Ratg

Critics of
Enlightenment
Rationalism
Edited by
Gene Callahan · Kenneth B. McIntyre
Critics of Enlightenment Rationalism
“Callahan and McIntyre have brought together a distinguished and cosmopolitan

array of contributors who have produced a lively and provocative collection of
essays exploring and analyzing the modern phenomenon of Enlightenment ratio-
nalism, whose distinguished critics range from the historically important Edmund
Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Friedrich Nietzsche, to our near contemporaries
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eric Voegelin and Michael Oakeshott. The connecting and
fascinating thread that runs through the volume is a relentless critique of a style of
thinking that prioritizes the pursuit of certainty, and a blind belief in the powers of
instrumental reason to overcome all adversity.”
—David Boucher, Professor of Political Philosophy and International
Relations, Cardiff University, UK
“This volume could not have arrived at a better time. McIntyre and Callahan have
given us an excellent set of essays that speaks directly to the fetishization of human
reason. Each of the thinkers examined reminds us of the fallibility of human
beings—a lesson we sorely need to revisit every generation or so.”
—Richard Avramenko, Professor, Department of Political Science,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
“This is a remarkable and remarkably comprehensive collection on thinkers who

questioned enlightenment rationalism, both in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
tury. The list is impressive: Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Burke, Nietzsche, Eliot, as
well as Oakeshott, Hayek, Alasdair MacIntyre, and a number of others equally
stellar, and equally deep and complex. The essays are by accomplished scholars,
and show that the opposition to enlightenment rationalism was both diverse and
strikingly coherent, and a treasure trove for thinking beyond the enlightenment. It
will be especially valuable for those with interests in one of these thinkers to see
them in the context of the larger fraternity to which they belong.”
—Stephen Turner, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy,
University of South Florida, USA
“The variety of topics considered, the range of thinkers included, the striking and
ultimately illuminating juxtaposition of approaches combine to cast, not a spot-
light, but indeed multiple of points of light on a rich selection of important think-
ers from the later-modern period. Scholars and students interested in modern
critics of modernity will benefit from the range of figures treated here and the
depth of the commentaries on them.”
—Alexander S. Duff, Assistant Professor of Political Science,
University of North Texas, USA
Gene Callahan • Kenneth B. McIntyre
Editors
Critics of
Enlightenment
Rationalism
Editors
Gene Callahan Kenneth B. McIntyre
New York University Sam Houston State University
Brooklyn, NY, USA Huntsville, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-42598-2 ISBN 978-3-030-42599-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sam Houston State University for its financial sup-
port and for granting me a sabbatical in which to complete the project. I
would also like to thank The Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy
at The University of Wisconsin for inviting me to spend the 2019–2020
academic year as a Visiting Scholar at the Center, and providing financial
support for the year. Thanks to my mother and father for all of the support
over the years. I want to thank my two daughters, Flannery and Julie, who
rarely agree with me, but, at least, find me occasionally humorous. Finally,
thanks to Maria for taking care of things.
Kenneth B. McIntyre
4 September 2019
Madison, WI
Many thanks to the patience of my wife, Elen, to the support of my
children, Eamon, Emma, and Adam, to Leslie Marsh for encouraging us
in this project, and to David Boucher for his mentorship. Selah.
Eugene Callahan
5 September 2019
Brooklyn, NY
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre
2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

Ferenc Hörcher
3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

Reason and Freedom 33
Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin
4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

Robert Wyllie
5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

Justin D. Garrison
6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

Corey Abel
7 Wittgenstein on Rationalism 95
Daniel John Sportiello
8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

Jack Simmons
vii
viii Contents
9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

Steven Knepper
10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

Charles W. Lowney II
11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

Luke C. Sheahan
12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

Nick Cowen
13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

Tradition: Situating Gadamer’s Philosophical
Hermeneutics”193
Ryan R. Holston
14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

Michael P. Federici
15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

Wendell John Coats
16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

Jason Ferrell
17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

Nathanael Blake
18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

Sanford Ikeda
19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of

Modern Moral Philosophy279
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Index295
Notes on Contributors
Corey Abel studied the history of political thought at The London

School of Economics and Political Science, where he earned an MSc., and
The University of Chicago, where his Ph.D. was on the thought of Michael
Oakeshott. He has taught in both political science and interdisciplinary
humanities at The United States Air Force Academy, The University of
Denver, Metropolitan State University, The University of Colorado, and
The Colorado College. He is the editor of Intellectual Legacy of Michael
Oakeshott and The Meanings of Michael Oakeshott’s Conservatism.
Nathanael Blake earned a PhD in political theory from the Catholic
University of America, and has written for a variety of scholarly and popu-
lar publications. He resides in Missouri.
Gene Callahan has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University and
a Master’s in the philosophy of the social sciences from the LSE. He is the
author of Economics for Real People, Oakeshott on Rome and America, and
co-editor of Tradition v. Rationalism. He teaches at New York University.
Wendell John Coats is Professor of Government at Connecticut College
where he teaches courses in the history of Western political theory, ancient,
medieval and modern. He is published widely in the field of political the-
ory, especially with regard to the work of the twentieth century, English
philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Nick Cowen has a PhD from the Department of Political Economy,

King’s College London, and degrees from the University of Oxford and
University College London. He has written for the American Journal of
Political Science, Critical Review and the Review of Austrian Economics.
Michael P. Federici is professor and chair of the Political Science and
International Relations Department at Middle Tennessee State University.
He received his B.S. in economics from Elizabethtown College and his
M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from The Catholic University of America.
He is the former president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters
and the author of three books and three edited volumes: The Political
Philosophy of Alexander Hamilton, The Challenge of Populism, Eric Voegelin:
The Search for Order, The Culture of Immodesty in American Life and
Politics: The Modest Republic, Rethinking the Teaching of American History,
and The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson.
Jason Ferrell currently teaches political theory at Concordia University,
having also taught McGill University and Mount Allison University. His
research interests include the thought of Isaiah Berlin, value pluralism,
and distributive justice. His articles have appeared in Political Theory,
Contemporary Political Theory, and the Critical Review of International
Social and Political Philosophy. He has also authored a “Glossary of Names”
for the second edition of Isaiah Berlin’sRussian Thinkers.
Justin D. Garrison is an associate professor of political science at Roanoke
College in Salem, Virginia. He is a political theorist who researches the rela-
tionship between politics and the imagination. He is the author of journal
articles, book chapters, and the book An Empire of Ideals: The Chimeric
Imagination of Ronald Reagan. He is also co-editor of the book The
Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a Post-Constitutional Age.
Ryan R. Holston is Professor and holder of the Jonathan Myric Daniels
‘61 Chair for Academic Excellence at Virginia Military Institute. He is also
an Associate Editor at the journal Humanitas. His published work has
appeared in History of Political Thought, Telos, and Harvard Theological
Review, among other places. He is currently writing a monograph, whose
working title is Tradition and the Deliberative Turn, and is co-editor of a
forthcoming book entitled The Historical Mind: Humanistic Renewal in a
Post-Constitutional Age (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2020).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher and historian of political

thought. His PhD was on the Scottish Enlightenment. He is research pro-
fessor and director of the Research Institute of Politics and Government at
the National University of Public Service in Budapest. He is senior fellow
and earlier director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. His publications include Prudentia Iuris: Towards a
Pragmatic Theory of Natural Law (2000) and the coedited volume: Aspects
of the Enlightenment: Aesthetics, Politics, and Religion (2004). Most
recently he co-edited an co-authored the volume: A History of the
Hungarian Constitution. Law, Government and Political Culture in
Central Europe (2019). A Political Philosophy of Conservatism, Prudence,
Moderation and Tradition is in print with Bloomsbury, scheduled to get
published in 2020.
Sanford Ikeda is Professor of Economics at SUNY Purchase. He is an
internationally recognized scholar of Jane Jacobs’ work, and the author of
Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism.
Jin Jin is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He
received his B.A. with honors in Political Science from Concordia
University in Canada, winning the Renée Vautelet Prize as the most out-
standing student in his program. His honors thesis, entitled “The Seas to
Rove and the Sea of Roving Men: Self-Awareness in Tocqueville’s
Recollections and Fortnight in the Wilderness,” discusses Tocqueville’s
self-awareness as a pathway to his thought on human nature.
Steven Knepper is an assistant professor in the Department of English,
Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His
research interests include American literature, tragedy, and aesthetics. His
writings have appeared in Telos, The Robert Frost Review, The Cormac
McCarthy Journal, Religion & Literature, and other journals. He is cur-
rently writing about the philosopher William Desmond’s approach to
literature.
Charles W. Lowney II is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hollins
University, Roanoke, Virginia, USA. He received his masters in philosophy at
Boston College, where he studied Continental Philosophy, and his doctorate
at Boston University, where he studied Analytic Philosophy. He is interested
in applying the concepts of emergentism and tacit knowing to ethics, society,
and religion, and has done so in articles such as “Authenticity and the
Reconciliation of Modernity” (2009), “From Science to Morality” (2009),
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
“Morality: Emergentist Ethics” (2010), “From Morality to Spirituality”

(2010), and in a chapter, “Four Ways of Understanding Mysticism” in
Mysticism and Silence (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan, Laura Weed, ed.).
Lowney is also the editor of Charles Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique
of Modernity: Pluralist and Emergentist Directions (2017).
Kenneth B. McIntyre is Professor of Political Science at Sam Houston
State University. He is the author of The Limits of Political Theory: Michael
Oakeshott on Civil Association, Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence,
and Skeptical Politics, and has also written essays on the philosophy of his-
tory, ordinary language philosophy, American constitutionalism, and prac-
tical reason. He is currently working on a book on value pluralism, liberty,
and the rule of law.
Luke C. Sheahan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duquesne
University and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Program for Research on
Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) at the University of
Pennsylvania. He researches the intersection of First Amendment rights
and political theory. Sheahan’s scholarly articles and reviews have appeared
inThe Political Science Reviewer, Humanitas, Anamnesis, and The Journal
of Value Inquiry He has lectured widely on religious liberty, freedom of
speech, and freedom of association. His book Why Associations Matter:
The Case for First Amendment Pluralism is forthcoming from the
University Press of Kansas. From 2018–2019, Sheahan was Associate
Director and Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Freedom Project at
Wellesley College and from 2016–2018, he was a postdoctoral associate in
the Department of Political Science at Duke University. He received a
PhD and MA in political theory from the Catholic University of America
and a B.S. in political science from the Honors College at Oregon State
University. Sheahan is a five- time recipient of the Humane Studies
Fellowship, a 2014 recipient of the Richard M. Weaver Fellowship, and a
2018 recipient of the Leonard P. Liggio Memorial Fellowship.
Jack Simmons is a Professor of Philosophy at Georgia Southern
University, in Savannah, Georgia. His research focuses on discourse ethics
and hermeneutics, leading to publications in bio-ethics, film, television,
technology and science.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Travis D. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia

University in Montreal. he has published on Thomas Hobbes and Francis
Bacon, and is the author of Superhero Ethics (Templeton, 2018) and co-
editor (with Marlene K. Sokolon) of Flattering the Demos (Lexington, 2018).
Daniel John Sportiello is an assistant professor of philosophy at the
University of Mary in North Dakota. He has published several book
reviews with the Notre Dame Evolution Working Group; he also contrib-
uted a chapter on Eric Voegelin to Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin,
Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others.
Robert Wyllie is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science
at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses upon Spinoza’s
moral psychology as a pivot in the modern understanding of envy. His
work, which includes several articles on the political theory of Kierkegaard,
has appeared in Perspectives on Political Science, Res Philosophica, Telos, and
other journals.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Gene Callahan and Kenneth B. McIntyre
Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the

writings of Francis Bacon and René Descartes, and to have come to self-
awareness in the works of the French philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot,
Condorcet, and d’Alembert), and their allies, such as Thomas Jefferson,
Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Paine. But almost contemporaneously with
the birth of this movement, it attracted critics. The aim of this project is to
provide an overview of some of the most important of the many critics of
“Enlightenment rationalism,” a term we use in an historically loose sense,
to cover not just leaders of the Enlightenment itself, but also latter figures
whose model of what is rational closely resembled that espoused during
the Enlightenment.1
The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commen-
tary on that thinker, but also to place him in the context of this larger
stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history
of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a his-
tory. Some may wonder at the mixed bag of thinkers we address: poets,
G. Callahan (*)
New York University, Brooklyn, NY, USA
K. B. McIntyre
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA
e-mail: kbm014@SHSU.EDU
© The Author(s) 2020 1

G. Callahan, K. B. McIntyre (eds.), Critics of Enlightenment
Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9_1
2 G. CALLAHAN AND K. B. MCINTYRE
philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is

unity in this diversity. Although these authors worked in a variety of forms,
they all sought to demonstrate the narrowness of rationalism’s description
of the human situation. It is our hope that surveying the variety of per-
spectives from which rationalism has been attacked will serve to clarify the
difficulties the rationalist approach to understanding faces, rather than dis-
persing our critical attention. In other words, we hope that these diver-
gent streams flow together into a river, rather than meandering out to sea
like the channels of a delta.2
The subjects of the volume do not share a philosophical tradition as
much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among mod-
ern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonable-
ness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the
presuppositions, methods, and logic of the natural sciences. In epistemol-
ogy, this scientistic reductionism lends itself to the notion that knowing
things consists in conceiving them in terms of law-like generalizations that
allow for accurate predictability. In moral philosophy, scientism leads to
the common notion among modern ethicists that any worthy moral the-
ory must produce a single decision procedure that gives uniform and pre-
dictable answers as to what is moral in any particular situation.
While the subjects of the volume are united by a common enemy, the
sources, arguments, and purposes of their critiques are extraordinarily
various and, though they often overlap, they often contradict one another.
There are epistemological pluralists like Gadamer, Oakeshott, and Berlin
who draw sharp distinctions between scientific, aesthetic, historical, and
practical modes of discourse, and, thus, reject the Enlightenment rational-
ists’ claims concerning the superiority of scientific explanation. There are
religious believers like Kierkegaard who criticize the “faith” in human rea-
son exhibited by Enlightenment rationalists (this group of critics tends to
be Augustinian Christians). There are aesthetes like Eliot, Lewis, and Kirk
who decry the insipid and desiccated conception of humanity put forward
by the Enlightenment rationalists. There are critics of modernity itself like
Heidegger and MacIntyre who deplore not merely Enlightenment ratio-
nalism, but other forms of modern rationalism associated with many of the
other subjects of this collection. And there are those who attack the
Enlightenment rationalists’ understanding of scientific activity and expla-
nation, like Polanyi and Hayek.
Other than Nietzsche, we have not included thinkers who are deeply
skeptical of any form of human reason, and who view human interactions
1 INTRODUCTION 3
almost solely as the result of power relations or unconscious desires,

motives, or beliefs. So the variety of postmodern thought that owes such
a great debt to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is not included (Lacan,
Foucault, Derrida, et al.), though all are highly critical of Enlightenment
rationalism. Additionally, due to limitations on space and time, we were
not able to include a number of other figures within our bailiwick, such as
Herder, De Maistre, Carlyle, Coleridge, Spengler, Arendt, Gray, and
Scott. We hope to produce a second volume that can remedy these
omissions.
Having looked at our criteria for selecting what thinkers to include, let
us now turn to the thinkers themselves. In his chapter on Edmund Burke
(1729–1797), Ferenc Horcher argues that Burke’s critique of the French
Revolution focuses specifically on the inappropriateness of the philos-
ophes’ and revolutionaries’ attempt to apply an abstract and rationalistic
blueprint to the messy complexities of French political life. According to
Horcher, Burke is justly understood as the founder of a political tradition
which might with good reason be labelled as British conservatism. One of
the central features of Burke’s position is his skepticism about the useful-
ness and applicability of theoretical abstractions in political affairs. Horcher
notes that Burke’s criticism of the French philosophes centered on the
practical destruction caused by their “social engineering,” and on the ever
more radical (and more bloodthirsty) revolutionary regimes created by
such “social engineering.”
Further, Burke argued that the nature of politics is exceedingly com-
plex. (As Jane Jacobs, discussed later in this volume, would have put it, it
is a matter of organized complexity, rather than simple order or pure ran-
domness.) Thus, the optimism characteristic of enlightened intellectuals
when they enter the political arena is not only logically unfounded, but
also politically counterproductive and often pernicious. Horcher focuses
his attention on those parts of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France which helped to identify a less optimistic, but more realistic view of
politics which has characteristic British traits, the most significant of which
is a belief in the value of such non-instrumentally rational political institu-
tions as precedents, custom, and political experience.
Travis Smith and Jin Jin discuss Alexis de Tocqueville’s (1805–1859)
nuanced criticism of rationalism by examining his views on the relation-
ship between philosophy and politics in Democracy in America and
Recollections. According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville claims that the
preservation of liberty requires a new political science to educate the
ineluctably emerging democratic social state. Tocqueville argues that the

ascendant political science of the Enlightenment, which aimed at whole-
sale social engineering, is actually an unscientific and partial ideology that
is oblivious to certain aspects of the human condition, and obliterates
other parts.
For Smith and Jin, Tocqueville’s recognition that both ethics and poli-
tics require educated virtue means that reason and political liberty are
inherently complementary. However, Tocqueville notes that the kind of
rationalism espoused by the French philosophes depends on assuming
ever more control over people’s lives. Smith and Jin observe that
Tocqueville witnessed at firsthand multiple attempts to implement ratio-
nalistic systems following the end of the Old Regime, and his more realis-
tic science of politics explains why they necessarily failed to produce the
supposedly just society or free people they were purportedly designed to
construct while succeeding instead at fostering ever more dehumanizing
injustices.
According to Smith and Jin, Tocqueville insists that political freedom
requires virtue, and virtue requires reason, but reason is best developed
when human beings are given the freedom to meet their greatest poten-
tial. Politics dominated by uncritical veneration of reason, especially an
Enlightenment conception of reason that is simultaneously excessive and
deficient, undermines virtue and freedom alike.
While Tocqueville focused on the political and social consequences of
the spread of Enlightenment ideas, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855),
often considered to be the first existentialist philosopher, turned his atten-
tion primarily to the theological and ethical conflicts following in their
wake. Nevertheless, he addressed political matters as well, as noted by
Robert Wyllie in his essay on the Dane: “Kierkegaard is a famous critic of
rationalism, though less well known as a critic of political rationalism”.
Kierkegaard condemned what he saw as his era’s tendency to replace deci-
sive action with political “talkativeness, chatter, or chit-chat”: such a trend
betrayed a lack of passion on the part of citizens. The age, he believed,
“lets everything remain, but subtly drains the meaning out of it”. Wyllie
draws a connection between the object of Kierkegaard’s critique and the
concept of the rationality of the public sphere in the work of Habermas.
As Wylie portrays it, Kierkegaard could be viewed as offering a century-in-
advance takedown of Habermas. For Kierkegaard, politics, at least as prac-
ticed in his age, was a distraction from fixing one’s own character. The
rationalism he criticizes consists in the belief that endless palaver about the
1 INTRODUCTION 5
“reasons” such-and-such should occur can take the place of true, ethical
commitment to an ideal of life.
Justin Garrison offers an account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844–1900)
critique of Enlightenment rationalism which is unique in this volume in
that, according to Garrison, Nietzsche rejects not only Enlightenment
rationalism, but even the idea of rational discourse itself. Garrison offers us
Thomas Jefferson, rather than the French philosophes, as his primary foil.
Of course, Jefferson was a great admirer of the philosophes specifically and
the Enlightenment generally. As Garrison notes, Jefferson consistently
proclaimed the innate goodness and rationality of human beings, and
believed that governments propped up by irrational claims of authority,
particularly the “monkish ignorance” of religious authority, had subverted
these qualities too often. For Jefferson, a new science of politics, one
grounded in reason rather than superstition, offered hope because it
allowed for the discovery of a rational foundation for government worthy
of the people it would serve.
Per Garrison, Nietzsche would find Jefferson’s political thought naïve
and unphilosophical. Nietzsche argued instead that Enlightenment ratio-
nalism did not inaugurate a break from the religious past so much as it
re-packaged pre-existing ethical and political beliefs in verbiage stripped of
many pre-existing theological and metaphysical associations. Thus, mod-
ern rationalism was not a new thing under the sun, but was instead an
example of a serious problem Nietzsche believed he had already identified
in Christianity: nihilism. Garrison explores Nietzsche’s understanding of
reason, morality, equality, Christianity, and democracy, and applies
Nietzsche’s analysis to those elements in Jefferson’s political thought. By
borrowing Nietzsche’s hammer to “sound out” Jefferson’s mind, Garrison
suggests that Jefferson’s oft-celebrated democracy of reason is tinged with
misanthropy and world hatred. In other words, such a vision is a manifes-
tation of the ascetic ideal and thus is ultimately nihilistic. Because many see
Jefferson as a paradigmatic figure in the American Founding, even as an
incarnation of the American spirit, the chapter has broad implications for
interpreting a fundamental dimension of the American political tradition.
Corey Abel grapples with the conundrum of how T.S. Eliot
(1888–1965), one of the paradigmatic “modernist” writers, could also
have been a staunch defender of tradition. Abel quotes Eliot arguing,
“The sound tree will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should be put
to the axe,” and describes the quote as “a vivid image of Eliot’s modernism”.
So, for this paradigmatic modernist, what, exactly, is the value of tradi-
tion? Abel argues that Eliot actually had a nuanced view of culture and art
grounded in a robust conception of tradition. He interprets Eliot as believ-
ing that, “from the poet’s standpoint, a tradition provides buoyancy…
Tradition, for the artist, is the gift of form”. When poets are writing within
a tradition, each poet has less work to do to express themselves than does
any poet who attempts to abandon all traditions. (Of course, as Oakeshott
demonstrated, such an abandonment is never really possible.) Abel sug-
gests that Eliot’s sensibility provides a view of tradition that powerfully
challenges modern ideological habits of thinking.
Daniel Sportiello, in his chapter on Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),
examines how Wittgenstein’s later philosophy brings into question many
of the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, especially its focus on
quasi-mathematical reasoning. According to Sportiello, the focus of
Wittgenstein’s critique of rationalism was his rejection of the thesis that
there is a single right way to do whatever it is that we do, and that way can
be discovered by the use of an abstract faculty called reason.
Sportiello observes that, for Wittgenstein, our words and deeds are
justified only by the rules of particular language games, but these language
games are themselves justified only insofar as they meet our needs; cer-
tainly none of them need be justified by reference to any of the others. In
claiming this, Wittgenstein is something more than a pragmatist since he
believes that the rectitude of all of our discourse is a matter of its use (for
whatever ends we happen to have). Taken together, our language games
constitute our form of life, though this form of life is not entirely arbitrary,
as some of its features can be explained by reference to our nature.
Nonetheless, per Sportiello, Wittgenstein claims that our form or forms of
life could be different in many ways. Indeed, the forms of life that have
characterized human communities have been and will continue to be
marked by significant differences. Thus, for Wittgenstein, the failure of
Enlightenment rationalism lies in its attempt to reduce the variety of lan-
guage games and forms of life to a single, abstract, rational unity. Sportiello
suggests that Wittgenstein reminds us that, on some level, we all know
this. Philosophy at its worst is the attempt to forget it; philosophy at its
best is, therefore, the attempt to remember it.
The work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jack Simmons says, can
be understood largely as a critique of scientism. As he writes, “Science sees
the world scientifically and Heidegger contends that this method of reveal-
ing the natural world conceals non-scientific ways in which the world
1 INTRODUCTION 7
might appear to us, ways that might represent a more authentic encounter
with the world”. As Simmons notes, the supposedly timeless “natural sci-
entific reasoning” is itself an historical phenomenon, and has no valid
claim to resist being evaluated as such. And, in fact, “The reductionist
approach of modern, scientific reasoning makes it well-suited to a utilitar-
ian worldview Heidegger calls technological thinking”. Here we might
note the similarity to both Marcel’s and Oakeshott’s attacks on “the tyr-
anny of technique.”
According to Simmons, the relevance of Heidegger‘s critique of tech-
nological thinking is demonstrated by “Our current affinity for STEM
education, wedding science to technology, engineering and mathematics,
in order to satisfy the needs of the community as determined by a reduc-
tionist, economic theory, and reducing the student to an economic
resource”.
Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), notes Steven Knepper, hosted one of
the most important salons in Paris both before and after the Second World
War, attended by Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Maritain,
Emmanuel Levinas, and others. As such, he influenced several major intel-
lectual movements, such as Catholic personalism and existentialism. He
would doubtlessly be better known today if he had chosen to align himself
with some such movement, and adopt a “doctrine” which could have
yielded him “followers.”
However, Knepper argues, “Marcel worried that such labels distort or
lead to assumptions”. Philosophy should be an open inquiry that did not
imprison him in a “sort of shell”. Nevertheless, an attack on “technocratic
rationalism” is a continuing theme in Marcel’s work.
Marcel’s concern with the “tyranny of technique,” which “drowns the
deeper human in a conspiracy of efficiency and a frenzy of industry” closely
echo Oakeshott’s criticism of the “sovereignty of technique,” and
Heidegger’s attack on “technological thinking.” The focus on technique
tended to turn life into a technological problem to be solved, and other
human beings into resources to be possessed for the assistance they might
provide in solving life‘s problems. (As evidenced by the ubiquity of
“human resource” departments.) Mystery is drained out of existence:
death becomes a tricky biomedical challenge to be handled as discreetly as
possible, and love is a matter of achieving as high a “relationship rating”
as possible in some romance “app.”
This solution to this problem, for Marcel, was not to abandon tech-
nique, or reject technological progress. Instead, he argued, “What I think
we need today is to react with our whole strength against that disassocia-
tion of life from spirit which a bloodless rationalism has brought about”.
Charles Lowney’s essay on Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) argues that
Polanyi’s work demonstrates that the Enlightenment’s standards defining
knowledge contain distortions that often have destructive effects, and in a
variety of ways. According to Lowney, Polanyi was a sympathetic critic of
the Enlightenment, which makes sense given Polanyi’s own success as a
natural scientist. Polanyi admired the Enlightenment’s political ideals, but
its rationalism led to a misunderstanding of the character of science, a
misunderstanding that Polanyi called “scientism.” Lowny notes that, for
Polanyi, this ideological “scientism” tended to reject the objectivity of
anything not based on physics and chemistry, thus relegating human val-
ues to the realm of the purely subjective.
Lowney claims that Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy revises
Enlightenment standards to more accurately reflect the limits of knowl-
edge and how science actually proceeds. This involves critiquing (1) the
viability of complete objectivity, (2) the adequacy of Cartesian explicit
analysis to simple self-evident truths, (3) the concomitant reductive analy-
sis of reality to smallest physical components, and (4) reductive dichoto-
mies between mind and matter, and between fact and value. Polanyi
accomplishes this with his conceptions of (1) personal knowledge, (2) tacit
knowing, (3) emergent being, and (4) discovery and indwelling. For
Lowney, Polanyi’s work undermines the traditional conception of scien-
tific knowledge, and shows that, instead, science moves toward truth, and
better contact with reality, by using the same tools of practical knowing
that produce understanding in those cultural and religious traditions that
are open to dialogue and discovery. Values, and not just physical facts, can
be real discoveries about the world. Polanyi’s post-critical epistemology
thus provides a non-skeptical fallibilism that goes beyond simple dualisms
and reductionism, forestalls a regression into nihilism, and renews hope in
human progress.
C.S. Lewis (1898–1963), notes Luke Sheahan, may seem an unlikely
candidate for inclusion in a book on anti-rationalists. After all, in a series
of books, he used reasoned arguments to defend the Christian faith. But
he believed that the effectiveness of such arguments “depended upon a
deeper mode of knowing”. Lewis is considered one of the most prominent
Christian apologists of the twentieth century. But he held a deep distrust
of the work of the rational faculty that was not properly oriented by the
imagination, which explains in large part his turn to writing imaginative
1 INTRODUCTION 9
fiction later in his life. Through his fiction Lewis was trying to demon-
strate, rather than rationally explain, what the world would look like if
Christianity and the broader moral worldview in which it exists were true.
Lewis explains this understanding of the imagination and its importance
for right thinking in a variety of essays and in his two most profound
books, The Abolition of Man and The Discarded Image.
F.A. Hayek’s (1899–1992) anti-rationalism, argues Nick Cowen, is
founded upon a revival of Scottish Enlightenment scepticism combined
with a psychology that rejects a correspondence between human orderings
of experience and “reality.” Despite the epistemic restrictions this view
apparently imposes, Hayek believes that humans can use their capacity for
“pattern recognition” to generate and sustain cooperative social orders
through a process of trial and error. Institutions that allow this cooperative
order to emerge centrally include private property, voluntary contract, and
the rule of law. Unlike many utopian theorists, Hayek does not rely upon
fundamental normative claims for his political ideas. Thus, Cowen argues,
his ideas are compatible with a cosmopolitan order made up of people
with varied conceptions of morality. He connects Hayek’s argument
against rationalism to other such critiques, which often rely on a distinc-
tion between the concrete and the abstract, when he notes that: “A neces-
sary feature of concrete orders is that they always have more dimensions
and features to them then we have apprehend. They are irreducibly com-
plex. Abstract orders, by contrast, are the simplified models and categories
that we use to make sense of our experience and communications with
others”.
In his chapter on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), Ryan Holston
explores Gadamer’s ambivalent relationship to Martin Heidegger (the
subject of his own chapter in the current volume) and the unusual way in
which Gadamer combined Heidegger’s historicism with the tradition of
Western metaphysics that was the very target of Heidegger’s own critique
of Enlightenment rationalism. According to Holston, Gadamer, while
acknowledging his deep indebtedness to Heidegger, moves beyond
Heidegger’s relativistic historicism to a position that is more deeply
indebted to the long tradition Western philosophy beginning with Plato
and Aristotle.
For Holston, Gadamer’s achievement is to offer an alternative account
of human epistemology which grounds human knowledge in the facticity
of human ontology. Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics collapses the
fact-value division which is characteristic of Enlightenment rationalism,
and, as such, combines a descriptive and normative epistemology. Holston

suggests that Gadamer has described what is fundamental to any true,
authentic, or genuine interpretation/understanding. To put it differently,
one might say that he is describing a normatively positive category of
human experience which encompasses understanding the human world in
a way that abstract “scientism” cannot.
According to Holston, Gadamer’s critique of modern rationalism arises
from his concern about the forgetfulness of being, and he sees that forget-
fulness as characteristic of scientific inquiry (understanding “from a dis-
tance”) in which the observer is conceived as not part of the reality being
observed. By calling attention to the ubiquity of “application” to present
circumstances that is part of all understanding, Gadamer aims to remind
us of our continuous involvement in a reality that transcends both “sub-
ject” and “object” of interpretation. That inescapable involvement of the
interpreter in the reality that interpreter attempts to describe was also a key
theme of our next thinker.
Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) is a hard theorist to summarize, as his 34
volumes of political philosophy include “multiple changes in focus and
emphasis,” according to Michael P. Federici. Federici notes that Voegelin
was not focused in his writing on “the Enlightenment itself but a broader
intellectual genealogy of which the enlightenment was a part”. Voegelin
was concerned “primarily with the rise of political religions [which were]
the outgrowth of existential closure to the truth of existence”.
Enlightenment rationalists were “interesting to Voegelin in so far as they
contributed to the development of... the western crisis of order that
inspired his work”. As Federici puts it, “Enlightenment thought has been
described as the religion of reason and the religion of humanity, language
that conveys Voegelin’s characterization of the enlightenment as apostatic
revolt”.
Similarly to Michael Oakeshott, Voegelin understood Enlightenment
rationalism to be irrational, “because it is reductionistic”. For Voegelin,
Federici writes, Enlightenment rationalism, following the lead of Voltaire,
takes “a part of human experience... the animal basis of existence... as its
whole” so that “man’s participation in transcendent reality is eliminated
from consciousness”.
“Removing consciousness of... transcendent structures from the life of
human beings and human civilization eliminates the very source of order
on which the ends of politics depend”. As Federici puts it, “a just political
1 INTRODUCTION 11
and social order, including rational discussion on which it depends, are

only possible if human beings are open to transcendent reality”.
Wendell John Coats, Jr. contends that the works of Michael Oakeshott
(1901–1990) on rationalism, from the 1940s and 50s, “develop in detail
the implications of a view of human knowledge and experience articulated
initially in the more philosophic Experience and Its Modes”. The earlier
work sets out a case that arguments from various “modes” of experience,
such as science, history, and practical life, are mutually irrelevant to the
advancement of other modes. For instance, a practical argument suggest-
ing that we would be better off if we could travel faster than the speed of
light should have no impact on a scientific case for whether or not such a
thing is physically possible.
Coats says that “Oakeshott’s fundamental critique of [rationalism] as
an approach to human activity and conduct is its partiality in the definition
of ‘rationality’”. The rationalist misses the essentially poetic, and not pro-
saic, character of human experience. In other words, Oakeshott’s critique
of rationalism is essentially an ontological one.
Jason Ferrell’s essay on Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) focuses on the vari-
ous ways in which Berlin deploys the term “monism” as a critique of a
variety of reductionist forms of theorizing. Ferrell notes that, though
Berlin associates monism with one of the primary historical traditions in
Western philosophy, Platonism, Berlin extends this critique of monism to
the kind of modern conceptions of moral philosophy and scientific ratio-
nalism associated with the Enlightenment. According to Ferrell, Berlin’s
understanding of monism manifests his pluralist and anti-reductionist
conception of the character of human experience, and is best understood
as consisting of three claims. Berlin avers that monists of various stripes
claim that, first, all questions have one and only one genuine or correct
answer; that, second, there is a means of determining these answers; and,
third, that the answers to all of the questions are compatible with one
another.
Ferrell then examines three different ways in which Berlin contrasts
monism with richer, more pluralistic conceptions of human activity. First,
he offers an account of Berlin’s critique of the attempt to apply the meth-
ods of the natural sciences to the human sciences, especially history. Ferrell
explains both Berlin’s critique of scientism and determinism in the study
of human action as connected to a conflation of the notion of causality in
the natural sciences, which is a logical and empirical notion, and causality
in the human sciences, which is a question of making actions intelligible.
Second, Ferrell surveys Berlin’s account of the character of philosophy and

why monist approaches to that subject tend to get things wrong. According
to Ferrell, Berlin takes philosophical questions to be those which cannot
easily be classified as empirical or logical, and claims that the error of phil-
osophical monism, especially modern “scientistic” monism, is to attempt
to reduce all questions to the empirical or logical. Finally, Ferrell offers an
account of Berlin’s critique of political monism, which once again focuses
on its fatal reductionism and its ignorance of human moral and social
plurality.
Nathaneal Blake, commenting on Russell Kirk (1918–1994), seeks to
place him in the context of the American conservative movement of the
mid-twentieth century. Blake claims that Kirk’s great achievement lies in
his steady insistence on the fundamental limitations of human rationality,
especially when that rationality is applied to social or political activity.
Blake notes Kirk’s Burkean opposition to schemes for collectivizing prop-
erty and centralizing power, and connects that opposition to his conten-
tion that such rationalist plans fail to account for the limits of human
knowledge and goodness. When implemented, they brought and continue
to bring misery to millions. Against the rationalist confidence of the cen-
tral planners, Kirk set tradition, which he saw as a repository of human
experience and the tried and true wisdom of the past.
Blake also notes that Kirk’s most famous work, The Conservative Mind,
brought about a revival of interest in Edmund Burke and solidified Burke’s
reputation as the founding figure of modern conservative political thought.
According to Blake, Kirk also offered unique insight into Burke’s blend of
natural law thinking and historical consciousness, and this blend offers
valuable insights into the real working of political communities. There are
real moral obligations upon us, but the mystery of human existence pre-
vents us from delineating once and for all a perfect system of moral phi-
losophy, or an ideal political system. Finally, Blake points out that, for
Kirk, truth, whether moral, cultural or political, is apprehended as much
by the imagination as by reason.
Sanford Ikeda, in his essay on Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), ties her cri-
tique of rationalist urban planning to Hayek’s analysis of the problems
facing any such planner, whether they are attempting to plan a city, an
economy, or an entire social order. (This, by the way, justifies Jacobs inclu-
sion in this volume: her concern was not merely with urban planning, but
also with broader questions of the nature of social order.) Ikeda notes how
Jacobs understood rationalist urban planners to be under a similar
1 INTRODUCTION 13
egophanic spell as other prophets of utopia: “As in all utopias, the right to
have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge”.
Ikeda makes clear the utopian character of Jacobs’ targets in a series of
sketches of their ideas; for example, Ebenezer Howard is quoted as boast-
ing that his schemes would create “garden cities” “in which all the advan-
tages of the most energetic and active town life, withal the beauty and the
light of the country, may be secured in perfect combination”. In common
with all utopians, Howard seems to lack any sense that life might involve
inescapable trade-offs: he suggests we can live in a place as lively as London
and as serene as the Lake Country. One wonders that he did not also
promise that his garden cities would be both as warm as the Congo and as
cool as Antarctica! Similarly, Ikeda quotes Frank Lloyd Wright’s claim that
implementing his planned communities would “automatically end unem-
ployment and all its evils forever”. And the arch urban rationalist, Le
Corbusier, sought to create a “theoretically water-tight formula to arrive
at the fundamental principles of modern town planning”. Again, the ratio-
nalist seeks to replace practical experience with a theory. As Ikeda con-
cludes, all of the urban rationalists “do not appreciate the nature of a living
city as an emergent, spontaneous order”.
In his chapter on Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–), Kenneth McIntyre (no
relation) examines MacIntyre’s critique of modern rationalist moral phi-
losophy and his attempted resuscitation of the Aristotelian tradition of
virtue ethics. According to McIntyre, Alasdair MacIntyre offers not only a
critique of Enlightenment rationalism, but a critique of modern moral
philosophy as a whole. MacIntyre proposes a revitalization of Aristotelian
and Thomistic ethics as an alternative to what he takes to be the desiccated
and deracinated nature of modern deontology, utilitarianism, and emotiv-
ism. What went wrong during the Enlightenment, according to MacIntyre,
was that philosophers jettisoned the anchor that tied moral rules to sub-
stantive human results, leaving practical reasoning and moral judgments
unmoored to any conception of human flourishing. As McIntyre notes,
for MacIntyre, as for Michael Oakeshott, the rationalist conflates practical
and theoretical/scientific reasoning. For MacIntyre, this is an outcome of
the modern rejection of Aristotelian teleology. As an alternative, MacIntyre
offers an account of human practical knowledge which rejects the modern
scientistic account of human reason as primarily instrumental and techni-
cal instead of insisting that it is acquired only by an engagement in the
variety of specific human practices themselves. Since to know a practice is
to understand the history of that practice, a notion MacIntyre adopts from
R.G. Collingwood, there is an inherently traditional aspect in human

rationality.
McIntyre offers a sympathetic account of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique
of modern moral rationalism, emphasizing the importance of MacIntyre’s
recognition of the teleological character of a significant part of human
activity, while also suggesting that his critique owes a great deal to other
modern critics of moral rationalism, like Hegel and Collingwood. McIntyre
also suggests that the primary weakness of MacIntyre’s version of virtue
ethics is that it does not adequately answer the challenges posed by mod-
ern moral pluralism to a unified conception of the human telos.
Notes
1. We are not concerned with delineating a specific historical event or series of
events in the manner of an intellectual historian, nor are we interested in
offering a rationalized version of the “philosophy” of the Enlightenment or
a cultural history of the Enlightenment. For academically significant exam-
ples of each, see respectively J.G.A. Pocock’s magisterial history of
Enlightenment historiography Barbarism and Religion, Volumes One, Two,
and Three (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 1999, 2003);
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Fritz C.A. Koelln and
James P. Pettegrove, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955); and Peter Gay,
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Volumes One and Two (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, 1969).
2. We are also not involving ourselves in the ongoing historical debate about
the Counter-Enlightenment. Whether the Counter-Enlightenment is best
understood as a discrete and internally coherent tradition of criticism of
Enlightenment thinkers and their ideas or whether it is best understood in a
pluralistic way as composed of a group of thinkers without a single target or
a unified argument is beyond our remit in this volume. The thinker most
often associated with the notion that the Counter-Enlightenment consti-
tuted a coherent and directed attack against the Enlightenment is Isaiah
Berlin, though this line of argument has been supported in recent years by
thinkers like Zeev Sternhell. See Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of Enlightenment:
Vico, Hamann, Herder, Second Edition, Henry Hardy, ed. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000) and Zeev Sternhell, The Anti-
Enlightenment Tradition, David Maisel, trans. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2010).
CHAPTER 2
Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason

of State
Ferenc Hörcher
“Il faut… tout détruire; oui, tout détruire; puisque tout est à recréer.”1
1
One of the most sophisticated minds of twentieth century political phi-
losophy seems to have completely misunderstood Edmund Burke’s frame
of mind. In his magisterial work, Leo Strauss presented Burke as a histori-
cist–relativist–particularist, almost a post-modern thinker, who did not
have any long-term values, but used political rhetoric for his own pur-
poses. He argued for the complete lack of natural law in Burke.2 In fact,
he found him lacking in rationality. He claimed that Burke “parts com-
pany with the Aristotelian tradition by disparaging theory and especially
metaphysics. He uses ‘metaphysics’ and ‘metaphysician’ frequently in a
derogatory sense.” His “opposition to modern ‘rationalism’ shifts almost
F. Hörcher (*)
Research Institute of Politics and Government, National University of
Public Service, Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities,
Budapest, Hungary
e-mail: horcher.ferenc@uni-nke.hu

16 F. HÖRCHER
insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such”.3 Here we have

Burke presented as the prophet of irrationalism.
There is another possible, even characteristic, opposite misunderstand-
ing of Burke by those, who—starting out from his fierce opposition to the
ideas, and even more the practice of the French Revolution—thought that
he was a dogmatic thinker.4 It is argued that he is an old-fashioned reli-
gious reactionary. An advocate of religious superstition and an unsubstan-
tiated Natural Law, he is claimed to be determined to fight against social
justice and progress. This is Edmund Burke, the dogmatic ideologist of
religious reaction and doctrinaire natural law thinker.
This paper does not want to argue against Strauss’ interpretation of Burke,
or address the problems of presenting Burke as a religious dogmatic. It sim-
ply takes it for granted, that neither was Burke a scholastic crypto-Catholic,
nor a thinker of almost post-modern, or at least romantic irrationalism, who
did not trust reason at all, and therefore urged his readers to set free irrational
political passions.5 Rather he is going to be taken here as someone convinced
of the use of a constrained activity of reason in politics, and who did himself
believe that practical wisdom could—on the long run—lead us to recognize
those truths, which are generally labelled as the precepts of natural law. I will
argue that this Burkean approach to politics is genuinely conservative (even
if he himself was a Whig), or not to become anachronistic, that it is in har-
mony with a sceptical, British type conservatism. I will also argue that this
sort of pessimistic, practical rationality is derived from the Aristotelian
account of phronesis, which was transformed into the Roman and later
Christian virtue of prudence. Finally, I will show the parallel between the
prudence attributed to the successful individual human political agent, and
the reason of state attributed to the early modern state.
To prove these claims I will rely on Burke’s reaction on the French
Revolution, famously elaborated in the Reflections, his most influential
political work, and will concentrate on his use of the term reason and
rationality. As it will be seen, I was influenced by two classics of Burke
scholarship, most importantly by the relevant works of J.G.A. Pocock, and
of Francis P. Canavan, S.J., to whose positions my own is perhaps the clos-
est.6 Yet I will not try to overcome Pocock’s magisterial historical scholar-
ship. Instead, I will try to read Burke with the intention to make him
useful for our present day concerns. As for Canavan, the present chapter
will position Burke closer to the British conservative tradition, more
embedded in the particularities of the common law tradition and less in
the Thomistic and scholastic discourse, while keeping the basic elements
of a Christian Aristotelianism, that Canavan uncovered in his thought.
2 BURKE ON RATIONALISM, PRUDENCE AND REASON OF STATE 17
2
In his fierce political pamphlet, written in the form of long letters, pub-
lished under the title Reflections on the Revolution in France, in 1790,
Edmund Burke tried to make sense of the fresh news about the revolution
in France. Or to put it in a more precise way: he was shocked by the news
of the events over the channel, and felt obliged to reflect on the possibility
whether the strange French disease can put its head up in his own country.
By giving his thoughts expression, the British Whig politician was able to
stir up a huge public debate about the situation, and about the necessary
measures to react upon the urgent challenges. What he was doing was not
much more than comparing the rhetoric of the French revolutionaries
with their own deeds, in order to show how much they were misleading
not only themselves and their own population but also the international
community. His strategy was a kind of dissection of revolutionary com-
munication, a rhetorical deconstruction, in order to reveal the actual polit-
ical stakes involved.
Perhaps the most important linguistic struggle in the Reflections went
around the notion of rationality. The revolutionaries claimed that the
political structure of the Ancien Régime had become anachronistic by
their day, and therefore it was irrational to sustain it any longer. Their
argumentation was based on the enlightened ideas of rationality recently
promulgated by people like Kant, who famously claimed that the
Enlightenment is not much more than the ability to “Sapere aude!” (appr.
Dare to know!, or Dare to think for yourself!). This trust in the potential
of human reason gave the name to the age: enlightenment, meaning a
kind of secular revelation induced by reason, or simply the Age of Reason.
This latter term was popularized by Thomas Paine, in his The Age of
Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology, published in
1794. Paine’s work, undoubtedly the most influential attack on Burke’s
Reflections, was a defence of Deism, an intellectual movement believing in
a passive God, influenced by early eighteenth-century British Deism.
Burke’s work was attacked by Paine partly because Burke himself criticized
with strong words such famous contemporary dissenters as Richard Price
and Joseph Priestley for the political theology they preached.
One should certainly ask, on what grounds Burke attacked these firm,
and most of the time worthy believers of human reason? Well, to be sure,
not on the grounds of irrationality, either in the sense of a religious mysti-
cism or of a Romantic form of it. I would argue Burke himself is to be
18 F. HÖRCHER
construed as an enlightened thinker, not an obscure believer of secret dog-

mas. His doubts in the power of reason in politics are not rooted in reli-
gious or other forms of irrationalism. His anti-rationalist argument is
limited in the Reflections to social and political issues. As he sees it, con-
trary to what is propagated by the “new conquering empire of light and
reason” the reason of an individual human being is not necessarily reliable
when it comes to the creation of new social or political systems.7 He pro-
poses that we should not rely solely on its power; on the contrary, we need
“to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason” in these
spheres.8 As it turns out he thinks that in social and political matters indi-
viduals lack the experience required to collect the empirical data which can
help to build up general principles of politics. “The science of govern-
ment… (is) a matter which requires experience, and even more experience
than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observ-
ing he may be.”9
3
Burke seems to have learnt a lot from his contemporary, the Scottish-born
British philosopher and historian, David Hume. It was Hume, who in his
essay Of the Perfect Commonwealth argued that “the bulk of mankind” is
“governed by authority, not reason”, and therefore it is better to rely on a
power that is established, than on experimenting with new solutions.10 He
was criticizing Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, works, which aimed at
great political transformations, but whose plans—when more closely
inspected—proved to be nothing more than plainly imaginary. Philosophers
should avoid, so argued Hume, to get directly involved in the affairs of the
state, as their theories might have very negative side effects (the famous
unintended consequences of the Scottish Enlightenment) which they can-
not control from the far distance.11 Philosophers should also take into
account, warned Hume, that in human nature “Reason is, and ought only
to be the slave of the passions.”12 And it was Hume who famously left his
cell when he felt that his “reason is incapable of dispelling” his “philo-
sophical melancholy and delirium”, and let nature solve the problem left
unsolved by philosophical reason: “I dine, I play a game of back-gammon,
I converse, and am merry with my friends, and when… I would return to
these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous.”13
I would like to argue that Burke shares this scepticism concerning the
intrusion of philosophy into common life, and it might have been actually
influenced by Hume—but this is less important for us here. The more

important fact is that Burke distinguished his own position from that of a
metaphysically inclined philosopher: while the latter had a role “to mark
the proper ends of government”, “(it) is the business of the politician,
who is the philosopher in action, to find out proper means towards those
ends, and to employ them with effect.”14 The important thing for us here
is that after his own early efforts to write philosophy Burke lost his illu-
sions about philosophy’s practical use. To put it more precisely: he seems
to have lost his belief in the capacity of philosophy to transform (to make
better) politics and society. An important part of this disillusionment must
have been his decision to become an active politician. The decision to
become one was in a way a necessary one. As it is argued, “Need for a
secure income led him into political service.”15 But interestingly as well as
importantly, the way to politics led him first to become a writer of works
of philosophical interest (Vindication (1756), Philosophical Enquiry
(1757)) and a public figure.16 The young Burke became the editor of the
brand new, but soon influential Annual Register, an annually published
organ both cultural and political, originally bearing the subtitle “A View
of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year…”, and published by
his earlier publishers. Due to the fact of receiving a well-founded educa-
tion at Trinity College Dublin first, and then a legal apprenticeship at the
Middle Temple in London, he had no problem in joining public debates
in Doctor Johnson’s London.17 As a result of his public recognition and
his success as editor he became an MP in 1765 and remained in the
Westminster in that position—except for a short interval—for almost
30 years, until he withdrew from politics in 1794. Although he was an
intellectually minded person who was unable to achieve political success as
a political leader, he soon became a distinctive voice in the Parliament,
arguing for a number of rather different cases with a rhetorical skill hardly
paralleled in his time. His success depended on a personal combination of
his intellectual inspirations: on his belief in God and the responsibility of
the educated, on his earlier philosophical interests both in Berkeley-like
scepticism and in Lockean empiricism, and his political experience in the
British Parliament, as well as his familiarity with the great Aristotelian–
Ciceronian tradition of political and moral philosophy. It is his remarkable
achievement to create from this colourful intellectual baggage his very
characteristic political convictions and his particular Burkean manners.
As far as the conceptual distinction between rationality versus rational-
ism is concerned, Burke’s main intention in the Reflections is to show that
20 F. HÖRCHER
both the French revolutionaries and their British advocates have a specific
understanding of the relationship between reason and politics, and this
understanding is based on a misconception of the nature of politics, and of
the possibility of philosophical ideals to get realized. As he sees it, the phi-
losophes—he often uses the term sophisters, comparing them to the soph-
ists of ancient Greece—think that their philosophical ideals can directly be
planted into the practical field of politics. In other words, they do not
recognize the difficulties, indeed the risks of efforts to change the social
and political machinery, and the difference in nature of the terrain of phi-
losophy, often identified by Burke as metaphysics, and that of practical
politics. This is, in fact, a philosophical mistake on their part, a conceptual
confusion of the two realms. Burke in a famous quote sharply criticizes
this confusion of reality and the ideal world of philosophical concepts:
“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in propor-
tion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.
The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not
impossible to be discerned.(…) Political reason is a computing principle:
adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not meta-
physically or mathematically, true moral denominations.”18 The extremity
Burke refers to, here, is, of course, philosophical extremism: pushing your
point too far. In certain cases, this strategy pays well in philosophy. But in
politics it is by definition dangerous. Apparently, Burke finds similarity
between such radical thought and religious enthusiasm. His criticism of
Priestly and Price is formulated in the British enlightenment discourse on
enthusiasm, as it was analysed most prominently by Pocock. This discourse
had the Glorious Revolution as its political background, based on a com-
promise between opposing camps both in theology and in politics, which
is only possible if moderation (both in religion and in politics) is taken
seriously. The revolution settlement which covered the whole eighteenth
century until the time of the French Revolution “had come about without
civil war, without a dissolution of the government, and without any inter-
lude of rule by plebeian religious fanatics”.19 Pocock went so far as to
argue that in the age “English and Scottish political thought was deeply
antirevolutionary”, which is quite close to his further conceptual innova-
tion of a Conservative Enlightenment. As Pocock points out the motiva-
tion behind the characteristic language of political theology used by Burke
is not primarily motivated by religion or even by a reactionary attitude.
Rather, it is the result of sensing an attack on the terms of the revolution
settlement of the Glorious Revolution by the radical dissenters. The point
is illustrated by a reference to the similarity of the argumentation of

Burke’s and Gibbon’s respective criticism of Priestley: “Both the pious
Burke and the sceptic Gibbon pointed to this passage from Priestley’s
writings as evidence that the wild fanaticism (or ‘enthusiasm’) of the
seventeenth-century sectarians was not extinct.”20
4
One point still needs clarification. Burke did not discount passions from
political and social affairs, as a radical Stoic would do. Rather, what he sug-
gests is in fact a balance between the passions and reason: a rational con-
trol of passions, and (natural) passions controlling the dogmatism of
reason. “It is true indeed that enthusiasm often misleads us. So does rea-
son too. Such is the Condition of our Nature… But we act most when we
act with all the Powers of the Soul; when we use Enthusiasm to elevate and
expand our Reasoning; and our Reasoning to check the Roving of our
Enthusiasm.”21
This demand for an equilibrium between passions and reason (as
opposed to Hume’s hierarchy between the two) is fairly easy to under-
stand even today for those who are familiar with the specific development
of the Ancien Régime in Britain. The possibility of the birth of a commer-
cial society in Britain was created by finding a modus vivendi between the
opposing social camps of the higher nobility and the middle classes, and it
was something the Whig oligarchy had to defend, and could defend suc-
cessfully only, if religious debates were not opened fully in political con-
texts, even if it was a rather shaky compromise, as pointed out by Jonathan
Clark in his influential account of the Ancien Régime.22 But one should
question what exactly has this to do with the French affair. After all, British
deists did not share the radical sceptical epistemology of the French philos-
ophes. Priestley’s sermon of 1789 made Burke recognize that there were
parallel tendencies in both societies to deconstruct the political edifice of
Church and State which guaranteed the success of eighteenth-century
British politics. Pocock underlines this parallelism the following way “In
England, there was now a militant (and anti-Trinitarian) movement with
goals extending as far as a separation of church and state; in France, there
was a revolutionary movement, attacking monarchy and aristocracy, aim-
ing at the reduction of the Church to a branch of the national govern-
ment, and employing the rhetoric of an anti-Christian philosophical
deism.”23 When Burke, therefore, mentions French sophistry and
22 F. HÖRCHER
metaphysics, he is in fact attacking this effort on the French side, built on

a politically radicalized philosophical vocabulary, as one could see in the
writings of people like Voltaire to Rousseau, but influencing people, like
Priestley and Price, in Britain, too.
5
If rationalism in the French Enlightenment style is dangerous for the
political equilibrium of late eighteenth-century Britain, what has Burke on
offer as an alternative? There are interpreters who suggest that in fact he
has no alternative but either reactionary slogans, or empty rhetoric which
has nothing to help a Britain on its way through industrial revolution in
industry to global commerce in business and to global power in interna-
tional relations.
In fact there are two interrelated answers to the above seemingly diffi-
cult question I would like to refer to. One is that, against the philosophical
radicalism of the French Enlightenment intent on working out an apoliti-
cal idea of a priori reason which can radicalize the whole Europe, Burke is
dedicated to work out a discourse of “reason of state”. This interpretation
of Burke is by now well developed, as we can see from the publications of
people like Armitage, Whelan and Richard Bourke. The argument here is
that in fact Burke belongs to that European trend of political thought,
which appeared on the scene in the late sixteenth century, and tried to
provide ideological support for the newly emerging centralized, territorial
or national state before, and, even more, after the birth of the Westphalian
system. In accounts like those of Richard Tuck and Maurizio Viroli we
have sweeping narratives of this development in political theory. Although
they present the new vocabulary as an alternative to the traditional dis-
course of political virtue, I would like to underline the continuity between
the two, at least in Burke’s understanding of the term.
But there is an alternative answer to the question of Burke’s alternative.
This is provided by those theorists who regard Burke as a late Aristotelian–
Ciceronian thinker, who keeps moving within the rhetorical orbit of a
discourse of prudence or practical reason. In what follows, I will do two
things. First, I will show that this second interpretative strategy has a very
strong and convincing potential. Secondly, I will try to prove that in fact
the central concept of practical reason understood as a virtue is in fact
closely connected to the reason of state discourse mentioned before. In
other words, I will argue that the two answers are connected because
Burke indeed was an advocate of the virtue of prudence understood as

practical political reason, and that his references to reason of state in fact
belong to this very discourse. That Burke could connect the discourse of
prudence and the discourse of reason of state, I will argue, is a great
achievement not only of his rhetorical skills, but even more importantly of
his political vision of post-Westphalian Europe. As I see his Reflections, it
is the result of his recognition that the novelty of the French Revolution
endangers that vision. The main aim of Burke in this situation is nothing
less but to defend the Westphalian system of national sovereignty against
the discourse of universal political rights, which radicalizes European soci-
eties, and threatens the European equilibrium. To achieve this, however,
he in fact introduces the basic elements of a new ideology in the Reflections:
that of modern Conservatism.
To prove this thesis, I will rely on Canavan. He shows how political
reason in general, and prudence in particular is presented in Burke’s
Reflections. Burkean political reason, he claims, does not look for universal
truths. Rather, it is interested in policy formation and decision making.24
First of all, the aim of political action should be “the good of the com-
monwealth”.25 But this is a good which is concrete, practicable, complex
and imperfect good. Canavan convincingly showed that indeed Burke’s
focus is on this non-ideal components of the political good. He quotes
Burke claiming that “The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society
are of the greatest possible complexity.”26 Canavan’s Burke does not
believe that philosophers or metaphysicians can simplify this complex, on
the contrary, as he sees it, if they try to do so, they can cause even more
serious problems: “Indeed, all that wise men even aim at is to keep things
from coming to the worst. Those who expect perfect reformations, either
deceive or are deceived miserably.”27
This minimalist account by Canavan of the chances of pure reason in
Burke’s account of politics does not mean, however, giving up the human
capacity to reason. It is only a recognition by Burke that human rationality
is seriously limited in this realm. But there is a chance to learn, and to
acquire skills which might help to make decisions which will help to draw
rational conclusions that would avoid the worst scenarios. Burke’s down-
scaled political reason is, therefore, not radical scepticism; neither is it
nihilism or a form of post-modern anything goes. When it is acquired
through experience and through learning from earlier examples, Burkean
political reason can in fact come close to Aristotelian–Ciceronian pru-
dence. Canavan, as we saw, identifies the practical concerns of Burke’s
24 F. HÖRCHER
political thought with the traditional idea of prudence. Instead of affirm-

ing a priori reason in human affairs, the wise statesman acquires prudential
skills. Burke’s prudence is the result of a certain self-fashioning on the part
of the political agent—to learn to live together with the infirmities of
human social and political life. It means to give up the hope to solve politi-
cal problems, even more to solve them universally—prudence cannot help
to find generally valid rules and norms: “The rules and definitions of pru-
dence can rarely be exact; never universal.”28 Rather they can lead—but
only imperfectly—to practical solutions in given hard cases. Burke imag-
ines prudence along the lines of the moral sense of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson
and the Scottish school: political wisdom is an ability to find the proper (or
the least improper) judgement in a given case—but not by deducting it a
priori, not even by building it up inductively from empirical data. Rather,
it is found by something like a skill, which is the result of practice, like the
ability of swimming or riding the bicycle, habituated, but most often not
reflected. “No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They
are a matter incapable of exact definition…” the British thinker cautions
his readers already in 1770, but, he adds, they will help “a prince to find
out such a mode of government, and such persons to administer it, as will
give a great degree of content to his people; without any curious and anx-
ious research for that abstract, universal, perfect harmony, which while he
is seeking, he abandons those means of ordinary tranquillity which are in
his power without any research at all.”29
Canavan’s point about Burkean prudence as a practical skill is backed
by the fact that since the Glorious Revolution the British political elite has
accumulated a reservoir of political experience on which individual players
could build their own strategies. This experience had the ideas of balance
and compromise in its centre. This striving for compromise, argued Burke,
enforced by human selfishness as well as by the nature of political reason,
has been the great lesson which is neglected by political Platonists,
Kantians and other universalists, like dissenter British or philosophical
French Deists. “For you know, that the decisions of prudence (contrary to
the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and
that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the
earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of
good and evil.”30 It is here, that we can search for Burke, the founding
father of modern British conservatism. After all, what he claimed was that
the tradition of British politics, built up in the revolution settlement and
afterwards in the eighteenth century and covered by the term of the
ancient constitution, is worthy to preserve. And this preservation can be a

maxim of politics, which, however, does not exclude, in fact encourages
smooth, step by step reformation.
But Canavan has a larger point as well. He wants to point out that the
British form of cautious compromise, favoured by Burke, is not simply
advocating unprincipled, or even sometimes immoral political dealing.
Rather, the prudence which is referred here, is in fact the traditional
Christian virtue of prudentia. Through it, Burke connects his theory of
compromise, balance and other prudential considerations to the Christian
natural law doctrine. According to Canavan, Burke’s theory this way is
grounded not only in traditional Christian moral theory, but also in its
metaphysical basis, that of a created universe of order. After all, Christian
prudence was not a denial of eternal truths or the natural law. Neither did
Aristotle deny the metaphysical teachings of Plato, when he worked out
his practical philosophy. He only tried to work out a more elaborate sys-
tem of application between universal rationality and practical reason. It is
in this context that one should understand Burke’s famous passage of
social contract, as a metaphysically enlarged version of “partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all
perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are liv-
ing, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who
are to be born.” In Burke’ vision of natural order a politically right practi-
cal decision will be in harmony with the precepts of a universal order,
because “(e)ach contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great
primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher
natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed
compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all
moral natures, each in their appointed place.”31
It is this created order which ensures that prudence rightly conceived
will never lead us against the basic moral values. In other words, Burke
seems to claim that there is an order between the principles of external
order and the demands of our human conscience, such that “acting in
accordance with the natural law, man obeys God, but is at the same time
most true to himself.”32 As Canavan presents it, Burke’s use of the concept
of prudence was meant to bridge the distance between invariable general
principles, which cannot be expected to purely prevail in political life, and
the constantly varying circumstances which threaten us with moral relativ-
ism in a Machiavellian sense. “Circumstances perpetually variable,
26 F. HÖRCHER
directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which

never vary, must alone prescribe a conduct fitting on such occasions.”33 In
this mediating function, Burke’s prudence, which always has the right
aims, cannot adhere to the unconditionality of logic, as a guide of human
action: “The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematicks.
They are broad as deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they
demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made
by the process of logick, but by the rules of prudence.”34
6
If Canavan is on the whole right in his appreciation of Burke’s concept of
political reason or prudence, there is one more step one can make in this
direction. One should realize that the Christian understanding of the car-
dinal virtue of prudentia belongs, in fact, to the great Aristotelian–
Ciceronian tradition of political thought.35 In this tradition, prudence is
not a Machiavellian skill, or a source of moral relativism. Rather, it is a key
virtue for the human being, who is understood as a zoon politikon, a politi-
cal being. To understand the full relevance of what this tradition teaches
about the proper prudential action in the political community, one should
look at the definition of phronesis in the 6th book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics. Or better to say, one should realize the significance that Aristotle
distinguishes between practical wisdom (phronesis), craft knowledge
(techné), scientific knowledge (epistemé) and theoretical wisdom (sophia)
or understanding (nous). But the relevant point of Aristotle here with the
distinction is not that these forms of knowledge should be interpreted
along a hierarchy from the one whose share of reason is the smallest pro-
portion to the one which is fully immersed into it. Rather, these are all
different forms of knowledge—in other words even practical wisdom is
also fully reasonable. The difference lies partly in what is known by the
given sort of knowledge, and what function (sort of activity) is expected as
a result of it. Without going into finer details let us recall how he defines
practical wisdom. It is knowledge of human things, in order to prepare
deliberation to act properly. In other words, it is “a true state involving
reason, a practical one, concerned with what is good or bad for a human
being”.36 It is very telling that after this definition, he offers Pericles and
people like him as examples of those people who are practically wise
“because they have a theoretical grasp of what is good for themselves and
for human beings, and we think household managers and politicians are
like that.”37 If practical knowledge is about human beings, whose action

can be otherwise, this knowledge cannot be universalized in the way sci-
entific knowledge, for example, is universalizable. Scientific knowledge is
about the parts of nature whose starting-points do not admit of being
otherwise. Practical knowledge, however, is only probable, as we would
say today, according to Aristotle.
The point to be made here is that Burke’s criticism of rationality is not
a criticism of the use of reason as such. Rather, it analysis those typical
sorts of mistaken uses of reason which can cause more problem than what
they actually solve. His fierce judgement of metaphysicians and sophistry
is a criticism of those who think that what they claim is true metaphysically
should be realized in practice, and possibly right now. Burke’s criticism is
a rational criticism of rationalism, in the sense of Aristotle’s concept of
practical wisdom (phronesis), claiming that in politics this is the form of
knowledge one should rely on.
7
By now I take it to be established that Burke’s prudence is to be inter-
preted as belonging to the Aristotelian–Ciceronian account of virtues, also
taken over by Christianity. I also claim that Burke’s reference to reason of
state should be understood in this Aristotelian–Ciceronian and Christian
context. If Canavan is right, and order (ordo) is a key principle of the cre-
ated universe, then it seems that his views of reason of state should be
interpreted in the context of an international order. This supposition,
which we do not have time here to fully verify, is supported by the insight
that balance was a key notion for Burke in internal affairs, and the concept
of “balance of power” is well known to be his guiding principle in interna-
tional affairs.38 And as balance and compromise did not mean in his views
of internal British affairs a denial of conflict and competition, his balance
of power and reason of state are only two poles of the same equilibrium,
and not a means to universal peace à la Kant. A state in the international
arena is subject to the same sorts of constraints as the individual human
agent or the statesman in the internal affairs of the political community. If
prudence explains the rationale of the individual political agent, some-
thing similar should be expected from the state as well, as a political agency.
Prudence in the internal context is, therefore, something similar to reason
of state in the international one. If prudence does not conclude in moral
relativism, neither should a reliance on reason of state mean simply the
28 F. HÖRCHER
affirmation of the common place that might is right. As compromise and

order are the most important values in internal affairs, so a balance of
power is required in the international arena to keep order. This is why it
seems Armitage is right, when he claims in connection with Burke’s under-
standing of reason of state: “The opponent of ‘Machiavellian’ expediency
could equally well be the proponent of Ciceronian ‘necessity’”.39 Armitage
also points out convincingly that Burke’s recognition of a French threat to
European peace was based on notions of prudence, reason of state, and
international order. “As Burke showed with an appendix of extracts from
Vattel, intervention against France would be a ‘prudent precaution’ for all
European states precisely because the French republic presented an
unprecedented threat to their natural reasons of state—their interests,
their security, and above all their shared political maxims as partners in the
commonwealth of Europe.”40
8
To conclude: in this paper I argued that by his full blown and sometimes
rather violent attacks on French “sophistry” and “metaphysics” Burke did
not become a prophet of irrationality or a moral relativist. Rather, I
claimed, he criticized the radical use of universal metaphysical claims (like
those of the new human rights of the French philosophes and of their
British dissenter sympathizers) in the realm of politics as a form of enthu-
siasm, which reminded him of earlier British debates of political theology
which lead to long-lasting conflicts and political disorder in the seven-
teenth century. His offer, instead of such sophistry and metaphysics, was
to rely on the practical knowledge of practising politicians which had been
accumulated by generations of the British political elite by his time, and
which he describes as a form of practical virtue or prudence. Prudence, as
he understood it, aimed to preserve what proved its usefulness, but not in
an unprincipled way. Rather, prudential action aims to preserve order, and
it was for this purpose that it was ready to accept compromises and even
reforms, when really necessary.
While prudence described the rationale of the action of the individual
human agent, the term reason of state describes the same sort of princi-
pled, yet flexible sort of rationality on the level of the state. It does not
exclude exceptional measures when necessity requires it, as it was accepted
also in the prudential paradigm of the Aristotelian–Ciceronian tradition.
By relying on this acclaimed reason of state, states did not behave
irrationally or immorally. On the contrary, their aim was to serve the com-
mon interest of their own community and the international community.
In both of these realms, the rational aim was to preserve order, which was
made possible in those contexts not by realizing universal truths, but by
accepting the balance of powers and conserving the compromised results
of political experience.
Notes
1. Rabaud de St. Etienne, quoted by Edmund Burke: Revolutionary Writings.
Reflections on the Revolution in France and the first Letter on a Regicide
Peace, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
2014, 171. (All further quotations of the Reflections are from this edition.)
2. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1953, 300–314.
3. Ibid., 311, 313.
4. For this position see for example: Albert O. Hirschman: The Rhetoric of
Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.; Corey Robin: The Reactionary
Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University
Press, Oxford, 2011.
5. As for his relationship to Catholicism, Pocock reminds us that “it is prob-
able that the families of both /of his parents/ had only recently converted
from Catholicism.” He also adds, however that “he was a baptized mem-
ber of the Church of Ireland and a vehement defender of the Church of
England.” Both of these quotes in: J.G.A. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, in:
Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. with intr. and
notes by J.G.A. Pocock, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/
Cambridge, 1987, vii–xlviii, ix.
6. Pocock’s position was first formulated in his book on The Ancient
Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957). Its more elaborate version is to
be found in his own edition of the Reflections, for details see above.
Canavan’s relevant piece is: Francis P. Canavan S.J.: Edmund Burke’s
Conception of the Role of Reason in Politics, The Journal of Politics, vol. 21.,
No. 1, Febr. 1959, 60–79.
7. Burke: Reflections, 79.
8. Burke: Reflections, 35. See also his statement: “There is, by the essential
fundamental constitution of things, a radical infirmity in all human contriv-
ances.” The Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (4
vols., London, 1844), III., 117.
30 F. HÖRCHER
10. David Hume: ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in his: Essays, Moral,

Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, Liberty Fund, Minneapolis,
1985, 512.
11. Craig Smith: The Scottish Enlightenment, Unintended Consequences and the
Science of Man, Journal of Scottish Philosophy, vol. 7., No. 1, March
2009, 9–28
12. David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature – Reprinted from the original
edition in three volumes and edited, with an analytical index, by L. A. Selby-
Bigge, Revised by P. H. Nidditch, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
1978, 415.
13. Hume: Treatise, 269. In this interpretation of Hume’s scepticism of solv-
ing metaphysical dilemmas, I rely on Donald Livingston’s works on Hume,
most importantly on his Hume’s Philosophy of Common Sense, Chicago
University Press, Chicago, 1984, and his Philosophical Melancholy and
Delirium. Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago and London, 1998.
14. Edmund Burke: Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770),
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols., the Rivington
edition, London, 1803–1827, II. 335.
15. Iain Hampshire-Monk: ‘Editor’s introduction’, in: Edmund Burke:
Reflections, xi-xxxvi., xi.
16. For a short account of his life, see: Ian Harris: Edmund Burke, The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/burke/>
17. For Burke’s early education in Dublin, we have by now Lock’s and Bourke’s
detailed biographical monographs. See F. P. Lock: Edmund Burke. Volume
I: 1730–1784, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. and F. P. Lock: Edmund
Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006. Richard
Bourke: Empire and revolution: the political life of Edmund Burke. Princeton
University Press, Princeton, 2015. For an early effort to take Burke’s edu-
cational background into account, see Francis P. Canavan: S.J.: Edmund
Burke’s College Study of Philosophy, Notes and Queries, N.S. IV (1957),
538–543. Both Johnson and Burke were founding members of The Club
proposed by Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1764. Yet their political positions were
much of the time antagonistic, as they were the spokespersons of the Tory
and the Whig cause, respectively.
19. Pocock: Introduction, xi.
20. Pocock: Introduction, xviii.
21. Edmund Burke: Religion of No Efficacy Considered as a State Engine,
Notebook, 68–69. Quoted in: Richard Bourke: Empire, 102.
22. Jonathan Clark: English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure, and
Political Practice During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1985. 2nd (revised) ed. English Society 1660–1832: Religion,
Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2000.
23. Pocock: ‘Introduction’, 27.
24. See Canavan: Edmund Burke, 62.
25. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 63, quoting: Burke: Letter to Sir Hercules
Langriske, 3 Jan. 1792, Works, VI, 318.
26. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 64, quoting: Burke: Reflections, 62.
27. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 65, quoting: Burke to Shackleton, 15 Aug 1770,
Correspondence, I, 231.
28. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting First Letter on a Regicide Peace
(1796), Works, VIII, 87.
29. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68–69, quoting Thoughts on the Cause of the
Present Discontents (1770), Works, II, 269.
30. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 68, quoting Letter to Sir Hercules Langriske
(1792), Works, VI, 309.
32. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 74.
33. Burke: Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), Works, VII, 197–8.
quoted by Canavan: Edmund Burke, 76.
34. Canavan: Edmund Burke, 77., quoting Burke: Appeal from the New to the
Old Whigs (1791), Works, VI, 97.
35. For a full blown elaboration of this argument see my A Political Philosophy of
Conservatism. Prudence, Moderation and Tradition, Bloomsbury, London
etc., 2020.
36. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, tr. by C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett Publishing
Company, Indianapolis, Cambridge, 2014, 1140b1, 102.
37. Ibid.
38. Burke wrote: “The balance of power had been ever assumed as the com-
mon law of Europe at all times, and by all powers.” Burke: Third Letter on
a Regicide Peace (1796), Works, IX, 338.
39. David Armitage: Edmund Burke and reason of state. Journal of the History
of Ideas vol. 61., No. 4, 2000, 617–634., 620.
40. Armitage: Edmund Burke, 631. Armitage’s reference is to this work by
Burke: Edmund Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), in
Writings and Speeches, ed. Mitchell, VIII, 474; the “Appendix” of extracts
from Vattel is inexplicably omitted from this edition. For a fragment of
Burke’s working notes on Vattel see Sheffield City Libraries Wentworth
Woodhouse Muniments, 10/27, (passage transcribed from Vattel, Droit
des Gens, II. 12. 196–97, printed in Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the
Allies [London, 1793], 207–9).
CHAPTER 3
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy

Friendship Between Reason and Freedom
Travis D. Smith and Jin Jin
A Science of Freedom
Free persons and societies depend on the confident exercise of human
reason. Our capacity to gain significant understanding of ourselves and the
world, and our ability to take actions that improve our lives and society,
are worthy of some pride. Despotism flourishes when people are con-
vinced that reasonable people can accomplish little through their own
efforts. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) worried that individuals in
modern democracies would allow their freedoms to fall fallow in the belief
that irresistible historical forces govern their lives. It was an audacious
variety of rationality that engendered this fatalistic attitude, however.
“New kinds of slavery” follow, Tocqueville finds, when reason becomes
“insolent” (OR 300n53; see also DA 641, 662; Rec. 62).1 Having divined
our collective destiny, Enlightenment thinkers derived an imperative to
T. D. Smith (*)
Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: travis.smith@concordia.ca
J. Jin
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
e-mail: jin.jin@wisc.edu

34 T. D. SMITH AND J. JIN
realize it through ambitious innovations in social engineering. Those who

claimed to be qualified sought authority to execute this plan.2 Unimpressed
by ordinary personal and political liberties, they promised emancipation
and equality (especially equality!)3 for all, armed with the rectitude and
certitude that only a truncated conception of human nature can bring.
In pre-Revolutionary France, the abstract theories of intellectuals who
had little actual political experience paved the way for rationalistic ideolo-
gies and political institutions premised on them (OR 197). Democratic
souls, Tocqueville observes, make recourse to general ideas and causes in
explaining the world. They imagine that systems are readily transformed
by the imposition of abstract principles and universal rules (DA 411, 415),
without being particularly solicitous of specific persons or complex par-
ticulars (DA 456–57). Proceeding apace from the top, the reconstruction
of society shall penetrate the foundations of society (OR 196–97). French
philosophes were hostile toward the biblical tradition, yet their ideologies
affirmed absolutes and resembled religious crusades (OR 99). Their fol-
lowers who sought power exhibited a “rival’s pride” toward God and a
“parvenu’s pride” toward human beings (OR 300n53).
Tocqueville is a modern liberal,4 and his ideas are largely informed by
Aristotle. He recognizes that politics should not be mistaken for what is
highest in human beings. As political animals, exclusion from political par-
ticipation is dehumanizing, but so, too, is being totally dominated by
political priorities. We are also rational beings. Philosophical or scientific
inquiries inherently exceed politics and cannot be subordinated to political
purposes without serving prejudice and power rather than truth.
Tocqueville’s political philosophy recommends distance between politics
and philosophy for the sake of both—or rather, for our sake, as free actors,
and to prevent “stagnation of thinking” (DA 410).
Through our reading of Tocqueville, we discern that politics and phi-
losophy have an uneasy friendship because reason and liberty are indis-
pensable to each other and yet in tension. Intellectual integrity and
discovery require freedom, and freedom requires reason so as to avoid
descending harmfully into license.5 Excessive rationalism, however, is the
enemy of freedom of action and thought alike (DA 12)—both in the
minds of those who adhere to it, and in the lives of those subjected to it.
Human beings reach their potential only through responsible voluntary
activity, in imperfect circumstances with incomplete information, in asso-
ciation with others who are likewise imperfect but free and reasonable,
settling for results that are less than ideal. Political rationalism assumes
3 ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE AND THE UNEASY FRIENDSHIP… 35
thoroughgoing responsibility for setting things straight in a way that

relieves individuals of responsibility for developing the qualities of mind
and character needed to live well themselves.6 It pretends knowledge of
what is, and what is to be done, saving individuals the need to judge and
act for themselves. Scorning negotiation and compromise, the techniques
of rational experts require only acquiescence and compliance.
Like Aristotle, Tocqueville maintains that political science should both
study and benefit society.7 Tocqueville holds that the preservation of human
liberty requires a new political science to correct the pretentious and con-
tentious science behind the French Revolution that threatens to dominate
modern democracies moving forward (DA 7, 12). Enlightenment rational-
ism is actually a partisan perspective that disregards and suppresses aspects
of the human condition. It pretends to be aloof and objective, but its moti-
vations are more psychological than purely logical.8 Preoccupied with tech-
niques of control and central planning, it renders human beings childlike,
dependent, and irresponsible (DA 663; OR 124). For the sake of achieving
systemic justice, it is systematically unjust toward individuals and destruc-
tive of their communities.
Freedom distinguishes men from beasts. It brings citizens into contact
with each other. It directs people toward goods beyond those of the body
(OR 88). An emphasis on freedom reminds us that society exists for the
sake of people, not vice versa. Emancipating people from the burdens of
deliberation, judgment, and action may seem well-intentioned, but it
abolishes the distinctions between us and beasts,9 who can be kept as pets
but are often only chattel or prey. The more Enlightenment rationalism
succeeds at approaching its goals on its own partial terms, the more it
distorts us (DA 410). Risk, uncertainty, conflict, and disorder come along
with freedom, but denying or ducking them—as if we could “banish
chance” (DA 524)—is untenable and detrimental.
On the French Question
The Old Regime in France collapsed from within well before the
Revolution finished it off, Tocqueville argues (OR 162–63). A vast and
centralized administrative entity, headed by a royal court abetted by a
priestly class, its regime was short on politics properly so-called. Having
surrendered and abandoned their traditional responsibilities, the old aris-
tocrats had become mere oligarchs, or as Tocqueville calls them, “a caste”
(OR 156). Withdrawing from public life, they retained their
socioeconomic status by convention alone. Politically inept, arrogant, and

indolent, unable to justify their own privileges, they delegitimized them-
selves (OR 117–18, 222).10 Peasants gained land ownership opportunities
but on unequal terms with aristocrats. Evidence of arbitrariness abounded
through exceptions and privileges, while “the most natural and necessary
guarantees for all citizens” were not secure (OR 179). People had many
grievances but neither political experience nor reliable recourse (OR 158,
182). Feudalism was neither abolished nor intact; political obligations dis-
solved but their odious material residue remained. A bureaucratic class
performing the tasks of public administration beneath the dignity of aris-
tocrats supplanted them, and they became dependent on its favor. Upon
Revolution’s arrival, France was populated by apolitical people at all ranks.
The men of action who led the Revolution or ruled in its wake were peo-
ple in whom the virtues of the active life had not been cultivated by cus-
tom or profession (OR 162–63). They relied mainly on theories and
speculations propelled by vision and determination (OR 196–97,
200, 202).
What noble forms of responsible freedom and greatness of spirit
Tocqueville attributed to the old aristocracy at its best were ancient his-
tory. The Revolutionary movement “alienated” and “slaughtered” the
nobility (OR 173), eliminating the possibility of establishing a stable
mixed regime. Vacillating between republican absolutism and sundry
autocracies during Tocqueville’s lifetime, French politics neither nurtured
nor rewarded statesmanship. Despite their “faults and prejudices,”
Tocqueville advises the post-Revolutionary French to look toward their
ancestors in the Old Regime to recover “a little of their greatness” (OR
179). Men then exhibited love and faith toward God and king and were
less enamored with coercion. Too proud to casually abuse their responsi-
bilities, they desired glory and to be worthy of it (OR 179). Even the lives
of the peasants in the Old Regime were less regulated and regimented
than the subjects of the Republic or the Emperors (OR 114, 131, 179,
183, 192).
If Tocqueville romanticizes the old aristocracy, it is only to correct the
prevailing calumnious caricature of it. He harbors no illusions about the
possibility of restoring aristocracy (DA 666). If Tocqueville doesn’t praise
democracy enough it’s only because it already enjoys an abundance of
vocal partisans (DA 400). He exhorts people in democratic times to live
in a fashion befitting dignified free persons. But those who have not known
freedom are most easily made to spurn it. The conjunction of reason and
freedom can only be learned by being lived; but lacking that, instances of
it from the past are better teachers of it than abstract systems of thought
promising it in the future.
Uniform, centralized, and calculated statecraft emerged before the
Revolution thanks to the theories of the physiocrats (OR 196). During
Tocqueville’s time, the doctrines of Auguste Comte epitomized this
approach to governance.11 The very goal is to render prudence, debate,
and judgment unnecessary. Indeed, anything that “hinders their plans” is
deemed by them “worthless” (OR 210). These frameworks form the basis
of modern theories that emphasize material interests and prescribe and
delimit action in terms of what a rational person would do, without need-
ing to consult or persuade actual people—proceeding then to rule every-
body so they’ll behave accordingly. Tocqueville sees in these attempts to
transcend politics an “immense public evil” (OR 208; cf. DA 408) that
tramples upon human nature. A positivistic approach that treats econom-
ics as king is practically heaven-sent for popular dictatorships, rejecting
limited government in order to do whatever they declare materially neces-
sary in the name of the people. Fortunately, the “spirit which animates”
laws remains more powerful than laws themselves, and it is “superficial” to
regard laws themselves as independent causes (OR 221); thus, imposing
tyranny upon a free people is not so straightforward.
After the disorder and disappointment of the Revolution, people began
to search for a new master.12 Through several rapid alterations of regime,
centralized schemes for public administration found immense opportuni-
ties for continuity and growth (OR 245). “[L]ike some rivers go under-
ground only to reappear” as “the same stream between different banks”
(OR 85), the centralizing tendencies of pre-Revolutionary France rapidly
resurfaced and continued to flow in what followed. People clamored for
the state to do what they could not do for themselves (DA 88), thanks to
what they had done to themselves, not understanding that what had been
done to them previously left them ill-equipped to accomplish what they
initially envisioned. Under the Old Regime, administrative centralization
had already eroded the authority of noble lords and made provisions for
the poor a micromanaged, nationalized operation (OR 121, 123).
Generally seeking policies “equally applicable over the entire kingdom”
(OR 123), according to Tocqueville, “the government already exchanged
the role of sovereign for that of guardian” (OR 124) well before later
regimes expanded and consolidated matters.
Democratization and the Authority of Science

The French Enlightenment spawned a larger literate population. Its intel-
lectualized elite regarded it as its responsibility to assume ruling offices
rather than to create the conditions under which the French people could
learn self-rule.13 The people were furthermore seen as in need of major
renovation to become suitable for enlightened society (DA 188, 340; OR
245). As a scholar and a statesman, Tocqueville observed multiple attempts
to implement rationalistic systems after the Old Regime fell. His political
science endeavors to explain why those efforts necessarily fail (Rec. 68).
Little effort is required to convince souls conformed to democratic
mores that inequalities are unjust. That principle is easy to apply, and it
gratifies (DA 482). To them, expertise in the applied science of equality in
an exception; they who possess it may enjoy legitimate advantages and
authority. But equality is a quality of the relationships between people.
Tocquevillian political science is instead concerned primarily with the
qualities that individual persons’ souls possess, and how they acquire them,
rather than with conforming people’s lives to the exigencies of a theoreti-
cally preferable system. Whereas late-modern democracies tend to be con-
sumed with consternation for and veneration of society as a whole,
Tocqueville attends principally to individuals and their rights (DA 641).
Happily, arrangements that promote personal self-development and self-
interest properly understood encourage and reward sociability and gener-
ate conditions of interdependency (DA 502, 648). Tocqueville’s political
science theorizes on the basis of empirical evidence, observing the effects
that beliefs, behaviors, customs, and institutions have on people’s lived
lives,14 offering practical counsel regarding these. It looks to inform par-
ticular communities of people about the conditions under which they are
better able to govern their own lives. It’s concerned with the justice of
treating people as human beings—as responsible agents capable of engag-
ing in reasonable and decent voluntary action—not as units to be coordi-
nated in achieving some ideal configuration. Efforts to engineer justice
systematically treat actual human beings unjustly, as less than they are or
should be. Regarding people as beings of a sort that they are not in order
to attempt to transform them into beings they cannot and oughtn’t be, by
means that won’t work, however much we wish they would and however
hard we try, is unscientific.15
Tocquevillian political science recognizes that causal factors in society

are irreducibly complex, whereas tidy rationalist theories demand parsi-
mony. They have a certain destination in mind, even if the manipulations
they enjoin are vast, endless, and require constant retuning. Tocqueville
knows you can only understand the present and predict the future with an
appreciation of past ideas and arrangements (see Rec. 66). Enlightenment
rationalism, zealously meddling in the present to realize the future, thinks
the only reason to look to the past is to disavow it (OR 106). One can
imagine the socialist leaders of Tocqueville’s time, inheritors of eighteenth-
century rationalism—depicted as fools in his Recollections (Rec. 101)—
shouting “But it’s 1848!” as if that sufficed to validate their views and
propel their program forward.16 Democracy renders people susceptible to
ideologies masquerading as science, peddling general ideas, profiting from
ignorance, preying on sentiment, engaging in flattery, and raising false
hopes. “[T]he intellect of democratic peoples receives simple and general
ideas with delight,” Tocqueville observes, adding, “[c]omplicated systems
repel it, and it is pleased to imagine a great nation in which all of the citi-
zens resemble a single model and are directed by a single power” (DA
640). Modern democracy prepares people for replacing God with govern-
ment, and Providence with progressive public policy (DA 421; OR 144).17
Tocqueville knows that democratic people are disinclined to heed his
appeal to appreciate and cultivate nobler qualities and embrace political
forms that require and respect them (DA 669). Their love for equality is
fanatical (DA 480, 513). They regard universal, indiscriminate compas-
sion as virtue (DA 538, cf. 409). Distrustful of other people’s freedom,
democratic individuals are ready to surrender their own. They would
rather be freed from responsibility than free to exercise it. Instead of per-
sonally developing and depending upon their own reasoning skills, they
would rather see society impersonally rationalized on their behalf. Even if
they’re not overtly tyrannized over, however, they become thereby unedu-
cated and “abandoned” (OR 183). A diminution of humanity follows
from a mutually contemptuous divorce between reason and freedom and
the concomitant disdain for the virtues that require both. Rationalist tech-
niques and technicians are inherently partial, treating people as less than
the fully developed creatures they could be in order to manipulate them
more easily. Whatever belongs to the human spirit that resists reengineer-
ing they disregard, discourage, and dispense with. Democratization, which
Tocqueville calls providential (DA 6–7), gradually affects human beings so
that its premises in time become increasingly plausible and its explanations
increasingly accurate (DA 408, 410). Masses of equally weak individuals

who are dependent on the constant, comprehensive care of distant massive
powers really do seem at the mercy of general causes, unable to manifest
meaningful agency in their lives. Tocqueville charges himself with theo-
retically articulating which institutions, customs, measures, behaviors, and
mindsets must be maintained in practice to ward off democratization’s
advancement toward its furthermost ends.
Incorporating aristocratic qualities or proxies into the institutions of a
democratic order and values of a democratic people is like trying to intro-
duce elements of a mixed regime. But all regimes, democracy included,
endeavor to see their principles proved altogether right by extending them
everywhere and seeing them thoroughgoingly realized. Mixed regimes are
hard to keep because the few and the many alike are always each trying to
seize absolute power over the whole. Technocratic democracy is freakish
because it allows both sides to do so apparently simultaneously. From the
perspective of the social engineer, whether he fancies himself a philosopher
or policymaker, mixed regimes look too messy, unfinished and impure.
They look irrational. Wishing to dispense with the need for phronesis,
modern social science is techne dressed up as episteme (see DA 199, 291)
(except not really—in order to be genuine techne it would have to success-
fully produce what it aims at manufacturing). What passes for prudence
among political engineers is only cleverness and shrewdness in disguising
or denying their utmost ends for the sake of winning partial victories that
keep the ball rolling down its preordained path.
Reason and Freedom in America

Democracy in America contains Tocqueville’s reflections on how the
American republic contains features that teach ordinary citizens how to
participate in self-governance, gaining experiences that help them to com-
bine freedom and reason in their individual lives and within their commu-
nities. American democracy was born without having to stage a revolution
against an aristocratic order (DA 67, 485), but it happens to cultivate in
Americans nobler qualities as they participate regularly in the demands of
the active life. Even while they were still colonists under the authority of a
distant crown, they developed many of the habits and structures of self-
government that would serve them well in erecting and sustaining a
republic.
Americans tend to be focused on material concerns in their education

and everyday business. As the religious believers Tocqueville observed
them to be,18 however, they are attuned to non-material goods (DA 42–44,
275), which makes them better citizens, since citizenship requires atten-
tiveness to obligations that exceed economic interests (OR 206). The
American regime is not formally mixed, but its federal system, separation of
powers, heavy dependence on local governance, political and civil associa-
tions, and free press get many people involved in many ways large and small
(DA 64–65, 274). Thus, America lacks the concentrated central govern-
ment and desiccated civil society of France. Tocqueville offers America as a
model to the French for restoring freedom within a democratic framework.
Imagine a Frenchman telling the French that they have anything to learn
from Americans! At the same time, Tocqueville frets that American society
might refashion itself along the lines of the French model,19 descending
into what he calls “mild despotism” should its mechanisms for moderating
democratic excesses dwindle and deteriorate (DA 662–63).
Tocqueville’s concept of self-interest well understood stresses that it is
not ultimately in an individual’s self-interest to always focus only narrowly
on one’s material self-interest (DA 519, 522).20 Sharing the burdens and
sacrifices that are associated with engaging in public life, getting involved
in one’s community, participating in decision-making offices and pro-
cesses, not to mention maintaining a religious association (DA 42; Rec.
65), all redound to one’s self-interest, and freedom, in the long run. These
activities ennoble one’s soul too, but you have to appeal to democratic
people with materialistic prejudices on terms they will appreciate to get
them to attend to concerns they would otherwise neglect to their detri-
ment.21 Even if it’s questionable that every single individual’s personal
self-interest is directly and measurably benefitted by attending to concerns
that seem outside and above it, the overall prosperity and character of
Americans generally is indirectly improved by having more people, across
the country, involved in the practices of self-governance at all levels, rather
than delegating those powers away. Restless activity in free association
forestalls the advent of despotism (DA 9).
The result is a moderately enlightened general population sporting
some know-how and a can-do spirit, confident that great things may be
accomplished together—even though there is always disagreement and
contestation and only ever partial and temporary solutions. Americans are
not great philosophers or artists, but they are tremendous businesspeople,
technological innovators, and passionate citizens (DA 461, 525, 528).
Their skepticism regarding philosophies other than those that recommend

figuring things out for oneself using one’s own brains (DA 403) means
that intellectuals lack overt authority among them (DA 46, 50).22 Their
mindset is practical, and they are busybodies rather than passive recipients
of boons. Because they get involved and pay attention, they acquire fair
judgment and the ability to do business with each other with respect to
private and public matters alike. They don’t rely on experts to tell them
what to do or think. They have a free press, but they are smart enough to
know that journalists are mostly vulgar “charlatans” (DA 189, cf. 178).
Americans are the beneficiaries of a political system of government that
is not excessively systematic, founded by statesmen who understood that
those occupying ruling offices have great but nonetheless limited respon-
sibilities. Their regime “was produced by a mature and reflective taste for
freedom,” accompanied by “a love of order and of legality” (DA 67). It
allows people to learn from their own mistakes rather than preventing
them from making any (DA 215–16). Individuals are best left free to
mind their personal priorities, and future generations need opportunities
to make society more perfect.23 The founders cemented a system that
encouraged and depended on widespread, regular political activity with-
out trusting or exalting political powers. They were not even certain that
the regime they established would last, on account of its demands and
open-endedness. Neither uniformity nor inflexibility of views or behavior
could be presumed upon; no one right way of thinking or doing things
could be indefinitely imposed (DA 87). Freedom is inherently perilous
and precariously perched, but it’s more reasonable to endeavor to sustain
popular liberty than to imagine we’ve become smart enough to forego it,
especially when not everybody’s equally enthusiastic about enlightened
leadership. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is an attempt to theorize
why a non-theoretical people live a preferable life in practice compared to
people who adore theory and theorizers. The practices of the Americans
correspond to a theoretically superior understanding of human nature—
even though it, too, is flawed and partial in ways that will probably under-
mine it in time. By happy combination of design and accident (drawing on
its received customs and given its material resources and parameters), the
American regime is more theoretically sound, despite its intellectually
unsophisticated population. It is even more democratic for being less the-
oretical.24 And why should people philosophize more when peoples who
over-philosophize about politics live less well or fairly by comparison, in
body and in spirit alike?
On Friendly Terms
Tocqueville recommends being reconciled to uncertain knowledge.25
Modern rationalism in politics, however, is premised on the view, deriva-
tive of the premises of technologically oriented modern natural science,
that it is irrational to say in advance that anything is definitively impossi-
ble.26 Upon that premise, a false inference is made that it is irrational not
to believe we can do whatever we put our minds to, given sufficient means
and resolve. Doubting our ability—nay, our obligation—to fix the world
seems not only unimaginative and complacent, but also complicit with the
suffering that continued imperfection brings. From the perspective of
practical reason, however, the rationalist’s attitude constitutes wishful
thinking, both reckless and cowardly. So fearful of and frustrated with
reality, it rails and rebels against it—proceeding often methodically and
mechanically but sometimes intoxicatedly, but in any case, insolently. The
combination of democracy and materialism, however, lends itself to adopt-
ing that faith,27 assuring its devotees of their righteousness. Meanwhile,
the moderate person who hesitates to confess, submit to, and work toward
it, looks ignorant and uncaring. Tocqueville has his work cut out for him,
reminding people that unless we acknowledge our limitations and insist on
freedom—even the freedom to err, compete, and disagree—the political
enforcement of the rationalistic pretense will continue to undermine the
social fabric and impoverish our souls.
Notes
1. Page references to Alexis de Tocqueville’s principal works are cited in this
chapter as follows:
DA Democracy in America, trans. and eds. Harvey C. Mansfield and
Delba Winthrop, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
OR The Old Regime and the Revolution, Volume One, eds. François Furet
and Françoise Mélonio, trans. Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998).
Rec. Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848, eds. J. P. Mayer and
A. P. Kerr, trans. George Lawrence (New Brunswick: Transaction
Books, 1987).
2. For significant treatments of Tocqueville’s criticism of rationalism in poli-
tics, see Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought: Volume
One (London and New York: Routledge, 2019); Richard Boyd and Conor
Williams, “Intellectuals and Statesmanship? Tocqueville, Oakeshott, and
the Distinction between Theoretical and Practical Knowledge,” in Alexis

de Tocqueville and the Art of Democratic Statesmanship, eds. Brian Danoff
and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., 117–36 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010);
James Ceaser, “Alexis de Tocqueville on Political Science, Political Culture,
and the Role of the Intellectual” The American Political Science Review 79,
no. 3 (1985): 656–72; Peter Augustine Lawler, The Restless Mind: Alexis de
Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), and “Tocqueville on Pantheism, Materialism,
and Catholicism,” in Democracy and Its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and
Political Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler, 31–48 (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 2004); Jacob T. Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and
Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Daniel J. Mahoney,
“Tocqueville and Socialism,” in Tocqueville’s Defense of Human Liberty:
Current Essays, eds. Peter Augustine Lawler and Joseph Alulis, 177–202
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1993); Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the
Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 1996); Harvey C. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and
Liberty,” American Political Thought 5, no. 2 (2016): 250–76; Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s New Political Science,”
in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Cheryl B. Welch, 81–107
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Joshua Mitchell, The
Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American
Future (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
3. Ralph C. Hancock, “The Modern Revolution and the Collapse of Moral
Analogy,” in Democracy and Its Friendly Critics: Tocqueville and Political
Life Today, ed. Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham: Lexington Books,
2004), 56.
4. See Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 212.
5. On abuses of liberty, see OR 88, 179.
6. For more on the subject of “political rationalism” in Tocqueville, see
Ceaser, “Tocqueville on Political Science,” 658ff.
7. Mansfield and Winthrop, “Tocqueville’s New Political Science,” 81.
8. Lawler, “Tocqueville on Pantheism,” 35.
9. Ibid., 45.
10. See Levy, Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, 216–17.
11. See Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity (London: Longmans, Green,
and Co., 1875), 2. Tocqueville never explicitly acknowledges Comte in his
writings. See Aron, Main Currents, 201.
12. Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, trans. Harriet
Martineau (New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1855), 6, 36.
13. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” 265.
14. Tocqueville’s method principally attends to what he calls the “social state.”
See DA 45.
15. That said, under ever more meddlesome laws governing the minutiae of
their everyday existence, people may “renounce the use of their wills,”
causing their “faculty of thinking, feeling, and acting by themselves” to
shrivel, leaving them “gradually falling below the level of humanity”
(DA 665).
16. See Mahoney, “Tocqueville and Socialism,” 184.
17. See Mitchell, Fragility of Freedom, 228; cf. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on
Religion and Liberty,” 255.
18. What really reigns in the minds of Americans is public opinion (DA 409,
424), and in Tocqueville’s time that just happens to be Christian, if only by
received tradition (DA 279, 406). Democratization, however, eventually
turns people against tradition (DA 405), and Tocqueville already observes
among Americans “distaste for the supernatural” (DA 404). Tocqueville
anticipates that a less religious America will prove less moral and less free
(DA 279–82).
19. Hence his concern about the tyranny of the majority (DA 241). Remember,
the majority of people are peaceful and well-meaning (DA 165). See
also DA 145.
20. Mansfield, “Tocqueville on Religion and Liberty,” 264–66. On the dis-
tinction between “self-interest properly understood” and “rational calcula-
tion of self-interest,” see Richard Avramenko, Courage: The Politics of Life
and Limb (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 219–20.
See also Peter Augustine Lawler, “Tocqueville on the Doctrine of Interest,”
in Homeless and at Home in America, 152–67 (South Bend: St. Augustine’s
Press, 2007).
21. Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 22, 113.
22. Tocqueville says that Americans follow Descartes without really knowing it
(DA 403), implying that they don’t really think entirely for themselves.
But no human being—including Descartes himself, who never was as
rationalistic as rationalists want to insist (DA 405)—escapes dependence
on a bunch of dogmatic prejudices (DA 407–8). Rationalists who pretend
otherwise are fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Tocqueville traces
the dogmatic imperative to judge everything for oneself that Americans
habitually heed from Luther through Bacon and Descartes to Voltaire and
beyond (DA 405), suggesting thereby that the Reformation proves ulti-
mately, if inadvertently (and if not providentially), corrosive of religious
faith (cf. DA 285, 418). Moreover, when democratic people think they’re
thinking for themselves they’re mainly just following their feelings (DA
214, 219).
23. Lawler, Restless Mind, 138, 153.
24. Boyd and Williams, “Intellectuals and Statesmanship?” 118–19.

25. “Concerning the immense majority of points that it is important for us to
know, we have only probabilities, almosts. To despair of its being so is to
despair of being a man.” Alexis de Tocqueville, “To Charles Stoffels,
October 22, 1831,” in Alexis de Tocqueville: Selected Letters on Politics and
Society, ed. Roger Boesche, trans. James Toupin and Roger Boesche
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64. Quoted in Mitchell,
Fragility of Freedom, 215–16.
26. See OR 299–300; see also Ceaser, “Tocqueville on Political Science,” 660.
27. See also Lawler, “Tocqueville on Pantheism,” 45.
CHAPTER 4
Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political

Rationalism
Robert Wyllie
Søren Kierkegaard is a famous critic of rationalism in philosophy, but less

well known as a critic of political rationalism. It might have surprised him
to learn how little he is appreciated as a political theorist today. As the
bread riots of 1847 crescendoed towards the Märzrevolution, Kierkegaard
wrote in his journal, “It all fits my theory perfectly, and I dare say it will
come to be seen how exactly I have understood this age.”1 Few scholars
appear to regard this as more than an idle boast. What “theory of the age”
is Kierkegaard talking about?
Kierkegaard’s account of “the age” can be found in his Two Ages: A
Literary Review, published in 1846. It presents a critical view of public
“reasoning” in a political age that lacks the passion for decisive action.2
Like Michael Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism in politics, Kierkegaard
arraigns the “the enemy of authority” who weighs public arguments “forti-
fied by a belief in ‘reason’ common to all mankind.”3 However, the spe-
cific “rationalist” assumption that politics is a domain of technical expertise,
so irksome to Oakeshott a century later, is still on the horizon in the
R. Wyllie (*)
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
e-mail: rwyllie@nd.edu

48 R. WYLLIE
1840s. Kierkegaard sees only the dawn of an age of political ideology.4

Amid the revolutions of 1848, Kierkegaard journals, “Everything that
looked like a religious movement became politics.”5 Accordingly,
Kierkegaard pivots from his better-known critique of rationalism in theol-
ogy to a more directly political critique of rationalism.
Kierkegaard’s earlier critique of rationalism in his mostly pseudony-
mous writings (sometimes called his “first authorship”) is only political by
extension: it focuses mainly upon rationalism in theology. Kierkegaard is
especially annoyed by Hegelian theologians’ expansive concept of reason.6
In Fear and Trembling, for example, his pseudonym Johannes de Silentio
attacks Hegel’s doctrine that political institutions, laws, and practices con-
tain some kernel of rational “actuality.”7 Kierkegaard emphatically rejects
the idea that following the norms of a given society, even those that can be
universalized like Kantian maxims, puts Christians in the right relation
with God automatically. Indeed, rationalizing that one is a Christian sim-
ply by virtue of conforming to social conventions is, for Kierkegaard, a
great obstacle to the life-changing conversion which faith demands. Using
Abraham’s binding of Isaac as an example, Fear and Trembling defines the
“religious” as the category that raises the individual above the universal.8
Kierkegaard spent his whole life driving a wedge between mere participa-
tion in the state church and the true “religious.” But his analysis of the
obstacle to the “religious” underwent an important change in 1846.
As the critique of theological rationalism in the first authorship neared
its completion in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard planned
to retire to the quiet life of a country parson.9 However, at the same time,
he became embroiled in a nasty public dispute with the political and liter-
ary magazine The Corsair. It started when literary critic P. L. Møller, an
editor of the magazine, criticized Kierkegaard’s 1845 book Stages on Life’s
Way. Kierkegaard fired back ad hominem, claiming that Møller cared only
to curry the favor of the Copenhagen elite. In response, The Corsair lam-
pooned Kierkegaard for the first several months of 1846. The “Corsair
Affair” seems to have caused Kierkegaard to consider the public sphere
itself as an obstacle to religious existence.10 He took up this problem in
Two Ages.
Two Ages is a critique of political rationalism in a broad sense, or the
view that political endeavors and political reflection are at least potentially
rational activities.11 Even Oakeshott rates as a “political rationalist” in this
broad sense, since he insists that it belongs to practical reason to be con-
versant with belief- and value-based traditions of political discourse.12 Of
4 KIERKEGAARD’S LATER CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL RATIONALISM 49
course, Oakeshott targets political rationalism in a narrower sense, namely,

the view that politics reduces to universal and transmissible empirical
knowledge for technical experts. Kierkegaard, however, attacks the ratio-
nality of political endeavors, at least in the present historical period.
Outstripping Oakeshott,13 Kierkegaard insists that reasonableness in mod-
ern, mediated political discourse only veneers a deeper psychology of pas-
sionate conflict.
What I have called the “broad” and “narrow” (or Oakeshottian) defini-
tions of political rationalism ought to be held separate. Spinoza offers an
exemplary disjunction. The political techniques in the Political Treatise are
based on a universal and transmissible science of irrational, conflicting pas-
sions described in the Ethics.14 Spinoza is no political rationalist in the
broad sense; he turns to non-rational passions to explain political behavior.
Yet Spinoza is a political rationalist in the narrow Oakeshottian sense
because he purports to offer practitioners universally valid political tech-
niques with a theoretical, scientific basis. Kierkegaard is not a political
rationalist in any sense of the term. Anticipating today’s agonist and neo-
realist critics of political rationalism, Kierkegaard argues that the apparent
rationality of political discourse in the present age is a sham.15
The birth of the nineteenth-century public sphere is often identified as
a watershed in rational politics, ideally representing an open-access politi-
cal community where anyone’s “force of reason” can sway public opinion
and affect government policy. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere argues that inclusive notions of human-
ity cultivated in the bourgeois intimate sphere generated the basis of a new
rational politics.16 For Habermas, the nineteenth-century public sphere
represents a “communicative domain” of formal and informal channels of
rational criticism or critical publicity.17 Broadband media like newspapers
and novels shaped inclusive sentiments and political reasoning about the
welfare of all.18 However, one artifact of this new public sphere,
Kierkegaard’s report in Two Ages, complicates our understanding of the
new communicative domain. It may make us skeptical of the very idea of
a communicative public sphere that “guarantees rationality.”19
Two Ages is (at least initially) a review of a Danish novel, anonymously
written by Thomasine Gyllembourg, entitled A Story of Everyday Life. A
literary review may seem like an unlikely genre for political theory.
However, Kierkegaard argues that reviewers do not address a political
opponent, but instead an entire “age, a reading public.”20 Literary criti-
cism is then an apposite medium to question the consensus of a particular
50 R. WYLLIE
time, and to make a historically bounded critique. Skeptical of the intel-

lectual fashions that have come in with his own cohort, and which valorize
participation in public life, Kierkegaard intervenes to defend the older
author of A Story of Everyday Life from the “incredible cruelty of the
young” who speak “in the name of the age.”21
What attracts Kierkegaard to A Story of Everyday Life is its reflection of
political times in the lives of two individuals. Both are women in the
extended Waller family of Copenhagen merchants. The revolutionary
upheaval of the 1790s is reflected by Claudine’s passionate love affair with
a dueling Frenchman, Lusard. Decades later, the Vormärz status quo is
reflected in Mariane’s patiently suffering the hesitations of her beloved
Ferdinand, whose money considerations keep him from marriage. Both
Claudine and Mariane remain steadfast in love; Kierkegaard writes, each is
“faithful to herself.”22 Claudine does not repent of her youthful enthusi-
asm for her French lover when he leaves her to go to war. Mariane, like-
wise, remains patient in her unrequited love for the money-conscious
Ferdinand. The two ages produce two different kinds of male lovers, but
the women are constant. According to Kierkegaard, the author would
persuade “his” (in fact, her) readers that “the demands of the times” are a
distraction from the real business of life—“the pain and suffering and peril
of one’s life are not always where the shrieking is.”23 Kierkegaard thinks of
politics in the present age as an esthetic realm of spectators with ever-
changing temporary concerns, distracted from ethical concern with prob-
lems of love and personal commitment. While the men engage in war and
commerce, the women that remain steadfast in love are where the real
action is.
In his retelling of A Story of Everyday Life, Kierkegaard emphasizes not
only how politics can distract from real passions, but also how political
concerns can mask deeper ulterior motives. For example, when the attor-
ney Dalund (who is Mrs. Waller’s lover) defends the permissive ideals of
the revolutionary age, it is only out of envy of the libertine Frenchmen and
as a self-justification for his relationship with his friend’s wife.24 Later
Ferdinand, who is “carried away with the bold possibilities life offers,”
gives any number of reasons for not marrying. But like the present age as
a whole, behind the public reasons he gives for his actions is Ferdinand’s
weak character: he lacks the passionate strength, Kierkegaard writes, to
actualize any higher ideal.25 His all-too-typical desire for money, for
instance, is aroused because it signifies any number of better possible
lives.26 A Story of Everyday Life, through the lens of Kierkegaard’s
criticism, unmasks psychological motivations that belie the reasons charac-

ters give publicly.
The weakness and hypocrisy of the political statements in A Story of
Everyday Life supply the grist for Kierkegaard’s long critique of the pres-
ent age, an excrescence longer than the review itself. This selection of Two
Ages has been translated and published separately—notably into German
by Theodor Haecker in 1914, which partially explains the uptake of
Kierkegaard among Weimar-era critics of political rationalism.27
Kierkegaard dismisses the exchange of reasons in the public sphere as mere
talkativeness, chatter, or chit-chat [snakke] that supervenes psychological
paralysis. The “whole age” becomes “a committee,” unable to act deci-
sively (Carl Schmitt repurposes this aphorism), that stifles individuality,
passion, and excellence.28 The present age demands no passionate com-
mitment; in fact, it does not tolerate them. Kierkegaard argues that the
age is characterized by amorphous envy, a “negatively unifying principle”
that degrades excellence and “takes the form of leveling” (Martin
Heidegger takes over this idea).29 The participants in political life “shrewdly
transform themselves into spectators” who feel no responsibility for the
events they read about.30 While they clamor for newspaper exposés, they
do not feel responsible when the press hounds and smears the victims of
the news cycle. For Kierkegaard, modern pieties like “transparency” and
“informed citizenship” are the self-deceptions of resentful tabloid readers,
who just want to see others torn down. Public opinion is a great abstrac-
tion that immunizes them from moral censure or ethical self-reflection.31
Kierkegaard’s theory of the age makes him cynical about political
debates in the Danish newspapers, but not all of them were transitory
entertainments for a resentful tabloid audience. In the 1840s, Danes were
debating the abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies—a day which
finally came on July 3, 1848. Of all Kierkegaard wrote in this period, and
for all the concepts he furnishes Richard Wright, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Cornel West, and others to describe the absurdity and despair of living in
racist societies, there is not a sentence in Kierkegaard’s vast corpus (diaries
included) about slavery and emancipation in his day.32 For all we may
grant to Kierkegaard’s unmasking of the “reasoning public,” he fails to
recognize the urgent political issues right in front of him, in his newspa-
pers. Yet his cynicism about the politics of the present age, however exag-
gerated, is not tantamount to a rejection of politics in any age.
Although Kierkegaard is sometimes maligned as an anti-social thinker
concerned only with individuality, his attack on the “public” is not an
52 R. WYLLIE
attack upon social or political life, but upon the historical phenomenon
that he observed divorcing the world of speech from the realm of action.
Like Alasdair MacIntyre (otherwise a great critic of his),33 Kierkegaard
criticizes the possibility of political rationality under present historical cir-
cumstances, where reasoned debate only supervenes emotional conflict. In
Kierkegaard’s public sphere, one wishes to be seen displaying fine opin-
ions, or to be heard making witty remarks on the topic of the day, as an
end in itself. Unlike the Greek citizen in the agora, who must act upon his
words, Kierkegaard’s spectator lacks the intention (or “passion”) to do
so.34 Kierkegaard compares the press to an ownerless dog—no one is
responsible when it hurts someone—and the public to English lords that
wager on if and when a man riding an out-of-control horse will fall.35
Members of the newspaper-reading public do not feed the hungry, in
Kierkegaard’s unflattering portrait, but rather preen to announce their
sympathy with the starving, or scour to find someone to blame for famine,
or incite bread riots.36 Though it may have dangerous consequences,
reason-giving in the public sphere is mere chatter that supervenes real
motives of middle-class envy and rivalry for reputation. Thus the
Revolutions of 1848 are not truly revolutionary, Kierkegaard argues (long
before Marx comes round to the same conclusion) because they lack pas-
sion. Unlike real revolution, the mediated political realm demands no pas-
sionate commitment.
What does it mean to reason [at raisonere]?” Kierkegaard asks, answer-
ing, that reason “is the annulled passionate disjunction between subjectiv-
ity and objectivity.”37 Dispassionate, talkative reasoners leave everything
open to criticism: in other words, they lack the passion to take up any
“objective” ideas that stamp their subjectivity. Thus a Ferdinand lacks a
Claudine’s moral character and remains formless, Kierkegaard writes, like
the sea.38 He describes the present age as a “dialectical tour de force: it lets
everything remain but subtly drains the meaning out of it.”39 The monar-
chy is not abolished, for instance, “but if little by little we could get it
transformed into make-believe, we would gladly shout, ‘Hurrah for the
king!’”40 The politics of the present age is not a politics of passionate
upheaval, because citizens devalue everything except their own opinions.
Kierkegaard criticizes the politics of an age that cannot act upon its ideals,
or which lacks ideals entirely.
In contrast to both the revolutionary and the present age, Kierkegaard
does briefly adumbrate a normative model for social life.41 He describes a
community united by common objects of love, albeit in a particular way42:
“When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately

related to an idea and together are essentially related to an idea, the relation
is optimal and normative.”43 There is “ideal distance” because each pos-
sesses their passion individually, which Kierkegaard compares to harmoni-
ous music. (He echoes Augustine’s Ciceronian description of “musical”
concord in a city, where different orders of society are “balanced by reason
as though they were voices”).44 Collapse the commitments of each and all
to the ideal to simply all, though, and riotousness ensues.45 Revolutionary
ages flirt with this danger. Uncouple ideas from passionate action, however,
and one is snared in the endless reflection of the present age.46 In
Kierkegaard’s ideal political theory, these unspecified ideas (or “springs of
ideality”) are eternal and could motivate a single individual at any time.
To explain the sudden emergence of an age obsessed with politics,
Kierkegaard offers a psychological explanation rather than an analysis of
technological or social history. Barriers to envy, he thinks, have broken
down. According to Kierkegaard, most people experience the world
through esthetic categories47: selfish, sensual, desirous of possibility, skepti-
cal, and escapist. The political reinforces the esthetic against the ethical
because citizens typically direct accusations against others rather than (ethi-
cally) against themselves.48 Envy, then, is the other-directing psychological
cause of the present political age: it causes citizens to doubt one another,
prevents citizens from enthusiasm, and traps society in reflection.49 Politics
offers enviers an escape; instead of interrogating the base motives that make
them pick up the newspaper, citizens fling themselves at ever-new transi-
tory goals. The public sphere is a formless sea of envy; this is its “negatively
unifying principle” that dissolves individuality.50 Everyone cares about the
same things, at least for a news cycle. “[L]eveling is powerful with respect
to the temporary,” Kierkegaard writes, and “reflection is a snare.”51
Kierkegaard warns of the Baudrillardian consequences:
[W]hen a man essentially puts his whole personality into communication…

eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction—
there will be no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection
will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, as abstract noise that will render
human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous...52
Kierkegaard goes on, warning that even love and education would become
depersonalized and technical pursuits, which no longer require passionate
commitments from individuals. We will criticize everyone except ourselves
and evaluate only what others can do for us.
54 R. WYLLIE
This critique of political reasoning in Two Ages seems at first to have

little in common with Kierkegaard’s earlier critique of theological rational-
ism. Spectators in the public sphere need not be speculative “Hegelians.”
The abstraction of public reason is conjured negatively, as nobody trusts
any other, or any higher, ideal. But the two critiques are connected on a
deeper level. Modern philosophical rationalism, long before peaking in
Hegel’s presuppositionless system, encourages people to doubt received
wisdom and traditional belief. Kierkegaard’s unfinished Johannes Climacus
suggests a connection that later critics of political rationalism make also:
political rationalism is the vulgarized legacy of Descartes.53 But while
Oakeshott emphasizes the formal supremacy of method or technical
knowledge in Cartesianism—he points to his more precise construal of
twentieth-century political rationalism—Kierkegaard proposes that
Descartes gives an imprimatur to doubt, with far-reaching effects.54
Kierkegaard’s “optimal and normative” political community requires shar-
ing admirable ideals that are asphyxiated by the modern predilection to
doubt. No less a student of the modern collapse of authority than Hannah
Arendt called Kierkegaard’s slender unfinished book the “deepest inter-
pretation” of Cartesian doubt.55
Post-Cartesian philosophy embarks on a quest for certainty that
demands knowledge of efficient causes for how political ideals, or any-
thing else, come to exist. Like his hero J. G. Hamann, Kierkegaard argues
that reason is powerless to answer such questions: we can only reason
about what we first experience. (The same argument from Hamann is
taken up by Isaiah Berlin’s critique of political rationalism.)56 In
Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus
protests that reason [Fornuft] is out of bounds in modern thought: one
cannot “reason in conclusion to existence,” one can only “reason in con-
clusion from existence.”57 Ancient philosophy that begins in wonder could
begin from existing opinions or phenomena, but modern post-Cartesian
philosophy can only doubt the arbitrariness of any “point of departure”
for action.58
The same “negative principle” animates both modern philosophical
rationalism and political rationalism, transmuting the ideals of former ages
into “make-believe,” so that only the illusion of shared reason remains.59
Kierkegaard identifies envy as the opposite of wonder, and the passion that
supplies modern philosophers’ motivation to doubt.60 Envy also motivates
citizens to doubt their fellows, embrace skeptical philosophy, and void
powerful ideals from the public realm. After leveling, twentieth-century

critics identify specific positive formations that fill the vacuum, like
Oakeshott’s sovereignty of technique or Eric Voegelin’s “gnosticism.”61
Kierkegaard describes an earlier development, but perhaps a more lasting
one. He envisions something like a “postmodern” age where words
change their meaning and no longer connect to reality.62 And Two Ages
seems especially relevant today, amid broad concerns that the Internet and
social media have had deleterious effects upon political communication.
We still live in the present age.
Ultimately, Kierkegaard is less concerned with explaining the origins of
the present age, and more concerned with developing an exit strategy.
How can one jolt citizens out of the mode of public reasoning, and into
ethical and religious existence, spheres of life that afford the passionate
ideals that unite communities? Kierkegaard brusquely rejects the idea that
a more systematic political philosophy is necessary for this task: “Instead
of all these hypotheses about the origin of the state, etc., we should be
more occupied with the question: given an established order, how can new
points of departure be created religiously?”63 Kierkegaard recommends
silence and suffering as points of departure, and his second authorship
would make a major theme of the imitation of the suffering Christ.64
However, by example, Kierkegaard shows how poetry, literature, and liter-
ary criticism create points of departure as well. A Story of Everyday Life
might show us our reflection in Dalmund or Ferdinand. Although
Kierkegaard at times adopts an apocalyptic tone, the situation is far from
hopeless:
For the younger person, however firmly he adheres to what he admires as

excellent, who realizes from the beginning that leveling is what the selfish
individual and the selfish generation meant for evil, but what can also be the
point of departure for the highest life, especially for the individual who in
honesty before God wills it—for him it will be genuinely educative to live in
an age of leveling. In the highest sense contemporaneity will develop him
religiously as well as esthetically and intellectually, because the comic will
come to be radically evident. For it is extremely comic to see the particular
individual classed under the infinite abstraction.65
Kierkegaard sees a silver lining. The present age cannot appear serious to
those who honestly desire to live ethically or religiously.
56 R. WYLLIE
Notes
1. Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer I-XI, eds. P. A. Heiberg,
V. Kuhr, and E. Torsting (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1909–48), VII, A 84,
n.d. 1847. Hereafter “Pap.”
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age,
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1978), 103. Hereafter Two Ages.
3. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5–42, in Rationalism in
Politics and Other Essay (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991), 6.
4. It is also the twilight of the “theocentric” (early) nineteenth century. Søren
Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments,
Vol. 1, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992), 16.
5. Pap. IX, B 63, n.d. 1848.
6. See William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Abingdon:
Ashgate, 2003), 206; Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1994), 345.
7. The doctrine is summed up in the Hegelian motto, “What is rational is
actual; and what is actual is rational.” G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel: Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allan Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.
8. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 70.
9. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse
10. Bruce Kirmmse, “Kierkegaard and 1848,” History of European Ideas 20.3
(1995): 173.
11. For this definition of political rationalism, see Peter J. Steinberger,
“Rationalism in Politics,” American Political Science Review 109.4 (2015):
750–763.
12. Oakeshott calls these traditions sufficient “to persuade but not to prove.”
Michael Oakeshott, “Political Discourse,” pp. 70–95, in Rationalism in
13. Steinberger argues that Oakeshott’s approach is “profoundly consistent”
with the broad ‘post-Kantian’ sense of political rationalism he defends: a
“conception of human reason understood as a socially located process of
rational reconstruction.” Peter J. Steinberger, “Rationalism in Politics,”
American Political Science Review 109.4 (2015): 750–763, 759.
14. Baruch Spinoza, The Collected Works of Baruch Spinoza, 2 vols., ed. and
trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
15. Chantal Mouffe, whom I take to be a representative agonist, bucks the

“rationalistic framework” by arguing that that politics is a matter of “col-
lective passions” mobilized against adversaries. Chantal Mouffe, The
Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), 60 and 102–3.
16. Later, Habermas would seek new grounds for political rationalism, leading
him to develop his theory of communicative action in the 1970s. Habermas
also regarded this communicative domain as a fragile one, soon to be
coopted by managed opinion and manufactured publicity. See Jürgen
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans.
Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1991), 46–47, 48, and 56.
17. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
246–248.
18. Historian Lynn Hunt has argued that the origin of human rights discourse
should be located in these reading publics. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human
Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
19. The early Habermas offers the most famous articulation of a critical con-
cept of the public sphere that at least guarantees rationality in principle. See
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,
trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1991), 238.
20. Two Ages, 9.
21. Kierkegaard’s motivations are a little more complex. He wishes to offer a
superior criticism of the work than the authorial preface in order to defend
the author, as a man experienced with the mud of the street is crestfallen to
see “a young girl” unsuccessfully avoid being splashed by a carriage (ibid.,
60). Thomasine Gyllembourg, the “young girl” in this case, is the mother
of Kierkegaard’s rival P. A. Heiberg, to whom he sent two copies of his
glowing review as well as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in order to
provoke a response. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans.
Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 358.
22. Two Ages, 30.
23. Two Ages, 7 and 20.
24. Two Ages, 47.
25. Two Ages, 52.
26. Two Ages, 75.
27. Leo Strauss suggests that Kierkegaard’s popularity in this period had to do
with a crisis of faith in liberal democracy. Kierkegaard was not only popular
among right-wing figures; Karl Jaspers, notably, appealed to him as well.
Peter Gordon has recently emphasized the importance of Kierkegaard to
Theodor Adorno. Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian
Existentialism,” The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas
58 R. WYLLIE
Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 39. Peter E. Gordon,

Adorno and Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016),
1–36. See also Allan Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner:
A Contribution to the History of the Reception of Two Ages in the
German-speaking World,” International Kierkegaard Commentary: Two
Ages, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1984); Heiko
Schulz, “A Modest Head Start: The German Reception of Kierkegaard,”
Kierkegaard’s International Reception: Northern and Western Europe, ed.
Jon Stewart (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), 346–47.
28. Two Ages, 79. Cf. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy,
trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 62.
29. Two Ages, 81 and 84. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 119.
30. Two Ages, 72.
31. See Gordon D. Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Milwaukee, WI:
Marquette University Press, 2001), 18.
32. Kierkegaard’s nemesis N. F. S. Grundtvig, who led a revival of the Danish
church that embraced liberal politics, was a leading abolitionist. Nigel
Hatton, “Justice the Carribean: Transfer Day and the Political Philosophy
of Frederick Douglass and Søren Kierkegaard,” conference paper pre-
sented at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference,
31 August 2017. For Kierkegaard’s influence on Wright, King, and West,
see the respective entries by Jennifer Veninga, Hatton, and Marcia
C. Robinson in Kierkegaard’s Influence on Socio-Political Thought, ed. Jon
Stewart (London: Ashgate, 2011)
33. MacIntyre sharply criticizes Kierkegaard’s concept of a “criterionless
choice” of taking up an ethical life. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, third
edition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 41–45.
For a nuanced defense of Kierkegaard that insists the choice of the ethical
is telic, but which admits some force of MacIntyre’s critique, see Gordon
D. Marino, “The Place of Reason in Kierkegaard’s Ethics,” Kierkegaardiana
18 (1996): 49–64.
34. A similar lament can be found in Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics,
ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2005), 12ff. and 110.
35. Two Ages, 105.
36. Kierkegaard’s journals evince a hatred of the press that can verge on the
conspiracy. For example, he claims that the press governs by intellectually
spiritually “buttering up” the middle class. Pap. X, A 690, n.d. 1850; Pap.
VII, A 134, n.d. 1847.
37. Two Ages, 103.
38. Two Ages, 77–78.
39. Two Ages, 77.
40. Two Ages, 81.

41. M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 119.
42. The image is basically Augustinian. See Oliver O’Donovan, Common
Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 25.
43. Two Ages, 62.
44. Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. R. W. Dyson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 77.
45. Two Ages, 63 and 21.
46. Two Ages, 89.
47. Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna
H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 43.
48. Kierkegaard describes “two changed persons who in a new misunderstand-
ing continue their association, each as the accuser of another, instead of
each one accusing himself and finding understanding.” Two Ages, 7. Like
Vico’s “barbarism of reflection,” the terminal phase of the cycle of regimes
in The New Science, Kierkegaard describes citizens trapped in reflection as
enervated, weak, and egotistical. Although Kierkegaard is describing a
nineteenth-century historical phenomenon, the rise of the press public
sphere, some basic contours of this critique of political rationalism are a
century older. See Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas
Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1968), 1106; Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed.
Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 104.
49. Two Ages, 82.
50. Two Ages, 81.
51. Two Ages, 89.
52. Two Ages, 103.
53. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 135.
54. Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics,” pp. 5–42, in Rationalism in
55. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 275 n32.
56. Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. Henry Hardy
57. Two Ages, 40.
58. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, trans.
Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1985), 145.
59. Two Ages, 103.
60 R. WYLLIE
60. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 146n. Ironically,
Descartes accused his own opponents of envy, claiming that this was their
only motivation to doubt his method. René Descartes, Letter to Dinet, in
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham,
Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), 387–388.
61. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), Ch. 4.
62. See Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, “Modernity, Mass Society, and the
Media,” pp. 23–61, in The Corsair Affair, International Kierkegaard
Commentary 13, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University
Press, 1990), 49–56.
63. Søren Kierkegaard, Pap. X, A 72, n.d. 1851.
64. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 98 and 109.
65. Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages, 88.
CHAPTER 5
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes

to Monticello
Justin D. Garrison
For I have sworn upon the alter of god, eternal hostility against every
form of tyranny over the mind of man.
—Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23,
1800,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New
York: Library of America, 1984), 1082.
If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the
law—let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled!
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1989), 95.
What is the meaning of reason and its relationship to American democ-

racy? Since the beginning of the United States itself, Thomas Jefferson has
been celebrated by many political leaders, scholars, and average people as
a figure who defines the highest American ideals. Statements from Ronald
Reagan and Barack Obama can serve as representative examples of this
understanding of Jefferson. In July of 1987, Reagan announces his
J. D. Garrison (*)
Roanoke College, Salem, VA, USA
e-mail: garrison@roanoke.edu

62 J. D. GARRISON
program for an Economic Bill of Rights. While encouraging Americans to

pursue his vision of economic progress, he says the last words of John
Adams, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” are factually false but symbolically
true. Reagan argues that throughout their history Americans have com-
mitted themselves to Jefferson’s dream of “keeping this a land of liberty
and justice for all [ensuring] that this country remains a bastion of free-
dom, the last best hope for mankind.”1 Almost thirty years later, Barack
Obama frames his 2016 White House Science Fair as continuing an
American tradition of support for science and progress. He says Jefferson,
like many of his fellow Framers, is a child “of the enlightenment.” By this
he means that Jefferson and those like him “had come of age when all the
old dogmas were being challenged. And they had this incredible faith, this
belief in the human mind, and our ability to figure stuff out.”2
In the American political tradition, it is not possible to think seriously
about topics such as equality, rights, limited government, reason, science,
democracy, and progress without becoming aware of the fundamental
ways in which Jefferson sets the tone for valuing and imagining them.
When considering Jefferson’s legacy, Reagan seems to have it right when
he said, “we’re still Jefferson’s children.”3 At the same time, these words
from Reagan and Obama already hint at some dimensions of Jefferson’s
way of thinking that will be explored below. Obama uses the phrase
“incredible faith” to describe Jefferson’s commitment to scientific
reasoning. Reagan’s words “last best hope for mankind,” which he
borrows from another Jefferson admirer, Abraham Lincoln, are a prophetic
statement about the fundamental meaning of the American political
experiment in democracy.
To examine these and other components of Jefferson’s political thought,
and thereby to see what reason and democracy might ultimately mean for
the United States, this chapter will draw upon the insights of one of the
greatest modern critics of reason and democracy—Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s view of reason could be the most radical in this volume.
Thinkers treated in other chapters tend to argue modern rationalists have
incomplete understandings of reason that could be improved if other
things, for example, history or tradition, were taken into account. For
both modern rationalists and such critics, disagreement is usually over
how best to reason; the idea that reason of some kind or another can
locate objective truth does not seem to be in dispute. As will be shown
below, Nietzsche sees truth itself as a value and therefore rejects the notion
that value-free, that is, disinterested reasoning is possible.
5 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE: THE HAMMER GOES TO MONTICELLO 63
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes his way of thinking as phi-

losophizing with a hammer. By sounding out idols contemporary and
eternal, he wonders which ones will begin to fall apart, giving him “as a
reply that famous hollow sound which speaks of bloated entrails.”4 With
Nietzsche’s hammer in hand, the American idol of rational democracy will
be struck “as with a tuning fork.”5 The vibrations from this hammer blow
will show that for Nietzsche, Jefferson’s sense of reason, and the concepts
of morality, equality, democracy, and progress it articulates, sings
Christianity in a different key. Because he is repackaging rather than
repudiating the “old dogmas,” Nietzsche would see Jefferson’s rationalism
and the vision of politics it generates as a manifestation of the paramount
crisis of modernity—nihilism.
The Oracle of Reason

Jefferson sees a real relationship between reason and Christianity. In a let-
ter to Benjamin Rush he explains, “I am a Christian, in the only sense
[Jesus] wished any one to be.”6 His Christianity is a contrast with and
improvement over the pervasive ignorance, superstition, and oppression
generated by historical or “Platonic Christianity.”7 For Jefferson, Plato is
a “Sophist” who creates “mysticisms incomprehensible to the human
mind” and hence cannot pass “the test of reason.”8 Jefferson believes that
Plato, like other metaphysical charlatans, would have been consigned to
the ash heap of history had it not been for a particular stroke of good luck
centuries after his death.
Jefferson claims Jesus’s early followers are “the most unlettered &
ignorant men.”9 In Jefferson’s mind, a few centuries after the historical
events of Jesus’s life, Christian clergy realize they will be displaced unless
they can convince the masses that the truth about Christianity is far too
complicated for the average person to discern without guidance. Enter
Plato in an omophorion. Jefferson writes, “the Christian priesthood …
saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up
an artificial system which might, from it’s [sic] indistinctness, admit
everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it
to profit, power and pre-eminence.”10 The institutional church creates a
variety of complex and unnecessary dogmas not to edify but to fog the
minds of believers and tyrannize over them.
According to Jefferson, reason can discern the truth about all of reality
when it is freed from the constraints of “monkish ignorance.”11 Thus it has
64 J. D. GARRISON
the power to transcend the limitations of Platonic Christianity, allowing

individuals finally to decide spiritual questions for themselves. In a letter to
Peter Carr, Jefferson explains reason “is the only oracle given you by
heaven.” To discover his personal religious convictions, Jefferson
encourages Carr to “shake off all the fears & servile prejudices under
which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason in her seat, and call
to her tribunal every fact, every opinion.”12 As Jefferson states, Carr will
be accountable to God only for the “uprightness” of his use of reason and
not the “rightness” of his conclusions.13 This will be so because reasoning
is an exercise in disinterested investigation. When reason errs, it makes
honest and correctable mistakes of logic, method, data collection, or
interpretation of materials. When used rightly, reason leads to the truth,
whatever it may be, that should be accepted by all other rational beings.
Following his own advice, Jefferson argues reason demonstrates the
true Jesus is the definitive moral instructor in human history. On his
telling, Jesus’s rational message builds upon the insights of ancient
philosophy and Judaism. Jesus improves the human understanding of God
to reflect “the principles of a pure deism,” brings the common human
code of ethics up to “the standard of reason, justice & philosophy,” and
reaffirms, on the basis of these revisions, the “belief of a future state.”14 In
morality, the most significant progress Jesus makes over all previous
religious and philosophical systems is “inculcating universal philanthropy …
to all mankind, gathering all into one family, under the bonds of love,
charity, peace, common wants and common aids.”15 Using reason to
interpret the evidence he derives from his senses, Jefferson feels he
successfully defends his “creed of materialism” against the rival claims of
supernaturalists.16
Like Jefferson, Nietzsche sees a very close connection between
Christianity and Plato, calling the former “Platonism for ‘the people.’”17
Nietzsche agrees with Jefferson that Christianity is taken in a bad direction
in its distant past, but he goes even further than Jefferson when he locates
the demise of the religion at its beginning, specifically in the preaching of
St. Paul. Such similarities notwithstanding, Nietzsche would be critical of
Jefferson’s conception of reason. Jefferson believes a difference between
traditional Christianity and a rational Jesus truly exists and that the latter
can be extracted from the former. For Nietzsche, what Jefferson wants to
do under the guidance of reason is not possible. In Twilight of the Idols he
writes, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to
Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means
self-evident.”18 Christianity is a complete system; to reject any particular

part, even on allegedly rational grounds, shatters the whole.
Further, Nietzsche would object to Jefferson using the language of
reason to make Christian morality synonymous with morality as such.
Moralities based on principles different from and incompatible with
Christianity are not only possible but have historically existed. In the first
essay in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche explains Christian morality
is neither natural nor universal. It is the historical culmination of a reaction
of the base character against an older set of morals practiced by the noble
or aristocratic person. Driven by hatred for the nobles, what Nietzsche
calls ressentiment, the lower type in aristocratic society becomes creative.
Desiring to remake the world so it testifies to the universal truth and
goodness of their weakness, those consumed with ressentiment take
“imaginary revenge” upon their oppressors and launch a moral rebellion
by creating new values.19 Ressentiment and will to power lurk underneath
the Christian moral revaluation that creates ostensibly loving values such
as equality, humility, compassion, other-worldliness, and asceticism. What
counts as good is simply the opposite of noble morality. Unlike Jefferson
then, Nietzsche sees Christian morality as a historical creation serving the
interests of a specific kind of person. It is not a discovery of universal
values by dispassionate reason. As will be shown below, Nietzsche also
finds the substance of this new moral orientation particularly disturbing.
In addition to criticizing Jefferson’s confusion on the relationship
between rational morals and Christian morals, Nietzsche would conclude
Jefferson does not know what he is doing when he is reasoning. Nietzsche
believes all claims to truth are determined by the perspective of the person
making the claim. Thus he is often described as a “perspectivist” whose
method of interpretation is “perspectivism.”20 In The Gay Science, he
writes, “the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own
perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner.”21
What specifically determines a person’s perspective? In a word, his or her
values. For Nietzsche, all people either create or adopt values. Those
values filter in what a person accepts as objective and true, and they filter
out what one sees as subjective and false. There are many areas of life
where such a claim causes little trouble for most people. For example,
everyone has had a conversation about a song, a novel, or a movie in
which friends disagree about its meaning. Sometimes someone insists
upon the truth of his or her interpretation, becoming angry when
challenged or criticized, but most people in these circumstances can live
with the existence of multiple points of view.
66 J. D. GARRISON
Perhaps shockingly to some, Nietzsche extends comfort with subjectivity

and multiplicity in discussions of the beautiful to those of the good and
the true. In Beyond Good and Evil, he argues most philosophers claim to
discern the truth about something through the exercise of “cold, pure,
divinely unconcerned dialectic.”22 In reality, the intellectual productions
of an allegedly value-neutral reason are justifications of pre-existing desires.
Nietzsche even rejects what most modern people take as the only truth
available—truth generated by the modern natural sciences. He claims,
“We see that science also rests on a faith; there simply is no science ‘without
presuppositions.’”23 There is no position of interpretive privilege, no
dispassionate realm a person can enter into and see things as they “really
are.”24 Nietzsche never separates the question of value from the question
“for whom?” If no value-free perspective is available, then there can be no
universal truths binding upon all peoples in all situations, places, or times.
One set of values may be good for a person or people in a given set of
circumstances, but those same commitments would be dangerous or
destructive for a different person or people.
As these comments about perspectivism suggest, Nietzsche’s way of
thinking is rather different from those of his predecessors, especially those
in the traditions of ancient and modern rationalism. Because he focuses on
multiplicity, subjectivity, and becoming, he is skeptical, even contemptuous,
of philosophies and religions that emphasize unity, objectivity, and being.25
With this in mind, one can see more clearly what Nietzsche would find
inadequate in Jefferson’s kind of reason. First, Jefferson sees reason as an
objective truth-finding faculty when it is really a subjective value-defending
faculty. Second, Jefferson’s misunderstanding of what reason is and what
it does inclines him to believe reason’s truths oblige all. The presence of
these errors in Jefferson’s account of morals has been addressed above.
When examining other elements of what Jefferson’s reason takes as true
and authoritative, Nietzsche’s likely criticisms become more intense.
What the Oracle Says About the Human Person

and Politics
For Jefferson, reason is also essential to understanding the human person

and politics. Reason shows the abstract individual is equal to all others,
rational, industrious, charitable, and naturally virtuous. This is especially
true of farmers, whom Jefferson’s thinks may be “the chosen people of
God.”26 In politics, reason points directly and exclusively at democracy. If

a sufficient mass of rational people is allowed to govern itself on the bases
of equality and popular participation, little can go wrong. He explains, “I
have so much confidence in the good sense of man … that I am never afraid
of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force.”27 Historically, it is
these views that justify the claims in the Declaration of Independence that
human equality, natural rights, and the right to majoritarian self-government
are self-evident truths, that is, the fruits of reason unencumbered by “the
laws and institutions of a semi-barbarous ancestry.”28 Since 1776, American
practice has proven “the sufficiency of human reason for the care of human
affairs and that the will of the majority, the Natural law of every society, is
the only sure guardian of the rights of man.”29 With this confidence,
Jefferson exhorts others to “for ever [sic] bow down to the general reason
of the society.”30 Reason explains egalitarian democracy is the only form of
government capable of providing for full human flourishing. Such claims
about human nature, the purpose of politics, and the foundations of politi-
cal legitimacy are obvious truths available to all who will but use their reason.
Jefferson’s zealous defense of the people and democracy makes it diffi-
cult for him to be charitable toward those who do not share his views. His
deep and uninterrupted loathing of Alexander Hamilton is well known, as
is his deep but temporary rift with John Adams. Hamilton, Adams, and
others of similar mind tend to have more reverence than Jefferson for the
wisdom of tradition and the teachings of history. They are also more skep-
tical of claims regarding human reason and natural goodness. To Jefferson,
those who hold such different views are not good people with bad ideas.
They are members of a heretical sect, “monocrats” who have been seduced
by “the glittering of crowns & coronets.”31 Americans who have more
favorable opinions of Britain than France, especially in the 1790s, are also
heretics as well as part of an “Anglican monarchical, & aristocratical party”
who have “had their heads shorn by the harlot England.”32 In a letter, he
counsels his friend John Taylor to persevere in the midst of the sufferings
inflicted upon the American people by the Adams administration. He
writes, “a little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over us,
their spells dissolve.”33
Nietzsche sees the Christian values described in the previous section of
this chapter, especially compassion and equality, as the foundation for
various modern political movements, including democracy.34 In the
Genealogy, he has a “free spirit” of his time say about this seemingly odd
situation “it is the church, and not its poison, that repels us. — Apart from
68 J. D. GARRISON
the church, we, too, love the poison. —”35 Elsewhere he states, “the
democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.”36 Whereas
Jefferson sees reason making a much-needed break with oppressive
traditional religious convictions, Nietzsche would interpret his claims
about rational democracy as an articulation of political morality for the
base herd of humanity. Jefferson’s democracy of reason is a politicized
Christianity unaware of its Christian paternity. For this reason, Nietzsche
would end up finding more sinister undercurrents in Jefferson’s vision.
In a section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra titled “On The Tarantulas,”
Nietzsche locates commitments to equality, so prevalent in Jefferson’s
mind, in a deeper desire for revenge. The tarantulas scream, “what justice
means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our
revenge … We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are
not.”37 For Nietzsche, this vengeance pretending to equality is directed
against any people who possess and display unusual talents beyond the
reach of most ordinary individuals. In politics, this requires leaders to
avoid speaking and acting on the basis of individual authority and superior
competence. To prevent political disenfranchisement and social ostracism,
leaders of genuine merit are coerced into pandering, branding themselves
as citizen-politicians, servants of the people, and instruments of the
popular will. This insight might shed some light upon the motivations
behind Jefferson’s populist rhetoric of appealing to the common man. At
the same time, even though Jefferson is often at the pinnacle of power,
tremendous, “tarantula” bitterness is on display when he characterizes his
opponents. In Jefferson’s democracy of reason, there still is room for
angels and demons. Underneath vows to provide and defend equality,
freedom, other natural rights, and self-government, Nietzsche sees
democracies driven by the spirit of ressentiment.
Reason is what gives Jefferson his hope for democracy’s future. In a
letter to Roger Weightman he predicts the following:
All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of
the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth,
that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor
a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the
grace of God.38
He believes he and his fellow Framers have played a pivotal role in this
historical drama. He encourages those who, like him, cherish the freedom
to think and publish to defend these liberties when they come under
attack, becoming martyrs if necessary.39 Even in the midst of spectacular
suffering, Jefferson’s optimism about the power of reason and the
inevitability of global democracy is not shaken. He believes the violent
turn of the French Revolution in the early 1790s is truly lamentable, but
instead of seeing it fail in its efforts to achieve equality, freedom, and
democracy, “I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an
Adam & an Eve left in every country, & left free, it would be better than
as it now is.”40 Jefferson never repudiates his conviction that violence
suffered or committed in the pursuit of democracy can be justified to the
degree that it ultimately redeems the world.
Beyond his contempt for the regime itself, Nietzsche would find
Jefferson’s frequent and fervent predictions about the future of democracy
and reason concerning rather than inspiring. Again, there is equivalence
between Jefferson’s thinking and the older Christian tradition Jefferson
thinks he has progressed beyond. Most Christians believe if they act
according to godly values, repenting and asking for God’s forgiveness
when they fall short, they will inherit the kingdom of heaven. This world
to come is the “true” world for Christians. It is beautiful and desirable
because it is free from the suffering, injustice, change, and decay that
define the false, “apparent” world in which people live.41
Over time, Nietzsche claims, belief in the true world of Christianity has
become incredible. Even as belief in God declines, the disappointment
with earthly life Christianity generates remains with many people.42 As
noted above, Jefferson makes it clear that belief in a future state of rewards
is an essential component of a rational system of ethics. When this idea is
interpreted through the lens of his predictions of a democratic future, it
becomes clear that the future state he has in mind is not found in some
realm radically separated from this world, as is the case with traditional
Christianity, but is instead located in this world, one that is supposed to be
politically, rationally, and spiritually transformed by human hands. His
prophesies about democracy refer to an immanent rather than transcendent
paradise. With this eschatological orientation, it is easier to see why his
enemies are heretics and why those who die trying to save the world for
democracy are martyrs.
The endurance of otherworldly thinking in Jefferson’s mind would
trouble Nietzsche because the tension between this world and the next
generated by Christian values is a central component in the irruption of
nihilism. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche explains, “A nihilist is a man who
70 J. D. GARRISON
judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it
ought to be that it does not exist.”43 Such a judgment about these two
worlds is made when the actual experience of living leads a person to
conclude his or her values cannot be realized. Rather than discarding the
values in question, the world itself is demoted to a contemptible location
for a life that cannot end soon enough. Jefferson’s thought agrees at least
with the first half of this definition of a nihilist. As far as he is concerned,
the world most certainly is not how it should be. Although there are hints
that Jefferson occasionally loses confidence in a future of reason and
democracy, he does not seem to have fallen into the type of despair
Nietzsche associates with fully formed nihilism. It is true there are many
substantive differences between Jefferson and Christianity on the end of
history. Here it is enough to note that for Nietzsche, Jefferson’s belief in
a rational democratic apocalypse and a Christian’s belief in the Second
Coming amount to the same life-denying thing.
What the Oracle Is
One might wonder why a person or a nation would live according to ideas
where ressentiment and hatred of the world underpin seemingly cheerful
statements about the progress of reason and democracy. In the Genealogy,
Nietzsche spends a great deal of time analyzing the meaning of what he
calls ascetic ideals. In the most general sense, an ascetic ideal is something
one holds forth as a goal for which tremendous sacrifices will be made.
Especially in Christianity, the ascetic ideal is powerful because it gives the
weak, the “whole herd of the ill-constituted, disgruntled, underprivileged,
unfortunate, and all who suffer of themselves,” a meaning in life that calls
forth action and staves off suicide.44 Thus, the change from noble to base
morality is not merely an act of revenge. It is an expression of the instinct
for existence. Even though the ascetic ideal is nihilistic, it is still a
manifestation of will to power. For Nietzsche, then, the appeal of such a
notion, at least for the weak personality, is not hard to understand. He
writes, “man would rather will nothingness than not will.”45
Nietzsche’s assessment of the meaning and appeal of the ascetic ideal
further clarifies his perspectivism. He claims the ascetic ideal does not
necessarily decline along with the demise of Christianity. He writes, “from
the moment faith in the God of the ascetic ideal is denied, a new problem
arises: that of the value of truth.”46 Lingering faith in the Christian value
of the truth has allowed the ascetic ideal to shape the modern reason and
science that rejects the dogmatic beliefs of Christianity. How else do
modern sciences, guided by reason, understand themselves except as

committed to revealing the truth about the world that has been obscured
or suppressed by religious authorities? Jefferson sees modern political
thought, also guided by reason, as pursuing a different part of this broader
project of liberation from the backward past. Thus, for Nietzsche,
Jefferson’s political rationalism would also be an expression of the will to
truth. It would also be a carrier of the ascetic ideal.
In the Genealogy, Nietzsche invokes his perspectival method and
explains “the more eyes, different eyes” one uses when examining a given
topic “the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity’
be.”47 Following this advice, this chapter has considered various aspects of
Jefferson’s political thought. For Nietzsche, it would be clear that Jefferson
does not derive his most deeply held views from the exercise of some kind
of objective rationality. In valuing reason, truth, equality, and democracy,
Jefferson is offering an “interested” interpretation rather than a disinter-
ested description of existence. Applying Nietzsche’s tools, wielding his
hammer, has also illuminated the darker places of Jefferson’s thought
where resonances with ressentiment, ascetic ideals, and nihilism are found.
Nietzsche would not be interested in answering a question like “Is
Jefferson’s political rationalism good or bad?” That is the kind of thinking
Nietzsche’s perspectivism tries to avoid. When the Nietzschean “for
whom?” is recalled, it is clear that Jefferson’s democracy of reason is good
for, that is, has worked for, the same people who have thrived under other
forms of the ascetic ideal—the weak. Politically speaking, Jefferson’s kind
of democracy is the one best equipped, at least for a time, to perpetuate
their survival. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche states, “If we have our
own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how.”48 Something like
Jefferson’s democratic rationalism has been a “why” for the masses in
American democracy for some time. It is at the heart of U.S. continental
expansion, economic progress, technological innovation, and global mili-
tarism. But, since such a perspective ultimately culminates in nihilism,
what might Americans need to consider when the political equivalent of
the death of God begins?
Overcoming the Oracle?
At the time of writing this chapter, Jefferson’s reputation in the minds of
Americans seems to be deteriorating. Mainly as a result of his status as a
slave owner, calls have been issued to remove his name and statues of him
72 J. D. GARRISON
from various places. His home county of Albemarle no longer officially

celebrates his birthday. While there is nothing wrong with providing an
interpretation of Jefferson that accounts for the abhorrent aspects of his
life, one wonders if the ambition to erase Jefferson and other historical
figures from the American past also suggests faith in the American
democracy of reason is collapsing.49 Nietzsche would not be surprised if it
is. If Jefferson’s vision of reason and democracy is Christianity in a different
key, then America’s disintegration is a political chapter in the civilization
implosion Nietzsche describes as emanating from the death of God. In
The Gay Science, a madman declares “God is dead … and we have killed
him.”50 His atheistic audience is indifferent to this revelation. After all,
cannot the relevant political institutions and moral commandments survive
without the religion that gave birth to them? Nietzsche’s answer, discussed
in a different context above, is “no.” From his point of view, then, the
institutions and norms of American life cannot continue in the absence of
America’s democratic faith.
What to make of the possibility of such an American future? For
Nietzsche, things are not likely to get better for those who belong to the
base majority of people. Especially among such people, suicides, drug
addiction, poverty, and despair are rising. Civic engagement, meaningful
employment, confidence in institutions, genuine love of country, and
hope for the future are in very short supply. Although Nietzsche is no
advocate for Christianity, he recognizes that most people need something
like it because such a structure is the only means by which they can survive.
He writes, “the less one knows how to command, the more urgently one
covets someone who commands, who commands severely—a god, prince,
class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience.”51 Without
the commanding presence of faith in reason and self-government, the base
masses will be at sea and likely look to more radical and even violent
political and social formations to channel their ressentiment. With this in
mind, those who advocate for the dismantling of the values that have
sustained America, those who, in other words, want to smash the idol they
despise, are as smug and naïve as the atheists in Nietzsche’s aphorism. If
there is any hope for most Americans, it probably lies in rejuvenating a
god who can save them.
For those few who have the potential to command, and such people are
Nietzsche’s primary audience, there might be a different and genuine
hope. The environment that degrades the masses is also one that can “give
birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive
quality.”52 Nietzsche gives such people no new values, no new method of

abstract reasoning. To do so would invalidate his project. Instead, he seeks
to inspire others to undertake responsibility for the adventure of creating
distinct lives. It is to those “who are bent on seeking in all things for what
in them must be overcome,” that Nietzsche provides the advice to seek
life’s greatest joy in living dangerously.53 How will such dangerous people
know when they are giving “style to one’s character”?54 In The Gay Science,
Nietzsche asks whether or not the reader could bear the possibility that his
or her life, exactly as it had been lived, would recur with “every joy and
every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your
life.”55 The goal for the free spirit is to construct a life that will enable him
or her to say “yes” to this prospect, to what Nietzsche calls the eternal
recurrence.56 In the contemporary American context, the people capable
of and willing to experience the exhilarations and sufferings of real freedom
and independence must first overcome faith in the democracy of reason.
For those who can, Nietzsche would say it is time to pick up the hammers,
leave Monticello, and create lives “in the horizon of the infinite.”57
Notes
1. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks Announcing America’s Economic Bill of Rights,
July 3, 1987,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald
Reagan: 1987 (In Two Books), Book I—January 1 to July 3, 1987
(Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office,
1989), 744.
2. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President at the White House Science
Fair, April 13, 2016,” accessed July 22, 2019, https://obamawhitehouse.
archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/04/13/remarks-president-white-
house-science-fair
3. Reagan, “Remarks Announcing America’s Economic Bill of Rights, July 3,
1987,” 740.
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a
Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Penguin, 1976), 465.
5. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 466.
6. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” in
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of
America, 1984), 1122.
7. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, Oct. 12, 1813,” in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America,
1984), 1302.
74 J. D. GARRISON
8. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814,” in Thomas

1984), 1341; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Short, October 31,
1819,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York:
Library of America, 1984), 1430.
9. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1124.
10. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1124; Jefferson
“Letter to John Adams, July 5, 1814,” 1342.
11. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826,” in
America, 1984), 1517.
12. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787” in Thomas
1984), 904.
13. Jefferson, “Letter to Peter Carr, Aug. 10, 1787,” 902.
14. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Joseph Priestley, Apr. 9, 1803,” in Thomas
1984), 1121.
15. Jefferson, “Letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush, Apr. 21, 1803,” 1125.
16. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820,” in Thomas
1984), 1443.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1989), 2.
19. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 36.
20. There are several interpretations of Nietzsche’s perspectivism in the schol-
arship. Deleuze and Nehamas understand it as a component of the broader
aesthetic project that is Nietzsche’s philosophy. On their views, Nietzsche’s
perspectivism, and its relationship to the creation of values, is consistent
throughout his writings. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia UP, 1983) and Alexander
Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1985). Clark and Leiter interpret Nietzsche’s perspectivism as part of a
developing notion of truth in his philosophy that culminates in his affirm-
ing the truth of sense experience and empirical reasoning in his last publi-
cations. See Maudmarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1990) and Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, 2nd
ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015).
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Random House, Inc., 1974), 336.
22. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 12.

23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 281.
24. Disagreement over the meaning of such statements about modern science
exemplifies the differences between Deleuze and Nehamas on the one
hand, and Leiter and Clark on the other. For example, Deleuze interprets
such claims as representative of Nietzsche’s consistent view and writes,
“What [Nietzsche] attacks in science is precisely the scientific mania for
seeking balances, the utilitarianism and egalitarianism proper to science.
This is why his whole critique operates on three levels; against logical
identity, against mathematical equality and against physical equilibrium.”
Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, 45. In contrast, Clark draws upon her
privileging of Twilight of the Idols and Antichrist and argues, “[These
works] contain no hint of the view that human truths, science, logic,
mathematics, or causality falsify reality. Instead, they exhibit a uniform and
unambiguous respect for facts, the senses, and science.” Clark, Nietzsche on
Truth and Philosophy, 105.
25. About this part of Nietzsche’s thought, Deleuze explains, “Pluralism is the
properly philosophical way of thinking, the one invented by philosophy;
the only guarantor of freedom in the concrete spirit, the only principle of
a violent atheism.” Deleuze, Nietzsche & Philosophy, 4.
26. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in The Portable Thomas
Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Viking Press Inc.,
1975), 217.
27. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Diodati, August 3, 1789,” in The Portable
Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The Viking Press
Inc., 1975), 444.
28. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Major John Cartwright, June 5, 1824,” in
The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: The
Viking Press Inc., 1975), 578.
29. Thomas Jefferson, “Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12,
1790,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New
York: The Viking Press Inc., 1975), 259–60.
30. Jefferson, “Response to the Citizens of Albemarle, February 12,
1790,” 260.
31. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to George Mason, Feb. 4, 1791,” in Thomas
1984), 972; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, Dec. 28, 1794,”
in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library
of America, 1984), 1015.
32. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Philip Mazzei, Apr. 24, 1796,” in Thomas
1984), 1036, 1037.
76 J. D. GARRISON
33. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Taylor, June 4, 1798,” in Thomas

1984), 1050.
34. Detwiler elaborates upon this relationship and Nietzsche’s interpretation
of its meaning when he argues, “[Nietzsche] might argue that contemporary
Christianity (with its emphasis on compassion and love of humanity),
contemporary liberalism (with its emphasis on toleration), and democracy
(with its emphasis on equality) are all in important respects nihilistic to the
core. They are all the products of a skeptical, relativistic age that accepts
everyone and everything without distinction because it has strong
convictions about nothing.” Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of
Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 71.
37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None in
The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Penguin, 1976), 212.
38. Jefferson, “Letter to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826,” 1517.
Jefferson makes a similar statement a quarter of a century earlier when he
writes, “I join with you in the hope and belief that they will see, from our
example, that a free government is of all others the most energetic; that the
inquiry which has been excited among the mass of mankind by our
revolution & it’s [sic] consequences, will ameliorate the condition of man
over a great portion of the globe.” See Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John
Dickinson, Mar. 6, 1801,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill
D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1084–1085.
39. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Green Munford, June 18, 1799,” in
America, 1984), 1065–1066.
40. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to William Short, Jan. 3, 1793,” in Thomas
1984), 1004.
41. About Nietzsche’s sense of the world Nehamas states, “the ultimate nature
of the world is to have no orderly structure: in itself the world is chaos,
with no laws, no reason, and no purpose.” Rather than driving people to
despair, this insight should inspire them to create values by which to live.
Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life and Literature, 42–43.
42. Reginster explains, “As Nietzsche himself recognizes, nihilism is a pressing
problem for those who are still in the grip of this [Christian] worldview, in
so far as they believe, for example, that without the hope for another life
this one has no meaning.” As this chapter shows, a person can be in the
“grip” of such a vision without being an orthodox Christian. Bernard
Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 8.
43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and
R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, Inc.,
1967), 318.
45. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 163. See also Nietzsche, The Will
to Power, 12–14.
47. Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, 119. Such a statement from
Nietzsche is where Clark’s and Leiter’s interpretations of his perspectivism
start to take shape. For example, Leiter writes, “It bears emphasizing that
there is nothing in the optical analog Nietzsche invokes … that requires
him to deny the existence or possibility of objective knowledge: after all,
GM III: 12 is, itself, a passage about the right way to think of both
‘knowing’ and ‘objectivity,’ not a repudiation of either.” Leiter, Nietzsche
on Morality, 219. Clark goes further and claims, “a philosopher can oppose
the ascetic ideal only by commending an opposed ideal to universal
attention. Otherwise, the philosopher will still be working in the service of
the ascetic ideal.” Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, 201–202.
These interpretations seem grounded in pre-existing beliefs in truth and
the perpetual but incremental progress of science that are difficult to
reconcile with Nietzsche’s thought. Perhaps Nehamas has the best response
to this peculiar line of interpretation. He states, “Nietzsche [is] not
interested in providing a theory of truth.” Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life and
Literature, 55.
49. About the death of God, Detwiler writes, “Modern man no longer believes
in God, but he is oblivious to the untoward consequences of his disbelief.
He does not see that his irreligion will gradually dissolve the horizon, the
moral firmament of ideas and aspirations, that has made possible all that is
worthy in the Western world.” This insight is worth considering as more
and more evidence points to the decline of America’s democratic faith. See
Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Rationalism, 72.
55. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 273–274.
56. The mercilessness of the eternal recurrence is one reason Nietzsche thinks
few people will be capable of living as “free spirits.” Reginster elaborates
78 J. D. GARRISON
upon the relationship between revaluation and the eternal recurrence

when he argues, “This is a demanding ideal, which is presumably achieved
only rarely. But it is achievable in the first place only if I hold no life-
negating values, for if my life were assessed by the light of such values, it
would necessarily leave something to be desired. This is why a revaluation
of these values is a condition of the very possibility of the affirmation of
life.” Reginster, The Affirmation of Life, 227.
CHAPTER 6
“Pagans, Christians, Poets”
Corey Abel
In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
T.S. Eliot was at least as learned as people say, but he was not half so dog-
matic as many critics take him to be. Let me start with one notorious
example: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in
religion.” You have heard it even if you have never read Eliot’s prose.
Everyone quotes it. Few quote what follows: “I am quite aware that the
first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am
aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily
leads itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate con-
servatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.”1 I would like to
notice Eliot’s peculiar decision to use flawed terms of self-description, and
his tactic of distancing himself from them by very rough qualifications.
Although Eliot could indeed “sound deceptively magisterial,”2 this strat-
egy of undercutting his own gestures of extremism is visible in much of his
social and literary criticism.3 Eliot’s thrust and retreat rhetoric reveals a
deep “philosophical caution,”4 and ties in to his “political modesty and
self-restraint.”5 Against Scott and others, I will argue that this modesty
C. Abel (*)
Independent Scholar, Denver, CO, USA

80 C. ABEL
and self-restraint is visible even in what Scott calls Eliot’s most “exclusion-
ary” and even “pathological”6 work, After Strange Gods, as well as in his
early criticism. I will limit this essay primarily to The Sacred Wood and After
Strange Gods, and focus on Eliot’s view of tradition. Classicism, royalism,
and anglo-catholicism are tropes of a dramatic stand against romantic sen-
timentalism, mass-society-as-democracy, and secularism or “paganism.”7
Eliot, however, was a modernist. By this I do not intend to join debates
in literary criticism, but rather name Eliot’s broad sensibilities. He repeat-
edly insists both that he is not undertaking the impossible task of bringing
back the past, and that all new cultural creation must be a recreation and
reinterpretation of the past, not merely a repetition of it. There is no
“reaction,” though there is much dissatisfaction with modernity, meaning
the wide-ranging changes that reshaped life in Western nations from about
1600 to the present. Tradition underlies Eliot’s literary criticism, his social
criticism, and his view of religion and heresy. Tradition is the key to under-
standing how the deliberately controversial terms—classicist, royalist,
Anglo-Catholic—could illuminate Eliot’s “own mind,” and possibly ours.
While it is mistaken, I think, to call Eliot “reactionary,”8 he seriously
rethinks modernity’s relation to the past. However, despite the provoca-
tions of his self-description, ce n’est pas une querelle.
Eliot was not an ideologue. He did not find the coherence of life in the
rationalistic “consistency” of a doctrine. The unfortunate tendency of crit-
ics is to assume that Eliot had a Christian ideology, that he had a “pro-
gram.” He had no such thing. Eliot had decided views, but they hang
together as a sensibility, as a “consistent style or disposition of thought,”
rather than a “settled doctrine.”9 This makes him hard to pin down in
“formulated phrases” as we moderns like to do. It also gives his mind a
suppleness that the ideologue can neither understand nor enjoy. Tradition
enfolds Eliot’s classicism, royalism and anglo-catholicism, and most radi-
cal of all, perhaps, reveals the operation of a “catholic” “sensibility.”
In The Sacred Wood, tradition is invoked for the sake of educating criti-
cal sensibilities, including, especially, assessing the value of poets and
poems. Indirectly, it is also tied to the process of poetic creation, though
he maintains that a writer gains nothing and likely loses, by trying self-
consciously to write as a “classicist.”10 Poetic creation comes not from the
self-conscious pursuit of an ideal, but from the assimilation of a culture,
which is then revealed in one’s writing.
The Sacred Wood, Eliot’s earliest volume of criticism, opens with his
assent to Arnold’s view of the weakness of the Romantics. In Arnold’s
6 “PAGANS, CHRISTIANS, POETS” 81
blunt phrase, they “did not know enough.”11 This relates to the issue of
erudition, which I will touch upon later. Eliot takes up Arnold’s notion of
the “current of ideas,” which runs stronger and deeper in certain eras, to
defend the cause of “second order” minds. He is careful to point out that
“second rate” would be too derogatory. The second-order minds are cru-
cial to Eliot’s view of tradition as a continuous stream of living ideas and
images, a close, almost familial proximity of persons and the works they
produce. The second-order mind is one piece of Eliot’s larger attack on
the cult of Genius. There is no communication from mountaintop to
mountaintop, as in so many defenses of the “canon” of “Great Books.”
While the phrase “minds of the second order” emerges in the immedi-
ate context of criticism, the larger context is Eliot’s undermining of the
simple separation of critical and creative activity. The unity—not iden-
tity—of critical and creative activity is an important part of the larger
theme of the unity of tradition and Eliot’s sense that not only has “sensi-
bility” been dissociated, so that “we find serious poets who are afraid of
acquiring wit lest they lose their intensity,”12 but society at large is danger-
ously specialized.13
Eliot’s ability to see tradition as a living whole, and the combination of
critical and creative energies in his own sensibility, allow him to make
nuanced judgments on what we might call “second level” poets. For
example, he says of Marvell, that “There is an equipoise, a balance and
proportion of tones, which, while it cannot raise Marvell to the level of
Dryden or Milton, extorts an approval which these poets do not receive
from us, and bestows a pleasure at least different in kind from many they
can often give. It is what makes Marvel, in the best sense, a classic.”14 This
passage illuminates Eliot’s idea that “the main current does not at all flow
invariably through the most distinguished reputations.”15 Eliot’s judg-
ment of Marvel is multi-faceted—his level, the approval he extorts (a
Spinozan assent would be more felicitous), the pleasure he gives, and his
status as a classic, drawn less from his “level” than the richness and balance
of feeling in his work. Later I will also notice the catholicity of Eliot’s liter-
ary judgments in relation to his views on orthodoxy.
I would like now to take up these three issues—the living character of
tradition, the unity of criticism and creation, and Eliot’s evaluations and
judgments—in order to explore Eliot’s view of tradition in greater detail.
Tradition involves “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past,
but of its presence…a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of [one’s] own
82 C. ABEL
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous

order.”16 Presence, whole, and simultaneous strike me as far more important
words here than “order.” Eliot calls the “historical sense” of tradition “a
sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of
the temporal together.”17 If the historical sense is a sense of the timeless,
we cannot agree with Shusterman’s claim that Eliot has a “hermeneutic
historicism and pluralism,” which “points to the inexorable change of
beliefs, aims, methods, vocabularies, and standards over the course of
time.”18 Eliot’s position is closer to Bradley’s idealism, or perhaps to
Plato’s view of the temporal as a “moving image of the eternal” than to
historicism. Eliot the poet must live “in what is not merely the present,
but the present moment of the past,” and be “conscious, not of what is
dead, but of what is already living.”19 There is a curious inversion here.
The writer lives in “the present moment of the past”—he lives in the past,
but in a present moment “there.” The figure brings home the two-sided-
ness of our conformity with tradition—it also conforms to us: “The exist-
ing monuments form an ideal order…which is modified by the introduction
of the new…work of art…the past [is] altered by the present as much as
the present is directed by the past.”20
If the poet is conscious of “what is already living” in the “present
moment of the past,” a vital connection exists that may be either main-
tained or lost. We become aware of “items” of a tradition when “they have
begun to fall into desuetude,” like autumn leaves falling off a tree. “The
sound tree,” Eliot says, “will put forth new leaves, and the dry tree should
be put to the axe.”21 This is a vivid image of Eliot’s modernism. He warns
against “clinging to an old tradition, or attempting to re-establish one, of
confusing the vital and the unessential, the real and the sentimental.” A
related danger is “to associate the traditional with the immovable.”22
Present, whole, timeless and temporal, living, real, and movable—these
are the characteristics of tradition, of what he calls “the habitual actions,
habits and customs, from the most significant religious rites to our con-
ventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of
‘the same people living in the same place’.”23 Eliot cannot not mean by
“habit,” “place,” or “people” quite what is commonly meant. He supple-
ments the stereotypic picture of the old couple on the porch surrounded
by obedient progeny with enlivening details: the grandson is reading
Lawrence or Baudelaire; in the background is a new Corvette: it is
grandma’s.
I shall return to the grandson when I take up the third broad theme—
Eliot’s catholicity of judgment. Now I would like to point out that in
poetry, at least, Eliot sees the “obedient progeny,” as under their own
compulsion—there being no obligation on any man which ariseth not from
some act of his own—and not the rod of hierarchical discipline. As he says
in The Sacred Wood, the poet is
judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them;
not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly
not judged by the canons of dead critics…And we do not quite say that the
new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a
test…which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us
infallible judges of conformity.24
There is a sense in which tradition means a discipline—standards, rigor,

and tests. But Eliot shows here that he is not concerned to legislate and
rank—it is not that simple, and that is not the real issue.
From the poet’s standpoint, a tradition provides buoyancy. One floats
on a current of ideas; without it, one may still walk down the dry riverbed,
which is both taxing and unpleasant. Tradition, for the artist, is the gift of
form. Eliot writes, “no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and
perfect it too.”25 The point is that a form is much more than the tech-
niques of poetry. “The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such
a pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling.”26 Eliot tauntingly
points out that where there is form in this sense there can be many good
poets, not because talent flourishes, but because less talent is wasted. We
become aware of “how little each poet had to do.”27 Not the way we usu-
ally think of the classics: Giants on the shoulders of dwarves. Eliot’s argu-
ment makes sense, and may be more palatable if we apply it to a more
neutral sphere. A climber visiting an unfamiliar crag will have a harder time
finding his way to the crag’s base because he does not know the terrain.
He may also be unfamiliar with the type of rock, and may be out-performed
by a “lesser” local. How much worse if he finds himself in the wasteland
of a “formless age”! There will not even be anything to climb.
For a poet with a tradition, his creative activity will involve a dialogue,
though not necessarily a conscious, deliberate one, with that tradition.
Eliot says that the poet’s mind is the site of a “concentration of diverse
experiences into ‘a new thing’.”28 The “concentration” of experience in
the poet’s mind leads to the well-trodden terrain of the “impersonal”
84 C. ABEL
theory of poetry. Much has been made of Eliot’s comments on the “extinc-
tion of personality,” but little of the fact that Eliot’s psychology rests on
the emotions and on the unification of thought and feeling. What he is
against is the “perpetual heresy” of celebrating the emotional and personal
aspect of the creative genius of the “Great Man.”29 Eliot writes that in
contrast to the “sentimental person, in whom a work of art arouses all
sorts of emotions [which are] accidents of personal association…in an art-
ist these suggestions…which are purely personal, become fused with a mul-
titude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and the result is
the production of a new object, which is no longer purely personal.”30 The
undesirable thing is what is “purely personal.” I think Eliot is on the mark.
Why should I care if a man in a four-piece suit took a stroll in the slums?
Yet how could there have been any “burnt-out ends of smoky days,” or
any “visions of the street as the street hardly understands” if he had not?
The street does not understand. A constant temptation exists to focus
on the fact of Eliot’s having walked the back streets and to confuse these
with “Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent.” In
fact, he may never have gone down such a street. Very few people, Eliot
says, understand “when there is expression of significant emotion, emo-
tion which has its life in the poem and not in the life of the poet.”31 Again,
“the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The
[ordinary man] falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or
the smell of cooking.” This is in contrast to poets who “feel their thought
as immediately as the odour of a rose.”32 I am not sure how many ordinary
men read Spinoza and type while the cooking is on. I do know, however,
that the “dissociation of sensibility,” the severance of thought from feel-
ing, is at the root of the modern “heresy” of personal expression, genius,
and “individualism.”33
When we have come to a point at which we can speak of “two cultures”
we have, I think Eliot would say, no culture. Eliot rejects firmly the myth
of the artist’s alienation and the retreat of the poet into a “dream world,”34
and spurns the merely sentimental attachment to tradition.35 Eliot encour-
ages learning, though not “erudition.” The poet, far from retreating into
a culture defined in terms of emotion or sentiment or “the humanistic,”
should embrace as wide a range of learning as he can digest. “The possible
interests of a poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the
more intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests; our only
condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on
them poetically.”36
In discussing the “wit” of Marvell, Eliot shows the connection between
deep and intimate learning within a defined, that is not to say fixed, tradi-
tion, and the poetic transmutation of emotion. Wit is “a tough reason-
ableness beneath the slight lyric grace.” It allows Marvell to “play with a
fancy”; it “is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination”; it
gives a “bright, hard precision,” to the expression of emotions in his poem
“Nymph and Fawn,” which, though “slight” in theme has the “sugges-
tiveness of true poetry…the aura around a bright clear center.”37 Wit is
neither erudition nor cynicism.
It has a kind of toughness which may be confused with cynicism by the

tender-minded. It is confused with erudition because it belongs to an edu-
cated mind, rich in generations of experience; and it is confused with
cynicism because it implies a constant inspection and criticism of experience.
It involves, probably, a recognition, implicit in the expression of every expe-
rience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.38
The richness in generations of experience, the recognition of other

kinds of experience, and the constant criticism of experience all bring us to
the third major issue: Eliot’s evaluations and judgments of writers, and his
views on heresy, blasphemy, and the “intrusion of the diabolical into mod-
ern literature.”39
After Strange Gods is presented as an attempt to apply “moral principles
to literature quite explicitly.”40 Although The Sacred Wood had claimed
that aesthetic enjoyment is “an experience different in kind from any expe-
rience not of art,”41 it also argued that tradition implies the inseparability
of artworks from the modes of thinking, feeling, and perceiving of specific
cultures. The application of a conscious criticism (orthodoxy) to the feel-
ings and habits of a culture (tradition) is only a partly new direction in
Eliot’s thinking. Eliot’s orthodoxy is qualified by a modernist, even
vaguely liberal claim that “tradition by itself is not enough; it must be
perpetually criticized and brought up to date under the supervision of
what I call orthodoxy.”42 Earlier, the critical element was conceived as
within tradition itself, but there was the same duality. The critical element
applied to the creation and evaluation of artworks in a more strictly aes-
thetic sense, but not exclusively. The sensibilities of poets, their wit or lack
of it, spoke to their grasp of human reality. For example, Shakespeare
86 C. ABEL
“shows his lovers,” in Romeo and Juliet, “melting into incoherent uncon-
sciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the process of
forgetting itself.”43 It is easy to peg Eliot’s Christianity at 1927. This
“watershedding” of Eliot’s career may lead us not to see the religious at
work in the earlier literary criticism—his engagement with Dante is early—
and perhaps also to exaggerate the religiosity, the Christianity, of the later
work. In After Strange Gods, we find an extended exercise in thrust and
retreat rhetoric. Its Preface seems to promise an orgy of inquisitorial judg-
ment. What we get is a curiously liberal definition of orthodoxy. What we
get is a well-developed sensibility and catholicity of taste.
Eliot’s concern in After Strange Gods is heresy as it applies to modern
literature. He identifies Lawrence as “an almost perfect example of the
heretic,” and Joyce as “the most ethically orthodox” writer of the time.44
What grounds the judgment is that in Lawrence’s “The Shadow in the
Rose Garden,” the characters, “who are supposed to be recognizably
human beings…betray no respect for, or even awareness of, moral obliga-
tions, and seem to be unfurnished with even the most commonplace kind
of conscience.”45 Interestingly, Eliot identifies the lack in Lawrence.
However, with Joyce, he does not identify what is present in “The Dead”
that would make it orthodox. He provides a two-third-page summary that
includes a paragraph of quotation from what Eliot takes to be the key
moment in the story.46 The characters’ concern with conscience and obli-
gation may be assumed, since this is what Eliot found lacking in Lawrence,
but Eliot’s method here seems to say that the “orthodox” is best shown,
exemplified rather than stated in terms of abstract rules.
This withdrawal seems significant, especially if it is paired with a key
statement on orthodoxy in writers and a discussion of the dangers of the
cult of genius for readers, which come before his discussing the stories:
I do not take orthodoxy to mean that there is a narrow path laid down for
every writer to follow. Even in the stricter discipline of the Church, we
hardly expect every theologian to succeed in being orthodox in every par-
ticular, for it is not a sum of theologians, but the Church itself, in which
orthodoxy resides. In my sense of the term, perfect orthodoxy in the indi-
vidual artist is not always necessary or even desirable.47
This passage shows Eliot to be cautioning against the application of any

rigid “rules.” We are reminded that the point of traditional criticism is to
“judge,” but not to “amputate” a poet. This passage also looks forward to
Eliot’s qualified recuperation of the great heretic, Lawrence, as well as his

praise, here and in two essays on Baudelaire.
The next thing to notice is that Eliot hopes a “right tradition” will not
stifle creativity, but “keep eccentricity to manageable limits.” The danger,
in a formless age in which “personality” is celebrated as an end in itself, is
that readers might “cherish the author of genius, not in spite of his devia-
tions from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them.”48
Earlier he had deplored the error of “eccentricity in poetry [of seeking] for
new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the
wrong place it discovers the perverse.”49
Eliot notes that it is “fatally easy” in modern times “for a writer of
genius to conceive of himself as a Messiah.”50 Although this may sound
outlandish, we have only to think of Hegel, or much more darkly, of the
political messianism of Hitler and others in the twentieth century, or more
bizarrely, a full page ad in The Rocky Mountain News (some years ago
before it went out of business), taken by the leader of the Moonies, declar-
ing that during “a special ceremony… in the spirit world” the leaders of
five major world religions and four communist countries had declared and
upheld by oath that Moon is the Messiah and the “True Parent” of all
humankind.
Eliot worries about the possibility of a pagan revival or of strange gods
being adopted in the West, as Irving Babbitt had delved into Buddhism,
and developed a humanism that was meant to stand independently of
Christian religion. Eliot was not opposed to other traditions, nor a purist
about his Christianity. He has reasons for declining exotic spiritual invita-
tions. Language, sentiment, and categories of thought make it unlikely
that a European can absorb Buddhism except “through romantic misun-
derstanding.” Pace, Boulder, CO, and other centers of easy-going spiritu-
ality. He notes that after two years of study “in the mazes of Pantanjali’s
metaphysics” he failed to gain real purchase. Eliot goes on to criticize the
shallowness of Pound’s Hell, Yeats’ search for a personal religion, and oth-
ers. Some would characterize Eliot as “exclusionary” and narrow-minded
here.51 It may seem that he is abusing non-Western cultures, and even the
heterodoxy of Pound’s medievalism. What I think he is doing is disabus-
ing Westerners of the idea that taking up a religion is a simple thing: a
mere choice. Eliot confesses, “I am willing to believe that Chinese civiliza-
tion at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem
crude.”52 Yet, Eliot goes on to say that he doubts he could come to under-
stand Chinese civilization well enough “to make Confucius a mainstay.”53
88 C. ABEL
We should attend to the humility here as well as the seriousness: a man

intimate with the Western tradition, and knowledgeable of Indian philoso-
phy, and the findings of modern anthropology declares his limits. This is
not a dismissal. Eliot’s idea of tradition has a depressing effect on modern
sensibilities. In a time when many people assume that “the mere accumu-
lation of ‘experiences,’ including literary and intellectual experiences as
well as amorous and picaresque ones, is—like the accumulation of
money—valuable in itself,”54 it is hard not to feel limited by the serious-
ness with which Eliot points out that to understand Buddhism takes gen-
erations. Just as we are more limited by not knowing a language, and just
as we would be unashamed to seek expert instruction in a new sport and
submit to its discipline, we cannot avoid the disciplines and grammars of
our culture. As mastery of a language opens up means of expression,
greater knowledge within the “confines” of tradition enlarges the very self
we would express.
With two examples of Eliot’s catholicity—his judgments of Lawrence
and Baudelaire—I would like to conclude this essay. We have seen Eliot
call Lawrence the exemplar of heresy. However, Eliot returns to Lawrence,
after dicing his way through the thicket of strange gods appearing in his
generation, and makes some positive remarks. I do not say praise; the
comments are too tepid. While Lawrence’s vision is said to be “spiritual,
but spiritually sick,” he is acknowledged at least to be awakening people,
albeit irresponsibly, to the spiritual. This irresponsibility is a grave matter,
but to be capable of good and evil is, for Eliot, a sign of life. In connection
with Baudelaire, he says that the glory of man is in both his “capacity for
salvation” and his “capacity for damnation.”55
Eliot ends one paragraph deploring the barbarous sexuality of
Lawrence’s novels by calling him “a very sick man indeed.” We come back
to the grandson on the porch. Eliot’s next paragraph opens: “There is, I
believe, a great deal to be learned from Lawrence.” The catch: how well
has the grandson been initiated into the tradition? The sentence finishes,
“though those who are most capable of exercising the judgment necessary
to extract the lesson, may not be those who are most in need of it.”56
Perhaps the boy should read Baudelaire instead. Eliot fears that Lawrence,
who has a limited but positive value as a critic of the modern world and as
a proponent of Life, will appeal not to what is healthy in readers, but to
what is “sick and debile and confused.”
Eliot is not fearful of Baudelaire having a bad effect. He describes him

as a Christian because “the notion of Original Sin came spontaneously to
him; and the need for prayer,” and because he “came to attain the great-
est, the most difficult, of the Christian virtues…humility.”57 In a longer
piece, Eliot expands on this idea, noting that Baudelaire fell short of a
clear, positive account of the Good, but achieved a redemptive awareness
of Sin and the need to overcome it. “The recognition of the reality of Sin
is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a
world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that
damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation—of salvation from the
ennui of modern life, because it at least gives some significance to liv-
ing.”58 There is a startling negativity in this view of Christianity. Eliot
makes merely the recognition of Sin sufficient for—or identical with—
“New Life.”
A Concluding Venture
A Baudelairean Christianity is, of course, far from the whole picture. If we
examined Eliot’s later writing on a Christian society, we would see a some-
what more positive account of Christianity and culture. His “idea of a
Christian society” does suffer from a Rationalistic bent toward orthodoxy
in the very sense he rejects. However, we would also see less the operation
of a dogmatist, or even apologist, than a searcher for a religious sensibility.
At times Eliot so thoroughly mediates art, culture, and religion that one
asks whether he loved art or religion more. But this is Puritanical distrust
of images. Eliot knew how Dante’s Commedia mapped on to human
experience. The intense appreciation of art, which early on and sometimes
later resembles Arnold or Pater, becomes that supreme catholicity which
makes room for much that is outside the Book.
Notes
1. Eliot, T.S. For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, Garden City,
NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., Inc., 1929, pp. vii–viii. (FLA) Russell
Kirk, in a speech to The Heritage Foundation, mentions the second quali-
fication, and goes onto say, “The Conservative Party of England was not
nearly conservative enough for T.S. Eliot.” Kirk, “The Politics of
T.S. Eliot,” Lecture Number One Hundred Eighty Two, February Ninth,
1989, and http:/www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk182.html
90 C. ABEL
2. Kearns, Cleo McNelly, “Religion, Literature, and Society in the Work of

T.S. Eliot,” in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 77–93. (CCTSE) p. 80.
3. Eliot’s warning against the “temptation to legislate,” surely applies to him-
self; he is saved only by his skepticism and catholicity of taste. See, Eliot,
The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays, Mineola, New York: Dover Pub.,
Inc., 1998, p. 7. (SW) Cf., Eliot, T.S., After Strange Gods: A Primer of
Modern Heresy: The Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia,
London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1933, p. 27, fn. 1. (ASG) In the text, Eliot
rejects the confinement of taste to the simple categories Romantic and
Classical: “For instance: two of my own favorite authors are Sir Thomas
Mallory and Racine.”
4. Kearns, CCTSE, p. 83.
5. Scott, Peter Dale, “The Social Critic and His Discontents,” in CCTSE,
pp. 60–76. p. 73.
6. Scott, CCTSE, p. 62, passim, 68.
7. Eliot regretted the errant rhetoric of the Preface of For Lancelot Andrewes.
In After Strange Gods, he calls his former statement “injudicious. It may
suggest that the three subjects are of equal importance to me, which is not
so; it may suggest that I accept all three beliefs on the same grounds, which
is not so; and it may suggest that I believe they all hang or fall together,
which would be the most serious misunderstanding of all.” ASG, pp. 27–8.
The irony of Eliot’s having just said something far more injudicious than
“classicist, royalist, anglo-catholic” is not to be missed. Because of the
inevitable scandal attached to ASG, I feel compelled to say something
about the single most notorious phrase in Eliot’s prose: “free-thinking
Jews.” I can scarcely enter into this controversy here. Too briefly, I would
only point out that the context makes clear that free-thinking is Eliot’s real
concern. Of course, he might have said simply “free-thinkers” or he might
have displayed another form of bigotry—free-thinking women, peasants,
Poles, who knows—but did not. He expressed the form he had, and his
recklessness is much to be regretted. I leave aside the poems.
8. Harrison, John, The Reactionaries: A Study of the Anti-Democratic
Intelligentsia, New York: Shocken Books, 1967.
9. Oakeshott, Michael, Rationalism in Politics, Indianapolis: Liberty Press,
1991. Preface to the First Edition, 1962.
10. ASG, pp. 25–26.
11. SW, p. iv.
12. SW, “Andrew Marvell,” p. 111.
13. See, “Literature of Politics,” TCC, where Eliot worries about the too radi-
cal separation of speculative and literary thought from politics, and “Notes
Toward the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture, New York:
Harcourt Brace, and Co., 1976, (CC) where Eliot argues against
Mannheim’s idea of elites on grounds of their lack of social connection.
14. SW, “Andrew Marvel,” p. 110. (My edition is “SW and Major Early
Essays.”)
15. SW, p. 29.
16. SW, p. 28.
17. SW, p. 28.
18. Shusterman, Richard, “Eliot as Philosopher,” CCTSE, pp. 40–41. This is
not to say Eliot would not sympathize with Gadamer’s concern for the liv-
ing connection to tradition that modern conditions have severed. Gadamer
is too accepting of “critical history,” and tries to tame it by binding it to
our practical present. Eliot, I think, strives to see the whole of human expe-
rience under the category of eternity. For an excellent study of Eliot’s rela-
tion to Bradley, which differs from Shusterman’s view, see Mallinson, Jane,
T.S. Eliot’s Interpretation of F.H. Bradley, Brighton, UK: Harvester
Press, 2001.
19. SW, p. 28, p. 33.
20. SW, p. 28. Many critics seem to take the word “ideal” to have a normative
force, but I think Bradley means something closer to “ideational.” Hence,
it is not that we face a past invested with an automatic prescriptive claim;
rather, we face a past that is structured in terms of our understanding, thus
“notional.” One reason for denying Shusterman’s view is that Eliot did not
devote his energies to theorizing the complexities of this relationship. He
exhibited his understanding in his poetry and criticism, where a perfectly
consistent theory is less important than standing ‘in the hard, Sophoclean
light/ and tak[ing] your wounds from it gladly.’
21. ASG, p. 18. A striking image, and possibly—this is a guess—a nod to
Thomas Jefferson, founder of The University of Virginia, where the lec-
tures were delivered, and who espoused the need for periodic revolution to
renew the tree of liberty.
22. ASG, p. 18.
23. ASG, p. 18.
24. SW, p. 29. My italics.
25. SW, p. 35.
26. SW, p. 36.
27. SW, p. 36. Eliot’s italics.
28. Shusterman, I believe, is misled by Eliot’s use of the word “object,” and his
sly praises of science, and so over-emphasizes Eliot’s debt to Russell. When
Eliot speaks of this “new thing” or about the “object” that poetry creates
and contemplates, he is speaking about emotional experiences, some the
poet’s (as ‘the man’) and some observed in human experience. Poetry is “a
presentation of thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of
92 C. ABEL
events in human action or objects in the external world,” SW, 36. The
“object” is connected with some human, emotional experience. Eliot
retains a distinctly idealist stance when he writes that “in the mind of the
poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,” SW, p. 127, and
passim. It is true that Eliot uses the quasi-scientific language of detachment
to describe the “objects” of poetry, but it remains the case that the object
is seen in its clarity in order to be “transmuted” and brought into coherence
with a body of systematically related experiences. “The true generalization
is not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions; the
perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but
form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement of this struc-
ture; it is the development of sensibility,” SW, pp. 8–9.
29. SW, p. vi.
30. SW, p. 4. My italics.
31. SW, p. 33. Eliot’s italics.
32. SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 127.
33. Like Tocqueville, Eliot uses “individualism” for a specific—though differ-
ent from Tocqueville’s—cultural and psycho-social malady, but certainly
refuses to take up any “anti-individualist” stance that would submerge the
individual in collective experience, or deny liberty. Eliot’s individualism
comes through in lines like “only those who know what it means to have
personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these
things,” SW, p. 33.
34. SW, “Andrew Marvell,” pp. 108–109.
35. ASG, p. 19.
36. SW, “The Metaphysical Poets,” p. 128.
37. SW, pp. 102–108, passim.
38. SW, p. 111.
39. ASG, p. 56.
40. ASG, pp. 11–12.
41. SW, p. 31.
42. ASG, p. 62. Perpetual criticism is not what the word “orthodoxy” usually
calls to mind.
43. SW, p. 47.
44. ASG, p. 38. What I mean by suggesting a liberality at work even in the
midst of severe and unsparing judgments of Lawrence and others, is that
Eliot was surely clever enough to see the ironies of placing Joyce, whose
Ulysses was banned and censored, as the most orthodox writer of the time.
That work, like Lawrence’s, was seen as obscene.
45. ASG, p. 37.
46. ASG, p. 37.
47. ASG, p. 32. We could think of Eliot’s “tradition/orthodoxy” as “spirit,” if

we took the term simultaneously in the senses of the New Testament,
Montesquieu, and a non-progressivist Hegel. The relation between the
individual—writer, theologian, or plain man—and the civilization is quite
close. For example, in “Andrew Marvell,” (SW, p. 101), Eliot progresses
from defining the “perennial task of criticism” as “bringing the poet back
to life,” to a different metaphor, of “squeezing some precious liquor” from
a few poems, to finding that this “essence” is “a quality of civilization, of a
traditional habit of life.” N.B. the progression: The poet, the works, the
civilization—the corpse, the corpus, the spirit?
48. ASG, p. 33.
49. SW, p. 33.
50. ASG, p. 33.
51. Scott, CCTSE, pp. 62–69, passim.
52. ASG, p. 40.
53. It is in this context that we can make sense of his criticism of Babbitt’s
humanism. It misses out on the “ancestral” and “cultivated” aspects of
religion. These are at least as important as the doctrinal, and may be more
so: “Is [Babbitt’s humanism], in the end, a view of life that will work by
itself, or is it a derivative of religion which will work only for a short time
in history, and only for a few highly cultivated persons like Mr. Babbitt—
whose ancestral traditions, furthermore, are Christian, and who is, like any
people, at the distance of a generation or so from definite Christian belief?”
Eliot, T.S. Selected Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, p. 472.
54. ASG, p. 34. An analogy and not merely a swipe: Money is a means—so
too, “experience” is the currency of meaning, but only if one pays the price.
55. SE, p. 344.
56. ASG, p. 61.
57. FLA, pp. 104–5.
58. SE, pp. 342–342.
CHAPTER 7
Wittgenstein on Rationalism
Daniel John Sportiello
Introduction
“Rationalism” is said in many ways.1 But if it is right to call Ludwig
Wittgenstein a “critic of rationalism,” then “rationalism” refers to the the-
sis that there is a right way to say or do whatever we say or do—a way that
we, with our reason, can discern. If this sounds vague, then it is only
because Wittgenstein means to articulate an alternative that is quite radi-
cal: Wittgenstein insists that, in some sense, we are justified in nothing that
we say or do—but also that this is okay, since the search for justifications
is in some sense a confusion.
Now, philosophy is often seen as a search for justifications—epistemology
tells us how we ought to think, for example, while ethics tells us how we
ought to act—and so it may seem that Wittgenstein means to criticize phi-
losophy itself. But it is more accurate to say that, in his mature work,
Wittgenstein hopes to initiate another way of doing philosophy—one that he
compares to therapy: if philosophy done wrongly is the search for justifica-
tions, then philosophy done rightly is the revelation that this search is neu-
rotic—that it originates, in other words, in anxieties that it cannot relieve.
There may be a paradox somewhere in the vicinity. (If nothing that we
say or do is wrong—at least in some sense—then how can it be wrong to
D. J. Sportiello (*)
University of Mary, Bismarck, ND, USA

96 D. J. SPORTIELLO
deny this?) But the more immediate issue is that Wittgenstein seems to be
at odds with the entirety of the history of philosophy—and so he may
seem to be entirely mad. In what follows, though, I’ll argue that he is
entirely sane—indeed, that he reveals to us something crucial about
ourselves.
Language-Games
In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks us to consider some
of the many ways in which we use language—ways that he calls
“language-games”:
Giving orders, and acting on them—

Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements—
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)—
Reporting an event—
Speculating about the event—
Forming and testing a hypothesis—
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—
Making up a story; and reading one—
Acting in a play—
Singing rounds—
Guessing riddles—
Cracking a joke; telling one—
Solving a problem in applied arithmetic—
Translating from one language into another—
Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying.2
Wittgenstein compares these various language-games to the various tools

in a toolbox: “There is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a
glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as
the functions of these objects.”3 This seems an apt metaphor for at least
two reasons. First, the presence of each tool is justified only insofar as it
meets one of our needs. Just so, each language-game is justified only inso-
far as it meets our needs. And, second, there is no sense in which the
usefulness of any particular tool is reducible to the usefulness of any other.
Just so, whether or not one language-game meets our needs has nothing
to do with whether or not any other language-game does. This is not to
say, of course, that there is no interchange among our various
language-games:
7 WITTGENSTEIN ON RATIONALISM 97
The symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus…

are, so to speak, suburbs of our language… Our language can be regarded
as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses,
of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a
multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uni-
form houses.4
Different “neighborhoods” of our language—that is, different language-

games—were “built”—that is, constructed or adopted—at different times.
As such, their “streets”—that is, the rules that define them—were laid out
with greater or lesser degrees of reflection. However, even the oldest
neighborhoods are continually modified by “commerce” with—that is,
conflict with or reinforcement by—other neighborhoods:
How many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question and com-
mand?—There are countless kinds; countless different kinds of use of all the
things we call “signs,” “words,” “sentences.” And this diversity is not some-
thing fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-
games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and
get forgotten.5
As our needs change, so do our tools and our neighborhoods—and, for

that matter, our language-games. Wittgenstein offers mathematics as an
example of a language-game that has changed in this way: “We can get a
rough picture… from the changes in mathematics.”6 It seems that
Wittgenstein suggests mathematics as a picture, however rough, of linguis-
tic change because the history of mathematics is so transparent—indeed, is
mirrored in the way in which we are taught mathematics. Calculus, for
example, was an extension of analytic geometry, which was an extension of
algebra, which was an extension of arithmetic; each, at its introduction,
prompted the reinterpretation of existing mathematical practice. We expe-
rience these reinterpretations as we extend our understanding from arith-
metic to algebra to analytic geometry to calculus; our final understanding
of mathematics is as it is only because of the history—simultaneously onto-
genetic and phylogenetic—that has wrought that understanding.
In one way, the history of mathematics is like the history of any other
language-game: its course was neither inevitable nor arbitrary. Just as chess
could have developed without bishops—without any alteration of its other
rules—mathematics could have developed differently: mathematicians
could have ignored the calculus of Newton and Leibniz without changing
98 D. J. SPORTIELLO
the rules of arithmetic, algebra, or analytic geometry. But just as there was
a reason that chess developed with bishops—the game would have been
less interesting without pieces that could move indefinitely far, but only
diagonally—there were reasons that mathematics developed as it did: once
one can represent geometrical constructions algebraically—that is,
abstractly—an equally abstract way to compute their areas becomes pro-
foundly useful.
Without bishops, chess would have been less useful for entertainment—
would have been, that is, less interesting. But things are not interesting or
uninteresting in themselves: they are only interesting or uninteresting to us.
Had we achieved only the intelligence of young children, chess would
have developed to look rather more like checkers—without, that is, any
differences among the pieces at all. Just so, were we pelagic like whales,
any game played in merely two dimensions might have seemed hopelessly
childish—rather as checkers does to us. It is the task of the philosopher,
Wittgenstein suggests, to offer this kind of explanation—to explain how
our language-games are by reference to how we are:
What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human
beings; not curiosities, however, but facts that no one has doubted, which
have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes.7
That almost all of us have ten fingers is such a remark on our natural his-
tory: that most of us count in decimal rather than binary is clearly not
arbitrary, but it is also could have been different—had we been different.
For all of its obviousness, however, the link between having ten fingers
and counting in decimal has often been overlooked—as the millennia of
numerological significance attributed to the number ten attests.
Counting in binary would not, of course, have been dramatically differ-
ent from counting in decimal: the decision of arithmetical base is mathe-
matically arbitrary. Nonetheless, it might be that mathematics has the least
arbitrary history of any of our language-games: for mathematics to be
radically different—for addition not to be associative, for example—we
would likely have to be so different that we would have trouble recogniz-
ing ourselves at all.
In one way, Wittgenstein blurs the distinctions among language-games:
mathematics, joking, and singing are not different in kind, insofar as they
are all equally paradigmatic examples of language in use. In another way,
however, Wittgenstein sharpens the distinctions among language-games:
mathematics, joking, and singing are different in kind, insofar as each is,
well, a different language-game—one defined by rules peculiar to it alone.
There is in this no contradiction: since our language-games are all equally
paradigmatic examples of language in use, no language-game depends for
its justification on others.
Mathematics offers only a rough picture of linguistic change because
certain extensions of mathematics—especially those initiated by Gottlob
Frege and Bertrand Russell, the teachers of Wittgenstein—are often taken
to be justifications of previous mathematics. (It is as though we were not
really sure that two and two make four until Peano articulated for us his
axioms.) On the contrary, Wittgenstein insists, to articulate the grammar
of any language is to offer a clarification, not a justification, of that lan-
guage. Thus the “foundations” of mathematics are a clarification, not a
justification, of mathematics:
The mathematical problems of what is called foundations are no more the

foundation of mathematics for us than the painted rock is the support of a
painted tower.8
Mathematics is—like all of language—our construction: it has the rules

that it does because we decided, consciously or not, that it would. Though
our decisions were not arbitrary, they are only justified insofar as their
product meets our needs: since mathematics was our construction, there is
no other authority to whom to appeal. And whether or not arithmetic can
be derived from some set of axioms is not relevant to whether arithmetic
meets our needs.9
Rule-Following
When playing a language-game, what makes certain moves right and oth-
ers wrong? Why is it, for example, that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2” and
not “3”? Well, one might respond, that is just what the rule of addition
demands! Indeed—but who is to say that what we have been calling “addi-
tion,” the way we have been interpreting “+,” is not in fact schmaddi-
tion—a language-game quite like addition, except that the answer to “1 +
1” is, at least on this occasion, “3”? More generally, who is to say that any
of our “mistakes” are not just the results of correctly following different
rules—or that our “successes” are not just the results of incorrectly follow-
ing different rules? Normativity seems to evaporate before our very eyes:
100 D. J. SPORTIELLO
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule,

because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule.
The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with
the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would
be neither accord nor conflict here.10
It may seem that what we need is a meta-rule that tells us how to play the
relevant language-game: when you see “+,” the rule might go, interpret it
as addition rather than schmaddition. Yet could one not interpret this new
rule in more than one way? In response, we seem obliged to offer a meta-
meta-rule. Yet could not one interpret this new rule in more than one way?
A vicious regress—one of our own creation—suddenly threatens us:
That there is a misunderstanding here is shown by the mere fact that in this
chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each
one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another
lying behind it.11
If to follow a rule is to follow the meta-rule of how to follow that rule,

then to follow the meta-rule would be to follow the meta-meta-rule of
how to follow that meta-rule… and so on. Stepping back, it seems that
there would be nothing that it is to follow a rule—nothing, in other words,
that it would be to be right rather than wrong.12 This skeptical conclusion
shows only, Wittgenstein suggests, that something has gone wrong:
What we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not
an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in
what we call “following the rule” and “going against it.”13
Normativity dissolved under the vicious regress of interpretations because

the limitless interpretability of every rule showed that the difference
between right and wrong was an illusion. But this hints at another solution
to the vicious regress: “‘Following a rule’ is a practice.”14 Our words,
including our mathematical words, operate according to rules—but these
rules are not such that we can succeed or fail in discovering them. Rather,
they are created by communal agreement: everyone insisting that the
answer to “1 + 1” is “2” just is what makes it true that the answer to “1 +
1” is “2.” A word gets its meaning through its use—that is, through the
way that we use it:
To think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s
not possible to follow a rule “privately”; otherwise, thinking one was follow-
ing a rule would be the same thing as following it.15
Publicity, Wittgenstein insists, is essential to normativity: normativity

demands fallibility, while fallibility demands publicity. Language is there-
fore inevitably public: in language, as in morality, the only reason that
distinguishing right from wrong matters is so that we might do justice,
broadly speaking, to one another.
Forms of Life
Of course, this insight runs the risk of profound misinterpretation—regard-
ing both language and morality. True, we would have neither language
nor morality were we not intrinsically social: alone, one cannot learn to
speak—or, for that matter, to act—rightly. But this does not mean that,
having learned to speak and to act rightly, one cannot talk to oneself—or,
for that matter, do right by oneself. For to learn to speak and to act rightly
is to rebuild within oneself the community that teaches one to speak and to
act rightly. It is to make of oneself a multitude—to divide oneself into
legislator and subject.16
Recall that, for Wittgenstein, everyone insisting that the answer to “1 +
1” is “2” just is what makes it true that the answer to “1 + 1” is “2.” One
might conclude from this that nothing more than communal agreement
distinguishes right from wrong—such that, alone, one can neither speak
nor act rightly. This is not, of course, an especially robust sort of normativ-
ity. Indeed, it reduces the normative to the descriptive—to certain facts
about how people in fact respond: “1 + 1 = 2” just means, if the reduction-
ist is right, that “most agree, most of the time, that ‘1 + 1 = 2.’” But
Wittgenstein is clear that this is not his doctrine:
“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is
false?”—What is true or false is what human beings say; and it is in their
language that human beings agree. This is agreement not in opinions, but
rather in form of life.17
It is possible—albeit not particularly likely—that everyone could one day

make the same mistake, could decide for example that the answer to “1+
1” is “3.” But this would still be a mistake: the answer to “1 + 1” would
still be “2.”
Why is this? Well, our rules for arithmetic are deeply embedded in the
language that we have created over our history. We could have created a
very different language—one in which, somehow, the answer to “1 + 1”
was “3”—but we have created this language, this form of life. And this
form of life determines that the answer to “1 + 1” is not “3” but “2.”
Language takes on a life of its own: we construct it, but then it con-
structs us. Of course, we can alter our language—including the mathe-
matical aspects of our language. This is exactly what would happen if
everyone began answering “3” to “1 + 1”—and continued to do so indefi-
nitely. The paradox in this is merely apparent:
It is not only agreement in definitions, but also (odd as it may sound) agree-
ment in judgments that is required for communication by means of lan-
guage. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so.—It is one thing to
describe methods of measurement, and another to obtain and state results
of measurement. But what we call “measuring” is in part determined by a
certain constancy in results of measurement.18
Words mean what they do because of how we use them: “meter” has the
meaning that it does because most of us agree, for most things, how many
meters long those things are. I cannot change, by myself, on a whim, what
“meter” means—but we can change, together, over time, what “meter”
means: we need only start measuring in a different way. Just so, I cannot
change, by myself, on a whim, what “+” means—but we can change,
together, over time, what “+” means: we need only start adding in a dif-
ferent way.
Again, it is doubtful that we—the species that we are, living in the
world that we do—could start adding in a way as different as this. But the
point is a general one: certainly many of our language-games that are at
least somewhat open to revision—the best evidence of which is that we
have in fact spent our history revising them.
Conclusion
Particular thoughts and actions—that is, particular moves in particular
language-games—are justified by the rules of those language-games. But
those rules—that is, those language-games themselves—are justified only
insofar as playing them meets our needs; certainly none of them must be
justified by any of the others. In some cases, it seems, we had to play the
particular language-games that we did; in these cases, we can explain—

though in no nontrivial sense justify—our playing of these particular
language-games by reference to our nature. In other cases, it seems, we
did not have to play the particular language-games that we did; we could
have chosen—and may yet choose—to play otherwise.
Perhaps, over time, all of us will converge on a particular set of language-
games—that is, on a particular form of life; presumably, this form of life
would be explained—though only in a trivial sense justified—by the
unchangeable aspects of our biology. In the meantime, though, it seems
that we ought to agree with Wittgenstein that rationalism—that is, using
mere reason to prove justified a particular form of life—is doomed to
failure:
“How am I able to follow a rule?”—If this is not a question about causes,

then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with
the rule. Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock,
and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply
what I do.”19
Why, since it is doomed to failure, is rationalism so appealing? After all,

Wittgenstein sometimes seems to identify the search for justifications with
the entirety of the history of philosophy—and we have been doing phi-
losophy for a while now! It is not obvious that Wittgenstein ever answers
this question himself—but perhaps the answer was unsaid because it was
so obvious: we search for justifications because we are afraid. We want to
prove that our form of life will not change again—even though we know,
on some level, that it will. And so we tell ourselves stories wherein we have
at last gotten it right: we tell ourselves stories that guarantee that there
won’t be any more scientific or political revolutions—even though we
know, on some level, that there will be. Wittgenstein therefore seems right
to compare his way of doing philosophy with therapy—for the alternative
way of doing philosophy seems, when explained in this way, neu-
rotic indeed.
If there is anything to be said for the history of philosophy, then per-
haps it is that it has been—at its best—always already therapeutic. Though
they are often called “rationalists,” what else are Plato and Immanuel Kant
trying to tell us but that there are inevitable limits on what doctrines we
can prove justified? But perhaps this is a topic for another essay.
Notes
1. See my “Rationalism in Eric Voegelin,” in Tradition v. Rationalism:
Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others, ed. Lee Trepanier and Eugene
Callahan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018), 51–61.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, ed. and
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2009), § 23.
3. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 11.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, revised
edition, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G. E. M. Anscombe
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), § 7.16.
9. Mark Steiner points out that Wittgenstein—in his Remarks on the
Foundations of Mathematics, a work philosophically continuous with his
Investigations—is wrong to attack Gödel’s Theorem. For Gödel proved
only that, within mathematics, a certain proposition is such that neither it
nor its denial can be proven, but Wittgenstein apparently misinterpreted
Gödel’s proof as somehow depending upon Gödel’s controversial interpre-
tation of it—that, within mathematics, a certain proposition is true and
nonetheless not provable; Wittgenstein insisted only that “truth” had no
meaning in such a context—because it had no use. Ironically, Steiner notes,
Gödel’s Theorem—stripped of Gödel’s own interpretation of it—is pro-
foundly congenial to the doctrine of Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein insists that
mathematics need not be derived from any foundation, while Gödel proved
that mathematics cannot be derived from any foundation. See Mark
Steiner, “Wittgenstein as His Own Worst Enemy: The Case of Gödel’s
Theorem,” Philosophia Mathematica 9, no. 3 (2001): 257–279.
12. Obviously, my presentation of this paradox owes much to that of Saul
A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982). It is less obvious to what extent my solu-
tion to the paradox is similar to his: Kripke is usually taken to offer a solu-
tion to the paradox—what is often called the “skeptical solution”—that is
fairly unsubtle, but it seems to me that he might be interpreted more chari-
tably than he usually is.

16. See Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 136–138.
Bibliography
Korsgaard, Christine. 1996. The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kripke, Saul A. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Sportiello, Daniel John. 2018. Rationalism in Eric Voegelin. In Tradition v.
Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others, ed. Trepanier Lee and
Eugene Callahan, 51–61. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Steiner, Mark. 2001. Wittgenstein as His Own Worst Enemy: The Case of Gödel’s
Theorem. Philosophia Mathematica 9 (3): 257–279.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1983. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed.
G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe, revised ed. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
———. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. and trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,
P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
CHAPTER 8
Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism

and Modernity
Jack Simmons
In the hands of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, phenomenology

became a way of reflecting upon the rigor of philosophy and science.
While Husserl aimed at adding rigor to philosophical investigation,
Heidegger criticized scientific rationality for being overly reductionist and
as having fallen under the sway of technology. In her book, Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Science, Trish Glazebrook suggests that we can read all of
Heidegger’s philosophy as a critique of science.1 If we understand
Heidegger as offering a Hegelian styled rejection of the reductionism of
modern science, then the suggestion is fairly defensible (though
Glazebrook does not herself see the need for the connection) and
Heidegger’s debate with Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929
helps illustrate this point. In the encounter between these two important
German thinkers, Heidegger accused Cassirer and the neo-Kantians of
carving up the world into domains designated by each of the natural sci-
ences, and that each of the sciences should maintain authority on all mat-
ters concerning its domain. Heidegger then asks, “what still remains of
J. Simmons (*)
Georgia Southern University, Savannah, GA, USA
e-mail: jacksimmons@georgiasouthern.edu

108 J. SIMMONS
philosophy if the totality of beings has been divided up under the sciences?
It remains just knowledge of science, not of beings.”2
This observation neatly captures the essence of Heidegger’s critique of
scientific reasoning. The sciences divide up the realms of the world among
themselves. Each science addresses itself solely to those entities that appear
within its realm, and understands those entities according to the parame-
ters of the rational instruments it wields. Those entities must then appear
according to the rubrics and parameters of the sciences that study them,
and as such, these entities will manifest as objects of study: objects of phys-
ics, objects of biology, objects of chemistry and so on. As a result, the
method of the modern natural sciences transforms all of the phenomenon
of the world into objects of science and offers us revelations, calculations
and assertions about those phenomenon, validated according to the limits
of the science governing the domain into which the phenomenon are rel-
egated. Science sees the world scientifically and Heidegger contends that
this method of revealing the natural world conceals non-scientific ways in
which the world might appear to us, ways that might represent a more
authentic encounter with the world. To understand the implications of
Heidegger’s accusation, we must understand his multi-layered criticism of
science, and what might count as a more or less authentic encounter with
the world. We begin with a fairly straight-forward characterization of the
way in which objects change in accord with changes in science, to make a
simple illustration of Heidegger’s point. We will then look more carefully
at three modes of scientific reductionism and conclude with a brief descrip-
tion of the technological thinking that results from overly reductionist
thinking.
The Appearance of Objects in Science

After the work of Carolus Linnæus in the eighteenth Century, fauna
appeared to zoologist within a fixed genus and species, a genus and species
that would remain unchanged forever. And because of the similarities in
physical appearance and method of reproduction, Linnæus placed humans
in the same order as primates. Although the idea that species might change
over time existed before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, it was not until
Darwin’s theory of evolution provided a framework for how species might
change that we could begin to think of the evolution of species. Within
8 HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF RATIONALISM AND MODERNITY 109
this new scientific theory, humans appeared to zoologists as a species in a

long chain of evolutionary history. Changes in the accepted mode of sci-
entific thinking result in a change in our understanding of objects
(humans). Darwin’s theory moved humans into direct line with other ani-
mals and shifted the study from physical appearance and method of repro-
duction to genetically and environmentally determined phenotypical
traits. These distinct interpretations of biological entities represent
advances in biology, and as such, the natural sciences replace earlier expla-
nations of entities with improved explanations. This is scientific progress,
the constant transformation of entities in accord with the new discoveries
and revelations.
At Davos, Heidegger expressed concern that the methodological for-
malism of neo-Kantian theories of science had contributed to a ridged
scientism that, since 1850, privileged mathematical–physical theory of
knowledge as the unique paradigm for all human understanding.3 As Trish
Glazebrook puts it, “natural science consists in the mathematical projec-
tion of nature.”4 So, where as humans appear to Linnæus as an unchang-
ing species, and to Darwin as an evolving species, they are described in the
Oxford Journal of Human Molecular Genetics as: “just 20,500 genes,”5 a
code or information sequence that dates back millions of years and shared
by countless other biological entities, including star fish and bananas. In
2005 the Human Genome Project, which had been working on isolating
the human genome for 15 years, declared its task complete:
A genome is an organism’s complete set of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a

chemical compound that contains the genetic instructions needed to
develop and direct the activities of every organism…about 20,000 different
BAC clones…contain the 3 billion pairs of bases of the human genome …the
gene-containing portion of the genome is complete in nearly every func-
tional way for the purposes of scientific research.6
In privileging math-based methodologies, humans appear to biology in

discrete, measurable units of DNA. As per Thomas Kuhn, objects of scien-
tific inquiry change according to the dominant scientific paradigm.
Humans transition from being understood as a fixed, biological form, to
evolving animals, to biochemical data.
110 J. SIMMONS
Scientific Reductionism
The method of the modern sciences reduces our understanding of the
phenomenon in the world to ideal, quantifiable modalities, and it leaves
philosophy with no purpose other than to furnish a theoretical ground-
work for natural-scientific knowledge. These were both conclusions that
Heidegger found unattractive, the first because it obscures the world and
the second because it distracts philosophy from uncovering a more authen-
tic relationship with the world. He placed the blame for the development
of these math based methodologies on a reductionist approach that I will
describe here in three moves:
. Transcendental logic: atemporal science and atemporal objects.

1
2. Transcendental objects: objects as purely independent entities.
3. Causation and freedom.
Transcendental Logic
Heidegger sees in natural science since 1850, an attempt to create a logic
that transcends history and establishes an instrument for identifying ahis-
torical truth: objective truth. He points to the neo-Kantians for an inter-
pretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that privileges modern scientific
reasoning and relegates all other modes of thinking to the role of hand-
maiden to the mathematical-physical sciences.7 Where the neo-Kantians
see Kant’s work primarily as epistemology, providing support for the
formal-methodological foundations of natural science, Heidegger views it
as ontology: the study of the nature of being itself.
I understood by neo-Kantianism that conception of the Critique of Pure

Reason that explains the part of pure reason that leads up to the
Transcendental Dialectic as a theory of knowledge with reference to natural
science. For me, what matters is to show that what came to be extracted here
as a theory of science was nonessential for Kant. Kant did not want to give
any sort of theory of natural science, but rather wanted to point out the
problematic of ontology.8
Heidegger sees in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, not an epistemology

of natural science, but a metaphysics attempting to unravel the appearance
of objects. The problematic of ontology he references here is the problem

of appearance itself, “is appearance [of objects] just a matter of fact that we
state, or must the entire problem of reason be apprehended in such a way
that we grasp from the beginning how appearance necessarily belongs to
the nature of human beings?”9 When Heidegger speaks of grasping “from
the beginning,” he means that we must understand how objects have
appeared, from the beginning of philosophy to the present. As we saw
with the appearance of humans in the history of biology, objects appear to
us relative to their historical situation, and that situation includes the privi-
leged methodologies for human understanding at that time. Setting aside
the accuracy of Heidegger’s account of Kant’s purpose in the Critique, we
see a striking similarity between Heidegger’s account of Kant and the
Hegelian passage Heidegger twice includes in his much later work, Hegel’s
Concept of Experience, “But science, in making its appearance, is an
appearance itself.”10 Modern science governs the way objects and/or ideas
appear to us, but modern science is itself an object/idea that appears
within history, and appearance that evolves in accord with the same cul-
tural pressures that apply to all human endeavors.
Philosophers have long sought foundations for objective truth, so the
neo-Kantians took Heidegger’s criticism as strange, and accused him of
relativism.11 But like Hegel, Heidegger sees the effort of natural science to
extract itself from history and recognize no authority other than its own
methodology as a sort of vanity.12 It accomplishes this by portraying itself
as an instrument of knowledge, an instrument that engages a transcenden-
tal epistemology, capable of independently deciding the validity of all truth
claims. Following Hegel’s description in the Phenomenology of Spirt,
Heidegger portrays this science as an appearance within history, and there-
fore subject to the scrutiny that its hopes to avoid: historical criticism.
Natural scientific reasoning is itself part of the historical dialectic. It is not
a value neutral tool for understanding reality, but is itself too an object of
study in ontology, which we might now more accurately define as the
study of the appearance of being.
Heidegger sees in Kant’s effort to work out das Problem des Scheins (the
problem of appearances, which may also be translated as the problem of
illusions),13 a quasi-Hegelian approach to ontology that not only partici-
pates in the dialectic of philosophy but considers the appearance of objects,
and their truth, as part of a grand historical narrative. The neo-Kantians
reading of Kant offers an ahistorical epistemology that resolves the prob-
lem of how objects appear so that they may be studied according to the
112 J. SIMMONS
standards of inquiry specific to each discipline. By ignoring its historical

situatedness, the logic of the natural sciences engages in a mode of self-
deception: imagining itself to be something that it is not. This self-
deception is manifest in scientific empiricism.
Scientific reasoning asserts ahistorical validity on the basis of its empiri-
cal testing, but the logical structure of hypothesis/experiment/observa-
tion/conclusion still places the idea first (hypothesis) and last (conclusion).
The hypothesis/experiment structure of scientific reasoning places the
idea before nature, such that the natural/objective world serves as a con-
firmation or rejection of a hypothesis.14 The observation/conclusion
structure reconfigures the experimental event according to the parameters
of human observation, which are themselves quite naturally governed by
the historical conditions in which the observation occurs. So, not only
does the scientific method fail to transcend its historical situatedness, it
imitates Platonic idealism, in which nature is judged according to the
extent to which it participates in an idea.15 Heidegger concludes that
ancient idealism is built into the methodology of modern scientific reason-
ing, the idealism that its empiricism was designed to avoid. Despite its
empirical credentials, modern science begins and ends with an idea. As
such, it maintains a subjective metaphysics of representation: that the nat-
ural world manifests to science as an idea, or representation.
Transcendental Objects
Heidegger argues that the special validity claimed by scientific reasoning is
ultimately grounded upon the appearance of objects in nature. Scientific
rationality remains indifferent to accusations of idealism by asserting the
absolute certainty of objective reality: that the methodology of science
allows objects to appear as they truly are, and therefore transcending his-
torical prejudices. As such, natural science enjoys the luxury of ignoring
Kant’s metaphysical das Problem des Scheins, which questions, why do
objects appear as they do? But Heidegger suggests that das Problem des
Scheins is an ancient one, and that scientific reasoning demonstrates a
metaphysical naiveté in ignoring it. In Being and Time, Heidegger points
to two ways in which objects appear: present at hand, as an object observed
or studied, and ready to hand, an object used.16 So, the glasses sitting on
my nose are ready-to-hand, as I use them to observe the picture on the
wall, which appears present-at-hand.17 That an object may appear in these
different fashions, speaks to our personal and historical relationship to
them. This is das Problem des Scheins, that objects do not simply appear in
an “objective” or “true” form, but instead objectivity itself is a mode of
appearance. Heidegger suggests that the appearance of objects has been
the primary concern of philosophy since the pre-socratic philosophers,
and that this concern persists in ancient and medieval thought. It was the
scientific revolution, and Cartesian philosophy, that conditioned us to
ignore das Problem des Scheins.
Although the medieval “Schoolmen”18 took Das Problem des Scheins
seriously, the problem is subtle and closely related to theological concerns,
so when Descartes ignored the problem for the sake of establishing some-
thing firm and lasting in the sciences,19 this oversight was easily set aside
and Descartes’ definition of the appearance of objects became the founda-
tion for modern scientific reasoning. For Descartes, an object is defined as
exhibiting extension. Heidegger calls this substantiality. The object dem-
onstrates extension by appearing in three dimensions. Objects are “things
which ‘are in need of no other entity,’”20 and therefore stand out as a thing
possessing independent existence. Objects maintain a transcendental exis-
tence, independent of human activity. Hence, the truth of an object,
revealed by science, transcends its historical situatedness.
The difficulty with this notion of objective existence arises when
Descartes asserts that “God is” and the “the world is.”21 Heidegger
explains that Descartes applies the same conception of being to God and
the world. Both are independent, transcendental entities. But Heidegger
suggests that this is a mistake; they cannot be independent in the same
way. God, as infinite and perfect, creator of all things, cannot exist in the
same way in which objects of creation exist. This is the distinction that the
Schoolmen took seriously, that Descartes evades.22 What is the nature of
existence (of Being), such that God and objects exist? What does it mean
for a created thing to exhibit independent existence? Why does a created
thing reveal itself to us in a fashion distinct from its creator? Rather than
address the question, Descartes suggests that the concept of extension
itself is inaccessible to us, that it cannot be perceived.23 Heidegger accuses
Kant of repeating the Cartesian error of extended being when he asserts
that “Being is not a Real predicate.”24 In this way, both Descartes and
Kant ignore das Problem des Scheins, the very question Kant raised.
Operating on the Cartesian idea of an object, modern science takes that
which is present-at-hand as the truth of being, and thereby repeats the
error of Descartes and Kant: overlooking the problematic of the appear-
ance of objects. Heidegger explains that,
114 J. SIMMONS
the ontological grounds for defining the ‘world’ as res extensa have been
made plain: they lie in the idea of substantiality, which not only remains
unclarified in the meaning of its Being, but gets passed off as something
incapable of clarification, and gets represented indirectly by way of whatever
substantial property belongs most pre-eminently to the particular
substance.25
Heidegger distinguishes between “being” (the objective existence of

objects) and “Being” (the event that unites the appearance of objects to
humans). In scientific rationality, the concept of existence (Being) is
reduced to the substantial properties of that which is present-at-hand,
which assumes that being present-at-hand is the real mode of being. This
assumption amplifies the equivocation regarding the use of the word “is”
because God does not appear as present-at-hand, and it cannot account for
the appearance of objects as ready-to-hand. Modern scientific reasoning
would need separate definitions of “is” or existence, to explain that which
is present-at-hand, ready-to-hand, and God.
Heidegger’s criticism is explained away simply enough by scientism.
Scientific thinking is the process by which we consider objects (present-at-
hand). The common characteristic of objects is extension. Therefore,
objects are defined as having extension. When we turn our scientific atten-
tion to those entities that manifest as ready-to-hand, they become present-
at-hand, and because there is no evidence that the entity has changed
under scientific scrutiny, we may assume that the qualities it demonstrates
as an object present-at-hand, extension, persist when it is ready-to-hand. As
to the question of God’s existence, natural scientific reasoning simply
takes a pass. Kant reminds us that it is not so extraordinary that a science
should demand and expect satisfactory answers to all the questions that
may arise within its own sphere,26 and ignore those that are outside of it.
Hence, we might interpret Kant to mean that if objects appear to the sci-
entific method as present-at-hand, then the answers to scientific investiga-
tions should not require metaphysical solutions that exceed scientific
reasoning and question other ways in which objects might appear, or why
the objects appear as they do. This is more or less the position of scientism,
the position Heidegger attributes to the neo-Kantians, though perhaps
unfairly, but a position very much supported by the pragmatic success of
the natural sciences since 1850.27
The remarkable results generated by the natural sciences make for a
robust utilitarian argument in its favor. We may readily point to rolled
toilet paper, television and microwave ovens as proof of the efficacy of

modern science, but Heidegger’s suspicion is difficult to dismiss because
it references the foundations of scientific reasoning. Recall that Descartes
himself opens his Meditations on First Philosophy with doubts regarding
the foundations of the natural sciences, specifically, the question of whether
or not objects truly exist, and if they do, whether or not they exist as we
perceive them.28 For Descartes, the veracity of our perceptions requires
God’s existence,29 which Heidegger sees as an acknowledgment that
objects cannot exist independently. In his essay, On the Essence of Truth,
Heidegger reminds us that the correspondence theory of truth upon
which modern science is based is derived from the medieval proposition:
veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus; truth is the approximation of thing
to intellect.30 But this medieval notion of intellect is a divine intellect, not
a transcendental [human] ego. So where Kant defines truth as the confor-
mity of objects to our perceptions, the medieval thinkers define truth as
the conformity of objects to divine intellect.31 For the medieval thinker, it
is the divine that establishes a creative order such that everything in the
world appears as a unified whole that can be understood. Modern scien-
tific rationality, proceeding from Descartes and Kant, eliminates God as an
unnecessary encumbrance to modern science, which begs the question:
how do we account for the unity of experience such that a proposition
might meaningfully correspond to a thing?
The unity of experience cannot be explained by the existence of inde-
pendent objects. If their existence is, by definition, independent, then
reducing science to the experience of independently existing objects leaves
it unable to explain how those objects relate to one another or to us. Nor
can the transcendental ego, provide the unity of experience necessary to
ground modern science. Even Kant rejects the radical idealism, fearful that
such a move would destroy the existence of things, but in so doing, admits
that “the predicates [of external things] may be said to belong, not to the
things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper exis-
tence outside our representations.”32 Heidegger emphasizes Kant’s devel-
opment of a metaphysics to account for the “appearances” of things, while
accusing the neo-Kantian’s of ignoring Kant’s metaphysics and supporting
a “mathematico-physical theory of knowledge,” which alone can only pro-
vide a knowledge of science, not of beings.33
By asserting a transcendental ego and a transcendental object, natural
science creates a subjective metaphysics of representation, in which truth
is expressed as a correspondence between a propositional representation
116 J. SIMMONS
of an independent object and the independent object, without explaining

how the correspondence of two unlike things expresses the truth of the
natural world. In re-asserting Kant’s das Problem des Scheins, Heidegger
reminds us of Hegel’s conclusion that science, having ignored the parou-
sia [appearance] of the Absolute, violates most flagrantly that very claim of
certainty which it pretends to meet.34
Causation and Freedom
The final reductionist move we will consider here is the reduction of all
causation to a single mode: the efficient cause. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle
identified four types of causation: material cause, formal cause, final cause
and efficient cause. The material cause suggests that what a thing is made
of causes it to behave in a particular fashion. Similarly, Aristotle suggests
that things behave according to the form that they take. The final cause
references the telos of a thing: what is its end. So if we accept, along with
Aristotle, that the human end is happiness, we can expect humans will
generally behave so as to affect happiness. In modern science, these three
causes are subsumed by the efficient cause: what Kant calls the mechanism
of nature.35 A detailed account of how science manages this exceeds the
parameters of this chapter, but this notion of causation vitiates human
freedom. That is, if we understand every event (effect) as having a cause
greater, and that cause must be greater than or equal to the event (effect),
then we reduce all human behavior to causes that can be isolated and
quantified.36 Kant acknowledges that the mechanism of nature leaves no
room for human creativity or free will, because every action, including an
act of will, would be the product of an identifiable cause, and the causal
stream would go back ad infinitum.37 All events (animal, vegetable and
mineral) will be subject to a strict determinism, a determinism that traces
its lineage back to the time of the big bang.
To avoid this strict determinism while maintaining the logic of cause
and effect, Kant posited rival conceptions of the world and our relation-
ship to it: receptivity and spontaneity.38 Receptivity dictates that human
perception conforms to external laws, and therefore we may rightly per-
ceive in the world only the unbroken causality of nature.39 Accordingly,
the human mind is merely receptive to what is given in our experience of
the world, an experience that must conform to the determinism of cause
and effect and leaves no room for freewill.40 The neo-Kantians define
spontaneity as a productive understanding of the world, whereby humans
are free to impose upon the world the logic of the natural sciences and
thereby capable of altering the stream of causation by virtue of internal,
logical reasoning.41 The two Kantian principles appear to be at odds, but
Peter Gordon suggests that Kant, “brought these two concepts into a
more harmonious relation,”42 as is demonstrated in Kant’s attention to
ethical reasoning, wherein Kant argues that human freedom results from a
transcendental ego, “conscious of his own existence…views his existence
so far as it does not stand under temporal conditions, and to himself as
determinable only by laws which he gives to himself through reason.”43
Under the conditions of receptivity we are bound by the logic of material
determinism; under the conditions of spontaneity we are bound by tran-
scendental, human logic.
In contrast, Heidegger argues that by 1850, the neo-Kantian emphasis
of spontaneity had bound science to a subjective metaphysics of represen-
tation that allows for neither freedom nor provides direct access to the
natural world. Under the conditions of spontaneity, truth occurs within a
debate about the scientific characterization of the world. The subjective
metaphysics of representation reduces that world to the strict, math-based
methods deployed in the natural sciences, methods that require every
effect to fall neatly within the perfectly isolatable and quantifiable string of
efficient causes. Hence, the neo-Kantian understanding of spontaneity
reaffirms a strict determinism, rather than rescuing us from it. Heidegger’s
reconsideration of spontaneity and receptivity offers a new conception of
freedom and undermines the validity of the subjective metaphysics of
representation.
Heidegger emphasizes Kant’s receptivity, though in a form that Peter
Gordon describes as transfigured beyond all recognition.44 Heidegger
understands receptivity as a freedom that allows us to stand back from the
world and see it in all its possibilities. To be receptive to the world means
to experience the world historically, to find ourselves in a place and time,
connected to every other place and time. In this encounter with what-is-
in-totality, we experience possibility, the possibility that objects may mani-
fest in different ways: that we may encounter divinity, the present-at-hand,
the ready-to-hand, and so on, and that in the “letting-be” of the world,
we come in contact with the possibility of a world, which is freedom
itself.45 Thus, receptivity, allows for an experience of the world that tran-
scends the limited experience offered by scientism: of objects
present-at-hand.
118 J. SIMMONS
Heidegger’s notion of freedom should be distinguished from both the

common sense understanding of freedom, as “the random ability to do as
we please” and the Kantian approach, “a mere readiness to do something
requisite and necessary.”46 Freedom is not the possibility of this or that,
whether random or logically determined, but rather the receptivity to and
subsequent possibility of being-as-a-whole, that humans do not merely
react to their experiences in the world, but experience the world as a world,
as a unified whole that can be understood. In this possibility, the possibil-
ity of propositional, scientific truth arises. But as Kant’s das Problem das
Scheins suggests, objects may appear as they are not. Heidegger calls this a
semblance.47 That objects appear in the world, and that they may appear
one way or another, is an expression of Being, what Gadamer calls the
horizon, what Husserl calls the co-present margin, or what we might simply
call: context. Truth is not, therefore, simply a correct proposition made by
a human subject about an object, that is, the tree is an olive.48 This sort of
propositional truth, attempts an approximation between two things unlike
in kind: an object (the actually tree) and a statement that the tree is an
olive. The nature of the approximation is determined by the kind of rela-
tionship obtaining between the statement and the thing.49 Hence, even
the possibility of propositional truth, favored by scientific reasoning,
requires the contextual truth that links objects in the world in a meaning-
ful way, and allows for a meaningful relationship between language and
those objects. Heidegger contends that this “relationship remains indeter-
minate and its nature unfathomed.”50
Heidegger describes this largely unfathomed indeterminate as Being,
whose character is not identical to the sum of known actualities.51
On the contrary, it is just where few actualities are known or where they are
known hardly at all by science or only very roughly, that the manifest char-
acter of what-is-in-totality can operate far more essentially than where the
Known and always Knowable has become impossible to survey and can no
longer resist the activity of knowing, because the technical control of things
seems limitless in its scope.52
Here we see a reference to Plato’s notion of philosophy as wonder,53 where

freedom is a sort of attention and attunement to what-is-in-totality, and
represents the starting point of philosophy. In the hands of a reductionist
philosophy of science, freedom is reduced to a set of scientific hypotheses
or decisions, this or that. A scientific hypothesis is detached from the
object, and Heidegger suggests that it is in this detachment that we expe-

rience both security and freedom from the objective world.54 This detach-
ment is the freedom of spontaneity. As such, philosophy and science
become fixated on making correct hypotheses and decisions, and therefore
focused on the technical control of things and the standardization of
knowledge. This reduction of freedom to a choice then judged, true or
false, reduces our experience of the world to conditions that conform to
or contradict scientific propositions, and conceals the mystery of what-is-
in-totality in favor of practical concerns and calculations.
It is precisely this proliferation and standardization of knowledge, this desire

to know everything, that causes the manifest character of what-is to sink
into the apparent void of indifference or, worse still, oblivion…This “in-
totality” appears, in the field of vision of our daily calculations and activities,
as something incalculable and incomprehensible. It cannot be understood in
terms of what manifestly “is,” whether this be part of nature or of history.
Although ceaselessly determining all things, this “in-totality” nevertheless
remains something indeterminate and undeterminable, and is thus generally
confused with what is readiest at hand and most easily thought of.55
Technological Thinking
The affinity we developed for the revelation of what-is-in-totality unwit-
tingly conceals what-is-in-totality, insofar as it gives precedence to a
“world” humanity builds up out of the projects and plans that happen to
be the most immediate, causing a continual forgetting of the mystery so
that our relationship to what-is-in-totality vanishes entirely.56 One way to
understand Heidegger’s critique of enlightenment reasoning is to think of
it as a critique of a utilitarian logic, a science that sees the world of objects
as resources, and ideas as tools, and the combination of the two as machines
to satisfy needs.
Heidegger suggests that all revealing involves a concealing. That is, the
process by which we come to understand nature always conceals some-
thing about it, but there are more or less authentic ways of being in the
world, which involve different forms of concealing. The reductionist
approach of modern, scientific reasoning, makes it well suited to a utilitar-
ian world view Heidegger calls technological thinking. To generalize in
the extreme, technological thinking involves systematizing the means by
120 J. SIMMONS
which we arrive at some end, by which the systematic itself involves an

enframing: an all-inclusive rubric designating the way in which everything
appears to us. The reductionist thinking of science allows everything to
appear in the light of cause and effect, and as the ends present themselves
as the correct results within the calculable complex of the effects of
causes,57 enframing characterizes the entire system by which ends and
means appear. Enframing closes off all possibilities that lie outside the
system, such that thinking and objects secretly lose their independence
(for Heidegger, autonomy), and what-is-in-totality appears only within
the system: “the ordering of the orderable.”58 Through its fixation on the
ordering of the orderable, technological thinking forces science into its
service and eliminates the real possibility of freedom by closing us off from
any alternative relationship to what-is-in-totality. All possibilities indepen-
dent of the scientific/technological agenda are nonchalantly swept aside
with the wave of Occam’s razor.
Heidegger concludes that science is the metaphysics of modernity.
Under the sway of technological thinking, a reductionist science appropri-
ates the world in service of technology: thinking of the world as a system
of means and ends. As such, we no longer stand open to, or in wonder of,
nature. Rather, we perceive the natural world as standing-in-reserve for
some purpose.59 The metaphysics of modernity even reduces human exis-
tence to its utilitarian parameters, so that to be human means being an
object of a fully mathematized technological science60 and thereby con-
strained by the material determinism foist upon objects by a technological
science. We need only consider our current affinity for STEM education,
wedding science to technology, engineering and mathematics, in order to
satisfy the needs of a community as determined by a reductionist, eco-
nomic theory, and reducing the student to an economic resource. Under
these conditions the truth of nature is replaced by the truth of practical
experience, economic calculation, political shrewdness, scientific research,
religious belief or art.61 Everything in its place, according to its discipline,
so that the wonder of Plato, needed to drive science, is lost. Technological
thinking becomes not only the means, but also the end, having eliminated
all other possibilities. “From these in their turn [scientific] man, having
forgotten what-is-in-totality, adopts his measures.”62
Notes
1. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science (Fordham University
Press: New York, 2000), 4.
2. Martin Heidegger, cited in Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide (Harvard
University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2010), 139.
3. Gordon, Continental Divide, 139.
4. Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science, 14.
5. Iakes Ezkurdia et al., “Multiple evidence strands suggest that there may be
as few as 19 000 human protein-coding genes,” Human Molecular
Genetics, 2014 Nov 15; 23(22): 5866–5878, accessed March 23, 2019,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4204768/
6. Human Genome Project FAQ, November 12, 2018, accessed March 23,
2019, https://www.genome.gov/11006943/human-genome-project-
completion-frequently-asked-questions/
8. Martin Heidegger, cited by Gordon, Continental Divide, 142.
10. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, cited by Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s
Concept of Experience, translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by
Kenley Royce Dove, (Harper & Row, Publishers, San Francisco,
1970), 12, 42.
12. Hegel, cited by Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 15.
14. Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science, 65.
15. Ibid, 230. Although Heidegger concedes that Plato still generally con-
ceives of nature as prior to the idea.
16. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson (Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1962), 115.
17. Ibid, 141.
18. Ibid, 125. Heidegger refers to the medieval scholastic philosophers, that is,
Saint Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.
19. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 3rd Edition, translated by
Donald A. Cress, (Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1993), 13.
20. Heidegger, Being and Time, 125.
21. Ibid, 126.
22. Ibid, 126.
23. Ibid, 127.
24. Ibid, 127.
25. Ibid, 127.
122 J. SIMMONS
26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp

Smith, (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1965), 433.
28. Descartes, Meditations, 14.
29. Ibid, 52–53.
30. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” translated by R. F C. Hull
and Alan Crick, appearing in Existence and Being (Gateway Editions, LTD,
South Bend, 1949), 296.
31. Ibid, 296.
32. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, revision of Carus
translation by Lewis White Beck (Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing,
Indianapolis, 1950), 37.
33. Heidegger, cited by Gordon, Continental Divide, 139.
34. Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 40–41.
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White
Beck (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1956), 100.
36. Descartes, Meditations, 28.
37. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 101.
39. Ibid, 362.
40. Ibid, 362.
41. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1998, p. A446/B474.
43. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, translated by Lewis White
Beck (Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1956), 101.
45. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 306.
46. Ibid, 308.
47. Heidegger, Being and Time, 51.
49. Ibid, 300.
50. Ibid, 300.
51. Ibid, 311.
52. Ibid, 311–312.
53. Plato, “Theaetetus,” in The Dialogues of Plato, Volume IV, translated by
B. Jowett (Oxford University Press, Humphrey, 1924), 210.
54. Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, 39.
56. Ibid, 314–315.
57. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” edited by
David Farrell Krell (Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1977),
307–308.
58. Ibid, 299.

59. Ibid, 299.
60. Michael Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity:
Technology, Politics, and Art (Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1990), 156.
62. Ibid, 316.
CHAPTER 9
Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age

of Problems
Steven Knepper
For many years, both before and after World War II, the French philoso-
pher and playwright Gabriel Marcel hosted Friday night salons in his Paris
flat.1 Miklos Vetö recalls visiting them as a student in 1959: “Each Friday,
from 5 to 7pm a large and very heterogeneous group of people, students,
philosophy teachers, society women, freaks, monks, Christian or Buddhist,
turned up to talk about a wide selection of philosophico-social themes.”2
Many prominent philosophers and literary figures attended at one time or
another: Jean Wahl, Nikolai Berdyaev, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Du
Bos, Emil Cioran, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. Emmanuel Levinas met
Jean-Paul Sartre for the first time at one of Marcel’s gatherings.3 Paul
Ricoeur, who visited Marcel’s salons as a student, later hosted similar gath-
erings of his own.4
Unsurprisingly, given this place in the Parisian milieu, Marcel shaped
some of the major movements of these tumultuous decades. His account
of relational humanity influenced the Catholic personalism of the 1930s.5
Likewise, his rejection of abstract systems and his attention to concrete,
S. Knepper (*)
Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA, USA
e-mail: knepperse@vmi.edu

126 S. KNEPPER
first-person experience helped launch French existentialism.6 Yet Marcel

did not want to be known as a personalist, and he bristled when Sartre
called him a Christian existentialist.7 Marcel worried that such labels dis-
tort or lead to assumptions. He even worried about being hemmed in by
his own work. He claimed to cringe when someone asked him to sum up
his philosophy. Marcel perceived this as an attempt to “imprison” him in
a “sort of shell.”8 Marcel wanted to maintain the sense of his philosophy
as an open inquiry, as an ongoing quest.
Still, there are consistent themes in Marcel’s work. He was concerned,
for instance, with how technocratic rationalism increasingly pervades
modern life.9 This rationalism relies on generalizable techniques and tech-
nical solutions. Marcel was no luddite. He claimed “only a lunatic” would
deny the usefulness of much technological progress, the ways in which it
has eased material hardships for many.10 He also noted how the scientist
can model certain human excellences, such as precision and accuracy. He
applauded the “purity and soundness of the joy which goes with technical
research when it results in a discovery.”11 Yet the twentieth century had
thoroughly discredited technological utopianism for Marcel. He was born
in 1889 and died in 1973. He lived through both world wars and some of
the tensest moments of the Cold War. He denied a necessary or even likely
link between technological progress and social or moral progress.
Technological research yields life-saving medical advances, but it also
yields nuclear weapons. In his later writings, Marcel claimed that we live in
“the eschatological age” because of the threat of nuclear annihilation.12
More controversially, Marcel held that a pervasive technical ethos
reshapes how we see the world. He warned “there is a danger of the tech-
nical environment becoming for us the pattern of the universe, that is to
say, the categories of its particular structure being claimed to be valid for
an objective conception of the world.”13 Generalized techniques involve a
reductive abstraction. The environment to which they are applied is
abstracted out of its particularity and treated as malleable material. Such
techniques, when “embodied,” seek “to reconstitute the world, moulding
it to [their] own image.”14 This calls to mind Heidegger’s account of how
modernity reduces the world to a “standing reserve” of exploitable
resource, as well as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of
instrumental reason. One of Marcel’s primary examples of this reductive
abstraction is the modern city. (Here the resonances are with Jane Jacobs.)
In “the past a city moulded itself on the natural structure or pre-structure,
as if it were fulfilling it,” whereas now “we are likely to see larger and
9 GABRIEL MARCEL: MYSTERY IN AN AGE OF PROBLEMS 127
larger agglomerations piling up without the slightest regard for the natural
pre-formation. There is not the least hesitation in doing violence to nature
to carry out an abstract plan.”15 Marcel predicts that such an approach will
leave cities, and the products and processes of abstraction in general, more
vulnerable to “crises, catastrophes, even natural upheavals.”16 But cities
also lose their distinctiveness and their charm. They become increasingly
generic, interchangeable.
Marcel’s main concern was how this pervasive ethos reshapes our concep-
tion of the human: “It is impossible for man not to consider himself as part
of this cosmos—or of this a-cosmos—planned and dissected by the techni-
cians; as a result, he inevitably becomes a target for those techniques which,
in principle, are legitimately applicable only to the outward world.”17
Humans are increasingly viewed in terms of their functions. Marcel saw
“mass transfers of populations” within communist countries as revealing this
underlying ethos of reductive abstraction.18 Humans are lifted out of their
concrete relationships to a place, a community, a shared past. They become
discrete units that can be repositioned according to an abstract economic
logic (or for the political aim of sheering those very relationships, of creating
discrete units). At an extreme, a society that manages its populations in such
a way conceives of life “in bio-sociological terms, that is to say, as a process
whose physico-chemical conditions are claimed to be strictly and objectively
definable and which exists in view of a given task which relates to the col-
lectivity.”19 Here, Marcel anticipates something like Michel Foucault’s cri-
tique of biopolitics. Marcel argues that the logic of functionality is pervasive
throughout the modern world, in ways both subtle and explicit.
Marcel saw the technical ethos spreading primarily through bureaucra-
cies. He noted the bureaucratic tendency to reduce humans to a datum or
a case file. Marcel’s experiences during World War I were formative in this
regard. Marcel did not serve in the trenches, but he did direct the Red
Cross Information Service in Paris. His job was to track down information
about soldiers missing at the front and then to relay it to inquirers. When
Marcel researched a missing soldier, he dealt with a name and a few bits of
information on an index card. For the inquirers who came to the
Information Service, though, the missing soldier was a son, brother, fian-
cée, husband, or friend. The experience taught Marcel much about the
dehumanizing potential for bureaucracies. He realized if he had only been
researching and not also reporting to inquirers, he could have easily turned
“the war into an abstract schema.”20 Even still, he could have played the
part of the reserved bureaucrat, simply stating the facts. Marcel later saw
128 S. KNEPPER
how the Nazis, in World War II concentration camps, utilized this poten-
tial for bureaucratic dehumanization to horrifying effect through “tech-
niques of degradation” designed to psychologically manipulate detainees,
to make them see themselves as valueless.21 Marcel was also sensitive to
techniques of degradation at work in the Soviet gulags, to how subtle
forms of propaganda and surveillance were spreading in the liberal West.
Marcel noted how “techniques of degradation” often bring together a
bureaucratic rationalism and an ideological irrationalism, both reductive.
In the latter, political passions yield distorting stereotypes and simplifica-
tions.22 He saw this at work in modern ideologies, and in particular in
fascism and communism, with their propaganda and caricatures of ene-
mies.23 Marcel referenced C. Virgil Gheorghiu’s World War II novel The
Twenty-fifth Hour, in which a young man is accused of being a Jew and
sent to a deportation camp, only to be deemed an example of the “pure
Aryan type” by a Nazi leader and sent to a S.S. training camp.24 The young
man escapes to the Americans, who at first welcome him but then put him
in prison because “Rumanians are enemies; ergo…”25 In each of these
cases, ideology reduces the singular, complex young man to a cipher.
Marcel claimed that a technocratic ethos ultimately reshapes how we
see ourselves, how we try to navigate our lives. This brings Marcel’s exis-
tentialism to the fore. Marcel frequently makes a distinction between
problems and mysteries. A problem is something external to us that can be
determinatively understood and solved with a generalizable technique. A
mystery, on the other hand, is something in which we are inextricably
involved. It has roots deep within us, but it also reaches beyond us. While
a problem can be solved, a mystery can only be navigated in light of the
concrete situation and the people involved. As Jill Graper Hernandez
points out, “Marcel does not mean to bring a vague literary floweriness to
the discourse on mystery; rather the mystery of our being involves the active
situation that we are concerned with—our experiences—and so, is one
whose true nature can only be grasped, acknowledged, or recognized
from the inside.”26 Marcel claimed that the modern facility with tech-
niques encourages the reduction of mysteries to problems. Death is no
longer an inevitable mystery to be confronted but a biomedical problem
to be delayed as long as possible and thought about as little as possible.
Love becomes “the will to live, the will to power, the libido, etc.”27 The
mystery of being itself is either forgotten (as Heidegger noted) or misun-
derstood as a physics problem.
Marcel pointed out that techniques do not simply work for us. They
also rework us. Iris Murdoch, who was influenced by Marcel, sums up a
similar concern in an aphoristic line: “Man is a creature who makes pic-
tures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”28 Marcel claimed
moderns are becoming less articulate about mysteries. They find them-
selves without the words to talk meaningfully and non-reductively about
love or death. They struggle to express feelings of wonder and gratitude
when they irrupt into their lives at, say, the birth of a child or the start of
a new relationship or when they behold natural beauty. The sentimental
and the trite often move in to fill the void.
Marcel feared this diminishment of mysteries actually makes us less
present to others, less able to care for them in a holistic way. Marcel
claimed, for instance, that we are losing our ability or willingness to
accompany others as they approached death. He worried that medicine
itself was becoming increasingly reductive, with hospitals serving as “the
inspection bench or the repair shop.”29 If we see love as inherently selfish
then we may be more likely to act in selfish, exploitative ways or to avoid
entering into relationships for fear of being exploited. Marcel noted that
modern educational bureaucracies mostly teach students to solve prob-
lems rather than to navigate mysteries. Indeed, the students themselves
become problems. Education is not a matter of paideia or Bildung but the
application of the correct generalizable pedagogical technique to students,
the teaching of students to apply techniques in turn. Marcel quipped that
Charles Dickens’s Gradgrind is a caricature of modern educational theo-
ries but a telling one nonetheless.30 Fundamentally, we lose our sense of
ourselves and others, their lives and our own, as mysteries. We increasingly
think of ourselves and others in terms of functions. William Desmond
points out that for Marcel, many modern malaises have their roots in this
reductionism: “The tyranny of technique drowns the deeper human in a
conspiracy of efficiency and a frenzy of industry. It may erect a house but
cannot make us a home.”31
The marginalization of religion is important for Marcel in this regard.
The language and rituals it provides for orienting ourselves within myster-
ies have been largely displaced. The question “Who am I?” is no longer
answered with the mysterious “an image of God” but with an occupation,
a function, a set of basic biographical facts. Life is no longer lived out as a
dramatic journey, quest, or pilgrimage but as a series of workweeks and
weekends unto retirement.32 The marginalization of religion is bound up
with the loss of communal wisdom, a sensus communis, that at its best is
130 S. KNEPPER
neither abstract nor reductive but responsive to human particulars.33 For

Marcel, the great task of philosophy is to restore awareness of mysteries,
to provide or renew a language for talking about them and the wisdom for
navigating them.
Marcel claimed philosophy should especially help recover a non-
reductive sense of human relations. This brings us to another of Marcel’s
key distinctions, the distinction between “having” and “being.” Having
involves appropriation and consumption. In terms of human relations, it
involves considering “a certain person as a mineral from which I can
extract a certain amount of usable metal.”34 This can take overtly exploit-
ative forms, but it can also be subtle, such as when interactions are struc-
tured by an unconscious egotism or instrumentalism. According to
Marcel, there is no true communication in such interactions, no open,
ongoing reciprocity. They are a means of extracting “the responses I
want.”35 We interact with others to get something we desire—help, infor-
mation, affirmation, sex—and then draw back into our self. Paradoxically,
the stance of having, even though it is defined by appropriation, can lead
to a sense of emptiness. It involves closing oneself off, at least partially,
from the fullness of being, from a true encounter with the other. Marcel
suggests that it is like secreting a carapace. As we have already seen, Marcel
feared that a society dominated by a technical, problem-solving ethos will
subtly encourage relations of having.
Marcel juxtaposed interactions structured by having with relationships
of “being.” These transcend instrumental calculation. They involve open-
ing oneself to the other. In them “I” am no longer pitted over against
“you.” “We” are on a different ontological plane, the plane of the “inter-
subjective,” the plane of “communion.”36 By opening ourselves to others,
we also open ourselves to being in its inexhaustible depth. The proof of
this is experiential for Marcel. In healthy relationships—with family,
friends, or spouses, for instance—we experience a dynamic richness and
sense of depth that we do not experience in more guarded interactions.37
For Marcel, this distinction between having and being is also ethically
charged:
Is it not obvious that if I consider the other person as a sort of mechanism

exterior to my own ego, a mechanism of which I must discover the spring or
manner of working […] I shall never succeed in obtaining anything but a
completely exterior knowledge of him, which is in a way the very denial of
his real being?”38
Intentionally or not, this ultimately “degrades him.”39 This may seem like
a reformulation of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. Having entails
treating humans as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Yet
Marcel was less concerned with a rational ethical imperative than with the
concrete encounter with a specific other.40
Marcel argued that the “we” is ultimately more basic than the “I,” that
openness is more basic than closure. This is anchored in the realities of
human childhood, which of course entail extended dependence. It is also
anchored in the continual experiences of irruption—in wonder and beauty,
for instance—that reopen us to reality and that could “only occur in a
being who is not a closed or hermetic system into which nothing new can
penetrate.”41 Still, Marcel acknowledged that it is easy to be “misled” by
“a false atomism”:
It can easily happen that, in general, I feel opaque, non-permeable, and this
state can be attributed to a number of different causes (fatigue, moral dete-
rioration, the habit of concentrating on myself too much; intimacy with
oneself, like any other relation or liaison, can degenerate and become
vicious).42
We slip easily into “egotism,” into assuming that we are the center of the
world. Such egotism distorts how we see others: “From the very fact that
I treat the other person merely as a means of resonance or an amplifier, I
tend to consider him as a sort of apparatus which I can, or think I can,
manipulate, or of which I can dispose at will.”43 We ultimately project an
idea that “can become a substitute for the real person, a shadow to which
I shall come to refer my acts and words.”44 We are always capable of subtle
self-delusion, of substituting a counterfeit for the real encounter with
the other.
Marcel’s remarks on such delusion skirt close to Jean-Paul Sartre’s anal-
ysis of “bad faith,” and Marcel did acknowledge that his fellow dramatist-
philosopher was often an insightful diagnostician of relational ills.45
Marcel’s own plays are full of egotism, manipulation, instrumentalism,
and indifference. They testify more readily than his philosophical works to
how we may retreat into self-enclosure to protect ourselves from this.
Openness entails vulnerability, which can lead in turn to ill treatment,
abuse, and heartache. Marcel did not quarrel with Sartre’s analysis of
antagonistic and agonistic relationships, then, so much as reject Sartre’s
penchant to see bad faith everywhere. Sartre recoiled from the
132 S. KNEPPER
fundamental relatedness of concrete existence. He greatly circumscribed,

and thus in Marcel’s view greatly distorted, the reality of love. For Sartre,
freedom and authentic existence require a disentangling from relations.
Contra Sartre, Marcel argued that we must cultivate a radical openness
to others, an alert readiness to attend to them.46 He called this openness
disponibilité.47 Again, this is both an ethical mandate and the path to ful-
fillment for Marcel. Healthy relationships within marriages, families,
friendships, and communities involve a “creative fidelity” based on such
openness. Marcel insisted that true fidelity involves continual re-
attunement and responsiveness. It is dynamic, “creative.” Marcel distin-
guished such fidelity from mere constancy, which may not be dynamic or
responsive at all.48 During the Nazi occupation, Marcel famously offered a
philosophy of “hope” as a state of open expectancy, a sort of disponibilité
toward the present and future, one ringed round by the possibility of
despair.49 Marcelian hope transcends hope for particular things. This dis-
tinguishes it from shallow optimism and allows it to persevere through
setbacks.
Marcel feared, then, that modern life was becoming increasingly atom-
istic, lived in the realm of problems and having rather than in the realm of
mystery and being. He argued that this was a recipe for widespread dis-
satisfaction and unhappiness since we have an ontological need or exi-
gence, a desire for true communion with being in its depth, a desire for
fullness that remains even if it is greatly dulled.50 Moderns often try and
fail to meet this need via having, via consumption and dreams of consump-
tion. Yet this provides only fleeting satisfaction.
Marcel could offer a dystopian and perhaps hyperbolic picture of “prob-
lematic man.” While he recognized the “positive value of technical prog-
ress,” he gave far more attention to the ills he saw in it.51 We may wonder
whether he still paints with too broad a brush and thus fails to draw
enough distinctions between different sorts of techniques. This was
Murdoch’s concern about his project.52 Within the domains he identi-
fies—applied science, urban planning, medicine, education—there have
always been counter-movements against reductive tendencies.
Again, though, Marcel is neither a crank nor a pessimist. He always
remained a philosopher of hope. Relationships of “communion” continue
to form all the time, even in the most inauspicious of environments, and a
wider renewal remains possible. Marcel claimed there was no turning back
to “a pre-technical age. The burden of technics has been assumed by man

and he can no longer put it down because he finds it heavy. The conse-
quences of such an abdication would be catastrophic.”53 He held we
should not abandon technics, but we should react against the reductive
ethos that can animate them and that increasingly pervades the wider cul-
ture. “What I think we need today,” he wrote, “is to react with our whole
strength against that dissociation of life from spirit which a bloodless ratio-
nalism has brought about.”54
Marcel’s major philosophical writings are more concerned with the
existential predicament of his readers and their societies than with political
movements or the architectonics of political theory. In terms of politics,
though, Murdoch claimed that Marcel “may remind us a little of Burke—
and, to come nearer home, of Michael Oakeshott, who uses the word
‘technique’ in the same pejorative sense as Marcel.”55 Marcel concurred
with his friend Gustave Thibon “that atomisation and collectivisation are
two sides of the same and indivisible process which could be described
both as devitalising and as de-spiritualising.”56 Both hollow out the inter-
mediate associations of civil society.57 Still, if Marcel was something of a
traditionalist, he was hardly a hidebound one. The emphasis repeatedly
falls on the “creative” work of readjustment and renewal. Marcel was a
staunch critic of communism, but he also claimed that “Marxism is right
to denounce the mystifying tactics employed by those who bring in spiri-
tual considerations inopportunely in order to veil realities which they have
not the strength or the courage to face in their nakedness.”58 In particular,
he called out a tendency to veil the struggles of the poor, the “disinher-
ited.”59 Marcel’s philosophy ultimately cuts across the politics of Left
and Right.
Marcel’s social critiques remain relevant in our world of Big Data and
the digital panopticon, of screen addiction and pervasive loneliness, of
social credit and opioids. Yet he is perhaps most timely in that he offers
perennial wisdom as an antidote to these malaises. He challenges us to
open ourselves to others, to seek out true communion, to pursue a life of
creative fidelity. He calls us back to the concrete. Against the notion that
“our thinking nowadays is only valid if it is on a world-wide or planetary
scale,” Marcel claims that it is “the sense of the neighbour that needs
awaking, for it is the only safeguard against calamites which indeed are
certain to be world-wide.”60
134 S. KNEPPER
Notes
1. A few lines in this chapter are adapted from Steven Knepper, “From
Problem to Mystery,” Commonweal, 147.3 (2020): 20–22. Those new to
Marcel are well served by A Gabriel Marcel Reader, ed. Brendan Sweetman
(South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2011). Kenneth T. Gallagher’s The
Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Fordham UP, 1975) offers a con-
cise, clear overview of Marcel’s major concepts and concerns.
2. Miklos Vetö, “Personal Memories of Gabriel Marcel,” Marcel Studies, 3.1
(2018): 51.
3. See the interview with Levinas in Dialogues with Contemporary Continental
Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984), 53.
Marcel was an important influence on Levinas’s thought. See Brian
Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate
(New York: Fordham UP, 2006). See also William Desmond, “Philosophies
of Religion: Marcel, Jaspers, Levinas” in Twentieth-Century Continental
Philosophy¸ ed. Richard Kearney (London: Routledge, 1994), 131–174.
4. See Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1996), 17.
5. See Juan Manuel Burgos, An Introduction to Personalism, trans. R.T. Allen
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 2018).
6. On the importance of the concrete situation in Marcel, see Gallagher, The
Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, 13–29.
7. Sartre calls Marcel and Karl Jaspers Christian existentialists in Existentialism
is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 20.
Marcel did accept the existentialist designation for a while, albeit reluc-
tantly He assented, for instance, to its use in the title of an essay collection
edited by Étienne Gilson: Existentialisme Chrétien: Gabriel Marcel (Paris:
Plon, 1947). From midcentury onward, though, Marcel sharply rejected
the label, claiming that it had become associated with Sartre’s philosophy.
F.H. Heinemann suggests that Marcel may have been influenced by Pope
Pius XII’s critique of existentialism in the 1950 encyclical Humani generis.
See Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1958), 150.
8. Marcel, “An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy” in Creative Fidelity, trans.
Robert Rosthal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964), 60.
9. For a study that forefronts this aspect of Marcel’s thought, see Jill Graper
Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope: Evil, God and Virtue (London:
Continuum, 2011).
10. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization” in The Decline of
Wisdom, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 8.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G.S. Fraser (South Bend:
Gateway, N.D.), 76.
13. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Society,” 13.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 14.
16. Ibid., 15.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Ibid.
20. Marcel, Awakenings, trans. Peter S. Rogers (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette
UP, 2002), 93.
21. See Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, 37–75.
22. In his youth, Marcel was struck by this in the anti-Semitism of the
Dreyfus Affair.
23. We might also think of racism broadly. See Dwayne Tunstall, Doing
Philosophy Personally: Thinking About Metaphysics, Theism, and Antiblack
Racism (New York: Fordham UP, 2013). Tunstall explores the affordances
in Marcel’s philosophy for a critique of racism but also criticizes the rela-
tively scant attention that it receives in Marcel’s own writings.
24. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1: Reflection & Mystery, trans. G.S. Fraser
(Chicago: Gateway, 1960), 35. See also C. Virgil Gheorghiu, The Twenty-
fifth Hour, trans. Rita Eldon (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).
25. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1, 36.
26. Hernandez, Gabriel Marcel’s Ethics of Hope, 12–13.
27. Marcel, “On The Ontological Mystery” in The Philosophy of Existentialism,
trans. Manya Harari (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1973), 20.
28. Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics” in Existentialists and Mystics:
Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (New York:
Penguin, 1999), 75. Murdoch reviews Marcel’s The Mystery of Being, Vol.
1 in “The Image of Mind” in Existentialists and Mystics, 125–129.
29. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 11.
30. See Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1, 24.
31. Desmond, “Philosophies of Religion,” 137.
32. On Marcel’s conception of the human as homo viator, see Terence Sweeney,
“Against Ideology: Gabriel Marcel’s Philosophy of Vocation.” Logos: A
Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 16.4 (2013): 179–203.
33. See Marcel, “The Breaking Up of the Notion of Wisdom” in The Decline
of Wisdom, 37–56.
34. Marcel, “An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy,” 71.
35. Ibid.
36. Marcel has much in common with Martin Buber in this regard. See Marcel,
“Martin Buber’s Philosophical Anthropology” in Searchings (New York:
136 S. KNEPPER
Newman Press, 1967), 73–92. See the chapter on Marcel and Buber in
Brendan Sweetman, The Vision of Gabriel Marcel: Epistemology, Human
Person, the Transcendent (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 135–151. See also
Robert E. Wood, “The Dialogical Principle: Buber and Marcel” in The
Beautiful, the True & the Good: Studies in the History of Thought
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 2015), 417–433.
37. Marcel argued that the experience of inexhaustible ontological depth in
love points the way to God. There are echoes of St. John: “God is love.”
While Sartre’s god was a tyrannical threat to freedom, Marcel’s was the
liberating wellspring of love. There are deep Christian resonances through-
out Marcel’s project, though he did not convert to Catholicism until he
was forty, and he never wished to write for believers alone.
38. Marcel, “The Ego and its Relation to Others” in Homo Viator: Introduction
to a Metaphysic of Hope, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1965), 23.
39. Ibid.
40. Furthermore, while Marcel admired Kant for putting human dignity at the
heart of his philosophy, he was highly critical of the modern emphasis on
autonomy. He thought it failed to account for how true freedom is found
in an immersion in reality. See Marcel, “Outlines of a Phenomenology of
Having” in Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary, trans. Katherine
Farrer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 173.
41. Marcel, “Belonging and Disposability” in Creative Fidelity, 48.
42. Ibid., 51.
43. Marcel, “The Ego in its Relations to Others,” 17.
44. Ibid., 17–18.
45. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on
Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press,
1992). See Marcel’s review in Homo Viator, 166–184. Marcel also offers
an extended critique of Sartre in “Existence and Human Freedom” in The
Philosophy of Existentialism, 47–90.
46. Sally Fischer approaches Marcel’s philosophy as an ethics of care in
“Reading Marcel’s Philosophy of Dialogical Inter-subjectivity in a
Contemporary Light” in Living Existentialism: Essays in Honor of Thomas
W. Busch, eds. Gregory Hoskins and J.C. Berendzen (Eugene, OR:
Pickwick, 2017), 24–44.
47. See Marcel, “Belonging and Disposability,” pp. 38–57. Marcel was frus-
trated by English translations of this word. “Disposability” can suggest the
entirely different (and negative) sense of getting rid of something.
“Availability” is perhaps better but doesn’t connote the dynamism that
Marcel wishes to convey.
48. See Marcel, “Creative Fidelity” in Creative Fidelity, 147–174.
49. See Marcel, “Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope” in

Homo Viator, 29–67.
50. On the ontological need, see Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Vol. 2: Faith &
Reality, trans. René Hague (Chicago: Gateway, 1960), 37–57.
51. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization,” 8.
52. See Murdoch “The Image of Mind,” 129.
53. Marcel, “The Limitations of Industrial Civilization,” 19.
54. Ibid.
55. Murdoch “The Image of Mind,” 129.
56. Marcel, “The Notion of Spiritual Heritage” in The Decline of Wisdom, 27.
57. For Marcel’s writings on the family, see “The Mystery of the Family” and
“The Creative Vow as Essence of Fatherhood” in Homo Viator, 68–124.
58. Marcel, “The Notion of Spiritual Heritage,” 34.
59. Ibid.
60. Marcel, “The Breaking Up of the Notion of Wisdom” in The Decline of
Wisdom, 56.
CHAPTER 10
Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against

Scientism
Charles W. Lowney II
The ideas of the Enlightenment bred scientism and romanticism in a

multitude of connected forms. The revival of the liberal tradition can
be assured only if we can establish it on a new, conscious understanding
of its foundations, on grounds which will withstand modern self-doubt
coupled with perfectionism.
—Michael Polanyi (TD 83, 86, 87.) To economize, references to
Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1967), are noted with TD, references to Personal Knowledge:
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958) with PK, references to “The Republic of Science: Its
Political and Economic Theory” [Minerva 1(1962): 54–74] with
RS, and references to Marjorie Grene (ed.) Knowing and Being:
Essays by Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969) with KB.
Michael Polanyi had a mixed relationship with the Enlightenment. As a

scientist, he valued the light and knowledge that reason and rigorous
C. W. Lowney II (*)
Hollins University, Roanoke, VA, USA
e-mail: LowneyCW@hollins.edu

140 C. W. LOWNEY II
method could provide, but he also realized that the critical standards for
knowledge that the Enlightenment emphasized could promote dangerous
distortions. While he cherished many Enlightenment values—especially
the freedom that it had brought to formerly repressive societies—he saw
that its critical program could not legitimize even its own humanist and
political values. He saw that excessive skepticism and rationalism, which
challenged traditional authority to topple monarchies and shake religious
institutions, could ultimately lead to forms of nihilism that ushered in
fascist and totalitarian regimes. As a practicing scientist, he saw that some
problems in Enlightenment thinking were rooted in misconceptions sur-
rounding how we discover and affirm scientific knowledge, and so, as a
philosopher, he worked to correct the epistemological mistakes behind a
“scientism” that could distort how we understand reality, human beings,
and human values.
In contrast to the modern idea of objective knowledge that is passively
engaged and discovered, Polanyi put forward the idea of personal knowl-
edge.1 In contrast to the ideal of critical rationalism, which would have all
knowledge be founded on an explicit analysis to immovable foundations,
Polanyi put forward the ideas of tacit knowing, interpretive frameworks,
discovery, and fallibilism. And in contrast to substance dualism—and the
growing materialist views that the really real consists solely of matter in
motion, the human mind is fully reducible, and all meaning and value is
merely subjective—Polanyi put forward the ideas of emergent being and
indwelling. Through these facets of his post-critical program, he affirmed
our contact with reality and our ability to discover true values.
Rather than reject the Enlightenment, Polanyi charts a course for revis-
ing the Enlightenment’s notion of discovering truth through rational
inquiry. His basic concepts work to balance the Enlightenment’s excesses.
In this, he hoped to avoid the recidivisms of analytic philosophy, the repu-
diations of postmodernisms, and the reactionary entrenchment of closed
traditions. His approach provides hope for cautious progress in a society
that both recognizes the value of its traditions and is open to change.
The momentum of the Enlightenment’s influence, however, is difficult
to restrain. It is still a common conception in the twenty-first century that
science, in opposition to religion or tradition, can provide all the answers
that we need. According to the Enlightenment story, science and its
method have liberated us from the dark ages. Its critical reason overcame
the oppression and distortion that religious and political powers enforced.
By the light of reason, the story goes, we find our freedom and our true
10 MICHAEL POLANYI: A SCIENTIST AGAINST SCIENTISM 141
human value… but all that seemed to fall apart amid the horrors of revolu-
tions, wars, and economic depressions.
Polanyi and the Enlightenment Roots

of Twentieth-Century Political Extremism
Michael Polanyi was a physician, a physical chemist, a social scientist, and

a philosopher.2 Born in Budapest in 1891, he served as a medical officer
during the World War I. Soon after the Red Army came to Budapest and
first established a Russian influence in Hungary, Polanyi immigrated to
Germany. There he established himself as a leading scientist at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute. When the Nazi party rose to power, however, Polanyi—
being of Jewish descent—left Germany for England. There he continued
doing research in physical chemistry at the University of Manchester for
15 years, but subsequently he exchanged his chair in chemistry for one in
social studies. This allowed him more time to develop deeper and broader
cultural criticisms and a philosophy of science that challenged mainstream
views. During his life, he believed he saw some implications of
Enlightenment thinking play themselves out in the social and political are-
nas. He believed that the Enlightenment’s noble ambitions and scientific
rationalism, while “a major influence toward intellectual, moral and social
progress,” could also produce “moral doubt…frenzied by moral fury” and
“armed by scientific nihilism”—a combination that led to violent and
totalitarian governments (TD 57, 60).
Polanyi asked, “Why Did We Destroy Europe?”3 His answer was that
the way science had come to be interpreted in modernity helped foster the
great wars of the twentieth century. The ideal of critical reason that
Enlightenment thinkers promoted could not sustain the values that
Enlightenment thinkers held. If everything needed to be proven scientifi-
cally before it could be accepted as true, not only could traditional reli-
gious and aristocratic powers fall, but so also could ideals of political
liberty and the free pursuit of knowledge.
The demand that knowledge be fully explicit and objectively verifiable
was unachievable and unlivable, and it fostered a backlash against rational-
ity and truth. The misguided epistemic ideals not only produced a stron-
ger dichotomy between faith and reason—charging up a reactionary
conservatism—it also produced antithetical postmodernisms that followed
Romanticist trains. So Nietzsche and Marx, with their suspicion of reason
142 C. W. LOWNEY II
and traditional values, were natural outcroppings for democratic and clas-
sically liberal values to crash upon. Polanyi believed he witnessed the ill
effects of the Enlightenment’s conception of knowledge and science when
he saw the Russian Revolution commandeered by Stalinism, and National
Socialism steered by Hitler into violence and death camps.
Critical rationalism led to a nihilism that could not reasonably ground
any values, but losing the foundations for meaning did not negate human
moral passion. The utopian moral ambitions of Enlightenment thinking
could thus motivate what Polanyi called a “moral inversion” (KB 14).
This inversion is a “dynamic coupling” uniting a moral skepticism, which
saw rational argument about morality as unfounded or ineffective, and an
unchecked moral passion. In this “inversion,” violent and immoral acts
became permissible and sometimes even obligatory, so long as they were
accomplished in the service of a greater humanitarian vision. Polanyi saw
this nihilistic play acted out fully in Central and Eastern Europe, but
thankfully, according to Polanyi, a lack of consistency between thought
and action in Britain and the United States stalled its progress (KB 23).
Anglo-American culture, in spite of romantic rhetoric about individual
freedom from authority and skepticism of traditional values, was still
guided by its traditional institutions and practices, embodied, for instance,
in the precedents of Common Law. This, according to Polanyi, kept the
dangerous combination of perfectionist rationalist imperatives, moral
skepticism, and moral passion from actively steering political policy toward
destruction, as it had done earlier on the continent beginning with the
French Revolution. But although the effects of the Enlightenment in
Anglo-American culture were different, they could still be pernicious.
Philosophers often attempt to carve different areas outside the purview
of scientific method to make room for faith and higher values. But in a
culture that idolizes science—our sort of culture—what cannot be shown
to be true scientifically can become devalued, if not consciously then
unconsciously; the plausibility of the justifications for nonscientific and
moral beliefs can become undermined by the epistemology we affirm.
There is thus an eventual crowding out of faith and values as they lose
their justification. So, the rational consistency that took effect more quickly
and with explosive effects in Continental Europe sowed its effects more
slowly and insidiously in the Anglo-American world. Like the frog that sits
in gradually heated water and boils, we never recognize the need to jump
out of the pot.
Historical Setting: The Rise

of a Science Misconceived
The importance of Polanyi’s post-critical approach is better seen when one

puts his ideas in their historical context. Then one sees, perhaps more
clearly than he did, how his basic conceptions work to counterbalance
trends in modern philosophical thought.
Key figures in modern philosophy, such as Descartes, sowed assump-
tions about scientific knowing and the nature of being that the
Enlightenment endorsed in its conception of scientific progress. Descartes
encouraged us to doubt everything that could not be put on secure and
unquestionable rational footing. Such a foundation was thought to be
open to view by everyone, regardless of their history and training, and so
were the rational steps that move us from truth to truth. This advanced
the ideals of critical reason and an impersonal objective stance, a God’s eye
view, that in principle anyone could attain.
All existing beliefs could now be subject to this corrosive, hyperbolic
doubt, no matter how sacred or well-affirmed by purported experts. The
only authorities Descartes recognized were the unquestionable intuitions
that were revealed by the light of reason. The project was to take apart any
claim to knowledge and analyze it down; then we could rebuild knowl-
edge up on secure and common foundations. In this conception, the
notion of phronesis, or practical wisdom, becomes a mystifying charade
and the knowledge of any true expert is considered fully explicit and ratio-
nally accessible to anyone. Descartes’ method emphasized analysis and
explicit knowledge. Complex ideas were deconstructed into simpler and
more assured ideas. Correlatively, this epistemic method extended into
our ontological understanding. Complex beings were understood in terms
of their simpler parts. For the material world, this secure ground was
found in material substance and causes.
The body and anything physical was thought to operate like a machine,
which was conceived as a complex whole that reduced down to the small-
est parts and their laws for combining together. This materialist concep-
tion led to the notion that all the sciences were reducible to what physics
studies, for example, biology was built on chemistry, and chemistry was
built on physics and whatever smallest bits produced the objects of percep-
tion. This reductive materialism on its own might encourage nihilism but,
for Descartes, the nihilism did not yet emerge as a problem. Since his dual-
ism distinguished between material and spiritual substance, it allowed for
144 C. W. LOWNEY II
meaningful values beyond the material. While our bodies and animal pas-
sions reduced down to material causes, our higher values could be inde-
pendently preserved.
Descartes’ bifurcation between spirit and matter was reproduced in
Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal. Kant’s
development of Descartes’ dualism included the provision that any phe-
nomenal entity or event would always be explicable in terms of causal laws,
hence, everything that we could possibly experience and understand could
be explained by science. This bolstered faith in the progress of science to
explain not only biology and living organisms but also psychology and
social phenomena. But while scientific study now included meaning and
values, those values could be considered constructs that were more fully
explicated by lower level chemical and physical laws, where their ultimate
causes would be discovered.
While Descartes endorsed a spiritual reality (beyond the material) to
preserve values, Kant endorsed a moral reality (beyond the phenomenal).
Kant saw the moral law as noumenal, but also as something we could
rationally grasp. But as the skeptical method of Descartes’ philosophy
morphed into the critical rationalism of the Enlightenment, natural sci-
ence more and more seemed to do away with any independent foundation
for spiritual or moral meaning. The subject matter of science, matter/
phenomena, was supported by hard evidence and explained our experi-
ence; the spirit/noumena, in contrast, was seen as accounting for nothing
tangible. So the spirit/noumena half of the dualism came to be rejected as
intellectually suspect. The scientism that demands a reduction of all knowl-
edge to science, and science to physics, could then become the full philo-
sophical ideal. The slippery slope was greased. All values and meanings
were thought to reduce to sociological or psychological causes, those
reduced to biology, which reduced to chemistry, which in turn reduced to
physics. Set in the context of scientism, this reduction and causal deter-
minism left no room for freedom and responsibility to real values—these
became epiphenomena or illusions.
The ontological force of this development can also be traced back into
the analytic and reductive metaphysical prejudices of Descartes. He not
only held that what is complex is explained by what is simpler, but that
what is most real is what is causally prior: “[F]or where else can something
derive its reality?”4 This metaphysical assumption dovetailed with
Descartes’ proofs for God’s existence. But, ultimately, when only one half
of Descartes’ dualism had scientific credence and analysis is the rule, then
what is really real is not God but the smallest and earliest material parts
and their causal relations. The natural conclusion is that values aren’t really
real. And as Nietzsche’s wiseman predicted, the implications of Descartes’
epistemology and its corresponding ontology, like the light of the stars,
took time to manifest in our thought and actions. According to Polanyi,
the light of the stars hit us when logical positivism emerged, nihilism took
hold, and moral inversion was blatantly displayed in twentieth-century
political movements.
On the continent, where the ill effects of Modern and Enlightenment
thinking were most pronounced, postmodernists generally reacted against
science and scientism, claiming instead that there was no neutral objective
stance, and reason itself was in the service of power rather than truth. All
ideas and values were effects of wills to power, or eddies in the fluid play
of historical circumstance. This rejection of scientific validity and celebra-
tion of subjectivity or power went too far for Polanyi; he believed that the
reactions against science were just as mistaken as scientism. He strove
instead to correct analytic, reductionist, and dualist excesses rather than
reject them.
Correcting the Excesses of Scientific Rationalism

Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy emerged from his worries over two atti-
tudes toward science. First, the attitude that subjects scientific truth to the
will of political power. This undermines the scientist’s call to follow clues
wherever they lead in the pursuit of truth. Thus, he reacted against the
USSR’s five-year plans and programs in Great Britain that would subju-
gate scientists’ goals to political aims (See RS). But as we have seen,
Polanyi also worried about scientism, that is, the idea that science is the
only real source of truth and that it provides a purely objective approach
that overcomes all prejudice and distortion. This second attitude encour-
aged efforts to unify science in a reductive account centered on physics as
the most basic science. This reduction characterized logical positivism,
and other efforts to unify science via analytic philosophy, into the 1950s
and beyond. We see it today in “eliminativists” who claim human minds
are fully reducible and are nothing but neurochemical processes. The sec-
ond attitude (analytic scientism) feeds into the first (which aligns with
postmodern skepticism) by undermining a foundation for moral values.
As a scientist himself, Polanyi saw that science did not proceed in the
way that lay people and philosophers of science imagined that it did. The
146 C. W. LOWNEY II
glamorized view of science that culture, history, and philosophy promoted

was a distortion. The ideal of objective knowledge, passively affirmed by
an impartial observer, was a myth. Science operates more like a tradition
itself. It relies on the indoctrination of apprentices, who are taught to use
equipment and taught to see in various ways (e.g., in reading an X-ray, or
understanding the significance of a protein immunoblot). The mutual
agreement of the community of scientists also acts like a traditional author-
ity. Polanyi saw that science itself relies on knowledge and values that it
cannot justify fully or explicitly. Polanyi thus saw that our best claims to
knowledge are better described neither as purely objective nor as merely
subjective, but as personal.
Science made discoveries by relying upon both explicit and tacit com-
mitments. And although these commitments cannot be fully justified
explicitly and are subject to revision, they are held with what Polanyi calls
“universal intent” (TD 78).5 By contrasting tacit knowing with the ideal of
explicit analysis, and contrasting ontological emergence with the notion of
reduction, Polanyi mobilized a view of knowledge that rejected both sci-
entism and postmodernism. Instead, he endorsed a non-skeptical fallibil-
ism that gave degrees of autonomy to different fields of inquiry. His
approach allows values to be real again, both as transcendent ideals and as
emergent properties discovered by human societies.
Personal Knowledge and Tacit Knowing

How knowledge is personal, but not merely subjective, can be seen in how
knowing works and how discoveries are achieved. There is nothing wrong
with efforts to analyze and reduce knowledge to components, but that
cannot be the whole story. There are inherent limits to analysis, and what
now acts as our firm ground may shift in the future, hence Polanyi argues
“[t]he pursuit of formalization will find its true place in a tacit framework”
(KB 157).
Polanyi saw that we always attend from some unspecifiable background
when we attend to something focal. Whereas Franz Brentano (TD x)
emphasized that there is always an object at the distal end of intentionality,
Polanyi emphasized that there were always tacit clues at the proximal end.
This from-to vector of intentionality was the key to understanding that
there is a tacit dimension to all knowledge. The background clues are
integrated together into a focal awareness or meaning, but during the act
of knowing we are not directly aware of the clues or context that we are
seeing from. There is thus a dichotomy between a tacit awareness of back-

ground clues and the focal awareness that goes into the formation of our
explicit knowledge.
Polanyi marshals many examples from perception, skills, and linguistic
cognition to show general features of the from-to knowing process, and
how the from-to dynamic can build in layers, that is, the to can become a
from in a further focal integration (KB 128, 154). Seeing in 3D shows
how the to is a “joint comprehension” of tacit clues that displays new
qualities. We attend from the two-dimensional pictures that each eye pro-
vides, and together they give us a focal image that includes the emergent
feature of depth perception.
How clues fade into the background to operate tacitly can be seen in
learning to use a stick as a probe. The muscles manipulating the stick and
the nerve endings in the hand all fade as our attention and feeling move to
the end of the stick and what it is touching; the stick becomes integrated
into our bodily background clues as we learn to feel the dimensions of a
dark room. When we develop a skill, Polanyi would say, we “dwell in” the
clues in order to become aware of their joint meaning.
The tacit clues that we pick up on and distinguish are not all explicitly
available. We recognize a face among millions of others, but we can’t say
precisely how (TD 4). According to Polanyi, the tacit dimension is at best
only marginally accessible. To shift one’s focus to tacit clues disrupts the
focal integration. For instance, Polanyi notes that in playing the piano one
is focused on the music as the end of the production. The trained motions
of the fingers act as tacit clues. If one shifts one’s attention from the music
to a direct awareness of the fingers as focal, it throws off the integration of
the clues and the music stutters or stalls.
We see this from-to structure in our use of signs as well. We look from
the letters “c,” “a,” and “t” when we look to the joint meaning toward
which they point, that is, the word “cat.” The individual letters form the
background clues to a new meaning. Similarly, if we take the words “cat,”
“is,” “on,” and “mat,” their joint meaning is different than when we take
the words individually. At the next level of integration, the sentence is a
clue, together with other sentences, toward a more comprehensive mean-
ing (we can then know if the sound “mat” refers to a small carpet or a
person). If we look at the word or letters in isolation, then we lose our
awareness of their joint significance. Instead of looking from the letters
and to the words, and from the words to the meaning of a sentence, we
148 C. W. LOWNEY II
would instead attend from other clues, for example, isolated sounds, or
dark marks on a light background, to see focally the shape of the letters.
The clues that we can uncover are inexhaustible and to a large extent
unspecifiable. Polanyi saw that a tacit background can never be made fully
explicit for several reasons (KB 124). We attend from it, but when we turn
to look at or to it we inevitably miss something, and we cannot be aware
of what we are missing. Also, the function changes: when we look back to
the from, it is now the to and is no longer operating as it does when it func-
tions as the from. So the pupil, eye, optic nerve, and so on are all tacit clues
to seeing a cat, but when we look at the eye, etc., we do not see the seeing,
since we are no longer dwelling in the physical and mental clues in the way
we do when we see the cat.
We learn by doing, and we can gain skills, like walking or being able to
recognize a face, without being able to explicitly break down all the clues
and steps involved in performing the skill. We often gain knowledge by
interacting in the world, for example, by “subception,” where we are not
aware of how we gained knowledge from experience (TD 7, 8). All explicit
knowledge is based on skills and tacit knowing, but that does not delegiti-
mize the knowledge that we gain, it just means that we cannot always fully
account for what we do know.
Making room for faith, like partitioning off an insensible spirit world,
merely undermined it. But Polanyi saw that the assumptions behind that
strategy were all wrong. Instead of making room for faith in an epistemol-
ogy dominated by critical rationalism, Polanyi showed how faith was inter-
weaved even in our most certain beliefs. In Personal Knowledge (1958), he
moved against the ideals of objective knowledge, explicit analysis, and
ontological reduction that had been brewing in our culture since the dawn
of modern thinking. There is always a side to knowledge that we must take
on faith—a personal side—even in science.
Interpretive Frameworks, Discovery,

and Non-Skeptical Fallibilism
In practicing skills and in comprehending texts, the tacit background
becomes marginal and often invisible to us. Similarly, we are not fully
aware of the background interpretive frameworks by which we understand
the world. This is why Polanyi says “all knowledge… is either tacit or rooted
in tacit knowledge” (KB 195) and “formalizing all knowledge to the exclu-
sion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating” (TD 20). We can see how the
background functions as a tacit from, and how some traditional knowl-

edge, learned by apprenticeship or subception, forms an “inescapable
framework” for Polanyi by looking at how scientific discovery works
(TD 63).
Discovery involves personal commitment and a reliance on a tacit inter-
pretive framework. To even see a problem in science one has to have suf-
ficient immersion in a background theory. Only then can one recognize
gaps or notice that some observations don’t quite seem to fit. Polanyi
related this searching to a problem in Plato’s Meno. Socrates posed a para-
dox: If we don’t know what we are looking for, how do we know when we
find it? And if we are able to recognize it, doesn’t that mean we knew it
already and did not have to search? The tacit dimension of knowledge was
the solution (TD 22–25). A scientist’s tacit sense of the background not
only makes her aware of a problem but can help guide the search in a pro-
ductive direction. The solution is recognized when the background clues
come together in a focal comprehension that is tacitly more consistent
with the interpretive framework and thus more satisfying than other
alternatives.
Each discovery shifts or enriches the background framework. In mak-
ing an important discovery, one might need to shift an interpretive frame-
work in a radical way. (This is what Thomas Kuhn would later call a
“paradigm” shift.) Polanyi follows Poincaré in laying out the stages of
discovery (PK 121–131). First the question arises; then one searches,
exploiting all the resources one has available. One is driven by a passionate
commitment to finding a solution. If it is an important problem that can-
not properly be solved inside the current conceptions, one might then hit
a wall and experience a “dark night of the soul.” In this dark night, the
interpretive framework through which you normally understand the data
breaks down. The factual observations no longer seem to make any sense.
Then “Eureka!” a solution may arise, which involves understanding things
in a radically different way. “Intuition” has tacitly integrated clues together
into a satisfying conception. This solution is first affirmed by a feeling of
validation, but then might be better verified in more explicit terms
(PK 121).
The personal commitment of the inquirer, along with his or her per-
sonal, cultural, and theoretic background, are indispensable for knowl-
edge and its progress,6 but this does not make the knowledge acquired
“merely subjective.” We recognize that there may be new discoveries in
the future and we may find better theories, but this does not make our
150 C. W. LOWNEY II
current best theories “simply wrong.” Just because there will be better
ways of understanding our observations does not mean “anything goes”
regarding theories and truth. We get closer to the truth, and we act on our
commitments, even though tacit knowing is ineliminable and Cartesian
certainty is impossible. We thus act with the “universal intent” of our cur-
rent best knowledge, while attempting also to be open to new information
and ideas. We acknowledge our fallibilism even as we acknowledge the
progress of knowledge.
Emergent Being and Indwelling

Just as focal meanings cannot be fully reduced to tacit clues, some emer-
gent wholes cannot be fully reduced to their subsidiary parts. For Polanyi,
emergent beings can gain an independence from the conditions they relied
upon to come into existence. Here Polanyi reverses the machine metaphor
that is typically associated with reduction.7 Polanyi noted that a machine
has principles or laws that govern its operation that are not reducible to the
principles or laws of chemistry or physics. The machine does not violate
the lower level laws, but it must be identified and understood in terms of
a higher level context and its laws. This is what Polanyi termed “dual con-
trol”: the subsidiary lower level sets necessary conditions, but the emer-
gent higher level can commandeer parameters left open by the lower level
to effect its own control (hence I can raise my arm, but I cannot make it
grow to the size of a submarine). So, the principles of physics and its ele-
ments were necessary but not sufficient to the understanding of the
mechanical principles of a machine. By the light of the meanings of physics
and chemistry alone, Polanyi noted, one could not distinguish between a
working steam engine and a broken one (KB 176).8
Rather than a materialist reduction in which all levels of inquiry reduced
down to the lowest level, Polanyi envisioned a hierarchy of dual control
relations in which a lower level and its laws were not violated, but higher-
level constraints could define new real beings with emergent qualities. So
that which physics and chemistry studies is subsidiary to biological organ-
isms, and that which biology studies is subsidiary to psychology and soci-
ology. Reality was no longer identified with the lowest, simplest, and
earliest; instead, emergent and complex entities could also count as real.
Similar to C.S. Peirce, Polanyi rooted reality in the notion of the effects
something can have in the world; something real had “the power for
manifesting itself in yet unthought of ways in the future” (TD 32). Minds
could be more real than cobblestones (TD 33).
The epistemology of tacit knowing and the ontology of emergent being
come together in that we often know and understand wholes focally by
attending from their parts and operations as tacit clues; we dwell in the
parts to understand a whole “comprehensive entity” (TD 18–21).9
Similarly, Polanyi says that we understand the mind of a person by dwell-
ing in the behaviors and words of that person. Polanyi’s view here is simi-
lar to Gilbert Ryle’s or Merleau-Ponty’s in that we dwell in the body to
experience mind (KB 222). Polanyi, however, distinguishes his view from
theirs because he wants to forestall a collapse of the expressions of mind or
the actions of the body into an identity with mind.10 An identification
leaves open the possibility that the mind might be reductively considered
“nothing but” bodily actions. Instead, Polanyi is careful to emphasize the
structure of knowing and being and distinguish between clues and subsid-
iary conditions, on the one pole, and the independent reality toward
which they point or gather, on the other. Just as we can gain a glimpse into
a chess player’s mind by watching the moves he makes on the board, we
can get a glimpse into a person’s mind by dwelling in a person’s words and
behaviors (KB 215). But minds, for Polanyi, are not only the joint mean-
ing of the body, they are active centers (KB 135) emergent upon the body
and its physical and cultural environment—an integral part of a compre-
hensive entity.
Descartes’ matter-spirit substance dualism is a misapprehension of the
subsidiary-emergent relation of body to mind. This dualism is also encour-
aged by the subsidiary-focal or from-to trajectory of intentionality. As we
saw, there is a gestalt switch in the shift from looking from the clues to
looking to those clues. When we look from the clues to the focal meaning,
the subsidiary clues become invisible to us (the music appears to exist on
its own, unproduced; we forget about our fingers); and when we look to
the subsidiary clues, their focal meaning disintegrates into nothing (the
music disappears when we focus on our fingers).
For Polanyi, the body provides the subsidiary base for the mind; body
and mind are two levels in a dual control system and not two separate
substances. We are comprehensive entities, but since attention to the focal
meaning neglects the tacit or subsidiary structures, focusing on meaning
and ideas (the stuff of mind/spirit) makes us forget their dependence on
the from (material subsidiaries) that form their tacit, supporting condi-
tions (we forget about our fingers; the individual letters become
152 C. W. LOWNEY II
transparent when we focus is on the meaning of a word). This makes it

easy to imagine that the “spiritual” can exist independently from anything
material. Similarly, when we focus on the material or subsidiary base as the
to (as we do in scientific investigation; we look at the letters in isolation
and their rules for combining) rather than dwell in them as the from, we
get the impression that the meaning and ideas (meanings; mind/spirit) are
ephemeral and illusory. This makes it easy to imagine that all that is really
real are the “material” subsidiaries. It is easy to forget that we always dwell
in clues and subsidiaries when we experience meanings and focal wholes.
So substance dualism—and the monisms that take one half of Descartes’
dualism and deny the other (materialisms or idealisms)—are easy mistakes
to make.
Polanyi parses out the significance of Descartes’ material-spiritual dual-
ism in terms of the dynamic of from-to awareness; that we dwell in a body
and experience value and meaning as emergent creatures with minds
already breaks down the matter-meaning and fact-value dichotomies that
scientism endorses. Emergence and indwelling also overcome any deep or
impassible gulf between me-in-here and the world-out-there.11 We see this
gulf incipiently in John Locke’s philosophy, and it is made fully manifest
in Kant’s. The chasm between mind and world can lead to representation-
alist views, according to which I can only know my own perceptions, con-
cepts, or signs—and whatever they are meant to grasp or symbolize “out
there” is too foreign to comprehend. This dichotomy between inner and
outer leads to a radical skepticism about the world’s existence and to the
problem of knowing whether or not there really are other minds like mine.
The notion of indwelling bridges theses gaps. Our tacit clues, signs, and
ideas are, as Aquinas said, “that by which” we understand and not merely
“that which” we understand.12 Rather than the endpoint on the nearside
of the chasm, they are the bridge. Representations and ideas become clues
to our experience and understanding of the world. Just as a microscope or
a telescope becomes a tool by which we can better grasp a focal awareness,
and just as our bodies and their extensions can bring us an awareness of
something real, so our concepts and conceptions act as tools that can allow
us to better grasp reality.13 According to Polanyi, we make contact with
reality, and we make discoveries, but reality will always continue to surprise
us in its possible future manifestations (KB 133).
Reality, Morality, Science, and Society

While analysis and synthesis can indeed enrich knowledge (KB 125, 130),
a fully explicit analysis and justification of knowledge is impossible. We
always rely on tacit background knowledge which constitutes what Polanyi
called “the tacit dimension.” And just as we cannot always have a full
analysis to simples in knowing, we cannot always have a full reduction to
constituents in being.
Polanyi challenges Cartesian assumptions that were the root source of
Enlightenment rationalism. In doing so, he also challenges naive cultural
assumptions about how science validates knowledge and progresses. But
he also challenges postmodern skepticisms. Polanyi shows that knowledge
is not purely objective, but neither is it merely subjective. Instead knowl-
edge is personal and must be affirmed with universal intent if one is to
advance toward further discoveries.
Polanyi thus re-envisions a role for faith and values in a world impressed
with the advances of science. His understanding of tacit knowing and
emergent being lead him to a Neo-Platonism of sorts, like that of the
pragmaticist C.S. Peirce, in which universals are real, since they, like minds,
can show themselves in “indefinite future manifestations” (KB 167, 168).
There can thus be ideals such as Truth, Beauty, and Charity that emerge
and gain a transcendent status. These “transcendentals” can help guide
our actions and our progress.14
In addition to re-imagining transcendent values, Polanyi, via his con-
ceptions of discovery and an emergent world, can encourage a notion in
which new moral values emerge. As new entities emerge, they interact at a
different ontological level than their subsidiary parts and have their own
emergent laws. This allows for the possibility of emergent moral realities.
Just as we can make scientific discoveries, we can make discoveries about
better ways of being, and better ways of being together.15 I believe Alasdair
MacIntryre’s work here is consistent with a Polanyian notion of emergent
value. MacIntyre sees traditions of enquiry as essential for rational discus-
sion, and he sees valid moral claims emerging from the practices of cul-
tures and traditions.16
New values can emerge as people and societies discover new and better
ways of being together in response to existential problems.17 Some of
those new, important, and true values emerged with the Enlightenment,
but some, as Charles Taylor says, can take on “degenerate forms.”18 Hence
Polanyi says, “I will not resist in any way the momentum of the French
154 C. W. LOWNEY II
Revolution. I accept its dynamism. But I believe that the new self-
determination of man can be saved from destroying itself only by recog-
nizing its own limits in an authoritative traditional framework which
upholds it” (TD 62).
Polanyi opposed scientism, but he saw in the operation of the scientific
tradition a model for how democratic institutions might work. The scien-
tific community is both conservative (vetting papers, marginalizing crack-
pots) and liberal (valuing novelty and discovery). The institution of science
was composed of free equals that advanced by cooperation, criticism, and
“mutual control” (TD 74). People in science must responsibly (77)
advance ideas with universal intent (78) for the consideration of the
community.
Polanyi, like F.A. Hayek, relied (perhaps a bit too much19) on the
notion of “spontaneous order” in which the free actions of individuals
could produce a stable yet open system.20 Direction should not be imposed
solely from the top down by one central agency, but should emerge from
the ground up through the combined efforts of free individuals and their
emergent institutions. Science functions and grows best when scientists
are free to pursue questions that interest them. Similarly, Polanyi endorses
a political pluralism in which people are committed to their individual
views but exercise a mutual control as they engage each other in an effort
to come to new and better views.21
The political, for Polanyi, needs to be guided by the moral and not
merely the economic. The political-economic order thus has the markings
of a dual control system. Polanyi says “Society, as an organization of power
and profit, forms one level, while its moral principles lie on a level above
it” (TD 86). From his perspective, a capitalist economic system was impor-
tant for the creation of wealth, but its operations should be guided toward
moral outcomes with the help of higher-level moral constraints—just as a
steam engine does not simply drive a ship forward, but its power is con-
strained and steered in worthwhile directions.
Conclusion: Progress via Dynamic Orthodoxy

Polanyi’s understanding of personal knowledge and tacit knowing sets the
basis for trusting our knowledge without the need to reduce everything to
the demands of explicit scientific evidence. It allows the possibility that
traditional and religious values can be responsibly upheld. His notion of
emergence also allows minds, people, and values to be real.
Polanyi was a critic of scientism, but he was also an advocate of science

and scientific truth. Similarly, Polanyi was a critic of rationalism and
Enlightenment thought, but was also an advocate of the use of reason and
Enlightenment values. With a better epistemology and ontology correct-
ing the distortions that the Enlightenment’s rationalism promoted,
Polanyi hoped the danger of nihilism and moral inversion could be averted
and the European liberal tradition—which valued individual and political
freedom—could grow.
While our society, as a legacy of the Enlightenment, is far from perfect,
Polanyi held hope for continued improvement. He thus firmly upheld the
Enlightenment value of progress and saw it as an important ideal for both
science and society. He says, “Any tradition fostering the progress of
thought must have this intention: to teach current ideas as stages leading
on to unknown truths which, when discovered, might dissent from the
very teachings which engendered them” (TD 82). According to Polanyi,
this progress relies on a “dynamic orthodoxy” in which both stability and
change are important. While building on the values of traditions, we
should be open to competing views and make an effort to discover new
truths together.
Notes
1. To economize, references to Polanyi’s work to Personal Knowledge:
Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press,1958) will be noted with PK; The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1967), with TD; references to “The Republic of Science:
Its Political and Economic Theory” [Minerva 1(1962): 54-74] with RS,
and references to Marjorie Grene (ed.) Knowing and Being: Essays by
Michael Polanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), with KB.
2. For more on Polanyi’s life, see William Scott and Martin Moleski, Michael
Polanyi, Scientist and Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. [1967] in R.T. Allen (ed.) Society, Economics & Philosophy (New York:
Routledge, 2017) 107–118.
4. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations (New York, NY:
Penguin Books, 1968) 119.
5. “A person speaks with universal intent when convinced of the truth of
what she or he says. ‘I speak not of established universality, but of a univer-
sal intent, for the scientist cannot know whether his claims will be accepted’
(TD 18)” (Quoted from Walter Gulick, ed., Recovering Truths: A
Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi’s Writings, Glossary, 17, avail-
able with permission at polanyisociety.org).
156 C. W. LOWNEY II
6. Compare here Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion that rational thinking can only
take place in the context of a coherent tradition of inquiry in his After
Virtue (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Also note that
MacIntyre studied at Manchester University while Polanyi taught there.
7. See Charles Lowney, “Rethinking the Machine Metaphor since Descartes:
The Irreducibility of Bodies, Minds and Meanings” Bulletin of Science,
Technology and Society 31, no. 3 (2011): 179–192.
8. There are different sorts and strengths of emergentist theory. Since down-
ward constraints can be construed as downward causes, Polanyi’s emer-
gentism falls somewhere between a weak and a strong emergentism (as
characterized by Mark Bedau in Emergence: Contemporary Readings in
Philosophy and Science, M. Bedau and P. Humphreys, eds., Cambridge:
MIT Press 2008, 157–161). It does not violate the laws of physics, but it
also does not affirm the causal closure of physics. Some friends of physical-
ism, such as Tihamér Margitay, thus believe Polanyi’s emergentism was too
strong and blame some of its faults on too strongly associating the struc-
ture of tacit knowing with the structure of emergent being [“From
Epistemology to Ontology: Polanyi’s Arguments for the Layered
Ontology” in Tihamér Margitay, ed., Knowing and Being: Perspectives on
the Philosophy of Michael Polanyi (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2010), 128–140]. I reply to Tihamer’s concerns in
“From Epistemology to Ontology to Epistemontology” [Tradition and
Discovery 40 no. 1 (Fall 2013) 17–31].
9. For the importance of this notion see, Phil Mullins, “Comprehension and
the ‘Comprehensive Entity’: Polanyi’s Theory of Tacit Knowing and Its
Metaphysical Implications” Tradition and Discovery 33 no. 3
(2006–2007): 26–43.
10. Marjorie Grene, a strong advocate of Polanyi’s work, sees in the end a
greater advantage to Merleau-Ponty’s approach to emergent pluralism.
While Polanyi’s emergentism is more hierarchized, Merleau-Ponty’s is
more “centrifugal.” [See Grene’s “Merleau-Ponty and the Revival of
Ontology” Review of Metaphysics 29 no. 4 (June 1976): 605–62.] In con-
trast, I attempt to show how Polanyi’s approach, while less philosophically
nuanced, might be the more useful and necessary (Lowney, ed., 2017, op.
cit., 159, 179–180). Further discussion of the advantages and disadvan-
tages of these two pluralisms can also be found in Lowney, “Robust
Realism: Pluralist or Emergent” in Charles W. Lowney II, ed., Charles
Taylor, Michael Polanyi and the Critique of Modernity: Pluralist and
Emergentist Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 235–270.
11. See Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 162.
12. Polanyi’s move here is similar to C.S. Peirce’s notion of triadic semantic
structures; see Polanyi’s “Sense Giving and Sense Reading” in KB,
181–210. For more on Peirce and Polanyi see Phil Mullins, “Peirce’s
Abduction and Polanyi’s Tacit Knowing” Journal of Speculative Philosophy
16 no. 3 (2002): 198–22; and also Mullins, “Comprehension and the
‘Comprehensive Entity,’” op. cit.
13. Polanyi’s notion of dwelling in technical clues anticipates Andy Clark’s
“extended mind” in Clark’s Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action,
and Cognitive Extension (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2008).
14. One can relate these “transcendentals” to telic goals that draw us forward
to new possibilities for being. See TD 88–92 and also D.M. Yeager’s
“Taylor and Polanyi on Moral Sources and Social Systems” for a discussion
of the significance of Polanyi’s transcendentals in a socio-political context
(in Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit., 189–214). On how concepts and platonic
ideas such as Beauty are formed, see my “The Tacit in Frege” [Polanyiana
17 no. 1–2 (2008): 19–37]. For more on the difference between teleologi-
cal notions and Polanyi’s conception of telic, see Richard Gelwick’s
“Michael Polanyi’s Daring Epistemology and the Hunger for Teleology”
[Zygon 40 no. 1 (2005): 63–76]. Part of Gelwick’s interest here is to show
how it is illegitimate to use Polanyi’s notion of “telic fields” in a theological
argument for intelligent design.
15. In “From Science to Morality: A Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and
the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009):
42–54] and in “Morality: Emergentist Ethics and Virtue For Itself” [TAD
36 no. 3 (Summer 2010): 52–65], I show how different moral theories—
deontological, utilitarian, virtue, and sentiment based—each catch part of
a moral reality that is better understood as emergent rather than pre-exis-
tent or rooted in some totally other dimension. Even purportedly simple
moral “intuitions” have their tacit subsidiary support in lived experience.
See also Lowney, ed., 2017, op. cit. chapters 8 “Overcoming the Scientistic
Imaginary” (143–168) and 9 “On Emergent Ethics, Becoming Authentic,
and Finding Common Ground” (169–187).
16. MacIntyre, 1984, op. cit. For more on how Aristotelian philosophy con-
nects with Polanyi’s philosophy, see my “From Science to Morality: A
Polanyian Perspective on the Letter and the Spirit of the Law” [Tradition
and Discovery 36 no. 1 (Fall 2009): 42–54], which links together tacit
knowing and phronesis; or my “Authenticity and the Reconciliation of
Modernity,” which connects Aristotle and Polanyi in understanding the
development of telic goal/ideals (2017, op. cit., 71–92). Also see
D. Hoinski and R. Polansky, “The Modern Aristotle: Michael Polanyi’s
Search for Truth against Nihilism” in A. Greenstine and R. Johnson, eds.,
Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2017): 180–201.
158 C. W. LOWNEY II
17. See Lowney, “Morality: Emergentist Ethics” op. cit. and Lowney “From
Morality to Spirituality: Society, Religion and Transformation” Tradition
and Discovery 37 no. 1 (Fall 2010): 19–38.
18. See Taylor’s A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)
and Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
For more on authenticity as an emergent value, see my “Authenticity and
the Reconciliation of Modernity” (2017, op. cit., 71–92).
19. See D.M. Yeager, 2017, op. cit.
20. See Richard T. Allen, Beyond Liberalism: The Political Thought of F.A. Hayek
and Michael Polanyi (Rutgers, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016) or Struan
Jacobs and Phil Mullins, “Friedrich Hayek and Michael Polanyi in
Correspondence” in History of European Ideas 42 no. 1 (2016): 107–130.
21. See my chapter 12, “Robust Moral Realism: Pluralist or Emergent?” in
Lowney ed., 2017, op. cit., 235–270.
CHAPTER 11
C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination,

and the Abolition of Man
Luke C. Sheahan
The inclusion of arguably the foremost Christian apologist and dialectician

of the twentieth century in a book on anti-rationalist thinkers may seem at
the outset ridiculous. If anyone put his faith in the rational faculty, it was
the esteemed Oxford don C.S. Lewis, the one for whom it could be said,
“The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.”1 One
biographer writes, “His rhetorical temper provided a compulsiveness and
a posture which could be resolved only in argument. Training, taste, and
talent equipped him for an academic and apologetic career, to the exclu-
sion of nearly all others.”2 But he was also the author of the children’s
fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia and the science fiction Ransom
Trilogy and a famed scholar of medieval and renaissance literature. While
he certainly made use of the rational faculty, it was in the imagination that
he put his faith.
Lewis wrote several famous works of Christian apologetics including
The Problem of Pain (1940), Miracles (1947), and Mere Christianity
(1952). But he found that their efficacy depended upon a deeper mode of
knowing. Through science fiction and children’s fantasy, Lewis engaged in
L. C. Sheahan (*)
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

160 L. C. SHEAHAN
what McGrath calls “imaginative narrative apologetics.”3 Lewis believed

in the rational soundness of his faith in that he believed that Christianity
made claims that were historically and philosophically true, but he further
believed that the imagination, not the rational faculty, was the key to
understanding reality, including the reality of the Christian religion.
Rationalism contributes to understanding truth insofar as it is shaped by a
healthy imagination. Rational apologetics has a place in the arsenal of the
Christian, but it is not of prime importance because it is inadequate to
capture the full truth of the Christian faith, or anything else for that mat-
ter. Lewis scholar Michael Ward writes, “Lewis was of the opinion that
rational argumentation was too rudimentary for the task of conveying
Christian truths.”4 The imagination is not irrational or sub-rational, but
supra-rational. It transcends rational argument, undergirds it, providing
the groundwork that enables rational arguments to make sense.
As an academic Lewis certainly valued reason, but he looked askance at
a thin rationalism, one that held that human syllogizing could provide bet-
ter insight into reality than imaginative narrative. Where the rationalist
sees only “theorizing” as rational, Lewis believed that truth could be per-
ceived through other faculties such as the imagination. He believed in the
“epistemological reliability of the imagination, especially when realized in
the forms of metaphor, symbolism, and myth, to establish meaning, the
antecedent of truth.”5 Reason did have value for Lewis and it was certainly
one way in which a person could access truths. But reason’s ability to yield
insight into reality was limited because reason itself is in large part deter-
mined by the imaginative backdrop, by the model of the universe that
underlies it. The structure of one’s imagination determined in advance
how one will reason. It is not so much that rationalism is a failure as a
means of inquiry, it is that to Lewis rationalism is woefully inadequate to
grasp the fullness of reality compared to the imagination.6
This chapter explores various ways that Lewis prioritized the imagina-
tion over the rational faculty in his work. This is significant for a proper
understanding of the fundamental thrust of Lewis’s writing throughout
his career.7 One scholarly account holds that Lewis believed reason to be
the key to understanding truth throughout his early life, but that he fled
to the imagination when his faith was publicly demonstrated to be unrea-
sonable in a 1948 debate with the noted philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.8
Anscombe attacked Lewis’s argument in a chapter of his book Miracles
titled “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist” published the previous
year. There Lewis argues that naturalism is self-defeating because it
11 C.S. LEWIS: REASON, IMAGINATION, AND THE ABOLITION OF MAN 161
simultaneously holds that the human mind is a product of chance and

survival instinct and that the mind may grasp truth. How, he asked, could
an organ that was the product of chance and survival instinct be trusted to
reason to truth? This could only be true if the human mind was capable of
grasping truth independent of its need for survival. Our trust in reason to
discover truth is predicated on our belief that it participates in the Divine
Logos, the eternal truth. But this implies that it has been created for the
purpose of grasping truth, which naturalism denies.9
Anscombe disagreed with the structure of Lewis’s argument, but not
with its conclusion. As a devout Roman Catholic, she too found natural-
ism untenable, but not for the reasons Lewis gave in that chapter of
Miracles. She argued that a rational thought may derive from “non-
rational” causes (such as the accidental development of the brain). One is
not required to reject the possibility of rational thought for the reason that
it emerged from a brain that arose by accident. Anscombe’s critique was
based on a distinction in Wittgenstein’s philosophy between reasons and
causes, an internal debate among Wittgensteinian scholars in analytic phi-
losophy of which Lewis was not aware.10
In response to Anscombe’s critique, Lewis rewrote the chapter and it
appeared in the 1960 edition of Miracles under the title “The Cardinal
Difficulty of Naturalism.” Some of Lewis’s biographers interpreted this
event as traumatic, a watershed psychological event that convinced him
that the Christian faith could not be rationally defended or was somehow
fundamentally irrational.11 Out of emotional distress he retreated into
children’s fantasy as a sort of psychological crutch to his wounded faith.
Anscombe herself scoffed at such depictions of Lewis as “projection” on
the part of their authors, noting that his rewrite of the chapter in question
demonstrated the seriousness with which he took his work.12 As Lewis
biographer Alistair McGrath writes, “There is no evidence of Lewis retreat-
ing into some kind of nonrational fideism or reason-free fantasy as a result
of this encounter.”13 As an academic he was used to such criticisms, receiv-
ing them regularly from his fellow writers, the Inklings, his editors, and
the like. Furthermore, he did not cease his apologetic writings. He pub-
lished Mere Christianity in 1952, four years after the debate. While based
on radio addresses delivered during WWII, he did not edit them to aban-
don reasoned argument. So it would be wrong to say that Lewis relin-
quished belief in reason or the reasonableness of Christianity for the
imagination after the debate.
162 L. C. SHEAHAN
More importantly for our argument here, Lewis engaged in imagina-

tive discourse before the debate. He had published Out of the Silent Planet,
the first of his science fiction Ransom Trilogy, in 1937, more than a decade
before his debate with Anscombe and he had been publishing poetry since
at least the 1920s. Even the beginnings of what would become Narnia had
been percolating in his mind since he was sixteen14 and he had a rough
sketch of the basics for a story of four children staying with a professor
during the London bombing around 1939–40.15 Through science fiction,
as he later did through children’s fantasy, Lewis engaged in what McGrath
calls “imaginative narrative apologetics,” and he had been doing this long
before his debate with Anscombe. McGrath writes, “Lewis was thus
already persuaded of the importance of the use of narrative and the appeal
to the imagination in apologetics.”16 Lewis believed in the rational sound-
ness of his faith in that he believed that the Christian faith was true, but he
further believed that the efficacy of reason was dwarfed by the importance
of the imagination. The imagination, not the reason, was the key to under-
standing reality. Rationalism was only valuable insofar as it was shaped by
a healthy imagination. The debate with Anscombe underscored in Lewis’s
mind this truth. Lewis scholar Michael Ward writes, “Anscombe reminded
Lewis of the generic deficiency of apologetics, that rational argumentation
can never convey the concrete realities of spiritual experiences.”17 Rational
apologetics has a place in the arsenal of the Christian, but it is not of prime
importance because it is inadequate to capture the full truth of the
Christian faith, or anything else for that matter. Ward writes, “Lewis was
of the opinion that rational argumentation was too rudimentary for the
task of conveying Christian truths.”18 The imagination was not irrational
or sub-rational, but supra-rational. It transcends rational argument, under-
girds it, providing the groundwork that enables rational arguments to
make sense.
That said, his apologetic output did decline after the debate. Miracles is
the only strictly apologetic polemic in his oeuvre and The Problem of Pain
(1940) and Mere Christianity (1952) are the only others that present
rational arguments for Christianity. All three were substantially written
before the Anscombe debate. While published later as a book, the sub-
stance of Mere Christianity was written as radio addresses during
WWII. McGrath gives three reasons for the decline. First, Lewis found
apologetics emotionally and spiritually draining. He simply didn’t like it.19
He did it because he thought it necessary. Second, those closest to him
were unconvinced by his arguments. His lifelong friend and confidant
Arthur Greeves left orthodox Protestantism for Unitarianism in midlife.

The older woman he lived with and cared for, Mrs. Moore, remained hos-
tile towards Christianity throughout her life. Even Warnie Lewis, his own
brother and a Christian convert, found the argument in The Problem of
Pain unconvincing. Third, the debate with Anscombe indicated that there
were others better situated to defend the Christian faith on rational
grounds. Lewis even suggested that Anscombe speak again at the Socratic
Club after the debate, writing in 1950, “Having obliterated me as an
Apologist, ought she not to succeed me?”20
This chapter explains Lewis’s conception of the differences between
imagination and reason and how he related one to the other. It proceeds
as follows. First, I examine Lewis’s idea of “looking at” versus “looking
along.” This idea is reflected in the dichotomy between his apologetic
works (full of rational argumentation) and his narrative fiction. Lewis
nuances and elaborates on this fundamental distinction elsewhere his
work. Second, I turn to his idea of “transposition.” He believed that the
translation of higher truths cannot be expressed or explored easily in ratio-
nal discourse due to rationalism’s limited “vocabulary.” Our rational facul-
ties are inherently inadequate to account fully for at least some truths
grasped imaginatively. These two sections lay the groundwork for how
Lewis differentiated between the imagination and the reason in terms of
grasping experiences.
Third, I discuss Lewis’s use of the metaphor of light to demonstrate the
necessity of an outer source of illumination for reason. Fourth, I turn to
how this applies to his understanding of the influence of the prevailing
model of the universe, grasped through the imagination, upon the ability
of the rational faculty to understand the nature of that universe. Both sec-
tions demonstrate how Lewis not only prioritized the imagination over
reason, but how he cast the imagination as forming the backdrop against
which the reason must work. Reason is not only inadequate to fully grasp
what is perceived by the imagination, but the imagination shapes the very
context within which reason operates.
Fifth, I conclude by examining what Lewis believed to be the high
stakes of the proper ordering of imagination and reason. Lewis adhered to
a Platonic understanding of the “chest” as the seat of the emotions
through which the rational faculty rules the appetite. Whatever value rea-
son may have, it is consequential insofar as a man’s sentiments are rightly
ordered by the imagination. The rationalists’ devaluing of the imagination
is dangerous because it abolishes the center of man and, ironically,
164 L. C. SHEAHAN
compromises the efficacy of reason itself. Like Irving Babbitt, Lewis

believed that the imagination was the real key to human understanding
and, subsequently, human action.21 Claes Ryn writes of Babbitt’s concep-
tion of the imagination, that it “gives man a sense of the very essence of
life, most importantly the moral order of existence.”22 The very same
could be said of Lewis’s conception.
“Looking At” Versus “Looking Along”

Lewis believed narrative fiction better at conveying truth than rational
argument by making truth experiential, helping the rational faculty to
“look along” Christian beliefs, rather than to “look at” them. Lewis
explained the difference between “looking at” and “looking along” as two
types of cognitive experience in a brief essay titled “Meditations in a Tool
Shed.” He begins the essay describing himself standing in a toolshed with
a sunbeam coming through a crack in the top of the door. Specks of dust
drift through the shaft, but all else is mostly dark. Lewis writes, “I was see-
ing the beam, not seeing things by it.”23 But then he moves and stands in
the shaft. Immediately the specks of dust disappear and he sees through
the crack above the door to the world outside. He sees green leaves against
the blue sky and, beyond that, the sun. He is now looking along the beam.
He writes, “Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very
different experiences.”24
Lewis follows up with a few poignant examples of how this distinction
functions in cognition. A young man falls in love. To him, a few minutes
of light conversation with this girl is better than a thousand favors from
any other. The young man is “looking along” the experience called “being
in love.” A neuroscientist looks at the young man and says that the experi-
ence is due to his genetic makeup and hormonal responses to the biologi-
cal need for sex and procreation. The latter figure is “looking at” the
young man’s experience from the outside. “That is the difference between
looking along the sexual impulse and looking at it,”25 Lewis writes.
Another example includes a mathematician who contemplates figures and
the neuroscientist who notes that what the mathematician thinks is a mat-
ter of “timeless and spaceless truths about quantity” is really just electrical
pulses in his gray matter.26
These two types of experiencing the same phenomenon raise a ques-
tion. “Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you the most
about the thing?”27 The idea of “looking at” is associated with science and
reason and the experience of “looking along” is associated with the imagi-
native and poetic interpretation of real experiences. Lewis is making two
points here. The first is that, contrary to what many think, both ways of
“looking” are means of grasping reality. Both are telling us true things. We
do not necessarily need to choose between them. The second is a subtler
point. It is that “looking along” is the more fundamental experience, the
more essential point. The experience of “looking at” is only relevant
because the “looking along” has occurred. The neuroscientist is only
interested in what is happening in the smitten young man’s brain because
he has already been felled by Cupid’s arrow, or in the mathematician’s
because the mathematician has already done figures. The primary thing
that is being “looked at” is one of concrete experiencing grasped through
the imaginative narrative of the one who is “looking along” the experience.
Now certainly the imaginative experience of “looking along” has led
many astray. Many have fallen in love with an unlovely person, or been
drawn away from accurate academic assessments by what turns out at bot-
tom to be a psychological bias. But the whole point of “looking at” some-
thing, reasoning about it, is to think more accurately about that thing, as
a check on the primary experience of the imagination. But it doesn’t fol-
low that the primary experience itself is therefore invalid. In fact, the sec-
ond type of looking, Lewis points out, is still a type of seeing. “Looking at”
also depends upon a fundamental belief in the accuracy of sight, just as
“looking along” does. If the neuroscientist points out that the calculations
of the mathematician are not a reflection of reality but only electric pulses
in the mathematician’s brain, a second neuroscientist could come along
and say the same about the first neuroscientist, that his analysis of the
mathematician’s brain is not an accurate assessment, but only the result of
electrical impulses in his gray matter. And of course, a third neuroscientist
would have to say the same about the second, and so on in perpetuity.
Lewis asks, “Where is the rot to end?”28 His answer is, “that we must
never allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the
very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer
or better than looking along. One must look both along and at every-
thing.”29 Reason and imagination are not at odds but two mutually rein-
forcing ways of approaching truth. Nonetheless, it is the imagination that
takes precedence.
In many ways Lewis’s work can be categorized as either “looking at” or
“looking along” his own beliefs, approaching subjects both through fic-
tion and non-fiction, giving his readers an exposition of a subject by
166 L. C. SHEAHAN
“looking at” it in a scholarly or apologetic treatise as well as the experience

of “looking along” the same subject through narrative fiction. He says this
explicitly in the preface to That Hideous Strength (1945), the third install-
ment of the Ransom Trilogy, writing that the book is making the same
points through fiction that he made in his non-fiction work The Abolition
of Man (1943).30 Something similar could be said about his arguments in
Mere Christianity and Miracles and the fantastical storytelling in The
Chronicles of Narnia. The narrative fiction helps his readers “look along”
his Christian beliefs and the apologetic pieces help them “look at” them.
Transposition
A similar approach Lewis takes, and one that also demonstrates why ratio-
nalism as such is less adequate to fully grasping reality than is the imagina-
tion, is explained in his essay “Transposition.” Lewis is writing about the
difficulty in translating higher theological realities, those of heaven, into
the language of lower realities, our common experiences on earth. He is
describing how “looking at” something may be not only different from
“looking along,” but inferior in an important sense. Lewis writes, “The
transposition of the richer into the poorer must, so to speak, be algebra-
ical, not arithmetical. If you are to translate from a language which has a
large vocabulary into a language that has a small vocabulary, then you
must be allowed to use several words in more than one sense.”31
Experiences of aesthetic delight, for example, are often described in terms
of physical sensations, even nausea. But, of course, positive aesthetic expe-
riences are not like getting sick but they do bring with them an unsettling
of the diaphragm, which is also part of the experience of nausea.32 When
we contemplate the higher experience of aesthetic delight we must trans-
late the experience into language that is not quite up to the task, that does
not have the breadth of meaning appropriate to these higher pleasures.
Lewis uses the metaphor of languages and music to demonstrate this
point.33 If one language has twenty-two vowel sounds and it is written in
an alphabet with only five vowels, then to express the same sound one
must use one vowel in the written alphabet to represent several in the
spoken. Or if a click language with dozens of consonant sounds is written
an alphabet with far fewer, then some of the consonant sounds are simply
lost. One consonant sound in the new alphabet must stand for several in
the old. If music written for an orchestra is only played upon a piano, the
piano rendition must necessarily transpose the music written for a
multitude of wind and string instruments into music played with only ten
fingers on only one instrument, condensing a larger musical experience
into a more limited medium.34 What results may be the same score, but
the fullness of the musical experience will not be completely realized.
Where there was to be a violin or a flute there will be only the piano and
where there were dozens of instruments there will only be one. It may be
the same notes and the same melodies, but it isn’t the same musical experi-
ence. The rational faculty operates on a sort of lower level, a smaller
vocabulary, a more limited vowel and consonant system, a single instru-
ment instead of a whole orchestra. It cannot capture the fullness of reality,
especially regarding the ultimate reality of the Christian faith. To commu-
nicate these higher realities one must use symbols and metaphors, lower
things signifying the higher.35
The rationalists who value reason above all else present another prob-
lem for Lewis. They are like the person hearing a musical score on a piano
who is unaware that the score was intended to be played by an orchestra
and, what’s more, doubts that such a thing as an orchestra exists. He can-
not imagine the violins, flutes, and trumpets executing the score in har-
mony and, furthermore, he does not know that such instruments exist or
how they differ in sound from the piano. Or like someone who reads a
passage written in an alphabet with five vowels but is intended to be spo-
ken in a language with twenty-two vowel sounds, but who is unaware of a
language with more than five vowels and cannot imagine that such a thing
exists. Those who adhere to this thin sort of rationalism cannot explain the
higher realities that we experience. The fact that we struggle to translate
these experiences into communicable concepts does not mean that they
are not real, but that they are beyond the grasp of our rational capacity. To
be contemplated these experiences must be transposed into a lower
medium with a more limited vocabulary that is not entirely adequate to a
full expression of those realities.
For Lewis, the remedy is not to contemplate these truths per se, but to
help people experience them or something like them, demonstrate through
symbol and metaphor the reality of the orchestra or the twenty-two letter
vowels sounds. Lewis’s appeal through both his apologetic work and,
more effectively, through his imaginative fiction is to present his readers
with other possibilities, with a vision of the world where Christianity is
true, but not explicit, experienced, but not contemplated. By presenting
this greater whole the non-rational but real experiences of ordinary life
begin to make sense within a larger imaginative framework, which for
168 L. C. SHEAHAN
Lewis included the Christian worldview. This is what Charles Peirce called
abduction,36 “the process by which we observe certain things, and work
out what intellectual framework might make sense of them.”37 This abduc-
tive process reveals “the role of the imagination in generating possible
schemes of things within which experience and observation might be
accommodated.”38 Needless to say, the imaginative constructs may be
inaccurate. But it is only through these constructs that the right imagina-
tive construct, one that actually grasps reality in its fullness, can be pre-
sented. Lewis’s own faith in Christianity began because he believed it
made sense of what he and other human beings actually experienced in the
world.39 His fiction from Out of the Silent Planet (1937) to The Chronicles
of Narnia to Till We Have Faces (1956) can all be understood as being
written in this vein. These works are not arguments for Christianity, but an
abductive presentation, an imaginative rendering of what a world might
be like were Christianity true.
Lewis’s idea of transposition is closely related to his discussion of “look-
ing at” and “looking along.” To put transposition in those terms, “look-
ing at” some truths, especially theological or spiritual truths, is not just
different from “looking along” the same truths, but it may be intrinsically
poorer because the medium of communication is less precise, poorer in
some way. In “Meditations in a Tool Shed” Lewis is merely pointing out
that the two experiences are not mutually exclusive in grasping reality. But
in “Transposition” he is going further to explain the inferiority of “look-
ing at” to “looking along,” especially in the highest realms of knowledge
and experience, such as aesthetics, love, and theology.
Both Lewis’s concepts of “looking at” and “looking along” and “trans-
position” between higher and lower modes of knowing bear a resemblance
to the distinction Eric Voegelin makes between the “engendering experi-
ence” of order and the symbolization of that experience. The “engender-
ing experience” is the original experience of divine order. These experiences
are rare in human history, taking place in the revelation of Israel and the
advent of Athenian philosophy, so they must take symbolical form to be
preserved for future generations.40 Voegelin describes symbolization as
“the attempt at making the essentially unknowable order of being intelli-
gible as far as possible through the creation of symbols which interpret the
unknown by analogy with the really, or supposedly, known.”41 The ratio-
nal faculty symbolizes through language what the imagination perceives
through the primary experience. But the process of symbolization can be
confusing, incomplete, and even distorting,42 especially when the
symbols—mere descriptions of the primary experiences of order—are mis-

taken for the reality of order itself.43 Any symbolization is inadequate to
the full expression of the engendering experience, but the attempt must be
made nonetheless to preserve the original experience of order for future
generations. To be effective in connecting the person to the engendering
experience, the symbolization must imaginatively relay the grasp of the
experience, communicating its meaning.44 Both “symbolization” and
“transposition” are terms that denote the attempt to describe participa-
tion in being in terms that are second order realities, but that attempt to
capture the original experience, even to recreate it. Lewis and Voegelin
both perceived inadequacies in such attempts. When we are “looking at”
something through symbol, myth, or doctrine, we must remember that
that is the secondary experience to “looking along” the same truth, the
same primary experience.45
The Metaphor of Light

Through the discussions in “Meditations in a Tool Shed” and
“Transposition” Lewis is demonstrating that reason and imagination are
not mutually exclusive in their grasp of truth and that the imagination may
in some circumstances be a superior mode of knowing, especially in grasp-
ing the most important things, although elsewhere Lewis depicts the
imagination as even more fundamental to reason than what has been
described so far. For Lewis, the imagination conceives the backdrop
against which reason must work, producing the bundle of assumptions
that forms the substance of our perception of the world about which we
reason. We will examine this rather difficult aspect in Lewis’s work through
a discussion of his use of the metaphor of light and his understanding of
the model of the universe.
Lewis explores how the imagination functions in relation to reason
through the metaphor of light.46 He famously writes at the end of his essay
“Is Theology Poetry?” “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun
has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything
else.”47 There is a difference for Lewis between seeing something and the
thing by which one sees, which demonstrates in another way how he
believed reason to be the junior partner in the search for truth. McGrath
writes, “The image of light allowed Lewis to emphasize the derivative
ability of the mind to comprehend.”48 Reason helps us to see things, to
understand them. But just like the eyes require light by which to see, so
170 L. C. SHEAHAN
reason requires a source of illumination by which it may behold the truths

of reality. Christianity, for Lewis, provided the central light that allowed
him to see, to make sense of the world around him. There are, of course,
other ways by which one may attempt to see other sources of light besides
Christianity. But there is only one sun. Lewis’s approach to apologetics
reflects the understanding that the light cast by these other stars does not
make sense of the world in the way that Christianity does. The metaphor
of a source of light separate from the activity of “seeing” demonstrates
that pre-rational source of intellectual illumination. Sure, we need eyes to
see, but our eyes are irrelevant if we do not have a light by which they may
behold the things around us. Furthermore, the quality of the source of
light will greatly affect the ability of our eyes to perceive. The rational
faculty will not operate effectively, will not behold reality accurately, unless
the light by which it sees is from a reliable source, the true sun rather than
a false star with a partial spectrum that limits what the rational faculty may
apprehend. To see things rightly, one must be seeing by the right light.
McGrath writes, “[T]he ability of reason to illuminate things is itself a
consequence of it already having been illumined by the Divine reason.
Reason is not autonomous, especially in relation to the things of God. It
must be enabled to see; otherwise, it sees only dimly, if at all.”49
This understanding of reason is sharply contrasted with the movement
that more than any other claimed the ocular metaphor: the Enlightenment.
For Lewis, many Enlightenment thinkers were blinded by their reliance
upon an abstract rationalism, conceiving reason as independent of culture
and tradition as well as authoritative above all other means of perceiving
truth. This type of rationalism “reduces reality to abstractions in order to
master it [rather than] see[ing] something as it really is.”50 Reason was
important to Lewis, but his conception of it was contextualized within a
deeper understanding of how one must grasp reality. “Lewis was con-
cerned to affirm the importance of reason, while avoiding the aesthetically
bleak and metaphysically austere vision of reality resulting from an exag-
geration of reason’s power and a failure to comprehend the importance of
other human mental faculties—above all, the imagination.”51
The Model of the Universe

Lewis’s use of the metaphor of light was derived from his realization that
“what he was able to ‘see’ was shaped “by a controlling worldview which,
in effect, determined what he saw.”52 Lewis writes that the “interpretation
of experiences depends on preconceptions.”53 Those preconceptions are

shaped by the fundamental model governing the mind’s perception of the
universe. Lewis writes in The Discarded Image, “[I]n every age the human
mind is deeply influenced by the accepted Model of the universe.”54 Every
age has a model, the “backcloth of the arts” that shapes the imagination
and the emotions of all who live under it.55 Ours is shaped by Freud and
Einstein. We live in a universe that is empty and silent. The heavenly bod-
ies are “pitch-black and dead-cold vacuity.”56 But medieval man lived in a
universe that was warm, full of life and music. Rather than empty space,
the universe was composed of spheres, each governed by its own intelli-
gences that in turn were driven to their circular rotations by a love that
sought to participate in its object by imitating it. The regular rotation in a
circle is the most perfect shape, one that mimics the perfection of God.57
The model of the universe cannot help but to have a profound emo-
tional effect on those who believe in it. Medieval man who looked up at
the stars and wondered at the nature of the universe was “like a man being
conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless
sea.”58 To the medieval mind, morality and theology were knit into the
very structure of the universe. Each of the spheres was oriented by its love
of God and indeed the whole universe was surrounded by the outer sphere
which was itself where God dwelt. All higher intelligences were oriented
toward God and not toward the earth. The earth was at the center of the
universe but the universe was conceived as sort of funnel, with the center
at the bottom. When man looked up, he was indeed looking up in a defini-
tive sense, up a stairway to a majestic spectacle towering above him.59
Lewis writes, “Man looked up at a patterned, populous, intricate, finite
cosmos; a builded thing, not a wilderness; ‘heaven’ or ‘spheres,’ not
‘space.’”60 Looking up at the stars was to behold a feast, an opera, or a
dance.61 In such a universe, disbelieving in God was nearly imaginatively
impossible. How could He not exist when one looked up and saw the
entire universe encompassed by His existence and ordered toward His will?
Contrast this to modern man who looks up to see the vast coldness and
emptiness of space, infinite in its chaos, with no center as such and no
order. The planets move in imperfect elliptical rotations for reasons that
have nothing to do with divine order and morality, let alone love. Man
beholds his place in the universe with terror and bewilderment, perceiving
no meaning in the vast coldness and emptiness of space, populated only by
planetary debris and balls of burning gas that would kill him if he were
even capable of coming within millions of miles of them. Such a model
172 L. C. SHEAHAN
cannot help but to make his life seem meaningless, rather than moral. In
such a universe, believing in God is imaginatively difficult. How could one
maintain belief in God’s existence when one looks up and sees the vast
emptiness of space with no moral order and with no apparent place or
need for Him?
Of course, the new model is more accurate as far as physical observa-
tions go. But for Lewis, it may be less accurate in its depiction of the moral
nature of the universe and humanity’s place within it. The benefit of the
old model is that it provided a backdrop which made sense of the actual
experience of human beings with each other and with God. The new
model affects the emotions in a way that may lead to distortion of moral
reality rather than a more accurate grasp of it. While we can no longer
believe the literal physical medieval model of the planets, it may yet serve
as a constellation of permanent spiritual symbols that help us to under-
stand the moral nature of the world around us.62
The preservation of permanent spiritual symbols is the key to under-
standing all of Lewis’s imaginative works. Michael Ward presents a strong
argument that The Chronicles of Narnia was Lewis’s attempt to help mod-
erns live in, to experience, to “look along,” a universe that is oriented
toward God according to “the discarded image” of the medieval model of
the universe.63 According to Ward, in each Narnia book Lewis is attempt-
ing to show the readers what it feels like to believe in such a thing by
depicting a world imbued with the qualities of each of the planetary
spheres. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis helps his readers
to “look along” the Jovial spirit,64 in Prince Caspian the Martial, in The
Voyage of the Dawn Treader the Solar, and so on. While we do not have
space to explore fully Ward’s case, our point here is one that is widely
accepted in Lewis scholarship: Lewis believed that one’s imaginative back-
drop would dispose one toward moral truth or away from it. Like Babbitt,
Lewis understood that the imaginative backdrop could prove illusory as
well as illuminating. Reason tends only to prove postulates that one is
already predisposed to accept. Ryn writes, “Reasoning that builds on dis-
torted imagination may be formally brilliant but will present illusions.”65
But Lewis believed literature can shape the imaginative backdrop and
good literature can make moral reality palatable to reason. Lewis writes,
“Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors,”66 by which he
means that literature is a way to see truth and even to enter into it. An
imaginative tale can give one the experience of truth, even if that truth is
contrary to one’s professed beliefs. By providing the true meaning of the
world in a deeper imaginative sense literature can prepare it to accept

propositional truths. Lewis pointed out that in his own childhood he
rejected religion at least partially because he was told he ought to believe
it. Being told one ought to show reverence for something is a good way of
making someone, especially a child, withhold the required reverence. But
through fairy stories, Lewis thought, he might “steal past those watchful
dragons,” to communicate the true meaning of the world and what he
believed to be the truth of Christianity to those predisposed to reject
Christian theological propositions.67 These stories could give the experi-
ence of living in a world where the medieval planetary scheme is true in a
moral sense and where Christianity is true in a theological sense. A person
under that influence would then be more open to the propositional pre-
sentation of moral and theological truths.
The Abolition of Man

We have explained above what Lewis thought about reason and its limited
ability to grasp truth. But his concern is not merely academic. Exalting the
rational, over what I have called here the imaginative strikes to the very
heart of what makes man, man. In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis
examines a trend in education that denigrates the tendency to insist on
correct emotional responses to certain things or to certain pieces of litera-
ture. It is not, this view holds, that a sunset demands a response of rever-
ence for its sublimity, it is that any sublime feelings are simply the subjective
response of the viewer. According to this view, to encourage students to
feel rightly, they will inevitably be weakened in their ability to think rightly.
But, Lewis writes, “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a
weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from
the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to
cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false
sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.”68 Rather than irrational as such,
some sentiments are appropriate for some things. They are signposts
directing us toward truth and the real meaning of the universe. Maybe a
sunset really does demand an emotional response that regards such a thing
as sublime. The rejection of this view in general is to reject truth and
goodness as such. Lewis calls this body of fundamental truths and primary
goods the Tao.
This tendency to quash sentiments derived from the imagination is to
bereave persons of the ability to control their appetites. While Plato may
174 L. C. SHEAHAN
have been right that Reason ought to rule, it only rules through the chest,
the imaginative seat of the emotions. Lewis writes, “[I]t is by this middle
element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his
appetite mere animal.”69 The result of such an education is to produce
“men without chests,” men who do not have this middle element, this
ability to control their appetites. It is wrong to call them intellectuals,
Lewis writes, “It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous
emotion that marks them out.”70
If we extirpate this essential element, what we get is not a more reason-
able populace, but one that cannot be governed by reason at all. In the
final analysis to reduce everything to reason by eliminating the seat of
emotion and imagination is to abolish the ability of the rational faculty to
rule, which simply allows the appetite full reign. When we have eliminated
the emotive power of Justice and Goodness we are left with only “I want.”
We are left only with the rule of appetite, the part of the man that he
shares with the beasts. Focusing only upon the rational side of man abol-
ishes man as man, depriving him of the very ability to be rational. In other
words, focusing only on “looking at” rather than “looking along” destroys
the ability to even do that.
Conclusion
Lewis writes in “On the Reading of Old Books,” “Every age has its own
outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to
make certain mistakes.”71 The rational faculty operates in each age to
affirm the spirit of the age and it is rejected when it works against it.72
Rather than guiding the search for truth, reason relies upon an imagina-
tive framework which determines what it reasons about and prejudices its
conclusions. This is the difference in priority that Lewis posited between
“looking at” and “looking along.” Our reason is constricted to “look at”
what the model of the universe has determined our imagination must
“look along.” And the light by which we see, by which we are able to
“look along” will to a great extent determine what we see. McGrath
writes, “This is one of the reasons why Lewis appealed to the imagina-
tion—not to retreat into irrationality, but to escape the austerity of a
purely rational view of reality, which could only offer a partial and inade-
quate account of things.”73 Lewis’s friend, Austin Farrier described read-
ing Lewis thus, “We think we are listening to an argument; in fact, we are
presented with a vision, and it is the vision that carries conviction.”74
Notes
1. This comment was written about W.T. Kirkpatrick, the tutor of Lewis’s
youth, but it applied equally to him. James Como, Branches to Heaven: The
Geniuses of C.S. Lewis (Dallas, TX: Spence Publishing, 1998), 40.
2. Como, Branches, 140.
3. Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis—A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
(Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2013), 255.
4. Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of
C.S. Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 219.
5. Como, Branches, 169.
6. Alister McGrath, The Intellectual World of C.S. Lewis (Chichester, West
Sussex: Wiley and Sons, 2014), 134.
7. I provide a similar account of this incident and its importance to Lewis
scholarship in Luke Sheahan, “The Intellectual Kinship of Irving Babbitt
and C.S. Lewis: Will and Imagination in That Hideous Strength,”
Humanitas Vol. XXIX: Nos. 1&2 (2016), 11–13.
8. For scholars who argue this perspective, see A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A
Biography, (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1990) and
George Sayer, Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times (San Francisco, CA: Harper
& Row Publishers, 1988).
9. Lewis was here picking up on an argument by J.B.S. Haldane, a leading
naturalist of the day, who was discomfited by the idea that his own thoughts
were the product of random chance and therefore, logically, untrust-
worthy. McGrath, Lewis, 252.
10. This is according to Oxford philosopher J.R. Lucas who played the part of
Lewis in a repeat of the debate over naturalism with Anscombe in the late
1960s. He further noted that Lewis was too much of a gentleman when
dealing with a “bully” like Anscombe and that he (Lucas) knew how to
take her to task. McGrath, Lewis, 256.
11. A.N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography, 220. “The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe grew out of Lewis’s experience of being stung back into child-
hood by his defeat at the hands of Elizabeth Anscombe at the Socratic
Club.” Wilson also holds that the White Witch was based on Anscombe. A
view for which he provides no support and one that has been explicitly
rejected by later biographers. See, for examples, McGrath, Lewis, 255–6,
and Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
(New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2005), 231–6.
12. Jacobs, Narnian, 232.
13. McGrath, Lewis, 255.
14. C.S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Harper
Collins Publishers, 1982), 79.
176 L. C. SHEAHAN
15. Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward, eds., The Cambridge Companion to
C.S. Lewis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 266.
McGrath, Lewis, 265–6.
16. McGrath, Lewis, 255.
17. Ward, Planet Narnia, 221.
19. Lewis writes in an essay titled “Christian Apologetics,” “nothing is more
dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist.” C.S. Lewis,
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. by Walter Hooper
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 103.
20. Quoted in McGrath, Lewis, 260. Lewis wanted Anscombe to speak on the
topic “Why I believe in God.”
21. See generally Sheahan, “Intellectual Kinship.”
22. Claes G. Ryn, Will, Imagination & Reason: Babbitt, Croce and the Problem
of Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 152.
23. Lewis, God in the Dock, 212.
25. Lewis, God in the Dock, 212. Emphasis in original.
30. C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing
Co. Inc., 1965), 7.
31. C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York, NY:
Harper Collins, 1980), 99.
32. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 96–7.
33. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 99.
34. Lewis, God in the Dock, 100–1.
36. Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul
Weiss. 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960). Peirce’s
primary discussion of abduction can be found in volume 5, pp. 171–94.
McGrath makes the connection between Lewis and Peirce’s approach,
although we don’t have evidence that Lewis was familiar with Peirce’s
work. See McGrath, Intellectual World, 119–20.
37. McGrath, Intellectual World, 120.
40. Voegelin sees the two great symbolizations as microcosmos and macroan-
thropos, which describe roughly the experience of men in society as “the
cosmos writ small” or as “man writ large.” Eric Voegelin, Order and
History, Vol. 1: Israel and Revelation (Louisiana State University Press,

1956), 5–6.
41. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 5.
42. Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 8.
43. Such as when symbols become ideological creeds. Eric Voegelin, The New
Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1952), 30.
44. Michael Federici, Eric Voegelin (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), 104–5.
45. As Michael Federici points out in his essay on Voegelin in this volume,
Voegelin believed that these second-order realities were dangerous distor-
tions of reality.
46. This is an under-studied aspect of Lewis’s thought. McGrath, Intellectual
World, 83. “Curiously, Lewis scholarship has paid surprisingly little atten-
tion to the way in which Lewis privileges metaphors relating to sun, light,
vision, and shadows in his writings.”
47. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 140.
48. McGrath, Intellectual World, 95. Italics in original.
50. McGrath, Intellectual Worlds, 95–6. McGrath is comparing Lewis’s under-
standing to that of David Michael Levin. See David Michael Levin, The
Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York:
Routledge), 1988, 440.
51. McGrath, Intellectual Worlds, 95.
54. C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and
Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2015), 222.
55. Lewis, The Discarded Image, 14.
60. C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. by Walter
Hooper (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7.
61. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 59–60.
63. Ward gathers an impressive array of sources from Lewis’s scholarship,
poems, and fictional accounts to demonstrate the planetary schemes
throughout his work.
65. Ryn, Will, Imagination and Reason, 222.
178 L. C. SHEAHAN
66. C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 2015), 138.
67. C.S. Lewis, Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70.
68. C.S. Lewis, Abolition of Man (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1974), 13–14.
69. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 25.
70. Lewis, Abolition of Man, 25.
74. Quoted in McGrath, Intellectual World, 139.
CHAPTER 12
Hayek: Postatomic Liberal
Nick Cowen
I believe F. A. Hayek was the most important social theorist of the twen-
tieth century. Yet his work was premised on a rejection of the rationalist
trend prevalent during his lifetime. Hayek wrote remarkably broadly
across several disciplines.1 His social theory harks back to the Scottish
Enlightenment while his political views align with nineteenth-century lib-
eralism. Nevertheless, I will argue, his epistemology and ontology have
more in common with the post-modernism, systems theory and complex-
ity theory of much contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship.
In what sense is Hayek an anti-rationalist? Hayek might appear moder-
ate in the anti-rationalist tradition. While more verbose than contempo-
rary economists, he often avoided emotive rhetoric for abstract argument
and technical analysis. His political theory includes a general commitment
to the rule of law (at least with respect to any large-scale social order),
voluntary contracting and private property. This limits space for local par-
ticularism. His chief intellectual opponents are not Kantians (from whom
he draws inspiration himself) but the constructivist rationalism of Russell,
Wells, Saint-Simon and Comte who have few explicit supporters even
among contemporary socialists.2 His key political enemies are generally
N. Cowen (*)
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
e-mail: ncowen@lincoln.ac.uk

180 N. COWEN
not piecemeal reformers but revolutionary socialists, authoritarian nation-

alists and central planners.
Although this latter view is defensible, in this chapter, I indicate some
of the ways in which Hayek’s approach offers a deeper conceptual critique
of rationalism than is often assumed. I begin with a sketch of the rational-
ist worldview and some critiques that bear a family resemblance to Hayek’s.
Then I outline Hayek’s alternative vision through his psychology, episte-
mology and ontology, economic and social theory, and his politics. I end
with some indications about where this paradigm takes contemporary
Hayekian research.
The Rationalist Worldview

Let us begin with a slightly gross description of how the common-sense,
practical, rationalist philosopher goes about fitting her normative theory
to social reality. The origins of the standard view lie in the philosophic
radicalism of the nineteenth century, the birth of professional philosophy
and economics among self-appointed destroyers of dogma and stale ortho-
doxy. On this account, there is a mind-independent universe composed of
physical objects based on consistent laws of nature that become progres-
sively more accessible to human understanding through scientific analysis.
This is a deterministic universe of facts that corresponds with reasonable
regularity to our experience and shared language, especially when we allow
our fallible individual perceptions to be corrected as needed by the scien-
tific method.
Some of these objects are bodies endowed with life, and the capacity to
feel and act. While still subject to natural laws, these experiencing beings
are the ultimate and only source of moral concern. Human agents are
normally taken to be the most important sources of value either absolutely
or to be generally prioritized because of their capacity for rational thought
and moral agency. We impute value to objects in the physical universe
based on the interests living beings have in them. As physical objects stand
in a deterministic relationship with each other, so do rational agents stand
in a moral relationship with each other. Moral agents have the capacity to
do each other right and wrong. While debates rage within the rationalist
tradition as to whether deontological, contractualist or consequentialist
meta-ethics are better accounts on which to ground morality, they share
this common notion that what matters is a distinct category of living sub-
jects in an otherwise lifeless world.
12 HAYEK: POSTATOMIC LIBERAL 181
Mediating the physical reality of objects and the reality of rational per-
sons endowed with moral worth, there lies social reality: the norms and
institutions through which persons interact. These social facts have their
own generalizations and logical structures, although they are blurrier and
more contestable than facts of nature. Moral progress is found in the eval-
uation and reform of these social relationships so that they can better serve
the fundamental interests of individuals. What rationalism offers is a dis-
tinct division of epistemic labor with natural scientists establishing the
objective conditions within which society must operate, social scientists
examining the outcomes of social arrangements and public policies, and
ethicists evaluating the conduct of individuals and the overall aims of social
institutions.
Rationalism’s Discontents
There is pushback against this account. Wittgenstein (incidentally Hayek’s
second cousin) showed that language cannot refer to discrete features of
the world but only to family resemblances that are elaborated through
language games.3 Catholic philosophers, such as Charles Taylor and
Alasdair MacIntyre, reject the idea that a science of human behavior can
be modeled on natural science and try to locate value in organic, social
practices and community relations rather than individual subjective experi-
ence.4 Judith Butler peels back the edges of social and naturalistic distinc-
tions, particularly Beauvoir’s binary between biological sex and socially
constructed gender, to argue that common scientific understandings of
biological distinctions do not follow naturally from neutral scientific analy-
sis but are the result of social relations and power dynamics.5 Pragmatists
and anti-foundationalists like Richard Rorty reject the fact/value distinc-
tion, proposing that all social scientific practices are value-laden.6
Despite these criticisms and concerns, the rationalist worldview prevails
because it is tractable for students and attractive to the class of intellectuals
that wish to make a positive mark in the world of public affairs. It sets up
an informal binary between an educated, progressive, scientifically
informed class of people active in public policy and the relatively less-
informed masses who can be presumed to cling to various illusions and
emotions. Nevertheless, on reflection, the rationalist worldview is rather
odd. It asks us to imagine that reality is constituted by a disenchanted
material world that contains within it pockets of fundamental normative
significance, the most important contained within the skulls of a subset of
182 N. COWEN
living hominids. This is not exactly Cartesian dualism, but it looks suspi-
ciously like a derivative of it. What if it turned out these foundations were
as contestable and subject to historical contingency as discourses founded
in mythology or theology?
Moreover, it is easy for the disenchantment inherent in the description
of the supposed physical universe to spread and undermine the conceptual
foundations of morality. The more deterministic explanation of human
behavior we find and accept, the less responsibility, individuality and vital-
ity we appear to be able to attribute to people. All individual attributes,
habits and decisions seem ultimately subject to rational deterministic expla-
nations founded in genetics, nurture and arbitrary external forces. Pushed
to a logical conclusion, one struggles to identify what exactly is supposed
to be special about human agency. In modern philosophy, free will appears
more like an epiphenomenon or an illusion, leaving only our passive expe-
riencing selves as supposedly valuable sites of moral worth. With such ten-
uous metaphysical foundations tethering human values to supposed
physical reality, it is unsurprising that philosophers may ultimately succumb
to an empirical realism, hard determinism and moral relativism.
Developments in natural science also challenge the warrant for accept-
ing this rationalist worldview. New insights from quantum physics suggest
the search for observer-independent fundamental entities in nature may
ultimately fail.7 The observer, for the time being at least, is back in the
model of fundamental physics. In the following, I try to show how Hayek’s
skeptical perspective can cope with this apparent lack of foundations for
our most basic beliefs.
The Hayekian Alternative

Hayek offers a way of fighting the monster of Rationalism while avoiding
becoming an inscrutable monster oneself. The crucial move, and in this he
follows Hume,8 is to recognize the non-rational origins of most social
institutions, but treating this neither as grounds for dismissal of those
institutions as unsound, nor an excuse to retreat from reason altogether.
Indeed, reason itself has non-rational, emergent origins but is nevertheless
a marvelous feature of humanity. Anti-rationalist themes that appear
throughout Hayek’s work include an emphasis on learning by processes of
discovery, trial and error, feedback and adaptation rather than knowing by
abstract theorizing and the notion that the internal processes by which we
come to a particular belief or decision is more complex than either a
scientific experimenter or our own selves in introspection can know. We

are always, on some level, a mystery even to ourselves.
Psychology
A key to understanding Hayek’s perspective lies in The Sensory Order and
The Counter-Revolution of Science.9 Published in the middle of Hayek’s
life, these pieces critique the possibility of a direct parallel between a physi-
cal stimulus and a state of consciousness. This assumption lies at the core
of the psychological school of behaviorism, a positivist doctrine that insists
that only directly observable phenomena are capable of systematic analy-
sis, and that the only features of psychology that can be studied are
responses to external stimuli. This was at the time one of the animating
justifications for Scientism that allows social scientists and philosophers to
claim that they can reform society based on provable scientific laws.10
The behaviorist mistake is assuming that human perception can be
treated as if it was made up of simple experiences that can be identified as
primitive sense-data to be deployed experimentally, for example, the expe-
rience of seeing a red dot. Hayek’s argument was that even the most
apparently simple concepts as ‘red’ and ‘dot’ are not really primitives that
pop into one’s brain as a result of initial perception but rely on categories
hewn through memory, childhood training, education and ultimately
shared language. The growing, learning mind takes the unpredictable,
holistic, multi-sensory stream of experience and incrementally separates it
into cognizable patterns that allow us to impose some order and predict-
ability on sensation.11 People’s responses to stimuli are mediated by the
coincidence of other stimuli (no stimulus is ever present in total isolation),
their previous patterns of experience and their approach to categorization.
Because of the adaptive, experiential origins of these categories, they are
open to revision should the predictiveness of existing patterns break down.
They do not correspond to objective, mind-independent facts.
Epistemology and Ontology
The implications of this critique are substantial for epistemology more
generally. It implies that we can only apprehend the world through the
imposition of theoretical categories. This radicalizes the position of
Hayek’s intellectual forebears in the Scottish Enlightenment. Adam Smith
showed that everyday morality, as essential as it was for social
184 N. COWEN
coordination, was grounded in sentiments (equivalent almost to an aes-

thetic sense) that were subject to subjective distortions and could not be
expected to reflect a systematic underlying moral relationship.12
Hayek’s contribution is more fundamental, showing that our everyday
sensory perception is deeply rooted in our collective and individual adap-
tations as embodied beings. Our entire sensory experience is constitutively
tuned to pick out what our experience thus far has found to be relevant
features of the world, presumably including features that make us better fit
for individual and communal survival. Our models of the world are func-
tional for certain purposes, but we have no warrant to believe the patterns
and categories that make up our shared human world reflect a fundamen-
tal mind-independent universe. Even our category of the physical itself is
the result of intersubjective engagement rather than identifying an objec-
tive world with clarity and certainty.
From this austere standpoint, what can sensibly be discovered and
known? For this, Hayek believes that we can leverage our capacity for pat-
tern recognition. While we cannot ever have true knowledge of physical
objects, or their constitutive elements, we can gain substantial knowledge
about the structure of phenomena that we experience and perceive. We
can come to understand temporal orderings, one phenomenon following
another, as well as structural orders, the way that certain elements of our
experience must be in place together in a pattern to produce another phe-
nomenon. In one later paper, Hayek makes a helpful distinction between
concrete and abstract orders.13 Concrete orders are those we experience
and encounter, while abstract orders are the categories and models that we
develop that help us make sense of these encounters. A necessary feature
of concrete orders is they always have more dimensions and features to
them than we can apprehend. They are irreducibly complex. Abstract
orders, by contrast, are the simplified models and categories that we use to
make sense of our experience and communications with others.
We can explain this distinction with a suitably mundane example. We
feel like we have a firm idea of a blade of grass, certainly enough to spot
one adequately in the contexts in which we are likely to find one, whether
it is in a field or crumpled in our hair after a picnic. Nevertheless, we may
not so easily recognize grass in an unfamiliar context such as in a soup.
Unless we have botanic expertise, we will struggle to differentiate a sedge
or rush stem from a blade of grass. Each blade has different dimensions,
shapes and colors and each structure is unique on cursory inspection and
more radically so if we cared to look at the cellular structure. The most
accomplished botanist cannot fully understand just one blade because it is

irreducibly complex. Our firm idea is an abstract order of various phenom-
ena that are ordinarily adequate to recognize grass for our purposes. Grass
is not a real object but an intersubjectively determined category that indi-
cates certain phenomena.
This has implications for the sort of deliberate interventions we can
make too. We can cultivate a lawn in the sense that we can learn how to
order the basic conditions that will allow an example of a pattern that fits
our category of lawn to grow. What we cannot do is determine the precise
arrangement of the blades of grass constituting the lawn or the precise
formation of any individual blade.
Departing from Cartesian assumptions of atomistic individualism,14 this
account can seem solipsistic. When we are in the mode of thinking of our-
selves essentially as separate minds that relate to others through interac-
tions in a material world, then it feels important that we share that world
and are capable of clear communication about it and ourselves in order to
share a genuine connection with others. Otherwise, we are each in our
separate worlds of illusion. From a Hayekian skeptical standpoint, the
mind’s eye can seem to be a narrow slit through which shadows of an
external world make shallow, distorted impressions on a remote psyche.
Fortunately, this is not the implication once we dispose of the supposedly
foundational subject/object distinction. We can recognize subjecthood as
an abstract category, a product of a philosophy laden with abstruse theo-
logical baggage. The category is no more real than the blades of grass but
a perspective that happens to come to mind more easily in a philosophy
seminar. During most of our everyday experience, when we are not primed
to be so self-conscious and self-centered, the phenomenal experience of
ourselves and the environment is more continuous, flowing and irreduc-
ibly social in the sense that the categories that we use for interacting with
the world are constituted and remade through interactions with many
other minds.
Economic and Social Theory

What does this skeptical standpoint mean for understanding human soci-
ety? Like concrete orders more generally, human social arrangements and
practices are irreducibly complex, impossible for any individual to compre-
hend in detail. What makes them interesting is that they are constituted by
the physically unconstrained activities of human beings but nevertheless
186 N. COWEN
take on the form of systematic orderliness. Both the rationalist and the
social critic alike observe such orderliness and structure and presume that
society persists, both for better and for worse, through the exercise of
force, legal authority and other more subtle forms of power and ideologi-
cal influence.
Hayek offers an alternative account, again drawing on insights from the
Scottish Enlightenment. Most features of society are spontaneous orders:
social institutions and structures that are the result of human action but
not of design. These spontaneous orders, or emergent institutions (includ-
ing language, property, law and money), have all developed piecemeal
through individuals attempting to cooperate to solve various practical
problems. These unintentionally generate more systematic patterns of
conduct that are accepted initially because they solve coordination prob-
lems and thereafter because they become part of the background moral
and practical understandings of the people participating in them. Hence
these complex orders are typically established through unguided processes
rather than rational design. The most that a reasoning agent can do is
influence some of the background conditions and inputs that make a pat-
tern of such an order more likely to emerge.
These various institutions combine to create an environment in which
individuals can make use of knowledge that they do not personally pos-
sess.15 These institutions harness human capacity to recognize and follow
patterns of behavior to create a social order that expands the scale, scope
and complexity of cooperation among people who may otherwise be oper-
ating with profoundly different categorical models of the world. These
institutions include language but also more specifically classical liberal ele-
ments such as alienable property, voluntary contract and the price system.16
Property rights impose negative duties not to use a resource or interfere
with a bounded environment. This gives property owners the capacity to
work, manage, reconfigure and develop property for their own use. With
immunity from arbitrary seizure, the owner can specialize in getting the
most out of the environment over which they have exclusive control. This
specialization can take the form of traditional knowledge and practical
know-how as well as trial and error with feedback generated by the owner
bearing the costs of failure. Alienable property allows for it to be exchanged,
sub-divided or merged, allowing those most able to make use of an area or
resource to come into its legal possession. The addition of voluntary con-
tracting allows exchanges of property, goods and services to be made over
distance and time. One way of looking at this is to say that property and
contract institutions take the daunting complexity of the world and divide
it up into modules for which people can sensibly take responsibility using
the various categories of thought they have available to them.
For successful cooperation across a whole community, a society needs,
in addition, an open-ended scheme of market exchange with a price sys-
tem. Prices play two main roles in Hayek’s framework. The first is discern-
ible within the more mainstream neoclassical economic model. They are
public announcements of the going rate for goods and services, and espe-
cially standardized commodities across an economy. This is what allows
consumers and producers operating within their own sphere of responsi-
bility to appropriate resources produced elsewhere while economizing
based on the knowledge of scarcities as embedded in prices. The second is
as signals of potential profit opportunities. Producers do not have to treat
prices as given but as standards that can be surpassed if they can figure out
a way of acting more efficiently or creatively, often by utilizing local or
tacit knowledge that other market participants do not possess.17
Allowing the pursuit of profit opportunities has a familiar incentive
role. However, the fundamental role of realization of profit and loss is to
provide practical feedback that causes patterns of socially beneficial con-
duct to expand and be imitated while causing poorly performing practices
to shrink and stop. The trappings of rationality (such as foresight, alertness
and prudence) certainly help individual ventures to succeed but the pro-
cess is ultimately evolutionary: trial, error, selection and filtering. The
result is that from remarkably irrational starting assumptions, patterns of
conduct that look as if they were designed for their purposes can emerge.18
In fact, they are far too complex, adapted and orderly for any actual ratio-
nal agent to have successfully implemented them.
Contemporary economic research often treats the core puzzle to be
‘given human beings are fundamentally rational, why do so many act so
dumb?’ The natural implication, once answered, is that a great deal of
human conduct benefits from discretionary correction to make it more
appropriately rational.19 The Hayekian standpoint inverts the puzzle.20 It
asks, ‘given overwhelming limits to individual rationality and knowledge,
why is it that humans can end up acting as if they are so smart?’ It is the
marvel of widespread social cooperation one sees in a peaceful civil society
that requires explanation, not the individual mistakes and deviances within
it. Hence from a condition of profound ignorance and very limited ratio-
nality, a spontaneous order based on cooperation and free exchange, what
Hayek calls catallaxy, emerges.
188 N. COWEN
Political and Legal Theory

From these theoretical foundations emerge Hayek’s controversial political
theory and praxis. His most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, was a
warning in the aftermath of World War II that the Western world could
slide into Soviet-style authoritarianism through the introduction of a
planned economy within a formal democracy.21 What distinguished
Hayek’s argument was his reliance on the epistemic limits of democratic
institutions rather than the typical conservative fear that the voting masses
will simply vote to expropriate the wealthy, leading to poverty once people
stop producing in the absence of incentives. Hayek argues that the nature
of tacit knowledge means that a great deal of relevant information cannot
be utilized through anything other than a market process. Hence, the
replacement of market processes even with democratically accountable
state-run economies will rapidly disappoint and impoverish citizens even
in the ideal scenario where politicians and administrators act purely with
benevolent intent. Citizens will be faced with a difficult choice of return-
ing to the apparent disorder and uncertainty of markets and private prop-
erty, or putting their faith in an economic dictator. Only at this point
would the more unscrupulous individuals rise to the top as leaders as only
the most deceitful would be willing to promise prosperity for all just so
long as they were handed more personal power.
Hayek’s strident critiques of the very notion of social justice kept him
on the periphery of political philosophy.22 Hayek’s description of the rule
of law, freedom from arbitrary commands, penetrated mainstream legal
theory and his account is often treated as compelling enough to be
included as canon.23 Nevertheless, most liberals tend to see the rule of law
as one important political value among several others, with the likelihood
that it may frequently have to play second fiddle to the substantive aims of
the state such as the pursuit of equality or welfare. Liberals see Hayek as
too concerned with legal formalities rather than real interests. From their
perspective, the rule of law is an important constraint on state power but
that tying the hands of the state can equally threaten individual interests in
other ways, so it is a matter of judgment and discretion when the rule of
law should be privileged.
This misses Hayek’s distinctively epistemic basis for the rule of law and
the context of the more substantive aims of his liberal order. The rule of
law is not merely a formal constraint on state action but an objective to
achieve a state of civil society where there is a large private sphere allowing
people to act and plan on the basis of their own ends rather than on the
basis of the arbitrary decisions of others. While these conditions are sub-
jectively pleasant, at least for people who dislike coercion in private life,
what is more significant is that it is only in these conditions where the
spontaneous experimentation, competition and imitation of catallaxy per-
sist. Without this sphere, cooperation at the scale of a society breaks down
altogether.
Legacy and Future
What is the practical legacy of Hayek’s critique of rationalism? In the
twentieth century, Hayek’s views made him a decisively ‘rightwing’ figure.
He was a cold-war liberal implacably opposed to the Soviet Union who
inspired Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms in the United Kingdom
and defended Pinochet’s violent coup against a democratic socialist gov-
ernment in Chile.24 But history shows that political categories are subject
to revision. In the twentieth century, the political spectrum aligned on the
issue of state management of the economy with the right taking the
broadly anti-statist side. In the twenty-first century, the big divide may
turn out to be between a statist nationalism (more easily associated with
the right) and an open-ended cosmopolitanism. In this context, Hayek’s
anti-nationalism, more than his anti-socialism, may come to be more
salient.25 Hayek’s skepticism of applying rigid categories to concrete situ-
ations is more compatible with shifting plural identities of an open-ended
society (with permeable borders) than one predicated on abstract identities.
Although Hayekian insights resist formalization, Levy helps cast light
on the link between Hayek’s epistemology and political economy by com-
paring robust statistics to robust institutions.26 Robust statistics sacrifice
the precision of statistical estimates in order to reduce the scope for error
based on mistaken model assumptions. Similarly, robust institutions sacri-
fice the capacity to make optimal decisions in individual cases in order to
minimize costly errors across many cases. Preferring robust analyses and
decision processes at the expense of pin-point accuracy reflects Hayekian
skepticism of both the abstract assumptions and empirical data that go
into a model. If data is always tentative and subject to revision, then a
process that relies as little as possible on accurate inputs is less likely to
steer us wrong. Levy’s approach has helped to inspire the robust political
economy research agenda, the comparative analysis of institutions on the
basis of their capacity to deal with knowledge and incentive problems.27
190 N. COWEN
In political philosophy, Gaus is the most prominent contemporary

developer of Hayekian ideas.28 Compared to many of his peers in the dis-
cipline, Gaus emphasizes the risks, more so than the opportunities, of
attempting to implement utopian social theories based on abstract models,
especially in circumstances where there are numerous different moral cog-
nitive styles that individuals have within the same communities. Without
denying a role for evaluative judgments, this mode of theorizing is more
comfortable with the deep diversity of moral frameworks and the complex
cultural adaptations that one sees in the variety of human societies.
Following the tolerant Kukathas,29 Gaus offers a promising research
agenda for a social morality suitable for a globalized world where remark-
ably different cultures and mores are expected to find ways of peacefully
cooperating.
Notes
1. Bruce Caldwell, Hayek’s Challenge an Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Peter J. Boettke, F. A. Hayek:
Economics, Political Economy and Social Philosophy, Great Thinkers in
Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
2. Jeffrey Friedman, “Popper, Weber, and Hayek: The Epistemology and
Politics of Ignorance,” Critical Review 17, no. 1–2 (2005): 1–58.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1968).
4. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed
(Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); Charles
Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics
25, no. 1 (1971): 3–51.
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
Routledge Classics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
6. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1. paperback print
(Princeton, N. J: Princeton University Press, 1980).
7. Bernard d’Espagnat, “Quantum Physics and Reality,” Foundations of
Physics 41, no. 11 (November 2011): 1703–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10701-011-9582-z; Henry Margenau, The Nature of Physical Reality
(New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1950).
8. Donald W. Livingston, “Hayek as Humean,” Critical Review 5, no. 2
(March 1991): 159–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/08913819108443220
9. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations
of Theoretical Psychology (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1952);
The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason, 2d ed

(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1979).
10. Bruce Caldwell, “Some Reflections on F.A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order,”
Journal of Bioeconomics 6, no. 3 (2004): 245, https://doi.org/10.1007/
s10818-004-5505-9
11. Joaquín M. Fuster, “Hayek in Today’s Cognitive Neuroscience,” in
Advances in Austrian Economics, ed. Leslie Marsh, vol. 15 (Emerald Group
Publishing Limited, 2011), 3–11, https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-
2134(2011)0000015006
12. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and
A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of
Adam Smith 1 (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982); cf. Maria Pia
Paganelli, “The Moralizing Role of Distance in Adam Smith: The Theory
of Moral Sentiments as Possible Praise of Commerce,” History of Political
Economy 42, no. 3 (September 1, 2010): 425–41, https://doi.
org/10.1215/00182702-2010-019
13. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “Kinds of Order in Society,” New
Individualist Review, 1981, http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2493/
Hayek_KindsOrder1964.pdf
14. Tibor Machan, “Liberalism and Atomistic Individualism,” in Liberalism
(Springer, 2000), 79–99, http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/
978-94-015-9440-0_5
15. Friedrich A. von Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American
Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–30.
16. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty: Rules and Order,
Reprinted 1993, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 1973).
17. Israel M. Kirzner, “Entrepreneurial Discovery and the Competitive Market
Process: An Austrian Approach,” Journal of Economic Literature 35, no. 1
(1997): 60–85; Don Lavoie, “The Market as a Procedure for Discovery
and Conveyance of Inarticulate Knowledge,” Comparative Economic
Studies 28, no. 1 (1986): 1–19.
18. Vernon L Smith, “Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics,”
American Economic Review 93, no. 3 (June 2003): 465–508, https://doi.
org/10.1257/000282803322156954
19. Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about
Health, Wealth and Happiness (London: Penguin Books, 2009).
20. Peter J. Boettke, W. Zachary Caceres, and Adam Martin, “Error Is Obvious,
Coordination Is the Puzzle,” in Hayek and Behavioral Economics, ed. Roger
Frantz and Robert Leeson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), http://
www.palgraveconnect.com/doifinder/10.1057/9781137278159.0009
192 N. COWEN
21. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents,
Definitive ed, The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, v. 2 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2007).
22. Friedrich A. von Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of
the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy. 2, the Mirage of Social
Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); Andrew Lister, “The
‘Mirage’ of Social Justice: Hayek Against (and For) Rawls,” Critical
Review 25, no. 3–4 (2013): 409–444; Adam James Tebble, “Hayek and
Social Justice: A Critique,” Critical Review of International Social and
Political Philosophy 12, no. 4 (December 2009): 581–604, https://doi.
org/10.1080/13698230903471343
23. Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago [Ill.]:
University of Chicago Press, 1960); Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty;
Joseph Raz, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue,” in The Authority of Law:
Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1979), https://doi.
org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198253457.001.0001
24. Bruce Caldwell and Leonidas Montes, “Friedrich Hayek and His Visits to
Chile,” The Review of Austrian Economics 28, no. 3 (September 2015):
261–309, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-014-0290-8
25. Aris Trantidis and Nick Cowen, “Hayek versus Trump: The Radical Right’s
Road to Serfdom,” Polity (April 2020), https://doi.org/10.1086/707769
26. David M. Levy, “Robust Institutions,” The Review of Austrian Economics
15, no. 2–3 (2002): 131–142.
27. Peter J. Boettke and Peter T. Leeson, “Liberalism, Socialism, and Robust
Political Economy,” Journal of Markets and Morality 7, no. 1 (2004):
99–111; Nick Cowen, “Why Be Robust? The Contribution of Market
Process Theory to the Robust Political Economy Research Program,” in
Interdisciplinary Studies of the Market Order: New Applications of Market
Process Theory, ed. Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne, and Virgil Storr
(London: Rowman and Littlefield International Ltd, 2017), 63–85; Mark
Pennington, Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future
of Public Policy, New Thinking in Political Economy (Cheltenham, UK ;
Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2011).
28. Gerald F. Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality
in a Diverse and Bounded World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012); Gerald F. Gaus, “Self-Organizing Moral Systems: Beyond Social
Contract Theory,” Politics, Philosophy & Economics, August 29, 2017,
1470594X1771942, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470594X17719425; cf.
Gerald F. Gaus and Keith Hankins, “Searching for the Ideal,” in Political
Utopias, ed. Michael Weber and Kevin Vallier (Oxford University Press,
2017), 175–202.
29. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago (Oxford University Press,
2003), http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/019925754X.
001.0001/acprof-9780199257546
CHAPTER 13
“Anti-rationalism, Relativism,
and the Metaphysical Tradition: Situating
Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics”
Ryan R. Holston
Introduction
In what sense can it be said that Hans-Georg Gadamer is an “anti-
rationalist?” Answering this question requires clarity about the particular
strain of “rationalism” that is the focus of much of his thinking and is,
ultimately, the impetus for the critique mounted by his philosophical
hermeneutics. It is worth noting that Gadamer wrote his habilitation dis-
sertation (Habilitationsschrift) under Martin Heidegger, whose concerns
about the historical development of Western metaphysics, particularly the
moral and social implications of modern rationalism, had a deep and last-
ing impact on Gadamer’s thinking. In light of his explicit appropriation of
a number of Heidegger’s philosophical insights, one might be tempted to
identify Gadamer as a representative of an extreme variety of anti-
rationalism, insofar as he is seen as the inheritor of Heidegger’s radical
historicism and the moral relativism that is attendant to it. In particular,
R. R. Holston (*)
Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, VA, USA
e-mail: holstonrr@vmi.edu

194 R. R. HOLSTON
the emphasis on the historical nature of human understanding in

Gadamer’s writing, most prominently in Part 2 of Truth and Method, has
led a number of interpreters to conclude that he denies all possibility of
transcending the finite boundaries of our temporal experience.1
However, not only did Gadamer reject the charge of relativism through-
out his career, but his relationship to the metaphysical tradition, particu-
larly that of Plato and Aristotle, runs deep. Indeed, in Gadamer’s later
work, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, one wit-
nesses the development of his own moral philosophy, and much of his
other writing—particularly his work on language and hermeneutics in Part
3 of Truth and Method—has deep roots in the metaphysical tradition that
runs from the Presocratics through Plato, Aristotle, Neo-Platonism,
Augustine, and Hegel.2 This essay aims to shed light on the particular
variety of “anti-rationalism” that belongs to Gadamer in light of the prima
facie tension in his thinking between these historicist and metaphysical
influences.3 It will do so through a discussion of Gadamer’s concerns
about methodologism in the humanities, his ambivalent relationship to
the philosophy of Heidegger, and the historically informed account of
transcendence underpinning his life’s work. In light of this discussion, it
will be argued that what Gadamer opposes is a distinctly modern form of
rationalism, which he believes the ancients—far from being complicit in its
distortions—offer us resources for confronting.
Lost Truth and the Human Sciences

The central concern of Truth and Method is the recovery of an experience
of truth that has been threatened by methodologism in the humanities or
modern “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), whereby texts and
other cultural phenomena are seen as historical artifacts, whose meaning is
understood in terms of an objective retrieval and exposition of informa-
tion, i.e. the ideas in the minds of the individuals from whom such artifacts
originated. Gadamer traces the lineage of this approach to the study of the
humanities back to the post-Kantian tradition, showing how Dilthey had
drawn heavily on subjectivist epistemological foundations in Schleiermacher
in order to establish a positive science of interpretation, which represented
a new meaning and purpose for the classical field of “hermeneutics.” What
Gadamer terms “aesthetic consciousness” and “historical consciousness”
is essentially the distantiated attitude of the modern interpreter of such
cultural phenomena, which no longer treats the latter as offering insights
13 “ANTI-RATIONALISM, RELATIVISM, AND THE METAPHYSICAL… 195
into the nature of human life and the choices with which the interpreter,
himself, is confronted. Instead, this subjectivist epistemology bolsters the
notion that ideas can be treated as data, accessible to the neutral observer
of historical life, whose approach to the social world parallels that of the
natural scientist, given the requisite detachment from the prejudices
(Vorurteile) of his own historical situation.4 The understanding of the
work of art or the historical text as having significance for the life of the
interpreter by virtue of an application to present circumstances has, for
Gadamer, essentially been lost or sacrificed to the idea that the ultimate
reality of such works is the fact of their expression, as representations of
the minds within their historical period.5
Consequently, the normative purpose at the heart of Truth and Method
is the recovery of the possibility of truth, which Gadamer believes is under
assault due to the methodologism or “rationalism” of the modern human
sciences.6 The threat that Gadamer sees “method” posing to “truth” is
thus the understanding of historical life as mere data, which is no longer
capable of shedding light or insight onto the situation of the present. The
notion that individuals’ utterances are facts to be observed and recorded
entails the “nominalist presupposition” that reality is merely the neutral or
value-free account of the social scientist, which fosters a “relativist skepti-
cism” about the idea of truth.7 The lynchpin supporting this entire
approach to the past, on Gadamer’s account, is the subjectivist epistemol-
ogy of historical consciousness. The human word cannot be objectified in
the manner of the modern social sciences, as it were, unless the observer is
conceived as somehow autonomous and thus more or less than human—
either a god or a beast, in Aristotle’s terms—insofar as he is outside of any
community. In other words, only the abstraction of an isolated subject
who is a spectator, not a participant, vis-à-vis the “reality” of facts being
observed can sustain this relativization of the truth claims of each histori-
cal culture.
It is for this reason that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics priori-
tizes a “rehabilitation of authority and tradition,”8 which is aimed at
restoring a view of interpretation as fundamentally dependent upon an
historical life and community of interpreters. In other words, the impor-
tance that Gadamer attaches to the role of “prejudice” in understanding is
rooted in his critique of the idea of an autonomous subject who stands
apart from the reality he observes. That our prejudices facilitate as much
as they occlude meaning is thus of profound significance from the point of
view of preserving truth over against the view that reality is merely
196 R. R. HOLSTON
historically observable expressions of mind. For Gadamer, coming to see

truth no longer in propositional terms, i.e. as descriptions of a static reality
of “things,” but as an “event,” in which past and present are continually
mediated by the prejudices that constitute one’s identity, thus serves the
purpose of “the rehabilitation of the possible truthfulness of belief.”9
Without such mediation, one alienates the past, standing over and apart
from one’s history as a distantiated observer, who objectifies and truncates
the latter’s meaning. In Gadamerian terms, such an approach silences or
turns a deaf ear to a partner in a dialogue, and we become closed off to the
truth claims that the past would otherwise make on us.
But what does it mean for truth to be understood as an “event,” instead
of in propositional terms? Is not truth the speech that accurately depicts a
state of affairs or set of verifiable phenomena in the world? Rather than
understanding truth as a descriptive claim about a reality of things that are
“out there,” objects to be documented by an observer or autonomous
subject, Gadamer collapses the subject-object divide of modern Cartesian
thinking to reorient us to the idea of truth as an experience one under-
goes, since the event of truth is always for one who is a part of, or partici-
pant in, reality. In his account of Gadamer’s critique of historical
consciousness, Jean Grondin refers to the “lost metaphysical experience”
of the humanities, which entails more than a mere loss of information
from the past, but the neglect or absence of an important relationship with
our history: “the humanities teach us truths and real-life lessons, in the
sense that history used to be seen as a magistra vitae.”10 Like the meta-
physical experience of beauty, which is purposefully chosen in Part 1 of
Truth and Method to provide a palpable example of the transcendent as an
event one undergoes,11 the historical texts of the humanities are able to
speak to the life of the present, bringing the interpreter “in play” as a par-
ticipant in a dialogue with the past, who experiences truth as a “revelation
and an increase in Being.”12 Such knowledge actually changes the person
who is part of the encounter with the past, expanding their horizon of
understanding and providing a greater depth of experience (Erfahrung)
that prepares one for further encounters.
Consequently, the hubris of a ruler like Kreon in Sophocles’ Antigone,
or the fidelity to community of Socrates in Plato’s Crito, each bear a par-
ticular revelation—in the literal sense of a revealing or disclosure—regard-
ing a life well-lived that offers guidance to the interpreter in the present.
Again, this is not as a static body of information, but a relatable insight
into reality that actually changes one’s perspective and judgment. To be
sure, not all such engagements with historical texts are of a metaphysical
character and thus, not all texts are capable of transcending their time in
this way. Certainly, Gadamer is well aware that the potential for the
enlargement or deepening of one’s horizon of understanding is not equal
among all such historical works. It is in this spirit, in fact, that Gadamer
points to the existence of a group of texts, which he refers to as “classical,”
that emerge as the “work of history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) and, he believes,
prove their transcendent quality within history by repeatedly speaking to
the life of the present, shedding light on the choices (prohairesis) individu-
als continually confront as part of a shared reality across time.13 For
Gadamer, this enlargement of the horizon of the present or increase in
being—in short, the event in which such truths are experienced—is incon-
ceivable without the very historicity of the one whose particular life is
ultimately shaped by their insight.14
The Early Heidegger

Much of what has been said thus far pertains to Gadamer’s concern regard-
ing the status of truth at the hands of the modern human sciences. But it
does not begin to address Gadamer’s relationship to Heidegger and the
nature of his influence, which may now seem particularly puzzling in light
of the radical historicism and moral relativism often associated with
Heidegger’s thinking. What is essential to reconciling this central concern
of Gadamer with the experience of truth and the importance of Heidegger
to his philosophy is understanding the difference between the early
Heidegger, whose work sought to recover vital insights from the meta-
physical tradition and informed the early direction of Gadamer’s thinking,
and the later Heidegger, whose radicalization and dismissal of the meta-
physical tradition after the self-described “turn” (Kehre) in his thinking
were flatly rejected by Gadamer.15 For it is the later Heidegger alone who
sees the history of metaphysics as inevitably leading to nihilism and thus
needing to be overcome or moved beyond, a position Gadamer finds to be
both phenomenologically and normatively dubious.16 However, as Brice
Wachterhauser notes, the early lectures of Heidegger, prior to the 1930s,
reflect “an open[ness] to metaphysics and its potential for ‘fundamental
ontology,’”17 which Gadamer finds helpful in beginning to address some
of his own concerns about modernity and how it undermines the experi-
ence of truth. At this early point in his career, one sees a Heidegger who
“understood himself as a philosopher who sought a better way to do
198 R. R. HOLSTON
metaphysics,”18 and it is this Heidegger whose insights into the nature of

human knowing serve Gadamer’s purpose of reorienting us toward a more
embedded and dynamic conception of truth.
It is impossible in a short essay to identify all of the ways in which
Gadamer is indebted to Heidegger, but two of the most prominent fea-
tures of Gadamer’s thought that are appropriated from Heidegger are
worth discussing here.19 First, Gadamer is in certain respects amenable to
one of the principal aims of the pre-Kehre Heidegger, which is to “dis-
mantle and reconstitute the metaphysical tradition in order to infuse it
with new life,”20 by recovering an ancient understanding of truth that
avoids what Frederick Lawrence describes as “picture thinking,”21 i.e. the
model of human understanding according to which truth is known in a
manner resembling vision of objects in the world. Heidegger’s Destruktion
(destructuring)22 of metaphysics—the purpose of which is to disentangle
or recover original meanings from their present ones, in order to creatively
see new possibilities or directions for them—leads him to identify an alter-
native view of truth (aletheia) held by some of the ancients, which con-
ceives of the latter as a process of unconcealment and concealment through
which we come to know reality. On this view, truth is understood in terms
of movement or motion, in which what is known is never seen before one
in its entirety, as from an Archimedean standpoint, but is characterized by
a process of emergence and withdrawal, advancing and receding, of what
is known.23 Gadamer’s questioning of the subject-object divide mentioned
above is therefore facilitated by Heidegger’s retrieval of this alternative
conception of truth as in-motion and underway, since it is better suited to
human life, which is always historically situated. It is to Aristotle, there-
fore, that Heidegger turns in order to resuscitate this view, since his cri-
tique of the Platonic eidos is based precisely on this neglect of development
or emergence in time regarding what is known.24 According to Gadamer,
“Aristotelian philosophy was at that time much more than a mere coun-
termodel for Heidegger; it was a real vindicator of his own philosophical
purposes,” even, as Gadamer notes, if Aristotle later “became suspect” for
Heidegger.25
A second important feature of Heidegger’s thinking for Gadamer—
obviously related to the first, but worth mentioning in its own right—is
his “hermeneutics of facticity” or insight into “the existential structure of
understanding,” which again elevates the significance of Aristotle for both
thinkers, albeit for different reasons.26 Heidegger’s aim of recovering “the
effective reality of the existential factum” is related to his overarching
concerns about the question of being.27 However, Gadamer’s interest in

Aristotle and Heidegger’s reading of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics
takes a different direction, one which endures until late in Gadamer’s
life.28 The significance of this investigation for Gadamer is related to
Aristotle’s account of phronesis, or practical wisdom, which serves pur-
poses related to both Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and his incip-
ient moral philosophy, whose early intimations can be seen in his
Habilitationsschrift.29 In Truth and Method, the principal purpose of phro-
nesis is to provide an illustration or analogy to elucidate the nature of
genuine interpretation, which Gadamer sees as sharing in the same funda-
mental structure as practical wisdom. One’s approach to the meaning of a
text, according to Gadamer, must always entail anticipations of meaning
based on the application of prior experience to present circumstances; that
is, it is never abstract reflection for the sake of theoretical or scientific
knowledge, but an inquiry by a concrete knower whose ultimate concern
is with human praxis. In the Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian
Philosophy, Gadamer employs phronesis in a more straightforward manner
for the purposes of an account of ethical decision-making. What guides
the search for the good in the situation of choice (prohairesis), Gadamer
argues, is not a general principle which must be applied to particular cir-
cumstances, but ethos or Sittlichkeit—the concrete ethical life and custom-
ary norms that have shaped the person one already is and one’s
predispositions (hexeis) for acting in the world. It is only within and by
virtue of this experiential context that the ethical decision-maker acquires
the reasonableness (phronesis) that allows him to choose well in new
circumstances.
However, in spite of this deep indebtedness to Heidegger, which
Gadamer is always quite explicit about, there is nonetheless a clear rejec-
tion by Gadamer of Heidegger’s attitude toward the metaphysical tradi-
tion after the Kehre.30 Increasingly, one witnesses the disappearance in
Heidegger’s thinking of the concept of Destruktion and its attempt to
recover resources from within the metaphysical tradition itself. Instead,
one sees an attempt to overcome metaphysics, which is now seen as a
regrettable error that must simply be moved beyond.31 The problem, for
Heidegger, is what he sees as an almost inevitable tendency toward forget-
ting the “ontological difference,” which refers to the obliviousness and
subordination of our concrete “Being” to the idea of our being “human
beings,” that is, autonomous agents with goals or projects, culminating in
the radical subjectivity of Nietzsche and nihilism with respect to ultimate
200 R. R. HOLSTON
ends.32 However, Gadamer has serious concerns about Heidegger’s read-

ing of the metaphysical tradition, and he questions not only the inevitabil-
ity of such a complete forgetfulness of being, but the threat that Heidegger’s
philosophy of history poses to all normative inquiry and ethical discourse.33
Consequently, Gadamer’s account of the nature of language (the logos
where truth is recognized) and his belief in the implicitness of metaphysi-
cal questions in all speech is designed partly to confront and reject such
claims about the end of metaphysics by Heidegger. Furthermore,
Gadamer’s remark near the end of Truth and Method that hermeneutics
“leads us back into the problems of classical metaphysics” indicates his
belief that it is possible to circumvent the dead end of modern subjectiv-
ity,34 and it points forward to the complexities that he sorts through in
dialogue with the ancients in his later work.
The Historicity of the Good

When Gadamer refers to a return to “classical metaphysics,” he specifically
has in mind “the Platonic tradition that saw in the transcendental predi-
cates of the One, the Beautiful, the True, and the Good first and foremost
traits of Being and not only of the thinking that stands in front of Being.”35
In other words, these “transcendental predicates” are not simply con-
ceived as the framework given by language to capture the essence of an
independent “reality,” but are features of reality itself, since the modern
division between speaker and thing, subject and object, has been called
into question by philosophical hermeneutics. It will not do, then, to con-
ceive of these transcendental predicates as the articulation of forms (eidos),
knowable to a rational subject, since this would merely repeat the mistake
of objectifying their being. Rather, Gadamer must find alternative resources
within classical metaphysics for repairing the severance of the noetic from
the sensory, and then, working through the “problem” of the one and the
many, he must—without resorting to a reified division—explain how real-
ity possesses both of these seemingly antithetical qualities.
For the purposes of this essay, it is worth noting that when Gadamer
works his way through this problem in The Idea of the Good, he is clearly
dealing with an ontological relationship that pertains as much to the true
and the beautiful as it does to the good. In other words, Gadamer’s
account of the good in this work speaks to the broader question of tran-
scendence within the immanent reality or flux of human life, which arises
for all three of the ideals in this classical trinity. Consequently, the question
of the one and the many is—for Gadamer as it was for Plato—about the
meaning of the unity within the diversity of all things, or how transcen-
dence ought to be conceived in light of the apparent temporality of our
existence. Once the early Heidegger’s insights into our historicity and fac-
ticity have been adopted by Gadamer, it becomes necessary to revisit this
question and, Gadamer believes, to look for alternative resources or
insights for confronting it among the ancients. Otherwise, one risks the
same radical historicism that befalls the late Heidegger’s thinking vis-à-vis
the entire metaphysical tradition.
One of Gadamer’s main tasks in The Idea of the Good, therefore, is to
refute the post-Kehre Heidegger’s distortion of Plato,36 which Gadamer
believes overemphasized the metaphysics of “presence,” and resulted in
the exaggerated conclusions at which Heidegger had arrived with respect
to the fate of metaphysics. According to Gadamer, Plato’s various meta-
phors and locutions regarding the separation (chorismos) of the good from
the world of experience gave rise to a misinterpretation—for which
Aristotle, himself, was partly responsible—that comprehends Plato as
asserting the forms in the most literal terms as independent entities, a part
of reality that is severed from the material world, resulting in the meta-
physical dualism for which Plato has become so widely known. However,
Gadamer argues, while there is undeniably something “separate” or dis-
tinct about good, right, or just behavior, Plato does not—notwithstanding
the tendencies of his Neoplatonist progeny—subscribe to an objectified
understanding of the good: “The complete separation of a world of the
ideas from the world of appearances would be a crass absurdity.”37 On
Gadamer’s reading, Plato is in fact much more concrete or “Aristotelian”
in his thinking than most of his interpreters recognize, a misconception
fueled by Aristotle’s deliberate construal of his mentor in intellectualist
terms for the purposes of his critique and to present a contrast with his
own thinking. In fact, says Gadamer, Plato never actually speaks of the
“eidos tou agathon (form of the good)” but always the “idea tou agathon
(idea of the good),” and while eidos and idea are interchangeable in the
Greek, Gadamer interprets this as Plato’s avoidance of objectification,
since the latter implies “looking to the good” rather than a “view of the
good.”38 In contrast to Plotinus’ subsequent separation of the good from
all being, Gadamer argues that in Plato, the good is presented as the unify-
ing oneness within the many.39 It is with this in mind, he argues, that Plato
coins the term methexis, in order to evoke the idea that the one actually
“participates” in the many. The good is the power (dynamis) that unifies
202 R. R. HOLSTON
all that is good in the concrete world of experience and consists only of all
of the good things in that world.40 Consequently, our knowledge of the
good is indirect and analogical, since the good is co-present in particular
things that we relate to one another in context, not an object or entity that
may be directly perceived in-itself.41
Although its manifestations are therefore diverse or plural, Gadamer
reads Plato as pointing to the unity, integrity, or coherence that character-
izes all of these particular instances of the good in context, which makes
them, in a sense, one with each other. It is, Gadamer tells us, the harmony
that defines this way of being in the world for both persons and societies,
a harmony that is first lived concretely in deed (ergon) but then capable of
being articulated to one another with the reason (logos) that takes place in
dialogue.42 And, though these particular instances of the good are not
defined by their conformity with an abstract principle, all have this quality
of adhering or holding fast to an enduring unity or constancy in the face
of impulses that serve momentary desires, which literally disintegrate both
individual and community.43 Although we may never have a clear, stable
grasp of the good without it being contingent vis-à-vis a particular con-
text, there is nothing relative or arbitrary about such an encounter. For
Gadamer, “reality is not an anarchy without principles, but a principled
structure. … Reality is an internally differentiated whole that allows us
[to] discern its own internal order.”44
In the case of the individual, the contours of this internal order are not
to be found in a set of a priori principles, but in the development over time
of the character of the spoudaios. As is the case with the truth that is dem-
onstrated in classical texts over time, what Gadamer calls the “work of
history” or “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) is the process by which
experience (Erfahrung) is built up and proves what is in conformity with
the order of reality concretely over time. Only here, in the case of the
good, it is not the message of a text, but a kind of person or character type,
constituted by certain ways of living, whose value is proven through the
work of history. The norms that are capable of transcending history are, in
this case, exemplified by the very persons themselves, these spoudaioi, who
become concrete instantiations of human virtue, elucidating the charac-
teristics or qualities that ground judgments of rightness and wrongness.45
Such characteristics, varying as they do over a life and diverse circum-
stances, are often imprecise, giving at best a “schemata” of the good.46
However, as such experiences build up in a number of lives over time, their
criteria become “more determinate”47 and, when shared within a
community, they become embedded in an ethos, which precedes and makes

less essential such reflective precision for choosing rightly.
Conclusion
Certainly, Gadamer’s thinking may be characterized as “anti-rationalist,”
but it is of a variety that opposes the distinctively modern “rationalism”
manifested in the methodologism of the modern human sciences. His
principal concern is the threat that this poses to our dialogue with the past
and the truth or insight that once constituted the purpose of the humani-
ties. The early Heidegger’s retrieval of aletheia helps Gadamer to resist the
distortions of modern rationalism by articulating anew a more dynamic
conception of truth, appropriate for historically situated beings; his recov-
ery of Aristotle’s attunement to the facticity of human life points Gadamer
to the concrete knowing of phronesis, whose embeddedness within ethos
stands in contrast to the abstraction of “method.” It is therefore the pre-
Kehre Heidegger, himself seeking to infuse the metaphysical tradition with
new life, who shapes Gadamer’s thinking regarding the nature of human
knowing. As such, philosophical hermeneutics does not call into question
the entirety of the Western metaphysical tradition—as one sees in the post-
Kehre Heidegger—but targets specifically modern rationalism, whose
objectivizing gaze relativizes our conception of truth. Yet, Gadamer
believes, we need not despair of this consequence of modern subjectivity.
Rejecting the post-Kehre Heidegger’s reading of Plato as the forebear of
such modern distortions, Gadamer mines an understanding of transcen-
dence within ancient metaphysics that does not succumb to the tendency
toward objectification. In the Idea of the Good, Gadamer shows an alterna-
tive strain of ancient thought, according to which the good, the true, and
the beautiful are never encountered “in-themselves” but come to be
known through their participation (methexis) in our concrete, historical
reality.
Notes
1. See, for example, Richard Rorty’s highly selective reading and appropria-
tion of Gadamer in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), as well as the attempt to distill anti-
foundationalist implications from philosophical hermeneutics in Gianni
Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern
204 R. R. HOLSTON
Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); see also Leo
Strauss’ interpretation and criticisms of Gadamer in their correspondence,
which can be found in Gadamer and Strauss, “Correspondence concerning
Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 5–12.
I have examined difficulties associated with these criticisms in Holston,
“The Poverty of Antihistoricism: Strauss and Gadamer in Dialogue,”
Modern Age 58, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 41–53.
2. Brice Wachterhauser, “Gadamer’s Realism: the ‘Belongingness’ of Word
and Reality,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice Wachterhauser
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 150.
3. Jean Grondin acknowledges the appearance of such a tension in Gadamer’s
thought as well when he remarks that “hermeneutics would [seem to]
contain or imply a repudiation of metaphysics (as appears evident in the
work of Heidegger, for instance).” Since Gadamer’s philosophical herme-
neutics sees reality as accessible to human beings through a variety of inter-
pretive frameworks of understanding, an ultimate account of being would
appear to be problematic, “which would signify the end of metaphysics,
understood as a reflection on Being and its ultimate principles.” Grondin,
“The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and
Phenomenology: Figures and Themes, eds. Saulius Geniusas and Paul
Fairfield (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 125. Grondin’s essay,
however, demonstrates the various ways in which Gadamer’s philosophical
hermeneutics entails or implies metaphysical aspects of being.
4. Gadamer famously refers to this insistence that knowledge of reality
requires the removal of all prejudices as the Enlightenment’s “prejudice
against prejudice.” See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum Books,
2004), 273.
5. In contrast to this approach, Gadamer’s model of authentic interpretation
is that which has traditionally been practiced in the fields of theology and
law where scripture and statute, respectively, are thought to achieve their
meaning by virtue of an “application” to the life and circumstances of the
interpreter. See Ibid., 310.
6. In the decades following the publication of Truth and Method, Gadamer
claims that the purpose of his text was strictly phenomenological or descrip-
tive with respect to its account of interpretation, rather than normative. I
have argued that such remarks must either be taken as highly qualified, in
the sense that Gadamer was describing genuine or authentic interpretation,
or render Truth and Method guilty of having committed a performative
contradiction. See Holston, “Two Concepts of Prejudice,” History of
Political Thought 35, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 174–203. A similar critical
observation is made by Alasdair MacIntyre in his review of Truth and
Method when he says that Gadamer’s avowal to have been purely descrip-
tive in that text is a testimony to the power of the views against which
Gadamer, himself, had written, and therefore, that “Gadamer partially mis-
understands his own book.” MacIntyre, “Contexts of Interpretation:
Reflections on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” Boston
University Journal 24, no. 1 (1976): 41–46. Lawrence Hinman, for his
part, has argued that Gadamer’s retrospective account of Truth and Method
would render the text entirely irrelevant, since describing what one always
inevitably does whenever one understands or interprets anything excludes
the possibility of acting otherwise. See Hinman, “Quid Facti or Quid Juris?
The Fundamental Ambiguity of Gadamer’s Understanding of
Hermeneutics,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 40, no. 4
(1980): 512–35. Frederick Lawrence appears to echo, at least in part, the
interpretation I have given to Gadamer’s remarks when he broadly charac-
terizes the quaestio facti, which Gadamer claims to be his exclusive focus,
as asking the question, “what are we doing when we are being authenti-
cally human?” Frederick G. Lawrence, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Philosopher
of Practical Wisdom,” Theoforum 40 (2009), 270. Emphasis added.
7. Ibid., 263.
8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 278.
9. Lawrence, “Hans-Georg Gadamer: Philosopher of Practical Wisdom,” in
Hermeneutic Rationality, eds. Maria Luísa Portocarrero, Luis António
Umbelino, Andrzej Wierciński (Berlin: Lit, 2012), 270.
10. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” 128. The ref-
erence is to Cicero’s De Orate, which reads, “Historia magistra vitae est,”
or “History is life’s teacher,” and it expresses the notion that the past
serves as a guide and as a source of wisdom for the present.
11. See Daniel L. Tate’s excellent discussion of the importance of beauty in
this regard for Gadamer. The ontological affinity between beauty (kalos)
and truth (aletheia) is this movement by which the transcendent comes to
be known while at the same time receding or withdrawing from view. Tate,
“Renewing the Question of Beauty: Gadamer on Plato’s Idea of the
Beautiful,” Epoche 20, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 21–41.
12. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Hermeneutics,” 129.
13. Ibid., 129–30.
14. Ibid. Objections have been raised against Gadamer that the acknowledg-
ment of such historicity or context dependency renders the truth of what-
ever insights are encountered merely relative. Ronald Beiner, addressing
such charges by those, such as Jürgen Habermas, explains, “The issue is
not one of truth versus relativity, as Habermas tends to present it, nor of
validated knowledge versus unvalidated opinion; the issue, rather, is one of
the truth of generality versus the truth of specificity, that is, truth at the
206 R. R. HOLSTON
level of abstract principles versus truth embedded in immediate circum-

stances. … What is intended is not an attenuation of moral reason, but its
confrontation with an alternative account of moral reason—its ‘localiza-
tion,’ one might say. … To use Gadamer’s terms, the choice is between
judging ‘from a distance’ and judging from within ‘the demands of the
situation,’ so it is not a question of whether moral truths exist but of
whether one gains access to these truths ‘from the inside,’ or whether they
are imposed from ‘outside’ shared moral experience.” Ronald Beiner, “Do
We Need a Philosophical Ethics? Theory, Prudence, and the Primacy of
Ethos,” The Philosophical Forum 20 no. 3 (Spring 1989), 236–7.
15. For a nuanced account of Gadamer’s intellectual relationship to Heidegger
with a particular focus on their respective attitudes toward the metaphysi-
cal tradition see Brice R. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being: Gadamer’s Post-
Platonic Hermeneutical Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1999), 166–199.
16. See Gadamer’s correspondence with Strauss in which he denies Strauss’
imputation to him of belief in Heidegger’s “world-night,” the alleged con-
dition of modernity in which Western metaphysics has come to an end.
Strauss and Gadamer, “Correspondence concerning Wahrheit und
Methode,” 10. See also Gadamer, “Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and
Metaphysics,” trans. A. Greider, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology 25, no. 2 (May 1994): 108–9.
17. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 168.
18. Ibid.
19. A more comprehensive account of Gadamer’s indebtedness to Heidegger
would, at a minimum, need to include the concept of the hermeneutic
circle, for which Gadamer is so well-known. See Gadamer, Truth and
Method, 268–278. Another prominent feature for which he is clearly
indebted to Heidegger is the idea that “language is the House of Being,”
which is strongly echoed in Gadamer’s close identification of language and
reality. See Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 167 and, in general, Part 3 of
Truth and Method. The features discussed in the section above are selected
based on their helpfulness in illuminating Gadamer’s relationship to the
metaphysical tradition and the nature of his convergence with the early
Heidegger in that regard.
21. Frederick Lawrence, “Ontology of and as Horizon: Gadamer’s
Rehabilitation of the Metaphysics of Light,” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia
56, Fasc. 3/4 (Jul – Dec, 2000), 396.
22. In Being and Time, Heidegger is clear that he does not mean a “pernicious
relativizing” or “negative … disburdening” of acquired meanings by this
term, but that he aims to “stake out the positive possibilities” in our tradi-
tion. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2010), 22. Emphasis in the original.
The negative sense of “Destruktion,” therefore, should not be overempha-
sized. Gadamer, himself, interprets the meaning of “Destruktion” as “dis-
mantling to discover” (“Abbau zur Freilegung”). See Concill-Sancho,
“The Experiential Hermeneutic Nature of Practical Reason,” 285 n. 3.
23. Gadamer’s appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia is not,
however, without modification. Robert J. Dostal argues that while
Heidegger characterizes this unconcealedness of the event of truth as a
“flash of lightning” or flash of insight, Gadamer understands truth’s emer-
gence to be more gradual, and his model is the conversation. See Dostal,
“The Experience of Truth for Gadamer and Heidegger: Taking Time and
Sudden Lightning,” in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 47–67.
24. Tate, “Renewing the Question of Beauty,” 24. It is important to note,
however, that Heidegger also saw it as necessary to dissociate Aristotle
from Scholasticism’s interpretation of him as carrying forth Plato’s corre-
spondence theory of truth. See Andrew Fuyarchuck, Gadamer’s Path to
Plato: A Response to Heidegger and a Rejoinder to Stanley Rosen (Eugene,
OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 87–92. Though Heidegger’s reading of
Aristotle is transformative for Gadamer, he nonetheless rejects Heidegger’s
interpretation of Plato in this regard, arguing that motility or motion
rather than stasis can be seen in Plato’s ontology. Wachterhauser, Beyond
Being, 180, 189.
25. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 536.
26. Jesús Concill-Sancho, “The Experiential Hermeneutic Nature of Practical
Reason,” 286.
27. Ibid.
28. Gadamer is known to have attended the seminar given by Heidegger in
1924, whose particular focus was Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Not
only has Gadamer written about this subject in a number of places through-
out his career, but he was working on an annotated translation of the Ethics
until late in his life. See Andrzej Wierciński, “Phronesis as the Mediation
between Logos and Ethos: Rationality and Responsibility,” in Hermeneutic
Rationality, 77 n. 10, 83 n. 33. For Gadamer’s explicit engagements with
Book VI of Aristotle’s Ethics, see “On the Possibility of a Philosophical
Ethics,” in The Gadamer Reader: A Bouquet of the Later Writings, ed.
Richard E. Palmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007)
and “Aristotle and Imperative Ethics,” in Hermeneutics, Religion, and
Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
29. Gadamer’s habilitation dissertation was later published as Plato’s Dialectical
Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [1983]). Although princi-
208 R. R. HOLSTON
pally a study of Plato’s Philebus, Gadamer begins to articulate his rather

Aristotelian account of Plato’s thinking about the ethical life. In this
regard, it is worth noting that Gadamer’s initial inclination for this project
was to foreground a study of Aristotelian ethics. Richard Palmer brings this
insight of Jean Grondin’s to bear in his prefatory remarks to Gadamer’s
essay, “On the Possibility of a Philosophical Ethics,” in The Gadamer
Reader, 274. Furthermore, Gadamer’s later work develops a synthesis that
interprets each thinker substantially in the light of the other, as is indicated
in the title of his book, which refers to “Platonic-Aristotelian” philosophy.
30. To be sure, Gadamer does not deny that the later Heidegger can be insight-
ful. The problem, for Gadamer, is Heidegger’s belief that it would be pos-
sible for him to get “beyond metaphysics.” In contrast, Gadamer believes
that language and the discourses in which language embeds us both imply
and give rise to metaphysical questions. To reinforce this point, Gadamer
frequently calls attention to connections between the thinking of the later
Heidegger and the metaphysical tradition, which Heidegger was unable to
appreciate. Wachterhauser, 170–1. Dostal provides a remarkably lucid
account of Gadamer’s complex relationship with the early and later
Heidegger. See Dostal, “Heidegger’s Hermeneutics, Gadamer’s
Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutical Heidegger, eds. Michael Bowler and
Ingo Farin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 285–303.
31. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 168–9.
32. Ibid., 169.
33. Ibid, 172.
34. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimensions of Hermeneutics,” 125–6.
Gadamer, Truth and Method, 456.
35. Grondin, “The Metaphysical Dimensions of Hermeneutics,” 134.
36. I am indebted to Ronald Beiner for this insight.
37. Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 16.
38. Ibid., 27–8. Emphasis added.
39. Ibid., 28.
40. Ibid., 10–11, 118.
42. P. Christopher Smith explains that on Gadamer’s view, “Ethical under-
standing is … a function not just of mind but also of who we are. There is
no logos without ergon, which is to say, no reason and reasoning without
deed; that we have already learned from Plato’s characters, Socrates and
Callicles, whom he uses to present his argument for the choice (prohairesis)
of the philosophical life over the life of pleasure and the pursuit of power.”
Smith, Hermeneutics and Human Finitude, 230–1. Emphasis in the origi-
nal. The reason (logos) of the soul that would seek the common good, in
other words, must be preformed by a certain way of living, i.e. concrete
norms that point toward civilized life as opposed to the fulfillment of

individual appetites. Living within and having been formed by such norms
of an ethical community thus precedes logos, and it is no mere coincidence
that the sophists, who live as itinerants outside of any community, are por-
trayed by Plato as incapable of such cooperative dialogue with Socrates.
43. Gadamer draws on Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthete and the
ethical person here and the idea that the former’s impulse and pursuit of
momentary pleasure is incapable of such integrity, while the latter’s stead-
fastness demonstrates a consistency and unity of the self over time. See
ibid., 202–3; Gadamer, Truth and Method, 82–3.
44. Wachterhauser, Beyond Being, 192. This same internal order is what char-
acterizes the beautiful, which is not merely a superficial symmetry in an
appearance of something, but a harmony and proportion that parallels that
of the concrete instantiations of the good. In his reading of Plato’s Philebus,
Gadamer echoes what is indicated above with respect to the good when he
says that the beautiful is defined by a “unity and integration,” and that it
exists only within what is concretely beautiful, but not anywhere in-itself.
Also, similar to the good, Gadamer sees this relationship as one of partici-
pation (methexis) not separation (chorismos). See Tate, “Renewing the
Question of Beauty,” 32–4.
45. Lawrence, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Aristotle’s Practical
Philosophy,” 210.
46. Ibid. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 318.
47. Lawrence, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Aristotle’s Practical
Philosophy,” 210.
CHAPTER 14
Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment

Rationalism
Michael P. Federici
Explaining Eric Voegelin’s (1901–1985) analysis of Enlightenment rational-

ism presents difficulties for the author of a brief essay. Voegelin’s political
theory is philosophically dense; it includes multiple changes in focus and
emphasis; and it encompasses 34 volumes. The Enlightenment is a large and
complex topic, and like most epochal/school of thought designations its
philosophical and historical boundaries are somewhat indistinct, variegated,
and subject to disagreement. In Henry F. May’s The Enlightenment in
America, he organizes the Enlightenment into four categories that converge
in some ways and diverge in others.1 Voegelin’s critique of the Enlightenment
focuses on what May classifies as the “Revolutionary Enlightenment” and
what others have called the “Radical Enlightenment.” Unlike May, Voegelin
was not interested in giving a rounded and balanced analysis of the
Enlightenment because his focus was not the Enlightenment itself but a
broader intellectual genealogy of which the Enlightenment was a part.
Much of Voegelin’s political theory is an effort to trace the develop-
ment of political and social thought to its spiritual origins as a way of
M. P. Federici (*)
Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN, USA
e-mail: michael.federici@mtsu.edu

212 M. P. FEDERICI
understanding the modern crisis of order. He was concerned primarily

with the rise of political religions, secular/pseudo-spiritual ideologies, and
political movements that were the outgrowth of existential closure to the
truth of existence. Like the sophist Protagoras, such ideologies and
political movements substituted man for God as the source of existential,
political, and social order and the measure of morality, meaning, and
reality. The Enlightenment fit into a pedigree of modern political thought
that Voegelin classified as “apostatic revolt.”2 In short, the Enlightenment
and its breed of rationalism were interesting to Voegelin insofar as they
contributed to the development of immanentizing ideologies like Marxism,
Nazism, and progressivism (i.e., utopian ideologies that claim the ability
to bring the Christian eschaton, heaven, into history). The appearance of
these ideologies marked the height of the Western crisis of order that
inspired his work.
The task at hand, then, warrants definition of Enlightenment rational-
ism while acknowledging that some degree of simplification is necessary for
the sake of clarity and succinctness. The Enlightenment was an intellectual,
political, and cultural movement that Peter Gay describes as “a family of
philosophies, …a cultural climate” that was characterized by rebellion
against traditional ideas and organized Christianity in particular.3 It tended
to embrace the rationalism of modern science to the exclusion of revela-
tion, myth, tradition, and the synthesis of faith and reason. It inspired the
belief that the progress of the natural sciences would result in moral prog-
ress and the dramatic improvement of social, political, and economic life.
The Enlightenment was a reaction to the perceived darkness of the Medieval
era, the suppression of reason; it celebrated the exploration of ideas that
questioned the authority of existing political, social, and religious elites.
Alexander Pope wrote an Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton that conveys the
common view of the transition from Medieval darkness to enlightenment:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
Enlightenment thought has been described as the religion of reason

and the religion of humanity, language that conveys Voegelin’s
characterization of the Enlightenment as apostatic revolt. The new religion
of reason replaces the old religion of superstition and priestcraft. Thomas
Jefferson was true to Enlightenment principles when he revised the Bible
with a knife removing descriptions of metaphysical experiences (e.g.,
14 ERIC VOEGELIN AND ENLIGHTENMENT RATIONALISM 213
miracles) unverifiable by scientific or natural reason. Thomas Paine referred

to the Enlightenment as the Age of Reason, the title of his 1794 book.
Both Jefferson and Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as the
application of Enlightenment ideas to political and social life. The
revolutions were part of a global democratic movement inspired by the
liberation of reason from the constraints imposed by the church, monarchs,
and aristocratic privilege. While secular in some respects, Enlightenment
thinkers like Auguste Comte (1798–1857) were deeply spiritual in a way
that contrasted with traditional religion. They radically immanentized
(brought into history) the Christian eschaton (the trans-historical
fulfillment of human existence in an afterlife). Voegelin was especially
interested in apocalyptic expectation and its relation to politics. While he
recognized that aspects of the Enlightenment had secular characteristics,
he identified its religious and spiritual tendencies, including Comte’s
Religion of Humanity, as its most significant feature because of its effect
on the Western crisis of order. In fact, Voegelin attributed the secularism
of Enlightenment rationalism, including positivism, to religious desires.
The Enlightenment developed, formed, and declined over the course
of centuries; its paradigmatic age was the eighteenth century and its most
fertile ground was France. Scholars continue to write about it because it
has influenced political, economic, social, and religious life long after its
cultural peak. It has been the source of heated and ideologically driven
debates about enduring questions including: What is human nature? and
What is the best political regime? Locke, Jefferson, and Paine answer the
latter question based on their answer to the former question. Human
beings are rational by nature and, therefore, forms of government, like
monarchy, that reject popular consent are illegitimate. They opposed the
divine right of kings and in its place, they posited the self-evident, rational
natural right of the people to rule themselves. In their view, consent of the
governed is the only reasonable basis for government’s legitimacy.4 The
Enlightenment’s contributors include Francis Bacon, John Locke, David
Hume, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Ben Franklin, Nicolas de
Condorcet, Denis Diderot, Claude Adrien Helvétius, Auguste Comte,
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude-Henri
Saint Simon, and Charles Louis Montesquieu among others. It influenced
or was influenced by the Renaissance, the Reformation and Protestantism,
the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Freemasons,
Unitarianism, Utilitarianism, Deism, positivism, democracy, capitalism,
and Marxism.
214 M. P. FEDERICI
The focus of this volume is on one aspect of the Enlightenment, its

conception of human rationality. My essay explains Voegelin’s critique of
Enlightenment rationalism that is part of his larger analysis of modernity
and the Western crisis that culminates in the totalitarian revolutions of the
twentieth century. He considers totalitarian movements like Nazism and
communism as well as socialism, positivism, and humanitarianism to be
the “ideological offspring of the Enlightenment.”5 Voegelin’s primary
work on the topic is From Enlightenment to Revolution, republished in his
collected works as Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man.6 After its initial
publication in 1975, the eighteenth-century thinkers and movements that
comprised the Enlightenment and figured prominently in the book faded
into the background of his work. His philosophical diagnosis of the
Western crisis is the foundation for his prescriptive response: restoration of
pre-modern symbols and experiences of order to memory so that they can
become a living force with which to oppose the disorder of the present age.
Voegelin has much to say about the Enlightenment. The analysis here
will focus on his core contention that Enlightenment rationalism
substitutes a false spirituality for authentic religiosity and Classical
philosophy. False spirituality stems from a loss of the balance of
consciousness between mundane and transcendent existence, between
mortality and immortality. The balance is achieved by Aristotle’s bios
theoretikos, the contemplative life, and lost by Enlightenment thinkers like
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783) who replaces it with the process
of acquiring scientifically derived useful knowledge. For d’Alembert and
other Enlightenment thinkers, reason was an instrument with which to
acquire useful encyclopedic knowledge. Classical Greek philosophers,
however, differentiated reason as man’s participation in divine nous, that
is, man responds to a divine attraction or pull (helkein) that is in tension
with the counterpull of passion. Knowledge (episteme) is the outcome of
following the divine pull. Doxa (opinion) and ideology are the consequence
of following the passions. Moreover, in following the divine pull man
inches toward immortal life. In articulating this experience of reason,
Plato and Aristotle gained a deeper understanding of the meaning of
human existence. This differentiation of reason/nous as the sensorium of
transcendence is an historical event, what Voegelin called a “theophanic”
event. It is not a theory, an idea, or a tradition. Unlike most Enlightenment
philosophers, Voegelin argued that the “life of reason is not a treasure of
information to be stored away” but an effort to participate in divine reality
and resist the forces of disorder in all aspects of historical life, personal,
social, and political.7 Three corollary points will be incorporated into the
analysis: (1) Enlightenment rationalism elevates method above
philosophical substance and historical experience; (2) Enlightenment
rationalism is irrational because it is reductionistic; it is unwilling “to rec-
ognize the ratio of ontology and philosophical anthropology”8; and (3)
Enlightenment rationalism embraces a progressive historicism that claims
to know the meaning of history thus ending the search for meaning in
history.
Pseudo-Spirituality
From his earliest publications, Voegelin insisted that philosophers must
account for the full range of human experience including participation in
divine reality. The story of human experience with divine reality is what St.
Augustine deemed sacred history to be distinguished from profane or
secular history. In Voegelin’s analysis of the Enlightenment, Voltaire is an
important figure because he dissolves Augustine’s notion of sacred history
and replaces it with a new sacred history based on “inner-worldly
religiousness” and the “intramundane spirit of man” rather than “the
transcendental pneuma of Christ.” The human spirit is the focus of history.
The transition from a Christian anthropology to a secular anthropology is
possible because of the deification of reason and the eventual “deification
of the animal basis of existence.”9 Voltaire’s rejection of Augustine’s sacred
history narrows the horizon of philosophical inquiry by eliminating sacred
history from the search for the truth of existence. A part of human
experience (e.g., the animal basis of existence) is taken as its whole.
Historical consciousness is becoming secularized. The Enlightenment
imagination of Voltaire conceives of historical participation as strictly
mundane; man’s participation in transcendent reality is eliminated from
consciousness.
Helvétius (1715–1771) is part of the movement toward the reduction
of man to his animal basis. He asserts that “In man all is physical sensation”
and that “man is under the direction of pleasure and pain.”10 Hobbes
articulated such a view in Leviathan. While Locke does not push the point
as far as Helvétius, he embraced a hedonistic morality. In An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, Locke states that “Good and evil are
nothing but pleasure and pain.” Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith
assert that selfish, pleasurable desires are beneficial to humanity.
216 M. P. FEDERICI
In Voegelin’s view, reality was not limited to the animal basis of exis-
tence, what was experienced through sense perception or determined by a
particular method of investigation. It encompassed a vast horizon of his-
torical experience that was beyond the comprehension of any one indi-
vidual. He used “Second Reality,” a concept borrowed from Robert Musil
and Heimito von Doderer, to refer to ideological abstractions and “ismic
constructions” that claimed a part of reality to be its whole. He insisted
that the metaxic (in-between) structure of reality was unchanging and that
human reason was limited in its understanding of reality. He was sensitive
to and critical of efforts—like Voltaire’s conception of history—that trun-
cated, inverted, or eliminated the open search for the truth of existence.
Because modern ideologies are the consequence of varying degrees of
existential and intellectual closure to divine reality, they are apt to identify
the source of order in man’s revolt from God, including the secularization
and instrumentalization of reason. In his early scholarship on political
religions, Voegelin stated that the Western crisis was a consequence of
“the secularization of the soul.”11The crisis included efforts to either
ignore man’s spiritual nature, as was the case with Max Weber’s value-free
positivism,12 or substitute a radical immanence for transcendence as
evidenced in the works of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx.
Such thinkers lost the tension and balance between immanence and
transcendence which exist not as unconnected spheres of existence but as
integrated (metaxic) aspects of human experience. The loss of the tension
between immanence and transcendence indicates a loss of the balance of
consciousness13 as individuals imagine a new pseudo-reality (Second
Reality) that is void of human-divine participation. It is in this intellectual
milieu that reason is detached from its transcendent moorings.
A universe governed by natural laws can be controlled by humans once
they unleash the potential of scientific knowledge, the derivative of
enlightened reason. Control of natural law gives humans a creative power
with which to remake the world. Thus, Francis Bacon claimed that
knowledge is power. Scientific knowledge can be used to transform human
nature itself and with it the conventions and institutions that are obstacles
to progress and perfection. The growing confidence of human beings,
inspired in part by the accomplishments of modern science, leads to the
construction of ideological movements that aim to radically transform
man and society. Before the new visions of human nature and politics can
be imagined, the philosophical anthropology of ancient and Judeo-
Christian thinking must be rejected or radically reinterpreted as was done
by Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers. Voegelin starkly separates

the older Western tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas
from the Enlightenment thinkers who develop irreconcilable theories of
human nature and politics and who pull reason away from its transcendent
roots. The New Science of Politics is an effort to restore political science to
its older foundations by exposing the reductionism of Enlightenment
rationalism, positivism, and modern political ideologies.
The ideas of Helvétius, D’Alembert, Turgot, Comte, and Condorcet,
among others, prepare the way for the great, utopian ideological
movements of modernity. The French Revolution is formative in the
development of these ideological movements because for the first time
“the apocalypse of man is driving…toward the deification of intramundane
society.” The consequence is “the destruction of Western Christian
civilization” and “the tentative creation of a non-Christian society.”14
Voegelin calls this desire to replace Christian civilization “the consciousness
of epoch,”15 a deliberate effort to circumvent the existing cultural order.16
Hobbes is an important figure in the Western crisis because he
responded to the rising conflict between religious sects by attempting to
depoliticize religion and solve a spiritual problem with institutional
structure, absolute rule. The summum bonum of the ancients and
Christians is replaced by Hobbes with the summum malum, the fear of
violent death. The absolute ruler, the Leviathan, is a mortal god who, like
Machiavelli’s prince, can manipulate power in accordance with natural law
and the needs of order without attunement to a transcendent truth. Yet,
as Voegelin notes, “Hobbes countered the gnostic immanentization of the
eschaton which endangered existence by a radical immanence of existence
which denied the eschaton.”17 Removing consciousness of the eschaton
and its transcendent structures from the life of human beings and human
civilization eliminates the very source of order on which the ends of
politics depend. Once the transcendent source of order and community is
removed, Hobbes is left with the problem of forming a society out of
individuals who are united by nothing more than a common passion to
avoid violent death. The problem of political order has been reduced to
managing the animal basis of existence. The internal logic of Hobbes’s
social contract theory is only rational if his assumptions about the summum
bonum and natural law are accurate. Yet, Voegelin considers Hobbes’s
assumptions, and social contract theory generally, to be irrational because
they are based on ahistorical abstractions, the consequence of unnecessarily
confining theoretical boundaries to utilitarian knowledge. Hobbes, like so
218 M. P. FEDERICI
many Enlightenment rationalists, revolts against the classical experience

of reason.
Here lies the crux of Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism.
He contends that a just political and social order, including the rational
discussion on which it depends, are only possible if human beings are open
to transcendent reality in whatever form it takes. Openness requires
movement or turning toward (periagoge) the divine light (aletheia) as
described in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Enlightenment rationalists
operate from contrasting assumptions. They either, like Hobbes and
Weber, assert that competing notions of transcendent reality are the cause
of disorder and must, then, be depoliticized or they, like Comte, recognize
the necessity of existential attunement to a spiritual ground but they
immanentize the ground and divinize man and/or the state. In either
case, the balance of consciousness has been lost; the metaxic structure of
reality has been deformed in the consciousness of the rationalist and
ideological revolutionary. In short, humans are capable of self-salvation;
they have no need for transcendent intervention. Nature has equipped
them with reason with which they can create new sources of order, for
example, natural rights, the great leader, the masse totale, the general will.
To be rational, however, political theory must account for human
participation in divine reality.
Hobbesian political theory becomes possible once modern science, and
Christianity before it, de-divinizes the cosmos. What is left is a radical separa-
tion of transcendent reality and immanent-world reality. The consequences
of this de-divinization of the cosmos include the movement toward a secular
politics and a narrowing of the horizons of consciousness. De-divinization is
followed by the re-divinization of politics. In the latter case, Second Realities
are created that substitute man for the transcendent ground of being. Comte
unites these two parts of modernity in his religion of humanity. He is a posi-
tivist who claims to be the messiah; he is what Voegelin calls an “intramun-
dane eschatologist.”18 Once the world-transcendent God is replaced by the
great leader, the state assumes the position as the ground of being. Moral
resistance to the state is impossible because it has become the highest author-
ity, the embodiment of Turgot’s masse totale and Condorcet’s superman.
The new religion of humanity rejects “the creation of man by God” as super-
stition. It “now returns as the creation of the superman through Condorcet.”19
As the state is led by and gives birth to the superman, it increasingly repre-
sents the masse totale; history progresses toward its perfection; the progres-
sive philosophy of history is born.
Progressive Historicism
Voegelin was a philosopher of history as well as a political theorist. He
insisted that while meaning can be found in history, human knowledge of
history was limited. In particular, the end of history was a mystery.
Enlightenment rationalism inflates the capacity of human understanding
to include gnostic claims about the progressive unfolding of history and its
end. Such “stop history” ideologies are the consequence of losing the
balance of consciousness. Human beings participate in a reality that
includes divine-human encounter. As noted, Voegelin used the term
metaxy to denote the in-between of human existence, for example,
immortal-mortal, divine-human, transcendent-immanent, reason-passion.
Voegelin states that “the problem of human history is precisely the tension
between the historical existence of man and his transcendental destination”
(FETR 158). The metaxic structure of reality is permanent. Human nature
is part of this historical structure and, thus, is unchanging. Ideologies that
claim the ability to transform human nature have lost consciousness of the
metaxic structure of reality or are in rebellion against it. They claim the
ability to transgress the limits of historical life by using political power to
bring history to its culmination. In the unfolding of history, traditional
obstacles to progress are eliminated, and in their most radical forms the
ideologies purport the perfection of both man and society.
The Irrationality of the Enlightenment

and the Problem of Method
One of the primary characteristics of the Enlightenment is its rejection of

“irrational” sources of knowledge such as tradition, revelation, religious
dogma, and metaphysics. Voegelin considers this proposition to be
reductionistic and irrational itself because it contracts the field of scientific
inquiry and eliminates from philosophical inquiry centuries of work by
philosophers who provided insights into human nature.20 For the purposes
of philosophical analysis, he was opposed to the reification of truth into
dogmas and doctrines because it separated the engendering experiences of
order from the symbols used to articulate them. He used the term
“logophobia” to refer to the unwillingness and fear of philosophy, the
open search for truth. In Voegelin’s more expansive view, science
220 M. P. FEDERICI
is a search for truth concerning the nature of the various realms of being.
Relevant in science is whatever contributes to the success of this search.
Facts are relevant in so far as their knowledge contributes to the study of
essence, while methods are adequate in so far as they can be effectively used
as a means for this end.21
Why do many Enlightenment figures wish to narrow the horizons of

science and reason? Voegelin claims that religious motives are ultimately
the cause. What are these religious motives? Radical thinkers like Turgot
and Comte exhibit at least some gnostic tendencies. They are not only
dissatisfied with the world as it is, but they suffer from what Voegelin
terms pneumopathology, a sickness of the soul that causes a desire to escape
from the world as it is. In the de-divinized world, the anxiety of existence
is heightened making it more difficult for humans to cope with the tension
of existence including the problem of mortality. The temptation is great to
short-circuit the process that ends in death and immortality. The
instruments of escape from heightened anxiety are gnostic myths about
the perfection of human beings, human society, and the end of history.
From the Enlightenment forward, there is a proliferation of gnostic
ideologies that purport to contain the secret knowledge that when
operationalized will transform human existence. Such gnostic ideologies
are political religions based on the pretense of science (e.g., National
Socialism, Communism, positivism). They theologize about the meaning
of human existence and the ultimate destiny of man. They are irrational
because they close off philosophical inquiry when it encounters evidence
of metaxic reality and the limits of human progress. In other words,
appeals to the historical reality of the limits of human nature and politics
are rejected as unscientific and irrational. Gnostics lack the spiritual
strength to come to grips with life in the metaxy including its many
injustices that limit the possibilities of politics and human life generally.
Man’s ultimate destiny, the older tradition proclaims, is not in the historical
world of politics but a transcendent beyond. Man must, then, balance the
demands of mundane, immanent existence with his transcendent destiny.
Unable to accept this reality, gnostics are intent on immanentizing the
Christian eschaton by bringing heaven to earth, an aspiration typically
connected to progressive historicism.
Given the reality of the metaxy, the transformation of human nature
and society is impossible. Attempts to accomplish the utopian end of
history characterize the horrors of the twentieth-century totalitarian
movements. Voegelin provides the theoretical genealogy of revolutionary

and totalitarian movements. The Enlightenment plays a prominent role in
the genealogy because it helps to develop three essential characteristics of
modern revolutionary movements, the rejection of the classical experience
of reason, pseudo-spirituality, and progressive historicism.
Helvétius, D’Alembert, Turgot, Condorcet,

and Comte
Voegelin’s conclusions about the Enlightenment, and modernity gener-

ally, stem from his analysis of thinkers who contributed to the theoretical
ground on which modern ideologies and revolutions have been
constructed. Helvétius is a key figure for Voegelin because in his rejection
of Christianity he inverts the direction in which human beings find the
source of reality and order. Christianity directed man’s philosophical and
religious gaze to the heavens toward the realm of his ultimate destiny.
Helvétius, like Hobbes, explained the “internal structure of man” using
utilitarian criterion, sensory perception and a pleasure-pain calculus. This
inversion is combined with the notion that human passion is not the
source of disorder, as Plato and Aristotle argued, but the “fundamental
force on which all order in the conduct of man has to rely.” Voegelin calls
this new view of human passion “the instrumentalization of man.”22 In
the older tradition the spiritual center of man, that which orders his life in
accordance with a divine will, was the soul; reason, or nous, was the
sensorium of transcendence. The new man’s reason is limited to calculating
self-interest and the pleasure-pain calculus. The new man is an instrument
to be manipulated by the legislator, in the case of Hobbes by the Leviathan.
Rousseau’s social contract empowers the state to force those who refuse to
follow the general will to be free. Man is no longer an end in himself but
an instrumental part of the collective whole of humanity. The meaning of
his existence is now tied to his participation in Turgot’s masse totale. The
change in meaning marks “the externalization of processes of the soul”
and the “perversion” of the life of the soul. As Voegelin explains, the
“growth of the soul through an internal process, which is nourished
through communication with transcendent reality, is replaced by a
formation of conduct through external management.”23 As Walter
Lippman notes, among the consequences of this inversion is a politics
based on passion and interest in which mass communication is used to
222 M. P. FEDERICI
manipulate public opinion.24 What is lost is the primacy of character and

virtue as necessary prerequisites for the right conduct of statesmen.
Political leaders take on new importance because they embody and
represent the externalized life of the soul.
Helvétius contributed to the idea of social evolution measured by the
conformity of private interest to the public interest. The evolution of
society makes little sense unless its end is identified, and it eventually stops
moving toward that end. Helvétius understands this problem and is one of
the first modern thinkers to “take his jump into eschatology” and suggest
the end of history. Once the objective of history and human existence has
been identified, all that remains is its realization. Comte, a positivist,
provides a more developed philosophy of history that is based on his
formation of a political religion, the religion of humanity. Comte’s
positivism builds on Diderot’s Encyclopédie, a collection of knowledge that
was useful to the progress of human society. D’Alembert wanted to
reorient the universe to the scientific methods of mathematics and the
natural sciences. He considered himself to be part of the “revolutionary
expansion of the horizon of knowledge.”25 Useful knowledge, however,
excludes the life of contemplation lauded by Aristotle, the bios theoretikos,
and the ancient focus of philosophy to search for knowledge about human
nature that enlivened the life of virtue. Voegelin considers these
Enlightenment attitudes to be contrary to the humanistic tradition but
central to the idea of progress characteristic of Enlightenment theory.
Progress is measured by the advancement of scientific knowledge and its
application to society, not by a deeper understanding of the human
condition and the process by which man participates in divine reality.
Virtue is no longer the telos of politics; improvement in material condition
and expansion of natural rights are the new ends of politics.
In addition, d’Alembert wished to create a new, autonomous moral
code to guide the application of useful knowledge. He was convinced that
radical material inequality was contrary to justice, but he did not take the
Benthamite step declaring the greatest good for the greatest number to be
the foundation of morality. What does begin to take shape is that justice
requires a redistribution of wealth and that a planned society is the
instrument for its realization. To support the legitimacy of this vision of
scientific knowledge and the progress of society toward equality,
d’Alembert creates the principle of “the authoritative present,” “the
assumption that the situation of the moment, or a situation that is
envisaged as immediately impending, is superior in value to any prior
historical situation of fact.” The principle establishes the superiority of the

present over the past, but it does not explain its relationship to the future.
Will one authoritative present be replaced by another? The authoritative
present remains authoritative into the future because it marks the end of
history which Helvétius establishes by a “jump into eschatology” declaring
the present to be the final phase of history. The future is an age of progress
but the principles that engendered it cannot be surpassed. The idea of the
authoritative present bestows “grace on the present” and “is needed for
the adequate expression of intramundane religiousness in politics.”
Voegelin responds to these claims by stating that “This act of grace,
bestowed by the intellectual leaders of Enlightenment on themselves and
on their age, is the source of the genuine revolutionary pathos that
animates the idea of progress.”26 Man no longer needs a transcendent god
to save him. Voegelin identifies Comte and Marx as indicative of the
spiritual disease that combines self-divinization and self-salvation. They
both substitute “an intramundane logos of human consciousness” for
“the transcendental logos.”27
Turgot recognized that the new meaning of history must surpass or at
least equal the universal, Christian meaning. The masse totale provides
historical meaning as mankind moves toward perfection. Individual human
beings cease to have historical meaning, but mankind in the lump carries
historical meaning. The masse totale is “the tentative evocation of a new
worldly divinity.” Comte creates the new worldly god and, with other
thinkers, he has “mutilated the idea of man.”28
Condorcet adds to the authoritative present the notion of predictability
in social and political life that assumes similarity between it and natural
science. If the laws of both natural and social science are fixed and
knowable, then outcomes are predictable as well. Condorcet develops a
plan to direct the destiny of mankind that contains three primary objectives,
ending the inequality of nations (regarding wealth and the development of
rationalism), ending the inequality of individuals, and the perfection of
human beings including the end of death itself. The first objective requires
the intervention of enlightened nations in the affairs of less enlightened
nations. The second objective is accomplished, in part, by the creation of
compulsory social security programs that eliminate great gaps between
rich and poor and bring everyone into the middle class. The final objective
of the plan requires the transformation of human nature, the creation of a
superman. Condorcet rejects the Christian dependence on revelation,
grace, and God’s mercy for salvation in favor of self-salvation. Voegelin
comments that:
224 M. P. FEDERICI
This program of Condorcet seems to be the first systematic project, elabo-

rated by a Western totalitarian, for the radical destruction of all civilizations
of mankind, the high civilizations as well as the less differentiated native civi-
lizations, and for transforming the surface of the globe into the habitat of a
standardized mankind that is formed by the ideology of a handful of mega-
lomaniac intellectuals. There is hardly any difference discernible between
the totalitarian Progressivist and his Communist and National Socialist
successors.29
Conclusion
Voegelin’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism focuses on the spiritual
and religious aspects of the thinkers who comprise the historical and philo-
sophical movement. Although it has the reputation for being secular,
Voegelin identifies the religious characteristics of a variety of Enlightenment
thinkers. The development of a new religion is intended to replace the
existing Classical and Christian philosophical anthropology. Because it nar-
rows the scope of philosophical inquiry, Voegelin considers the positivism
of the Enlightenment to be irrational. He noted the tendency in a variety
of Enlightenment thinkers to reject the Classical experience of reason by
divorcing it from participation in divine reality. These thinkers lose the bal-
ance of consciousness when they reduce reason to a strictly mundane expe-
rience. The result is not a rational, secular politics but the introduction of
political religions that substitute for Christianity and claim an ability to
transform the human condition. Voegelin is especially attentive to the ten-
dency in Enlightenment thought to immanentize the Christian eschaton
and substitute an intramundane logos for a transcendent logos. The conse-
quences of Enlightenment rationalism are revolutionary and manifest in
the radical and totalitarian movements that are part of the Western crisis of
order. Restoration of order begins with realization that Enlightenment phi-
losophy is far more radical than is typically thought and that it represents a
paradigm shift in political thinking that aims to obliterate the classical and
Judeo-Christian tradition on which the Western order depends.
Notes
1. Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976).
2. Revolution and the New Science, ed. with an introduction by Barry Cooper
in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 26 (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1999), 9. (hereafter CWEV) (FETR 3). Please note that
From Enlightenment to Revolution. From Enlightenment to Revolution
will henceforth be mentioned as FETR.
3. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), x–xi.
4. Paine went so far as to suggest the infallibility of the people.
5. CWEV, vol. 5, Modernity Without Restraint, ed. Manfred Henningsen
(Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000): 13.
6. From Enlightenment to Revolution, ed. by John H. Hallowell (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1975) and Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man,
ed. with an introduction by David Walsh in CWEV, vol. 26 (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
7. CWEV, vol. 12: 288.
8. CWEV, vol. 5: 106.
9. CWEV, vol. 24: 41–42. (FETR 10–12).
10. CWEV, vol. 26: 47–48.
11. CWEV, vol. 5: 24.
12. Voegelin classified Weber’s positivism/value-free science as “modern irra-
tionalism.” See CWEV, vol. 5: 105.
13. The loss of balance between immanent and transcendent concerns is pres-
ent throughout human history. The prophet Isaiah as well as St. Paul are
included among those who Voegelin identifies as having lost the balance of
consciousness. See The Ecumenic Age, chapter 5 “The Pauline Vision of
the Resurrected.”
14. CWEV, vol. 26: 214. (FETR, 176).
15. CWEV, vol. 24: 31. (FETR, 3).
16. Consciousness of epoch is not limited to Enlightenment thinkers. Voegelin
identifies the twelfth-century thinker Joachim of Fiore as the first of many
modern thinkers who articulate a consciousness of epoch.
17. CWEV, vol. 5: 234.
18. CWEV, vol. 26: 174. (FETR 145).
19. CWEV, vol. 26: 158–159. (FETR 134).
20. Michael Oakeshott expresses a similar criticism of rationalism is his January
28, 1948 letter to Karl Popper. Hoover Institute Archives (Collection title:
K. Popper, box number: 332, folder ID: 17). Irving Babbitt’s Democracy
and Leadership provides a criticism of English rationalism, especially
Hobbes and Locke. See Democracy and Leadership (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1924), 64–71.
21. CWEV, vol. 5: 91.
22. CWEV, vol. 26: 82–83. (FETR 69).
23. CWEV, vol. 26: 83–85. (70–71).
24. See Lippmann’s The Phantom Public, Public Opinion, and The Good Society.
226 M. P. FEDERICI
25. CWEV, vol. 26: 87, 89. (FETR 76).

26. CWEV, vol. 26: 99–100. (FETR 83–85).
27. CWEV, vol. 26: 343. (FETR 276).
28. CWEV, vol. 26: 114. (FETR 94–95).
29. CWEV, vol. 26: 156–157. (FETR 132).
CHAPTER 15
Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern

Rationalism
Wendell John Coats
This essay lays out the critique of modern Rationalism by the twentieth-
century English philosophical essayist and political theorist, Michael
Oakeshott (1901–1990), and then attempts briefly to assess its general
cogency as well as its practical implications for especially political and
moral life. It draws largely upon two of Oakeshott’s works—Experience
and Its Modes (1933) and Rationalism in Politics and other Essays (1962).
It will become evident to those who have familiarity with these two works
that the popular essays of the latter work develop in detail the implications
of a view of human knowledge and experience articulated initially in the
more philosophic Experience and Its Modes.1 And although Oakeshott
(like Plato’s Socrates and Chinese Daoists) occasionally resorts in his
expositions to the use of everyday skills such as cookery and pottery, we
shall find that his central concerns are with the effects of what he calls
modern Rationalism in the political and moral life of Western civilization
of the past four centuries or so.
In Experience and Its Modes, Oakeshott presents a view of the relation-
ship obtaining among various forms of knowing and doing as they present
W. J. Coats (*)
Connecticut College, London, CT, USA
e-mail: wjcoa@conncoll.edu

228 W. J. COATS
themselves in human experience over time. He says his viewpoint owes

much to the Idealist philosophers Hegel and Bradley, and we can observe
it certainly would fall within that school insofar as it begins from the
“whole” of which something less than the whole is predicated in various
forms of thought and action. This is a complex and lengthy work which
goes into much detail on various, settled “modalities” of experience such
as “history,” “science,” and “practice,” but here we will only look at those
of its arguments which Oakeshott subsequently develops in some detail in
his critique of modern Rationalism. Arguably, the most important point
relevant to his subsequent critiques of “rationalism” is the anti-realist
claim that there is no common subject matter in human experience.
(“there is never in experience an it”, Oakeshott 1933, p. 31) Rather, each
particular settled way of experiencing, creates its own subject matter in the
tension between how and what is experienced. (Or, as Oakeshott some-
times says, every subject matter is “correlative to” the distinctive method
of experiencing which creates it.) For example, the scientist does not study
a falling apple; rather the scientist first resolves the apple into an abstrac-
tion (called “mass”) with universal proprieties before plugging it into a
formula such a d = 1/2gt2 and so on. (Science, on Oakeshott’s account, is
experience under the category of “quantity” or quantity-like). Or to take
another illustration, the historical past (created by the principle of conti-
nuity) is not the same subject-matter as the practical past, the realm of
value and desire; the former looks at the past for its own sake, the latter for
useful lessons. (It has been suggested that Oakeshott developed this gen-
eral view as a young man when trying to mediate between the claims of
religion and science.)
Owing to the absence of a common subject matter to address, Oakeshott
is often critical of various settled modalities of experience from the stand-
point of logical irrelevance (ignoratio elenchi), for attempting to give
advice to one another, as though they were all addressing the same subject
matter. Attempting to derive practical implications from a poetic image
would be an illustration of this logical error on Oakeshott’s view.2
A related point for our exploration of Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism
is that “truth” for Oakeshott is a matter of logical (and ontological) coher-
ence, not realist correspondence between an idea and a something “out
there.” On Oakeshott’s view, the coherence theory of truth comprehends
the correspondence theory, not the other way round. To take a contem-
porary example (clearly not Oakeshott’s), the laws of Newtonian physics
are still considered valid by the scientific community even in the wake of
15 MICHAEL OAKESHOTT’S CRITIQUE OF MODERN RATIONALISM 229
the post-Einsteinian discovery of the curvature of time and space, so long

as the context for Newton’s laws is not subject to conditions of extreme
speeds (e.g., the speed of light) and extreme gravitational pulls (e.g., that
of “black holes”). Oakeshott would have called this accommodation of
Newtonian and Einsteinian physics a matter of increasing coherence
within the mode of science. To rehearse thus far, we have taken and sum-
marized a few arguments from Experience and Its Modes as a preface to our
exposition of Oakeshott’s critique of modern Rationalism. These are: that
there is no common subject matter in human experience; that distinctive
subject matters are created in the tension between a how and what of expe-
riencing; that it is a logical error to pass from different subject matters as
though they were the same and that truth is a matter of the increasing
coherence of a settled field of thought and activity, rather than realist cor-
respondence to a common-sensical reality.
In the popular essays of the 1940s and 1950s collected in Rationalism
in Politics and Other Essays, Oakeshott defines modern Rationalism as a
mode of thought appearing over the past four centuries, and characterized
by a belief in the “sovereignty” of technique, to the exclusion of practical
knowledge of timing and judgment acquired in a patient apprenticeship.
Although he sees this development as a potential in both Platonic rational-
ism and medieval rationalist theology, he sees it as crystallizing in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, saliently in the thought of Francis Bacon
and René Descartes. Oakeshott’s fundamental critique of it as an approach
to human activity and conduct is its partiality in the definition of “ratio-
nality.” In brief, it fails to grasp the full context for its own thought, “like
a man who turns off the light and then complains he cannot see.”
(Oakeshott 1962, p. 32) In its quest for certainty and in its belief that the
only true knowledge is that of a technique which can be written down and
put in books, it resolves human activity into a series of problems with dis-
tinct starting and ending points amenable to “rational” solutions, and
loses the balance and comprehensive judgment of traditional knowledge
acquired in patient apprenticeships. A related blindness it engenders as it
spreads in a culture is the misguided belief that there are universal tech-
niques which can be abstracted from one particular skill or profession and
applied directly in others without loss of skill and balance. And as it creates
new crises (saliently wars) and problems through destruction of genuine
skill and moral balance, it becomes even more “rationalist” in the illusory
search for more “rationalist” solutions, only compounding the problems
facing it.
230 W. J. COATS
This entire critique is based in turn upon Oakeshott’s view (not yet
developed in Experience and Its Modes) that modern Rationalism proceeds
from an erroneous theory of the mind, viewing it as a neutral instrument
existing in advance of the human activity it directs. As he explains in the
1950 essay “Rational Conduct,” this erroneous view is based upon “the
supposition that a man’s mind can be separated from its contents and its
activities.” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 86) In its place, Oakeshott offers an
account of the “concrete” mind, which arises from, and in, apprenticeship
to a tradition of behavior and consists in knowing how to behave in some
particular idiom by pursuing its coherence and intimations (and not in the
illusory belief that it is pursuing antecedently existing ends.) For Oakeshott
“rational conduct” has no meaning outside of a particular idiom of con-
duct (including that of scientific research); there are no universal methods
because there is no universal subject matter—each subject matter arises in
the tension between a something given identity and the method cre-
ating it.
By way of more detailed illustration of Oakeshott’s critique of
Rationalism let us look at what he has to say about the corruption of
Western political and moral life of the past four centuries or so, as it has
come increasingly under the spell of the Rationalist illusion that not to
have a ubiquitously applicable and abbreviated technique or code or ideol-
ogy, is not to be serious. Let us start with Oakeshott’s account of a healthy
morality, and how it is corrupted by the “Rationalist” illusion, and then go
on to his critique of Rationalism in politics. In the 1948 essay, “The Tower
of Babel,” Oakeshott says that “our morality appears to be a mixture of
two ideal extremes,” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 61) the character of the mixture
depending on which of the two is dominant as the spring of belief and
conduct. One is a morality of habits of feeling and conduct, the other of
reflection. The first is acquired “by living with people who habitually
behave in a certain manner,” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 61) and the second by
reflection upon either moral ideals or moral rules and laws in deciding
upon a course of action. He suggests that all existing moralities subsist as
a mixture of these two pure cases and that Western morality since about
the fourth century has been a mixture (owing to the disarray of both clas-
sical and early Christian traditional morality in the face of the barbarian
invasions) in which the “rationalist” or reflective element is dominant in
conduct, that is in which choice of action is determined by (apparent)
antecedent application of a moral ideal or a moral rule or law. He goes on
to suggest that a healthy or balanced and skillful morality arises in the
opposite mixture, one in which the role of reflective intellect is subsidiary

in the choice of conduct to a habit of behavior, and in which its proper role
is as critic and protector of habitual morality during crisis or emergency,
not as the normal spring of action, so to speak. By implication, Oakeshott’s
account has it that the continual progression of Rationalist morality and
ideology from self-induced crisis to crisis, and the continued loss of bal-
ance and acquired skill, leaves little hope of a Rationalist escape from this
imbalanced moral “mixture.” Arguably, the central insight on which
Oakeshott’s argument here is based (with Daoist3 and Hegelian4 influ-
ences) is that the implicit (an sich) is normally stronger than the explicit
(für sich) the latter of which is best restricted to times of crisis and emer-
gency, when normally healthy moral and intellectual ambiguity becomes a
liability. (An illustration of this—not Oakeshott’s—might be the Roman
Catholic resort to rationalist Aquinian theology to defend itself from criti-
cisms of the Protestant Reformation.)
In the 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” Oakeshott turns his atten-
tion to the expressly political errors of modern Rationalism. Having
defined it as a belief in the sovereignty of technique (as we have seen),
Oakeshott goes on to explore its expressly political manifestations. He
calls its myth “the assimilation of politics to engineering” (Oakeshott
1962, p. 4) and says that it resolves politics into a series of “felt needs” and
crises to be solved by the application of perfectionist universal techniques
and that the “modern history of Europe is littered with the projects of the
politics of Rationalism” (Oakeshott 1962, p. 6), giving as examples,
among others, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, national or racial
self-determination, open diplomacy, a single tax, Federalism, and the
World State.
When Oakeshott’s turns to the provenance of this “intellectual fashion
in the history of post-Renaissance Europe,” he starts with the circum-
stance under which a series of slowly mediated changes emerged unmis-
takably in the seventeenth-century investigation into the conditions
necessary for the achievement of human knowledge of both nature and
civilization, by dispensing with the presuppositions of Aristotelian science.
Oakeshott focuses in this context on the attempts of Bacon and Descartes
to formulate universal methods of inquiry capable of “certain and demon-
strable knowledge” of the world, applicable to all subject matters, and
capable of being applied by persons of average intelligence (the new
method placing “all wits nearly on a level” in Bacon’s words). He suggests
that the advance of the doctrine of the certainty and sovereignty of
232 W. J. COATS
technique into the realm of politics came largely by way of the needs of the
“inexperienced” in politics—that of the new ruler, the new ruling class
and the new political society, all searching for a “crib” or ideology to fulfill
their newly acquired functions. Machiavelli’s Prince (in advance of Bacon
and Descartes5) speaks to the needs of the first; Locke’s Second Treatise to
the needs of the second and the work of Marx and Engel (“the most stu-
pendous of our political rationalisms”) to the needs of the last (Oakeshott
1962, p. 26). This invasion of Rationalism is illustrated especially well,
Oakeshott thinks, in the views of the American founders, who, thinking
they were beginning government anew by basing it on the natural rights
discerned by Locke, merely re-articulated the historic rights of Englishmen
which Locke had abbreviated as the (Liberal) ideology of the Second
Treatise:
The Declaration of Independence is a characteristic product of the saeculum

rationalisticum. It represents the politics of the felt need interpreted with
the aid of an ideology. (Oakeshott 1962, p. 28)
Before turning to an assessment of Oakeshott’s critique of modern

Rationalism (in especially politics and morals), let us rehearse briefly its
main features. We might summarily say that (1) Oakeshott has presented
us with a constructivist6 (“reason has insight only into that which it pro-
duces after a plan of its own”), neo-Kantian7 account of the relative auton-
omy of various modalities which make up the conditional plurality of
human experience (less any account of a noumenal realm) and (2) which
also shows influences of the ancient Chinese Daoist view of right action
flowing from implicit pursuit of what is appropriate in any particular idiom
of activity at any particular moment (versus the illusory application of dis-
tracting moral ideals and precepts, a la Confucius).
Oakeshott’s rather original formulation of this general viewpoint we
have seen expressed as the claims that (1) there are no universal methods
because there is no common subject matter in human experience; (2)
therefore, it is a mistake to take methods achieved in one settled idiom of
activity and apply them indiscriminately in another such idiom and (3)
since “mind” is not a neutral instrument existing in advance of, and
detachment from, its acquired contents, political and moral activity espe-
cially are mis-conceived (with disastrous effects) when viewed as the appli-
cation of antecedently existing codes and ideologies to particular cases or
problems. By way of assessing the cogency of these Oakeshottian claims,

let us attempt very briefly to analyze these claims critically.
Arguably, an intelligent way of assessing the cogency of Oakeshott’s
critique of Rationalism is to start with those of its claims which appear
most indisputable. Arguably, doing so requires finding the level of gener-
ality at which Oakeshott first conceived it, which appears to be neither at
the level of particular crafts, nor at some grand epistemological or onto-
logical level, but rather at the level of the “theory-practice” problem, that
is, at the level of political and moral analysis (which Aristotle calls praxis).
This approach would allow us to bypass rehearsing the various philosophic
debates between, for example, Idealism and Realism, coherence theory of
truth and correspondence theory of truth, Hegelianism and Cartesianism
and Aristotelianism, and so on. To say this differently, let us try to find
those of Oakeshott’s claims which appear the soundest at first blush, and
which have the most explanatory “force” in making sense of political and
moral events. Arguably, these are two—(1) the claim that there are no
universal methods because each settled activity arises in the tension
between its distinctive how and what, or form and content of activity; and
hence, (2) it is a mistake which results in loss of balance and skill to attempt
to export, wholesale, methods from one settled activity to another as
though they had a common subject matter (a mistake implied in the old
adage, “constitutions, like wines, do not travel well”). Or to say this latter
point differently, each method creates, or is correlative to, its own subject
matter (a constructivist approximation to the realist Aristotelian claim in
the Ethics that an educated person will choose a method appropriate to the
subject matter, neither too precise nor too rough) (Aristotle 1936, p. 9).
This is not the forum for a careful policy discussion, but consider
momentarily, by way of illustration, the baleful effects of the of the ongo-
ing, misguided twentieth-century attempt to export the quantitative
methods of corporate business management into the academic and mili-
tary professions. In the former case, “general education” is reduced to
vocational training as measures of successful teaching are reduced to those
criteria which can be quantified (number of books written, number of
students taught, number of students placed with employers, etc.) In the
latter case both tactical military skill and moral balance generally are lost
as the measures of success are quantified (e.g., body counts, number and
tonnage of bombs dropped) to the exclusion of achievement of strategic
and tactical goals insusceptible of quantification.
234 W. J. COATS
Arguably, in both instances, academic and military, the effect of this

corporate import is really the creation of a new activity only nominally akin
to what preceded it and deficient in performing the functions required of
it. Viewed as supplements to the formulations of this middling level of
generality, Oakeshott’s sometimes rhetorically hyperbolic8 ontological and
epistemological claims find their appropriate fit and full explanatory force.
Concerning Oakeshott’s political tastes, we might simply observe in
conclusion that his writing shows a clear preference for loose, general
arrangements (such as civil association and markets) which mirror the cre-
ative or “poetic” structure of experiential reality by allowing spontaneous
orders to arise and function with minimal, prosaic centralized direction.
However, that theme would be the subject of another paper.
Notes
1. For more on this subject, see Coats (2000), Coats and Cheung (2012) and
Callahan (2018).
2. In his lengthy 1959 essay, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of
Mankind,” Oakeshott presented the view of poetic or aesthetic experience
as a separate modality of experience, detached from practical experience.
3. For development of the parallels between Oakeshott’s critique of Rationalism
and Chinese Daoist thought (especially the Zhuangzi) see Coats and
Cheung (2012).
4. According to Oakeshott biographer Robert Grant (in private correspon-
dence) Oakeshott read and discussed Emile Hovelaque’s 1923 book China
which is keen on similarities between Hegelianism and Daoism. Also,
Oakeshott’s essays from the 1940s and 1950s are peppered with footnotes
quoting Daoist and Confucian texts.
5. Oakeshott says that Descartes himself never became a “Cartesian,” but for
the view that Oakeshott is too kind to Descartes on this point, see my essay
“Oakeshott’s Descartes, Vico’s Descartes,” in Coats (2019).
6. There are limits to the degree to which Oakeshott’s account of experience
may be called “constructivist” since he asserts an abiding structure in the
emergence of settled modalities of experience arising in the tension between
their form and content. (The quotation is from Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, 1965, p. 20, where Kant is explaining his own subjectivist
“Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics by exploring the possibility that
the objects in experience “must conform to our knowledge” (p. 22) rather
than the other way round.)
7. For development of the parallels between Oakeshott and nineteenth- and
twentieth-century German neo-Kantianism (especially that of Simmel and
Rickert), see Podoksik (2013). For the view that Podoksik goes too far in
characterizing as “fragmentationist” Oakeshott’s account of modern plural-
ity, see Coats (2019, pp. 20–35).
8. For examples of Oakeshottian hyperbole consider the claims that philosophy
has no bearing on the practical conduct of life; that the human mind is inca-
pable of functioning as a “neutral instrument” even when conducting oper-
ations of formal logic; that no skills are transferable from one idiom of
activity to another; that to know the gist of something is to know nothing
at all, and so on.
Bibliography
Aristotle. 1936. Nichomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, 9. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Callahan, G. 2018. Hayek and Oakeshott on Rationalism. In Tradition
V. Rationalism, 211–230. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Coats, W.J. 2000. Oakeshott and His Contemporaries: Montaigne, St. Augustine,
Hegel, et al. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press.
———. 2019. Oakeshott’s Descartes, Vico’s Descartes. In Michael Oakeshott as a
Philosopher of the “Creative” and Other Essays, ed. W.J. Coats, 53–65. Exeter:
Imprint Academic.
Coats, W.J., and C. Cheung. 2012. The Poetic Character of Human Activity.
Lanham: Lexington Books.
Oakeshott, M. 1933. Experience and Its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 1962. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Methuen and Co.
Podoksik, E. 2013. From Difference to Fragmentation. In Praxis und Politik –
Michael Oakeshott im Dialog, ed. M. Henkel and O. Lembcke, 101–104.
Tubingen: Möhr Siebeck.
Smith, N.K., ed. 1965. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, 20, 22.
New York: St. Martin’s Press.
CHAPTER 16
Isaiah Berlin on Monism
Jason Ferrell
Introduction
Of the many things written about Isaiah Berlin it is surprising to note the
relative dearth of studies that have taken monism as their singular subject.
Compared to his studies of particular figures in intellectual history or his
essays in political philosophy, the attention given to his claims about
monism seems rather subdued. Generally when the topic of monism arises
in the scholarly literature on Berlin, it is prefatory to other considerations.
Monism is effectively a vehicle for the discussion of other, apparently more
important, concerns. Given the controversies some of Berlin’s writings
have generated—such as whether value pluralism can be distinguished
from moral relativism—it is perhaps not surprising that his thoughts on
monism have been treated this way.1 An initial glance at what he wrote on
the subject does not immediately strike one as controversial. Monism,
according to Berlin, embodies the central tradition of Western rationalism
from the time of Plato until the contemporary moment.2 Generally char-
acterized as the belief that all questions have one true answer, Berlin often
associates monism with the Enlightenment and its assumptions about the
primacy of reason, and calls into question whether such a belief is true. For
J. Ferrell (*)
Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada
e-mail: jason.ferrell@concordia.ca

238 J. FERRELL
him it is clear that figures such as Hobbes, Locke, and Voltaire are less
interesting than writers like Herder, de Maistre, and Vico. Indeed, Berlin’s
reputation is tightly tied to his studies of the opponents of the
Enlightenment, as well as his investigations into anti-rationalist move-
ments like Romanticism. Since this is where his originality is taken to lie,
the impetus is to highlight those things and relegate monism to the back-
ground. What, then, is there to discuss?
As with so much in Berlin’s oeuvre, a reconsideration of what at first
appears unambiguous leads to the realization that his views are quite
nuanced. Monism frequently appears in his work, but it also varies when it
occurs, much like a musical improvisation performed on different eve-
nings. These variations highlight different aspects of what is often treated
as a settled concept, and indicate dimensions to Berlin’s discussion that are
easy to overlook. While he does define the term in a clear-cut way, his
treatment of monism is multifarious. Ostensibly, his concern is to illumi-
nate the various forms of monism, and his depiction of it will vary accord-
ing to what he considers the main concern of a specific essay. For present
purposes, I will confine my investigation to what he says about three top-
ics: history, philosophy, and politics. References to monism recur during
his studies within each of these fields, and thus they provide appropriate
areas to investigate what he says. To be sure, I believe that Berlin’s use of
monism is meant to be more illustrative of a certain set of beliefs and their
influence than a logically precise analytical account. As is well known,
Berlin had little interest in relating together all the strands of his thought,
and the attempt to do so invites forcing a rich diversity of essays into a
Procrustean mold. Berlin returns to topics repeatedly like a virtuoso devel-
oping a melody, with the result that he elaborates a set of ideas much as a
performer elaborates a particular set of themes. The issue is not so much
the logical consistency of what he says, but the expression of a viewpoint
that is rhetorically persuasive, where analytical precision contributes but
one part to overall meaningfulness. Such is arguably the case for Berlin’s
claims about monism.3 With this in mind, I will now begin.
Monism and Its Iterations

A fairly standard account of monism recurs in Berlin’s writings. One part
of this account is metaphorical, and involves the image of a “three-legged
stool,” a “tripod,” or a “jigsaw puzzle.” No matter which metaphor is
marshalled, Berlin also says monism depends upon three basic
16 ISAIAH BERLIN ON MONISM 239
assumptions—the second part of his account. These assumptions are: that

all questions have one genuine answer; that there is a means of determin-
ing these answers; and that the answers are all compatible with one
another.4 Insofar as he characterizes monism this way it partially serves a
heuristic role for him; monism is a means to frame, explore, and explain
certain trends, figures, or positions. Particular individuals, for example, are
classified as monists, their work then parsed as to how it exhibits the
assumptions of monism. This use of monism occurs often in Berlin’s intel-
lectual histories, which often highlight the importance of a given figure
based on how well they exemplify, or oppose, monism. Thus Plato is a
monist par excellence while Machiavelli is not. From this perspective,
monism becomes a simplifying device that allows Berlin to sort different
authors and their works into different categories.5 Although such a classifi-
catory scheme is artificial—indeed Berlin repeatedly admits that he does
this sort of thing primarily as a means of provoking debate—it is not the
sole way he employs monism.6 Instead, monism, as he defines it, becomes
a way of examining how history, philosophy, and politics can be under-
stood and practiced. To clarify what I mean by this I will take each in turn.
Monism and History
Berlin’s view of the subject of history is straightforward. On the one hand,
history comprises a record of past events. In this respect history is a store-
house of narratives concerning the thoughts and deeds of significant fig-
ures and their influence. On the other hand, Berlin also claims “history is
what historians do.”7 It is frequently his efforts regarding the first form of
history that captures our attention, as Berlin’s accounts of historical fig-
ures—such as Tolstoy or Vico—are extraordinarily captivating. But the
latter idea—that history is what historians do—is no less compelling, espe-
cially when paired with what he says about monism.
According to Berlin, the study of history involves noting patterns that
display both similarities and differences between diverse eras. Although
Berlin argues that the historian’s task is akin to an aesthetic one, wherein
imaginative insight and a sensitivity to detail generate an account that
illuminates what has happened, he also acknowledges that there is the
temptation to interpret historical events analytically.8 It is this temptation
that prompts historians with monist inclinations to assemble theories that
provide historical studies which go beyond simple narratives. As Berlin
describes it, there is a desire to see a deeper significance in events than that
240 J. FERRELL
of mere occurrence, and this leads some to interpret history as embodying

a purpose, or reflecting a transcendent ideal, or following a set of nomo-
logical laws.9 Such desires yield architectonic accounts that attribute mean-
ing to events insofar as they can be properly related to the purpose, ideal,
or laws of the given approach. This is particularly true for attempts to
render history a more scientific domain of study. In such cases there is the
belief that the facts of history are susceptible to explanation in the way that
the facts of the natural sciences are. Both historical and scientific fields deal
with data that is taken to be objectively true; specific events that are known
to have actually occurred for the one, and particular datum that provide
the basis of theory building for the other. The similarity leads to the
assumption that the kind of explanations that work so successfully in phys-
ics, chemistry, and the like will prove equally successful for history.10 Berlin
finds this assumption to be problematic, as he does not believe the types
of explanation are the same. For him the sciences deal with those observ-
able traits that are most susceptible to quantification or descriptions
according to their “external” features. The study of history, however,
requires descriptions that are sensitive to those features that are not so
susceptible. Because history is constituted by the actions of individuals,
the historian must be able to see things from the perspective of a partici-
pant.11 If such a perspective is not taken into account, the result is a stilted
interpretation of events that ignores the issues that actually interest us.
The problem is ultimately that the attempt to explain events according to
a preconceived theory consisting of logically deducible “general formu-
lae” and “relevant laws” provides an incomplete account of what it pur-
ports to explain.12 And, according to Berlin, what can be said about the
scientific approach to history can be said about the other approaches as
well, as teleological and “metaphysical realist” approaches attempt to force
facts to fit their models.13
Given the impulse to interpret historical events according to criteria
that are considered logically necessary, Berlin also regards monist
approaches to history as being deterministic. The issue here is how monist
readings of history interpret events as causally related or “inevitable.” As
he explains it, the problem arises partially from a misunderstanding of how
the term “because” applies within the sciences as opposed to humanistic
studies like history. For the sciences, “because” delineates a set of logical
relations that determine the links between assumptions, arguments, and
conclusions. With the humanities, “because” signifies the intelligibility of
the account—of how things fit together or cohere—rather than the
logically necessary ties between events. The attempt to apply the first
understanding of “because” to the domain of history helps generate his-
torical studies that treat historical moments as if they were causally deter-
mined, with little regard for human agency. Instead the focus is upon
those forces—classes, or culture, or institutions—that do not simply shape
individual behavior, but necessitate it.14 For Berlin, such explanations of
human behavior do not simply provide poor histories; they are also
counter-intuitive. Since we do have a sense of ourselves as possessing
agency, to accept an account that regards individual behavior as causally
determined is to contradict what we believe to be true about the human
condition. While such accounts may be eventually proven true—and the
sense of our autonomy similarly disproven—as Berlin notes, this will
require an overhaul not only of the way history is practiced, but of our
moral discourse. In essence, if determinism is correct, then our view of
what it means to be human will radically alter.15 It is here that monism as
relates to history overlaps with monism as found within the practice of
philosophy. For the consequences of a monist approach to history—where
one approach provides a parsimonious explanation of all that has hap-
pened, according to precisely determined causal relations—are similar to
those found within monist visions of philosophy.
Monism and Philosophy
For Berlin philosophy is an activity that investigates the conditions of
truth and meaning, or, put differently, attempts to specify the conditions
that render the world intelligible. As a field of study, Berlin considers phi-
losophy delineated by the questions it asks; there are questions that are not
just difficult to answer, but lack obvious indicators as to where the answers
lay. According to him, most questions can be classified as either formal or
empirical, and thus gathered into one of two “baskets” (one that consists
primarily in the use of deductive methods, and the other that consists pri-
marily in inductive techniques). Philosophical questions, however, are not
readily classifiable in either way. Instead, they exhibit an admixture of both
formal and empirical elements, and cause perplexity by proving resistant to
conventional methods based on “observation and calculation.”16 Questions
such as “What is the nature of time?” differ substantively from those such
as “Is it raining?” or “What is the square root of 1?” Thus philosophical
questions prompt a variety of queries into facts, values, principles,
242 J. FERRELL
language, and methods, in wide-ranging attempts to determine their

answers.17
Given the perplexity that philosophical questions evoke, Berlin indi-
cates that there is an understandable desire to attain answers by the steady
application of one method. Monist approaches to philosophy arise as a
consequence, for such a desire easily lends itself to monism’s assumptions
that all questions have a genuine answer that can be determined by the use
of one method. Some of Berlin’s earliest writings take up these issues
through critiques of logical positivism and phenomenalism. While not his
most famous essays, “Verification,” “Empirical Propositions and
Hypothetical Statements,” and “Logical Translation” address what are
demonstrably monist tendencies as found within philosophical theories
that were dominant in the early to mid-twentieth century. As he argues in
these particular pieces, both logical positivism and phenomenalism attempt
to reduce philosophical questions to one dimension, and then articulate
how this dimension is determinative of truth and meaning. In the case of
logical positivism the claim that truth is determined by whether a state-
ment can be “verified”—or has empirical content that corresponds to the
external world—exhibits the monist impulse, while with phenomenalism
this impulse ties to the claim that truth depends upon the sensory impres-
sions of individuals, conceptualized as ideally situated observers.18
Statements (or propositions) are then regarded as meaningful to the extent
that they meet the conditions stipulated by the verification principle, or
can be translated into hypothetical statements of an “if ... then ...” form.
While Berlin criticizes logical positivism and phenomenalism for various
technical reasons (such as an inability to account for the meaning of state-
ments about past events), two of his biggest concerns are the reductive
nature of both positions and the way they incorrectly assume meaning is a
function of truth. According to Berlin, the attempt to reduce all state-
ments to either claim that are empirically verifiable or stated in a hypo-
thetical form distorts experience.19 Relatedly, he also argues that meaning
precedes the determination of truth, as there are intelligible claims that we
regard as significant, despite their not meeting the criteria of logical posi-
tivism or phenomenalism. In fact, the ability to determine whether a state-
ment is true presumes that its meaning is already understood, otherwise
there would be no way to verify, falsify, or investigate it.20 Ultimately, the
desire for certainty which underlies such approaches, and drives their belief
that genuine knowledge is a function of one procedure or mode of inquiry,
is the problem, as it precludes the consideration that perhaps truth and

meaning are multifarious.21
As with the study of history, Berlin indicates that what can be said
about the flaws of logical positivism and phenomenalism can be said about
any approach which assumes that truth and the conditions for determin-
ing it are fundamentally unitary. Thus Platonism, Aristotelianism,
Scholasticism, Cartesianism, Lockean and Humean forms of empiricism,
Kantianism, and Hegelianism all reflect the same monist tendencies dis-
cernible in logical positivism and phenomenalism, despite their very differ-
ent assumptions and arguments. Each, in its own way, holds that there is
one particular way to determine truth, and attempts to reinterpret all
other approaches in its own terms or refute them by arguing that their
answers are false. Accordingly, Berlin holds that monist approaches to phi-
losophy provide the common stream from which much of European
thought flows, from its classical origins to its contemporary articulations,
and indicates there may be deeper problems lying under the surface. In
particular are the practical implications of such approaches, especially as
found in the realm of politics.
Monism and Politics
Berlin’s discussion of politics is notably sparse when it comes to consider-
ations of institutional arrangements. Rather than focus on conventional
subjects like the role of the legislature, executive, or judiciary, he instead
focuses upon issues of political judgment and the broader dimensions of
decision-making. His concern is less about the mechanics of governance
than about the context of individual agency.22 Given this, the political
implications of monism revolve around its understanding of human
nature, as well as how this relates to ideas about liberty and autonomy. His
main goal is to show how the rationally determined order of a monist
inspired politics leads to paternalism and a restriction of liberty.
One of the clearest instances of monism’s influence upon politics is
found in Berlin’s discussion of utopianism. In “The Decline of Utopian
Ideas in the West” he explicitly says that the assumptions of monism—here
he uses both the “three-legged stool” and “jigsaw puzzle” metaphors—
embody the central tradition of western political thought.23 However, he
also adds an assumption to his account, for he says that there is a further
presumption that “virtue is knowledge.”24 This proposition, which he
attributes to Socrates, depends upon the assumption of an unchanging,
244 J. FERRELL
eternal human nature.25 The elaboration of what this human nature is—of
its true purpose—generates a moral vision that blends together descriptive
and evaluative claims, such that knowing what human nature “is” provides
the basis for knowing what individuals “ought” to do.26 As Berlin makes
clear, the combination of the three basic monist assumptions with the
further assumption about human nature justifies an approach to politics
that aims to establish the perfect society. Accordingly, utopian writers pro-
pose arrangements that fulfill our basic human nature, and thereby pro-
vide criteria to judge actual political practice. It is an approach to politics
that Berlin believes ranges from Plato’s views about the philosopher-king
to Marx’s views of the proletariat, and lends itself to forms of rational
planning that limit autonomy and are paternalistic.
The paternalism of monist approaches to politics is most evident in
their treatment of liberty. Berlin is famous for his distinction between neg-
ative and positive liberty, with the first referring to the opportunities indi-
viduals have and the second referring to their moral agency.27 For Berlin,
the issue is how monism interprets the concept of positive liberty and
justifies a type of politics that inhibits the individuals’ ability to make their
own decisions. His argument is that positive liberty assumes individuals
are purposive in their actions—that we have ends that we rationally pur-
sue—and that monism distorts this assumption. The distortion arises
when monism mistakenly presumes that the ends of a given individual are
not simply rational, but universal in scope and applicable to the whole of
humanity. As Berlin notes, “if I am rational, I cannot deny that what is
right for me must, by the same reasons, by right for others who are ratio-
nal like me.”28 The result is that what is said to be the rational purpose of
one is construed as the rational purpose of all—an extension that is logi-
cally unsound. While it may be true, for example, that some individuals
find meaningful agency through labor, this does not warrant the reifica-
tion of labor as the definitive end of all humanity, as Marx holds. Similarly,
while others might define their actions according to a spiritual ideal, it is a
mistake to assume that all human endeavors are to be so judged, as Tolstoy
suggested in his later years. For Berlin, the monist influence is the appro-
priation of positive liberty such that one, and only one, form of autonomy
is exalted over all others, because of a belief that what is right for me must
also be right for everyone else. The dilemma then is why someone should
be allowed to do what the monist knows is contrary to their true end. If I,
the monist, know that your true purpose is to cultivate the use of reason,
then why would I allow you to do things that don’t contribute to this end?
Obviously I shouldn’t—not if I am certain about what I know.29 Thus I

am justified in restraining you. At this point, Berlin believes the monist
invokes a variety of questionable rationalizations: that doing what you
want, rather than what your true end requires, is actually to be unfree; that
since you are being coerced in the name of your true self, it isn’t really
coercion; that if you understood what was genuinely good for yourself,
you would approve the monist’s actions; and that no matter who it hurts,
so long as the higher end is attained, no amount of sacrifice is too great.30
All are dubious arguments grounded upon monism’s conflation of posi-
tive liberty as something that conceptualizes individual autonomy with an
allegedly universal end that defines all of humanity. Worse, all are argu-
ments that regard human beings not as what they are—individuals—but as
material to be shaped and fitted together according to a pattern.
As Berlin makes clear, there is no political movement, secular or reli-
gious, that has not at some point used such reasoning to inflict the most
horrible suffering upon others.31 Consequently, of all the iterations of
monism, the political variant is the one with the deadliest implications. For
where the other forms of monism challenge our understanding of the
world and our place in it, the political iteration demands that the world be
changed, and us with it. If this cannot be accomplished voluntarily, then it
will have to be through the forceful efforts of those who know what is
best. “In this way,” Berlin writes, “the rationalist argument, with its
assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logi-
cally valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible from an ethical
doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an
authoritarian State obedient to the directives of an elite of Platonic
guardians.”32
Appraisal and Conclusions
Berlin’s depiction of monism as a jigsaw puzzle is useful for appraising his
own account of it; for it is simple to put the pieces together and see how
they fit as a whole. The understanding of history as a causally determined
set of events squares nicely with the philosophical conception of existence
as having a rational order. Both then fall into place with a utopian view of
what society could be, if individuals recognize their real ends and corre-
sponding place in the world. Monism, seen in this way, does provide an
interesting way to interpret various movements, thinkers, and ideologies.
The temptation is then to articulate a different account of things—or
246 J. FERRELL
present different pieces of a different puzzle. Thus the ease with which
many scholars turn their attention to what Berlin says about pluralism and
liberalism.
Yet there is something to recommend resisting such a temptation. As I
have indicated throughout my discussion, each of the iterations of monism
highlights different issues, and, upon reflection, can be seen to stand
alone. Berlin’s critique of them, while it allows their relation, actually takes
each in turn. That is, Berlin provides reasons to reject each piece of the
monist puzzle on its own terms. Hence he calls into question whether or
not history is a discipline that is amenable to a scientific approach; raises
doubts about the idea that all questions can be answered by the use of one
method; and highlights the intelligible but logically flawed political impli-
cations of monism. The interesting thing to note about Berlin’s approach
to monism is not whether his characterization of the Western tradition of
rationalism as monist is correct, but how he identifies particular assump-
tions and their influence. For the implications of monism for history, phi-
losophy, and politics entail a substantive shift in our ideas about what it
means to be human, how we understand the world, and the way we orga-
nize society. In this respect, Berlin’s account—or accounts—of monism
foregrounds widely held assumptions and asks that they be reconsidered.
Perhaps, Berlin suggests, we’ve not fully thought through the conse-
quences of what we say we believe. Perhaps once we’ve done so we may
not be comfortable with where our beliefs lead us.
So can anything be said on behalf of monism? Some, such as Ronald
Dworkin, say yes, and argue that Berlin’s concerns can be accommodated
within a monist rubric.33 I believe such a defense of monism misses the
point. If one wants to defend monism the issue is not whether a monist
position can account for pluralism or liberalism as Berlin understands
them. Rather, the issue is whether one can speak of events as “causes”
without falling prey to a scientific interpretation of history—or whether
one can provide answers to philosophical questions that inspire analogous
approaches that aren’t reductive—or whether one can assume a shared
human end without sliding into authoritarianism. In other words, the
issue is whether one can address the particular problems of monism Berlin
notes, and provide precise responses to his specific charges. Ultimately,
contra Berlin, it may prove to be the case that there is no a priori reason to
think that the assumptions of monism must lead to the outcomes he indi-
cates. This may be why he acknowledges the fact that monism’s political
iteration proceeds according to steps that require logical leaps. Without
caution, rationalism segues into irrationalism. At the very least, then, it

seems that if one desires to defend rationalism, one must treat Berlin’s
account of monism as a set of unavoidable admonitions.
Notes
1. For a good overview of the critical literature on Berlin, see: Ian Harris,
“Berlin and His Critics,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017), 349–374; George Crowder, “After Berlin: The
Literature since 2002,” accessed May 21, 2019, http://berlin.wolf.ox.
ac.uk/lists/onib/after-berlin.pdf, and the exhaustive bibliography of sec-
ondary literature compiled by Henry Hardy on the Isaiah Berlin Virtual
Library website that can be found at http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/
onib/other.html. For more specifically about the relativism-pluralism
debate see: George Crowder, “Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin, ed. Joshua L. Cherniss and
Steven B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018),
229–249.
2. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” in The
Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 183–185; Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the
Ideal,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), 4–5; Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce
between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in Against the Current: Essays
in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1997), 80–81;
Isaiah Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry
Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5; and Isaiah Berlin,
“The Birth of Greek Individualism,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2017), 290.
3. For a different take on this issue see: Sara Lagi, “Sir Isaiah Berlin: against
Monism (1953–1958),” in Monisms and Pluralisms in the History of
Political Thought, ed. Andrea Cantanzaro and Sara Lagi (Rome: Edizioni
Epokė, 2015), 139–154, and Luke MacInnis, “Two Concepts of Monism:
Axiomatic and Asymptotic,” The Review of Politics 77, no. 4 (2015):
603–635.
4. For examples of both the ways Berlin speaks about monism, see: Berlin,
“The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 5–6; Berlin, “The Birth of Greek Individualism,”
290–294; Isaiah Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” in
The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 24–27; and Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism,
ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21–23.
248 J. FERRELL
5. One of the most famous instances of this is the distinction Berlin draws
between “foxes” and “hedgehogs.” See: Isaiah Berlin, “The Hedgehog
and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History,” in Russian Thinkers,
2nd edition, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (London: Penguin Books,
2008), 24–92. Eric Mack, however, is particularly critical of Berlin’s read-
ing of history in this manner. See: Eric Mack, “Isaiah Berlin and Liberalism
Pluralism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1993): 216 f.
6. Compare: Berlin, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” 24–26 and Isaiah Berlin,
“The Naïveté of Verdi,” in Against the Current: Essays in the History of
Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1997), 287–290.
7. Isaiah Berlin, “The Concept of a Scientific History,” in Concepts and
Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999), 103.
8. Isaiah Berlin, “The Sense of Reality,” in The Sense of Reality: Studies in
Ideas and their History, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Chatto & Windus,
1996), 19–20.
9. Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 104–110.
10. Berlin, “The Concept of Scientific History,” 104–105.
11. Berlin, “The Sense of Reality,” 25–26.
12. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 109.
13. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 110.
14. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 114 f.
15. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 161–162. Compare: Isaiah Berlin,
“Introduction,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2017), 4–7.
16. Isaiah Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” in Concepts and Categories:
Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 3. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “Does Political Theory Still
Exist?” in Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 144–148.
17. Berlin, “The Purpose of Philosophy,” 3. Compare: Isaiah Berlin, “The
Philosophers of the Enlightenment,” in The Power of Ideas, ed. Henry
Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 36–38.
18. Isaiah Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” in
Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 40.
19. Berlin, “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,”
39–43, 46–47.
20. Isaiah Berlin, “Verification,” Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays,
ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 25.
21. Isaiah Berlin, “Logical Translation,” in Concepts and Categories:

Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999), 77–79. Compare: Berlin, “My Intellectual Path,” 2–4.
22. For more on Berlin’s lack of discussion about the mechanisms of gover-
nance, see: Jeremy Waldron, “Isaiah Berlin’s Neglect of Enlightenment
Constitutionalism,” in Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), as well as George
Crowder, “Value Pluralism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy: Waldron
and Berlin in Debate,” The Review of Politics 81, no. 1 (2019): 101–127.
23. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 24–25, 27.
24. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 27.
25. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 28.
26. Berlin, “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West,” 28–29.
27. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Liberty, ed. Henry Hardy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 169–181.
28. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 191.
30. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 192–198. Compare: Berlin, “My
Intellectual Path,” 16–18.
31. Berlin, “European Unity and its Vicissitudes,” 181–182.
33. Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011).
CHAPTER 17
Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human

Existence
Nathanael Blake
Introduction
Russell Kirk’s 1953 classic, The Conservative Mind, was more than a dis-
covery, but less than an invention, of an Anglo-American conservative
intellectual tradition. Kirk successfully wove disparate threads into a coher-
ent scholarly tapestry, making clear a previously inchoate conservative
heritage that remains important to this day.
Regarded therefore as a founder of modern American conservatism,
Kirk was “one of the most important men of letters in the twentieth cen-
tury.”1 He is still held in honor (though perhaps less than he deserves)
decades after his death in 1994. He did not win all of his battles over the
nature and practice of conservatism, let alone more broadly, but those
engaged with intellectual conservatism had, and have, to reckon with him.
Kirk’s conservatism was based on belief in a moral order beyond human
will, coupled with an acute awareness of the limitations of private human
reason in apprehending, articulating and applying that moral order to
society and politics. Thus, the first of Kirk’s six canons of conservative
thought, as originally formulated in The Conservative Mind, was “Belief
N. Blake (*)
Independent Scholar, Columbia, MO, USA

252 N. BLAKE
that divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal

chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.
Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow
rationality…cannot of itself satisfy human needs.” Kirk then quoted the
memorable line that, “Human reason set up a cross on Calvary, human
reason set up the cup of hemlock, human reason was canonized in Notre
Dame” before concluding that “politics is the art of apprehending and
applying the Justice which is above nature.”2
This passage would be modified in subsequent editions over the years,
but the message remained consistent. In The Politics of Prudence (1993),
Kirk declared as the first principle of conservatism that “the conservative
believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for
man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths
are permanent.”3 This affirmation of enduring moral truths was followed
by Kirk’s endorsement of “custom, convention, and continuity” and the
“principle of prescription.” Kirk wrote that “it is perilous to weigh every
passing issue on the basis of private judgement and private rationality.”4
Conservatives affirm the existence of permanent moral truths, but they are
skeptical of the capabilities of human reason to unerringly apprehend and
articulate them—the conservative thus values tradition and the wisdom of
the past.
Consequently, Kirk’s conservative revival was founded on convictions
that many philosophers have treated as contradictory: belief in real moral
truth and natural law, combined with an anti-rationalist suspicion of the
capacity of human reason to apprehend and articulate moral truth in abso-
lute propositions. Following the example of Edmund Burke, Kirk’s con-
servatism rejects Enlightenment philosophy, which tended to take
mathematics as a model for all knowledge, including moral knowledge.
True moral knowledge, per the Enlightenment, would be derived from
universal principles, expressed as philosophical propositions demonstrable
to all rational persons, and applicable to practical politics. Moral relativism
has often been presented as the alternative to this rationalism perspective.
Against this dichotomy of rationalism and relativism, Kirk asserted that
there is a moral order beyond human invention, to which we own obedi-
ence and which ought to inform our culture, politics and economics.
However, he appended his conviction that the truths of this moral order,
and their subsequent application, cannot be precisely defined by human
reason, leaving us dependent upon convention and tradition for much of
our moral knowledge.
17 RUSSELL KIRK: THE MYSTERY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE 253
Reason’s Limits
While serving in the Army during the second world war (his station in the
Utah desert left the young scholar much time to read and reflect), Kirk
realized that he did not “sympathize with the chief currents of thought
and feeling” of the Enlightenment, but that what he “respected in the
Enlightenment was the men who had stood against the whole tendency of
their epoch—such men as Johnson and Burke.”5 The latter in particular
would define his thought; out of the multitude of poets, philosophers and
politicians whom Kirk wrote about, Edmund Burke was the lodestar of his
thought, perhaps followed by T.S. Eliot. Consequently, in reading Kirk, it
is sometimes difficult to delineate where the summary and interpretation
of Burke leave off and commentary and criticism begin.
Following Burke’s lead, Kirk contended that the model of rationality
embraced by the Enlightenment obscures essential moral and political
truths. Though Enlightenment thinkers hoped to establish a compelling
standard of universal public rationality, they failed. They proved unable to
provide a method for rationally deriving and demonstrating universal
moral and political truths. They began by seeking the philosophical equiv-
alent of the methodology of mathematics, and ended by substituting pri-
vate speculation in place of public reason.
This failure was demonstrated by the French revolutionaries and their
apologists, who claimed to be establishing a political regime based on the
laws of a universal reason and nature. But in hindsight, Burke’s objections
were vindicated. Far from being purely rational, the revolutionaries’ phi-
losophies were captive to a multitude of prejudices and presuppositions.
The Revolution’s radical theories of universal reason and rights were not
publicly vindicated, but were instead exposed as so much ill-founded pri-
vate speculation. A regime that proclaimed liberty, equality and fraternity
bloodily descend into tyranny and war. The application of the Rights of
Man produced an enormity of wrongs done to men.
By Kirk’s time, metaphysicians were held in less esteem than during the
heady days of the French Revolution’s celebrations of Reason. But ratio-
nalism endured, albeit often in altered guise. From scientific socialism to
positivism to the cults of social science experts, the rationalist impulse hid
the ragged mantle of metaphysics under the lab coat of science.
Against the spirit of his age, Kirk found that his was “not an
Enlightenment mind,” for he did “not love cold harmony and perfect
regulation of organization.” He realized that the “men of the
254 N. BLAKE
Enlightenment had cold hearts and smug heads,” and that their successors
“were in the process of imposing upon all the world a dreary conformity,
with Efficiency and Progress and Equality for their watchwords—abstrac-
tions preferred to all those fascinating and lovable peculiarities of human
nature and human society that are the products of prescription and
tradition.”6
In all cases, whether the revolutionary philosophes or the revolutionary
scientific socialists or the authoritative (and often authoritarian) experts,
rationalism aims to apprehend truth through an act of intellect (whether
speculative or methodological), and articulate it so that it may be unerr-
ingly applied. The conformity of rationalist systems is thus revealed as a
consequence of the will to power of those who seek to rule through intel-
lectual domination.
Rationalism’s sin is hubris, founded upon the belief that finite humans
can apprehend, articulate and apply universal truths without regard for
our own weaknesses and contingencies. The rationalist mentally constructs
a model universe, or at least a part of it, that he (and it has usually been a
he) is capable of fully comprehending. He simplifies the world, or artifi-
cially isolates part of it, to the point where his intellect can encompass it.
The mystery of human existence as finite creatures, thrown into life, is
rejected in favor of a totalizing system that is meant to bring the cosmos
and society under control by the intellect.
Kirk opposed this intellectual arrogance, having learned from Burke
and others that human reason is limited, human circumstances complex
and human goodness fallible. Kirk traced this view to Burke’s Christianity,
“which the men of the Enlightenment violently rejected.”7 He found in
Burke’s thought acceptance that “We must leave much to Providence; to
presume to perfect man and society by a neat ‘rational’ scheme is a mon-
strous act of hubris.”8 Man must accept truth as it can be known to him
within his limited and contingent existence, rather than trying to attain to
a God’s-eye view that apprehends the entirety of truth.
Likewise, Kirk found much to admire in T.S. Eliot, the great meta-
physical poet and critic who was “opposed to abstract systems created out
of private rationality,” and who, like Burke, “came to dread not the intel-
lect itself—certainly not to dread right reason—but rather to dread defe-
cated rationality, arrogantly severed from larger sources of wisdom. He
dreaded this presumption in the person, and he dreaded it in the com-
monwealth.”9 Kirk increasingly used Eliot’s language in his writing, which
gave them a mystical aura at times. This was intentional, for Kirk knew
that not all truths can be perfectly communicated through philosophical

propositions. Thus, in his writing he used the imagery of Burke and Eliot
as he emphasized their wisdom in rejecting rationalistic schemes.
Truth, Tradition and the Sword of Imagination

Kirk’s rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and its heirs did not fall into
the morass of a thoroughgoing moral relativism. He avoided the trap
(identified by Alasdair MacIntyre and others) of accepting the
Enlightenment’s model of rationality as definitive, thereby leading to a
rejection of the reality of reason and truth by those who perceive the fail-
ure of the Enlightenment project. Kirk knew that moral truths are real,
though they cannot be reduced to definitive postulates and philosophical
propositions as part of a comprehensive system. Rather, they are appre-
hended through a variety of means, from tradition to the moral imagination.
Birzer explains that Kirk “wanted to profess myriad good little truths.”10
We should strive for knowledge of particular moral truths that can be
instantiated in our lives, rather than chasing the illusion of a complete,
rational, demonstrable moral system. Thus, Birzer notes that Kirk, like
Burke, believed that “natural rights exist, but a definite set of rights for all
times and all places and all persons might simply be unknowable and
uncategorizable to the human’s finite capacities.”11 We must be content to
realize truth within our finitude, rather than constructing rationalist sys-
tems that aim to transcend our human limitations.
It is here that Edmund Burke may be most essential to Kirk’s thought.
Twentieth-century scholars, including Peter Stanlis and Francis Canavan,
had noted that Burke was not the utilitarian many had presumed him to
be. Rather, they showed that Burke was a natural law thinker, but these
revisionist scholars did not always appreciate their subject’s unique contri-
butions to natural law theory. Burke’s understanding of the natural law
was informed by the natural law tradition, but (as noted in the chapter on
Burke in this volume, Chap. 2), he was no doctrinarian Thomist (neo or
otherwise).
Kirk agreed that Burke was a follower of the natural law tradition, who
“enunciates the doctrine of the jus naturale, the law of the universe, the
creation of the Divine mind, of which the laws of man are only imperfect
manifestations.”12 He argued that in Burke’s view, human laws and institu-
tions are meant to reflect the order and goodness of God and His eternal
law, which man defies at his peril. Consequently, Kirk found that “Burke
256 N. BLAKE
declared that men do not make laws, they merely ratify or distort the laws
of God.”13 Contrary to what many prior scholars of Burke had thought,
Kirk argued that for Burke the standard by which human laws are to be
judged is not their apparent utility (often narrowly defined), but their
conformity with the natural law. Nor was Burke’s attachment to religion
rooted in its social utility. Rather, Kirk argued that “Burke does not
approve religion because it is a bulwark of order, instead he says that mun-
dane order is derived from, and remains a part of, Divine order.”14 The
portrait that emerges of Burke in Kirk’s study is not that of a conservative
utilitarian but of a natural law thinker, albeit one who was most influenced
by the classical tradition of Cicero rather than the scholastic tradition of
Aquinas. Kirk articulated the consistent natural law underpinnings of
Burke’s thought, while drawing out that which was unique to it.
Of the scholars who recovered Burke as a natural law thinker, Kirk may
have best understood the corrective that Burke provided to the corruption
that Enlightenment rationalism had worked upon natural law theorizing.
Modern and Enlightenment thinkers had transmuted the idea of natural
law into a source of mathematical models for morality and politics. But the
natural law is not a heavenly statute book that can be apprehended through
reason and readily applied to practical politics. Even if it were understood
in such a fashion, superlative acts of individual reason are not a firm foun-
dation for a moral and political order. To constantly reevaluate each new
circumstance from first principles (even if they could be established, which
they have not) would be intolerable.
Kirk knew that social order depends on habit, and that the instantiation
of natural law precepts depends less on reason than on prescription. He
wrote that “it seems that people are decent, when they are decent, chiefly
out of habit. They fall into habits of decent conduct by religious instruc-
tion, by settled family life, by assuming private responsibilities.”15
Philosophers and statesmen have tasks of reflection and reform, but they
ought to begin with a determination to preserve the good, knowing that
a tolerably good social order is often fragile, and that most men do not
reason their way to moral truths, but inherit and assimilate them through
family, church and culture.
These politics of prudence were championed by Burke, who was a great
reformer as well as a foe of radical revolution. Even as he condemned the
French Revolution, Burke directed the impeachment of Hastings for
wrongs committed against the British Empire’s subjects in India. Kirk
helped make clear the continuity of Burke’s efforts, where many others
had seen only contradictions. Burke’s reforming efforts were undertaken

not on behalf of abstract systems of rights, but on the best of the moral
knowledge and traditions of the world.
But the radicals of the Enlightenment were eager to tear down the
social order that instructed men in their moral duties, in part because they
had embraced a fallacious idea of human nature that stripped away man’s
social realities. Their theories of man’s natural state removed man from
the relationships and institutions that form and define him. In contrast,
Burke rejected theories of natural rights that posited man in an unnatural,
asocial state. Society is the natural state of man, and art is man’s nature.
Nonetheless, a good social and political order is established only with dif-
ficulty, often through painful trial and error. Kirk knew that even within
the natural social order of mankind, “Disorder always had been the natural
condition of man; order, the product of elaborate artifice.”16 An asocial
state of mankind would be dreadful; “Order, justice and freedom are gar-
den plants; the natural condition of humankind is that of the jungle.”17
The jungle is not asocial, but it is often brutal.
The effort to elucidate the precepts of the natural law by positing a
humanity whose essence is the opposite of the real social condition of
humanity was a failure. The moral truths of the natural law are not found
through abstract speculation that strips away the realities of human exis-
tence as it is in search of an abstract human essence. Rather, they are
apprehended throughout the human experience. The process by which
moral and political truths are realized involves the whole person, as she
actually exists in society, rather than the naked intellect contemplating an
isolated individual.
Kirk understood that Burke in particular had redeemed tradition as a
mediator of natural law, rather than its opponent. Indeed, tradition func-
tions as a form of the public reason that was so elusive for Enlightenment
thinkers. In Burke’s language, instead of each man relying on his own
private stock of reason, tradition allows him to rely upon the bank and
capital of nations and of ages—the natural law as instantiated and prac-
ticed. Kirk’s use of Burke to illuminate the importance of tradition to the
natural law is a significant achievement, though it may be underappreci-
ated by natural law theorists.18
While discussing Cicero, Kirk connected this reliance on tradition to
the importance of the moral imagination, asserting that the “natural law is
not a fixed code in opposition to the law of the state: properly understood,
the law of nature is the moral imagination and that natural law enables us,
258 N. BLAKE
through reason, to apply customary and statutory law humanely. The nat-
ural law, in Cicero’s expression of it, is ethical principle interpreting the
rules by which men live together in community.”19 The natural law is
known through the moral imagination reflecting upon experience and tra-
dition, more than through the abstract efforts of reason.
And the moral imagination is inculcated in many different ways. Kirk
knew that art and religion are as essential to the formation and continua-
tion of a sound political and social order as are philosophies. He expanded
and elaborated upon Burke’s insight that the moral imagination is shaped
by culture, with its symbols, norms and narratives, and so Kirk wrote
about art and literature and architecture. He penned an insightful book
about T.S. Eliot, his friend and the greatest poet of the twentieth century.
He even wrote gothic fiction. He enjoyed ghost stories; there was some-
times money to be made in writing them, but his efforts are also rich with
nutrients for the moral imagination of his readers. Some of Kirk’s fiction
sold well (Old House of Fear sold more copies than all his other books
combined),20 but he did not have the enduring success of a J.R.R. Tolkien
(whose work Kirk admired). Still, his tales were part of his efforts to water
and fertilize the wasteland that Eliot had so memorably described.
We are creatures of narrative and imagination, more than of reason.
Kirk declared that what “chiefly distinguishes the human kingdom from
the animal kingdom is the power of imagination possessed by the human
race.”21 This may overstate the matter, but it is true that reason and imagi-
nation are interactive and complementary within the human
consciousness.
The apprehension of moral truth depends on the right quality of imagi-
nation, as much as right reason. And both reason and imagination are
shaped by culture and language, rather than existing in a realm of pure
intellects and essences. As Kirk put it, “so far as we can delineate the fea-
tures of natural justice, Burke suggests, it is the experience of mankind
which supplies our knowledge of Divine law; and the experience of the
species is taught to us not only through history, but through myth and
fable, custom and prejudice.”22 The moral truths that should guide us will
be made manifest through the whole of our experience.
As Kirk understood Burke’s view, we know the Divine mind and will
through “the prejudices and traditions which millenniums of human expe-
rience with Divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of
the species.”23 Man, as a social being, cannot exist outside of tradition, and
though tradition is not infallible, regarding it with humility is the proper
response given the grave limits of private reason, and the extent to which
we are always shaped by tradition. We are instructed both consciously and
unconsciously by these legacies of the past, though we also influence them
in return as we partake of them.
Kirk discovered such a dynamic in the American founding. Arguing
against those who saw America as a project of Enlightenment or classical
liberal philosophy, he traced the traditions upon which the framers of the
United States relied, often consciously. The United States founding was
influenced by natural law thinking, but it was not reducible to the ratio-
nalistic natural rights theories of Locke and his followers. For instance,
Kirk noted that that “Blackstone and by his American disciples Story and
Kent…looked upon the common law as the nearest approach (however
imperfect) to natural law, because it had grown out of the experiences and
observations and consensus of many generations of wise men and had
been tested repeatedly for its conformity to natural law.”24
Though the natural law may justify and inform rebellion against unjust
government, Kirk emphasized that it should do so in defense of concrete
goods, not on behalf of abstract ideals. He repeatedly pointed out that the
American colonists rebelled to preserve a patrimony and habit of self-
government, unlike the radicals of the French Revolution. The American
War for Independence was waged in defense of rights that were long-
standing, rather than the product of abstract speculation. The Declaration
of Independence contains appeals to natural law (or at least natural rights),
but also many complaints regarding the denigration of the rights and tra-
ditions of self-government that the colonists had enjoyed.
Therefore, in the American context Kirk’s conservatism directs us
toward the Constitution and the inheritance of our history and traditions,
rather than defining the United States according to a few sentences from
the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Birzer explains that
Kirk knows that “simply because Locke or Jefferson declared three rights
as rights did not make them so and never could. To believe that either of
these men identified the rights perfectly would be to presume that each
knew things that only God can know, and the result would be nothing
short of a parody of real rights and real justice.”25 The United States was
not established as a project of Enlightenment rationalism, and Kirk resisted
attempts to rebrand it as such.
260 N. BLAKE
Conclusion
Though the conservative intellectual tradition Russell Kirk illuminated has
not always triumphed over its rivals in the academy and in politics, his
work remains indispensable reading for educated conservatives, and those
who seek to understand them.
Kirk established intellectual conservatism as neither rationalistic nor
relativistic. Conservatives believe that there is an enduring moral order to
which we own obedience, and that we, as finite, contingent creatures, can-
not fully encompass it through an act of intellectual domination. With our
limitations, we must often rely upon tradition, informed by the moral
imagination. But tradition is alive, always needing renewal and often need-
ing reform. We should, however, prefer to proceed cautiously, mindful of
our limits and frailties, rather than eagerly seeking to remake culture and
government in accord with rationalist plans.
This wisdom is frequently neglected, even by self-described conserva-
tives. Kirk’s legacy is too often unheeded by those who claim to honor
him. Nonetheless, his works still nourish the moral imaginations of read-
ers, and his ideas resonate with those who seek to redeem the time. Kirk
liked to reference Eliot’s observation that there are no lost causes because
there are no gained causes, and the conservative cause is, by definition,
perpetual. But Kirk repelled rationalist assaults, rebuilt and restored an
intellectual conservatism, and added a noble amount to the wisdom held
in the bank and capital of ages.
Notes
1. Bradley J. Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, (Lexington,
Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 8.
2. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, (Chicago:
Regnery, 1953), 7–8.
3. Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books,
1993) 17.
4. Kirk, The Politics of Prudence, 19.
5. Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of
Literary Conflict, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Co., 2002), 68.
6. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 68–69.
7. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, (Wilmington, DE:
ISI, 1997), 165.
8. Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered 165.

9. Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T.S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the
Twentieth Century, (Peru, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984), 45.
10. Birzer, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, 101.
12. Kirk, The Conservative Mind 32.
13. Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 43.
15. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 126.
18. See, for instance, the rationalism of the so-called new natural law theory
developed by John Finnis and others, which is contemptuous of tradition,
as opposed to rationality, as a source of moral truth.
19. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI
Books, 2004), 112.
21. Kirk, The Sword of Imagination, 309
24. Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 371.
CHAPTER 18
Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem

in Cities
Sanford Ikeda
Urbanization and Its Problems

Although the messiness of urban life has probably been taken for granted
since ancient times, the rise in human material well-being and greater lit-
eracy and communication since the 1800s (McCloskey 2010: 1–2) played
a major role in finally transforming the urge to address negative externali-
ties into municipal policy. This essay addresses the role and the limits of
urban planning based on my interpretation of the great urbanist,
Jane Jacobs.
In order to understand the role and limits of urban planning and urban
interventionism, we need to look more closely at the underlying reasons
behind those limits, reasons that center on the “knowledge problem” (or
what Jacobs (1961: 418) refers to as the problem of “locality knowledge”)
and the way that problem might or might not be solved. We will see that
effective solutions to urban problems hinge crucially on the extent to
This article was made possible in part by a grant from the Charles Koch
Foundation.
S. Ikeda (*)
Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY, USA

264 S. IKEDA
which we appreciate the nature and significance of the knowledge prob-

lem and that, in fact, the failure of planning and interventionism in general
(Ikeda 1998) is a direct consequence of the failure to appreciate or even to
acknowledge the existence of that problem owing to an attitude of ratio-
nalist constructivism.
“Rationalist Constructivism”1
F.A. Hayek defines “constructivism,” or what he elsewhere (Hayek 1967:
85) refers to as “Cartesian rationalism,” as “the innocent sounding for-
mula that, since man has himself created the institutions of society and
civilization, he must also be able to alter them at will so as to satisfy his
desires or wishes” (Hayek 1978: 3). In her critique of mid-twentieth-
century urban planning, Jane Jacobs is attacking this sort of rationalist
constructivism.
Jacobs’s critique focuses on planners’ neglect of street-level human inter-
actions, owing to their simplistic rationalist conceptions of the nature of a
living city, and the actual influence that the built environment has in enabling
or undermining those interactions (e.g., social capital and “webs of com-
munication”). Those interactions form an overall invisible social infrastruc-
ture that is not the result of any person’s or group’s rational, deliberate
design but the outcome of myriad unpredictable contacts that take place in
public space. In short, Jacobs sees the living city as a spontaneous order, or
to use her terminology a “problem of organized complexity” (Jacobs 1961:
429). This means that a city thrives when the individual plans of its inhabit-
ants collectively, but unconsciously, contribute to the unplanned emergence
of complex and dynamic social networks. It is in this sense that, as she puts
it, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only
because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (Jacobs 1961: 238).
In both Jacobs’s critique of centralized urban planning and the eco-
nomic critique of collectivist economic planning, planners ignore the
“knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” (Hayek
1948: 80) that individuals possess within the context of their daily lives. In
the economic critique of central planning, rationalist constructivism results
in the elimination of meaningful money prices, owing to the absence of
market transactions of property rights, so that ordinary people cannot
determine the relative scarcity of resources and rationally calculate profits
and losses (Lavoie 1985). In Jacobs’s critique it is naïve rationalism that
leads to the failure of local planning authorities to understand how the
18 JANE JACOBS AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IN CITIES 265
design of public spaces impacts the fine-grained and intricate interactions

among people who, for the most part, are strangers to one another.
Among those responsible for cities, at the top, there is much ignorance. This
is inescapable, because big cities are just too big and too complex to be
comprehended in detail from any vantage point—even if this vantage point
is at the top—or to be comprehended by any human; yet detail is of the
essence. (Jacobs 1961: 121–2)
These are different kinds of contextual knowledge, but they are the
same category of knowledge. The problems identified by economists in
the early twentieth century are robust in the sense that they apply mutatis
mutandis to the knowledge problem that Jacobs identified in the mid-
twentieth century. Where her critique differs from the market-process ver-
sion, they tend to complement rather than conflict because they issue from
the same underlying critique of rationality.
This led Jacobs, in the last chapter of her 1961 classic to identify a living
city, following Warren Weaver, as a “problem of organized complexity.”
Here is how Gene Callahan and I summarize Weaver’s three categories of
scientific problems.
The first are problems of simplicity, which deal with situations involving a
very few independent variables, in which the rules of ordinary algebra are
appropriate. The second level are problems of disorganized complexity, which
concern situations involving so many independent variables that their inter-
actions produce random variations. Here formal statistical analysis is appro-
priate. Finally, there are problems of organized complexity that lie between
the first two kinds of problems. This is the realm of social orders in which
the movement of individual elements are not predictable but overall, non-
statistical patterns are discernable. Jacobs’s and Weaver’s warning is that the
methods appropriate to solving one problem should not be used for the
solution of the others. (Callahan and Ikeda 2004: 17; emphasis added)
The problem, according to Jacobs is that “the theorists of conventional

modern city planning [circa 1961] have consistently mistaken cities as
problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to
analyze and treat them thus” (Jacobs 1961: 435). Which boils down to
treating a living city as a machine completely comprehensible to the human
mind, much as an experienced architect may design an efficient apartment
building; or as one might approach the problem of calculating the optimal
266 S. IKEDA
amount of light and air necessary to maintain the health of an “average

person.” This is a result of ignoring epistemic and cognitive limits of effec-
tive, rational calculation.
Unlike either problems of simplicity or of disorganized complexity, a
city as a problem of organized complexity can be predictable only insofar
as we can discern general patterns rather than specific outcomes. There is
in fact no assurance that any particular pattern will emerge, no matter how
much we want it to; only that these conditions tend over time to create the
an overall sense of safety that encourages people to interact, informally in
more or less creative ways. What emerges in that process no one can say
with complete accuracy. If you could, it would not be a problem of orga-
nized complexity; it would not be a living city. To view a city therefore as
anything other than a problem of organized complexity, or in our termi-
nology a spontaneous order, is to risk missing the essential quality of urban
life, and indeed all genuinely social life.
Moreover, policies based on such a misunderstanding have little hope
of attaining their intended goal, except perhaps by accident. Rather, the
outcomes of such ignorant policy-making can and have indeed resulted in
tragic, unintended consequences.
Jacobs was not alone among urbanists in characterizing a living city in
this way. Indeed, she acquired much of her understanding of cities from
researchers such as William Whyte (1988), who carefully observed and
analyzed the various and subtle ways in which ordinary people use public
spaces, such as plazas, from which he drew important conclusions for the
design and placement of those plazas.
Christopher Alexander, whom Jacobs admires, deciphers the “pattern
language” shared by successful spaces in general, private and public.
A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by

the timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves;
it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it
in. (Alexander 1979: ix; emphasis original)
Ken-ichi Sasaki’s discussion of the “urban tactility” one experiences at

street level when in a public space highlights an essential dimension to the
urban experience. As we become familiar with a place, what we feel
becomes more important than what we see (Sasaki 1998: 36).
“Tactile knowledge” is what we feel in the presence of an object: the
smells of a street, the texture of a building, the grade of a hill. It is the
knowledge gained though contact or direct experience with an event or

environment, and is related to Jacobs’s concept of “locality knowledge” as
well as to F.A. Hayek’s “local knowledge.” The bias in urban policy toward
the car and away from the pedestrian has profoundly shifted our experi-
ence of the city from the tactile to the visual, making it in the processes
duller. This in turn has discouraged the formation of social capital, which
is the foundation for tactile/local knowledge and its utilization, because
there will be less meaningful contact as people shun dull places.
Similarly, Kevin Lynch describes the way in which people spontane-
ously come to a common understanding of their image of a city, one that
is useful for navigating the complex urban environment.
There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of
many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images each
held by some significant number of citizens. Such group images are neces-
sary if an individual is to operate successfully within his environment and to
cooperate with his fellows. Each individual picture is unique, with some
content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public
image, which in different environments is more of less compelling, more or
less embracing. (Lynch 1960)
What all these approaches have in common—Jacobs, Whyte, Alexander,

Sasaki, and Lynch—is an understanding that for planners to successfully
plan they need to observe and appreciate the intricate ways in which peo-
ple see and interact with the urban environment; something that com-
pletely escapes planners who treat a city in a rationalist constructivist
manner, as a problem of simplicity or of disorganized complexity.
The Consequences for Urban Design

In Death and Life Jacobs identifies a number of consequences of failing to
see a city as a problem of organized complexity and of using a rationalist
constructivist approach. But I believe three are especially important for
illustrating her critique of urban planning and design.
Border Vacuums
Jacobs defines a “border vacuum,” as “a single massive or stretched-out use
of territory” (Jacobs 1961: 257). A structure with a single, massive use in a
268 S. IKEDA
neighborhood or district—for example, a river, a park, an enormous resi-

dential or office complex, a sports stadium, a parking lot, a university cam-
pus—means that people crowd into and dominate that area only during
certain times of the day or on certain days of the week. When not used,
however, it becomes largely devoid of people, making it less interesting and
potentially more dangerous. The influence of a border vacuum radiates
from that “great blight of dullness” to the surrounding streets and public
spaces that surround it, making those adjacent spaces duller and less attrac-
tive in turn. It may extend some distance before livelier streets can offset the
forces of dullness that a border vacuum generates.2 In her time, although
critical of private endeavors as well, Jacobs took particular aim at the massive
projects that were funded by taxation or relied on eminent domain, such as
urban renewal, monument building, and housing projects: “Extraordinary
governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree
of monotony, sterility and vulgarity” (Jacobs 1961: 7). The failure of ratio-
nalist constructivism in urban planning to recognize the way people subjec-
tively perceive their environment removes an important constraint on the
creation of border vacuums. The same holds true with respect to cataclys-
mic money.
Cataclysmic Money
Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing
drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends
relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm. Putting it figu-
ratively, insofar as their effects on most city streets and districts are con-
cerned, … [cataclysmic money behaves] like manifestations of malevolent
climates beyond the control of man—affording either searing droughts or
torrential, eroding floods. (Jacobs 1961: 293)
As a practical matter, cataclysmic money that floods into (and also out
of) an area often produces border vacuums. With budget constraints
funded in whole or in part by government taxation, public projects or
public-private partnerships that rely on the power to tax and eminent
domain tend to be much larger-scale than purely private, market-based
projects. As the scale of a project or plan increases (or a design becomes
more detailed) the mind of the planner increasingly substitutes for, rather
than complements, the spontaneous complexity of a socio-economic order
driven by many independent, experimenting minds.
Visual Order
The way an area looks, particularly from a distance, is less important than
the way it is perceived, and following Sasaki, felt, up close and personal. A
city should be legible, first and foremost, by the people who live in it and
not by the rational planner or designer. But “there is a basic esthetic limi-
tation on what can be done with cities” (Jacobs 1961: 372). And that
esthetic limitation is imposed on the conscientious planner because the
beauty of a living city is in the eyes of the inhabitants who behold it
largely on the street, not of the planner or designer who wants to shape
the city in according to a pet image, either in whole or in part.
Which is not to say that Jacobs sees no role for active urban planning,
or even for an ideal of visual order, as long as the planner respects the
nature of a living city.
The first kind of visual order often arises when planners impose a visual
uniformity such as we find in much of Le Corbusier’s work (Jacobs 1961:
229). The second kind of visual order might be what we find in Disney
World (Ibid) where planners design and attempt to create a visual diversity
that is however clearly artificial and superficial. Both of these are massive
projects built at the same time by the same architects, designers, or plan-
ners—or by people who anyway grew up under the same set of cultural
and educational influences—so that the style of their product, no matter
how hard they may try, all reflect a temporal or stylistic homogeneity.
There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this
meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignor-
ing or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
(Jacobs 1961: 15)
The third “hopeful” kind of visual order emerges spontaneously over

time and from a variety of planners, inspired by different things. Again,
like capital, the elements of the city need to complement each other, not
be homogenous or perfectly substitutable for one another. Visual diversity
can then generate order by enabling a city’s inhabitants to read and navi-
gate, a la Lynch, its public spaces; without that visual diversity navigating
public space would be like trying to find your way through a snow storm.
The diversity of land use (and of the skills, knowledge, and tastes of the
city’s inhabitants) enable experimentation among a diverse set of elements,
and that on-going process usually isn’t clean and attractive, at least not for
270 S. IKEDA
all people at all times. That messiness does not appeal to rationalist con-
structivists; indeed, it is this messiness, which is an inescapable and neces-
sary part of real urban processes, that rationalist planners most object to.
What role do these three factors play in Jacobs’s critique of rationalist
constructivism in urban planning? Examining four of the leading urban plan-
ners/designers of the twentieth century will help to answer this question.
Constructivist Theories of Urban Planning

and Design
As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the
planners in charge. (Jacobs 1961: 17)
The following are brief sketches of major planning theorists whose

work reflected the emerging high-modernist ethos of urban planning and
design, and whose influence on the profession as a whole is unquestioned.
Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903)

Olmsted is one of the giants of landscape architecture and planning.
Contrary to the trend among many of the urban and regional planners
who followed, Olmsted sought not to scatter inhabitants of the modern
city across the wilderness but to bring nature into the city in order to pro-
mote well-being, both physical and mental (Olmsted 1970: 339). Olmsted
relied on estimations of such variables as the cubic feet of sunshine and
fresh air that typical urbanites require, and the square-footage they need
to avoid the kind of mental stress that comes just from walking from place
to place on city streets.
We may understand these better if we consider that whenever we walk

through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we
meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have to constantly watch, to foresee,
and to guard against their movements. This involves a consideration of their
intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so
much for their benefit as our own. Our minds are thus brought into close
dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them, but
rather a drawing from them. (1970: 338)
Olmsted means to relax this hustle and bustle so that the city, and its
image, does not disfigure the human body and psyche, much as Georg
Simmel discusses the impact of the market economy and the exacting
demands of time schedules (Simmel 1903). Not for Olmsted is Jacobs’s

“eyes on the street.” He speaks disparagingly of neighborhood where you
see people “a half a dozen sitting together on the door-steps or, all in a
row, on the curb-stones, with their feet in the gutter; driven out of doors
by the closeness within; mothers among them anxiously regarding their
children who are dodging about at their play, among the noisy wheels on
the pavement” (Olmsted 1970: 342). Here, parks and trees are desper-
ately needed. “Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage” (1970: 339) and
parks offer space for much-needed recreation “strongly counteractive to
the special, enervating conditions of the town” (1970: 340).
But Jacobs not only appreciates, as Olmsted does not, the scene as a
“street ballet” but she warns that “parks are volatile places” that can easily
become border vacuums. You cannot count on a park of any size to auto-
matically complement the character of the neighborhood or district in
which it is placed. Unless you take great care in its design and location, a
park will drain the life out of an area.3 In the 1960s and 1970s, Central
Park itself became a fearful place, earning the Park and the City of
New York a reputation for danger and dereliction that it still has to many,
mostly non-New Yorkers, despite being far less deserved today. With the
greater economic vitality and growing population surrounding it, Central
Park is now about as safe as it has ever been.
Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928)

Jacobs’s characterization of Ebenezer Howard, the early and influential
utopian urban planner, is typical of her view of the urban planners of
her day.
Howard looked at the living conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-

century London, and justifiably did not like what he smelled or saw or
heard. He not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the
city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many
people should get themselves into an agglomeration. His prescription for
saving the people was to do the city in. (Jacobs 1961: 17)
Howard, who developed and popularized the concept of “Garden

City,” evidently found much inspiration in the writings of the American
economist, Henry George (of land-value tax fame), who, following
William Cobbett, likened a great city, such as London, to a tumor (George
1879: Loc 21655–21659).
272 S. IKEDA
Howard believed that the town and the country of his time, particularly
of his English homeland, were each a mixed blessing. The city is rich with
opportunity of all kinds and full of liveliness, but crowded and polluted;
while the country is full of healthful, natural beauty but life is dull, iso-
lated, and poor. His answer was his so-called “town-country magnate”
which, it should come as no great surprise, would be carefully and ratio-
nally designed so as to contain the best of town and country and shed the
worst of each, “in which all the advantages of the most energetic and
active town life, withal the beauty and delight of the country, may be
secured in perfect combination” (Howard 1998: 247).
His carefully designed, utopian Garden City consisted of 6000-acre
plots, segmented into functionally divided zones and imprinted with enor-
mous roadways that formed concentric circles, and linked with similar
settlements by highways and high-speed rail lines. His ambition was evi-
dently to empty the great cities that had formed under industrial capital-
ism and disperse their populations across these interconnected pinwheels,
each limited to a population of about 30,000 persons, that in the aggre-
gate represents a grand, integrated Garden City. Residents live and work
within a carefully subdivided matrix of lots averaging 20 feet by 130 feet
with plenty of open space, today we might call them “green belts,” for
parks, nature, and farmland, that focuses the relatively thin population
within pre-determined districts (1998: 315).
While Garden City looks, and indeed is, highly constructivist in con-
cept, Howard was no socialist. Nevertheless, according to Jacobs,
Howard’s concept of the market, consistent with the static approaches to
utopias of the day, was hardly dynamic and entrepreneurial in our sense:
He conceived of commerce in terms of routine, standardized supply of

goods, and as serving a self-limited market. He conceived of good planning
as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is
needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor
subsequent changes (Jacobs 1961: 19).
The appeal of the Garden City is like that of the modern planned com-
munity, with none of the grittiness of a city of innovation and radical
change, and has had a powerful and continuing influence on urban
planning.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1559)

Where Howard dreams of creating a “town-country magnate” Wright
envisions a kind of techno-suburban magnate founded upon “three major
innovations”: the “motor car,” “electrical inter-communication,” and
“standardized – machine-shop – production” (Wright 1935: 377–8). What
he called “Broadacre” would somehow “automatically end unemployment
and all its evils forever” (1935: 379).
While he would evidently devolve government down to the level of the
county, it would hardly be laissez-faire but instead highly authoritarian:
“In the hands of the state, but by way of the county, is all redistribution of
land—a minimum of one acre going to the childless family and more to
the larger family by the state” (Wright 1935: 378). As Wright envisions it,
on their one-acre plots, individuals liberated from the constraints of den-
sity by distance-annihilating technology, would build their single-level,
low-cost Usonia houses out of cinder block. All of this would be adminis-
tered by the wise and benevolent hand of the architect: “The agent of the
state in all matters of land allotment or improvement, or in matters affect-
ing the harmony of the whole, is the architect” (Wright 1935: 378).
Change must be carefully, rationally controlled in order to keep the city
within the constraints of the planner’s imagination.
Charels-Edouard Jeanneret a.k.a. Le Corbusier (1887–1969)

Olmsted wanted to bring the country into the city, Howard to decentral-
ize the city to low densities, and Wright to transform the city into a techno-
suburb. Le Corbusier, like Olmsted, sought the greening and opening up
(and tidying up) of the city, not by decentralizing it but by hyper-
densification. Le Corbusier seeks to achieve this “by constructing a theo-
retically water-tight formula to arrive at the fundamental principles of
modern town planning” (Le Corbusier 1929: 368–9). Those principles
include what he refers to as site, population, density, lungs/green open
spaces, the street, and traffic. Drawing on Howard and Olmsted, Le
Corbusier intends to make cities both greener, more spacious, and denser
(Le Corbusier 1929: 370). For him, the city is essentially a problem of two
independent variables: How do you decongest a city center while increas-
ing its density? He aims to achieve these seemingly contradictory objec-
tives by constructing “machines for living”: super-tall offices and somewhat
shorter residences—his famous “towers in a park”—that populate his
274 S. IKEDA
“Radiant City.” The result is a population density of 1200 persons per acre
with two-thirds fewer streets than Paris,4 and where streets are separated
by an astonishing four-hundred yards creating his famous “superblocks”
(Le Corbusier 1929: 371)!
Furthermore, his conception, as an architectural work, had a dazzling clar-

ity, simplicity and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to under-
stand. It said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement (Jacobs
1961: 23).
This is a city made for covering macro distances at very high speed.
Indeed, Corbusier is explicit that his design perspective at ground-level is
that of a person in a “fast car” (Le Corbusier 1929: 374) speeding down
one of the above-ground super-highways as row after row of symmetrical
skyscrapers whizz past her window. The problem, of course, is how people
will travel the micro distances between such widely spaced and segregated
primary uses. And as some have noted, where to park all those cars and
how to address the resulting pollution were details that escaped his atten-
tion (Hall 1998: 209).
The architect Ken-ichi Sasaki’s (1998) exploration of “urban tactility”
is relevant here.
The most important factor in the aesthetics of the city is not visuality but
tactility. I consider visuality as the viewpoint of the visitor to a city, and tac-
tility as that of its inhabitants. (Sasaki 1998: 36)
In contrast, Radiant City is almost purely visual and very stark, indeed.
There is no tactility inside a car, no perspective from the street except
when going exceptionally fast speeds, because the meaningfulness of the
urban environment, its legibility and detail, is the bird’s-eye, top-down
perspective of the designing architect’s or of the first-time visitor and not
that of the actual inhabitants of the city.
From a Jacobsian perspective, what would people find visually and tac-
tilely interesting in the broad, homogenous superblock grids of Le
Corbusier’s “City of Three Million” and make them want linger in public
spaces and informal contact with strangers? How do Le Corbusier’s super-
high densities, without short navigable blocks and nearby mixed primary
uses, enable people in to serve as the eyes on the street and form the spon-
taneous social networks and webs of communication that foster the trust
in public spaces, which for centuries have done the heavy lifting of provid-
ing safety and security on the street? Without cheap, worn-down build-
ings, where would poor young people with fresh ideas get their start? Will
people be so content in their high-modernist residences, separated by
great, unwalkable distances from their jobs and recreation (their necessar-
ies, conveniences, and amusements) that they would simply and inexplica-
bly behave in a trusting, civil manner toward one another? Or is formal
policing and monitoring supposed to substitute adequately for the social
capital, invisible from on high, that great cities have historically relied
upon? Or does he assume that all the inhabitants of Radiant City all just
nice people?
In Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, there is no wiggle room for anything as
unpredictable, seemingly chaotic, and messy as a living city to emerge.
Not surprisingly then, “he came to believe in the virtue of centralized
planning, which would cover not merely city-building but every aspect of
life” (Hall 1998: 210). For Le Corbusier, border vacuums, cataclysmic
money, and pretended visual order combine in spectacular ways. According
to Peter Hall, “the evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him….”
Ideas forged in the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s, came to be applied

to the planning of working-class housing in Sheffield and St. Louis, and
hundreds of other cities too, in the 1950s and 1960s; the results were at best
questionable, at worst catastrophic. (Hall 1998: 204)
But these failings are not in Le Corbusier, alone. All of the schemes for
urban design outlined here combine the same three errors on a huge scale.
Border Vacuum: The rationalist separation of functions that Howard,
Wright, and Corbusier employ ignores the way a variety of uses within a
relatively small area invites ordinary people to use public space at various
times of the day, providing eyes on the street and safety. Absent these
attractors, public space becomes dangerous and the liveliness associated
with urbanity disappears.
Cataclysmic Money: The larger the scale of the project, the larger the
volume of funds and the faster the flow of funds into an area, leaving less
time for the kind of organic development that adjusts to changing and
unforeseen conditions to take place. Not only does this mean that the
mind of the planner substitutes for the multitude of minds of a living city,
but the sheer size of the projects that require cataclysmic money often
(though not necessarily) generates border vacuums with their attendant
276 S. IKEDA
anti-urban consequences. Moreover, since all the structures within such

projects tend to be built within a relatively short time-frame, the built
environment ages at roughly the same rate, requiring enormous and
simultaneous repair and replacement costs as well as a fairly uniform
depreciation of value. The constructions of Howard, Wright, and Le
Corbusier would obviously entail massive amounts of cataclysmic money.
Visual Order: These large-scale “giga-projects” will tend to generate
visual homogeneity simply because their structures will largely be built in
the same era and reflect the ethos of the age, even if a variety of designers
and architects contribute to the end product and they aim to design a
diversity of spaces. Most uses will need to be planned ahead of time, oth-
erwise financing would be impracticable, so that initially there will be a
predictable sameness in the mixture of uses in the various districts, unless
tenants can be given large financial subsidies to overcome of the high costs
of the large-scale, new construction. Instead of an emergent order of
dynamic experimentation of a variety of uses—at odds with constructivist
notions of order—the overwhelming tendency will be a static pattern of
use. Any conscious attempt at diversity in appearance will achieve merely a
pretended order.
Jacobs’s problem with all of these visionaries is not so much that they
are grandiose. The problem is that their narrowly constructivist perspec-
tive doesn’t begin to grasp the unpredictable nature of cities or the signifi-
cance of that unpredictability. Rather than having distilled, through close
observation of how people in a great city actually live in it, they instead
treated the city as a problem of simplicity or disorganized complexity
rather than as a problem of organized complexity and spontaneous order.
They leave no significant space for unpredictable improvisation save in the
ways and directions in which they the planners dictate: “Only the plan-
ners, not ordinary people, are permitted to experiment and to fail” (Jacobs
1961: 17).
Concluding Thoughts
Urbanization causes unique problems unknown and hard to imagine in
non-urban settings. A great city’s problem, its messiness, is an unavoidable
product of ordinary people trying to better their situation when knowl-
edge is imperfect. Experiment is necessary in that case, but experiment
entails trial-and-error, disappointment, and apparent chaos. A city is cre-
ative not only because it is able to successfully address most of those
problems in unpredictable ways—which is the result as well as the cause of

emergent social orders—but because a creative city actually causes the
problems that it needs solve. Novel problems, novel solutions. An organ-
ism without problems is dead.
The designs of Olmstead, Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright all to a
greater or lesser degree reflect a rationalist constructivist mindset in which
the designer-architect-planners impose a comprehensive vision onto the
living flesh of a city—or attempt to create an entirely new settlement out
of whole cloth—in just this way. They err precisely in proposing border
vacuums, cataclysmic money, and pretended order because a single human
mind, no matter how brilliant, cannot fully comprehend, let alone design,
the emergent fine structure of a complex social order. They fail to account
for the “street-level” microfoundations that enable people in cities to dis-
cover, solve, and cope with the inevitable problems that come with the
astonishing benefits of city life. While their intent may be to bring order
(on their terms) to the messiness of dynamic urban environments, their
plans typically ignore or discount imperfect knowledge, trial-and-error,
genuine change, and the resourcefulness and unruliness of ordinary peo-
ple. The result is to stifle the creativity unique to a great city. In short, they
do not appreciate the nature of a living city as an emergent, spontaneous
order. Their rationalist constructivism prevents them from doing so.
Notes
1. My understanding of rationality, rationalism, and reason derives primarily
from the work of F.A. Hayek, but I know full well that other sources –
for example Popper, Oakshott – are equally valid starting points.
2. This may be the place to forward a hypothesis of mine that the farther away
from a border vacuum you go the better the quality of restaurants tend to
be. That is because the high concentration of persons using a border vac-
uum, say a civic center, the majority of users have only a short time to have
lunch, so that restaurants will cater to higher-volume, quickly prepared
meals. The capital requirements, especially human capital, are generally too
great for such establishments to also offer a lower-volume of diners a better-
quality menu. Farther from a border vacuum these lunch-time pressures are
thus lower and, ceteris paribus, we would expect the quality of restaurants
to be higher. While I have not yet conducted a rigorous test analysis of this
hypothesis, my casual empiricism supports it over a range of locations and
for different kinds of border vacuums.
3. Jacobs devotes her entire Chapter 5 in Death and Life to parks.
4. Compare this with the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the densest
districts in New York City, with 185 persons per acre.
278 S. IKEDA
Bibliography
Alexander, Christopher. 1979. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Ashton, T.S. 1963. The Treatment of Capitalism by Historians. In Hayek (1963).
Callahan, Gene, and Sanford Ikeda 2004. The Career of Robert Moses: City
Planning as a Microcosm of Socialism. Independent Review (September) 9 (2):
253–261. Also, Kindle Edition, location given in the text.
George, Henry. 1879. Progress and Poverty. Page references to Locations in the
Kindle Edition.
Hall, Peter. 1998. Cities of Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Hayek, F.A. 1978. New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of
Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
———. 1963. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1948. The Use of Knowledge in Society. In Individualism and Economic
Order, ed. Friedrich A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Howard, Ebenezer. 1998. “Author’s Introduction” and “The Town-Country
Magnate”. In Legates and Stout, ed. (1996).
Ikeda, Sanford. 1998. Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of
Interventionism. New York: Routledge.
Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Vintage.
———. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage.
Lavoie, Don. 1985. Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation
Debate Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Corbusier. 1929. A Contemporary City. In LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996).
LeGates, R.T., and F. Stout, eds. 1996. The City Reader. New York: Routledge.
Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The City Image and Its Elements. In The City Reader 1996,
ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, 98–102.
McCloskey, Dierdre. 2010. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the
Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. 1970. Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns. In
LeGates and Stout, ed. (1996).
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City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Tim Hall, and Iain Borden.
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Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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and Stout, ed. (1996).
CHAPTER 19
Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s

Critique of Modern Moral Philosophy
Kenneth B. McIntyre
Most of the thinkers examined in this volume focus their criticism on the
various ways in which modern conceptions of rationality, especially those
connected with the methods of the natural sciences, distort or undermine
other, often modern, conceptions of rationality that are not based on the
methods of the natural sciences. Alasdair MacIntyre presents a more encom-
passing critique of Enlightenment rationalism which condemns almost all
conceptions of modern rationality or reasonableness. Indeed, almost half of
the subjects in this volume are specific objects of MacIntyre’s critique of
modern rationalism.1 However, unlike many of the other thinkers in this
volume, the source of MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with modern rationalism
lies not in his skepticism about its “scientism,” but in what he understands
to be the incoherence of modern moral philosophy and practice. He was not
the first contemporary philosopher to make this claim, however.
In 1958, G.E.M. Anscombe published an essay titled “Modern Moral
Philosophy” in the journal Philosophy. Anscombe’s brief essay presented a
case for rejecting the whole of modern moral philosophy, in part, because
K. B. McIntyre (*)
Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX, USA
e-mail: kbm014@shsu.edu

280 K. B. MCINTYRE
the terms of modern moral philosophy (e.g. moral obligation, moral duty)
“are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of eth-
ics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.”2
Anscombe suggested that the moral language which informs and is char-
acteristic of modern moral philosophy (and by this, she means moral phi-
losophy after Aquinas) only really makes sense within a philosophical
anthropology which is defined by a teleological conception of human
beings. The teleology provides the background for judgments concerning
virtuous and vicious actions, and it is within such a philosophical system
that “virtue ethics” arose as a contemporary alternative to deontology and
various forms of utilitarian consequentialism.3
It is also within this re-vivified tradition that Alasdair MacIntyre devel-
oped his own version of virtue ethics, which he first expounded in After
Virtue, one of the most influential treatises on moral philosophy in the
twentieth century. MacIntyre has developed his version of virtue ethics in
a series of books subsequent to After Virtue, including Whose Justice?
Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, Dependent
Rational Animals, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.4 What is strik-
ing about all of these works is their consistent claim that, not only is mod-
ern moral philosophy corrupted by a desiccated language, but that modern
conceptions of practical reason/epistemology are also gravely inadequate.
According to MacIntyre, without a coherent conception of the human
telos, moral judgments cannot be defended in a convincing way, and, thus,
no adequate account of practical reason can be offered. MacIntyre associ-
ates the attempt to offer an account of morality while jettisoning any
monistic account of the human good with moral philosophers like Hume,
Kant, and Kierkegaard, and, thus, represents an impeccable example of a
critic of Enlightenment rationalism. MacIntyre’s critique of the two most
prominent modern moral theories (deontology and utilitarianism) is often
penetrating, and his insistence that a more adequate way of making judg-
ments about human actions can be found in his neo-Aristotelian account
of morality, which is based upon a cognitivist conception of practical
knowledge, is partially successful. However, his positive project ultimately
founders on his insistence that moral judgments are impossible if not ulti-
mately justified by appeal to a single telos which is the same for all human
beings. The failure characterizes both his early work, After Virtue, in
which the telos is identified in a nebulous and non-substantive way with a
quest for the telos, and in his later works in which he introduces an ele-
ment of biological naturalism as the foundation of the telos, which can
19 PRACTICAL REASON AND TELEOLOGY: MACINTYRE’S CRITIQUE… 281
offer support for either a monistic account or a pluralist account of human

goodness. MacIntyre never offers a satisfactory account of the single
human telos, and that is probably the case because, as various moral plural-
ists have argued, there is no single human telos that is the same for every-
one, everywhere, and every when.
The Critique: Modern Moral Philosophy

and Emotivism
MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy has remained consistent

throughout his later writings, and he connects this critique to a series of
observations about the current state of moral discussion.5 His most impor-
tant claim about contemporary moral life is that it is uniquely character-
ized by irresolvable moral disagreements. MacIntyre points to
disagreements about abortion, the death penalty, just war theory, and so
forth, to suggest that modern moral philosophy and modern moral prac-
tice are irremediably fragmented. He writes that:
the most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of

it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the
debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable
character…[because] the rival premises [of such disagreements] are such that
we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one…against another.6
According to MacIntyre, participants in contemporary moral debates

begin from vastly different sets of presuppositions, and there is seemingly
no way of determining which starting point is correct. Some begin with an
assumption that human beings are endowed with natural rights, some
assume that there is a natural order in the universe expressed in human
rationality, while others believe that human reason is naturally corrupt.
The arguments proceeding from each presupposition can then be logical,
so that disagreements occurring between those operating with the same
set of presuppositions can be resolved, but any type of resolution between
those beginning from different presuppositions is impossible. The result,
according to MacIntyre, is that moral positions appear to be somewhat
arbitrary, and moral arguments to be mere statements of preference.
MacIntyre suggests that this emotivist position has become, by default,
the common way that modern individuals use moral language. He writes
that “emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments…are nothing
282 K. B. MCINTYRE
but expressions of preference.”7 Nonetheless, he also correctly observes

that individuals usually do not characterize their own moral beliefs as mere
preferences, but instead insist upon the objective rightness of these opin-
ions. So, modern moral practice is characterized by a conception of the use
of moral language which diverges significantly from its conception of the
meaning of moral language. This divergence, according to MacIntyre, is a
sign of the decadence of modern moral philosophy and practice, a deca-
dence characterized by the existence of a desiccated moral vocabulary
which no longer appears to describe objectively the moral world in which
we live. The stages of this decline are as follows:
Stage one: “moral theory and practice embody genuine objective and imper-
sonal standards which provide rational justification for…actions;”
Stage two: “there are unsuccessful attempts to maintain the objectivity and
impersonality of moral judgments, but during which the project of pro-
viding rational justifications…continuously breaks down;”
Stage three: “theories of an emotivist kind secure wide implicit acceptance
because of a general implicit recognition in practice…that claims to
objectivity and impersonality cannot be made good.”8
According to MacIntyre, we have reached stage three, and the task that he
sets himself in After Virtue and his other subsequent works is to explain
how exactly we went from stage one, in which there was seemingly a com-
mon and relatively settled moral vocabulary, to stage three, in which our
moral vocabulary has become as fragmented as the vocabulary of those in
the immediate post-Babelian world.
MacIntyre’s methods of investigation and explanation of the decline
and fall of Western moral philosophy and practice consist of a not always
coherent mélange of history, sociology, and philosophy.9 His treatment of
the writings of past philosophers alternates between a traditional philo-
sophical approach to their arguments, an historicized examination of the
questions that informed those arguments, and an unfortunate tendency
toward sociological reductionism, especially of the works of those of
whom he is critical.10 Nonetheless, MacIntyre’s claim that, around 400
years ago, a profound change took place in the way in which philosophers
in the Western world approach moral questions is certainly reasonable and
is widely accepted by historians of moral philosophy. What makes
MacIntyre’s arguments worthy of attention then? First, he insists that
there was not merely a change, but a radical diremption that has made the
moral philosophy and practice of the pre-modern world almost completely

unintelligible to us, and which has left us in a state of almost complete
moral chaos. Second, he places this diremption during the European
Enlightenment, commonly understood to be one of the high water marks
of human intellectual achievement. Finally, he maintains that the solution
to our contemporary moral confusion lies in a resuscitation of pre-modern
classical ideas about what it means to be human.
The radical disruption occurred, according to MacIntyre, when moral
philosophers rejected functionalist conceptions of human flourishing, and
attempted to replace such notions with highly abstract and universal pre-
scriptions about human behavior. This transformation of moral philoso-
phy took place within the context of the secularization associated first with
the Renaissance and the breakdown of the unity of the Catholic Church
associated with the Protestant Reformation. For MacIntyre, the period
between 1630 and 1850 gave rise to what he calls the Enlightenment
project, and he asserts that “the Enlightenment’s central project ha[s]
been to identify a set of moral rules, equally compelling to all rational
persons.”11 This project aimed to produce a morality based upon reason
alone, excluding authority or tradition, and the failure of this project has
led to the current crisis.
For MacIntyre, the failure is exemplified in the works of three authors,
Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard. For all three thinkers, morality consists
solely of a set of rules, according to MacIntyre’s exposition. For Hume,
the rules of morality are expressions of human desires or feelings, espe-
cially commendations of useful desires and condemnations of harmful
desires. However, according to MacIntyre, Hume had no theoretically
sound justifications for what counted as useful or harmful. Instead,
MacIntyre writes that “what on Hume’s view makes reasoning about jus-
tice sound reasoning is…that it is reasoning shared by at least the vast
majority of members of the community to which one belongs.”12 For
MacIntyre, Hume’s moral philosophy represents a non-cognitivist depen-
dence on subjective desires, and Hume’s dependence on purely conven-
tional judgments about what counts as useful or harmful renders his moral
philosophy a failure, at least in terms of the Enlightenment project.13
Meanwhile, Kant’s moral philosophy rests on the elucidation of a set of
rules discoverable by reason alone and, like the reason which discovers
these rules, common to all human beings. Kant’s categorical imperative,
which commands that we engage only in actions which we can coherently
will universally, offers one such rule. However, MacIntyre rejects this sort
284 K. B. MCINTYRE
of abstract rationalism as both irrelevant and impossible, as there are all

sort of things that we can will universally that are not moral (e.g. “always
eat pheasant on Friday”), and because rules are, by themselves, not guides
to specific actions but must be interpreted by individual agents. Finally,
according to MacIntyre, Kierkegaard admits that the choice between liv-
ing an ethical life and living the life of an aesthete or any other non-ethical
life is the result of arbitrary choice, and is not the result of rational consid-
eration at all. Far from being universal, the moral life is the result of mere
contingency. Thus, MacIntyre claims that none of these attempts to find
an objective, authoritatively rational set of rules succeeds, and the failure
of these various Enlightenment projects is manifest in modern moral
practice.
Modern moral philosophy itself is still concerned with discovering the
proper set of rules to guide human conduct, whether these be rules derived
from a consideration of the concept of practical reason or rules designed to
maximize the satisfaction of desires. Modern moral conduct, however, has
been increasingly marked by the disjunction between the meaning of moral
utterances and their usage. According to MacIntyre, this disjunction mani-
fests itself most clearly in the contradiction between the commonplace
appeals in moral discourse, on the one hand, to natural/human rights, and,
on the other, to both utilitarianism and scientific expertise. He avers that
the chaos of contemporary moral practice “results in…political debates
being between an individualism which makes its claims in terms of rights
and forms of bureaucratic organization which make their claims in terms of
utility.”14 MacIntyre dismisses arguments based upon references to rights as
manifestations of the already abstract character of understanding morality as
merely as a set of rules. Rights do exist, of course, but only within settled
authoritative political communities, and to consider them as free-floating
claims is to make the same mistake as those who would abstract certain rules
from a current moral situation and universalize them as the rules of morality.
MacIntyre’s critique of the notion of rights, while insightful, is sketchy,
but his treatment of the modern understanding of managerial expertise is
closely connected with the critique of scientism common to many of the
other critics of Enlightenment rationalism found in this volume. He is not
concerned to offer a critique of the methods of modern science, but,
instead notes that the claims of modern social science to be scientific are
quite misleading and easily refuted. The modern natural sciences are char-
acterized by their production or discovery of a great variety of law-like
generalizations which reliably predict future occurrences under certain
definable circumstances. These sciences presuppose a mechanical universe

in which “every mechanical causal sequence exemplifies some universal
generalization and that generalization has a precisely specifiable scope”
(e.g. water/H2O not containing impurities boils at 100 degrees Celsius at
1 atmosphere of pressure), and the various modern natural sciences have
been extraordinarily successful at discovering and refining such laws over
the past several centuries.15
In contrast, as MacIntyre observes, while the modern social sciences
have attempted to mimic the natural sciences methodologically, they have
been completely unsuccessful in producing almost any of these law-like
generalizations. This ought to have severely undermined the claims of
bureaucratic managerialism, but it has not done so. As MacIntyre writes,
“what managerial expertise requires for its vindication is a justified con-
ception of social science as providing a stock of law-like generalizations
with strong predictive power” like that of the natural sciences.16 However,
the law-like generalizations produced by social scientists have almost none
of the characteristics of those of the natural sciences. As MacIntyre notes,
unlike the laws of natural science, the “laws” of social science co-exist with
counter-examples, which would falsify any natural law (e.g. predictions of
party affiliations based upon ascriptive characteristics always exist along-
side thousands of counter-examples). The “laws” of social science also lack
universal quantifiers and scope modifiers (part of this a problem of under-
determined definition, e.g. what counts as a revolution” in politics v what
counts as “revolution” in astronomy). That is, these “laws” are much
more like the maxims that any competent practitioner of politics, econom-
ics, urban planning, and so forth might pick up from experience than like
the laws of natural science.
MacIntyre explains the failure of the social sciences to succeed as mod-
ern sciences as a consequence of the intrusion of an irrelevant set of natu-
ralistic and mechanistic assumptions into the study of human actions and
human judgments. The natural sciences preclude the consideration that
their objects are capable of practical reason and action. This preclusion is
perfectly rational when examining the tides or the planets or amoebic
movement, but does present problems when attempting to explain human
action. MacIntyre suggests that there are four general reasons why human
action is unpredictable, and they are all directly connected to the fact the
human beings can make decisions based upon their own reasonable, or
not so reasonable, judgments. First, humans are capable of radical concep-
tual innovation, and the creation of something radically new cannot be
286 K. B. MCINTYRE
predicted. Second, humans are not completely capable of predicting their

own actions, and, since the actions of each individual affect others, the
actions of others cannot be predicted either. Third, since knowledge of the
intentions and actions of others is limited, the capacity of the individual to
plan his or her own action is complicated by a kind of infinite reflexivity.
And, finally, MacIntyre claims that there are pure contingencies in life, like
the intrusion of eccentric influences, which occur completely outside of
any person’s capacity to know. All of these factors point to the exceptional
character of human reason, but they do not offer a complete answer as to
how to properly understand practical reason and they don’t provide the
solution to what MacIntyre deems to be the modern moral crisis.
MacIntyre’s Neo-Aristotelian Alternative

I have offered a skeletal account of MacIntyre’s diagnosis of what he takes
to be the current crisis. However, MacIntyre’s interpretation of Hume,
Kant, and Kierkegaard and his analysis of emotivism are merely the over-
ture to his examination of a possible alternative to Enlightenment ratio-
nalism based upon a return to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.17
MacIntyre asserts that “the predicaments of contemporary philoso-
phy…are best understood as arising as a long-term consequence of the
rejection of Aristotelian and Thomistic teleology at the threshold of the
modern world.”18 What went wrong during the Enlightenment was that
philosophers jettisoned the anchor that tied moral rules to substantive
human results, leaving practical reasoning and moral judgments unmoored
to any conception of human flourishing. Thus, according to MacIntyre,
two of the primary weaknesses of modern philosophy, its conflation of
practical and theoretical/scientific reasoning and its vacuity concerning
the character of human goodness, are the direct result of its dismissal of
the Aristotelian conception of human life as inherently teleological.
MacIntyre argues that the classical thinkers relied on a functional concep-
tion of human nature which posited three things: human nature as given, a
telos for that human nature, and a set of ways in which that given nature
could be transformed into a fully developed nature. As MacIntyre notes:
since the whole point of ethics…is to enable man to pass from his present
state to his true end, the elimination of any notion of essential human nature
and with it the abandonment of any notion of a telos leaves behind a moral
scheme composed of two remaining elements whose relationship becomes
quite unclear.19
Without the telos or purpose, the rules or precepts directing the transfor-
mation of given nature to achieved nature become a bridge to nowhere.
The knowledge and understanding of such rules and precepts become a
matter of technical/scientific knowledge (a “knowing that”) rather than a
matter of practical knowledge (a “knowing how”), and the character of
human flourishing or happiness becomes a matter of mere preference
instead of a matter of objective fact. Non-cognitivist moral philosophy
replaces cognitivism because moral questions deal with preferences and
not objective reality.
MacIntyre observes correctly that human beings still make judgments
based upon teleological or functional considerations in many areas of their
lives, especially in areas in which they are specifically experienced or knowl-
edgeable. He notes that “plain persons are in fact generally and to a sig-
nificant degree proto-Aristotelians.”20 We all make relatively objective
determinations about the goodness or badness of watches, knives, com-
puters, automobiles, and so forth. These are all functional objects and it
makes perfect sense to say, for example, that, since the function of a watch
is tell time accurately, a watch that tells time accurately is a good watch,
and that a watch ought to tell the time accurately. The fact/value distinc-
tion which arises with the rejection of teleology dissolves when dealing
with functional matters.
But how do we know what function human beings have? MacIntyre
answers that the various functions that humans perform are learned
through participation in the great variety of practices that human beings
have created. According to MacIntyre, practices are “cooperative forms of
activity whose participants jointly pursue the goods internal to those forms
of activity and jointly value excellence in achieving those goods.”21
Practices, therefore, are inherently teleological. Practices include activities
such as farming, fishing, and fowling, playing football, playing chess, and
playing the mandolin, riding a horse, riding a bicycle, and (perhaps) riding
a bus.22 Engaging in a practice involves learning the nature of the rules,
the character of the activity, and the nature of excellence embodied in that
particular practice. According to MacIntyre, participation in practices
teaches human beings both about the character of goods internal to the
practices themselves and about the virtues needed to be successful in these
practices.23 Internal goods are those connected intrinsically with the prac-
tice itself. For example, those learning to play baseball will need to learn
how to hit, to catch, and to throw the baseball, but also will learn when to
hit the cut-off man, when to steal a base, when to take a pitch, and so
288 K. B. MCINTYRE
forth. Those learning to play the mandolin will learn how to play scales
and arpeggios, how to crosspick, how to play tremolo, but also will learn
when to improvise, when to use double-stops, and when to turn it up and
down. That is, those engaged in learning practices will acquire both tech-
nical skills and a style of their own, and both will be internal to the practice
itself (though some skills, like reading music or developing hand-eye coor-
dination, will be internal to many practices).
So, how do humans become accomplished in such practices? MacIntyre
uses the term “virtue” to refer to the human qualities, which enable us to
achieve the goods that are internal to practices. These virtues, especially
courage, honesty, and justice, are necessary to achieve fully the excellences
inherent in any practice. These virtues define the relationship between the
apprentice and the teacher, between the competitor and other competi-
tors, and between teammates or bandmates, and, ultimately, the character
of the practitioner herself. In order to learn how to read Latin, one must
have the honesty and courage to admit that one does not know it and the
justice to submit to the instruction of one who does. In order to compete
in a marathon, one must have the courage to train, the honesty to know
one’s strengths and weaknesses, and the justice to recognize excellence in
one’s self and others. In order to be a good teammate, one must be honest
with others about one’s own competence, have the courage to strive for
excellence for the team first, and the justice to accept one’s position on
the team.
What this means, according to MacIntyre, is that questions about
whether a person is a good baseball player or mandolin player, a good
Latin scholar, marathon runner, or teammate are objective questions with
objective answers, and not merely questions concerning the preferences of
participants in these activities or spectators to these activities. However, as
MacIntyre avers, “those who lack the relevant experience [in the practice]
are incompetent…as judges of internal goods.”24 The reason that those
ignorant of practices cannot make rational judgments about the internal
goods of the practice is that they are ignorant of the teloi or purposes of
the practices, which can only be learned by learning the practice itself.
Thus, MacIntyre offers an account of human practical knowledge which
rejects the modern scientistic account of human reason as primarily instru-
mental and technical. Instead, MacIntyre insists that practical human
knowledge consists of connoisseurship, not technical expertise, and it is
acquired only by an engagement in the variety of specific human practices
themselves and not in the accumulation of factual knowledge or in the

promulgation of rules.
Of course, practices have histories, and are, therefore, inherently tradi-
tional activities. Thus, for MacIntyre, human rationality, as it is embodied
in practices, is inherently traditional, as well. He writes that “all reasoning
takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought.”25 For
example, the argument between those in favor of changing the penalty for
pass interference in the National Football League from a spot foul to a 15
yard penalty appeal to the character and traditions of American football in
their argument (e.g. the spot foul is eccentric in football and therefore the
penalty should be 15 yards, like other egregious penalties in the sport),
and do not attempt to formulate a universal rule on deontological princi-
ples (e.g. a penalty of 15 yards for pass interference would maximize total
utility). This notion that rationality is traditional has led some critics to
accuse him of relativism, which he rejects, but what is more important for
the purposes of this essay is his move from the multiplicity of human prac-
tices/traditions to what he takes to be the unity of traditions and, more
importantly, the necessary singularity of the human telos. He observes
that “the conception of a single, albeit perhaps complex, supreme good is
central to Aristotle’s account of practical rationality,” and MacIntyre pos-
its that it is necessary for his as well.26 For MacIntyre, the teleological
character of practices leads to a notion that there must be a single teleo-
logical character to human life, a practice of practices, which he tends to
identify as morality. Thus, if morality is a practice, then it is obviously
teleological, like other practices, and what is central to achieving the telos
is perfecting human virtues.
So what is the telos of human beings, or in what does human flourish-
ing consist? MacIntyre offers two different answers, but neither of them
necessarily support his contention that there must be a single human telos
or purpose in order to make any sense of morality. Actually, it is rarely the
case that either traditional practices or functional objects manifest a single
purpose (e.g. watches should keep time accurately, but also need to be
light, portable, and durable, so a grandfather clock would be a bad watch
despite keeping accurate time), so MacIntyre’s claim that there is a neces-
sary logical move from the teleological character of practices and func-
tional objects to a unified and single telos for human beings is an
inappropriate generalization. Nonetheless, his initial account of the human
telos is that it involves an attempt to unify and order the various practices
of an individual’s life under the category of a narrative quest story. He
290 K. B. MCINTYRE
avers that “the good life for man is spent in seeking for the good life for
man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable
us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.”27
However, there is a profound difference between an individual discover-
ing her telos and an individual discovering the telos for all human beings.
The notion that the telos involves merely the quest for a telos offers a
procedural not a substantive purpose to human lives, and it affords sup-
port for a pluralist conception of human activity as consisting of multiple
purposes not reducible to a single telos.
In MacIntyre’s more recent work, he offers a more substantive account
of the human telos based on both a biological account of human flourish-
ing and a notion of morality as the sensus communis of a homogeneous
community. On the one hand, MacIntyre claims that there are common
elements to all forms of human flourishing which can be identified in
terms of certain biological needs that all humans share. These are “a set of
goods at the achievement of which the members of the species aim, a set
of judgments about which actions are or are likely to be effective in achiev-
ing those goods and a set of true counterfactual conditions that enable us
to connect the goal-directedness and the judgments about effective-
ness.”28 Humans need food, water, shelter, a stable living environment,
friendship, love, intellectual stimulation, and need to avoid starvation,
poverty, pollution, nuclear war, and so forth. Once again, however, this
minimal and general outline of the human good can support all sorts of
different human purposes and a pluralist account of morality and virtue.29
On the other hand, MacIntyre presents morality or the ethical life as con-
sisting in the traditional practice of a homogeneous community which
orders all other practices and, in this kind of community, according to
MacIntyre, the question of what is the good life “is not a question that [a
person] can ask and answer for her or himself, apart from those others
together with whom she or he is engaged in the activities of practices.”30
Instead, it is the moral community as a whole that orders the practices of
the community “so that individuals may direct themselves towards what is
best for them and for the community.”31 The model here seems to be the
Greek polis or the medieval monastery, and the importance of moral con-
noisseurship in both cultures was central. Of course, such inequalities in
moral capacity as the notion of moral connoisseurship implies were used
to justify slavery and sex role differentiation in the polis, and similar sorts
of hierarchies in the monastery, and it is perfectly reasonable to make such

distinctions, if the moral life is as MacIntyre suggests.32
The practical problem which MacIntyre does not adequately address,
though he certainly recognizes it, is that, in the current Western world,
there is no agreement on a single telos, and it seems highly unlikely that
one will be forthcoming, absent the advent of totalitarian governments.33
The moral life of the modern world is going to continue to be fragmented,
in MacIntyre’s sense of the term, and one aspect of modern moral philoso-
phy that MacIntyre doesn’t address is that both Kantian and Humean
(deontology and consequentialism) moral philosophy have been means of
dealing with a morally plural community, though MacIntyre is correct in
noting that both are erroneous when considered as monistic accounts of
human morality. Ironically, it is the continuing successful presence of clas-
sically liberal political communities which is the sine qua non for
MacIntyre’s intentional communities to exist all, let alone flourish in the
modern world.
Conclusion
MacIntyre’s critique of Enlightenment rationalism, what he calls “the
Enlightenment Project,” emerged, not out of a critique of scientism, but
from MacIntyre’s dissatisfaction with modern moral philosophy. He does
offer a critique of scientism, which he associates with the emergence of the
modern bureaucratic/administrative state, and he connects it with one
aspect of emotivist moral philosophy. However, his real concern is modern
moral fragmentation. He claims that modern disagreements about moral
and political questions are irresolvable in a way that moral disagreements
during medieval Christendom or classical Greece were not. However, it is
not at all clear that the moral and epistemological pluralism that MacIntyre
finds so troubling about the modern Western world is at all unique. What
is of great value in MacIntyre’s work is not his potted history of the decline
and fall of Western moral philosophy and practice, but, instead, his insight-
ful critique of the conflation of scientific and practical reason. His concep-
tion of reason as embedded in social practices has a great deal in common
with others in this volume, including Gadamer, Oakeshott, and Polanyi,
and, despite himself, he offers support for pluralist conceptions of both
epistemology and morality.
292 K. B. MCINTYRE
Notes
1. Of the thinkers discussed in this volume, MacIntyre offers critical remarks
on Burke, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Hayek, Gadamer (to a lesser extent
than the others), Oakeshott, and Berlin.
2. G.E.M Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Ethics, Religion, and
Politics: Collected Papers Volume III (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981) 26.
3. For an overview of virtue ethics, see Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds.,
Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
4. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd Edition (Notre Dame Press: Notre
Dame, IN, 2007) henceforth AV; Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which
Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)
henceforth WJ/WR; Alasdair MacIntyre, The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin
Knight (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1998) henceforth
MR; Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human
Beings Need the Virtues (Open Court Publishing: Peru, IL, 1999) hence-
forth DRP; and Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An
Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge University
Press, 2016) henceforth ECM.
5. Though his earlier work is interesting in its own way, MacIntyre’s critique
of Enlightenment rationalism only emerges fully with his publication of
After Virtue in 1981. His rather careering career as a philosopher had
already led him through a long dalliance with Marxism and a series of
detailed critiques of contemporary social science. MacIntyre has described
his career as consisting of three parts: a first part consisting of “heteroge-
neous, badly organized, sometimes fragmented and often frustrating and
messy enquiries;” a second part, which “was an interim period of some-
times painfully self-critical reflection;” and a third (final?) part in which he
has “been engaged in a single project…described by one of my colleagues
as that of writing An Interminably Long History of Ethics.” MR, 268–269.
I will focus on his works from this third part of his career.
6. AV, 6, 8.
7. AV, 12. In later works, MacIntyre uses the term expressivism instead of
emotivism. ECM, 17–24.
8. AV, 18.
9. MacIntyre mentions the centrality of the influence of R.G. Collingwood’s
later historicized philosophy on his own work in several places. See, for
example, MR, 261, where he recounts “what I learned from R.G. Collingwood:
that morality is an essentially historical subject matter and that philosophi-
cal inquiry, in ethics as elsewhere, is defective insofar as it is not
historical.”
10. I will not concern myself with the historical or philosophical accuracy or
adequacy of MacIntyre’s account of other thinkers, though his treatment
of the history of philosophy has been the subject of severe criticism both
by intellectual historians and by experts in the particular subjects of his
work (e.g. Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, et al.). For exam-
ple, Thomas Nagel writes that “accuracy in reporting what others say has
never been MacIntyre’s strong point. On the principle that it is easier to
shoot a sitting duck, he tends to be most inaccurate when he is on the
attack: the representation of Kant’s ethical theory in After Virtue makes it
unwise ever to trust what he says about a philosophical text again, and the
treatment of Hume [in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?] is not much
better.” The emphasis that MacIntyre places on historicizing philosophy
generally and moral philosophy specifically makes such criticism quite
damning, when the criticism is convincing. Thomas Nagel, “MacIntyre
versus the Enlightenment,” Other Minds: Critical Essays, 1969–1994
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 208.
11. MR, 261.
12. WJ/WR, 320. MacIntyre’s distaste for Hume because of his supposed
Anglophilia is quite palpable and he refers to his philosophy as an
“Anglicizing subversion” of the Scottish tradition. Indeed, MacIntyre uses
the terms “England” and “English” much as certain folks from the
American South used to use the term “Yankee,” and for similar reasons.
13. Baier notes that Hume’s moral philosophy is based upon a traditionalist
moral epistemology and is dependent on the kind of virtues that MacIntyre
extols. It does not rely on a single telos, however, and is connected with a
nascent version of modern classical liberalism. MacIntyre’s disdain for
modern liberalism also involves a disdain for the virtues associated with
such a culture. Annette Baier, “Civilizing Practices,” Postures of the Mind:
Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985) 246–262.
14. AV, 71.
15. AV, 83.
16. AV, 88.
17. MacIntyre’s account of moral action and practical rationality is interesting
on its own account, so I will not consider how genuinely Aristotelian or
Thomistic it is. One obvious area in which MacIntyre is not presenting an
Aristotelian or Thomistic argument is precisely in his commitment to his-
toricize philosophy, which is largely derived from Hegel and R.G. Collingwood
(neither of whom would have approved in any way of his notion that the
whole of modern moral philosophy rests on an error). For a critique of
MacIntyre’s interpretation of Aristotle and Aquinas, see, among others,
Janet Coleman, “MacIntyre and Aquinas,” After MacIntyre: Critical
294 K. B. MCINTYRE
Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Horton and Susan

Mendus, eds. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1994) 65–90.
18. MR, 197.
19. AV, 54.
20. MR, 138. This sentiment represents a softening of his sometimes socio-
logically deterministic account of the emotivism of modern practical life.
21. MR, 140.
22. Having grown up in suburban Texas in the 1970s, I had never encoun-
tered public transportation before moving to the Northeast, where I had
to learn how to ride the bus and the subway. I also learned that some
people were and are exceptionally good at using public transportation and
others, like myself, are especially bad at it.
23. There are also external goods, often of a material variety, associated with
excellence in certain practices, but these are not intrinsically related to the
specific practice, and, in fact, often have a corrupting influence on the
practice.
24. AV, 20.
25. AV, 222.
26. WJ/WR, 133.
27. AV, 219.
28. DPR, 25. Philippa Foot offers a similarly naturalistic account of morality in
Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
29. See, for example, John Kekes, The Morality of Pluralism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993).
30. MR, 240.
31. MR, 241.
32. MacIntyre admits of this possibility when he writes that “there are kinds of
teaching—the teaching of piano or violin, for example—in which the ruth-
less exclusion of the talentless from further teaching (a mercy to the stu-
dent as well as to the teacher and to any innocent bystander) is one of the
marks of a good teacher and in which the abilities to identify the talentless
and to exclude them are among her or his virtues.” DRA, 89. This cer-
tainly suggests that there might be those who are just not capable of learn-
ing the practice of morality, and, thus, should excluded from the moral
community.
33. Of course, the conflicts which arise because of the diversity of the moral
world do not necessarily have to be viewed as aberrant or inherently
destructive. As Stuart Hampshire notes, “neither in the social order, nor in
the experience of an individual, is a state of conflict the sign of vice, or
defect, or a malfunctioning. It is not a deviation from the normal state of a
city or a nation, and it is not a deviation from the normal course of a per-
son’s experience.” Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001) 33–34.
Index1
A Alexander, Christopher, 266

The Abolition of Man (Lewis), America, 61, 62, 142, 259
166, 173 de Tocqueville on, 3
Abolition of man, Lewis motify Kirk on, 259
on, 173–174 reason and freedom in, 40–42
Abstract orders, 9, 184, 185 American Revolution
Abstract rationalism, Lewis Kirk on French vs., 259
critiqhue of, 170 Paine and Jefferson view of, 213
Adams, John, 62, 67 Ancien Régime, 17, 21, 35–38
Adorno, Theodor, 126 Tocqueville on French
Aesthetes, 2, 209n43, 284 Revolution and, 35
Aesthetic consciousness, The Ancient Constitution and the
Gadamer on, 194 Feudal Law (Pocock), 29n6
Aesthetic delight, transposition of, 166 Anit-rationalists, see Critics of
After Strange Gods (Eliot), 80, 85, rationalism (anti-rationalists)
86, 90n7 Annual Register, 19
After Virtue (MacIntyre), 280, Anscombe, G. E. M., 279, 280
282, 292n5 Anti-foundationalists, 181, 203n1
The Age of Reason (Paine), 17 Antigone (Sophocles), 196
Agonists, Kierkegaard and, 49 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 152, 217,
Aletheia (divine light), 198, 203, 256, 280, 286, 293n10,
205n11, 207n23, 218 293n17
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Rationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42599-9
296 INDEX
Aristotle jigsaw puzzle analogy, 238, 243, 245

bios theoretikos, 214, 222 monism definition and, 237–238
causation types of, 116 multifarious treatment of
de Tocqueville and, 34, 35 monism, 238
forms of knowledge, 26 philosophy and, 241, 242
Gadamer and, 198, 199, 203 Plato and, 237, 239, 244
MacIntyre and, 293n17 politics and, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246
prudence and, 27 on positive and negative liberty, 244
Voegelin and, 217 utopian writers and, 244
Armitage, David, 22, 28 writers most important to, 238
Arnold, Matthew, 80, 89 Beyond Being (Wachterhauser), 209n44
Augustine (St.), 53, 194, 215 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 66
Voegelin and, 217 Bible, Jefferson revision of, 212
Authoritarianism, Berlin on, 246 Bios theoretikos (Aristotle), 214, 222
Authoritative present, d’Alembert Birzer, Bradley J., 255, 259
principle of, 222 Border vacuums, 267–268, 271, 275,
277, 277n2
Bradley, F. H., 82, 91n18, 91n20, 228
B Bread riots, 47, 52
Babbitt, Irving, 87, 93n53, 164, 172 Brentano, Franz, 146
Bacon, Francis, 1, 45n22, 213, 216, Buber, Martin, 135n36
229, 231, 232 Buddhism, 87, 88
Baier, Annette, 293n13 Burke, Edmund, 3, 12, 15–29, 133,
Baudelaire, 82, 87–89 252–258, 292n1
Being (being) Annual Register and, 19
emergent and indwelling, 150–152 Aristotelian-Ciceronian tradition
forgetfulness of, 10, 200 and, 19, 26, 28
Gadamer word for, 118 on balance of power, 27–29
having distinguished from, 114 Canavan on, 16, 23–27, 255
Heidegger description of, conservatism and, 3, 16, 24, 252
107, 112–114 education of, 19
Marcel on mystery and, 128, 132 enthusiasm and, 20, 21, 28
zoon politikon, 26 French Revolution and,
Being and Time (Heidegger), 112 3, 16, 20, 23
Berdyaev, Nikolai, 125 French sophists and, 21
Berlin, Isaiah, monism critique by Hume and, 18
authoritarianism, irrationalism Kirk and, 12, 252–258
and, 246 on limits of rationality, 15
dearth of studies on, 237 as misunderstood, 15
history and, 243 as natural law thinker, 16, 255, 256
on human agency, 241 on natural rights and tradition,
iterations of monism, 245, 246 255, 257
INDEX 297
on philosophy intrusion of common prudentia and, 25, 26

life, 18 reason and democracy as form of, 72
political and philosophical career Voegelin critique of rationalism and,
of, 19, 20 211, 214, 218, 224
on reason and politics, 20 The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis),
religion and, 20 159, 166, 168, 172
sophistry alternative of, 27 Cicero
Butler, Judith, 181 Kirk and, 256, 257
prudence and, 22, 23, 27, 28
Cities
C Marcel on modern, 126, 127
Calculus, 97, 221 public image of, 267
Canavan, Francis, 16, 23–27, visual order in, 269
29n6, 255 See also Jacobs, Jane, urban
Canavan, S. J., 16, 23–27, 29n6, 255 rationalists critiqued by
Carr, Peter, 64 City of Three Million, 274
Cassirer, Ernst, 14n1, 107 Clark, Jonathan, 21
Cataclysmic money, 268, 275–277 Clark, Maudmarie, 74n20, 75n24, 77n47
Causation Cobbett, William, 271
Aristotle on types of, 116–117 Coherence theory of truth, Oakeshott,
Heidegger on freedom and, 117, 118 228, 233
Centralization Collingwood, R. G., 14,
Kirk critique of, 12 292n9, 293n17
Tocqueville critique of, 35 Colonists, American, 40, 259
in urban planning, 264 Commedia (Dante), 89
Chess, 98, 151, 287 Communism, 128, 133, 214, 220
China (Hovelaque), 234n4 Comte, Auguste, 37, 179, 213, 217,
Chinese civilization, Eliot on, 87 218, 220–224
Christianity Voegelin and, 213, 214, 218, 220,
Baudelairean, 89 221, 223
Condorcet and, 223 Concept of Experience (Hegel), 111
imagination and, 8, 9, 160–162 Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Jefferson view of reason and, (Kierkegaard), 48, 57n21
63–65, 70 Concrete orders, 9, 184, 185
Kierkegaard and, 2, 48, 55 Condorcet, Nicolas de, 1, 213, 217,
Lewis apologetics of, 159, 160, 162, 218, 221–224
166, 167, 170 Consciousness of epoch, Voegelin
McGrath on Lewis and, 160 and, 217
Nietzsche and, 64, 65, 67, Conservatism
69, 70, 72 Burke and, 252
nihilism and, 5, 63, 69, 70, 76n42 first principle of, 252
Platonic, 63, 64 of Kirk, 251, 252, 259, 260
298 INDEX
The Conservative Mind on democratization and authority of

(Kirk), 12, 251 science, 38–40
Constructivism on French Revolution and Old
Jacobs critique of rationalist, 270 Regime, 35
Oakeshott and, 2, 234n6 on political science and freedom, 35
urban planning, Cartesian political science of, 3, 4, 35, 38, 39
rationalism and, 264 on politics and philosophy, 34
Co-present margin, Husserl on reason and freedom in
concept of, 118 America, 38–40
Corporate import, Oakeshott social engineering criticized by, 4, 34
theory of, 234 on uncertainty, 35
The Corsair, 48 “The Dead” (Joyce), 86
The Counter-Revolution of Science Death and Life (Jacobs), 267, 277n3
(Hayek), 183 Death, of God, 71, 77n49
Creative fidelity, 132, 133 Declaration of Independence,
Crisis and the Apocalypse of Man 67, 232, 259
(Voegelin), 214 Deism, French, 21
Critical rationalism, nihilism as Deleuze, Gilles, 75n24, 75n25
result of, 142 Democracy
Critics of rationalism (anti-rationalists), Christianity as reason and, 5
1, 8, 18, 159, 179, 182, 203, 238 de Tocqueville on, 35, 36, 38–40, 43
criteria for inclusion, 8 Jeffersonian predictions about, 69
most radical, 62, 80 Nietzsche on ascetic ideals and, 70
overview of, 1 of reason, 5
See also specific thinkers ressentiment and, 68, 70
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 234n6 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville),
Heidegger on, 110 3, 40, 42
new-Kantian interpretation of, 110 Descartes, René, 1, 45n22, 54, 113,
Crito (Plato), 196 115, 143–145, 151, 152, 229,
Cult of Genius, 81, 86 231, 232, 234n5
dualism of, 144, 151, 152
Heidegger on error of Kant and, 113
D Kant and, 113
d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 1, 214, Kierkegaard and, 54
217, 221–224 Oakeshott and, 229, 232, 234n5
Dante Alighieri, 86, 89 Polanyi and, 145, 152
Darwin, Charles, 108, 109 Despotism, France’s “mild,” 41
Das Problem des Scheins, 111–113, 116 Destruktion (destructuring), 198,
de Beauvoir, Simone, 7, 125, 181 199, 207n22
de Tocqueville, Alexis, 3, 4, Detwiler, Bruce, 76n34, 77n49
38–40, 92n33 Dickens, Charles, 129
Aristotle and, 35 Diderot, Denis, 1, 213, 222
INDEX 299
The Discarded Image (Lewis), modernism of, 5

9, 171 “obedient progeny” of, 82, 83
Disponibilité, Marcel idea of, 132 orthodoxy and, 81, 85, 93n47
Dissociation of sensibility, personal expression and, 84
Eliot and, 84 poetic creation and, 80
Divine light (aletheia), 218 present-moment inversion and, 82
Dryden, John, 81 reactionary label for, 80
Du Bos, Charles, 125 Russell and, 91n28
Dual control, Polanyi concept of, on second order minds, 81
150, 151, 154 self-description, 79, 80
Dworkin, Ronald, 246 sentimental attachment and, 84
Shusterman interpretation of, 82,
91n20, 91n28
E thrust and retreat rhetoric of, 79, 86
Economic Bill of Rights, 62 tradition as discipline, 83
Economics, in light of Hayek, 189 wit and, 85
Education Emergent being, indwelling and,
Lewis on, 173 8, 140, 150
Marcel on, 129 Emotivism, MacIntyre on, 286
STEM, 7, 120 “Empirical Propositions and
Einstein, Albert, 171 Hypothetical Statements”
Eliot, T. S., tradition and (Berlin), 242
After Strange Gods, 80, 86 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 222
alleged Christian ideology of, 80 Enframing, 120
Arnold and, 81, 89 The Enlightenment in America
Babbitt and, 87 (May), 211
Baudelaire critique by, 89 Enlightenment rationalism
Bradley and, 82, 91n18 authors of, 2
catholic sensibility of, 80, 86 Cartesian assumptions as
on Chinese civilization, 87 source of, 153
Christianity and, 86, 87, 89 contrasting assumptions in, 218
criticism and creation issue, 80, 81 definition of, 212
Dante and, 86, 89 development of, 223
dissociation of sensibility and, 84 epistemological pluralists as
evaluations and judgments critics of, 2
issue, 81, 85 irrationality of, 10, 215,
on historical sense of tradition, 82 219–221, 224
Kirk and, 2, 253, 254 MacIntyre term for, 255,
Lancelot preface and, 89n1, 90n7 279, 280, 286, 291,
Lawrence and, 88 292n5
living character of tradition issue, 81 momentum of, 140
Marvell and, 85 reductionism and, 217
300 INDEX
Enlightenment rationalism (cont.) France

religious believers as critics of, 2 deism in, 24
Scottish Enlightenment and, 179 “mild” despotism in, 41
Voegelin on ideological Franklin, Ben, 213
offspring of, 214 Freedom
See also Critics of rationalism America, reason and, 40
(anti-rationalists); Rationalism; de Tocqueville on political science
specific thinkers and, 33–43
Enthusiasm, Burke critique on, Heidegger on causation and, 110
20, 21 Free-market reforms, in United
Episteme (knowledge), 26, 214 Kingdom, 189
Epistemology Free press, Tocqueville on, 41
Hayek ontology and, 189 Free spirit, Nietzsche on, 67,
pluralists, 2, 291 73, 77n56
Epitaph, on Newton, 212 Frege, Gottlob, 99
Equality French existentialism, 126
fanatical love for, 39 French philosophes, 4, 5, 21,
Nietzsche on Jefferson and, 28, 34, 125
5, 63, 68, 71 French philosophes, 1, 3–5, 21,
Erfahrung, 196, 202 28, 34
An Essay Concerning Human French Revolution
Understanding (Locke), 215 American vs., 213
Eternal recurrence, Nietzsche on, Burke criticism of, 3
73, 77n56 Jefferson on, 213
Ethics (Spinoza), 49, 233 Paine and Jefferson view of, 213
Ethics, Maclntyre on Tocqueville on Old Regime and, 36
purpose of, 286–289 French sophistry, Burke
virtue, 13, 14, 280 criticism of, 21
Existentialism Freud, Sigmund, 3, 171
of Marcel, 128 From Enlightenment to Revolution
Experience and Its Modes (Oakeshott), (Voegelin), 214
11, 227, 229, 230 From-to dynamic, Polanyi
concept of, 147
F
Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 48 G
Federici, Michael, 10 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, as anti-
For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot), 90n7 rationalist, 2, 9, 10, 91n18, 118,
Forgetfulness of being, Gadamer 193–203, 291, 292n1
and, 200 on aesthetic consciousness, 194
Foucault, Michel, 3, 127 Aristotle and, 194, 198, 199,
Framers, 62, 68, 259 201, 203
INDEX 301
authentic interpretation model Gordon, Peter, 117

of, 204n5 Grant, Robert, 234n4
Eliot and, 91n18 Green belts, 272
forgetfulness of being idea Grondin, Jean, 196, 204n3,
of, 10, 200 208n29
Heidegger and, 9, 118, 193, 194, Gyllembourg, Thomasine,
197–201, 203, 204n3, 206n15, 49, 57n21
206n16, 206n19, 207n23,
207n24, 207n28, 208n30
hermeneutics-metaphysics tension H
in, 204n3 Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 49, 57n16,
historicity of the Good and, 200–203 57n19, 205n14
on internal order, 202, 209n44 Hamilton, Alexander, 67
Kierkegaard and, 209n43, 292n1 Hampshire, Stuart, 294n33
on lost truth in human Hastings, Warren, 256
sciences, 194–197 Hayek, F. A., rationalism critique of, 2,
metaphysical tradition and, 193–203 9, 12, 154, 179–190, 264, 267,
on method vs. truth, 194–196, 199, 277n1, 292n1
200, 204n4, 204–205n6 alternative to, 180, 182–189
phronesis and, 199, 203 economic and social theory,
Plato and, 9, 194, 201–203, 180, 185–187
205n11, 208n29, epistemology and ontology of, 179,
208n42, 209n44 180, 183–185
on prejudice, 195, 196, 204n4 future issues in light of, 189–190
pre-Kehre Heidegger and, 198, 203 grass analogy of, 184–185
Smith, P. C., on, 208n42 intellectual opponents of, 179
Garden City, Howard concept of, Jacobs and, 12, 264, 267
271, 272 legacy of, 189
Gaus, Gerald F., 190 norms, politics and, 9
The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 65, 72, 73 on pattern recognition, 9
George, Henry, 271 political and legal theory, 188–189
Gheorghiu, C. Virgil, 128 on property rights, 264
Gibbon, Edward, 21 psychology and, 9, 180, 183
Glazebrook, Trish, 107, 109 rationalism discontents
Glorious Revolution, 20, 24 and, 181–182
God rationalist worldview and, 180–182
death of, 72, 77n49 rule of law and, 9, 179, 188
elimination of, 115 Scottish Enlightenment and, 9, 179,
Heidegger on objects and, 113 183, 186
in Lewis model of universe, social justice critique by, 188
171, 172 spontaneous order and, 186, 187
Voegelin on new religion and, 218 urban planning and, 12, 264
302 INDEX
Hegel, G. W. F., 14, 48, 54, 87, Hermeneutics, Gadamer

93n47, 111, 116, 194, of facticity, 9, 198, 201
228, 293n17 rehabilitation of authority and
Eliot and, 87, 93n47 tradition in, 195
Heidegger and, 111, 116 tension between metaphysics and,
Kierkegaard criticism of, 54 194, 204n3
MacIntyre and, 14, 293n17 Hernandez, Jill Graper, 128
Oakeshott and, 54, 227 Historical consciousness, Gadamer
Heidegger, Martin, Gadamer and on, 194–196
aletheia and, 203, 207n23 History, monism and, 237,
early, 197–201, 203, 239–241, 246
206n19, 208n30 Hitler, Adolph, 87, 142
later, 197, 198, 208n30 Hobbes, Thomas, 215–218, 221, 238
presence and, 201 Horizon, Gadamer concept of, 118, 197
Heidegger, Martin, scientific Horkheimer, Max, 126
reductionism critique by, 2, 6, Hovelaque, Emile, 234n4
7, 9, 51, 112–116, 126, 128, Howard, Ebenezer, 13,
193, 194, 197–201, 203, 271–273, 275–277
204n3, 206n15, 206n16, Human Genome Project, 109
206n19, 206–207n22, Human Molecular Genetics, 109
207n23, 207n24, 207n28, Human sciences, Gadamer on loss of
208n30, 292n1 truth in, 194–197
Cassirer debate with, 107 Hume, David, 18, 19, 21, 30n13,
on causation and freedom, 112–116 182, 213, 280, 283, 286,
Glazebrook on, 107, 121n15 293n10, 293n12, 293n13
Hegel and, 111, 116 Burke and, 18
Husserl compared with, 107 MacIntyre criticism of, 280
on Kant, 110, 111, 115–117 Husserl, Edmund, 107, 118
neo-Kantians and, 107, 109–111, co-present margin of, 118
114, 115, 117 Heidegger compared with, 107
on objectivity, 113
receptivity understood by, 117
science critiqued by, 107, 108, 119 I
on subjective metaphysics of The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
representation, 112, 117 Aristotelian Philosophy (Gadamer),
on technological thinking, 7, 108, 194, 199
119, 120 Imagination, 85, 159–174,
transcendental logic and, 112–116 215, 255–260
transcendental objects and, 112–116 Kirk on, 12, 255–260
Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science See also Lewis, C. S., on imagination
(Glazebrook), 107 and reason
Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 213, 215, Instrumentalization of man, Voegelin
217, 221–224 concept of, 221
INDEX 303
Internal goods, 287, 288 Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard), 54

In-totality, Heidegger concept of, 119 Joyce, James, Eliot on, 86, 92n44
Intuition, science and, 143, 157n15
“Is Theology Poetry” (Lewis), 169
K
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 141
J Kant, Immanuel, 1, 17, 27, 103,
Jacobs, Jane, urban rationalists 110–118, 136n40, 144, 152,
critiqued by 213, 280, 283, 286, 293n10
Alexander and, 266, 267 Descartes’ dualism and, 144, 152
border vacuums and, 267–268, 271, error of Descartes and, 113
275, 277, 277n2 God and, 48, 115
cataclysmic money and, Gordon on, 117
268, 275–277 Heidegger on, 110, 111, 113,
city image and, 267, 270 115, 117
constructivist theories and, 270–276 MacIntyre and, 280, 283, 286
on Howard, 271–273, 275–277 Marcel and, 131, 136n40
on Olmsted, 270–271 mechanism of nature idea of, 116
summary of critique, 265 truth defined by, 113, 115
tactile knowledge and, 266, 267 Kehre (Heidegger), 197, 199
on urban design Kierkegaard, Søren, political
consequences, 267–270 rationalism and, 2, 4, 47–55, 280,
on urbanization problems, 283, 284, 286
263–264, 276 age theory of, 47, 51, 52
urban researchers inspiring, 266 The Corsair and, 48
Jeanneret, Charels-Edouard, see Le definitions of, 49
Corbusier (Charels-Edouard Descartes and, 54
Jeanneret) on envy, 51, 53, 54
Jefferson, Thomas, 1, 5, 61–72, envy and, 51, 53, 54
76n38, 91n21, 212, 213, 259 Habermas and, 49, 57n16
Bible revised by, 212 Hegel criticized by, 48, 54
democracy predictions and, 69 literary criticism used by, 55
French Revolution and, 69, 213 MacIntyre criticism of, 58n33, 280,
letter to Weightman, 68 283, 286
Nietzsche and, 5, 61–73 negatively unifying principle, 51, 53
Plato criticized by, 63, 64 Oakeshott and, 47–49
Reagan, Obama and, 61, 62 press viewed by, 52, 58n36, 59n48
on reason and Christianity, 63, 72 pseudonyms of, 54
reason as misunderstood by, 66 slavery not addressed by, 51
reputation of today, 71 Spinoza and, 49
skepticism of tradition, 66, 67 A Story of Everyday Life and,
Jigsaw puzzle, Berlin analogy of, 49, 51, 55
238, 243, 245 Strauss on popularity of, 57n27
304 INDEX
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 51 rule-following and, 99–101

Kirk, Russell, rationalism critique by, as toolbox, 96
12, 252, 255, 256 Lawrence, D. H., 82, 86–88, 92n44
Birzer on, 255, 259 Le Corbusier (Charels-Edouard
Burke and, 12, 252, 253, 256 Jeanneret), 13, 273–277
Cicero and, 256, 257 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 97
conservatism first principle, 252 Leiter, Brian, 74n20, 75n24, 77n47
conservatism of, 251, 252, Leviathan (Hobbes), 215, 217, 221
259, 260 Levinas, Emmanuel, 7, 125
Divine mind and, 255, 258 Levy, David, 189
Eliot and, 254, 255 Lewis, C. S., on imagination
fiction of, 258 and reason
on imagination, 257, 258, 260 abolition of man motif of, 174
legacy of, 260 Christian apologetics of,
moral relativism and, 255 159, 166–170
natural law theory and, 255 Christianity and, 9, 160–163,
on reason’s limits, 253–255 167–170, 173
summary of, 253, 260 on education, 173
tradition and, 12, 255–260 language metaphor of, 166
on US Constitution, 259 “looking at vs. looking along” motif
Knowledge, 227, 229, 231, 234n6 of, 163–166, 168, 174
Aristotle on forms of, 26 metaphor of light used by,
as episteme, 214 163, 169–170
de Tocqueville on uncertain, 43 model of universe and, 160,
from-to dynamic in, 147 163, 169–174
in Hayek epistemology, 184 Peirce on abductive process
irrational sources of, 219 and, 168
locality, 263, 267 Platonic “chest” and, 163
personal, 140 rhetorical temper of, 159
physics reduction of, 144 symbolization and, 168, 169
Polanyi concept of, 8, 146, 153 Tao and, 173
tacit knowing as basis of all, 148 transposition motif of,
tactile, 266, 267 163, 166–169
Knowledge reduction, 144 Voegelin and, 168, 169
in scientism, 144 Ward on, 160, 162, 172
Kuhn, Thomas, 109, 149 Liberty, see Freedom
Kukathas, Chandran, 190 Light metaphor, Lewis use of, 163,
167, 169–170
Lincoln, Abraham, 62
L Linnæus, Carolus, 108, 109
Language games, Wittgenstein and, 99 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
examples, 97–99 (Lewis), 172, 175n11
mathematics and, 97, 98 Lippman, Walter, 221
INDEX 305
Literary criticism, Kierkegaard use Mandeville, Bernard, 215

of, 49, 55 Marcel, Gabriel, 7, 125–133
Living cities, 13, 264–266, 269, Buber and, 135n36
275, 277 Catholicism conversion of, 136n37
Locality knowledge, 263, 267 disponibilité and, 132
Locke, John, 152, 213, 215, 232, on egotism, 130, 131
238, 259 existentialism of, 7, 126, 128
Logical positivism, 145, 242, 243 Kant and, 131, 136n40
Berlin and, 242, 243 Marxism and, 133
“Logical Translation” (Berlin), 242 on mystery, 7, 125–133
Lynch, Kevin, 267, 269 Paris salons of, 7, 125
as philosopher of hope, 132
on reductive abstraction, 126, 127
M Sartre and, 7, 125, 131,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 217, 232, 239 132, 136n37
Machine metaphor, Polanyi social critiques by, 133
reversal of, 150 “standing reserve” idea, 126
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 2, 13, 14, 52, on techniques of degradation, 128
58n33, 153, 156n6, 181, Thibon and, 133
204–205n6, 255, 279–291 Maritain, Jacques, 7, 125
Aquinas and, 280, 286, Maritain, Raïssa, 125
293n10, 293n17 Marvell, Andrew, 81, 85, 93n47
career of, 292n5 Marx, Karl (Marxism), 3, 141, 216,
on emotivism, 13, 281, 286, 292n7 223, 244
Enlightenment project and, 255, Märzrevolution, 47
283, 284, 291 Masse totale, of Turgot, 218, 221, 223
on good life, 290 Mathematics
Hume criticized by, 280, 293n10 agreement paradox in, 102
Kant and, 280, 283, 286, 293n10 as language-game, 97–99
Kierkegaard and, 52, 58n33, 280, May, Henry F., 211
283, 284, 286, 292n1, 293n10 McGrath, Alister, 160–162, 169,
modern moral philosophy critique 170, 174
by, 13, 279–291 Mechanism of nature, Kant
on morality and practices, idea of, 116
289, 294n32 Medicine, reductionism in, 129, 132
neo-Aristotelian alternative Medieval man, Lewis on universe
of, 286–291 and, 171
notion of rights, 284 Medieval thinkers, Heidegger
Polanyi and, 153, 291 and, 115
on radical disruption, 283 “Meditations in a Tool Shed” (Lewis),
on social science, 284, 285 164, 168, 169
virtue ethics in works by, 13, 14, 280 Meditations on First Philosophy
Magistra vitae, 196 (Descartes), 115
306 INDEX
Meno (Plato), 149 Moral relativism

Mere Christianity (Lewis), 159, 161, Gadamer, Heidegger and, 193, 197
162, 166 Kirk and, 252, 255
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 151, 156n10 Mouffe, Chantal, 57n15
Metaphysical tradition, Murdoch, Iris, 129, 132, 133
Gadamer ties to Musil, Robert, 216
early Heidegger openness Mystery, Marcel on
to, 197–200 problems vs., 125–133
hermeneutics tension with, religion and, 129
194, 204n3
Metaphysics
Heidegger Destruktion N
(destructuring) of, 198, 199 Nagel, Thomas, 293n10
Kirk and, 253, 254 Natural law theory, 255
of modernity, 120, 197, 206n16 Natural rights/human rights
subjective metaphysics of Burke on tradition and, 255, 257
representation, 112, 115, 117 MacIntyre on, 281, 284
Metaxic (in-between structure), Natural sciences
216, 218–220 Berlin on history and, 11
Methexis, 201, 203, 209n44 rationalist worldview and, 181, 182
Methodologism, Gadamer critique of Natural sciences, Heidegger critique of
human science and, 194, Heidegger on transcendental objects
195, 203 and, 110, 115–116
Milton, John, 81 subjective metaphysics of
Miracles (Lewis), 159–162, 166 representation in, 112,
“Modern Moral Philosophy” 115, 117
(Anscombe), 13, 279 Nazis (Nazism), 212
Møller, P. L., 48 Nehamas. Alexander, 74n20, 75n24,
Money, Jacobs on cataclysmic, 264 76n41, 77n47
Monism, see Berlin, Isaiah, monism Neo-Kantians
critique by causation viewed by, 116–117
Moonies, 87 Heidegger and, 107, 109–111,
Moore, Thomas, 163 114, 117
Moral imagination, natural law and, Oakeshott and, 234n7
257, 258 The New Science (Vico), 59n48
Morality The New Science of Politics
MacIntyre on practices and, 153 (Voegelin), 217
in rationalist worldview, 180–182 Newton, Isaac, 229
Moral philosophy, modern, 11, Nicomachean Ethics
279–286, 291, 293n17 (Aristotle), 26, 199
prominent theories in, 280 Nietzsche, Friedrich
See also MacIntyre, Alasdair advice of, 71, 73
INDEX 307
on Christian morality, 65 Objectivity

on death of God, 72 Berlin and, 240
Deleuze on, 74n20, 75n25 Gadamer and, 10, 196
eternal recurrence, 73, 77n56 Heidegger and, 110–115, 119, 120
hammer analogy of, 5, 61–78 MacIntyre on, 279, 284, 289
on nihilism crisis, 5, 63, 69–71, 199 Nietzsche on, 65, 71
on objectivity, 65, 71, 77n47 Occam’s razor, 120
“On the Tarantulas” essay by, 68 Of the Perfect Commonwealth
on Oracle of Reason, 63–66 (Hume), 18
perspectivism of, 66 Old Regime, see Ancien Régime
on Platonic Christianity, 63 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 270–271
ressentiment concept of, 65, 68, 71 On the Essence of Truth (Heidegger), 115
Nihilism On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
critical rationalism as leading to, 140 ascetic ideals analysis in, 70,
definition of, 70 71, 77n47
Nietzsche and, 5, 63, 69–71, 199 perspectivism and, 65, 66, 70, 71,
Polanyi fear of, 8, 145, 155 74n20, 77n47
Nous (transcendent experience of On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 108
reason), 214 “On the Reading of Old Books”
“Nymph and Fawn” (Eliot), 85 (Lewis), 174
“On the Tarantulas” (Nietzsche), 68
Ontology, Hayek epistemology and,
O 180, 183–185
Oakeshott, Michael, rationalism Oracle of Reason, Nietzsche on
critique by, 7, 10, 11, 13, ascetic ideals and, 70, 71
47, 55 overcoming, 66–70
coherence theory of truth, politics, 66–70
228, 233 Orchestra analogy, Lewis use of,
concrete mind described by, 230 166, 167
Descartes and, 54, 229, 234n5 Orthodoxy
idealist philosophers and, 228 Eliot and, 81, 85, 86, 89, 93n47
Kierkegaard and, 47 Polanyi’s dynamic, 154–155
logical irrelevance and, 11, 228 Out of the Silent Planet (Lewis), 162, 168
“no common subject matter” claim
of, 228, 229, 232
sovereignty of technique and, 7, 55, P
229, 231, 232 Paine, Thomas, 1, 17, 213
summary of criticism by, 7 Pater, Walter, 89
theory-practice problem and, 233 Paternalism, monism and, 243, 244
on value-based traditions, 48 Pattern language, in cities, 266
works relevant to, 11 Pattern recognition, Hayek on, 184
Obama, Barack, 61, 62 Peano, Giuseppe, 99
308 INDEX
Peirce, Charles S., 150, 153, Pocock, J. G. A., 14n1, 16, 20, 21,
156–157n12, 168, 176n36 29n5, 29n6
abduction and, 168 enthusiasm discourse and, 20
Personal Knowledge (Polanyi), 140, 148 Poincaré, Jules Henri, 149
Personal knowledge, Polanyi concept of Polanyi, Michael, post-critical
tacit knowing and, 8, 154 approach of
Perspectivism, Nietzsche and, 66, 70, correcting excesses of scientific
71, 74n20 rationalism, 145–152
Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard), Descartes and, 152
54, 59n53 dual control dynamic of, 150,
Philosophical Investigations 151, 154
(Wittgenstein), 96 dynamic orthodoxy and, 154–155
Philosophy on emergent being and indwelling,
Anscombe work on modern moral, 140, 150–152
279, 280 Enlightenment viewed by, 8, 139,
Berlin on monism and, 237 140, 153–155
de Tocqueville on philosophes, 4, 34 historical setting for, 143
Marcel on purpose of, 126, 130, interpretive frameworks and, 140
132, 133 knowledge distortions and, 8, 140
Oakeshott on idealism and, 227 knowledge forms of, 186
politics and, 19, 20, 28, 34, 133, machine metaphor reversal of, 150
180, 238, 239, 246, 252 Peirce and, 150, 157n12
as search for justification, 95, 103 on personal knowledge and tacit
teleology and moral, 2, 12, 13, 19, knowing, 8, 146, 154–155
194, 199, 279–291 on political extremism roots in
Wittgenstein on “done right,” 95 Enlightenment, 154–155
Phronesis (practical wisdom), 16, 26, reality, morality, society
27, 40, 143, 157n16, 199, 203 and, 154–155
Gadamer work on, 199, 203 on scientific discovery, 149, 153
science and, 40 as scientist, 8, 154–155
Physics as sympathetic critic, 8
quantum, 182 transcendentals and, 153, 157n14
reduction of knowledge to, 115 universal intent and, 146, 153
Pinochet, Augusto, 189 Political science, de Tocqueville
Plato on, 38, 39
Berlin and, 237, 244 Political Treatise (Spinoza), 49
“chest” understood by, 174 Politics
Gadamer and, 194, 201–203, attempts to transcend, 10, 217,
205n11, 208n29 218, 220
Jefferson criticism of, 63, 213 Berlin on monism and, 12,
Polanyi and, 149 238, 243–246
Voegelin and, 217 Burke and, 3, 16, 19, 24, 133, 256
Plotinus, Gadamer and, 201 conservative moment in, 12, 16, 245
INDEX 309
de Tocqueville political science, 3, 4, Property rights, Hayek on, 186

35, 38, 39 Protagoras, 212
freedom and political science, 3, 4, Prudence
35, 38, 39, 217 Aristotelian-Ciceronian, 22, 23, 27
Hayek theory of, 180, 188–189 in Aristotelian-Ciceronian
Mouffe definition of, 57n15 tradition, 26
Oakeshott essays on, 6, 47, Christian prudentia and, 25, 26
227, 234n4 Psychology, in Hayekian alternative,
Oracle of Reason on, 66–70 180, 183
political religions and, 212, 216,
220, 222, 224
prudence and, 256 Q
religion and, 212, 216, 220, 222, 224 Quantum physics, 182
religious movement as, 48
robust political economy, 189
Spinoza on rationalism in, 49 R
Tocqueville on philosophy and, 3, 34 Radiant City, 274, 275
zoon politikon, 26 Ransom Trilogy (Lewis), 159, 162, 166
See also Kierkegaard, Søren, political Rationalism
rationalism and critical, 140, 142, 148
The Politics of Prudence (Kirk), 252 technocratic, 7, 126
Pope, Alexander, Newton Rationalism in Politics and other Essays
Epitaph by, 212 (Oakeshott), 227, 229, 231
Post-critical approach, see Polanyi, Ready-to-hand, object appearance as,
Michael, post-critical approach of 112, 114, 117
Postmodernists, scientism Reagan, Ronald, 61, 62
response of, 145 Reason
Pound, Ezra, 87 American freedom and, 40–42
Pragmatists, 6, 181 ascetic ideals and, 5
Praxis, 188, 199, 233 Burke on politics and, 16, 23
Present at hand, object appearance as, Christianity as democracy and, 68, 72
112, 114, 117 de Tocqueville on freedom
Price, Richard, 17, 20, 22 and, 40–42
Priestley, Joseph, 17, 21, 22 democracy of, 5, 62, 68, 71–73
Prince (Machiavelli), 217, 232 Jefferson’s misunderstanding of, 66
Prince Caspian (Lewis), 172 Jefferson view of Christianity
Problem of appearances, 111 and, 63, 68
The Problem of Pain (Lewis), 159, Kirk on limits of, 253–255
162, 163 nous and, 214, 221
Problems of disorganized transcendence and, 214, 221
complexity, 265 See also Lewis, C.S., on imagination
Problems of organized complexity, 265 and reason; Oracle of Reason,
Problems of simplicity, 265, 266 Nietzsche on
310 INDEX
Recollections (de Tocqueville), 3, 39 S

Red Cross Information Service, 127 The Sacred Wood (Eliot), 80, 83, 85
Reductionism “obedient progeny” and, 83
machine metaphor and, 150 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 125, 126, 131, 132,
in medicine, 132 134n7, 136n37, 136n45
reductive abstraction and, 126 Marcel and, 125, 126, 131, 132
Voegelin on, 217 Sasaki, Ken-ichi, 266, 267, 269, 274
Reductionism, scientific urban tactility idea of, 266, 274
Heidegger and, 110 Schoolmen, medieval, 113
monism and, 12 Science (scientific rationalism)
technological thinking and, 120 appearance of objects in,
Voegelin critique of, 217 108–109, 111–114
See also Heidegger, Martin, scientific corrections to excesses of, 145–146
reductionism critique by de Tocqueville on democracy and, 3
Reflections on the Revolution in France Descartes and Kant error repeated in
(Burke), 3, 17 modern, 113
main intention of, 19 discovery stages in, 149
Reginster, 76n42, 77n56 Gadamer on human, 194–197, 203
on eternal recurrence, 78n56 glamorized view of, 146
Relativism, Gadamer and, 193–203 Heidegger critique of, 6, 108
Religion intuition and, 149, 157n15
Burke and, 20, 256 Jefferson faith in, 5, 62
Marcel on mystery and, 129 “looking along vs. looking
politics and, 20, 79 at” in, 165
Voegelin on, 10, 212 MacIntyre on social science and,
Republic (Plato), 18 284, 285, 292n5
Ressentiment, Nietzsche concept of, as metaphysics of modernity, 120
65, 68, 70–72 Polanyi on, 8, 145, 155
Revolutionary Enlightenment, 211 problem categories in, 265
See also French Revolution; Glorious shared criticism of reductionism in, 282
Revolution See also Reductionism, scientific
Rights of Man, 253 Scientism
Riots, bread, 47, 52 Berlin on monism and, 12
Robust political economy, 189 Heidegger criticism of, 107, 114
Romantics, 16, 17, 80, 87, 142 knowledge reduction in, 144
Rorty, Richard, 181, 203n1 MacIntyre and, 279, 284, 291
Rule of law, Hayek on social justice Polanyi opposition to, 139–155
and, 188 Scientism (Hayek), 183
Russell, Bertrand, 99, 179 Scientistic monism, 12
Russian Revolution, 142 Scott, Peter Dale, 3, 79, 80
Ryle, Gilbert, 151 Scottish Enlightenment, 9, 18, 179,
Ryn, Claes, 164, 172 183, 186
INDEX 311
Second order minds, Eliot and, 81 T

Second Realities, Voegelin on, 218 Tacit knowing
Second Treatise (Locke), 232 Hayek and, 188
Second World War, 7, 125, 128, personal knowledge and,
188, 253 8, 146–148, 154
Secularization of soul, 216 Tactile knowledge, 266
The Sensory Order (Hayek), 183 Taylor, Charles, 153, 181
Sensus communis, 129, 290 Taylor, John, 67
Sexual impulse, Lewis on looking Techniques of degradation, 128
along, 164 Technocratic rationalism, Marcel
“The Shadow in the Rose Garden” critique of
(Lawrence), 86 reductive abstraction and,
Shakespeare, William, 83, 85 126, 127
Shusterman, Richard, 82, 91n18, technical ethos and, 126, 127
91n20, 91n28 Technological thinking, Heidegger
Smith, Adam, 183, 213, 215 critique of, 7, 108
Smith, P. Christopher, 208n42 Teleology (teleos), MacIntyre on,
Social engineering, Tocqueville 13, 279–291
critique of, 4 Thatcher, Margaret, 189
Social science, MacIntyre on, That Hideous Strength (Lewis), 166
284, 285, 292n5 Thibon, Gustave, 133
Sophistry, Burke criticism and Thomistic ethics, 13
alternative to, 27 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 68
Sophocles, Gadamer and, 196 Till We Have Faces (Lewis), 168
Soul, secularization of, 216 Tolkien, J. R. R., 258
Spinoza, Benedict de, 49, 84 Tolstoy, Leo, 239, 244
Spontaneity, neo-Kantians view of, Town-country magnate, Wright, F. L.,
116, 117 concept of, 272, 273
Spontaneous order, 13, 186, 187, Tradition
234, 264, 266, 276, 277 Aristotelian-Ciceronian, 26, 28
Stages on Life’s Way (Kierkegaard), 48 Burke on natural rights and,
Steiner, Mark, 104n9 255, 257
STEM education, 7, 120 conservative intellectual, 251, 260
A Story of Everyday Life enduring moral truths and,
(Gyllembourg), 49, 50 252, 255
Strauss, Leo, 15, 16, 206n16 Jefferson skepticism of, 67
Burke misunderstood by, 15 Kirk, Burke on, 255, 257
on Kierkegaard popularity, 57n27 MacIntyre on teleos and, 280
The Structural Transformation of the Oakeshott on value-based, 48
Public Sphere (Habermas), 49 See also Eliot, T. S., tradition and;
Symbolization, Lewis, Voegelin and, Metaphysical tradition,
168, 169, 176n40 Gadamer ties to
312 INDEX
Transcendence and transcendentals Utopias

Polanyi and, 153 Berlin on writers of, 243
reason and, 214, 221 Garden City, 272
Voegelin and, 10, 214 ideologies based on, 212
Transposition, Lewis motif of, 166, 168 urban design and, 270
Truth and Method (Gadamer)
on hermeneutics, 194
transcendence and, 194, 196 V
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 213, Vattel, Emerich de, 28, 31n40
217, 218, 220–224 Vengeance, equality as, 68
The Twenty-fifth Hour “Verification” (Berlin), 242
(Gheorghiu), 128 Vetö, Miklos, 125
Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), Vico, Giambattista, 238, 239
63, 64, 71, 75n24 Virtue ethics, 14, 280
Two Ages: A Literary Review Voegelin, Eric, Enlightenment
(Kierkegaard), 47–49, 51, 54, 55 rationalism critiqued by,
public sphere and, 48 10, 55, 168
Tyranny of technique, 7, 129 on act of grace, 223
apostatic revolt and, 10, 212
Aristotle and, 214, 217, 221, 222
U Comte and, 213, 217,
Uncertainty, de Tocqueville on, 35 218, 220–223
Unfathomed indeterminate, as Condorcet and, 213, 217,
Being, 118 218, 221–224
United Kingdom, free-market on consciousness of epoch,
reforms in, 189 217, 225n16
United States (US), see America crisis of order and, 10, 212,
Universal intent, Polanyi concept of, 213, 224
146, 150, 153, 154 Enlightenment definition and, 212
Urban planning false spirituality contention of, 214
constructivism and, 264, 270 Helvétius and, 213, 215,
Hayek and, 12, 264 217, 221–224
problem categories applied to, 275 Hobbes and, 215–218, 221
researchers inspiring Jacobs, 266 instrumentalization of man
utopias and, 13, 270 idea of, 221
See also Jacobs, Jane, urban on irrationality of
rationalists critiqued by Enlightenment, 219–221
Urban tactility, 266, 274 Lewis and, 168, 169
USSR, five-year plans in, 145 logophobia term used by, 219
Utopia (Moore), 18 May compared with, 211
INDEX 313
on metaxic, 216, 218–220 Whyte, William, 266, 267

Plato and, 214, 217, 218, 221 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 69
political religions concern of, 10, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 95–101,
212, 216, 220, 222, 224 103, 104n9, 161, 181
primary work, 214 on arbitrariness, 6
on problem of method, 219–221 on clarification vs. justification, 99
progressive historicism and, Hayek and, 181
215, 219–221 language-games idea of, 6,
religion focus of, 214, 224 99–101, 181
on Second Realities, 216, 218 on life forms and language, 102
transcendence and, 214, 216, 221 mathematics paradox and,
on Western crisis, 10, 212–214, 102, 104n12
216, 217, 224 normativity and, 99, 101
“The Voice of Poetry in the philosophy done right
Conversation of Mankind” according to, 95
(Oakeshott)of Mankind, 234n2 rationalism appeal and, 103
Voltaire, 1, 10, 22, 45n22, 213, rationalism definition and,
215–217, 238 6, 95, 103
von Doderer, Heimito, 216 rule-following in language-
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader games, 99–101
(Lewis), 172 on search for justification, 95, 103
Steiner on, 104n9
teachers of, 99
W Wright, Frank Lloyd, 13,
Wachterhauser, Brice, 197, 209n44 273, 275–277
Wahl, Jean, 125 Wright, Richard, 51, 58n32
Ward, Michael, 160, 162,
172, 177n63
Weaver, Warren, 265 Y
Weber, Max, 216, 218, 225n12 Yeats, William Butler, 87
Weightman, Roger, 68
Whigs, 16, 17, 21, 30n17
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Z
(MacIntyre), 280, 293n10 Zoon politikon (political being), 26

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Critics of

“Callahan and McIntyre have brought together a distinguished and cosmopolitan

“This is a remarkable and remarkably comprehensive collection on thinkers who

ISBN 978-3-030-42598-2 ISBN 978-3-030-42599-9 (eBook)

2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of

Corey Abel studied the history of political thought at The London

Nick Cowen has a PhD from the Department of Political Economy,

Ferenc Hörcher is a political philosopher and historian of political

“Morality: Emergentist Ethics” (2010), “From Morality to Spirituality”

Travis D. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at Concordia

Enlightenment rationalism may be said to have been birthed with the

© The Author(s) 2020 1

philosophers, economists, political theorists, and urbanists. But there is

almost solely as the result of power relations or unconscious desires,

ineluctably emerging democratic social state. Tocqueville argues that the

and, as such, combines a descriptive and normative epistemology. Holston

and social order, including rational discussion on which it depends, are

Second, Ferrell surveys Berlin’s account of the character of philosophy and

R.G. Collingwood, there is an inherently traditional aspect in human

Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason

© The Author(s) 2020 15

insensibly into an opposition to ‘rationalism’ as such”.3 Here we have

construed as an enlightened thinker, not an obscure believer of secret dog-

influenced by Hume—but this is less important for us here. The more

is illustrated by a reference to the similarity of the argumentation of

metaphysics, he is in fact attacking this effort on the French side, built on

Burke indeed was an advocate of the virtue of prudence understood as

political thought with the traditional idea of prudence. Instead of affirm-

ancient constitution, is worthy to preserve. And this preservation can be a

directing a moral prudence and discretion, the general principles of which

like that.”37 If practical knowledge is about human beings, whose action

affirmation of the common place that might is right. As compromise and

10. David Hume: ‘Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in his: Essays, Moral,

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy

© The Author(s) 2020 33

realize it through ambitious innovations in social engineering. Those who

thoroughgoing responsibility for setting things straight in a way that

socioeconomic status by convention alone. Politically inept, arrogant, and

Democratization and the Authority of Science

Tocquevillian political science recognizes that causal factors in society

increasingly accurate (DA 408, 410). Masses of equally weak individuals

2 Burke on Rationalism, Prudence and Reason of State 15

3 Alexis de Tocqueville and the Uneasy Friendship Between

4 Kierkegaard’s Later Critique of Political Rationalism 47

5 Friedrich Nietzsche: The Hammer Goes to Monticello 61

6 “Pagans, Christians, Poets” 79

8 Heidegger’s Critique of Rationalism and Modernity107

9 Gabriel Marcel: Mystery in an Age of Problems125

10 Michael Polanyi: A Scientist Against Scientism139

11 C.S. Lewis: Reason, Imagination, and the Abolition of Man159

12 Hayek: Postatomic Liberal179

13 “Anti-rationalism, Relativism, and the Metaphysical

14 Eric Voegelin and Enlightenment Rationalism211

15 Michael Oakeshott’s Critique of Modern Rationalism227

16 Isaiah Berlin on Monism237

17 Russell Kirk: The Mystery of Human Existence251

18 Jane Jacobs and the Knowledge Problem in Cities263

19 Practical Reason and Teleology: MacIntyre’s Critique of

Perhaps shockingly to some, Nietzsche extends comfort with subjectivity

Different “neighborhoods” of our language—that is, different language-