Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul

Commentary

There is no more fundamental task that lies before us than a self-conscious effort to recover the meaning of politics, civilization, and the soul for this (or any other) time. Not politics as a diabolical realm of power-seeking and “domination” rooted in will-to-power, but the “ruling and being ruled in turn,” as Aristotle called it, made possible by the uniquely human capacity to speak and reason about “the advantageous and the just.” If politics is unthinkable without conflict, it is defined above all by the enduring and humanizing imperative to “put reason and actions in common.” Politics so understood is at once light years from the violent mastery that defines despotism, the metaphysically mad dream of a “solution” to the human condition at the heart of all revolutionary and utopian temptations, and the anarchist and libertarian reverie that freely associating individuals can escape the arduous requirements of moral and civic virtue, debate, and disputation. Politics rightly understood is not reducible to morality. It is at the same time incompatible with frenzied moralism and all ideological projects to move beyond truth and falsehood, good and evil. If politics isn’t identical with ethics, it is an essentially moral enterprise.

By civilization I have in mind that state of human flourishing where ordered liberty is tied to law and self-limitation, and where progress in the arts and sciences, and in economic productivity more broadly, is accompanied by a sober appreciation of human imperfection and the fragility of all human achievements. Civilized human beings must combine a certain confidence in the ability of human beings to govern themselves, and to achieve great things, with a pronounced appreciation of the sempiternal drama of good and evil in every heart and soul, and even of the fragility of civilization itself. In authentic civilized existence, reformation must be tied to conservation, in Burke’s famous words. Civilized human beings should never succumb to the allure of some revolutionary or ideological “Year Zero” where all will be made anew. That is the path of political and spiritual perdition, of murderous negation. The Kingdom of Heaven, in decisive respects, is not of this world.

There can also be no recovery of free politics and of our civilized patrimony without a renewed appreciation of the human soul as the locus of free will, personhood, moral agency, personal responsibility, and human dignity as such. The soul is not a metaphor or a poetic fiction. It is the “I” in the I-Thou relationship of which Martin Buber famously spoke, it is the self (but more than a self) that exercises the virtues, moral and intellectual, and that experiences remorse when we human beings act or choose poorly or even inexcusably. It is the seat of our consciousness and it is what a face and speech give expression to when we encounter other human beings in familial, social, and political settings. It is inseparable from the logos—the human capacity for speech and reason—that makes political life possible for the political animals that human beings are. Without it, philosophical reflection is impossible. It is tied to character and character formation, and it is what endures as we physically age and endlessly metabolize. Contrary to a widespread fiction of our time, it is we who think, speak, and act, not our brains as essential as they are to our embodied personhood.

We “thinking reeds,” as Pascal called us, have no identity, dignity, or capacity for thought or action without the human soul. To deny it is to deny our access to self-knowledge and a common world. “Nothing-buttery,” the reductive explaining away of the soul as nothing but matter in motion, free will and consciousness as nothing but illusions of “folk psychology,” and God as a superstitious projection of infantile fantasies, gravely distorts reality. It is also a recipe for personal and civilizational self-destruction. As Alexis de Tocqueville and Walker Percy both asked with consternation, why do modern intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers take such pride and pleasure in explaining away their own powers of ratiocination? Creatively exercising the remarkable powers of the “angel” in man, they are delighted to proclaim themselves nothing but “brutes.” That, too, is the path of spiritual perdition. It is anything but realistic and “scientific,” whatever its scientistic dogmatists say.

The book you have before you hopes to pursue another more truthful and humanizing path. It takes its bearing from the late English philosopher and man of letters Roger Scruton (1944–2020) and the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent (who was born in 1949). In my judgment, they are the contemporary philosophers and political thinkers who demonstrate how we can recover the continuity of civilization, the dignity of the political vocation, and an appreciation of the ensouled human person. They are philosophers who resist the late modern dogma, and it is a dogma, that the Good is absolutely unsupported in the nature of things. By opening themselves to what Scruton, following Husserl, called the “life-world,” the world of lived experience, and what Manent calls the imperatives of action (“What are we to do?”), as opposed to abstract theorizing, they have recovered a sound grounding for politics, civilization, and the soul in the world right before us and within us.

To be sure, there are differences of some importance between these two men and thinkers. Scruton is more concerned with saving the residues of high culture and our inherited tradition; Manent with renewing the possibilities of human action and practical reason. Scruton owes much to Kant and Burke; Manent to Aristotle, St. Thomas, Tocqueville, and (with important qualifications) Leo Strauss. One is unmistakably English; the other strikingly French. As partisans of the self-governing nation, and of the plural civilization that is the West, that is exactly as it should be. In this case, an American will do the mediation.

This book is attentive to their affinities perhaps even more than their differences. Both deny, in Pierre Manent’s words from a 2019 address, that “humanity” in and of itself has any “concrete political reality.” They both see in the national form not only the indispensable instrument for democratic self-government but the only viable instrument for keeping justice and force together, to cite a famous and memorable formulation from Pascal’s “Pensées.” Both have thought seriously, even profoundly, about how to conjugate the secular state with the broader Christian inheritance of the Western world. For Scruton, the neighbor-love so beautifully evoked by Christ in the Gospels “makes sense” on the political plane “only if there is also a neighborhood in which it can be freely and safely exercised,” as he put it in a 2017 article in Law and Liberty. For Manent, the self-governing nation owes much to the European Christian search for a political form that avoided the “immensity” of empire and the “puniness” of the city-state. That is the political via media that Christianity made possible.

Both Manent and Scruton see “care of the soul” as the great imperative, at once moral and intellectual, uniting classical and Christian wisdom and separating it from every ideological project to free human beings from the challenge to put in order our souls. To do so, is to live in light of the cardinal virtues—courage, moderation, justice, and prudence—virtues that give strength and definition to a life well-lived. By allowing the phenomena to come to sight unimpeded by scientific reductionism, ideological utopianism, and a humanitarianism at odds with both civic loyalties and transcendental religion, they help restore the ties that connect ordinary experience with discerning philosophical reflection. They both admirably fulfill what Leo Strauss called the highest practical task of political philosophy: to defend sound practice against bad theory. Neither identifies philosophy with moral transgression or with an antinomianism that forgets that sound practice is in effect a “second nature” for human beings. The reckless disregard of traditional wisdom is far from philosophical. It shows contempt for the accumulated wisdom of humankind. It has nothing to do with the search for truth. Negation is completely devoid of intellectual eros and thus is deeply at odds with philosophy rightly understood.

Manent and Scruton are also profoundly countercultural, and not a little courageous, in their openness to the wisdom inherent in the Christian religion. Both are philosophers who treat religion with some circumspection and with a great deal of respect. In his latest book, “Pascal et la Proposition Chrétienne,” to be published by Editions Grasset in the fall of 2022, Manent emphasizes the radical impoverishment of collective life and the human soul that occurs when spiritually complacent men and women forget “the most high and urgent question that the rational animal” that is man is capable of posing, the question of God, inseparable from “the Question” of “the meaning and urgency of life.” Late modern man confuses the Christian proposition that forgets neither Adam’s sin nor Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, with a complacent belief in human resemblance and self-sufficiency, and in egalitarian politics separated from any need for Divine Grace to save man from his incorrigible sinfulness. Compassion and sentimentality replace charity. A naïve and facile faith in human unity or brotherhood substitutes for faith in God and demanding care for the soul. Cheap grace, indeed, and bad politics to boot.

Scruton’s engagement with Christianity is perhaps more qualified than Manent’s. Scruton oscillates between a defense of the “sacred” rooted in the life-world with an openness to the transcendence glimpsed “at the edge of things.” But in the face of man, which strikingly reveals the reality of personhood and the soul, Scruton sees intimations of God himself, “the face of God” who informs “the soul of the world.” Scruton could not imagine a truly reasonable account of the human world that reduced “the holy, the forbidden, the sacred, the profane, and the sentimental” to something other than themselves. In the Anglican liturgy and the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper, Scruton saw sacramental access to a holy realm where the true meaning of sacrifice, repentance, forgiveness, and communion with God are more fully revealed. In them, Scruton saw “a purifying rite” and “a visitation of the transcendental,” as he put in a luminous 2016 lecture (“The Sacred, the Profane, and the Desecrated”) at Westminster Abbey posthumously published in the Summer 2021 issue of The European Conservative.

In the study that follows, all this will be explored and more. Against the dominant spirit of repudiation, we will rediscover the path of affirmation. Against ideology and moralistic fanaticism, which is the frenzied side of moral relativism, we will see humane political reason at work. Against atheism, whether fervent or indifferent, we will see what is entailed in genuine openness to the Good—and God. And in contrast to the regnant religion of humanity, with its facile cosmopolitanism and failure to engage the breadth and depths of the soul, we will see how moral and political philosophy can allow us to recover all the resources of the soul.

Let us end on a note of affirmation. The fashionable theory behind the culture of repudiation, what we have called la pensée de soixante-huit, sees in the human world an artificial and oppressive “construct” to be forever negated and “deconstructed.” In striking contrast to these false and unlivable claims, Manent and Scruton counter with two vital truths. They reaffirm that authority is not authoritarianism and that, in Scruton’s words, “power is sometimes decent and benign, like the power of a loving parent, conferred by the object of love.” And both acknowledge a structure of reality that is not closed to the possibilities of the Good. Limning its various elements, they help recover a common world where humanity may find a home. And more, while doing so, they recognize those intimations of transcendence that inspire noble action and give human beings reasonable grounds for hope. Something really is better than nothing.

From RealClearWire

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.