his depiction of it will vary according to what he considers the main concern of a specific essay. For present purposes, I will confine my investigation to what he says about three topics: history, philosophy, and politics. References to monism recur during his studies within each of these fields, and thus they provide appropriate areas to investigate what he says. To be sure, I believe that Berlin’s use of monism is meant to be more illustrative of a certain set of beliefs and their influence than a logically precise analytical account. As is well known, Berlin had little interest in relating together all the strands of his thought, and the attempt to do so invites forcing a rich diversity of essays into a Procrustean mold. Berlin returns to topics repeatedly like a virtuoso developing a melody, with the result that he elaborates a set of ideas much as a performer elaborates a particular set of themes. The issue is not so much the logical consistency of what he says, but the expression of a viewpoint that is rhetorically persuasive, where analytical precision contributes but one part to overall meaningfulness. Such is arguably the case for Berlin’s claims about monism.3 With this in mind, I will now begin.

Monism and Its Iterations A fairly standard account of monism recurs in Berlin’s writings. One part of this account is metaphorical, and involves the image of a “three-legged stool,” a “tripod,” or a “jigsaw puzzle.” No matter which metaphor is marshalled, Berlin also says monism depends upon three basic

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

239

assumptions—the second part of his account. These assumptions are: that all questions have one genuine answer; that there is a means of determining these answers; and that the answers are all compatible with one another.4 Insofar as he characterizes monism this way it partially serves a heuristic role for him; monism is a means to frame, explore, and explain certain trends, figures, or positions. Particular individuals, for example, are classified as monists, their work then parsed as to how it exhibits the assumptions of monism. This use of monism occurs often in Berlin’s intellectual histories, which often highlight the importance of a given figure based on how well they exemplify, or oppose, monism. Thus Plato is a monist par excellence while Machiavelli is not. From this perspective, monism becomes a simplifying device that allows Berlin to sort different authors and their works into different categories.5 Although such a classificatory scheme is artificial—indeed Berlin repeatedly admits that he does this sort of thing primarily as a means of provoking debate—it is not the sole way he employs monism.6 Instead, monism, as he defines it, becomes a way of examining how history, philosophy, and politics can be understood and practiced. To clarify what I mean by this I will take each in turn. Monism and History Berlin’s view of the subject of history is straightforward. On the one hand, history comprises a record of past events. In this respect history is a storehouse of narratives concerning the thoughts and deeds of significant figures and their influence. On the other hand, Berlin also claims “history is what historians do.”7 It is frequently his efforts regarding the first form of history that captures our attention, as Berlin’s accounts of historical figures—such as Tolstoy or Vico—are extraordinarily captivating. But the latter idea—that history is what historians do—is no less compelling, especially when paired with what he says about monism. According to Berlin, the study of history involves noting patterns that display both similarities and differences between diverse eras. Although Berlin argues that the historian’s task is akin to an aesthetic one, wherein imaginative insight and a sensitivity to detail generate an account that illuminates what has happened, he also acknowledges that there is the temptation to interpret historical events analytically.8 It is this temptation that prompts historians with monist inclinations to assemble theories that provide historical studies which go beyond simple narratives. As Berlin describes it, there is a desire to see a deeper significance in events than that

240 

J. FERRELL

of mere occurrence, and this leads some to interpret history as embodying a purpose, or reflecting a transcendent ideal, or following a set of nomological laws.9 Such desires yield architectonic accounts that attribute meaning to events insofar as they can be properly related to the purpose, ideal, or laws of the given approach. This is particularly true for attempts to render history a more scientific domain of study. In such cases there is the belief that the facts of history are susceptible to explanation in the way that the facts of the natural sciences are. Both historical and scientific fields deal with data that is taken to be objectively true; specific events that are known to have actually occurred for the one, and particular datum that provide the basis of theory building for the other. The similarity leads to the assumption that the kind of explanations that work so successfully in physics, chemistry, and the like will prove equally successful for history.10 Berlin finds this assumption to be problematic, as he does not believe the types of explanation are the same. For him the sciences deal with those observable traits that are most susceptible to quantification or descriptions according to their “external” features. The study of history, however, requires descriptions that are sensitive to those features that are not so susceptible. Because history is constituted by the actions of individuals, the historian must be able to see things from the perspective of a participant.11 If such a perspective is not taken into account, the result is a stilted interpretation of events that ignores the issues that actually interest us. The problem is ultimately that the attempt to explain events according to a preconceived theory consisting of logically deducible “general formulae” and “relevant laws” provides an incomplete account of what it purports to explain.12 And, according to Berlin, what can be said about the scientific approach to history can be said about the other approaches as well, as teleological and “metaphysical realist” approaches attempt to force facts to fit their models.13 Given the impulse to interpret historical events according to criteria that are considered logically necessary, Berlin also regards monist approaches to history as being deterministic. The issue here is how monist readings of history interpret events as causally related or “inevitable.” As he explains it, the problem arises partially from a misunderstanding of how the term “because” applies within the sciences as opposed to humanistic studies like history. For the sciences, “because” delineates a set of logical relations that determine the links between assumptions, arguments, and conclusions. With the humanities, “because” signifies the intelligibility of the account—of how things fit together or cohere—rather than the

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

241

logically necessary ties between events. The attempt to apply the first understanding of “because” to the domain of history helps generate historical studies that treat historical moments as if they were causally determined, with little regard for human agency. Instead the focus is upon those forces—classes, or culture, or institutions—that do not simply shape individual behavior, but necessitate it.14 For Berlin, such explanations of human behavior do not simply provide poor histories; they are also counter-­intuitive. Since we do have a sense of ourselves as possessing agency, to accept an account that regards individual behavior as causally determined is to contradict what we believe to be true about the human condition. While such accounts may be eventually proven true—and the sense of our autonomy similarly disproven—as Berlin notes, this will require an overhaul not only of the way history is practiced, but of our moral discourse. In essence, if determinism is correct, then our view of what it means to be human will radically alter.15 It is here that monism as relates to history overlaps with monism as found within the practice of philosophy. For the consequences of a monist approach to history—where one approach provides a parsimonious explanation of all that has happened, according to precisely determined causal relations—are similar to those found within monist visions of philosophy. Monism and Philosophy For Berlin philosophy is an activity that investigates the conditions of truth and meaning, or, put differently, attempts to specify the conditions that render the world intelligible. As a field of study, Berlin considers philosophy delineated by the questions it asks; there are questions that are not just difficult to answer, but lack obvious indicators as to where the answers lay. According to him, most questions can be classified as either formal or empirical, and thus gathered into one of two “baskets” (one that consists primarily in the use of deductive methods, and the other that consists primarily in inductive techniques). Philosophical questions, however, are not readily classifiable in either way. Instead, they exhibit an admixture of both formal and empirical elements, and cause perplexity by proving resistant to conventional methods based on “observation and calculation.”16 Questions such as “What is the nature of time?” differ substantively from those such as “Is it raining?” or “What is the square root of 1?” Thus philosophical questions prompt a variety of queries into facts, values, principles,

242 

J. FERRELL

language, and methods, in wide-ranging attempts to determine their answers.17 Given the perplexity that philosophical questions evoke, Berlin indicates that there is an understandable desire to attain answers by the steady application of one method. Monist approaches to philosophy arise as a consequence, for such a desire easily lends itself to monism’s assumptions that all questions have a genuine answer that can be determined by the use of one method. Some of Berlin’s earliest writings take up these issues through critiques of logical positivism and phenomenalism. While not his most famous essays, “Verification,” “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” and “Logical Translation” address what are demonstrably monist tendencies as found within philosophical theories that were dominant in the early to mid-twentieth century. As he argues in these particular pieces, both logical positivism and phenomenalism attempt to reduce philosophical questions to one dimension, and then articulate how this dimension is determinative of truth and meaning. In the case of logical positivism the claim that truth is determined by whether a statement can be “verified”—or has empirical content that corresponds to the external world—exhibits the monist impulse, while with phenomenalism this impulse ties to the claim that truth depends upon the sensory impressions of individuals, conceptualized as ideally situated observers.18 Statements (or propositions) are then regarded as meaningful to the extent that they meet the conditions stipulated by the verification principle, or can be translated into hypothetical statements of an “if ... then ...” form. While Berlin criticizes logical positivism and phenomenalism for various technical reasons (such as an inability to account for the meaning of statements about past events), two of his biggest concerns are the reductive nature of both positions and the way they incorrectly assume meaning is a function of truth. According to Berlin, the attempt to reduce all statements to either claim that are empirically verifiable or stated in a hypothetical form distorts experience.19 Relatedly, he also argues that meaning precedes the determination of truth, as there are intelligible claims that we regard as significant, despite their not meeting the criteria of logical positivism or phenomenalism. In fact, the ability to determine whether a statement is true presumes that its meaning is already understood, otherwise there would be no way to verify, falsify, or investigate it.20 Ultimately, the desire for certainty which underlies such approaches, and drives their belief that genuine knowledge is a function of one procedure or mode of inquiry,

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

243

is the problem, as it precludes the consideration that perhaps truth and meaning are multifarious.21 As with the study of history, Berlin indicates that what can be said about the flaws of logical positivism and phenomenalism can be said about any approach which assumes that truth and the conditions for determining it are fundamentally unitary. Thus Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, Cartesianism, Lockean and Humean forms of empiricism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism all reflect the same monist tendencies discernible in logical positivism and phenomenalism, despite their very different assumptions and arguments. Each, in its own way, holds that there is one particular way to determine truth, and attempts to reinterpret all other approaches in its own terms or refute them by arguing that their answers are false. Accordingly, Berlin holds that monist approaches to philosophy provide the common stream from which much of European thought flows, from its classical origins to its contemporary articulations, and indicates there may be deeper problems lying under the surface. In particular are the practical implications of such approaches, especially as found in the realm of politics. Monism and Politics Berlin’s discussion of politics is notably sparse when it comes to considerations of institutional arrangements. Rather than focus on conventional subjects like the role of the legislature, executive, or judiciary, he instead focuses upon issues of political judgment and the broader dimensions of decision-making. His concern is less about the mechanics of governance than about the context of individual agency.22 Given this, the political implications of monism revolve around its understanding of human nature, as well as how this relates to ideas about liberty and autonomy. His main goal is to show how the rationally determined order of a monist inspired politics leads to paternalism and a restriction of liberty. One of the clearest instances of monism’s influence upon politics is found in Berlin’s discussion of utopianism. In “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West” he explicitly says that the assumptions of monism—here he uses both the “three-legged stool” and “jigsaw puzzle” metaphors— embody the central tradition of western political thought.23 However, he also adds an assumption to his account, for he says that there is a further presumption that “virtue is knowledge.”24 This proposition, which he attributes to Socrates, depends upon the assumption of an unchanging,

244 

J. FERRELL

eternal human nature.25 The elaboration of what this human nature is—of its true purpose—generates a moral vision that blends together descriptive and evaluative claims, such that knowing what human nature “is” provides the basis for knowing what individuals “ought” to do.26 As Berlin makes clear, the combination of the three basic monist assumptions with the further assumption about human nature justifies an approach to politics that aims to establish the perfect society. Accordingly, utopian writers propose arrangements that fulfill our basic human nature, and thereby provide criteria to judge actual political practice. It is an approach to politics that Berlin believes ranges from Plato’s views about the philosopher-king to Marx’s views of the proletariat, and lends itself to forms of rational planning that limit autonomy and are paternalistic. The paternalism of monist approaches to politics is most evident in their treatment of liberty. Berlin is famous for his distinction between negative and positive liberty, with the first referring to the opportunities individuals have and the second referring to their moral agency.27 For Berlin, the issue is how monism interprets the concept of positive liberty and justifies a type of politics that inhibits the individuals’ ability to make their own decisions. His argument is that positive liberty assumes individuals are purposive in their actions—that we have ends that we rationally pursue—and that monism distorts this assumption. The distortion arises when monism mistakenly presumes that the ends of a given individual are not simply rational, but universal in scope and applicable to the whole of humanity. As Berlin notes, “if I am rational, I cannot deny that what is right for me must, by the same reasons, by right for others who are rational like me.”28 The result is that what is said to be the rational purpose of one is construed as the rational purpose of all—an extension that is logically unsound. While it may be true, for example, that some individuals find meaningful agency through labor, this does not warrant the reification of labor as the definitive end of all humanity, as Marx holds. Similarly, while others might define their actions according to a spiritual ideal, it is a mistake to assume that all human endeavors are to be so judged, as Tolstoy suggested in his later years. For Berlin, the monist influence is the appropriation of positive liberty such that one, and only one, form of autonomy is exalted over all others, because of a belief that what is right for me must also be right for everyone else. The dilemma then is why someone should be allowed to do what the monist knows is contrary to their true end. If I, the monist, know that your true purpose is to cultivate the use of reason, then why would I allow you to do things that don’t contribute to this end?

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

245

Obviously I shouldn’t—not if I am certain about what I know.29 Thus I am justified in restraining you. At this point, Berlin believes the monist invokes a variety of questionable rationalizations: that doing what you want, rather than what your true end requires, is actually to be unfree; that since you are being coerced in the name of your true self, it isn’t really coercion; that if you understood what was genuinely good for yourself, you would approve the monist’s actions; and that no matter who it hurts, so long as the higher end is attained, no amount of sacrifice is too great.30 All are dubious arguments grounded upon monism’s conflation of positive liberty as something that conceptualizes individual autonomy with an allegedly universal end that defines all of humanity. Worse, all are arguments that regard human beings not as what they are—individuals—but as material to be shaped and fitted together according to a pattern. As Berlin makes clear, there is no political movement, secular or religious, that has not at some point used such reasoning to inflict the most horrible suffering upon others.31 Consequently, of all the iterations of monism, the political variant is the one with the deadliest implications. For where the other forms of monism challenge our understanding of the world and our place in it, the political iteration demands that the world be changed, and us with it. If this cannot be accomplished voluntarily, then it will have to be through the forceful efforts of those who know what is best. “In this way,” Berlin writes, “the rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian State obedient to the directives of an elite of Platonic guardians.”32

Appraisal and Conclusions Berlin’s depiction of monism as a jigsaw puzzle is useful for appraising his own account of it; for it is simple to put the pieces together and see how they fit as a whole. The understanding of history as a causally determined set of events squares nicely with the philosophical conception of existence as having a rational order. Both then fall into place with a utopian view of what society could be, if individuals recognize their real ends and corresponding place in the world. Monism, seen in this way, does provide an interesting way to interpret various movements, thinkers, and ideologies. The temptation is then to articulate a different account of things—or

246 

J. FERRELL

present different pieces of a different puzzle. Thus the ease with which many scholars turn their attention to what Berlin says about pluralism and liberalism. Yet there is something to recommend resisting such a temptation. As I have indicated throughout my discussion, each of the iterations of monism highlights different issues, and, upon reflection, can be seen to stand alone. Berlin’s critique of them, while it allows their relation, actually takes each in turn. That is, Berlin provides reasons to reject each piece of the monist puzzle on its own terms. Hence he calls into question whether or not history is a discipline that is amenable to a scientific approach; raises doubts about the idea that all questions can be answered by the use of one method; and highlights the intelligible but logically flawed political implications of monism. The interesting thing to note about Berlin’s approach to monism is not whether his characterization of the Western tradition of rationalism as monist is correct, but how he identifies particular assumptions and their influence. For the implications of monism for history, philosophy, and politics entail a substantive shift in our ideas about what it means to be human, how we understand the world, and the way we organize society. In this respect, Berlin’s account—or accounts—of monism foregrounds widely held assumptions and asks that they be reconsidered. Perhaps, Berlin suggests, we’ve not fully thought through the consequences of what we say we believe. Perhaps once we’ve done so we may not be comfortable with where our beliefs lead us. So can anything be said on behalf of monism? Some, such as Ronald Dworkin, say yes, and argue that Berlin’s concerns can be accommodated within a monist rubric.33 I believe such a defense of monism misses the point. If one wants to defend monism the issue is not whether a monist position can account for pluralism or liberalism as Berlin understands them. Rather, the issue is whether one can speak of events as “causes” without falling prey to a scientific interpretation of history—or whether one can provide answers to philosophical questions that inspire analogous approaches that aren’t reductive—or whether one can assume a shared human end without sliding into authoritarianism. In other words, the issue is whether one can address the particular problems of monism Berlin notes, and provide precise responses to his specific charges. Ultimately, contra Berlin, it may prove to be the case that there is no a priori reason to think that the assumptions of monism must lead to the outcomes he indicates. This may be why he acknowledges the fact that monism’s political iteration proceeds according to steps that require logical leaps. Without

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

247

caution, rationalism segues into irrationalism. At the very least, then, it seems that if one desires to defend rationalism, one must treat Berlin’s account of monism as a set of unavoidable admonitions.

Notes 1. For a good overview of the critical literature on Berlin, see: Ian Harris, “Berlin and His Critics,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 349–374; George Crowder, “After Berlin: The Literature since 2002,” accessed May 21, 2019, http://berlin.wolf.ox. ac.uk/lists/onib/after-berlin.pdf, and the exhaustive bibliography of secondary literature compiled by Henry Hardy on the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library website that can be found at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/ onib/other.html. For more specifically about the relativism-pluralism debate see: George Crowder, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, ed. Joshua L.  Cherniss and Steven B.  Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 229–249. 2. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 183–185; Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 4–5; Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1997), 80–81; Isaiah Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5; and Isaiah Berlin, “The Birth of Greek Individualism,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 290. 3. For a different take on this issue see: Sara Lagi, “Sir Isaiah Berlin: against Monism (1953–1958),” in Monisms and Pluralisms in the History of Political Thought, ed. Andrea Cantanzaro and Sara Lagi (Rome: Edizioni Epokė, 2015), 139–154, and Luke MacInnis, “Two Concepts of Monism: Axiomatic and Asymptotic,” The Review of Politics 77, no. 4 (2015): 603–635. 4. For examples of both the ways Berlin speaks about monism, see: Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 5–6; Berlin, “The Birth of Greek Individualism,” 290–294; Isaiah Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 24–27; and Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21–23.

248 

J. FERRELL

5. One of the most famous instances of this is the distinction Berlin draws between “foxes” and “hedgehogs.” See: Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” in Russian Thinkers, 2nd edition, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin Books, 2008), 24–92. Eric Mack, however, is particularly critical of Berlin’s reading of history in this manner. See: Eric Mack, “Isaiah Berlin and Liberalism Pluralism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1993): 216 f. 6. Compare: Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” 24–26 and Isaiah Berlin, “The Naïveté of Verdi,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1997), 287–290. 7. Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of a Scientific History,” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 103. 8. Isaiah Berlin, “The Sense of Reality,” in The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 19–20. 9. Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 104–110. 10. Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” 104–105. 11. Berlin, “The Sense of Reality,” 25–26. 12. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 109. 13. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 110. 14. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 114 f. 15. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 161–162. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “Introduction,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4–7. 16. Isaiah Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still Exist?” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 144–148. 17. Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” 3. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “The Philosophers of the Enlightenment,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 36–38. 18. Isaiah Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 40. 19. Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” 39–43, 46–47. 20. Isaiah Berlin, “Verification,” Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25.

16  ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 

249

21. Isaiah Berlin, “Logical Translation,” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 77–79. Compare: Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” 2–4. 22. For more on Berlin’s lack of discussion about the mechanisms of governance, see: Jeremy Waldron, “Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment Constitutionalism,” in Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), as well as George Crowder, “Value Pluralism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy: Waldron and Berlin in Debate,” The Review of Politics 81, no. 1 (2019): 101–127. 23. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 24–25, 27. 24. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 27. 25. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 28. 26. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 28–29. 27. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 169–181. 28. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 191. 29. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 214. 30. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 192–198. Compare: Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” 16–18. 31. Berlin, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” 181–182. 32. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 198. 33. Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

CHAPTER 17

Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence Nathanael Blake

Introduction Russell Kirk’s 1953 classic, The Conservative Mind, was more than a discovery, but less than an invention, of an Anglo-American conservative intellectual tradition. Kirk successfully wove disparate threads into a coherent scholarly tapestry, making clear a previously inchoate conservative heritage that remains important to this day. Regarded therefore as a founder of modern American conservatism, Kirk was “one of the most important men of letters in the twentieth century.”1 He is still held in honor (though perhaps less than he deserves) decades after his death in 1994. He did not win all of his battles over the nature and practice of conservatism, let alone more broadly, but those engaged with intellectual conservatism had, and have, to reckon with him. Kirk’s conservatism was based on belief in a moral order beyond human will, coupled with an acute awareness of the limitations of private human reason in apprehending, articulating and applying that moral order to society and politics. Thus, the first of Kirk’s six canons of conservative thought, as originally formulated in The Conservative Mind, was “Belief

N. Blake (*) Independent Scholar, Columbia, MO, USA © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_17

251

252 

N. BLAKE

that divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality…cannot of itself satisfy human needs.” Kirk then quoted the memorable line that, “Human reason set up a cross on Calvary, human reason set up the cup of hemlock, human reason was canonized in Notre Dame” before concluding that “politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which is above nature.”2 This passage would be modified in subsequent editions over the years, but the message remained consistent. In The Politics of Prudence (1993), Kirk declared as the first principle of conservatism that “the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.”3 This affirmation of enduring moral truths was followed by Kirk’s endorsement of “custom, convention, and continuity” and the “principle of prescription.” Kirk wrote that “it is perilous to weigh every passing issue on the basis of private judgement and private rationality.”4 Conservatives affirm the existence of permanent moral truths, but they are skeptical of the capabilities of human reason to unerringly apprehend and articulate them—the conservative thus values tradition and the wisdom of the past. Consequently, Kirk’s conservative revival was founded on convictions that many philosophers have treated as contradictory: belief in real moral truth and natural law, combined with an anti-rationalist suspicion of the capacity of human reason to apprehend and articulate moral truth in absolute propositions. Following the example of Edmund Burke, Kirk’s conservatism rejects Enlightenment philosophy, which tended to take mathematics as a model for all knowledge, including moral knowledge. True moral knowledge, per the Enlightenment, would be derived from universal principles, expressed as philosophical propositions demonstrable to all rational persons, and applicable to practical politics. Moral relativism has often been presented as the alternative to this rationalism perspective. Against this dichotomy of rationalism and relativism, Kirk asserted that there is a moral order beyond human invention, to which we own obedience and which ought to inform our culture, politics and economics. However, he appended his conviction that the truths of this moral order, and their subsequent application, cannot be precisely defined by human reason, leaving us dependent upon convention and tradition for much of our moral knowledge.

17  RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 

253

Reason’s Limits While serving in the Army during the second world war (his station in the Utah desert left the young scholar much time to read and reflect), Kirk realized that he did not “sympathize with the chief currents of thought and feeling” of the Enlightenment, but that what he “respected in the Enlightenment was the men who had stood against the whole tendency of their epoch—such men as Johnson and Burke.”5 The latter in particular would define his thought; out of the multitude of poets, philosophers and politicians whom Kirk wrote about, Edmund Burke was the lodestar of his thought, perhaps followed by T.S. Eliot. Consequently, in reading Kirk, it is sometimes difficult to delineate where the summary and interpretation of Burke leave off and commentary and criticism begin. Following Burke’s lead, Kirk contended that the model of rationality embraced by the Enlightenment obscures essential moral and political truths. Though Enlightenment thinkers hoped to establish a compelling standard of universal public rationality, they failed. They proved unable to provide a method for rationally deriving and demonstrating universal moral and political truths. They began by seeking the philosophical equivalent of the methodology of mathematics, and ended by substituting private speculation in place of public reason. This failure was demonstrated by the French revolutionaries and their apologists, who claimed to be establishing a political regime based on the laws of a universal reason and nature. But in hindsight, Burke’s objections were vindicated. Far from being purely rational, the revolutionaries’ philosophies were captive to a multitude of prejudices and presuppositions. The Revolution’s radical theories of universal reason and rights were not publicly vindicated, but were instead exposed as so much ill-founded private speculation. A regime that proclaimed liberty, equality and fraternity bloodily descend into tyranny and war. The application of the Rights of Man produced an enormity of wrongs done to men. By Kirk’s time, metaphysicians were held in less esteem than during the heady days of the French Revolution’s celebrations of Reason. But rationalism endured, albeit often in altered guise. From scientific socialism to positivism to the cults of social science experts, the rationalist impulse hid the ragged mantle of metaphysics under the lab coat of science. Against the spirit of his age, Kirk found that his was “not an Enlightenment mind,” for he did “not love cold harmony and perfect regulation of organization.” He realized that the “men of the

254 

N. BLAKE

Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads,” and that their successors “were in the process of imposing upon all the world a dreary conformity, with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords—abstractions preferred to all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human nature and human society that are the products of prescription and tradition.”6 In all cases, whether the revolutionary philosophes or the revolutionary scientific socialists or the authoritative (and often authoritarian) experts, rationalism aims to apprehend truth through an act of intellect (whether speculative or methodological), and articulate it so that it may be unerringly applied. The conformity of rationalist systems is thus revealed as a consequence of the will to power of those who seek to rule through intellectual domination. Rationalism’s sin is hubris, founded upon the belief that finite humans can apprehend, articulate and apply universal truths without regard for our own weaknesses and contingencies. The rationalist mentally constructs a model universe, or at least a part of it, that he (and it has usually been a he) is capable of fully comprehending. He simplifies the world, or artificially isolates part of it, to the point where his intellect can encompass it. The mystery of human existence as finite creatures, thrown into life, is rejected in favor of a totalizing system that is meant to bring the cosmos and society under control by the intellect. Kirk opposed this intellectual arrogance, having learned from Burke and others that human reason is limited, human circumstances complex and human goodness fallible. Kirk traced this view to Burke’s Christianity, “which the men of the Enlightenment violently rejected.”7 He found in Burke’s thought acceptance that “We must leave much to Providence; to presume to perfect man and society by a neat ‘rational’ scheme is a monstrous act of hubris.”8 Man must accept truth as it can be known to him within his limited and contingent existence, rather than trying to attain to a God’s-eye view that apprehends the entirety of truth. Likewise, Kirk found much to admire in T.S. Eliot, the great metaphysical poet and critic who was “opposed to abstract systems created out of private rationality,” and who, like Burke, “came to dread not the intellect itself—certainly not to dread right reason—but rather to dread defecated rationality, arrogantly severed from larger sources of wisdom. He dreaded this presumption in the person, and he dreaded it in the commonwealth.”9 Kirk increasingly used Eliot’s language in his writing, which gave them a mystical aura at times. This was intentional, for Kirk knew

17  RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 

255

that not all truths can be perfectly communicated through philosophical propositions. Thus, in his writing he used the imagery of Burke and Eliot as he emphasized their wisdom in rejecting rationalistic schemes.

Truth, Tradition and the Sword of Imagination Kirk’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and its heirs did not fall into the morass of a thoroughgoing moral relativism. He avoided the trap (identified by Alasdair MacIntyre and others) of accepting the Enlightenment’s model of rationality as definitive, thereby leading to a rejection of the reality of reason and truth by those who perceive the failure of the Enlightenment project. Kirk knew that moral truths are real, though they cannot be reduced to definitive postulates and philosophical propositions as part of a comprehensive system. Rather, they are apprehended through a variety of means, from tradition to the moral imagination. Birzer explains that Kirk “wanted to profess myriad good little truths.”10 We should strive for knowledge of particular moral truths that can be instantiated in our lives, rather than chasing the illusion of a complete, rational, demonstrable moral system. Thus, Birzer notes that Kirk, like Burke, believed that “natural rights exist, but a definite set of rights for all times and all places and all persons might simply be unknowable and uncategorizable to the human’s finite capacities.”11 We must be content to realize truth within our finitude, rather than constructing rationalist systems that aim to transcend our human limitations. It is here that Edmund Burke may be most essential to Kirk’s thought. Twentieth-century scholars, including Peter Stanlis and Francis Canavan, had noted that Burke was not the utilitarian many had presumed him to be. Rather, they showed that Burke was a natural law thinker, but these revisionist scholars did not always appreciate their subject’s unique contributions to natural law theory. Burke’s understanding of the natural law was informed by the natural law tradition, but (as noted in the chapter on Burke in this volume, Chap. 2), he was no doctrinarian Thomist (neo or otherwise). Kirk agreed that Burke was a follower of the natural law tradition, who “enunciates the doctrine of the jus naturale, the law of the universe, the creation of the Divine mind, of which the laws of man are only imperfect manifestations.”12 He argued that in Burke’s view, human laws and institutions are meant to reflect the order and goodness of God and His eternal law, which man defies at his peril. Consequently, Kirk found that “Burke

256 

N. BLAKE

declared that men do not make laws, they merely ratify or distort the laws of God.”13 Contrary to what many prior scholars of Burke had thought, Kirk argued that for Burke the standard by which human laws are to be judged is not their apparent utility (often narrowly defined), but their conformity with the natural law. Nor was Burke’s attachment to religion rooted in its social utility. Rather, Kirk argued that “Burke does not approve religion because it is a bulwark of order, instead he says that mundane order is derived from, and remains a part of, Divine order.”14 The portrait that emerges of Burke in Kirk’s study is not that of a conservative utilitarian but of a natural law thinker, albeit one who was most influenced by the classical tradition of Cicero rather than the scholastic tradition of Aquinas. Kirk articulated the consistent natural law underpinnings of Burke’s thought, while drawing out that which was unique to it. Of the scholars who recovered Burke as a natural law thinker, Kirk may have best understood the corrective that Burke provided to the corruption that Enlightenment rationalism had worked upon natural law theorizing. Modern and Enlightenment thinkers had transmuted the idea of natural law into a source of mathematical models for morality and politics. But the natural law is not a heavenly statute book that can be apprehended through reason and readily applied to practical politics. Even if it were understood in such a fashion, superlative acts of individual reason are not a firm foundation for a moral and political order. To constantly reevaluate each new circumstance from first principles (even if they could be established, which they have not) would be intolerable. Kirk knew that social order depends on habit, and that the instantiation of natural law precepts depends less on reason than on prescription. He wrote that “it seems that people are decent, when they are decent, chiefly out of habit. They fall into habits of decent conduct by religious instruction, by settled family life, by assuming private responsibilities.”15 Philosophers and statesmen have tasks of reflection and reform, but they ought to begin with a determination to preserve the good, knowing that a tolerably good social order is often fragile, and that most men do not reason their way to moral truths, but inherit and assimilate them through family, church and culture. These politics of prudence were championed by Burke, who was a great reformer as well as a foe of radical revolution. Even as he condemned the French Revolution, Burke directed the impeachment of Hastings for wrongs committed against the British Empire’s subjects in India. Kirk helped make clear the continuity of Burke’s efforts, where many others

17  RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 

257

had seen only contradictions. Burke’s reforming efforts were undertaken not on behalf of abstract systems of rights, but on the best of the moral knowledge and traditions of the world. But the radicals of the Enlightenment were eager to tear down the social order that instructed men in their moral duties, in part because they had embraced a fallacious idea of human nature that stripped away man’s social realities. Their theories of man’s natural state removed man from the relationships and institutions that form and define him. In contrast, Burke rejected theories of natural rights that posited man in an unnatural, asocial state. Society is the natural state of man, and art is man’s nature. Nonetheless, a good social and political order is established only with difficulty, often through painful trial and error. Kirk knew that even within the natural social order of mankind, “Disorder always had been the natural condition of man; order, the product of elaborate artifice.”16 An asocial state of mankind would be dreadful; “Order, justice and freedom are garden plants; the natural condition of humankind is that of the jungle.”17 The jungle is not asocial, but it is often brutal. The effort to elucidate the precepts of the natural law by positing a humanity whose essence is the opposite of the real social condition of humanity was a failure. The moral truths of the natural law are not found through abstract speculation that strips away the realities of human existence as it is in search of an abstract human essence. Rather, they are apprehended throughout the human experience. The process by which moral and political truths are realized involves the whole person, as she actually exists in society, rather than the naked intellect contemplating an isolated individual. Kirk understood that Burke in particular had redeemed tradition as a mediator of natural law, rather than its opponent. Indeed, tradition functions as a form of the public reason that was so elusive for Enlightenment thinkers. In Burke’s language, instead of each man relying on his own private stock of reason, tradition allows him to rely upon the bank and capital of nations and of ages—the natural law as instantiated and practiced. Kirk’s use of Burke to illuminate the importance of tradition to the natural law is a significant achievement, though it may be underappreciated by natural law theorists.18 While discussing Cicero, Kirk connected this reliance on tradition to the importance of the moral imagination, asserting that the “natural law is not a fixed code in opposition to the law of the state: properly understood, the law of nature is the moral imagination and that natural law enables us,

258 

N. BLAKE

through reason, to apply customary and statutory law humanely. The natural law, in Cicero’s expression of it, is ethical principle interpreting the rules by which men live together in community.”19 The natural law is known through the moral imagination reflecting upon experience and tradition, more than through the abstract efforts of reason. And the moral imagination is inculcated in many different ways. Kirk knew that art and religion are as essential to the formation and continuation of a sound political and social order as are philosophies. He expanded and elaborated upon Burke’s insight that the moral imagination is shaped by culture, with its symbols, norms and narratives, and so Kirk wrote about art and literature and architecture. He penned an insightful book about T.S. Eliot, his friend and the greatest poet of the twentieth century. He even wrote gothic fiction. He enjoyed ghost stories; there was sometimes money to be made in writing them, but his efforts are also rich with nutrients for the moral imagination of his readers. Some of Kirk’s fiction sold well (Old House of Fear sold more copies than all his other books combined),20 but he did not have the enduring success of a J.R.R. Tolkien (whose work Kirk admired). Still, his tales were part of his efforts to water and fertilize the wasteland that Eliot had so memorably described. We are creatures of narrative and imagination, more than of reason. Kirk declared that what “chiefly distinguishes the human kingdom from the animal kingdom is the power of imagination possessed by the human race.”21 This may overstate the matter, but it is true that reason and imagination are interactive and complementary within the human consciousness. The apprehension of moral truth depends on the right quality of imagination, as much as right reason. And both reason and imagination are shaped by culture and language, rather than existing in a realm of pure intellects and essences. As Kirk put it, “so far as we can delineate the features of natural justice, Burke suggests, it is the experience of mankind which supplies our knowledge of Divine law; and the experience of the species is taught to us not only through history, but through myth and fable, custom and prejudice.”22 The moral truths that should guide us will be made manifest through the whole of our experience. As Kirk understood Burke’s view, we know the Divine mind and will through “the prejudices and traditions which millenniums of human experience with Divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species.”23 Man, as a social being, cannot exist outside of tradition, and though tradition is not infallible, regarding it with humility is the proper

17  RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 

259

response given the grave limits of private reason, and the extent to which we are always shaped by tradition. We are instructed both consciously and unconsciously by these legacies of the past, though we also influence them in return as we partake of them. Kirk discovered such a dynamic in the American founding. Arguing against those who saw America as a project of Enlightenment or classical liberal philosophy, he traced the traditions upon which the framers of the United States relied, often consciously. The United States founding was influenced by natural law thinking, but it was not reducible to the rationalistic natural rights theories of Locke and his followers. For instance, Kirk noted that that “Blackstone and by his American disciples Story and Kent…looked upon the common law as the nearest approach (however imperfect) to natural law, because it had grown out of the experiences and observations and consensus of many generations of wise men and had been tested repeatedly for its conformity to natural law.”24 Though the natural law may justify and inform rebellion against unjust government, Kirk emphasized that it should do so in defense of concrete goods, not on behalf of abstract ideals. He repeatedly pointed out that the American colonists rebelled to preserve a patrimony and habit of self-­ government, unlike the radicals of the French Revolution. The American War for Independence was waged in defense of rights that were long-­ standing, rather than the product of abstract speculation. The Declaration of Independence contains appeals to natural law (or at least natural rights), but also many complaints regarding the denigration of the rights and traditions of self-government that the colonists had enjoyed. Therefore, in the American context Kirk’s conservatism directs us toward the Constitution and the inheritance of our history and traditions, rather than defining the United States according to a few sentences from the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Birzer explains that Kirk knows that “simply because Locke or Jefferson declared three rights as rights did not make them so and never could. To believe that either of these men identified the rights perfectly would be to presume that each knew things that only God can know, and the result would be nothing short of a parody of real rights and real justice.”25 The United States was not established as a project of Enlightenment rationalism, and Kirk resisted attempts to rebrand it as such.

260 

N. BLAKE

Conclusion Though the conservative intellectual tradition Russell Kirk illuminated has not always triumphed over its rivals in the academy and in politics, his work remains indispensable reading for educated conservatives, and those who seek to understand them. Kirk established intellectual conservatism as neither rationalistic nor relativistic. Conservatives believe that there is an enduring moral order to which we own obedience, and that we, as finite, contingent creatures, cannot fully encompass it through an act of intellectual domination. With our limitations, we must often rely upon tradition, informed by the moral imagination. But tradition is alive, always needing renewal and often needing reform. We should, however, prefer to proceed cautiously, mindful of our limits and frailties, rather than eagerly seeking to remake culture and government in accord with rationalist plans. This wisdom is frequently neglected, even by self-described conservatives. Kirk’s legacy is too often unheeded by those who claim to honor him. Nonetheless, his works still nourish the moral imaginations of readers, and his ideas resonate with those who seek to redeem the time. Kirk liked to reference Eliot’s observation that there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes, and the conservative cause is, by definition, perpetual. But Kirk repelled rationalist assaults, rebuilt and restored an intellectual conservatism, and added a noble amount to the wisdom held in the bank and capital of ages.

Notes 1. Bradley J.  Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 8. 2. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, (Chicago: Regnery, 1953), 7–8. 3. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 1993) 17. 4. Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 19. 5. Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 68. 6. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 68–69. 7. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 1997), 165.

17  RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 

261

8. Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered 165. 9. Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T.S.  Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984), 45. 10. Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, 101. 11. Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, 250. 12. Kirk, The Conservative Mind 32. 13. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 43. 14. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 28. 15. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 126. 16. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 378. 17. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 394. 18. See, for instance, the rationalism of the so-called new natural law theory developed by John Finnis and others, which is contemptuous of tradition, as opposed to rationality, as a source of moral truth. 19. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2004), 112. 20. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 250. 21. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 309 22. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 44. 23. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 26. 24. Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 371. 25. Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, 251.

CHAPTER 18

Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities Sanford Ikeda

Urbanization and Its Problems Although the messiness of urban life has probably been taken for granted since ancient times, the rise in human material well-being and greater literacy and communication since the 1800s (McCloskey 2010: 1–2) played a major role in finally transforming the urge to address negative externalities into municipal policy. This essay addresses the role and the limits of urban planning based on my interpretation of the great urbanist, Jane Jacobs. In order to understand the role and limits of urban planning and urban interventionism, we need to look more closely at the underlying reasons behind those limits, reasons that center on the “knowledge problem” (or what Jacobs (1961: 418) refers to as the problem of “locality knowledge”) and the way that problem might or might not be solved. We will see that effective solutions to urban problems hinge crucially on the extent to This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. S. Ikeda (*) Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_18

263

264 

S. IKEDA

which we appreciate the nature and significance of the knowledge problem and that, in fact, the failure of planning and interventionism in general (Ikeda 1998) is a direct consequence of the failure to appreciate or even to acknowledge the existence of that problem owing to an attitude of rationalist constructivism.

“Rationalist Constructivism”1 F.A. Hayek defines “constructivism,” or what he elsewhere (Hayek 1967: 85) refers to as “Cartesian rationalism,” as “the innocent sounding formula that, since man has himself created the institutions of society and civilization, he must also be able to alter them at will so as to satisfy his desires or wishes” (Hayek 1978: 3). In her critique of mid-twentieth-­ century urban planning, Jane Jacobs is attacking this sort of rationalist constructivism. Jacobs’s critique focuses on planners’ neglect of street-level human interactions, owing to their simplistic rationalist conceptions of the nature of a living city, and the actual influence that the built environment has in enabling or undermining those interactions (e.g., social capital and “webs of communication”). Those interactions form an overall invisible social infrastructure that is not the result of any person’s or group’s rational, deliberate design but the outcome of myriad unpredictable contacts that take place in public space. In short, Jacobs sees the living city as a spontaneous order, or to use her terminology a “problem of organized complexity” (Jacobs 1961: 429). This means that a city thrives when the individual plans of its inhabitants collectively, but unconsciously, contribute to the unplanned emergence of complex and dynamic social networks. It is in this sense that, as she puts it, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (Jacobs 1961: 238). In both Jacobs’s critique of centralized urban planning and the economic critique of collectivist economic planning, planners ignore the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” (Hayek 1948: 80) that individuals possess within the context of their daily lives. In the economic critique of central planning, rationalist constructivism results in the elimination of meaningful money prices, owing to the absence of market transactions of property rights, so that ordinary people cannot determine the relative scarcity of resources and rationally calculate profits and losses (Lavoie 1985). In Jacobs’s critique it is naïve rationalism that leads to the failure of local planning authorities to understand how the

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

265

design of public spaces impacts the fine-grained and intricate interactions among people who, for the most part, are strangers to one another. Among those responsible for cities, at the top, there is much ignorance. This is inescapable, because big cities are just too big and too complex to be comprehended in detail from any vantage point—even if this vantage point is at the top—or to be comprehended by any human; yet detail is of the essence. (Jacobs 1961: 121–2)

These are different kinds of contextual knowledge, but they are the same category of knowledge. The problems identified by economists in the early twentieth century are robust in the sense that they apply mutatis mutandis to the knowledge problem that Jacobs identified in the mid-­ twentieth century. Where her critique differs from the market-process version, they tend to complement rather than conflict because they issue from the same underlying critique of rationality. This led Jacobs, in the last chapter of her 1961 classic to identify a living city, following Warren Weaver, as a “problem of organized complexity.” Here is how Gene Callahan and I summarize Weaver’s three categories of scientific problems. The first are problems of simplicity, which deal with situations involving a very few independent variables, in which the rules of ordinary algebra are appropriate. The second level are problems of disorganized complexity, which concern situations involving so many independent variables that their interactions produce random variations. Here formal statistical analysis is appropriate. Finally, there are problems of organized complexity that lie between the first two kinds of problems. This is the realm of social orders in which the movement of individual elements are not predictable but overall, non-­ statistical patterns are discernable. Jacobs’s and Weaver’s warning is that the methods appropriate to solving one problem should not be used for the solution of the others. (Callahan and Ikeda 2004: 17; emphasis added)

The problem, according to Jacobs is that “the theorists of conventional modern city planning [circa 1961] have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus” (Jacobs 1961: 435). Which boils down to treating a living city as a machine completely comprehensible to the human mind, much as an experienced architect may design an efficient apartment building; or as one might approach the problem of calculating the optimal

266 

S. IKEDA

amount of light and air necessary to maintain the health of an “average person.” This is a result of ignoring epistemic and cognitive limits of effective, rational calculation. Unlike either problems of simplicity or of disorganized complexity, a city as a problem of organized complexity can be predictable only insofar as we can discern general patterns rather than specific outcomes. There is in fact no assurance that any particular pattern will emerge, no matter how much we want it to; only that these conditions tend over time to create the an overall sense of safety that encourages people to interact, informally in more or less creative ways. What emerges in that process no one can say with complete accuracy. If you could, it would not be a problem of organized complexity; it would not be a living city. To view a city therefore as anything other than a problem of organized complexity, or in our terminology a spontaneous order, is to risk missing the essential quality of urban life, and indeed all genuinely social life. Moreover, policies based on such a misunderstanding have little hope of attaining their intended goal, except perhaps by accident. Rather, the outcomes of such ignorant policy-making can and have indeed resulted in tragic, unintended consequences. Jacobs was not alone among urbanists in characterizing a living city in this way. Indeed, she acquired much of her understanding of cities from researchers such as William Whyte (1988), who carefully observed and analyzed the various and subtle ways in which ordinary people use public spaces, such as plazas, from which he drew important conclusions for the design and placement of those plazas. Christopher Alexander, whom Jacobs admires, deciphers the “pattern language” shared by successful spaces in general, private and public. A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it in. (Alexander 1979: ix; emphasis original)

Ken-ichi Sasaki’s discussion of the “urban tactility” one experiences at street level when in a public space highlights an essential dimension to the urban experience. As we become familiar with a place, what we feel becomes more important than what we see (Sasaki 1998: 36). “Tactile knowledge” is what we feel in the presence of an object: the smells of a street, the texture of a building, the grade of a hill. It is the

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

267

knowledge gained though contact or direct experience with an event or environment, and is related to Jacobs’s concept of “locality knowledge” as well as to F.A. Hayek’s “local knowledge.” The bias in urban policy toward the car and away from the pedestrian has profoundly shifted our experience of the city from the tactile to the visual, making it in the processes duller. This in turn has discouraged the formation of social capital, which is the foundation for tactile/local knowledge and its utilization, because there will be less meaningful contact as people shun dull places. Similarly, Kevin Lynch describes the way in which people spontaneously come to a common understanding of their image of a city, one that is useful for navigating the complex urban environment. There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images each held by some significant number of citizens. Such group images are necessary if an individual is to operate successfully within his environment and to cooperate with his fellows. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which in different environments is more of less compelling, more or less embracing. (Lynch 1960)

What all these approaches have in common—Jacobs, Whyte, Alexander, Sasaki, and Lynch—is an understanding that for planners to successfully plan they need to observe and appreciate the intricate ways in which people see and interact with the urban environment; something that completely escapes planners who treat a city  in a rationalist constructivist manner, as a problem of simplicity or of disorganized complexity.

The Consequences for Urban Design In Death and Life Jacobs identifies a number of consequences of failing to see a city as a problem of organized complexity and of using a rationalist constructivist approach. But I believe three are especially important for illustrating her critique of urban planning and design. Border Vacuums Jacobs defines a “border vacuum,” as “a single massive or stretched-out use of territory” (Jacobs 1961: 257). A structure with a single, massive use in a

268 

S. IKEDA

neighborhood or district—for example, a river, a park, an enormous residential or office complex, a sports stadium, a parking lot, a university campus—means that people crowd into and dominate that area only during certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. When not used, however, it becomes largely devoid of people, making it less interesting and potentially more dangerous. The influence of a border vacuum radiates from that “great blight of dullness” to the surrounding streets and public spaces that surround it, making those adjacent spaces duller and less attractive in turn. It may extend some distance before livelier streets can offset the forces of dullness that a border vacuum generates.2 In her time, although critical of private endeavors as well, Jacobs took particular aim at the massive projects that were funded by taxation or relied on eminent domain, such as urban renewal, monument building, and housing projects: “Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity” (Jacobs 1961: 7). The failure of rationalist constructivism in urban planning to recognize the way people subjectively perceive their environment removes an important constraint on the creation of border vacuums. The same holds true with respect to cataclysmic money. Cataclysmic Money Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm. Putting it figuratively, insofar as their effects on most city streets and districts are concerned, … [cataclysmic money behaves] like manifestations of malevolent climates beyond the control of man—affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods. (Jacobs 1961: 293)

As a practical matter, cataclysmic money that floods into (and also out of) an area often produces border vacuums. With budget constraints funded in whole or in part by government taxation, public projects or public-private partnerships that rely on the power to tax and eminent domain tend to be much larger-scale than purely private, market-based projects. As the scale of a project or plan increases (or a design becomes more detailed) the mind of the planner increasingly substitutes for, rather than complements, the spontaneous complexity of a socio-economic order driven by many independent, experimenting minds.

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

269

Visual Order The way an area looks, particularly from a distance, is less important than the way it is perceived, and following Sasaki, felt, up close and personal. A city should be legible, first and foremost, by the people who live in it and not by the rational planner or designer. But “there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities” (Jacobs 1961: 372). And that esthetic limitation is imposed on the conscientious planner because the beauty of a living city is in the eyes of the inhabitants who behold it largely on the street, not of the planner or designer who wants to shape the city in according to a pet image, either in whole or in part. Which is not to say that Jacobs sees no role for active urban planning, or even for an ideal of visual order, as long as the planner respects the nature of a living city. The first kind of visual order often arises when planners impose a visual uniformity such as we find in much of Le Corbusier’s work (Jacobs 1961: 229). The second kind of visual order might be what we find in Disney World (Ibid) where planners design and attempt to create a visual diversity that is however clearly artificial and superficial. Both of these are massive projects built at the same time by the same architects, designers, or planners—or by people who anyway grew up under the same set of cultural and educational influences—so that the style of their product, no matter how hard they may try, all reflect a temporal or stylistic homogeneity. There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. (Jacobs 1961: 15)

The third “hopeful” kind of visual order emerges spontaneously over time and from a variety of planners, inspired by different things. Again, like capital, the elements of the city need to complement each other, not be homogenous or perfectly substitutable for one another. Visual diversity can then generate order by enabling a city’s inhabitants to read and navigate, a la Lynch, its public spaces; without that visual diversity navigating public space would be like trying to find your way through a snow storm. The diversity of land use (and of the skills, knowledge, and tastes of the city’s inhabitants) enable experimentation among a diverse set of elements, and that on-going process usually isn’t clean and attractive, at least not for

270 

S. IKEDA

all people at all times. That messiness does not appeal to rationalist constructivists; indeed, it is this messiness, which is an inescapable and necessary part of real urban processes, that rationalist planners most object to. What role do these three factors play in Jacobs’s critique of rationalist constructivism in urban planning? Examining four of the leading urban planners/designers of the twentieth century will help to answer this question.

Constructivist Theories of Urban Planning and Design As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge. (Jacobs 1961: 17)

The following are brief sketches of major planning theorists whose work reflected the emerging high-modernist ethos of urban planning and design, and whose influence on the profession as a whole is unquestioned. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) Olmsted is one of the giants of landscape architecture and planning. Contrary to the trend among many of the urban and regional planners who followed, Olmsted sought not to scatter inhabitants of the modern city across the wilderness but to bring nature into the city in order to promote well-being, both physical and mental (Olmsted 1970: 339). Olmsted relied on estimations of such variables as the cubic feet of sunshine and fresh air that typical urbanites require, and the square-footage they need to avoid the kind of mental stress that comes just from walking from place to place on city streets. We may understand these better if we consider that whenever we walk through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have to constantly watch, to foresee, and to guard against their movements. This involves a consideration of their intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their benefit as our own. Our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them. (1970: 338)

Olmsted means to relax this hustle and bustle so that the city, and its image, does not disfigure the human body and psyche, much as Georg Simmel discusses the impact of the market economy and the exacting

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

271

demands of time schedules (Simmel 1903). Not for Olmsted is Jacobs’s “eyes on the street.” He speaks disparagingly of neighborhood where you see people “a half a dozen sitting together on the door-steps or, all in a row, on the curb-stones, with their feet in the gutter; driven out of doors by the closeness within; mothers among them anxiously regarding their children who are dodging about at their play, among the noisy wheels on the pavement” (Olmsted 1970: 342). Here, parks and trees are desperately needed. “Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage” (1970: 339) and parks offer space for much-needed recreation “strongly counteractive to the special, enervating conditions of the town” (1970: 340). But Jacobs not only appreciates, as Olmsted does not, the scene as a “street ballet” but she warns that “parks are volatile places” that can easily become border vacuums. You cannot count on a park of any size to automatically complement the character of the neighborhood or district in which it is placed. Unless you take great care in its design and location, a park will drain the life out of an area.3 In the 1960s and 1970s, Central Park itself became  a fearful place, earning the Park and the City of New York a reputation for danger and dereliction that it still has to many, mostly non-New Yorkers, despite being far less deserved today. With the greater economic vitality and growing population surrounding it, Central Park is now about as safe as it has ever been. Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) Jacobs’s characterization of Ebenezer Howard, the early and influential utopian urban planner, is typical of her view of the urban planners of her day. Howard looked at the living conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-­ century London, and justifiably did not like what he smelled or saw or heard. He not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many people should get themselves into an agglomeration. His prescription for saving the people was to do the city in. (Jacobs 1961: 17)

Howard, who developed and popularized the concept of “Garden City,” evidently found much inspiration in the writings of the American economist, Henry George (of land-value tax fame), who, following William Cobbett, likened a great city, such as London, to a tumor (George 1879: Loc 21655–21659).

272 

S. IKEDA

Howard believed that the town and the country of his time, particularly of his English homeland, were each a mixed blessing. The city is rich with opportunity of all kinds and full of liveliness, but crowded and polluted; while the country is full of healthful, natural beauty but life is dull, isolated, and poor. His answer was his so-called “town-country magnate” which, it should come as no great surprise, would be carefully and rationally designed so as to contain the best of town and country and shed the worst of each, “in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, withal the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination” (Howard 1998: 247). His carefully designed, utopian Garden City consisted of 6000-acre plots, segmented into functionally divided zones and imprinted with enormous roadways that formed concentric circles, and linked with similar settlements by highways and high-speed rail lines. His ambition was evidently to empty the great cities that had formed under industrial capitalism and disperse their populations across these interconnected pinwheels, each limited to a population of about 30,000 persons, that in the aggregate represents a grand, integrated Garden City. Residents live and work within a carefully subdivided matrix of lots averaging 20 feet by 130 feet with plenty of open space, today we might call them “green belts,” for parks, nature, and farmland, that focuses the relatively thin population within pre-determined districts (1998: 315). While Garden City looks, and indeed is, highly constructivist in concept, Howard was no socialist. Nevertheless, according to Jacobs, Howard’s concept of the market, consistent with the static approaches to utopias of the day, was hardly dynamic and entrepreneurial in our sense: He conceived of commerce in terms of routine, standardized supply of goods, and as serving a self-limited market. He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes (Jacobs 1961: 19).

The appeal of the Garden City is like that of the modern planned community, with none of the grittiness of a city of innovation and radical change, and has had a powerful and continuing influence on urban planning.

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

273

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1559) Where Howard dreams of creating a “town-country magnate” Wright envisions a kind of techno-suburban magnate founded upon “three major innovations”: the “motor car,” “electrical inter-communication,” and “standardized – machine-shop – production” (Wright 1935: 377–8). What he called “Broadacre” would somehow “automatically end unemployment and all its evils forever” (1935: 379). While he would evidently devolve government down to the level of the county, it would hardly be laissez-faire but instead highly authoritarian: “In the hands of the state, but by way of the county, is all redistribution of land—a minimum of one acre going to the childless family and more to the larger family by the state” (Wright 1935: 378). As Wright envisions it, on their one-acre plots, individuals liberated from the constraints of density by distance-annihilating technology, would build their single-level, low-cost Usonia houses out of cinder block. All of this would be administered by the wise and benevolent hand of the architect: “The agent of the state in all matters of land allotment or improvement, or in matters affecting the harmony of the whole, is the architect” (Wright 1935: 378). Change must be carefully, rationally controlled in order to keep the city within the constraints of the planner’s imagination. Charels-Edouard Jeanneret a.k.a. Le Corbusier (1887–1969) Olmsted wanted to bring the country into the city, Howard to decentralize the city to low densities, and Wright to transform the city into a techno-­ suburb. Le Corbusier, like Olmsted, sought the greening and opening up (and tidying up) of the city, not by decentralizing it but by hyper-­ densification. Le Corbusier seeks to achieve this “by constructing a theoretically water-tight formula to arrive at the fundamental principles of modern town planning” (Le Corbusier 1929: 368–9). Those principles include what he refers to as site, population, density, lungs/green open spaces, the street, and traffic. Drawing on Howard and Olmsted, Le Corbusier intends to make cities both greener, more spacious, and denser (Le Corbusier 1929: 370). For him, the city is essentially a problem of two independent variables: How do you decongest a city center while increasing its density? He aims to achieve these seemingly contradictory objectives by constructing “machines for living”: super-tall offices and somewhat shorter residences—his famous “towers in a park”—that populate his

274 

S. IKEDA

“Radiant City.” The result is a population density of 1200 persons per acre with two-thirds fewer streets than Paris,4 and where streets are separated by an astonishing four-hundred yards creating his famous “superblocks” (Le Corbusier 1929: 371)! Furthermore, his conception, as an architectural work, had a dazzling clarity, simplicity and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand. It said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement (Jacobs 1961: 23).

This is a city made for covering macro distances at very high speed. Indeed, Corbusier is explicit that his design perspective at ground-level is that of a person in a “fast car” (Le Corbusier 1929: 374) speeding down one of the above-ground super-highways as row after row of symmetrical skyscrapers whizz past her window. The problem, of course, is how people will travel the micro distances between such widely spaced and segregated primary uses. And as some have noted, where to park all those cars and how to address the resulting pollution were details that escaped his attention (Hall 1998: 209). The architect Ken-ichi Sasaki’s (1998) exploration of “urban tactility” is relevant here. The most important factor in the aesthetics of the city is not visuality but tactility. I consider visuality as the viewpoint of the visitor to a city, and tactility as that of its inhabitants. (Sasaki 1998: 36)

In contrast, Radiant City is almost purely visual and very stark, indeed. There is no tactility inside a car, no perspective from the street except when going exceptionally fast speeds, because the meaningfulness of the urban environment, its legibility and detail, is the bird’s-eye, top-down perspective of the designing architect’s or of the first-time visitor and not that of the actual inhabitants of the city. From a Jacobsian perspective, what would people find visually and tactilely interesting in the broad, homogenous superblock grids of Le Corbusier’s “City of Three Million” and make them want linger in public spaces and informal contact with strangers? How do Le Corbusier’s super-­ high densities, without short navigable blocks and nearby mixed primary uses, enable people in to serve as the eyes on the street and form the spontaneous social networks and webs of communication that foster the trust

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

275

in public spaces, which for centuries have done the heavy lifting of providing safety and security on the street? Without cheap, worn-down buildings, where would poor young people with fresh ideas get their start? Will people be so content in their high-modernist residences, separated by great, unwalkable distances from their jobs and recreation (their necessaries, conveniences, and amusements) that they would simply and inexplicably behave in a trusting, civil manner toward one another? Or is formal policing and monitoring supposed to substitute adequately for the social capital, invisible from on high, that great cities have historically relied upon? Or does he assume that all the inhabitants of Radiant City all just nice people? In Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, there is no wiggle room for anything as unpredictable, seemingly chaotic, and messy as a living city to emerge. Not surprisingly then, “he came to believe in the virtue of centralized planning, which would cover not merely city-building but every aspect of life” (Hall 1998: 210). For Le Corbusier, border vacuums, cataclysmic money, and pretended visual order combine in spectacular ways. According to Peter Hall, “the evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him….” Ideas forged in the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s, came to be applied to the planning of working-class housing in Sheffield and St. Louis, and hundreds of other cities too, in the 1950s and 1960s; the results were at best questionable, at worst catastrophic. (Hall 1998: 204)

But these failings are not in Le Corbusier, alone. All of the schemes for urban design outlined here combine the same three errors on a huge scale. Border Vacuum: The rationalist separation of functions that Howard, Wright, and Corbusier employ ignores the way a variety of uses within a relatively small area invites ordinary people to use public space at various times of the day, providing eyes on the street and safety. Absent these attractors, public space becomes dangerous and the liveliness associated with urbanity disappears. Cataclysmic Money: The larger the scale of the project, the larger the volume of funds and the faster the flow of funds into an area, leaving less time for the kind of organic development that adjusts to changing and unforeseen conditions to take place. Not only does this mean that the mind of the planner substitutes for the multitude of minds of a living city, but the sheer size of the projects that require cataclysmic money often (though not necessarily) generates border vacuums with their attendant

276 

S. IKEDA

anti-urban consequences. Moreover, since all the structures within such projects tend to be built within a relatively short time-frame, the built environment ages at roughly the same rate, requiring enormous and simultaneous repair and replacement costs as well as a fairly uniform depreciation of value. The constructions of Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier would obviously entail massive amounts of cataclysmic money. Visual Order: These large-scale “giga-projects” will tend to generate visual homogeneity simply because their structures will largely be built in the same era and reflect the ethos of the age, even if a variety of designers and architects contribute to the end product and they aim to design a diversity of spaces. Most uses will need to be planned ahead of time, otherwise financing would be impracticable, so that initially there will be a predictable sameness in the mixture of uses in the various districts, unless tenants can be given large financial subsidies to overcome of the high costs of the large-scale, new construction. Instead of an emergent order of dynamic experimentation of a variety of uses—at odds with constructivist notions of order—the overwhelming tendency will be a static pattern of use. Any conscious attempt at diversity in appearance will achieve merely a pretended order. Jacobs’s problem with all of these visionaries is not so much that they are grandiose. The problem is that their narrowly constructivist perspective doesn’t begin to grasp the unpredictable nature of cities or the significance of that unpredictability. Rather than having distilled, through close observation of how people in a great city actually live in it, they instead treated the city as a problem of simplicity or disorganized complexity rather than as a problem of organized complexity and spontaneous order. They leave no significant space for unpredictable improvisation save in the ways and directions in which they the planners dictate: “Only the planners, not ordinary people, are permitted to experiment and to fail” (Jacobs 1961: 17).

Concluding Thoughts Urbanization causes unique problems unknown and hard to imagine in non-urban settings. A great city’s problem, its messiness, is an unavoidable product of ordinary people trying to better their situation when knowledge is imperfect. Experiment is necessary in that case, but experiment entails trial-and-error, disappointment, and apparent chaos. A city is creative not only because it is able to successfully address most of those

18  JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 

277

problems in unpredictable ways—which is the result as well as the cause of emergent social orders—but because a creative city actually causes the problems that it needs solve. Novel problems, novel solutions. An organism without problems is dead. The designs of Olmstead, Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright all to a greater or lesser degree reflect a rationalist constructivist mindset in which the designer-architect-planners impose a comprehensive vision onto the living flesh of a city—or attempt to create an entirely new settlement out of whole cloth—in just this way. They err precisely in proposing border vacuums, cataclysmic money, and pretended order because a single human mind, no matter how brilliant, cannot fully comprehend, let alone design, the emergent fine structure of a complex social order. They fail to account for the “street-level” microfoundations that enable people in cities to discover, solve, and cope with the inevitable problems that come with the astonishing benefits of city life. While their intent may be to bring order (on their terms) to the messiness of dynamic urban environments, their plans typically ignore or discount imperfect knowledge, trial-and-error, genuine change, and the resourcefulness and unruliness of ordinary people. The result is to stifle the creativity unique to a great city. In short, they do not appreciate the nature of a living city as an emergent, spontaneous order. Their rationalist constructivism prevents them from doing so.

Notes 1. My understanding of  rationality, rationalism, and  reason derives primarily from  the  work of  F.A. Hayek, but  I  know full well that other sources  – for example Popper, Oakshott – are equally valid starting points. 2. This may be the place to forward a hypothesis of mine that the farther away from a border vacuum you go the better the quality of restaurants tend to be. That is because the high concentration of persons using a border vacuum, say a civic center, the majority of users have only a short time to have lunch, so that restaurants will cater to higher-volume, quickly prepared meals. The capital requirements, especially human capital, are generally too great for such establishments to also offer a lower-volume of diners a better-­ quality menu. Farther from a border vacuum these lunch-time pressures are thus lower and, ceteris paribus, we would expect the quality of restaurants to be higher. While I have not yet conducted a rigorous test analysis of this hypothesis, my casual empiricism supports it over a range of locations and for different kinds of border vacuums. 3. Jacobs devotes her entire Chapter 5 in Death and Life to parks. 4. Compare this with the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the densest districts in New York City, with 185 persons per acre.

278 

S. IKEDA

Bibliography Alexander, Christopher. 1979. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press. Ashton, T.S. 1963. The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians. In Hayek (1963). Callahan, Gene, and Sanford Ikeda 2004. The Career of Robert Moses: City Planning as a Microcosm of Socialism. Independent Review (September) 9 (2): 253–261. Also, Kindle Edition, location given in the text. George, Henry. 1879. Progress and Poverty. Page references to Locations in the Kindle Edition. Hall, Peter. 1998. Cities of Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hayek, F.A. 1978. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1963. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1948. The Use of Knowledge in Society. In Individualism and Economic Order, ed. Friedrich A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howard, Ebenezer. 1998. “Author’s Introduction” and “The Town-Country Magnate”. In Legates and Stout, ed. (1996). Ikeda, Sanford. 1998. Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism. New York: Routledge. Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage. ———. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage. Lavoie, Don. 1985. Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Corbusier. 1929. A Contemporary City. In LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996). LeGates, R.T., and F. Stout, eds. 1996. The City Reader. New York: Routledge. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The City Image and Its Elements. In The City Reader 1996, ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 98–102. McCloskey, Dierdre. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1970. Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns. In LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996). Sasaki, Ken-Ichi. 1998. For Whom Is City Design? Tacility Versus Visuality. In The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden. New York: Routledge. Seabright, Paul. 2004. The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1903/1971. In The Metropolis of Modern Life, ed. Donald Levine. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Susskind, John. 1998. Perfume. Trans. John Woods. New York: Knopf. Whyte, William. 1988. The Design of Spaces. In LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996). Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1935. Broadacre City: A New Community Plan. In LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996).

CHAPTER 19

Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Moral Philosophy Kenneth B. McIntyre

Most of the thinkers examined in this volume focus their criticism on the various ways in which modern conceptions of rationality, especially those connected with the methods of the natural sciences, distort or undermine other, often modern, conceptions of rationality that are not based on the methods of the natural sciences. Alasdair MacIntyre presents a more encompassing critique of Enlightenment rationalism which condemns almost all conceptions of modern rationality or reasonableness. Indeed, almost half of the subjects in this volume are specific objects of MacIntyre’s critique of modern rationalism.1 However, unlike many of the other thinkers in this volume, the source of MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with modern rationalism lies not in his skepticism about its “scientism,” but in what he understands to be the incoherence of modern moral philosophy and practice. He was not the first contemporary philosopher to make this claim, however. In 1958, G.E.M. Anscombe published an essay titled “Modern Moral Philosophy” in the journal Philosophy. Anscombe’s brief essay presented a case for rejecting the whole of modern moral philosophy, in part, because

K. B. McIntyre (*) Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_19

279

280 

K. B. MCINTYRE

the terms of modern moral philosophy (e.g. moral obligation, moral duty) “are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.”2 Anscombe suggested that the moral language which informs and is characteristic of modern moral philosophy (and by this, she means moral philosophy after Aquinas) only really makes sense within a philosophical anthropology which is defined by a teleological conception of human beings. The teleology provides the background for judgments concerning virtuous and vicious actions, and it is within such a philosophical system that “virtue ethics” arose as a contemporary alternative to deontology and various forms of utilitarian consequentialism.3 It is also within this re-vivified tradition that Alasdair MacIntyre developed his own version of virtue ethics, which he first expounded in After Virtue, one of the most influential treatises on moral philosophy in the twentieth century. MacIntyre has developed his version of virtue ethics in a series of books subsequent to After Virtue, including Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Dependent Rational Animals, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.4 What is striking about all of these works is their consistent claim that, not only is modern moral philosophy corrupted by a desiccated language, but that modern conceptions of practical reason/epistemology are also gravely inadequate. According to MacIntyre, without a coherent conception of the human telos, moral judgments cannot be defended in a convincing way, and, thus, no adequate account of practical reason can be offered. MacIntyre associates the attempt to offer an account of morality while jettisoning any monistic account of the human good with moral philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard, and, thus, represents an impeccable example of a critic of Enlightenment rationalism. MacIntyre’s critique of the two most prominent modern moral theories (deontology and utilitarianism) is often penetrating, and his insistence that a more adequate way of making judgments about human actions can be found in his neo-Aristotelian account of morality, which is based upon a cognitivist conception of practical knowledge, is partially successful. However, his positive project ultimately founders on his insistence that moral judgments are impossible if not ultimately justified by appeal to a single telos which is the same for all human beings. The failure characterizes both his early work, After Virtue, in which the telos is identified in a nebulous and non-substantive way with a quest for the telos, and in his later works in which he introduces an element of biological naturalism as the foundation of the telos, which can

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

281

offer support for either a monistic account or a pluralist account of human goodness. MacIntyre never offers a satisfactory account of the single human telos, and that is probably the case because, as various moral pluralists have argued, there is no single human telos that is the same for everyone, everywhere, and every when.

The Critique: Modern Moral Philosophy and Emotivism MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy has remained consistent throughout his later writings, and he connects this critique to a series of observations about the current state of moral discussion.5 His most important claim about contemporary moral life is that it is uniquely characterized by irresolvable moral disagreements. MacIntyre points to disagreements about abortion, the death penalty, just war theory, and so forth, to suggest that modern moral philosophy and modern moral practice are irremediably fragmented. He writes that: the most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character…[because] the rival premises [of such disagreements] are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one…against another.6

According to MacIntyre, participants in contemporary moral debates begin from vastly different sets of presuppositions, and there is seemingly no way of determining which starting point is correct. Some begin with an assumption that human beings are endowed with natural rights, some assume that there is a natural order in the universe expressed in human rationality, while others believe that human reason is naturally corrupt. The arguments proceeding from each presupposition can then be logical, so that disagreements occurring between those operating with the same set of presuppositions can be resolved, but any type of resolution between those beginning from different presuppositions is impossible. The result, according to MacIntyre, is that moral positions appear to be somewhat arbitrary, and moral arguments to be mere statements of preference. MacIntyre suggests that this emotivist position has become, by default, the common way that modern individuals use moral language. He writes that “emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments…are nothing

282 

K. B. MCINTYRE

but expressions of preference.”7 Nonetheless, he also correctly observes that individuals usually do not characterize their own moral beliefs as mere preferences, but instead insist upon the objective rightness of these opinions. So, modern moral practice is characterized by a conception of the use of moral language which diverges significantly from its conception of the meaning of moral language. This divergence, according to MacIntyre, is a sign of the decadence of modern moral philosophy and practice, a decadence characterized by the existence of a desiccated moral vocabulary which no longer appears to describe objectively the moral world in which we live. The stages of this decline are as follows: Stage one: “moral theory and practice embody genuine objective and impersonal standards which provide rational justification for…actions;” Stage two: “there are unsuccessful attempts to maintain the objectivity and impersonality of moral judgments, but during which the project of providing rational justifications…continuously breaks down;” Stage three: “theories of an emotivist kind secure wide implicit acceptance because of a general implicit recognition in practice…that claims to objectivity and impersonality cannot be made good.”8

According to MacIntyre, we have reached stage three, and the task that he sets himself in After Virtue and his other subsequent works is to explain how exactly we went from stage one, in which there was seemingly a common and relatively settled moral vocabulary, to stage three, in which our moral vocabulary has become as fragmented as the vocabulary of those in the immediate post-Babelian world. MacIntyre’s methods of investigation and explanation of the decline and fall of Western moral philosophy and practice consist of a not always coherent mélange of history, sociology, and philosophy.9 His treatment of the writings of past philosophers alternates between a traditional philosophical approach to their arguments, an historicized examination of the questions that informed those arguments, and an unfortunate tendency toward sociological reductionism, especially of the works of those of whom he is critical.10 Nonetheless, MacIntyre’s claim that, around 400 years ago, a profound change took place in the way in which philosophers in the Western world approach moral questions is certainly reasonable and is widely accepted by historians of moral philosophy. What makes MacIntyre’s arguments worthy of attention then? First, he insists that there was not merely a change, but a radical diremption that has made the

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

283

moral philosophy and practice of the pre-modern world almost completely unintelligible to us, and which has left us in a state of almost complete moral chaos. Second, he places this diremption during the European Enlightenment, commonly understood to be one of the high water marks of human intellectual achievement. Finally, he maintains that the solution to our contemporary moral confusion lies in a resuscitation of pre-modern classical ideas about what it means to be human. The radical disruption occurred, according to MacIntyre, when moral philosophers rejected functionalist conceptions of human flourishing, and attempted to replace such notions with highly abstract and universal prescriptions about human behavior. This transformation of moral philosophy took place within the context of the secularization associated first with the Renaissance and the breakdown of the unity of the Catholic Church associated with the Protestant Reformation. For MacIntyre, the period between 1630 and 1850 gave rise to what he calls the Enlightenment project, and he asserts that “the Enlightenment’s central project ha[s] been to identify a set of moral rules, equally compelling to all rational persons.”11 This project aimed to produce a morality based upon reason alone, excluding authority or tradition, and the failure of this project has led to the current crisis. For MacIntyre, the failure is exemplified in the works of three authors, Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard. For all three thinkers, morality consists solely of a set of rules, according to MacIntyre’s exposition. For Hume, the rules of morality are expressions of human desires or feelings, especially commendations of useful desires and condemnations of harmful desires. However, according to MacIntyre, Hume had no theoretically sound justifications for what counted as useful or harmful. Instead, MacIntyre writes that “what on Hume’s view makes reasoning about justice sound reasoning is…that it is reasoning shared by at least the vast majority of members of the community to which one belongs.”12 For MacIntyre, Hume’s moral philosophy represents a non-cognitivist dependence on subjective desires, and Hume’s dependence on purely conventional judgments about what counts as useful or harmful renders his moral philosophy a failure, at least in terms of the Enlightenment project.13 Meanwhile, Kant’s moral philosophy rests on the elucidation of a set of rules discoverable by reason alone and, like the reason which discovers these rules, common to all human beings. Kant’s categorical imperative, which commands that we engage only in actions which we can coherently will universally, offers one such rule. However, MacIntyre rejects this sort

284 

K. B. MCINTYRE

of abstract rationalism as both irrelevant and impossible, as there are all sort of things that we can will universally that are not moral (e.g. “always eat pheasant on Friday”), and because rules are, by themselves, not guides to specific actions but must be interpreted by individual agents. Finally, according to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard admits that the choice between living an ethical life and living the life of an aesthete or any other non-ethical life is the result of arbitrary choice, and is not the result of rational consideration at all. Far from being universal, the moral life is the result of mere contingency. Thus, MacIntyre claims that none of these attempts to find an objective, authoritatively rational set of rules succeeds, and the failure of these various Enlightenment projects is manifest in modern moral practice. Modern moral philosophy itself is still concerned with discovering the proper set of rules to guide human conduct, whether these be rules derived from a consideration of the concept of practical reason or rules designed to maximize the satisfaction of desires. Modern moral conduct, however, has been increasingly marked by the disjunction between the meaning of moral utterances and their usage. According to MacIntyre, this disjunction manifests itself most clearly in the contradiction between the commonplace appeals in moral discourse, on the one hand, to natural/human rights, and, on the other, to both utilitarianism and scientific expertise. He avers that the chaos of contemporary moral practice “results in…political debates being between an individualism which makes its claims in terms of rights and forms of bureaucratic organization which make their claims in terms of utility.”14 MacIntyre dismisses arguments based upon references to rights as manifestations of the already abstract character of understanding morality as merely as a set of rules. Rights do exist, of course, but only within settled authoritative political communities, and to consider them as free-floating claims is to make the same mistake as those who would abstract certain rules from a current moral situation and universalize them as the rules of morality. MacIntyre’s critique of the notion of rights, while insightful, is sketchy, but his treatment of the modern understanding of managerial expertise is closely connected with the critique of scientism common to many of the other critics of Enlightenment rationalism found in this volume. He is not concerned to offer a critique of the methods of modern science, but, instead notes that the claims of modern social science to be scientific are quite misleading and easily refuted. The modern natural sciences are characterized by their production or discovery of a great variety of law-like generalizations which reliably predict future occurrences under certain

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

285

definable circumstances. These sciences presuppose a mechanical universe in which “every mechanical causal sequence exemplifies some universal generalization and that generalization has a precisely specifiable scope” (e.g. water/H2O not containing impurities boils at 100 degrees Celsius at 1 atmosphere of pressure), and the various modern natural sciences have been extraordinarily successful at discovering and refining such laws over the past several centuries.15 In contrast, as MacIntyre observes, while the modern social sciences have attempted to mimic the natural sciences methodologically, they have been completely unsuccessful in producing almost any of these law-like generalizations. This ought to have severely undermined the claims of bureaucratic managerialism, but it has not done so. As MacIntyre writes, “what managerial expertise requires for its vindication is a justified conception of social science as providing a stock of law-like generalizations with strong predictive power” like that of the natural sciences.16 However, the law-like generalizations produced by social scientists have almost none of the characteristics of those of the natural sciences. As MacIntyre notes, unlike the laws of natural science, the “laws” of social science co-exist with counter-examples, which would falsify any natural law (e.g. predictions of party affiliations based upon ascriptive characteristics always exist alongside thousands of counter-examples). The “laws” of social science also lack universal quantifiers and scope modifiers (part of this a problem of underdetermined definition, e.g. what counts as a revolution” in politics v what counts as “revolution” in astronomy). That is, these “laws” are much more like the maxims that any competent practitioner of politics, economics, urban planning, and so forth might pick up from experience than like the laws of natural science. MacIntyre explains the failure of the social sciences to succeed as modern sciences as a consequence of the intrusion of an irrelevant set of naturalistic and mechanistic assumptions into the study of human actions and human judgments. The natural sciences preclude the consideration that their objects are capable of practical reason and action. This preclusion is perfectly rational when examining the tides or the planets or amoebic movement, but does present problems when attempting to explain human action. MacIntyre suggests that there are four general reasons why human action is unpredictable, and they are all directly connected to the fact the human beings can make decisions based upon their own reasonable, or not so reasonable, judgments. First, humans are capable of radical conceptual innovation, and the creation of something radically new cannot be

286 

K. B. MCINTYRE

predicted. Second, humans are not completely capable of predicting their own actions, and, since the actions of each individual affect others, the actions of others cannot be predicted either. Third, since knowledge of the intentions and actions of others is limited, the capacity of the individual to plan his or her own action is complicated by a kind of infinite reflexivity. And, finally, MacIntyre claims that there are pure contingencies in life, like the intrusion of eccentric influences, which occur completely outside of any person’s capacity to know. All of these factors point to the exceptional character of human reason, but they do not offer a complete answer as to how to properly understand practical reason and they don’t provide the solution to what MacIntyre deems to be the modern moral crisis.

MacIntyre’s Neo-Aristotelian Alternative I have offered a skeletal account of MacIntyre’s diagnosis of what he takes to be the current crisis. However, MacIntyre’s interpretation of Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard and his analysis of emotivism are merely the overture to his examination of a possible alternative to Enlightenment rationalism based upon a return to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.17 MacIntyre asserts that “the predicaments of contemporary philosophy…are best understood as arising as a long-term consequence of the rejection of Aristotelian and Thomistic teleology at the threshold of the modern world.”18 What went wrong during the Enlightenment was that philosophers jettisoned the anchor that tied moral rules to substantive human results, leaving practical reasoning and moral judgments unmoored to any conception of human flourishing. Thus, according to MacIntyre, two of the primary weaknesses of modern philosophy, its conflation of practical and theoretical/scientific reasoning and its vacuity concerning the character of human goodness, are the direct result of its dismissal of the Aristotelian conception of human life as inherently teleological. MacIntyre argues that the classical thinkers relied on a functional conception of human nature which posited three things: human nature as given, a telos for that human nature, and a set of ways in which that given nature could be transformed into a fully developed nature. As MacIntyre notes: since the whole point of ethics…is to enable man to pass from his present state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature and with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos leaves behind a moral scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes quite unclear.19

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

287

Without the telos or purpose, the rules or precepts directing the transformation of given nature to achieved nature become a bridge to nowhere. The knowledge and understanding of such rules and precepts become a matter of technical/scientific knowledge (a “knowing that”) rather than a matter of practical knowledge (a “knowing how”), and the character of human flourishing or happiness becomes a matter of mere preference instead of a matter of objective fact. Non-cognitivist moral philosophy replaces cognitivism because moral questions deal with preferences and not objective reality. MacIntyre observes correctly that human beings still make judgments based upon teleological or functional considerations in many areas of their lives, especially in areas in which they are specifically experienced or knowledgeable. He notes that “plain persons are in fact generally and to a significant degree proto-Aristotelians.”20 We all make relatively objective determinations about the goodness or badness of watches, knives, computers, automobiles, and so forth. These are all functional objects and it makes perfect sense to say, for example, that, since the function of a watch is tell time accurately, a watch that tells time accurately is a good watch, and that a watch ought to tell the time accurately. The fact/value distinction which arises with the rejection of teleology dissolves when dealing with functional matters. But how do we know what function human beings have? MacIntyre answers that the various functions that humans perform are learned through participation in the great variety of practices that human beings have created. According to MacIntyre, practices are “cooperative forms of activity whose participants jointly pursue the goods internal to those forms of activity and jointly value excellence in achieving those goods.”21 Practices, therefore, are inherently teleological. Practices include activities such as farming, fishing, and fowling, playing football, playing chess, and playing the mandolin, riding a horse, riding a bicycle, and (perhaps) riding a bus.22 Engaging in a practice involves learning the nature of the rules, the character of the activity, and the nature of excellence embodied in that particular practice. According to MacIntyre, participation in practices teaches human beings both about the character of goods internal to the practices themselves and about the virtues needed to be successful in these practices.23 Internal goods are those connected intrinsically with the practice itself. For example, those learning to play baseball will need to learn how to hit, to catch, and to throw the baseball, but also will learn when to hit the cut-off man, when to steal a base, when to take a pitch, and so

288 

K. B. MCINTYRE

forth. Those learning to play the mandolin will learn how to play scales and arpeggios, how to crosspick, how to play tremolo, but also will learn when to improvise, when to use double-stops, and when to turn it up and down. That is, those engaged in learning practices will acquire both technical skills and a style of their own, and both will be internal to the practice itself (though some skills, like reading music or developing hand-eye coordination, will be internal to many practices). So, how do humans become accomplished in such practices? MacIntyre uses the term “virtue” to refer to the human qualities, which enable us to achieve the goods that are internal to practices. These virtues, especially courage, honesty, and justice, are necessary to achieve fully the excellences inherent in any practice. These virtues define the relationship between the apprentice and the teacher, between the competitor and other competitors, and between teammates or bandmates, and, ultimately, the character of the practitioner herself. In order to learn how to read Latin, one must have the honesty and courage to admit that one does not know it and the justice to submit to the instruction of one who does. In order to compete in a marathon, one must have the courage to train, the honesty to know one’s strengths and weaknesses, and the justice to recognize excellence in one’s self and others. In order to be a good teammate, one must be honest with others about one’s own competence, have the courage to strive for excellence for the team first, and the justice to accept one’s position on the team. What this means, according to MacIntyre, is that questions about whether a person is a good baseball player or mandolin player, a good Latin scholar, marathon runner, or teammate are objective questions with objective answers, and not merely questions concerning the preferences of participants in these activities or spectators to these activities. However, as MacIntyre avers, “those who lack the relevant experience [in the practice] are incompetent…as judges of internal goods.”24 The reason that those ignorant of practices cannot make rational judgments about the internal goods of the practice is that they are ignorant of the teloi or purposes of the practices, which can only be learned by learning the practice itself. Thus, MacIntyre offers an account of human practical knowledge which rejects the modern scientistic account of human reason as primarily instrumental and technical. Instead, MacIntyre insists that practical human knowledge consists of connoisseurship, not technical expertise, and it is acquired only by an engagement in the variety of specific human practices

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

289

themselves and not in the accumulation of factual knowledge or in the promulgation of rules. Of course, practices have histories, and are, therefore, inherently traditional activities. Thus, for MacIntyre, human rationality, as it is embodied in practices, is inherently traditional, as well. He writes that “all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought.”25 For example, the argument between those in favor of changing the penalty for pass interference in the National Football League from a spot foul to a 15 yard penalty appeal to the character and traditions of American football in their argument (e.g. the spot foul is eccentric in football and therefore the penalty should be 15 yards, like other egregious penalties in the sport), and do not attempt to formulate a universal rule on deontological principles (e.g. a penalty of 15 yards for pass interference would maximize total utility). This notion that rationality is traditional has led some critics to accuse him of relativism, which he rejects, but what is more important for the purposes of this essay is his move from the multiplicity of human practices/traditions to what he takes to be the unity of traditions and, more importantly, the necessary singularity of the human telos. He observes that “the conception of a single, albeit perhaps complex, supreme good is central to Aristotle’s account of practical rationality,” and MacIntyre posits that it is necessary for his as well.26 For MacIntyre, the teleological character of practices leads to a notion that there must be a single teleological character to human life, a practice of practices, which he tends to identify as morality. Thus, if morality is a practice, then it is obviously teleological, like other practices, and what is central to achieving the telos is perfecting human virtues. So what is the telos of human beings, or in what does human flourishing consist? MacIntyre offers two different answers, but neither of them necessarily support his contention that there must be a single human telos or purpose in order to make any sense of morality. Actually, it is rarely the case that either traditional practices or functional objects manifest a single purpose (e.g. watches should keep time accurately, but also need to be light, portable, and durable, so a grandfather clock would be a bad watch despite keeping accurate time), so MacIntyre’s claim that there is a necessary logical move from the teleological character of practices and functional objects to a unified and single telos for human beings is an inappropriate generalization. Nonetheless, his initial account of the human telos is that it involves an attempt to unify and order the various practices of an individual’s life under the category of a narrative quest story. He

290 

K. B. MCINTYRE

avers that “the good life for man is spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.”27 However, there is a profound difference between an individual discovering her telos and an individual discovering the telos for all human beings. The notion that the telos involves merely the quest for a telos offers a procedural not a substantive purpose to human lives, and it affords support for a pluralist conception of human activity as consisting of multiple purposes not reducible to a single telos. In MacIntyre’s more recent work, he offers a more substantive account of the human telos based on both a biological account of human flourishing and a notion of morality as the sensus communis of a homogeneous community. On the one hand, MacIntyre claims that there are common elements to all forms of human flourishing which can be identified in terms of certain biological needs that all humans share. These are “a set of goods at the achievement of which the members of the species aim, a set of judgments about which actions are or are likely to be effective in achieving those goods and a set of true counterfactual conditions that enable us to connect the goal-directedness and the judgments about effectiveness.”28 Humans need food, water, shelter, a stable living environment, friendship, love, intellectual stimulation, and need to avoid starvation, poverty, pollution, nuclear war, and so forth. Once again, however, this minimal and general outline of the human good can support all sorts of different human purposes and a pluralist account of morality and virtue.29 On the other hand, MacIntyre presents morality or the ethical life as consisting in the traditional practice of a homogeneous community which orders all other practices and, in this kind of community, according to MacIntyre, the question of what is the good life “is not a question that [a person] can ask and answer for her or himself, apart from those others together with whom she or he is engaged in the activities of practices.”30 Instead, it is the moral community as a whole that orders the practices of the community “so that individuals may direct themselves towards what is best for them and for the community.”31 The model here seems to be the Greek polis or the medieval monastery, and the importance of moral connoisseurship in both cultures was central. Of course, such inequalities in moral capacity as the notion of moral connoisseurship implies were used to justify slavery and sex role differentiation in the polis, and similar sorts

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

291

of hierarchies in the monastery, and it is perfectly reasonable to make such distinctions, if the moral life is as MacIntyre suggests.32 The practical problem which MacIntyre does not adequately address, though he certainly recognizes it, is that, in the current Western world, there is no agreement on a single telos, and it seems highly unlikely that one will be forthcoming, absent the advent of totalitarian governments.33 The moral life of the modern world is going to continue to be fragmented, in MacIntyre’s sense of the term, and one aspect of modern moral philosophy that MacIntyre doesn’t address is that both Kantian and Humean (deontology and consequentialism) moral philosophy have been means of dealing with a morally plural community, though MacIntyre is correct in noting that both are erroneous when considered as monistic accounts of human morality. Ironically, it is the continuing successful presence of classically liberal political communities which is the sine qua non for MacIntyre’s intentional communities to exist all, let alone flourish in the modern world.

Conclusion MacIntyre’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism, what he calls “the Enlightenment Project,” emerged, not out of a critique of scientism, but from MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with modern moral philosophy. He does offer a critique of scientism, which he associates with the emergence of the modern bureaucratic/administrative state, and he connects it with one aspect of emotivist moral philosophy. However, his real concern is modern moral fragmentation. He claims that modern disagreements about moral and political questions are irresolvable in a way that moral disagreements during medieval Christendom or classical Greece were not. However, it is not at all clear that the moral and epistemological pluralism that MacIntyre finds so troubling about the modern Western world is at all unique. What is of great value in MacIntyre’s work is not his potted history of the decline and fall of Western moral philosophy and practice, but, instead, his insightful critique of the conflation of scientific and practical reason. His conception of reason as embedded in social practices has a great deal in common with others in this volume, including Gadamer, Oakeshott, and Polanyi, and, despite himself, he offers support for pluralist conceptions of both epistemology and morality.

292 

K. B. MCINTYRE

Notes 1. Of the thinkers discussed in this volume, MacIntyre offers critical remarks on Burke, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Hayek, Gadamer (to a lesser extent than the others), Oakeshott, and Berlin. 2. G.E.M Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Ethics, Religion, and Politics: Collected Papers Volume III (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981) 26. 3. For an overview of virtue ethics, see Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds., Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 4. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd Edition (Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN, 2007) henceforth AV; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) henceforth WJ/WR; Alasdair MacIntyre, The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1998) henceforth MR; Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Open Court Publishing: Peru, IL, 1999) henceforth DRP; and Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2016) henceforth ECM. 5. Though his earlier work is interesting in its own way, MacIntyre’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism only emerges fully with his publication of After Virtue in 1981. His rather careering career as a philosopher had already led him through a long dalliance with Marxism and a series of detailed critiques of contemporary social science. MacIntyre has described his career as consisting of three parts: a first part consisting of “heterogeneous, badly organized, sometimes fragmented and often frustrating and messy enquiries;” a second part, which “was an interim period of sometimes painfully self-­critical reflection;” and a third (final?) part in which he has “been engaged in a single project…described by one of my colleagues as that of writing An Interminably Long History of Ethics.” MR, 268–269. I will focus on his works from this third part of his career. 6. AV, 6, 8. 7. AV, 12. In later works, MacIntyre uses the term expressivism instead of emotivism. ECM, 17–24. 8. AV, 18. 9. MacIntyre mentions the centrality of the influence of R.G. Collingwood’s later historicized philosophy on his own work in several places. See, for example, MR, 261, where he recounts “what I learned from R.G. Collingwood: that morality is an essentially historical subject matter and that philosophical inquiry, in ethics as elsewhere, is defective insofar as it is not historical.”

19  PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 

293

10. I will not concern myself with the historical or philosophical accuracy or adequacy of MacIntyre’s account of other thinkers, though his treatment of the history of philosophy has been the subject of severe criticism both by intellectual historians and by experts in the particular subjects of his work (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, et al.). For example, Thomas Nagel writes that “accuracy in reporting what others say has never been MacIntyre’s strong point. On the principle that it is easier to shoot a sitting duck, he tends to be most inaccurate when he is on the attack: the representation of Kant’s ethical theory in After Virtue makes it unwise ever to trust what he says about a philosophical text again, and the treatment of Hume [in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?] is not much better.” The emphasis that MacIntyre places on historicizing philosophy generally and moral philosophy specifically makes such criticism quite damning, when the criticism is convincing. Thomas Nagel, “MacIntyre versus the Enlightenment,” Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969–1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 208. 11. MR, 261. 12. WJ/WR, 320. MacIntyre’s distaste for Hume because of his supposed Anglophilia is quite palpable and he refers to his philosophy as an “Anglicizing subversion” of the Scottish tradition. Indeed, MacIntyre uses the terms “England” and “English” much as certain folks from the American South used to use the term “Yankee,” and for similar reasons. 13. Baier notes that Hume’s moral philosophy is based upon a traditionalist moral epistemology and is dependent on the kind of virtues that MacIntyre extols. It does not rely on a single telos, however, and is connected with a nascent version of modern classical liberalism. MacIntyre’s disdain for modern liberalism also involves a disdain for the virtues associated with such a culture. Annette Baier, “Civilizing Practices,” Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 246–262. 14. AV, 71. 15. AV, 83. 16. AV, 88. 17. MacIntyre’s account of moral action and practical rationality is interesting on its own account, so I will not consider how genuinely Aristotelian or Thomistic it is. One obvious area in which MacIntyre is not presenting an Aristotelian or Thomistic argument is precisely in his commitment to historicize philosophy, which is largely derived from Hegel and R.G. Collingwood (neither of whom would have approved in any way of his notion that the whole of modern moral philosophy rests on an error). For a critique of MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle and Aquinas, see, among others, Janet Coleman, “MacIntyre and Aquinas,” After MacIntyre: Critical

294 

K. B. MCINTYRE

Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Horton and Susan Mendus, eds. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) 65–90. 18. MR, 197. 19. AV, 54. 20. MR, 138. This sentiment represents a softening of his sometimes sociologically deterministic account of the emotivism of modern practical life. 21. MR, 140. 22. Having grown up in suburban Texas in the 1970s, I had never encountered public transportation before moving to the Northeast, where I had to learn how to ride the bus and the subway. I also learned that some people were and are exceptionally good at using public transportation and others, like myself, are especially bad at it. 23. There are also external goods, often of a material variety, associated with excellence in certain practices, but these are not intrinsically related to the specific practice, and, in fact, often have a corrupting influence on the practice. 24. AV, 20. 25. AV, 222. 26. WJ/WR, 133. 27. AV, 219. 28. DPR, 25. Philippa Foot offers a similarly naturalistic account of morality in Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 29. See, for example, John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 30. MR, 240. 31. MR, 241. 32. MacIntyre admits of this possibility when he writes that “there are kinds of teaching—the teaching of piano or violin, for example—in which the ruthless exclusion of the talentless from further teaching (a mercy to the student as well as to the teacher and to any innocent bystander) is one of the marks of a good teacher and in which the abilities to identify the talentless and to exclude them are among her or his virtues.” DRA, 89. This certainly suggests that there might be those who are just not capable of learning the practice of morality, and, thus, should excluded from the moral community. 33. Of course, the conflicts which arise because of the diversity of the moral world do not necessarily have to be viewed as aberrant or inherently destructive. As Stuart Hampshire notes, “neither in the social order, nor in the experience of an individual, is a state of conflict the sign of vice, or defect, or a malfunctioning. It is not a deviation from the normal state of a city or a nation, and it is not a deviation from the normal course of a person’s experience.” Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 33–34.

Index1

A The Abolition of Man (Lewis), 166, 173 Abolition of man, Lewis motify on, 173–174 Abstract orders, 9, 184, 185 Abstract rationalism, Lewis critiqhue of, 170 Adams, John, 62, 67 Adorno, Theodor, 126 Aesthetes, 2, 209n43, 284 Aesthetic consciousness, Gadamer on, 194 Aesthetic delight, transposition of, 166 After Strange Gods (Eliot), 80, 85, 86, 90n7 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 280, 282, 292n5 The Age of Reason (Paine), 17 Agonists, Kierkegaard and, 49 Aletheia (divine light), 198, 203, 205n11, 207n23, 218

Alexander, Christopher, 266 America, 61, 62, 142, 259 de Tocqueville on, 3 Kirk on, 259 reason and freedom in, 40–42 American Revolution Kirk on French vs., 259 Paine and Jefferson view of, 213 Ancien Régime, 17, 21, 35–38 Tocqueville on French Revolution and, 35 The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Pocock), 29n6 Anit-rationalists, see Critics of rationalism (anti-rationalists) Annual Register, 19 Anscombe, G. E. M., 279, 280 Anti-foundationalists, 181, 203n1 Antigone (Sophocles), 196 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 152, 217, 256, 280, 286, 293n10, 293n17

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9

295

296 

INDEX

Aristotle bios theoretikos, 214, 222 causation types of, 116 de Tocqueville and, 34, 35 forms of knowledge, 26 Gadamer and, 198, 199, 203 MacIntyre and, 293n17 prudence and, 27 Voegelin and, 217 Armitage, David, 22, 28 Arnold, Matthew, 80, 89 Augustine (St.), 53, 194, 215 Voegelin and, 217 Authoritarianism, Berlin on, 246 Authoritative present, d’Alembert principle of, 222 B Babbitt, Irving, 87, 93n53, 164, 172 Bacon, Francis, 1, 45n22, 213, 216, 229, 231, 232 Baier, Annette, 293n13 Baudelaire, 82, 87–89 Being (being) emergent and indwelling, 150–152 forgetfulness of, 10, 200 Gadamer word for, 118 having distinguished from, 114 Heidegger description of, 107, 112–114 Marcel on mystery and, 128, 132 zoon politikon, 26 Being and Time (Heidegger), 112 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 125 Berlin, Isaiah, monism critique by authoritarianism, irrationalism and, 246 dearth of studies on, 237 history and, 243 on human agency, 241 iterations of monism, 245, 246

jigsaw puzzle analogy, 238, 243, 245 monism definition and, 237–238 multifarious treatment of monism, 238 philosophy and, 241, 242 Plato and, 237, 239, 244 politics and, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246 on positive and negative liberty, 244 utopian writers and, 244 writers most important to, 238 Beyond Being (Wachterhauser), 209n44 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 66 Bible, Jefferson revision of, 212 Bios theoretikos (Aristotle), 214, 222 Birzer, Bradley J., 255, 259 Border vacuums, 267–268, 271, 275, 277, 277n2 Bradley, F. H., 82, 91n18, 91n20, 228 Bread riots, 47, 52 Brentano, Franz, 146 Buber, Martin, 135n36 Buddhism, 87, 88 Burke, Edmund, 3, 12, 15–29, 133, 252–258, 292n1 Annual Register and, 19 Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition and, 19, 26, 28 on balance of power, 27–29 Canavan on, 16, 23–27, 255 conservatism and, 3, 16, 24, 252 education of, 19 enthusiasm and, 20, 21, 28 French Revolution and, 3, 16, 20, 23 French sophists and, 21 Hume and, 18 Kirk and, 12, 252–258 on limits of rationality, 15 as misunderstood, 15 as natural law thinker, 16, 255, 256 on natural rights and tradition, 255, 257

 INDEX 

on philosophy intrusion of common life, 18 political and philosophical career of, 19, 20 on reason and politics, 20 religion and, 20 sophistry alternative of, 27 Butler, Judith, 181 C Calculus, 97, 221 Canavan, Francis, 16, 23–27, 29n6, 255 Canavan, S. J., 16, 23–27, 29n6, 255 Carr, Peter, 64 Cassirer, Ernst, 14n1, 107 Cataclysmic money, 268, 275–277 Causation Aristotle on types of, 116–117 Heidegger on freedom and, 117, 118 Centralization Kirk critique of, 12 Tocqueville critique of, 35 in urban planning, 264 Chess, 98, 151, 287 China (Hovelaque), 234n4 Chinese civilization, Eliot on, 87 Christianity Baudelairean, 89 Condorcet and, 223 imagination and, 8, 9, 160–162 Jefferson view of reason and, 63–65, 70 Kierkegaard and, 2, 48, 55 Lewis apologetics of, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 170 McGrath on Lewis and, 160 Nietzsche and, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72 nihilism and, 5, 63, 69, 70, 76n42 Platonic, 63, 64

297

prudentia and, 25, 26 reason and democracy as form of, 72 Voegelin critique of rationalism and, 211, 214, 218, 224 The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), 159, 166, 168, 172 Cicero Kirk and, 256, 257 prudence and, 22, 23, 27, 28 Cities Marcel on modern, 126, 127 public image of, 267 visual order in, 269 See also Jacobs, Jane, urban rationalists critiqued by City of Three Million, 274 Clark, Jonathan, 21 Clark, Maudmarie, 74n20, 75n24, 77n47 Cobbett, William, 271 Coherence theory of truth, Oakeshott, 228, 233 Collingwood, R. G., 14, 292n9, 293n17 Colonists, American, 40, 259 Commedia (Dante), 89 Communism, 128, 133, 214, 220 Comte, Auguste, 37, 179, 213, 217, 218, 220–224 Voegelin and, 213, 214, 218, 220, 221, 223 Concept of Experience (Hegel), 111 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard), 48, 57n21 Concrete orders, 9, 184, 185 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 1, 213, 217, 218, 221–224 Consciousness of epoch, Voegelin and, 217 Conservatism Burke and, 252 first principle of, 252 of Kirk, 251, 252, 259, 260

298 

INDEX

The Conservative Mind (Kirk), 12, 251 Constructivism Jacobs critique of rationalist, 270 Oakeshott and, 2, 234n6 urban planning, Cartesian rationalism and, 264 Co-present margin, Husserl concept of, 118 Corporate import, Oakeshott theory of, 234 The Corsair, 48 The Counter-Revolution of Science (Hayek), 183 Creative fidelity, 132, 133 Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man (Voegelin), 214 Critical rationalism, nihilism as result of, 142 Critics of rationalism (anti-rationalists), 1, 8, 18, 159, 179, 182, 203, 238 criteria for inclusion, 8 most radical, 62, 80 overview of, 1 See also specific thinkers Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 234n6 Heidegger on, 110 new-Kantian interpretation of, 110 Crito (Plato), 196 Cult of Genius, 81, 86 D d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 1, 214, 217, 221–224 Dante Alighieri, 86, 89 Darwin, Charles, 108, 109 Das Problem des Scheins, 111–113, 116 de Beauvoir, Simone, 7, 125, 181 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 3, 4, 38–40, 92n33 Aristotle and, 35

on democratization and authority of science, 38–40 on French Revolution and Old Regime, 35 on political science and freedom, 35 political science of, 3, 4, 35, 38, 39 on politics and philosophy, 34 on reason and freedom in America, 38–40 social engineering criticized by, 4, 34 on uncertainty, 35 “The Dead” (Joyce), 86 Death and Life (Jacobs), 267, 277n3 Death, of God, 71, 77n49 Declaration of Independence, 67, 232, 259 Deism, French, 21 Deleuze, Gilles, 75n24, 75n25 Democracy Christianity as reason and, 5 de Tocqueville on, 35, 36, 38–40, 43 Jeffersonian predictions about, 69 Nietzsche on ascetic ideals and, 70 of reason, 5 ressentiment and, 68, 70 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville), 3, 40, 42 Descartes, René, 1, 45n22, 54, 113, 115, 143–145, 151, 152, 229, 231, 232, 234n5 dualism of, 144, 151, 152 Heidegger on error of Kant and, 113 Kant and, 113 Kierkegaard and, 54 Oakeshott and, 229, 232, 234n5 Polanyi and, 145, 152 Despotism, France’s “mild,” 41 Destruktion (destructuring), 198, 199, 207n22 Detwiler, Bruce, 76n34, 77n49 Dickens, Charles, 129 Diderot, Denis, 1, 213, 222

 INDEX 

The Discarded Image (Lewis), 9, 171 Disponibilité, Marcel idea of, 132 Dissociation of sensibility, Eliot and, 84 Divine light (aletheia), 218 Dryden, John, 81 Du Bos, Charles, 125 Dual control, Polanyi concept of, 150, 151, 154 Dworkin, Ronald, 246 E Economic Bill of Rights, 62 Economics, in light of Hayek, 189 Education Lewis on, 173 Marcel on, 129 STEM, 7, 120 Einstein, Albert, 171 Eliot, T. S., tradition and After Strange Gods, 80, 86 alleged Christian ideology of, 80 Arnold and, 81, 89 Babbitt and, 87 Baudelaire critique by, 89 Bradley and, 82, 91n18 catholic sensibility of, 80, 86 on Chinese civilization, 87 Christianity and, 86, 87, 89 criticism and creation issue, 80, 81 Dante and, 86, 89 dissociation of sensibility and, 84 evaluations and judgments issue, 81, 85 on historical sense of tradition, 82 Kirk and, 2, 253, 254 Lancelot preface and, 89n1, 90n7 Lawrence and, 88 living character of tradition issue, 81 Marvell and, 85

299

modernism of, 5 “obedient progeny” of, 82, 83 orthodoxy and, 81, 85, 93n47 personal expression and, 84 poetic creation and, 80 present-moment inversion and, 82 reactionary label for, 80 Russell and, 91n28 on second order minds, 81 self-description, 79, 80 sentimental attachment and, 84 Shusterman interpretation of, 82, 91n20, 91n28 thrust and retreat rhetoric of, 79, 86 tradition as discipline, 83 wit and, 85 Emergent being, indwelling and, 8, 140, 150 Emotivism, MacIntyre on, 286 “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements” (Berlin), 242 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 222 Enframing, 120 The Enlightenment in America (May), 211 Enlightenment rationalism authors of, 2 Cartesian assumptions as source of, 153 contrasting assumptions in, 218 definition of, 212 development of, 223 epistemological pluralists as critics of, 2 irrationality of, 10, 215, 219–221, 224 MacIntyre term for, 255, 279, 280, 286, 291, 292n5 momentum of, 140 reductionism and, 217

300 

INDEX

Enlightenment rationalism (cont.) religious believers as critics of, 2 Scottish Enlightenment and, 179 Voegelin on ideological offspring of, 214 See also Critics of rationalism (anti-rationalists); Rationalism; specific thinkers Enthusiasm, Burke critique on, 20, 21 Episteme (knowledge), 26, 214 Epistemology Hayek ontology and, 189 pluralists, 2, 291 Epitaph, on Newton, 212 Equality fanatical love for, 39 Nietzsche on Jefferson and, 5, 63, 68, 71 Erfahrung, 196, 202 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 215 Eternal recurrence, Nietzsche on, 73, 77n56 Ethics (Spinoza), 49, 233 Ethics, Maclntyre on purpose of, 286–289 virtue, 13, 14, 280 Existentialism of Marcel, 128 Experience and Its Modes (Oakeshott), 11, 227, 229, 230 F Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 48 Federici, Michael, 10 For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot), 90n7 Forgetfulness of being, Gadamer and, 200 Foucault, Michel, 3, 127 Framers, 62, 68, 259

France deism in, 24 “mild” despotism in, 41 Franklin, Ben, 213 Freedom America, reason and, 40 de Tocqueville on political science and, 33–43 Heidegger on causation and, 110 Free-market reforms, in United Kingdom, 189 Free press, Tocqueville on, 41 Free spirit, Nietzsche on, 67, 73, 77n56 Frege, Gottlob, 99 French existentialism, 126 French philosophes, 4, 5, 21, 28, 34, 125 French philosophes, 1, 3–5, 21, 28, 34 French Revolution American vs., 213 Burke criticism of, 3 Jefferson on, 213 Paine and Jefferson view of, 213 Tocqueville on Old Regime and, 36 French sophistry, Burke criticism of, 21 Freud, Sigmund, 3, 171 From Enlightenment to Revolution (Voegelin), 214 From-to dynamic, Polanyi concept of, 147 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, as anti-­ rationalist, 2, 9, 10, 91n18, 118, 193–203, 291, 292n1 on aesthetic consciousness, 194 Aristotle and, 194, 198, 199, 201, 203

 INDEX 

authentic interpretation model of, 204n5 Eliot and, 91n18 forgetfulness of being idea of, 10, 200 Heidegger and, 9, 118, 193, 194, 197–201, 203, 204n3, 206n15, 206n16, 206n19, 207n23, 207n24, 207n28, 208n30 hermeneutics-metaphysics tension in, 204n3 historicity of the Good and, 200–203 on internal order, 202, 209n44 Kierkegaard and, 209n43, 292n1 on lost truth in human sciences, 194–197 metaphysical tradition and, 193–203 on method vs. truth, 194–196, 199, 200, 204n4, 204–205n6 phronesis and, 199, 203 Plato and, 9, 194, 201–203, 205n11, 208n29, 208n42, 209n44 on prejudice, 195, 196, 204n4 pre-Kehre Heidegger and, 198, 203 Smith, P. C., on, 208n42 Garden City, Howard concept of, 271, 272 Gaus, Gerald F., 190 The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 65, 72, 73 George, Henry, 271 Gheorghiu, C. Virgil, 128 Gibbon, Edward, 21 Glazebrook, Trish, 107, 109 Glorious Revolution, 20, 24 God death of, 72, 77n49 elimination of, 115 Heidegger on objects and, 113 in Lewis model of universe, 171, 172 Voegelin on new religion and, 218

301

Gordon, Peter, 117 Grant, Robert, 234n4 Green belts, 272 Grondin, Jean, 196, 204n3, 208n29 Gyllembourg, Thomasine, 49, 57n21 H Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 49, 57n16, 57n19, 205n14 Hamilton, Alexander, 67 Hampshire, Stuart, 294n33 Hastings, Warren, 256 Hayek, F. A., rationalism critique of, 2, 9, 12, 154, 179–190, 264, 267, 277n1, 292n1 alternative to, 180, 182–189 economic and social theory, 180, 185–187 epistemology and ontology of, 179, 180, 183–185 future issues in light of, 189–190 grass analogy of, 184–185 intellectual opponents of, 179 Jacobs and, 12, 264, 267 legacy of, 189 norms, politics and, 9 on pattern recognition, 9 political and legal theory, 188–189 on property rights, 264 psychology and, 9, 180, 183 rationalism discontents and, 181–182 rationalist worldview and, 180–182 rule of law and, 9, 179, 188 Scottish Enlightenment and, 9, 179, 183, 186 social justice critique by, 188 spontaneous order and, 186, 187 urban planning and, 12, 264

302 

INDEX

Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 48, 54, 87, 93n47, 111, 116, 194, 228, 293n17 Eliot and, 87, 93n47 Heidegger and, 111, 116 Kierkegaard criticism of, 54 MacIntyre and, 14, 293n17 Oakeshott and, 54, 227 Heidegger, Martin, Gadamer and aletheia and, 203, 207n23 early, 197–201, 203, 206n19, 208n30 later, 197, 198, 208n30 presence and, 201 Heidegger, Martin, scientific reductionism critique by, 2, 6, 7, 9, 51, 112–116, 126, 128, 193, 194, 197–201, 203, 204n3, 206n15, 206n16, 206n19, 206–207n22, 207n23, 207n24, 207n28, 208n30, 292n1 Cassirer debate with, 107 on causation and freedom, 112–116 Glazebrook on, 107, 121n15 Hegel and, 111, 116 Husserl compared with, 107 on Kant, 110, 111, 115–117 neo-Kantians and, 107, 109–111, 114, 115, 117 on objectivity, 113 receptivity understood by, 117 science critiqued by, 107, 108, 119 on subjective metaphysics of representation, 112, 117 on technological thinking, 7, 108, 119, 120 transcendental logic and, 112–116 transcendental objects and, 112–116 Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science (Glazebrook), 107 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 213, 215, 217, 221–224

Hermeneutics, Gadamer of facticity, 9, 198, 201 rehabilitation of authority and tradition in, 195 tension between metaphysics and, 194, 204n3 Hernandez, Jill Graper, 128 Historical consciousness, Gadamer on, 194–196 History, monism and, 237, 239–241, 246 Hitler, Adolph, 87, 142 Hobbes, Thomas, 215–218, 221, 238 Horizon, Gadamer concept of, 118, 197 Horkheimer, Max, 126 Hovelaque, Emile, 234n4 Howard, Ebenezer, 13, 271–273, 275–277 Human Genome Project, 109 Human Molecular Genetics, 109 Human sciences, Gadamer on loss of truth in, 194–197 Hume, David, 18, 19, 21, 30n13, 182, 213, 280, 283, 286, 293n10, 293n12, 293n13 Burke and, 18 MacIntyre criticism of, 280 Husserl, Edmund, 107, 118 co-present margin of, 118 Heidegger compared with, 107 I The Idea of the Good in Platonic-­ Aristotelian Philosophy (Gadamer), 194, 199 Imagination, 85, 159–174, 215, 255–260 Kirk on, 12, 255–260 See also Lewis, C. S., on imagination and reason Instrumentalization of man, Voegelin concept of, 221

 INDEX 

Internal goods, 287, 288 In-totality, Heidegger concept of, 119 Intuition, science and, 143, 157n15 “Is Theology Poetry” (Lewis), 169 J Jacobs, Jane, urban rationalists critiqued by Alexander and, 266, 267 border vacuums and, 267–268, 271, 275, 277, 277n2 cataclysmic money and, 268, 275–277 city image and, 267, 270 constructivist theories and, 270–276 on Howard, 271–273, 275–277 on Olmsted, 270–271 summary of critique, 265 tactile knowledge and, 266, 267 on urban design consequences, 267–270 on urbanization problems, 263–264, 276 urban researchers inspiring, 266 Jeanneret, Charels-Edouard, see Le Corbusier (Charels-Edouard Jeanneret) Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 5, 61–72, 76n38, 91n21, 212, 213, 259 Bible revised by, 212 democracy predictions and, 69 French Revolution and, 69, 213 letter to Weightman, 68 Nietzsche and, 5, 61–73 Plato criticized by, 63, 64 Reagan, Obama and, 61, 62 on reason and Christianity, 63, 72 reason as misunderstood by, 66 reputation of today, 71 skepticism of tradition, 66, 67 Jigsaw puzzle, Berlin analogy of, 238, 243, 245

303

Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard), 54 Joyce, James, Eliot on, 86, 92n44 K Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 141 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 17, 27, 103, 110–118, 136n40, 144, 152, 213, 280, 283, 286, 293n10 Descartes’ dualism and, 144, 152 error of Descartes and, 113 God and, 48, 115 Gordon on, 117 Heidegger on, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117 MacIntyre and, 280, 283, 286 Marcel and, 131, 136n40 mechanism of nature idea of, 116 truth defined by, 113, 115 Kehre (Heidegger), 197, 199 Kierkegaard, Søren, political rationalism and, 2, 4, 47–55, 280, 283, 284, 286 age theory of, 47, 51, 52 The Corsair and, 48 definitions of, 49 Descartes and, 54 on envy, 51, 53, 54 envy and, 51, 53, 54 Habermas and, 49, 57n16 Hegel criticized by, 48, 54 literary criticism used by, 55 MacIntyre criticism of, 58n33, 280, 283, 286 negatively unifying principle, 51, 53 Oakeshott and, 47–49 press viewed by, 52, 58n36, 59n48 pseudonyms of, 54 slavery not addressed by, 51 Spinoza and, 49 A Story of Everyday Life and, 49, 51, 55 Strauss on popularity of, 57n27

304 

INDEX

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 51 Kirk, Russell, rationalism critique by, 12, 252, 255, 256 Birzer on, 255, 259 Burke and, 12, 252, 253, 256 Cicero and, 256, 257 conservatism first principle, 252 conservatism of, 251, 252, 259, 260 Divine mind and, 255, 258 Eliot and, 254, 255 fiction of, 258 on imagination, 257, 258, 260 legacy of, 260 moral relativism and, 255 natural law theory and, 255 on reason’s limits, 253–255 summary of, 253, 260 tradition and, 12, 255–260 on US Constitution, 259 Knowledge, 227, 229, 231, 234n6 Aristotle on forms of, 26 as episteme, 214 de Tocqueville on uncertain, 43 from-to dynamic in, 147 in Hayek epistemology, 184 irrational sources of, 219 locality, 263, 267 personal, 140 physics reduction of, 144 Polanyi concept of, 8, 146, 153 tacit knowing as basis of all, 148 tactile, 266, 267 Knowledge reduction, 144 in scientism, 144 Kuhn, Thomas, 109, 149 Kukathas, Chandran, 190 L Language games, Wittgenstein and, 99 examples, 97–99 mathematics and, 97, 98

rule-following and, 99–101 as toolbox, 96 Lawrence, D. H., 82, 86–88, 92n44 Le Corbusier (Charels-Edouard Jeanneret), 13, 273–277 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 97 Leiter, Brian, 74n20, 75n24, 77n47 Leviathan (Hobbes), 215, 217, 221 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 125 Levy, David, 189 Lewis, C. S., on imagination and reason abolition of man motif of, 174 Christian apologetics of, 159, 166–170 Christianity and, 9, 160–163, 167–170, 173 on education, 173 language metaphor of, 166 “looking at vs. looking along” motif of, 163–166, 168, 174 metaphor of light used by, 163, 169–170 model of universe and, 160, 163, 169–174 Peirce on abductive process and, 168 Platonic “chest” and, 163 rhetorical temper of, 159 symbolization and, 168, 169 Tao and, 173 transposition motif of, 163, 166–169 Voegelin and, 168, 169 Ward on, 160, 162, 172 Liberty, see Freedom Light metaphor, Lewis use of, 163, 167, 169–170 Lincoln, Abraham, 62 Linnæus, Carolus, 108, 109 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Lewis), 172, 175n11 Lippman, Walter, 221

 INDEX 

Literary criticism, Kierkegaard use of, 49, 55 Living cities, 13, 264–266, 269, 275, 277 Locality knowledge, 263, 267 Locke, John, 152, 213, 215, 232, 238, 259 Logical positivism, 145, 242, 243 Berlin and, 242, 243 “Logical Translation” (Berlin), 242 Lynch, Kevin, 267, 269 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 217, 232, 239 Machine metaphor, Polanyi reversal of, 150 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 2, 13, 14, 52, 58n33, 153, 156n6, 181, 204–205n6, 255, 279–291 Aquinas and, 280, 286, 293n10, 293n17 career of, 292n5 on emotivism, 13, 281, 286, 292n7 Enlightenment project and, 255, 283, 284, 291 on good life, 290 Hume criticized by, 280, 293n10 Kant and, 280, 283, 286, 293n10 Kierkegaard and, 52, 58n33, 280, 283, 284, 286, 292n1, 293n10 modern moral philosophy critique by, 13, 279–291 on morality and practices, 289, 294n32 neo-Aristotelian alternative of, 286–291 notion of rights, 284 Polanyi and, 153, 291 on radical disruption, 283 on social science, 284, 285 virtue ethics in works by, 13, 14, 280 Magistra vitae, 196

305

Mandeville, Bernard, 215 Marcel, Gabriel, 7, 125–133 Buber and, 135n36 Catholicism conversion of, 136n37 disponibilité and, 132 on egotism, 130, 131 existentialism of, 7, 126, 128 Kant and, 131, 136n40 Marxism and, 133 on mystery, 7, 125–133 Paris salons of, 7, 125 as philosopher of hope, 132 on reductive abstraction, 126, 127 Sartre and, 7, 125, 131, 132, 136n37 social critiques by, 133 “standing reserve” idea, 126 on techniques of degradation, 128 Thibon and, 133 Maritain, Jacques, 7, 125 Maritain, Raïssa, 125 Marvell, Andrew, 81, 85, 93n47 Marx, Karl (Marxism), 3, 141, 216, 223, 244 Märzrevolution, 47 Masse totale, of Turgot, 218, 221, 223 Mathematics agreement paradox in, 102 as language-game, 97–99 May, Henry F., 211 McGrath, Alister, 160–162, 169, 170, 174 Mechanism of nature, Kant idea of, 116 Medicine, reductionism in, 129, 132 Medieval man, Lewis on universe and, 171 Medieval thinkers, Heidegger and, 115 “Meditations in a Tool Shed” (Lewis), 164, 168, 169 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), 115

306 

INDEX

Meno (Plato), 149 Mere Christianity (Lewis), 159, 161, 162, 166 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 151, 156n10 Metaphysical tradition, Gadamer ties to early Heidegger openness to, 197–200 hermeneutics tension with, 194, 204n3 Metaphysics Heidegger Destruktion (destructuring) of, 198, 199 Kirk and, 253, 254 of modernity, 120, 197, 206n16 subjective metaphysics of representation, 112, 115, 117 Metaxic (in-between structure), 216, 218–220 Methexis, 201, 203, 209n44 Methodologism, Gadamer critique of human science and, 194, 195, 203 Milton, John, 81 Miracles (Lewis), 159–162, 166 “Modern Moral Philosophy” (Anscombe), 13, 279 Møller, P. L., 48 Money, Jacobs on cataclysmic, 264 Monism, see Berlin, Isaiah, monism critique by Moonies, 87 Moore, Thomas, 163 Moral imagination, natural law and, 257, 258 Morality MacIntyre on practices and, 153 in rationalist worldview, 180–182 Moral philosophy, modern, 11, 279–286, 291, 293n17 prominent theories in, 280 See also MacIntyre, Alasdair

Moral relativism Gadamer, Heidegger and, 193, 197 Kirk and, 252, 255 Mouffe, Chantal, 57n15 Murdoch, Iris, 129, 132, 133 Musil, Robert, 216 Mystery, Marcel on problems vs., 125–133 religion and, 129 N Nagel, Thomas, 293n10 Natural law theory, 255 Natural rights/human rights Burke on tradition and, 255, 257 MacIntyre on, 281, 284 Natural sciences Berlin on history and, 11 rationalist worldview and, 181, 182 Natural sciences, Heidegger critique of Heidegger on transcendental objects and, 110, 115–116 subjective metaphysics of representation in, 112, 115, 117 Nazis (Nazism), 212 Nehamas. Alexander, 74n20, 75n24, 76n41, 77n47 Neo-Kantians causation viewed by, 116–117 Heidegger and, 107, 109–111, 114, 117 Oakeshott and, 234n7 The New Science (Vico), 59n48 The New Science of Politics (Voegelin), 217 Newton, Isaac, 229 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 26, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich advice of, 71, 73

 INDEX 

on Christian morality, 65 on death of God, 72 Deleuze on, 74n20, 75n25 eternal recurrence, 73, 77n56 hammer analogy of, 5, 61–78 on nihilism crisis, 5, 63, 69–71, 199 on objectivity, 65, 71, 77n47 “On the Tarantulas” essay by, 68 on Oracle of Reason, 63–66 perspectivism of, 66 on Platonic Christianity, 63 ressentiment concept of, 65, 68, 71 Nihilism critical rationalism as leading to, 140 definition of, 70 Nietzsche and, 5, 63, 69–71, 199 Polanyi fear of, 8, 145, 155 Nous (transcendent experience of reason), 214 “Nymph and Fawn” (Eliot), 85 O Oakeshott, Michael, rationalism critique by, 7, 10, 11, 13, 47, 55 coherence theory of truth, 228, 233 concrete mind described by, 230 Descartes and, 54, 229, 234n5 idealist philosophers and, 228 Kierkegaard and, 47 logical irrelevance and, 11, 228 “no common subject matter” claim of, 228, 229, 232 sovereignty of technique and, 7, 55, 229, 231, 232 summary of criticism by, 7 theory-practice problem and, 233 on value-based traditions, 48 works relevant to, 11 Obama, Barack, 61, 62

307

Objectivity Berlin and, 240 Gadamer and, 10, 196 Heidegger and, 110–115, 119, 120 MacIntyre on, 279, 284, 289 Nietzsche on, 65, 71 Occam’s razor, 120 Of the Perfect Commonwealth (Hume), 18 Old Regime, see Ancien Régime Olmsted, Frederick Law, 270–271 On the Essence of Truth (Heidegger), 115 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) ascetic ideals analysis in, 70, 71, 77n47 perspectivism and, 65, 66, 70, 71, 74n20, 77n47 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 108 “On the Reading of Old Books” (Lewis), 174 “On the Tarantulas” (Nietzsche), 68 Ontology, Hayek epistemology and, 180, 183–185 Oracle of Reason, Nietzsche on ascetic ideals and, 70, 71 overcoming, 66–70 politics, 66–70 Orchestra analogy, Lewis use of, 166, 167 Orthodoxy Eliot and, 81, 85, 86, 89, 93n47 Polanyi’s dynamic, 154–155 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis), 162, 168 P Paine, Thomas, 1, 17, 213 Pater, Walter, 89 Paternalism, monism and, 243, 244 Pattern language, in cities, 266 Pattern recognition, Hayek on, 184 Peano, Giuseppe, 99

308 

INDEX

Peirce, Charles S., 150, 153, 156–157n12, 168, 176n36 abduction and, 168 Personal Knowledge (Polanyi), 140, 148 Personal knowledge, Polanyi concept of tacit knowing and, 8, 154 Perspectivism, Nietzsche and, 66, 70, 71, 74n20 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard), 54, 59n53 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 96 Philosophy Anscombe work on modern moral, 279, 280 Berlin on monism and, 237 de Tocqueville on philosophes, 4, 34 Marcel on purpose of, 126, 130, 132, 133 Oakeshott on idealism and, 227 politics and, 19, 20, 28, 34, 133, 180, 238, 239, 246, 252 as search for justification, 95, 103 teleology and moral, 2, 12, 13, 19, 194, 199, 279–291 Wittgenstein on “done right,” 95 Phronesis (practical wisdom), 16, 26, 27, 40, 143, 157n16, 199, 203 Gadamer work on, 199, 203 science and, 40 Physics quantum, 182 reduction of knowledge to, 115 Pinochet, Augusto, 189 Plato Berlin and, 237, 244 “chest” understood by, 174 Gadamer and, 194, 201–203, 205n11, 208n29 Jefferson criticism of, 63, 213 Polanyi and, 149 Voegelin and, 217 Plotinus, Gadamer and, 201

Pocock, J. G. A., 14n1, 16, 20, 21, 29n5, 29n6 enthusiasm discourse and, 20 Poincaré, Jules Henri, 149 Polanyi, Michael, post-critical approach of correcting excesses of scientific rationalism, 145–152 Descartes and, 152 dual control dynamic of, 150, 151, 154 dynamic orthodoxy and, 154–155 on emergent being and indwelling, 140, 150–152 Enlightenment viewed by, 8, 139, 140, 153–155 historical setting for, 143 interpretive frameworks and, 140 knowledge distortions and, 8, 140 knowledge forms of, 186 machine metaphor reversal of, 150 Peirce and, 150, 157n12 on personal knowledge and tacit knowing, 8, 146, 154–155 on political extremism roots in Enlightenment, 154–155 reality, morality, society and, 154–155 on scientific discovery, 149, 153 as scientist, 8, 154–155 as sympathetic critic, 8 transcendentals and, 153, 157n14 universal intent and, 146, 153 Political science, de Tocqueville on, 38, 39 Political Treatise (Spinoza), 49 Politics attempts to transcend, 10, 217, 218, 220 Berlin on monism and, 12, 238, 243–246 Burke and, 3, 16, 19, 24, 133, 256 conservative moment in, 12, 16, 245

 INDEX 

de Tocqueville political science, 3, 4, 35, 38, 39 freedom and political science, 3, 4, 35, 38, 39, 217 Hayek theory of, 180, 188–189 Mouffe definition of, 57n15 Oakeshott essays on, 6, 47, 227, 234n4 Oracle of Reason on, 66–70 political religions and, 212, 216, 220, 222, 224 prudence and, 256 religion and, 212, 216, 220, 222, 224 religious movement as, 48 robust political economy, 189 Spinoza on rationalism in, 49 Tocqueville on philosophy and, 3, 34 zoon politikon, 26 See also Kierkegaard, Søren, political rationalism and The Politics of Prudence (Kirk), 252 Pope, Alexander, Newton Epitaph by, 212 Post-critical approach, see Polanyi, Michael, post-critical approach of Postmodernists, scientism response of, 145 Pound, Ezra, 87 Pragmatists, 6, 181 Praxis, 188, 199, 233 Present at hand, object appearance as, 112, 114, 117 Price, Richard, 17, 20, 22 Priestley, Joseph, 17, 21, 22 Prince (Machiavelli), 217, 232 Prince Caspian (Lewis), 172 Problem of appearances, 111 The Problem of Pain (Lewis), 159, 162, 163 Problems of disorganized complexity, 265 Problems of organized complexity, 265 Problems of simplicity, 265, 266

309

Property rights, Hayek on, 186 Protagoras, 212 Prudence Aristotelian-Ciceronian, 22, 23, 27 in Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition, 26 Christian prudentia and, 25, 26 Psychology, in Hayekian alternative, 180, 183 Q Quantum physics, 182 R Radiant City, 274, 275 Ransom Trilogy (Lewis), 159, 162, 166 Rationalism critical, 140, 142, 148 technocratic, 7, 126 Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (Oakeshott), 227, 229, 231 Ready-to-hand, object appearance as, 112, 114, 117 Reagan, Ronald, 61, 62 Reason American freedom and, 40–42 ascetic ideals and, 5 Burke on politics and, 16, 23 Christianity as democracy and, 68, 72 de Tocqueville on freedom and, 40–42 democracy of, 5, 62, 68, 71–73 Jefferson’s misunderstanding of, 66 Jefferson view of Christianity and, 63, 68 Kirk on limits of, 253–255 nous and, 214, 221 transcendence and, 214, 221 See also Lewis, C.S., on imagination and reason; Oracle of Reason, Nietzsche on

310 

INDEX

Recollections (de Tocqueville), 3, 39 Red Cross Information Service, 127 Reductionism machine metaphor and, 150 in medicine, 132 reductive abstraction and, 126 Voegelin on, 217 Reductionism, scientific Heidegger and, 110 monism and, 12 technological thinking and, 120 Voegelin critique of, 217 See also Heidegger, Martin, scientific reductionism critique by Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 3, 17 main intention of, 19 Reginster, 76n42, 77n56 on eternal recurrence, 78n56 Relativism, Gadamer and, 193–203 Religion Burke and, 20, 256 Marcel on mystery and, 129 politics and, 20, 79 Voegelin on, 10, 212 Republic (Plato), 18 Ressentiment, Nietzsche concept of, 65, 68, 70–72 Revolutionary Enlightenment, 211 See also French Revolution; Glorious Revolution Rights of Man, 253 Riots, bread, 47, 52 Robust political economy, 189 Romantics, 16, 17, 80, 87, 142 Rorty, Richard, 181, 203n1 Rule of law, Hayek on social justice and, 188 Russell, Bertrand, 99, 179 Russian Revolution, 142 Ryle, Gilbert, 151 Ryn, Claes, 164, 172

S The Sacred Wood (Eliot), 80, 83, 85 “obedient progeny” and, 83 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 125, 126, 131, 132, 134n7, 136n37, 136n45 Marcel and, 125, 126, 131, 132 Sasaki, Ken-ichi, 266, 267, 269, 274 urban tactility idea of, 266, 274 Schoolmen, medieval, 113 Science (scientific rationalism) appearance of objects in, 108–109, 111–114 corrections to excesses of, 145–146 de Tocqueville on democracy and, 3 Descartes and Kant error repeated in modern, 113 discovery stages in, 149 Gadamer on human, 194–197, 203 glamorized view of, 146 Heidegger critique of, 6, 108 intuition and, 149, 157n15 Jefferson faith in, 5, 62 “looking along vs. looking at” in, 165 MacIntyre on social science and, 284, 285, 292n5 as metaphysics of modernity, 120 Polanyi on, 8, 145, 155 problem categories in, 265 shared criticism of reductionism in, 282 See also Reductionism, scientific Scientism Berlin on monism and, 12 Heidegger criticism of, 107, 114 knowledge reduction in, 144 MacIntyre and, 279, 284, 291 Polanyi opposition to, 139–155 Scientism (Hayek), 183 Scientistic monism, 12 Scott, Peter Dale, 3, 79, 80 Scottish Enlightenment, 9, 18, 179, 183, 186

 INDEX 

Second order minds, Eliot and, 81 Second Realities, Voegelin on, 218 Second Treatise (Locke), 232 Second World War, 7, 125, 128, 188, 253 Secularization of soul, 216 The Sensory Order (Hayek), 183 Sensus communis, 129, 290 Sexual impulse, Lewis on looking along, 164 “The Shadow in the Rose Garden” (Lawrence), 86 Shakespeare, William, 83, 85 Shusterman, Richard, 82, 91n18, 91n20, 91n28 Smith, Adam, 183, 213, 215 Smith, P. Christopher, 208n42 Social engineering, Tocqueville critique of, 4 Social science, MacIntyre on, 284, 285, 292n5 Sophistry, Burke criticism and alternative to, 27 Sophocles, Gadamer and, 196 Soul, secularization of, 216 Spinoza, Benedict de, 49, 84 Spontaneity, neo-Kantians view of, 116, 117 Spontaneous order, 13, 186, 187, 234, 264, 266, 276, 277 Stages on Life’s Way (Kierkegaard), 48 Steiner, Mark, 104n9 STEM education, 7, 120 A Story of Everyday Life (Gyllembourg), 49, 50 Strauss, Leo, 15, 16, 206n16 Burke misunderstood by, 15 on Kierkegaard popularity, 57n27 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 49 Symbolization, Lewis, Voegelin and, 168, 169, 176n40

311

T Tacit knowing Hayek and, 188 personal knowledge and, 8, 146–148, 154 Tactile knowledge, 266 Taylor, Charles, 153, 181 Taylor, John, 67 Techniques of degradation, 128 Technocratic rationalism, Marcel critique of reductive abstraction and, 126, 127 technical ethos and, 126, 127 Technological thinking, Heidegger critique of, 7, 108 Teleology (teleos), MacIntyre on, 13, 279–291 Thatcher, Margaret, 189 That Hideous Strength (Lewis), 166 Thibon, Gustave, 133 Thomistic ethics, 13 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 68 Till We Have Faces (Lewis), 168 Tolkien, J. R. R., 258 Tolstoy, Leo, 239, 244 Town-country magnate, Wright, F. L., concept of, 272, 273 Tradition Aristotelian-Ciceronian, 26, 28 Burke on natural rights and, 255, 257 conservative intellectual, 251, 260 enduring moral truths and, 252, 255 Jefferson skepticism of, 67 Kirk, Burke on, 255, 257 MacIntyre on teleos and, 280 Oakeshott on value-based, 48 See also Eliot, T. S., tradition and; Metaphysical tradition, Gadamer ties to

312 

INDEX

Transcendence and transcendentals Polanyi and, 153 reason and, 214, 221 Voegelin and, 10, 214 Transposition, Lewis motif of, 166, 168 Truth and Method (Gadamer) on hermeneutics, 194 transcendence and, 194, 196 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 213, 217, 218, 220–224 The Twenty-fifth Hour (Gheorghiu), 128 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 63, 64, 71, 75n24 Two Ages: A Literary Review (Kierkegaard), 47–49, 51, 54, 55 public sphere and, 48 Tyranny of technique, 7, 129 U Uncertainty, de Tocqueville on, 35 Unfathomed indeterminate, as Being, 118 United Kingdom, free-market reforms in, 189 United States (US), see America Universal intent, Polanyi concept of, 146, 150, 153, 154 Urban planning constructivism and, 264, 270 Hayek and, 12, 264 problem categories applied to, 275 researchers inspiring Jacobs, 266 utopias and, 13, 270 See also Jacobs, Jane, urban rationalists critiqued by Urban tactility, 266, 274 USSR, five-year plans in, 145 Utopia (Moore), 18

Utopias Berlin on writers of, 243 Garden City, 272 ideologies based on, 212 urban design and, 270 V Vattel, Emerich de, 28, 31n40 Vengeance, equality as, 68 “Verification” (Berlin), 242 Vetö, Miklos, 125 Vico, Giambattista, 238, 239 Virtue ethics, 14, 280 Voegelin, Eric, Enlightenment rationalism critiqued by, 10, 55, 168 on act of grace, 223 apostatic revolt and, 10, 212 Aristotle and, 214, 217, 221, 222 Comte and, 213, 217, 218, 220–223 Condorcet and, 213, 217, 218, 221–224 on consciousness of epoch, 217, 225n16 crisis of order and, 10, 212, 213, 224 Enlightenment definition and, 212 false spirituality contention of, 214 Helvétius and, 213, 215, 217, 221–224 Hobbes and, 215–218, 221 instrumentalization of man idea of, 221 on irrationality of Enlightenment, 219–221 Lewis and, 168, 169 logophobia term used by, 219 May compared with, 211

 INDEX 

on metaxic, 216, 218–220 Plato and, 214, 217, 218, 221 political religions concern of, 10, 212, 216, 220, 222, 224 primary work, 214 on problem of method, 219–221 progressive historicism and, 215, 219–221 religion focus of, 214, 224 on Second Realities, 216, 218 transcendence and, 214, 216, 221 on Western crisis, 10, 212–214, 216, 217, 224 “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (Oakeshott)of Mankind, 234n2 Voltaire, 1, 10, 22, 45n22, 213, 215–217, 238 von Doderer, Heimito, 216 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Lewis), 172 W Wachterhauser, Brice, 197, 209n44 Wahl, Jean, 125 Ward, Michael, 160, 162, 172, 177n63 Weaver, Warren, 265 Weber, Max, 216, 218, 225n12 Weightman, Roger, 68 Whigs, 16, 17, 21, 30n17 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (MacIntyre), 280, 293n10

313

Whyte, William, 266, 267 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 69 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 95–101, 103, 104n9, 161, 181 on arbitrariness, 6 on clarification vs. justification, 99 Hayek and, 181 language-games idea of, 6, 99–101, 181 on life forms and language, 102 mathematics paradox and, 102, 104n12 normativity and, 99, 101 philosophy done right according to, 95 rationalism appeal and, 103 rationalism definition and, 6, 95, 103 rule-following in language-­ games, 99–101 on search for justification, 95, 103 Steiner on, 104n9 teachers of, 99 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 13, 273, 275–277 Wright, Richard, 51, 58n32 Y Yeats, William Butler, 87 Z Zoon politikon (political being), 26