Keep Philosophy Away From the Barricades

Among contemporary American philosophers, Martha Nussbaum has long represented the best and the worst of the urgent liberal conscience. One feels the moral seriousness of her work—and one worries (at least I do) that intellectual corners are being cut and complexities set aside so that her vision of goodness and justice can sail to victory. David Rieff’s recent posting on Nussbaum in relation to Bernard Williams, a very different sort of liberal intellectual, puts his finger on the problem . Nussbaum imagines that the modern progressive struggle for justice does not just accord with clear thinking about reality: an activist stance emerges from true philosophy. Rieff rightly observes that this easy marriage of political advocacy and intellectual honesty is, well, too easy.

We have a duty to serve the common good, but I’m an Augustinian, and so I find myself allergic to the sort of philosophical messianism one finds in Martha Nussbaum. If forced to chose, I’ll opt for the astringent skepticism of Bernard Williams. It protected him from imagining that his political sensibilities could be cheaply gilded with the conceits of philosophy.

As Josef Pieper noticed decades ago, the tendency to want to energize all dimensions of life with urgent social purposes ends up debasing society, because a restless activism neglects the contemplative core of culture. Worship and philosophy have more in common, or at least should, then philosophy and politics. Let’s do the best we can as citizens, but let’s not sacrifice the deeper goods of the soul—not the least of which is the integrity of our minds that allows us to entertain the failures, inadequacies, over-generalizations, false assumptions, and convenient simplicity of our political convictions—to the hungry postmodern gods of the news cycle, the ballot box and the legislative chamber.