In Defence of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
On the Loss of Transcendence and the Decline of the West
By Jordan B. Cooper
This book has just been brought to my attention. As an indefatigable fighter for the true, the good, and the beautiful, I have consistently drawn attention to the need for transcendent standards of truth and justice, warning of the consequences of their loss as a result of prevailing doctrines of relativism, constructivism, and deconstructionism. I have not read this book and can’t find a review of it, so am unable to judge its contents and the cogency of its core argument. I would also be cautious of titles of ‘decline’ and need to examine the precise terms leading to that judgement. I don’t know whether the book is good or bad. I do know that I have been writing some such book since the 1990s. Indeed I have written many books on this theme. I shall present a short list of a select few at the bottom (and refer people to my posts on Being and Place, where I continually write on this theme). I address the issue in terms of the loss of metaphysics and of the metaphysical sensibility on the part of people brought up on the sufficiency of science. I argue that science requires metaphysics if it is to do its job as a check against reality properly. Without metaphysics, there are only scientific categories. Sooner or later, there is a loss of reality. The current controversies with respect to the denial of material reality and biological sex by ‘woke’ culture and identity politics really doesn’t grasp the depth of the crisis the world is in. It seems easy enough to stand with the likes of Kathleen Stock in asserting material reality against the wave of radical nominalism taken to extremes. Much of it is indeed intellectually destitute, philosophically incoherent, and socially barren. But it will take more than a re-assertion of material reality and biology to resolve the issue. The only surprise is that it has taken this long for natural science to face the anti-realist implications of metaphysical loss that ethics succumbed to a long time ago. Science will go the same way unless there is metaphysical recovery and reconstruction. At the same time, whilst I do address the metaphysical aspects of the question – defining a concept of ‘rational freedom’ that is located in the philosophical anthropology of Plato and Aristotle – I address notions of ‘decline’ historically, identifying the social relations, processes, and practices implicated in the unravelling of the true, the good, and the beautiful. ‘Reason has always existed,’ Marx noted, ‘just not always in rational form.’ An analysis of the social forms mediating the historical incarnation of truth, goodness, and beauty is absolutely key. Far too many accounts of the modern crisis employ the language of ‘fall,’ ‘loss,’ and ‘decline,’ but do so in abstraction from the evolution of social forms and relations in the historical process, rendering their criticisms empty, thus delivering only an impotent lament for times beyond recall. Metaphysical recovery and reconstruction inevitably involves the use of a lot of long, jaw-cracking words, but I hope I have always embedded these in a lively style and mode of argumentation that makes their meaning clear and accessible. I write a lot on Socrates but insist that the man was not just an intellectual but a man of action who took philosophy into the public square, the agora, a soldier and a stone mason who dialogued with the people. The death of Socrates caused a trauma in the philosophical world from which it never really recovered. Plato pulled clear and retreated to the icy purity of the ideal forms, keeping people and politics somewhat at a distance. I try to overcome that distance, seeking the Philosopher-Ruler as the rule of philosophy through the activation of the common moral reason. As a quote attributed to Thucydides has it, “The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” The origins of that quote seems to be the biography Charles George Gordon written by Sir William Francis Butler, both who were admirable Westerners themselves: "The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards." There are a lot of cowards and fools around today. I make the point not merely to condemn people but to bemoan the waste of so much good and often well-intentioned effort that results from the separation of theory and practice. The failure to bridge the transition from contemplation to action means that a lot of decent thinking turns pale and insipid as a result of timidity in face of people, power relations, and practical realities whilst, at the same time, a lot of action brings about the opposite of what was intended through overly-vigorous and misapplied effort. If it is important that political and social leaders are well-rounded, taking all aspects of a question into consideration, it is no less important that those who are most concerned to change the world actually also have some commitment to understanding that world, before, during, and after the process of changing it. The great imbalances in the world result from the way that theory and practice are held apart, with each losing something essential in the process. Both the archetypes of the scholar and the warrior are essential to the healthy functioning of society, and I would argue that the realisation of the warrior-scholar would render recourse to the Platonic Philosopher King redundant. Whilst we need more people to be philosophers in general, the more they are also citizens, the less need of kings there will be. The problem with the Philosopher-King is that the ruler is still detached from the citizen body, an ideal raised above the democratic public, indicating a failure to incite the common moral reason. This is the theoretico-elitist model I sought to extirpate from radical politics in the 1990s, denoting the tendencies of a knowledgeable vanguard to commandeer the revolutionary process of change and steer it to its own ends, on the assumption that they and they alone possess the true knowledge of the objective interests of the mass they educate and direct from above and from the outside. The obvious example here is Leninism, but I traced the idea back through Marx’s repudiation of the Buonarotti-Blanqui-Weitling model to notions of the Lawgiver, back to Lycurgus. I considered Marx to have overcome the separation of contemplation and action, the philosophical ideal and the means of its realisation, but it seems that the theoretico-elitist model has returned with a vengeance. Whilst conservative critics consistently identify woke and identitarian activists as Marxists and socialists, they are not, entirely lacking the critical realism, foundationalism, and socio-economic roots that define Marxism. Any left wing commitments and positions asserted by these activists are entirely arbitrary and will consume themselves in due course. I made precisely those points back in the 1990s. The problem with vanguards – the Philosopher King – is that they are elitist and idealist, removed from people and reality, and may very well not have interests consistent with reality as it is actually lived and experienced. My aim has always been a Republic premised on a democratic public of active, informed citizens who prefer intellectual honesty and are swayed more by the understanding of policy mechanics than tribal affiliation. Such a public embodies and articulates the moral reason that is common to all by way of participatory structures at all levels of society. How else is the educator to be continuously educated in a viable polity?
I see far too many ‘loss of innocence’ stories being peddled from various standpoints to be persuaded by the word ‘decline’ in the title. I need to know more, along the lines adumbrated above. The notion is a stock in trade of reactionaries of all kinds, the latest being ‘greens’ or ‘environmentalists’ who are obsessed with seeing the contemporary world as irredeemably bad and heading for catastrophe, tracing its damnable condition to some ancient wrong – sky gods, dispossession, technology, men (of course) and other such demons. It’s errant ahistorical and apolitical nonsense of zero explanatory value. I find it nauseating to see how many who think themselves radical and progressive actually indulging modes of thought that are thoroughly reactionary and regressive, as if there really was some Golden Age and as if we could simply return. This is a complete misreading of the problem. The problem is not chronological, it is structural. Even if – and that’s a big ‘if’ – there was a Golden Age of peace and plenty, it is neither possible nor desirable to return to it. In engaging with people who reason this way it soon becomes apparent to me that they harbour fantasies of a bucolic hunter-gatherer or primitivist existence. I don’t know what to make of them. In many respects, such notions seem clear examples of decadence in an urban culture, an indulgence on the part of people who perceive that contemporary society has reached an impasse but who are utterly lacking hope in progressive possibilities, refusing future transformations to yearn for the simplicities and perceived wholeness and fullness of a pre-modern existence. It’s a hopeless fantasy which contains some worrying misanthropic strains, whether its adherents know it or not. The tendency of environmental activists to circumvent democratic process and wield a war of attrition against ordinary members of the public is a surface manifestation of this misanthropy. I get the impression that many still agree with David Attenborough’s view of humanity as a virus on the planet. The idea that several billion human beings could live a hunter-gathering existence is so hopelessly naïve that I call it a naïve cynicism, setting impossibly high goals in anticipation of inevitable failure. They seem rather blasé about the prospects of the dying off of billions of human beings. Or worse. I remember when an environmentalist at the dinner table casually offered the view that “it is time to cull the herd.” When I checked him by asking which government he would invest with the power of culling he seemed startled, as if it were the first time in his life he had had to address some real politics.
The idea that there was some problem-free pristine pure past is utterly fanciful. The view is decadent. All ages are confronted by problems and this age is no different. As soon as I hear the word ‘decline’ or its variants in a title, then I prepare to be faced by the kind of dire warning that used to be written on the sandwich-boards worn by scruffy men. Where once these scruffy men would tramp our city streets and hang around on street corners, now they are all over social media anti-politics.
That said ….
I’ve been arguing for years that people need to start taking the moral environment at least as seriously as they do the natural environment, even more so, in truth, because it is what human beings think and do in relation to one another and in relation to their environment that will determine how successful human attempts to deal with the physical aspects of the environmental crisis will be.
Societal deterioration and collapse is almost invariably preceded by a process of demoralisation, a destabilisation and dissolution of old certainties and assumptions, not just a loss of standards but a loss of confidence. The result is a disorientation in which people can no longer chart their way to a feasible future. Not only do they not see the way to that future, without purpose, they don’t see the point of even trying to get there. The will and the hope has gone with the vision. Always, this process is accompanied by an internal confusion and disintegration which destabilises the peaceful self-regulating functionality of established societies. As societies are overcome by internecine conflict, chaos and a confusion of standards and purposes follows, sapping energies and inducing a loss of confidence. Environmentalists can currently be found attempting to radicalize the population by fear, issuing dire predictions of economic and institutional collapse, famine, war, torture, rapine, and myriad other such hardships. They hold this to describe the ‘existential crisis’ that is upon us. This is shallow. The things they describe are merely the physical aspects of a much deeper crisis. Unless the crisis is addressed in its depths, then the physical aspects will be untouched, becoming merely the alibi for an authoritarian and austerian environmental regime – would-be universal environmental reformers one day could very easily become universal environmental tyrants the next.
This is just a surface manifestation in politics of a problem that runs much deeper. The current obsession is with ‘wokery’ and cancel culture. These, too, are just surface manifestations of a problem that at root concerns the loss of transcendent standards of truth and justice. Nietzsche characterised the loss of an authoritative and overarching moral framework as the ‘death of God.’ The world has yet to get to grips with Nietzsche’s challenge here, either in terms of moving on towards Nietzsche’s life-affirming nihilism – if some such thing is possible – or recovering the transcendent standards that Nietzsche felt to be illusory projections of certainty. Instead of projections of objective reality and truth, Nietzsche gave us perspectivism. Nietzsche’s view is not mine, but it is a cogent view, hence I engage with it. It’s one or the other. We live in the in-between world that Nietzsche feared would be likely – human beings discarding the unitary God only to become their own gods miring the world in a religiosity constantly contending with itself. This is the world that Max Weber, influenced by Nietzsche, described as a polytheism, renascent gods ascending from their graves and taking new impersonal forms. And personal. In relativizing the Absolute, human beings in the contemporary age have absolutized the relative. Where truth and goodness are matters of existential choice in an objectively valueless, meaningless, and purposeless world, there is no unitary God, only as many gods as there are human beings. That is a world of the warring gods that Weber warned of. We now find ourselves in a place where truth has been kicked into the same gutter that goodness had been kicked into once ethics was made a matter of mere subjective choice. Many who took their stand on science were happy to see the realms of fact and value separated, the former raised over the latter as the one and only source of true knowledge. That view can now be shown to be complacent. Nietzsche knew the true and the good to be twin poles: lose the one and the other will follow in short course. Even the commitment to pursue truth in science is a moral commitment. With the divorce of fact and value into rational and non-rational realms, fact-based rationalists are left in the impossible situation of having to defend the rational by non-rational means. The paradox crops up whenever you hear people of scientific persuasion defending ‘the value of science’ against those who are in denial of truth. They’ve been caught out. It is a short step from asserting that individuals are able to choose the good as they see fit to a position in which individuals choose his, her, or their truth in like manner. There in a nutshell is the real dilemma of the existentialism that catastrophizing activists and alarmists keep harping on. I very much doubt that the end of the world is nigh. But the end game of modern-day existentialism is most certainly nearing, aided and abetted by a flood of scarcely reasoned obfuscations, nihilisms, relativisms, denials, and downright lying. This is existentialism as subjective choice and preference over against a view of transcendent standards that cleaves to the idea of objective truth and reality. Since the 1990s I have been arguing for an essentialist metaphysics that holds that a thing is essentially something and something essentially. I have been at pains to insist that such a view does not entail fixed and static categories set in stone for all time but is premised upon organic growth and development in terms of the actualization of immanent healthy potentials. I have also been at pains to differentiate essentialism from biology, to allow for the moral, cultural, and creative aspects of actualisation. I not only feel vindicated in that view, I feel like I am light years ahead of the current morass in which the main controversy pits those asserting their rights to self-creation when it comes to reality and identity against those insisting on the material reality of biological sex (and by extension all those scientists who hold science to be a rational and evidential check against reality). I have argued for a long while now that science needs metaphysics to do its work, however much scientists may see such an argument as idle and irrelevant philosophising. We now see the difficulties that science gets into when it lacks metaphysical support. Science is currently being assailed by the most appalling metaphysics, by people who seem to proceed by justification by faith alone – you only understand when you accept the truth of the positions being advanced – if you don’t accept, then you don’t understand and are therefore the target for further education.
By the fruits you shall know the tree. This situation reveals social constructivism and deconstructionism in their true light, no longer skulking in the academic shadows and shallows, but out in society, their job of re-education/miseducation, and their mission now well advanced through the institutions and media which govern and steer society.
I contested it back in the 1990s, and so saw it all coming. The odd thing for me is back then I was among a number of left-wing and Marxist thinkers who had no trouble in identifying these modes of thought as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism.’ Terry Eagleton, David Harvey, Frederic Jameson, and Istvan Meszaros were among the leftist philosophers who influenced me the most here, but they were far from being alone. But they were certainly swimming against the intellectual and political tides in a way that postmodernists and poststructuralists were not. The anti-realism and anti-foundationalism of the ‘post’ thinkers was explicitly anti-socialist and anti-marxist. I made a great point of arguing that whatever leftist commitments remained amongst such thinkers were, at base, arbitrary and ungrounded. The necessary relations that Marx had established between social relations and value positions and politics had been utterly severed. Instead of essentialism, we had a discursive and linguistic turn in which politics and identities didn’t exist until discursively created. Such a position was a denial of human agency, I warned. Instead, human beings were now reduced to passive beings, clay in the hands of the ideological potter. Deconstructionists argued that essentialism was inherently oppressive in fixing identities. This was a gross caricature of essentialism. Marx was a pioneer of dissolving false fixities which naturalized social relations, but he did so whilst using explicitly essentialist categories of form, necessity, potentials, and lines of development. The constructivists and deconstructionists in contrast are rootless and hence fruitless; their handiwork is all around us in an age of increasing excommunication.
I can remember being picked up in my research writings for writing on truth and taking a stand on truth. I was told that truth is a relative concept and should be written as ‘truth’ or ‘Truth’ to indicate its function as a projection of and mask for power. There was something of an attempt of a fightback by analytical philosophers, but the assertion ‘truth matters’ was hardly persuasive on account of merely setting a dry conception of truth, modelled on the natural sciences, against its social mediation. The Sokal and Bricmont books failed to hold the line, the same with respect to the book ‘Why Truth Matters’ by Jeremy Stangroom and Ophelia Benson. Whilst such attempts to fight back against relativism and its consequences for thought and society were well-intended, unfortunately the authors advanced a very narrow and brittle conception of truth, the kind of thing which incited the rebellion against ‘truth’ in the first place. There was the same condemnation of feelings, emotions, values, beliefs etc, with whole areas of human life put outside of the realm of true knowledge and truth. I took a different approach whilst challenging the same destructive modes of thought.
Truth and whether it matters or even exists seems to have become the seminal question of the contemporary age, but the challenge to truth has been around since the nineteenth century at least. Frankly, both Hegel and Comte, to name just two, were attempting to recover truth in the post-religious world they saw opening up. Unfortunately, we live in an age of philosophical amateurism and ignorance allied to arbitrary political commitment, meaning that those most concerned to press ‘their’ truth are unable to ask the deeper questions let alone answer them. Their preference is for a subjectivism and a relativism that makes it impossible to argue either for or against any proposition, since reality isn’t really real and transcendent standards don’t exist, only perspectives and interpretations which are filtered by arbitrary and rootless biases, passions, and preferences. There is no consistency given the explicit rejection of coherent intellectual standards. Essentialism is thrown out through the front door as self-created value and identity is asserted, only for it to be smuggled in through the back door as a racial essentialism. This results in absurdities, along the lines of ‘If you are white, you are racist.’ On the one hand, there is a denial of necessary relations between things, on the other the reassertion of that very thing in the worst possible terms. The same with assertions of cultural appropriation. The whole area is a complete nonsense, a playground of would-be tyrants who, controlling the language, assert the right to control culture, people, and society. Reflex has taken the place of reason. This is the price that society has to pay when its key institutions and media jettison truth in favour of relativism. The arbitrariness is not merely an intellectual danger, leaving us philosophically destitute, but a political danger – the loss of truth has deleterious practical consequences. The loss of transcendent standards of truth and justice enable the ‘woke’ to assert that since people refuse to be re-educated and accept his/her/their ‘truth,’ then they must be forced into compliance or silenced. This follows as a result of a perverse logic that runs deep in constructivist and deconstructivist thought. And you can see the results in any number of areas, from Covid to climate campaigns to ‘tell the truth.’ Unable to persuade people to accept the ‘truth,’ the agents of re-education set about resorting to force to ensure compliance. ‘Would-be universal reformers’ (Marx’s words of condemnation) turn very quickly into actual universal tyrants. The path for this tyranny has been cleared by the academics, the evolutionary psychologists, the behaviourists, the technocrats and the psychocrats who engage in indoctrination instead of education, not only suppressing dissenting views but inducing a self-suppression on the part of activists and campaigners. Freedom of speech, thought and action now exists in the public realm as no more than the freedom to agree or face excommunication. I have done my bit to contest this wannabe overclass of educator manipulators.