Abstract
The U.S. Army General, George S. Patton, reportedly told his troops, ‘No bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his.’ D.C. Schindler’s recent volume—released as part of Notre Dame’s series, ‘Catholic Ideas for a Secular World’—is a philosopher’s call to arms for the kind of country worth dying for, namely, a polis in which freedom essentially means conforming oneself to an objective, higher Good. But in view of the conflicts between this more classical vision and much of contemporary political liberalism, the book sometimes feels like the war of ideas version of Patton’s advice: the battle plan consists largely in convincing the enemy of its impending self-destruction.
To start with a summary, Schindler argues that modernity is defined by a self-defeating vision of personal volition, in which the self subverts its receptive capacity to the Good, by assuming (falsely) that it possesses the power (potentia) over such a transcendent force of attraction. The Aristotelian priority of act over potency is here inverted, since the exercise of the will is not understood as the individual’s response-able movement towards or away from any actual good perceived in the order of reality (and thus a conversion from potency to act), but is instead, merely an external demonstration of the individual’s more basic power of choice. This is ‘dia-bolical’ because it effectively separates—διαβάλλω: ‘to set at variance’, ‘to divide’—the action of the will from the Good towards which the will moves. It creates an extrinsic relation where there once had been ontological participation.
In Part One, John Locke takes centre stage, not because his account of the will has been particularly influential upon subsequent developments, but because he ‘sums up and crystallizes’ the contradictions that lie at the heart of modern liberty (p. 132). So, for example, in response to the scholars’ debate about Locke—was he ultimately a compatibilist or a libertarian?—Schindler insists the answer is ‘yes’. Locke gives us reasons to conclude both that the will is ‘free’ because it is able to respond conscientiously to a transcendent good beyond itself, and that the will is ‘free’ because it self-generates its motion towards any particular object of its desire, arbitrarily. Schindler brilliantly exposits Locke here, showing how both shoes fit, which amounts to saying neither shoe truly fits when it comes to engaging the world beyond one’s subjectivity.
After a brief discussion of how, despite their differences, Kant and Spinoza also share this idea of freedom as ‘spontaneous and unconditioned causality’ (p. 147), Part Two explores the diverse ways such an idea has infiltrated a host of values, ideals, and institutions in the Western world (though Schindler mainly has the U.S. in view). Schindler roams broadly, spreading his discussion across the following diverse territories: the personal values of choice, self-determination, and autonomy; the political ideals of equality, freedom of the press, the power to vote, rights, and privacy; and the cultural forces of power, technology, academic freedom, access to information, and the free market. The overall point is that the emancipation of liberty from any correspondence with real transcendence unhinges means from ends, thus creating more diabolical effects in culture more broadly, as ‘power’ comes to serve as the currency of human relations.
In Part Three, Schindler shifts gears dramatically, aiming to retrieve an alternative view of freedom based on Plato and Aristotle. This is not meant as philosophical pining for a lost golden age, for as Schindler insists, quite rightly, ‘we do not have to re-create truth and goodness as a response to the diabolical’ (p. 283). Rather, the perennial challenge is to reorient ourselves to reality, which for Schindler entails a retrieval of original sources gifted with more authentic metaphysical insight than Locke.
To be sure, Schindler is inspiring in his breadth of discussion and depth of insight. His treatment of Locke is poignant and creates an effective chiaroscuro with the pre-modern account of liberty he hopes to revive. As a resource for understanding of how we got here, the book succeeds admirably, and provokes further reflection about the ‘ontological emptiness’ of many current cultural phenomena. Beyond this however, and despite my sympathies with Schindler’s overall position, I’m honestly not sure what to do with the constructive implications of the argument. Schindler goes to such great lengths to show how tight is the weave between metaphysics, ethics, and politics, that it is hard not to feel confused at the crucial turning point of how we are to confront diabolical modernity—as if we could critique its defining element as only so much illusion, while at the same time claiming the need to exorcise it. As Schindler says, the answer is ‘not execution but exorcism, which is not a rejection but a reorientation, from the innermost depths, to the good. To think otherwise would be to make the diabolical a positive reality in itself, which represents, we might say, a diabolical interpretation of the diabolical. It remains caught in the very trap it is attempting to dismantle’ (p. 195).
But if the diabolical has no positive reality in itself, what exactly is there to exorcise? The plan remains unclear on this step, probably because there is some dissemblance going on, methodologically. Responding to the ‘diabolical’ by way of ‘exorcism’ surely must entail the invocation of the divine name, but Schindler appears duty bound to remain more at the level of metaphysics, no doubt in hopes of gaining a wider audience in political philosophy. I’m just not sure it works. Either we unmask the gods of modernity in the way of a prophet, showing them up as only so much wood and stone (and thus, the wood and stone are surely good for something) or we presume (more hazardously) to heal the victims of possession in the way of a priest—certainly not by ‘reorienting’ them to their demons, but, indeed, by casting the latter out with the curse of damnation. It is hard to do both tasks at the same time, which might be why, beyond his expert analysis of the conflicts, Schindler resorts more consistently to a third plan of action: perhaps we can convince ‘the other dumb bastards’ that indwelling their pseudo-reality will only lead them to more fragmentation, more isolation, and ultimately, their own self-destruction.
Having said all that, I learned so much from this book that I would be remiss not to end this review positively. Schindler should be thanked for so clearly demonstrating what it is that makes a classical metaphysical vision coherent and compelling, and for conducting such a perspicacious diagnosis of why certain contradictions exist in many pockets of modern culture. It is a testament to the book’s inherent credibility that this reader, at least, is mainly concerned with the more practical, if not to say tactical, implications issuing from the argument.