UTOPIAN FORGETFULNESS OF DEPTH -Part 4

by David Walsh

David Walsh is professor of politics at Catholic University of America. He is the author or editor of many books; he is editor of three volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. His Guarded by Mystery has been serialized here at VoegelinView in its entirety. His most recent book is The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. The book from which the current offering is taken, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, is available from the University of Missouri Press and appears here with permission. "Utopian Forgetfulness of Depth," Chapter 3, appears here in four parts.

The Hollowness of Liberal Construction (concluded)

The notion that we are in possession of a means of evaluating truth that does not involve our own inchoate struggle toward it is one of the great distorting conceptions of our world. "This belief in its ability to understand everything from human culture and history, no matter how apparently alien, is itself one of the defining beliefs of the culture of modernity" (385). It is evident in the conceit that all the richness of traditional meaning can be captured through our meager placement of them in museums, lists of great books, or under the impoverished rubrics of aesthetics. The governing assumption is that all historical wisdom can be absorbed in ways that do not fundamentally challenge the shallowness of our own world. The culminating expression of this approach is reached in contemporary deconstructionism, which no longer even regards texts as wholes and permits us to interpret them freely without any controlling reference to historical context or autho­rial intention.¹⁶

Recognition of their untranslatability into contemporary language pulls us up sharply against the limitations of our modern worldview. It reminds us of the existential depth from which all symbolization arises and knocks the supports from the modern conceit that we can have a language that presup­poses nothing. All constructions of meaning, even the minimal constitution of liberal neutrality, arise from the way of life through which liberal meaning is rendered transparent. Without reference to the practice of the tradition we can neither make sense of nor sustain the meaning subscribed. The hermeneutical challenge then becomes not finding a philosophical Esperanto in which the least common denominator can be expressed but testing that our own existential-symbolic horizon is rich enough to include all the types it seeks to interpret. If our own tradition of meaning is not up to the level of the texts we attempt to read then we face an impasse. It can be broken only if we permit the texts of our inquiry to expand our horizons sufficiently to include them.

At that point we will, in Maclntyre's conception, have taken seriously the nature of a tradition. We will have entered at least imaginatively into the way of life of a tradition and acquired the basis from which to understand the rationality that forms its coherence. Rather than going along with the typical liberal tactic of "reformulating quarrels and conflicts with liberalism, so that they appear to have become debates within liberalism" (392), we will have taken the first step of putting liberal conviction itself to the test and thereby evoke its own living foundations. That will be the indispensable means by which substance is restored or perhaps rediscovered in the hitherto hollow appearance of liberal principles. The way will then lie open to the recognition that liberal practice too is a tradition and that it is sustained principally through its capacity to evoke existential order within its adherents.

The story of the liberal persuasion has been the story of its progressive amnesia toward its own sources. The sequel of its recovery must follow the correlative path of an anamnestic rediscovery of its own inspiration. As Oakeshott and Arendt (and Rawls and Rorty in their own way) em­phasize, liberal order is a practice that is sustained by the virtues endemic to the practice itself. More important than any principles or foundations beyond liberal order is the reality constituted through the engagement with individual and communal self-government. That is what forms the core of the liberal tradition, and its continuance depends on that recognition. Like every tradition, liberal order must insist that it can be understood only from within and refuse to concede the interpretation placed from the outside. Participation in it, also like other traditions, must be conditioned on the ability and willingness to enter into its way of life. The exercise of authority must be strictly limited to those who have clearly demonstrated their virtue in sustaining the tradition's order. Only in this way is it possible to preserve an order that, not being something that can be maintained indifferently by every human type, depends for its flourishing on the capacity to evoke those qualities in its citizens that are its living foundation.¹⁷

Insufficiency of Critique

The problem with the recommendation that liberal politics acknowledge its own dependence on a tradition is that Maclntyre does not seem to think it can be taken seriously. He does not appear to believe that liberal practice is capable of understanding its historical unfolding. The liberal mind-set is too unalterably opposed to the whole notion of a tradition, in his view, for it ever to acknowledge its own self-constitution in-depth. Instead, he looks to the liberal encounter with more substantive rational traditions to bring about first "an awareness of the specific character of their own incoherence and then accounting for the particular character of this incoherence by its metaphysical, moral, and political scheme of classification and explanation" (398). This is also the reason that he is somewhat vague about how this transformation of the liberal tradition into one of the earlier, more coherent traditions is possible. He allows as it is likely to come about only through a fundamental "conversion," since it will involve the detached liberal self becoming "something other than it now is, a self able to acknowledge by the way it expresses itself in language standards of rational enquiry as something other than expressions of will and preference" (396-97). How such a conversion might come about and how the process might be set in motion are considerations beyond the limits of Maclntyre's reflections.

In this regard he is representative of a very formidable movement of thought that has been gaining momentum since the beginning of the century. The discovery of the richness and depth of premodern philosophical tradi­tions, such as the classical and the medieval, has convinced many thinkers that only the infusion of truth from these sources can save the liberal ethos. Left to itself, the tradition remains irretrievably bankrupt. This is particularly the conclusion of the generation of European emigres, such as Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, who witnessed the corruption and disintegration of liberal democratic regimes before the onslaught of totalitarianism. Arendt, too, often sounds as if she is speaking from a Greek perspective, with her emphasis on the immortality of publicly effective action. The long-standing Catholic critique of liberalism from Leo XIII to John Paul II is similarly rooted in the conviction of the superiority of natural law and solidaristic perspectives over liberal atomistic individualism.

They are all friendly critics of liberal democracy in the sense that, unlike the now largely defunct revolutionary ideologies, they wish to see it improved rather than abolished. Like the Canadian critic George Parkin Grant, they concede that the liberal construction is "the only political language that can sound a convincing moral note in our public realms" (English-Speaking Justice, 5). But they cannot see any way that the moral residue of liberal order might be coherently expanded to secure it against its inherently centrifugal tendencies. Only one of the traditions with "more substantive presupposi­tions of truth" possesses the requisite durability to withstand the corrosive relativism of egalitarianism. A tradition requires the fortitude to be able to insist that not everything within it is equally accessible to everyone, if it is to preserve the conditions in which the substantive rationality of practice can be maintained. In most respects the liberal tradition struck its most serious friendly critics as a poor candidate for the position. It is simply too difficult for the emphasis on individual autonomy to be corralled by the authoritative requirements of a practice.

Yet despite the evident merit of this assessment, it is also difficult to avoid the suspicion that the evaluation too is tinged with a certain utopianism. True, the charges directed against the liberal construction are largely valid, and the greater cogency of premodern spiritual and philosophical traditions is indisputable, but is there not an element of escapism secreted in the very heightening of the contrast between such juxtapositions? A trenchant critique of liberal politics is an indispensable first step, but can the meditation afford to rest there? It is almost as if the critics have given up entirely on the effort to remediate the liberal framework from within and are now confined to recording its inexorable descent into the maelstrom. One is struck by the absence of much serious reflection on how liberal self-understanding might be modified to accommodate the critics' insights. An impression is conveyed of having already abandoned the effort at remediation.

This is a perpetually tempting possibility, especially for those who have reached a personal viewpoint of greater meaning and depth. The task then becomes to find a modus vivendi that will enable the life of reason to be carried on in a world that is pervaded by unreason; the challenge to do what one can to bring about a growth of the soul within that world is declined. The tendency to dismiss responsibility is increased by the very power of the critique of liberal hollowness, which strongly reinforces the sense of the crit­ics' own superiority to contemporary vacuity. Whether reading MacIntyre, Strauss, Voegelin, or Arendt, one comes away with a very strong sense of the power of the Platonic or Thomist viewpoint on the world and of how paltry the confused gropings of modern liberal philosophy really are by comparison. There is little encouragement to consider the substantive achievements of liberal order or to think through the way it might be internally redirected to overcome its manifest defects. Even the realization that the liberal conception is the only option available to us for the foreseeable future is not often made.

Such blithe dispensation creates the air of unreality that Rorty has pilloried as "terminal wistfulness" in the various shades of communitarianism. Without some concrete indication of how liberal democracy might be nudged toward the transformation, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the discussion has been merely an exercise in longing for an irrevocably vanished past. After all, what is the purpose of reflecting on the superiority of the premodern traditions if it is not to draw them into this world as a source of order? If that is the intention, then some attention must be given to the question of how capable the liberal ethos is of absorbing such insights and how the insights might be organically promoted within the liberal construction. A mere assertion of premodern truth, without any attempt to mediate it in language that renders it minimally intelligible from a liberal perspective, would be futile. A way must be found to give the philosophic-Christian tradition a public voice; otherwise, it will go the way of all traditions compelled to shrink to a wholly private level.

It is one of the principal contentions of this study that such a means is available, although not sufficiently recognized, in the traditionalist critique itself. The very act of critique contains within it the implication of what is required to remediate the defects. By undertaking the resistance and diagnosis of what is at fault within the liberal polity, we correlatively evoke a vision of the alternative that would overcome it. The therapeutic growth of the soul is the means by which disorder is defeated by order. That process is, moreover, not one that occurs simply in the critics of liberal thinking but is, as we have seen, an unfolding that has also emerged from the crisis within liberal society itself. The analysis of the critics and the self-diagnosis of the liberal tradition are convergent, even if they are not coincident. They provide the opportunity for the critics to inject their more profound diagnosis at a stage within the intraliberal conversation that will enable the dialogue to move forward toward a horizon beyond the contemporary liberal preserve. This suggestion is simply another way of stating Maclntyre's account of how one tradition manages to integrate its rivals "in such a way as both to correct in each that which ... by its own standards could be shown to be defective or unsound and to remove from each, in a way justified by that correction, that which barred them from reconciliation" (Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 123).

The difference between my approach and Maclntyre's is that I do not consider the liberal conviction to be an unalterable fixed quantity. I take seriously the suggestion that it is a tradition and that, like all traditions, it rests not on its overt formulations but on the underlying resonances that give its principles life. Thus, the possibility remains of expanding the admittedly limited existential base that now underpins liberal order. By building on the fragments that still constitute a liberal tradition, it is possible to discover the firm reality on which to build a greater development. Anything else, as Oakeshott has reminded us, will be utterly ineffectual. It would comprise only the erection of a superstructure on a foundation of air, unconnected with the real living world of human beings today. The principal object of this study is to show how such a meditative expansion within liberal politics can take place. Beginning with a reflection on the state of crisis within liberal theory and practice, we move through a consideration of the nature and source of the crisis to a realization of the direction that must be pursued in its resolution. It is crucial that we at no point depart from the liberal self-understanding. The outcome is then one that, even if it is several stages removed from the contemporary liberal conception, is intimately connected to it as its own meditative unfolding. It cannot be disavowed by the liberal mind, and it provides a trajectory of the way by which the liberal tradition itself might be transformed.

The first stage has consisted of the self-recognition of the crisis and the outline of the parameters in which the liberal order is both an enduring source of moral authority and incapable of acknowledging the depth of conviction from which it springs. The next stage is to delve more deeply into the liberal tradition to discover what resources might be available to renew it from within. This will begin naturally with a reflection on the source of the liberal contradiction between its convictions and their acknowledgment, which seems to be the core of the instability of the whole construction. Why is it that liberal conviction is so constitutionally incapable of mounting a coherent defense of the principles that it so manifestly holds? With that deeper understanding of its nature in mind, it will then be possible in the third stage of the meditation to take account of the limitations and strengths that conjoin to form the liberal tradition. In that way we will have a means of exploring the extent to which the limits can be expanded and the strengths exploited to constitute a more substantively moral politics. The conversion that Maclntyre and others look to must, like all true conversions, occur within the soul of the penitent.     

[This is part 4 of a four part article.  

Part 1 may be read HERE.]

NOTES

(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Walsh's book)