Arche Vol.III, No.2 (Spring 2020)

Arche | Ἀρχή

Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory Spring 2020 | Volume III, Issue No. 2

Arche | Ἀρχή

Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory Spring 2020 | Volume III, Issue No. 2

A Journal Published by the Philosophy and Political Theory Students of Patrick Henry College

STAFF & CONTRIBUTORS editor-in-chief

Mikael Rose Good senior editor publication manager

Thomas Keith senior editor

Noah Farley

The Arche Journal of Philosophy and Political Theory is an undergraduate journal publishing academic essays on topics of philosophy proper and political theory.

Arche (Ἀρχή) is an ancient Greek word meaning “beginning” or “origin.”

Carrying the idea of a source or ground of being from which other things flow, it captures the purpose of this journal: to present careful writing dealing with first principles and the deepest questions of reality and human life.

Essays in the journal represent the opinions of the authors and are not necessarily the views of Patrick Henry College or the editors.

ISSN 2471-2655 Patrick Henry College 10 Patrick Henry Circle Purcellville, VA 20132 (540) 338-1776 archephc@gmail.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Authors of the respective essays in this publication retain copyright privileges.

Copyright © 2020 • Printed in the United States of America.

TA B LE O F C O N T EN T S Letter from the Editor

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The Cult of the Minotaur

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A Discussion of Power and Nobility

By John Southards

A Work Unto Itself

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The Metaphysics of James Wilson

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Plato on Punishment

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On the Problem of Futility

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Art and Commodification in Arendt’s Thought

By Marina Barnes

By Benjamin Phibbs

Gorgias and Rehabilitation

By Noah Farley

By Mikael Rose Good

LET TER FROM THE EDITOR

Letter from the Editor As a graduating senior, I am obligated to think about what these last four years of my life have meant. A key reference point is a book I read during my senior year of high school: The End of Our Exploring by Matthew Lee Anderson, a reflection on the role of questioning in the life of a Christian. This book implanted in me a desire to ask good questions and live my way into the answers.

It gave me a vision of the end—the final destination and purpose—of my own exploring: Christ Himself, the embodiment of truth, who keeps us safely within the bounds of His care even as we wander. Four years later, one of my last college assignments was to memorize “Little Gidding V” from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the passage from which Anderson draws his title. Anderson’s book and Eliot’s poem are poignant bookends to my undergraduate years. These lines have taken on a weighty meaning: With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

I have not yet “arrived where I started” in the fullest sense, and I think I can say the same for my fellow students. But I have experienced a taste of this arriving in a hundred little moments when I suddenly see something that I thought I already knew—something bigger and more wonderful than I thought possible.

The increasing sum of these moments strengthens my yearning for the day when I arrive at “the source of the longest river” and at last discover “the hidden waterfall”: the ever-springing Fountain, the one true source of life and joy.

To arrive and see the Caller is our true end. Until then, we are called to step into mystery. Although Love draws us and guides us in our wandering, often we cannot actually see where we are going. The answers that we do have are mostly bits and fragments—clues to the deep mysteries of existence. We cling to these clues, but we do not understand them yet. We have only intimations. It will be a long time before we arrive and “know the place for the first time.”

With this in mind, I’ve come to see philosophy (and intellectual endeavor in general) as an expression of exile. We thirst for the truth as we wander in the wilderness. We wonder why we exist in this world and what is the meaning of our lives. Our attempts to formulate answers to these questions feel like shots in Vol. III, No. 2

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the dark. Philosophy is messy and perplexing, and we often get it wrong. And yet, paradoxically, the truth is behind us and before us even when we cannot see it. Even in our exile, we are “safely comprehended by goodness and order,” as Anderson says. And so we must not cease from exploration. We must keep on searching out mysteries as we look forward to the day when we finally understand why we live.

This journal publishes papers on a wide variety of topics in philosophy and political theory, but all are attempts to understand fundamental truths about reality: the “permanent things” of which T. S. Eliot speaks. In this sense, they are the fruitful work of exile. This issue—which is being published during the very tangible exile of a worldwide pandemic—is no exception. In the first paper, John Southards reflects on the corrupting influence of Power. He considers how we can develop the virtues of the noble man who seeks the good of others over his own. Next, Marina Barnes engages with Hannah Arendt’s view on art, arguing that art is capable of transcending time even when modern society tries to reduce it to a consumer good. In the third paper, Benjamin Phibbs explores the metaphysical views of James Wilson, who understood God as the wise Creator who governs His creatures by a good law. This truth about reality has profound implications for how we live together in society. In the fourth paper, Noah Farley analyzes Plato’s idea in the Gorgias that just punishment helps to direct the soul towards its good. This idea, he shows, provides a foundation for modern rehabilitative theories of punishment. Finally, I explore the problem of futility and the obstacles it poses to conservative political philosophies. I suggest that love for the human person created by God transcends the futility of the temporal and grounds our politics in something eternal.

As most of us are still in some form of quarantine, I hope this issue will be an encouragement to you in your solitude. I hope it will lift your gaze above the affliction of this world to the goodness, truth, and beauty that always beckons us.

Mikael Good Editor-in-Chief 29 May 2020

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The Cult of the Minotaur A Discussion of Power and Nobility John Southards

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he race has begun. The 2020 election is in sight. As presidential candidates and their campaign managers even now begin to slide to the edge of their seats in anticipation of that glorious day, we citizens must steel ourselves to hear a slew of factoids about every candidate. But since we are about to hear the resumés of these candidates rattled off in well-crafted soundbites, perhaps we ought to evaluate the candidates like an interviewer would evaluate job applicants. In a sense, this is what candidates expect us to do when they list their major accomplishments: they hope that the American people will be captivated by their competence (how many times did we hear John Kasich say he balanced the budget during the 2016 GOP primaries?). As potential employers, voters should want to know that their applicants can perform the job. However, employers want to know more than the qualifications of their applicant, which is why they ask, “Why do you want this job?” If we are to treat political candidates like job applicants, we should pay as much attention to their motivation for ruling as we should to their ability to rule.

In a job interview, we might expect the applicant to declare that he has real enjoyment for the work, or that he is called to work in that field, or sometimes, if the applicant is honest, that he needs the money. Very few politicians ever claim that they are seeking office because they enjoy debating policies or are looking for a way to feed their families. Nor would we expect them to. Does this mean that politicians are always motivated by some noble obligation? It seems unlikely.

What is more probable is that there is some natural reward proper to being a polVol. III, No. 2

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itician that does not belong to most occupations. The reward that is more proper to politics than anything else is power.1 But if we are to evaluate these alternative motivations of noble obligation and power, we must first consider what they are. Let us begin with the latter.

In 1945, the French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel undertook the project of understanding the nature of Power. He found that Power tends to expand. For centuries, Jouvenel suggests, the centralization of Power had found its locus in the monarchy. And when the monarchies which dominated the West were overthrown in favor of democratic government, it was thought that the encroaching nature of Power was at last defeated.2 But it was not. The growth of Power was not destroyed but disguised. “Now, masked in anonymity, it [Power] claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will.”3 But the general will, Jouvenel argues, is a façade, a curtain behind which Power lurks. The democratization of Western states, rather than freeing them from the chains of despotism, seemed, but failed, to weaken Power. “But,” Jouvenel warns, “it is of Power’s essence not to be weak.

Circumstances arise which make the people themselves want to be led by a powerful will.”4 In the name of democracy, the people give away all of their Power, thinking themselves the wielders of it, not knowing that they have created a tyrant greater than history has yet seen.5 Before going further, we need to understand what it is that Jouvenel means by “Power.” A translator of Jouvenel’s work, J.F. Huntington, explains, “the word ‘Power,’ whenever it begins with the capital letter, denotes the central governmental authority in states or communities.”6 Which is to say, “Power” is simply a term used to convey centralized power within each jurisdiction.

Yet, throughout Jouvenel’s discussion, Power is spoken of less as a governmental authority and more like an independent agent, whose essence and devices are not unlike that of Tolkien’s One Ring. Rather than merely treating Power as 1. Some have objected to this assumption, claiming that a desire for greatness or fame is just as natural a reward of politics as power. I do not deny that these may play a role in motivation, but it is hard to claim that greatness or fame are more natural rewards. Consider the classic motif of a young heir to the throne who is ruled by his guardians. The young heir may be considered king de jure, but his overseers are the ones running the kingdom de facto. Is it not obvious that, though they do not have greatness or fame, the overseers are the rulers and the heir is not? Power naturally proceeds from rulership, greatness and fame do not.

2. By “democratic” and “democracy,” I refer to any form of government that vests the authority of governance in the people.

3. Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, trans. J.F. Huntington (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948), 13.

4. Ibid., 14.

5. Ibid., 15.

6. J.F. Huntington, “Translator’s Note” in On Power, xx.

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force employed by the government, Jouvenel gives Power a name: the Minotaur.

And because he has named Power, Jouvenel has, though perhaps unwittingly, conferred upon it sort of identity, or being, or even agency. While discussing Hobbes’ Leviathan, Jouvenel expresses, “metaphor is always a dangerous servant; on its first appearance it aims but to give a modest illustration to an argument, but in the end it is the master and dominates it.”7 Perhaps Jouvenel has been a prophet of his own work, for in reading his discussion of Power while envisioning the Minotaur, we can come to see Power more as a person than a phenomenon.

But first, we must investigate the metaphor itself. What is the Minotaur?

What should such a metaphor invoke? First, and most obviously, that Power is a sort of monster. It is not a plough-horse that man may harness for his own use. It is not that with which man can have amicable relations. It is other. It is frightening. Second, Power must be contained. The well-known legend depicts the Minotaur as being imprisoned in a labyrinth to be kept from mankind. Third, Power is the product of unrestrained, brutish passions, a “veneris monimenta nefandae.”8 Perhaps most concerning of all is what fear of the Minotaur installs in men: worship. Meditating on the might of the Minotaur, men mistake the monster for a god. Jouvenel warns that there “comes a time when whoever has taken hold of Power, whether it be a man or a gang, can make fearless use of its controls. These users quickly demonstrate the crushing enormity of Power. They are thought to have built it, but they did not. They are only its bad tenants.”9 The Minotaur, I want to suggest, has two different sorts of worshipers: priests and laymen. The priests are those whom Jouvenel describes, those who want to own Power and will take every chance they can to lord it over the fearful.

Such men believe that they have created Power themselves, until the Minotaur consumes them. But the laymen do not pursue Power itself. Like most casual worshippers, the laymen are more concerned with the benefits external to their religion than those internal to it. So, Jouvenel quips, “The natural requirements of Power made the fortunes of the common people.”10 That is, to preserve Power, the priests often placate the people. The laymen prefer to be comfortable men rather than great men. They do not want to own Power, only to be in the good graces of those who do. Together, these classes form what I call the “Cult of the Minotaur.” What binds these two classes together is the approval of those despicable qualities which characterize the Minotaur: monstrous, dangerous to 7. Jouvenel, 60.

8. Virgil, Vergil’s Aeneid Books I-VI: With Introduction, Notes, Vocabulary, and Grammatical Appendix, ed. Clyde Pharr (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964), VI:26. Pasiphae, the wife of Minos, had intercourse with a beast and gave birth to the Minotaur, a reminder of unspeakable love.

9. Jouvenel, 15.

10. Ibid., 200-201.

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mankind, and appetitive.

But, we are tempted to ask, can all men belong to this Cult of the Minotaur? Is there not a remnant? To answer this, we must momentarily shift our gaze away from Power.

The Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset, writing a little over fifteen years before Jouvenel, claims to have discovered two types of men: the mass, or average, men and the select men. “The mass,” Ortega explains, “is all that which sets no value on itself—good or ill—based on specific grounds, but which feels itself ‘just like everybody,’ and nevertheless is not concerned about it.”11 Select men, on the other hand, rather than being those who are superior to everybody else, are merely the ones who do not think of themselves as being just like everybody.12 Though it is tempting to fit these conceptions of men into our understanding of social classes, Ortega not only warns against this but claims that “a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar.”13 Which is to say, the democratization of the West has placed mass men in control of every social and political association.

What does this empowerment of mass men do to society? Ortega is solely concerned with its product in the modern age. As technological and economic discoveries rained down prosperity on society, mass men came to see historically unprecedented blessings as merely a part of the natural world. “What before would have been considered one of fortune’s gifts, inspiring humble gratitude towards destiny, was converted into a right, not to be grateful for, but to be insisted on.”14 Once mass men dominate both social and political spheres, society is characterized not only by overwhelming ingratitude but by the demand for the satisfaction of its appetites. “These attributes together,” Ortega quips, “make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.”15 And like a spoiled child, mass men have no conception of when to stop. They can only stop when someone or something stronger than themselves forces them. This force must come as a surprise to mass men, for not only do they see themselves as no different than everyone else but, in a democracy, they come to believe that superior men are a myth.16 So, the society under the rule of mass men becomes appetitive and never considers the possibility of becoming better.

But what of select men? Unlike the mass men, they see that the blessings 11. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. anonymous (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1993), 14-15.

12. Ibid., 15.

13. Ibid., 16.

14. Ibid., 55.

15. Ibid., 58.

16. Ibid., 59.

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of their time are not natural to all men. The select men are not content to live as they are, but instead constantly seek to better themselves in accordance with a standard that exists outside of themselves. “These are the select men, the nobles, the only ones who are active and not merely reactive, for whom life is a perpetual striving, an incessant course of training.”17 Though they are not characterized as being better than the mass men, the select men are constantly striving to become better.

How does this framework compare to the Cult of the Minotaur? Thus far, it seems that Ortega’s two types of men loosely align with the cult. The laymen and the mass men are both contented with their station as inferiors. Yet, they are contented in so far as they believe that they can obtain the pleasures they seek without working for it. Similarly, those of the priestly class do not seem so different from select men. Both groups desire to rise above the common station and long to be those through which Power is directed. But if this is true, it seems that everyone belongs to the Cult of the Minotaur.

In our present desperation to escape from Power’s control, let us reexamine the relationship between the priests of the Minotaur and the select men. Let us remember that the priests believe they have naturally obtained Power while the select men are characterized as those who are aware of the source of their gifts.

How can the select men, if they are not as ungrateful as the priests, belong to the Cult of the Minotaur at all? Perhaps select men are more complex than they appear.

For all his excellences in thought and writing, Ortega was perhaps off the mark when he theorized merely two classes of men. The need for a distinction between two sorts of select men arises when we learn of their conflicting attributes. On one hand, Ortega asserts that “it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude.”18 That is, the select men are those who possess the noblesse oblige, that obligation to serve those who are less able than themselves. Here, the select men are depicted as gallant, distinct from those ungrateful mass men who demand that gifts be given to them. But on the other hand, Ortega expounds, “[t]he privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favours; on the contrary they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment.”19 Which is to say, select men hold their position because they have earned it and, if anyone contests that merit, select men will reestablish their rule through force.

This betrays a misunderstanding of gratitude. The select men, we are led to 17. Jouvenel, 66.

18. Ortega, 63.

19. Ibid.

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understand, do not possess the ingratitude that mass men do. But how is it that these nobles have become grateful? They must have first reflected on the gifts that have been given them and acknowledged them as gifts. Those who were gifted with a natural ability or station greater than the average man must go one step further—they must acknowledge that such gifts were given either by posterity or by God, and thus, the recipients cannot repay the benefactors. As we learn from the parable of the ungrateful servant, when one has received a gift that cannot be repaid, he ought to imitate his benefactor and likewise give a similar gift to one below his station.20 This is the gratitude of the man with noblesse oblige.

Such a man recognizes that he did not earn his position. And so, it would be a contradiction in terms to define the select man as he who possesses noblesse oblige and who thinks he has earned his position of superiority.

So, we must break Ortega’s select men into two different sorts of men: those whose primary motivation proceeds from their noblesse oblige and recognize that the gift of another has made them distinct, and those whose primary motivation is to distinguish themselves from everybody else by their own actions. The former sort of men I shall call “nobles.” The latter, as they are consumed with what Augustine called libido dominandi—the lust for mastery—and seek to lord it over others using what they believe to be their own might, I shall call “meritocrats.”21 How does this new element improve our understanding of select men and the Cult of the Minotaur? The meritocrats are ungrateful, in that, thinking they have earned their position of Power, they see themselves as the primary, if not only, source of their Power. So, the meritocrats do in fact belong to the priestly class within the Cult.22 On the other hand, the nobles do not belong to the cult at all. Only by breaking the select men into these two distinct groups can we reconcile Ortega’s theory with the Cult of the Minotaur.

Tentatively, then, we have our answer: not all men belong to the Cult of the Minotaur. But surely, one may ask, by defining the meritocrats as those who are ungrateful, have I likened them too much to the mass men? And if there is no real distinction between these two types of men, what has been the point of this whole discussion?

Are mass men and meritocrats the same? Yes and no. These types of men are similar in that they both neglect to acknowledge any giver of good gifts. But what separates the priests from the laymen, or the meritocrats from the mass men, is not the presence of gratitude in one group but not the other. Ingratitude, 20. Matthew 18:23-34.

21. Cf. Augustine, City of God, trans. George E. McCracken (London: Harvard University Press, 1957), Bk 1: Preface.

22. As the priestly class is comprised of meritocrats I shall use the terms interchangeably for the remainder of the discussion. This rule can also be applied to laymen and mass men.

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instead, is a mark of belonging to the Cult of the Minotaur. What differentiates these two types of men is what they want and why they want it, not how they receive it. Meritocrats possess a great drive to overcome and rule; mass men have no desire to place themselves above others. Meritocrats demand their rights because they have earned them; mass men demand their rights simply because they are human. Meritocrats want Power itself; mass men want the benefits of Power.

Though the distinction between these two classes of men is subtle, we cannot dismiss its significance. If either class obtains Power, the desires of that class will drive its use of force. This is why Ortega was concerned that the reins of society were being passed from select men to mass men. Though we cannot admire the priests for their motivation for ruling, we should not be too hasty to dismiss them as incompetent rulers. Even if they do not acknowledge that their merits are gifts, that does not disqualify them from having any merits. Jouvenel points out that even the man who rules for the sake of Power has a “need to establish his authority, to maintain it and keep it supplied, [which] binds him to a course of conduct which profits the vast majority of his subjects.”23 But if the mass men are given Power, what sort of rulers would they be?

Recalling that Ortega likened these men to spoiled children, perhaps it would be easier to first imagine what a room full of spoiled children would be like. Some children would express their desires and then infer a demand from it. “I want to play tag. Let’s play tag.” Of course, all the children who have a like desire will quickly agree and those who have an opposing desire, say, to play cards, will quickly protest. In most groups of children, we may imagine that they would vote on the matter or follow the popular kid’s lead. But in either of these situations, the children would have to be willing to submit their will either to the majority or to an individual. Since it is not in the nature of spoiled children to submit their will to anyone or anything beyond themselves, they would split into two different groups according to their preferences. Yet, even while one group plays tag and the other cards, one child will grow bored of his current occupation and demand a third alternative. Either the process will repeat itself as more and more groups are made, or everyone else will be pleased with their activity and leave the child to his own devices. If it is the former, the groups will continue to split apart until only one child per group remains. If it is the latter, the lone child, not knowing how to suppress his appetites, will throw a tantrum, which will have no effect on the other spoiled children. This process will likewise repeat. In either case, the children will break off association with each other because they cannot have their own way. Which is to say, a room full of spoiled children leads to a sort of anarchy. But anarchy, even among children, cannot last for long. A 23. Jouvenel, 118.

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leader will arise, and the children must learn to give up their claims. If mass men hold Power, we should expect a similar trajectory.

Jouvenel briefly outlines the stages of arbitrary Power, which bear an undeniable resemblance to the thought experiment. First, the people will be unhappy because they do not believe they are receiving what they are owed. Second, the laws will do nothing to remedy the situation, since the legislation is “nothing better than the hurried botching of short-sighted interests and blind passions.”24 Third, Power becomes stronger, because it is not being reined in by any limitations. Fourth, a mob demands a despot to order the unrestrained Power. This demand “breeds ambition.”25 In other words, Jouvenel predicts that the revolt of the masses that Ortega laments is temporary. The meritocrat rises and fills the vacuum created during the unstable rule of mass men. This is precisely what historian Christopher Lasch noticed in the United States in the 1990s. Lasch denies that the U.S. is still operating under a democratic system, that the laymen possess the same authority as the priests. Instead, Lasch sees “a reversal in which age-old inequalities are beginning to reestablish themselves.”26 He is concerned that the “best and brightest,” the experts and managers, have risen above the average man and claimed rulership for themselves. This meritocracy “has little sense of ancestral gratitude or of an obligation to live up to responsibilities inherited from the past. It thinks of itself as a self-made elite owing its privileges exclusively to its own efforts.”27 Lasch transformed a discussion of abstract political theory into a very real, current issue. However, Lasch does not suggest that we attempt to escape the Cult of the Minotaur, only that we return to a democratic system where the elites do not hold all the Power. Though Lasch proclaims, “[i]t isn’t simply a question of whether democracy can survive [… but] whether democracy deserves to survive,” he does not immediately answer whether democracy does deserve to survive.28 But it is certainly Lasch’s aim to paint a picture of what a good democracy looks like. Equality, Lasch argues, was not historically centered around wealth but around an opportunity to learn. In this regard, citizenship created equality.29 Political equality is not merely a gift that must be received, but one that must be stewarded; it “has to be accompanied not only by formal training in the civic arts but by measures designed to assure the broadest distribution of economic and 24. Jouvenel, 402.

25. Ibid.

26. Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 30.

27. Ibid., 39.

28. Ibid., 86.

29. Ibid., 59.

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political responsibility.�30 Democracy deserves to survive, Lasch thinks, if we are willing to make it work.

Yet it seems that Lasch has too optimistic a view of people. As we have already seen, as a democracy turns in on itself, it acclimates a people to handing more Power to the state and eventually turns itself into a meritocracy. To have a noble democracy, as Lasch desires, we would first need a vast majority of our mass men to become noble-minded. And with such a caveat, a noble democracy runs into the same objection facing Marxism. It is perhaps not wholly impossible to turn so many minds from their own desires toward the good of the community, but it is highly improbable. We should not dismiss Lasch without a second thought, but neither should we be eager to accept him with open arms.

What is to become of society? The Cult of the Minotaur now reigns in the form of a meritocracy, and if we were to bring those priests level with laymen, we would only grant more Power to a new generation of priests. What hope remains?

Perhaps the nobles are our last recourse. But before we give ourselves over to this mysterious class of men, we ought to learn more about them. Having grown up in a democratic society (or a meritocratic society that wears the mask of democracy), the idea of noblesse oblige is foreign to us. Not growing up with the language of nobility, we have not learned to speak of nobility in its natural form.31 Though there is no time to take a course on this language, we may be able to partially see nobility as its native speakers do if we immerse ourselves in their stories. In this case, it is from the literature of the aristocratic English that we may awaken some slumbering memory of nobility. I want to suggest that even a cursory look at the works of Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens can give us a better grasp of nobility.32 These classic writers do not speak of a time when all men were noble, but rather of a raging war between nobles and meritocrats. William Shakespeare’s laudable history, Julius Caesar, depicts such a battle at the dawn of the Roman Empire. Cassius, who represents libido dominandi, is the first to reveal his true 30. Lasch, 88.

31. Cf. C.S. Lewis, Meditations on a Toolshed. Lewis offers a brilliant reflection on the difference between looking at something externally and internally.

32. A reader has asked why we should bother dwelling on English literature when we are primarily concerned with American politics. I hope it has been made clear that, when trying to understand nobility as those who are ruled by nobles, we cannot turn to American literature because no American has lived under nobles. There is certainly an alternate view of nobility that may be proffered by Americans, but I have assumed that this is precisely the view we have grown up with.

I rely on English literature because it embodies a culture wholly different from ours in matters of nobility but familiar enough that we need not begin with their history to understand it (as we might need to do for German or Russian literature).

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colors. Caesar has returned from besting Pompey, and the Romans are enthralled with him. Even as the people offer Caesar a crown, Cassius tells Brutus of Caesar’s weakness. He speaks of a time when Caesar challenged him to race through the Tiber where Caesar, overpowered by the waters, called for help.33 Cassius, who had mastered the river, quite pompously proclaims, “I, as Æneas, our great ancestor, Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber Did I the tired Caesar.”34 Unwilling to bow to such a man with seemingly less merit than himself, Cassius hopes to enlist the aid of Brutus to thwart Caesar’s rise to power. Cassius even reminds Brutus of his namesake, who was renowned in all Rome, suggesting that he too can become kinglike.35 Yet Brutus, who represents the man with noble intentions, at first refuses. “Brutus had rather be a villager Than to repute himself a son of Rome.”36 Yet it is not long before Brutus gives in to a conspiring band of senators and agrees to help undertake the assassination of Caesar.

But even then, Brutus strains to think in categories of nobility—“Let’s kill him boldly, but not wrathfully; Let’s carve him a dish fit for the gods, Not hew him as a carcass fit for hounds […] This shall make our purpose necessary and not envious.”37 But for all his good intentions, the words of Brutus’ wife, Portia, reveal him as a man who has lost his nobility.38 She accuses him of no longer being gentle and exclaims, “You have some sick offence within your mind.” So, it is no great shock when Brutus commits to the cause, joins rank with Cassius, and kills Caesar.

Shakespeare depicts a tragic scenario where all men are consumed by a longing for Power. We cannot dismiss the warning embedded in Julius Caesar: the enticements of Power may corrupt even the noblest man. As we study the virtue of noblesse oblige, we must not deceive ourselves into thinking that it is a quality or a disposition that is inherent to certain men. Instead, it is a virtue that must be developed and, as the tragedy of Brutus points out, maintained.

While Shakespeare warns against the corruptibility of nobles, Jane Austen suggests that the corrupt can become pure. From the beginning of Austen’s book, Emma, we find the protagonist, a wealthy, young aristocrat in a small town, is best described as a meritocrat: “The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much of her own way, and a disposition to think 33. William Shakespeare, “Julius Caesar,” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, ed.

George Clark and William Aldis Wright (New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1911), Act I, Sc. II: lines 100-111.

34. Ibid., Act I, Sc. II: lines 112-115.

35. Ibid., lines 158-61.

36. Ibid., lines 172-73.

37. Ibid., Act II, Sc. I: lines 172-4, 177-79.

38. Ibid., lines 279, 268.

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a little too well of herself.”39 Emma is not a cruel, power-hungry aristocrat like Cassius, but she does enjoy too much the perks of the upper-class without realizing its responsibilities. Emma’s pleasures come not from organizing the state and accumulating military might, but by ordering others’ lives by matchmaking.

Before the first chapter is complete, the reader learns that Emma’s good friend and former governess, Ms. Taylor, marries a local gentleman. Though sad to see her friend go, Emma consoles herself with the knowledge that she made the match. Such knowledge, Emma avows, “may comfort me for anything.”40 She proceeds to announce that matchmaking “is the great amusement in the world!”41 Such an amusement, though its indulgence invokes the sarcastic laughter of Emma’s friend Mr. Knightley, is seemingly harmless.

Yet it is not long before Emma’s practice takes on a monstrous form. In the absence of Ms. Taylor, Emma begins a friendship with a pretty girl, Harriet, who has obviously received a lesser education and, being abandoned as a child, does not belong to the same social stratum. When Harriet receives an offer of marriage from the respectable farmer, Mr. Martin, and is uncertain how to respond, Emma eagerly joins in. Hoping that she can force Harriet and the local vicar, Mr. Elton, to fall in love, Emma subtly convinces Harriet to deny Mr. Martin.42 When Mr. Knightley, who had supported Mr. Martin’s endeavor, learns of Harriet’s refusal, he is flabbergasted. “Then she is a greater simpleton than I ever believed,” Mr. Knightley exclaims. “What are Harriet Smith’s claims, either of birth, nature or education, to any connection higher than Robert Martin?”43 Mr. Knightley soon realizes that such a refusal could not have been made by Harriet alone: “You saw her answer! you wrote her answer, too. Emma, this is your doing.

You persuaded her to refuse.”44 Mr. Knightley, a depiction of a true noble with sensibility, sees clearly what sort of usurper Emma is becoming. In a 2009 TV series adaption of Emma, Mr. Knightley is given a line which, though it does not proceed from Austen’s own pen, clearly captures the spirit of the gentleman’s frustration toward Emma.

“Harriet and Martin are not your playthings, your dolls to be told what to do and to marry […] at your bidding. They are flesh and blood!”45 This language is strikingly similar to Jouvenel’s discussion of Napoleon’s Power, where the “intoxicating pleasure of moving the pieces on the board of a social game breaks out 39. Jane Austen, Emma (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996), 4.

40. Ibid., 9.

41. Ibid., 10.

42. Ibid., 47-50.

43. Ibid., 55.

44. Ibid.

45. Emma, season 1, episode 1, “Episode 1,” directed by Jim O’Hanlon, written by Sandy Welch, aired Jan. 2010, on BBC.

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continually in Napoleon’s correspondence. […W]hen he regulates the vast traffic of men and goods, he fills, as it were, the coursing of an infusion of new blood which supplements his own.”46 Though on a much smaller scale, Emma is engaging in the same practice and enjoying the same pleasures as Napoleon. She is orchestrating the lives of those over whom she has Power because, in controlling someone else’s life, there is a thrill of exhilaration.

Emma’s rehabilitation begins when Mr. Elton, who she had convinced herself really had fallen in love with Harriet, finally proposes. The proposal, unfortunately, is to Emma. In the following days, Emma gives herself up to introspection where she develops a sort of humility—immature in nature, but humility nonetheless. She recognizes that she was wrong to arrange her friend’s marriage, though she still firmly believes that she was right to dissuade her from marrying Mr. Martin.47 This agonizingly small first step toward true nobility is significant.

It illustrates that becoming a noble cannot be performed like flipping a switch.

The virtue of nobility must take root and, even then, it grows slowly.

Emma’s greatest reform, like Mr. Elton’s proposal, comes most unexpectedly. On a social outing, Emma allows her passions to get the better of her and openly mocks a poor, simple woman for her habit of talking too much. In private, Mr. Knightley lays bare the situation. Emma, the most prominent woman of the town, has publicly insulted an inferior and has tacitly encouraged everyone else to join in. The poor woman has been hurt, but, rather than becoming bitter, has quite genuinely lamented that she must be a constant thorn in Emma’s flesh. “I would not quarrel with you for any liberties of manner.” Mr. Knightley admonishes Emma, “Were she your equal in situation—but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case. She is poor […] Her situation should secure your compassion.”48 Mr. Knightley not only shows Emma that she indulges in a lust for lording it over her inferiors, he reminds her that she ought to possess the noblesse oblige. Her station does not demand that she ignore those below her but that she have compassion on them and serve them.

That night, as Emma once again dwells on her character, she realizes that she “had been often remiss, her conscience told her so; remiss, perhaps, more in thought than fact; scornful and ungracious.”49 This reflection comes, however, not merely from the scolding of Mr. Knightley but from a recognition of the unearned favor her doting father bestows on her. It is not until Emma comes to be grateful that she learns to be gracious. From that point on, Emma resolves to watch herself, to be kinder to those below her, and begins by personally visiting 46. Jouvenel, 135.

47. Austen, 126-27.

48. Ibid., 346.

49. Ibid., 348.

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the woman she had wronged.50 Nor is this change in Emma a mere fancy that she adopts to relieve her guilt, to be dropped as soon as her conscience is clear. By the end of the story, we can see a new humility in Emma. When Mr. Knightley informs her that Harriet and Mr. Martin are engaged to be married, Emma is pleased to hear it. When Mr. Knightley, hardly believing Emma could change her opinion on the match, prods for more information, she merely replies, “at that time, I was a fool.”51 Though Austen does suggest that a meritocrat can be transformed into a noble, we must not take from Emma the idea that anyone can simply become noble on their own. Throughout the work, we can see two primary elements that led to Emma’s reformation. First, Emma does not grow until she reflects on her character in light of the consequences of her actions. Nobles are, by their essence, reflective beings. They are not only reflective by virtue of their introspection; they literally reflect the goodness given to them onto others. Second, Emma must be driven to reflection by the stern words of Mr. Knightley. This suggests that to develop the noblesse oblige, one must be guided. Just as it is unlikely that Emma would have ever become a noble on her own, it is unlikely that any man in Power will, of his own accord, turn his mind from the thoughts of a meritocrat and embrace the disposition of a noble.

The idea that one must be led to proper reflection is perhaps most forcefully illustrated in Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol. Scarcely has the story begun when Ebenezer Scrooge, a wealthy but stingy businessman, is asked to give money to the poor. Scrooge maintains that since he supports the prison and Union workhouses (likely through taxes), he has no reason to give to the poor.

It would be better for the poor to die and “decrease the surplus population.”52 Though Scrooge’s refusal to give to the poor was intended to be held in contempt of the viewers, the action itself no longer seems quite out of place. The gentleman taking donations is shocked, but how surprised would we be to hear that a wealthy man decided not to give some of his money to the poor? As Lasch noted, modern meritocrats “cannot be said to subscribe to a theory of noblesse oblige, which would imply a willingness to make a direct and personal contribution to the public good.”53 The modern, democratic man is more likely to see the horror of Scrooge’s action because he has unconsciously joined in a tradition of hating Scrooge than because he believes Scrooge is shirking the duty inherent to a man of means. Before we can appreciate much of what Dickens has to say, we must view Scrooge not merely as stingy but as someone who failed to be a noble in a 50. Austen, 348.

51. Ibid., 438.

52. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 6.

53. Lasch, 45.

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community where he is expected to be one.54 Much like Emma, Scrooge must be guided in reflection, though unlike Emma, he is literally guided through his past, present, and possible future. With the help of the Ghost of Christmas Past, Scrooge is shown much that he had forgotten. It is not until Scrooge sees himself as a schoolboy that he wishes he had listened to a carol sung by a young lad outside his door and had paid him for it.55 He recalls the kindness of his old employer and remembers how the woman he loved broke off their engagement because of his love for money.56 The man of business is forced to reflect on who he was, who he became, what he lost, and what he gained. Scrooge begins to see that he has not made a profit, after all.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is no kinder and shows Scrooge those whom he has an obligation to help. Scrooge sees the merry but dilapidated home of his employee, a poor miner family, and his nephew’s Christmas party, where they are laughing about the wretched Scrooge.57 Finally, Scrooge is shown hideous children, who represent all the neglect men of means show children of want.

Horrified, Scrooge asks if they have any means of provision. “‘Are there no prisons?’ said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ‘Are there no workhouses?’”58 Scrooge sees that he has not merely made foolish decisions in the past: he is daily making himself a monster.

At last, the ominous Ghost of Christmas Future shows a time when the poor become a little merrier because a rich man has died, leaving his goods unaccounted for and freeing his debtors.59 Scrooge begs to know whose death it is that has so changed people’s lives.60 The Ghost of Christmas Future somberly points Scrooge to his own grave. Scrooge, thinking he is to die in earnest, awakens in his bed, and finds himself a changed man. Dickens concludes by telling his readers, “He became as good a friend, as a good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew.”61 To be transformed from a meritocrat to a noble, Dickens suggests, a man must be forced to reflect on who is he is, which is constituted by who he has been since childhood. He must contemplate the gifts he has been given and look 54. The careful reader should not overlook Scrooge’s often forgotten first name. Ebenezer is the name the prophet Samuel gave to a monument recognizing the aid of God (1 Sam 7:12). The name should suggest to readers that, by his very nature, Scrooge is supposed to be a testament to the grace of God. 55. Dickens, 22.

56. Ibid., 24, 27-28.

57. Ibid., 37-42, 43, 45-48.

58. Ibid., 49-50.

59. Ibid., 55-58.

60. Ibid., 62.

61. Ibid., 68.

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around him and see whether others benefit from his gifts. Finally, he must come face-to-face with his own mortality. The noble recognizes that his life will end and his gifts, material and immaterial, will pass away. Because the noble expands his temporal horizons beyond the present, he sees himself as part of his community, rather than seeing his community as one of his belongings.

Perhaps Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens do paint a clearer picture of nobility, but, one may object, is there really any greater hope that the Cult of the Minotaur will be replaced by nobles than by Lasch’s democracy? And if so, how would we transition from our present meritocracy?

The hope is greater, though it is still slim. Lasch’s democracy demands that the majority of men become selfless. A government of nobles at least only asks that a minority possess the noblesse oblige.

Yet, a project of establishing a formal nobility cannot succeed in one generation (if ever). We must keep in mind that possessing the noblesse oblige is not the sole criterion for being a good ruler. This entire discussion has been predicated on the notion that we must look for a quality in our leaders that complements, not replaces, competency. It is entirely possible that a priest in the Cult of the Minotaur could possess better tools for ruling than a noble. There are more virtues proper to a statesman than nobility (e.g. prudence), and the noble ought to take care to develop them. Perhaps the greatest barrier to ever securing noble rulers would be for an incompetent man with the noblesse oblige to rise to some great formal position of power and, with good intentions, do violence to his community.

But just as an employer wants to choose an applicant that is both capable and properly motivated to perform his job, voters should want to choose an applicant who is both competent and possesses the noblesse oblige. This desire will never be fully satisfied. No ruler will be perfectly qualified. But voters nonetheless have a duty to look for the most qualified candidate, and the presence of nobility is simply another quality that they should search for.

Shakespeare’s warning should not be far from our minds, either. The influence of the Cult of the Minotaur is strong, and even if we elected men with noble motivations, they can be corrupted. If we want to increase our chances of having rulers firmly rooted in nobility, we must refrain from placing our hope in making the next president noble. Instead, we must begin to develop a long-term strategy.

Many may object to the notion of establishing any sort of nobility in a nation as democratic as America. They may refuse to be satisfied until I have clarified exactly how this may happen. Such objectors shall be forever consigned to dissatisfaction on this regard, for I can do no such thing. The idea of nobility must be planted and watered in our society before it can be expected to bear any weight. If this project has any hope of success, that hope lies in training men, women, and children to think in terms of gratitude and grace, to feel an obligaVol. III, No. 2

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tion to help those who cannot help themselves, and to reflect on their placement on this earth. This project must include teasing out what it would mean for an elected official to be a noble. I have not any definitive idea of what such a noble would look like, save for the felt need to help others out of gratitude. This idea is merely a seed that I am trying to plant, not a thick oak on which I rely for strength and comfort. But we can hope that, with care, the seed will become a sapling and will grow strong and beautiful in a way that we have not seen before.

What I ask for is not faith that I am right in every regard concerning nobility.

All I ask is that citizens genuinely investigate nobility and, if they see the good I have seen, that they might seek to understand it and to pass that understanding on to their children. If everyone who is a part of this discussion simply agreed with every jot and tittle I have proposed, I would consider this project a failure.

My goal is that this inspires some to understand nobility more than I ever will.

How, my reader may ask, are we to begin the task of training others to be nobles? Who is to undertake such a project? I submit that you, my reader, now have the tools to begin training yourself. I have only given a cursory glance at Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens, and countless other authors have discussed nobility. Use these wise authors as guides. Reflect. Ask yourself, even now, what it is that you have been given? Whom is it in your life that, owing to his lack of gifts, you ought to help? And if you find this either convincing or convicting, discuss it with others. If Jouvenel is correct, the strength of the Minotaur grows every day. His reach can only be beaten back when we learn to ignore his temptations to Power and instead seek to help those less fortunate than ourselves simply because it is good.

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Bibliogr aphy Austen, Jane. Emma. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996 Augustine. City of God. Translated by George E. McCracken. London: Harvard University Press, 1957.

Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. New York: Dover Publications, 1991. de Jouvenel, Bertrand. On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth. Translated by J.F. Huntington. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1948.

Emma. Season 1, episode 1, “Episode 1.” Directed by Jim O’Hanlon. Written by Sandy Welch. Aired January 2010 on BBC. Lasch, Christopher. The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995.

Virgil. Vergil’s Aeneid Books I-VI: With Introduction, Notes, Vocabulary, and Grammatical Appendix. Edited by Clyde Pharr. Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1964.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Revolt of the Masses. Translation anonymous. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1993.

Shakespeare, William. “Julius Caesar.” In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by George Clark and William Aldis Wright. New York: Grosset & Dunlap Publishers, 1911.

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A Work Unto Itself Art and Commodification in Arendt’s Thought Marina Barnes

H

annah Arendt dedicates only one chapter of The Human Condition to works of art. In this chapter, she classifies the production of art as a work of the homo faber who fashions the human artifice. However, art does not fit neatly into Arendt’s category of work. The creative process of the artist differs from that of the standard worker, and works of art differ from standard use objects both in form and function. Art also contravenes the principle of utility that generally governs work. These distinct characteristics help art avoid the degradation experienced by the world of things when society lives for consumption alone.

While Arendt argues that the modern society treats formerly durable objects as consumable goods, the unique durability and revelatory quality of art enables it to resist this commodification.

This paper addresses the role of art in Arendt’s thought and in the consumer society in three parts. First, it examines the elements of the work of art that distinguish it from other objects produced through work. From there, it turns to a discussion of art’s relationship to the categories of means and ends. Finally, it explores the role art plays in society, focusing in particular on the consumptive society’s treatment of art. This paper ultimately concludes that the same qualities that set works of art apart from other fabricated objects enable art to withstand the modern attempt to reduce art to a consumptive good.

Before engaging in such a discussion, it is important to clarify what is meant by “art.” Though Arendt never offers a singular definition of art, she refers to numerous different products of creative expression as art. Beyond the obvious example of the visual arts, Arendt includes music, poetry, literature, theater, and Vol. III, No. 2

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architecture in her discussion. While such a list could arguably be expanded further without doing any injustice to Arendt, this paper takes a conservative approach and limits its discussion of art to the above forms specifically referenced

by Arendt in The Human Condition.1 The Uniqueness of the Work of A rt Arendt begins her discussion of art in The Human Condition by identifying works of art as the “most intensely worldly of all tangible things.”2 Art possesses a durability that goes deeper than that of most objects and thus has the potential to “attain permanence throughout the ages.”3 This durability stems from art’s distance from the life process, which allows the work of art to remain “almost untouched by the corroding effect of natural processes.”4 In this way, art differs from objects that are continually subject to the use of living creatures and slowly crumble from the weight. Though more lasting than the products of labor, such objects are gradually destroyed by the “wearing-out process [that] comes about through the contact of the use object with the living consuming organism.”5 Meanwhile, the work of art is carefully “removed from the exigencies and wants of daily life” so as to protect it from the destruction of the life process and preserve its beauty.6 The distance between art and the life process does not develop by happenstance; rather, it occurs when men recognize the intrinsic value of art and choose to preserve it through the centuries. Because art is designed to be appreciated rather than used, it forms the most stable and permanent part of the human artifice: “It is as though worldly stability had become transparent in the permanence of art, so that a premonition of immortality, not the immortality of the soul or of life but of something immortal achieved by mortal hands, has become tangibly present, to shine and to be seen, to sound and to be heard, to speak and to be read.” 7 1. It is worth noting that some of the attributes of “art” discussed in this paper may not apply uniformly to each individual art form. For instance, the process of composing music is clearly different from the process of sculpting a statute. However, the characteristics described in this paper as applying to art in general typically fit at least several of the identified art forms. When appropriate, I will stop to note where a characteristic of art or the artistic process does not apply to a particular art form.

2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 167.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 138.

6. Ibid., 167.

7. Ibid., 168.

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Artists construct the human artifice by turning thoughts into things, reifying what were formerly mere objects of the imagination. This process sounds similar to the fabricating of use objects based on models; however, the artist’s transfiguration of thought into thing is a distinct process for Arendt. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt articulates the idea of art as a “thought-thing:” “art works are thought-things, and what gives them their meaning—as though they were not just themselves but for themselves—is precisely the transformation they have undergone when thinking took possession of them.”8 In her book Doing Aesthetics with Arendt, Cecilia Sjoholm notes that the concept of a “thought-thing” is borrowed from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where it is used to reference “ideas that cannot be experienced or intuited” and can only be conceived of through pure reason.9 However, Arendt’s use of the term is different from Kant’s. Sjoholm explains that Arendt uses “thought-thing” to refer to an object produced by the intellect in “defiance of the fleeting character of thought processes.”10 The creation of a work of art thus differs from the fabrication of a use object, which is guided by a model or idea that exists “outside the fabricator.”11 The creative process is thus more akin to multiplication in that it “multiplies something that already possesses a relatively stable, relatively permanent existence in the world.”12 The artist’s creation of a thought-thing, on the other hand, brings something entirely new into the world: it is not a replication but a birth.

As thought-things, “[w]orks of art are situated between the real and the unreal, in an uncanny borderland where thought touches itself through the sensible qualities of the work.”13 The thought-thing quality of art can thus have a dizzying effect. Sjoholm elaborates: “We are immersed in the multiplicity of appearances, perspectives, and senses, but we are used to things appearing in a certain way. The thought-thing brings us out of context, as if the thing itself is possessed by a thought and quickly loses its grip on reality.”14 The transfiguration of thought into thing is not without cost. Arendt argues that “this reification and materialization, without which no thought can become a tangible thing, is always paid for, and that the price is life itself.”15 Indeed, Arendt claims that “deadness” is “present in all art and indicat[es], as it 184.

8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978),

9. Cecilia Sjoholm, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 50.

10. Ibid., 51.

11. Arendt, The Human Condition, 140.

12. Ibid., 142.

13. Sjoholm, 52.

14. Ibid., 53.

15. Arendt, The Human Condition, 169.

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were, the distance between thought’s original home in the heart or head of man and its eventual destination in the world.”16 However, she does admit that the completeness of this death varies based on the type of art, as some forms of art remain more thought than thing. For instance, she declares that “[o]f all things of thought, poetry is closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art.”17 Because poetry’s material is language, it is the “most human and least worldly of the arts.”18 Music also possesses a more thought-like quality and retains more of a living spirit than most other forms of art.19 Even after a composer fully notates his composition, musicians who perform the piece in the years to come will offer their own interpretations of his work. Although Arendt does not mention it specifically, theater operates similarly in that every production of a play is unique, given that different directors, producers, actors, and set designers bring the story to life differently.

However, Arendt does not view such performances as a true restoration of life to the otherwise dead work of art. Instead, she describes such performances as temporary resurrections of the living spirit in the art: “it is always the ‘dead letter’ in which the ‘living spirit’ must survive, a deadness from which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it, although this resurrection of the dead shares with all living things that it, too, will die again.”20 On first glance, this deadness appears to reduce art to the status of other fabricated objects, but such an interpretation ignores a key distinction between the two. The resurrection of a work of art comes as a result of the art’s contact with a living being—the very same contact that condemns the use object to eventual destruction. Unlike with other work products, man’s engagement with art enlivens rather than erodes.

Works of art do not emerge finished; indeed, every work of art owes its existence to an artist. Of course, such a statement is in no way profound. Every created object, artistic or otherwise, must have a creator. However, the relationship between the art and the artist is more personal than the relationship between the use product and the worker. Arendt notes that “[t]he modern age’s obsession with the unique signature of each artist, its unprecedented sensitivity to style, shows a preoccupation with those features by which the artist transcends his skill and workmanship in a way similar to the way each person’s uniqueness transcends the sum total of his qualities.”21 The work of art distinguishes the 16. Arendt, The Human Condition, 169.

17. Ibid., 170.

18. Ibid., 169.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

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artist in much the same way as action discloses the identity of the actor. It is no mistake that we refer to a painting by Monet as “a Monet” or a sonata by Mozart as “a Mozart.” Though Arendt does not elevate art to the level of action, she does say that it is “this transcendence [that] distinguishes the great work of art from all other products of human hands.”22 It is true that objects intended primarily for their use can be artistically crafted. As Arendt says, “whatever has a shape at all and is seen cannot help being either beautiful, ugly, or something in-between.”23 Consequently, “there is in fact no thing that does not in some way transcend its functional use, and its transcendence, its beauty or ugliness, is identical with appearing publicly and being seen.”24 With art, however, there is often no clear functional use to transcend. The beauty of a work of art is no accident; rather, art is created to be seen.

Art thus seeks a space of appearance. Mel Topf explains that, while “the creation of art…is a private matter, art itself is a public—that is a political— one.”25 Arendt thinks the exchange market that serves as the space of appearance for use objects should not satisfy the artist, as works of art “are not exchangeable and therefore defy equalization through a common denominator such as money.”26 As a result, Arendt says any time art enters the exchange market, it will inevitably be arbitrarily priced.27 In its desire for a space of appearance, art is very similar to action.28 Indeed, Dana Villa notes that Arendt has an “aesthetic interpretation of action,” as seen by her frequent comparisons between political actors and performing artists.29 Villa takes this comparison further, writing, “The glorification of appearance that takes place in art and self-contained action endows the world with a meaning that it otherwise lacks: both activities make the world beautiful; both escape the reduction of meaning that characterizes modernity.”30 Art could arguably be classified as a kind of action. Both art and action reveal the identity of their creator and need a space of appearance. Arendt’s description of action as “the actualization of the human condition of natality” seems equally applicable to art, as every time an artist creates a work of art, 22. Arendt, The Human Condition, 169.

23. Ibid., 172-173.

24. Ibid., 173.

25. Mel Topf, “Hannah Arendt: Literature and the Public Realm,” College English 40, no. 4 (1978): 357, https://www.jstor.org/stable/376254.

26. Arendt, The Human Condition, 167.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Dana Villa, “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action,” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 280, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/192004.

30. Ibid., 287.

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“something uniquely new comes into the world.”31 However, instead of considering art a type of action, Arendt characterizes art as the handmaiden of action.

She says that “acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is, the help of the artist, of poets and historiographers, of monument-builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.”32 George Kateb comments that “the revelations of action are perfected only in art, the great poems, plays, epics, histories.”33 The durability of art counteracts the frailty of human action.

From this cursory examination, it is clear the work of art is distinguishable from the average use object in several key ways. Works of art are the most durable and permanent of all objects, as they are best able to resist the degradation caused by encounters with living beings. As a representation of the thought of the artist, a work of art reveals the identity of its creator to the world in a way that most use objects never can. Because of this, art also has a unique need for a public realm of appearance. However, important though all of these differences are, they do not touch on one of the most crucial differences between works of art and use objects: their relationship with utility.

A rt and U tilit y According to Arendt, utility governs both the work process and the work product. The end not only justifies the means in the work process; “it produces and organizes them.”34 After the desired end is identified, “everything [in the work process] is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else.”35 However, while the end product governs the process, the produced object never becomes an end in itself. Immediately after the conclusion of the work process, the created object turns into a means to a new end: “It has now become an object among objects, that is, it has been added to the huge arsenal of the given from which homo faber selects freely his means to pursue his ends.”36 In this sense, the relationship between means and ends in the work process is “very much like a chain whose every end can serve again as a means in some other context.”37 Arendt argues that “there is no way to end the chain of means and prevent 31. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178.

32. Ibid., 173.

33. George Kateb, “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory 5, no. 2 (1977): 154, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/190726.

34. Arendt, The Human Condition, 153.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 155.

37. Ibid., 153-154.

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all ends from eventually being used again as means, except to declare that one thing or another is ‘an end in itself.’”38 Unfortunately, Arendt says that the idea of an end in itself is incomprehensible to the homo faber, who has “an innate incapacity to understand the distinction between utility and meaningfulness.”39 This is where Arendt’s classification of the artist as homo faber becomes baffling.

Indeed, art seems to be the quintessential example of an end in itself. To say that the artist has no conception of meaning and engages in the artistic process for the sake of utility alone seems to miss the point.

That is not to say the artistic process has no connection to utility. It is true that the artist views the material worked upon as a means to the end of producing art. To the painter, the brush and canvas are tools that exist for the sake of creating a masterpiece. Because of this, some philosophers have described the artistic process as inherently violent. In his 1795 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, German philosopher Friedrich Schiller writes: When the artisan lays hands upon the formless mass in order to shape it to his ends, he has no scruple in doing it violence; for the natural material he is working merits no respect for itself, and his concern is not with the whole for the sake of its parts, but with the parts for the sake of the whole. When the artist lays hands upon the same mass, he has just as little scruple in doing it violence; but he avoids showing it. For the material he is handling he has not a whit more respect than has the artisan; but the eye which would seek to protect the freedom of the material he will endeavor to deceive by a show of yielding to the latter.40 Arendt references Schiller in her essay “Culture and Politics,” and Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb argues that Arendt refines and revises Schiller’s ideas through her work.41 Arendt describes the homo faber in the same way Schiller describes the artist: “This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication, and homo faber, the creator of the human artifice, has always been a destroyer of nature.”42 However, violence seems to be accidental to the artistic process rather than essential. While it is easy to see the violence that underlies many visual arts, such as in a statue or mosaic, this violence is not so readily apparent in all art 38. Arendt, The Human Condition, 154.

39. Ibid.

40. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 219.

41. Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Introduction to Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), xxiv.

42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 139.

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forms. Works of art that retain more of their thought-quality, such as music and poetry, do not rely on the manipulation of the physical to the same extent as visual arts. Arendt contends that such art forms are still violent even if to a lesser extent. The poet, she says, “violates his material as well; he does not sing like the bird living in the tree.”43 But such an assessment seems too limited. By painting a picture with words, the poet commits no violent act against language. Using words metaphorically in a poem in no way undermines their literal use in other contexts. If anything, the poet elevates language, imbuing it with beauty and allowing it to transcend common speech. Far from violating language, poetry frees it.

Even when violence does accompany the artistic process, it is redeemed by the intrinsic value of the finished work of art. The weight of violence in the fabrication process for use objects can become oppressive due to the never-ending chain of means and ends. Immediately upon the completion of the fabrication process, the object that has been created through the act of violence becomes a tool for violence itself. Art, on the other hand, is created for its meaning, not its utility. Because the work of art is an end in and of itself, the violence ends as soon as the artistic process is complete. When the sculptor sets down his chisel for the last time, the violence departs, leaving in its stead a deep sense of awe.

Ultimately, though it does use materials as a means to an end during the creative process, art transcends the standard of utility that governs other fabricated objects. This is arguably art’s most distinctive characteristic and is the source of its permanence. The work of art is designed to be appreciated rather than used; as such, it is preserved from the erosion brought upon other objects by the exigencies of daily life. In a world ruled by utility, art reminds us of the deeper desire for meaning. Though she does not discuss the difference in art’s relationship with utility in The Human Condition, Arendt does note in The Life of the Mind that art is born out of the human pursuit of meaning. She writes, “if [men] were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, [they] would lose…the ability to produce those thought things that we call works of art.”44 Conversely, as long as society preserves great works of art, the search for meaning is not wholly hopeless.

Because art is recognized as meaningful rather than useful, works of art are passed down from generation to generation as a cultural inheritance. Arendt explains that the “objective status of the cultural world…insofar as it contains tangible things—books and paintings, statues, buildings, and music—comprehends, and gives testimony to, the entire recorded past of countries, nations, and 43. Hannah Arendt, “Culture and Politics,” in Reflections On Literature and Culture, ed.

Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 192.

44. Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 62.

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ultimately mankind.”45 Though created by a similar process of fabrication, works of art thus reach beyond the ordinary durability of use objects to grasp immortality. We protect works of art from the exigencies of life because we recognize that “they are fabricated not for men, but for the world which is meant to outlast the life-span of mortals, the coming and going out of the generations.”46 A rt in S ociet y Though art is a crucial part of a society’s cultural inheritance, it is not always treated as such. In the modern consumer society, the threat to art is greater than ever before. Arendt traces the devolution in society’s treatment of art in her essay “The Crisis in Culture.” This began when society was overtaken by what Arendt refers to as “philistinism.”47 The term designates a mentality that “judge[s] everything in terms of immediate usefulness and ‘material values.’”48 Because art is not created for utility, philistinism dismissed works of art as useless. The resulting society thus grew disinterested in art.49 By itself, philistinism did not pose a significant threat to art. As Arendt points out, artists were well accustomed to fighting to obtain recognition of their work’s value.50 However, a more dangerous breed of philistine soon evolved: the “cultural philistine.”51 The cultural philistine took the works of art that those around him had despised as useless and “seized upon them as a currency by which he bought a higher position in society or acquired a higher degree of self-esteem.”52 The former disinterest in art quickly dissipated; in its stead grew a shallow fascination with art for the purpose of social advancement. No longer viewed as useless, art now became seen as a status symbol.

It may be tempting to view this as a positive development in society’s relationship with art. Surely it is better for art to be appreciated for a perverted purpose than to be ignored or forgotten. However, Arendt argues that the cultural philistine’s misuse of art posed a dangerous threat to art’s immortality.

She writes that “as soon as the immortal works of the past became the object of social and individual refinement and the status accorded to it, they lost their most important and elemental quality, which is to grasp and move the reader or 45. Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance,” in Between Past and Future (New York: The Viking Press, 1961), 202.

46. Ibid., 209.

47. Ibid., 201.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 204.

52. Ibid.

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the spectator over the centuries.”53 The cultural philistine was drawn to sweet, light art that offered an escape from the realities of the lower regions of society.54 The demand for such art quickly resulted in the mass proliferation of kitsch during the nineteenth century.55 Arendt says that many artists began to rebel against this trend, having “smelled the danger of being expelled from reality into a sphere of refined talk where what they did would lose all meaning.”56 Unfortunately, an even greater danger lay ahead. Arendt believes that we have now moved from the cultured philistine society to a consumer (or mass) society. Rather than merely devaluate art, the consumer society devours it. Arendt explains: Perhaps the chief difference between society and mass society is that society wanted culture, evaluated and evaluated cultural things into social commodities, used and abused them for its own selfish purposes, but did not “consume” them. Even in their most worn-out shapes these things remained things and retained a certain objective character; they disintegrated until they looked like a heap of rubble, but they did not disappear. Mass society, on the contrary, wants not culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods.57 Rather than being distanced from the life process as works of art, products of entertainment are subsumed into the cycle of labor, filling in the leftover time not devoted to labor or sleep.58 As such, these entertainment products are not actually things at all: they were never intended to become a part of the human artifice; rather, they were intentionally designed for immediate consumption.59 Perhaps if the entertainment industry simply created its own consumer goods and left the human artifice untouched, it could be dismissed as a mere annoyance or a sign of society’s lack of taste. Unfortunately, the standards of the entertainment industry have bled over into the world of art. Arendt writes, “the extent to which we use [the standards of freshness and novelty] today to judge cultural and artistic objects as well, things which are supposed to remain in the world even after we have left it, indicates clearly the extent to which the need 53. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 203.

54. Ibid., 202.

55. Ibid., 203.

56. Ibid., 202.

57. Ibid., 205.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 206.

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for entertainment has begun to threaten the cultural world.”60 In order to satisfy the “gargantuan appetite” of the consumer society, the entertainment industry inevitably turns to past great works of art to find new material and begins to “feed…on the cultural objects of the world.”61 Of course, these works cannot simply be offered as they are; they cannot be digested easily enough in their original form. The entertainment industry thus alters art to make it consumable.

Arendt observes that the “objects themselves are changed, rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies.”62 Some works of art may survive this process—but others may not. While “[t] here are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect…it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.”63 Arendt suggests that the damage done by the consumer society may be irreversible, as its appetitive attitude “spells ruin to everything it touches.”64 However, the situation may be less hopeless than it appears. Jerome Stolnitz rebuts Arendt’s assessment of modern society. While he agrees that the entertainment industry has attempted to transform high art into a consumptive good, he does not believe these efforts have had any lasting effect.65 Modernized versions of high art never linger long, but their eventual disintegration does no damage to the original work of art. Great though it may be, Stolnitz argues that the appetite for entertainment has not eliminated the desire for high art. In fact, he believes that “no century other than this one can boast greater knowledge of or concern with authenticity—of musical scores, instrumentation, styles, and performance techniques, of dramatic and literary texts and theatrical techniques, and of the provenance of works of visual art.”66 Stolnitz concludes that “[high] art perdures, as it always has, sustained by its unique goodness, kept unimpaired by the institutions, scholars, critics and audiences, who know the difference.”67 Those who recognize art’s intrinsic meaning and view it as a cultural inheritance in need of conservation will not be swayed by the call of the entertainment industry.

However, it is not just the attention of the educated that has helped art survive the rampages of the consumptive society. Art testifies to its own intrinsic value, and this testimony cannot be silenced, no matter how much kitsch and 60. Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” 206.

61. Ibid., 211.

62. Ibid., 207.

63. Ibid., 207-208.

64. Ibid., 211.

65. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Apparent Demise of Really High Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 4 (1985): 351, https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/429896.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid.

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cheap entertainment the consumer society produces. Even the consuming man can sense the unique beauty of a truly great work of art. When Notre Dame burned, the whole world mourned—not because an object of utility had been lost, but because a seemingly immortal piece of the world had been stripped away. When a great work of art is destroyed, even the most common of men can recognize the loss.

Ordinary use objects are treated as consumable goods because they can be replaced relatively easily, given that the fabrication process is already based on multiplication. As such, most people are untroubled by the way society devours the formerly durable objects, failing to recognize that the very framework for human life is being destroyed. Great works of art, on the other hand, cannot be truly replicated. The artist’s creative process does not consist of the multiplication of an already existing model; it is the birth of something new. Though it fails to recognize the importance of use objects in upholding the human artifice, even the consumer society cannot help but acknowledge the intrinsic value of a great work of art. Consequently, while it certainly tries to profit from art, the consumer society would not dare to actually destroy it.

C onclusion Arendt is correct that the consumer society’s tendency to devour everything in its path threatens the stability of the human world. However, art does not fall prey to the devouring life process in the same way as other objects. Even the consumptive man can feel the pull of a beautiful work of art and recognize that he has come face-to-face with something truly unique. Art thus reminds the consumptive man of the potential for immortality, lifting his eyes up from the cycle of labor.

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Bibliogr aphy Arendt, Hannah. “The Crisis in Culture: Its Social and Its Political Significance.” In Between Past and Future, 197-226. New York: The Viking Press, 1961.

———. “Culture and Politics.” In Reflections On Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, 179-204. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

———. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

———. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Gottlieb, Susannah Young-ah. Introduction to Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, xi-xxxi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Kateb, George. “Freedom and Worldliness in the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Political Theory 5, no. 2 (1977): 141-82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ pdf/190726.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. Translated by Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967.

Sjoholm, Cecilia. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Stolnitz, Jerome. “On the Apparent Demise of Really High Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 4 (1985): 345-58. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/pdf/429896.

Topf, Mel. “Hannah Arendt: Literature and the Public Realm.” College English 40, no. 4 (1978): 353-63. https://www.jstor.org/stable/376254.

Villa, Dana. “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political Action.” Political Theory 20, no. 2 (1992): 274-308. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/192004.

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The Metaphysics of James Wilson Benjamin Phibbs

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n A Theory of Justice, John Rawls tried to develop a conception of the social contract that does not rely on metaphysics. According to Allan Bloom, that experiment has failed. For Bloom, as for traditional contract thinkers, “metaphysics cannot be avoided” in political philosophy.1 Government is inevitably concerned with ends; thus, in order to develop a political system that is most conducive to man’s happiness, one must begin with a proper understanding of who man is. Rawls’ critical mistake is his confidence that metaphysics has no relevance to the creation of government. The political philosophy of American Founder James Wilson provides a counterexample.

It is because Wilson believed that metaphysics does affect government that he devotes much intellectual energy to developing a proper understanding of philosophy prior to political theory. This essay outlines Wilson’s metaphysics and shows that it does indeed result in a different form of government than that envisioned by other thinkers of his time.

M etaphysics Wilson grounds his metaphysics in God as the source of law. Before he asserts anything about reason or man, he begins with the understanding that God exists, that He has created the universe, and that He interacts with His creation.

1. Allan Bloom, “Justice: John Rawls Vs. The Tradition of Political Philosophy,” The American Political Science Review 69, no. 4 (June 1975): 651.

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For Wilson, God is law. Indeed, the first and most foundational feature of Wilson’s metaphysics is that God is orderly and that “he himself works not without an eternal decree.”2 And if God is an orderly Creator, then certainly the laws that govern nature and man will reflect who He is. As Wilson suggests, “[I]s it probable that the Creator, infinitely wise and good, would leave his moral world in this chaos and disorder?”3 This much is not surprising: Wilson follows a long and rich tradition of political thinkers who all begin with God as the Supreme Governor of man.4 But for Wilson, God is not only the source of law in the sense that His dictates govern nature and men, but also in the sense that He alone may allow men to rule over one another. In this sense, God is the source of political power.

This principle relies on a second feature of Wilson’s metaphysics: that superiority must precede the exercise of power. After all, if two beings are equal, then “nothing can be ascribed to one which is not applicable to the other.”5 Rather, “to constitute superiority and dependence, there must be an essential difference of qualities, on which those relations may be founded.”6 Since He is by nature omnipotent, God is superior to man and is the source of all power; but God has also ordained government by men over men. This raises a very important question for Wilson: what man is superior—and thus qualified to exercise power over others—and how did he become so?

Wilson’s answer depends on his view that God has revealed the law to all men. This is essentially the inevitable outcome of the first and second features of his metaphysics. God, being orderly, has revealed His order to man and obligated him to conform to it. This is His right to do, and it is His creatures’ duty to obey, because He is superior. For this reason, Wilson says that “His just and full right of imposing laws, and our duty in obeying them, are the sources of our moral obligations.” 7 But these obligations are not found with reason. They are felt, impressed by “the moral sense or conscience.”8 Because Wilson believes that all men possess the moral sense, and thus have equal knowledge of their rights and obligations under the law, his answer to the question of superiority is that all men are equal. Interestingly, instead of appealing to the divine image in man, Wilson’s foundation for equality is more Ciceronian. He says that “with regard to all, there is an equality in rights and obligations; there is that ‘jus aequum,’ 2. James Wilson, Lectures on Law, in Collected Works of James Wilson Vol. 1, ed. Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall (Carmel: Liberty Fund, 2007), 465.

3. Ibid., 505.

4. Namely Cicero, Hooker, and even Hobbes and Locke.

5. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 501.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid. 508.

8. Ibid.

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that equal law, in which the Romans placed true freedom.”9 The reason for the equality of rights and obligations is further explained below, but the immediate explanation is that God is omnibenevolent and has given the law for man’s happiness, and so “virtue is the business of all men.”10 Regardless, it is enough to say that Wilson is setting equality on broad ground.

Wilson’s metaphysical views about God lead him to conclude that man is made for community. As Creator, God designed man for community, and this is evinced in two ways. First, God has given man “social intellectual powers,”11 which include language and moral perceptions. Wilson starts by pointing out the way infants presume the intelligence of adults, which gives rise to one of the most natural features of language: questions. Questions imply that answers will be given, and thus expression, the communication of information, is also a social power.12 For Wilson, the more a society participates in these acts, the more it refines itself and progresses.. Society is also marked by moral perceptions: they form the bases for cooperation, veracity, and confidence, without which “society could not be supported.”13 The performance of promises is a basic and important feature of society for Wilson. He even goes so far as to point out that “it is not considered how much, in every hour of our lives, we trust to others.”14 Moreover, Wilson believes that the moral perception from the natural law that restrains one from harming the innocent is a communal sentiment. If men naturally communicate with one another through questions and expressions, and perceive that they have moral duties to honesty and justice in their interactions with one another, it would seem that God designed them for community.

The social intellectual powers show that God designed men for community, and so do their “passions and affections.”15 Perhaps the most important of these passions to Wilson are those that give men pleasure. Wilson observes that people desire to share their feelings and experiences with each other—not only their pain, but also their joy. His use of a thought experiment from Archytas, the Greek philosopher, is particularly noteworthy: “‘If a man were to be carried up into heaven, and see the beauties of universal nature displayed before him, he would receive but little pleasure…unless there was some person, to whom he could relate the glories.’”16 People also share their joy through acts of kindness, whether by giving money, favor, or advice, and they likewise receive joy from 9. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 638.

10. Ibid., 513.

11. Ibid., 624.

12. Ibid., 625.

13. Ibid., 627.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 628.

16. Ibid., 632.

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doing so.17 The desire to share does not make sense to egoist man. This desire is only natural to society. The same is true for esteem.18 Egoist man does not receive satisfaction from the regard of others, nor pleasure from admiring the good conduct of others. All these natural passions only make sense in community.

G overnment Wilson spends so much time on metaphysics because it has real implications for liberty.19 His two fundamental principles—that God is the source of law and that community is natural to man—set his social contract theory apart.

One implication from these principles is that equality is rooted in the propagation of the natural law to all men. With this conclusion, Wilson attacks not only rule by force and excellence, but also the greatest political threat of his time: the divine right of kings, which was “the political weapon used, with the greatest force and the greatest skill, in favor of the despotic claims of Great Britain over the American colonies.”20 Another implication from these principles is that the good is knowable. This confidence will put Wilson’s view of government at odds with modern contract thinkers like Hobbes and Boucher, who are skeptical that we can know what is good for man. Of course, much of Wilson’s confidence is inspired by his epistemology. But perhaps the most interesting theme that emerges when Wilson’s metaphysics are applied to government is the impact of the classical tradition on liberty.

Because Wilson believes that all men have equal knowledge of and obligation under the natural law, he maintains that strength and excellence are insufficient justifications for sovereignty. As noted above, Wilson’s concept of equality harkens back to Cicero, who asserts, “‘That first and final law…is the mind of God, who forces or prohibits everything by reason.’”21 This law “‘applies to all men, and is unchangeable and eternal.’”22 As Beitzinger points out, the propagation of natural law to all men led the Stoic to conclude that all men should be considered equal.23 This does not make much difference for Wilson regarding the classic position on rule by force. In fact, his appeal to the conscience and will 17. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 633.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 472. “Despotism, by an artful use of ‘superiority’ in politics; and skepticism, by an artful use of ‘ideas’ in metaphysics, have endeavored…to destroy all true liberty and sound philosophy.”

20. Ibid., 483.

21. Cicero, De Legibus, cited in Wilson, 508 n.3.

22. Cicero, De Republica, cited in A.J. Beitzinger, A History of American Political Thought (Eugene: Resource Publications, 1972), 5 n.3.

23. Beitzinger, 5.

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as the source of obligation is quite Platonic. As he says, “we may suffer all the external effects of superior force; but we feel not the internal influence of superior authority.”24 But Wilson’s Ciceronian position does conflict with Aristotle’s view that the excellent man has a title to be king, primarily because of the impracticality of discerning among degrees of excellence.25 This is how truly self-evident Wilson believes the natural law to be. All men know their obligations and know they are equal.

It is also interesting to see the way Wilson’s classical position interacts with divine right theorists. For one thing, it is helpful to notice that Wilson’s arguments against rule by force and rule by excellence both deal with classical sources, but Wilson deals only with modern sources when debating divine right.

This seems to suggest that the divine right theory itself is a seventeenth-century invention. Regardless, Wilson provides two arguments against the divine right of kings. First, he contrasts the universal knowledge of the natural law with the universal ignorance of the divine right. The strength of Wilson’s argument for equality under natural law is that no man can honestly deny his moral sentiments. God clearly propagates His law for man, and so “had it been the intention of Providence, that some men should govern the rest, without their consent, we should have seen indisputable marks distinguishing these superiors from those placed under them.”26 Because there are no such indisputable marks, Wilson calls claims to a divine right “pretensions to superiority.”27 Second, in a reductio ad absurdum, Wilson shows that if God has not made some men greater, then the only justification for divine right is if other men somehow become lesser.28 Thus, the divine right is simply a masquerade for tyranny.

Wilson sets his political philosophy apart from other contract thinkers because he believes that the good is knowable. Again, Wilson follows the classical tradition here, for as Bloom explains, while the ancients were able to rally around an idea of the good life, modern contract thinkers could only agree that man is selfish and needs protection.29 But Wilson’s confidence in the good comes from his epistemology, which acknowledges common sense as a valid faculty for discerning first principles. Whereas modern thinkers elevate reason as “the supreme arbitress of human knowledge,”30 Wilson sees no problem in trusting unprovable intuitions. Indeed, this is the strength of Wilson’s political philosophy. By validating common sense, he allows for the possibility of self-government, which 24. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 502.

25. Ibid., 477.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 487.

29. Bloom, 653.

30. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 603.

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makes his social contract look quite different from that of Hobbes and Boucher.

Wilson readily acknowledges the first principle that consciousness exists.

This is a problem for modern thinkers like Descartes and Hume, who maintain that knowledge is only that which can be proven.31 But it is not a problem for Wilson for three reasons. First, unless there are first principles from which to reason, knowledge is simply an infinite regression of proofs.32 For Wilson, reason is a method by which one judges between ends, but reason cannot find the end itself.33 Second, Wilson uses defeasibility, not incorrigibility, as the standard for knowledge justification. In other words, if nature has imbued all men with common, discernable sentiments as a “matter of fact,”34 then the burden of proof is not to show why these cannot be doubted, but why they should be doubted in the first place. As he says, “If it exists; why is it to be deemed fallacious?”35 Moreover, even if our common sentiments were fallacious, one could not discover this by using reason, which is natural to us. For, “if [nature] is false in every other instance, how can we believe her, when she says she is a liar?”36 Finally, Wilson points out that even thinkers like Descartes assumed consciousness without proving it, and that this was in fact a first principle for them.37 Because Wilson feels justified in believing in consciousness, he also feels justified in believing in moral sentiments. Indeed, Wilson believes that man can know the good simply by examining “what passes in our own breasts,”38 for consciousness is an “internal sense, which gives us information of what passes within us.”39 This view has important benefits for Wilson. First, it allows him to avoid the problems of radical skepticism, namely the eradication of the whole universe.40 If sentiments cannot be trusted, neither can the senses. Second, it allows him to maintain an objective conception of moral principles, for “so long as we find men pleased or angry, proud or ashamed; we may appeal to the reality of the moral sense.”41 Finally, Wilson’s epistemology is the reason why he grounds his metaphysics in sentiments. This in fact makes sense of his choice to use the propagation of natural law as the source of equality. The same is true of his discussion of the social intellectual powers and passions that draw man into community.

31. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 594-5.

32. Ibid., 603.

33. Ibid., 508, 514.

34. Ibid., 602.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 595.

38. Ibid., 505.

39. Ibid., 594.

40. Ibid., 609.

41. Ibid., 510.

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For Wilson, the moral and communal sentiments are, at bottom, reflections of the way that God designed creation, and this critically affects his political philosophy. As Bloom explains, any social contract theory must begin with “a comprehensive reflection about the way things really are,”42 and the sentiments provide that basis for Wilson. They show that God intended for man to live morally within community and that this would secure his happiness. Thus, in this way, community is prior to government. This picture is dramatically different from the one that modern contract thinkers like Hobbes and Boucher envision.

Importantly, the difference is the result of philosophy. Hobbes and Boucher deny that man can know the good, or at least, if he can, that he can act upon it.43 Their pessimism paints the state of nature not as a community of sociable, morally cognizant creatures, but as a state of war among sinful, selfish, isolated individuals.44 The result for such thinkers is that there is no orderly pursuit of the good prior to government—only fear.

These contrasting views result in two different ideas of liberty. For Wilson, liberty is the power to act on the moral and communal sentiments for one’s own happiness, provided that he does not harm anyone.45 This liberty is not purely selfish. As Wilson explains, the “generous affections” of men, rooted in the moral sense, suggest that “in our voluntary actions consist our dignity and perfection.”46 This means that even in the state of nature, men have a desire to pursue the good—again, a classical idea. More importantly, this is why Wilson believes men are capable of self-government—that, even without government, they are capable of good. For this reason, depriving men of all their liberty would be worse than allowing them to use it freely, even if they might abuse it.47 Hobbes and Boucher do not share the same confidence. For them, the state of war presupposes that man is perpetually abusing his liberty, which is why he lives constantly in fear. Moreover, because he is ruled by his passions, man requires the “terror of the laws” to restrain him and thus to live in peace with others.48 For Hobbes and Boucher, then, man is not capable of self-government, and true liberty is not found apart from the reign of government.

On the other hand, Wilson’s metaphysics leads him to the climax of his 42. Bloom, 651.

43. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in Classics of Moral and Political Theory 5th ed., ed. Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 618; Jonathan Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-resistance,” in The American Republic Primary Sources, ed. Bruce Frohnen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 164.

44. See Hobbes, 619; Boucher, 167.

45. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 638.

46. Ibid., 639.

47. Ibid.

48. Boucher, 167.

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political philosophy: that the greatest foundational principle of government is consent. Because his epistemology validates moral and communal sentiments, Wilson is able to build a metaphysical framework wherein God has made all men equal by universal propagation of the natural law and given man a desire to pursue happiness in community. This means that no man may arbitrarily claim supremacy over another, and that community is prior to government. Thus, if man decides to form a government, he freely consents to give up his liberty only for the improvement of the society that already exists. It should be noted that Wilson finds precedent for this idea in common law.49 Perhaps most importantly, man does not give up all his liberty when he consents.50 He only surrenders as much as he thinks is necessary to improve his condition. For this reason, during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, Wilson maintained that “everything which is not given, is reserved.”51 But the metaphysics of modern contract thinkers reserves no freedom for the individual once he is under a government. For Hobbes and Boucher, consent is simply an acknowledgement that, in order to have peace, the sovereign must be absolute. Again, the difference is a result of philosophy. Their epistemology does not allow them to construct a society that is prior to government because man cannot know the good. The only thing he can know is that he is equal in power to his fellows and that he must preserve his life. This results in a state of fear, war, and isolation. Such a condition necessitates that one man claim superiority over the others, and that community is only possible after government. Thus, man either chooses to surrender all his rights and powers to the sovereign, as Hobbes says, or is placed under a sovereign by God, as Boucher says.52 Regardless, the submission is total because man is not capable of self-government under these theories.

C onclusion Beitzinger’s maxim that “metaphysics always buries its own undertakers”53 may be helpful advice to Rawls. But in the same way, Wilson’s political thought demonstrates that metaphysics rewards those who pay it heed. Before espousing any principle of government, Wilson begins by setting straight the principles of philosophy. His two philosophical foundations—that God is the source of law 49. See Wilson, 565, discussing Edward I and “quod omnes tangit.” See also 570, discussing Blackstone’s recognition of custom as evidence of consent.

50. Ibid., 557.

51. Wilson, “State House Yard Speech,” in Hall and Hall, 172.

52. Hobbes, 634; Boucher, 167.

53. Beitzinger, 404.

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and that community is prior to government—lead directly to a view of government based on consent. The result is a government of “true liberty.”54 Wilson also demonstrates the consequences of establishing government on wrong philosophy. Indeed, the result of wrong philosophy is tyrannical government. Thus, Wilson testifies to the importance of strong philosophy to political theory. If one arrives at a government of freedom apart from metaphysics, Wilson’s thought suggests that one simply “began from what is wanted here and now and then looked for the principles that would rationalize it.”55

54. Wilson, Lectures on Law, 472.

55. Bloom, 649.

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Bibliogr aphy Beitzinger, A.J. A History of American Political Thought. Eugene: Resource Publications, 1972.

Bloom, Allan. “Justice: John Rawls Vs. The Tradition of Political Philosophy.”

The American Political Science Review 69, no. 2 (June, 1975): 648-662.

Boucher, Jonathan. “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-resistance.”

In The American Republic Primary Sources. Edited by Bruce Frohnen, 159-178.

Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, 5th ed. Edited by Michael Morgan, 578-708. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011.

Wilson, James. Collected Works of James Wilson, vol. 1. Edited by Kermit Hall and Mark David Hall. Carmel: Liberty Fund, 2007.

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Plato on Punishment Gorgias and Rehabilitation Noah Farley

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odern debates as to the proper nature of punishment typically devolve into two questions. First, ought we to punish for utilitarian or deontological reasons?

Second, ought we to punish harshly (so as to deter) or less harshly (so as to rehabilitate)?1 In the Gorgias, Plato provides a helpful contribution to this debate. In his argument that punishment is beneficial, Socrates presents the idea that punishment “cures” a moral ill in the soul of the wrongdoer and is justified based on the good it does for the criminal. In this paper, I will argue that Plato’s theory can only function if a society successfully imports moral meaning into punishment. I will conclude that even though rehabilitative theories were not available conceptually to Plato, his conception of punishment-as-cure provides an effective moral foundation for such theories.

Plato’s argument in the Gorgias is that punishment is a good for the soul of the punished. This is for the simple reason that immorality is an evil that afflicts the soul and is made better by punishment.2 Paying the penalty for your crimes is thus a way of remedying a disease in the soul.3 More than that, immorality is the worst disease. This means that being cured of it is not only a good but one of the best goods.4 Socrates’ conclusion is that if we want good done to our friends and evil to our enemies, then we ought to use rhetoric to cause our friends to suffer 1. See Mike C. Marteni, “Criminal Punishment and the Pursuit of Justice,” The British Journal of American Legal Studies 2, no. 2 (2013): 266.

2. Plato, Gorgias, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 477a.

3. Ibid., 474c-476a.

4. Ibid., 478d-e.

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punishment and our enemies to avoid it.5 But why is punishment good for the soul? Plato justifies this by presuming the wrongness of our actions and the rightness of the state’s punishment.6 This is critical because Plato provides no external moral justification for punishment outside of the standards implemented by the state.7 He repeats his assumption in the Crito dialogue, which seems to explicitly accept the moral judgments of the state as ruling and worthy of being followed.8 From this we conclude that the critical factor in Plato’s doctrine of just punishment (such as it is) is that the state produces legitimate standards for punishment, which will then be acknowledged by all parties.9 Without this legitimacy, the punishment becomes no more than an exercise of power, losing all its curative benefits for the soul.

We can misread Plato’s apparent ambivalence toward the intersection of justice and punishment in the Gorgias in two ways. We can assume, incorrectly, that Plato is in some way a moral relativist. On the contrary, he certainly believes that justice is a transcendent value, and he certainly believes states ought to uphold that standard. He does not engage in the project of justifying that belief in this dialogue­—his argument can work while assuming that the socially des5. Plato, Gorgias, 480a-481b.

6. Plato deals with both in Crito, where Socrates argues that the laws must be obeyed because the government that enacted them is legitimate and that they should be opposed only in the proper channels. To go against the law would be to reject the judgment of the entire community and to place one’s own idea of justice above that of the entire polis. From Crito we learn that Socrates would follow an unjust law willingly and accept the punishment as decided by the community even though he disagreed with it. There is no echo of Thoreau here. See Plato, Crito, trans. C.D.C. Reeve, in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, ed. Michael C. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), 50a-54e.

7. While Plato does seem to believe in a standard of external justice for the laws of the state, he does not justify the actions of an Antigone in resisting the rule of the state on the grounds that the laws are unjust. The connection between law and justice is generally assumed. Plato directly connects the suffering of the punished to the penalty enacted by the state. See: “Would you agree that there’s no difference between a criminal paying the penalty for his crimes and being justly punished for them?” (Plato, Gorgias, 476a).

8. The existence of unjust laws which lead to unjust punishments would not seem to bear particularly on the moral education theory that Plato presents. Because the offender can always reject the judgment of the law and refuse to reorder his soul according to its dictates, an innocent person facing punishment under an unjust law can internally resist the moral education of punishment. Nevertheless, for Socrates, it makes sense to say that the laws propagated by the state are generally just and to make his argument on that assumption.

9. This separates him immediately from the explicitly utilitarian theorists, who often favor punishments which are unlinked to concepts of teleology or even responsibility. Rehabilitationists who favor indefinite punishments (that is, until the offender is cured) do not see the offender as a rational being capable of choosing good and evil outside of his environment, and deterrence theorists see the offender primarily as a proxy for accomplishing larger social goals. See C.S. Lewis, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy 13, no. 1 (1987), https:// scholarsarchive.byu.edu/irp/vol13/iss1/11.

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ignated punishment is just.10 We can also mistake Plato’s discussion of his own judicial system to be an endorsement of retributive theory. He mentions near the end of the above discussion that “We should submit to the lash, if that’s what the crime warrants, or to imprisonment, if that’s what we deserve. If we’re fined, we should pay up; if we’ve earned exile, we should go; if the penalty is death, we should let ourselves be executed.”11 This statement, which seems to assume that such harsh punishments are what is deserved, can seem like an endorsement of the retributive theory. However, Plato never claims that the moral prescriptions of the Greek city-states are normative. Moreover, we should not mistake a similar harshness of punishment for a similar motive.12 Plato’s argument for punishment in this dialogue can be called the moral education theory.13 In the words of Jean Hampton, moral education theory holds that “Wrong occasions punishment not because pain deserves pain, but because evil deserves correction.”14 For the Socratic justification of punishment to work, the key party which must accept the punishment as just is the wrongdoer. This is implicit in Plato’s argument—particularly in the analogy to the medical treatment of the body.15 Just as the patient must accept the legitimacy and authority of the doctor to receive treatment for his body, the criminal must accept the legitimacy and authority of the state to punish him in order for him to receive treatment for his soul.16 We need not imagine criminals who remain in rebel10. In the Republic, he more directly engages in this project, of course. The first definition he critiques is that of doing good to your friends and evil to your enemies, which is problematic because (1) one can be wrong about who those are and (2) hurting someone makes him more unjust, which the just ought not be able to do. There seems to be a contradiction between the second argument here and the argument made in Gorgias. It is entirely possible in the Republic that he means that the just ought not to take justice into their own hands (without the agency of the state), analogous to what Christ refers to in the Sermon on the Mount, while in the Gorgias he refers to a particular context of justified state punishment. See Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeve, in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, ed. Michael C. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011), I.331d-336a.

11. Plato, Gorgias, 480b-c.

12. Plato’s later theory of punishments, as expressed in The Laws, seems to be premised on the idea that harsh penalties are good for the soul. As in the Gorgias, the main thrust of that part of the dialogue is that the punishment is good for the soul and it is justified for this reason. How harsher penalties (those typically associated with retributive theories) are good for the soul is largely left unargued. See Nicholas R. Baima, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Plato: The Laws,” https:// www.iep.utm.edu/pla-laws/.

13. There is dispute as to whether Plato’s argument falls into the realm of moral education theory. See M.M. McKenzie, Plato on Punishment, as cited by Jean Hampton, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (1984), https://www.jstor.org/ stable/pdf/2265412.pdf?ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_SYC-4631%2Ftest.

14. Hampton, 238.

15. Plato, Gorgias, 478b-c.

16. Marteni describes this as a structural problem for the theory of rehabilitation writ large—

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lion against the state despite punishment. The perennial problem of recidivism evinces that. If we wish “that the kind of benefit [the criminal] receives if his punishment is just is that his mind is made better,” then we must be sure that the criminal recognizes the punishment as just and is ready to have his mind made better.17 This function of moral education can operate independently of the particular iteration of the criminal justice system in question. Alcoholics Anonymous asks participants to believe in a higher power and to trust in that higher power as a key part of the program.18 This does not require a particular doctrine of God, or even a meaningful belief in Him; it is entirely possible for atheists and agnostics to participate in the program. Similarly, the benefits of moral education through punishment can be achieved as long as the criminal believes the penalties he is suffering are the just reward of his crimes, regardless of whether they actually are.19 Since the criminal’s healing is accomplished in the soul, the benefits of punishment can accrue to the punished as long as the criminal accepts the state’s punishment as just.

This can be phrased more strongly in a positive sense. To draw the Christian allegory, the punished soul could, depending on his attitude toward the punishment, be either in hell or purgatory. It is the response of the sufferer that makes the difference in the punishment’s effect. As Dorothy Sayers writes in her introduction to Dante’s Purgatorio, “The sole transforming difference is the mental attitude of the sufferers. . . .If a man is once convinced of his own guilt, and that he is sentenced by a just tribunal, all punishment of whatever kind is remedial, since it lies with him to make it so; if he is no so convinced, then all punishment, however enlightened, remains merely vindictive, since he sees it so and will not make it otherwise.”20 Punishment as moral education rests on the offender’s choice to see it as such.

I do not mean to say that the retributive theory of justice is incorrect; I mean merely to say that Plato’s justification of punishment in Gorgias as moral education does not on its own justify the retributive theory. Retribution itself, or something like it, does seem to be assumed by Socrates in this dialogue. Althat the criminal must willingly accept rehabilitation and it cannot be forced upon him. This is a similarity with the moral education theory, except that the moral education theory strengthens the impossibility of forcing change in the soul, for reasons that I will touch on later. See Marteni, 292.

17. Plato, Gorgias, 477a.

18. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, “The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous,” 1981, https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-121_en.pdf.

19. I mean that to access the benefits to the criminal, he must believe it at least approximates justice, not require it to match up with precisely with his conception of natural law.

20. Dorothy Sayers, introduction to Dante, The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory, trans. Dorothy Sayers (London: Penguin Classics, 1955), 15-16.

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though he asks: “Would you agree there’s no difference between a criminal paying the penalty for his crimes and being justly punished for them?” this question is unnecessary for his later argument.21 His occasional references to fairness and justice in punishment do not bear on the aim or benefit of punishment as moral education. Even if they did play a part in his more complete theory of punishment, they do not in the theory presented in Gorgias.

Nor do I mean to say that all kinds of punishment are equally valid. Under this theory, many factors would need to combine for a punishment to be effective in moral education. This includes a complex of beliefs about the state’s claims to legitimacy, the society’s beliefs about justice and morality, and the traditional connection between the legal and the moral.22 Furthermore, there are multiple utilitarian reasons to justify punishment which must be considered, some of which are more compatible with the moral education theory than others.

This leads us to the second part of my argument. In Plato’s moral education theory we are provided with a teleological reason to focus our punishment on particular utilitarian ends. Rather than judging them based on their contribution to overall societal happiness, we can judge them by their contribution to the end of punishment.

If punishment is understood to be good for the soul, then the theory of rehabilitation becomes easier to justify on teleological grounds. This is because rehabilitation openly admits of a constructive purpose of punishment in the same way that Plato does. If we punish because it is good for the person punished, then as long as we do not undermine the moral education, the theory gives us significant grounds to design the punishment to accomplish societal and individual goods. The question is whether the particular rehabilitative practices will enhance or undermine moral education.

The governor of Norway’s Bastoy prison, a world-famous example of rehabilitation, describes the concept of punishment in that system: “In the law, being sent to prison is nothing to do with putting you in a terrible prison to make you suffer. The punishment is that you lose your freedom.”23 The point he makes is that even in a system that favors rehabilitation, there is still a punishment that 21. Plato, Gorgias, 476a.

22. It is conceivable that in a society in which the phrase “you can’t legislate morality” is common currency, the link between law and justice is severed or so weakened that moral education through the justice system ceases to operate altogether. In this case people would primarily see the justice system as a utilitarian institution designed to keep some degree of order in society. People thus freed from a moral obligation to obey the law would be more likely to stay in rebellion against the criminal justice system, particularly if it is seen to be plagued with systemic injustice.

23. Christina Sterbenz, Business Insider, “Why Norway’s Prison System is so Successful,” December 11, 2014, https://www.businessinsider.com/why-norways-prison-system-is-so-successful-2014-12.

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satisfies the demands of justice. In this system, the criminals still suffer and for that reason still experience the consequences of a disordered soul. They can still be morally educated. The legitimacy of state punishment is maintained. The link between law and justice that Plato and Aristotle both recognize can still exist in a rehabilitative system.

This is not to say that Plato would necessarily endorse rehabilitation. In its modern iteration, it did not appear to be on his conceptual horizon. What Plato works with is a system that he understands to be retributive in nature, and he argues that this system (punishment with the goal of retribution) is counterintuitively good for the criminal. Plato’s arguments would not prima facie support a rehabilitative system, but the arguments he makes, perhaps unintentionally, provide a strong teleological basis for such a system.

Curiously enough, in his last dialogue The Laws, Plato seems to suggest that the direct purpose of punishment is the cure of the offender of the injustice which led him to commit the crime. By the time we reach The Laws, Plato seems to have fully rejected the retributive theory of punishment and produced a code which explicitly sanctions a kind of rehabilitation, though he would not use that term. See this passage in particular: The cases that are curable we must cure, on the assumption that the soul has been infected by disease…When anyone commits an act of injustice, serious or trivial, the law will combine instruction and constraint, so that in the future either the criminal will never again dare commit such a crime voluntarily, or he will do it a very great deal less often; and in addition, he will pay compensation for the damage he has done…We may take action, or simply talk to the criminal; we may grant him pleasures, or make him suffer; we may honor him, we may disgrace him; we can fine him, or give him gifts. We may use absolutely any means to make him hate injustice and embrace true justice – or at any rate not hate it.24 Here, Plato seems to be making the argument that in punishment, the means used to make the criminal hate injustice are discretionary. This bolsters my argument that Plato would consider some rehabilitative measures to be acceptable.

Rehabilitation adds to the benefits provided to the criminal by providing him with education. This comes in the form of both moral and practical education. Rehabilitation includes the teaching of particular job-related skills which criminals often lack. It also often includes instruction on moral and psychological issues through counseling. In fact, rehabilitation has conceptual room for an 24. Plato, The Laws, 862c-d.

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explicit attempt to convince prisoners that their punishment is just and for their own good.

It is important to note that the moral education view also puts limits on the theory of rehabilitation we can employ. In this view, whatever rehabilitation programs we employ cannot be created to “cure� the offender of some disease. As Hampton argues, we cannot punish someone indefinitely without undermining our ability to convince the prisoner that the punishment is just.25 Because the fundamental benefit of punishment is his to accept or reject, the state is required to engage with him as a rational being capable of choice.26 The full implications of this theory of punishment as moral education on rehabilitation are beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is fair to say that such a system would be constrained to be far more humane than that favored by the most extreme of the rehabilitationists.

25. This is a concept some rehabilitationist theorists have endorsed: to keep the criminal in prison until his lesson is taught. See Hampton, 233.

26. Ibid.

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Bibliogr aphy Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing. “The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.” 1981. https://www.aa.org/assets/en_US/smf-121_en.pdf Baima, Nicholas R. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Plato: The Laws.” https://www.iep.utm.edu/pla-laws/.

Hampton, Jean. “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (1984): 208-238.

Lewis, C. S. “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment.” Issues in Religion and Psychotherapy 13, no. 1 (1987), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/irp/vol13/ iss1/11.

Marteni, Mike C. “Criminal Punishment and the Pursuit of Justice.” British Journal of American Legal Studies 2, no. 1 (2013): 263-304. https://bcuassets. blob.core.windows.net/docs/BJALS-Volume-2-Issue-1.pdf.

Plato. Crito. Translated and Edited by C.D.C. Reeve. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, edited by Michael C. Morgan, 64-71. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002.

———. Gorgias. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

———. Republic. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. In Classics of Moral and Political Theory, edited by Michael C. Morgan, 75-251. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.

———. The Laws. Translated by Robert J. Saunders. London: Penguin Books, 1970.

Sayers, Dorothy. Introduction to Dante, The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory, 9-71.

Translated by Dorothy Sayers. London: Penguin Classics, 1955.

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On the Problem of Futility Mikael Rose Good

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certain world-weariness pervades some conservative thought. Conservatives have put away the incandescent dreams of youth—no one can deceive them now.

They know that power corrupts, institutions crumble, and utopian dreams fail. They see goodness in the world, to be sure, but they see its inherent precariousness just as clearly. They also know that the best intentions to bring heaven to earth often end in disaster. With the hard lessons of history in mind, conservatives content themselves with a humble political vision: that of rescuing at least some good things from the ravages of decay and corruption. This is a worthy goal, but one that warrants further probing into the heart of things. Why do loftier and more idealistic visions of politics seem destined to fail? What is it about our world that makes this so?

A key culprit is time, which subjects all human achievements to decay. It seems, then, that any human pursuit must be characterized by a condition of futility. The problem of futility is one that we must encounter—both intellectually and emotionally—in the quest for political wisdom. Perhaps one of the only ways we can transcend the futility of the temporal is through love. Love of the other enables us to discern something of eternity, of infinite worth, and of imperishable goodness in another immortal soul. Love is inescapably practical and particular in its manifestation and, as such, is one absolute that conservatives can afford to hang their hats on.

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anchor the events of our lives and give them meaning. It is thus a condition of unceasing loss. Most of us (whether consciously or unconsciously) believe that there is something absolute that transcends time. This helps to mitigate the inherent anxiety of being subject to it. But there are some who have rejected eternity altogether, and they have peculiar insight into the tragedy of temporal existence. Momentarily immersing ourselves in that insight will help us understand the difficulty of the conservative task.

Take an example from literature. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello explores the frustration of temporality through the character of the Father. The Father observes that each person presents himself to the world as though he were one. But in reality, his existence is fragmented into a multiplicity of false fronts. This is because, according to the Father, man possesses no underlying essence that persists through the flux of time. You can never really trust “this reality you breathe and touch in yourself today,” because tomorrow it will appear to be an illusion.1 After all, this is how the whole duration of our lives has proceeded: illusion replacing illusion with rapid succession. Realizing this, we lose all footing: Well, sir, thinking of all those illusions long gone, of all the things that no longer seem to you the way they were then, don’t you feel not just these stage boards, but the ground itself giving way under your feet, realizing that in the same way everything you feel is here and now, everything that’s real for you today, is bound to reveal itself an illusion tomorrow?2 The Father thinks we cannot be sure of the truth or goodness of anything. Reality as a whole evades our grasp because whatever seems true and permanent is soon invalidated by time’s succession and whatever new perception of reality that succession brings along. Day after day, time rips the illusion of solid ground out from under our feet. The Father’s analysis calls into question all of our efforts in this life: how can we know that what seems good to us today truly reflects reality, given that we have been disillusioned of our perceptions many times before?

An even more pessimistic variation of these themes is found in an essay by Schopenhauer titled “On the Vanity of Existence.” For Schopenhauer, the very condition of human existence is one of complete futility because we are subject to time. He explains: 1. Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, in Pirandello’s Theatre of Living Masks: New Translations of Six Major Plays, trans. Alice Gladstone Mariani and Umberto Mariani (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), EBSCOhost eBook, accessed April 15, 2020, 158-9.

2. Ibid., 158.

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Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live—the thing-in-itself and therefore imperishable—has revealed to it that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess.3 Since “the ever-passing present moment” is the only true mode of existence, everything that is in the past loses all of its reality, along with any significance it once had.4 The only thing that persists through time is our own will to live, and even this is futile—it leads nowhere. Our life consists of “continual Becoming without ever Being,” relentless motion without the hope of rest, and an unhappy striving for happiness that is ultimately “vain and empty.”5 Then death comes and extinguishes us forever. Considered as a whole, the life of humanity consists of “generations of men” who “live their little hour of mock-existence and then are swept away in rapid succession.”6 This is how life must be in a world where “all is unstable, and nought can endure, but is swept onwards at once into the hurrying whirlpool of change.” 7 Ultimately, neither Schopenhauer nor Pirandello offers us much hope for redemption in this unhappy state of affairs.

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, at least attempts to give us guidance on how to live in such unstable conditions. We all have a nostalgia for unity and for the absolute. This tempts us to try to transcend time and reach eternity. But in reality, we are totally limited to the temporal perspective. Our reason is incapable of transcending time to “add up” discrete events and experiences into a unified whole. And we cannot pretend that there is anything beyond human reason.8 Instead of trying to vault ourselves into an imaginary eternity, we should recognize that our existence is but a momentary flame and embrace the futility and absurdity of it all. Hope must be eschewed, since it presumes something about a future that is not in our possession. So must transcendent meaning and value, since these are not accessible to us within the confines of time: I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just 3. Arthur Schopenhauer, “On the Vanity of Existence,” in Studies on Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Sonnenschein, 1891), accessed April 16, 2020, http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/schopenhauer_vanity.pdf, 1.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 1-2.

6. Ibid., 3.

7. Ibid., 1.

8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 35.

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now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me—that is what I understand…What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition?9 Yes, man is his own end. And he is his only end. If he aims to be something, it is in this life.10

Camus holds up the solitary conqueror as an example of the “absurd man.” The conqueror cannot expect that anything he does will last or that he will metaphorically live on as an example to others. He knows nothing about any sort of life after death and he refuses to pretend as though he does. Like the universe he lives in, he is “inseparable from time” and “without future.”11 And so he simply lives, defying the absurd by embracing it, accepting his own limits and doing “nothing for the eternal.”12 One might say this is all quite melodramatic. How many people actually lie paralyzed with angst, convinced that they cannot know reality and that their whole life will be eradicated by the merciless onslaught of time? Hopefully not many. Yet these thinkers are valuable, because they see something that is true about time considered in itself. Erazim Kohák, in his theologically-rooted reflection on time and eternity, says that time in itself cannot be the locus of meaning or value. Without eternity, “even an infinite prolongation of time cannot redeem its futility.”13 Temporalistic philosophies try to disguise this fact by postponing the fulfillment of human life to society’s distant future, as in Marxist ideology, or by vapidly insisting that “progress” creates meaning. But there is no such thing as real “progress” without an eternal reference point, for that means that value is purely instrumental, “defined by a horizontal reference to a before and after” and not to any absolute value.14 According to Kohák, the existentialists saw past the sham of purely relative value—they were “agonizingly aware of the vast absurdity of a life whose meaningfulness is predicated on ‘progress.’”15 In this respect, Sartre was not wrong to say that death turns all human lives into failures.16 In keeping with Kohák, we can say that Pirandello, Schopenhauer, and 9. Camus, 51.

10. Ibid., 88.

11. Ibid., 92.

12. Ibid., 66.

13. Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 171.

14. Ibid., 18.

15. Ibid., 101.

16. Ibid., 171.

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Camus rightly understand the crisis of meaning and value that occurs when we limit human existence to the temporal dimension. If human life is not rooted in something absolute, something that transcends the constant motion of time, it can have no fixed meaning. This has dramatic implications, not just for individual life, but for social and political life as well.

The Politics of Tempor alit y Chantal Delsol, in her analysis of twenty-first-century man, claims that every era adopts a “specific vision of measureless time”—be it eternity or merely the extension of time as we know it.17 This vision is “an expression of permanence.”18 Man relies on it because he is aware of the inevitability of his death and the fundamental precariousness of his existence. He finds this precariousness “repulsive,” and he seeks some means of mitigating it.19 This is normally done in one of three primary ways. One way is through religious belief, which promises eternal life after death in the world to come. A second way is through ideology, which requires the devotion of one’s life to transcendent values that are promised to someday reach full social and political manifestation in this world—not in the world to come. According to Delsol, all the ideologies that dominated the twentieth century “substituted immortality for eternity”: they thought their political systems could overcome transience by bringing heaven down to earth.20 This desire to force eternity into time, which requires that eternity be relegated to the distant future, is precisely what Kohák criticizes in his discussion of historicist philosophies.

A third, less extreme way that man seeks measureless time is through the maintenance of strong social institutions that outlast the individual. Unlike the previous option, this is not the dream of a future utopia: it is a weaker form of permanence that can be obtained in the here and now. It is based on the conviction that social institutions, which embody values deemed “worthy of immortality,” can obtain “stability and duration” through man’s hard work.21 The individual’s wholehearted dedication to maintaining these institutions makes him feel that part of himself will outlive death. For such a reward, he is willing to make great sacrifices. His own individual life becomes secondary to the maintenance of “certain immortal undertakings—the nation or the tribe or any valued insti17. Chantal Delsol, Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World, trans. Robin Dick (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013), 171.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., 173.

21. Ibid., 172.

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tution.”22 In light of these social undertakings, biological death loses its sting.

Perhaps Delsol overstates the extent to which the commitment to social institutions is a spiritual quest for immortality. Nevertheless, she is drawing an important connection between the basic condition of temporality we have discussed and the spirit that underlies a large segment of intellectual conservatism.

The conservative thinks that the values embodied in our tradition are worth conserving—that is, they are “worthy of immortality.” He thinks that meaningful human life is possible in the context of communities supported by stable, enduring institutions. At the same time, he knows that even our best institutions are threatened by the inherent precariousness of our condition. He sees that political conservatism is hard work, because conserving anything through time is hard work. He feels the weight of the challenge that Delsol so poignantly describes: Existence lived out as the fashioning of a work of art tells the tale of a battle against chaos. The infant experiences no more than a series of scattered sensations and feelings, the adolescent, a series of scattered meanings, while the adult is one who names and gives structure to existence. But this structure always remains uncertain and precarious. At every instant some elements are being added while others are being lost. We spend our lives sifting the known from the unknown, trying to gather bits and pieces into a cohesive whole…Our plans, ventures, loves—the monuments of our lives— must be constantly rebuilt or they will fall from neglect.23 In this particular context, Delsol is focused on the individual’s search for meaning. But we can easily apply these insights to the political realm. Roger Scruton describes something like the “battle against chaos” in his attempt to outline a conservative politics. Conservatism, he says, is in some sense merely “an attempt to escape the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”24 Entropy is a relentless force of disorder that leaves no order or system untouched; conservatism is “the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.”25 In Delsol’s terms, this requires that we constantly rebuild our social monuments lest they fall into disrepair.

Scruton thinks our most important social monuments are “the long-term associations over time that form the traditions and institutions of a self-governing 22. Delsol, 176.

23. Ibid., 181-2.

24. Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), EBSCOhost eBook, accessed April 16, 2020, 10.

25. Ibid.

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society.”26 The modest goal of conservatism, then, is to maintain our inherited institutions in the face of entropy. Scruton elaborates, The purpose of politics is not to rearrange society in the interests of some over-arching vision or ideal, such as equality, liberty or fraternity. It is to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium. The goal is to pass on to future generations, and meanwhile to maintain and enhance, the order of which we are the temporary trustees.27 Scruton reassures us that although we cannot actually halt entropy, “that does not make conservatism futile as a political practice, any more than medicine is futile, simply because ‘in the long run we are all dead.’”28 We must shrug off the critics who say we are “doomed to failure.”29 Given entropy, we must content ourselves with an achievable political goal: preserving what we have for a while.

Our political achievements, like our biological lives, will at least be good while they last. This may not be the most compelling motive for dedicating oneself to the good work of conservatism, but Scruton thinks it is good enough. We are left to wonder whether a sufficient number of people will agree.

Michael Oakeshott adopts a similar approach to political activity. For Oakeshott, politics takes place strictly within the confines of a tradition of behavior that has persisted through time. The spring of politics is not abstract ideas or eternal values but rather “the existing traditions of behaviour themselves” that we continually explore and revise.30 A society’s tradition is neither fixed nor finished; it has no changeless centre to which understanding can anchor itself; there is no sovereign purpose to be perceived or invariable direction to be detected; there is no model to be copied, idea to be realized, or rule to be followed. Some parts of it may change more slowly than others, but none is immune from change. Everything is temporary.31 Neither is there anything outside this tradition-in-flux that can ground us.

Oakeshott envisions politics as a ship on “a boundless and bottomless sea” with 26. Scruton, 11.

27. Ibid., 9-10.

28. Ibid., 10.

29. Ibid.

30. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in politics, and other essays (New York: Basic Books Pub. Co., 1962), accessed April 17, 2020, https://archive.org/details/rationalisminpol00oake/page/n11/ mode/thumb, 123.

31. Ibid., 128.

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“neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination.”32 The whole enterprise of politics is “to keep afloat on an even keel.”33 We do this by preserving the continuity of our tradition through time and constant change. This is possible because “all its parts do not change at the same time and…the changes it undergoes are potential within it.”34 Oakeshott knows that some find this “a depressing doctrine.”35 After all, who wants to be stranded at sea without hope of the shore? But we are depressed because we believed the illusion that there was some safe harbor, either behind us or ahead of us. We must face the facts and put our minds to the task at hand.

In Delsol’s terms, our tradition of behavior is an “expression of permanence” that can keep our ship afloat. It has no specific goal—not even a driving ideal—but at least it extends indefinitely into past and future. This very continuity protects it from being rendered entirely meaningless by time.

F urther Difficulties Given our initial exploration of the angst of temporal existence, the aforementioned political strategies leave something to be desired. First of all, a society’s values, traditions, and institutions cannot be ultimately meaningful—and cannot reliably provide individuals with a sense of meaning—if they are restricted to a purely temporal frame of reference. Because everything in time is subject to change, nothing endures that can serve as a fixed standard of value. But we can only carry out a prudential effort to conserve societal good against the forces of entropy if we know what is good in the first place. We must be able to perceive what is absolutely valuable and not just relatively valuable. It seems, then, that the prospect of preserving social “goods” through time does not in itself protect us from the collapse into futility. For the futility of temporality is not merely the inability to achieve some good. It is the lack of any absolute good whatsoever that can anchor our pursuits and imbue our temporal experience with meaning. Such good can only come to us from outside of time. As Kohák puts it, “the pure good cannot be transient.”36 The second trouble is more of a practical one. If we realize that we will soon die and that not even our best efforts can ensure the permanence of our institutions, it is all too easy to succumb to the despair of futility. According to the philosophies of Scruton and Oakeshott, constant political vigilance is neces32. Oakeshotte, 127.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 128.

35. Ibid., 127.

36. Kohák, 166.

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sary for the seafarers to protect their ship and navigate the stormy seas. And for what? Why try when we seem destined to fail? This, says Delsol, is the prevailing attitude of the contemporary mind: we are disinterested in doing the hard work required to conserve societal structures. In fact, we have given up on attaining measureless time altogether. We have watched the religious man, the ideological man, and the socially conservative man sacrifice their individual existences for an elusive immortality, and “we acutely feel the futility of all these sacrifices.”37 For our part, “we cannot bear the thought of sacrificing ourselves to a theoretical God, an imaginary radiant future, or institutions that the future will prove futile.”38 This line of thinking naturally manifests itself in an anti-conservative impulse. We refuse the responsibility of stewarding “the institutions, projects, or traditions of [our] predecessors,”39 because we suspect “that institutions transmit ideas that lead nowhere, that they are but empty suits of armor.”40 Like Camus, we think that if there is joy and meaning to be found, it is solely located in the here and now—in the brief span of our biological lives. The quest for eternity and immortality become irrelevant. Each individual lives in the moment.

And so, committing himself to live fully in time, contemporary man is ruined by it. Delsol says that man’s experience of temporality, when it is deprived of the hope of measureless time, “is not simply a shortened duration; it is time shattered into many fragments.”41 Man’s life now consists of “moments or scattered slices of life without connections to each other.”42 This is precisely due to “the inability of biological time to be sufficient when the idea of a personal future beyond death is absent.”43 Man refuses to think about his life as a whole because in light of death, the whole does not make sense, and this is unbearable to him.44 He does have a natural desire to accomplish a meaningful life-work that will provide some continuity and wholeness to his life. But life-work is always fragile—the risk of failure is too high. And so “he lets entire swaths of his life slip away, out of neglect. Meanings pile up without hierarchy, thrown one on top of the other. Man seems to come undone, scattered about himself in pieces…The entropy of it all overwhelms him and drives him to despair.”45 In all this chaos, the fragmentation of individual reality is mirrored by the fragmentation of social and political reality, since “we do not know what kind of society we want to 37. Delsol, 173.

38. Ibid., 175.

39. Ibid., 184.

40. Ibid., 174.

41. Ibid., 175.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 184.

44. Ibid., 177.

45. Ibid., 183.

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build.”46 We have given up on any human project that transcends the immediate.

Delsol thinks the answer to our fragmented existence is for people to toughen up and pursue a life-work. One individual’s life-work can become a sort of social inheritance of meaning upon which future generations can build.

By it, the individual himself will manage to “dominate the passing of time” and “shape scattered bits and pieces into a meaningful whole.”47 Perhaps this is the best solution we can arrive at, given our circumstances. But it does not really seem to solve the problem. Time and entropy still work against us, undermining every foundation and threatening every achievement. We still have no hope of arriving at a goodness or a meaning that transcends the contingencies of time.

We are still tempted to say, with Schopenhauer, that time turns everything into nothing and erases all value. The angst of temporal existence runs deeper than these political philosophies are capable of addressing.

Time and Eternit y The only satisfying solution to the problem of futility is the one rejected from the start: the reality of eternity. Kohák provides a beautiful defense of this reality that is rooted in Christian theology and philosophy. For Kohák, “eternity” is not merely the eternal life of religious hope that Delsol talks about, which she thinks of as an infinite extension of temporal existence after death. Rather, eternity is an order of being altogether different from the order of time. It is the locus of absolute being and absolute value, so it provides the standard for good and evil—a standard that time itself can never produce. Furthermore, eternity is accessible in every moment of temporal existence. Kohák pictures the intersection of two axes: the axis of value, which is outside of time; and the axis of temporal progression, which (in itself) is valueless.48 It is only because eternity ingresses in time that every temporal moment can be judged according to an eternal standard of good and evil rather than “in terms of its relation to what preceded and followed it.”49 Eternity makes judgments and bestows meanings on temporal realities, “making being meaningful and meaning actual.”50 Without this constant ingression of value, “temporality becomes absurd.”51 According to Christian theology, the temporal dimension as we now know it will one day pass away. Eternal life with God will not be an extension of 46. Delsol, 175.

47. Ibid., 181.

48. Kohák, 166.

49. Ibid., 167.

50. Ibid., 197.

51. Ibid., 202.

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earthly time but a different kind of life altogether. Then the incorruptible life of God himself will flow through us, untouched by death or decay. Yet even in our present lives we have access to the realm of eternity. For this reason, we can experience visions of absolute being now. According to Kohák, whenever we see that something is good, make an objective judgment of value, or perceive the intrinsic meaning of our lives and experiences, we do so with reference to the eternal. The ingression of the eternal is also “the ingression of the Idea of the Good, of beauty, truth, goodness, of holiness, justice, tenderness, love.”52 These eternal ideals are perceivable aspects of corruptible earthly realities. We see eternity in time, in things that are bound to pass away in their present form. This is the deepest solution to futility: In a hundred daily actions, what redeems us from the sense of ultimate futility of the order of time with its knowledge that the house I build will decay and fall, the love I cherish will pass in time, is the vitalist recognition that in spite of its absolute futility it is all still relatively good, intensely good in its season.53 The specific activities that we accomplish in our lives have profound relative goodness because they participate in what is absolutely good. Our earthly homes may collapse in time, but goodness in itself—the pure aspect of eternity—is imperishable.

L ove and the Human P erson Reclaiming eternity goes a long way to redeem our lives from futility. But now we arrive at another question: how do we begin to take hold of eternity in our day-to-day experience, much less in the political affairs of a whole society?

Perhaps we can refer to eternal ideals in our political discourse. We can recognize the instantiation of these ideals in our traditions and institutions and work to conserve them. But talking about concepts like “justice” and “peace” and “goodness” is, to some extent, mental abstraction away from the messy particulars of actual political life. We cannot get past the fact that any concrete action we take in the political realm is fragile and temporary. Eternal goods do not perish, but the forms they take on this earth certainly do.

As a final response to the sense that politics cannot escape futility, I want to discuss a particularly tangible and concrete instance of eternity ingressing in time. This is the human person, discerned by love. Insofar as we are temporal 52. Kohák, 197.

53. Ibid., 100.

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beings, everything we are and do is precarious. We change all the time—our beliefs, values, opinions, dreams, and pursuits are rarely static. But there is another dimension of our being that transcends time. Jacques Maritain calls it our “personality,” juxtaposing it against our material individuality, which is rooted in matter and tends to “dispersion” and “disintegration.”54 Space, time, and matter lend us only “a precarious unity, which tends to be scattered in a multiplicity.”55 But insofar as we are persons, each of us is a genuine whole, “a reality which, subsisting spiritually, constitutes a universe unto itself.”56 Personality is the locus of our interaction with the eternal and transcendent because it is rooted in “the deepest and highest dimensions of being.”57 As persons we are “directly related to the absolute” and to “those indefectible goods which are as the pathways to the absolute Whole which transcends the world.”58 It is easy to see that under Maritain’s conception, the person is subject to none of the difficulties of temporal existence that we have discussed. The person has “a destiny beyond time,” and for this reason transcends temporal society.59 According to Maritain, a good political society must seek the good of the human person, which requires that it recognize the “supra-temporal aspirations” of personality. “With respect to the eternal destiny of the soul, society exists for each person and is subordinated to it.”60 Insofar as political society serves the good of the person, its task and mission transcends time and futility. A society has as many points of contact with the eternal and transcendent as it has persons. But there is one last crucial piece to the puzzle: love. Love is the mode of seeing by which we perceive a human being not in his material individuality, but in his personality. Love, in the pure sense that Maritain is concerned with, “is not concerned with qualities or natures or essences but with persons.”61 He continues: We love the deepest, most substantial and hidden, the most existing reality of the beloved being. This is a metaphysical center deeper than all the qualities and essences which we can find to enumerate in the beloved. The expressions of lovers are unending because their object is ineffable. Love seeks out this center, not, to be sure, as separated from its qualities, but 54. Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 44, 38.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid., 40.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 42.

59. Ibid., 61.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., 39.

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as one with them. This is a center inexhaustible, so to speak, of existence, bounty and action; capable of giving and of giving itself; capable of receiving not only this or that gift bestowed by another, but even another self as a gift, another self which bestows itself.62 Of course, the full expression of this self-giving love is relatively rare. It does not characterize all human relationships—probably almost never those in the political realm. Nevertheless, insofar as we view others through the lens of love, we are able to discern something of this “metaphysical center” in them. And, by seeing it in some people, we begin to think of all people differently. Oliver O’Donovan describes the effect of this type of seeing: We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is irreplaceable. Perhaps we only discover this, in the fullest sense, of a few human beings in the course of our lives, though we would have inklings of it with many more.63 To see another person and know that they are irreplaceable: this is a foundation for action that transcends the contingencies of time. Both Love itself and the object of Love—the ineffable, irreplaceable human person—bring eternity into time. It is here, in the words of T.S. Eliot, that we encounter “the still point of the turning world.”64 To love is to catch a glimpse of eternal beauty and goodness that transcends this earth. Even if we could find no lasting meaning in our political endeavors, we would still have love, which is more foundational than politics. Indeed, God is Love in its purest form—the triune Fount of being, eternally self-giving. Our purpose is to love and be loved by this God and to love his image in other human beings. It is true, then, that “to love another person is to see the face of God.”65 A meaningful life is perhaps as simple as knowing one is loved by God and extending that same love to “the least of these.” Christ modeled this for us in his earthly ministry, revealing that a fully human existence—a life of love in obedience to God—is possible even in undesirable social and political conditions. None of this, however, is meant to downplay the importance of attending faithfully to the good of our political society. If anything, love ought to transform the way we think about the political order by anchoring it to the eternal worth of the human 62. Maritain, 39.

63. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 59.

64. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Coker, line 62.

65. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/13661.Victor_ Hugo. Accessed May 6, 2020.

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person created by God. L ove and Politics?

The best conservative politics would be one that fully understands its relationship to time and eternity. It would understand the human person to be of absolute and eternal value, and therefore the earthly reality most worthy of care and conservation. Conservatives themselves would be motivated by love, which must begin in the personal realm, not in the political realm. They would do the hard work of preserving our traditions and institutions because they know they are working for the good of the human person, who will outlast every earthly achievement.

There may be structural implications as well. A more local form of politics would seem to serve the human person most effectively. It would allow politicians to see the people they govern—not only their “metaphysical centers,” but also the qualities that differentiate them from other groups of people. This would prevent “love” from being a purely abstract concern for an abstract populace. It would allow leaders to observe how their practices and policies affect real people.

It would bring together affection and practical understanding so that love and concern could be accompanied by concrete, meaningful action.

Lastly, we can see now that humanity is not doomed to a futile enterprise, sailing aimlessly through stormy seas until death makes an end of us. Love of the person gives politics a mooring. Conservatives like Scruton and Oakeshott are afraid of lofty ideals; they do not want to disguise the inherent instability of time by embracing abstractions. But love has to do with persons, not abstractions.

Conservatism can find a resting-place here, in something that is both eternally worthy and inescapably concrete.

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Bibliogr aphy Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Delsol, Chantal. Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in an Uncertain World.

Translated by Robin Dick. Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2013.

Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971.

Goodreads. “Victor Hugo Quotes.” https://www.goodreads.com/author/ quotes/13661.Victor_Hugo, accessed May 6, 2020.

Kohák, Erazim. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Maritain, Jacques. The Person and the Common Good. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966.

Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in politics, and other essays. New York: Basic Books Pub. Co., 1962. Accessed April 17, 2020. https://archive.org/details/ rationalisminpol00oake/page/n11/mode/thumb.

O’Donovan, Oliver. Begotten or Made? Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

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