Bowing to relentless and overwhelming demand from postmodern-leaning lovers of truth and virtue waiting somewhere out there in cyberspace, I offer this extended version of the Draft Manifesto from a few weeks ago. (I include the previously published first 8 points here, so you won’t have to look them up.)
Also, anticipating the difficulty some true seekers of truth and virtue might encounter, I offer this “bottom line” declaration right here at the top:
The emulation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s approach to modern individualistic democracy is fundamental for postmodern conservatives because:
a. Tocqueville’s whole purpose in writing Democracy in America follows from his attentive insight into and his manly affirmation of the reality of “man’s true greatness.”
b. And yet he never proposes a theory of such greatness; indeed, he hardly deigns to name it.
c. Moreover, while he understands modern democracy to pose a profound threat to this greatness, he also interprets it as an expression of greatness.
In Sum: A postmodern conservative reasonably affirms a ground of ethical-political judgment that cannot be completely captured in a theory (classical, Christian, or otherwise), but that comes to view and to speech through an engagement with promises and threats to humanity implicit in the evaluation of a concrete political-social order, and of its theoretical self-representations.
Now, the Manifesto, including continuation:
1. Reason has somehow become tyrannical; this tyranny manifest itself in broad daylight in ideocratic totalitarianism, but it also threatens liberal democracy.
2. Human beings are subject to an elusive compound of reason and power. The rule of reason is as fragile and tainted as it is inevitable.
3. A reasonable self-understanding of reason would at once be open to the possibility of transcending shared (socially-politically authorized and thus to some degree enforced) frameworks and aware that even the terms of such transcendence must depend on such practical frameworks. Such an understanding would be the deepest ground of postmodern conservatism.
4. Humanity can be understood to exist along two dimensions: “practical” and “theoretical-spiritual.” We find ourselves embedded in a context of practices, habits, and shared understandings; and yet we are aware of being “other” than that context, of being free to transcend it or to conceive possibilities beyond it . To avoid pathological separations and fusions of these dimensions we need a proper self-understanding of the rule of reason and its limits.
5. The modern reduction of reason to formal method is complicit in such a pathology: it is at once too theoretical (abstracting from practically embedded intimations of the good) and too practical – that is, transformative, having renounced all ends but the implicit drive to realize itself materially.
6. Tocqueville described this pathology as the “abolition of moral analogy,” a rupture between public and private, the city and the soul, between common, practical life and man’s theoretical-spiritual transcendence.
7. Modern, methodical reason drives a wedge between the common, practical world it proposes to rule and the soul’s self-understanding. The same rupture results from the soul’s claim radically to transcend the city. The “individual” is a halfway house on the soul’s fall into an abyss in which it has lost all possibility of self-representation. This fall is driven at once by democratic individualism and by scientific reason.
8. Modern reason’s implicit assertion of radical transcendence (the Archimedean point of scientific power over nature) is inseparable from the radical reduction of humanity to the “material” object of science.
9. Heidegger does not turn from theory to practice but rather seeks to uncover the very practice of theory as a ground of existence. This requires wresting Aristotle’s ideas of both “practical wisdom” and “theoretical wisdom” away from the concern for an elusive higher good. Thus Heidegger’s quest for a ground deeper than the theoretical or scientific has nothing to do with a respect for the common, practical purposive realm. Instead he seeks a ground in the purposeless practice of theoretical abstraction itself: human transcendence understood as the radical absence of purpose. To reject Heidegger’s inhuman thinking is to ask what it would mean to take the possibility of human choice as an insuperable starting point of philosophy.
10. Levinas’s idea of the priority of the ethical is one compelling response to this possibility, but he wastes this insight at the outset by accepting the modern (especially Kantian) radical separation between the ethical and the natural.
11. Leo Strauss proposes “classical political philosophy” as an antidote to the modern eclipse of truth by power (historicism). This seems to mean a return to the idea of eternal truth,” protected by an astute political and moral rhetoric. But the deeper meaning of “political philosophy” is the insuperable dependence of philosophy itself on traces of transcendence rooted in our common, political existence.
12. However, Strauss (for understandable practical reasons that we cannot accept as final) chooses to interpret the transcendence rooted in common life in exclusively classical-hierarchical or “vertical” terms, thus deliberately suppressing the continuity between Christian and modern hopes (universalist and “horizontal”).
13. Tocqueville chooses neither Heidegger’s surrender to an inhuman understanding of Being nor Strauss’s deliberately hierarchical understanding of philosophy. Rather, he understands that the aristocratic sense of elevation must somehow be preserved alongside the Christian and democratic understanding of transcendence in terms of “justice” (the horizontal projection of meaning upon a future in which, ideally, all are “saved” or “recognized/satisfied”). It is Tocqueville who best shows us the way towards an understanding of the rule of reason that it is practically sound precisely because it is rigorously self-aware (that is, aware of its conditions and limitations as well as of its possibilities).
14. The Christian and modern effort to understand the implication of eternity in Time (a God whose purposes are somehow bound up with the fate of humanity) is vulnerable, as Tocqueville and Strauss and saw, to the eclipse of transcendent truth by all-too-human power and thus inhuman power (“historicism,” “technology,” nihilism”). But a return to the rhetoric of a serene, indifferent eternity is both practically and theoretically impossible. To rule responsibly and humanely, reason must accept the challenge of managing, directing, informing hopes and longings, expressions and figures of transcendence which can in no simple way be included under or subordinated to “reason.”
