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Liberal and Conservative: Sources of Light or the Same Black Hole?
Whenever it attempts any sort
of actualization, or concretization, of its potential,
in action, the human social condition always seems
to find its bearings only by negotiating the middle
ground between two monstrous extremes. The bodily
image of a torso, legs, and head situated between
the left and right arms (or "wings") of
a creature that acts in the world implies symbolically
the desirability of living "in the middle" while
deriving a functional orientation from the outer
limits of livable space by reaching out on either
side to the extremes in order to navigate the middle
course. If we add to these "left" and "right" spatial
orientations the color designations common to American
political discourse, we further consider the middle
ground between liberal and conservative ideologies
as a negotiation between blue and red, respectively,
which the media commonly throws like a bucket of
paint over entire states (as in our typical election
ritual) or even the entire nation (through the modern
mythology of "statistical trends"). But
the extreme boundaries that limit the actual human
sphere of speech and action are not blue and red,
but equally colorless vacuities — black holes,
empty abysses in which the freedom required for all
human flourishing, including political discourse
and common initiative, disappear entirely. More to
the point, when the respective liberal and conservative
ideologies represented by blue and red in our system
are pushed to their furthest extremes, they ironically
coalesce to form the same black hole of totalitarianism,
with communist totalitarianism on the left and fascist
totalitarianism on the right.(1)
The point I wish to make here,
if I may be allowed to mix these several metaphors,
is that the light necessary for carving out a meaningful
space to live without compulsion – i.e., a
space governed by freedom – must come from
a source that transcends the ideological organizing
structural principles at either the left or right
ends of the political spectrum. Either extreme, by
itself – that is, qua ideology – provides
only darkness, coercion, bondage, necessity, enslavement,
the heteronomy of tyranny. The twentieth century
attempt to combine the two extremes has shown itself
to be a ruinous solution — an unthinkable,
horrifying "final solution" in which light
and life are stamped out. To comprehend the nature
of the transcendent light that allows the graduated
spectrum between blue and red (or any other colors
signifying the diversity of human actualization)
to appear as genuine possibilities for collective
human action, I turn to three key thinkers who understood
the necessity (ironically, paradoxically) of the
appeal to Transcendence for the conceptualization
and actualization of freedom: Hannah Arendt, Karl,
Jaspers, and Reinhold Niebuhr. They each recognized
not merely the need to invoke a programmatic conception
of Transcendence as the actuating impetus for human
freedom, but this accompanied by a formulation of
freedom woven together with a reckoning with human
nature, or, alternately posed, the human condition
(through which categories we obtain a "dialectical
circumscription" of both the inner and outer
limitations of humanity). Hannah Arendt: The Black Hole of Sameness and the Nihilism of Animal Laborans
In The Human Condition, Arendt
characterizes modern industrial society as almost
entirely bereft of the potential for speech and action,
or even genuine craftsmanship (humanity as authentic
homo faber, the creative maker who produces works
and establishes an enduring world) due to the reduction
of all human purposes to an artificial metabolism
of production and consumption, a twisted model of
the original, organic survival condition of the human
metabolic labor-relationship with the surrounding
environment of the earth (animal laborans). The possibility
of transcending the technologized, mechanized, artificial
condition of labor and consumption in genuine speech
and action (the vita activa) becomes an Herculean
task in the modern age — far more difficult
than the original human struggle of labor with nature,
for now the struggle has become a vicious, self-consumptive,
and impersonal cycle of humanity devouring itself.
There appears to be no exit from the nausea of this
solipsism in which human individuality is leveled,
or flattened, to appear "the same." Arendt
describes this loss of individuality with military
and mechanistic allusions:
The sameness prevailing in a society
resting on labor and consumption and expressed in its conformity
is intimately connected with the somatic experience of
laboring together, where the biological rhythm of labor
unites the group of laborers to the point that each may
feel that he is no longer an individual but actually one
with all others. To be sure, this eases labor's toil and
trouble in much the same way as marching together eases
the effort of walking for each soldier. It is therefore
quite true that for the animal laborans "labor's sense
and value depend entirely upon the social conditions," that
is, upon the extent to which the labor and consumption
process is permitted to function smoothly and easily, independent
of "professional attitudes properly speaking" [Alain
Touraine]; the trouble is only that the best "social
conditions" are those under which it is possible to
lose one's identity.(2)
In modern labor society, which
has now attained global reach, the only meaningful
activities are "jobs" that sustain and
perpetuate the totalizing economic machine. The
purpose of education is simply to get a good paying
job. Knowledge pursued for its own sake, along
with artistic pursuits, are little more than frivolous
hobbies, parasitic behaviors with respect to the
purposes of mass society. The quasi-totalitarian
sameness of our labor society is governed by a "communist
fiction," as Arendt puts it,(3) in which political
equality is no longer conceived as "an
equality of unequals who stand in need of being
'equalized'
in certain respects for certain purposes," such
as the farmer and the physician who require a common
public sphere in which to join together for common
purposes (Arendt cites Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics 1133a16).(4) Rather, the question of
the nature and purpose of humanity (or the "nature
and destiny of man," to put it in Niebuhr's
terms) is itself suppressed by a systematic deadening
of the native drive of human beings to seek out
the meaning of their existence — the very
drive to question the compulsive illusions of mass
society; that is, the questioning that is the only
real avenue of escape. Without this deadening,
the global economy as we now know it would collapse.
The concluding portions of Arendt's Human Condition carefully
chart the modern path of the collapse of genuine
speech and action to the "flat
world," (as Thomas Friedman has recently described
it ),(5) of the mere animal laborans (from
Galileo's telescope to Marx's communist vision
to the relativistic
Archimedean point somewhere in the Universe beyond
the natural world of the earth and sky of human
experience). Although the universalization, or
totalizing, of humanity as a mere animal laborans began
with a complex web of forces in the modern age,
too numerous to discuss here, significant
light can be shed on the matter by considering
what are perhaps the two chief external engines
driving our modern social addiction to the artificial
cycle of labor and consumption: a degenerate, mandatory
public educational system and a seductive, all-pervasive
visual media driven largely by the hidden agendas
of advertising.
Serious consideration should
be given to the question of whether the actual
functioning of our compulsory, government-run,
public school system is in fact closer to the ideology
of totalitarianism than to the ideal of free, autonomous,
democratic citizenship. It is one of the chief
goals of totalitarian institutions to condition
the minds and wills of youth to accept and follow
predetermined patterns of behavior, thereby stamping
out the unwelcome interference of new, power destabilizing
social initiatives, which Arendt aptly characterizes
as the phenomenon of "natality." The
chief goal of public education in America today
is not to learn how to think creatively for the
achievement of human flourishing – what the
Greeks knew as eudaimonia – but
to train youth in the warped virtues of a labor/consumption
society, as well as to acclimate them to the tedium
of this nihilistic treadmill. After spending one's
entire youth incarcerated in the "cells" conceived
by late nineteenth and early twentieth century
social planners to fit the needs of the rising
industrial economy, the average American citizen
can hardly dare to imagine an alternative mode
of being. And that is precisely the desired outcome
of a labor society whose entire economic system
depends on accelerated consumption, which in turn
depends on immature, unfulfilled consumers who
do not know how to find satisfaction and repose
in organic processes, but who now live in the constant
attention deficit of sound-bite consciousness and
momentary, serial gratification. Advertiser driven
television in particular (but reinforced through
other media outlets like radio, internet, and popular
films) accelerates the process by informing the
empty vessels created by the methods of modern
schooling of the new needs they are supposed to
have and what new products can satisfy those fabricated
needs — for the moment. A self-narcotizing
cycle is thus perpetuated, with the whole of public
education continually adjusting itself to establish
and feed it. Contemporary education is not designed
to actualize the true native potentiality of unique
human Existenz (i.e., it does
not exist to nurture natality); children are not
taught to think for
themselves or to actualize their unique potential
for the sake of new constructive initiatives in
the world. If they were, one might expect that
the entire artificially confining and abysmally
ineffectual compulsory school system would collapse
of its own weight in a single generation as young
people are introduced to genuine encounters with
the true wonders of nature, history, the structures
of thought, etc. —encounters for
their own sake and in preparation for future engagement
with
the world. To what extent the coercive, even tyrannical,
nature of our educational institutions and the
political forces that support them would allow
this remains to be seen. But rather than come to
the conclusion that the entire concept of compulsory
public education needs to be rethought from the
ground up, we are continually inundated by calls
from the left for more money to feed the beast
and from the right for stricter testing before
federal money should be doled out — both
of which completely miss the point. The
central problem is that the domineering exercise
of mental
control through coercive manipulation (both subtle
and overt) chokes the native quest for truth and
meaning and kills, or at least radically disfigures,
that inner potential which alone makes us truly
human. The free play of "original seeking" which
has inspired every philosophy worthy of remembrance
is systematically obliterated in children beginning
with their earliest educational experiences.(6)
Our contemporary situation
is all the more insidious due to the strange condition
that "no one" seems to be masterminding
this quasi-totalitarian strategy — at least
no particular someone, no Führer, although
perhaps a handful of corporate and government individuals
from both the left and the right could be selected
for dishonorable mention. But as the inauthentic
possibility of hiding one's true involvement and
passing the buck in a bureaucratic system of collective
rule allows no one but the occasional scapegoat
to be called to account, the system itself runs
on like a headless Leviathan demanding both liberal
and conservative soldiers of the global economy
to feed the machine with the souls of their children
and train them to make it grow bigger, run smoother,
and consume faster. The resulting "clockwork
orange" is a vicious monstrosity that, like
the more overt totalitarian monstrosities of the
twentieth century, can hardly be recognized by
the well-trained herd that cannot bring itself
to imagine and actualize an alternative to the
self-consumptive frenzy of product consumption.
In "The Crisis in Education" – a
crisis now roughly half a century older and considerably
more acute – Arendt insightfully describes
the problem in American education in terms that
mirror her distinction between the public and private
realms in The Human Condition. She describes the
chief problem of American public education as a
failure to preserve and protect the development
of children within the private sphere necessary
for authentic maturation; instead, they are exposed
at a defenseless age to a public sphere for which
they are developmentally completely unprepared.
The result is an abandonment and betrayal of children
to the compulsive forces of mass society, where "no
one" in particular takes responsibility for
the world; processes of labor and consumption dictate
the meaning of human existence; preparation for
mature thought, speech, and action in the adult
world is circumvented and instead a perpetual childhood,
or perpetual adolescence, is instituted; a world
of mass-produced, consumable toys is then offered
to the developmentally stunted adults – themselves
the "products" of the system – in
place of genuine human interaction and a meaningful
engagement with the actual world and its potential.
Arendt describes a key step in correcting this
warped view of modern education as a sort of dialectical
middle ground between conservatism and liberalism — more
specifically, between conservatism in education,
where the very point is to conserve, or preserve,
the world that has been established through the
work of homo faber and will outlast the individual's
sojourn in the world, and on the other hand, liberal
progressivism in politics, whereby the natality
of childhood can be brought to bear in a fully
matured development of its newborn individual potentiality
against a conservative preservation of the status
quo, which continually requires revision in order
to balance the potential injustices in a society
of diverse individuals. Arendt states:
The problem is simply to educate in
such a way that a setting-right remains actually possible,
even though it can, of course, never be assured. Our hope
always hangs on the new which every generation brings;
but precisely because we can base our hope only on this,
we destroy everything if we so try to control the new that
we, the old, can dictate how it will look. Exactly for
the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child,
education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness
and introduce it as a new thing into an old world, which,
however revolutionary its actions may be, is always, from
the standpoint of the next generation, superannuated and
close to destruction.(7)
In The Human Condition,
Arendt describes the natality that is the potential
gift
of every child to the adult world – that
is, if it is allowed to bloom in the relative protection
of the private realm before being faced with the
daunting challenges of public life – as a
kind of miracle, a gift of Transcendence (and here,
she directly invokes Judeo-Christian symbolism).
Referring to action in general, but forgiveness
(via the symbolism of Jesus of Nazareth) and the
ability to make covenants (via the symbolism of
Abraham) in particular, Arendt describes this gift
of Transcendence as "The miracle that saves
the world, the realm of human affairs, from its
normal, 'natural' ruin," and which furthermore
is "ultimately the fact of natality, in which
the faculty of action is ontologically rooted." It
is, she continues, "the birth of new men and
the new beginning, the action they are capable
of by virtue of being born."(8) The ontological
question thus introduced returns us to the question
of human nature, or alternatively, the human condition
(i.e., alternate modes of approaching the question
of the human essence and its possibilities). Natality
is a symbol of the freedom derived from Transcendence.
But in what sense is the potential of human freedom
innate and to what extent can human goodness be
nurtured through education? And why does it necessarily
fall short of the goal of perfection? At the close
of "The Crisis in Education," where the
phenomenon of natality is described as "the
fact that we have all come into the world by being
born and that this world is constantly renewed
through birth," Arendt suggests a relative
optimism concerning the capacity of education to
nurture the quasi-miracle of natality; she writes:
Education is the point at which we
decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility
for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which,
except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and
young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where
we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel
them from our world and leave them to their own devices,
nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking
something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare
them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.(9)
In what sense does the middle
ground between the rigid ideologies of liberalism
and conservatism, or, pushed to extremes, between
the black hole sameness of totalitarian communism
and totalitarian fascism, depend on something beyond
ordinary human capacity? Whence comes the freedom
that the education of children is ideally meant
to nurture and guide, but does not create, and
destroys only at the grave peril of falling headlong
into an abyss? For clarification we turn to the
thought of Karl Jaspers.
Karl Jaspers: Transcendence and the Light of Freedom
The opposition of liberalism
and conservatism in the political realm mirrors the
opposition between subjectivity and objectivity in
epistemology generally. The former opposition represents
the collective expression of the opposition between
the self and the world that occurs in the dichotomy
of ordinary perception within the world-orientation
of the individual (although important differences
do emerge in this enlargement of the concept).(10)
In the final section of his mature work, Von
der Wahrheit (1947),
an excerpt translated into English as Truth
and Symbol, Jaspers succinctly expresses the
relationship between subjectivity and objectivity
and explains
how the "Encompassing" union of the two
brings freedom into being through the opening of
Transcendence within ordinary experience. In his
own words:
The path of true philosophizing loses
neither the subject nor the object in the appearance of
Objectivity, but instead grasps Being in their polarity....
In the opposition of the will toward the object and toward
the subject it would be a mistake to decide in favor of
one side. Polemically both are right in their opposition
to the obliqueness of the opposing side, but are wrong
in denying its peculiar kernel of truth. The conflict is
resolved in the movement out of both sides in the Encompassing.(11)
The appearance of truth "between" subjectivity
and objectivity occurs in the quasi-objective form
of ciphers — i.e., the symbols or metaphors
in which Transcendence speaks, or "encodes" itself.
In this "space" opened up by the cipher-script
(Chifferschrift) of being, the possible individual
being of the unique human subject (Existenz) and
the possible meaning of the absolute objectivity
of being as Other than human subjectivity (Transzendenz)
is mediated, thus opening individual human beings
to the light of the whole spectrum of collective
organizational possibilities that exist within
the historically particular horizon of collective
human needs and ambitions (society/political action).(12)
Jaspers points out that an
absolutizing of either the subjective or objective
poles of being in world-orientation results in
either case in "the consciousness of a groundlessness."(13) I
have characterized this "groundlessness" in
the political dichotomy of liberal ideology versus
conservative ideology as an abyss, or black hole,
of totalitarian sameness. In order that we not
fall into such a trap, we are reminded by Jaspers
not to interpret ciphers, on the conservative side,
as fixed objectivities, settled dogmas that communicate
the truth of human experience once and for all
and without constant reassessment and reappropriation.
But the equivalent danger occurs on the liberal
side if we interpret ciphers as mere signs, the
ultimate meaning of which is due solely to a hermeneutical
investment by the subject.(14) The result of a
subjectivization of the cipher-script of being
is an ideology that
deifies human power structures, thereby "killing
God," as in the Nietzschean paradigm, and
setting up humanity in God's place. On the other
hand, clinging to the objectivity of ciphers as
though they constituted empirical knowledge, after
the fashion of materialistic positivism, likewise "kills
God," as in the paradigm of modern scientific
enquiry, and leads to idolatry in religion, legalism
in ethics, and fetishism in science (all of which
likewise throw human beings back upon their own
deified illusions of power). The middle ground
that potentially overcomes the groundlessness of
either absolutized extreme is to be found for Jaspers
in the Encompassing, the authentic transcendent
totality that puts every inauthentic finite totality – in
politics, "totalitarianism" – in
proper check. Here Jaspers locates the metaphysical
structure that opens a plurality of epistemic and
existential phenomena, appearing in various historical
and cultural modes—here we see the plural
manifestations of the divine, including the Truth
in communicated truths, the Logos in meaningful
logoi, the Torah in peace treaties and
social covenants, the Holy Spirit in the hearing
of the gospel and
receiving of the sacrament, the cross of Christ
in human acts of forgiveness, and, to recall Arendt's
central cipher, the Virgin Birth in the creative
potential of every child to mature and enter the
adult world with something new and transform it
through speech and action (natality). Generally
speaking, it is "the Holy" in mundane
transactions whenever those actions transcend the
cyclical necessity of nature and attain the status
of free acts.(15) It is the potential
freedom from the ideological totalitarianism of
liberalism
or
conservatism and potential freedom for new initiatives
that break through the lulling stupor of the tyrannical
grip of the status quo in our labor/consumption
society. But this freedom has its limits.
Just as no attempt to transcend
the finitude of the subject-object dichotomy and
attain the fullness of Being-in-itself is ever
wholly successful, no attempt to transcend the
left and right poles of the political spectrum
and attain a utopia wherein all of the opposing
ambitions of collective life are mutually satisfied
is ever even theoretically possible. The upshot
of this fact of worldly existence is that the closest
we can come to a "just" political determination
is to attain a situation where nearly everyone
is relatively content with the outcome, but wherein
no one is fully satisfied, since justice itself
is a cipher of philosophical faith, an ideal given
in encompassing Reason that is never fully actual.
The idea of the full satisfaction of all the participants
in a political collective is simply a "communist
fiction" that pretends to an Objectivity of
the good that it can never in principle obtain.
Such a "state" (whether ontological or
political) is obtained only through a false fixing
of the conditions of human life (as, for example,
in the warping of human natality into the strait-jacketed
existence of a labor/consumption society). Jaspers
affirms that "To declare any reality of man
as essential reality itself signifies a neglect
of the Encompassing"(16) — and hence,
a loss of the possibility of human freedom qua
Existenz.
Putting it more starkly, he declares in no uncertain
terms that "There is no absolute, permanent
reality of man."(17) What are the implications
of this when faced with the daunting challenges
of contemporary life, such as our capacity to destroy
not only ourselves, but the earth itself? Our capacity
for destruction (the result of an evil will) seems
to have multiplied exponentially through the technological "advances" of
the twentieth century; can our capacity for good
match this negative possibility? The question of
human nature takes on a new urgency in this context.
In The Atom Bomb and the
Future of Man, Jaspers sets forth a provisional
vision, so to speak, of a solution to the immense
danger
of the human capacity for self-destruction in the
nuclear age. He stresses that any "final solution" would
be a totalitarian illusion. However, appealing "from
reason to reason," Jaspers believes that "If
we grow sure of our freedom, and thus of our responsibility,
there is a chance for the change, and thus for
salvation."(18) This confidence in human freedom
is only possible through an appeal to Transcendence,
but the actualization and enactment of freedom
seems nevertheless, for Jaspers, to be a human
achievement, an actualization of a collective cipher-script
that willingly chooses a better future. Perhaps
this is stated too one-sidedly in the light of
Jaspers' own "hovering" (schwebend)
description; but an alternative emphasis which
stresses the
long tradition of "original sin," stemming
from St. Paul and Augustine, seems nevertheless
to push Jaspers further to the left than he himself
would perhaps like to go. This can be seen, for
example, by contrasting the later Heidegger's quasi-Augustinian
lack of hope in human nature (which links up, significantly,
with his earlier quasi-Augustinian treatment of "fallenness," or "falling
prey," [Verfallen] in Being and
Time; §38)
with Jaspers' more optimistic point of view (shall
we call it quasi-Pelagian by contrast?). In the
1966 "Spiegel Interview,"(19) Heidegger
indicates a definite lack of hope in humanity's
potential
to extricate itself from its technological "enframing" (Gestell);
he writes, for example, "A decisive question
for me today is how a political system can be assigned
to today's technological age at all, and which
political system would that be? I have no answer
to this question. I am not convinced that it is
democracy."(20) In another instance he states
his lack of confidence with tragic-romantic flair:
Philosophy will not be able to bring
about a direct change of the present state of the world.
This is true not only of philosophy but of all merely human
meditations and endeavors. Only a god can still save us.
I think the only possibility of salvation left to us is
to prepare readiness, through thinking and poetry, for
the appearance of the god or for the absence of the god
during the decline; so that we do not, simply put, die
meaningless deaths, but that when we decline, we decline
in the face of the absent god.(21)
In contrast to Heidegger's
famous proclamation that "only a god can still
save us," Jaspers suggests that only through
the mutual recognition of our collective responsibility
in the free exercise of communicative reason can
we deliver ourselves from the danger that lurks
in the technologization of humanity. But a this-worldly,
political salvation through world peace, an always
tenuous and fragile possibility, is, for Jaspers,
no mere external task that can be accomplished
through the bureaucracy of laws and treaties. Rather,
he insists, "If mankind's existence is in
question, man's total essence must be summoned
to provide the answer." And so, he adds, "We
become newly conscious of our basic human condition."(22) Technology
and the present state of peril it reveals, thus
shows human beings "both chances"(23) which
define humanity qua possible Existenz.
One "chance" is
the genuine possibility of meeting and transcending
the challenge of the danger humanity has created
for itself. The other is the possibility of becoming
enslaved or destroyed by our own devices. The biblical
cipher of the imago dei, stamped, as it
were, upon the pinnacle of creation in Genesis
1 (vv. 26–31),
holds these two "chances" together in
a paradoxical suspension. This symbol, perhaps
above all others (at least within the Western tradition),
reveals the potential of humanity as homo faber,
the ability to be "like God," to "know" both
good and evil through creative action, including
the use of technology (from the invention of "natural
tools" to the discovery and weaponization
of atomic energy), as well as through the communicative
action that seeks to control this immense, potentially
self-destructive power. For Jaspers, the reason
why human beings must be acknowledged to have the
possibility to master even the most destructive
of forces is that, in his words, "man is fundamentally
incomplete. He is Nietzsche's 'still undetermined
animal.'"(24) The essence of humanity, for
Jaspers, is not fixed; it is underway. It is responsive
to the range of possibilities given to it by both
the natural world and the world that is created
by humanity itself (the work of homo faber).
In response to these daunting challenges, the human
essence itself must change or be destroyed: "[Man]
will either change or he is unworthy of life and
will, against his will, destroy himself by his
technology."(25)
To save ourselves from ourselves
and transcend the monstrous machine we have created,
Jaspers stresses that the "new way of thinking" now
demanded of us all requires us to rise above the
mere calculative thinking of the intellect to embrace
encompassing Reason. And this returns us to the
same problem of education that we saw emerge with
Arendt. Jaspers points out that the scientists
who invented the atomic weaponry that got us into
the particular peril of our age cannot be looked
to for an answer to the problem, for the sort of
specialized scientific thinking that invents bombs
has no clue what to do with them once they have
been produced. He writes:
Science – as the progress of
the cogent knowledge of nature – cannot understand
its own meaning and can never adequately account for its
own necessity. Therefore, it cannot show us the way out
of doom, either. Today, its bearers frequently lack that
high philosophical impulse; they take up science as a sort
of brainwork that can yield a livelihood, position, and
prestige like any other vocation.(26)
Homo faber must transcend
to the plane of speech and action, the vita activa,
or else perish. But our educational system promotes
such mere brainwork rather than aspiring to the
cultivation of the full range of human possibilities
and virtues; it is primarily designed to reinforce
the "personality split between profession
and conscience," as Jaspers puts it.(27) The
escalating psychosis required to maintain our ever
increasing
labor/consumption cycle requires people who avoid
personal responsibility for the collective whole
by conceiving of themselves as mere cogs in the
machine. And so, the fact that our society does
not deem it necessary to teach our children how
to think about the meaning of being-human, but
instead teaches them that the highest aspiration
is to get a high paying job so as to consume more
products, perhaps more than any other practical
factor hinders a solution to our most pressing
technological and political dangers. "The
public is content," writes Jaspers, "all
it wants is calm and a flourishing economy, a high
standard of living and oblivion in pleasure."(28) For Jaspers, as with Arendt,
education is essential for developing the practice
(like the physician's "practice" which
is never a finished state of affairs) of reasonable
thinking which is required to save us from ourselves.
But such thinking must be further distinguished
from the sort of moral indoctrination currently
practiced in our public schools. The "political
correctness" that we typically find taught
today in both schools and universities as the liberal
corrective to perceived forms of conservative power
manipulation is in fact a form of indoctrination
into dogmatic modes of thinking, which in practical
effect promotes the same sort of slavish orientation
as fundamentalist-conservative religious or political
ideology (cf., the coercive strategies of anarchist
protesters, PETA activists, environmental terrorists,
etc.). Such attempts not to nurture, but to control,
the thinking of the succeeding generation seek
to rig the game by determining a fixed outcome.
Even though certain outcomes may be admirable in
theory, such as world peace, indoctrination can
never attain the goal, since the meaningfulness
of the goal, and hence the inner drive to actually
make the sacrifices necessary to accomplish and
maintain it, are sought from a heteronomous (but
not transcendent) source. The youth of each generation
must be allowed to discover the true meaning of
their own humanity and thereby come to take responsibility
for the world. This cannot happen through compulsion,
and it certainly cannot be tacked on as an addendum
to the central purpose of education today, which
is merely to get a job. So what educational model would
accomplish the sort of cultivation of reason called
for by Arendt and Jaspers? I suggest a return to
the classical model, although the current system
would likely have to collapse entirely before giving
way to such a course of action on a grand scale.
The classical Western curriculum known as the trivium
was designed to awaken free and creative thinking,
based on traditional knowledge and wisdom rather
than mere functional instrumentality, by leading
students through the three successive stages of
grammar (first through fourth grades; basic acquisition
of facts, including reading and writing skills),
logic (fifth through eighth grades; analysis and
assessment of factuality), and finally, rhetoric
(ninth through twelfth grades; the ability to externalize
the previous, largely internal development). Through
this development, partly student directed, partly
mentored, but always knowledge and wisdom based,
a well-cultivated mind is allowed to fashion autonomously
the rational tools necessary to confront the world
in speech and action, and hence enter the public
sphere not as a mere worker, but as a fully prepared
human being fit to confront the challenges of the
adult world (including, but not limited to, engaging,
meaningful work).(29) Such a curriculum, further,
has the great benefit of self-correction, since
the
young are trained to think for themselves at an
early age, not for the sake of some external agenda
per se, but for the sake of the development
of their own humanity in dialogue with the human
development
of the entire world. The impetus to act can thus
emerge naturally through the cultivation of concern
for the world which they have come to care for — not
simply been told they ought to. The current system,
by not permitting the logic phase to begin essentially
until college – which becomes simply the "thirteenth
grade" for most – promotes a delayed
adolescence of intellectual passivity and mental
slavishness by stretching out the (predominantly
passive) grammar phase to fill the entire twelve
years of the public system. But by this time, the
true formative period of awakening to life's possibilities
and seeing the authentic potential beauty of human
existence within the world has been squashed in
all but a few who manage to recover it and break
through to a new way of thinking, seemingly against
all odds. But in all of these considerations,
we must not forget the central issue of whether
and to what extent we are truly capable of accomplishing
these grand ideals from out of our own nature,
incomplete as that may be. We must not be seduced
into false utopian visions, for the transformation
of humanity that Jaspers calls for is realistic
about the fact that history displays the repetitive
tendency of humanity to fall into patterns of self-seeking
inauthenticity, the tendency of human beings to "fall
away" from themselves. Poor educational patterns
are not the only problem, although they certainly
exacerbate and drive the problem to new levels.
Good education can be considered good only to the
extent that it brings us to ourselves; as such
it is merely a vehicle. We must still wrestle with
ourselves when we get there. We must wrestle with
our apparently innate tendency to avoid responsibility,
for ourselves and the world. Jaspers comes rather
close to describing something akin to the cipher
of original sin when he says, "There is within
us an unconscious urge to fight any contact with
our innermost being, which we consider obscure,
incalculable, and therefore profound."(30)
Instead, "Man
wants to be able to follow instructions without
having to commit himself. He wants to remain aloof
and not to expose himself."(31) Good education
does not fix this problem; it merely creates the
conditions of an awakening to it. In order to comprehend
this particular phenomenon of being-human – the
inherent tendency to fall into patterns of inauthentic
behavior, the tendency to hide from ourselves,
to not be what we know we ought to be – we
must engage our thought with the religious tradition
of the West that has developed this notion as the
cipher of "original sin." In so doing,
it is hoped that we may glimpse an encounter of
Transcendence with Existenz that may shed light
on the nature of the human condition qua freedom.
Reinhold Niebuhr: The Human Condition as Freedom and Fall
For Jaspers, the human essence
(Existenz) is not a fixed objectivity,
nor is its potential vis-à-vis the challenges of worldly
existence; hence, the outcome of human action in
the world is not a fixed certainty, a definite
Fate. From the standpoint of finite human existence,
we simply do not know whether we will destroy ourselves
or transcend this danger to some new collective
possibility. Bringing Christian theology to bear
on this situation, Reinhold Niebuhr, who is relatively
close to the existentialist neo-Kantian thinking
of Jaspers and Arendt, reminds us of the potency
of specific traditional symbols – like that
of "original sin" – that stress
the inherent evil in human nature as the ostensible
inevitability of humanity to fail to overcome its
own self-centeredness for the sake of collective
peace.
In The Nature and Destiny
of Man, Niebuhr identifies the paradoxical
tension at the heart of the traditional Christian
interpretation
of human nature, explaining that "The Christian
doctrine of sin in its classical form offends both
rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly
absurd position that man sins inevitably and by
a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless
to be held responsible for actions which are prompted
by an ineluctable fate."(32) In Romans, Paul
identifies human self-glorification as "without
excuse" before
God, since, apparently, humanity corrupted its
own freedom by turning away from God through its
own act of volition (Rom. 1:20–21). But on
the other hand, the corruption of sin seems to
be an
inevitable defect, stemming from the sin of the
first man, Adam (Rom. 5:12). Niebuhr concisely
states the absurdity as follows::
Original sin, which is by definition
an inherited corruption, or at least an inevitable one,
is nevertheless not to be regarded as belonging to his
essential nature and therefore is not outside the realm
of his responsibility. Sin is natural for man in the sense
that it is universal but not in the sense that it is necessary.(33)
With the formula that sin is
inevitable (i.e., universal), but not
necessary (i.e., human freedom and responsibility must be
maintained), Niebuhr seeks to interpret the central
cipher of the Christian formulation of human nature
in a manner that does not reduce it either to the
objective, "conservative" pole in which
a meaningless "freedom" of human volition
is consumed by the all-encompassing Sovereignty
of a God who capriciously predestines some to salvation
and some to perdition, nor to the subjective, "liberal" pole
which reduces Transcendence to a mere sign in which
human beings take the position of God as the absolute
determiners of their own destiny. As Jaspers points
out repeatedly, for a symbol, or cipher, to be
meaningful, and hence a vehicle for the actualization
of Existenz, it must not be reduced to a mere sign,
for then Transcendence evaporates. Niebuhr thus
seeks a theological middle ground between liberal,
subjectivizing, Pelagian doctrines and the conservative,
objectivizing views favored by literalist Augustinian
interpretations of human nature. He may perhaps
be thought of as an Augustinian existentialist.
For Niebuhr, original sin is
not an objective designation of the human condition
in the same way that, for example, one has hands
and feet. His approach to the problem is phenomenological
and existential. For instance, "original sin" gathers
together in one symbol, understood as revelatory
of a transcendent source or meaning, the paradox
of human existence qua freedom, which inevitably
fails to actualize the good that it knows it should
and is ultimately responsible for. Instead human
freedom attempts to descend below its authentic
possibilities, seeking refuge in sensuality, or
attempts to rise above its authentic possibilities,
seeking refuge in pride, arrogance and self-love,
in either case avoiding a genuine confrontation
with one's self and the mutual claims between self,
others, and the world that come to light in that
encounter. It is precisely because human beings
are free (not bound to necessity), but nevertheless
anxious about that freedom, not wanting to confront
the responsibility it implies, that temptation
to sin emerges and inevitably occurs. Niebuhr summarizes
the point succinctly:
The temptation to sin lies...in the
human situation itself. This situation is that man as spirit
transcends the temporal and natural processes in which
he is involved and also transcends himself. Thus his freedom
is the basis of his creativity but it is also his temptation.
Since he is involved in the contingencies and necessities
of the natural process on the one hand and since, on the
other, he stands outside of them and foresees their caprices
and perils, he is anxious. In his anxiety he seeks to transmute
his finiteness into infinity, his weakness into strength,
his dependence into independence. He seeks in other words
to escape finiteness and weakness by a quantitative rather
than qualitative development of his life.(34)
Here we see the very problem
Jaspers identified as the incapacity of scientific,
calculative thinking (or quantitative thinking)
to solve the inevitable problems into which it
necessarily falls. And yet, the qualitative leap
that transcends quantitative thinking can never
become a permanent accomplishment, fixed once and
for all, although it may be provisionally "grasped" (or
we might say, inspired by Jaspers, gegriffen
aus dem Umgreifenden) through the introduction
of other ciphers of Transcendence, which in turn
resist
objectification. Nevertheless, human beings inevitably
fall back into fixation upon their finite needs
and goals and glorification of themselves as they
master particular dimensions of their limited worldly
existence. This leads, according to Niebuhr, to
the ultimate paradox that "the final exercise
of freedom in the transcendent human spirit is
the recognition of the false use of that freedom
in action." And so, Niebuhr declares, "Man
is most free in the discovery that he is not free." We
use our freedom to relinquish our freedom.(35)
Human freedom is beyond the
closed, systemic dualities of the natural world,
governed by natural necessity. The paradox of original
sin thus lies beyond the binary, calculative categories
of modern analytical logic. It requires a cipher
of Transcendence that holds the opposition together
in one image, or concept, that nevertheless expresses
not a fixed objectivity of the past (an historical "Fall" that
is inherited bodily), nor a fixed objectivity of
the future (a particular Fate, such as a this-worldly
or other-worldly conflagration), but rather the
phenomenon of what actually happens at every moment
of the present when human beings are faced with
the anxiety of the freedom into which they have
been thrown by virtue of being born.(36) The "Fall" as
an historical event is unthinkable, but not because
it did or did not happen. The question is not whether
it happened; the point is to see that it happens.
And recognition of this happening opens humanity
to a vertical dimension with God, from Niebuhr's
perspective of Christian theological faith, or
Transcendence, from Jaspers' perspective of philosophical
faith. For this reason, Niebuhr finds (consistent
with the Pauline cipher, but understood qua cipher,
not objectification) that "Jesus' injunction,
'Therefore I say unto you be not anxious' contains
the whole genius of the Biblical view of the relation
of finiteness to sin in man."(37)
If we do not fall into objectifying,
conservative interpretations of human nature as
ontologically fallen or subjectifying, liberal
interpretations of human nature as basically good,
despite massive historical evidence to the contrary,
we may see that the biblical tradition itself preserves
an element of the original goodness of humanity
in the cipher of the imago dei of Genesis
1. The original perfection of human nature, however,
likewise
cannot be sought as an objectified state existing
within time, before an objectified Fall; nor can
the destruction and deformation of the ideal of
a sinless human nature be found as an objectified
state after an objectified Fall. Rather, Niebuhr
contends that the loss of virtue and destruction
of the proper function of human nature can only
come about by human beings availing themselves
of one of the elements central to being-human,
namely freedom.(38) Thus, for Niebuhr, the concept
of a justia originalis ("original
righteousness")
that can never be wholly obscured, even through
the self-destructive abuse of freedom, balances
the concept of original sin, which nevertheless
drives us to seek a vertical relationship with
Transcendence, pressing humanity to look beyond
its own resources for salvation from its own self-destructive
tendencies — including both dimensions: temporal
political salvation in world peace and supra-temporal
soteriological redemption in "the peace of
God, which passes all understanding" (Phil.
4:7).
The Christian interpretation
of human Existenz by means of the cipher of original
sin, or fallenness, becomes meaningful only in
relation to its counterpart-cipher in the dimension
of Transcendence proper — i.e., through the
cipher of the transcendent revelation of the meaning
of humanity in the person and work of Christ (i.e., "God
with us" as Savior, Redeemer, and hence as
Exemplar). Just as the meaning of humanity is obscured
when the cipher of original sin falls to the liberal,
subjective pole or the conservative, objective
pole, so the cipher of Christ as divine Savior
of fallen, sinful humanity is obscured in the following
ways. If the cipher of Christ becomes a mere sign,
something less than a true cipher, we are left
with an empty "ought," an ineffectual
moralism that tells us how we should live, but
fails to ground the moral imperative in anything
beyond ourselves; so if we fail in the task, we
are left hopeless, and if we succeed, we are left
with no check on our tendency toward self-glorification.
On the other hand, if the cipher of Christ is turned
into a literal object of knowledge, and hence becomes
something more than a true cipher, then all other
dimensions of meaning within religious consciousness
become subordinate to an all-pervasive soteriology,
resulting typically in one of two distortions in
either the political or individual sphere: moral
complacency or moral obsessiveness qua legalism.
In fact, it is not uncommon to find these extremes
bound together in one ideology, as in the medieval
Christian Church's combination of a corrupt papacy
together with a policy of inquisition and severe
punishment of heresy, or in the strikingly similar
contemporary example of Islamic fundamentalism,
which justifies the breaking of all moral norms,
including the killing of innocent children through
terrorism, in the service of a supposedly purist
interpretation of the tradition of Jihad. The extremes,
when pressed, turn into the same groundlessness
(our "black hole" metaphor) of empty,
self-glorifying moralism. In this vein, Niebuhr
comments in Moral Man and Immoral Society that "Religion
draws the bow of life so taut that it either snaps
the string (defeatism) or overshoots the mark (fanaticism
and asceticism)."(39) The solution is to cultivate
the tension that, ironically, is the essence of
peace.
When viewed from the standpoint
of politics and the collective self-transcending
required to overcome our current technological
peril, this groundlessness takes the form of fatalism
on either side. On the left, we are given empty
utopian fantasies, as in the social gospel of liberal
Christianity or in Marxism, but no real hope to
expect that a vision of collective human freedom
will be actualized. The promise appears hollow
when faced with the record of history. The result
is a tragic vision of humanity, ending in nihilism
and despair (a mood felt throughout Europe since
the late nineteenth century and in America at least
since the Vietnam era) – with little to help
but the coping mechanisms of stoicism, cynicism,
hedonism, etc. – once the harsh Anstoß,
or "check," of reality finally shakes
the sleepers awake from their Polyanic dreaming
(unless, of course, they remain asleep in blissful
ignorance until it is too late). On the right,
however, as in radical Protestantism, excessive
deference to the sovereignty of God and the hand
of Providence in historical affairs can likewise
rob humanity of a real hope for human flourishing
in this life. The Christian cipher that transcends
and holds in tension both of these extremes is
the symbol of the kingdom of God, understood as
already here, "within you," and yet to
come, "from above." This is the dual-parousia of Christ, which reveals the ultimate Christian
interpretation of being, in which cipher of presence is reconciled past and future, humanity and God,
time and eternity, finitude and infinity, and fallenness
and world peace. It is the reconciliation, the
absolution, of all things within one cipher of
the Absolute. The political problem of world peace,
itself a universal concept, or cipher of totality,
as raised by Jaspers, comes into fruitful dialogue
with the cipher of the kingdom of God at this point
and will also return us to the question of education.
"World peace" and
the "kingdom of God" on earth, are complementary
philosophical and religious ciphers, the quasi-objects
of philosophical faith and religious faith. Arendt,
Jaspers, and Niebuhr would all agree that such
a state is not realizable as any sort of finished
product, a thing to be accomplished and from which
we could then get about the business of other affairs.
Rather, such ciphers direct the meaning of life
itself and clarify its fundamental condition as
always unfinished, imperfect, striving and failing,
but transcending limits, always to find new ones.
Also, such ciphers open humanity to a revelatory
dimension of experience that provides hope for
peace and an encompassing Reason to keep working
together, despite the despair that should necessarily
engulf us when we calculate the probabilities of
destroying ourselves. These ciphers, by their inherent
power to lift us out of the despair of ideological
extremism and organize us in the direction of a
reasonable policy of moderation, stimulate a realistic
perspective concerning human existence in a world
that continually falls into cycles of violence
and consumption. Jaspers' middle position in politics
has been called "conservative liberalism," or
alternately, "cultural Republicanism," either
of which suggests the attempt to forge a middle
course between the left and the right.(40) In a
similar vein, Niebuhr adopted the designation "Christian
realism" as a label for his attempt to navigate
a middle course between the, (in his view unrealistic),
pacifist tendencies of the liberal social gospel
and the militaristic totalitarianism that threatened
the twentieth century in the forms of communism
and fascism, and continues to threaten the world
in the form of terrorism, both conventional and
nuclear. In the face of the destruction of humanity,
hard practical choices must be made based on particular
circumstances, including the call to war. The ciphers
of world peace and the kingdom of God, when juxtaposed
in a mutually revelatory hermeneutical circle,
provide a transcendent source of light that suspends
in tension encompassing Reason and divine revelation,
providing us with a dual grounding principle of "love
and justice"(41) that makes possible transcending, "saving" judgments
in the face of seemingly insurmountable individual
and collective will to power. Niebuhr sums up the
historical relation of justice to love in the following
insightful passage:
[T]he Christian conception of the relation
of historical justice to the love of the Kingdom of God
is a dialectical one. Love is both the fulfillment and
the negation of all achievements of justice in history.
Or expressed from the opposite standpoint, the achievements
of justice in history may rise in indeterminate degrees
to find their fulfillment in a more perfect love and brotherhood;
but each new level of fulfillment also contains elements
which stand in contradiction to perfect love. There are
therefore obligations to realize justice in indeterminate
degrees; but none of the realizations can assure the serenity
of perfect fulfillment.(42)
Good education, always to be
distinguished strongly from mere indoctrination,
is one of the most important means of nurturing
and cultivating the ciphers that lead us beyond
ourselves and inspire us to make difficult, sacrificial
choices for the sake of fellow human beings and
the preservation rather than destruction of the
world. On the side of philosophy, the cultivation
of ciphers of encompassing Reason inspire a love
of humanity as part of an overarching love of the
very structures of being, the way being manifests
itself and provides open possibilities for repose,
contentment, beauty, tranquility, and inspiration
for individual and mutual creativity. However,
whereas the ground of self-sacrificing love does
not ascend through philosophy to absolute status
as it can in religion, philosophical reflection
nevertheless can serve to ground human respect
for justice (as we see particularly in the legacy
of Kantian thought). On the side of religion, the
cultivation of ciphers of Transcendence proper
inspire a love of humanity through archetypes of
divine self-sacrifice, revealing the love of God
for a fallen, sinful humanity, thereby inspiring
us to love one another "as God first loved
us" and to "take up our crosses" and
sacrifice ourselves for our fellow human beings
and for the sake of externalizing the kingdom of
God that has already come and reigns within the
recipient of grace. In neither case can education
force an appropriation of ciphers; the result being
groundless ideology. Rather, they must be preserved
in a "conservative" model of education,
as Arendt has argued, that nevertheless allows
them to be brought forth in ever new practical
situations to allow for a progressive transcending
of the status quo. Tradition must therefore
be preserved, but must not become a rigid fixation.
Rather, Ricoeur's wise aphorism at the conclusion
of The Symbolism of Evil – "the
symbol gives rise to thought"(43) – ought
always to orient the transition from fixed traditional
metanarratives (ethnic myths, ecclesiastical dogmas,
etc.) to the practical political sphere which demands
a transcending of the special interests of particular
cultural collectives such as those organized around
particular myths or dogmas. On the side of religious
observance, mention may be made of the significance
of liturgy and traditional ritual reenactment for
preserving the symbols of the past, so long as
this preservation does not degenerate into empty
recitation disconnected with the day to day lives
of practitioners, a situation resulting in Nietzsche's
identification of churches as the tombs of the
dead God of Western society. In the realm of education,
I have recommended the classical trivium model
precisely because its emphasis on historical knowledge
(typically forfeited in the public schools for
the sake of moralizing "social studies")
promotes a preservation of the lessons of the past
on a universal, cross-cultural scale toward the
end of human cultivation in general, but also toward
practical thinking in the present. And further,
its emphasis on the interconnected theoretical
and practical skills of logic and rhetoric (almost
completely neglected in our current system, even
at the college level) promotes a transition from
mere knowledge acquisition, i.e., preservation,
to an actualization of new possibilities in light
of the needs of collective humanity (the vita
activa).
Conclusion
As the Democratic and Republican
parties today become increasingly polarized, both
ironically becoming the advocates of "big
business" interests — on the right,
the big business of corporate and military expansionism,
and on the left, the big business of government
expansionism through social programs, it is easy
to become disillusioned by the lack of creative
solutions on either side, or the ability of either
party to identify the depth of the central problems
of the age. And so we are tempted to withdraw from
the public sphere, relegating the fundamental responsibilities
of democratic life to someone else — perhaps "they" will
take care of it. But the imperative to transcend
the ideological fixations of liberalism and conservatism
does not necessarily imply that we should seek
to opt out of the fray by taking refuge in some
extreme form of libertarianism. Libertarian alternatives
that seek a simple retreat from the left and right
ideologies of mass society can indeed provide a
limited chance of acquiring more authentic possibilities
of genuine community, places where human beings
meet each other face to face with mutual claims
of responsibility. But they can also become escapist
refuges that likewise rely on "someone else" to
solve the big problems of global society, such
as the threat of nuclear terrorism. Thus, they
tend to appear as romantic, stoic, or perhaps even
parasitic enclaves—odd lumps on the flattened,
leveled off world where everyone becomes the Same
sort of impersonal working animal. We have considered
this "sameness" at either extreme as
the essence of the quasi-totalitarian spirit now
driving the economic engine of globalization and
seeking to crush the freedom of the human spirit
by retarding its growth in the earliest stages
of our educational system. And so, although it
does not provide a simple solution (there is no
simple solution, and this is precisely the illusion
of libertarianism), so long as it does not turn
into escapism, the libertarian model provides an
important point of negation to the dialectic of
left and right ideologies, an orientation point
of authentic communal spirit, impracticable as
an easy fix to the clash of the dominant ideologies,
but nevertheless a crucial point of reference for
attaining pockets of authenticity within a global
network that, we may presume, will always be too
big to become anything more than an impersonal,
functional network. But perhaps by seeking out
such places of genuine community, authentic substructures
within the necessarily inauthentic global totality,
we can find opportunities to discover and nurture
the genuine humanity within ourselves and our "neighbors" as
a possible ground for engaging humanity on a universal,
global scale — which we must do if there
is to be any hope for "saving" the world.
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