So now that we’re “cooking with gas,” as the great man says, let me say something to the Porchers-with whom we’ve just become friends–about Strauss and “us,” keeping in mind that there are big details here that Ralph and the Ralphians wouldn’t fully embrace:
Strauss thinks of the individual as both modern and Christian. The truth is that the modern individual depends on distinctively Christian premises but is not Christian. The status of the individual—the being invented by Hobbes, Locke, etc.—is not the same thing as the status of individuality.
Individuality depends on the insight that each human being exists for himself as a whole—or not just a part. He or she is a unique, irreplaceable being with a personal identity. The person is, among other things, a part of a family, country, friendship, and so forth, but the person can’t be reduced merely to being a part. A being with individuality knows himself to have a real personal fate and so real personal responsibility. A person is always a who and not a what, and so God is also a who, not a what.
The person can’t be reduced to the impersonal rational “systems” that can describe pure mind or pure body. Strauss says the world is the home of the mind, but no person—not even the character Socrates invented by Plato and Xenophon—is pure mind and so no person can be fully incorporated into some impersonal whole that would be fully satisfying to minds. Strauss says that the real concern of the philosopher is eternity or not ephemeral human lives, and physicists at least typically have relied on impersonal laws of nature characteristic of matter that’s neither created nor destroyed. But no person is eternal, which is not the same thing as saying persons are necessarily ephemeral.
Both Strauss and the physicists seem to say that a man is most fully himself when he loses himself in contemplation of eternity, but the truth is that, deep down, persons are incapable of losing themselves, of not knowing the truth about themselves in some sense. Darwin (not to mention many materialists ancient and modern) says that everything can be described in terms of bodies—in terms of the impersonal process of evolution. But no person can be fully described as the “species fodder” Darwin says every living being is, and persons never really fully believe that the Darwinian teaching applies to them, to their personal experiences. Strauss says that the philosopher, most deeply, is a citizen of the whole, but the person can’t be reduced to a part of some necessarily impersonal eternal whole called “nature” or to part of the evolutionary process that we now call “nature.” No person is a citizen of a whole.
The real existence of the person—the being with individuality—was defended by St. Augustine in his polemic against the serious theologies of the Greeks and Romans—natural theology and civil theology. Both reduce the person to nothing more than a part of a whole—either nature or “the city.” St. Augustine, of course, denied that persons are most deeply “political animals.” They are, in truth, aliens or pilgrims in the country where they find themselves. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have political inclinations and responsibilities, but they can’t be fully described by them. No person can be fully described by either “philosophy” or “law” or both, in the senses Strauss means them.
The truth is that the person is, most deeply, not a political but a social animal, but not merely the gregarious chimp described by Darwin. He is “hardwired”—so to speak—to be a relational being, to find his own identity in relation to other persons. Because God is a person, he could not exist alone, but always in relation to other persons. That’s why the doctrine of the Trinity is indispensable for understanding him.
So the modern individual—in his sovereign emotional self-sufficiency—is no person. He’s stuck with creating himself out of nothing. And even God didn’t do THAT. More to come.
June 28th, 2009 | 12:25 pm
Here is a significantly, but slightly, different view: Hobbes and Locke did not simply invent something called the modern individual — although the sort of character ripped out of the religious framework supplied by both Hobbes and Locke sure would look, and behave, like it. More on that in a moment. The main difference between Hobbes and Locke is that the world of the Hobbesian individual is first and foremost social, while that of the Lockean individual is natural. Critics of modernity are often inclined to attack Locke for setting the bad individual loose on the (natural) world; but Lockean liberalism, as a huge host of evidence shows, is a boring prison to the kinds of individuals on the loose in liberalism today. Even an individual rapaciously obsessed with mastering nature tends to require a certain, well, certitude about the integrity of his incarnate identity — whereas the individual rapaciously obsessed with conquering women and usurping men tends, like Don Juan, to deliberately deconstruct his incarnate identity, becoming everyone and no one. The modern individual exploiting the natural world, if the stories about Locke are accepted, tends to create a social and political order which winds up repugnant to the sorts of persons rampant today who are far more interested in conspiracies of consensual, mutual exploitation, and the personal deconstruction that goes along with it.
Now, talking about this latter sort of person — a defining figure of contemporary life — could lead us in reference to a ‘third wave of modernity’, such that the Lockean world of abusing the natural world leads inexorably or logically to a counter-Lockean world of abusing the cosocial world. Following Strauss, we would apparently see in this third wave a final revelation of the inevitable problems with individuality, visited upon us whether any plain person wanted to pursue them to the logical bottom or not. But as Dr. Lawler suggests above, for Strauss the relationship between the individual and individuality seems to be one of harmony, not tension: the more one has individuality, the more one is an individual, simple as that. Yet thinking in this way is an assault of sorts on the authority of creation, and the authority of our condition as incarnate individual beings. The obsessive pursuit of individuality, as our misguided pomos have shown us, has led in contemporary life to the fragmentation and disorientation of the incarnate individual. Seeking more individuality is even more difficult than seeking more utils. The quest to ensure that more and more areas of one’s life are shot through with ‘me-ish-ness’ is one that culminates in the sort of arbitrariness and soft nihilism of low expectations characteristic of bad pomos, who have to trust geniuses like Rorty to teach them who to want to rule over them in official life while they sail the endless seas of all-too-public ‘private’ passion in unofficial life.
At bottom, the idea that the individual as exploiter of the natural world forced us into thinking of the individual as the mutually, consensually exploiting being is just not convincing. Something else is afoot — something internal to the struggle for repose in our incarnate individual being, something present at the creation of ‘modernity’ and present when those blamed for creating modernity were doing what they were doing too. The allure of the eternal and the allure of the novel tug the incarnate individual to and fro in an energetic, but often wearying, oscillation; the individual seeks to experience himself in his eternal character as a uniquely created being, but also in his novel character as a participant in the endless recombinations of more and less durable relationships that give him the resources to develop and revise his qualities. The possibility of unifying these two experiences, stuck in such profound tension, is most alluring. It takes shape in the promise of individuality as the ‘essence’ of individual being — something at once more wondrously Protean and Pelagian than our merely incarnate persons yet more transcendent than our fleeting novel experiences. ‘Individuality’ suddenly seems to salve the discomfort of being stuck with ourselves by assimilating us into a bottomless reservoir of totality; our individuality is a sort of force or energy that animates our raw material in a way that makes us special. This is Emerson’s and Mill’s account of individuality. For them, ‘individual’ is simply an honorific title we grant to those who seem to be fully experiencing individuality.
The upside of this heavy innuendo is that the allure of individuality, and the cultish or mystical enthusiasm it generates as a moral ideal, looks quite a lot like Tocqueville’s idea of pantheism. And the allure of pantheism in a democratic age, Tocqueville tells us, has little to do with any logic of modernity; it has to do with the nature of the soul of the democratic individual. Obviously the Emersonian or Millean vision of individuality is a lot different than the Lawlerian vision, which downplays the way in which individuality has been elevated into a superstition or moral ideal in order to free us from the authoritative obligations that we recognize when we admit our character — and that of our fellow humans — as uniquely incarnate individual beings.
June 28th, 2009 | 1:07 pm
Dr. Lawler –
Your penultimate paragraph makes me think you’ve (accidentally?) found common ground between pomocons and Martin Buber. (Or maybe you’ve just given me insight into why he was sometimes accused of being “too Christian” for a Jewish thinker.)
That’s really all I’ve got to contribute to this FPR-Pomocon showdown, exciting as it is to watch. You guys are pretty well over my head (though I think you may be finally driving me to read more Strauss).
June 28th, 2009 | 1:32 pm
I would like to bring up Kierkegaard.
Mr. Lawler writes that Strauss believed the life spent in contemplation was the model life; this was indeed the opinion of Strauss and is the opinion of the classics. In some sense, it has also been incorporated into Christian philosophy -the idea that one surrenders individuality so that one may contemplate the Good and live, in a sense, in eternity. And yet, eternity, the good, is not God, but God’s law; by sacrificing individuality to contemplate the eternal, one enters into an indirect relation with the Absolute, or God. A man in such a relation is what Kierkegaard called a knight of infinite resignation; he has surrendered his own individuality to live in the “ethical” or eternal, that is, what the Greeks would have called the life of contemplation.
Now, I think there are two salient points that derive from the above. First, is the obvious difficulty of “forgetting yourself” and living the life of contemplation -very, very few can do so. This, I believe, has been one of the conservative defenses of tradition and ritual -that tradition and ritual “democratize” the mysteries of the life of contemplation and allow the masses to enter into that life through the ritual and ceremony.
The second point is that Christianity introduces a radical innovation in the relation between the individual and eternity -between the Individual and Virtue. Pre-Christian philosophers believed Virtue was the highest state; the knight of infinite resignation who resigned his individuality to enter into the ethical, the life of Virtue, is the model. But Christianity introduces a further movement -the movement of faith. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham and Mary, for example, entered first into Virtue and resigned their individuality, but then resigned virtue to reassert their individuality and enter into an Absolute relation with the Absolute -a direct relation with God that transcended the indirect communion with God through His Law. When Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac, for example, he was no longer living the life of contemplation, but he was in a higher state, a direct relationship with the deity -the ethical had been temporarily suspended as the knight of faith had entered into a direct relation with God.
I bring this up because it may shed some light on the great error of liberal individualism. Christianity introduced a means through which the individual could rise above the ethical and enter into a direct relation with the deity that was -superior- to the ethical. Obviously, however, such a knight of faith first had to make the movement into the ethical, the life of contemplation, and then the further movement by which the ethical was sacrificed and individuality reasserted to commune directly with God. Kierkegaard called this the movement of the absurd for reason that it required paradox to make -as far as Kierkegaard was concerned, only Abraham and Mary had ever made it.
The error of liberal individualism, in a sense, is that it has taken this Christian innovation and stripped it of its difficulty -for whereas the Christian first had to enter the life of contemplation and then emerge from that by virtue of faith to suspend the ethical and enter into a direct relation with God, the liberal individual has no need of this middle step and makes the movement directly from the lower individuality, suspending the ethical, to his conception of the Absolute -which, in our society, has become Relative. What this means, in effect, is that the liberal individual now defines his own good and then suspends the ethical or eternal, the life of contemplation, to enter into a direct relation with his relative Good. It is an almost devilish parody of the Christian ideal.
A Chart:
The Classical Ideal: INDIVIDUAL –> ETHICAL
The Christian Ideal: INDIVIDUAL — > ETHICAL –> NEW INDIVIDUAL –> GOD (ABSOLUTE)
The Liberal Ideal: INDIVIDUAL –> HIS GOOD (RELATIVE)
Yours &c.,
Maro
June 28th, 2009 | 2:05 pm
JLW–we postmodern cons don’t say “over my head”–by “above my pay grade,” following the example set by our president. There’s something to that Buber comment, although the same thought might be found in both Kass and our philosopher-pope. One of my “teaching objectives” is to get the FPRs to join you in reading more Strauss.
June 28th, 2009 | 3:52 pm
For James, an objection via Oakeshott. Locke and Hobbes didn’t “invent” anything. What they did, as Rousseau observed, was DESCRIBE a particular life-form that had already come into existence, but hadn’t previously been given theoretical expression. Something similar may be true of Augustine. If you read archaic Greek literature, you (by which I mean, I) get the impression that people at that time had a radically different experience of selfhood to the one Augustine describes in the Confessions. Although its articulation required his particular genius, the Augustinian person had been in the works for a long time before him. When people talk as if philosophical arguments were constitutive of historical experience, well, that’s when I reach for my revolver.
June 28th, 2009 | 5:05 pm
Augustine’s emphasis on man as pilgrim is part of what makes me nervous about the porchers’ emphasis on place. The early church fathers, up to and including Augustine, were ambivalent about place, viewing excessive attachment to place as a mark of paganism and its geographically-particularistic cults. Place, for Augustine, definitely belongs to “uti” and not “frui.”
June 28th, 2009 | 6:57 pm
All good comments. To Sam, surely the individual of Hobbes and Locke is at least both descriptive and transformational. It became more true over time, and it’s more true now than when they wrote it, as they intended. They were nominalists in some sense; words are weapons (as the SC says in Lawrence v. Texas). Augustine, it’s true, did not invent the person. Tom, I’m nervous for the same reason you are. I’m afraid the cease fire might get broken, though, if I called them pagans. VMG, gotta wait until later, but a very thoughtful K post, thanks.
June 28th, 2009 | 7:33 pm
Tom: As Lawler himself seems to concede, one shouldn’t absolutize the pilgrim identity to such an extent as to totally eclipse other lesser degrees of communal belonging. Even Augustine, who is near the extreme end of the Christian spectrum on this point, still recognizes something like the Stoic idea of multiple stations we inhabit, bearing overlapping but not entirely consistent responsibilities. Paul’s letters, after all, mostly bear place-names in their titles.
While I agree in principle with Sam’s caveat about philosophers “inventing” historical experience, nevertheless, the articulations they give can provide powerful interpretations of experience that set a course for the way things unfold, especially when they have active, ideologically zealous followers. The rights-bearing individual was not quite so anthropological a notion before Locke. After Locke (as Manent compellingly argues), this becomes our anthropology in a way that leads pretty inexorably to the contentless individual that James doesn’t want it to lead to.
And thus Sam’s caveat, plus my emendation, provides the beginning of a response to James’ point about Tocqueville. Yes, Tocqueville is making an observation about the tendencies of the “religious” sensibilities under democratic social conditions. But the expression of these sensibilities is helped along its way by the hollowing out of the notion of a created world — in particular, hollowing it out of the recognition that goodness is a constitutive principle of being, which hollowing is one effect of the Lockean project (not invented but crystallized into an ideology by Locke) of turning against nature while conceiving it as virtually worthless raw material.
Lastly, in the larger pomo-porcher exchange, there sometimes appears a contrast between Straussian regime-centered analysis and quasi-Marxist economic-conditions analysis. This dichotomy can’t be sustained for anyone who takes Tocqueville or Aristotle seriously. For Aristotle, no regime that doesn’t in some way formalize the relationships among different kinds of property and occupation proper to a place can be effective, unless it revolutionizes those relationships as Sparta did. And for Tocqueville, democracy is a matter of social conditions, which has a lot to do with property relations. In neither case is the line of causality one-directional as it is in Marx.
June 28th, 2009 | 7:41 pm
Good work, Peter. Now, I might be able to guess, but save me some time by just telling me in what way(s) this statement is incompatible with Ralphism.
June 28th, 2009 | 7:53 pm
Peter,
Go ahead and call ‘em pagans, that would be fun since they’re already in high dudgeon due to Scott’s sorties!
Also, VMG’s doing the Big K and I’m looking forward to “later!”
Also, check out D.W.’s response to VMG at FPR, oh yeah!
June 28th, 2009 | 8:35 pm
The “contentless individual” has never existed “in practice.” The actual world of human beings never been and never will be thoroughly Lockeanized, as Marx exaggerates [to provoke revolution]. One paradox is that we live in a time when nobody believes Locke’s theory is true, but it does seem to inform how we talk about what we do more than ever. My life is nothing but my individual choices, as the self-help books say. But, as Tocqueville says, when the Americans speak following the moral doctrine of self-interest rightly understood they’re actually both bragging about their freedom and doing themselves less than justice–they’re still moved by love and death, just like people always have been. To support Mark S’s point, it’s easy to observe that modern individualism exaggerates or sort of doubles our alienation as persons. Still we are deep down in the world “displaced persons,” as Flannery O’Connor writes, and when Chesterton talks about America as “a home for the homeless,” he means we can regard all persons everywhere equally as citizens because we know that they’re all equally more than citizens. To support the pagan point, it’s easy to observe that the first American agrarians–the Jeffersonians, some antebellum southerners, and most postbellum southern aristocrats such as William Alexander Percy–really did think of themselves as pagans–as Epicureans (Jefferson) as Stoic followers of the emperor Marcus Aurelius (most of the other leading men of the south).
June 28th, 2009 | 8:37 pm
And it’s above my pay grade to speak authoritatively on Ralphism.
June 29th, 2009 | 12:21 am
Peter, I was on the verge of offering you a raise if you had risen to the occasion (or taken the bait). Since you didn’t I’m left to speculate well beyond my salary. If only in fragments. I seem to be somewhere between you and Strauss, since I emphasize more the political-rhetorical character of Strauss’s evocation of impersonal eternity, and sympathize up to a point with it. (Though I note you affirm what Strauss “says” more than what he “thinks.”) This rhetoric is the ultimate expression of prideful affirmation of one’s self-sufficient worth. Such pride is of course pretension and therefore false, but it is also a partial and partisan truth; and there is no political life or truly human existence without some such prideful and partisan affirmation of what I grasp and represent in myself, Thus I see some justification in Strauss’s pagan rhetoric, and would be less inclined than you to posit the simple truth of man’s “social nature” against the pagan pretension of his political nature. Likewise I find myself agnostic concerning whether the ultimate principle, the Highest, can be conceived as simply “personal.” Knowing is coequal with loving, maybe. So yes, I am at least at grave risk of heresy re. trinitarianism. Maybe it comes down to my dissent from a creation ex nihilo.
Well, as I warned, speculations way above my pay grade.
June 29th, 2009 | 8:36 am
I’m going to let others begin to unpack that goldmine of Ralphism. But let me say one thing: Ralph is perfectly rightly on my comments are based on what Strauss says. God knows what he really thinks. Strauss says straight out that restoring the IDEA of eternity is indispensable for restoring the IDEA of philosophy–against the idea of CREATIVITY (either divine [=Biblical] or human [=Historical]). The philosophers, in his view, have always used eternity as a weapon against creation. And eternity=natural in the sense of natural right. And History=human self-creation in imitation of the absent Creator God. Finally, we Christians, Jews, Mormons etc. can’t be for either NATURAL RIGHT or HISTORY, it seems to me. As a matter of historical fact, it’s not the idea of natural right that defeated History, although it was in a way the truth about who we are.
June 29th, 2009 | 3:53 pm
To Mark S: Sure, but the actual address of Paul’s letters tends to be “to the holy ones of X” or “to the Church at X,” in other words, to the same transcendent reality present in different places. Which is not to say that place isn’t important to Paul; if it weren’t he would just have written the same form letter to all the churches. But it’s less important than the Church present in those places.
As far as Augustine goes, the most immediate argument of the City of God seems to me to be that the Christian’s pilgrim character is what allows those lesser communal belongings to really flourish in virtue, partly because of the pilgrim Christian’s resistance to harmful, place-specific idolatry, which is a more deadly danger both to the man and his community than rootlessness.
June 29th, 2009 | 5:40 pm
[...] there.) A few weeks later, Patrick threw down the gauntlet and, well, the debate rolled onward (and continues) from [...]
June 29th, 2009 | 9:52 pm
“So the modern individual—in his sovereign emotional self-sufficiency—is no person. He’s stuck with creating himself out of nothing. And even God didn’t do THAT.”
Beautiful in it’s subtly, I like the notion of nothing in that sense, it illuminates for me the real power of no-where, now-here… We really do have to create ourselves out of nothing, perhaps necessarily under the pretense that we return to nothing at death. Can those two things be reconciled? the idea that we both fight nihilism by creating that will to power (i.e. a form of motivation) and accept nihilism as the ultimate fate of the impersonal whole we exist in without denigrating the first part? I hope so.
June 30th, 2009 | 3:07 pm
Snore city, Lieutenant.
How many times can one restate Crick’s astonishing hypothesis?
And all the while…the creep, creep of scientific knowledge.
Try harder, if you want to hold my interest.
June 30th, 2009 | 10:12 pm
Although the M. Chan comment is silly, the article that’s linked is pretty fascinating. But even assuming it’s possible to coax “fully synthetic life” out of inert chemicals, that really wouldn’t answer the question of what life is, just as our ability to clone what some call a self-conscious mortal wouldn’t answer the questions of what consciousness is and who a conscious being is.
July 1st, 2009 | 8:49 am
“But even assuming it’s possible to coax “fully synthetic life” out of inert chemicals, that really wouldn’t answer the question of what life is, just as our ability to clone what some call a self-conscious mortal wouldn’t answer the questions of what consciousness is and who a conscious being is.”
Yes, amen!
“Although the M. Chan comment is silly…”
Yes, the Sufi flower is “silly” and confused, but that beautiful mind is questing, searching, seeking and so, there is hope!
July 1st, 2009 | 10:10 am
Yes it would…as would the development of a silicon intelligence.
If our Gods and our hopes are nothing but scientific phenomena, then let us admit it must be said that our love is scientific as well.
July 1st, 2009 | 1:36 pm
Bob, Thanks for keeping hope–not to mention charity–alive. I hear they’re going scientific soon.
July 2nd, 2009 | 6:17 pm
[...] Lawler again [...]
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