1. So I took a few days off and now come back to this distinction, with a lot of fine comments in the thread.
2. Our Founders built better than they said. Is that because no theory can comprehend great practice? Or because there’s no theory adequate to the truth about who we are? In both cases (to some extent), but of course.
3. But some Founders built worse than they said. (Like those behind the French Revolution or even relatively non-sociopathic Communist tyrants such as Castro.)
4. Tocqueville (and Brownson and Burke) distinguishes between the two categories in a very clear way: The Americans (and English) had a long experience of self-government and their leaders thought like statesmen more than theorists. The French intellectuals–excluded under the enlightened, despotic monarchy from public life–were in the thrall of irresponsible “literary politics”–some combination of abstract theory and poetic romanticism. Some Americans–such as Mr. Jefferson–were more attracted to French literary politics than others. So Mr. Jefferson was far superior as a theorist to Mr. Adams, but Mr. Adams was the more realistic statesman (who saw right through the French from the beginning). Perhaps Rousseau was a superior theorist to Burke, but… Just as perhaps Kojeve was a superior theorist to Aron, but…
5. The deepest theoretical current of our Founding is Lockean, and our Constitution and our Declaration are more Lockean than anything else. But…
6. The Declaration was a statesmanlike legislative compromise between the “past tense” God of Locke (and his penurious state of nature as a replacement for GENESIS etc.) and the living God of the Christians. Nature’s God morphed into being also the God of the Bible, producing a kind of accidental Thomism. The result was better than either of our two highly principled Foundings–the Puritan or the Jeffersonian–while incorporating much of what was best about both. Something like that could be said about the emergence of the exact language of the religion clauses of the First Amendment. The individualistic and implicitly anti-ecclesiastical right of conscience became “the free exercise of religion”–for participation in an organized body of thought and action under God. And it was Madison the statesman–not the theorist of, say, THE MEMORIAL AND REMONSTRANCE–who was all for the compromise.
7. So it’s not so mysterious why the Founding practice was better than the theory of the leading Founders (from a theoretical point of view). Still, we still seem to need a theory that justifies those great legislative compromises, because the history of the country, from one view, is the erosion of the compromises in the name of high Lockean principle (see–once again–LAWRENCE v. TEXAS and the general emergence of the presumption of liberty doctrine). The big objection to the jurisprudence beginning with ROE is that it makes prudent legislative compromise impossible.
8. We Americans, as Tocqueville says, are much better than what we say when we talk the basically Lockean moral theory of self-interest rightly understood. But a problem is, he adds, that what we say does, over time, tend to transform who we are. For Locke (and for LAWRENCE) words seem most of all to be weapons in the service of the progress of individual liberation over time. There is surely a disjunction in Locke between what he says and what he knows (on the state of nature, just to begin with), but that’s because he does really think that words aren’t meant to correspond to some enduring truth about who we are. Our leading Founders, we can’t deny, were to varying degrees aware of that Lockean purpose for words.
9. It goes without saying that, for me, Thomism is a kind of rough way of saying that we need to restore the personal logos of the Christians, to recover the ways we are open to God and personal reality generally by nature. That theory would include a lot of Augustine. It is, as Walker Percy says, to some extent these days about putting back together what’s true about European existentialism with what’s true about Anglo-American empiricism. It’s about putting back together what’s true about Pascal, what’s true about Locke, what’s true about Darwin, what’s true about Aristotle’s proud and responsible political science, and what’s true about premodern or “receptive” natural science as found in Aristotle and Thomas–which includes a proper appreciation of both wonder and love. Such a “postmodern realism” could never be articulated in a theory like the one found in Rawls’ big book.
May 17th, 2010 | 1:56 pm
The disjunction in Locke between what he says and what he knows is really central to his project.Everyone has noticed the distinction he makes between philosophical and civil discourse in the 3rd book of the Essay–and the standard interpretation (well maybe straussian) is that the former is precise and the latter less so allowing him some rhetorical latitude to disguise the full extent of his heterodoxy. However, even philosophical discourse turns out be imprecise, in a way, for Locke if we assume precision means a precise articulation of the way things are. These two brands of imprecision have consequences for each other: the Essay provides a scathing epistemological critique of natural types but the whole 2nd Treatise is built around the natural type that is man. Maybe the most extraordinary feature of the Treatise is the utter lack of a coherent anthropology despite the insistence on beginning with our natural and unvarnished condition. The real beginning for MAN is the 5th chapter where he discovers his transformative powers and his most efficient tool is language which creates more than it describes. Therefore, one has to understand both philosophical and civil discourse as modes of linguistic construction–they are parts of the same political project versus wholly different modes of communication.
May 17th, 2010 | 1:58 pm
So in other words theory and practice seem to get collapsed into each other in Locke, and maybe more generally in modernity, because knowing gets reduced to making. In more concrete terms, philosophy is co-opted by politics.
May 18th, 2010 | 11:52 am
The Results-Better-than-Theory idea is good. We should perhaps give more credit to the obscure Founding Fathers who were willing to listen to the geniuses but also to curb them. This may also be an example of how often a committee *is* better than an individual.
May 18th, 2010 | 11:57 am
Plural founders vs. single founder – what political impact? A great question…that Hobbes tried to transcend.
May 18th, 2010 | 1:07 pm
If “postmodern realism” were about your point 9-Lawler’s Allegoresis-we would already be well on the way to recovering order.
May 18th, 2010 | 2:11 pm
Our founders had work to do to build a nation. Except for a few intellectual pretenders, including Jefferson, most of the founders understood, as Tocqueville remarked, that ordinary democracy would fail without a foundation of religious virtue along with hard work.
Unfortunately at present the cultural heights are dominated by airy and foolish “equalitarian” and hedonistic Jeffersonians that of necessity over time shall involve the West in utter failure. Even blogs like this are pissing against the tide.
May 18th, 2010 | 2:47 pm
So here is the thing. This sounds very Straussian. The distinction between said and knew… I think we all know better, at least we should. What we say is completely different. It seems so counter-intuitive to claim that they built better than they knew, more like they knew better than they built–and their knowledge manifests itself in a myriad of ways, fore-mostly in the idea that “the will to power” is the ultimate fate. I don’t know if you agree with my thesis, but I think that they were mightily aware of the pervasive notion of nihilism and combated it by talking up liberty, pursuits, sweating, spiritedness etc. Don’t get me wrong Dr. Lawler, I definitely think they built better than they knew in relationship to juries, federalism etc. but those are mere footnotes in the overwhelming and understandably pervasive tendency of what we all know… i.e. quantum physics etc… I look forward to continuing the debate next semester.
May 18th, 2010 | 7:57 pm
Ivan hit upon what I thought was most provocative in Peter’s post, namely the relation between speech and being–or what is. Peter points to a trend in jurisprudential thought found in ROE and confirmed in LAWRENCE. To this, he adds the insight of Tocqueville that what we say becomes reality over time. We become subject to language games invented by ourselves (or at least by the luminaries on the court), but the question is whether this speech goes all the way down as Rorty has it or is there some limit to it. And if so, what is that limit? It is not comforting to hear–but it is true–that there are distinctions in psychopathy to be made between a Castro and a Stalin. Slozhenitsyn’s whole critique depends on the reality that speech cannot reconstruct what goes all the way down, but postmodern USA is not the Soviet Union–let alone 1960s Havana. In terms of the supreme court, we live in what could comparatively speaking be considered a delightful version of psychopathy (for the time being)–but psychopathy it remains.
Peter says, “Our leading Founders, we can’t deny, were to varying degrees aware of that Lockean purpose for words,” i.e., that words aren’t meant to correspond to enduring truths about who we are.
But in para. 9, Peter gives us a truly important and philosophical question–as well as a full on research proposition, one that would need the breadth of mind and intellect of a Herodotus or an Augustine or a Toqueville to take it all in. I agree that it is an area of research that must be assiduously pursued to the truth no matter what. However, I am incapable of sifting between the truth and falsity of so many doctrines as Peter outlines–though I have been mentioning Walker Percy more recently in my speech. (I should thank Peter for this, as I almost wrote my diss on Percy and had forgotten his genius–if only his book Postmodernism Rightly Understood had come out when I was in grad school!)
I just fear that any attempt of separate the truth of various modes of modern thought from decayed aspects its own ideology is itself already denied by the same premises of modern thought itself.
With excellent “thick” descriptions of the present situation that point toward enduring philosophical questions as Peter has done in his writings one may have a rhetoric that can persuade a few of the madness of the implications of John Rawls or recent supreme court decisions. American history is rife with such attempts, but it seems to make no difference in the seemingly inexorable logic of equality and liberty–or rather should I say justice.
May 18th, 2010 | 8:53 pm
The founding was never a ‘democratic’ event or was it? Rather, it was the birth of a ‘republic’ which our current leaders never acknowledge, either out of ignorance or conspiratorial intent?
It is never ‘pissing against the tide’ if the intent is to restore order, a charge directed at our philosophers.
May 20th, 2010 | 3:03 pm
Thanks Peter and others for very thoughtful contributions. The fight I was trying to pick never had any chance of being a very big one, and maybe you’ve shown that there’s no space between us at all. But let me keep trying just a bit – if it matters at all, it’s just to get as clear as possible on the theory-practice problem, and on the implications for sound and consistent pomocon rhetoric today. It’s really a question how far we should distance ourselves from the Founders, or how much distance is implied in the “better than they knew” formula. I meant to argue for a rhetoric of “founding properly understood” rather than one that suggests an appeal to some “theory” superior to that of the Founders. Maybe the distinction is too fine to matter, but I just needed some help figuring out what I think.
3, & 4. The founders who built worse than they said, the “literary politicians,” are precisely those who embrace the possibility of being able to say thoroughly, foundationally, what they are doing – being able to reconstruct practice on the model of some theory.
4. Why say that Jefferson was a superior “theorist” to Adams, or Rousseau to Burke? Or, for that matter, Heidegger to Tocqueville? Who saw more clearly – or, rather: who was attuned more truly to the realities of our human condition?
6. agreed.
7, 8 & 9. agreed, maybe. What kind of “theory” would justify that great compromises that contained and limited the dynamic of Lockean, constructivist theory? OK, much theorizing is certainly relevant to this task – or we would all have to fold up our tents and go into some other line of work. But our theorizing amounts mainly to a criticism of modern constructivism, i.e., calling attention in various ways (relying upon literary and religious texts, for example) to dimensions of our experience of truth that modern theories (really theoretical theories, that is) cannot account for. That is, there are limits to the capacity of us counter-theorists to “put back together” what’s true in the various sources of truth. If the logos is personal, we cannot catch it in a theory. There is no set of words that “corresponds [adequately] to some enduring truth about who we are.” (But of course we can’t help trying to give accounts to each other, and in the public realm.)
What follows might appear banal, but it might conceivably matter for our efforts as “theorists”: any political/rhetorical resources available in our constitutional tradition that can serve as counterweight to the liberationism that results from the unboxed Lockeanism ought to be considered fair game. We shouldn’t concede the Founding to the liberationists. We should claim its (practical) essence as our own, and go on to define that essence as distinct from the Lockean constructivism. We should see improving upon it as a way of being faithful to it. We should read sound practice into it and marginalize the resonances of over-reaching theory within it. We must try to say all the truth we can, but we should strive to re-found (as the opportunity may present itself) better than we can say.
May 21st, 2010 | 10:38 pm
I am a bit new to the history of the founding, but I wonder about how much Lockean ideas were modified by a Ciceronian-Augustinian dynamic at work as a kind of alternative tradition.
I’m thinking of the way in which Stoic and Platonic ideas coming out of the 1600s in the Cambridge Platonists and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (who consciously rejected his former tutor, Locke and his empiricism). This was picked up and developed into the moral sense idea by Francis Hutcheson. I have found it in Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon. I think it is also prevalent in Jefferson. It seems to me that this way of construing the law of nature is grounded upon teleology of human nature itself that is connected to human affectivity in which affections are dispositions that give rise to a moral sense–the ancient idea of sympatheia, or in 18th century discourse, benevolence.
Cicero himself mediated Stoic ideas and he also valued the role of religion in terms of pietas as a civic virtue. One could not be affectionately bound to country and kin without an affectionate bond to God. Virtue required all of this. And, of course, Augustine read Cicero quite carefully.
So, I wonder if the thesis that they practiced better than they knew might be modified to the degree that they operated within philosophical frameworks with common roots (whether consciously understood or not) and thus this allowed for a shared emphasis on the necessity of religion. Cicero and Hutcheson both had more positive assessments of human nature that appealed to a Jefferson while Edwards and Witherspoon could also incorporate Hutcheson’s ideas within their more Puritan or Scottish Presbyterian frameworks precisely because Augustine’s ideas originated partly through a life-long dialogue with Cicero.
If this is on the right track, then recovering this trajectory can have important consequences for a common platform between Catholics, Protestants, and even progressives who follow Jefferson. However, with apologies to the Thomists out there, to get at the Catholic connection you would need to go to Bonaventure, not Thomas.
Just a thought.
May 23rd, 2010 | 8:53 am
Thanks for all the great comments on this. I agree in some ways with all of them. I agree especially that we shouldn’t concede the Founding to the liberationists, adding, of course, that we also shouldn’t view it as beyond criticism. We should be grateful for in some ways the best Constitution ever, while admitting that the whole gratitude-veneration thing was sort of mocked from an enlightened perspective in FEDERALIST 49. So our Founders, unlike the French etc., affirmed genuinely but with insufficient consistentcyand perhaps too much irony the limits of liberationism.
May 29th, 2010 | 2:51 pm
Lawler, you saved the best for last…# 9. Currently, we have a kind of consumerist truth afoot. Brand Loyalty is the Great intellectual Bear Trap. Seems fairly simple to me that a combination of wonder and love works wonders but there are those who will assert it is a tad twee, before they direct everyone’s attentions to the great tumescent truths of their own thought brand.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact