Responses to Six Critics

RESPONSES TO SIX CRITICS OF MY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY BOOK

Theory at its best should be a kind of friendship. Thinking is something one does on one's own; but having thought one's way to a set of theoretical positions, one exposes those intellectual commitments to the test of seeing how they stand up to friendly but challenging scrutiny. I'm grateful for the critical commentaries on my book featured in this symposium1 because they seem to me to have generated interesting and thoughtful responses to what I have written; but I’m no less grateful because they also nicely exemplify this spirit of dialogical friendship. In that way, they help to vindicate the enterprise of theory as I have just characterized it. These theorists are also my friends, and the friendship is constitutively grounded in a shared commitment to theory as a vocation.

Response to Leah Bradshaw I don’t see any significant differences between me and Leah in what she says about Hannah Arendt. I’d prefer to take up what she says about Freud and Weber, and Weber in particular. Leah writes: “Resolution in the face of tragedy is the core of political philosophy for Beiner.” Is that actually my view? In the Second Prologue I try to make the case that Freud and Weber are post-Nietzscheans, or are shaped by a post-Nietzschean sensibility (I’ll be teaching a graduate seminar on this theme in the spring of 2016). And that largely means: embracing tragedy as the route to a more noble, and also truer, view of life. But in Weber’s case, that means not only (qua Nietzschean or post-

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An abridged version of this text, along with the six commentaries on my Political Philosophy

book to which it responds, is forthcoming in Review of Politics.

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Nietzschean) practicing political philosophy but also rejecting it. For we are presented with multiple conflicting gods, and we have to choose (merely choose, I would say) which one we will serve. In Leah’s formulation: it’s ultimately a matter of courage. But then reason isn’t the ultimate standard; and if reason isn’t the arbiter, it isn’t political philosophy! (I come back to this issue in my response to Charles Blattberg.) I once participated in a workshop in Austin devoted to my book on Political Judgment. The participants (mainly political activists and clerics agitating for better treatment of workers and Hispanics in Texas) said that they particularly liked my view that “human judgment is inevitably tragic judgment” (or words to that effect quoted from my book). They wanted me to elaborate that view – but in response, I was quite uncertain whether I still believed that. I published the Political Judgment book in 1983 and the Texas workshop took place in 1994: in the intervening 11 years, the “all human judgment is tragic judgment” sentence had come to seem to me a bit melodramatic. Don’t we make lots of reasonable judgments that are not locked in a tragic situation? Why privilege the tragic judgments? Nietzsche, needless to say, wanted to ramp up the pathos, and Weber went along with that. I’m not sure I’m enough of a Nietzschean for that. Nietzsche wanted to ramp up the pathos as a way of compensating for (what he saw as) the banal, de-spiritualizing character of modernity. (Heidegger cast modernity in very similar terms. In the Letter on Humanism, he too famously privileged the tradition of the tragedians over the anti-tragic rationalism of post-Socratic philosophy. Clearly, he sought to put himself forward as Nietzsche’s principal philosophical successor, while purging Nietzsche of residual vices of the metaphysical tradition, as these were conceived by Heidegger.) To some extent, Weber wanted this too. In my book (p. lii, note 26), I cite both Strauss and Voegelin asking – why did Weber have such a deep inner need for tragedy? I’m with Strauss and Voegelin on this. The need for tragedy can be seen as a character flaw as much as strength of character! One could say: a need for tragedy like Weber’s is a test of how Nietzschean one is. I fail this test, and I’m quite comfortable failing it. Let me illustrate this whole set of questions by citing an important philosophical (metaphysical!) issue that crops up repeatedly in my book: see for instance p. xxxviii (including notes 11 and 12) and p. liii (including note 28). Plato’s view is that there’s a fundamental unity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nietzsche explicitly and deliberately contradicts Plato, asserting very 2

emphatically that there is a fundamental disharmony of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Simone Weil sides with Plato. Max Weber sides with Nietzsche. (Habermas too sides with Nietzsche, at least as mediated through Weber – or really, mediated through Weber and Kant. He casts it in terms of a Kantian diremption of the bases upon which each of these establishes distinct claims to validity: scientific validity; moral validity; aesthetic validity. And, significantly, he doesn’t highlight this – as Weber and Nietzsche certainly do – as something essentially tragic. I’ll come back to the Habermasian position on this issue when I discuss Simone Chambers’s critique of my Habermas chapter.) There is no middle ground here: one either agrees with the Socratic-Platonic thesis of metaphysical harmony, or one agrees with the Nietzschean-Weberian thesis of metaphysical disharmony. So where do I stand on this grand metaphysical question? Am I with Plato or with Nietzsche? I’m not sure that I’m equipped to pronounce a final verdict on the metaphysical harmony or disharmony of the cosmos (nor am I sure whether Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, or Max Weber are any better equipped to pronounce a final verdict). In all likelihood, it remains an open question. But let me just say that I’m not persuaded that Plato has been refuted on this, and insofar as I lean one way or the other, I think I’d prefer to lean in Plato’s direction. And certainly: if the ultimate alternative to Plato is Weber’s “warring gods” conception (which, as I discuss in the Second Prologue, one can also find in Freud), then I’d very definitely side with Plato, simply because Plato privileges reason over will. I understand the appeal of a tragic view of life, and in that sense I’ve been drawn to Nietzsche right from the start of my life as a theorist. But Nietzsche is dangerous, and getting carried away by the tragic view is also dangerous. I’m trying to resist that -- to hang on to an untragic view if I can. For me that’s an important part of why I find Karl Löwith so philosophically attractive. (I wrote Political Philosophy as if I were the world’s only true “Löwithian” – though I recognize that there may be a handful of others, not excluding Daniel Tanguay.) Löwith so to speak stares tragedy in the face and somehow finds a way to recover a view of non-tragedy in human life. As I highlight in Political Philosophy, he himself certainly embodies a deeply tragic sensibility, yet in his privileging of the natural world (in its placid in-itselfness) over the human world (in its franticness), Löwith simultaneously finds a way not to let tragedy have the last word. Consider for instance the text I discuss in note 39 on p. 76 of my book. This text reminds us of the unarguable fact that human beings regularly go through things from which one would assume 3

they’ll never recover. But somehow they do – again and again, they re-establish equilibrium. In this respect, human beings appear as what they are – creatures of the natural world as a whole. Just as nature always seems to bounce back, so human beings do as well. By trying to reorient our philosophical imagination towards the bigger picture – towards the sempiternal cosmos that far transcends the paltry human things in which we get so wrapped up – Löwith helps to liberate us from being over-fixated on tragedy.

Response to Ed Andrew Ed Andrew and I have had lots of spirited disagreements over the course of a long friendship. But those disagreements look very minor indeed relative to our overarching solidarity concerning the humanistic and humanizing mission of theory, as one can easily see from Ed’s flattering commentary. Ed concludes his commentary by asking: what is our common world? The answer is fairly obvious, for if there were no common world, there would be no politics, and if so, no subject-matter for political philosophy. Contrary to what Ed suggests, the existence of this common world is presupposed in Ed’s antipathy to the Kennedy brothers juxtaposed to his friend’s love for them, for precisely those opposing points of view define a world of common concern where friends have things about which to disagree (perhaps strongly) and about which to pursue passionate debates. Ed poses the question as if he endorsed postmodern radical pluralism, but in fact, as his commentary makes clear, he’s as committed to a political world unsplintered by postmodernism as I am.

Response to Simone Chambers Michael Sandel once wrote – partly in reference to me – that it’s precisely his friends who are his sharpest critics. I’m receiving a bit of that kind of treatment in Simone’s commentary. Simone provides a great account of Habermas! I’ve always said that Simone gives a better account of Habermas than Habermas gives of himself. I truly believe that. Simone whacks me as hard as she can manage. I like that, I really do. After all, I was partly educated at Oxford, where philosophy is a bloodsport. But I’ll whack back a bit, and in the same spirit.

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Simone writes: “Habermas and Rawls … try to push political philosophy beyond the great metaphysical debates,” and they deserve credit for doing that (a credit I refuse to accord them). “Only discourses of justification can generate validity in a post-metaphysical world. If we look at democracy this way, then our constitutions, rights and freedoms, our equal opportunities to participate and speak, the fair regulation of the public sphere, and the accountability of our representatives are all to be understood in discourse-theoretic terms that is as a legally constituted discursive process of legislation. Thus legitimacy is purely procedural.” For reason has become “a completely proceduralized reason.” I want to make three points: 1. First, one can’t draw substantive commitments out of a merely formal or proceduralist ethics. And Habermas has very robust substantive commitments (very attractive ones, in fact!). So the proceduralist ethics is acting as a cover for those substantive commitments. This is one of the many things I believe I learned from Charles Taylor (Simone’s uncle, my teacher), and also from Gadamer’s critique of Habermas. So, contrary to what Simone suggests, I don’t think that I’ve misread or misunderstood Habermas. I know exactly how Habermas presents the ideal speech situation. But I don’t take that at face value – because I think the proceduralist ethics is serving as a stand-in for something much more substantive, namely an ideal of how social life should be. 2. Secondly, contrary to Simone, I don’t accept that we inhabit “a post-metaphysical world.” If someone says that they’re “post-metaphysical,” don’t believe them! Here are three examples of what I have in mind. First example: the doctrine that there is a correspondence between politics and the soul is a metaphysical view. But the doctrine that there isn’t such a correspondence is also a metaphysical view. Plato is neither more nor less metaphysical than liberals like Rawls and Habermas, and vice versa. Second example: I once was present at a philosophical exchange between Habermas and Rorty. (It was in Dubrovnik, in the late 70s.) Rorty was trying to make the case that there was no principled objective boundary between the natural sciences and the human sciences, to which Habermas replied: atoms don’t talk to each other. I think Habermas was right about this, but that’s not a post-metaphysical view. It presupposes a metaphysics as much as the opposite view does.

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The third example is one that I already discussed in responding to Leah Bradshaw, namely the Habermasian doctrine that the true, the good, and the beautiful are governed by distinct logics of validity. This is a philosophical claim. It can’t be decided by a post-Weberian sociology of modernity, as Habermas claims that it can. As I suggested earlier, the debate between Plato and Nietzsche on whether truth, beauty, and goodness are unitary or in fundamental discord is yet to be decided. Whichever side one takes on a question like this, it’s metaphysical either way. This business of getting beyond metaphysics is, I would guess, an over-reaction on the part of Habermas to what he clearly saw as the intellectual (and moral) pathology of Heidegger. Moreover, I just don’t buy the idea of Habermas as an “anti-foundationalist.” He’s striving for some ultimate way of leveraging a privileged vision of political life. That’s a foundation, an Archimedean point. He wants to purge Kantian ethics of its metaphysics, but he is as much of a foundationalist as Kant is. 3. Thirdly: Simone hasn’t pulled her punches so I won’t pull mine. I think we have here a certain number of Habermasian dogmas being presented in the guise of post-metaphysical “openness.” One of these relates to the problem of historicism as it figures in Strauss’s critique of historicism. As is true also for Rawls and Rorty, history rather than the making of a philosophical case seems to do most of the work -- the heavy lifting -- of establishing validity. Hence what Simone refers to as a “sociological-historical learning process.” That is, history delivers us to a new mode of experience and a new kind of rationality, beyond metaphysical commitments. But in fact there is no such thing. For Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas, Nietzsche has been refuted by history and sociology. He hasn’t! He can only be refuted by a more compelling account of the human good. And I believe that such an account is in principle philosophically available – in fact, would be more available in Habermas if he were more upfront about his real commitments. We don’t know what the future will bring. The majority of people in Egypt today believe that Sharia should be the law of the land, and that Egypt should be a theocratic state. That is: piety and not discursive or communicative equality should be the centre of political existence. Who can guarantee that that view won’t prevail a hundred years from now? And what happens to the appeal to procedural rationality and to pluralism as a sociological fact if it does prevail? John Gray last fall published a powerful piece on “the liberal delusion”: the presumption that history 6

favours liberalism (that is, favours the idea of each individual having equal status in the conversation of one’s society). As Gray rightly pointed out, that presumption is unwarranted. Human history is as much a process of unlearning as of learning! [In the discussion, Simone said that Habermas is “friendly to religion.” Well, like Rawls, he’s friendly to religious liberals. But what happens when these proceduralist liberals confront religionists who appeal to piety against liberalism? Will the latter be persuaded by Habermas that pre-commitment to liberal-egalitarian norms is already inscribed in their very nature as communicative beings? If appeal to comprehensive doctrines is passé, on the basis of what might one even in principle persuade a theocrat to become a liberal?] In sum: Habermas’s proceduralism and his (largely unacknowledged) philosophy of history cover over a lot of tacit liberal complacency. But again, we can’t let history make our arguments for us: moral-political commitments have to be argued for on the ground of the best account we can come up with as regards what best satisfies human longings and worthy human ends. Let me finish with one last shot at the procedural liberalism advanced by Rawls and Habermas, who offer differing versions of this procedural liberalism but do it with similar motivation and in a similar spirit, one could say. As a citizen, I find their conceptions of civic life attractive: tolerant, oriented towards the encouragement of civic deliberation and mutual respect among people who share a political community, and oriented towards the encouragement of publicmindedness. Our political communities would certainly be better as political communities if they more fully embodied these liberal, egalitarian, and civicist ideals. But the practice of political philosophy that Rawls and Habermas stand for, and that Simone defends, represents a kind of “fifth-wheelism” of philosophy. Rawls, Rorty, and Habermas presume that people who live in modern liberal polities already know what the ultimate political good is, and there’s nothing that political philosophy can tell them that adds anything significantly new. It simply crystallizes the wisdom that liberal citizens already embody in their practice of citizenship: they deliberate with each other; they trade reasons and counter-reasons; they presume that policies cannot be enforced without public justifications; and they treat each other as equals. If it’s these procedures that embody the right moral philosophy and if everyone already knows that this is what a modern liberal democracy entails, why do we need philosophy? “A completely proceduralized reason” means that there is nothing further for philosophers to teach. Citizens in their procedural republic 7

have already taught themselves all the essential moral truths. As Daniel Tanguay will be suggesting in the next commentary, these liberals all stand for a kind of “end of history” Hegelianism. But as I’ve intimated in the rejoinders already put to Simone: this self-willed redundancy on the part of leading theorists of egalitarian liberalism will start to look fairly perilous if history surprises us (as it may well do) and keeps pre-modern and anti-modern alternatives in vibrant contention with a liberalism that isn’t universally received as attractive. Finally: Simone speaks as if I’m excluding Habermas and Rawls from the political philosophy club, but I’m not. Both are in my book! The nub of my complaints against them is that Rawls offers a comprehensive doctrine pretending to be a “political doctrine,” and Habermas offers a substantive view of the human good pretending to be a proceduralist view.

Response to Daniel Tanguay I’m full of gratitude for Daniel’s careful and thoughtful account of what my purpose is in this book. It’s hard to respond to criticisms since there’s virtually nothing in Daniel’s commentary that counts as a criticism, and virtually nothing with which I would disagree. Daniel raises the question of whether what I have offered is an “elegy” for a practice of grand theory that is now largely dead, and he writes: “in the short term, the epic practice of political philosophy is threatened with extinction, at the very least on the institutional plane.” (His view of the state of contemporary theory, it has to be said, is a fair bit more severe than mine.) Daniel compares this to Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” But Daniel and I agree that there is no end of history! New anti-liberal ideologies are on the rise in our own day: there’s an alarming resurgence of odious ideologies today – in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, and elsewhere.2 In his last paragraph, Daniel emphasizes that while epic theory as I celebrate it in Political Philosophy may be dormant today, it “perhaps has a fine future in front of it” in the face of these

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Tanguay alludes, for instance, to neo-Eurasianism – an unpleasant ideology that I have

sketched in my essay, "Who is Aleksandr Dugin?" (an essay also available on my Academia.edu page).

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new ideological challenges. This is a paradox I myself note at the end of my book: things that are a catastrophe for humankind can be productive of theorizing of real grandeur. One of the main reasons – perhaps the main reason – that one had great theory in the mid-20th century is that Western civilization was shaken to its very core. And that’s not just true of 20th-century theory – think of the catastrophe of the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides; or the collapse of Rome and The City of God; or the catastrophe of the English Civil War and Hobbes. In that sense, we pay a high price for the masterpieces of political thought that make up our canon! If it’s guaranteed that catastrophes await us in history to come (and I fear that they do!), the silver lining may be that it’s also guaranteed that grand theorizing will have more of a future than it may appear at present to have.

Response to Emma Planinc I’m grateful to Emma for bringing into the discussion a dimension of Foucault’s thought that is very important and that got left out of my Foucault chapter. Emma’s nice formulation: Madness and Civilization is “the older brother” of Discipline and Punish. I like that formulation, and think it’s correct. According to Emma’s account, Foucault’s purpose was to present himself as a champion of madness as a kind of higher sanity, a champion of poetry as a kind of higher prose, and a champion of Dionysian wisdom as a kind of higher rationality. As Emma presents Foucault’s most provocative insights, madness is regarded as a vehicle to a more exotic destination, and rationality serves merely to “tether” that ship! When reason is unmoored, it sails to somewhere more interesting, and hence we ought to regret the moorings that conventional rationality supplies. That’s an arresting image, and it unquestionably captures the vision of existence beyond confining rationality that Foucault sought to conjure up. And I certainly don’t want to rule out of court the possibility that such a thing as Dionysian wisdom exists as a human possibility. But political philosophers as political philosophers must privilege prose over poetry; must privilege sanity over madness; and must privilege reason (logos) over non-reason. Hence one can indeed champion Dionysian wisdom, but one is compelled to make a case for it in a medium other than Dionysian wisdom. Why? Because engaging in the enterprise of political philosophy (and Foucault does engage in that enterprise, whether he avows it or not) means writing books meant to bring people around to seeing the force of insights they would otherwise 9

overlook; getting them to appreciate conceptions of life that are otherwise beyond their horizons. One has to persuade people that they’re slighting possibilities of human life that in fact are humanly important. Writing a book written in reasonable prose (even if it seeks to champion something higher than reasonable prose) – and Foucault wrote many such books! – already bespeaks a commitment to rational dialogue and rational persuasion. [In the discussion, Simone pointed out that the political philosophy of Bernard Mandeville incorporated verse. That’s true; and one can add that the political philosophy of Hobbes does as well. Nietzsche too. But would we take these political philosophers seriously – would they be part of our political philosophy canon – if they had written only in verse? Lucretius is perhaps the only philosopher whose work is available to us only in verse.] I particularly appreciate the Bernard Williams quote that Emma draws from p. 19 of Truth and Truthfulness: Foucault may be counted as one of those theorists who “hold up a sign saying that something is true or plausible or worth considering, and then try to vacate the spot before the shutter clicks.” There’s a sense in which this is true and a sense in which it’s not true. Yes, Foucault was resistant to acknowledging that he participates in the enterprise of normative theorizing: of articulating visions of how fully flourishing human beings should live. But contrary to his disclaimers, he did participate in that enterprise and did articulate visions of less truncated, less stultifying social existence. That’s why his books have had such an overwhelming impact on the world of political philosophy, and why all political philosophers today are obliged to read him.

Response to Charles Blattberg First, let me respond to Charles’s complaint that I define political philosophy in a way that categorically excludes Isaiah Berlin, and wrongly excludes him. I don’t think Berlin is categorically excluded. It’s true: I wouldn’t want to drop any of the twelve in my book in order to make room for Berlin. But suppose I expanded the group to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen theorists. Would he still be left out? Probably not. Leo Strauss once wrote: “Pluralism, by virtue of being an ism, is also a monism.” I think there’s a deep truth in that observation. And it helps to account for why there is a genuine political philosophy in Berlin. In any case, monist or not, Berlin’s 10

work, largely but not entirely devoted to intellectual history, in important ways exemplifies an ambitious way of doing theory. In fact, in the Preface to my Civil Religion book, I refer to Berlin as practicing an exemplary kind of liberal political philosophy – more exemplary than Rawls or Habermas or most conventional liberals. I stand by what I wrote on p. xiv of that book (cf. p. 310, n. 3). Secondly: Charles claims that there’s an element of ridicule in my critical treatments of at least eleven of my twelve theorists (he thinks I’m kinder to Gadamer): “I fail to see why [Beiner] thinks that his book praises epic theories rather than buries them.” I hope that’s not true. An important part of writing any book is hitting on the right rhetoric. I tried to exert myself to craft a rhetoric that would challenge these thinkers while taking them seriously. If I failed to achieve what I was trying to do in that respect, I apologize. Yes: I put pretty tough challenges to my twelve theorists. That’s what theory is supposed to do. If one pulls one’s punches, mutes one’s challenges, or lets them off too easily, then one runs the risk of treating them as what Brian Barry calls “gurus.” Better to ridicule them than to bow down to them. But hopefully we can engage them in critical dialogue without doing either. Charles offers a colourful and interesting metaphor to capture my relation to the twelve theorists: judge at a figure-skating competition! But why foist on me metaphors I haven’t chosen? Relatedly: Charles makes the serious charge that I’m aestheticizing theory. Simone makes that accusation as well. I reject it! It would be a fair accusation only if it were the case that my ultimate standard for judging these theorists is grandeur, or “epicness,” or monumentality, or whatever one wanted to call it (maybe sublimity). But that’s not my standard, although such standards are not irrelevant to what draws us to this enterprise and keeps it interesting. The ultimate standard is truth. Hence, on my view, both Simone and Charles charge me with aestheticism because they discount my earnest and committed rationalism, my dedication to reason as the standard of all theorizing. So: setting myself up as supreme judge at a figure-skating completion is a poor or questionable metaphor, or so I think. My metaphor (which is not just a metaphor!): interlocutor in a dialogue. Each has to make a rational case – offer a logos. All of this obviously goes back to the Socratic origins of political philosophy (not an accident that the enterprise of political philosophy was founded with the invention of a new genre called “Socratic dialogues”). That has continued to 11

define, since Plato, what those participating in this enterprise are participating in. One can’t just assert one’s vision of the good. One has to make an argument for it (while allowing considerable latitude with respect to what counts as an argument). That is, one has to write a book – and persuade readers of the book. We challenge each other. The dialogue is ongoing. (Why would it end?) And I don’t for one moment privilege my own judgments, as if they automatically count as final judgments. The process is intrinsically dialogical; and to be dialogical, of course it can’t be simply agonistic – it has to be rational, an appeal to shared reasons. Strauss’s apotheosis of “ancient rationalism” is wrong. This ancient rationalism is still going! There’s no fundamental break between the ancients and the moderns. (Here I side with Gadamer against Strauss.) One thing that Charles gets emphatically right: he says that I’m neither a monist nor a pluralist but rather a dualist. I agree. I believe that theory is a high human vocation. And I believe that citizenship is a high human vocation. And what they each demand of us is categorically different: Citizenship requires prudence and moderation. And theory requires intellectual radicalism and “excess.” Citizenship is a high vocation because it matters, humanly speaking, that we be able to co-exist on civil terms with people with whom we share a political existence; and theory is a high vocation because thinking (ambitious reflection and self-reflection) matters. Neither trumps the other. Maybe one could say: I’m a Platonist or Rousseauian with respect to intellectual life, a Montesquieuian or Burkean with respect to civic life. There are people who believe that theory is an extension of politics and politics is an extension of theory. I’ve never believed that, and I’ve resisted that view on every possible occasion. The classic expression of this debate, for me, is the exchange between Hannah Arendt and Christian Bay (in Toronto!) transcribed in the Melvyn Hill volume. That text probably influenced my view more than any other single text (Gadamer’s interview with Ernest Fortin in Interpretation influenced it as well), and it links up quite closely with things that Leah said in her commentary. (According to Leah, Arendt too is not a monist but a dualist, and I agree with that view of Arendt.) Anyway, let me say once more: I don’t get to render final judgment on these theorists. Why should I? Straussians will say that I don’t give Strauss his due, Habermasians like Simone will say that I don’t give Habermas his due, Arendtians will say I don’t give Arendt her due, and so on. I simply give my reasons for why I’m not – yet! – fully persuaded by any of these twelve. And their followers will give reasons for why they’re not persuaded by my reasons. And the 12

dialogue goes on. Two of my theorists are still alive, and I recently participated in a sharp intellectual exchange with one of them (Alasdair MacIntyre). Naturally, he fought back against my criticisms of him. So he wasn’t just subject to my judgment, I was also subject to his judgment! RB

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