The Catholic Underpinnings of Rational Freedom
“The Politics of Hell By Urban Hannon
https://thejosias.com/2022/06/16/the-politics-of-hell/ This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but the lecture “The Politics of Hell” by Urban Hannon (June 2022) brought home to me the extent to which a full-blooded Catholicism underlies my philosophical work of the past couple of decades. That Catholic ethic is more of an underpinning and cohering theme than something explicitly stated and foregrounded. Indeed, in the 1990s and well into the 2000s, my work is more of an unconscious reworking of key Catholic themes through the entirely different tradition of early modern German philosophy. It is no wonder that I selected Immanuel Kant as my key interlocutor. Kant is the philosopher with whom I critically engaged through the writings of first Hegel and then Marx. Kant’s roots lie in the Pietist Protestant tradition, a tradition which coloured his attempts to put the religious ethic on a rational and secular basis. Kant was also, following Rousseau, a Platonist. For all of his undoubted insights – and I have praised Kant at length in various writings - I found the approach uncongenial to the Aristotelian tradition I sought to trace through Hegel and Marx. It took me until 2013 and my book on St Thomas Aquinas to notice the extent to which my critique of Kant was not merely Aristotelian but Catholic to the core. In the process, I also noticed that my reading of both Hegel and Marx, identifying Marx as a fundamentally moral thinker, was also profoundly Catholic. In effect, I established the cogency of the social and political thought of Hegel and Marx by an unconscious borrowing from the teachings of my Catholic background. I understand now why my examiners for my viva voce were making jokes about Alasdair MacIntyre. Their comments puzzled me, seeing as I had made but passing reference to MacIntyre in my thesis, but now I see clearly that they considered my thesis to be pointing in the direction MacIntyre has taken, only to veer in another direction via Rousseau and Kant to Hegel, Marx, and Habermas. I should have paid more attention to the jocular comments of my examiners! It is now abundantly clear to me that I was raising questions that involved answers that took me beyond the secular incarnation of rational freedom, with its basis in a self-legislating reason (Kant and Hegel) and self-creating labour (Marx), to the contemplation of the transcendent divine. Throughout my thesis, I made continual reference to ‘the philosophical ideal,’ which is such a vague and nebulous term that I am surprised I wasn’t made to clarify its meaning. It was perhaps considered that the term itself wasn’t of primary importance, seeing as my argument focused on Marx’s resolution of philosophical critique into sociological critique, bringing about the abolition of philosophy and the contemplative-passive approach to the world conceived as an objective datum. I think that heady notion is an accurate characterisation of Marx’s breakthrough to the reality of the self-made social world. But already I was worried that Marx’s critical-revolutionary praxis could be interpreted as a value-free pragmatism or power philosophy. It wasn’t in Marx, as I made clear, but it could be in others, especially those who reduce truth to the relativism of power-infused social relations, and who then supplant the creative agency of revolutionary subjects with their own superior and superogatory mediation. Hence I was concerned to argue that Marx incorporated certain values and principles from philosophy and ethics into his emphasis on practical transformation. I stand by this view, but now see that I was attempting to strengthen Marx’s case by resources that come from outside of Marx’s own critique. I had spotted the dangers contained in Marx’s praxis of dissolving the philosophical ideal, with its moral and rational component, into a pure power philosophy, and had sought to check against it. ‘Are you sure this is what Marx said’ my Director of Studies would ask me, ‘or is this you saying that this is what Marx ought to have said?’ He knew, as I ought to have known, that my moral recovery of Marx as a critic of atomism, separation, disconnection, and dislocation was motivated and informed by a tradition other than Marx, a tradition made richer, more rounded, and more humble by the centrality of God.
Everything that I argued via Marx I have since argued much better and more securely via St Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. That Catholic core was present all along.
I don’t go as big on the diabolical as does Urban Hannon in this lecture, and I write of the Politics of Love and Paradise rather than the Politics of Hell. But the critique of atomisation, division, disconnection, and dislocation is so very similar as to be the same, which is to say, Catholic to the core.
The similarity between the fundamental principles of Catholicism and Catholic social ethics with core themes in my own work are clear. I’m more sympathetic towards and respectful (and maybe knowledgeable) of the ‘rational’ tradition of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx than are the more intellectually austere Catholics. But whilst I temper the austerity in my forthcoming book on, Dante, Dante’s Politics of Love, I neither compromise nor dilute it: it is there from first to last.
Given my attempts to integrate Plato and Aristotle, Catholicism, Thomism and early modern ‘rational’ philosophy, it is little wonder that I feel like an exile in a desert landscape when it comes to contemporary politics.
Before I quote passages from Hannon’s lecture which are consistent with views I have developed over the last two decades, I should point out that I did also criticise Kant for his view that the political problem could be solved by a “race of devils.” In making this criticism I attempted to accuse Kant of rationalising a divided and diremptive society of competing individuals motivated only by self-interest. (In my viva voce I joked with Kantian examiner Gary Banham that Marx’s condemnation of Kant as ‘the leathery-tongued lickspittle of the bourgeoisie’ was perhaps a tad reductive). There is still something in that criticism of Kant. But it is only fair to point out that Kant’s “race of devils” argument was most decidedly not an argument rationalising and justifying bourgeois devilry, merely a minimal assumption which brought the problem of achieving the political peace within the scope of the way human beings are, with no need for an even more diabolic attempt to coerce human beings into angelic shape via some theo-political state manipulation. That minimal assumption, bringing the solution to the political problem within ordinary human reach, strikes me as sane and sober.
I would also add that my sympathetic critique of Kant was motivated by an awareness that his admirable project of political peace to be achieved by the ideal civic constitution is ultimately a failure, with Kant’s intersubjective ethic succumbing to the subjectivism of modern society. It is this that led me back to St Thomas Aquinas. There should be nothing surprising about this progression (or regression, critics may say, as they do of MacIntyre) in my thought. St. Thomas drew upon Plato and especially Aristotle in coming to describe how the moral economy (oikos-nomoi) works. Unconsciously, it was precisely this strain of moral economy that I first sought to trace through Kant, Hegel, and Marx, before a decade or so later drawing the conclusion that a self-legislating reason and self-creating labour necessarily curves in on itself, fracturing the world into a ‘men as gods’ polytheism. This plunges human beings into the endless and unwinnable war of irreducible subjective preferences and choices.
Remove God, and reason and humanity will soon follow.
The phrase “incurvatus in se” was (perhaps) coined by St. Augustine of Hippo. Incurvatus in se is a Latin phrase that means to be "turned/curved inward on oneself," describing a life that is lived "inward" for oneself rather than "outward" for God and others.
There is a need for a greater ‘something’ that draws each self out of itself into communion with something greater than any of us are, either alone or even together, a transcendent standard that draws each and all into a communion of souls. That is precisely what the modern world has lost as the result of ‘the death of God.’ The effects are now with us with division, fragmentation, and diremption eating away the common ground from under our feet. In the process in which each has become his or her own god, choosing the good as they see fit, society has become a sphere of universal egoism and antagonism in which individuals are driven by a self-interested search for a purely private good, rejecting all reference to the common good provided by the social and moral order, and rejecting most of all the transcendent common good which is God Himself. It is no wonder I affirm transcendent standards of truth and justice, then.
Marx said much the same thing in his emancipatory critiques which demanded the social restitution of power from the alien forces that governed the human world. Crucially, and fatally, however, he classed God with the state and capital as an alien human power to be practically reappropriated by human beings. Marx rejected the view that God is the ultimate transcendent standard for the view that human beings as the self-authoring subjects of history set their own standards. That sounds liberatory and, for the best part of two decades I argued in its favour. The problem is that once you replace God with humanity, ethics fractures into a polytheism of values – there are as many goods and gods as there are human beings. And once the individual becomes his or her own god, there can be neither compromise nor communion, only an endless, unwinnable war fought in the inescapable quagmire of irreducible subjective opinion. In these conditions, the restitution of social power invites humanity curving inwards on itself, accompanied by the enclosure of God’s anarchic surplus and core in a totalising reason and labour.
It’s a winnable war, since most people remain sane and sensible, and in touch with their common moral reason. This is precisely why the active organised minorities have to push so hard and divide so much. Passive and atomised outside of culture and media, people can think the situation hopeless and submit to the slow grind of a relentless daily pressure, taking them further and further away from their moral matrix. We should remember that those putting on the pressure can only deconstruct, divide, and destroy. They really have nothing constructive to offer; they are parasites promoted by an electronic media that fosters the illusion that ideology is reality. They can be beaten by building; we can join together and build. As John Ruskin said, when we build, let us build as if we build forever. We don’t have to be a passive and atomised mass preyed on by external forces, but can institutionalise and embed truth, beauty, and goodness, we can defend liberty by speaking freely.
Instead of curving inwards, there is a need to expand being outwards. To Rousseau’s great credit, he did always emphasis this expansion of being in relation to God as well as nature and society.
The only thing left to say is that I argued everything that is contained in this lecture by Urban Hannon, and much more besides, in my Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity from 2013. The book may be considered a happy accident. I received an invitation from Harvard Divinity School to submit a paper to a conference they were putting on. It took me by surprise. Not quite knowing how these things work, I felt I had been singled out especially. Although I was keen to respond, theology wasn’t within my area of expertise. I had a think and came up with the idea of subjecting a thinker within my own area of expertise – I chose Kant – to a critique from the man I considered to be the pre-eminent Catholic thinker, St Thomas Aquinas. The problem was that I didn’t know a great deal about Aquinas. When I started to read him I found him revelatory, endlessly surprising. And the fact that I took to Aquinas like a duck takes to water serves to underline the extent to which core themes in my work really were in tune with Catholicism. I didn’t need to adjust to any great extent, other than to make room for God …
I submitted the paper, The Thomist Critique of Kantian Philosophy, and it made the final reading period before losing out to some fashionable “post” something or other nonsense. I gathered the notes together and issued them in book form. It has proven to be one of my most popular works, being consistently in the Academia Top 5% since 2013. It has also received a lot of praise from those who have read it.
My granny and uncle, and odd teacher, perhaps saw something when they suggested that I should become a priest. I’ll settle for bit-part theologian instead.
“The Politics of Hell By Urban Hannon
The following lecture was delivered at the Pro Civitate Dei summer school in La Londe-les-Maures, France on June 12, 2022.
“Let’s start with a little guided meditation. I want you to imagine a society—a society made up of self-absorbed, atomized individuals—a society in which the various members tolerate each other, because they know they need each other, but only so that each of them can achieve his own private ambitions and desires—a society, moreover, that is in open rebellion against its own origins. Sound familiar yet? Now I want you to imagine that, once upon a time, this society had been noble, and civil, and good—but that its citizens—especially its elite citizens—out of a disordered sense of pride, effected a revolution against that received ancient order. Imagine, if you will, that this revolution had some ironic consequences, such as that, in the name of liberating themselves from being subject to any official king, these citizens wound up creating for themselves an even more oppressive and authoritarian regime—and that their honorable hierarchy, which in their pettiness they would have liked to dissolve altogether, was merely replaced by a dishonorable hierarchy—that they traded an ordered harmony for hostile power relations, and a common good for private vices. Now imagine that this populace—who, again, hate their own heritage and devote all their time and energy to contradicting it, loudly—is in fact deeply unsatisfied, frustrated, lonely, sad. And yet imagine that, despite their unhappiness in this society, they also live in constant, ever-growing fear—fear that this society of theirs, and everything it stands for, is on the verge of defeat. Imagine, finally, that this hysterical anxiety of theirs makes them even more odious and offensive and obnoxious. Probably by now you are not having to imagine, because unfortunately what I have been describing is not imaginary. This is a society—or at least, a “society”—which is very real, which is all around us, and with which we are forced to interact on a daily basis. I am speaking, of course, of the society of Satan and his demons. This is a talk about the politics of hell.
I used to think that St. Thomas Aquinas had never addressed liberalism in his political writings, living, as he did, several centuries before the Enlightenment. I was wrong. He treats it carefully and critically in the text we have just considered: Prima Pars Question 109, on the political arrangement of the demons. It is terrifying how similar St. Thomas’ account of the politics of hell is to Immanuel Kant’s account of the ideal government. Kant even refers to such a state as being perfect for “a population of demons,” secured with general laws for conserving their common accord, laws that pit particular sentiments against each other, so that they might procedurally neutralize the proud egoistic dispositions of each individual. “Kant is here at antipodes with the political thought of St. Thomas Aquinas,” remarks Fr. Bonino. As I expect everyone here will know well, St. Thomas teaches that society arises from the natural sociability of man expressed in civic friendship and ordered to his temporal common good, itself ordered to his spiritual common good attained in and through the Roman Church. It is the Catholic alternative to Kant’s Lutheran individualist state of nature, in—another Protestant’s catchphrase—a war of all against all.
It is the angelic alternative to Kant’s republican rule for a race of demons. For in St. Thomas’ Dionysian worldview, the angelic hierarchy is to serve as the archetype of our human societies, both political and ecclesiastical. James Madison was wrong, therefore, that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” As we have seen, the angels have an elaborate government, and theirs is meant to be the model for ours. But alas, too often of late, our states have taken the demons for their political inspiration instead, with our citizens driven only by a narcissistic search for their private interest, rejecting all reference to a common good of the moral order, beginning with the transcendent common good which is God himself. Granted, there are dissimilarities here as well: Unlike the angels, our societies are not founded upon essential inequalities, since all men share a single species; and unlike the demons, no human society is definitively fixed in its rejection of God. Nonetheless, the similarities are pronounced, and they are not accidental. Liberalism has traded a hierarchy unto God for an every-man-for-himself tyranny.
“The demonic society offers us an interesting theoretical model, for thinking about the not-always-theoretical possibility of a society that either rejects or disregards any reference to the objective moral good, and merely ensures a more or less peaceful coexistence among individuals who are deemed evil and guided solely by the pursuit of self-interest. Reflection on the demonic city confirms our contemporary experience: Such a society is feasible! It survives by virtue of a certain “a-moral,” unjust, and precarious balance that is established between the subjective interests of each of the individuals involved. However, this society survives above all and most profoundly because the natural tendencies that lead each being toward the objective good of its own nature remain active in it, though disavowed and opposed on the reflective level.
“In other words—what is old hat for us by now—liberalism survives by exploiting pre-liberal resources, the resources of the very metaphysical order and natural law that it speculatively denies.
“By grace, St. Thomas teaches, we are to be taken up into the orders of the angels, perhaps filling out the places in the celestial hierarchy vacated through the fall. And so our politics should be practicing for that ascent, and indeed helping to accomplish it, by ordering us together toward our true good. Whereas liberalism prepares our souls to be slotted into the demonic order of hell, of which it is an alarmingly accurate imitation. May our better angels prevail.”
I feel compelled to add that the views expressed in this lecture do not do full justice to Kant’s philosophy, and that the dissolution of Kantianism is a complex affair that needs to take into account forces which Kant himself sought to constrain and curtail. His failure here has been the common failure of the modern world. For a more sympathetic reading, I refer readers to my own work on Kant. To repeat, whilst Kant’s work is bourgeois and liberal, but cannot thereby be reduced to the politics of a ‘race of devils.’ I should know. I tried to make that very same claim in my Viva Voce and was pulled up immediately by Kantian philosopher Gary Banham, who pointed out that these were used by Kant as mere minimal assumptions for the political – Kant’s concern was to establish political principles that even a race of devils could accept and make work. It wasn’t an argument that modern society actually is or should become a race of devils. All that said, the world is far from realising Kant’s ideal civic constitution – the problems of the political peace require something more than Kant could provide.
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