Finally, as an example of such vision of substantive goods (as evoked by Roger Scruton, above), let me share a tidbit from an important essay against same-sex marriage (made world famous by the Pope’s high praise) authored by France’s chief Rabbi Gilles Bernheim. I have just finished translating this essay, very soon to appear in First Things.
“Genesis finds the similarity of the human being with G-d only in the association of the man and the woman and not in each one taken separately. This suggests that the definition of a human being is perceptible only in the conjunction of the two sexes. Because of his sexual identity, each person is referred beyond himself. From the moment a person becomes conscious of his sexual identity, he is thus confronted with a kind of transcendence. The person is required to think beyond himself and to acknowledge the independent existence of an inaccessible other, that is, of one who is essentially related to oneself and desirable, yet never wholly comprehensible.”
……………
Conservative Lockeanism, like the Tocquevillean strategy of smuggling real goods into an interpretation of the American soul under cover of “self-interest well understood,” made a lot of rhetorical sense when the residues of a Christian and Greek civilization were robust enough to support a near-universal assumption or sense of the reality of goods of the soul. But now that Lockeanism in its reductionist essence has penetrated from elite ambition into actual popular consciousness, trying to spin goods out of meager thread of rights will no longer do. The ideological challenge is large, perhaps indeed impossible, but for my part I can see no hope for our souls or for the social functions they perform that would not involve some kind of explicit and public repudiation of that reductionist essence. There is no way to halt the self-erosion of rights that does not involve learning to talk again about real goods that are neither mere individual satisfactions nor mere social functions.
There are still higher goods left to be conserved, and there will no doubt always be some (that we are “stuck with”), but there is no chance such goods will prosper and characterize us as a people if we cannot restore or learn ways of naming such goods, and praising them (unlike Locke and even Tocqueville, except in asides), not instrumentally, but directly, explicitly, publicly.
February 1st, 2013 | 4:59 pm
One thing I’ve wondered for a long time, and which I think Peter suggested in “Postmodernism Rightly Understood,” is whether this problem of “naming [higher goods] and praising them” is even possible under the Cartesian understanding of metaphysics, and thus “God” and ourselves. Inasmuch as the kind of goods you are referring to cannot be inscribed inside the Lockean system, or inasmuch as we cannot think them according to our metaphysical approach, the goods have no real ground. This even seems to be true when “real goods” are “smuggled in,” as you say Tocqueville and Conservative Lockeans do. In that case, rather than accommodating the system to the seemingly incompatible goods, we end up with a mish-mash, such as the mixed views of “God” in the Declaration that have been discussed here. Higher goods, although incidentally or partially instrumental, always manage to escape full comprehension by a metaphysics that would reduce them to a concept according to the parameters of that metaphysics. Hence, perhaps, why it would be truer to say of the dignity of human being that it comes from the ipsum esse of God which escapes all concepts (even if it is aimed at…) than to try to base that dignity on any particular understanding of being. We are, as Peter says, both homeless and at home, and if we lose our understanding of our relational plurality in the face of a reductive metaphysics, we also lose these goods which exceed our conceptual schemes.
This is, perhaps, what Rabbi Bernheim grasps when he says that “the similarity” between people and God begins “only in the association of the man and the woman and not in each one taken separately… The person is required to think beyond himself and to acknowledge the independent existence of an inaccessible other, that is, of one who is essentially related to oneself and desirable, yet never wholly comprehensible.” We only begin to understand the higher goods when we understand that we are not complete as individuals, that our fulfillment lies in the beloved who is both relatable and incomprehensible. As Jean- Luc Marion writes (following Augustine), “I experience myself insofar as I discover myself to be unintelligible to myself” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/23893365/Marion-Jean-Luc-The-Privilege-of-Unknowing).
What has perplexed me about all this is what can be said about ethics and politics if, following Marion, all this thinking about metaphysics and ontological difference just ends up in more self-referential idolatry. How do we determine the “higher goods,” which point towards God iconically, if “the residues of a Christian and Greek civilization” have been washed away such that there is no longer widespread public recognition of “the reality of goods of the soul?”
The only thing I can think of is that the encouragement of a culture that appreciates the “higher goods” can only come from the rejuvenation of just the kind of understanding of love that Rabbi Bernheim suggests here. Family and local relationships must be repaired, or at least emphasized inasmuch as they do exist, before there can be a political answer. Somewhat along the lines of Arendt’s argument about the security of rights only in communities that respect them, there needs to be a community that respects the excessive/ incomprehensible origin of the higher goods before they can be secure (is this the Church?). Maybe this is also one way of bridging the gap between the Porchers and the PoMoCons.