I thank Graham McAleer for his considerate assessment of The Slender Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Chance of Political Philosophy.
McAleer makes quite a few clever observations and fair-minded criticisms. My most substantial disagreement considerations his declare that Eric Voegelin offers a prepared resolution to our dilemmas. McAleer writes:
Voegelin argues that a permanent polity has a resilient image that opens house for each purpose and fervour. He gave this symbolic phenomenon the flamboyant title differentiation. A logo worthy of humane politics delivers solidarity and facilitates individuals differentiating themselves from the entire, capable of body theories, pursue pursuits, and indulge foibles. Symbols have “buy-in,” they specific a individuals’s sense of cosmos which eliminates the irrational seesaw between hauteur and self-pity. Voegelin provides a nod to postmodernism by reexploring one thing the Enlightenment closed off, the worth of delusion.
In The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin wrote, “Not more than the cosmos, I needed to conclude due to this fact, will the cosmogonic delusion disappear. Any try to beat, or get rid of, the parable is suspect as a magic operation, motivated by an apocalyptic want to destroy the cosmos itself.” Voegelin’s political considering examines the symbols that doc how peoples have considered their place in world order and historical past.
It is a somewhat summary and antiseptic conception of the sources of which means in human life; and it helps clarify why McAleer understates my e book’s exploration of faith, the holy, and the necessity for divine or sacred authority in politics. Regardless of a number of references to Plato’s Legal guidelines, McAleer appears to miss the dialogue’s essential opening line: “A god, stranger, or some man was it who created your legal guidelines?”
Legendary divinities and transcendent symbols are politically and spiritually empty when they’re understood solely as myths and symbols. This is among the key issues I grapple with within the e book. We reside in a relentlessly cynical and suspicious age, during which every part is seen as merely symbolic; and we’re thus all too prepared to just accept that fact is nothing however a assemble of energy. That’s why I discover Foucault so related.
The postmodernists assist us see what it means when the ruling class (i.e. the woke intelligentsia and its bureaucratic enforcement arm) repudiate the thought of goal fact. Foucault reveals how political energy features—the way it maneuvers, co-opts, and insinuates itself—when fact is solely a story, a symbolic assemble of the dominant energy construction. What we most want, due to this fact, is the flexibility to distinguish actuality from symbolism, to emphasise the distinction between delusion and fact, so as to reaffirm that political authority derives its legitimacy from the legal guidelines of nature and nature’s God, that are greater than mere symbols. To be morally and politically significant, real piety—the sense that there’s something sacred above human will or want—have to be greater than a pose. I’m reminded of what Flannery O’Connor mentioned about transubstantiation and the Eucharist: “Nicely, if it’s only a image, to hell with it.”
My e book concludes that our greatest hope lies in returning to the classical and everlasting questions on God, nature, and justice.
In fact, recovering real piety and an consciousness of sacred fact is simpler mentioned than achieved. I freely admit, due to this fact, that my e book is “unfinished.” Simply as I resist the concept Voegelin gives any easy solutions for our predicament, I additionally demur from McAleer’s suggestion that “an extended work might need advised us how [Leo] Strauss answered them.” Quite the opposite, Strauss insisted that “the issues are all the time extra evident than any options.” Above all, he meant by this the theological-political downside. For Strauss, the central conundrum of human life pointed, partially, to the selection between two distinct “peaks”: the lifetime of obedient piety, or the lifetime of skeptical inquiry—Jerusalem or Athens.
As a result of these alternate options are paradoxically incompatible but complementary, the theological-political downside additionally factors to the last word insufficiency of each purpose and revelation. Neither, by itself, can provide a totally sufficient foundation for political life. Until we deny our capacity to make cheap distinctions between Jehovah and Moloch, or between Athenians and Aztecs (and to disclaim this may imply denying that our minds are additionally a present from God), we should acknowledge the position of purpose in distinguishing wholesome traditions from barbaric superstitions; the flexibility to rationally refine and elevate the stabilizing energy of customized. But purpose, untethered from the anchoring authority of the traditional, might be equally problematic. Lincoln’s best act of statesmanship was elevating our self-evident truths into our historical religion.
McAleer is right to emphasise the enduring significance of Plato’s Legal guidelines—which explores with infinite subtlety the indispensable position of piety in political life. However Plato’s knowledge is nearly misplaced to us now. The basis of our fashionable disaster is the unconventional conceit that we are able to dispense with the divine and create a purely rational and secular society. That challenge has gone far towards dissolving conventional piety—and the morality that relied on it—within the acid of hedonistic atheism.
Although I recognize the earnestness and good intentions of McAleer’s references to Voegelin, I don’t see how an attraction to what are self-consciously seen as mere symbols and myths may also help us escape from our present dilemmas. Thus, my e book concludes with the far more modest concept that whereas any options stay elusive, our greatest hope lies in returning to the classical and everlasting questions on God, nature, and justice.
