Love and the Postmodern Predicament

Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

Schindler

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532648755
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of "reality" is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the "transcendental properties" of being: beauty, goodness, and truth.The book begins with a reflection on the importance of metaphysics in our contemporary setting, and then presents the human person's relation to the world under the signs of the transcendentals: beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge. The book culminates in an argument for why love is ultimately a matter of being, and why metaphysical reason in indispensable in faith.

Part I

Reality and the Transcendentals

1

Philosophy, the Transcendentals, and Reality

1. The Impossible Grass, and Our Bourgeois Metaphysics

At the end of his collection of essays entitled Heretics, G. K. Chesterton prophesies that the most common sense truths will turn into creeds requiring the fidelity and courage of martyrs to proclaim in the face of the “great march of mental destruction” that is modernity.6 In the concluding paragraph, his tone climbs to an almost fevered pitch, so that one might worry he is overstating his case, even as one admires his genius:

Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed.7

Blessed are those who believe even though they have seen with their very own eyes! A century ago, such a declaration would no doubt have appeared as a comical exaggeration, cleverly employed to make a point. Today, however, we read this passage with a dawning suspicion that Chesterton may have been entirely serious. For a host of reasons we will be exploring, we have been learning to deny the obvious as a matter of course.8 It is not only that we have become accustomed to deny in public—for the camera, as it were—things that we know to be true, which is evident enough. But we have begun not even to recognize that we know them as true; the camera has become our most intimate conscience, which is to say that it has insinuated itself not only between us and the world, but between us and ourselves. The “Father who sees in secret” has not only been replaced by “Big Brother,” with his extensive system of surveillance, but even “Big Brother” has ceded his place, in trusting confidence, to each person’s super ego. We feel that we are betraying something if we admit to certain straightforward truths that are simply there for anyone to behold.

There is no need to offer examples of this self-policing in the matters that revolve around the extremely charged theme of identity politics, and especially at the moment that which concerns gender. But Chesterton’s text suggests that this controversy, however abruptly it may have entered the scene just yesterday, is not a strange novelty. Rather, it is arguably the implication of a disposition, the inexorable working out of a logic that has deep roots. Chesterton identifies this logic as modern skepticism, a general reluctance to admit anything as definitively true. Skepticism itself is, of course, not an exclusively modern phenomenon; the ancient Greek world was well acquainted with eccentric individuals who sought to break radically with conventional beliefs, and through rigorous training to learn to suspend any and every judgment so as to achieve a perfectly undisturbed tranquility of mind, or absolute equanimity. It is just this point, however, that sets into relief what is distinctive about modern skepticism: this more recent version tends not to be the result of rigorous training, unless we would use that phrase to characterize the normal program of public education, and it is not so much a break with conventional belief as a standard expression of it. The modern skeptic is not the heroic individual, but the everyday “person in the street.” The skeptical “suspension of judgment” is not an extraordinary judgment, the fruit of long ascetic discipline, but has become the “default” frame of mind of contemporary people.

Now, Chesterton is quick to point out the deep inconsistencies in this frame of mind. Though it evinces a reluctance to affirm any definitive truth, it is quite definitive about its own truth, so much so that we have to recognize modern skepticism as dogmatic in spite of itself, since it rules out any opposing view a priori: “It is the vague modern who is not at all certain what is right who is most certain that Dante was wrong.”9 There is a humorous self-contradiction in this, but it is important to recognize that this is not a typical one, the simultaneous assertion and denial of a particular claim. Instead, it is a contradiction that goes to the core of what it means to be human; if man is defined as the animal with logos (speech or reason), then this confusion represents man’s contradiction of his very humanity, which is why Plato, for example, characterized this loss of faith in reason—which he called “misology” (literally, the “contempt for reason”)—the worst thing that can befall a human being.10 But any denial of reason never gets rid of the contradiction, since we cannot help but affirm reason at the same time. As Chesterton goes on to show, quite irrefutably, it is simply impossible to be a human being, to put any two thoughts together, to express any preference for anything at all, without presupposing a philosophical vision about the nature of reality, the nature, therefore, of the Creator of reality, and so in inevitably quite concrete ways what it means to be a human being: “Every man in the street must hold a metaphysical system, and hold it firmly.”11 Even if one hates reason, one will always do so as “an animal with logos,” and one cannot be such an animal without “holding a metaphysical system,” however unconsciously or unwillingly. It is therefore in the end never a question of whether one has a metaphysics, but only whether one’s metaphysics is adequate.

Adequate to what? This is, of course, the decisive question, but we will leave it to the side for the moment. In order to say anything meaningful in response, beyond what might seem a facile truism—“adequate to reality”—we need to reflect in more depth on the problem that Chesterton is presenting here. The problem turns out to be, in fact, much more subtle and profound than it initially appears. One might get the impression that the traditional quarrel between the ancients and the moderns that Chesterton invokes here by criticizing “the modern” is a contest between two metaphysical systems, the claims of which might in principle be placed side by side and compared, so that a judgment could be reached about which is the right one. While it is certainly true that there are different metaphysical systems at issue, the contest is a very peculiar one in this case, because the difference is so radical: it is sort of like a contest—if such a thing could even be imagined—between an American football team and a British football team. Not only are the rules governing the two teams incommensurate, and not only is the ground under their feet different, but the very projectile around which the game turns is an equivocation. How would one determine, in such a contest, which is the better team? In the contest between the ancients and the moderns, a metaphysics has been challenged by a non-metaphysics, or rather, since there can be no challenge where there is no common playing field at all, as it were, we have to say instead that the pre-modern metaphysics has simply been supplanted, in the etymological sense of the word: the ground has been taken out from under it, so that it is left in a sense floating in the air. In this respect, it has been effectively neutralized, and so there ceases to be any need to challenge it, much less replace it by another metaphysics.

This point requires more explanation. Chesterton said that “swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green.” One might object, in response, that this is ridiculous: no one denies that leaves are green. If anyone denies some other traditional “truth”—for example, that one’s sex determines one’s gender and whom one is capable of taking in marriage—it is because he believes there is something real at stake here, namely, the possible happiness of many concrete individual human beings. But there is nothing comparable at stake in the question of the color of leaves. So there is no one who cares to deny it.

This is a revealing objection: note that the reason offered here for the willingness to accept that leaves are green is that it does not really matter one way or the other, which is to say that it (apparently) does not immediately bear on the desires of concrete individuals. In other words, we may be willing to admit the truth that leaves are green, but not strictly because it is true. In fact, were we pressed on this point, we would very quickly grow uncomfortable. To say that this claim is “true” sounds “absolutist.” If we were presented with another person who passionately declared that it is not true, even if it “seemed” so to us, we would be inclined to recognize the right of others to think otherwise: How in the world can we know, after all, what color leaves might seem to someone else, perhaps from a radically different background from our own? How do we know that we don’t all perceive different colors, but have just learned to use the same name for these different perceptions? In making this concession, we ask only in return that these others, who see things differently, recognize our “right” to perceive leaves as green. This is what was meant earlier by saying the old metaphysics is left suspended in the air: we moderns continue to say, perhaps, that it is “true” that leaves are green, just as the ancients did, but everything is now different. The meaning of “true” is no longer the same—not to mention the meaning of “leaves” and of “green.” In fact, the very nature of words has been transformed, since they no longer serve to make manifest what is, but instead have become mere instruments for the expression of subjective judgments, the personal content of individual minds. In short, “meaning” now means something different, and the very act by which it means this different thing is not the same. We are thus ta...