Francis Canavan, S.J., "Liberalism in Root and Flower"

From The Ethical Dimension of Political Life: Essays in Honor of John H. Hallowell, edited by Francis Canavan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983, 40-48.

Father Canavan sent me a photocopy of this essay, his contribution to the Festschrift he had edited. It accompanied his letter to me of April 6, 1994, as he intended it to amplify points he made in that letter.

As a description of aspects of the logic of classical liberalism, it is eloquent. It is also, unfortunately, silent on the etiology of the philosophical displacement he writes about. In that respect the paper is merely a report of facts—people once believed this, now they don’t: behold the consequences. As he was largely addressing those who shared his tacit judgment that the consequences were bad, failing to argue explicitly for that judgment led to no loss of meaning. And so, we are advised, “The reader may decide for himself whether this situation [i.e., the ubiquity of pornography in contemporary Europe and America.—A.F.] represents liberalism’s finest hour or its most fetid flower.” The dominant impression, at least in my mind, with all due respect for Father Canavan’s great learning, is one of conservative grumbling, equally erudite and ineffectual.

Father Canavan does not even hint at a possible causal story for what he clearly regards as a cultural and even civilizational disaster. He does not even betray any awareness of the need for one. He outlines what is “difficult for the nominalist mind to grasp,” but merely counterposes, externally, as though reciting a manual from his first year at seminary, the displaced scholastic alternative (which, despite its putative superiority, came to a dead end no less than has it modernist displacers). After second-rate conservative writers (not including Father Canavan!) grew tired of parroting Voegelin’s references to the “immanentizing of the eschaton,” they began finding the bogeyman of “nominalism” under every bed. (It was certainly less of a mouthful to utter.) But what, pray tell, was nominalism’s root? Is it merely the result of philosophical blunder? A failure of education? And if one is not a fatuous nominalist, what kind of realist ought one be?

We understand the need for a division of labor, and Father Canavan, for all his gifts in the area of political thought, was simply neither a metaphysician nor epistemologist. And so we find somewhat more (but not completely) excusable his failure to consider the postmodern Whiteheadian alternative to both modernity and antiquity, which has been taken up in varying degrees and in different ways by several Roman Catholic priests, e.g., Thomas Hosinski, Joseph Bracken, and James Felt. The last two named have been fellow Jesuits of Father Canavan’s for at least fifty years. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., a Thomistically inspired Jesuit who modified his own philosophy as a consequence of his engagement with Whitehead’s thought, resided at Fordham’s Loyola Hall with Father Canavan and contributed an essay for a Festschrift in his honor.

For my further thoughts on this, please see both my letter to Father Canavan (to which he wanted me to regard the essay below as a reply) and my notes entitled, “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster?”

Anthony Flood

August 4, 2011

Liberalism in Root and Flower

Francis Canavan, S.J.

Pornography has become the hallmark of liberal democracy. When General Franco died and democracy returned to Spain, pornographic establishments blossomed all over Madrid, heralding the dawn of liberty. But the phenomenon was not a unique or peculiarly Spanish one. Throughout the democratic world pornography is the external sign of that bland, permissive tolerance which is now liberalism’s sole remaining inward grace.

It may appear strange that liberal democrats should have come to accept mass pandering to a degraded taste as the symbol of their regime, but that they have done so is clear. Why they have done so, however, is a question that invites inquiry. The reason, upon inquiry, will turn out to have little to do with sex but much to do with the subjectivism that is the essence of liberalism.

John H. Hallowell described, over forty years ago, the original or “integral” liberalism of the seventeenth century in his The Decline of Liberalism as an Ideology.¹ It was based, he said, on a concept of individuality which emphasized “the inherent moral worth and spiritual equality of each individual, the dignity of human personality, the autonomy of individual will, and the essential rationality of men.” Because of the importance attached to both autonomy and rationality, “two essential elements are found in liberalism in its integral form: first, the belief that society is composed of atomic, autonomous individuals; and, second, the belief that there are certain eternal truths transcending individuals and independent of either individual will or desire.” Consequently, integral liberalism blended two different theories of law: “On the one hand, there is the notion that law is the product of individual wills and the embodiment of individual interests; on the other hand, there is the notion that law is the embodiment of eternal and absolute truths independent of either individual will or interest.”²

The foundation of integral liberalism, therefore, is a merging of “the two concepts, despite their logical inconsistency and respective self-sufficiency, into one theory.” The cement that held the two concepts together was conscience, conceived of as each individual’s share of human reason. Integral liberalism, Hallowell explains,

espoused freedom for the individual under the impersonal authority of law. It conceived of the law as being eternal, universal, and rational, and as containing substantive limitations upon subjective interest and will. To an anarchic conception of society as composed of autonomous individual units, liberalism opposed the conception of an order transcending individuals, and placed the responsibility for realizing this order, potentially embodied in eternal truths, upon individual reason and conscience. The link between the subjective will of the individual and the objective order was reason and conscience.³

The greater part of Hallowell’s book is devoted to showing how the liberal synthesis fell apart under the impact of historicism and positivism. As people lost confidence in their ability, through reason, to know truths that transcend sense experience, reason became increasingly individualized and moral judgment turned into the mere expression of individual preference. The disintegration of the liberal synthesis paved the way in Germany, he argues, for the triumph of Hitlerism. But (as Hallowell, of course, is well aware) the liberal conception of reason contained within itself the seeds of this disintegration from the beginning. The subjective will of the individual eventually prevailed over the objective moral order because of the way in which liberals understood reason and its capacities.

Liberal rationalism has always contained a strong streak of hedonism.⁴ We may cite a few well-known English writers in the liberal tradition for illustration. The view of Thomas Hobbes as the author of that tradition is recent and admittedly controversial, but it is held by eminent scholars.⁵ John Locke, too, is the subject of endless controversy, but Sheldon Wolin expresses a common opinion when he says, “To the extent that modern liberalism can be said to be inspired by any one writer, Locke is undoubtedly the leading candidate.”⁶ Jeremy Bentham brought into bold relief the utilitarianism that was implicit in liberalism. His somewhat recalcitrant disciple, John Stuart Mill, was the nineteenth-century liberal par excellence.

These writers began their moral reasoning by reducing “the good” to pleasure. Thus Hobbes: “Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions. . . .”⁷ Locke agrees:

Things then are good or evil only in reference to pleasure or pain. That we call good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure or diminish pain in us; or else to procure or preserve us the possession of any other good, or absence of any evil. And, on the contrary, we name that evil which is apt to produce or increase any pain or diminish any pleasure in us; or else to procure us any evil, or deprive us of any good.⁸

Bentham repeats the theme in these words: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”⁹ John Stuart Mill strove to free utilitarianism from the crudity of Bentham’s quantitative analysis of pleasure and pain, and maintained in his Utilitarianism that pleasures differ in quality as well as in quantity. But he did not break with Bentham’s thesis that pleasure and pain are the only springs of human action. He devoted chapter 4 of Utilitarianism to showing that “happiness is a good,” that “there is in reality nothing desired except happiness,” and that happiness is pleasure or the absence of pain, so that “to desire anything except in proportion as the idea of it is pleasant is a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”¹⁰

It is important to notice at this point the effect that hedonism has upon rationalism. A philosophy which equates the good with pleasure severely limits the scope of reason. The whole realm of judgment on what is good or bad for human beings, therefore of normative ethical and political judgment, is closed to reason. This explains why Hobbes’s laws of nature are only “conclusions, or theorems” of enlightened self-interest,” why Locke’s efforts to set his law of nature on a firm rational foundation were unsuccessful,¹² and why Bentham declared that talk of natural rights was “simply nonsense . . . nonsense upon stilts.”¹³

It also explains why Mill’s On Liberty, although it is premised upon a theory of human development and progress, nonetheless insists on identifying development with the cultivation of individuality. For if the good is reducible to pleasure, and pleasure is a subjective and individual experience, then all judgments about the good must ultimately be felt preferences or aversions that are beyond the criticism of reason and intellect.

A more recent writer than any previously mentioned, Robert A. Dahl, rejects the idea of natural rights, on which he says James Madison’s theory of the constitutional republic in Federalist No. 10 is based, because natural rights have no operational definition and are therefore unacceptable to “anyone of positivist or skeptical predispositions.” “The other alternative”—and the one which Dahl proposes to follow in his theory of democracy—”is to lay down political equality as an end to be maximized, that is, to postulate that the goals of every adult citizen are to be accorded equal value in determining government policies.”¹⁴ This is to say that, since the relative worth of different goals cannot be discerned by reason, the political system must postulate the equal worth of all adult citizens’ desires. Thus political equality comes to be founded, by default, so to speak, on the subjectivity of all values. This is the direction in which the inner dynamism of liberal thought has moved it from the beginning. The substantive limitations upon subjective interest and will, which Hallowell pointed out in integral liberalism, broke down under the pressure of liberal hedonism.

Underlying the hedonism and subjectivism of the liberal mind is its individualism, and this in turn springs from its nominalism. Michael Oakeshott explains:

Individualism as a gospel has drawn its inspiration from many sources, but as a reasoned theory of society it has its roots in the so-called nominalism of late medieval scholasticism, with its doctrines that the reality of a thing is its individuality, that which makes it this thing, and that in both God and man will is precedent to reason. Hobbes inherited this tradition of nominalism, and more than any other writer passed it on to the modern world. His civil philosophy is based, not on any vague belief in the value or sanctity of the individual man, but on a philosophy for which the world is composed of individuae substantiae.¹⁵

Locke’s nominalism runs throughout his Essay concerning Human Understanding. The object of our knowledge, he holds, is our own ideas, and these are either sensations caused from without or our interior reflection on the operations of our own minds. From these elementary building blocks we compose the ideas that constitute our knowledge of the world. Consequently, we never know the real essence of a thing, but only its nominal essence, which is a mental construct that we make up for the sake of convenience in dealing with the world. Besides, the real essence of any substance, could we know it, would be its particular and individual constitution, that which makes it this thing and no other.¹⁶ Locke’s world, as much as Hobbes’s, is a world of individual substances, known to us only in the sensations they cause in us.

Concerning Bentham, Crane Brinton remarks, “It may seem no small violence to Bentham’s memory to describe him in a term drawn from those Middle Ages he so disliked, but he really is the perfect nominalist. The individual, John Doe, is for him an ultimate reality.”¹⁷ Mill’s theory of knowledge is a more mixed bag, on the contents of which there are widely varying views among scholars. R. P. Anschutz, who has written an extended analysis of Mill’s epistemology, sees him as oscillating between nominalism and realism, but coming down on the side of realism where science was concerned. “He was always a realist when he was in earnest about science: . . . and there are few philosophers who have been more thoroughly in earnest about science than Mill,” says Anschutz. Mill could therefore hold a deterministic view of man in “the heavier treatises on scientific method like the Logic.” But in “the more popular essays on ethics like the essay on Liberty,” he could espouse “the romantic or self-formative view.”¹⁸ It is in his highly individualistic ethics that Mill’s nominalism comes into play. The individual must decide upon his own good because it is so thoroughly his.

A few references to a few writers prove very little, of course. But one may venture the suggestion that the nominalist view of the world, which reduced it to a collection of individual substances only externally related to each other, furnishes a key to understanding what has happened to the liberal tradition. It explains, for one thing, why the idea of a moral law of nature, which still persisted in Hobbes and Locke (in however withered a form), was abandoned and replaced by scientific laws of nature of the sort that Bentham and Mill believed in.

For if, in our ignorance of the nature of anything, we cannot know its natural good, we may yet observe and apprehend the relations of efficient causality that obtain among things. And if, instructed by David Hume, we learn to doubt even our ability to know causality, we may yet perceive patterns among the data of the senses, patterns which can be expressed in statistical “laws” and may be explained by hypotheses that are at least conditionally valid. Our knowledge of the real, therefore, insofar as we have genuine knowledge, is simply knowledge of those aspects of reality that are quantifiable.

Such a view of the world has a tendency to make substances themselves disappear, because it depends on a particular method of analysis and synthesis. Just as we understand a clock when we can take it apart and put it together again, so we understand any other thing in particular and all things in general. As the Enlightenment philosophe, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, put it, “we can hope to know nature . . . by thoughtful study of phenomena, by the comparison we make among them, by the art of reducing, as much as that may be possible, a large number of phenomena to a single one that can be regarded as their principle.”¹⁹ The synthesis or reconstitution of the object analyzed shows how the subsidiary phenomena follow from the one or few basic phenomena which are the principles from which the whole ensemble flows. This way of understanding things creates at least a temptation to regard the parts as more real than the whole because it is they that “explain” the whole: we understand something when we can reduce it, if only in thought, to its elements and see how they fit together again.

Michael Polanyi describes this view of scientific understanding in these words:

The paradigm of a conception of science pursuing the ideal of absolute detachment by representing the world in terms of its exactly determined particulars was formulated by Laplace. An intelligence which knew at one moment of time—wrote Laplace—”all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the entities which compose it . . . would embrace in the same formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be present to its eyes.” Such a mind would possess a complete knowledge of the universe.²⁰

On the contrary, however, far from revealing the whole history of the world, Laplace’s theory would not let us know that there was a world at all. As Polanyi says, Laplace assumes that “we should explain all kinds of experience in terms of atomic data.” Once you refuse to make this fallacious assumption, however, “you immediately see that Laplacean mind understands precisely nothing and that whatever it knows means precisely nothing.”²¹

Yet it is this type of thinking that makes the community a collection of individuals, the living body a collection of cells, and the cell a collection of atoms. It is capable of regarding a human being as nothing more than a highly complicated chemical compound and the human mind as a mere sum total of its contents. Nominalism does not stop with the individual substance but goes on to dissolve it, too. Its urge to analyze and to synthesize mechanically reduces a substance to its elementary components which it never succeeds in putting together again in their original form because it sees the whole only as an assembly of parts.

The nominalist mind therefore cannot understand a natural whole or appreciate a natural good. To illustrate what is meant by this, let us make an assertion: the life of the mosquito is a good to the mosquito. But of course; the mosquito has a subjective urge that makes it fly away when it sees a hand raised to swat it. Very well, let us substitute another proposition: the life of a tree is a good to the tree.

The tree has no subjective urges, so far as we can tell. It feels neither pleasure nor pain and makes no resistance to the woodsman when he cuts it down. But it is a single, unified organism, all of whose functions serve its life as this unfolds itself in a process of growth, development, and eventual reproduction. Although the tree knows nothing of good or evil, its life is its good because its being and its intelligibility consist in its life. The tree cannot be understood, simply as a fact, unless it is understood as an organic whole, organized for life and growth, not for disease and death.

That all trees eventually die is irrelevant, since a tree cannot be said for that reason to be intrinsically indifferent to life and death. Like all material and composite things, it will finally decompose. But what makes it a tree, so long as it remains one, is its unifying inner thrust toward living, not the fact that it will some day die. Nor does one dispose of the organic unity of a tree by asserting that trees are the products of a blind, mechanical evolution. What evolves is more significant than how it evolves, and the “how” does not explain away the “what.”²² No matter how they came to be here, while there are trees on earth, they are living organisms whose life is the end which their intrinsic functions serve.

That is why it is possible to speak of a particular tree as deformed, diseased, or dying. The being of a tree is a standard by which its good or ill can be judged. The good spoken of here is not a moral but an ontological one. But it is a true, objective, and intellectually knowable good, founded in the recognition of a tree as a natural whole. When we turn our attention to those natural wholes called human beings, we may recognize that they, too, have a premoral and ontological good proper to their nature. It is this premoral good that makes moral judgments by and about human beings possible.

All of this is difficult for the nominalist mind to grasp because it seeks to understand and explain everything in terms of its parts and therefore overlooks the priority of the whole of which they are parts. Because it is antipathetic to the idea of natural wholes, such a mind also finds it hard to entertain the notion of relations as natural. For it, relations are external, accidental, and adventitious, not consequences of the natures of things. Reality is made up of individual things which collide with one another to form more or less lasting patterns. These patterns are the only order of nature that there is.

This conception of reality has led to the understanding of relations among human beings as external and voluntary. The individual human being is an atom, motivated by self-interest, to whom violence is done if he is subjected to a relationship with other humans which he has not chosen. [The printed text gives “whom he has not chosen,” but Father Canavan crossed out “whom” and wrote in “which” in the margin of the photocopy to indicate that “relationship,” not “humans,” was his intended antecedent.—A.F.] It is no accident that this mentality thinks of civil society as essentially contractual, that its corrosive view of community is now affecting marriage and the family (to the point of contractualizing the relations among parents and children), and that it seeks to reduce the two sexes so far as possible into one, relations among whose members will be a matter of freely chosen lifestyles.

It is understandable, therefore, that thinkers infected or affected by nominalism should regard all goods as subjective, that is as objects of desires or as what positivism calls “values.” One may not know whether the cause of pleasure or pain is objectively good or evil. One may doubt whether objective good and evil are meaningful terms at all. But one can be certain of pleasure and pain precisely because they are so totally subjective; one feels them or one does not.

A politics based upon the pleasure-pain principle must be one that seeks to satisfy the most basic human drives. (Whether they will be the desires of the ruling few or of the democratic many then becomes the primary issue of politics.) The early modern period took greed and the desire for power as the strongest of these drives. “Men pursue their ends, which are wealth and power,” as Machiavelli almost casually remarked.²³ Hobbes for his part took as “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”²⁴ But these writers did not see what was lacking in their view of the moving forces of human nature.

One of our own contemporaries has pointed it out. “If a leading insight of modernity was that men do badly so long as they try to stifle rather than to compound with the passions,” says Joseph Cropsey, “then surely the modern project must be said to have lain in a state of incipience until the sexual appetite, as well as those more visibly political ones disencumbered by Machiavelli and Hobbes, was itself at last reported on the surface.”²³

Now that it has been reported on the surface, our nominalism forbids us to think of it in terms of natural purpose and function, and our individualistic hedonism compels us to leave the judgment on satisfying it to each man’s taste, “so long as he doesn’t hurt anyone else.” Hence follow a number of contemporary trends, one of which is public tolerance of pornography as the sign by which one may know that he is in a liberal democracy. The reader may decide for himself whether this situation represents liberalism’s finest hour or its most fetid flower.

Even if it is the flower, however, it is only the flower and not the root. It is worth calling attention to merely because its odor may cause people to wonder about its root. Then they may address themselves to the more serious matter of how long a society and a culture can maintain themselves on the basis of the subjectivity of values.

Reference Notes

¹ University of California Publications in Political Science (1943), reprinted New York: Howard Fertig, 1971.

² Ibid., pp. 5, 35-36, 9.

³ Ibid., pp. 10, 50.

⁴ See Frederick Vaughan, The Tradition of Political Hedonism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).

⁵ For an exposition of this view see Frank M. Coleman, “The Hobbesian Basis of American Constitutionalism,” Polity 7 (1974): 67—74, with further references in n. 27.

⁶ Politics and Vision (Boston and Toronto: Little Brown & Co., 1969), p. 293.

⁷ Leviathan, ed. with intro. by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell, n.d.), chap. 15, p. 104.

⁸ Essay concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, chap. 20, sect, 2, in The Works of John Locke, 10 vols. (London: Thomas Tegg et al., 1823, reprinted by Scientia Verlag Aalen, Germany, 1963), i :23i.

⁹ An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols., reproduced from the Bowring Edition of 1838-43 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 1:1.

¹⁰ Ed. Oskar Piest (Indianapolis and New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957), pp. 45, 48, 49.

¹¹ Leviathan, chap. 15, p. 104.

¹² See John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969), p. 187.

¹³ Anarchical Fallacies, in Works, 2:501.

¹⁴ A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 45, 32.

¹⁵ Hobbes, Leviathan, intro., p. lv. The second of the nominalist doctrines, that will is precedent to reason in both God and man, is a consequence of the first doctrine, that the reality of a thing is its individuality.

¹⁶ Locke says all of this so often that it is almost otiose to give references, but see bk. 4, chap. 3, sect. 23, in Works, 2:374; 2, 1, 2, in 1: 83; 4, 6, 11, in 3:7; 2, 23, 32, in 2: 30; 2, 31, 6—13, in 2: 129-35; 3, 3, 20, in 2: 185; 3, 3, 11, in 2:72.

¹⁷ English Political Thought in the 19th Century (New York: Harper & Bros., 1962), p. 16.

¹⁸ The Philosophy of J. S. Mill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 119-21, 181-82, 173.

¹⁹ Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans, and ed. Richard N. Schwab (Indianapolis and New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1963), p. 22.

²⁰ Personal Knowledge (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1964), pp. 139-40.

²¹ Ibid., p. 141.

²² It is of course questionable whether we can explain living, organic matter by a blind, mechanical development of its chemical composition. Be that as it may, all we need insist upon here is that an organism cannot be understood as a mere sum of its parts. It is intelligible only as a composite but single, living whole.

²³ The Ruler: a Modern Translation of Il Principe (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1955), chap. 25, p. 123.

²⁴ Leviathan, chap. 11, p. 64.

²⁵ Political Philosophy and the Issues of Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 316.