So this is my ‘much-anticipated’ rejoinder to Freddie .
The best way I know how to do this is like sewing a button. I want to sew Freddie to my fabric of understanding (but not so close that he, the button, is too tight to the fabric to be usable as a button!). The back of that fabric, though, has flaws that have been covered up by the more polished surface it’s attached to. The back of that fabric is what I am going to pierce first with this needling post, in order to punch the thread through to Freddie. Nicola and Helen’s nonfoundationalism is on the back of the fabric. Freddie’s main question is the eyelet I want to loop through: are people who radically personalize their inescapable contexts in denial about the truths that might yield from an understanding that the studied approach to political philosophy is necessary?
First I need to say that Nicola is making, in my estimation, a big mistake by connecting certainty to truth . Of course you can have truth without certainty. Maybe not the truth about the point at which water boils or the size of Australia, but other kinds of truth: nonempirical truths. Like certain things about the relationship between God and Man, about which a conversation is incoherent unless conducted in terms of truth. (But not certainty.) The question Strauss drove us towards was whether you could have truth about other nonempirical, non-material things besides the relationship between God and Man: things like justice . To deny that you can is to decline to open at least some human practices to either critical inquiry or rational question, or both.
MacIntyre’s searing critique of Burke opens with the claim that he made a whole disposition out of this denial. But this is just MacIntyre’s superficial claim. MacIntyre’s deep claim is that Burke knew he was doing this to himself (privately) and to others (publicly), and was in public and private denial about that, too . Burke, MacIntyre says, self-consciously recreated himself falsely as a truly unconsciously already-created Englishman, and then wickedly activated the consciousness of those who were actually what he pretended to be artificially! MacIntyre leads us to deny that Burke was in the right to become who we know him as. He leads us to deny that Burke had a right to join the tradition that he did, because MacIntyre concludes that it was impossible for Burke to truly — as in, without bearing false witness to himself and others — join that tradition.
The hallmark of our age is our increasing capacity as common people to become virtuosos at believing untruths that we tell ourselves stipulatively in order to generate causal statements that manage our complex and always-shifting passions, appetites, hopes, and interests. The main threat to postmodern conservatives is complicity in this hypermodern mendacity.
But if Helen is right about loyalty , there is a second-order justification for complicity that takes the heat off the accusation of egotism or solipsism or selfishness. Perhaps Burke had to do what he did in order to save something precious about England that, for whatever reason, couldn’t be saved without him. Indeed, under the pressure of secular or ‘political’ or ‘crisis’ time, we often lack the luxury of trying to ascertain the truth about whether precious things can or can’t be saved without our help or interference. In the affairs of men in crisis — as opposed to, say, the affairs of a lone drowning child in a shallow lake — we often cannot be certain about whether our active agency in secular time is going to save anyone or anything. We have to decide anyway. (Thucydides is one of the most brilliant writers on this problem.) The question of how and when to act in moments of crisis is the political question. The answer seemingly must implicate questions of team membership: the question of whom is on whose side shapes so much of our understanding of any crisis. And when the crisis is itself a crisis of team membership — well, now we are off to the races. Helen wants tribal loyalty to manage or adjudicate the relationship between the team and individuals who are caught in the uncertain area between membership and nonmembership; this is loyalty as therapy, in one fashion, but in another it is loyalty as epistemology. In MacIntyre’s language, Rittelmeyeran loyalty is a virtue we use to resolve a certain kind of epistemological crisis.
Sure enough, MacIntyre’s main criticism of Nietzsche is a reverse, higher-order version of his critique of Burke. Where Burke falsely pretended to be loyal to a tradition/team that he was not truly a part of, Nietzsche, on MacIntyre’s telling, falsely pretended that he didn’t have to be loyal to the biggest of all traditions/teams: humanity itself. But Nietzsche also built a philosophy that was a therapy of denial at a more local level, too — some of the confining contingencies of his personal life. There was lots on Wagner and his illness, but there was nothing on his family. MacIntyre is partially right, here, but he doesn’t pay enough attention to Nietzsche’s courageous willingness to wrestle with the philosophy of disloyalty and loyalty in his critique of "fatherlandishness" and his complex attempt to rearticulate "Germanness" and "Europeanness" from within the formal constraints of his inherited German and European traditions and teams.
But the real fight between MacIntyre and Nietzsche is over our species being. MacIntyre, especially in his later work, is forthright that a key part of what makes us human is our shared inescapable condition as mutually dependent rational animals — as members whose loyalties must include, if they are not to be mendacious, a loyalty to what Nietzsche called the herd. Aristotelian Thomist that he is, MacIntyre theorizes loyalty in the language of Christian love and of classical natural law. He tells us that misericordia is both a virtue (of pity) and a natural law (of our species being). Nietzsche fights in ways with which we are largely familiar to deny that this is so. But both men operate within a framework that contrasts essentially to a Jewish standpoint, in which truth can be at once universal and particular. The whole question of loyalty and pity and our species being emerges from the basic problem of Christ, who both was and was not Jewish, and both was and was not Christian. Christianity is the attempt to make everyone a Jew and then to make every Jew into a Christian. Put more sweetly, it is the hope and conviction that all are the chosen people of God, and that all the chosen can know the terms of that choice. Christian thinkers oftentimes keep running up against the problem of loyalty, identity, tradition, and truth because of the strange truth about Christ and Christianity. And that problem is oftentimes intensified by a certain denial of the Jewishness of Christ. When Catholic and Calvinist pomocons probe the differences between one another, they are maneuvering around the contours of this dynamic.
One escape hatch from the whole problematic — the one I like least, in that it puts pomocons at the greatest risk in the way I suggested above — is dramatized by the advent of Freud and Jung, and the relation between those men’s theories. Freud recognized that many bourgeois Christians had become so good at being publicly loyal and privately disloyal that they had become paralyzed in a network of neuroses that their denial of their unloving disloyalty made it impossible for them to break. Through the establishment of an analytic attitude by way of the talking cure, Freud hoped to break not just the neuroses but the religion marbled around them. The great post-Jew wanted to train post-Christians in the ascetic, artistic science of managing the permanent division of loyalties that defined the bourgeois-cum-human ego.
For Jung, this was all too bleak, infertile, exhausted. "Fulfilling as he did the cultural-historical task of criticism, Freud stood for no new way of life." (This is Rieff talking.) "In Jung’s view, the critic has served his purpose; he must be succeeded by prophets. In burying Freud with praise, Jung subtly voiced a wider dissatisfaction among intellectuals with their established cultural function as critics, chief designers of the deconversion experience. Not that Jung wished to return to the interdictory animus of the Jewish prophetic tradition. After Freud, it appears, the prophet stands not for repressive piety but for remissive blasphemy."
What does Rieff mean with that last line? "Jung suspected the new and adored the old. These passions dominated his pyschology. The representation of the archaic in modern situations, mainly internal to the person, was the mode in which tradition survived. In Jung, psychology was transformed into an inventory of traditions, from which culture could borrow variety and relieve the boredom of an ‘unspiritual,’ although comfortable, life."
Sound familiar? Would-be pomocons, beware! The guilty desire to minimize your inventory of traditions is a therapy of asceticism at the dead end of the modern age. An inventory of one is still an inventory — which is why Warhol and Hirst seek to reduce it to an inventory of none. But death won’t let them.
The will to loyalty to a single tradition — and the will to self-persuasion that this is enough to justify one’s contentment in the adequacy of the meaning one’s relationship with it generates — is postmodern after a Foucauldian fashion and conservative after a Burkean fashion but it is not postmodern conservatism as I understand the term. This cuts in both directions, because this will can either be too parochial, too universal, or even both! We all know the way that parochial traditions can develop pretensions not just to universal veracity but general veracity — i.e., not just "truly true" but "true for everyone." So I cannot be a Burkean and I cannot be a Gersonian. Nor can I be a loyal member of "just one" of "many different teams." It is a human limitation of loyalty itself that ultimately it puts one in this position, and when we realized this we Westerners struggled epically to figure out a way to cope with it. The coping mechanism had to promise an end to the neurotic restlessness that drives those horrified by their weakness (contingency) on the one hand and power (agency) on the other. Jung’s answer was a comfortingly inexhaustible yet comfortingly finite palette of fecund myths — indelibly unified yet endlessly customizable. The therapies of commitment afforded by these personaliable myths allowed neurotically restless moderns to remain active without going mad and inactive without getting bored. Existential Nietzschean commitments to single traditions are not much more, in this context, than therapies of discipline that challenge the self to seek trustfully (or is that courageously? or fatalistically?) for totalizing meaning under more or less extreme conditions of seeming meaning-scarcity.
What we find, then, is an extremely denuded and overgeneralized discovery of ‘meaning’. It is something inexplicable, indescribable, something which we can only evoke by metaphor and describe in senses of itself. This is a chintzy version of our inability to look upon God, just as the ‘deeply personal’ indescribable experience of ‘meaning’ is a therapeutic individualization of the old romantic treatment of nature — something primal, sweeping, protean, teeming with life power and limitless possibility. When Freud democratized genius, he simply personalized the primacy of possibility. His pessimistic aim in doing this was to make people less ill, merely normally miserable. Jung’s optimistic aim was to do this to make people happier, to make them flourish. Jung did so under the chintzy version of the Biblical injunction that there is nothing new under the sun. It was a therapy of creativity meant to breathe new life into the nostalgic deathbed of the West. It also looks a lot like the pantheism Tocqueville warned us against, able to ecumenically accomodate the celebration of any value that’s told in a gripplingly personal enough fashion. It points us toward what the cult of love that I have referred to by way of the Eros lo Volt! crowd, and back that way toward the problem of loyalty, team, tradition, identity, and truth. And it implicates those who would rely on themselves to commit deeply to their traditions to generate enough meaning for themselves in a manner I don’t think they much want it to.
So, clearly, this is not the end of this line of thinking, but before I stretch the form of blogging so far that it won’t snap back, I’ll see where this gets our conversation first.
