David Walsh’s The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence, the magisterial concluding volume of a long-gestating trilogy, proposes a radical revaluation of modernity. Whereas Walsh began twenty years ago with the view that modern philosophy was complicit in “ideological madness” and nihilism, his intensive studies of the moderns has convinced him that “the death of metaphysics in thought has meant the return of metaphysics in life.” (xiii) “There is no crisis,” after all. (10) The “search for meaning” is “inexhaustible,” fortunately. (11) Modern philosophy progressively articulates, not a denial of authoritative moral standards, but an awareness of “the unsurpassable exigency of goodness … that is all the more powerful for our inability to contain … [it] within discursive limits.” (xiii) Moreover, at the deepest level, this insight represents not a rupture with classical and Christian thought but “a convergence with rational and revelatory tradition.” (xiv) Thus, the modern turn from “entities and concepts to an existential meditation on the horizon within which [philosophy] finds itself,” and thus to an appreciation of “the profoundly mysterious mode” in which alone “the transcendent can surface” (xv) fulfills the deepest meaning of both Socrates and of Christ – once the meaning of the Western tradition is emancipated from “the fixity of the categories we have inherited from the ancient thinkers,” or from the claim that “nature [can] furnish guidance.” (12) The modern philosophical revolution can teach us that the fact that “reason remains unknown to itself” (16) is good news, indeed a saving existential truth.
Walsh’s project, however, seems to me to rest upon a notion of “practice” that proves to be fundamentally equivocal. There is a “practical” meaning of practice, which concerns the preservation or definite improvement of mundane human life, and which therefore is bound up with a more or less articulate understanding of the human condition and its limits. This view of practice, closer to the classical view, necessarily (if often only implicitly) associates practice with theory or “metaphysics,” even if it does not exactly subordinate one to the other. And then there is a more “spiritual” or theological or existential meaning of practice, which Walsh evokes as a living towards a mysterious meaning that utterly transcends ordinary experience, the practice of a “pure abnegation of self that draws the soul toward God.” (219) For Walsh, we have seen, this spiritual practice is essentially identical to the synthesis of freedom and universal humanist morality that Kant first evokes. Such an identity appears to be possible because, as Walsh claims (most clearly and emphatically in The Third Millennium: Reflections on Faith and Reason), following Heidegger and Voegelin, the transcendent must be utterly “differentiated” from our worldly or secular existence: the withdrawal of the divine into utterly transcendent mystery relieves existential-theological practice of any ends “higher” than humanity.
Walsh’s chosen task of articulating the continuity between Christianity and modernity clearly favors the theological-existential meaning of “practice” over the practical meaning, since the latter would seem to subordinate practice to a (pagan) “account of entities and concepts.” Modern philosophy shares with Christianity an emancipation from entities and concepts and thus an understanding of spirituality as “an existential meditation on the horizon within which it finds itself.” “The practice of faith has ever and always been the only available source of faith.” (xiv)
In sum, Walsh’s enthusiasm for a purely open and therefore purely formal understanding of practical existence, articulated through brilliant, original, and remarkably comprehensive readings of the greatest authors of the continental tradition, seems to me to draw him very far away indeed from actual moral and political practice, and thus from the reality of our human condition. A truer and more truly “performative” attention to “the nature of practice itself” (Growth of the Liberal Soul 289) would be less inclined to praise pure freedom or openness and more solicitous of the actual horizons of common worlds, including implicit metaphysical and hierarchical elements. If, as Walsh himself writes, “the great challenge is to find a means of bridging the gap between … personal growth of the soul and the common ethos,” (313) then the Christian and modern evocation of the mystery of personal existence must not lose touch with the insuperable bond between the good of the soul and the good of the city. A concern for this bond would lead us back, in turn, to Kant’s “fretting” over the link between the moral law within and the starry heavens above. And such fretting might, further, lead us to consider how “practical” it was of the ancients to praise the supremacy of “theory.”
(This is a sample from a contribution to a symposium on Walsh’s trilogy to be published in Perspectives on Political Science.)
February 19th, 2010 | 9:00 am
So what’s good about Walsh is that there’s something real and Christian about the modern understanding of personal freedom But nothing modern can provide any real guidance to the purpose of the relational purpose of that freedom–toward other persons, the city (or authoritative community), and God. Thanks to Ralph for lifting us up toward his and David W’s pay grade.
February 19th, 2010 | 10:44 am
The binary opposition you are setting up through the post does not seem to line up with the one in the last paragraph.
You conclude by pushing us toward some connection of the good of the soul with the good of the city. However, based on what you say about Walsh, he seems to emphasize the good of the soul as distinguished from the good of the person. That is, the individual soul in is put right order and perspective when someone comes to understand the differentiated reality of the transcendent. But that does not really accord with classical conceptions of the Good – not just because classical conceptions preferred to think of the polis over the person, but because “Good” to them meant not just a correct understanding of the whole, but the practice of living rightly within that whole.
In this sense, the opposition (that I thought you were leading up to) was between the existential/spiritual/ascetic conception of the Good, and the Aristotelian/participatory/anti-dualism conception of the Good. And I thought you might work to show how the modern contemplation of abstract and non-embodied Truth could work as a powerful compliment to the more practice-oriented understanding. This is what Postmodern Conservative would be all about, I would think.
I bring this up simply because I don’t know that modern philosophy has had much of a problem with thinking about the good of the polis – rather, the errors committed in this arena have been in the way they tried to combine abstract/transcendent truth with the good of the whole, since they confused the whole polis with the whole transcendent order. Thus, modern philosophy is still open to acceptance for its “illumination” but open to criticism for its failure to connect acceptably the practical good with the beholding of transcendent reality.
February 21st, 2010 | 5:49 pm
At the end of his seminal study Dr. Walsh writes, “Narratives, as Eric Voegelin eventually concluded in “Order and History,” although he never fully elaborated, must move backward and sideways as well as before and after, if we are to move within the richness in which we find ourselves. To understand the present in terms of the past, the famous thesis on the Gnostic character of modernity suggests, is to follow only in one direction. It is equally plausible to understand Gnosticism in relation to the modern evocation of an alternative to it, as precisely the overcoming of the horror of existence that Gnosticism had expressed.”
Coincidentally, the best description of the Western collapse may have been offered by the diplomat George Kennan when he wrote, in our age “..there is a real danger that we may lose altogether our ability to distinguish the real and the unreal, and, in doing so, lose both the credibility of the true moral behaviour and the great force such behaviour is, admittedly, capable of exerting.” Perhaps, we have reached that point.
The brilliantly conceived thesis proffered by Dr. Walsh may illustrate the desire to challenge the notion of a closed “system” that would draw the soul into a seductive embrace of an ‘unreal’ gnostic existence in a cosmos devoid of “ignorance and suffering.” But the danger as Stefan Rossbach pointed out in his seminal study, “Gnostic Wars,” is that “..if gnosis elevates the soul above the cosmos, beyond Plato’s chorismos, the unbridgeable gap which the classical thinkers perceived between the human and the divine realms mutates into a gap between those with gnosis and those without.” Thus, “the common bond of mankind,” as Professor Rossbach explicates, will be torn asunder by two disparate groups with absolute visions of truth, order, and reality and these groups will engage in constant wars, “driven by gnosis.”
We find then the apocalyptic tone of a ongoing “Gnostic War” in contrast to what Walsh identifies as a modern project, the “existential dynamic by which the liberal soul is enlarged to fulfill its indispensable civic responsibility” perhaps stand as another example of the poles of the tension of existence. But that is a dangerous thing to say because as Kierkegaard realized and Walsh explicated, “Modernity cannot in this sense (from within) be comprehended, for to do so would be to remove oneself from living it.”
February 22nd, 2010 | 12:29 pm
Bryan – It seems you and I agree, as far as I can tell. Except perhaps that I see the merging of abstract illumination with political thinking in fact effects a suppression of the question of the good. If the practical good and transcendent beholding are severed, neither can really survive.
Robert- The whole question concerns what it means to comprehend modernity from within it. I don’t believe “civic responsibility” can be adequately articulated or practically assumed in terms of the theoretical categories of modernity itself – which tend precisely to abstract from living civic and ethical reality (and the implicit metaphysics of “heterogeneity” [to cite Leo Strauss) that arises naturally from practical responsibility.
February 22nd, 2010 | 1:52 pm
Walsh is brilliant and consequently somewhat intimidating, even though he nearly always wears half a smile. To the extent that I would venture to criticize him, I think he neglects the quiet theophanies of grace acting in ordinary life, a tendency that I think remains from his earlier study of Voegelin.
I don’t think there’s much of an about face in his different views to modernity. Surely the constant temptation facing existential openness is the closed certainty of ideology.
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