(More excerpts here from Manent’s new book of interviews, Le Regard Politique – i.e., Seeing Things Politically)

When I met Aron I was carried away with admiration for him… Aron desired less than any man to exercise influence over people or to dominate a young man [such as I was].. By instinct, by nature, no less than by reason, he could only live in freedom – his own freedom and that of others.  … Before teaching me by his books, Aron educated me first, I would say especially, be his very person, by his way of holding himself in the world and exercising his humanity in the world.  By his very being he allowed us to understand that only a long education of the intellect and of judgment allows a person to find his bearings with some confidence in political life.  In this way he freed us from the disdain for politics that comes so naturally to intellectuals, even or especially those that are, as we say, politicized…. He showed that in politics as in other matters, there is something to be known…

Aron was, I would say, the perfect gentleman who experienced no need for transcendence.  Humanity’s immanent rule was sufficient for him.  And maybe he was right; maybe that is what wisdom is.  But for my part I felt an impatient desire for the “measure,” to speak Plato’s language, for the transcendent measure…  Aron understood very quickly that I wanted to follow a path along which he could not guide me.  He suggested I read Leo Strauss…  I have always appreciated that and I still admire him for this, because I believe one must be very generous in order to lead a young man with whom one enjoys a friendly and trusting relationship, a close intellectual relationship, towards an author, a colleague in a sense, whom one knows will become a dominant influence for this young man.  Aron led me to Strauss knowing that to go toward Strauss meant to distance myself from him… Aron gave each person what seemed best for that person without concern for his proper influence…

As far as one can make such judgments in one’s own case, I would say that Leo Strauss had the greatest influence on me…  Confronting the great orchestra of modern philosophy, Strauss represents a discordant voice, a voice at first almost inaudible, very sober and reticent.  Compared to the rolling thunder of a symphonic orchestra, I might say his voice is the harsh and virile monody of a Dorian flute.  But once you are bitten by this music of Strauss, you are had. 

(To be continued.)

I feel it my duty to pass on some choice tidbits from a scintillating book of interviews with Pierre Manent  (conducted by Benedicte Deloreme-Montini) just published in French under the title: Le Regard Politique ( Flammarion). Here is the first (in provisional translation), from pages 203-204:

“You know the argument: membership in a plurality of communities is not a problem because there is no need to choose among them: on the contrary, to a multiplicity of belongings is enriching – is it not enriching to be at once and equally Breton, French, European and a citizen of the world?  I find this presentation seductive but misleading.  All these memberships in fact aspire towards and are absorbed in our membership in humanity.  But humanity is not a political body since it is incapable of self-government.  Certain circumstances, notably American protection and power, have relaxed ad almost suspended the pressure of political necessity in Europe; and, since they are on vacation, Europeans believe that they are forever free from work.   Let them enjoy it, because it won’t last… Europe as a whole can consider itself to be humanity’s pacified avant-garde because the United States still takes care of European defense.  The European religion of humanity is thus based, finally, on American power…

… “At some point external pressures – economic, political, military, and those related to migrations – from countries or areas that not only do not share our religion of humanity but that even despise it (do you believe that the Chinese or the Muslims see themselves as citizens of the world?), these pressures will perhaps bring about reactions of survival, something like: “we do not after all want to die.”  And so, I say only that, in these conditions, a third possibility might emerge, in which the old nations and the old religion will appear as a priceless resource – if only because we have no other.  How could they be given new life?  I do not know, but necessity, as Machiavelli taught us, is a great teacher.”

(Future tidbits: Manent on Aron, Strauss, Straussians, the essence of the West, and more.)

I had the opportunity to share some themes from my forthcoming The Reponsibility of Reason at Yale in September.  A very able graduate student (Lucas Entel) responded to my work, providing a deft summary as well as some valuable questions.

Now this is fundamental political philosophy, in condensed form and addressed to those who want to discuss how our Postmodern Conservative position (neither simply Thomist nor quite Straussian or Burkean — and certainly not modern-materialist) might articulate its depths – with  apologies in advance to those looking for something of more direct and accessible practical application (go to the next post, or the previous).  

“Professor Hancock makes reference to a dualism or tension between two dimensions of human existence, a tension that aligns our internal dispositions with the theoretical, with transcendence, possibility and freedom on one side, and our external ones with the practical, with immanence, actuality and authority, on the other. The former leads to alienation or homelessness, whereas the latter is conducive to being-at-home.  This, in turn, throws light onto why, in the political realm, modernity and democracy cannot fulfill the void left by tradition and aristocracy.

 ”According to Professor Hancock, Tocqueville’s fundamental insight is that human meaning happens in a field defined by the fundamental polarity between free, transcendent possibility and concrete, authoritative actuality. Modern democracy tends at once to drive these poles apart and to evacuate the space between them such that it collapses; the radical emancipation of one pole from the other releases the energy from their normal tension into a compulsion to fusion. Such a tendency, it goes without saying, does not modify our basic condition. It does not abolish the human need to concretize abstract longings.

 ”It does, however, degrade the forms that such a concretization adopts and leads, not to an overcoming but to a perversion of our condition, which threatens to dehumanize humanity. The radicalization of transcendence that results from the fusion of the two poles must therefore be countered with a responsible understanding of reason’s transcendence, one that would be fully aware of the inescapability of the polarity between transcendence and immanence, the possible and the actual.

 ”The challenge is immense, but it seems the stakes could not be higher. In Professor Hancock’s terms, thinking is always preceded and exceeded by being. This excess transcendence is configured along two axes of significance, vertical and horizontal, which are determined by freedom as self-affirmation and the rule of reason, in the first case, and by the calling of reason by something or someone other (which underscores the responsibility of thinking) in the second. The freedom of this second dimension is humble openness to the possibility of negating the present in the name of justice. It demands responsibility because the negation of the present can potentially become more prideful than vertical pride. But the vertical and horizontal axes cannot operate without the other, since self-affirmation would be reduced to mute sameness and pure openness could never being affirm itself.

 ”Professor Hancock starts his enquiry with Plato, in this case with the idea of the good in the sixth book of the Republic. The good is the ground of both being and knowing. To know any natural being is to be aware of the possibility of knowing and aware of a larger whole of which we are parts, an awareness, therefore, that concerns both the possibility of knowing that is the goodness of thinking  and the larger whole  that is, the thinking of goodness. And this initial moment of self-awareness of thinking, the realization of the existence of both the thinking part and the whole as well as their mutual relation — a yoke, Hancock argues — is the beginning of the responsibility of reason.

 ”Our openness to the whole takes place in space and time, in a given language, and it is therefore fundamentally political. An account of the whole is of necessity built on a politically charged vocabulary. The yoke between being and knowing must somehow be both thought and enacted as a yoke between the Good and the goods of common, practical human existence. This is the theoretical-practical ground from which all responsible thinking and the thinking of all responsibility must issue.”

[Part II to follow, with questions.]

Leo Strauss’s “Progress or Return” was on my mind this morning as I listened to NPR’s Weekend Edition.  (I had re-read Strauss’s great essay this week with a class of students.) Unsurprisingly, there were stories and issues on the latter that might be illuminated by the former.

I was newly impressed by the phenomenological power of Strauss’s essay, a power that was illustrated by a great classroom discussion among students divided (even as individuals) between the two sensibilities.  On the one hand, there is the sense of the goodness of some origin, some ancestral ways to which we must return by repenting; on the other, the sense of progress beyond the unenlightened past, the openness to new possibilities empowered by new ways and new technologies.   Strauss’s view, I would say (to be ridiculously synoptic) is disapproval of the modern progressive sensibility as an incoherent hybrid of human science and divine infinity; he is at pains in particular to discredit progressive interpretations of Judaism.  He does leave the door open for “Plato’s notion that indefinite progress is possible in principle” for philosophy (but not for politics, and thus not for society, morality, religion).  Of course the wrench that Christianity threw into these works, from Strauss’s point of view, was to link speculative understanding with religious faith and thus compromise the barrier between progress and return, knowledge and obedience. 

These considerations were on my mind as I heard an interview on NPR with the co-authors of the new American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, the famous Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) of Harvard, and his former student David Campbell, a BYU graduate, now Associate Professor at Notre Dame. Here is the blurb I found at Amazon:

“Unique among nations, America is deeply religious, religiously diverse, and remarkably tolerant. But in recent decades the nation’s religious landscape has been reshaped.

America has experienced three seismic shocks, say Robert Putnam and David Campbell. In the 1960s, religious observance plummeted. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative reaction produced the rise of evangelicalism and the Religious Right. Since the 1990s, however, young people, turned off by that linkage between faith and conservative politics, have abandoned organized religion. The result has been a growing polarization—the ranks of religious conservatives and secular liberals have swelled, leaving a dwindling group of religious moderates in between. At the same time, personal interfaith ties are strengthening. Interfaith marriage has increased while religious identities have become more fluid. Putnam and Campbell show how this denser web of personal ties brings surprising interfaith tolerance, notwithstanding the so-called culture wars.”

As you can see, the argument clearly leans towards “Progress” (in tolerance, interfaith ties, the freeing of politics from religion) and away from any “Return” to a religious grounding of moral and political order.  The abandonment by many, especially the young, of organized religion is, it seems the fault of conservatives or reactionaries who presumed to link faith and politics.  Likewise it is the fault of religious conservatives, apparently, that the fault line between believers and unbelievers is increasingly the same line that divides conservatives from liberals and Republicans from Democrats.  (Note that this “Progressive” argument, like any good old-time American progressive argument, cannot avoid sounding a note of Return:  Putnam and Campbell in effect call us back to a time when religion was not a political issue, and when believers and atheists were more or less equally distributed in both major parties.  What they don’t seem to see as that this would require a Return to an earlier, fundamental consensus on an underlying settlement concerning the question Progress or Return.)

Another story heard on Weekend Edition concerned an upcoming rally at the Lincoln Memorial by a group of Democrat activists who call themselves “One Nation, Working Together.”  It was mentioned in passing, about 11 times, that this rally was in no way a response to Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” (by Returning to God) rally, so it is clear it in fact is such a response.  And is it any less obvious that the name is a direct counter to “One Nation Under God”?  (Yes, I am aware that the “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1950s.)

Putnam and Campbell observe that today our most fundamental political cleavage is in an important sense stronger than our religious differences.  If a person’s religious affiliation seems to be in tension with his or her political orientation, then the political orientation generally wins out.  Conservative Catholics and Conservative Protestants seem to have more in common than conservatives and liberals of the same “denomination.”  The authors of American Grace clearly whish that our political differences didn’t go so deep, and one has to sympathize with this sentiment.  But is the cleavage between Progress and Return the fault of the political forces of Return that have become visible in the last generation?  Or is it the work of many more decades, or even centuries, of Progress? 

The notion of Freedom under God long seemed to amalgamate or even synthesize Progress and Return, and thus allowed Americans to avoid confronting the question: Progress or Return?  But perhaps no longer, despite the progressive faith of some of our best political scientists.

As President of the John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs, I’ve been working on a statement of our purposes, and thus on an explanation of the critical importance for society of careful philosophical engagement with the deepest underlying issues.  I realize various assumptions are involved in such an explanation, and I invite discussion of such assumptions.  I plan to follow up with relevant remarks on Tocqueville and on James D. Hunter, for example, but let’s start with the following propositions concerning the political and moral importance of deep thoughts:

The intellectual bubble of a false, relativist understanding of freedom casts a shadow over our whole society and profoundly affects the terms of moral and political debates.  So in a way it is everywhere.  But if we limit ourselves to fighting its effects piecemeal we will often end up shadow-boxing, lunging at an elusive target that may seem to slip away only to reappear in more subtle and virulent forms. The inflated prestige of this relativism must be addressed at its intellectual source – let’s say the sophisticated mechanism that pumps air into the bubble.  This mechanism cannot be flattened with a sledge hammer but must be dismantled and reformed with surgical precision to produce the fresh air of healthy moral discourse in which true religious liberty can flourish.  This careful intellectual work can only be done by minds deeply grounded in the best of our religious and philosophical traditions and trained in careful argumentation. 

What is necessary is to rally the best minds that are open to higher moral and spiritual truths in order to form the next generation to intellectual and moral excellence and thus to address our society’s confusion at its deepest intellectual source. This is the importance of efforts addressed to scholars, teachers and students in higher education and to the higher reaches of public intellectual life; this is why we must engage the critical philosophical questions that will determine the outlook of the most influential minds of the rising generation.  By influencing the most influential minds, and by presenting the best of contemporary thought to a wider public, it is possible affect the character of society and contribute to an understanding of political and personal liberty that is truly humane and truly open to what transcends human power.

Over at Times and Seasons, a blog mostly for Mormons, where I am guest, I have posted some thoughts on a “third-order” question that lies behind or underneath the most vital (I think) contemporary political issues.  Come on over and join the fray, if you dare.

So here’s a modest effort to open up a discussable little fissure in the unified  vanguard of the political and philosophical juggernaut that we know as Postmodern Conservatism.

Is it fair, and is it consistent with Pomocon-ism to say that the American Founders “founded better than they knew”?  Does this venerable and catholic criticism not seem to imply the possibility of a founding in which the truth of practice might receive a definitive, complete and thus internally stable formulation in theory?  But are we Pomocons not rather in agreement with the first great Pomocon, Monsieur Tocqueville, that there is and can be no such complete and definitive theory? 

Hobbes and Locke, certainly, might be criticized (even excoriated, be my guest) for attempting to sever the right from the good, for proposing to “enlighten” society with the proposition that rights can be established without any reference to a common Good, that freedom can produce order from itself, without acknowledging any power not only outside by above itself.   And there can be no doubt that those who articulated the premises of American constitutionalism adopted much vocabulary and many bits of arguments traceable to the finally atheistic foundations of the modern theory of Natural Rights.  We have every reason today to be more alert to the radical and destructive resonances of these terms and arguments than any but the profoundest philosophers could have been 230 years ago. 

To be sure, 220 years ago (go ahead and correct my chronology), Edmund Burke grasped immediately this radicality and destructiveness when it showed its face in the streets of Paris.  And John Adams, to take one notable example, was not far behind.  But neither of them, any more than Tocqueville a few decades later, proposed an alternative theory in which freedom would be answerable to a fully knowable Order or the right could be logically derived from The Good.  And neither, I take it, do we Pomocons.

(Or did Thomas Aquinas supply such a theory?  Full knowable? – I think not.  Allow me to cite, for those familiar with it, Marc Guerra’s important Christians as Political Animals, forthcoming from ISI.  Prof. Guerra, if I understand him – and he is invited to correct me – finds it necessary to keep Augustine in play along with Aquinas, which seems a way of saying that there is no final theoretical solution to the puzzle of man’s at once mysterious and rationally-politically ordered existence.)

Our Founders were not philosophers; they had a job to do, albeit one that required great insight into the human condition as well as a myriad of changing circumstances.  But if we dispense with the comforting illusion that there is some Pure Theory of The Good Order in which human freedom is acknowledged by securely contained, then it does not make sense to blame our forefathers for not being in possession of such a theory, and for improvising as best they could, given the available terms and possibilities, as stable an equilibrium between freedom and order as could be asked of any human founders. 

The Founders founded better than they said, better than they could have said, better than anyone could have said.  There was no theory and there is no theory that could have comprehensively guided their practice.  Or ours.  Knowing what we must do (which is not easy) guides, at least as much as it is guided by, knowing what we must say.  And to me it is clear that we must now say that freedom has no meaning without virtue, nor rights without duties.   And if we find an effective way to do this, we too will be founding better than we can say, for there is no final way of saying the way that freedom and truth contain each other.

Thanks to Samuel and others for an excellent discussion (just below).   Though I do not wish to disappoint, I find myself unconvinced that I have gone too far in criticizing Rawls, and in fact tempted to go further.

1.  Epigones:  Of course Rawls, no more than Strauss, say, cannot be held completely responsible for his followers.  Both have projects, which implies a willingness to mobilize followers, who by definition follow and do not altogether rethink.  My critique of Strauss’s High Straussian followers is, if not well-known, at least “on the record.”  But a certain Straussian narrowing cannot really be compared with the Rawlsian attempt to settle or rather put aside the big questions once and for all.  Which brings me to …

2. Liquidation:  Rawls’ project is fundamentally Hobbesian, but does he even know this, or fully appreciate it?  He cannot because it seems so obvious to him that Hobbes’ dismissal of the Good is … right, that he has no way of appreciating Hobbes’ boldness, or therefore, his (Rawls’) own boldness – or what would be boldness if he knew what he was doing.  (Likewise for Rousseau and, most spectacularly, Kant.)  And notice that Samuel seems to disagree not only with Strauss but with the moderns he means to defend when he demotes Aristotle to just one star in a rich constellation.  All the early moderns, including, very explicitly, Martin Luther, understood perfectly well that everything depended on severing human action from the notion of the natural perfection of the human soul, a notion of which Aristotle’s classic formulation is classic… for good reason.  Given this, there is something to the Straussian idea that there’s only one authoritative (ancient) tradition, which includes the (modern) counter-tradition.  (I leave to another time the interlinked questions of Christianity and postmodernism.)

But it is not right to describe the Aristotelian core of the tradition as attempting to “derive the right from the good.”  To be sure, the good enjoys a certain priority in classical political philosophy, but there is also an awareness of the impossibility of simply “deriving” the right from it.  Thus Aristotle suggestively links the intrinsic rightness of action with the good of the soul and of the city, but he is very aware that no definitive “derivation” is possible.  Thus the dialectic between theory and practice remains open.  This is precisely the dialectic the moderns attempt to close, but claiming that the good can be derived from or altogether subordinated to the right.  We see this dream very much alive in Rawls, especially as he succumbs to lyricism on the last page of A THEORY OF JUSTICE: purity of heart, or the heart of the truly best life, is living from the standpoint of the absolute priority of right.  Call this modest, if you like, in the way that Calvin or Descartes were modest.  In a way, Rawls’ ambition, because it is unknown to himself, is at the same time much smaller and much bigger than those of his great predecessors.  One thing it is not, finally, is “intermediate.” This, I think, is a reason to teach about it. Rorty’s charm (considerable, perhaps, though not exactly to my taste) is that he is in some way aware of being a man of ambitions at once tiny and huge (is the ambition that there should be no significant ambitions tiny or huge?). 

3. Comprehensiveness:  If all the professional political theorists already recognize that Rawls’ apparent modest re. “comprehensive doctrines” is sham, then I’m glad (albeit a bit surprised) to learn of this.  But excuse me, would not the whole program collapse if we understood it to be fundamentally “theological?”  In any case, Samuel no doubt noticed that I’m not the one arguing for ignoring Rawls.  He gets more weeks in my Contemporary Political Theory class than any other author, even though this cramps my style on Heidegger, Strauss, etc. 

4.  Rawls’ catching the wave of academic liberalism and his providing a plug-and-play research program are two dimensions of the same phenomenon, no?

5. Here I have to disagree massively.  I think Rawls’ conceptualization of liberalism has massively penetrated beyond the academy to the legal academy and the public intellectual and legal realms generally.  Ronald Dworkin would be one early case in point (is he a has-been already?).  Rawlsianism has managed for many academics and therefore for many intellectuals and therefore for the public that listens to intellectuals to suppress the tension between classical liberalism and de facto socialism (in principle unlimited entitlements), encouraging the illusion that one can make individual liberty a  first principle and at the same time consider the demands of whatever category might consider itself “least advantaged” to be morally authoritative.   Even more conspicuously, have we not all noticed the tendency of even would-be moderates to assume that intellectuals or experts have the right to perform a gatekeeper function separating authorized “public reasons” from what regular (especially religious) people might wrongly consider a “reason.”  Thus the sovereignty of the right over the good is close to becoming an effectual truth, and I cannot believe Rawls and Rawlsianism have not played a massive role in making this move respectable and plausible, when it should be considered outrageous.

I conclude – to reconnect with our Great Books discussion below– that one cannot now be a partisan of greatness without first (or in a first moment, at least) being a partisan of the ancients against the moderns.  For Hobbes did in a way produce Rawls and Rorty, and I cannot conceive a more devastating critique.  I will continue to teach Rawls in order to teach the necessity of arriving at this conclusion.  We need now to take Aristotle seriously in order to take Hobbes seriously.  But there is no denying that this means finally to take Aristotle’s side against Hobbes (and Luther & Calvin too — I’ll throw them in for free.)

Now, once we’ve taken Aristotle’s side to open the question, we are in a position to make the Christian and postmodern move of confronting the undecidability of the ranking of the good and the right, of theory and practice, of virtue and freedom.

If you’re planning to be on the North Carolina outer banks Memorial Day, you’ll want to stop by the Sanderling Resort at Duck Beach for quite a unique set of talks, to be followed by discussion.  This is hosted by the up-and-coming new educational foundation, The John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public affairs.  You will find some familiar names on the Boards of Directors and Advisors.