Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise

"Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car" by William Blake

I have been working on this book since February 2017. It started life as an article on Dante and music as I embarked on my rehabilitation classes after a spell in hospital following a heart attack. Dante has always been an unfailing guide for me, and he didn’t fail me as I went through a long period of recovery. I read and wrote for pleasure, but also for strength and resilience. Dante nourishes the soul. There is a depth of existential truth and understanding in Dante. And there is more. As I continued, Dante's musical references allied to the inner music of his poem started to expand horizons and suggest greater possibilities. I began to develop the musical theme a little further. There is a definite pattern and structure in The Comedy. Dante doesn’t just employ music for aesthetic and poetic effect, however pleasurable to the senses the music of The Comedy is. There is a point and a purpose to the inner music in Dante's 'sacred poem.' There is, in short, a musico-moral structure and architectonic, one that brings the inner and outer worlds into accord. I have written a lot of words since the 1990s, maybe far too many words. The greatest books are never the ones that are finished and have the final say. There is no final say, and the best books are unfinishable; they leave something over for you to do as moral agents alive and active in the world. That’s how I read Dante, as one who underlines - and guides - creative moral agency. Human beings have free will and make free choices. Dante emphasises that agency on the part of human beings. At the same time, he is concerned that human beings come to choose right. I have never thought that Dante gives us a complete book. He takes us to Paradise in order to return us to Earth again, to begin the journey anew as self-conscious moral agents. At the same time, Dante is plainly concerned that human beings come to recognize a reality greater than their own subjective will and choice and conform themselves to it, for their own good. I am encouraged by the extent to which further reading served to confirm the views I set out in the initial work I completed in 2017. I have recently taken extensive notes from Francesco Ciabattoni's erudite and informative Dante's Journey to Polyphony (2010). Whilst I was somewhat disappointed to have come across this incredibly scholarly and detailed book after I had largely written my Dante book on the same theme, I remain heartily encouraged by the fact that many of the key points made in this incredibly learned and critically acclaimed book were ones that I had already made. And I've made a lot more points besides. I haven't missed much, haven't taken a wrong turn, and reassured to know that I am developing a key theme in Dante studies. Given that I started my Dante book merely to entertain and amuse myself, to lift my spirits whilst going through the uncertainties of cardiac rehabilitation, I think I am entitled to be a little pleased with my efforts. I can also testify to the fact that Dante is good for the spirit.

The liveliest minds of the age tell us that we live within a purposeless materialism, living a life to no particular end, other than surviving for as long as possible and enjoying ourselves while we can. It’s a meagre philosophy of life and its effects can be seen all over the mad mechanarchy that ‘governs’ the world. Dante affirms greater possibilities; he says that there is a point and a purpose. As well as being an unfailing guide, Dante can also an awkward and challenging read. I examine whether it is testimony to the truth of Dante's faith or to his genius as a poet that he has us believing in his impossibilities and implausibilities by the end. At times I thought Dante’s views so audacious that they simply must be true; no one could have had the nerve, let alone the imagination, to have made them up. In the very least, there is such a thing as poetic invention and redemption. Dante is an incredibly powerful moralist and wide ranging thinker as well as a peerless poet. Many people will be unable to cope with his deep questioning, let alone accept where it leads. Brave soldiers in the age of Positivism, their own prejudices concerning non-sense betray them to a reality that is always something less than their innate potentials and yet always somewhat more than they can know. Dante believed in a code of ethics as something much more substantial than subjective choice and irreducible preference and opinion. The idea that there is a reality greater than individual will and wish is readily accepted with respect to natural science, and people of scientific persuasion insist that nature is what it is, regardless of human projections and pretensions. The very same people struggle with that same notion with respect to ethics. I have no trouble in moving from Nature to God here, for the reasons I present and develop at length in this book. There is such a thing as moral knowledge and moral truth, and a science which has become detached from ethics in this sense will find itself unable to defend the value of its truth-seeking against those who seek to deny its findings. Fact and value go together as do Elohim and Hashem, as two sides of the same God, the God of the physical universe joining the God of love and personal relationships. Separate those two and all you have is a scientific knowledge and technological know-how without appetitive quality and motivational power. The idea of Dante as a Christian elitist and reactionary fundamentalist is mistaken, and profoundly so. Dante is actually very subversive, radical in the true sense of the word, and very far from being an elitist. Petrarch is much more the elitist, dismissing Dante for soliciting “the windy applause of the masses.” I have a substantial chapter which emphasizes Dante’s public concern. Dante wrote with conscious political, ethical, and educative intent; he wrote to move people, all people. I also qualify sharply the notion that Dante is part of a 'Western' canon. I write of the uncanonical Dante who weaves themes drawn from Averroes and other Arab philosophers in his texts. In fact, the notion of a ‘Western’ canon is utterly misleading with respect to Dante, given that Arab philosophers were Dante’s neighbours at this time. At this time, there was no ‘West’ in this sense. I bring out these points and more in my book.

There are many reasons why Dante is my favourite poet and author. I like Dante because he is so damned tough and challenging. He doesn’t immediately confirm one's beliefs. In fact, he challenges them. He says things that you wish he hadn’t said, and raises questions you wish he hadn’t. He's not for the timorous. He gets to the messy heart of the human world, and makes you think about its dilemmas. He elicits a conscious response, when maybe people would prefer to pass over an issue in silence. He makes you aware of your complicity and evasion. He makes you take sides. He hates indifference, and denies you the safety of neutrality.

Dante avoids the easy route of simply stating non-negotiable truths to people but engages real flesh and blood men and women, negotiates with them, tries to bring them to truth.

The 'divine' Comedy is also profoundly human. may well get too absorbed in politics and in settling scores as a consequence. Dante plainly harbored grudges and took them to the afterlife. And he went mad in Hell. I argue that the Inferno shows the reality of an all-too-human politics and justice, a justice far removed from divine justice. The Inferno is the world of a human morality bereft of God's infinite and redeeming mercy and forgiveness. The idea of humanity taking morality into its own hands is a liberatory one, but one which begs serious questions as to the identity of this ‘humanity.’ Politically and ethically, there is no ‘humanity,’ only individual human beings who are located within asymmetrical relations of power. The voices of some human beings count for much more than the voices of others within those relations. The marginalized, the oppressed, the silenced, the downtrodden will find it necessary to look for a standard outside of this human world to press their claims against injustice. Within this sophist world, as Thrasymachus told Plato long ago, justice is the interests of the strongest; the most powerful have the greater 'moral' voice, and the more resources to impose their 'truth' upon everyone else. Dante takes us out of a self-made Hell and takes us to true realities. I offer neither proof nor evidence here, for there are none to offer. Instead, I offer Dante's 'impossibilities.' I show that Dante believes his impossibilities to be more than the products of poetic invention. And I show that they make the most sense of the richness of human life as a quest for belonging, meaning, and love. I show them not to be impossibilities at all, but to be a faith that is lived in relation to others in real cities and communities. Dante lights the way. He is always searching, always challenging; he offers no easy options. Dante takes on the toughest moral issues and brings them to a head. He's not for the oafish who stick to the obvious - the people who see references to Hell and Heaven and dismiss it all as idle, made-up fantasy, the people enchained to the empirical necessity of existing institutions and practices and to immediate inclinations of the sense, and yet at the same time assert a vision that holds that such a reality is, or could be, more than it actually is. Dante’s vision extends beyond the immediacy of sense experience, buttressed always by a moral praxis that is socially embedded. This article by D.M. Black has an important part of the truth: Dante's Psychological Comedy The author is a psychologist and clearly appreciates the moral psychology that lies at the heart of The Comedy. Dante's insight into human motivations is indeed genius. Dante is a rationalist in the Aristotelian mode, his love follows the intellect. But I have no doubt that Dante is a mystic, his reunion with God transcending limited forms of expression is mystical. I think it is fair to refer to Dante's mystical psychology for that reason. Some may consider 'mystical ecology' to be a term of abuse; it is actually the profoundest wisdom. At the same time, Dante is down-to-earth and embedded in politics and social life for all that. And he is intellectual, clear, and crystalline. A genuine mysticism is far from an obscurantism. At no point does Dante reject political action and involvement in the affairs of the world for the sake of spiritual redemption, at no point does he denigrate the human will and embrace the virtues of human irrationality in passive obedience to the laws of God. Such criticism betrays a complete ignorance of how Dante develops a view of freedom as the appreciation of necessity. Dante understands that truth cannot just be simply and passively given but has to be actively and consciously recognised, embodied, and lived. In this, Dante reconciles the two great wings of the philosophical tradition: reason-nature (the objective world, the world of fact) and reason-culture-will-artifice (the subjective world, the world of value and human agency). This is the great achievement of The Comedy.

For all of the mystical aspects of The Comedy with respect to the return to and reunion with God, Dante himself expresses the vision he receives not as a flight from the world, but as inspiring hope and effort within the world. Dante is at pains to stress the direct bearing of his ‘sacred poem’ upon everyday human life, action, and conduct: non ad speculandum, sed ad opus incoeptum est totum "not for speculation, but for practical effect was the whole work undertaken" Dante openly states his practical intention as being that of leading human beings from their present state of misery in a divided society to a state of happiness: "the end of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and to lead them to the state of felicity." The aim of Dante's mystical psychology is to facilitate a spiritual experience that is capable of being a force for the reformation of humankind. Dante’s Comedy is the supreme attempt to express the eternal through a necessarily limited symbolism and imagery, portraying the union of the soul with the supra-sensible realm. The mysticism of the ‘sacred poem’ is intellectual, inherently practical, and consciously altruistic. There is no self-effacement, passivity, and blind obedience to given laws of God and Nature. Truth and its living is not so simple. Basing himself on Aristotle’s view of human beings as social beings, Dante is in complete agreement with St. Catherine of Siena’s view that in boosting spiritual virility, the mystical life has a powerful impact on social life: “there can be no perfect virtue, none that bears fruit, unless it be exercised by means of our neighbour." Dante has a direct political intent in not only bringing eternal truths with regard to humanity and nature to the people, but communicating them in the language of the people; he translates transcendent truths into practical concerns, making them not only comprehensible, but practicable. He effects the transition from contemplation to action that Plato attempted, but could never quite achieve. He brings these truths to human beings subjected to the things of time on "the threshing-floor that maketh us so fierce" and succeeds in raising their sights to a vision of Eternity, which Boethius presented as "the complete and perfect simultaneous possession of unlimited life." In the above article, Black writes that 'The Comedy can be viewed as a sort of gigantic encyclopaedia of human motives, classified according to understandable ethical criteria.' That is not only immensely important as an intellectual achievement, it is crucial as a moral achievement, serving to inspire, motivate, and obligate human beings as moral agents. If we ever come to lose that aspect of existence, then we are lost, individually and as a species, living at the mercy of external forces and events. Dante’s moral psychology is hugely important in relation to the civic and sociological aspects of his thought. Dante goes deeply into the appetites and desires of human beings, into the motivational economy and the longings that lead or mislead individuals, depending on the knowledge, acquisition, and exercise of the virtues and modes of conduct on the part of these individuals.

The book contains a substantial section on virtue ethics and on the social philosophy underpinning his vision of the political peace. Dante is intimately concerned with the rational reconstruction of the habitus required for the ethical life, a realm of practical education in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised. Dante’s world is an inherently ethical world, a world that is very different to today’s world in which fact and value have been separated, with the former exalted over the latter as true knowledge, and the latter reduced to mere subjective value judgement. Dante’s world is not one of objects which are to be studied dispassionately, with knowledge yielded by way of fact and logic and no more, but a world of subjects with free-will, which they may use wisely, or not; each has a distinctive point of view, each seeks the satisfaction of desires, seeks happiness, and join with others in society in furtherance of particular ends. Society succeeds or fails according to whether love, the greatest motivational force of all, is properly ordered to its true ends, or is disordered; whether human beings are properly connected or disconnected. The challenge is to form a union of wills in conformity with a greater will, with ultimate reality outside of subjective choice. Dante presents us with a "free necessity," or a "necessary freedom," something which educates free-will to choose the right thing. Dante describes a world of subjects, a world of wills, which find peace in harmony with a greater will. (‘In bona voluntate, pax nobis est’ (St Augustine). ‘In His will is our peace’ (Dante). Dante anticipates Rousseau’s great insight with the concept of the ‘General Will,’ the idea that an objective truth cannot just be passively given but must be actively willed, internalized, and lived to be truly known. Knowledge is not just cognitive, it is affective, in the sense of the ‘moving’ and ‘turning’ that Dante writes of at the end of The Comedy. Dante is not just presenting the objective truth of some hypothesis; he is discovering, with sympathy, distress, joy, or outrage, how life works out for and is experienced by real, various individuals. With knowledge as experiential and experimental in these terms, change is a self-change, and education is a self-education. Human beings are agents of the journey they undertake every step of the way. And Dante shares the pilgrim journey with them. As Dante walks he learns, and as he learns, he changes. ‘This is another difference from science as we usually think of it, where the scientist remains detached and above the battle. Dante is absolutely not above the battle.’ Dante, like the rest of us, is in the thick of social and political life; he is, as we are, interested beings. We have stakes in societies, actions, and outcomes. ‘He learns about the appetites and longings that mislead the human heart, often catastrophically, and have misled his own.’ ‘So this is no cool, objective appraisal of human motives; it is a passionately concerned recognition of the terrible or wonderful consequences that flow from our emotional choices, and from our ability or our failure to retain or recover our integrity.’ Lose that appetitive quality, and your demands for action are dead, no matter how insistent, for the very reason that your knowledge is severed from the springs of action. I am interested in the clashes of politics, in the bridge between theoretical and practical reason, and in the disclosing/unfolding of truth through dialectic. Politics can cloud truth, but it can also through argument and discursive interaction and communication shed light on it and bring it forth in the public world. It all depends on how we conceive ‘the political,’ and it all depends on how we establish the conditions of the political. Dante argues for good politics, a politics of friendship and love. He also saw the politics of faction and division. ‘Dante for a while was a major figure in the political life of Florence, at a time of civil war and vicious partisan infighting: he had seen first-hand how the consequences of individual psychology include such huge matters as war and peace, social chaos or social harmony, as well as personal grief or happiness. The psychological, the personal, the political, and the religious were not, for him, separate categories: they were closely interrelated, and “sin” was the corrupting element in all of them.’ If you want to really change the human social world, then you cannot legislate or dictate truth from the outside like the fabled lawgiver, but have to engage people on the inside and cultivate the inner motives. Dante is engaged and involved, he works on and with character on the inside of the question; that is to say, he isn’t out to simply ‘inform’ heads and expect action to follow as a result, he seeks to ‘form’ characters so that people will know what to do without having to be told. The truth cannot just be passively given to individuals, it has to be actively willed by them. Dante is all about cultivating the right will through the setting of love in order. Virtue is the proper ordering of love to its true ends, as against a disordering which attaches human beings to goods which separate them from each other, from the ultimate good, and from their own selves (or, in a theological idiom, from their own souls). Even those who struggle with numbers, will understand the internal music. It's innate and universal, a common language that we share, making the world as one. As the great Dantista T.S. Eliot said, ‘only connect.’ In this book I develop Dante's Comedy as an eco-poetics that is moved by the Greatest Love of all. I've been on the receiving end of complaints that such interests are 'idle' at a time when the planet is unravelling. I used to suffer such complaints as well-meaning, coming from activists seeking to address real problems besetting the world, but I don't tolerate it now. I consider such criticism to be blinkered, for reasons E.F. Schumacher gave with respect to the necessity of metaphysical reconstruction to effective action decades ago. The planetary ecology is unravelling precisely because its moral and social ecology is faulty. Correcting the latter is a condition of correcting the former. Those obsessed with ‘action’ ignore the conditions which make it effective and enduring. In calling for constructive models of the future society, Jurgen Habermas underlines the importance of allying social transformation with personal moral transformation: ‘I know that all learning depends on the formation of inner motives’ (Habermas 1981: 28). Our technics will fail for want of clarity on ends and for failure to cultivate inner motives. I'm interested in a literary ecology modelled on the likes of Dante. I would recommend Joseph Meeker's book The Comedy of Survival here. I took the same approach to the Tolkien piece I wrote a couple of years ago: Tolkien and the Fellowship of all Living Things: The Politics of Proximity, Person and Place. I would also recommend another work I have published on this theme: The Ecological Comedy: The Case for an Existential Literary Ecology Dante, with his integral approach bounded by the Love that moves all, concerns us and moves us to touch again the wholeness and wholesomeness of the world, seeking to restore that integral ethic within us. I shall make a general comment here on music/art/aesthetics, on Beauty as one of the three transcendentals. Plato’s great wisdom was to have affirmed Beauty to be the supreme political category for the way that it lights the path to Truth and Goodness and invites the heart to follow. Since all have a heart, then all can and will respond to Beauty's call to bid an end to our sad divisions. I repeat this view often, because it is my core belief, and I cleave to it. It is a democratic view. Like Rousseau, I am a Platonist of the heart in this respect. And I shall put a word in for music here, too. Keep your ears open and be ready to hear, and listen to, the inner music of the universe, and how all living creatures express this music in their diverse and particular forms, and your hearts will be open and ever ready to respond to Beauty’s call. In The Symposium, Plato wrote of the Divine Beauty which is beheld by the eye. That is a very different notion from the subjectivist assertion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Plato's Beauty is something that inheres within a thing, and within the universe, as an objective quality; it has nothing to do with the projection of meaning and value on a meaningless and valueless universe, nothing to do with perceptions, and nothing to do with a Nietzschean perspectivism within power relations. It is the very antithesis of those things, in fact. The one obligates us to conform our subjective choices to a more than subjective truth, the other asserts wilful self-projection to be the arbiter of truth. Music links the inner and the outer words in order to avoid having to make such a choice between disclosure and imposure. Beauty is the last bastion of evangelisation in the subjectivist culture of today, a culture in which solipsism seems to hold all the trump cards, (but, ultimately, doesn't.) Beauty is possibly the only thing left that motivates all people from deep within the core of their being to strive for something greater than the egoistic will and expand their being outwards. Kant wrote of a "common moral reason" that is possessed by all and which is shared between us in public community when activated. He received that insight from Rousseau. Kant was particularly struck by Rousseau's moral vision of simplicity and integrity, tempering his very elevated view of reason by Rousseau’s warm and generous vision of common humanity. Kant writes: "I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge and a restless desire to advance in it, as well as a satisfaction in every step I take. There was a time when I thought that this alone could constitute the honour of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This pretended superiority vanished and I learned to respect humanity." That's a lesson in humility that those seeking an alignment of politics and truth need to learn and cleave to. Rousseau repeatedly wrote of the transcendent truths that are engraved on all hearts, truths which are much more than human self-creations and conventions. This is a dominant and recurring theme in Rousseau’s works. It appears in his First Discourse, where he writes: ‘Are not your principles engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough in order to learn your Laws to return into oneself and to listen to the voice of one’s conscience in the silence of the passions?’ The view is repeated in his State of War, where he writes: ‘If natural law were inscribed only in human reason, it would have little capacity to guide most of our actions, but it is also engraved in the human heart in indelible characters.’ He affirms the same idea in his Lettres morales: ‘There is … found in all souls an innate principle of justice and of moral truth, anterior to all national prejudices, to all maxims of education.’ He presents the view in the voice of Saint Preux in Julie, we all sense what is right,’ and ‘He [God] has given him [man] freedom to do good, conscience to will it, and reason to choose it. He has constituted him the sole judge of his own acts. He has written it in his heart.’

The only thing that Dante would disagree with here, or qualify, is the idea that human beings are the ‘sole judge’ of their actions. Dante emphasizes individual responsibility and personal moral effort, certainly, and it is for us as moral agents to judge the right course of action to take. But there is a greater judge, and we are enjoined to conform our wills to God’s plan of justice. That affirms a transcendent standard over above subjective will, a view that Rousseau also affirms, as David Lay Williams’ excellent book Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment establishes at length. In the Dialogues, Rousseau writes: ‘Those innate feelings [of justice and moral truth] that nature has engraved in all hearts to console man in his misery and encourage him to virtue, by means of art, intrigues, and sophisms become stifled.’ In the Reveries Rousseau declares that there are ‘eternal truths which have been accepted at all times and by all wise men, recognized by all nations, and indelibly engraved on the human heart.’ In Emile, Rousseau writes that there are eternal laws of nature that are ‘written in the depth of his heart by conscience and reason.’ Rousseau therefore affirms the existence of transcendent norms, truths, and values against merely conventional truths, holding that these standards are expressed by way of conscience. In Emile, the vicar affirms: ‘There is in the depth of souls … an innate principle of justice and virtue according to which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge our actions and those of others to be good or bad. It is to this principle that I give the name conscience.’ These are the principles that Rousseau launches against the materialism of the Philosophes, bringing him much closer to Dante than perhaps many have realized. We can refer to an innate moral grammar as something we share in common, but the lesson is plain: we have to activate that grammar and learn to sing in tune, in harmony, in unison. That was Dante’s argument, and it was one that Rousseau, an ancient among the moderns, gave his own distinctive twist to in the eighteenth century. Ethically, this ideal is proving elusive to obtain. But beauty, aesthetics, and music offer a way of cutting through to commonality when words either fail or divide. A point I am concerned to make is that for all of Dante’s emphasis on the Greatest Love that moves all things, his Comedy actually ends with a word that emphasizes the plurality that is enhanced and confirmed by universality - “stars.” This is a key point to establish. For all of the chaos and apparent diversity of the Inferno, Hell is actually a condition of sameness, homogeneity, and mechanical repetition. Dante shows that the devil does not have all the best tunes at all; in fact, he has the worst. There is no music in Hell: it is a place of immobility and “mechanized petrification” (to borrow a phrase that Max Weber used to describe modern bureaucratic industrial society, but which fits the "eternal prison" of Hell perfectly - and indicates the extent to which human beings become their own jailors in a self-made 'iron cage.'). Hell is a place of an aggressive selfishness that is expressed in different ways to snare one and all in a dehumanizing sameness chained to empirical necessity. In complete contrast, Paradise is a place of sweet harmony expressing the greatest variety of life. And it is the “diverse voices” in Paradiso that create harmony at its sweetest. There is an inner music, both in the universe and in Dante's 'sacred poem.' It is significant that Dante uses a musical image to convey the way that Paradise requires souls of every kind and level. The line he writes is itself the sweetest of music: "Diverse voci fanno dolci note" (Paradiso 6: 124). The literal translation is "Diverse voices make sweet notes.” Or, poetically rendered: “Diverse voices make sweet music.” “As diverse voices make sweet music and blend, so diverse stations of our life amid these spheres make sweet accord without an end.” I therefore write of the internal music in Dante's Comedy. Beauty is something to cleave to beyond the clashes of self- and sectional interest and assertion (think of Arnold's Dover Beach here, where the "sea of faith" has withdrawn and "ignorant armies clash by night"), and it still occupies a central place in people’s lives. So long as people continue to strive for beauty, then it is possible for them to be “turned,” (in the sense of Dante's turning in the final lines in The Comedy), and it is possible to “turn” people on to the truth and goodness that inheres in and moves all things. These are the three great transcendentals and, whatever Nietzsche says with respect to their fragmentation, they are all connected – they are all qualities of the divine. Nietzsche's critical comments apply to the modern world, not the world as such. The Quest for Meaning, Belonging, and Morality: Morality and Modernity Such will be part of my argument in Dante's Journey: The Sweet Symphony of Paradise. There's much more to the argument, as the table of contents above shows. A character in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot made the bold statement that “Beauty will save the world.” If that is true, then the obvious question is: "what is Beauty?" Dostoyevsky put those words in the mouth of Prince Myshkin, who is a simpleton. Terentiev asks Myshkin if he said it, he is asking him to explain the self-explanatory. 'The context is enlarged by the fact of Myshkin’s love for the abused and then abusing Nastasya Filippovna, whose physical beauty no man could doubt, though whose intelligence he might fear. A portrait of her had conveyed to Myshkin the suffering that underlay a beautiful face. Men love her possessively, even murderously. Myshkin’s own interest is taken for infatuation. He has grasped the suffering and responds to it with a love that is incomprehensible to the shallow – for it is innocent and selfless.' It is the humble power of Myshkin's selfless, naïve, and “idiot” beauty that will save the world. 'This is a beauty that is not isolated, constrained. This Beauty is finally indistinguishable from the True and the Good. It is embodied in art of the highest order, and it is reflective of that mysterious light of faith – that “saving grace” with which Christ enlightens the world.' This is the truth of Christ’s love for us, a truth that transcends death. Can Beauty Save the World? Yes it can. So let me return to Dante and end on one of the central teachings of The Comedy concerning love, intellect, vision, and truth. The lesson is taught by Beatrice: "And thou must know that all have delight in the measure of the depth to which their sight penetrates the truth in which every intellect finds rest; from which it may be seen that the state of blessedness rests on the act of vision, not on that of love, which follows after, and the measure of their vision is merit, which grace begets and right will." (109-113) It is important to note here that love does not lead in Dante, it follows. The teaching is delivered with respect to the angels, noted for their keenness of intellectual vision, but it applies to all the blessed. The “truth in which every intellect finds rest” is God as the First Truth, and it is the highest end of human beings to know this Truth. Love follows rather than leads since it is both incited and directed by the thing that is seen, the Beloved. Were love primary, it would be cut off from the truth; rather than being educative it would degenerate into mere feeling. Dante's love is therefore based on the primacy of intellect. There is no sacrifice of reason, no celebration of the virtues of human irrationality - the very opposite. In the New Life he calls Beatrice was “the Lady of my mind.” In this book, I write on Dante as an Aristotelian affirming the desire to know within the tradition of ‘rational freedom,’ the core organizing principle of my life’s work. I have studied this idea in a number of variants, always feeling something to be missing. I’ve gone from Habermas, Marx, Kant, Hegel, and Rousseau back to Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes, all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. There was always something missing. Dante encompasses all things, there is nothing missing. More commentary from me on Dante here: Fire and Ice: Where would Dante place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth … Dante and Marx Dante and Marx is not as unusual a combination as it may seem. Whilst Marx didn’t share Dante’s moral and metaphysical commitments, he was nevertheless an ardent admirer of the man he called “the great Florentine.” In the book Marx’s Inferno, William Clare Roberts explains Marx’s Capital as exhibiting a structure drawn from Dante. Here, I argue that we should set Dante’s undoubted insights into Hell as a self-made Inferno within the moral and metaphysical architectonic of The Divine Comedy as a whole, rather than adapt and secularize it to an age that is ever further removed from the transcendent source and end of all things. I will finish with a comment on the practical political and social implications of Dante’s idea of ‘sweet harmony.’ This view expresses the power of Love, the respect for boundaries, and the peace of the blessed life "through which our wills become a single will." "but you’ll see no such discord in these spheres; to live in love is—here—necessity, if you think on love’s nature carefully." Comedy, Paradiso Canto 3: 76-90 Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney comments here: "The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace." (Tawney 1982 ch 11). We will only have agreement on means if we are clear about the ends which we serve. "Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired." Tawney The Acquisitive Society 1982 ch 11 There are times when I think I'm on my own taking the approach I do. I could make things much easier for myself and could find much greater popularity that way. But I can do no other. Every time I analyse problems and trace them to source, I draw the same conclusions. I know other roads lead nowhere, for the very reason I have taken them. Dante’s key lesson in the Inferno is this: “critical reflection on the loss of hope engenders hope, immersion in images of falsehood reveals truth, descent leads to return." "Dante ranked himself as sixth among the greats. Hubris? Not really. Iliad is a story, the Odyssey a work of great imagination. But Dante dissects a civilisation and holds it to account. No one else did that." Dante Alighieri and the World I am determined to see this work to conclusion and publication in time of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri next year, 2021. I’ve been working on it since my time in cardiac rehab in 2017. Dante has been my unfailing guide. Human beings cannot live without purpose, without direction, without hope - I know that as a fact, not a mere debatable intellectual proposition. Dante takes us to the source and end of that hope. I now see that I need to secure the metaphysical, ethical, and philosophical grounds, for the simple reason that many will reject Dante out of hand, for any number of reasons. Dante is tough. Many may consider that I have wondered off the point in my written work. I haven’t: here is the point. Of all the people I have read – and I have read many – Dante challenges me more and gives me more. And he wrote the best line ever written in literature at the end of The Comedy. That line contains all we need. This will be my masterwork, eclipsing by far everything I have written. I already have a first draft of this, but am now adding a metaphysical, ethical, and philosophical frame. Dante's Journey: The Sweet Symphony of Paradise I shall end with a response what could be taken to be a liberal dismissal of the views I have set out above. I shall make brief comment on this article by James Chappel: Nudging Towards Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism

A generation of thinkers was raised in the orbit of 'centrist technocracy.' As its lustre continues to fade, 'strange new gods will arise in their midst' opines Chappel. Liberalism has been the dominant political philosophy for the past century - the problems it protests are self-authored, and need to be owned. There are reasons for the rise of these ‘strange new gods,’ and they lie deeper than centrist technocracy. Max Weber locates the warring of renascent gods in the terrain of rationalization itself, taking the view that liberal society is forever prone to generate ersatz forms of community and commonality for want of the capacity to generate real forms. We could examine Rousseau or Hegel’s critique of modern diremption or Marx’s critique of atomisation and commodification, or Durkheim’s analysis of anomie, or Weber’s awareness that ‘mechanized petrification’ that emerges from within the soil of liberal modernity itself. Instead, James Chappel takes liberalism’s dominant position as read to focus on the errors and misunderstandings of liberalism’s critics: "And it is certainly true that, especially since 2008, liberal shibboleths of individual autonomy and human rights have come in for serious criticism from both the right and the left. And yet, as Daniel Luban has recently argued in these pages (“Among the Post-Liberals,” Winter 2020), it is also true that this crisis talk is overblown, and that the critique of liberalism is often more rhetorical than real. Many critics begin with an utter parody of the liberal tradition, according to which liberals view human beings as isolated monads. This allows any invocation of community to fashion itself as post-liberal, ignoring the fact that every liberal worth their salt, from Locke onward, has been committed to various forms of sociability. The ubiquity of funeral rites for liberalism can distract attention from those few who are genuinely committed to its murder. There are intellectuals and politicians out there who are seeking to uproot liberalism, root and branch. This kind of true opposition to liberalism has a long history in our country, most prominently among apostles of legal segregation. And in our own strange times, it is mounting a comeback. This is apparent at multiple levels, from the rowdy “Proud Boys,” who stand up for the rights of white men supposedly under assault, to the genteel climes of the academy, where a number of writers and thinkers are adopting flamboyantly illiberal postures, imagining quasi-medieval visions of social harmony as an antidote to the putative aimlessness of modern consumerism. It is hard to know how seriously to take any of this. It can often seem like a bit of playacting from people who know very well that the basic structures of American society—whose liberalism allows them to speak in the first place—will remain intact. And yet, as our current president knows, the line between reality and reality TV has become blurred. Thinkers and politicians who seem to be half-joking can become, when the tide changes, deadly serious." I take such charges to apply to me, among others, as I seek to reframe socialism and conservatism in an attempt to reclaim true law and order in the world from within the clutches of a purposeless mechanarchy. Accordingly, I feel the need to respond, not merely to rebut any charges of being illiberal, and therefore a very bad person, but to clarify the character of my views. In the first place, I don’t work in ‘the academy,’ genteel or otherwise, I work independently as a writer and earn my money working in distribution in my local community. I am not 'clubbable,' either, and the biggest mistakes I have made stem from a misplaced sense of loyalty (rarely, if ever, reciprocated, let alone rewarded). I go where the argument takes me, now. In the second place, I work in the less than genteel streets and weathers of my local community, and can see the consequences of libertarianism in economics, ethics, and culture in myriad inequalities and emptinesses, in a pervasive disconnection and dislocation. I spent Lockdown during the first wave of Covid-19 as an "essential" and "key" worker, despite to chronic illnesses identifying me as belonging to the at risk category. And this is how I am spending the second Lockdown. I would be honoured to be classed an academic and would love to take my place in the academy. But I am neither 'academic' nor genteel, and I am not presenting truths at a safe distance from reality and real folk - the very opposite. And since I have no academic position and no academic reputation to defend, I am free to speak freely. Liberalism has lost 'ordinary' people, abandoned them. In the third place, the ‘aimlessness’ of modern society is real and not ‘putative.’ Most of all, though, my argument has naught to do with ‘quasi-medieval visions of social harmony.’ As I have argued at length over the years, against people who espouse romantic 'back to nature' delusions the problems we face are structural, not chronological. There is no turning back to whatever past we project our fantasies upon, even if some such thing were desirable. I studied Hegel and Marx long and hard and learned the lessons on this well. Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx An Introduction to the Thought of Istvan Meszaros And I can identify the bourgeois mind at a thousand paces: “It is as ridiculous to yearn for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that with this complete emptiness history has come to a standstill. The bourgeois viewpoint has never advanced beyond this antithesis between itself and this romantic viewpoint, and therefore the latter will accompany it as legitimate antithesis up to its blessed end.” (Marx Gr 1973: 162). If I rule out a return to a pre-modern fullness, I also deny that history has come to an end with the present atomised market society. Liberalism is not the only game in town. Liberal ideologists naturalize what needs to be historicised.

Still, there are those who identify socialism with a statist regime of accumulation (summed up in the bourgeois idiom of ‘economic growth,’ that slippery euphemism for capital accumulation, which identifies the logic and drive of the capital system that socialism, properly understood, seeks to uproot). I exchange words no more on this. Time and energy is limited, I have problems enough to be addressing than to be constantly reaching back to address those whose viewpoint will never advance beyond ‘the end of history’ and ‘the world we have lost.’ That’s what Marx identifies as ‘the bourgeois viewpoint,’ and it is still in place, as we all stand on the brink of the end, blessed or otherwise. As for how seriously people need to take this, that's for them to decide. I take it very seriously indeed, since it represents the culmination of a quarter of a century research and thought on my part. I would suggest people take it very seriously indeed. Because this civilization is not in good enough shape to do otherwise. Here is the James Chappel article, “Nudging Towards Theocracy.”

When liberals become as complacent as this, amidst myriad converging crises in divided societies, you won't need anyone, least of all genteel academics, to "murder" liberalism. The word ‘putative’ attached to aimlessness makes clear what the author thinks of criticisms of modern liberal society - a dismissive nothing. Such criticisms are not new, of course, and go back to the critique of diremption we can find in Hegel – himself a corporate liberal – in social liberals like T.H. Green, and most specifically in Durkheim’s notion of ‘anomie’ or normlessness. To describe such ills to be merely ‘putative’ is to strongly imply that they exist nowhere other than in the minds of modernity’s disgruntled and discontented, among the rabble of reactionaries and revolutionaries who are never happy anywhere on account of their own psychological dislocation.

In the very least, that still begs the question of why so many are so disgruntled. What, precisely, is the cause of this pervasive dis-at-ease, among right as well as left? The age is rootless. The dismissal of the criticism with respect to isolated monads needs to be challenged. The critical examination of the liberal ontology that separates two aspects of human nature – individuality and sociality – and renders them abstract and antithetical is buttressed by a sociological critique in which society is atomized and individuals are separated from social supports and communal sources of identity and belonging. There is no parody here, unless Chappel is referring to the short-hand of political articles and polemics rather than substantive texts. Writing on the political and ethical significance of Dante Alighieri, a fourteenth century poet from the Christian Middle Ages, there is a good chance that I could be considered to be one of the illiberal malcontents targeted in this article, and so feel the need to respond briefly to what appears a little parody on the part of one of liberalism’s apologists. The first thing to check is this loaded reference to ‘illiberal,’ as in a plainly bad thing. This kind of tendentious dismissal of alternate platforms is itself highly illiberal, in that it contradicts one of liberalism’s central tenets concerning pluralism and the interplay of ideas. All platforms allowed so long as they are liberal! Neutrality between competing views of the good is just another word for liberalism. Of course, we have seen this delegitimation of contrary views before, as with Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, those enemies being Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx. Anyone holding views influenced by those sources were immediately condemned as ‘enemies’ of liberty.

In my past work I have made it abundantly clear that my views are post-liberal, emphasizing transcendence in Marx’s sense of abolition, or Aufhebung or Aufgehoben, as a preservation, a realisation, and a raising up, not an obliteration. Marx, I show, is post-liberal, extracting the universal significance of liberal rights and achievements and seeking their realisation in substantive form as against the atomistic conception of rights which are based on the separation of individuals from one another. That remains the defence against those who accuse those seeking to constitute commonality beyond the liberal order of being ‘illiberal’ and reactionary. The concern is to resolidify and resolidarise through new forms of community. Given that liberal critics have persistently accused Marx of subscribing to a ‘thickly textured communitarianism’ that is inimical to individual liberty, the nuances of that defence are plainly neither understood nor accepted, but it is worth mounting the defence in the hope that others, seeing plainly the deficiencies of the liberal position, may see the point being made with respect to the ethical and socio-institutional framework of the truly human and free society. There are reasons why people such as I do not take liberals seriously when they claim a concern with forms of sociality, not least the tendency of liberal thinkers to caricature forms of commonality developed by socialism as repressive of individual liberty. (That’s a stock criticism, so I don’t feel the need to supply references, but you can try the work of Joseph Femia, J.G. Merquior, Talmon, Popper, Thomas, many more). Liberals have indeed been concerned with "various forms of sociability" and with searching for some kind of community, but the real question concerns how successful they have been in satisfying this concern. The tendency of the modern world to embrace various collective fictions and fundamentalisms would suggest not very. The seemingly endless quest for community in modern society (see Nisbett The Quest for Community, also Ezioni, Taylor, Sandel and the communitarians) arises from the atomisation of society and ethics that results from liberalism’s ontological premises and sociological impacts. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that liberals have been "committed" to finding community, given the premise and priority of the moral and ontological ultimacy of the individual. The evidence is that liberals have been leery of notions of community and common good as being potentially repressive of individual liberty, a view stated quite openly by John Rawls. The problem with liberalism is not that liberals have not sought some form of sociality but that, given its ontological roots in a bifurcation between individuality and sociality, liberalism is unable to find commonality in anything other than legalistic, abstract, and ersatz form. This is the record of liberalism to date. It is absolutely no surprise whatsoever that the age is characterised by false collectivisms and surrogate communities, such as nationalism and the emotional power and unity inspired by war and death. Max Weber one hundred years ago stated that the nation-state in war does a much better job of providing meaning and unity than religion now. He was right. In an age of self-choosing individuals separated from binding commitments, loyalties and communities, all that remains for communal expression and identification are ersatz forms, or legalistic forms which hold competing individuals together in the civil peace. And as a matter of record, liberalism is premised on the pre-social, discrete, self-possessing individual who contracts into society in order to secure and promote self-interest and contracts out for the same reason. Rights are held by each individual against others and against society; that is precisely what moral and ontological ultimacy is all about. Yes, there have been liberalisms which have sought to do more, but that is because they have had to, given the moral and sociological illiteracy of the individualist premises and their practical consequences. Hegel was a corporate liberal, and he influenced people like T.H. Green, whose social liberalism fed into the socialism of the early twentieth century. None of it ever proved strong enough to overcome the acidic nature of the individual choice and methodological individualism that lies at the core of liberalism. Margaret Thatcher restated that central truth of liberalism when she stated ‘there is no such thing as society.’ That so many turned on her for that statement merely proves the extent to which people who present themselves as radicals in some way are actually liberals in denial. Mrs Thatcher stated the truth of the modern liberal society, and the truth hurt. But most acted and continue to act on that truth, to the extent that they are not bound by collective identity, loyalty, and obligation. When the going gets tough, and a cause and a commitment demand something of a sacrifice of immediate self-interest, individuals bail out, as they are perfectly entitled to do under liberalism. And they do it on climate change. That’s a truth environmentalists have still yet to grasp. Without an authoritative ethic, people can remain deaf and unresponsive to any moral imperative. Do people have what it takes to restore the referents of such imperatives? So I am a wandering scholar free in exile to ‘tell the truth,’ and the whole truth about an age in which people care so much about the natural environment, but not so much as to restore the moral environment in such a way as to bind their self-choosing ability to a common ethic. The ‘moral imperative’ to protect the planetary ecology lacks a referent, hence commonality is not something that emerges as a result of individuals forging the collective wit and will among themselves, but by the legal force of abstract government. That, in turn, breeds resistance from recalcitrant individuals, and so issues in political paralysis. I strongly suspect liberalism will carry on being the dominant tradition, with people continuing to press radical demands in self-contradictory forms, to the detriment of both the moral and the planetary ecology. This will reproduce the very mentalities and modalities that generated crisis in the first place. We should be wary of mistaking the self-image of liberalism for the reality. Liberalism is no longer the outsider seeking to liberate society from feudal power and authority. That job has long since been done. As it was being done, Rousseau saw that the old elites would come in time to be replaced by new elites of money and commerce. That time is now. To the extent that many have yet to grasp that point means that liberalism has become the hidebound conservatism of the putative liberators and radicals, people who are wedded psychologically, ethically, and socially to the very social order whose ills they claim to want to end. It hasn’t been done, it can’t be done, it won’t be done. The levels of poverty, homelessness, and inequality, the depths of hopelessness and misery, the drug problems, the ecological problems, the fiscal crises, the debt, the wars, militarism, terrorism the lot – as the dominant political tradition, liberalism needs to look these crises stark in the face as if looking in the mirror. The idea that we owe rights, including the right to speak, to liberalism is false. Natural rights are grounded in the pre-modern, pre-liberal tradition of natural law. We can defend this by affirming transcendent standards as against conventionalism. To write here of "quasi-medieval visions of social harmony” is itself a parody of this affirmation. The specific determinations and incarnations of the transcendent truth in time and place are themselves distinct from the transcendent standard. When the Founding Fathers of the USA stated that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are born equal,’ they were citing the transcendent standards of natural law, the idea that rights are God-given and not merely conferred by the state. That idea can be presented independently of its determinations in time and place. Dante may be a ‘medieval; author, but his ethic on universal justice and rule of law can be stated independently of his fourteenth century determinations. Any solutions I identify in this book cannot be dismissed as “quasi-medieval.” Lewis Mumford developed the concept of the ‘usable past,’ drawing on permanent lessons contained in previous times and places to develop an enabling tradition of restoration and recovery. It is in this spirit that I write here. "It is hard to know how seriously to take any of this," Chappel comments. "What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk." Fellow exile and quester Karl Marx quotes Dante here in the Preface to the first volume of Das Kapital: "Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti. [Go your own way, and let the people talk]." Marx alters the line to suit his own purpose: he will make no concessions to make his arguments palatable to the prejudices of the times. Marx takes his stand here on science, as understood in the wider German sense. Dante identifies ethics, or moral philosophy, to be the Queen of the sciences, bringing meaning and order to all other forms of knowledge and disposing us properly to the other sciences (Convivio II, xiv, 14). As for why I have ended up with a medieval poet after reading a billion books ... I've set that out in many places, so I'll just put it simply - history is a synergy of material interests, moral motives, and metaphysical ideals. You can have all the knowledge and know-how in the world, but unless you can reach into the motivational economy - the characteristic of a true virtue is its appetitive quality - then you lack transformative capacity. Knowledge and know-how are not virtues in themselves, since they lack the appetitive quality that defines a true virtue. Knowledge and know-how give us the ability to act; they do not make us want to act. Describing how he was 'turned,' Dante indicates what it takes to motivate and move, enthuse, inspire and - importantly - obligate. You can issue all the moral imperatives on the back of knowledge and information you like: without a moral referent (and that is what this world lacks) those commands will fall on deaf ears. The modern world still hasn't grasped Nietzsche's challenge when he dispensed with truth and morality with 'the death of God.' The loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework is debilitating. People may be happy to say goodbye to religion. You can say goodbye to science for the same reason. Post-truth as post-fact? Imagine being a moral philosopher and reading that morals are no more than value judgements, subjective preferences. That's been the moral condition of the modern world for a long time now. Individuals are free to choose the good as they see fit, to contract in or contract out according to calculations of self-interest, buy in or bail out. Try cracking a collective problem like climate change with a morality like that. Hence the recourse to a blunt rationalism that has manifestly failed. E.F. Schumacher told us ages ago that metaphysical reconstruction is key. His message in Small is Beautiful on this was missed. So he followed that up with "A Guide for the Perplexed." His message on morals and metaphysics was still ignored. First Principles and Firm Foundations The Economics of Purpose - EF Schumacher I may be wrong. I could make life much easier for myself by blending something from physics with ecology and a dash of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology - I have the massive research notes to do it. That's how I sketched out the plan for Being and Place more than ten years ago. But it's deficient, a quasi-scientific ethical naturalism of the kind you can see in contemporary neo-Aristotelianism. Being and Place It's full of view we can all agree with, for the reason it evades the very stuff of ethics and politics - the things that actually make a difference. But, yes, I do like puppy dogs. I find it all utterly boring, a reversion to Saint Simon and utopians and idealists, with plans and knowledge detached from their means of realisation (other than the fetish of 'government' - elitist, managerial, technocratic, intellectual and psychic preparation for entry into the Megamachine. Predictable and safe and irrelevant with respect to the deeper transformations that are required, a continuation and extension of the world we have today rather than a coherent response to it. So I look elsewhere. The moderns thought themselves smart enough and powerful enough to go it alone. Removed ever further from the source and end of life - call it a biological or ecological matrix if you like - we risk being made orphans of our alienated creations - call it technology if you like, it embraces culture in the broad sense of technics. I prefer the proper ordering to true ends within the happy habitus. Eudaimonics. I have always been careful to value and protect the achievements of liberalism. At the same time I have also noted a) the extent to which these achievements are rooted in older traditions of natural law; and b) extending and enriching rights and liberties leads beyond the formal sphere to the substantive and social sphere. What we seem to be left with is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “groundless grounds,” or the “liberal ironist” stance of Richard Rorty, in which we have to live with the irony that our deepest commitments have no necessary objective support. (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York NY: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). I maintain that this view is inadequate, and that at some point the effort of maintaining commitments in a condition of “irony” becomes unsustainable, the underlying pointlessness and meaninglessness sooner or later coming to the surface. It’s like playing a game of football without goals at either end of the pitch – at some point exhaustion is reached and someone asks ‘what’s the point?’ The grounding of our experiences and justification of our views and values cannot be arbitrary, still less empty, in this way. That entails having to provide a realist account of value, knowing the extent to which the ontological status of all things has been found to be uncertain. But I see the inadequacies of the alternative. (And since when was God ever certain? Since when did we have no need of faith?) The early work of Thomas Nagel adopts a similar ironist stance in relation to the “the absurd.” Nagel underlines how difficult it is for human beings to be content with the value experiences that arise naturally within the particular form of life in which we are placed given that we also naturally take the self-transcending step of wondering how our experiences fit within the overall scheme of things. (Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (New York NY: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), p. 21). Human beings are meaning seeking beings, possessed by a cosmic longing for meaning. It is pointless to describe that search for meaning as fruitless and meaningless. If an objective analysis reveals life to be pointless and meaningless, then nothing is more pointless and meaningless than the science or philosophy that says it is so. We know that human beings have a thirst and hunger for meaning, and that life is characterised by a search for fulfilment. The titles of Viktor Frankl’s books are revealing: ‘Man’s Search for Meaning,’ ‘The Will to Meaning,’ ‘Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning,’ ‘The Unheard Cry of Meaning.’ Viktor Frankl and the Reasons to Choose Life These titles indicate the extent to which human beings are the kind of beings who are – or can become – concerned with the big and deep questions about the meaning and purpose of their lives in relation to ultimate reality. Nagel’s designates life as absurd since the things about which human beings express a deep concern about lack an objective grounding within reality and an overall view of that reality. The best we can hope for is a sense of irony in knowing this to be the case. (see Cottingham, ‘The Good Life and the “Radical Contingency of the Ethical,”’ pp. 32-8). I hold that irony and absurdity are utterly incapable of sustaining a vital and confident civilization. Civilisation will fall through a loss of confidence, a loss of hope, a loss of the sense of purpose, a loss of a vision of the future. I, therefore, look for stronger grounds and reasons to sustain our evaluative commitments with respect to truth and justice and a society that not only treats all with respect but unites each and all in a mutually unfolding freedom and happiness. I am aware of the extent I can seem to be going out on a limb. Who, on Earth, believes in all that medieval mumbo-jumbo anymore? Take a look around at the world and consider whether such condescension towards the past is in order. In making gains in some areas, the moderns have suffered some substantial losses in others. Something that I love most of all about Dante is the profound human truth that runs throughout his writing. The ethics are embedded and lived, and not some dry lifeless academic presentation. His cast of characters is at least as rich and as varied as that of Shakespeare, but without a morally neutral, non-committal scepticism. We are hearing the term ‘existential crisis’ a lot these days. Such is life’s journey. Dante doesn’t just address the ‘big questions’, he renders them existentially meaningful, at the personal level, and the appeal lies in the dialogic nature by which these questions are answered. To be alive and well involves more than securing material needs, but also spiritual and existential needs with respect to the cosmic longing for meaning in light of experiences of suffering, death, guilt, and what some of the liveliest minds of recent times have identified as an objective valuelessness, purposelessness, and meaninglessness (no wonder, then, that we have a civilisation unable to muster the collective wit and will to rescue itself). Restoring the frame in which Dante’s argument can be set, makes it possible to make sense of these existential experiences, to diagnose them, and find a way through the reefs and barriers that stand in the way of our well-being. I love Dante for the way that he makes the world – however we may conceive it, and certainly in the teeth of a disenchanting science - existentially intelligible. The search for intelligibility occurs on a number of levels, but is concerned with making sense of the experimental and experiential data of life. I like that Dante brings ‘the transcendent’ – however we want to define these standards of truth and justice – ‘down to Earth,’ that is, within reach of human existential choice, as something more than mere subjective choice, but as a free necessity in which human beings acquire the character and the virtues in learning to conform the will to something greater than irreducible preference (emotivism, expressivism, individualism). We have to get out of this irreducible game the modern world (based on various alienating separations and dualisms, not least fact and value) is plunging us ever deeper into. My argument is sometimes misconstrued as being anti-science (and anti-technology). It is anything but, quite the contrary. In arguing that science needs metaphysics I am looking to affirm and support the worth of truth-seeking as such. It’s an ‘old’ wisdom, of course, the idea that the world expresses an order that is intelligible to intelligent beings, but truth has naught to do with the date at the top of a newspaper. Here, I am referencing to a recurring theme in my work: ‘dialectic and disclosure,’ bridging the gap between contemplation and action, between theoretical reason (our knowledge of the external world, fact) and practical reason (ethics and politics, fact). In a blog essay I refer to “the idea of an intelligible world, that God made humans as intelligent beings who are not only capable of knowing the intelligible world, but are morally enjoined so to do. The notion of humans as truth-seekers is a theological concept. The evolutionary view is that humans are deceivers, manipulators and rationalizers, of others, of themselves, and of reality.” I write on this here: Dialectic and Disclosure As a matter of applied ethics, the intelligible in science refers to observation, explanation, prediction, and control (I don’t like the world control, implying a transgressive manipulation, but it becomes clear what I mean in the text, in terms of a human agency that is both creative and respectful of boundaries and limits); and, in religion/spirituality to the provision of moral purpose and personal meaning. I am very much interested in the moral and motivational economy of human beings and how this is established in social relations and practices, an institutional framework and relational infrastructure, enabling human beings to steer their path through the course of life, to the great beyond, if Dante’s main message is true. I fully realize people will baulk at the religious theme. I no longer shy away from this, I am now an explicitly theistic philosopher. I note that many people declare themselves spiritual but not religious. I understand this positively as an attempt to move beyond a soulless materialism. A thinker who influenced me deeply, and whom I was proud to count as a friend, was Joel Kovel, who wrote beautifully on the need to recover the spiritual dimension. He took a different turn on this to me, but we have the same direction – he wrote well on the debilitating psychological strain of the destinationless voyage. I restore destination in Dante’s journey, I affirm a happy ending. There is no opposition between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is about reality and substance, religion is about form and structure. That distinction is one between metaphysical statements and standards with respect to goodness, value, purpose and the concrete particulars and practices which are the ‘pragmatic’ test effect of such statements. I’m interested in human beings as knowledgeable moral agents at work in a creative universe, their social practices and relations, that awkward world of dissensus and disagreement, that dialectic by which truth is teased out and lived at the level of experience, embodied in our institutions and practices (hopefully). The argument is not the phony, sterile, and irrelevant science vs religion ‘debate,’ nor some bland statement of complementarity. I am instead bringing the worlds of fact and value back into unity, affirming both scientific knowledge and truth and moral knowledge and truth, making both experimental and experiential in history through creative human agency within a ceaselessly creative, purposeful, meaningful, and participatory universe. "Science and religion share the conviction that the world is intelligible, susceptible to be logically understood, but they delineate this under different paradigms. In the cleanest cases we can say that science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things. Meanings and causes have in common a concept of order, but the type of order differs" (Rolston 1987:22). Religion (ethics, the realm of value, if people prefer, I have no interest in a side-debate on the distinction between religion and ethics) aims at the transformation of personal life (and by implication the transformation of society. This interests me greatly, in that I don’t want to just identify and state truth, I want to see the ways in which human beings in their societies and actions assimilate that truth and live in accordance with it. The goal here, then, is "the sudden or gradual change of the individual from an absorbing self-concern to a new centering in the supposed unity-of-reality-and-value that is thought of as God, Brahman, the Dharma, Sunyata or the Tao" (John Hick 1989: 36). I’m not involved in a turf war over concepts in the naming and the framing, although I need to be careful about the extent to which I affirm an anarchic excess beyond totalising Reason. I affirm reason, as far as reason will go. But I relate the “emancipation” or “liberation” pursued by the moderns to an older "salvation” and “redemption,” which is the transformation of the human situation from self-centeredness to Reality-centeredness. There are many ways to express this. I rather like how Dante does it. But I love the way Rousseau – who I affirm with David Lay Williams to have been one of the greatest of the modern Platonists – writes of expanding our being outwards, in terms of others and society (“The Social Contract”), God (The Savoyard Vicar in “Emile,” and Nature (the “Reveries.”) The function of value domain or meaning space is to furnish a practical living context for the transformation of human existence from a condition of estrangement from Ultimate Reality to a condition of being in harmony with that reality. Dante has a thousand beautiful phrases to express that reconciliation of the multiplicities within the One, the well-tempered harmony of the Paradiso. I develop at length the inner music of The Comedy, as the internal music of the universe, the accord of different sounds together. He affirms a musico-moral metaphysic that brings us to attunement – harmony as attunement, “armotto” (Greek) meaning ‘to put together’). In Christianity this typically means that salvation lies in a personal relationship with God. This is the view Dante presents, and I well understand that immediately people who have no truck with religion of any kind will lose interest. The strong metaphysical, moral, and philosophical supports are offered to show why they should pay attention. Religion on this account has a soteriological goal which science – the world of fact and observation with respect to physical processes – lacks. So I examine ‘the God of Einstein/Spinoza’ as a God/Nature that focuses on one half of ultimate reality, but scotomizes the moral half, the God of personal relationships and Love (the distinction between Hashem and Elohim).We need both. I utterly reject the view of scientists and biologists such as E.O. Wilson (and Dawkins, of course) that science can ‘cannibalize’ ethics and philosophy and answer all existential and moral questions (or render them redundant). I think we are looking at a world that mirrors that indifference of a cold and pitiless nature (or however it was that Dawkins characterized the world that God in Genesis repeatedly told us to be ‘good.’) (Not that I disagree with Dawkins in other respects: “Why are we here? What are we for? What is the meaning of life? There's a conventional wisdom which says that science has nothing to say about such questions. Well all I can say is that if science has nothing to say, it's certain that no other discipline can say anything at all. But in fact science has a great deal to say about such questions." I’m fine with that, going back to Aristotle, arguably the first systematic scientist, who certainly sought to relate his biological and zoological studies to his Politics and Ethics. He never lost sight of the cosmological dimension, either, and the cosmic longing for meaning. I’m leery of the view that both science and religion have value on account of their ‘usefulness,’ as though the test of their truth is ‘what works.’ In the end, usefulness and ‘what works’ are not satisfactory answers and are of no value whatsoever when it comes to justifying the reasons for our views, choices, and actions. Truth involves more than practice and usefulness, and is prior. We hold views because we think they are true, not because they are useful or practical. They may well be useful and practical, I’m all in favour of such things, insist on them. I am the anti-Nietzsche. Brave soldier as he was, I am everything that caused Nietzsche a fear and trembling unto madness: Pythagorean, Platonist, Aristotelian, Christian, Catholic, Thomist, Dantista, Rousseauvian, Kantian, Hegelian, Marxist, socialist, eco-socialist, feminist, eco-feminist, communist, trade unionist, democrat, vegetarian. I jest (a little), but my point is there are such things as truth and morality and both matter, both make a difference (I am against indifference, and can see certain trends in scientism and naturalism (modern variant of the old – and untenable - materialism) as a psychic preparation for an inhumanism. We hold our views because we consider them to be true, and not merely useful and practical: it is being true, that these views are useful and practical – and worth acting on. The goal is not only to attain significant truth, but to act on it, to body forth the truth (as Dante argues), to recognize it and live in accordance with it. That comes with symbols, stories, practices, and rituals by which actions are guided and directed, so that truth becomes existentially meaningful, part of our character and embedded in modes of conduct. We aim at truth, and aim to say something that is true about reality, either as such or some part of it. I read a lot of evolutionary biology and psychology, and what strikes me is the extent to which human beings are not rational beings but rationalizing beings. See, for instance, Mark Pagel, “Wired for Culture,” ch 6 “That human society is a marketplace in which reputations are bought and sold”; ch 7 “That we owe our big brains less to inventiveness than to conflicts of interest among social minds engaged in an arms race to be the best at manipulating others;” ch 9 Deception, Consciousness, and Truth, “That our minds might have evolved more to manipulate others and ourselves than to perceive the truth.” Dante affirms the peace of the good God to the ‘constant battles’ thesis, tranquilitas. I return time and again to the genius of Rousseau’s seemingly paradoxical concept of the General Will (a will can only be particular, how can it be general?). Rousseau understood the paradox but also understood that truth cannot just be passively given, but had to be actively willed, and that it’s not just a truth of an objective world as an external inanimate datum or physical process, but also a moral truth. There is, in Dante’s thought, a cogent attempt to reconcile the two great traditions of western philosophy, that of nature and reason and of will and artifice. It also involves a dialectic of disclosure and imposure, building a bridge between contemplation and action. And I love and value how he brings transcendent standards of truth and justice into a coherent idea of political peace here on Earth. All that said … I want to retain the lightness of touch that Dante demonstrated in distilling the essence whilst incarnating this substantial moral and metaphysical infrastructure, in his words but most importantly in real human exchange in context, whilst at the same time offering a robust theoretical presentation and defence. That’s quite a challenge. I have a feeling that I don’t half go on a bit and lose people. But I’m neither a mathematician, musician, nor a poet. In my head, I have it. But like my DoS kept telling me, people can’t see what is in your head, you have to put it down on paper, and in a structured and orderly form that people can follow. I managed it on Marx, but Marx is actually easy compared to Dante. The great pitfall lies in reducing to Dante to his influences, unravelling the threads and losing the magic. Dante is an unoriginal philosopher, it is easy enough to trace his arguments to their sources. That makes for a rather dull book on old philosophical arguments. It’s not the mechanics that matter, it’s where we are going and why. It’s all in the weaving and interweaving.