As I see it, part of the problem with the approach characteristic of Deneen and company is not merely a romanticizing of halcyon days that are now surely, if not entirely, irrevocably lost and an underappreciation of its own peculiar obstacles to virtue. They also fail to take seriously the ways in which a kind of hyper-Lockeanization of the individual, and the technological dimension of human freedom, actually illuminates the nature of human virtue, and to go one step further, often against its own intentions, further reveals some important truths central to Christian (or Pascalian) psychology.
I’ve made this argument before on this blog to partially rehabilitate Locke even while taking him to task: it is certainly true that his emphasis on the divide between nature and freedom plus the radical autonomy of the individual seem doomed to result in the transformation of every natural human relation into matters of consent and calculations of self interest. This is never more obvious than in his dissection of the family–marriage is nothing other than a “voluntary compact” between two individuals based upon rights and privilages to each other’s bodies and the care parents have for their progeny is reduced to an obligation based on a child’s insufficient measure of rationality (and therefore not yet entirely autonomous freedom). The paradoxical move in Locke’s social scientific thought experiment–attempting to account for all of human life through the prism of autonomous freedom–is that it requires a powerful abstraction of logos from eros–the relation we have to spouses is a matter of cerebral calculation versus erotic longing. Nevertheless, he recognizes that this doesn’t quite capture the incentive for coupling in the first place and therefore he also needs a corresponding de-eroticization of the body— marriage is a kind of corporeal contract but those carnal motivations are weak enough to succumb to the language of pedestrian interest and computation. Locke, in typical modern form form, wants to liberate the intelect from the will which means reducing the will to the machinations of the intellect. He describes for us a pefectly rational but perfectly loveless family.
However, Locke’s otherwise perverse depiction of family life does manage to capture an important element of the real significance of the unique individual and of that unique individual’s choice that was historically neglected. He argues for the equality between the man the woman both within their own compact and with respect to the authority they wield over their children. He also argues for the protections that children deserve from harm, the care they must have and are morally obligated to receive, and a certain freedom they should have from their parents once they are capable of making decisions for themselves. Moreover, while Locke certainly goes too far in reducing marriage to one choice among many he does rightfully argue for some real choice consistent with real eros–that marriage is a loving relationship freely entered into by two free and equally significant individuals. Locke’s unhinged reductionism exposes the also unhinged reductionism of those who want marriage to be absorbed into the political, the traditional, or the natural or used to justify the subservience of one to the other. This is one somewhat quasi- Tocquevillian element in my purposely generous reading of Locke–that in loosening conventional ties he does not strengthen but further articulates, against his own intentions, something about the strength and limitations of natural ties.
Of course, Locke’s concessions here and there to the erotic nature of marriage and the loving ties of family life defy the parameters of his thought experiment–spouses can divorce each other at will when their interests no longer coincide and sons largely honor their fathers out of an expectation of their patrimony. Nevertheless, Locke’s exaggerated interpretation of freedom–that it only really finds full expression when contrary to nature–still helps to elucidate the way the free choices of the full human person are not simply identical to the dictates of nature or the contingent circumstances of history.
The F-Porchers recognize the technological dimension of freedom that Locke hyperbolically valorized—they often talk of the tension created between us and nature by the fact of our natural selves and our freedom to transcend our natural selves. However, they seem to think that the modern emphasis (I won’t say discovery) on this individuality unbounded didn’t teach us anything helpful or true about who we are or even help affirm the truth of the Christian anthropology that sees each free, rational, and loving human being as simply irreplaceable and not reducible to any set of political, cultural, or natural circumstances. The problem of Locke’s view is that he narrows human freedom to this technological dimension creating a kind of modern schizophrenia–we are the masters and possessors of nature, the captains of our fate, but we only experience this mastery when our fate is to become other than what we really are–our mastery is driven by a deep misanthropy. Likewise, the problem for the F-Porchers is that they embrace certain conditions that make free moral life optimally possible but then reduce the possibility of that freedom to the historical circumstances within which it emerges. The have very reasonably rejected Locke but without learning some valuable lessons he offers about freedom, individuality, and our place in nature.
June 28th, 2009 | 6:59 pm
So good post. I certainly agree that the last sentence summarizes a big problem with FPRs.
June 28th, 2009 | 8:15 pm
Lawler: Or it shows that FPRs differ from pomocons in not viewing nature sub specie technologiae.
Speaking primarily for myself, I find Ivan’s privileging of Pascalian psychology revealing, since Pascal makes concessions to the modern construal of nature that I want to join with the Pope (among others) in resisting. This also bears on Lawler’s muted characterization of FPR as pagan, which I will counter by wondering whether Lawler’s position is a bit too Protestant or Jansenist. Paganism seems to me not a bad ground upon which to build Catholicism. And it is in the end a Catholic understanding of nature and the relationship of nature and grace that I want to defend, not a Pascalian tangent to that tradition. (And of course this leads me to want to maintain some reservations about Tocqueville too, love him though I do.)
All too briefly: The dominant premodern philosophical tradition joins with Genesis 1 in recognizing goodness as a principle of being; the modern scientific analysis of nature and the technological stance it underwrites rejects this metaphysics (and this goes all the way back to the nominalists). How we understand the truth about freedom depends in significant measure on where we come down on this metaphysical divide. The impression that I’m starting to get is that our two groups fall on opposite sides, at least in terms of the ways our sensibilities lead us to answer the question.
June 28th, 2009 | 10:49 pm
In the spirit of pro wrestling, the question of who’s the extremist might be answered by Mark S’s use of “inexorable”–as in inexorable progress toward contentless individualism or even, as Mr. Goldman complains below, his laying so much emphasis on nominalist metaphysics as a fundamental cause of historical change. (Hobbes and Locke, in my view, used nominalism as a weapon [appropriately] for purposes that were basically moral.) The postmodern view is that makes little sense to say there’s NOTHING good about modern technology or even that technological success doesn’t show us anything about who we are. I’m all for the goodness of being, but part of being is our freedom. Mark’s reservations about Tocqueville appear to have to do with disdain for our French friend’s fair and balanced approach–which leads him to observe, for example, that the while the democrats have to indefinite a view of human perfectibility, the aristocratic view was too definite or vainly deluded. T. also says, of course, that had he lived in aristocratic times, he would have encouraged people to do more to pursue prosperity, just as in democratic times he talks up the soul and its ineradicable needs against arrogantly reductionistic materialists. The idea that our two groups are opposites, for that matter, seems to me extremist. If Mark is right, T. would join we postmodern conservatives in branding the FPRs as extremists, although ones that provide a salutary corrective to reigning prejudices. Still, I agree that there’s an up side to being pagan, and maybe I’m not pagan enough. I did teach a course last spring on the plausibility of Stoic ethics in America today, though. How many of you FPRs did that?
June 28th, 2009 | 10:52 pm
Although, if you want to talk Genesis, you’ll recall that nothing is said about man being good. And a lot of this dispute, as Ivan’s previous posts on techno-politics points out, concerns technologies of controlling human beings, rather than nature understood in the Lockean sense as the nonhuman.
Also, not to ride my own hobby horse, I want to suggest again the motherlode of the modern position on technology is not Locke–who I’ve always thought gets blamed for claims that his arguments vaguely point toward but don’t actually assert–but rather Fichte. Heidegger, I might add, thinks the same.
June 29th, 2009 | 9:06 am
Not to ride my own hobby horse, but this is one reason why I pulled Nietzsche from German philosophy with a long pair of tongs and ran as fast and far away as I could.
June 29th, 2009 | 10:33 am
And, Schelling provided the materials necessary to interupt the line-of-meaning from Marx, to Hegel, to Boehme and restore order… that Schelling heartily cheered by the German people forced to endure the egophanic revolt.
June 29th, 2009 | 2:39 pm
[...] Ivan Kenneally tries to synthesize nature, technology, and the individual. [...]
June 29th, 2009 | 4:53 pm
Sam: I’d be happy to hear more about your thoughts on Fichte (maybe you should email me if you care to). You’ll need to convince me that I shouldn’t reach for my revolver, though, if you want to argue that Fichte’s explicit arguments have had more practical historical influence than not only what Locke said, but also what remains implicit but still INEXORABLY present (that one’s for Peter) in the adoption of his program.
Peter: Quite wounded that you would accuse me of disdaining any fair and balanced approach, though I might be pressing too far one way in my dialectical zeal to stir things up some more. Tocqueville’s balance and good sense is one of the things I love most about him, and I have not a shred of disdain for him.
You’ll have to explain what you are calling my “extremism”.
As for the historical influence of nominalism, I don’t have as detailed an account of that as I some day hope to. It is striking, however, how pervasive and deeply-rooted a characteristic of modern thought it is. It is our “common sense” view, which Hobbes and Locke (and Condillac and Rousseau) helped to bring about, and I don’t think that can be the case without important consequences for how we treat our world and understand ourselves. But again, I’ll have to get some account from you of the moral ends served by nominalist polemics, maybe next time we meet. (Part of my reservations about Tocqueville is that he appears to be a nominalist philosophically, which is not unrelated to his esteem for Pascal and Rousseau. Is it extreme to have reservations about someone’s teachings when you think he is philosophically misguided? Only if you maintain a more extreme insulation than I am willing to accept between theoretical and practical reason, though I do recognize that they operate quite differently.)
June 30th, 2009 | 9:44 am
It’s not extreme to have reservations. It’s extreme to see NOTHING good in… Locke etc. employed extreme nominalism–which he knew to be untrue–to create unprecedented human liberty. In a sense, he knew nominalism would become more true as a description, but it could never become completely true. Part of the description of world where words are weapons and nothing but is of the incessant pursuit of happiness, but no real happiness, not to mention no real love etc. But Locke knew well enough that that extreme world would be unendurable, and he had, I think, enough confidence on “human nature” to think it would never become anything like completely real. Even Tocqueville–viewing an America heavily influenced by Locke–thought of that description as a kind of democratic tendency that was countered in many ways in American practice. Locke’s assumption was that freedom and prosperity would, on balance, make us more happy or at least definitely less miserable. And his morality was something like stop whining, start sweating, God helps those who help themselves etc. etc. Locke also thought, following Descartes, that we can only have certain knowledge of what we make, and we shouldn’t rest content with Socratic “zetetic” uncertainty.But that criticism too is in a way moral; philosophers too should do what they can to know more and be more helpful. Locke’s perception of the indifference of nature to the being of the human person or individual isn’t exactly a complete innovation, after all. (Think about Aristotle’s God–a principle, not a person.) (Or think about Augustine’s description of the miseries of our mortality–which is meant to show we can only be happy in hope. Locke’s hope, of course, is quite different.)
June 30th, 2009 | 10:23 am
[...] Our PAL has made a comment down there that deserves some above-the-fold riffing. He writes that Locke knew nominalism would become more true as a description, but it could never become completely true. Part of the description of world where words are weapons and nothing but is of the incessant pursuit of happiness, but no real happiness, not to mention no real love etc. But Locke knew well enough that that extreme world would be unendurable, and he had, I think, enough confidence on “human nature” to think it would never become anything like completely real. Even Tocqueville – viewing an America heavily influenced by Locke – thought of that description as a kind of democratic tendency that was countered in many ways in American practice. Locke’s assumption was that freedom and prosperity would, on balance, make us more happy or at least definitely less miserable. [...]
July 8th, 2009 | 7:10 pm
[...] Ivan Kenneally [...]
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