We move into the tightening circle in which more technological science is called for to meet the problems which technological science has produced. In that tightening circle, the overcoming of chance is less and less something outside us, but becomes more and more the overcoming of chance in our own species, in our own very selves.
George Grant1
Such a question—why?—could convey an effort to persuade reluctant readers to keep reading. While I hope the chapter does convince readers that studying Grant—reading him in the original as well as my reactivation of him here—is worth their time, with this question I am thinking of Sonya Sikka’s association of the question “why” with humanity’s historic preoccupation with transcendence, for Heidegger2 a question that is “ultimately grounded in Dasein.”3 During his lectures (1972–73) on Heidegger’s thought, Grant acknowledged that “at that center is Dasein,” which he defined: “Literally, to be there—man.” To be there—here—denotes subjective as well as physical presence. So present, Grant represents a living protest of modernity, lamenting the loss of the question “why?” now supplanted with “how?”4 The former question also recalls Augustine, with whose work Grant grappled. As Jean Bethe Elshtain explains, for Augustine,
the mind can never be transparent to itself; we are never wholly in control of our thoughts; our bodies are essential, not contingent, to who we are and how we think; and we know that we exist, not because “I think, therefore I am,” but rather, “I doubt, therefore I know I exist.” Only a subject who is a self that can reflect on itself can doubt. His Confessions is a story of a human being who has become a question to himself.5
Grant made a question of himself as well, a question refracted through the wide range of impressions he left on others, others who described their impressions of him in the following terms.
Perhaps most prominently, Grant has been deemed a political philosopher, nationalist, theologian, witness, and prophet, that last designation conferred by both William Christian6 and Mel Hurtig.7 On another occasion Christian extolled Grant as a “singer of enchanted songs…that scare away…the frightful apparitions that flit about in the darkness, particularly that night which envelops our civilization.”8 In an editorial note to Grant’s letters, Christian—also his biographer—names him “the most famous philosopher in Canada and one of the country’s best teachers.”9 That judgment is one Larry Schmidt shared.10
That assessment, that Grant was one of the country’s best teachers, a “real professor,”11 Alex Colville felt, seems shared by the political philosopher Tom Darby, who likened him to Socrates, suggesting that “Grant’s rootedness in, but criticism of, his own society recalls Socrates’ similar relation to his city.”12 Darby also likened Grant to the biblical Jeremiah,13 a preaching prophet14 who condemned idolatry.15 “Prophets are often marginalized when alive,” Dart reminds, acknowledging that “Grant faced his share.”16 Also emphasizing biblical associations, Dennis Lee depicted him as a witness.17 The journalist Charles Taylor terms him an a “trenchant moralist” very much needed “to arouse our apprehensions.”18
For Schmidt, Grant was also Canada’s “foremost political philosopher.”19 Graeme Nicholson termed him a “public philosopher…very much an academic, but one with a public, a readership.”20 “Some say he was the foremost indigenous philosopher Canada has produced,” Athanasiadis acknowledges, enjoying “popular appeal” and demonstrating “deep wisdom and originality.”21 Hugh Donald Forbes regarded Grant as more a theologian than political philosopher22—Andrew Kaethler calls him a philosopher and a theologian23—but Robert Meynell appears to disagree with both, listing Grant alongside C. B. Macpherson and (the philosopher) Charles Taylor as one of the “three leading Canadian political philosophers.”24 Meynell is in good company, as Arthur Davis and Henry Roper also acknowledge Grant as “one of Canada’s leading political philosophers.”25 Davis adds that while on occasion Grant regarded himself as a moral and political philosopher, “he was reluctant to call himself a theologian.”26 A “political philosopher,” Andrew Potter writes, Grant is also remembered as the “father”27 of English-speaking Canadian nationalism.28
Grant later devalued the significance of political philosophy29 and was reluctant to claim the title of philosopher. “What I dare not do,” Grant once remarked, “is to make the claim that I am a philosopher.”30 Grant said the same to David Cayley: “I wouldn’t for a moment call myself a philosopher,” adding that “I would call myself a really quite competent teacher of philosophy and quite competent student of it.”31 Robin Lathangue cast Grant in broader terms still, as a “public intellectual,”32 as does Nicholson, who affirmed that “George Grant was Canada’s most significant public philosopher, meaning that his public was Canadian.”33 Ramsay Cook, Sibley reports, regarded George Grant and Pierre Elliott Trudeau as “the two most important Canadian intellectuals of the past twenty years.”34 Greenspan also emphasizes that
Grant steadfastly addressed the public realm. The simplicity of his prose and the eloquence of its rhythms presupposed a public agora, an assembly where all citizens listened and spoke on the momentous issues of the day. He rarely chose academic journals as his forum. He preferred magazines and publishers devoted to public affairs, as well as the C.B.C [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. In response, the Canadian public or at least a large segment of it, looked upon George as its philosopher.35
As a “public man,” E. Joan O’Donovan confirms, “Grant has continually engaged the traditions of his society in a self-consciously questioning way.”36 Invoking an even broader term, Barry Cooper accords him the status of, simply, a “thinker.”37 Grant viewed his own fate to be that of “a lesser thinker,” too humble a self-estimation in my judgment, but consistent with his humility.38 That virtue maybe political as well as personal, as Craiutu points out that political moderation “is sustained by a sense of humility, the rejection of self-righteousness, and a profound mindfulness of one’s limited knowledge and potential for error and violence.”39
“So what was he?”40 Rigelhof asks. He quotes University of Toronto philosophers Francis Sparshott—“George Grant was a visionary cultural critic who had a dream of what philosophy might be”—and Mark Kingwell—“George Grant was a towering force in the intellectual life of this country, perhaps the first truly public intellectual Canada has produced,” and adds, “Irascible, opinionated and arrogant, he attacked enemies of wisdom with verve, charm and tenacity.”41 As for Rigelhof himself? “Grant was a brilliant talker—as his [published] conversations with [journalist] Charles Taylor and David Cayley make abundantly clear. He was also a remarkable listener, especially when he went head-to-head with one other person.”42 Perhaps the phrase “larger than life” must be included in any description of George Grant.
While his political sympathies were often on the left, Umar notes, Grant was no “left-wing intellectual.”43 Indeed, to the American sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, Grant was “Canada’s most distinguished conservative intellectual.”44 That adjective, “conservative,” requires clarification, as the term connotes for Grant a different set of political preoccupations than it does in the United States,45 where it signifies, Grant noted, “those who exalt the rights of private property so that they can do what they want at whatever expense to the common good.”46 Neither “reactionary” nor “revisionist,” Grant’s conservatism, Sibley suggests, is “grounded in the assumption of an overarching good—in this case, the good of Canada as a sovereign nation-state able to exist as long as it holds to the intentions for which it was founded.”47 That view resonates with Grant’s assertion that the “truth” of conservatism is that of “order and limit” in “social” and “personal” life.48 In an April 1959 letter49 Grant wrote: “If ever there was a need of spiritual conservatism (I do not mean economic) it is now.”50 For Grant, “to be a Canadian,” Muggeridge concludes, “is to be per se a conservative.”51
Lamenting the loss of Canada—as Grant famously did in his 1965 book52—was lamenting not only the loss of Canada53 but of its founding conservative idea.54 Lament, Reimer suggests, is “the re-collection of a past good, of ‘one’s own,’ of tradition, of time before the triumph of the modern age…a much more distant past—the truths of Athens and Jerusalem.”55 Greenspan suggests that the book “elevated” Canadian anxiety over its neighbour into a “cohesive philosophy of history exposing the breakdown of that tradition that had founded Canada as a sanctuary of pre-modern reverence for the transcendent order.”56 Not stuck in sadness57 (he was often accused of pessimism,58 which he denied), Grant appreciated keenly conservatism’s appropriation: “Yet to express conservatism in Canada means de facto to justify the continuing rule of the businessman and the right of the greedy to turn all activities into sources of personal gain.”59 In contrast, Ian Angus suggests, “Grant’s conservatism was more like the conservationism of the ecology movement than [of Canada’s] Conservative Party.”60 In this regard, “Grant identifies himself with a much more radical form of conservatism,” Reimer clarifies, “an ancient non-historicist type of conservatism.”61 Such conservatism could not be more different from the revolutionary “conservatism” of the radical Right in the United States today.
Each of these callings was undertaken, I would say realized, through George Grant’s teaching. An “intense and gifted teacher,” Cayley appreciated, “Grant was unusually open to dialogue with his students.”62 Cayley quotes Louis Greenspan, who remembers that the Grants regularly shared their Halifax home—already filled with six children—with students, creating (quoting Greenspan) “a kind of salon for philosophy students.”63 When the novelist Matt Cohen met Grant during the 1960s, Cayley reports (quoting Cohen):
[I] was very impressed by his willingness or even eagerness to take what I said seriously…. His whole method of teaching and of discourse was not to say what was right and what was wrong, although he certainly had his own thoughts on these questions, but it was much more of…a Greek approach to things, where he believed that people should lead themselves…because he believed that what was right and wrong was within peo...
