Naturally I appreciate the kind and intelligent attention to my ideas from Peter Lawler, Richard Reinsch, and Carl Scott.  (I would not be dismayed in the unlikely event that the term “Ralphism” caught on, though I might have suggested a term more along the lines of “the Hancockian wisdom.”  But be that as it may…)   Anyway, I think the present focus on my concern for what Tocqueville calls “moral analogy” (indeed a lynchpin of my book), my friends risk exaggerating my … “classicism.”   I use Tocqueville’s alarm at the loss of moral analogy to evoke the necessity of a classical (& Straussian) moment in our reflection on the meaning of reason.  But I am clear that this moment is not adequate, that the analogy between the city and the soul, or the soul’s interpretation of its own meaning by reference to the city’s hierarchy cannot withstand the Christian and subsequent modern critiques.

So, to redress the balance in the interpretion of … OK, “Ralphism,” let me share just a few condensed statements, from my book, of my approach.  And again, thanks to all for your attention to my arguments.  I hope this provides the occasion for some further discussion:

[Augustine’s]  radicalization of Platonic dualism liberates the soul from human hierarchy and thus necessarily puts moral analogy, the bond between the spiritual and the practical, at grave risk.

…  The minimal truth that Biblical revelation reveals is that philosophers have no exclusive claim to a sense of the limits and inadequacy of even the most comprehensive goods available within the human city, or, as Christians will say, within the cities of “this world.”  Without presupposing the perfection of their rational natures, humans are capable of an awareness of their mysterious otherness from the conventions and implicit understandings that are the medium of our political existence, from the world organized by human power and human reason.  Human beings are “fallen;” even, or perhaps especially if they are not philosophers, they can somehow sense that their true home is elsewhere.   Nietzsche will ridicule Christianity as “Platonism for the people,” but already Augustine advances the claim that the people have a right to, so to speak their Platonism—that is, to their sense of transcendence or otherness, of having a home beyond any earthly city or “culture,” and this apart from any specifically philosophical claim.

A moment’s reflection will make it clear that this universalization of the awareness of a possible transcendence irreversibly complicates the task of political philosophy.  Man’s perfection and fulfillment are no longer available to him as a simply natural being, and so the philosopher’s claim of natural right is profoundly problematic.  And yet the political character of the human condition remains: in the absence of an authoritative and comprehensive Law determining human affairs, men must somehow reason together regarding the authoritative terms of their lives in community, or else abandon themselves to sheer accident and force.  But how will they reason when they cannot claim competence regarding final purposes?

…  This truth is that human beings will always be driven to some degree and in some way by an awareness of their mysterious transcendence of every concretely representable or publicly determinate good.  Augustine was right: no classical philosophical image of human perfection as culminating in the serene autonomy of the philosopher himself can contain or govern the longings of the human soul for some other kind of home.  The rule of reason cannot be direct, but must honor the problematic articulations of transcendence generated in man’s practical existence, religious, familial, and political.  For reason to assume any constructive responsibility among a humanity addicted to the flattery of “human rights,” to the unprecedented power over nature resulting from the coupling of universal material incentives with a negative spirituality or idealism, it will have to learn to show the connections between the indefinable freedom of the human spirit and the humbler necessities of our natures as beings dependent upon family, community, and polity.  But to do this, to take responsibility for some “moral analogy” connecting our theoretical freedom with our practical belonging, reason would first have somehow to learn to see its own goodness in the light of a transcendence it can never adequately name.

[And from the conclusion:] The irreversible Western inheritance of an Eternity not indifferent to Time no doubt implies a more elusive, if arguably also richer and dynamic, sense of the meaning of human existence than can be contained in the classical ruling idea of reason. It therefore also implies a more hazardous horizon for practical reason, in effect a resignation to the impossibility of containing the soul’s longings within a specific, substantive understanding of the nobility of the good. The illusion of the simple superiority of “theory” to “practice” (or vice versa) cannot be sustained, and the circulation of meaning between these poles must be accepted and assumed into the very self-understanding of reason. …              Practical wisdom today must be attuned to the truth of the fundamental aporia that is the deep spring of Western dynamism, the aporia defined by the alternatives of, on the one hand, a horizon of knowable goodness above ordinary human concerns and, on the other, by the Christian and revolutionary promise of the regeneration of all humanity.  Whether such an attunement is possible without respect for or perhaps even faith in a personal Divinity in whose love vertical and horizontal transcendence are thought to achieve their only true synthesis – this is the question I must further ponder, and on which I invite the reader’s assistance.

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.

(This is a continuation of a post from yesterday; it will make most sense in that context.)

When Maggie Gallagher answers John Corvino’s individualist argument for “gay marriage” (in Debating Same-Sex Marriage), she relies mainly on a good and important argument for man-woman marriage based upon universal human and social necessities: “Marriage is a word for the way in which societies throughout history have sought to celebrate and idealize these truths: sex makes babies, society needs babies, and those babies need and long for a mom and a dad….This is what an institution—and a norm—does; it replaces the process of individuals thinking on their own about what is best for them, in the service of creating a common good. Institutions arise to answer problems that are social.”  Only in a rhetorical crescendo near the end does she allude to another kind of argument that bridges necessity and transcendence, biology and divinity.  Echoing themes of her much earlier Enemies of Eros (a great and beautiful book), Gallagher evokes “the sense of participating in the great chain of being itself, rooted in a natural call that is larger than any one person’s desire.”

In his essay, “Meaningful Marriage,” the great Roger Scruton eloquently evokes a justification of marriage that transcends the socially functional and is truly communal because it truly addresses personal satisfaction at the deepest level:

“…our beliefs about the blindingness of erotic love and the existential change that it inflicts on us [a change institutionalized in marriage] are objective, based in a true apprehension of what is at stake in our sexual adventures, and what is needed for our fulfillment.”

“To spell out the justification may be hard…”… Scruton goes on to explain, and such a justification may be draw as much upon art and literature as upon  philosophy (though, I say, we would-be philosophers must give what help we can).

“Nevertheless,” Scruton continues, “it is true of erotic feelings as it is of moral values, that their functionality does not undermine the vision that they impart, and that this vision is also a validation.”

(to be continued, returning to the question of Locek & Conservatism)

Tom West – who, I want to make clear at the outset, can easily run circles around me in his knowledge of Locke’s writings – does well to remind us of the (now) conservative, pro-family conclusions that Locke draws from his very modern philosophical premises.  And these conclusions are (or should be) still relevant to contemporary debates regarding the family, since they make the case that the public, and therefore government, has a legitimate interest in stable families (up to a point, that is, the point at which children have been raised) and therefore in the sexual morality that protects the marital bond.

The limitation of this argument, however, is that it can never transcend its constructivist and utilitarian (not to say nihilist) premises.  It might show that it is useful to be faithful in marriage (up to a point) and to perform one’s familial duties, but it cannot show that it is good.  If we start with consciousness as a blank slate that then evolves (whether as an individual or as a species) to adapt to the necessities of its self-preservation (as an individual or as a species), we will never get to an argument for the goodness of fidelity, fecundity, etc.

Scott Yenor lays out the problem nicely in the introduction to his very important and carefully argued Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought.  As Yenor argues, the goods of family can never be grasped either from a standpoint that reduces all goods to personal satisfactions, nor from one that sees marriage and family as “social institutions” performing a necessary function.  For if a necessary function is only necessary, then it is possible, indeed it is even in a way noble, to defy nature.  (Such defiance, Peter Lawler notices, can even be understood as inspired by a lingering trace of Christian, “personal” transcendence of nature.  Indeed, I would reply, but any trace that lacks gratitude for the goodness of something greater is not a trace worth praising or even excusing.) A socio-biologist can tell a young woman on the best scientific authority that nature designed her, body and mind, to conceive, bear and care for children, but it he cannot tell her in the name of science that in so doing she will fulfill her human possibilities, and he cannot answer her when she declares war on such natural necessities.

The alternative to  arguments from “personal” satisfactions on the one hand and necessary social function on the other is not, admittedly, easy to name – Yenor calls it “communal,” that is, an understanding that shows how personal satisfaction is bound up with the social goods marriage produces.  In order words, some kind of recourse to a broadly Aristotelian argument is unavoidable – that is, an appeal to a good grounded in the kinds of beings we are, and one that bridges the gap between lower needs and high purposes, that links necessity with transcendence.

The outrage in Arizona has sparked another cycle of mutual recriminations between liberals and conservatives that points up what seems to be a growing chasm running through our political culture.   Each side sees itself as faithful to good old American principles, and sees the other side as tending (at least) towards a dangerous extremism.

It is remarkable how difficult it is to have a calm, polite discussion on anything connected with politics.  Evidently there are a lot of already hurt feelings on both (or all) sides – people feeling they are habitually misunderstood and maligned.

This, I have to admit is my case.  The difficulty with any form of intellectually-developed conservatism is that the intellectual mainstream, which is fundamentally liberal  feels very confident and within its rights in dismissing any view that does not share its fundamental assumptions as discredited, “un-intellectual,” moronic.  (By “mainstream” I don’t mean , say, opinions of the majority of Americans.  I mean the dominant paradigm(s) of the more articulate classes that dominate in higher education and, yes, the “mainstream media.”  Most of the time these paradigms are invisible because, well, they’re paradigms, and generally unquestioned.  Thus: there are stupid people associated with the Tea Party, or there are stupid things Glen Beck has said, and therefore it’s clear we don’t need to take seriously people who are alarmed about the growth of government.

How would I define the essence of this mainstream?  Well, that’s the kind of long question that is hard to include in a blog comment or post, but let’s start with this:  the liberal mainstream takes it to be obvious that government is a “secular matter,” not deeply connected to religious beliefs or “personal” morality, and that “democracy” is, let’s say, autonomous, self-grounding, just a tool for securing personal freedom and some degree of economic security that people work out collectively, pragmatically.  In a word: freedom is a good independent of “virtue,” or of any goods higher or deeper, more authoritative than that of individual freedom itself.  The conservative intellectual position (or the one that interests me – you can see I’m not at all a libertarian) holds instead that liberal democracy necessarily draws upon moral/ religious reserves that it does not itself create.   Freedom is not good — in fact, it’s not, finally, even thinkable, when severed from virtue.  That, in shorthand, is what is at stake in every fundamental political question that we face.

Of course people within both paradigms disagree with those holding the others.  Liberals tend to dismiss conservative assumptions, and conservatives tend just as much to dismiss liberal assumptions.  But actually I believe there is an asymmetry, and it is this asymmetry, I confess most abjectly, that can make me a little grouchy.  Unlearned conservatives tend straightforwardly to reject liberal assumptions, when they can see them, as immoral, impious, contrary to divine writ, or whatever.  This  is not, in turns out, the most effective way to invite careful discussion and deliberation.  But liberals tend to dismiss conservative assumptions as … well, just stupid, unsophisticated, intellectually groundless.  That is, liberals enjoy a deep sense of being supported by the dominant intellectual mainstream, and they take it to be obvious that conservatives are just stupid.

Of course many conservatives are just stupid, because many people are just stupid.  And even more people are just stupid when they are passionate politically.  I don’t know if I could get you to agree at the outset that, yes, many conservatives are stupid and many liberals are stupid – and that we don’t make much progress just invoking again and again the stupid positions that can be found on each side.  But here is the asymmetry: liberals are very confident that conservatism itself is just stupid, whereas ordinary conservative folk (not me, it goes without saying J) are worried that liberals are smarter than they are, that the liberal mainstream is in possession of some sophistication that goes along with higher degrees (the universities being flagrantly dominated by left-liberalism) and media-cultural prominence.  Conservatives often lack the intellectual resources to understand the contestability of liberal assumptions, but liberals think that every educated person knows that conservative assumptions are just a relic of past prejudices. 

Of course I think, and I can argue (and have argued in pages that won’t fit here), that a deeper intellectual investigation exposes the frailty of liberal assumptions and opens the possibility of deep articulations of more conservative premises.   But you don’t need to agree with me to see the asymmetry I’m trying to explain.  I suppose, though, that if you think what I propose re. deeply intellectual conservatism is impossible, then you must think that stupid conservatives are truly representative of conservatism, whereas stupid liberalism is just an aberration.

Do I think liberalism is stupid?  Well, I observe that it can be stupid.  But there are smart and good liberals, and their smartness and goodness sometimes shines through their impatience with the stupidity of conservatism.   But yes, I indeed think liberalism, even at the highest (or deepest) level, is over-confident, complacent, and therefore blind and, yes, even dangerous.   By highest levels, I might mean someone like John Rawls, or Richard Rorty (OK, they’re dead now, but they’re still pretty alive), but if you wish I could go back through JS Mill to Locke and to the foundations of liberal individualism in Hobbes.  But you don’t wish.

(By the way: if you think liberalism arises not from such theorists but from Protestant freedom of conscience or from pragmatic social learning, I think you end up in the same place, that is, with some delusion of a neutral public space and of unmediated individualism).  

So, of course, we can go on endlessly pointing out some conservatives who are smarter than some liberals, or some liberals who are smarter than some conservatives – but really, the question is, what would the very smartest position be, more like the basic liberal assumptions, or more like the conservative.  I think the latter, but of course I recognize smart people can disagree.  But let’s just try to be clearer what we’re disagreeing about. But to do so we would have to navigate around the asymmetry I’ve described. Liberal condescension will eventually destroy itself, since it cannot know itself; but it threatens to take down the sound practice of liberal democracy with it.  So liberalism is more than ever the enemy of liberty. 

[The following is the preface to my forthcoming The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age (Rowman & Littlefield)]

Propadeutic to a Thumotic and Erotic Ontology. This is the fanciful and facetious subtitle I used to try out on friends when asked about the book I was writing.  It was a serious joke.

“Propadeutic” is just a philosophically pretentious word for “introductory,” or “preparatory,” I think, so we can pass over that.  “Ontology” can only invoke Heidegger and his question about the meaning of Being in relation to human being.  “Thumotic,” from the Greek for spiritedness, suggests what Leo Strauss learned from the ancients about the political in political philosophy, that is, in a way of philosophizing that is attentive to the question of its own purpose and status, a philosophy aware of the need to affirm its own importance.  Of all Straussians, Harvey Mansfield, who led me to Strauss, has been most attentive to the manly assertion of human importance as an essential philosophical problem.  And “erotic” suggests a Platonic and then a Christian longing for a completion beyond our ken.  An erotic philosophy could never fulfill such a longing, or it would be satisfied and no longer a longing.

Ontology’s question, the question of Being, arises from a kind of second-order wonder.  Philosophy begins with the immediate experience of wonder before a partially intelligible whole of which we are small and apparently insignificant parts.  Christianity deepens this wonder through its conviction that little parts like us who are aware of and can be open to the whole, open to something that exceeds us infinitely, are somehow ourselves, individually, of infinite significance to the whole, which whole must  then have personal significance, which is to say it must be God’s.  Ontology in the present sense was revived when Heidegger pursued this Christian deepening but attempted to remove God; ontology is a pondering on the openness of human beings to Truth, and on the power of Truth to solicit human beings. (Heidegger would like this pondering to be at once somehow maximally bold and maximally reverent;  Leo Strauss somewhere remarks that Heidegger’s Being is as mysterious as the Biblical God yet as impersonal as the pagan Plato’s ideas – that is, utterly inhuman because neither personal nor intelligible.)   Ontology, or talk about “Being” articulates a dissatisfaction with an assumed separation between thinking and meaning.  For me, though not exactly for Heidegger, this implies dissatisfaction with the assumption that seeing things clearly and understanding moral and spiritual purposes are different capacities.   What we call a questioning of the meaning of “Being” springs from a need to address the common ground of theory and practice.  Yet obviously there can be no simple “theory” of the common ground of theory and practice.  This set of preparatory essays is “thumotic” in that it invites us, not to discern such a ground as if it were a neutral object of cognition, but responsibly to affirm and enact such a ground; it is “erotic,” moreover, in striving to hold such an affirmation open to some consuming fulfillment, some revelation of meaning, that must ever surpass it.  And again unlike Heidegger, I do not insist that such a revelation be thought in isolation from or against the notion of a personal God.

Though I have forsaken the self-mocking title, it is not obvious, in the explanation I have just given of it, that I have removed the cause of ridicule.  This prefatory account  of a response to the wonder of Being that would attend to thumos as well as eros  no doubt  still appears laughably remote from common sense, ordinary language, and actual practical concerns.  So I may as well admit that I am a professor writing to other professors and to their students.  Of course I warmly welcome readers who are neither paid professionals nor their captive audience, but I confess in advance to the professional deformation that is the cost of pursuing a conversation that our busy society has left to a very few   –  inevitably, no doubt, but still to the detriment, I think, of both few and many. 

 I am not willing, in any case, to forsake all hope that this project, and kindred projects that it might stimulate,  could matter beyond the echo chamber of the philosophical and political-philosophical academy.  I write to an academic audience with considerable recourse to a distinctly academic vocabulary, addressing as I must established and somewhat inbred schools of thought.  But I do not write for simply academic purposes.    In fact I would hope ultimately to contribute to a kind of healing of the rift between academic philosophy and social science on the one hand and the concerns of thoughtful citizens, statesmen, believers and lovers on the other.  For in fact each side suffers from this separation of the most critical and self-critical thinking from practical (political, religious, poetic) existence.  The alienation of thinking from goods we affirm or long for as human beings is a matter of far more than academic consequence; it concerns our city or civilization as well as our souls . 

The investigations and reflections offered here are my own response to what I have experienced as a call to attune my own thinking to my own human (moral and spiritual, thumotic and erotic) being.  But let me try to say that more directly and colloquially:  what I have written is a working out of a hunch I have not been able to repress that intellectual excellence and moral-spiritual excellence cannot finally be separate.  Such a response is never adequate, but I find some satisfaction in the capacity and the opportunity to share it.  For this I am grateful.  If others find some resource here in seeking their own attunement, their own integrity in theory and practice, then my satisfaction and my gratitude will be multiplied.  And I hold it to be possible that by multiplying examples of such a reconciliation between thinking and goodness the common good might become both better and more common.

17-20 November 2010

A Conference Hosted by the Tocqueville Project of Brigham Young University, with Funding from The John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs and The Sutherland Institute.

Is the Constitution as understood by the Founders at risk?  If so, then how so, and what caused this?  And would the passing of the Founders’ Constitution represent a grave threat (as Tea Partiers or Glenn Beck would have it) or rather a welcome moment in the progressive unfolding of basic principles of freedom and equality? Can our deepest constitutional concerns be addressed through ordinary political means, or are our problems fundamentally moral and spiritual?

Conference Director: Ralph C. Hancock, BYU Professor of Political Science and President of the John Adams Center.  Author of The Responsibility of Reason: Theory and Practice in a Liberal-Democratic Age.

Visiting Speakers:

Paul Rahe, Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in Western Heritage and Professor of History, Hillsdale College, Author of  Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift. “Montesquieu and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism,”

Charles R. Kesler, Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government, Claremont McKenna College, editor of the Federalist Papers and of the Claremont Review of Books: “Restoring Constitutionalism”

William Voegeli, Visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books and the author of Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State: “Populism and Constitutionalism”

Peter Lawler, Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia, editor-in-chief of Perspectives on Political Science, and author of Modern and American Dignity: “Toward a Consistent Ethic of Judicial Review: Our Founding and Legislative Compromise.”

Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, author of “Oligarchies in America? Reflections on Tocqueville’s Fears”: “The Constitutional Philosophy of Barack Obama.”

[Conclusion of the astute synopsis by Mr. Entel, followed by his even more astute questions:]

Plato, Hancock contends, enacts this yoke between being and knowing by seemingly affirming the simple superiority of theory to practice, thus suppressing the question of the relation between the good of thinking and the common good by appearing to answer it. The responsibility of reason thus takes here the form of the rule of reason, a form of ruling that is itself an aristocratic configuration of transcendence, a claim to transcend our political condition that is very political. But the rule of reason cannot be established by reason alone. In fact, Leo Strauss has a similar, very practical intension when he posits the transcendent goodness of pure theory, insofar as theory must accommodate itself to the cave as required by human nature. Philosophy must not abolish the cave but rule it nobly: Strauss’ claim that theory transcends practice is rooted in an awareness of the practical conditions of theory, and of the practical sources of the nobility of theory.

The problem is that Strauss, or his followers to be precise, seem not to be aware that such rule can only spring from an actual practice of nobility.

Hancock is also guided by an awareness of the practical conditions of theory, an awareness that is heir to both Plato and Strauss. Democratic reason undermines itself because it emphasizes reason as critique rather than reason as rule. Reason, under these circumstances, can no longer affirm itself, and it is therefore irresponsible. Rawls, for instance, in giving priority to the just over the noble, hides vertical transcendence in the horizontal dimension, thus adopting a form of unacknowledged partisanship that is itself the most blind and dangerous partisanship. What Rawls forgets, Hancock argues, is that the good is noble because it involves responsibility for the whole, including the just. Taylor, in turn, posits that we have to be aware of how believers and unbelievers can experience their world differently, to which Hancock responds by asking: Is every articulation of an experience of the world equally adequate to that experience, or to the fullest human possibilities? Can he avoid leaning toward one direction or the other? Hancock’s answer is negative, to which he adds that even Taylor’s distinction between immanence and transcendence, on which he builds but which he does not question, is Christian. Taylor forgets the primordial embedding of the religious and the philosophic in the political.

Where do we go from here then? A coherent and wholesome retrieval of the question of theory and practice requires a complex assumption of responsibility for the irreversibly public character of the circulation [of meaning between poles], that is, of the mutual implication of the axes. Such an assumption, as Hancock underscores, is a most hazardous horizon for practical reason, which brings forth nevertheless a more dynamic and richer meaning of human existence.

According to him, this insight leaves us not so much with a solution as with a new problem.

I disagree, but only insofar as it actually leaves us with a new solution to a most old problem. This new solution, in turn, consists in a meta-prudence, or second-order self-awareness that must adjust the claims of a limitless, non-partisan (yet very partisan) party of humanity with that of a limited and explicitly partisan party of tradition. What is required, therefore, is a higher form of awareness than what the parties themselves possess, particularly the limitless and non-partisan one.

Questions:

-           Regarding Strauss and the weaknesses of the elevation of philosophy so

manifest today: If the very elevation of philosophy can only spring from an actual practice of nobility, is the absence of such an elevation characteristic of the present or of democracy at large? If the latter is the case, wouldn’t that underscore Strauss’ attempt from the outset? If not, what has changed in the last decades?

-           If the illusion of the superiority of theory to practice cannot be sustained, should it be recreated? The assumption of responsibility that you allude to in response to the fusion of theory and practice and to the latter acknowledgement of the public character of the circulation within the axes, doesn’t itself demand an illusion of a novel kind? Isn’t philosophy of necessity partisan and meta-prudence a form of meta-partisanship?

-           If I understand it correctly, the main goal of the paper is to address the

practical dimension of philosophy in a responsible way, and to address the main evil of our age, which is a so-called neutral form of neutrality that is anything but, even if it doesn’t know it. How would a responsible philosophy or philosophy of responsibility address this, particularly since the limits of the limitless party are so hard to grasp both conceptually and practically, and since its main partisan tenet is its non-partisanship?