Collected Works of George Grant: Vol. 4: 1970 - 1988 9781442687677

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COLLECTED WORKS OF GEORG E GRAN T VO LUME 4 1970–1988

George Grant, 1982. Photograph courtesy Hazen Truemen.

COLLECTED WORKS

OF GEORGE GRANT Volume 4 1970–1988 Edited by Arthur Davis and Henry Roper

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N TO P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9930-3

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Grant, George, 1918–1988. Collected works of George Grant / edited by Arthur Davis. Vols. 3–4 edited by Arthur Davis and Henry Roper. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 1. 1933–1950 – v. 2. 1951–1959 – v. 3. 1960–1969 – v. 4. 1970–1988. ISBN 0-8020-0762-7 (v. 1) ISBN 0-8020-0763-5 (v. 2) ISBN 0-8020-3904-9 (v. 3) ISBN 978-0-8020-9930-3 (v. 4) 1. Philosophy. 2. Political science. 3. Religion. 4. Canada – Politics and government. I. Roper, Henry II. Davis, Arthur, 1939– III. Title. B995.G74 1999

191

C999-313177-B995*

This volume has been published with the generous financial assistance of W.H. Loewen and the University of King’s College. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Permissions

xiii

Chronology

xv

Introduction to Volume 4: 1970–1988

xix

Time as History Appendix: Dialogue on the Death of God with Charles Malik

3 62

‘Revolution and Tradition’

79

‘Jelte Kuipers – An Appreciation’

93

‘Address to History Society, University of Toronto’

97

Preface to Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture by Scott Symons and John de Visser

107

‘Nationalism and Rationality’

111

‘Technique(s) and Good’ (excerpts)

118

‘Lessons of the Vietnam War’ on Cross-Country Check-Up, with Laurier LaPierre

144

Interview with Ramsay Cook on Impressions

148

Exchange with Peter Gzowski on This Country in the Morning

160

vi

Contents

‘Ideology in Modern Empires’

177

English-Speaking Justice: The Josiah Wood Lectures, 1974

190

‘Knowing and Making’

269

‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used”’

280

Brief Comment in Time (Canadian edition) on Trudeau’s ‘New Values’

299

‘Obedience,’ edited by Gerald Owen

301

Miscellaneous Notes on Technology, Good, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Other Subjects

313

Foreword to The Liberal Idea of Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Question of Canada’s Survival by James Laxer and Robert Laxer

330

‘No Alternative to Moderation’

335

Review of Nietzsche’s View of Socrates by Werner J. Dannhauser

340

‘Conversations’ from George Grant in Process, edited by Larry Schmidt

345

‘Faith and the Multiversity’ – Compass version

385

‘Diefenbaker: A Democrat in Theory and in Soul’

403

‘Inconsistency Ruled in Canada’s 70s’

408

Convocation Address, University of Toronto

415

‘The Battle between Teaching and Research’

421

‘Céline’s Trilogy,’ edited by Sheila Grant

426

Contents

vii

‘Céline: Art and Politics’

473

‘Balance in Broadcasting’

489

‘The Case against Abortion’

493

‘Why Read Rousseau?’

497

Appendix: ‘History and Justice’

504

‘Dennis Lee – Poetry and Philosophy’

511

Foreword to Neo-Vedanta and Modernity by Bithika Mukerji

520

‘Justice and Technology’

525

‘A Giant Steps Down’

536

‘Professionalism’

538

‘Man and Beast,’ a Review of Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada by Carl Berger

547

‘Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche’

550

‘An Interview with George Grant’ – Grail

562

Technology and Justice Thinking about Technology Faith and the Multiversity Nietzsche and the Ancients Research in the Humanities The Language of Euthanasia Abortion and Rights

583 589 607 639 651 655 664

Review of If You Love This Country: Facts and Feelings on Free Trade, edited by Laurier LaPierre

702

‘Sacrifice and the Sanctity of Life’ (with Sheila Grant)

706

viii

Contents

‘The Triumph of the Will’

726

‘George Grant and Religion’ – A Conversation with William Christian

736

George Grant on Simone Weil (edited by Lawrence E. Schmidt) Editorial Introduction ‘Some Comments on Simone Weil and the Neurotic and Alienated’ ‘Introduction to Simone Weil’ ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil’ Excerpts from Graduate Seminar Lectures, 1975–6 Review of Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Pétrement ‘In Defence of Simone Weil,’ a Review Essay on Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles Excerpt from Interview by David Cayley – Primarily on Simone Weil Book Reviews Published in the Globe and Mail Review of The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: Volumes V–VIII, The Political Writings, edited by Norman St John-Stevas Review of The Gladstone Diaries: Volumes III and IV, edited by M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew Review of Essays on Politics and Society, Volumes XVIII and XIX of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson ‘Torture in Greece,’ a Review of The First Torturer’s Trial 1975 by Amnesty International Review of The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, edited by William Christian Review of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye Review of Benjamin Disraeli: The Early Letters, Volumes I and II, edited by J.A.W. Gunn, John Matthews, and Donald M. Schurman Review of Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters by Hans Mayer ‘Literature and the Uncertainty of Modern Criticism,’ a Review of The World, the Text and the Critic by Edward Said

771 771 781 786 805 814 851 855 867 881 882 887

893 899 903 906

911 916 920

Contents

ix

Some Letters to the Editor of the Globe and Mail

924

Lectures at McMaster University in the 1970s – A Selection

929

Undergraduate Lectures ‘Five Lectures on Christianity’ ‘The Beautiful and the Good’ ‘Resurrection’ ‘Two Ways of Teaching Plato and Augustine in the Modern World’

931 931 950 954 956

Graduate Lectures ‘Nietzsche’: Excerpts from 1974–5 ‘Heidegger’: Excerpts from 1972–3 and 1978–9 Excerpt from Interview by David Cayley on Heidegger ‘Kant’: Excerpts from 1973–4 and 1977–8 ‘Strauss’: Excerpt on Political Philosophy ‘Aristotle’: Excerpts on Politics

961 962 1019 1036 1044 1073 1079

Appendix A: Grant’s Undergraduate and Graduate Courses, 1970–80 Appendix B: List of Notebooks, 1970s and 1980s

1082 1083

Appendix 1: List of Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant – CBC (1971–89)

1085

Appendix 2: Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 4

1087

Index

1091

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Acknowledgments

A large project needs the help and goodwill of many friends, colleagues, critics, and interested parties. We cannot mention them all, but we single out particularly Sheila Grant, who extended her wonderful hospitality during our many visits to work on the papers at her Halifax home, as well as giving her wise counsel, sharing her special knowledge of Grant’s writing, and contributing countless hours of hard work to the preparation of the papers, and Ron Schoeffel, former editor-inchief of the University of Toronto Press and the editor of this project, who deserves heartfelt gratitude for years of advice, support, and assurance. We wish also to give special thanks to Anne Laughlin, Managing Editor, University of Toronto Press, for her care, patience, and artistry while guiding the design and editing of all the volumes, to Peter Emberley for his enormous contribution to the early preparation of the works in this volume, and to Lawrence Schmidt who has edited Grant’s writings on Simone Weil in Volume 4. Professor Schmidt is uniquely qualified because of his many years of study of both Grant and Weil. We are grateful to him for his willingness to undertake this difficult task and his dedication in pursuing it. We are grateful to Gerald Owen for allowing us to reprint ‘Obedience,’ which he edited in 1990 for The Idler, as well as for his extensive and always valuable editorial assistance throughout, and we thank Hugh Donald Forbes once again for his invaluable help with this volume. We thank Ed Andrew for his initial and strong on-going support of the project, Dennis Lee, for wise and timely editing and advice, Michael Burns, for support and advice in the early stages, Jon Alexander, for early work in the project scanning much of Grant’s published writing, Mark Haslett, for working so diligently in compiling an exhaustive bib-

xii

Acknowledgments

liography and tracking down obscure journals, Louis Greenspan, for unflinching support and assistance, and William Christian, for sharing the knowledge of Grant he has garnered. Many others have helped along the way including William Barker, John Baxter, Bob Davis, Christopher Elson, Rainer Friedrich, Nita Graham, David R. Jones, Ken Puley, Peter Redpath, Neil G. Robertson, Phoebe Roper, and Mel Wiebe. Finally, we wish to thank John St James for his excellent copy-editing of a complex text, Barbara Schon for preparing the index, and Cameron Wybrow for his careful reading of the page proofs. Any errors that remain are, of course, our responsibility. The editors are grateful for financial assistance during the period of the early editorial work of the project from the Canadian Studies Directorate, Secretary of State, the Jackman Foundation, the Henry White Kinnear Foundation, and the McLean Foundation. We are especially thankful for indispensable, on-going, generous financial support from Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, and to the University of King’s College for a grant in aid of publication. Special Acknowledgment The editors are particularly indebted to W.H. Loewen for his commitment to support financially the publication of these volumes.

Permissions

The editors thank the following for permission to reprint material in this volume: Sheila Grant for ‘Address to History Society,’ Convoca-, tion Address (University of Toronto), ‘Balance in Broadcasting,’ ‘Why Read Rousseau,’ ‘History and Justice,’ ‘Professionalism,’ ‘Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche,’ unpublished writings about Simone Weil, notebooks that contain McMaster undergraduate and graduate lectures, nine reviews and four articles in the Globe and Mail, ‘Brief Comment’ in Time magazine, and notes on technology and the good; Longman Group UK for ‘Ideology in Modern Empires’; Saturday Night for review of Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada; Constellation Assurance for ‘Nationalism and Rationality’; the University of Toronto Press for Time as History, ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,”’ ‘The Triumph of the Will,’ and ‘Céline’s Trilogy’; Gage-Macmillan Canada Publishing Corporation for ‘Revolution and Tradition’; McClelland and Stewart for the preface to Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture; The Silhouette for ‘Jelte Kuipers – An Appreciation’; The Idler for ‘In Defence of Simone Weil’ and ‘Obedience’; the Royal Society of Canada for ‘Knowing and Making’; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for ‘Lessons of the Vietnam War’ and interviews with Ramsay Cook and Peter Gzowski; the Anglican Book Centre for ‘Abortion and Rights: The Value of Political Freedom,’ ‘Euthanasia,’ and ‘Sacrifice and the Sanctity of Life’; Descant for ‘Dennis Lee – Poetry and Philosophy’; Bithika Mukerji for the foreword to Neo-Vedanta and Modernity; University Press of America for ‘Justice and Technology’; Grail: An Ecumenical Journal and the University of St Jerome’s College Press for ‘An Interview with George Grant’; American Political Science Review for review of Nietzsche’s View of Socrates; the Globe and Mail for letters to the editor; the Toronto Star on behalf of former Today Magazine for

xiv

Permissions

‘The Case against Abortion’; James Lorimer and Company for the foreword to The Liberal Idea of Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Question of Canada’s Survival; Stoddart Publishing Company for English-Speaking Justice, Technology and Justice, and ‘Conversations’ in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations; Journal of Canadian Studies for ‘George Grant and Religion: A Conversation’; and John Baxter for ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in The Compass. Excerpts from George Grant in Conversation by David Cayley, copyright © 1995 by David Cayley, reprinted with permission from House of Anansi Press.

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

1918 1927 1935 1936 1939 1940 1941

1942 1943

1945 1947

1948 1950

1952

Born in Toronto on 13 November to William Grant and Maude Parkin. Enters Upper Canada College in Toronto. Father dies. Enters Queen’s University to study history. Awarded Ontario Rhodes Scholarship. Enters Balliol College, Oxford, to study jurisprudence. Volunteers as Air Raid Precaution Officer on the London docks in Bermondsey during the Battle of Britain. Applies to join the Merchant Marine but is rejected because he has contracted tuberculosis. Works on a farm in Buckinghamshire. Conversion experience to a belief in ‘order beyond space and time.’ Convalesces in Canada. Works under Dr E.A. Corbett as National Secretary of the Canadian Association for Adult Education. Writes for the journal Food for Thought and, with Jean Hunter Morrison, for the radio program Citizens’ Forum. Returns to Balliol to study theology. Attracted to circle of A.D. Lindsay, Austin Farrer, and C.S. Lewis. Meets Sheila Allen. Marries Sheila Allen. Begins work at Dalhousie University as Professor of Philosophy. Works closely with Professor James Doull, ‘who taught me to read Plato.’ Daughter Rachel born. Son William born. Oxford University awards Grant DPhil degree for dissertation entitled ‘The Concept of Nature and Supernature in the Theology of John Oman.’ Son Robert born.

xvi

1954 1957 1958 1959

1961

1963 1965 1966 1969 1970 1971 1974

1976 1980

1982 1983

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

Daughter Catherine born. Daughter Isabel born. Grant delivers a series of nine talks on CBC Radio’s University of the Air. Son David born. Publishes a revised version of the nine radio talks as Philosophy in the Mass Age. Accepts and then resigns a position at the newly established York University in Toronto. While in Toronto writes for Mortimer Adler of the Institute for Philosophical Research including a review of the year’s books in philosophy and religion published in the first volume of Great Ideas of Today. Contributes ‘An Ethic of Community’ to Social Purpose for Canada, a book published to coincide with the founding of the New Democratic Party. Accepts a position as Associate Professor of Religion at McMaster University. Writes first essay on Simone Weil (unpublished). Mother dies. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Publishes Lament for a Nation. Addresses International Teach-In at the University of Toronto. Publishes a new introduction to Philosophy in the Mass Age. Publishes Technology and Empire. Delivers Massey Lectures on the CBC, which are published as Time as History in 1971. Writes a new introduction to Lament for a Nation. Begins work on ‘Technique(s) and Good,’ a book projected but not completed. Delivers Josiah Wood Lectures at Mount Allison University, which were extensively revised and published as English-Speaking Justice in 1978. Begins work on ‘Good and Technique,’ another book not completed. Resigns teaching position at McMaster University. Accepts Killam professorship in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, with a cross-appointment to the Departments of Classics and Religion. Begins work on the idea of history in the thought of Rousseau and Darwin. Publishes essay on Céline, intended as part of a projected book on Céline and the nature of art.

Chronology: George Grant’s Life

1984 1985 1986

1988

xvii

Retires from teaching. Publishes University of Notre Dame Press edition of EnglishSpeaking Justice. Publishes Technology and Justice (Anansi and Notre Dame University Presses). Publishes Est-ce la Fin du Canada? Lamentation sur l’échec du nationalisme Canadien, the French edition of Lament for a Nation (reprinted 1992). Begins work on a projected book responding to Heidegger’s Nietzsche with a defence of Christianity and Plato. Dies in Halifax on 27 September.

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Introduction to Volume 4: 1970–1988

By 1970 George Grant was recognized as one of Canada’s leading political philosophers. The previous year he had delivered the Massey Lectures, the country’s most prestigious lecture series, entitled Time as History, on CBC radio. In April 1970 he felt the need of a rest and he and his wife Sheila went on holiday to Barbados. While returning to their hotel after an evening out, the taxi in which they were riding collided head-on with an oncoming vehicle. Four people died in the accident; both Grant and Sheila were injured, in his case extremely seriously. His leg and right hand were broken and his mouth severely damaged. He was flown back to Canada, where he spent two months in hospital. Although his leg healed so that he could walk again, his right hand remained partially paralysed and the scarring of his tongue and the inside of his mouth caused him discomfort for the rest of his life. Grant’s long recovery delayed the preparation of Time as History for publication and the book did not appear until 1971. Time as History (3–78) forms a bridge between his thinking during the 1960s and his preoccupations during the remainder of his life. Grant always understood philosophy as fundamentally concerned with justice, whether in the individual soul or the life of the community. Justice in the world, he believed, must be understood in the light of the eternal, of which he found the most complete expression in the writings of Plato and the Christian Gospels. ‘Our varying intuitions of the Perfection of God,’ as he put it in his essay for the Massey Commission in 1951,1 could only be obtained through contemplation and study, such as his own exploration of the thought of John Oman in his Oxford DPhil thesis (1950).2 In the early 1950s he began reading Simone Weil, whose writings were then beginning to appear in English. Weil’s insights into Greek civilization, the Incarnation, and the relation between divine perfection

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and human affliction made her for him the greatest of contemporary philosophers and his most profound intellectual influence. Grant’s published and unpublished writings about her, although small in quantity, extended from the 1950s until his death. Rather than following the usual chronological pattern of the Collected Works, we have chosen to place them together in this volume, edited and introduced by Lawrence E. Schmidt (771–80). Grant’s lifelong commitment to Weil’s thought contrasts with his changing view of Hegel, whose influence upon him is evident in his first book Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959).3 He was repelled by Hegel’s view of the revelation of freedom through the historical process, with its implication that truth emerges through historical process alone. Hegel’s position seemed to justify the evils of war and the sufferings of the innocent, for the great German philosopher saw freedom emerging through ‘enormous sacrifices’ at ‘the slaughter-bench of history.’4 Followers of Hegel such as Alexandre Kojève regarded ancient wisdom as superseded by modern thinkers.5 Grant was attracted to the thought of Leo Strauss at least partly because Strauss’s writings uphold the timeless truths of the ancient philosophers against the purely historical philosophy Grant rejected in Hegel and his followers. Grant’s books and articles in the 1960s reveal his preoccupation with the end to which this historical philosophy must lead. As he put it in Technology and Empire (1969): [M]ost men have given up not only the two great accounts of human excellence in the light of which Western men had understood the purpose of existence (the one given in philosophy, the other in revealed religion), but also the very idea of human existence having a given highest purpose, and therefore an excellence which could be known and in terms of which all our activities could be brought into some order.6

The absence of such a ‘given highest purpose’ means that humans in the contemporary world create themselves and their societies by the will alone, unrestrained by any sense of limit imposed by religion or philosophy. Grant saw this absence of restraint underlying American aggression in the Vietnam war. The inevitable result of the drive to mastery made possible by embracing technological change must inevitably lead to a ‘universal and homogeneous state,’ in which differences

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rooted in particular religions, traditions, and customs will be destroyed in the name of economic, political, and social ‘progress.’ In Time as History Grant argues that humans living inside the coming of the universal and homogeneous state have accepted a conception of time within which there is no awareness of the eternal, but only of their immediate historical context, which frees them to make themselves and their world. Nietzsche was the philosopher who thought through this idea of time as history explicitly and understood its implications for human beings. Nietzsche argues that the realization of time as history will destroy the morality that has crippled humans since its invention by such creators of human horizons as Socrates, Moses, and Jesus. Without God, or morality, and so ‘beyond good and evil,’ humans must have the courage to will their self-creation. Grant recognizes that there is nobility in Nietzsche’s insistence that the ‘superman’ must overcome the spirit of revenge to achieve both self-creation and love of the earth, but he finds it difficult to see how justice can be possible if humans must live lacking a sense that they exist within a given eternal order of which justice is an integral part. Grant turns again to the question of the possibility of justice in modernity in English-Speaking Justice, published in 1978 (190–268). He sees the restless unchecked dynamism of modernity expressed in the word ‘technology,’ originating in the union of the Greek words for ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ (198). Liberalism is the ideology of modernity and Grant considers the nature of liberal justice by looking first at one of its most powerful contemporary formulations in John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). He then examines liberal justice in practice by analysing the decision of the American Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, which struck down laws forbidding abortion during the first six months of pregnancy as unconstitutional. He argues that this landmark case reflects modern liberalism because the judgment is based on the liberal assumption that rights, in this case a woman’s right to privacy, are prior to good. Furthermore, Grant asks, if fetuses are not ‘persons,’ as was stated in the judgment, may not the old, the infirm, and the handicapped be considered less than human and treated accordingly? As traditional restraints inherited from the ancient world vanish with the decline of traditional religion, what will prevent liberal justice from becoming not the protector of the weak, but the instrument of the powerful as they make the world according to their interests and desires?

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Throughout the period covered by this volume Grant meditated upon the meaning of technological civilization. ‘In each lived moment of our waking and sleeping, we are technological civilization’ (589). He came to the conclusion that the word ‘technique’ does not encapsulate the full meaning of the modern destiny as does ‘technology’: What is given in the neologism – consciously or not – is the idea that modern civilization is distinguished from all previous civilizations because our activities of knowing and making have been brought together in a way that does not allow the once-clear distinguishing of them. In fact, the coining of the word ‘technology’ catches the novelty of that co-penetration of knowing and making. It also implies that we have brought the sciences and the arts into a new unity in our will to be masters of the earth and beyond. (590)

The effort made by Grant to think through the meaning of ‘technology’ can be seen in volume 4 of the Collected Works, which allows the reader to follow the development of his thought from his unfinished book ‘Techniques(s) and Good’ (118–40) through ‘Knowing and Making’ (269–79), and ‘Justice and Technology’ (525–35), to ‘”The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used”’ (280–98), which appeared in revised form as ‘Thinking About Technology’ in his final book Technology and Justice (1986) (589–607). Grant played a key role in the creation of the department of religion at McMaster.7 He hoped that the study of religion there would not proceed according to the paradigm that has come to dominate universities in North America, where, following the pattern of the natural sciences, humanities research consists of the pursuit of ‘objective knowledge’ by ‘the summonsing of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so that it is forced to give its reasons for being the way it is as an object’ (608). Under this paradigm he believed that religions could not be studied as what they are. In Grant’s view each religion should be taught by believing individuals, not for devotional reasons, but because religions such as Hinduism, Christianity, and Judaism could be more fully understood from within. In ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ which he published first (1978) in a literary journal, The Compass (385–402), then with major revisions in Technology and Justice (583–701), Grant discusses the inadequacy of this approach to knowledge in relation to Simone

Introduction to Volume 4: 1970–1988

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Weil’s statement that ‘faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love.’ The modern research paradigm by its nature excludes love and beauty, and can give no insight into the nature of good, whether for the individual or the community. Grant’s dream of building a different type of department within the modern university uniting intellectual rigour with reverence for the world’s religious traditions ended in a sense of failure as the department increasingly moved towards the type of ‘scientific study’ that he rejected. His views gained national prominence with the publication of his article ‘The Battle between Teaching and Research’ (421–5) in the Toronto Globe and Mail in April 1980, shortly after his resignation from McMaster to become Killam professor of humanities at Dalhousie. Central to Grant’s thinking during the period covered by this volume was his immersion in, and confrontation with, Martin Heidegger. His engagement with Heidegger brought together fundamental strands of his thought. Grant was deeply influenced by Heidegger’s critique of technology and revered him as a philosopher of the highest order: This was a very great genius – I have no doubt at all that he is the great philosopher of the modern era. For myself, for instance, nobody has spoken so wonderfully about what technology is, and this goes beyond any question of agreement or disagreement. Heidegger has seen what the modern phenomenon that we call technology is, and seen it with prodigious attention. I mean modern in the sense that there wasn’t anything like what we call technology in the ancient world. There was technique, and there were arts, but technology is essentially a modern phenomenon, and it is to me the overwhelming phenomenon. Heidegger expressed this in a marvellous way when people asked him about capitalism and communism, and he said that capitalism and communism are just predicates of the subject technology.8

However, Grant argued that Heidegger rejected the notion of eternal truth as found in Plato and the Gospels, which had been the ground of his own philosophical position since his conversion experience in 1941. As he put it in a graduate class in 1972–3: ‘Yet what makes it difficult for me ... is that that vision of modernity [Heidegger’s] excludes that to which I pay my highest reverence and which at my age I know I will

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Introduction to Volume 4: 1970–1988

never give up reverencing’ (1020). Accordingly, Grant felt compelled to vindicate Plato and the metaphysical tradition against what he believed was the most profound attack made against it, greater, he considered, even than that of Heidegger’s predecessor Nietzsche. During the years between 1980 and his death, this project absorbed much of Grant’s intellectual energy. He continued to read widely, as indicated by the books he reviewed for the Globe and Mail on a variety of subjects, for example, Gladstone (887–92), Disraeli, (911–15), John Stuart Mill (893–8), Harold Innis (903–5), Northrop Frye’s major work The Great Code (906–10), and Edward Said’s The World, the Text and the Critic (920–3). These reviews are models of the art, and reveal the breadth of Grant’s interests and the depth of his general knowledge, particularly of history. They were, however, light relief from his projected work on Heidegger, which, sadly, was never completed, indeed barely started. He drafted a preliminary essay ‘Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche,’ which was left unfinished at the time of his death (550–61). In addition we have included excerpts from his lectures on Heidegger in 1972 and 1978 (1019–35), an excerpt from David Cayley’s conversation with Grant on Heidegger (1036–43), and notes and fragments relating to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and technology and good (313–29). The reader will find in volume 4 evidence of Grant’s continuing interest in Canada, reflected in such occasional articles as ‘Inconsistency Ruled in Canada’s ’70s’ (408–14) and the interviews with Ramsay Cook, Laurier LaPierre, and Peter Gzowski broadcast on the CBC. However, for Grant the situation of Canada had been subsumed in the larger question of the fate of technological civilization, and these pieces lack the passion of his writings on Canada in the 1960s. Grant had always been a reader of literature, particularly the novels of Henry James. In the last decade of his life he read and reread Louis Ferdinand Céline’s trilogy of novels North, Castle to Castle, and Rigadoon, which describe the collapse of Germany, the world’s most advanced technological civilization, at the end of the Second World War. In his essays ‘Céline: Art and Politics’ (473–88) and Céline’s Trilogy,’ edited by Sheila Grant (426–72), Grant presents the trilogy as the greatest literary work of the contem-porary era, greater even than such favourites as The Golden Bowl, because of Céline’s capacity to capture life as it is lived, to make the reader exclaim, in the words of Lear, ‘Thou art the thing itself.’9 ‘When one says that Céline describes the human condition, one

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is just saying that he sees it as one sees it oneself. One does not learn it from him’ (460). Grant and Sheila Grant also became deeply involved in the abortion debate. ‘Abortion and Rights,’ (664–74) in Technology and Justice, examines the implications of affirming a woman’s right to abortion for other rights, not only those of the fetus but of other vulnerable groups in society such as the mentally ill and the aged, whose humanity is denied because society no longer accepts that ‘all men are created equal,’ but regards them only as ‘accidental beings in a world that came to be through chance’ (670–1). The Grants warn that this denial of rights could lead to the subjection of the weak to the strong, with Nazi Germany as a precedent: ‘Justice can become a privilege society grants to some of its people, if they are of the right age, and sufficiently like most other people’ (671). Grant himself returns to this theme in his final essay, provocatively titled ‘The Triumph of the Will’ (726–35), completed shortly before his death in 1988. In ‘The Language of Euthanasia,’ in Technology and Justice (655–64), the Grants argue that the denial of universal and inalienable human rights they see in the abortion issue underlies the smooth and superficially plausible euphemisms advanced to justify euthanasia. We have included in volume 4 interviews of Grant by William Christian (736–69) and David Cayley (867–79, 1036–41), along with a conversation with unidentified questioners edited by Lawrence Schmidt (345– 84). We have also included a sample of unpublished lectures and notes, following the pattern of earlier volumes, as well as a collection of fragments on ‘Obedience,’ compiled and edited by Gerald Owen (301–12). This is a lengthy volume, and it is only possible in a short introduction to highlight what it contains. Taken as a whole the material collected in this volume of The Collected Works brings into focus the many facets of Grant’s thought. George Grant was fearless in his willingness to question the intellectual and spiritual foundations of modernity, as well as subject his own ideas to revision. He believed that the purpose of thinking was to uncover what humans are and how they should live. For Grant the life of the mind meant engagement with the most immediate problems of existence in the world, and in this engagement he was as critical of corporate capitalism as he was of communism. Although given to moments of despondency, he never lost his conviction that life is not a ‘tale told by an idiot,’ in the despairing words

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of Macbeth, but has meaning and purpose. This unquenchable lifeenhancing vitality is one of the reasons why Grant is read twenty years after his death, and will continue to be read by future generations. The late Matt Cohen, a friend and former colleague at McMaster, put it well: Grant loved the idea of being a dangerous man, and his most dangerous message was not a call to action but a call to Being. That such a possibility existed was his most optimistic tenet – and how our own creations of reason and science had become enemies of Being was Grant’s great subject.10

The purpose of the four volumes of The Collected Works of George Grant is to make accessible the insights he attained during his lifetime of commitment to truth. We conclude the Introduction to this final volume with one of Grant’s favourite quotations, ‘Tolle lege,’11 in the belief that those who do so will be rewarded. The Texts of Volume 4: Sources and Presentation Most of the published works in this volume did not present any unusual editorial problems or challenges. They include book reviews, essays and articles, substantial interviews and conversations, forewords to books by other authors, and several newspaper articles and letters to the editor. The articles and essays have been gathered from the books or journals where they originally appeared. The interviews and reviews appeared in newspapers, journals, and books. The three books in this volume, Time as History, English-Speaking Justice, and Technology and Justice, required special treatment. For each we have included introductions and extensive annotations. To help with the reading of Technology and Justice, we have included information about the earlier versions of the essays and the changes made for the book in 1986. Grant composed by hand as well as on the typewriter, but generally did not retain original handwritten drafts once he had a typed version to work with. The lectures found in notebooks were handwritten. The task has been to reproduce the printed version, typescript, or handwritten manuscript accurately and to provide the necessary introductory notes and annotations. The works in this volume appear in chronological order with the exceptions of the reviews in the Globe and Mail, the

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lectures, the writings about Simone Weil, and the essays gathered for Technology and Justice. Groups of writings are ‘classified’ arbitrarily in this introduction, only to facilitate an account of their sources and the editorial work involved in their presentation. Published Works (1970–88) 1. Books: Time as History, English-Speaking Justice, and Technology and Justice 2. Articles and Essays about Technology, Justice, Nationalism, Ideology, Céline, and Abortion Grant’s publications of the 1970–88 period (other than the books) include three essays on technology, ‘Knowing and Making,’ ‘”The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,”’ and ‘Justice and Technology’; two political essays, ‘Revolution and Tradition’ and ‘Nationalism and Rationality’; an essay published in a Festschrift for professor Gerald Graham, ‘Ideology in Modern Empires’; two essays on Céline, ‘Céline’s Trilogy’ and ‘Céline: Art and Politics’; three essays on abortion, ‘The Case against Abortion,’ ‘Sacrifice and the Sanctity of Life,’ and ‘The Triumph of the Will’; an early version of ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ and a tribute to his friend, ‘Dennis Lee – Poetry and Philosophy.’ 3. Book Reviews, Forewords, Newspaper and Journal Articles, Letters, Interviews, and Conversations This volume includes reviews of books on W.E. Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, J.S. Mill, Nietzsche, torture, Harold Innis, and Benjamin Disraeli, and by Edward Said, Carl Berger, Northrop Frye, and Laurier LaPierre; two forewords to books by James and Robert Laxer, and Bithika Mukerji, and a preface to one by Scott Symons; letters to the Globe and Mail and five newspaper articles, ‘No Alternative to Moderation,’ ‘Diefenbaker: A Democrat in Theory and in Soul,’ ‘Inconsistency Ruled in Canada’s ‘70s,’ ‘The Battle between Teaching and Research,’ and ‘A Giant Steps Down’; a brief comment in Time magazine and a presentation of a portion of Grant’s notes in The Idler, ‘”Obedience,” edited by Gerald Owen’; and, finally, interviews and conversations with Grant by David Cayley, William Christian, and Lawrence E. Schmidt.

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Unpublished Works (1970–88) 1. Writings about Simone Weil All Grant’s writings about Simone Weil (1960–76) are presented here as a unit edited and introduced by Lawrence E. Schmidt. They include two reviews of books on Weil (1977, 1988), three manuscripts written as talks and drafts of possible books (1960, 1970, 1970–5), selections from graduate lectures on Weil delivered in 1975–6, and a portion of David Cayley’s interview of Grant on Simone Weil. 2. Addresses to conferences, convocations, and groups, radio and television broadcasts, essays for friends, and preparatory notes This volume includes a talk delivered to the Canadian Political Science Association, ‘Professionalism,’ a 1980 talk to an unidentified audience, ‘Balance in Broadcasting,’ an address to the History Society of the University of Toronto, and a convocation address delivered at the University of Toronto; three radio and television broadcasts, ‘Lessons of the Vietnam War,’ with Laurier LaPierre, ‘Impressions,’ with Ramsay Cook, and ‘This Country in the Morning’ with Peter Gzowski; a eulogy and talk for a student at McMaster, ‘Jelte Kuipers – An Appreciation’; notes for the preparation of a book that was not completed, ‘Technique(s) and Good’; notes on technology, good, Nietzsche, and Heidegger; an essay dedicated to James Doull, ‘Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche,’ and another dedicated to James Aitchison, ‘Why Read Rousseau?’ 3. Selection of graduate and undergraduate lectures Sheila Grant found among the Grant papers thirty-six notebooks where Grant wrote out some of his graduate and undergraduate lectures in these later years. Nine undergraduate lectures and graduate lectures on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, Strauss, and Aristotle have been chosen for publication here. They were selected in part for their intrinsic interest and in some cases because they illustrate Grant’s approach to teaching. We have supplied annotations and head notes to help readers understand Grant’s references and the context in which they were delivered. Only some of the lectures could be dated accurately. We have made an exception to the chronological principle and grouped most of the lectures together in the final section of the volume.

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CBC Broadcast List (1971–89) We decided to include in this volume the list of Grant’s radio and television broadcasts for the CBC from 1971 to 1989, as complete as it can be, given the limitations of the CBC’s records and our resources. A complete list of Grant’s broadcasts can be found in volumes 1–3. We consider the list valuable because it indicates the surprisingly large amount of broadcasting work Grant did, but decided not to reprint the complete list in this volume because of space considerations. Arthur Davis Henry Roper Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Collected Works, Vol. 2 (1951–9), 4. Collected Works, Vol. 1 (1933–50), 167–419. Collected Works, Vol. 2, 311–407. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (1837: lectures delivered 1830–1), trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), Introduction, 21. See ‘Tyranny and Wisdom,’ Collected Works, Vol. 3 (1960–9), 532–57. Collected Works, Vol. 3, 571. See ‘George Grant and the Department of Religion, McMaster University, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 633–67. David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995), 125. Italics in text. See below, 1037. King Lear, III, iv, 108–9. Toronto Star, 18 December 1993. ‘Take up and read’ (Latin). St Augustine, Confessions, trans. Edward B. Pusey (New York: Modern Library 1949), book VIII, 167.

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Time as History

Grant wrote Time as History when he was invited by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to broadcast on radio the ninth series of Massey Lectures in the fall of 1969. This was an important recognition of his stature as a leading Canadian thinker. First delivered in 1961 by the British economist Barbara Ward, Grant’s predecessors as Massey lecturers included Northrop Frye, F.H. Underhill, C.B. Macpherson, Paul Goodman, and John Kenneth Galbraith.1 As is still the case today, the Massey Lectures attracted a large audience, and were published in book form by the CBC. Grant’s recovery from a serious automobile accident in 1970 delayed the publication of Time as History until the following year.2 Originally brought out by CBC Learning Systems and long out of print, the book appeared in a second edition in a new format in 1995, published by the University of Toronto Press, edited and with an introduction by William Christian.3 The new edition included portions of Grant’s text that had been omitted from the first published version. These are indicated by the use of square brackets. In addition, the original titles of the lectures were included as chapter headings rather than simply numbering each lecture as a chapter, the procedure followed in the 1971 edition. Christian’s edition also included an appendix, the transcript of a broadcast produced by the CBC as a sequel to the 1969 Massey Lectures. This is a dialogue between Grant and the Lebanese diplomat, statesman, and theologian Charles Malik, who played an important role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and served as president of the thirteenth Session of the United Nations General Assembly.4 We have decided to include all the additional material in the 1995 edition in the version published here, but we have followed Grant’s usage in the 1971 edition rather than the alterations introduced by Christian. A selection from Time as History was included in The George Grant Reader.5

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Grant’s long recuperation was perhaps the reason why he failed to provide notes for the quotations in Time as History that remained unidentified in the 1995 edition. We have attempted to identify the quotations in the text as well as the translations used by Grant, whose German was limited, noting any discrepancies between the translations and the quotations themselves. Grant consulted the original German in the case of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and possibly other works. In some instances this may have led him to introduce his own words and phrases in the translations he was following. It is also likely that other discrepancies were due to Grant’s reliance upon his memory rather than going back to check his sources word for word. Grant first read Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a young man, but did not study Nietzsche seriously until 1967–8, when he became intrigued by the enthusiasm of his teenaged son William, to whom Time as History is dedicated.6 He quickly realized that Nietzsche’s writings were central to his own philosophical concerns. Since his return to Ontario from Nova Scotia in 1960, Grant had meditated upon the dynamic nature of technological society and its corrosive effect upon traditional ideas of good, as well as upon the beliefs that had sustained Canada as a nation. Out of these preoccupations had come the writing of both Lament for a Nation and Technology and Empire. In Lament for a Nation he explained the failure of Canada as due to its absorption into the universal homogeneous state exemplified by liberal America.7 Traditional notions of good upon which the country had been based were being destroyed by the belief in the power of the will to shape both human and non-human nature. This theme is taken up in Technology and Empire, whose final essay, ‘A Platitude,’ provides an elegiac summary of Grant’s vision of technological society: [A]ll languages of good except the language of the drive to freedom have disintegrated, so it is just to pass some antique wind to speak of goods that belong to man as man. Yet the answer is also the same: if we cannot so speak, then we can only celebrate or stand in silence before that drive. Only in listening for the intimations of deprival can we live critically in the dynamo.8

Grant concluded after close study that Nietzsche best explained how the universal homogeneous state, shaped by a belief in the unlimited

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human will, has come into being. He determined in the Massey Lectures to explicate what he had learned from Nietzsche’s analysis of modern civilization in such books as The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nevertheless, Grant’s primary focus in Time as History is not simply upon Nietzsche but his relation to ‘the present crisis in Western civilization’ (11). Grant’s purpose is clear from the argument in the first two chapters, ‘Time as an Historical Process’ and ‘Temporality and Technological Man.’ Here he sets the stage for Nietzsche’s critique of modernity by developing a general argument about the nature of Western civilization, barely mentioning him in either chapter. Grant asserts that our world is based on the assumption that both human beings and the natural world are completely explicable historically. Traditional ideas of humans having a timeless essence, or of species in nature being immutable have broken down. Today the meaning of the word ‘history’ has changed. It no longer refers exclusively to the ‘collective life of man’ (18). ‘History’ has become allencompassing, embracing both man and nature. Humans today think of themselves not only as living within a historical context, but as having the power to alter at will themselves and the natural world. Such a conception of time as divorced from any vision of the eternal, within which humans possess absolute freedom to create themselves, is what Grant means by time as history. The three great ideologies of the twentieth century, ‘national socialism,’ ‘Marxist communism,’ and ‘American liberalism,’ Grant argues, are all based on time as history (21). They look to a future shaped by humans exercising their wills towards the mastery of human and non-human nature: ‘The more we are concentrated on the future as the most fascinating reality, the more we become concentrated on that side of our existence which is concerned with making happen. The more we can make happen novel events which come forth in the potential future, the more properly can we be called historical beings’ (24). Grant states that the traditional conception of the word ‘will’ has two meanings, first, wanting or desiring, and, second, making something happen. The first meaning, ‘the erotic language of wanting or desiring’ (26), suggests a dependence on what is desired. The second, which has to do with the ‘assertion of power of the self over something other than the self, and indeed of the self over its own dependencies’ (26), has become paramount in the modern language of willing:

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Time as History We now see our wills as standing above the other beings of nature, able to make these other beings serve the purposes of our freedom. All else in nature is indifferent to good. Our wills alone are able, through doing, to actualize moral good in the indifferent world. It is here that history as a dimension of reality, distinguished from nature, comes to be thought. History is that dimension in which men in their freedom have tried to ‘create’ greater and greater goodness in the morally indifferent world they inhabit. As we actualize meaning, we bring forth a world in which living will be known to be good for all, not simply in a general sense, but in the very details we will be able more and more to control. Time is a developing history of meaning which we make. (27)

Reason has become the handmaiden of the will, the means by which humans change the world, specifically through science and technology, whose interrelationship, Grant argues, is not simply accidental, but intrinsic to the nature of modern science. The stance of modern scientists in viewing the world as a ‘field of objects,’ is in itself a ‘stance of the will’ (28). This approach to knowledge has now spread to the social sciences, which make more explicit the element of willing in the scientific approach to the world as object, since the objects of the social scientists are human beings. Grant sees in the thought of Marx the survival of some idea of teleology: ‘For all his denial of past thought, he retained from that past the central truth about human beings – namely that there is in man a given humanness that it is our purpose to fulfil’ (29). Contemporary decisionmakers, however, seem motivated by nothing more than the desire for change for its own sake. In Grant’s words: ‘We will, not so much for some end beyond will, but for the sake of the willing itself’ (30). In chapter 3, ‘Nietzsche and Time as History,’ Grant introduces the figure of Nietzsche, who ‘thought the conception of time as history more comprehensively than any modern thinker before or since’ (33), and who understood most clearly ‘the profundity of the crisis that such a recognition must mean for those who have accepted it’ (33). Nietzsche’s writings, although they may have inadvertently contributed to both anti-Semitism and the rise of National Socialism, are primarily reflections upon existing reality, rather than the cause of its coming into existence: ‘His thought does not invent the situation of our contemporary existing, it unfolds it’ (35). Nietzsche, Grant asserts, is the first thinker to make explicit the

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meaning of defining humans historically: they have no ‘essence’ by which they can be understood or judged, for God, the basis of such an idea of permanence, has died.9 The death of God means that belief in the supremacy of reason, which is dependent upon the possibility of truth, is an illusion, an illusion exposed by modern science, itself the product of the Christian belief in truth. The boundaries within which humans have lived, which Nietzsche calls ‘horizons,’ for example, notions that ‘reason’ and ‘love’ are ultimate realities, are simply human inventions. Nietzsche argues further that they have come into being because they have been imposed upon the weak by the strong as a means of expressing their will to power. Once it is understood that a ‘horizon’ is simply a human creation, it is no longer possible to live within it. If ‘reason’ has no purpose, if humans lose all sense of anything for which they are fitted, if loving is not humans’ highest purpose, then they must rely upon the will entirely to create meaning when any given meaning has disappeared: This is the burden that Nietzsche sees the historical sense imposing on man. On the one hand, we cannot deny history and retreat into a destroyed past. On the other hand, how can we overcome the blighting effect of living without horizons? In his twenties Nietzsche saw the crisis with which the conception of time as history presented men. The great writings of his maturity were his attempt to overcome it. (41)

Grant considers Nietzsche’s answer to the problem of how humans can live stripped of the beliefs that have sustained them in chapter 4, entitled ‘Revenge and Redemption.’ Humans are liberated from traditional restraints, but how is their mastery to be exercised when even the supremacy of reason itself has been dethroned along with the ideas that flowed from it, such as virtue, happiness, and equality? Reason becomes simply an instrument, and all branches of knowledge can have no purpose other than to control nature, for they can reveal nothing about human purpose. With the collapse of the beliefs that have sustained civilization, two types of person emerge, the ‘last men’ and the ‘nihilists.’ The ‘last men’ continue to cling to illusory ideas such as the reality of equality and progress even though they have given up the beliefs that sustained them. Unwilling to confront the implications of their intellectual and spiritual emptiness, and so doomed to superficiality and littleness of spirit,

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they live for the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. In Grant’s words: The central fact about the last men is that they cannot despise themselves. Because they cannot despise themselves, they cannot rise above a petty view of happiness. They can thus inoculate themselves against the abyss of existing. They are the last men because they have inherited rationalism only in its last and decadent form. They think they have emancipated themselves from Christianity; in fact they are the products of Christianity in its secularized form. (43)

The nihilists do not turn away from the reality of their situation like the last men; they accept that life is meaningless. All that exists for them is their need to exercise their will to power, which they do simply for its own sake, since there can be no larger purpose to their willing: ‘The violence of their mastery over human and non-human beings will be without end. In the 1880s [Nietzsche] looked ahead to that age of world wars and continued upheavals which most of us in this century have tried to endure’ (44). The nihilism that gripped Europe came later to North America as religious belief survived longer on this continent. However, Grant sees in the banalities of liberalism the characteristics of the last men, and in the exercise of American imperial power the nihilism that Nietzsche viewed as an inevitable result of the ‘crisis of the end of modern rationalism’ (44). Unlike Marx, who believed that the alienation created by capitalism would inevitably be overcome, Nietzsche saw a crisis with no social resolution. Such a crisis can only be overcome on an individual level by those strong enough to confront it. They will not exercise their wills in the spirit of revenge like the nihilists, of whom Grant sees Hitler as an example. Revenge to Nietzsche is the product of the suppression of will and instinct, the ‘it,’ which was later to be a cornerstone of Freud’s account of the psyche. Only a few can free themselves from revenge, individuals whom Nietzsche calls Übermenschen or ‘supermen,’ a term that Grant points out is awkward for North Americans to use because of its association with ‘Superman,’ the fantasy hero of comic strips and movies. The Übermensch, delivered from the spirit of revenge, will be able to look at the past, present, and future, all the horror of individual and collective existence, and embrace them by his amor fati (love of fate), which Grant

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connects with the ‘eternal recurrence of the identical,’ Nietzsche’s idea that every moment has happened before and will recur again in the endless moments of time that have no beginning and no end. As Grant puts it: To live on the earth, to be masters of the earth, to deserve to be masters because we can live in joy, requires the act of amor fati, held outside any assertion of timelessness. The love of fate has been asserted in the Greek tragedies, in Plato, and by certain Christians. But this fate was enfolded in a timeless eternity, in an ultimate perfection. For Nietzsche, the achievement of amor fati must be outside any such enfoldment. It must be willed in a world where there is no possibility of either an infinite or finite transcendence of becoming or of willing. (51)

In the final chapter, ‘Time as Mastery,’ Grant begins by making two points. The first is that Nietzsche thought more deeply about the concept of time as history than any other thinker. Second, this did not lead him to nihilism, despite his brilliant attacks upon nineteenth-century European society. What Nietzsche asserted about the need to live without horizons have become the platitudes of contemporary life: Everybody uses the word ‘values’ to describe our making of the world: capitalists and socialists, atheists and avowed believers, scientists and politicians. The word comes to us so platitudinously that we take it to belong to the way things are. It is forgotten that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecessors, men did not think about their actions in that language. They did not think they made the world valuable, but that they participated in its goodness. (53)

Grant then turns to what he calls his own ‘suspicion of the assumptions of the modern project’ (54). He sees the redemption that Nietzsche proposes in his conception of amor fati as being both powerful and noble, if perhaps unattainable. He expresses his own incomprehension at the possibility of loving fate in the full acceptance that life is nothing more than endless becoming: I do not understand how anybody could love fate, unless within the details of our fates there could appear, however rarely, intimations that they are illumined; intimations that is, of perfection (call it if you will God) in which

10

Time as History our desires for good find their rest and their fulfilment ... This means that the absurdities of time – its joys as well as its diremptions – are to be taken not simply as history, but as enfolded in an unchanging meaning, which is untouched by potentiality or change. So when Nietzsche affirms that amor fati comes forth from the contemplation of the eternity (not timelessness, but endless time) of the creating and destroying powers of man and the rest of nature, I do not understand how that could be a light which would free us from the spirit of revenge. It seems to me a vision that would drive men mad – not in the sense of a divine madness, but a madness destructive of good. (55)

However, in the light of the breakdown of older accounts of God, humans, and nature, is it possible today to think outside and beyond the modern account given voice by Nietzsche, which shapes all aspects of modernity? As an alternative to the primacy of the will that is demanded by Nietzsche’s vision, Grant suggests that possibility of an openness to what the ancients called a ‘passion,’ or in modern language, ‘receptivity,’ an intimation that activity is not simply a creation, but an imitation of something beyond human making. Such a sense is full of difficulty: [A]ny appeal to the past must not be made outside a full recognition of the present. Any use of the past which insulates us from living now is cowardly, trivializing, and at worst despairing. Antiquarianism can be used like most other drugs as mind contracting. If we live in the present we must know that we live in a civilization, the fate of which is to conceive time as history. Therefore as living now, the task of thought among those held by something which cannot allow them to make the complete ‘yes’ to time as history, is not to inoculate themselves against their present, but first to enter into what is thought in that present. (57–8)

Grant concludes by suggesting that such an awareness can be found in remembering what has come to us from both the traditions of West and East: Nevertheless, those who cannot live as if time were history are called, beyond remembering, to desiring and thinking. But this is to say very little. For myself, as probably for most others, remembering only occasionally

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can pass over into thinking and loving what is good. It is for the great thinkers and the saints to do more. (62)

Henry Roper

To William who taught me to read Nietzsche

CHAPTER 1: TIME AS AN HISTORICAL PROCESS [In these talks I am going to discuss the conception of time as history. Next week I will try to enucleate what is being thought when time is conceived as history. What part does such a conception play in what we think ourselves to be? What is its relation to what we think worth doing? After that I will attempt to say something of how this conception came to be in the Western world. That there is something unique about Western civilization seems to me indubitable when one remembers the fact that in the last three hundred years agents of our civilization have been able to influence, transform, or destroy so many other civilizations. One way of looking at that uniqueness is to look at our conception of time and what enabled the West to bring forth that notion. By looking at the historical origins of that conception I will be thinking within typically modern forms. To think that one understands something chiefly in terms of its historical genesis is itself a fundamental mark of what it is to be modern. Having tried to see what is meant by thinking time as history, I will then connect that symbol to the present crisis in Western civilization, and thereby attempt to make some tentative judgments as to how liberating a symbol this has been for men. In my opinion the thinker who thought the crisis of Western civilization most intensively and most comprehensively was Nietzsche. And often his thought about that crisis was centred about the notions of time and of history. Therefore I will express that crisis by attempting to speak his thought. In the light of these thoughts I will say as best I can what seem to be the advantages and difficulties for men in conceiving time as history. Let me make two points about method in carrying out this undertak-

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ing. One way of making clearer what is assumed about temporality in our civilization is to compare it to what men have thought about time in other civilizations. That human beings can think very differently about such matters is evident if one talks to people from other parts of the world. For example, I live much of my life with people brought up in the Sanskrit culture of India.10 Just to be with them in the ordinary occurrences of life and death is to be aware of how different is their apprehension of time from my own. Also within differing aspects of the Western tradition differences appear. My wife was raised within European Catholicism; I come out of North American liberal Protestantism.11 To live together is to become aware of how differently time is experienced from within these two sides of Western Christianity. Of course such differences are more clearly thought by the deepest thinkers of a civilization than by ordinary people. Locke or Rousseau thought the content of their liberalism more explicitly than a practical follower of that faith such as Prime Minister Trudeau has thought them.12 What is implicitly thought by many who take the presuppositions of their civilization for granted – as granite chunks of faiths – is revealed in its intelligibility by great thinkers who bring out of the granite its form as a statue. Indeed the analogy breaks down because the greatest thinkers may transcend the very granite. To start from these differences between the conceptions in various civilizations is useful because such comparisons may help us ascend above the particular conceptions of time with which we have been inculcated by our tradition. These days the ascent is especially difficult because the powers of our society for inculcation are very great. Therefore the knowledge of other civilizations is a useful means for making comparisons. However, comparison between conceptions in different civilizations has danger in it. Its greatest danger is that it may lead to a stultifying relativism. This relativism is asserted by many practitioners of contemporary social science. What is asserted is that different societies are divided from each other by having different absolute presuppositions about the most important matters, for example, What is time? The presuppositions are absolute because thought at any historical moment is always within them and no man can rise above them to judge between them. I do not think that historicism, so defined, is true and, in making distinctions between conceptions of temporality, I do

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not want to imply in any way that I am assuming the truth of such historicism.13 To start from these civilization differences, if not to end with them, is only a possible means of rising to a position in which some perhaps can begin to understand our own conception of time. The second point is to assert that this discussion should not be thought of as arising simply from the calm of academic retirement. Our conception of time appears to us in the most usual and most intense experiences of our lives in the world. The question is inescapable. How can the dynamic system ever stop expanding? To stop would produce chaos and suffering. It would eliminate those goals in terms of which our civilization defines its life. In speaking of time as history, and in using the general words necessary to its explication, I do not mean to be moving away from what is real for most of us into a formal exercise of specialized vocabulary, but rather to be trying to think what is immediately present for most North Americans in their waking hours – our lives and technological society.] ‘History’ is one of the key words in which English-speaking people now express what they think they are and what they think the world to be. There are similar words in the other modern Western languages. English, however, is our destiny, and it is now also the destiny of others. In the events of the last two hundred years, English has become the predominant language through which the culture of the Western world expresses itself throughout the globe – whether for good or ill. The polyglot language from that small island off the north-west of Europe is now more than any other the ‘lingua franca.’14 It is well to remember that in speaking our own, we are speaking a world language. And in that language the word ‘history’ comes forth from lips and pens near the centre of what is most often said. ‘History will judge my Vietnam policies,’ says a President.15 ‘This is a history-making flight,’ says an astronaut. ‘History’ demands, commands, requires, obliges, teaches, etc., etc. Whatever may be, it is clear that human beings take much of what they are and what their world is through the way that words bring forth that world and themselves to themselves. Other words, such as ‘freedom’ and ‘value,’ ‘science’ and ‘nature,’ ‘personality’ and ‘attitudes,’ are also at the core of what we conceive ourselves to be. But ‘history’ has particular significance because it is one of those words that is present for us and was not present in any similar sense in the languages

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of other civilizations – including those from which ours sprang.a Therefore if we desire to understand our own understanding of ourselves, it is well to think about this word, which has come to have such a unique connotation amongst us. It is not in language in general, but in the words of one collective that the world and ourselves are opened to us. In all groups of languages, for example the European or the Indic, certain languages such as Sanskrit or Greek appear marvellously to transcend limitation, and so have been thought of as called forth for a universal destiny. However, the very liberation through language takes place by the moulding of particular forms. Like food, language not only makes human existence possible, but can also confine it. It is, therefore, useful to think about those parts of our language that particularly express our civilization, and to judge just how these key words have come to determine our apprehensions of what is. Anybody aware of living in the spearhead of modernity as a North American hears much talk about a crisis in our life. Indeed one manifestation of that crisis is the division between us as to whether the crisis is fundamental. Many of our rulers seem to assume that our way of life may have faults in detail but that basically we are on the right track and that our civilization is the highest ever. On the other hand, significant minorities see what is happening as more than a crisis of detail. Western civilization becomes world-wide just as it becomes increasingly possible for some to doubt its assumptions. The causes of that doubting cannot be fully described in language that concentrates simply on either outward or inward phenomena. To speak of outward problems, of cities, water and air, poverty, monstrous weapons, and expanding populations, is not sufficient. On the other hand to speak of such inward difficulties as banality in education, alienation from meaning, and widespread nihilism is also not sufficient. Whatever the distinction between outward and inward may mean, our present uncertainties can only be held in our minds by transcending such a distinction. If there be a crisis, it is a crisis about what we are and a It is often said that our concentration on history comes from our Biblical origins. The Biblical God of history is compared with the philosophical God of nature. Whatever use there may be in so distinguishing the traditions that come to us from philosophy and from the Bible, it first must be insisted that there are no words in the Bible which should serve as synonyms for what we mean by ‘nature’ or ‘history.’

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what we are becoming, both inward and outward. Language itself transcends the distinction between inward and outward. We can hear it and measure it as sound waves; at the same time we know the difference between listening to a foreigner whose speech is meaningless sounds to us, and listening to someone speaking in a language we know and conveying to us intelligible meanings. Like sexuality or religion or music, language transcends the inward-outward distinction. In this crisis of our present lives in North America, an effort is required to think what we have become. That is manifested to us in language, and central to our language is the word ‘history.’ To use then the very language that encloses us, it may be said that one of our present historical tasks is to think what we are summing up to ourselves when we use the word ‘history.’ To touch upon that task is the purpose of the following pages. ‘History’ is used for many different purposes in our language with shades of differing meaning. There is one division of its use, however, which is more important than any other and which is often a cause of ambiguity. On the one hand the word is used to denote an activity that some men pursue – the study of the past. It is also used to denote a certain kind of reality – human existing – the whole of which, whether in the past, present or future, we call ‘history,’ and which is distinguished from other kinds of existing. The ambiguity caused by this central division of usage can be seen when we compare the words ‘history’ and ‘biology.’ In our educational institutions we study ‘life,’ not in departments of life, but in departments of biology or in departments of the life sciences. On the other hand, we study history in departments of history, thus using the same word both for the study and what is studied. Some people like to describe this fact by speaking of the subjective and objective uses of the word ‘history’; the subjective being the activity of the studying, the objective being what is studied. This subjectiveobjective language about the two uses is misleading, because history as a sphere of reality is something in which we take part, and which is therefore only an object for us in the most artificial sense of the word ‘objective.’ There is indeed an English word ‘historiology’ meaning the study of history.16 In some ways our language would be clearer if we used that word for the study of history, and kept the word ‘history’ and ‘historical’ for a special dimension of existence. In fact, we are not going to use the word ‘historiology’ (technical pedantry does not yet entirely

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determine the development of our language), and therefore the ambiguity of using the same word to describe a dimension of reality and the study of that dimension is going to stay with us. The Germans are coming to make this distinction more clearly in their language by use of two separate words: ‘Geschichte’ for that particular realm of being, historical existence, and ‘Historie’ for the scientific study of the past. Perhaps in English the word ‘history’ should be kept for the systematic study of the past, while we should find some other word to denote the course of human existence in time. Certainly the Greek original ‘historia’ was used to denote some kinds of human inquiry. It is easy to see how the word for inquiry moved in the direction of the study of human affairs. If you wanted to inquire about an event far away in time or space, you went and asked an old person or somebody in another country. Thereby a general word for inquiry came to be used for what had happened in human affairs. The two uses of the word ‘history’ – as a study and as an aspect of reality – cannot finally be separated because they are interdependent. We see the enormous interest in the last two hundred years in the study of man’s past from the way that resources have been poured into those studies. Men spend a lifetime understanding the administrative details of earlier empires; a day to day description of the literary life of eighteenth-century London is available to us.17 This would be unlikely outside the belief that knowledge about man will be brought forth by the assiduous study of his genesis and development. Thousands of grown men have believed that they could penetrate to the core of the Christian religion by historical studies about its origins. In other civilizations, men have been quite interested in their past, but never with the passion and hope for illumination therefrom which have characterized Western historical studies. This is surely because we have believed that man is essentially an historical being and that therefore the riddle of what he is may be unfolded in those studies. The thinkers of other societies have not believed that man was finally understandable as an historical being. Our interest in history as a study is directly related to our belief that we are historical beings. It may be argued that the word ‘history’ to distinguish human existence from that of stones and animals is poor usage, because we now know that birds and stars have a history as much as men. Two of the great scientific achievements of the nineteenth century were the discov-

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ery of the history of the earth in geology and of the development of life in evolutionary biology. When pre-modern biology, with its doctrine of unchanging species, is compared with modern biology, which accounts for the origin of species, (how they came to be and their development through time), one must surely say that the earth and the beasts have history as much as man. Indeed in modern thought the idea of history is everywhere. Not only men and stones and animals have history, but philosophers such as Whitehead write as if God has a biography.18 Even reason, which was traditionally conceived as transcending all development, has been given its own history. The most beautiful modern book on the subject, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ends with a section on the history of pure reason.b The modern concentration on man as historical is but an aspect of a whole way of conceiving temporality, which, it is claimed, allows us to understand more adequately the story not only of our own species, but of everything. In such a usage, the account of man’s collective development through the ages is held together with the development of other beings, for example, the beasts evolving and the earth coming to be through millennia. The word ‘history’ does not mean a particular kind of reality, because it is used about all forms of reality. It is what we must know about something to understand that something. To know about anything is to know its genesis, its development up to the present, and as much of its future as we can. Perhaps it may be said that the greatest difference between the ancient and modern accounts of knowledge is this modern concentration on the genesis of something in order to know it. History (call it, if you will ‘process’) is that to which all is subject, including our knowing, including God, if we still find reasons for using that word. Yet as soon as this is said we must see that within the modern project the human is at other times clearly distinguished from the non-human, and the word ‘history’ appropriated for this distinction. ‘History’ is distinguished from ‘nature.’ The modern physics of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton accounted for the ‘physical’ world (including our own bodies) as understandable in terms of mechanics, and without final cause. But

b This section of Kant’s first Critique has generally been neglected by English-speaking commentators. Indeed the British in their commentaries on Kant generally tried to turn that genius into one of their own. To put the matter simply, they neglect the fact that Kant paid an even greater tribute to Rousseau than to Hume.

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immediately, questions about men arose for those who so conceived nature; how men, who are part of such a nature, have still the freedom to know it, and even more, how their determination by this nature affects their freedom to do good or evil. Those thinkers who were unwilling to reduce what they considered the undoubted ‘given’ of morality, and at the same time accepted the new account of nature, reconciled any difficulty in so doing by showing forth our lives as lived in two realms – that of nature and that of freedom. It was indeed in this intellectual crisis (the attempt to understand the modern scientific conception of nature which excluded any idea of final purpose, and to relate that conception to human purposiveness) that the modern conception of history first made its appearance in the thought of men such as Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. The realm of history was distinguished from the realm of nature. ‘History’ was used to describe the particular human situation in which we are not only made but make. In this way of speaking, history was not a term to be applied to the development of the earth and animals, but a term to distinguish the collective life of man (that unique being who is subject to cause and effect as defined in modern science, but also a member of the world of freedom). As a North American, living outside Europeanness, and yet inheriting from many sides of the European tradition, it is perhaps worth stating that by and large it has been the English thinkers who have insisted that we apply the word ‘history’ to stones and birds as well as to man, while it has been the German and French thinkers who have insisted on the unique human situation, and who have used the distinction between nature and history to make that clear. To them, man alone should be called essentially historical, because he not only suffers history, but in freedom can make it. Both these ways of looking at man and the world are but facets of modernity. Indeed these two languages are used together in the sermons preached by our journalists about the achievement of landing on the moon. These events are called another upward step in the march of evolution, one of the countless steps since life came out of the sea. Man and nature are seen together. On the other hand, in the same sermons there is talk of man in his freedom conquering nature, indeed transcending himself. In as archetypal an event for technological man as the space programme, it is right that the two languages should come together in the hymning of the achievement. The two languages come together as

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man is seen not only as a part of evolution, but as its spearhead who can consciously direct the very process from which he came forth. In such speaking, man is either conceived as the creator, who arose from an accidental evolution, or if evolution is itself conceived within a terminology about the divine, man is then viewed as a co-operator, a co-creator with God. This latter language is presently very popular in the United States, particularly among those who want to include Christian or Jewish theology within the liberal ideology of their society. However these two sides of the modern project may be put together, my purpose is to write about the word ‘history’ as it is used about existence in time, not as it is used to describe a particular academic study. I am not concerned with historical inquiry, its proper purposes and methods, to what extent it is a science and if a science, how it differs from physics or mathematics, to what extent we can have correct knowledge of the past, etc., etc. These are technical questions for those who earn their living by being historians, or philosophers of historiology, and want to think about how best to practise their profession. All such professions, be they practical arts or theoretical sciences or a mixture of both – physicists, historians, dentists – have their own trade papers in which the methods of their particular occupation are discussed. Such occupational matters are not my business. I am concerned with what it means to conceive the world as an historical process, to conceive time as history and man as an historical being. Words such as ‘time’ arise from the fact that existing is a coming to be and a passing away. Our doing and our making (perhaps even our thinking) occur within time’s thrall. Because ‘has been,’ ‘is now,’ and ‘will be’ make possible our purposes but also dirempt us of them, it is no wonder that through the ages men have tried to understand the temporality of their lives. In our age, astonishment about that temporality has been calmed by apprehending it above all as history. It is this conception of time as history that I wish to try to enucleate. To enucleate means to extract the kernel of a nut, the seed of a tree. In the present case, there appears around us and in us the presence which Western men have made – modern technical society. It has been made by men who did what they did out of a vision of what was important to do. In that vision is the conception of time as history. The word ‘enucleation’ implies that I am not simply interested in describing the manifestations of that vision, for example the mastery of movement through

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space or the control of heredity. Rather I try to partake in the seed from which the tree of manifestations has come forth. But the metaphor fails because to extract a kernel may be to expose it as a dead thing rather than as a potential tree. In another age, it would have been proper to say that I am attempting to partake in the soul of modernity. When we are intimate with another person we say that we know him. We mean that we partake, however dimly, in some central source from which proceeds all that the other person does or thinks or feels. In that partaking even his casual gestures are recognized. That source was once described as the character of his soul. But modern knowing, in a strict sense, has excluded the conception of the soul as a superstition, inimical to scientific exactness. To know about human beings is to know about their behaviour and to be able to predict therefrom. But it is not about the multiform predictable behaviours of modern technical society that I wish to write. It is about the animating source from which those behaviours come forth. What I am not doing is what is done by modern behavioural social science, which is not interested in essences. A leading behavioural political scientist, Mr David Easton, said recently: ‘We could not have expected the Vietnam War.’19 This was said by a man whose profession was to think about political behaviour in North America, and whose methods were widely accepted by other scientists. But not to have expected the Vietnam War was not to have known that the chief political animation of the United States is that it is an empire. My use of the word ‘enucleate’ indicates that I do not wish to use a method which cannot grasp such animations. To write of the conception of time as history and to think of it as an animator of our existence is not, however, to turn away from what is immediately present to all of us. When I drive on the highways around Hamilton and Toronto, through the proliferating factories and apartments, the research establishments and supermarkets; when I sit in the bureaucracies in which the education for technocracy is planned; when I live in and with the mechanized bodies and resolute wills necessary to that system; it is then that the conception of time as history is seen in its blossoming. An animating vision is not known simply in a retired academic thinking, but in the urgent experience of every lived moment. The words used to explicate ‘time as history’ may seem abstract, but they are meant to illuminate our waking and sleeping hours in technical society.

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CHAPTER 2: TEMPORALITY AND TECHNOLOGICAL MAN Those who study history are concerned with the occurrences of passed times; those who conceive time as history are turned to what will happen in the future. When we speak of the present historical situation we are oriented to the future, in the sense that we are trying to gather together the intricacies of the present so that we can calculate what we must be resolute in doing to bring about the future we desire. The accomplishments of modern society are every year more before us, not simply as they once were as hoped for dreams, but as pressing realizations. The magnitude of those modern accomplishments, as compared with those of other civilizations, lies in what they enable us to do by our mastery through prediction over human and non-human nature. These accomplishments were the work of men who were determined to make the future different from what the past had been; men oriented to that future in which greater events than have yet been, will be. They conceived time as that in which human accomplishments would be unfolded; that is, in the language of their ideology, as progress. Whatever differences there may have been between the three dominant ideologies of our century – Marxist communism, American liberalism, national socialism – they all similarly called men to be resolute in their mastery of the future. Four centuries ago, those who thought of mastering the future were a dreaming minority, forced to work subtly against those with some other account of time. Today such men are our unquestioned rulers, welcomed by the overwhelming majority in both East and West. To enucleate the conception of time as history must then be to think our orientation to the future together with the will to mastery. Indeed the relation between mastery and concentration on the future is apparent in our language. The word ‘will’ is used as an auxiliary for the future tense, and also as the word that expresses our determination to do. Men have always attempted to understand what is meant by the future and what knowledge or control we can have of it. Certainly we must make the limited statement that a future awaits, and in that sense is an inescapable presence for us. When young we must be turned to the future for the realization of our potentialities, and we are aware of the future even as it becomes slowly clear that eventually and inevitably there will be no future for us as individuals. We die in the knowledge that tomorrow’s dawn will not be present for us. We may be so

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egocentric that in that dying we hardly care about its coming for others. But can we reach that pitch of solipsism in which we are able to think that our death is the end of the world? In these atomic days the end of the race as a whole can easily be imagined; but imagining includes the sun rising over a humanless planet. Whatever certain modern philosophers have meant by the mind making the object, they did not mean that we could deny a future in our imagining. Whatever the physicists may mean in showing us the increasing randomness of the elementary things, they are not asking us to think what it would be for nothing to be happening. Some theologians have conceived time as a creature. But to use that language sensibly (that is not as some extension from human making to explain our dependence upon God) it must be recognized that the language of creation leaves us always with the question: what does it mean to speak of the end of time? – certainly not, after time. The word ‘creativity’ is only properly used about God and not about man. It is an abyss in which the human mind is swallowed up, and those of us who use it must recognize it as such a limit. It is not possible to imagine what it would be for nothing (or better for no event) to be occurring. To speak of the future as potential and not actual, does not deny its presence for us. Those of our contemporaries who, in their revolt against the doctrine of progress and its concentration on living for the future, assert that living is always in the present are saying something North Americans need to hear. But they distort the truth about time, if in so saying they assume that the future is not with us, although in a less articulated presentation. Yet that which is there for us potentially can only be there in an undetailed way. In the public world, who would have guessed in the early 1960s that the Kennedy dynasty would move into the 1970s with an uncertain political future, while Mr Nixon would be in the seat of political authority?20 To deny all chance in the name of a predicting science may be logically possible but the nearer we get to the details of life, the more clearly it invalidates common sense. Yet the inscrutability and unpredictability of events must not be over-emphasized, in either the individual or the collective case. We can plan our lives so that within limits the future depends on what we have done and are doing. This is truer collectively than individually because of the greater ability of the collective to control the results of chance. The success of the planned moon landing did

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not fluctuate because of the assassination of the president who had made the decision that it was to be an imperial purpose.21 (Indeed the greater ability of collective than of individual purposes to be sustained against accidents is one of the reasons why, in an age given over to making the future, we all more and more truly exist in the collective, and less and less pursue purposes which transcend it.) Indeed our surrender to the oil cartels has taught us ecologically that the ‘best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.’22 It would be however facile pessimism to carry the tag too far. Human purposive doing is both possible and potent. And the more complex that which we wish to accomplish, the more we have to envisage the future in which it will be accomplished. The presence of the future in our imagining is one reason why men are so effective in their doing. It is not necessary to be able to define satisfactorily the difference between men and the other animals to recognize that human beings are able to accomplish more purposes than the members of other species. Both men and the other animals are in an environment in which their food and their shelter, their protection and their continuance, are not given to them without organization. They have to take continuing steps in arranging and using other parts of nature so that these ends can be achieved. (By way of parenthesis I would say that in the past at least, those nations and classes within nations who have come through generations of ease to take their food, shelter, and protection for granted, as given in the nature of things, have not long survived. Some now hope that this is no longer the case.) But men are so much more potent and therefore so much more violent than other animals in this using and arranging. Other species also have histories – for example, certain birds changed their migrations after the glacial age. But human beings have more history because they are capable of more differentiated doing, and this capability depends upon openness to an imagined future and the power to plan towards that future. Whatever is the correct use of the word ‘novelty,’ we can bring more novelty into the future than any other species. To deny novelty may be to speak in some true way which moderns cannot penetrate, but it is at least contradicted in common sense understanding, by many human projects. The more we are concentrated on the future as the most fascinating reality, the more we become concentrated on that side of our existence

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which is concerned with making happen. The more we can make happen novel events which come forth in the potential future, the more properly can we be called historical beings. When we single out somebody as an historical individual, or a people as an historical people, we surely mean that those in question have been in their doing the makers of events. Thus the English were an historical people in harnessing new power to industry, and in beating their European rivals in taking it around the world. In our generation Chairman Mao is an historical individual in bringing European technology to the Chinese masses, by uniting Chinese and European politics.23 In this sense we can say that just as men are more historical than other animals, so in the last centuries Western men have been more historical than the other civilizations still present, and than those civilizations we superseded geographically. Ours has been a dynamic civilization and that dynamism has been related to the fact that our apprehension of temporality was concentrated on the future. ‘Has been’ and ‘is now’ weakened in our consciousness compared with ‘will be.’ The concentration upon time as future and the dynamism of doing fed upon each other. As Westerners found their hope in an imaginable future, they turned more and more to mastery; their concentration on mastery eliminated from their minds any partaking in time other than as future. Equally, the clarification of this conception of time by thinkers and the intensified making of novelty by practical men were mutually interdependent. As Europeans achieved more and more mastery through their works, thinkers increasingly defined time as history. As words such as ‘progress’ and ‘history’ were placed in the centre of the most comprehensive thought, so practical men were encouraged thereby to justify their conquests as the crown of human activity. Also (as I have tried to describe elsewhere) we North Americans whose ancestors crossed the ocean were, because of our religious traditions and because this continent was experienced as pure potentiality (a tabula rasa), the people most exclusively enfolded in the conception of time as progress and the exaltation of doing that went with it.24 We were to be the people who, after dominating two European wars, would become the chief leaders in establishing the reign of technique throughout all the planet and perhaps beyond it. The accomplishments of masterful doing lead us to think about the language of willing. When we say that somebody has a strong will we mean that there is a resoluteness through time about his determination

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to carry out his purposes in the world. It says little about how much he may have deliberated about those purposes, nothing about their nobility. To state the obvious: in a university one knows many thoughtful people, irresolute in decision; in the political world one meets decisive men whose purposes are little deliberated. For example, in the regime of the Kennedys there was much rhetoric about decisiveness, but we may well ask (in the light of the results of their decisions, for example towards South East Asia or towards de Gaulle) whether there was sufficient deliberation on what it was important to be decisive about.25 The language surrounding the word ‘will’ summons up human doing and distinguishes it from our thinking or feeling. I do not wish here to give a justification of what is currently described and abused as faculty psychology: the doctrine which speaks of a power of human beings to will, to think, to suffer, etc. We need, however, some language that catches the determination necessary to our doings, and distinguishes that from our other activities. When Shakespeare writes of the Macbeths’ determination to be rulers, he puts into Lady Macbeth’s mouth the following words to her husband at their decisive moment: ‘But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail.’26 What is required of them is not further thought about their desire to rule, nor further calculation about the means to that end, but an unflinching ‘will’ to carry out the deeds which she believes will realize what they want. The language of will that summons forth for us the deeds of men is found in many civilizations – not only among people who conceive time as history. But the language of willing has been at the very core of Western men’s account of themselves. However, the reference of that language is often uncertain. Some have used it as if willing were simply a kind of thinking; others as if it were desiring. Neither seems to me satisfactory. Therefore, to approach the language of ‘willing’ it is useful to relate it to our ‘desiring’ and ‘thinking’ and then to distinguish it therefrom. What we are determined to do is clearly related to our thought about purposes and our calculating about the means to those purposes. But however long and beautifully men deliberate about purposes, however carefully they calculate, there comes the moment when they either bring about or do not bring about certain events. Willing is that power of determining by which we put our stamp on events (including ourselves) and in which we do some violence to the world. In willing to do

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or not to do we close down on the openness of deliberation and decide that as far as we are concerned, this will happen rather than that. Indeed, one strange ambiguity among human beings is that what seems required for the greatest thought is opposite to what is required for the greatest doing. If our thinking is not to be procrustean, we require an uncertain and continuous openness to all that is; certainty in closing down issues by decision is necessary for great deeds. In thought about the most important matters there is nothing we need do, there is nothing we can wish to change. It is more difficult to distinguish the language of willing from desiring, particularly because of the history of the English language. Indeed from the changes in the use of the word ‘will’ can be seen the changes in what men thought they were. In its beginnings the word ‘will’ is most often used synonymously with wishing or wanting or desiring, and yet also it is used in the sense of determining or making happen.c When we use the erotic language of wanting or desiring, we express our dependence on that which we need – be it food, another person, or God. The language of desire is always the language of dependence. Some English uses of ‘willing’ are closely identified with this language of need. Yet as we enter the modern era the language of will comes more and more to be used about making happen what happens. Here it becomes the assertion of the power of the self over something other than the self, and indeed of the self over its own dependencies. The dependence of desire passes over into the mastery. In related language, Kant, who always so brilliantly expressed what it is to be a modern as against a classical man, made the modern use clear when he maintained that we cannot will a purpose without willing means to bring it about. ‘To wish’ or ‘to want’ can be casual when we are not serious about what happens in the world; ‘to will’ means that we are serious about actualizing our purposes. To will is to legislate; it makes something positive happen or prevents something from happening. Willing is then the expression of the responsible and independent self, distinguished from the dependent self who desires. Indeed as soon as we look at the modern era, we see how the lanc The philological question is complicated by the fact that the word ‘will’ has its origins in two distinct old English verbs, ‘willan’ and ‘willian.’ It is therefore difficult to follow the development of its use.

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guage of willing has taken on a significance not present in other civilizations. On Marx’s tomb at Highgate in London is inscribed his most famous aphorism: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’d 27 Here we are called to master the world through our doing and to make it as we want it. Greek heroes were summoned to be resolute for noble doing, but their deeds were not thought of as changing the very structure of what is, but as done rather for the sake of bringing into immediacy the beauty of a trusted order, always there to be appropriated through whatever perils. In the modern call, human wills are summoned to a much more staggering challenge. It is our destiny to bring about something novel; to conquer an indifferent nature and make it good for us. Indeed in that summons our wills come to be thought of as operating within a quite different context. Human willing is no longer one type of agent in a total process of natural agents, all of which are directed towards the realization of good purposes. We now see our wills as standing above the other beings of nature, able to make these other beings serve the purposes of our freedom. All else in nature is indifferent to good. Our wills alone are able, through doing, to actualize moral good in the indifferent world. It is here that history as a dimension of reality, distinguished from nature, comes to be thought. History is that dimension in which men in their freedom have tried to ‘create’ greater and greater goodness in the morally indifferent world they inhabit. As we actualize meaning, we bring forth a world in which living will be known to be good for all, not simply in a general sense, but in the very details we will be able more and more to control. Time is a developing history of meaning which we make. The self-conscious animal has always been plagued by anxiety as to whether it is good to be in the world. But to modern man, though life may not yet be meaningful for every one, the challenge is to make it so. Upon our will to do has been placed the whole burden of meaning. To distinguish the language of willing and thinking, and then to say that modern life has near its centre the will’s challenge to itself to make the world, must in no way imply that the modern world is not made by d It is interesting for Canadians that Marx’s tomb is close to Lord Strathcona’s – the man who more than any other was responsible for the actual building of the CPR, a noble deed making possible the possibility of Canada.

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reasoning. Such an implication would be absurd because it would disregard the chief mark of the modern era – the progress of the sciences. The systematic use of reasoning and experimenting in order to know objectively – that is for knowledge to be accumulated collectively by the race through the generations – has been and is increasingly the central achievement of our civilization. Indeed the idea of time as history was more shaped in response to the progressive sciences than by anything else. In the methodology by which the scientists of the last centuries carried out their activities, the race had at last found the sure and certain path which would guarantee that knowledge would increase among men, collectively. The belief in progress gained its power over the minds of intelligent men through this recognition, more than through anything else. The will to change the world was a will to change it through the expansion of knowledge. This is how willing and reasoning have come together in the modern era. At a superficial level it is obvious that the ability of men to discover how the world works can be used to improve the conditions of man’s estate. This relation between the discoveries of science and their use for human good has been the cause of the great public respect for the scientist. But leaving the matter there might imply that the modern relation between willing and reasoning is an external one, in which practical men simply turn into technology what the scientists happen to discover. Such a conception leads to the false view that the relation between technology and science is an external, not an intrinsic one. It leads to that popular falsehood, namely that scientists just find out what their pure curiosity leads them to, and that it is up to society to decide whether that knowledge be used for good or ill. Such statements must be denied, not because they might free scientists from responsibility for the results of their discoveries, but because they imply a false description of what scientists do. The coming together of willing and reasoning lies essentially in the method which has made possible the successes of modern science. The world is a field of objects which can be known in their workings through the ‘creative’ acts of reasoning and experimenting by the thinking subject who stands over them. This brings together willing and reasoning, because the very act of the thinking-ego standing over the world, and representing it to himself as objects, is a stance of the will. This statement could only be substantiated by a careful analysis of the

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work of the greatest modern scientists and philosophers; how they illuminated what they were doing in their science. It would require thinking through what they meant by such words as ‘object’ and ‘subject,’ ‘representation’ and ‘experiment,’ what the word ‘technique’ has come to mean for us, and above all what is now meant by ‘mathematics.’e I have not the time to do that here nor indeed the capability. But in turning from this question, I leave incomplete the enucleation of what we are thinking when we think time as history. However, as the methods of modern science are more and more applied to understanding human beings, in what are now called ‘the social sciences,’ it becomes easier to grasp what is meant by our science being a kind of willing, because in the social sciences the stance of the subject-scientist standing over against the object-society has very immediate and pressing consequences for us, since we are the objects. When Marx wrote of changing the world, he still believed that changing was not an end in itself, but the means to a future society conducive to the good life for all. Overcoming the chances of an indifferent nature by technique and politics was an interim stage until conditions should be ripe for the realization of men’s potential goodness. For all his denial of past thought, he retained from that past the central truth about human beings – namely, that there is in man a given humanness that it is our purpose to fulfil. So equally in the sentimentalized Marxism of Marcuse, the victory of the will over nature is not an end in itself, but simply a means to that time when men will find happiness in the polymorphous liberation of their instincts.28 The burden on the will to make the meaning of the world is thus limited by the belief that in some unspecified future the age of willing will be at an end. Even the traditional capitalist ideologists, who believed that changing the world was best achieved by sanctifying greed, had some vision of the fulfilled state of man (albeit a vulgar one) which transcended changing the world. In the conceptions of history now prevalent among those ‘creative’ men who plan the mastery of the planet, changing the world becomes ever more an end in itself. It is undertaken less simply to overcome the natural accidents which frustrate our humanity and more and more for the sheer sake of the ‘creation’ of novelty. This movement inevitably grows among the resolute as the remnants of any belief in a lovable e This has been thought most illuminatingly by Heidegger.

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actuality disappear. We will, not so much for some end beyond will, but for the sake of the willing itself. In this sense, the challenge of the will is endless to the resolute, because there is always more ‘creation’ to be carried out. Our freedom can even start to make over our own species. As Hegel so clearly expounded, doing is in some sense always negation. It is the determination that what is present shall not be; some other state shall. But it is positive in the sense that in its negating of what is, it strives to bring forth its own novel ‘creations.’ In this sense the burden of creation itself is placed upon us. Resoluteness for that task becomes the key virtue for the history makers – a resoluteness which finds the sources of novelty in their own ‘values.’ They assert that meaning is not found in what is actually now present for us, but in that which we can yet bring to be.

CHAPTER 3: NIETZSCHE AND TIME AS HISTORY [In our period the world that has been brought into existence by those who have conceived time as history begins to reach its apogee. Those who have dreamed since Machiavelli of controlling the planet by technology are no longer a minority working subtly against those with some other vision, but have become our unquestioned rulers, loved by the overwhelming majority. The achievements of the modern conception are all before us, not as some hoped-for dream, but in their realization. Do I have to list them? Its disasters are equally before us. Do I have to list them? As these realizations are so pressingly manifest, the nature of the conception presents itself unavoidably as a question to be unfolded.] An obvious question is why the conception of time as history came to its flowering in the West, rather than in one of the other great civilizations. Why have Western men come to think as they think and do as they do? Why was it our destiny to raise up ‘willing’ and ‘orientation to the future’ so that they have become universal ways of men’s existing? As in the most hidden aspects of our lives we cannot come to know ourselves without recognizing our own familial histories, in all their idiosyncrasy, so equally we cannot come to know ourselves without recognizing how our enfolding civilization came to be what it is. Such a search for recognition must start from the truism that the two chief sources of modern ‘Westernness’ are the Bible and the relics of Greek civilization. However, care must be taken that this truism is not turned

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into the idea that the origins of our ‘rationality’ are Greek, while we receive our ‘religion’ from the Bible. This is a distortion of our origins, because both among the Greeks and in the Bible thought and reverence are sustained together. Also as these origins came out into the West they were held together in ways ‘too deep, too numerous, too obscure, even simply too beautiful for any ease of intellectual relation.’29 Many of the deepest controversies in which Western men have defined what they are have been centred around the proper ways of relating or distinguishing what was given to them from Athens and Jerusalem. If we were searching for the origins of our present, we would first try to state what was given to men in Judaism or Christianity, and then seek out how this intermingled with the claims of universal understanding which were found in the heights of Greek civilization. As Christianity was the majoritarian locus in which that intermingling occurred, we would have to examine how it was that Christianity so opened men to a particular consciousness of time, by opening them to anxiety and charity; how willing was exalted through the stamping proclamations of the creating Will; how time was raised up by redemption in time, and the future by the exaltation of the eschaton.30 But to recognize ourselves today, we cannot turn simply to our origins in Athens and Jerusalem, because those aitiai31 are obscured for us by the massive criticism which the thinkers and scientists and scholars have carried on for the last centuries. That criticism so penetrates every part of our education that we cannot hope to reach back easily to make these origins present. Indeed even that penetrating criticism – which scholars hypostatize as the Enlightenment – is itself ambiguous in so far as it is penetrated by an acceptance of certain aspects of that which was being criticized. This is just the truism that the modern conception of progress may be characterized as secular Christianity. As in the relations of children and parents, the conception of time as history in its first optimistic and liberal formulation was at one and the same time a critical turning away from our origins and also a carrying along of some essential aspects of them. Even today as the liberal formulation of time as history disappears before the hammer blows of the twentieth century, we are left with a more frightening conception of time as history which holds within it that presence of anxiety and willing which came from our particular origins. [Unless we know that we carry with us the long shaping of what our ancestors have been, how can we know what we are now? The alterna-

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tive method would be to turn to what is here now and what in that is potentiality for the future. For example, I could take the fact that we move fast to the point where man may be able to make man. The signs grow that we approach the point when the traditional but chancy method of intercourse between the sexes (however dear it may be) may no longer be the chief means whereby we perpetuate our species. Our control over nature moves to the moment when we may be able to perpetuate the species by more rational means. When we try to think what these means are, when we try to think what are and what are not their potentialities, we are led to think what we mean by our freedom, what we mean by nature, indeed what we mean by time as history. Both these alternative methods of looking at the conception – either by understanding it through its genesis, or by bringing forth the potentialities of its present – are necessary to understanding it. Yet how do we hold these two methods together? If either is taken separately, it falls into a particular danger. If we turn to the past, and understand the conception in its genesis, we can easily find ourselves impotent and irrelevant for living in the full reality of the present. Just go into the arts faculty of a university. Never has a society put such resources into scholarship about the past as has ours in North America. Yet never has there been a society where what is known about the past is so irrelevant to our living. One bad result of turning to the past may be that men are left with such a sense of ambiguity that they are unable to consider any relevance that past has now for present living, and so are made impotent. They are submerged by the sheer relativity they find in history. Indeed some can look to scholarship about the past as a sanctuary from the present. They find in study a means of pretending they do not live in the twentieth century. So much of our modern education in humanities first makes students impotent by drumming into them the sheer relativism to be derived from the past, and then training them to fit into the sanctuary of objective scholarship. One of the brightest possibilities in contemporary student unrest is their revolt against the irrelevance of modern scholarship, and the way it hides its meaninglessness under the rhetoric of objectivity. On the other hand, if we turn to the present to understand its potentialities, we are easily led into the opposite danger. We tend to comprehend the present only within its own terms. At its worst this turns

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science into calculating how we can use that present for our most immediate purposes. Scientists advise governments on juvenile delinquency, taxation policy, urban renewal, defoliation in Vietnam. The danger of immediacy is also present in many of the radical students who, in reaction against the service of the multiversity to the imperial interests, propose that all thought in the universities be made relevant to reform or revolt. This tends to as great an immediacy as that of the scientific bureaucrats the radicals despise. Of course in both cases some of the resulting activity is good, some wicked and much pointless. But what must be said in the present connection is that such immediacy can only be a stance for calculating, not for thinking the modern. To look at what we are in our present realization of time as history, it is necessary on the one hand to avoid a scholarship that by its immersion in the past castrates our thinking about what it is to exist now, and on the other hand to avoid an immediacy that trivializes by persuading us that we are understanding the modern when in fact we are being carried along by the waves of its dynamism. Only the greatest thinkers transcend scholarship without preaching easy acceptance of shallow activism.] However, it is not possible in lectures such as these to sort out the complexity of the geneses of what we now are. Therefore I turn away from a search for the fundamentals of the Western past to the thoughts of that writer where the conception of time as history is most luminously articulated. Nearly a hundred years ago Nietzsche thought the conception of time as history more comprehensively than any other modern thinker before or since. He did not turn away from what he thought. That is, for good or ill, he accepted ‘en pleine conscience de cause’32 that temporality enfolds human beings and that they experience that temporality as history. Yet he also understood, better than any other thinker, the profundity of the crisis that such a recognition must mean for those who have accepted it. Therefore in trying to follow Nietzsche’s thought, we can go further in thinking what it means to conceive that time is history. Moreover, in looking at the flowering tree at the height of its wildest blooming, we are not far from its seed and its seed bed. There are certain difficulties which stand in the way of Englishspeaking people listening seriously to Nietzsche. The cataclysms of violence which have occurred between the English-speaking peoples and

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the Germans, in this century, make it hard for us to look at the German tradition without suspicion. Many English-speaking intellectuals write about Nietzsche in the tone of personal discrediting. This often has the mark of those who wish to inoculate themselves against thoughts they do not want to think by calumniating the author of those thoughts. Although we can exclude by such inoculation the thought of Nietzsche explicitly from our minds, we are still caught in its implicit presence. For example, modern sociology is central to our North American way of living. The chief founder of that sociology was Max Weber.33 And certainly Weber’s sociology must be taken, more than anything else, as a commentary on his engrossed encounter with Nietzsche’s writings. In much writing in English, Nietzsche is spoken of as a second-rate poet masquerading as a philosopher, or as an aphorist who did not face questions comprehensively, or as a romantic of the feelings who was not concerned with science. His thoughts are impugned by the fact that he retreated into madness (to use that ambiguous word). In the worst condemnation he is accused of being a fountainhead of National Socialism and open to what is called today anti-Semitism. (Anti-Judaism is a more accurate name for that baseness.) To start from the worst of these accusations, Nietzsche’s works are filled with his loathing of anti-Judaism and of his understanding of its particular danger in certain German circles. He clearly would have been disgusted by the Nazis, that union of a desperate ruling class, of romantic nationalism among the bourgeoisie, and the industrial gutter. As for romanticism, his deepest book is indeed in dramatic form, a conscious parody of the New Testament, which sometimes breaks into poetic utterance.34 But his other writings are in limpid prose which expounds difficult philosophic questions with breath-taking clarity. This picture of Nietzsche as a second-rate romantic poet was partly created among the English by the absurd early translations of his work. His German was translated into a phoney Gothic English, filled with words such as ‘thou’ and ‘spake.’35 Above all, this obscured Nietzsche’s great wit with a patina of pretentiousness. In fact, there are few works of modern comedy which could rank beside The Case of Wagner.36 As for modern science, nobody ever more emphasized its achievements, took these achievements to be the centre of the modern world, and pondered on the nature of that science. It shows a good understanding of the course of modern science to predict in the 1870s: ‘The dynamic inter-

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pretation of the world will shortly gain power over the physicists.’37 He was, at 24, a professor of philology at a great European university.38 It is indeed true that he spent the last years of his life in madness.39 One must remember, however, that he was the first thinker to bring out the very great difference in the use of the word ‘madness’ in modern thought as compared to the traditional meaning of that term. At a deeper level, I must say that in using the thought of Nietzsche to enucleate the conception of time as history, I in no sense imply that what he said is the best or highest word about what is. Nor do I imply that however much he would have loathed the Nazis, he is free from any responsibility for their power in Germany. The very clarity and force of his criticism of the European past liberated many Germans from the traditional religious and moral restraints of their tradition, so that they were opened to a barren nihilism which was a fertile field for the extremities and absurdities of National Socialism. Nor do I imply that his lucid but immoderate rhetoric is the best way to put forth one’s thoughts. Indeed it might have been better for humanity if Nietzsche’s works of high genius had never been written, or if written, published. But to raise this possibility implies that it is better, at least for most men, not to be told where they are. Nietzsche’s words raise to an intensely full light of explicitness what it is to live in this era. He articulates what it is to have inherited existence as a present member of Western history. His thought does not invent the situation of our contemporary existing, it unfolds it. He carries the crisis of modern thought further only in the sense that by the accuracy and explicitness of his unfolding, he makes it more possible for others to understand the situation of which they are the inheritors. But the inheritance of modern Western man was something that Nietzsche took over as a given fate from what others had done and thought, made and felt before him. He made explicit what had been implicit. Therefore, to say that it would have been better for Nietzsche’s words not to have been published implies that some men can live better if they know less where they are. From whom should some knowledge be hidden? How much is it good for any one person to know? I raise this question to make clear that I do not intend to take up Nietzsche’s words as journalists take up the thoughts of others on television. They call thoughts fascinating and controversial, and in so doing castrate them for themselves and for their audience by cutting off

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those thoughts from any connection with actuality. The work is done through the implication that no thought can rise above the level of opinion, and therefore be something more important than a source of entertainment. I would not want to trivialize Nietzsche, as if I wished to entertain the bored with a ‘controversial’ figure. To speak about his thoughts on history implies that as the present situation is what it is in any case, it is better to know that situation for what it is, than to live in it without so knowing. Whether this is a correct judgment depends on a difficult argument in political philosophy. Indeed some of what Nietzsche says will seem obvious today, so that the response may easily be: ‘What’s so new?’ In the century since he began to write, not only have his opinions filtered down unrecognized through lesser minds to become the popular platitudes of the age, but also what he prophesied is now all around us to be easily seen. Nevertheless, though his more obvious teachings have become the platitudes of such schools as positivism and existentialism, psychiatry and behavioural social science, the subtler consequences of extremity he draws necessarily from them are not much contemplated. Most men want it both ways in thought and in practice; the nobility of Nietzsche is that he did not. In Human, All Too Human Nietzsche says: ‘Lack of historical sense is the inherited defect of all philosophers.’40 Or again: ‘What separates us from Kant, as from Plato and Leibnitz, is that we believe that becoming is the rule even in the spiritual things. We are historians from top to bottom ... They all to a man think unhistorically, as is the age old custom among philosophers.’41 Previous philosophers have taken their contemporaries as if they were man as he always is, and proceeded from their definition of that supposedly unchanging being to make generalizations about the meaning of human life, and even about the whole of which man is a part. But it has become evident that all species, human as much as non-human, can only be understood as continually changing, that is, as having histories. Darwin made this patently clear about the other animals. There are not types of animals that are always on earth; species come to be, are in continual change and pass away. The same is so about ourselves. What is fundamental about all human behaviour (including our understanding of it – itself a behaviour) is its historicity. To repeat, this does not seem very new today. Every literate high

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school student would take a simple statement of this historicism for granted. We are taught early to use the language of values, to say that our values are dependent on our historical situation and that this generalization proceeds from any objective study of the past. Civilizations and individuals have lived by different values. As there is no way of judging between the value of these values, we are taught early a very simple historical relativism. As we go farther in our education, we are taught to express that historicism with greater sophistication. However, the almost universal acceptance of this relativism by even the semi-literate in our society is very recent. The belief that men are enfolded in their historicity, and the consequent historical relativism with its use of the word ‘values,’ only began to be the popular vocabulary in this century. Nietzsche is the first thinker who shows how this historicity is to be recognized in the full light of its consequences, in every realm of existence. To repeat, most previous philosophers have shown their lack of historical sense by trying to insist, in some form or other, that there is something permanent in human beings, individually or collectively, which survives through change and in terms of which we can be defined. From that definition can be drawn out a scale of better and worse purposes for ourselves and others. But as Nietzsche says in The Genealogy of Morals: ‘All terms which semiotically condense a whole process elude definition; only that which has no history can be defined.’42 We must give up about man (as much as about other animals) the thought that ‘species’ is a definable term from which we can draw forth our proper purposes. Nietzsche uses the metaphor ‘bridge’ to describe the human process. Men are a bridge between the beasts from which we came and what we may yet be, if we should overcome being simply men. The historical sense is more precise than a general recognition of the change in and between the civilizations which make up that bridge. It is the apprehension that in the shortest moment we are never the same, nor are we ever in the presence of the same. Put negatively, in the historical sense we admit the absence of any permanence in terms of which change can be measured or limited or defined. In Nietzsche’s ironic phrase, we are required to accept the finality of becoming. Belief in permanence in the world around us arises from the different rhythms of change – for example, in roses, in birds, in stones. Belief in permanence in ourselves (for example, that we are ‘selves’ or even

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‘souls’) arises from our desire to believe that there is some unifying purpose in our existing. The desire to assert some permanence is particularly pressing among those who have begun to be aware of the abysmal void of its absence, and who wish to turn away from such a cause of fright. The reasonable activities of scientists and philosophers are the attempt to impose some order, so that awareness of primal chaos may be mitigated whether through practical or contemplative ordering. The very language centring around the word ‘truth’ dominated previous Western history because it was the most disciplined attempt to sedate consciousness against the terror and pain of becoming. But when we examine that language scientifically we see that it is made up of a set of metaphors and metonyms which mitigate the chaos by imposing anthropomorphic explanations on everything. The use of the language of ‘truth’ is an assertion of value about what we consider ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ which we will to impose upon ourselves and others. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the consequences to be drawn from the dawning historical sense had been alleviated for many by the belief in progress. Because they believed that the process of historical change manifested as a whole the growing power of rationality in the race, and because they assumed that rationality was ‘good,’ they could find in history the purpose of their existing. Scientists had increasingly been able to show that the non-human world could be fully explained without any idea of final purpose; but the idea of purpose was retained as the unfolding of rationality among the species, man. Nietzsche sees that just as natural science has shown that there is no need of the idea of purpose to understand the geneses and developments of the non-human species, so also there are no reasons to justify belief in the goodness of rationality as our given purpose. The belief that increasing rationality is good is just a survival left over from the centuries of Christianity, when men had seen human life grounded in the sovereignty of the divine wisdom, and so considered reason as more than an instrument. Those who had criticized this traditional perspective to death, in the name of modern science and philosophy, still wanted to keep from it the belief in good and evil. They maintained the idea of purpose through the belief in progressive rationality, while freeing themselves from the legacy of philosophy and theology. But can the exaltation of reasoning be maintained when the very meaning of the word ‘reason’ has been changed in modern science? According to

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Nietzsche, in the light of the historical sense men have to give up belief not only in the transcendent ground of permanence (God is dead), but also in the moral valuations which accompanied the former, particularly the idea that our existing has its crowning purpose in rationality. Nietzsche turns with irony to the fact that the centuries of Western belief in rationality as the highest for man, finally produced from itself that science which was to show that there is no reason for this belief. The first exaltation of rationality occurred in Platonism (which according to Nietzsche took popular form in Christianity). It identified reason with virtue, and virtue with happiness, and grounded this identification in the primacy of the idea of the Good. Human existing was at its heart to be trusted as good. It therefore exalted truth-seeking as virtue, and the discipline necessary to that ascetic pursuit. From the long history of disciplined truth-seeking in Christianity, there came forth at last the great modern scientists who, in their pursuit of truth, showed that the human and non-human things can be fully understood without the idea of final purpose, or that human nature is properly directed towards rationality. The very greatness of Christianity was to produce its own grave-diggers. While Nietzsche recognizes that the historical sense is the basis for all valuable science and philosophy, he affirms with equal force that it casts a blight upon living. Great living comes forth from those who are resolute in the face of chaos. Such resolution has been sustained by the horizons within which men lived. Horizons are the absolute presuppositions within which individuals and indeed whole civilizations do their living. He uses the metaphor ‘horizons’ because everything which appears, appears to us within their limits. The lives of ordinary men are lived from within their horizons; the deeds of historical men, such as Caesar or Napoleon, come forth from the strength of their horizons. The greatest have been those such as Socrates, the Buddha, or Christ, who have themselves created horizons, within which the people of whole civilizations have henceforth lived. The historical sense shows us that all horizons are simply the creations of men. In the past, men thought that their horizons were true statements about reality. For example, they affirmed that ultimate reality was reason or love. In terms of these statements which they considered ‘true,’ they thought they could know what human purposes were worth pursuing. For example, God being self-giving weakness, the

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highest human virtue is to give oneself away. But what the historical sense makes plain is that these horizons are not what they claimed to be; they are not true statements about actuality. They are man-made perspectives by which the charismatic impose their will to power. The historical sense teaches us that horizons are not discoveries about the nature of things; they express the values which our tortured instincts will to create. Nietzsche affirms that once we know that horizons are relative and man-made, their power to sustain us is blighted. Once we know them to be relative, they no longer horizon us. We cannot live in an horizon when we know it to be one. When the historical sense teaches us that our values are not sustained in the nature of things, impotence descends. Nietzsche’s most famous aphorism, ‘God is Dead,’ implies that God was once alive.43 He was alive in the sense that He was the horizon from which men could know what was worth doing and therefore be sustained in the resolute doing of it. When it is recognized that God is an horizon, He is dead, once and for all. Indeed the death of the Christian God in Western civilization is not just the death of one horizon, it is the end of all horizons. The Christian God might be called the last horizon, because its formidable confidence in truth-seeking as the way of contending with the primal anguish brought forth that science and critical philosophy which have made evident that all horizons are man-made. Nietzsche does not take the death of God – the end of all horizons – as a moment to be taken lightly, as something after which we can get on with the business of making life cosy. He is not the American liberal described by Abbie Hoffman as saying: ‘God is dead and we did it for the kids.’44 For Nietzsche, the end of horizons is not cosy, because we are still left with how to live when we have admitted chaos. When Nietzsche writes ‘only that which has no history can be defined’45 it may seem that this has little importance outside the logic of definition – an academic matter. Science does not need definitions except as instruments. But ‘to define’ in a wider context includes stating the purpose of something. The definition of man as the rational animal asserted that our special purpose was rationality. To have been told that man is the creature of Trinity was to know that our highest activity was loving. To say that man has a history and therefore cannot be defined is to say that we can know nothing about what we are fitted for. We make ourselves as we go along. This is what Nietzsche means when he says

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that we are at the end of the era of rational man. We must live in the knowledge that our purposes are simply creations of human will and not ingrained in the nature of things. But what a burden falls upon the will when the horizons of definition are gone. This is the burden that Nietzsche sees the historical sense imposing on man. On the one hand, we cannot deny history and retreat into a destroyed past. On the other hand, how can we overcome the blighting effect of living without horizons? In his twenties Nietzsche saw the crisis with which the conception of time as history presented men. The great writings of his maturity were his attempt to overcome it.

CHAPTER 4: NIETZSCHE: REVENGE AND REDEMPTION In the last section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: ‘The hour in which I tremble and in which I freeze; the hour which demands and demands and goes on always demanding: “Who has enough courage for that, who deserve to be the masters of the earth?”’46 In the eighty years since Nietzsche stopped writing, the realized fruits of that drive to mastery are pressed upon us in every day of our lives. Capabilities of mastery over human and non-human beings proliferate, along with reactions by both against that mastering. The historical sense comes from the same intellectual matrix as does the drive to mastery. We have been taught to recognize as illusion the old belief that our purposes are ingrained and sustained in the nature of things. Mastery comes at the same time as the recognition that horizons are only horizons. Most men, when they face that their purposes are not cosmically sustained, find that a darkness falls upon their wills. This is the crisis of the modern world to Nietzsche. The capabilities for mastery present men with a more pressing need of wisdom than any previous circumstances. Who will deserve to be those masters? Who will be wise enough? What is wisdom when reason cannot teach us of human excellence? What is wisdom when we have been taught by the historical sense the finality of becoming? What is wisdom, when we have overcome the idea of eternity? Till recently it was assumed that our mastery of the earth would be used to promote the values of freedom, rationality, and equality – that is, the values of social democracy. Social democracy was the highest

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political wisdom. It was to be the guaranteed culmination of history as progress. But to repeat: for Nietzsche progress was the doctrine that held men when the conception of history in Western Christianity had been secularized by modern philosophy and science. Christianity was Platonism for the people.47 Platonism was the first rationalism. Its identification of rationality, virtue, and happiness was a prodigious affirmation of optimism. This identification was for the few who could reach it in the practice of philosophy. Christianity took this optimism and laid it open to the masses, who could attain it through trust in the creating and redeeming Triune God. It united the identification of reason, virtue, and happiness with the idea of equality, sustained in the fact that all men were created by God and sought by Him in redemption. By this addition of equality, the rationalism was made even more optimistic. In the modern era, that doctrine was secularized: that is, it came to be believed that this uniting of reason and virtue and happiness was not grounded beyond the world in the Kingdom of God, but was coming to be here on earth, in history. By saying that this union was to be realized here on earth, the height of optimism was reached. In the last part of Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: ‘The masses blink and say: “We are all equal. – Man is but man, before God – we are all equal.” Before God! But now this God has died.’48 The modern movements which believe in progress towards social democracy assert the equality of all men and a politics based on it. But the same liberal movements have also at their heart that secularism which excludes belief in God. What kind of reason or evidence then sustains the belief that men are equal? As for the expectations from the progress of knowledge – that is the belief that freedom will be given its content by men being open to the truths of science and philosophy – Nietzsche asserts that we have come to the end of the age of rational man. To repeat: the cause of this end is the ambiguity at the heart of science. For Nietzsche, modern science is the height of modern truthfulness and the centre of our destiny. But it is an ambiguous centre, because in the very name of ‘truthfulness’ – itself a moral value – it has made plain that the values of rationalism are not cosmically sustained. The natural science of Darwin and Newton has shown us that nature can be understood without the idea of final purpose. In that understanding, nature appears to us as indifferent to moral good and evil. We can control nature; but it does not sustain vir-

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tue. As for the sciences of man, they have shown us that reason is only an instrument and cannot teach us how it is best to live. In openness to science we learn that nature is morally indifferent, and that reason is simply an instrument. At the end of the era of ‘rational’ man, the public world will be dominated by two types, whom Nietzsche calls the last men and the nihilists. The last men are those who have inherited the ideas of happiness and equality from the doctrine of progress. But because this happiness is to be realized by all men, the conception of its content has to be shrunk to fit what can be realized by all. The sights for human fulfilment have to be lowered. Happiness can be achieved, but only at the cost of emasculating men of all potentialities for nobility and greatness. The last men will gradually come to be the majority in any realized technical society. Nietzsche’s description of these last men in Zarathustra has perhaps more meaning in us and for us than it had for his contemporaries who read it in 1883. ‘They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. “We have discovered happiness,” say the last men and blink.’49 [The fun society] Or again, ‘A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death.’50 [With Timothy Leary as the priest] Or again, ‘Formerly all the world was mad, say the most acute of the last men and blink. They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make up – otherwise they might have indigestion’51 – our intellectuals. The central fact about the last men is that they cannot despise themselves. Because they cannot despise themselves, they cannot rise above a petty view of happiness. They can thus inoculate themselves against the abyss of existing. They are the last men because they have inherited rationalism only in its last and decadent form. They think they have emancipated themselves from Christianity; in fact they are the products of Christianity in its secularized form. They will be the growing majority in the northern hemisphere as the modern age unfolds. The little they ask of life (only entertainment and comfort) will give them endurance. This is the price the race has to pay for overcoming two millennia of Christianity. The end of rational man brings forth not only last men but nihilists. These are those who understand that they can know nothing about what is good to will. Because of the historical sense, they know that all

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values are relative and man-made; the highest values of the past have devaluated themselves. Men have no given content for their willing. But because men are wills, the strong cannot give up willing.f Men would rather will nothing than have nothing to will. Nietzsche clearly has more sympathy for the nihilists than for the last men, because the former put truthfulness above the debased vision of happiness, and in this hold on to the negative side of human greatness. But he has little doubt of the violence and cataclysms which will come forth from men who would rather will nothing than have nothing to will. They will be resolute in their will to mastery, but they cannot know what that mastery is for. The violence of their mastery over human and non-human beings will be without end. In the 1880s he looked ahead to that age of world wars and continued upheavals which most of us in this century have tried to endure. In parenthesis: if we look at the crises of the modern world through Nietzsche’s eyes, and see them above all as the end of two millennia of rational man, we can see that those crises have come to North America later than to Europe. But now that they have come, they are here with intensity. The optimism of rational man was sustained for us in the expectations of the pioneering moment. It was also sustained by the fact that among most of our population our identification of virtue and happiness took the earlier and more virile form which came out of Biblical religion, rather than the soft definition of that identification in the liberalisms of the last men. Among the early majority this was above all Protestant; but its virility was sustained in the Catholicism and Judaism of the later immigrants. In the fresh innocence of North America these religions maintained their force, albeit in primitive form, longer than they did in the more sophisticated Europe. Because the identification of virtue and reason and happiness in these religions was not altogether immanent in its expectations, it held back many North Americans for longer from that banal view of happiness which is the mark of mass liberalism. As these religions provided some protection from the historical sense, they still provided horizons for our willing which saved the resolute from nihilism. At the height of our present imperial destiny, the crisis of the end of modern rationalism falls upon us ineluctably. In f Who ever more agreed with St Augustine’s dictum ‘Quid sumus nisi voluntates?’ [What are we except wills?].

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Nietzsche’s words: ‘the wasteland grows.’52 The last men and the nihilists are everywhere in North America. For Nietzsche, there is no possibility of returning to the greatness and glory of pre-rational times, to the age of myth and cult. The highest vision of what men have yet been was unfolded in the early Greek tragedies. Here was laid forth publicly and in ordered form the ecstasy of the suffering and knowing encounter of the noblest men and women with the chaos of existing.53 The rationalism of Socrates smoothed away that encounter by proclaiming the primacy of the idea of the Good, and in so doing deprived men of the possibility of their greatest height. The optimism of philosophy destroyed the ecstatic nobility which had been expressed in the tragedies. But now that rationalism has dug its own grave through the truthfulness of science, there is no returning to that earlier height. The heritage of rationalism remains in its very overcoming. Its practical heritage is that through technique and experimental science men are becoming the masters of the earth. Its theoretical heritage is that men now know that nature is indifferent to their purposes and that they create their own values. Therefore the question for our species is: can we reach a new height which takes into itself not only the ecstasy of a noble encounter with chaos, but also the results of the long history of rationalism? Neither the nihilists nor the last men deserve to be masters of the earth. The nihilists only go on willing for the sake of willing. They assuage their restlessness by involvement in mastery for its own sake. They are unable to use their mastery for joy. The last men simply use the fruits of technique for the bored pursuit of their trivial vision of happiness. The question is whether there can be men who transcend the alternatives of being nihilists or last men; who know that they are the creators of their own values, but bring forth from that creation in the face of chaos a joy in their willing which will make them deserving of being masters of the earth. It must be said that for Nietzsche this crisis is authentic, because there is no necessity about its outcome. This may be compared with another influential account of the modern crisis, that of Marx. For Marx also, industrial society is at a turning point. The achievements of capitalism have led to the stage where this form of social organization must now be transcended. For Marx, as for Nietzsche, this is a situation which produces widespread and terrible human suffering. But according to Marx, if we have knowledge of the forces now at work, we can

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know that the crisis will inevitably be transcended. In the midst of the suffering we have that enormous consolation and spur to effort. A net of inevitable success is put under the performers, so that their actions are guaranteed from the ultimate anguish. For Nietzsche there is no such net. The historical sense shows us that we must take seriously the idea that we create history, and that therefore there can be no inevitable outcome. We do not know whether beings will appear who will so overcome themselves that they will deserve to be masters of the earth; we do not know whether the last men will be in charge for centuries and centuries. To repeat: for Nietzsche the net of inevitable progress is a shallow secular form of the belief in God. Just as the historical sense has killed God, it kills the secular descendants of that belief. Indeed the first step in man’s self-overcoming is to know that all such nets over chaos are simply comforting illusions. The historical sense teaches us that what happens now and what will happen is radically contingent. (I may be allowed to note that the absence of all nets is a truth that those of us who trust in God must affirm.) Unfortunately, one of the key words in Nietzsche’s answer has been killed amongst us by strangely diverse associations. Most of us on this continent grew up with the comic strips and film cartoons in which the bespectacled newspaper man, Clark Kent, turned into ‘Superman,’ who went zooming through the skies destroying gangsters and enemies of his country. To use the word ‘superman’ is to think that image – an image from the comics and the Saturday matinee filled with screaming children and popcorn. The other association is a debased one. The word ‘superman’ was used by the propagandists of the most disgusting political regime that the Western world has yet produced. The Nazis took over this part of Nietzsche’s language, so that when people of my generation hear the word ‘superman’ as used about reality, we conjure up images of those arrogant and sadistic maniacs sweeping their violence and vulgarity over Europe. Because of those events, the word ‘superman’ has become revolting. Of course, without doubt, Nietzsche would have seen in the Nazis his worst predictions of nihilism and vulgarity combined – predictions which he made particularly about his own people – the Germans. Indeed as I have watched Leni Riefenstahl’s famous documentaries of the Nazi era, particularly her shots of Hitler speaking, I have been

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aware in Hitler of just that spirit that Nietzsche believes to be the very curse of mankind – the spirit of revenge (that which in Nietzsche’s language above all holds back men from becoming ‘supermen’ – Übermenschen).54 As one watches Hitler speaking one sees that his effectiveness came from the uniting of his own hysterical self-pity with the same feelings present in his German audience. Life has been a field of pain and defeat for him both privately and publicly, as it has been for the Germans, and he summons up their ressentiment.55 In a political context, Hitler made specific demands; but behind anything specific one feels a demand more universal – a demand for unlimited revenge. This is what Nietzsche says is the very basis for the violence of nihilism. Indeed in his language, the supermen will be those who have overcome in themselves any desire for revenge. As he writes in Zarathustra: ‘That man may be delivered from revenge: that is for me the bridge to the highest hope.’56 (To make a parenthesis about Leni Riefenstahl’s films: many people these days seem to place enormous confidence in the electronic media. They see in them the way by which enlightenment can be brought to the majority. Electronic enlightenment will overcome the old anal rationality of print and speech. Those who think this way should ponder these films of Leni Riefenstahl. The art of the film was there used in all its stunning magic. But these films were made to persuade men of the glory of the basest of political regimes. Indeed to watch them is to be presented with Nietzsche’s very question: Who deserves to be the master of electronics? The last men and nihilists from contemporary television journalism and politics? One would be happier about the McLuhanite cult, if its members dealt with such questions.)57 Both because of the comic strip and because of the Nazis, the word superman cannot be used with seriousness amongst us. But that fact must not prevent us from looking at Nietzsche’s question. Who is wise enough for this moment in history? Nietzsche takes the historical sense for granted. He does not speak of the race of men as if they had a nature which is unchanging through the course of history. Man is a bridge between the beasts and something higher than man. As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘Man is the as yet undetermined animal.’58 It is now open to man in the future to become nobler than his past, so that some will come to deserve the present destiny of being masters of the planet. For this deserving, the essential condition is that men overcome the spirit of revenge. Therefore if one wants to understand what

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Nietzsche means by history, one must look at what he means by revenge. Desire for revenge has come from the very conditions of human existence. As self-conscious animals men have lived in the chaotic world, experiencing as anguish all its accidents, its terrors, and its purposelessness. Most men have lived in a world in which our instincts are thwarted and twisted from the very moment we enter it. Our wills are continually broken on the wheel of the chaos which is the world. Our response to that brokenness is the will to revenge against others, against ourselves, against the very condition of time itself. ‘It is the body which has despaired of the body.’59 From that despair comes forth the spirit of revenge. The more botched and bungled our instincts become in the vicissitudes of existing, the greater our will to revenge on what has been done us. Nietzsche was the first to use consistently that description of man which Freud later employed for psycho-analysis. The elemental in man is an ‘it,’ that is, an impersonal chaos of instincts out of which comes forth as epiphenomena, reason and morality.60 It was once believed that the irrational in man existed to be subordinated to the rational. In Nietzsche this is denied. This does not, however, free us from thinking. It simply means that thinking is carried on over an abyss which it can never fathom. Philosophy is simply the highest form of ‘the will to power.’ As he writes in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘There is a point in every philosophy when the philosopher’s “conviction” appears on the stage – or to use the language of an ancient Mystery: Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.61

Nietzsche enucleates with black wit the many forms of revenge which make up for him the very substance of history. In the earliest societies, the victory of the strong over the weak is the victory of those with vigorous instincts over the majority of weak instinct. The weak bring forth from their condition of enslavement the spirit of revenge. The rules of justice come from that spirit. The creditor takes a quantum of revenge for the debtor who cannot meet his debts. As the infliction of pain gives pleasure, the creditor finds his satisfaction in that punishment. In the West, the greatest achievement of the spirit of re-

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venge has been Christianity. In it, the priests, who are those among the ruling classes whose instincts have been most botched and bungled, and therefore desire the greatest revenge, get power by uniting with the weak majority against the strong. They produce a morality which exalts such virtues as altruism, humility, equality, etc. Those virtues necessary anyway for the weak majority are guaranteed to get them revenge, in the next world, if not in this. The priests teach an ascetic morality, telling men that the instincts should be repressed. In the name of this rationalist control, those of strong and noble instinct are held back from their proper authority for the sake of the weak and bungled majority.62 Indeed, the will to revenge is turned inward by men against themselves. They punish themselves, not only others. The greed of the self teaches us that if we put aside full living in the name of humility and altruism and asceticism, we will gain an infinite extension of our wills in eternity. Those who transpose their will from this world to the beyond are expressing the most intense will to power from out of their desire for revenge at not being able to express it in this life. For Nietzsche the very idea of transcendence – that time is enfolded in eternity – is produced out of the spirit of revenge by those who because of their broken instincts are impotent to live in the world, and in their selfpity extrapolate to a non-existent perfection in which their failures will be made good. In the language I have used in these lectures, any belief that time cannot be identified with history comes from the broken instincts of men who cannot live greatly in history.63 For Nietzsche, Plato is the philosophic enemy, because he conceives time as an image, ‘the moving image of eternity.’64 The reality of the ‘idea’ was invented by Socrates, who wanted to overcome tragedy and who therefore posited that the immediate world was just the moving image of a real eternity.65 The greatness of Socrates was the greatness of his revenge on tragedy. But philosophy only provided revenge for the few. In Christianity the will to revenge is taken up into a transcendence opened to the majority. As Nietzsche puts it in The Genealogy of Morals: ‘Then suddenly we come face to face with that paradoxical and ghastly expedient which brought temporary relief to tortured humanity, that most brilliant stroke of Christianity: God’s sacrifice of himself for man. God makes himself the ransom for what could not otherwise be ransomed; God alone has power to absolve us of a debt we can no longer dis-

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charge; the creditor offers himself as a sacrifice for his debtor out of sheer love (can you believe it?) out of love for his debtor.’66 Now that Christianity has been secularized, the transcendence of progress has been substituted for the transcendence of God. The spirit of revenge is still at work among the last men and the nihilists. The last men want revenge against anything that is noble and great, against anything that threatens their expectations from triviality. The nihilists want revenge on the fact that they cannot live with joy in the world. Their revenge takes the form of restless violence against any present. As nothingness is always before them, they seek to fill the void by willing for willing’s sake. There can be no end to their drive for mastery. Indeed for Nietzsche, revenge arises most deeply in our recognition that all our existing is subject to time’s thrall. Everything is enfolded in ‘it was,’ ‘it is,’ ‘it will be.’ And as we recognize that inescapable temporality in every lived minute, we can will to batter against its inevitable consequences. That is the deepest cause of our revengings. At its simplest, we want revenge against what is present in our present. If we seek to overcome our present by bending our efforts to the building of a future to suit our heart’s desire, when that future came we would still be subject to that thrall. At the deepest level, revenge is most engaged against the past. [That is what Professor Marcuse cannot include within his utopian Marxism.] Consciousness always includes within itself ‘it was.’ Human life would not be possible without some memory. But the will can do nothing about the past. What has happened has happened, and we cannot change it. By the ‘it was’ of time, Nietzsche means not only our personal past (with its defeats, its enslavements, its tortured instincts), but the past of the race which is opened to us in communal memory, and opened to us as never before by the historical sense. [As a great thinker of this century has said to her fellow Christians: ‘Can we make object(s) of contemplation out of 70,000 slaves hanging on their crosses on the roads about Rome after the defeat of the slave rebellion?’67 How does the will overcome its desire for revenge on that past?] In Zarathustra Nietzsche writes: ‘To transform every “it was” into “this is what I wanted” – that alone I could call redemption.’68 The height is for him amor fati.69 And that love must come out of having grasped into one’s consciousness the worst that can be remembered or imagined – the torturing of children and the screams of the innocent. To deserve to be masters of the earth will be to have overcome

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the spirit of revenge and therefore to be able to will and create in joy. Nietzsche’s image for himself is the convalescent. He is recovering, step by step, from the spirit of revenge. The recovery from that sickness is not simply from the disasters of his own instincts, but the recovery from the long history of revenge in the race. In that history, the greatest revenge against time’s ‘it was’ took the form of belief in the transcendence of a timeless eternity. It pretended to be a redemption of time, but it was in fact an expression of revenge against time. To live on the earth, to be masters of the earth, to deserve to be masters because we can live in joy, requires the act of amor fati,69 held outside any assertion of timelessness. The love of fate has been asserted in the Greek tragedies, in Plato, and by certain Christians. But this fate was enfolded in a timeless eternity, in an ultimate perfection. For Nietzsche, the achievement of amor fati must be outside any such enfoldment. It must be willed in a world where there is no possibility of either an infinite or finite transcendence of becoming or of willing. For Nietzsche, the possibility of that love of fate is related to his discovery of ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical.’ This ‘discovery’ was that as the number of possible combinations of what exists is finite, yet time is infinite; there has already been and will be again an endless recurrence of the present state of affairs, and of every other state possible. As he writes in Zarathustra: You do not know my abysmal thought – that thought which you could not endure. Look at this gateway. – Two paths come together here and no one has ever reached their end. This long path behind us goes on for an eternity. And that long path ahead of us – that is another eternity. – On the gateway is written its name: ‘Moment’. – Must not all things that can run have already run along this path? Must not all things that can happen have already happened, been done, run past? And if all things have been here before; what do you think of this moment? – Must not this gateway, too, have been here, before? And are not all things bound inextricably together in such a way that this moment draws after it all future things? Therefore, draws itself too?

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It is not my business to repeat here all that Nietzsche says about that ‘discovery.’ It can be found in Zarathustra and in his notebooks, which have been published posthumously in English under the title The Will to Power.71 Nor is it my task to write here of the objections which have been made against ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical’ – that is, to discuss the varied thoughts of those who claim that it is not a discovery. However, I can say that in the endurance of that ‘discovery’ Nietzsche found the possibility of overcoming the spirit of revenge. In that thoughtful enduring was the movement towards the realization of amor fati. According to Nietzsche, when men know themselves beyond good and evil, the strong are moved to the violence of an undirected willing of novelty. But from his ‘discovery’ Nietzsche’s nihilism becomes therapeutic, so that he can begin to will novelty in joy. In the recognition of the dominance of time in which no past is past and no future has not yet been and yet in which there is openness to the immediate future – the conception of time as history reaches its height and yet is not hypostasized into a comforting horizon.

CHAPTER 5: TIME AS MASTERY I have brushed against the writings of Nietzsche because he has thought the conception of time as history more comprehensively than any other thinker. He lays bare the fate of technical man, not as an object held in front of us, but as that in which our very selves are involved in the proofs of the science which lays it bare. In thinking the modern project, he did not turn away from it. His critical wit about modern society might lead one to believe that he condemned its

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assumptions. Rather he expressed the contradictions and difficulties in the thought and life of Western civilization, not for the sake of turning men away from that enterprise, but so that they could overcome its difficulties and fulfil its potential heights. In his work, the themes that must be thought in thinking time as history are raised to a beautiful explicitness: the mastery of human and non-human nature in experimental science and technique, the primacy of the will, man as the creator of his own values, the finality of becoming, the assertion that potentiality is higher than actuality, that motion is nobler than rest, that dynamism rather than peace is the height. The simpler things that Nietzsche says (for example, that men must now live without the comfort of horizons) seem so obvious to most people today that they are hardly worth emphasizing. Everybody uses the word ‘values’ to describe our making of the world: capitalists and socialists, atheists and avowed believers, scientists and politicians. The word comes to us so platitudinously that we take it to belong to the way things are. It is forgotten that before Nietzsche and his immediate predecessors, men did not think about their actions in that language. They did not think they made the world valuable, but that they participated in its goodness. What is comic about the present use of ‘values,’ and the distinction of them from ‘facts,’ is not that it is employed by modern men who know what is entailed in so doing; but that it is used also by ‘religious’ believers who are unaware that in its employment they are contradicting the very possibility of the reverence they believe they are espousing in its use.72 The reading of Nietzsche would make that clear to them. Indeed even some of the deeper aspects of Nietzsche’s thought increasingly become explicit in our world. If one listens carefully to the revolt of the noblest young against bourgeois America, one hears deeper notes in it than were ever sounded by Marx, and those are above all the notes of Nietzsche. To repeat: the thought of great thinkers is not a matter for the chit-chat of television and cocktail parties; nor for providing jobs for academics in the culture industry. In it the fate of our whole living is expressed. In this sense, the thought of Nietzsche is a fate for modern men. In partaking in it, we can come to make judgments about the modern project – that enormous enterprise which came out of western Europe in the last centuries and has now become worldwide. Nevertheless, as implied in the previous pages, the conception of

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time as history is not one in which I think life can be lived properly. It is not a conception we are fitted for. Therefore I turn away from Nietzsche and in so turning express my suspicion of the assumptions of the modern project. Yet this immediately produces a difficulty. Before speaking against Nietzsche, one must affirm the language one shares with him, even as one negates his use of it. To illustrate: Nietzsche clearly uses the same language as the tradition in its eternal truth, when he says that the height for human beings is amor fati. Yet the love of fate which he would call redemption is not in any sense a call to the passivity that some moderns falsely identify with words such as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny.’ In him the love of fate is at one with his call to dynamic willing. The love of fate is the guarantee that dynamic willing shall be carried on by lovers of the earth, and not by those twisted by hatred and hysteria against existing (however buried that hysteria may be in the recesses of our instincts). Some Marxists have taken his love of fate as if it were a call to passivity as the height, and as if, therefore, he were an essentially nonpolitical writer. They have denied that love of fate (love of the injustices and alienations and exploitations of time) can be good. Is it not just a sufficiently deep and sustained hatred of these iniquities that brings men to fight and to overcome them? But Nietzsche’s love of fate is not passive, but a call to dynamic political doing. He states explicitly that any philosophy must finally be judged in the light of its political recommendations. What he is saying beyond many Marxists is that the building of the potential height in modern society can only be achieved by those who have overcome revenge, so that what they accomplish comes forth from a positive love of the earth, and not simply from hatred of what presently is. Dynamic willing that has not overcome revenge will always have the marks of hysteria and hatred within it. It can only produce the technical frenzy of the nihilists or the shallow goals of the last men. It cannot come to terms with the questions: ‘what for, whither and what then?’ However, against the complacency of any easy amor fati, Nietzsche makes clear that it must take into itself all the pain and anguish and ghastliness that has ever been, and also the loathing of that ghastliness and pain. Hatred against existence is, it would seem, limitless, and the more we are aware of the nervous systems of others, the more that hatred and hysteria must be actual or repressed for us. Only those of us who are not much open to others can readily claim that we think existing to be as we wanted it. Amor fati is then a height for men,

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not in the sense that it is easily achieved or perhaps ever achieved by any human being. The redemption that Nietzsche holds forth is not cheaply bought. Yet having said this, I must state my simple incomprehension. How is it possible to assert the love of fate as the height and, at the same time, the finality of becoming? I do not understand how anybody could love fate, unless within the details of our fates there could appear, however rarely, intimations that they are illumined; intimations that is, of perfection (call it if you will God) in which our desires for good find their rest and their fulfilment. I do not say anything about the relation of that perfection to the necessities of existing, except that there must be some relation; nor do I state how or when the light of that perfection could break into the ambiguities and afflictions of any particular person. I simply state the argument for perfection (sometimes called the ontological argument): namely that human beings are not beyond good and evil, and that the desire for good is a broken hope without perfection, because only the desire to become perfect does in fact make us less imperfect. This means that the absurdities of time – its joys as well as its diremptions – are to be taken not simply as history, but as enfolded in an unchanging meaning, which is untouched by potentiality or change. So when Nietzsche affirms that amor fati comes forth from the contemplation of the eternity (not timelessness, but endless time) of the creating and destroying powers of man and the rest of nature, I do not understand how that could be a light which would free us from the spirit of revenge. It seems to me a vision that would drive men mad – not in the sense of a divine madness, but a madness destructive of good. [That we must speak of two accounts of reason, the ancient and the modern, can be seen in the fact that for the ancients thought was at its height, not in action, but in what they called a passion. Whatever the differences in what came to us from Jerusalem and from Athens, on this central point there was a commonness. The height for man was a passion. In modern language we may weakly describe this by saying that thought was finally a receptivity. We can see that this is not true of modern thought because its very form is the making of hypotheses and the testing by experiment, something intimately connected with the acts of our wills, the controlling of the world, the making of history. Indeed, the enormous difficulty of thinking outside the modern account of thought is seen in my using the very word ‘passion.’ Words

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that once summoned up receptivity have disappeared or disintegrated into triviality. If I were to use the noblest Greek word for this receptivity, pathos, and say, as has been said, that philosophy arises from the pathos of astonishment, the suffering of astonishment, the word would bear no relation to our present use of it.] The preceding statements are not here proved or even argued. Indeed it is questionable how much it would be possible to argue them in the modern world. For all those statements are made from out of an ancient way of thinking. And to repeat: the core of the intellectual history of the last centuries has been the criticism of that ancient account of thought. As that criticism has publicly succeeded, what comes to us from that ancient thought is generally received as unintelligible and simply arbitrary. All of us are increasingly enclosed by the modern account. For example, central to my affirmations in the previous paragraph are the propositions: the core of our lives is the desire for perfection, and only that desire can make us less imperfect. Yet clearly that account of ‘morality’ (to use a modern word) is quite different from what has been affirmed about morality in the last centuries. The attempt to argue for my propositions would require a very close historical analysis of how the use of such words as ‘desire’ and ‘reason’ has changed over the last centuries. It would require, for example, what the ancients meant by ‘passion.’ Whatever the differences between what has come to us from Plato and from Christianity, on this central point there is commonness. The height for man could only come forth out of a ‘passion.’ Yet in using such a word, the enormous difficulty of thinking outside the modern account can be seen. When we use the word ‘pathetic’ we may be thinking of a defeated character in a movie [like Ratso in Midnight Cowboy],73 or the performance of the quarterback for the Hamilton Tiger Cats football team74 this season. [As for the word suffering, that means simply pain, which sensible men have always wished to avoid.] The word ‘passion’ has come to be limited for us to little more than an emotion of driving force, particularly intense sexual excitement. [The experiences of receptivity having dropped from our vocabulary, we think of art and thought and morality quite differently. We talk of what the artist does as creation, not as imitation, a begetting of the beautiful.] To say that philosophy arises from the suffering of astonishment would bear no relation to our present understanding of thought, because the archetype of thought is now that science which

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frames instrumental hypotheses and tests them in experiment, a kind of willing. How can we think of‘morality’ as a desiring attention to perfection, when for the last centuries the greatest moral philosophers have written of it as self-legislation, the willing of our own values? Therefore my affirmations in the previous paragraph use language in a way that can hardly be appropriated. [As an example of the poverty of modern language, let me say how partial it is to speak of Tolstoy as creating War and Peace, or Mozart his piano concertos. The disappearance of the words of receptivity, the words of passion, from the modern account of thought, shows what a wide separation there is between the ancient and the modern. It clarifies what it means to say that modern thinking is always a kind of willing. Because we are always surrounded in every conscious minute of our lives by the modern conception of thought, we cannot take what is given to us from the past as intelligible. If we take it at all, we take it more and more as sheerly arbitrary. Therefore fewer and fewer people can appropriate it.] Indeed, beyond this, there is a further turn of the screw for anybody who would assert that amor fati is the height, yet cannot understand how that height could be achievable outside the vision of our fate as enfolded in a timeless eternity. The destruction of the idea of such an eternity has been at the centre of the modern project in the very scientific and technical mastery of chance. As a great contemporary, Leo Strauss, has written in What Is Political Philosophy?: ‘Oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become the master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.’75 And the turn of the screw is that to love fate must obviously include loving the fate that makes us part of the modern project; it must include loving that which has made us oblivious of eternity – that eternity without which I cannot understand how it would be possible to love fate. To put the matter simply: any appeal to the past must not be made outside a full recognition of the present. Any use of the past which insulates us from living now is cowardly, trivializing, and at worst despairing. Antiquarianism can be used like most other drugs as mind contracting. If we live in the present we must know that we live in a civilization, the fate of which is to conceive time as history. Therefore as living now, the task of thought among those held by something which

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cannot allow them to make the complete ‘yes’ to time as history, is not to inoculate themselves against their present, but first to enter what is thought in that present. What has happened in the West since 1945 concerning the thought of Marx is an example of inoculation. Our chief rival empire has been ruled by men who used Marx’s doctrine as their official language, while we used an earlier form of modernity, the liberalism of capitalist democracy. The thought of Marx, therefore, appeared as a threatening and subverting disease. The intellectual industry in our multiversities produced a spate of refutations of Marx. Most of these, however, were written with the purpose of inoculating others against any contagion, rather than with thinking the thoughts that Marx had thought. These books have not prevented the reviving influence of Marx’s thought among many of the brightest young; any more than the official Marxism of the East has been able to stop the influence of existentialism among its young elites. [Why? Marx’s thought abides because he thought some of what is happening in the modern world. His writings could therefore help other men to think about what was happening. What we were doing in Vietnam seemed to be explained by Marxism.] Men may have to attempt this inoculation if they are concerned with the stability of a particular society, but it is well to know when one is doing it that it is not concerned directly with philosophy but with public stability. And you will not even be successful at inoculating those most important to inoculate, if you pretend you understand Marx when you do not. To apply the comparison: when I state that I do not understand how Nietzsche could assert amor fati to be the height, while at the same time asserting the finality of becoming, my purpose is not to inoculate against Nietzsche. [As I have said, Nietzsche thinks what it is to be a modern man more comprehensively, more deeply, than any other thinker, including Marx, including Freud, including the existentialists, including the positivists. Therefore the first task of somebody trying to think time as history is not to inoculate, but to think his thoughts.] The task of inoculation is best left to those who write textbooks. [Yet if I am right that in the thought of Nietzsche we drink most deeply of the modern experiment, we cannot finally avoid making some judgments of that experiment, and so of that thought. We might start from our current experience, and argue that since Nietzsche’s day more evidence is in. As one looks at the vulgar and chaotic results of our modern dynamism, it

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is possible to say that the modern project has led men away from excellence, and that this debasement is not accidental, but comes forth from the very assumptions of that project. Then one would say that these debasements are not to be overcome by a further extension of the modern assumptions, as Nietzsche would have it. If one denies the possibility of any returning to the past, and yet does not believe in the assumptions of the modern experiment, what then is the task of thought?] What then could be the position of those who cannot live through time as if it were simply history, who cannot believe that love of fate could be achieved together with the assertion of the finality of becoming, and yet must live in the dynamism of our present society? In that position there is a call to remembering and to loving and to thinking. What I mean by remembering was expressed for me by a friend who died recently. He knew that he was dying, not in the sense that we all know that this is going to happen sometime. He knew it because a short term had been put upon his life at an early age, long before what he was fitted for could be accomplished. Knowing that he lived in the close presence of his own death, he once said shortly: ‘I do not accept Nietzsche.’76 Clearly such a remark was not intended to express a realized refutation of Nietzsche. Neither he nor I saw ourselves capable of that magisterial task. He had collected (at a time when such collecting must have been pressed upon him) what had been given him about the unfathomable goodness of the whole, from his good fortune in having partaken in a tradition of reverence. In the inadequate modern equivalent for reverence and tradition, his remark might be called ‘religious.’ In an age when the primacy of the will, even in thinking, destroys the varied forms of reverence, they must come to us, when and if they come, from out of tradition. ‘Tradition’ means literally a handing over; or, as it once meant, a surrender. The man who was dying was in his remark surrendering to me his recollection of what had been surrendered to him, from the fortune that had been his, in having lived within a remembered reverence – in his case, Christianity. [He surrendered to me the affirmation that the whole is in some unfathomable sense good. The absurdities of time, indeed also its joys as well as its diremptions, are to be taken not simply as history but as enfolded in a meaning (call it if you will a transcendence) that is beyond potentiality, that is beyond change. I do not imply that what is handed over in tradition must be in conflict with reason or experience. The belief that reason and tradition

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are at logger-heads is only a product of modern thought. It comes from the doctrine of progress, that the race as a whole is becoming increasingly open to reason by shuffling off its irrational past. The traditions that came to us from Athens and Jerusalem claim to be, in the main, reasonable, but what was handed over in them is now accepted, if accepted at all, less and less as thought-filled because it is so assailed by the modern account of reason, and all of us are increasingly enclosed by that modern account. The core of the history of the last three hundred years has been the criticism of the ancient account of thought and the coming to be of the new account. As that criticism has publicly succeeded, what comes to us from the past is received as unintelligible, as simply arbitrary.] In the presence of death, he [my friend] had collected out of that remembrance an assertion for me which stated how he transcended conceiving time as history. By distinguishing remembering from thinking, I do not imply that this collecting was unthoughtful, but that what this man had there collected could not have been entirely specified in propositions. For nearly everyone (except perhaps for the occasional great thinkers) there is no possibility of entirely escaping that which is given in the public realm, and this increasingly works against the discovery of any reverence. Therefore those of us who at certain times look to grasp something beyond history must search for it as the remembering of a negated tradition and not as a direct thinking of our present. Perhaps reverence belongs to man qua man and is indeed the matrix of human nobility. But those several conceptions, being denied in our present public thought, can themselves only be asserted after they have been sought for through the remembrance of the thought of those who once thought them. Remembering must obviously be a disciplined activity in a civilization where the institutions which should foster it do not. One form of it may be scholarship, the study of what the past has given us. But scholarship of itself need not be remembering. The scholar may so hold out from himself what is given from the past (that is, so objectify it) that he does not in fact remember it. There are scholars, for example, who have learnt much of the detailed historical and literary background of the Bible, and yet who remember less of what was essentially given in those books than Jews or Christians untutored in such scholarship. This is no argument against the necessity of disciplined scholarship. It is simply the statement that modern scholarship has to hold itself above

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the great gulf of progressive assumptions, if it is to be more than antiquarian technique and become remembering. It may also be said that ‘remembering’ is a misleading word, because we should turn not only to our own origins in Athens and Jerusalem, but to those of the great civilizations of the East. Many young North Americans are learning from Asia, because of the barrenness of their own traditions. Indeed many have only been able to look at their own past because they have first been grasped by something in Asia. It is hardly necessary for a member of a department of religion, such as myself, to assert that it can be a great good for Western people in their time of darkness to contemplate the sources of thought and life as they have been in the East. But that meeting will be only a kind of esoteric game, if it is undertaken to escape the deepest roots of Western fate. We can only come to any real encounter with Asia, if we come in some high recognition of what we inevitably are. I use the word ‘remembering’ because, wherever else we turn, we cannot turn away from our own fate, which came from our original openings to comedy and tragedy, to thought and charity, to anxiety and shame. As remembering can only be carried on by means of what is handed over to us, and as what is handed over is a confusion of truth and falsity, remembering is clearly not self-sufficient. Any tradition, even if it be the vehicle by which perfection itself is brought to us, leaves us with the task of appropriating from it, by means of loving and thinking, that which it has carried to us. Individuals, even with the help of their presently faltering institutions, can grasp no more than very small segments of what is there. Nor (to repeat) should any dim apprehensions of what was meant by perfection before the age of progress be used simply as means to negate what may have been given us of truth and goodness in this age. The present darkness is a real darkness, in the sense that the enormous corpus of logistic and science of the last centuries is uncoordinate as to any possible relation it may have to those images of perfection which are given us in the Bible and in philosophy. We must not forget that new potentialities of reasoning and making happen have been actualized (and not simply contemplated as mistrusted potentialities, as for example in Plato) and therefore must be thought as having been actualized, in relation to what is remembered. The conception of time as history is not to be discarded as if it had never been. It may be that at any time or place, human beings can be opened to

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the whole in their loving and thinking, even as its complete intelligibility eludes them. If this be true of any time or place, then one is not, after all, trapped in historicism. But now the way to intelligibility is guarded by a more than usual number of ambiguities. Our present is like being lost in the wilderness, when every pine and rock and bay appears to us as both known and unknown, and therefore as uncertain pointers on the way back to human habitation. The sun is hidden by the clouds and the usefulness of our ancient compasses has been put in question. Even what is beautiful – which for most men has been the pulley to lift them out of despair – has been made equivocal for us both in detail and definition. [The very bringing into being of our civilization has put in question the older means of finding one’s way, without discovering new means for doing so. Nevertheless it is also clear that this very position of ambiguity in our civilization presents enormous hope for thought, if not for life. The questions whether the modern project opens out new heights for man, or whether at its heart it was a false turning for man, are so clearly before us. Questions that were settled, and therefore closed over the last centuries, are now open to us once again. Perhaps the essential question about the modern project is not that of Nietzsche – Who deserve to be the masters of the earth? – but the very question of mastery itself.] Nevertheless, those who cannot live as if time were history are called, beyond remembering, to desiring and thinking. But this is to say very little. For myself, as probably for most others, remembering only occasionally can pass over into thinking and loving what is good. It is for the great thinkers and the saints to do more.

Appendix: Dialogue on the Death of God with Dr Charles Malik The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation presented a special sequel to the 1969 Massey Lectures, Time as History : a dialogue between George Grant and Dr Charles Malik (see note 4 below).

malik: Your interest in Nietzsche gives me great pleasure because I have studied Nietzsche in Germany under Heidegger and read the interpretations of Nietzsche by Jaspers and the great thinkers of this

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age.77 In addition, of course, I have imbibed Nietzsche at a very early age and was deeply influenced by him. I think you are quite right in saying Nietzsche plays a very important role in the modern firmament of thought. And you put it here that these basic undertones in the modern revolt of youth go back to Nietzsche perhaps more than to any other thinker. Concerning your interpretation of Nietzsche I may not completely agree with you because I believe Nietzsche was a tremendous rebel against the falsities of Western existence. He could only have been that, as you intimated at one point in your lecture, because of the deep Christian background from which he spoke. I therefore would look upon Nietzsche more as a perverted and inverted Christian prophet (and for that reason a very important man) than a secular philosopher. Let me very briefly, just to touch off some kind of conversation between us two, remark on one or two things in your presentation. First of all, the most important observation I want to make is that you’re dealing all the time with forms and concepts and generalities. Now that is part of the malaise of the world against which you seem to be reacting. Therefore I should have wished just from the point of view of refreshment and antithesis, I should have wished you to be far more personal, far less general, far less speaking in terms of tendencies, and concepts, and generalities, and ideas, and far more in terms of individual persons. You named a few people, but you soon dissolved them into their ideas rather than retained their distinctive individuality. This is idealism. And the problem with this world is this excessive idealism. You talk about the youth – the youth are idealists. They are idealists in the bad sense of the term. I wish they were idealists in the good sense of the term. Now you seem, in treating them on their own level, to be confirming them in their false idealism. You had better talk to them in terms of their own persons. And the best way of doing it is to put before them some great personal heroes of history – and I shall come to that in a moment on another level. Then you say about the past coming to us as unintelligible, as simply arbitrary. I wish you had dwelt more on this because it is this very denial of the reality of the past and the livingness of the past that is part of the great tragedy of Western existence today. It is this disruption of the past, this discontinuity from the past, this breaking away from the past. [Perhaps] here in the new world you feel that is part of your life

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and you want to forget about Europe and about the old countries and about the old traditions and start out in a new world all of your own. Well, [it could be that] this modern temper has been produced exactly by your own feelings, by your own experiments. You cannot break away from the old world – either intellectually, or spiritually, or certainly these days as you know, politically. The unintelligibility of the past is your own fault, much more than the fault of what you here are criticizing. It is the re-establishment of the unity of the tradition and the making it appear as the only intelligible thing, and as the ground of intelligibility far more than what you call reason. I know you are reacting against it, but I wish you had brought that out much more clearly to show that the ground of reason is a tradition and not only abstract immediate rational considerations. Then you speak about Christianity, and this is probably the most important thing I want to say. I don’t know what you mean by Christianity – I only know what is meant by the church. You don’t mention the word church (I don’t think you do – you may have mentioned it here and there). But that, you see, is in keeping with your generalizing approach, [that] Christianity is a system. Why don’t you talk about Jesus of Nazareth? Your young men these days don’t want to talk about persons; they want to talk about ideas, systems, Christianity, Hinduism, Western civilization. Well with all respect to Western civilization, Western civilization would have been nothing and probably would be nothing without Jesus Christ. I want to be as specific as that. You can’t make a dent on these young men these days if you fall into these generalities. I wish you had spoken about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, who lived and died and said what He said and thought about Himself in the way He thought about Himself and was understood as He was by the church. You know what is going to happen? Western civilization may go to pieces and probably deserves it. But the church isn’t going to go to pieces. I can make a prediction now, which you should have made in your lecture – that whatever happens to you in Canada and the United States the Christian church will survive you all. And the Christian church is based upon Jesus of Nazareth, not upon ideas of Christianity. I have no idea what the word Christianity means. The word Christianity varies from one culture to another. But I have every idea what Jesus of Nazareth means. And finally time as history reminds me, of course, of the second part

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of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit.78 The tradition, the living tradition, that is the effect that is most needed here – to make people feel that you are dealing with four thousand years of continuous tradition, so that the present [grows] out of the past, and the past out of its own past. Unity of time – unity of history. I wish you had done more. gpg: I just want to say that North America is the only society that has no history before the age of progress. I remember, when I went to Europe (Europe in my case being England and France), feeling this sense of continuity. I would have enormous sympathy for your sense of particularity, but I would say [that] in the kind of life we have now in North America the tradition is just broken. I think it is incomparably easier for somebody who lives in a great society like the Near East has been, where it is all around you, to understand what it means to live in 4000 years, but in North America Henry Ford had it when he said, ‘History is bunk.’79 And our ancestors were the poor of Western Europe who wanted to get out, and who wanted to turn their back on the tradition and, when they crossed on the ships, they broke that tradition. And I think this is the tragedy of North America. I would certainly believe that the church, as you say, will exist when civilizations have gone. But I think it is a terrible, immediate tragedy that North American progressivism first destroyed Protestantism, then it destroyed Judaism, and now I think indubitably it is destroying Catholicism in North America. I don’t mean everywhere. But I think it is destroying it in North America. Now I think it is incredibly difficult for young North Americans. They grow up in a world where everything is new every moment. The tradition is orientation to the future – there is no sense of the past. The yearning of North Americans for the past and to turn away from the denial of tradition is everywhere. But how you re-establish a tradition in a society like this when it is totally broken I do not know. malik: Well, may I make one or two observations on that very point. You see, the tradition is wholly broken but it is obvious that for the thinking mind, for responsible individuals like yourself and others, for leaders, for statesmen, for thinkers, it’s obvious that it cannot be broken. This very language that you are using you did not invent here. You brought it over from abroad and language is the greatest vehicle of culture and tradition. Shakespeare is studied here as much as in England

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and Shakespeare is the vehicle of the continuity of your tradition. How can you say you started from scratch? You never started from scratch here. Take the Bible. The Bible takes you back four thousand years. The Bible is at the very core and the heart of your civilization here. This is [the] Christmas season – I was seeing your magnificent decorations and illuminations last night here in Toronto. Well, you all are thinking in terms of Bethlehem. I think you will be thinking it for several weeks. That’s a very clear thought. With the English language, with the English Bible, with English law, how can you say that you are starting from scratch here? You go back for hundreds of years to your roots in Europe. If you do not acknowledge them, well that is your fault. The objective state of affairs is that you are an offshoot, a continuation, of the European, Western, Mediterranean tradition and you’ve got to recognize that and re-establish it consciously in your own mind. And your kids who go about as if the world begins with them, they should be told the truth – that the world began before them. gpg: We came here just at the time when Europe itself, partly in the name of something new, was attacking its tradition. For instance, the science of Galileo and the moral science of Machiavelli were attacking Aristotle, were attacking the Mediterranean, the Greek side. At the same time there was an enormous attack by these same people against the Biblical side. You can’t read people like Locke and Rousseau without seeing that there is a fantastic attack on Christianity going on. Now, what I’m saying is just when the Europeans were secularizing, were kicking out the heart of what I called Athens and Jerusalem, North Americans came across to this continent. And it seems to me the power of what I call modern liberalism – that is, the belief that you are going to build a universal and homogeneous state that eliminates all particularity – has, except for the province of Quebec, built a universal and homogeneous state in North America in which the past is broken and young people therefore find it an enormous jump to come to that past. malik: Well, it may be that three hundred years, or two hundred years, are about as long a time as is necessary for that experiment to go on. It may be, in fact I think it is, time now for the Western hemisphere to recognize its historical traditional roots. Also it may very well be that the Lockean and Machiavellian criticisms of the great tradition, which

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occurred outside the unity of Western civilization were [resented] at the time by the church. I go back to the church (I am Greek Orthodox myself), and therefore, I am not much impressed by any reference to Locke, or Machiavelli, or Rousseau. It is these very people who set themselves outside the unity and continuity of the tradition who have brought about the present chaos in which you in the Western world, and all of us (because we all depend on you these days), are living. So what is needed is something of heroic, gigantic magnitude so far as the reformation and reconstruction – I think you used the word reconstitution somewhere – of life and thought and history is concerned. And this task should be done precisely by the new world. So I believe that the real cure is a return. You are quite right in saying there is no return in the identical sense of return. But there is certainly a reconstitution of the unity of the spirit of the tradition. Certainly there is that and that ought to be done. This seems to me to be the most important task facing Western thinkers today. gpg: Dr Malik, you’re a man who came out of the very centre where the original western tradition came from. What was the meaning for you in the church? How did you find the movement of that into the world of politics? You went for your country to the United Nations, you served your country, you have been very much at the centre of the public world, the Western world since 1945. What was the relation of the depth of your philosophic and religious life to that life in the public world? malik: Well, I am very grateful to you for that question. I’ve found absolutely no discontinuity, no contradiction, between being a religious person, which I always was, and serving as best I could under the general world diplomatic conditions under which I worked. If we are thrown in this life we struggle in it to the best of our ability. I don’t believe at any time I subordinated the ultimate truths of the spirit or used them for any political purpose whatsoever. They stood uppermost in my mind and I could apply them here and there as occasion offered to the best of my ability. gpg: Can I ask you about this, Dr Malik? You did this as a citizen of a civilized country, a non-aggressive country, a fairly small country. Do you think you could have done it in the service of one of the powerful,

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aggressive, violent empires? On the one hand, obviously you couldn’t have done it as a Christian for the Soviet Union because its empire is ruled by a very hostile view of the spirit. If I may talk about my own life and a lot of the young people’s lives, the Vietnam War was, for us, an enormous break in the sense that one felt that one could no longer do it for North America, that North America was proving itself a more violent empire [and] was entering the lists of competition. Would it have been possible for you to do this if you had been a citizen of a great and powerful empire in the modern world? malik: Well, it’s obvious that it is impossible to answer that question because I don’t know whether I would have been able to do it, nor do I know whether were I a citizen for such an empire, as you put it, that that empire would have asked me to do for it what I was asked to do for that little country to which you referred. But I don’t share this sense of guilt on your part and on the part of many of the young these days about Vietnam and about many other things in the Western world to the extent to which some of you seem to have it. I respect your feeling, but I think there is a great deal of unnaturalness and sentimentality about it. There is a great deal of going over to the other side. There are two ways of reacting, my friend. There are always two ways of doing anything – the right way and the wrong way. And to react in the manner in which your youth now and many of your older folks are reacting by doubting your deepest values is the wrong way. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war, as I said, if young people or thinkers in the Western world react against the thing, there are two ways of reacting against it: one way would be to go all the way over to the position of your opponents, and that is what is happening in the minds of many soft-headed people. They’re all Ho Chi-Minhists;80 they’re all Marxists now just to spite their own people, their own government, their own tradition. That seems to me to be the wrong reaction to a situation even if the reaction were justified in the first place. The best way to react to a situation is to go back to your deepest values, [values] that are different from what your youthful rebels are stating these days. I find them becoming denatured reacting against the war in Vietnam and going all the way over to the values of the people whom you are fighting in Vietnam and that I don’t think is healthy at all. I think it’s superficial, sentimental, childish, and you’ll get over it.

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gpg: I think it’s not only wrong, but extremely foolish to think that you can ever have, or should want, or it would do any good to have, a leftwing revolution on this continent. But on the other hand, to a lot of the young people, it would be the established powers of North America who have denied the tradition. Compared to what General Motors, General Electric, and people like that are doing in denaturing people, the reaction of the left is very minor on this continent. malik: Now let me make one point clear. I do not intend to make any statement about the Vietnam War. There are two ways of reacting against anything. One way is to say that that thing is bad because it is founded on bad principles. But then whoever says that must tell us what his principles are and the principles of your youthful reactors today are not better at all than the principles against which they are reacting. That is what I am saying. gpg: But is it not true that the principles against which they are reacting are not [those of] the great Western tradition? They are [reacting against] slick modern twentieth-century liberalism. Surely these protestors at their best may be reacting against an extraordinary emptiness of tradition in North American society. I mean, after all, one of the men being tried in Chicago, Mr Hoffman, defined American liberalism as, ‘God is dead and we did it for the kids.’81 It’s against this emptiness of tradition that a lot of the youngsters, I think, are reacting. MALIK: I wish they were reacting in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, which is the last thing they would think of. They would much rather think of Uncle Ho.82 They have not gone deep into their own tradition. If they reacted in the name of the tradition I would not only respect them, I would go along with them. But if they react in terms of an imported, improvised, synthetic view of life that is so vague, and so unreal, and so alien, I don’t respect them.

gpg: What do you think will happen to the church when it ceases to hold the established powers of the Western world? malik: Well, it will be tried: it will be persecuted; it will go back to the catacombs; it will suffer; it will be crucified, but it will rise on the third

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day as it always did in the past. The church will never disappear; all else will disappear. How many cultures and civilizations have disappeared? I see no reason why Canadian civilization is not going to disappear. It could disappear – it is not much greater than all those cultures that disappeared, but I see every reason why the church is going to survive Canadian civilization. And Canadian civilization can survive only to the extent that it can hitch its wagon to the star of the church. This I see very clearly, so clearly that it is more true to me than any mathematical proposition. gpg: But out of that Western tradition, centred on Western Christianity, there has come forth this dynamic civilization that has at least at a public level or an official level dug the grave of that from which it came forth. malik: Yes, well, it will never dig the grave of the church, of course; it digs its own grave, and, well, all right. Part of the freedom of man is that he can commit suicide. If Western civilization wants to commit suicide, well that’s part of its freedom. God will never take that away from it. God is incapable of taking our freedom away from us. Incapable. We are responsible. I am responsible, you are responsible, Western civilization is responsible, responsible before God and I hope there will come out of the present deep questioning that you represent and that many others represent and that I deeply feel as I travel about in North America and in Europe, I hope there will come out a tremendous new revival of the spirit in the Western world. We shall always have dying, stupid civilizations. We shall always have kingdoms of men that will disintegrate. And we shall always have the church of Christ that will never disappear until He comes again.

Notes 1 The Massey Lectures were named in honour of Vincent Massey, governorgeneral of Canada (1952–9), who was married to Grant’s aunt, Alice Parkin. See Collected Works, Vol. 1, xxiv. Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth (1914–81), British economist, was an internationally known writer on the problems of developing countries. Her Massey Lectures were pub-

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lished under the title The Rich Nations and the Poor Nations (Toronto: CBC 1961). For J.K. Galbraith, Northrop Frye, F.H. Underhill, C.B. Macpherson, and Paul Goodman, see Collected Works, Vol. 3. George Grant, Time as History (Toronto: CBC Learning Systems 1971). George Grant, Time as History, ed. and intro. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). Charles Habib Malik (1906–87), Lebanese diplomat and professor of theology at the American University of Beirut, was a key figure, with Eleanor Roosevelt, in preparing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations (1948), and later served as president of the thirteenth Session of the UN General Assembly. See Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House 2001). William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 280–90. William Allen Grant (1950– ), moved to Halifax after graduating from the University of Toronto, where he works as a member of the staff of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission. Collected Works, Vol. 3, 271–367. Ibid., 579. See Grant’s essay ‘Why Read Rousseau?’ in this volume (497–510) for a further discussion of the origin and implications of the idea of humans as solely historical beings. One of Grant’s closest colleagues in the McMaster department of religion was Professor John Arapura, a scholar of Indian philosophy. Grant wife, Sheila Veronica Allen, was born in England and brought up as a Roman Catholic, attending the Convent of the Holy Child, a Roman Catholic private boarding school in St Leonard’s-on-Sea, before going up to St Anne’s College, Oxford in 1939. She left the Roman Catholic Church during the Second World War before she and Grant met. Grant was nominally brought up in the United Church of Canada. He and Sheila Grant were both confirmed as Anglicans in 1956. Grant criticized the liberalism of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and other FrenchCanadian intellectuals in Lament for a Nation. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 337–9. Grant is using the word historicism as meaning ‘the tendency to regard historical development as the most basic aspect of human existence’ (OED). He discusses the question of historicism in Technology and Empire. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 502. Trans. ‘Frankish tongue’ (Italian); ‘Any mixed jargon used for intercourse between people speaking different languages’ (OED).

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15 Grant is referring here to Lyndon Baines Johnson, thirty-sixth president of the United States (1963–9), who used this argument to defend his escalation of the Vietnam War. 16 Historiology: ‘The knowledge or study of history’ (OED). 17 Grant may have had in mind the publication of the papers of James Boswell begun by Frederick A. Pottle, professor of English at Yale. See Frederick A. Pottle, ed., Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–3 (1950) and many subsequent volumes published by the Yale University Press, edited by Pottle and others. 18 Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), British mathematician and philosopher, achieved world renown through writing (with Bertrand Russell) Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–13), an attempt to demonstrate that mathematics can be reduced to logic. Whitehead turned to metaphysics in his later work, particularly after becoming professor of philosophy at Harvard University (1924–37). In Process and Reality (1929), he argues that God’s nature is not immutable but changes from ‘primordial nature’ to ‘consequent nature.’ See A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, ed. David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 31–2 and passim. 19 David Easton (1917– ) Canadian political scientist, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine (1982– ), taught for many years at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including The Political System (1955), A Framework for Political Analysis (1965), A Systems Analysis of Political Life (1965), and The Analysis of Political Structure (1990). These attempted to demonstrate how objectivity could be secured in the study of politics by limiting investigation to strictly ‘empirical’ questions about systems of behaviour, an approach to the political realm that has nothing in common with Grant’s focus upon classical political philosophy. 20 Richard Milhous Nixon (1913–2000), became thirty-seventh president of the United States in 1969, defeating Vice-president Hubert Horatio Humphrey (1911–78) in the 1968 presidential election eight years after having been defeated by John F. Kennedy (1917–63), thirty-fifth president, in the presidential election of 1960. Humphrey’s selection as the Democratic candidate followed the assassination in June 1968 of his principal rival, Kennedy’s brother, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy (1925–68). 21 In his special address to Congress, 25 May 1961, John F. Kennedy pledged that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade, a feat accomplished on 20 July 1969. 22 Robert Burns (1759–86), ‘To a Mouse, on turning up her nest with the plough,’ verse 7, lines 3–4: ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley ...’

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23 Mao Zedong (1893–1976), principal architect of the Communist Chinese revolution, was chairman of the Communist Party and president of the People’s Republic of China 1949–76. 24 In the 1971 text Grant here referred the reader to Technology and Empire (Toronto: Anansi 1969) with no page reference. See his comments on North American society in ‘In Defence of North America,’ Collected Works, Vol. 3, 480–503. 25 Grant refers to the ‘the regime of the Kennedys’ because Robert Francis Kennedy served in the administration of his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy as attorney-general and was his principal adviser. General Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), soldier and statesman, was founder and first president (1958–69) of the fifth French republic. The failure of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to conciliate de Gaulle led to the withdrawal of France from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1966. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 362n104. 26 Macbeth, I, vii, 60–1. 27 Donald Alexander Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal (1820– 1914), Canadian fur trader and railway financier, joined the Hudson’s Bay Company as an apprentice clerk (1868). He became chief executive officer (1885). His financial support was essential to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway and he was invited to drive the last spike when the railway was completed (1885). The quotation on Marx’s tomb is from ‘The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach’ (1845). 28 See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press 1955) for an explication of this position. 29 Henry James, ‘Preface,’ The Aspern Papers (New York: Scribner’s, 1908; rpt. New York: Kelley, 1971), v. Grant’s quotation is slightly inaccurate. The text reads: ‘too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange, or even simply too beautiful, for any sense of intellectual relation.’ 30 Trans. ‘end’ (Gk.). Hence ‘eschatology,’ ‘the part of theology concerned with death and final destiny’ (OED). 31 Trans. ‘sources’ (Gk.). 32 Trans. ‘in full awareness of the cause’ (Fr.). 33 Max Weber (1864–1920), German sociologist and economist, was one the key figures in the development of the methodology of the social sciences. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 18n4. 34 Grant is referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, written between 1883 and 1885. See F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Viking 1954; rpt. New York: Modern Library 1995); hereafter Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann. See also Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1961); hereafter Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale.

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Time as History Grant provides no indication as to the translations he used in writing Time as History. These can, however, be deduced to a great extent from the quotations. He used that by Walter Kaufmann for Beyond Good and Evil (New York: Vintage 1966), and Francis Golffing’s for The Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday 1956). He consulted both Kaufmann and Hollingdale for Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A typescript in the Grant collection in the possession of Sheila Grant indicates that he also consulted the original German for Thus Spoke Zarathustra and possibly for other works as well. Grant did not always follow the various translations he consulted word for word, occasionally modifying them. We have attempted in each note to establish the origin both of the quotation and of the translation. Grant owned a copy of the translation by A. Tille (1896) as revised by M.M. Bozman and entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra (London: Dent 1933). For another example of this tradition, see Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Russell & Russell 1964; originally published c. 1910). F. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner (1888), in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library 1992), 611–48. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (1901), trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage 1968), 333, book 3, #618 (1885): ‘[T]he dynamic interpretation of the world, with its denial of “empty space” and its little clumps of atoms, will shortly come to dominate physicists.’ In 1869 Nietzsche became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. See Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1982), 101–2. Nietzsche became insane in January 1889, but lived on until 1900, unaware that he had become world-famous. See Nietzsche: A Critical Life, 334–50. F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878), trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986), 13, ‘Of First and Last Things,’ #2. Hollingdale’s translation reads: ‘Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all philosophers.’ Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking 1954), 51, a book owned by Grant, translates the quotation: ‘Lack of a historical sense is the original error of all philosophers ...’ The note by Nietzsche can be found in Samtliche Werke: Kritische Ausgabe vol. 11, 34 [73], April–June 1885. F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books 1956), 212. Grant used the Golffing translation of The Genealogy of Morals for this and subsequent quotations. Hereafter Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing. See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, 12, prologue. Abbie (Abbott) Hoffman (1936–89), American political activist, was one of

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the founders of the Youth International Party or ‘yippies,’ who developed original and outrageous tactics to express their opposition both to the Vietnam War and to capitalism, such as throwing dollar bills from the visitors’ gallery onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (1967), creating a near riot as traders scrambled to pick them up. He was one of the ‘Chicago Seven,’ who were tried (1969–70) for conspiring to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. See Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (1968), Steal This Book (1971), and other publications. Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing, 212, second essay, ‘“Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and Related Matters,’ XIII. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 4, #4, ‘The Drunken Song.’ A typescript of this passage in German exists in the Grant papers, and Grant made his own translation. Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, 320, ‘[T]he hour when I shiver and freeze, which asks and asks and asks, “Who has heart enough for it? Who shall be the lord of the earth?”’ Hollingdale translates the passage: ‘the hour which chills and freezes me, which asks and asks and asks: “Who has heart enough for it?”’ (328). F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1966), 3, preface: ‘Christianity is Platonism for the “people.”’ Hereafter Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, 297, part 4, ‘Of the Higher Man.’ Grant has somewhat altered and abridged Hollingdale’s translation, which reads: ‘“You Higher Men” – thus the mob blink – “there are no Higher Men, we are all equal, man is but man, before God – we are all equal!” Before God! But now this God has died.’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, 46, prologue. Although using this translation, Grant substitutes the more widely accepted usage ‘last man’ for Hollingdale’s idiosyncratic ‘ultimate man.’ Ibid., 46. Timothy Leary (1920–96), American psychologist, experimented with the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid or LSD after 1960 and was cast by the press as the ‘LSD guru.’ He was arrested in 1966 on drug charges, escaped in 1970, and was sent back to prison (1973–6). Ibid., 47. Grant has slightly altered the translation. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, part 4, ‘Among the Daughters of the Desert,’ 315: ‘Deserts grow: woe to him who harbours deserts!’ Heidegger refers to the passage in What Is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 29–30: ‘The wasteland grows: woe to him who hides wastelands within.’ Grant is here summarizing the argument of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872). Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), German film-maker, made Triumph des Willens

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Time as History (Triumph of the Will), a documentary of the 1934 National Socialist party rally at Nuremberg, which glorified both Hitler and the Nazi party using ground-breaking cinematic techniques. Her later film Olympia (1938) was a documentary of the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, and was first shown to celebrate Hitler’s forty-ninth birthday. Trans. ‘resentment’ (Fr.). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Kaufmann, 99, part 2, ‘Of the Tarantulas.’ Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–78), communications theorist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, achieved world-wide celebrity and many intellectual disciples through his argument that society was influenced by the media and not by the information and ideas they conveyed, in books such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 89, Epigrams and Interludes, #144. Kaufmann translates the aphorism: ‘... for man is, I may say so, “the sterile animal.”’ Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, 59, part 1, ‘Of the Afterworldsmen’: ‘Believe me my brothers! It was the body that despaired of the body – that touched the ultimate walls with the fingers of its deluded spirit.’ Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), Austrian physician and writer, founder of psycho-analysis, argued that the mind was divided into three parts, of which the conscious mind was the ‘I’ which he referred to by the Latin word ‘ego,’ while the unconscious mind was an ‘it’ or (Latin) ‘id.’ See Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), trans. Joan Riviere, rev. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton 1962), and many other works. For Nietzsche’s use of ‘it’ see Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 24–7, part 1, ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers,’ #17–19. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 15, part 1, ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers,’ #8, ‘The ass arrived, beautiful and most brave’ (Latin). Nietzsche develops this argument in The Genealogy of Morals, first essay, ‘“Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad,”’ and second essay, ‘“Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and Related Matters.’ See also Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, 75, part 3, ‘What Is Religious,’ #62, where Nietzsche refers to the ‘bungled and botched.’ See Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing, Third Essay, ‘What Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?’ See also Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Kaufmann, part 3, ‘What Is Religious.’ Grant is referring to Plato’s account of time and eternity in the Timaeus. See F.M. Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato translated with a running commentary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1937), 97: ‘Time, the moving image of eternity’ (Timaeus, 37c–38c).

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65 See Nietzsche’s treatment of Socrates in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday 1956), 86–96, sections XIV and XV. 66 Genealogy of Morals, trans. Golffing, 225, second essay, XXII. 67 Unidentified quotation by Simone Weil. Cf. Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 1, 255: ‘What saint shall transfigure the misery of the slaves who died on the cross in Rome and the Roman provinces throughout the course of so many centuries?’ 68 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 2, ‘Of Redemption,’ translated by Grant. Hollingdale’s translation, which is much closer than Kaufmann’s to Grant’s reading, is as follows: ‘To redeem the past and transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone do I call redemption.’ See Hollingdale, 161. 69 Trans. ‘the love of fate’ (Latin). See F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House 1974), 223, book 4, #276. 70 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale, 178–9. Grant has followed Hollingdale’s translation with a few minor changes. 71 See n. 37. 72 See Grant’s discussion of the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value in Technology and Empire, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 652–70. 73 In the film Midnight Cowboy, the role of ‘Ratso’ Rizzo, a disabled social outcast, was played by Dustin Hoffman. The film, directed by John Schlesinger, won an Academy Award for best picture of 1969. 74 The Hamilton Tiger-Cats are a team in the (professional) Canadian Football League. 75 Leo Strauss, ‘What Is Political Philosophy?’ in What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Glencoe: Free Press 1959; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1988), 55. 76 We decided not to identify the source of this quotation. 77 Karl Theodore Jaspers (1883–1969), German psychiatrist and philosopher, wrote many works including his three-volume Philosophy (1932), which shows the influence of Nietzsche. Jaspers argues that, confronted by the limits of empirical or scientific method, individuals can either despair or make a ‘leap of faith’ in which they confront their unlimited freedom (‘Existenz’) and come to experience authentic existence. This ‘leap of faith’ Jaspers calls ‘Transcendence.’ 78 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (London: SCM Press 1962). 79 ‘History is more or less bunk. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history

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that we make today.’ Henry Ford (1863–1947), American automobile industrialist, in an interview with Charles N. Wheeler, Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1916. 80 Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969), Vietnamese communist revolutionary, became president of the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam (1955) and was the key figure in the subsequent war to create a united Vietnam, which ended with American withdrawal (1975) and the establishment of communist rule throughout the country. 81 See note 44 above. 82 Ho Chi Minh’s supporters in Vietnam referred to him as ‘Uncle Ho.’

Revolution and Tradition

The paper was first delivered at the 1970 Gerstein Lectures at York University, 18 March 1970. It was published as ‘Tradition and Revolution’ in volume 50, nos. 591–2 of the Canadian Forum (April/May 1970) and the slightly revised version presented here appeared under the title of ‘Revolution and Tradition’ in Lionel Rubinoff, ed., Tradition and Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan 1971), 79–95.

To start from the obvious: the word ‘tradition,’ in its present common sense usage, is much nearer to its origins, as an English word out of Latin, than is the word ‘revolution.’ It still means what is handed over, what is passed across. Indeed in earlier usage, the sense of ‘handed over’ could be used to express betrayal. A country was handed over to its enemies; it was betrayed; it was said to be traditioned. But now we use it simply in the sense of what is handed over or across the generations: what one generation knows about nature, or how best to achieve justice, or how to make music, how to worship God, how to conduct relations between men and women, etc. etc. Tradition is what we pass over from one generation to the next - in every way, both for good and for ill. Indeed in our modern world, where all language comes to us from out of a particular account of subjectivity-objectivity, what we include in the word tradition is generally taken to be only certain conscious or semi-conscious patterns of human behaviour. But that is obviously an inadequate way of speaking when one considers the seed and the semen (objectify them as chromosomes, if you will). Till very recently (let us put the date at Nietzsche) most people believed, following the teaching of both Jerusalem and Athens, that the greatest gift passed across from one generation to the next was life itself.1

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When a friend from the rabbinate said to me the other day that in any sane society Timothy Leary would be in jail,2 he did not mean it because he wanted to limit pleasure, but because of the imprudence with which Leary had advocated acids without knowing of their effects on the core of the tradition – the seed and the semen. I must say in parenthesis that I replied by asking how one could single out Leary in an era such as ours. In an age when the most respected scientists have for generations shown absurd imprudence about putting nature to the question (and now demand more science to cure the ills their very science has brought about), when our own respected leaders have been willing to use defoliant and atomic weapons (on Asians of course), when oil and pulp and mining businessmen have been free to rape the earth and wipe out many species, it may seem rather minor to turn on the advocates of LSD. The imprudence of putting nature to the question (and Bacon, who invented that phrase, knew what it meant to put anything, or anybody, to the question) has been at the heart of modern moral and natural science - that is, at the heart of the tradition – so where is one to start putting the blame for what has happened within this tradition? To return from the parenthesis: I mean by tradition all that people pass across from one generation to the next.3 In the word revolution there is a greater ambiguity between its origins in our language and our present common sense usage. In a political context we now mean by that word: change in the government of a given community so that the regime of that community is altered. It is generally implied that such a change takes place through sudden and violent events. I emphasize regime to make clear that I do not mean a simple change in government. Much as I rejoiced at the defeat of the Democratic Party in the United States in 1968, it did not bring the country a new regime, it brought a new administration.4 The word ‘regime’ means that character which penetrates all aspects of a community, governmental and otherwise. Indeed one only needs the word in one’s vocabulary when one sees the dangers in the modern distinction in language between state and society. Our common sense definition of revolution includes then a change in the regime of the community, as there was in France after 1789, in Russia after 1917 and in a subtler way in England after 1688. Within progressivist dogma, the modern usage of the word generally implies that this change of regime is to a new and higher form of community.

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As we look at the origin of the word we see that the Europeans put it together from the Latin volvere (to turn, to whirl) and the prefix re (which English has made use of in so many words) with the sense of ‘again,’ and often of ‘again and again and again.’ Thus the first use of revolution describes the motion of the planets in a circular course. The earth revolves on its axis and revolves around the sun, again and again and again. The word brings to us not what is involved in our present use of it, the occurrence of something new and something different, but rather the continual occurrence of the same.5 In both cases revolution means motion and not rest. (In using the word ‘rest’ it must be noticed that restare or rest is not quite the same as the Greek word stasis). But the original ‘revolution’ calls forth a cyclical motion, concerned with the same and not the different. On the surface it is easy to see how the change in usage came about. The word was to do with motion and change, and in our era motion and change have come to be thought of as e-volving, a whirling out of something, to something new. So the word revolution came to be used simply to describe an instance of great change or alteration, in affairs or in some particular thing. It is the idea of evolution which makes revolution a word with connotations of the new. Of course this only explains the change on the surface because we are left with the question why men came to believe the doctrine that motion is higher than rest, or that good is e-volving. But such a question is not for this paper. Even as we use the word in its modern sense it is well to re-member, to re-collect, that the very letters of the word remain. It still has the prefix ‘re’ - again and again and again. Indeed the lasting ambiguity in the word (its refusal to give up its prefix) can be seen when we speak of the central revolution of our era - the technological revolution. When the managerial ideologues of that revolution speak in praise of it, they say that it is bringing something higher, something new for man. Indeed in one sense they are right. Over the last three hundred years the thrust to mastery has been in the hope of bringing forth motion towards the different, to whirl out higher potentialities of man which were not yet actualized. But in any technique, whether ancient or modern (and I am not concerned in this paper to describe the difference which has come into modern technique through its complex interaction with modern science), there is always to some degree the element of routine, a regular and unvarying procedure. The wheel revolves; the computers come

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out with their necessary answers; the bureaucracies organize so that events happen predictably. It is clear to anybody who lives in advanced technical society that initiation of the new and the different is now subordinated to the regular occurrence of the unvarying same. The overcoming of chance by technique may have made us oblivious to the true eternity; but it more and more opens to us an immanent sempiternity of the same.a It is indeed the awareness of this fact that technique, which was to make the new, has also imposed on man the iron maiden of routine that now turns so many of the spontaneous to the pursuit of ‘fine’ art and sexuality. (I include the adjective ‘fine’ before art because the original word ‘art’ comes from the word techne.) They hope to find there an authentic novelty, but may rather find that the pursuit of novelty in art and sexuality may turn even them into routines. These words about technique are simply to illustrate that in the word revolution, the prefix ‘re’ remains although we would like to lose it. I speak of revolution and tradition to illustrate how dark is the question of good in this era. At any time and place the finally important question for any human being is what is good. I hope it is clear that I do not wish to illustrate that darkness for the sake of confusing any mind, or dimming any heart. But if when one is in the dark one pretends or believes it is not dark (for example, if one is drunk and it is easy to be drunk in an age dominated by ideology), one blunders around falling on one’s face, and even knocking others about. If one is to be a man, the first thing to know of our era is that it is an age of clouded night. When I speak of night, I speak only of the Western world, and particularly of existence in North America, where we are at the apogee of technical civilization and at its imperial centre. Perhaps there are corners of the earth where Esso has not yet reached, and where it would be possible to live by the light of tradition. There are parts of the world (for example, Brazil) where the situation may be sufficiently clear that to live by the light of revolution seems the only decent course. But for those of us who do not choose to emigrate from North America, the first fact seems to me the enormous darkness which surrounds the question: how is

a I use the word ‘technical’ rather than ‘technological’ because the latter is a confusing neologism.

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good to be brought down into our existences, in so far as those existences attempt to be more than private? In asserting the language of good at the core of thought, I am clearly not speaking entirely from within the modern darkness. It is the claim of the modern, at its height and in its most wonderful self-consciousness, to say that the language of good has been destroyed, and that therefore men at their greatest must live beyond the limits of good and evil. Nietzsche’s immense clarity stemmed from his recognition at a very early age that the very form of ‘reason’ which had made technical civilization had at the same time destroyed any reason for thinking that we can know the proper purposes (the proper goods) of human life. The chief commentary on his own thought is therefore called Beyond Good and Evil. Redemption for him is the will’s acceptance of all existence as not including such limits. Of course we try to remain modern while denying the love of that modernity by substituting the language of value for that of good: but when we try to think the language of value (and not simply use it in our liberal sermons) we must then think Nietzsche’s thought that the very use of the language of values only arises when we have put ourselves beyond good and evil. In using the language of good, therefore, I am refusing the modern at its height. Moreover, I am asserting that the core of what has been handed over to us from Athens and from Jerusalem is this language of good and evil, and that it is a language which belongs to man as man. To put the matter as crudely as I can, if there were to be twenty-one thousand civilizations or an infinite number after ours, in which all memories of Athens and Jerusalem had been destroyed, it still would be the condition of men to live within and not beyond good and evil. In this sense, the modern, which at its height denies this in thought, cannot in its existence be a total darkness. But it is nevertheless a darkness in the following sense. First in the obvious sense that when the deepest thinkers of an epoch claim to be beyond good and evil, the epoch is in darkness. Also, those of us who assert the language of good and evil can only assert it in a very formal sense, and cannot think its content sufficiently specifiable in any way. The identification of the good with the ancestral or the past is impossible: the identification of the good with the future or the new or the potential is impossible. To live beyond good and evil in total darkness is madness (in the sense that madness and not ignorance is for Plato the opposite of wisdom).6 It is still dark-

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ness when one denies the denial of good and evil, and yet cannot even begin to think them, let alone give specification of them in the world. In our era it is not necessary to emphasize the limitations of being oriented to the traditional. The story has been told over and over again of the impossibility of tradition in an age when the dominant tradition is orientation to the future. How can there be tradition when the tradition is the tradition of the new? How can there be reverence when the dominant religion is the religion of progress? What has been handed down to us has not been the ancestral or the customary; what has been handed down is that we must change. One of the ridiculous sides of my own life is that when I have proved (at least to my own satisfaction) the impossibility of conservatism as a theoretical stance in the technological society, I find myself being described as a conservative. To those who would think conservatism possible, I would recommend what Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of the Idols under the heading ‘Whispered to the conservatives.’7 Of course, there are those who accept the orientation to the future in the modern, but who want to stop the movement of modernity at points which touch their special interests. This is generally what is today called conservatism. This is particularly true in the English-speaking world at the moment. The first public movement to modernity was in the English-speaking world. We see it beautifully enucleated in the thought of Hobbes and Locke. This movement brought into being the worlds of liberal constitutionalism and capitalism. To do so it had to demolish the world of the throne and the altar which had been the public expression that the presuppositions of Athens and Jerusalem had generally taken in their strange blending in Western Europe. This English-speaking modernity began that public enucleation of the modern with its exaltation of motion over rest, of potentiality over actuality, of interest as detached from virtue. Yet today we see the inheritors of that tradition (particularly in the United States) asking to be called conservatives and claiming that the movement of the modern must be stabilized at the point which suits their interests. They overcame the throne and the altar above all by demanding freedom for the passion of greed; yet now they demand restraint on the freedom of other passions, for the sake of the protection or the comfortable exercise of their property. In rather the same way, a later and more explicit wave of the modern, which reaches its clearest expression in Marxism, insists that in its doctrine is found the

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culmination of the modern and strenuously opposes any extension of the modern outside itself. But both the capitalists and the Marxists will be taught that the modern which they helped originate is a will to will which their doctrines cannot bridle. Conservatism in this era only means then the desire of those who have mounted modernity to stop the triumphant steed when their particular interests are no longer served. The darkness of this era and the confusion in such words as revolution and tradition is illustrated by the trial we have been witnessing in Chicago. As a follower of Plato and therefore as a person who believes in law and stability, I yet find myself deeply committed to the side of the defendants in that trial, people who have supposedly offended against law and order. This is not primarily because of my deep ancestral antipathy to the United States and the consequent temptation to rejoice in each of its new difficulties. To repeat, a man who tries to be a philosopher must try to be oriented to the good, and not to the ancestral, and therefore try to put aside pleasure in the difficulties of his enemies. Why then do I find the good more visible in Abbie Hoffman than in Julius Hoffman? Why, when one cannot but feel some sympathy with Agnew’s attacks on the networks, must one scorn what he is saying in his praise of the outcome of this trial?8 Of course, the true assessment of the Vietnam war is primary. Can one have any doubt that those young people were right, and indeed noble, to go to Chicago and to protest what was set up to take place there in the Democratic Convention: the justification of the policies of the dominant political instrument of American imperialism, and the justification of the most degraded activities of that imperialism in Vietnam? Yet beyond that, when a government, symbolized here by its Attorney General, makes the error of bringing them into court, have these people the right to make a mockery of the court, even when they feel justified in that action because the judge of the court negates the deepest principle of the English-speaking administration of law, namely that the function of judge and prosecutor must be kept separate?9 I am not unmindful in raising this question that the man whose name calls forth philosophy made sparkling ridicule of the court which condemned him to death, and that the being whose name is the only one higher in my judgment than Socrates also showed contempt of his court. Nevertheless the question is, were they acting well when they ridiculed their court? This is a question I have singularly failed to come to terms with

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properly in my own life: what loyalty and respect one owes to a regime with which one does not feel any sympathy and how far one should act against the regime when its purposes pass beyond those with which one lacks sympathy and begin to appear monstrous. As in all practical matters, this judgment is one requiring not only true principles, but also phronesis (that wonderful Greek word which loses much in its Latinized translation, prudence). I must leave the question, for having failed to come to grips with it in my own life, I do not want to seem to be offering advice to men such as Dellinger, Hoffman, and Davis who are facing it in the very cannon’s mouth. To quibble with courageous men in the moment of their pain is not pretty. A sane man does not enjoy being in jail. One part of the issue brings back the word revolution. One prudential consideration is that the extreme speech and action of a rebel minority cannot but increase in a society such as ours the willingness of the majority to forgo their traditions of constitutional government, and to increase the tyrannous in the procedures of law. It is cheap to say that the principles of constitutional government have been only a facade in the English-speaking world.b Even in terms of the tradition of American constitutionality, it is clear that one of the results of a rebellious minority there is to weaken the majority’s tenuous hold on constitutionality.10 Like all noble things, constitutionality is a frail plant compared to the determination to protect one’s property. If one is a Marxist one has an answer to this. Constitutionality is a bourgeois facade. Bring the issue into the open and from the resulting polarization after much struggle and violence will come the inevitably higher form in which men will have transcended the private ownership of the means of production and therefore will be more rational about property. It might be thought that this argument has led to such disastrous political actions in the events of the modern era that it would be forgotten. However, it goes on being espoused even in the Marxism which has revived in North America in the 1960s. There is much that could be said against it at many levels. But it rests on one thought above all. There is a net inevb (A parenthesis about Canada: these days when it is popular, from the prime minister down, to downgrade all British traditions in our society, it is well to remember that we in Canada had a deeper and richer hold on the basic roots of constitutionality, in our system of parliament and custom, than anything to be found in the American traditions which we more and more imitate.)

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itability towards human betterment in the nature of things. To quote the Duke of Wellington: if you can believe that, you can believe anything.11 Nets of inevitability that are based on an identification of the order of necessity and the order of good are an opiate. Marx should have read Plato’s Timaeus with the same attention he paid Democritus.12 To put the matter simply: each of the modern revolutions was indeed related to advances in technique. Every advance in technique was claimed to overcome further the chains of nature which had not allowed men to be free. Revolutions (albeit undesirable) were necessary because there were lags between advances in technique and the realized state of freedom. Violence therefore became necessary, so that potential freedom could be brought to a higher stage of actuality. This still remains the doctrine of many people who believe revolution possible in our present context. But those who have thought this do not seem to have grasped the nature of modern technique. The desire to overcome chance, from which modern technique came forth and which is realized in any technique, involves always the reduction of the different to the same. It requires revolution in its primary sense of again and again and again. And that recurrence is expressed as a mechanical recurrence. It is no longer that strange recurrence which is as much part of nature as the new and the evolutionary. Putting nature to the question has required the imposition of mechanical recurrence over all aspects of nature and human nature. Therefore the connection that Marx saw between increase in freedom and advance in technology must appear with a more Janus face than it did to him. The freedom sought in technique becomes as it is realized a freedom lived within a tighter and tighter order of mechanical recurrence. The freedom we seek requires an enormous apparatus of conditioned human and non-human beings. This is why I say the darkness about good action in this era includes a darkness about revolution. What would revolution be in this society? The very freedom desired requires the enormous apparatus which must be maintained and which inhibits violence against it. Revolution for the breakdown of the system is possible, but it would include the very breakdown of that control over nature which is considered by the populace the basis of that freedom which is sought in the revolution.13 In an immediate sense, the great reaction against protest now obviously present in the United States comes from the masses of personnel

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who keep the mechanical apparatus together, and know that what gives life meaning for them comes forth from at least a minimally efficient operation of the system, below which they cannot afford to see it drop. Those who propose revolt against the system are in the bind that they must appeal to a majority who are aware that the technical apparatus is the horizon within which what they want is supplied, and who therefore will not opt for actions which fundamentally threaten that apparatus. In this sense, revolution is as little a light in our society as tradition. Eighty-five years ago Nietzsche wrote in the last section of Zarathustra: ‘The hour in which I tremble and in which I freeze; the hour which demands and demands and goes on always demanding: “Who has enough courage for that, who deserve to be the masters of the earth?”’14 He wrote those words in the light of his recognition that both tradition and revolution had ceased to illuminate. To repeat, he recognized the difficulty of the question because he knew that the ambiguity of living at the apogee of technical civilization is that the very form of reason, which had made possible the building of that civilization, has destroyed what had been handed across to us about the proper purposes of human life. The moment of technical mastery comes out of the same science which gives us the historical sense. This leads us to recognize as illusion the old belief that our purposes are ingrained in the nature of things. Mastery comes at the same time as the recognition that there is nothing in the nature of things to sustain our wills. When most men find this is so, a darkness falls upon their wills. To be masters of the earth presents men with a more enormous need for wisdom than ever before. But what is wisdom when we have overcome the idea of eternity? Who deserve to be the masters of the earth? In the light of the last eighty-five years, however, Nietzsche’s question may not be the essential one. The essential question may not be: who deserve to be the masters of the earth; but rather, is it good that the race ever came to consider that mastery was its chief function? I do not know which of these two questions is essential, because I do not know whether the second could be properly posed as an authentic question. How could one have clarity about this? The very fabric of modern civilization has been based on affirmations which exclude that question as a question, and therefore even to raise it is to think about how those

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affirmations were incarnated in what was said about reason, love, suffering, knowledge, etc. What is an object, what a subject? How can we, who are Western men, think about Western thought outside the thinking which makes us Western men? The very circle is the root cause of why we must say that in this era there is no alternative to being in darkness. But it is that being in darkness from which comes forth the determination to be outside that circle. It may be said that the practical problems which assail us make it simply self-indulgence to pursue such theories. At a time when the very existence of the race is at stake we should put our hands to the plough of practical duties about pollution and war, cities and universities, and so on. It might be said that Nietzsche’s question ‘who deserve to be the masters of the earth?’ is allowable in the face of the impossibility of tradition and revolution, because it has a direct practical reference to the immediate before us. We must be clear enough about what kind of men will be good enough to lead us in our prodigious political tasks, and how such men (or more than men) can be brought to be. But to raise the question of whether men are intended to be masters of the earth is self-indulgence, because it can have no practical public reference in any conceivable future. Indeed, I would never want to say anything to turn anybody away from what appears to them a practical immediacy, and such immediacies as war and pollution, Canadian independence, and cities are obvious.15 But let me also end with a small plea that if the ambiguity of the darkness manifests itself as the question – are men intended to be masters of the earth? – then the only way is to turn from the practical and try to open oneself to the full consciousness of what it would be to think that question, even in the darkness of its impossibility. Because if one says there is one light which is always a light at all times and places, namely that man qua man can only come to a fuller light in so far as he does not think he can find himself beyond good and evil, one has in saying that placed oneself outside modern thought in its highest self-consciousness. To place oneself outside modern thinking is clearly to give one’s self the task of thinking the whole (including the modern), in a way which overcomes what I have called the final outcome of madness in the modern. If we are to say that men live within good and evil, we must give ourselves to thinking it, because it has not yet been thought in the light of modern criticism.

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However ridiculous or redundant it may seem amid the busy pandemonium of our multiversities, the question of good appears as inescapable because of the darkness which has fallen on both tradition and revolution. Notes 1 Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ in Canadian Forum edition, 88, where Grant continues: ‘In that sense, what is more traditioned than life?’ 2 For Timothy Leary, see 75n50. 3 Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution’: ‘... including the chromosomes themselves.’ 4 Grant is referring to the defeat of Hubert Humphrey by Richard Nixon in 1968. After this sentence in ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ Grant continues: ‘By “regime” I mean what the greatest political educator of the western world meant by politeia. (You will remember that that is the Greek title of his most famous book which we translate under the poorer words The Republic).’ 5 Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution’ ‘... perhaps indeed, in Nietzsche’s intoxicating words, the eternal recurrence of the same.’ 6 See Alcibiades 138d. 7 F. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking 1954), 547, ‘What the Germans Lack’ #43, ‘Whispered to the conservatives’: ‘[T]oday too there are still parties whose dream it is that all things might walk backwards like crabs. But no one is free to be a crab. Nothing avails: one must go forward – step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern “progress”)... One can check this development and thus dam up degeneration, gather it and make it more vehement and sudden: one can do no more.’ 8 The trial of the ‘Chicago Seven’(actually eight), 1969–70. The defendants, charged with organizing the demonstrations against the Vietnam War at the Chicago Democratic Party Convention in 1968 were Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Tom Hayden, John Froines, Lee Weiner, and Bobby Seale. The judge was Julius Hoffman. For Abbie Hoffman, see above 74n44. Spiro Theodore Agnew, (1918–96), lawyer and politician, was vice-president of the United States (1969–73). He was forced to resign as a result of his prosecution for accepting bribes and falsifying tax returns. Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant continues: ‘I will put it in terms of my own groping reactions.’ 9 Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant adds in parenthesis: ‘This principle has often been negated – see the story of Lord Braxfield.’ Robert McQueen, Lord Braxfield (1722–99), Scottish jurist, known as ‘the hanging

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judge,’ was notorious for his harshness and for such sayings as ‘Hang a thief when he’s young and he’ll no steal when he’s ould.’ Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution’: ‘... in terms of the thinner tradition of American constitutionality.’ Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant adds: ‘Biblical religion may hold the core of truth (in a certain sense I think it does) but secularized, but perhaps better, immanentized Biblical religion is nonsense.’ Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant adds the following: ‘This indeed takes us back to the darkness of human action in this era - the darkness which becomes a present when we sense that revolution is no longer a source of light. Let me put it this way. It was the great achievement of Marx to draw into public light for the modern era the connection between political revolutions and technology. But because he lived within the orbit of immanentized Biblical religion, and therefore confused the order of necessity with the order of good (as seen in his use of the word history), he did not understand sufficiently the origins (I would prefer to say the arché) of technology. (In parenthesis let me state here once again the obvious, I do not mean by technique something external to man, e.g. a set of machines, however complex a set. It is not my purpose in this paper to say what technique is {a long and very complex undertaking}. I simply want to make the negative statement that I do not mean by it something external to us. To speak of it as something external is to speak within the terms of the particular account of the subject-object distinction from which the triumph of modern technique comes forth. But to enucleate it in terms of that way of thought {which could be quickly described as the post-Cartesian} is to describe it in a way that puts it completely in charge of man. Indeed our popular ideologues of technique have said just this for many generations. Techniques are neutral. Men can use them for good or ill. It is up to us to use them for good. Thus in making technique external to us, they seem to be putting the weight nobly on human freedom and responsibility. In fact this kind of speech has led in exactly the opposite direction. By defining technique from within the very assumptions that have brought it to be, they have guaranteed that its rights should stand sovereign above any other. I cannot say any more of this difficult question here. My purpose in this parenthesis is simply to say that when I speak of Marx’s view of technology, I am not objectifying technique. Let us leave that to the political and scientific managers and ideologues whose business is to preach sermons flattering the spirit of the age.)’ Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant adds: ‘Of course, revolutions might be able under certain circumstances to make a shambles of the system, but they cannot build a substantially different one, because any system

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which incarnates the degree of organization sought by the revolutionaries would require the same enormous apparatus of mechanical repetition. In this sense a revolution in our society can only be a revolution of nihilism.’ 14 See Time as History 41 above. 15 Cf. ‘Tradition and Revolution,’ where Grant adds: ‘One of the chief obscurities in the tradition is, for me, the relation of charity (giving oneself away) to contemplation.’

Jelte Kuipers – An Appreciation

This tribute appeared in The Silhouette (McMaster University), 2 October 1970, 6, and was reprinted in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 453–6.

Individual life is always the loser in nature. Because human beings are self-conscious, the apprehension of this is a startling presence, even when the death concerned has been long expected and comes at the end of a natural span. But when death comes for the young – a child before his parents, a young man who has only begun the course – death appears unnatural and therefore more terrible. When the young death is that of a noble person (in origin the words noble and beautiful mean the same) then there is a deep revolt against the fact of death – against its waste and seeming uselessness. Jelte Kuipers, who was a graduate student at McMaster, was killed this August in a motor accident at the age of twenty-five. Love is the way we glimpse the actual and potential beauty in other people. It is therefore good at the time of revolt against the waste of his death, to remember what it was about him that made those who knew him, apprehend him as beautiful. At an early age Kuipers had come into a manhood which knew there were good and evil purposes in human life, and knew also that our present society (Canada in particular and the Western world in general) has for a long time been promoting amongst us those destructive purposes which frustrate the fullness of humanity. In the last decade it has not been difficult for young North Americans to face the negations of our society, in the war we have been waging, in the banality of the soci-

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ety we are building from the fruits of imperialism and now also in the destruction of the very nature of which we are a part. But many cannot pass to any vision of good underlying the destructive present. At a very early age Kuipers passed beyond this negative bind, so that he saw that any vision of the barrenness is only valuable when it is the occasion for searching through to the noble roots of human existing. Because he saw the emptiness of resting in negation even in a time of negation, one can say that he had come upon his manhood. Yet he had looked at the negation unflinchingly so that the positive he asserted was not simply a set of banal platitudes. He had watched his North American society as it pressed its patterns on individuals and institutions of which he was part. Knowing those patterns for what they were, he could resist their shaping of his own life and the lives of those who depended upon him. He had come to see the universities (including his own) as places where vast numbers of the young were kept off the labour market in kindergartens, and filled with trivia. Yet that vision did not turn him from hoping that the university might be the place where human beings would have time to think about the most important matters. In the last years he had turned from the immediate negations of our institutions to see the central issue of our society in the deep questioning of ecology. The greatest negation for him was the dynamism of our conquest of the planet – a conquest which has become so total that it threatens the very possibility of life for man in that environment of which he is a part. The recognition of this negation above all brought him from youth to an early maturity. He was brought to maturity in the face of that terrible vision because he was able not to be swallowed up in that world of shifting personal relations and of drugs (that is, the world of ‘democratic’ existentialism) which has become the private retreat for so many of his generation. Nor on the other side was he content with the reaction of Marxism because he saw clearly that much of the protest advocated was just part of the system, and that the call to revolution in Marxism had at its heart a further extension of the modernity which has brought us where we are. Because he had watched carefully, he had seen early that the crisis of Western society was too total to be met by any ‘ad hoc’ solutions. It needed a repossession of the roots of heaven through a deep understanding of nature and what is beyond nature. It was because of this that he turned to the understanding and production of Greek drama, and to

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the study of what was great in the ancient near east. It was because of this that he could at the end of a short life become part of the Roman Catholic Church. ‘Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, etiam eis auferetur verbum hominis.’1 The desire to partake through thought in the roots of wisdom did not, however, turn him away from the practical world to a life of easy solitude. In his impatience with injustice and his involvement in the practical there could be seen his debt to the long line of Calvinist forebears in Holland. He knew clearly that the thought of those who have not the courage to deal with the world is bound to become sterile and even vacuous. He had learnt the lesson of the founder of philosophy (repeated by its practitioners from Socrates to Wittgenstein) that philosophy is not a value-free, analytical game, but a study which can only be grasped as its truths are lived out in the world. Just before his death, Kuipers had decided to put aside his studies in religion and to devote himself to working full-time with those groups of people in Canada who are determined to try to stop the pollution of nature. He would have brought to that activity all the sharp determined will which was part of his manhood. He had made that decision because he believed that he had no right to proceed with his own studies at a time when the very possibility of natural life was so obviously threatened. In the year before that decision, he had spent most of his time at the McMaster Board of Publications, drawing and writing and editing a series of papers to arouse people against pollution. His death came just as he was to embark (with all the assistance his wife would have given him) into the public world to help in the mobilization of this country against the enormous continental forces dedicated to the destruction of nature. He was not leaving the studies which fascinated him because of any optimism that he was taking on a winning cause. He was not touched by the modern blasphemy about being on the side of history (that is, the side of worldly success). But he knew that for many men at many times, it is necessary to keep certain flags flying even when it is likely that that flag will finally go down before the superior public forces of unreason. As those who knew him think now of his sudden accidental death, and contemplate what he might have done and been, a sense of unexplainable waste must be present. Why in the midst of so much folly and vacuity should a beautiful young man be taken away, as if it were by chance? Yet in that presence we must remember that we have also been

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told: ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them.’2

Notes 1 C.S. Lewis translated this statement as ‘They that have despised the Word of God, from them shall the word of man also be taken away.’ See Lewis, That Hideous Strength (London: John Lane 1945), 435. 2 Wisdom of Solomon 3:1: ‘The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.’

Address to the History Society, University of Toronto

Grant wrote short notes at the top of this handwritten manuscript indicating that he planned to apologize to his audience for writing out his talk and, second, that he would allude to his connection to ‘the early days of this club.’ He was probably referring to the heyday of the society, originally called the ‘Historical Club,’ when his father William Lawson Grant acted as host for the club at Upper Canada College. His father was a historian and a friend of George Wrong, who had founded the club in 1904.1 We were not able to establish an exact date for the address, but Sheila Grant believes it was delivered early in the 1970s.

I thought I would say a few remarks about the study of objectivity [to] those of you who are going into the practical life. My examples will be from history. Such examples come easily to my mind – because before I became a philosopher I studied history and still think very much as an historian. But what I am going to say applies equally to other studies. Let me say what should not need to be said in any university and does not, I think, need to be said in a subject with traditions such as history, that intellectual integrity is an essential virtue of the practice of such crafts as history. It is the particular virtue of our function and those who have lost it can’t practise the function. Clearly also, integrity implies objectivity. An historian ceases to be an historian if he tampers with the facts – an obvious platitude. This was brought home to me early from my father who was a professional historian. He had written a history of Canada used in the high schools of this province.2 This book was criticized by the Orange Order because it praised the Jesuits. The minister of education in the way of politicians sought a compromise – eliminate the page about the Jesuits and we will keep your book.

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No, said my father, history is history and is not to be changed. So he lost the money he needed. Let me say he was not a person in sympathy with the doctrines of the Jesuits. This platitude should go without saying – but the objectivity of the historian is corrupted these days in very many ways. Let me take as an example Mr Pickersgill’s volumes about Mackenzie King.3 There are some overt mis-statements of fact – but I certainly had the impression that things were not said that were known and should have been said – and this kind of thing is even more widespread in other subjects – particularly those of the social sciences. Of course we all are prone to err in that direction attaching ourselves to theories because they are ours. But of course there is the built-in remedy for each sin against the virtue of integrity in any decent university – namely that other historians force us to face our own objectivity. But it is rather like bringing Mr E.P. Taylor a Christmas turkey, to speak at the University of Toronto of objectivity.4 The great days of this university, in which the tradition of the university was formed, was the era before the first war. The scholarly liberalism of the 19th century certainly did not fail in objectivity. Therefore I want to pass beyond intellectual integrity to speak of its relation to other virtues. And when I say other virtues, I do not mean other virtues outside the academic sphere – such as the courage and prudence which are necessary virtues for the politician – but other virtues necessary to the pursuit of truth. Let me raise the question in a very practical way. (Most difficultly. It is always wise to raise questions that are most difficult.) You will see that it is raised in terms of my own position as a teacher – but you can apply it readily enough to the position of the student or the researcher. It is raised by asking the following question: ‘Is there any proposition which should not be questioned in the classroom?’ That is, is there any question in our studies that should not, at some stage of our careers, be an open question? Now obviously even to put this question is difficult in the face of our rightly cherished traditions of freedom, but the very principle of the free university is undermined if we answer this question in the affirmative. Hasn’t every obscurantist used the affirmative answer to this question as the way he prevented the search for and spread of truth. Let me take from my own case an obvious example of when the elimination of objective discussion would be scandalous. As well as being a

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philosopher I am a Christian believer. Therefore the dearest proposition – the one closest to me is the assertion of the divinity of Christ. But should this not be an open question? Of course, it should. I would not raise it in the philosophy classroom because it is only indirectly a philosophical question – but in any university it should be treated as an open question. Let me say in parenthesis to any of you who may be religious believers that there are always religious people who go around a university advising others never to think or study along any line which raises religious doubt. Such advice is base. It rests upon stupidity and obscurantism. Above all it is [?] for the believer because it is based on an implicit lack of faith. Let me take another example from a very different faith from my own – the humanist faith. Many of the humanists these days speak as if the survival of the race was an unqualified good. You will remember Russell’s remark that if the race was destroyed except for a brother and sister it would be a categorical obligation for them to mate incestuously.5 Now, I do not think that the proposition that the survival of the race is the highest good should be made a closed question – however dear such a proposition is to certain humanists in the way that the divinity of Christ is dear to me. Thus I clearly do not think that the dearness or closeness of a proposition to oneself or to others is the mark that it should not be open. Obviously people have considered dear to them propositions which are immense nonsense. We have to find out [a] more public principle than dearness by which to decide that there are closed questions if there are such. But I still have not answered the question – are there any propositions that a free university should consider closed? Let me take an extreme case. ‘It is permissible to torture children in order to increase one’s income.’ I preclude the ‘in order’ clause because it is a current argument in England whether if a man was walking around London with an H-bomb and we could only find him by torturing one of his children should we do so. The ‘in order’ clause means – should one torture children in one’s own interests. And if anybody should say that this is an unreal question because after all no sane Canadian would ever consider such a proposition, I would simply dissent. The history of the race is full of examples of people torturing children in their own interests. Many slum landlords are doing it today not very far from this

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room. A simple appeal to the decency of human beings will not get us out of this question. But should such a question be an open one in the classroom? Should I debate this proposition as if an affirmative answer was to be taken seriously? By seriously, I mean to emphasize that there are always students who raise the question as a joke. If I do treat it seriously as a open question to be discussed, I am implying that there is the possibility that it might be permissible to torture children in our own interests – and through the cracks left open by such possibilities, that the beast raises its head in civilized countries, [?] in universities, experiments in life, [on] conscious people against their will. If I will not treat it as an open question, let us be clear what I am doing. I am saying there is at least one question (and one is enough) on which I am not objective – in the scientific use of the term. This is the dilemma. And to apply it to the writing and study of history, if I say that the torture of children in one’s own interests is always wrong in the present and future, I surely must state it about the past. And in so closing this question about the past, present or future what is the result on the free university? I am putting something beyond academic inquiry. Of course many Canadian academics wave away such questions by saying that it isn’t in their field, so that they won’t speak either way. This solution has a certain immediate appeal because it seems grounded in humility and honesty. And this apparent humility and honesty is decorated by noble statements about pure scholarship. Those who make this appeal sometimes seem to me often more grounded in vanity and complacency than humility and honesty. Vanity because in saying we are not competent we may simply be trying to hide the fact that [we] have not thought of such questions and do not want to discuss questions when we are not in the driver’s seat of being expert scholars. Complacency, because we are content to settle into our own little field rather than look at existence in its fullness. On broader grounds this solution of some academics not to discuss such questions will not do because we are men as well as scholars and it is a dreadful thing to sacrifice one’s humanity to the nature of one's trade – whether that trade is being a scholar, a civil servant, or a plumber. Stock brokers tend to forget that money is not an end; scholars tend to forget that scholarship is not. Indeed let me say in parenthesis that the central talk of scholarship that we hear in Canadian universi-

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ties is just what makes us doubt the scholarship of the men who so talk. In hearing such talk we should remember that impotent men often talk of their sexual conquests. If one has the art of being a scholar one doesn’t have to talk about it, at least not to the extent it is now popular to do so in certain quarters. But there is a deeper reason why the solution of avoiding these important questions in the name of scholarship will not do. If the university is not concerned with them – what then? Do you remember the story of Sir James Frazer – the author of The Golden Bough? In the 1930s he was asked what he thought of the German persecution of the Jews and he answered that he was a pure scientist and not concerned with such matters.6 The tradition of scholarly objectivity in the German universities certainly had much to do with the fact that the young people of Germany sought the beliefs by which they should live outside the walls of the university. Here then I have reached the point which raises an apparent difficulty. The university should be concerned with more ultimate questions than those of scholarship and that there should be certain questions which are not open questions. But I must leave that question and return to give more justification of the position that there are these questions which are not open. Aristotle put the idea of the closed question very succinctly when he said that he addressed his ethical writings to decent men. What he meant by this was that the book did not only need a certain level of education to be understood but also the level of moral training successfully achieved by a Greek freeman. Plato takes exactly the same position in the Republic. If they have not the habits arrived at through such training, they will not understand philosophical teaching. That is, the virtues were closed questions to the Greek philosophers. It is above all the doctrine that these virtues are closed questions, that is meant by natural law. This, indeed, raises the whole difficulty of the idea of the closed proposition in our society. We live in a pluralist capitalism – in which all questions are up for dispute except the proposition that the making of money is a good. We have no settled doctrine of virtues – many people think the doctrine of natural law nonsense. And this pluralism of belief is not confined to religious differences – but to the great moral platitudes which were generally and publicly accepted in the Western world

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till about 1800. Nor is this pluralism merely a public thing – it deeply penetrates the universities. For example, most social science is now taught as if the doctrine of virtues was nonsense. Or again, a philosopher at the U of T in reviewing some essays of mine recently spoke of natural law as so antediluvian a conception that one must be hardly aware of the world, if one took it seriously. One indeed might almost say that the very heart of the modern spirit which is the dominating force in our universities is the idea that there are no closed propositions – of the kind I have described. And this situation sounds fine. Let all come to university and study these questions openly and come to what conclusion they will. This is true freedom. Some will become hedonists, some Kantians, some Aristotelians, some will like torture, some not etc., etc. The universities are, after all, not [?]s of indoctrination. President Eliot of Harvard who was the chief architect of the chief university on this continent based on the principle of objectivity – once put it well when he wrote: ‘It is not the function of the teacher to settle philosophical and political controversies for the pupil, or even to recommend to him any one set of opinions as better than another. The student should be made acquainted with the salient parts of each system.’7 This spirit of which Eliot was the chief exponent has obviously been the dominant ethos among those universities, like this one, which took their traditions from Harvard. Let me say in passing that this was not the spirit of Oxford and from this let me draw the historical conclusion: Though our Canadian universities claim to draw their traditions from Oxford, their basic philosophy of objectivity comes much more from Eliot than from Jowett.8 What is true in this argument is of course that for the individual in his freedom, these must be open questions, when he comes to be educated. It would indeed kill the spirit of the university – if the young person could not go there to discuss openly all questions and what are more important questions than such questions as should we torture children in our own interests. But, and, as is the case with most buts, this takes us to the nub of my argument, can any society possibly exist with even limited cohesion if it is held together simply by the principle of objectivity – strictly defined? No of course not, the answer may come back – but the university, a society within a society, can. The rest of society must stand on

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some of the grand moral platitudes, e.g. a rejection of the torturing of children – but the [illegible] of this is not the business of the university – it is the business of other institutions. I do not intend to answer that argument directly – though I think it can easily be torn to shreds. Rather I would answer the objectivist case in its most limited field – namely the university itself – not its relation to society. Therefore my but takes the form of this question: ‘Can the university fulfil its proper function, that is, to educate people, if its principle of cohesion is simply objectivity or scholarship?’ Now I have assumed in this question that there will be argument on the function of the university – that it provides an opportunity for young and old to educate themselves. The assuming of this common argument may seem to you the most childish lack of awareness on my part. Is it not patently obvious that our mass universities exist for other purposes than the education of individuals and that therefore my assumption is just nonsense. But I think my assumption can be made in this room. Therefore, I make it. Now as soon as this assumption is made – what is it for a person to be educated? What must a person know to be educated? And this raises the question what is really worth knowing? Let me take six examples of knowledge and ask you which of them is most worth knowing. (1) The terms of the peace of Westphalia were such and such. (2) College St runs parallel to and north of Queen St in Toronto. (3) It is an unjust act to torture children. (4) The form of Bach’s fugues is such and such. (5) The proposition E=mc2 can be proved in the following way. (6) Dieticians should see that in every institution every inmate should receive so much protein and this can be done most efficiently and aesthetically in the following way. Now I do not want to discuss these propositions but simply to say that in setting up universities one has some principle as to what is worth knowing and it is by that principle that one decides what should be taught at the university. And that principle can not be derived from the idea of objectivity or scholarship. One can be an objective scholar about matters of the most trivial nature as that great research project on egg-sorting in Pennsylvania illustrates. What then are these principles? Why do you still teach philosophy at the U of T and not egg sorting? Why do you not teach natural theology within the university and do teach physiotherapy?

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Address to the History Society, University of Toronto

If, as is obvious, the university decides its curriculum on some principle more than scholarship, what is it that it considers are really worth a man or woman knowing? And let me make the obvious explicit – if something is considered worth knowing what is known is not an open question in the university. It is not an open question I hope in the classrooms of this university that the peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648. Can then the principles on which it is decided that something is worth studying be open questions? Now in saying this I am not being so foolish as to imply any programme whereby our universities or our society will temper the pluralism which is at the very heart of its existence and of its intellectual tradition. It is not, thank God, the chief job of the philosopher to say how society can be changed and to place his hope in any changes taking place in the world. If I had to place my hard cash on the barrel, I would bet that the pluralistic scholarly spirit in our universities will have the worst possible effects in the immediate years to come and that as our universities lose the principles that in the older Western tradition gave them coherence, the best young people will have to look outside them for illumination upon what really is worth knowing. If you [?] in thinking this way, you will not waste your time in tinkering with their present machinery. However I would end by saying something more positive about the question of intellectual integrity or objectivity and the difficulties it raises. As what I have to say takes a certain exhortatory form – I beg your indulgence. It is this: all our searchings have blind alleys – or ‘no thoroughfare’ signs of the [?] in which we can waste our time and if we are really unfortunate we may get stuck in one of those ‘no thoroughfares’ for our lives. In the search for intellectual integrity the blind alley is the belief that it can best be achieved by limitation of view. [That is,] one will be a great historian, if one averts one’s eyes from the majesty and terror of human existence and what lies beyond it, and as the expression goes, ‘sticks to one’s last.’ What was inadequate with the scholarly liberalism of the nineteenth century was not its objectivity – but its limitation of vision and interest. And this is very important for us today who live in institutions which are still held together at their best by that tradition of scholarly objectivity and nothing else. As that tradition becomes a weak unifying force one must not attack objectivity or even less intellectual integrity. Rather one must recognize the vice

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implicit in these very virtues – namely limitation of view. Just because those of us who are students live in an age when we cannot expect much from the institutions we live in, is no reason why we should not endeavour to try and conduct ourselves as we ought. Because the institutions always incline to equate objectivity and a minuscule vision – is no reason that we should follow them. The more difficult problem of the closed proposition in the open society – I have not attempted to answer. For the difficult questions, there are no easy formulae. But questions for which there are no easy formulae still remain important and this one seems to me the most important one affecting our universities today. If any of you agree with this – perhaps we could discuss it now.

Notes 1 Professors in Toronto’s history department chose the most promising undergraduate students (only males until the 1960s) to be members of the club. George Wrong’s idea for the club was to provide a link between the university and society. At the annual dinners the members invited speakers to talk about controversial social topics. The formal link of the club to the department of history was broken in the 1960s; the name was changed to the History Society; and in 1974 ‘it fell on evil days and dissolved.’ See Robert Bothwell, Laying the Foundation: A Century of History at the University of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1991), 51–6. 2 William Lawson Grant (1872–1935), Grant’s father, taught history at Queen’s and later at Upper Canada College, where he was principal until his death. See Ontario High School History of Canada, revised and enlarged edition (Toronto: Ryerson Press 1927). 3 John (‘Jack’) Whitney Pickersgill (1905–97), public servant, historian, taught history at Wesley College, Winnipeg (1929–37), joined the Department of External Affairs and later worked in the Prime Minister’s Office before becoming Clerk of the Privy Council (1952–3), and was elected to the House of Commons in 1953, serving in the cabinets of Louis St Laurent and L.B. Pearson. His influential historical studies include The Mackenzie King Record (1960–70) and The Liberal Party (1962). 4 Edward Plunket Taylor (1901–89) was a leading figure in Canadian business circles as president of the Argus Corporation, a holding company he created after the Second World War and ran as president until 1969. 5 Bertrand Russell, (1872–1970), English philosopher, social critic, and political

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activist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1950). For Grant’s view of Russell, see ‘Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell,’ in Collected Works, Volume 2, 34–48. 6 Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), British anthropologist, published the first edition of his famous and influential work The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in 1890. 7 Charles William Eliot (1834–1926), educational administrator, was president of Harvard University 1869–1909, during which time he transformed Harvard. Among his many reforms was the introduction of the elective system by which undergraduates could choose a variety of courses in each field rather than following a prescribed curriculum. In 1910 Eliot edited the Harvard Classics, a ‘five foot shelf’ of outstanding books designed to make a liberal education available to those unable to attend college. 8 Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), British classical scholar and Church of England clergyman, was renowned for his translations of Plato and as a tutor of great influence who became master of Balliol College, Oxford (1870), and later vice-chancellor of the university (1882–6).

Preface to Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture by Scott Symons and John de Visser

The book was published simultaneously in 1971 by McClelland and Stewart (Toronto) and by the New York Graphic Society. For an account of Grant’s relationship to Scott Symons, see William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 335–8. This preface was reprinted in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, ed. and intro. Christopher Elson (Toronto: Gutter Press 1998), 181–3.1

It is a pleasure to write some words at the beginning of this splendid book, splendid both in what is said about the furniture by Mr Symons and in how it is photographed by Mr de Visser. Symons shows us consummately that the furniture of any time or place cannot be understood as a set of objects, but rather as things touched, seen, used, loved, in short, simply lived with through the myriad events which are the lives of individuals, of families, of communities, of peoples. For an object is any thing (whether stone or tree or even human being) when it is held by another outside himself so that it can be organized to show its potentialities for being at the disposal of other wills, as an undifferentiated source of supply. As our society has become objectified, we can either buy furniture in Simpson-Sears, or distantly look at it in museums. There is a long choice of supplies for us to buy: Italianate or Swedish, Louis Quinze or Chippendale, in teak or oak or plastic, depending on our bank accounts and our fantasies. As bank accounts are always quantitative, whether in Dallas or Dusseldorf, in Twickenham or Toronto, so our fantasies move to become homogeneous. Furniture becomes the fixtures, whether in Holiday Inns or apartments. The question remains whether the heart’s core can be sustained by things supplied in the same way as motor cars

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under the principle of organized obsolescence. Museums are needed in an age of quick change and therefore of quick destruction. This therapy has been produced by the same conditions which have produced what it would cure. Museums are not places where we can live with things. (Many of the pieces Symons describes are now in museums, but he obviously much prefers to find them elsewhere.) Symons is telling us of furniture before it was so objectified; the furniture of three distinct societies which came together into Canada. He knows that furniture among these people was not a supply of objects, but things brought forth in the arts of those who shared a communality of existence with others who would live amidst it. He shows this about things as different as a fireplace in Halifax, a cupboard in Ontario or a communion table of a French Canadian bishop. He knows therefore that the modern distinctions between ‘fine’ art and ‘craft’ and between ‘art’ and ‘technique,’ are not adequate to understand these things, because their makers assumed that beauty was not something divided from daily utility and that ‘art’ was in its origins the Latin translation of techne. The writing in this book brings the furniture before us because Symons is gifted with what I can only describe platitudinously as ‘the educated imagination.’ In our imaginative judgments we bring together the particular perceptions of our sensibilities with the universal entities. Leaving aside the hiddenness of what it would be to make Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor, when we listen to its particular melodies and harmonies, we may partake in a statement of what always and everywhere is. Though in listening we never leave those particular melodies and harmonies, they draw us out to the enjoyment of what can never be completely actualized in them. Symons’ enjoyment of this furniture (and his help to our enjoyment) arises from the way his sensibility never loses its hold on the particular pieces before us. Yet he is led out and out from those particularities to the people who made them and lived with them, to the community they inhabited, and beyond that to the differing riches of the European civilization which lay unbroken behind them in all its surging richness of politics and religion and art. What is so satisfactory about Symons’ descriptions is that he never uses the furniture as an excuse for a pedantic lecture, but rather by making us look at the furniture leads us out into the complexities of lived traditions. The man of intellect without sensibility does not bother

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to look at furniture; the man of sensibility without intellect cannot know fully what is given to him in his looking. In the ‘educated imagination’ of this book we can be helped both to look and to know.2 Furniture is tied closely not only to the love of the good, but to the love of our own, which may be only slightly good. It is more our own even than our clothes because it is liable to be longer lasting as jewellery or china. Of all things it is only less our own than our bodies and the bodies of those we love. Las Meninas is also a thing,3 but it attains to such universality of statement that who could dare to say that they possess it, except a king as representing a people. Perhaps a Spaniard could understand it in more detail than anybody else because of his particular awareness of what Velasquez made there; but its very universality of statement opens it to the understanding of man qua man. We can possess furniture as our own because of its very limitation. But in understanding it we need particularly an intimate knowledge of the detailed lives of those who live with it as their own. This kind of knowledge is best available to those who are of the same own. In his book Symons shows forth the knowledge of what it was to be a Canadian in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To be such was precarious and even ambiguous – something so dividedly poised as that part of North America which had not broken its connection with western Europe. It was, however, something unique. Symons knows that uniqueness in its details, because he knows his fate is to be that and he has loved it. Perhaps that fate can be escaped by some who desire to be cosmopolitan and who love to be part of more powerful or fuller cultures. However, escaping a particular fate may not result in transcending it; one may enter something so general as to be almost nothingness, and therefore unsustaining. From knowledge and love of his limited fate as Canadian, Symons brings to his study of furniture an appreciation of the blood and bones of Canadian history, from which one can learn and learn. He apprehends its concrete immediacy in a way quite absent in the liberal and positivist textbooks from which our children are asked to learn about their past. If one wishes to know what was unique, ambiguous and precarious about Canada, one should read his jokes and gaieties with attention. In writing of Canadian furniture Symons does not forget how different were the cultures of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes; nor does he forget the differences in each, for example between Nova Scotia and

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New Brunswick. Ontario loyalism is Symons’ own, in a way that the Maritimes or Quebec are not. But it is evidence of the fact that we did in some sense come together that he can open himself to the other cultures as his own. This appears in his understanding of how greatly different were the styles of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick from those of Ontario, and how in some ways that of New Brunswick was nearer to Ontario than that of Nova Scotia. It appears even more strongly in his unequivocal recognition that the furniture of Quebec shows itself as more finely beautiful than the others. He has an openness to the attainments of French North America which no citizen of the United States has yet shown. For example, it is singularly lacking in the barren comments of so rare an American artist as Henry James. What a different history Canada might have had, if more Ontario loyalists and even some Methodists had so apprehended the reality of Quebec. Indeed his admiration of what Quebec has been appears even more deeply in his proclamation of the sadly necessary yet impossible choice; were it inevitable that he must be either a French Canadian or part of the imperial republic, he would choose the former.

Notes 1 Scott Symons (1933– ) Canadian novelist, critic, and musicologist, was curator-in-chief of Canadian collections at the Royal Ontario Museum before abandoning this career to write Place d’Armes (1967) and Civic Square (1969), which created a sensation because of their explicit homoeroticism. He left Canada to live in Morocco, where he wrote his 1986 Helmet of Flesh trilogy. He returned to live in Toronto in 2000. 2 Grant is perhaps alluding here to Northrop Frye’s 1962 Massey Lectures, The Educated Imagination. 3 Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660).

Nationalism and Rationality

This article first appeared in volume 50, no. 600 of the Canadian Forum (January 1971): 336–7, then with minor changes in Abraham Rotstein, ed., Power Corrupted: The October Crisis and the Repression of Quebec (Toronto: New Press 1971), 51–6, and was reprinted again in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 103–7. A French translation was published in Maintenant 106 (May 1971), 137–9, under the title ‘Trudeau et l’éclatement du Canada.’

The politics of technologized societies are an open field for demagogic tactics. Politics is the working out of public disagreement about purposes. But politics is now increasingly replaced by administration, as disagreement about purposes is legitimized away by the pervasive assumption that all which publicly matters is the achievement of technical ‘rationality.’ Elections become increasingly plebiscites in which the masses choose between leaders or teams who will be in charge of the administrative personnel. In plebiscites it is necessary to have leaders who can project their images through the various media, and so catch the interest of the masses who are bored with politics, except as spectacle and as the centralizing organization for technologized life. The plebiscitary situation calls forth from the privileged classes leaders who have the will to project their personalities and as these men are increasingly the product of the modern ‘value-free’ university, they are likely to be willing to use any means when it suits their interests. A negative example of this thesis is Mr Nixon.1 It is inconceivable that he could have been elected President in 1968 without the administrative disaster of the Vietnam war which exposed the blatant failure of the Democratic

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personnel to provide what was wanted at the home of the empire. For all his administrative reliability and talent, he simply lacked the image for the plebiscites in comparison with his Republican predecessor or his Democratic alternatives. In recent Canadian events there have been two successful plebiscitary leaders – Mr Diefenbaker and Mr Trudeau.2 Mr Diefenbaker had, however, one grave disadvantage. He had certain residual loyalties (for example, to the independence of Canada) which acted against the demands of ‘rationality’ and administration. Therefore despite his ability to transmit his image he came into conflict with the sheer needs of the private and public corporations – that is, with state capitalist ‘rationality’ itself. He could not continue to get votes in the parts of Canada which were most enmeshed in the continental administrative system, and where the voters were most at the mercy of the legitimizing powers of that system. But Mr Pearson lacked the plebiscitary appeal so that he could not get an outright majority, even although his actions were acceptable to continental administrative ‘rationality.’3 Mr Trudeau combines plebiscitary appeal with acceptance of the assumptions of state capitalist ‘rationality.’ He must therefore be seen as a formidable figure in our public life. In his writings he has unequivocally stated that he believes the best future for French Canadians is to be integrated into the Canadian structure as a whole, and that the Canadian structure should be integrated into the whole Western system (if not in an overtly political sense, at least economically and socially). Throughout his career his appeals have been to universalism, and universalism in a Canadian setting means integration into a smoothly functioning continental system. It is this union in Mr Trudeau of charisma with the acceptance of the purposes of corporation capitalist efficiency which made Mr Denis Smith’s article about his policies so telling.4 The idea that Mr Trudeau was changing our political framework from a parliamentary to a presidential system involves more than a change from Canadian to US traditions. This change in political structure would fulfil the needs of a society in which administrative rule is bolstered by plebiscites about personnel. In Mr Trudeau’s writings there is evident distaste for what was by tradition his own, and what is put up along with that distaste are universalist goods which will be capable of dissolving that tradition. Indeed this quality of being a convert to modern liberalism is one cause of

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his formidability. Most English-speaking liberals have lived in universalism much longer. They have not come to it out of something different, but have grown up in it as their tradition. They are apt, therefore, either to accept it automatically or even to start to be cynical about its ability to solve human problems. On the other hand, Mr Trudeau’s espousal has behind it the force of his distaste of its opposite against which he is reacting. Recent converts are especially effective exponents of a system because they have the confidence of believing they are doing right. Mr Trudeau combines then administrative reliability with the power to project his image in the plebiscites. In 1968 this image was partially a revamped Kennedy one – openness to youth and freedom, a marvellous expectation about the potentialities of our system, (no interference in the bedrooms of the nation, etc.).5 This was effective in the Canada of Expo,6 especially because there was an awareness that things were not going as well in the US as had been expected at the beginning of the Kennedy era. Tacitly behind this part of the image and clearly related to it, was the sense, in English-speaking Canada, that here at last was a French Canadian who would deal with Daniel Johnson and de Gaulle.7 Mr Trudeau came to power by a brilliant use of television around that constitutional encounter.8 Indeed many of the smartest media men who now deplore his recent actions had helped him to organize that use. At its worst, Mr Trudeau was for many English-speaking Canadians that happy phenomenon ‘a Frog who could deal with the Frogs.’ In his recent actions he has fulfilled for them that promise. As he said in October, 1970 ‘Just watch me.’9 I leave aside the intriguing question of why the Trudeau administration embarked on the War Measures Act and I do so having taken for granted that the government had sufficient power, without its invocation, to deal firmly with what was happening in Quebec. The question then arises: does his employment of these powers make Mr Trudeau a more or less effective plebiscitary leader in Canadian life? As far as French Canada goes, a useful answer could only be made by somebody with great knowledge of Quebec from the inside. How deep is the desire on the part of many French-Canadians to exist as a Franco-American community in the midst of the homogenized English-speaking sea? Is the French-Canadian question a truly political one, in the sense that the powers of administrative rationality cannot dissolve it?

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Obscurity is increased by the fact that two different voices of opposition to Mr Trudeau seem to be coming out of Quebec. On the one hand, there is the voice of nationalism, expressed particularly by members of the elite, who care about the continuance of their community and who know that Mr Bourassa’s slogan ‘American technology – French culture’ cannot be an adequate basis for any real survival.10 On the other hand are the inchoate voices of those who are the particular victims of the fact that Quebec came late into the American technological expansion – e.g. the people of east Montreal and the students who cannot get jobs. These voices seem to employ the mode of popular Marxism. What is the relation between these two forms of opposition? It has often been possible for Marxists to appear as supporters of nationalism, for example as resisters of Western invasion in Russia or China. But clearly at its heart Marxism is a universalist and not a nationalist doctrine, and just as much as Mr Trudeau’s liberalism, it puts the development of technique as its priority. Also, since Quebec is at the very heart geographically of the Western empire, it is going to be modernized within the setting of capitalist rationality – not Marxist. Within that setting Marxism will be simply an ideology for the sympathetic, an opiate for the unfortunate. The responses of the student population will be crucial. Can enough of them be won over from their nationalism, as Mr Trudeau has predicted, if Quebec is effectively oriented into the American system and enough managerial jobs are provided for the educated? Has capitalist rationality the means of bringing about that integration quickly enough? In English-speaking Canada it seems that Mr Trudeau’s status will remain high. He has come through on his promise to deal strongly with separatism. That he deals with it quite outside the principles of constitutional liberties does not seem important, because although these traditions of law were the best part of the British tradition, they are not something that can hold masses of voters’ minds in the age of technological rationality. Civil liberties can be a supplementary issue in times of bad employment or in connection with other failures of the system, but they cannot be a determining issue for many voters who live within modernity. Indeed in the extreme circumstances of the War Measures Act, the two main political questions of Canadian life come together for those of us who must oppose what the Trudeau administration has done. The

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possibility of some freedom in the American empire is mutually interdependent with some potential modus vivendi between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians. But it is hard to move from this relation to practical judgments about immediate Canadian politics. On the one hand, it is obvious that any indigenous English-speaking Canadian society requires the help of Quebec. Yet how can this be advocated in a way that is not simply asking French-Canadians to be led along to their doom as a community? In other words are the French not best to be separatists in the face of the North American situation? This dilemma for English-speaking nationalists is even more evident because of the events of the autumn. Before these events, a certain nationalist spirit seemed to be growing in English-speaking society. This was encouraged by the obvious social failures of the United States, and also by the economic consequences of being a branch-plant society, which were coming home to many Canadians at a time of American retreat. Yet during the crisis in Quebec, a large English-speaking majority readily acquiesced in an attack not only on terrorism but on constitutional French nationalism. In the light of this, French-Canadian nationalists would perhaps do well to concentrate on the possible means of their own cultural survival and to accept that English-speaking culture is only a Trojan horse for the ‘rationality’ of the North American monolith. What effective alliance can English-speaking nationalists offer their French compatriots? How would it be expressed in immediate political terms? What advantage has it to offer those who seriously desire that FrancoAmerican culture survive in a more than formal sense? Mr Lévesque’s question to English-speaking nationalists stands, and has been made more urgent by the present crisis.11

Notes 1 Richard Milhous Nixon (see note 20, p. 72 above) was the first president to resign from office. He was forced to do so when faced with impeachment over the Watergate scandal, stemming from a break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee located in the Watergate building, Washington, DC, during the election campaign of 1972. The epithet ‘Tricky Dick’ dogged him throughout his career. Although he spoke well in four televised debates with Kennedy (1960), JFK conveyed an image of youthfulness, energy, and physical poise.

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2 John George Diefenbaker (1895–1979), lawyer and politician, was Progressive Conservative prime minister 1957–63. In 1958 he received the overwhelming support of the country with the largest majority of seats in Canadian history. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 348n14. Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000) was Liberal prime minister of Canada 1968–79 and 1980–4. His election to the leadership of the Liberal party in 1968 resulted in the phenomenon of almost hysterical popularity dubbed ‘Trudeaumania.’ See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 377n2. 3 Lester Bowles (Mike) Pearson (1897-1973), diplomat and politician, became Liberal prime minister of Canada, leading a minority government as a result of the election of 1963, and forming another minority government after the 1965 election. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 246n1. 4 S.G. Denis Smith (1932– ), political scientist, was editor of the Journal of Canadian Studies 1966–75. He wrote articles about Trudeau and the Quebec Crisis for The Canadian Forum, which he later edited (1975–9). His publications include Bleeding Hearts, Bleeding Country: Canada and the Quebec Crisis (Edmonton: Hurtig 1971), and Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker (Toronto: MacFarlane Walter & Ross 1995). 5 Trudeau, then minister of justice, asserted, ‘There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation’ to CBC television reporters on 21 December 1967 in connection with the introduction of an amendment to the criminal code decriminalizing homosexual acts performed in private. 6 Expo 67 was the highly successful world’s fair held in Montreal from 28 April to 28 October 1967. 7 Daniel Johnson (1915–68), lawyer and politician, was Union Nationale Premier of Quebec 1966–8. He was the father of Pierre-Marc Johnson (1946– ) who was the leader of the Parti Québécois 1985–7 and premier of Quebec in 1985 until the party’s defeat by Robert Bourassa in December of that year. His other son, also Daniel Johnson (1944– ), was leader of the Quebec Liberal Party 1993–8 and briefly premier of Quebec in 1994, until he was defeated by the PQ under Jacques Parizeau. Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970), soldier and stateman. See 73n25 above. In 1967 during his visit to Canada de Gaulle uttered his famous phrase, ‘Vive le Québec libre,’ arousing deep nationalist sentiment in Quebec and incurring the wrath of Prime Minister Pearson. 8 Grant is referring to a confrontation between Premier Johnson and Trudeau, federal minister of justice, at a federal-provincial conference, 6 February 1968, in which Trudeau out-argued Johnson. 9 Trudeau made his famous retort ‘Just watch me’ in a response to journalists Tim Ralfe of the CBC and Peter Reilly of CJON-TV on 13 October 1970. Trudeau: ‘Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t

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like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don’t like the looks of ...’ Q: ‘At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?’ Trudeau: ‘Well just watch me.’ After the October 1970 kidnapping of James Cross, the British trade commissioner in Montreal, and Pierre Laporte, the Quebec minister of labour and immigration, the federal government proclaimed the existence of a state of ‘apprehended insurrection’ under the War Measures Act. 10 Robert Bourassa (1933–96), lawyer, politician, and premier of Quebec 1970– 6 and 1985–94. He was a strong supporter of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s free trade initiative (1985–8) and the Meech Lake Accord, which disintegrated in 1990. 11 René Lévesque (1922–87), journalist, broadcaster, and politician, left the Liberal Party in 1967 to found the Mouvement Souverainté-Association out of which developed the Parti Québécois in 1968. In 1976 the party swept into power and Lévesque became premier of Quebec until 1985. See René Lévesque, Memoirs, trans. Philip Stratford (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1986), 216–26.

Excerpts from ‘Technique(s) and Good’

Grant took a year’s leave in 1971–2 with a grant from the Killam committee of the Canada Council to work on a book to be titled ‘Technique(s) and Good.’ This was never completed. We have selected some passages from an unfinished draft, leaving out sections about the statement of a computer scientist which became the recurring nucleus of several later pieces. We have appended Grant’s letter of 1972 to the Council’s Frank Milligan where he describes the work he was doing with the help of the grant. The first published essay that came out of this project was ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,”’ in Abraham Rotstein, ed., Beyond Industrial Growth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976) (280–98). It was later revised and published as ‘Thinking About Technology’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986) (589–607). Grant returned to the projected book (with the new title of ‘Good and Technique’) during his sabbatical leave in 1976, again not finishing it. Instead he produced a short but important piece that was eventually published as ‘Justice and Technology’ in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, edited by Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (525–35). Some of the notes and drafts produced during the two sessions in 1972 and 1976 were mixed together, first by Grant himself in 1976, and then after his death when Sheila Grant organized the papers. We cannot, therefore, assign exact dates to particular notes, plans, and drafts from this period. Arthur Davis The first section, following, is an excerpt on the language of ‘values’ from pages 31–48 in the original. Pages 1–30 contain several draft ‘beginnings’ that do not add substantially to what is published elsewhere.

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How then do we know what purposes we should use computers for and what not? The content of ‘should’ certainly does not come to us from ‘nature’ because in bringing the computer to be we have represented nature to ourselves as objective stuff which we master in our transcending of it; certainly not by the revelations of God because we have been taught that infinite transcendence is an unclear, uncharitable and indeed neurotic mystification; certainly not by the self-evident imperatives of reason, for there is no reason to think it is preferable to be rational; there are no facts of reason [?] [things?] to the rest of history; certainly not by the necessities of history because the question is what exactly does history now necessitate. At this point the word ‘values’ is generally introduced in the popular discussion of the matter in the Western world. Computers are means upon which men impose ends in the realization of their values. In the widespread use of this language, I have never found a clear account of what is meant by the central word ‘value.’ It seems to stand either for a human preference of any kind or for a principle by which we place preferences in a hierarchy of superordination and subordination. If the discourse is extended it generally alternates between the two. If it is a preference, we are left with the question how we judge which preference to realize individually and the more difficult question how we decide which to realize politically. If it is a principle for judging between preferences, how do we judge between such principles when we have admitted that judgment is instrumental. ... Nevertheless it is necessary to take seriously the language of values because it is so widespread particularly among the publicly articulate in our society and when a language is thus used it is likely to have some deeper power in serving the needs of the society than is met by a couple of easy sentences. Indeed the language of values has served valuable purposes, particularly for the most advanced technical society in North America. (Note: perhaps refer to ‘In Defence of North America’ – perhaps not) Above all in its use men affirm the central necessary doctrine of a technical society that they stand above what they have made and in their freedom can control the directions that their societies will take. Secondly as values are affirmed by individuals, in affirming this language men are allowed to believe that modern society is pluralistic, in the sense that the vast range of human proclivities are being given a

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chance to be fulfilled. This is a central cause why the language of ‘values’ has replaced the language of goods. The latter was thought to affirm that certain ways of behaving were cosmically sustained as better than others, that is as ‘objective’ goods and therefore it was an instrument to squeeze the proclivities of the individual into the straitjacket of a monistic or closed society. But modern society is a liberal society in which individuals gain happiness in the world in their own way. It claims to be an open and pluralistic society. Within the language of value men are given freedom to build their lives as they choose in a way not possible in a language of good in which standards were imposed upon them by elitist leaders (generally priests and so forth) who, in proclaiming certain actions as cosmically sustained virtue, were in fact simply fortifying their own tastes and interests. Modern men with their knowledge of history can now know the multiform goods which had been exalted in different societies and could know that the objective claims to good had in the past been relative to the interests of class or caste and could now in the name of values assert the individual’s right to be what he or she chose. Yet at the same time as the language of values freed men from the authority of these monistic strait-jackets, it also seemed to assert, by the very positive involved in the word value that they were actions worth achieving in the world. At the same time as it could be used to relativize the authoritarian goods of the past, it also could be used to affirm that life had more purpose. It seems fair to say that the language of values served the purpose in our society of being a half-way house in which men could at one and the same time free themselves from the frustrating taboos of the past and yet not fall into the debilitating despair of moral nihilism. The language of values also served our society in a deeper way. In its assertion that values were self-legislated by the individual, it exalted that human mastery which was necessary to the coming to be of the technicizing and technicizable society. Yet it maintained that mastery within a framework of ‘ideals’ and ‘values’ which somehow stood above it. Here also it served the purpose of a half-way house in which publicly men could live between past and present. In the way it was used to insist that values were man made, it served as an instrument by which could be publicly negated those affirmed goods from the past which because in their very definition were said to stand over man in all times and places, needed to be eliminated from human conscious-

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ness, if technical change was to be given its free scope. In a society determined on technical innovation rapid and continuous change in all aspects of existence must take place. If that change is to take place with as little difficulty from human intransigence as possible and with as little consequent cost in the slowing down of technical development, it is necessary that as many members of that society as possible should be freed from belief in unchanging standards at the same time as the strong disciplining of will, also necessary to that technical change, be not lost. The language of self-legislated values facilitated that readiness for constant change while maintaining the discipline of the will. Values were man made and therefore open to be changed in the drive to the future; yet that drive to the future was enclosed in a language of morality which held the mass of men from being weakened in their willing by the spectre of nihilism. Early in the modern world Hume could write to free men from monkish virtues at the same time as he proposed the necessary continuance of more convenient virtues. In the same spirit in our era, ‘it has been wonderful to behold legions of social scientists wising up others about the subjectiveness of their values while they themselves earnestly preached the virtues of industrial democracy, egalitarianism, and decent progressive education’ (Technology and Empire, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 502). The language of values was a useful public cement because it could be used in both these ways. Indeed the service performed by the language of values in the interest of pluralism went together with the service it performed in the interest of the development of techniques. The progress of techniques was given in it a public moral justification as making possible the liberties of such pluralism. On the other hand new techniques could be seen as necessary to any possible pluralism in so far as human beings could only be free to pursue their won liberation in their own way if they were greatly freed from the necessities of work. But in serving these two purposes of technique and pluralism, the language of values is increasingly pulled apart to speak differently in different realms. Its service to pluralism is more and more confined to the private realm; its service to technique to the public realm. And the private and the public are increasingly severed from each other. Thus from the instruments of legitimation in our society came forth in the language of values the advocacy of pluralism about such subjects as sexuality and traditional religious faith (necessarily taken as a private matter). ‘The state has no

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business in the bedrooms of the nation.’1 In the public realm the monistic interests of technical development are proclaimed by the same legitimizers in the same language of values. The difficulty of maintaining the division between the public and private realm manifests itself in such dicey questions as drugs and pollution where therefore there are hesitations and divisions between the users of such language. Out of the private realm there emerge into the public young people who insist that their pluralism have some scope in the framework of society; out of the public realm comes increasingly the insistence by leaders that the pluralism in the private be sufficiently limited so that enough young people can take part effectively in the necessities, both of peace and war, of technical development. What is clear, however, is that the language of values begins to cease to be a useful public cement the more its essential nature becomes clear, as it is cut off from those elements it borrowed from the past to give it positive content. It ceases to be a useful half-way house between the language of good and the language of nihilism as it becomes clear that it can provide individuals with no reason why they should do anything. What Nietzsche said a hundred years ago in elucidating the language of values – namely that values were the basis for action when we need to will from out of the recognition that the world and our own lives included are an accidental chaos – becomes clearer to more and more people. In such clarity the language of values is known as being consistent only when it eschews any use of ‘should.’ In its barest form the language of good was expressed in two platitudes. Human beings should care sometimes for others. Human beings should sometimes control instinctive appetite. Whatever else was at issue between those who have lived within such language (differences for example between Jews and Christians, between followers of Plato and followers of Aristotle) it was considered out of the question for these ‘shoulds’ to be publicly debated. For to put them even in intellectual question was to have stepped outside morality. Those ‘shoulds’ were often carried over from the traditional language to ... give ... positive content. (Obedience) But as the language of values is thought by more people, it becomes increasingly publicly evident that there is no reason within it why we should do anything, and indeed that any ‘should’ exists as a limitation on our freedom to make ourselves as we choose. When that becomes sufficiently publicly clear to enough people, it can no longer serve its

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purpose as the guardian against nihilism. (Perhaps sentence about: it may be socially useful and privately convenient to have a strong ego nevertheless ...) As the language of values dims because of its inability to serve as a cloak for the modern difficulties about shouldness, it can only be used confidently in public by those for whom the should is self-evidently given in the very expansion of technique. Values and the progress of technique become publicly one. Those who wish to stay in the practical world and work for ends not identifiable with the progress of technique must have at their disposal some other language. In the private world it can only be used by those who can immerse themselves in privacy, in the form of the cultivation of immediate sensuality without thought. Even in as affluent a society as ours that is a rare fate and it is a fate which can be broken either by thought or more usually by encounters with the public world. When the public world enters the privacy of such people, before they have thought, the language of values is impotent to guard them from the nihilism consequent on such encounters. ... [Section on Biblical theology. (Pages 66–71)] Indeed if one has no alternative but to call oneself Christian, this is to say that the perfection of the claim of perfection blazes forth from Christ. But it is a different matter so to be able to think what is given in that claim as to assert ‘theological propositions’ that are given from that blazing forth – ‘theological’ propositions that give detailed illumination to the fire of our public lives in our present novelty. Happy indeed are those who from what they are given there can still spell out in volumes propositions which are supposed to tell their fellow acceptors what is meant there concerning ‘history,’ ‘nature,’ ‘man,’ ‘technique,’ etc. etc. ... These volumes go under the strange rubric of ‘Biblical theology’ and are generally written by Europeans who have accepted the criticisms common to their civilization of what was false in ancient ways of thinking, and even in some cases to identifying that criticism with the Biblical stories about the origins of human sinfulness, and yet who still take seriously from their culture the clerk’s task of ‘theology.’ Where then do they find the means whereby they derive all these propositions about ‘nature,’ ‘history’ etc. from the Bible? Happy are those who find in the Bible the strange amalgam of ancient and modern thought given in the

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words ‘sacred history’ and claim that that conception illumines us about what is now taking place in our ‘secular’ history. The light of those volumes must, however, be dimmed for us by the fact that this same ‘sacred history’ tells some of these writers that the coming to be of technical civilization is an aspect of the realization of the divine plan for human beings, while it tells others that our present novelties are the culmination of man’s revolt against obedience, and both these conclusions are supposed to come to us unmediated by either modern or ancient accounts of reason. The propositions of ‘Biblical theology’ would be more helpful in our present amazement if these propositions could show us specifically how the claim of owed good illumines what technical civilization portends for good or evil. Happy above all would be those who were able from the claim of owed good given them in the origin of their tradition to specify what it would be to understand as purpose-filled that fact that in the coming to be of our present novelties, the possibility of the acceptance of that claim has been enveloped in darkness. That assailing is more destructive of that claim than traditional doubt, because in the past doubt was met by the thought corporately given from the activities known as philosophy and theology. But these corporate means of meeting doubt have become so ambiguous, that when doubt about that then turns in expectation to thought it meets only itself. Can the presence of the claim of perfection be held in light for us if we turn to the activity of philosophy? But what is that activity in the modern world? If it is said by a few in the English-speaking world to be more than ‘logistics,’ does it not then become a return to some past way of thought which has been shown to be erroneous by modern logic, and which may indeed ask us to deny as true what the modern sciences teach any competent person to be true? If we try to bring that owed claim to light by a rational justification from modern philosophy, are we not asserting that it comes to us as a categorical imperative, a duty which is ever grimmer and blanker, as its unsustainedness by any relation to our experience of the world becomes clear? The secularized theology of the great delayer masquerades as philosophy. Is it not more perverse for Kant to masquerade his secular theology as philosophy than Plato’s unequivocal act in which philosophy was turned into theology? If we attempt to bring that claim to light in Athenian thought, is not our attempt to speak Greek an antiquarianism only possible for self-indulgent academics who use such a return to

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cosset themselves from the intellectual realities of the present, while living comfortably in the advantages consequent upon such realities? To speak what Plato spoke about that claim ... ... Therefore my purpose in this book is to try to elucidate two facts of our current circumstances: namely that the coming to be of technical civilization tends to lead its members to the belief that they are beyond good and evil and that human beings always exist within good and evil. [In another attempt (page 72) Grant wrote about the two facts as follows: Therefore my purpose in this writing is to state as clearly as I am able how the coming to be of technical civilization has shaped and [was] shaped by what Western human beings conceived and consented to of good. The purpose of that account of the relationship between the techniques and good is to listen to what is said in the history of that relationship about two facts of our current circumstances: (1) that technical civilization in its origins and in its movement to fulfilment carries the complication that men will and should come to be the masters of the earth, and (2) that in the profoundest expression of the origins of Western civilization – that is, in writings of the greatest philosophers and theologians – the assertion is present that men are measured and defined by ‘good’ which we do not make.] I use the phrase ‘facts of our current circumstances’ because circumstantial evidence is employed in the law courts to mean indirect evidence founded on circumstances which limit the number of admissible hypotheses. Because the difficulty of judging what modern technical civilization portends for future is just the novel destruction its coming to be has brought to the means of judging any circumstances, it is my hope that in the attempt to elucidate these facts as indirect evidence it is possible to limit the number of admissible hypotheses about what technical civilization portends for the future. (Perhaps add – Such an elucidation is a complex but minor preliminary to the greater, but for me too difficult question of what is the political good in the light of modern science and technique – a question which can only be answered by those who know clearly what technical civilization portends.) The use of the word ‘fact’ always begs the question because by ‘fact’ is meant a situation the existence of which is put beyond question. Obviously it is easy to deny that what I have called facts are facts. From one side it would be possible to say that it is not the case that the mem-

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bers of technical civilization tend to the belief that they are beyond good and evil. From another position it would equally be possible to deny that human beings always live within good and evil. Also it would be easy to point out that these two facts are of very different orders – one of event, the other of condition. Also obviously in such phrases as beyond or within good and evil the words good and evil are quite unspecific and the prepositions beyond and within incline to the metaphoric. To specify these facts as facts – the elucidation of them in this language – is the primary purpose of this book. Therefore the judgment of the propriety of this language must wait upon the detailed attempt to use it. To do this is clearly ... theology. [In pages 72–87 of the original document Grant outlined but did not write out a section of the proposed book on the topic of ‘postponement’ and its relation to ‘obedience.’ The triumph of technology in our world confronts us with the difficult options of going along with it and ‘embracing mastery’ or stepping back and postponing the actions that obedience indicates to us. Part of the outline or plan can be found in ‘Obedience,’ sections 10 to 14, (308–11) and some other fragments are reprinted here.] When the hesitations of postponement of the most comprehensive questions [about] techniques lead to a shelving of one’s obligations in what can be called a kind of romantic mysticism, why must one yet say it is necessary? The opting-out-of-society side of postponement and how it must be sincere (?) Why I Am Writing This Book (a) For whatever reasons, both sane and insane (who is to know how sane one is?), I cannot accept that we stand beyond good and evil. (b) The coming to be of technical civilization has brought the assumption that we stand beyond good and evil. (c) I am at sea about how one thinks that is not so – or whether it is not so. (d) I want to see the assumptions – technical civilization – look through the maze of them and see what is said about good and evil – as a prolegomena to ...

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(e) If one says one stands above good and evil then in the West one must look back to three things, Christianity – the Jewish Bible – and Platonism, which started from the assumption that man is not [beyond good and evil], and see. ... When at the end of first chapter I am being agnostic – plus also neither accepting the demands of technique nor denying them, I must also say that I am not simply a spectator of all time and existence and that action therefore does not matter – but rather a kind of hesitation and withdrawal in terms of which greater action Oh the botched and the bungled. Am I entirely that? Because I am the botched and the bungled I nevertheless do not want to live as Nietzsche says – by sheer instinctive will – nor do I think morality and religion is for me simply the desire to put off my botched and bungled self into another world – it is rather that even if I am botched and bungled I still want to give myself – as I feel Mozart does – to the forces of the world – be they just nature or be they God’s – give myself, take part in them. What Nietzsche has made me really admit is that I am one of the botched and the bungled.2 The very ambiguity of what is presented to us in the novelty can be seen in the example of the noble effort to remove the scourge of malaria by DDT leading to the death of the sea. This can be seen as a nobly adopted means having failed and the need to look for others – but it can also be seen as the heart of ambiguity. Are there any limits to our making happen what happens? The great question is one’s own egocentricity. If I say put down my ego – the question is what do I exalt in its place? what do I reverence which transcends that ego, the same pulling down of the ego – against the music.(?) Heidegger’s enormous ego – Nietzsche’s enormous ego – helps them to write. What is greater than the ego? identity yet not identity GPG – It is not possible to give oneself to what is, unless it is to something which is morally beautiful. Here it seems to me is where Heideg-

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ger fails in thinking without willing, in that what he gave himself to is not morally beautiful. GPG – What I find in Kant as secularized Christianity is the moral law as command – but as command which is given rational content – but is not the command which is given at Gethsemane – something that asks a consent which transcends rational content. Like a lamb he was led to the slaughter.3 One thing that is certainly holding me back from writing the sense: what right have I to write the good life when I wake up in the morning as I do. This seems to me pretentious – so to think. Is Aristotle a good enough man to write about the good life? His answer to that would be that the highest life – the best life – is the life of contemplation and he is capable of that – therefore he has subsumed all below him. But then I am faced with asking: does he subsume charity or giving oneself away – and I must answer no. Therefore one is left with the old thing of the saint and the philosopher, and I find A’s (or Strauss’s) answer to this quite impossible. It isn’t that Strauss excludes the saint on principle. He just has no place for him. I am a contemplative and not a saint –but that doesn’t give one the excuse to put one first – that is egocentricity.4 Plan for rest It is of course true that the part written accepts obedience to Christ, accepts Plato’s account of the good life – absolutely and undeniably – the wisdom politically. However difficult these are to put together. But (a) that is to be in a mystery and (b) not to be in doubt is to have abstracted oneself from the modern world – to refuse to face its achievements. Morally (?) I am in this first piece arguing against Heidegger and against Ellul – against Heidegger as (a) the greatest person in thinking about technique, and yet (b) outside obedience – against Ellul as (a) the great thinker who describes what happens with technique and yet (b) when he says what it is – puts it in a framework which I simply can’t think. Barthianism as ghetto, perhaps ...5

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What is it exactly which lies beyond thinking? saying yes to good. to call of good. the saints higher than the philosophers. [Section on the conflict between thought and public responsibility, page 91ff.] Indeed wherever there have been human beings one source of conflict within individuals and among members of communities has been between the claims of thought and the claims of public responsibility. It is but a platitude to say that public practice can easily degenerate into mad decisiveness, while thinking can degenerate into proud irresponsibility. The modern form of this conflict has often been described by quoting Yeats’s line: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’6 But this is a misleading saying because its surface paradox cloaks what is at stake ... ... we comprehend technology in act of living in it and of adjusting its difficulties as they arise. So immediately present and so self-evident are its advanced benefits that the search for any other form of comprehension appears a mad absurdity. Technology is the horizon in which all other activities take place, not only the operations of popular practice, but indeed of all thought. It is the horizon (call it if you will the religion) not only in the sense that to live seriously and effectively in the realm of institutions requires that one must assume that it is the horizon, but in the deeper sense that in the recesses of the solitude of thought and belief serious men see it so self-evidently as the way things are that it is beyond questioning. When something is taken as self-evidently being so, it cannot be an object of questioning, but becomes the horizon within which and from which questioning proceeds. For example, I am often told by one or other of those who organize this society how important it [is] that there should be [and] are those who study philosophy, for from philosophy will arise a sense of those purposes by which men decide how to live. Granted that in so speaking these people are attempting to be pleasant, it still must be pointed out that the affirmation takes for granted that thought about human purposes exists within an overreaching reality – the movement of men to technological mastery – which is itself beyond the thought about human purposes, be-

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cause it is just the way things are, that men should want to certainly work less in which consciously or unconsciously the must-be and the good that it be are totally at one. Of course, among those who hold this overwhelmingly dominant position are some who, welcoming the technical in principle, ask both how and whether particular techniques can serve human good. In the extreme case of military techniques, the majority will asks such questions. Beyond this, there are still many who ask how we best can use the manifold and necessary means of government planning without producing tyranny. Beyond this again, there are a smaller number who ask questions about how and whether the new biochemical discoveries can be used for human good. And so on and so on. As the potential harm from the new techniques becomes less self-evident, the number of questioners become fewer. Indeed is this not the obvious position for sensible men in our situation: to accept the benefits from our modern understanding, but to keep a firm judgment. The first argument against holding such a position arises from a dispute about the fact. Are we in our present society able any more to accept or reject particular techniques in the light of some wider framework than the simply technical? [Three or four pages on Jacques Ellul and his book The Technological Society are omitted. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 413. The following section returns to the question of ‘postponement’ and how it relates to moral action and thought.] To stand in the novelty of the technical society and for one’s amazement to express itself by wandering in the maze of questions of how that society came to be, what it now is and what it points to in the future requires that some human beings postpone in their thought that movement to acceptance or rejection of its achievements which practical life forces upon us. Principles for the requirements of practical life must be expressed in some immediate formula which is itself a description of and prescription about the situation, generally in the form of a rejection or acceptance of our ability to make certain events happen. Even if such prescriptive descriptions can finally be able to be known as correct, they close down on certain questions which are at least raised by the novelty. They take as self-evident as descriptions of this or that for example, that techniques are neutral means for humans to control for their purposes and how are we to judge easily in our present darkness

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that this does not prescribe upon our situation something which is not the case. For whatever else may be ambiguous about the novelty, it is clear that our situation is a public darkness. For evidence about the clarity about that darkness, it is only necessary to appeal to the fact that the greatest modern Western thinkers have claimed to know that the race has moved to a time where many men can be aware that they live beyond good and evil. If this claim be so, then darkness is present for us in the difficulties of living in such a radical change of perspective. If it be not so, what a darkness it is that very great thinkers should affirm that it is. At the least the coming to be of technical civilization has put in darkness the perspective by which men traditionally lived, including what it is to think the truth. To think anything in that darkness requires that we think the novelty of our situation because it is what has been brought [to] be as novelty which has enclosed everything in that darkness. Therefore think in the maze of questions about that novelty in the prolegomena to thinking about more important questions than the social. And to avoid the tendency to close down on certain aspects of that novelty requires postponing the requirements of practical life. Yet such postponement is itself questionable. At the deepest level for any Jew or Christian such postponement seems to impose an answer upon that central question from the past concerning the relation of charity to thought. To wander in the maze of questions is to turn away from the always immediate demands of charity. Leaving aside that depth, however, the postponement is questionable at a simpler and more general level. To think does not mean to write or to write to publish. If one publishes one intends to communicate with some others. And however one publishes that communication must be somewhat indiscriminate. To write inside the maze of questioning is to provide no immediate help to men the mass of whom must spend their lives dealing with their immediate responsibilities of maintaining or increasing some human order in the technical society. Indeed it has been clear since the origins of philosophy in the West that thought is always the enemy of life, of practice and of the requirements of the public realm. Whatever criticism can be made against such statements as ‘the computer does not impose on us the way it should be used’ in the name of thinking, its advantage over the ambiguities of thought in the public realm remains untouched. It is a clear statement from which practical human beings can proceed to do what is evidently important to be done.

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The claims of the immediate for action are particularly pressing for those in the West who call ourselves Jews or Christians. The claim against withdrawal is given in the very fact of those callings. (Note. It may seem impertinent for a Christian to write of the claims put upon Jews. Indeed that is not my intention. It would, however, be more impertinent to make a general statement about what Western men have called revelation and to mention only Christianity). However darkly modern existence has veiled in ambiguity what is received in being Christian, in that receiving Christians are told that they are unconditionally subject to a claim upon them by good which they have not made but receive. To put it first negatively against what we are generally told in the modern world. What it is to be told that one is a Christian is to have been told that one is not ‘beyond good and evil.’ To put it positively we are told what we are suited to is to love perfectly. Because that telling comes to us in the whole of our condition in the world, our possible acceptance of what we are told requires that it pass through the flesh by way of actions appropriate to what we have been told. Any thoughts about or desires for that good which have not passed through actions appropriate to them will be phantoms in the sense that our acceptance of that good will be only conditional. The good which we are being persuaded to accept as above all desirable is only manifest to us in the goods needed by those with whom we have possible contact. In that sense we have been told that the second commandment we have been given is ‘like unto’ the first.7 In that sense matter is an infallible judge of what we [do with?] that which we know to have been told.8 We are turned to thinking about thought because when doubt about or the dissolution of that claim to owed good turns us in hope that our thinking will bring that claim to stand radiantly in our consciousness we meet in our modern thinking only reasons for that doubt and dissolution itself. The ancient activities of philosophy and theology by which the presence of that claim was publicly sustained can [now?] no longer be publicly carried on in a world in which ‘reason’ is publicly believed to be an instrument which has arisen accidentally and which cannot judge what anything is fitted for except that which it makes. For those within the English-speaking world the difficulty of thinking about good has been particularly present. The long dominance of our peoples in the world, first under Great Britain and now under the United States,

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plus the undoubted dominance of the bourgeois within those societies has meant that thought about goodness was inhibited by the great public certainty about it. Classes whose rule is not greatly questioned at home and who are extending successfully their rule over the world are not called to contemplate their accepted conceptions of goodness. The long Whig dominance in England provided the political setting for the development of the first industrial society and its great maritime empire. Within that dominance ‘political philosophy’ did not move much outside the limits of the appropriate contractual utilitarianism which had been spoken at the beginning of that dominance. That liberalism [?] the rest of philosophy became increasingly an academic ‘epistemology’ which was supposed to clarify an advancing science of mastery. In the United States, the pioneering experience of expansion into the continent and then the capitalist expansion around the world were well ideologically sustained by and sustaining of that modern liberalism. Indeed in a society which had no history from before the age of progress, that contractual liberalism was even less inhibited than in England, where certain classes had remnantial memories from before that which came forth from a conception of comfortable self-preservation as the end of life to give their society a more forceful conception of the common good. It found that aid in the widespread influence of the right of the good. It is the destiny of North Americans then to be the society which is the first most realized technology, which is indeed the chief imperial centre from which that technology is spread around the world and where therefore the need to think what this is that we are is most pressing and yet where the resources of tradition from which to think it are extremely limited. When what presents itself to us most immediately both as ourselves and as everything else is presented as within technology, it can only be vanity to think of any matter outside thinking technology. We can only move to think of such things as the state and politics, children and education, time, God, being animals and atoms in terms of the framework of the technology within which they now present themselves to us as things to be thought. To use a non-contemporary language, that framework may not be first in the order of what is, but it is first in immediacy for us. To start to think anything as outside that framework is to think it as an abstraction, to cut it off from being what it is immediately for us. (strengthen this)

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Yet so immediately present is that framework and so few our resources of contemplation that nearly all our thinking about technology remains within a simple acceptance of technology as the external framework of what is and not a historical framework with which we are presented. Thus most of our thinking about technology becomes a simple surrender to it. For example in the leading ideologies of the modern world, Marxism and liberal democracy (give this latter if you will its theoretical name, positivism), it is generally the case that all matter may be put in question but unlimited technological advance. This is true of most Marxists (especially the official variety) and even more so of liberal positivism. Within the context of evolution and of history within evolution it is assumed that what is chiefly true of man is that he is the being who wishes to be able to do more and more with less and less muscular effort. Now this indeed may very well be a truth about us. It would be folly ever to think of technology (it would be indeed not to think it for what it is) without holding clearly in one’s mind at all times the history of man’s hunger, disease, and overwork. Nevertheless as we think technology in such a way we are extremely likely to place it as the one activity outside thought. Thought is permissible about politics, sexuality, art, God etc. but not about unlimited technological advance. It is the only subject put outside the what for, whither and what then? But this is in fact surrender to technology. (Perhaps note about Sartre) [?] [?] [Section on ancient thought and the ability to make a judgment about technology (pages 111–13 in original)] There are those who faced with the presence of the technological dynamo seek standards by which to judge it practically and ways of thought by which to comprehend it, by studying the truth of earlier philosophies and theologies from before the technological age. One example of this kind of thought is found among those philosophers and theologians (or most likely a mixture of both) who envisage their task as explicating what was known in traditional philosophy or revelation about the proper end of man and then applying these truths as standards by which men can direct technology in its development. The basic error in such positions is that those who advocate them seem to think of modern techniques simply a continuance of the way that men have come to terms with practical exigencies throughout his-

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tory (greater in quantity, but qualitatively in continuance with pre-progressive societies). They seem to conceive technique as if it were simply to do with and external of ‘material’ environment and as not touching the essence of the human condition. They seem to assume that the fundamentals of what was said about the human and divine things in the traditional position remain true and can be used as meaningful regulators for modern society. They do not seem to understand that modern technique was as much a product of modern moral science as modern natural science and that those sciences when understood in their theoretical implications make radically ambiguous the traditional teaching about the human and divine things and that those who are practically responsible for the technological era cannot therefore find in the traditional teachings the standards by which to direct the technological society. You cannot accept the traits of modern technology, as some Christian thinkers seem to do, as if they could be cut off from the accounts of human and non-human nature from which technology came forth. The extreme extent of such self-delusion can be illustrated from American Catholic thinkers who have attempted to show the close similarities between the political philosophy of Aquinas and of Locke and through Locke the similarities between Aquinas and the American constitution. Locke just happened to hold a modern non-Aristotelian account of nature. He was presumably then not sufficiently consistent to see this – that the attempt to understand the alternatives to the modern from the most comprehensive thinkers of the past and the refusal to foreclose on certain of their claims is, however, quite a different matter from asserting that such ancient thought gives us the point outside the technological present from which we can comprehend that present. For it is clear that at certain points the claimed comprehensiveness of the classics has been once and for all undermined by certain known facts discovered in modern times. To take a simple example: no sane and educated man can today hold to be true the doctrine of the eternity of species as explicated by Aristotle. Indeed the fact that we know that doctrine not to be true is the chief cause why the classical doctrine of virtue is put in question by modern men and beyond that why any doctrine of virtue has become ambiguous for us. In stating this doctrine is untrue I am not implying either (a) that the attempts of modern thinkers to pass beyond the negative consequences of the denial of the eternity of species and to assert in the light of it an account of man as a

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moral being have been successful or (b) that the untruth of the eternity of species means that we have nothing to learn from Aristotle’s account of the human things or (c) whether in Plato the doctrine of virtue depends on the doctrine of the eternity of species or whether it is possible to hold his doctrine of virtue as true without assuming the eternity of species. All those questions are left open. [Section (pages 117–25 in the original) continuing with ancient thought and the question whether it can comprehend technology] It is possible to attempt to comprehend technological civilization through the most comprehensive Western thought from before its arising and yet not consider it possible that such comprehension will afford one standards by which to deal morally with the technological dynamo. That is, to turn to what is found in the ancient philosophers not in any practical hope of deriving from them some kind of ‘ethics’ in terms of which to adapt technique, but rather in the light of their reflection about what is, to find means of understanding this remarkable civilization in which we are engrossed. Such an attempt ... must proceed from the full recognition of the unity and claimed comprehensiveness of what has come to be in modern civilization so that technique is not conceived as an external plaything which man can use as he wants, but as an occurrence totally related to the way moderns have thought about what is and what ought to be. There is none of the nonsense of attempting to control modern technology by moral standards which are only thinkable within ancient thought about the human and divine things and which have been criticized out of the minds of modern men by the very thought which allowed technological civilization to come to be. Such an attempt to understand (comprehend) technological civilization in terms of the claimed comprehensiveness of the classics is then a purely theoretical activity. It is not a practical defensive strategy for controlling technology in the interests of tradition – call such strategies if you will ‘conservatism.’ Indeed this very absence of any practical reference will make such a position appear extremely irresponsible to one engaged in the day to day business of making the best of what is. It will appear a detached elitism to those who care about others because clearly such a theoretical return to the classics is not an activity open to many. It will appear a product of romantic nostalgia to those who are sure about the claims of the modern.

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Yet it must be said that faced with the technological dynamo, with the outbreak of ferocity and violence which have characterized its realization in the twentieth century, with the nihilism which seems to be part of its very occurring and above all with the extraordinary difficulty of comprehending in its own terms what this is which is coming to be, the return to the claimed comprehensiveness of classical thought as the position from which to comprehend technological civilization is compelling. In the light of the extreme uncertainty about the what for? whither? and what then? of modern civilization it would seem at least unwise to foreclose on the thought of those who claimed to be comprehensive in their thoughts and who had said no to the potentiality towards unlimited technology. To illustrate: later in this book there is a comment on the debate between Kojève and Strauss about tyranny and wisdom.9 In that debate the essential differences between the highest ancient and the highest modern thought about political matters find their most lucid contemporary expression. That debate lays out the claim of the moderns that the universal and homogeneous state is the highest goal of political striving and the claim of the ancient political philosophers that the pursuit of such a goal must result in tyranny. And in the latter assertion there is present the belief (almost incredible for a modern as having been thought) that a society given over to continual technical development cannot be one in which human excellence will be realized. The classical political teaching at its height in Plato and Aristotle turned away from the realization of the human potentiality. Indeed the recognition of this, in the light of what we are today, must lead one to see in the classical thinkers not simply a seed-bed out of which our modern reason came to be, but an alternative rational account of what is. And to move into the details of that alternative, but not simply as an antiquarian exercise, is to come upon different answers to the most important questions not simply at the level of our political life in the immediate, but about the whole in which that politics is lived out. Beyond understanding the difference between the classical teaching about virtue and the modern accounts of human action, and the implications of such differences for our immediate dealing with our emotions and instincts, our sexuality and our politics etc. lies an understanding of the difference about the deepest matters, of nature and history, of potentiality and actuality, the possibility of deity, of the relation of thought to what is. In the recognition that the classical alter-

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natives are thought within a claimed comprehensiveness, it is possible to begin to look at the modern in its claims from outside itself and not [?] In this situation, it is not primarily a question of trying to limit the massive crimes which will be carried on with official sanction, although there may perhaps be something that can be done by irony and hiddenness to put some limits on the officially sanctioned sweet. It is rather that obedience gives us sufficient clarity for immediately required actions of charity for those who are and will be increasingly afflicted by the public crimes committed. Yet among Western men, at least, an occurrence has happened in the light of the dim apprehension of which the claims of responsibility may be stunned and in our inability to fulfil them we may be turned to a hypnotized and faltering wonder. The event is that the way the question of what is good is presented to us has (been) publicly changed. To describe this significance as an occurrence or event which has happened may seem to unify too simply and to specify too directly the complexity which is being considered. After an accident for which we are responsible we may suddenly say to ourselves ‘I have killed somebody’; [a] specified event has happened. In the more complex interaction of public occurrences there may be a moment, for example the capture of the seat of government, when one knows irretrievably that the collapse of one’s country is occurring. Yet the language is appropriate to what is being described. It is an event in that what began slowly for example in the minds of a few men has come out into the public realm. It occurs in that we are part of something like a river which runs towards its sea despite obstacles and undiverted by such diversions as its eddies and bays. It has happened in that it has fallen to the lot of most Western men to apprehend the question of what is good in a changed context from the multitude of their ancestors. ... If one then passes beyond the endless expanding and adjusting of the technological society which make up the public lives of most of us and tries to think what this is in which we unfold, one is faced with the dilemma of how to think it. On the one hand if one attempts to think it within modern thought one must end by celebrating it rather than comprehending it. The triumphs of technique are the apotheosis of the modern and therefore as we attempt to make it more explicit to ourselves within the modern it becomes an object of worship rather than

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comprehension. On the other hand, if we attempt to think it within even the most comprehensive thought from before its realization, we think as if it were not or at best as if it were some external plaything. How can one think about any important matter – art, sex, religion, thought itself, – if one does not start from this new realization as the immediate presence in which and from which any questioning proceeds? It may be that there are questions given to man as man which transcend this immediacy (but this very statement is because of the immediacy [?] the [?] which says there are no such questions) but if there be, any movement to them can only be in terms of this presence. I do not know, nor expect to know the resolution of this dilemma. To say that one did would be to assert the absurdity that one could understand the modern in all its unfolding, that one is capable of more than simply touching the garments of the greatest modern philosophers who have attempted to understand the modern. To put it crudely: if the contemporary philosopher of genius, Heidegger does not complete Sein und Zeit and speaks of waiting, it would be patent megalomania to claim any higher standpoint. Yet if the dilemma is rightly posed and its resolution unknown, the attempt to comprehend technological society (what it is made within the claim that it is our greatest North American need) must proceed from a constantly aware tentativeness. Indeed even such a tentative search must be continually assailed by the question: why try and think what the technological society is, when no such thinking can possibly change the fact that this dynamo is going to unfold irrespective of any thought. All the effort necessary to an understanding of what it is or where it has come from will not [suffice] simply to live in it as the way things are. We can escape the hold that the modern has on us as a monolith with which we analyze and begin to elucidate its wholeness as a set of analyzable and distinguishable propositions. We can judge its claimed comprehensiveness from an alternative position outside itself. It may be (I do not know) that Eastern philosophy and religion may provide equally such an alternative position with which the modern monolith can be compared. But antique thought has the enormous advantage that it is both an alternative to and the origin of the modern. When at one and the same time we think that our modern account of reason came forth from philosophy as it was for the Greeks and yet that philosophy in its contemplation of human matters rejected the building of communities centred

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on unlimited technological advance, as not serving excellence, we are given a means of looking at ourselves which is both from within and without. Yet to assert that an entry into classical thought makes possible such an analysis of the modern must not be taken as the assertion that that thought is the standpoint from which technological civilization can be comprehended.

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LETTER TO THE CANADA COUNCIL – 1972 Dear Mr [Frank] Milligan, This is a report concerning what I accomplished thanks to the grant given me by the Killam Committee of the Canada Council which freed me from teaching for the academic year 1971–72. The book I am writing has now the title ‘Techniques and good.’ This change came about because it became clear to me in writing about ‘what is technique’ that at the heart of the coming to be of modern technique [there] has been a mutual interdependen[ce] with a changed conception of goodness in the western world. What led me in that direction is that the question ‘what does technical civilization portend for the future for good or evil?’ – a question clearly of import for thinking people – is complicated by the fact that it is very unclear what is meant by good and evil in our modern technical civilizations. Indeed some of the most penetrating modern thinkers say that men have in technical civilization passed ‘beyond good and evil.’ Therefore, the main body of the work historically is an account of the relation between the arising of the modern conception of technique out of that very different classical account of technique and the arising of the modern conception of good out of the original conceptions of good from Athens and Jerusalem. The best analogy is from music. It is a contrapuntal writing in which the themes of good and technique are developed together in the hope that light is thereby thrown on the question ‘what does technical civilization portend for the future of good and evil’? Because the English-speaking world is now so dominant and because this is a book to be published in Ontario, the history will concentrate on the development of the conception of good in the Englishspeaking tradition. This has the added advantage for my purposes that in the English-speaking world the meeting of philosophy with religion (in its Protestant form) allows one to discuss in terms of the clearest paradigm the relation of the modern conception of good not only to Athens but to Jerusalem. I do not want the book to exclude theology in the name of philosophy or vice versa. It is impossible to know when the book will be finished. That depends not only on the practical considerations of how much I have to do as a teacher and organizer here, but on the much more dicey question of my ability to think through certain matters. The chief of these is

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to be able to put in the greatest clarity what it means to say that human beings are not ‘beyond good and evil’ as against certain modern philosophers who say that they are. I am not now able to think that, but am much nearer to be able to do it than eighteen months ago. What I can say to the Council is that the book is rarely out of my mind and that if I survive and remain sane (a dubious matter) this book is what I will be working on till it is completed. I have arranged to issue in appropriate Canadian journals sections of the book and to present them at appropriate learned meetings. This all expresses my profound sense of debt to the Council. Their very generous grant (which allowed me to do this work for the first time without going into debt) allowed me to move toward thinking in a way that I had never in the past. It is to be hoped that that generosity will not only result in my own great private gain, but that, in what I publish, there may be some assistance to others who are attempting to think through the fundamental questions about technical civilization. Obviously our present circumstances call Canadians to that activity. This report may appear to you not sufficiently detailed and perhaps pompous. But my gratitude to the Council led me to express in theoretical terms what I have been about, thanks to your generosity. If you want anything more exact than this, I will be delighted to write more. Yours sincerely, George Grant Notes 1 Pierre Elliott Trudeau. See 116n2. 2 See above (48) for Nietzsche’s use of the phrase ‘botched and bungled.’ 3 Isaiah 53:7: ‘... he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter’; Acts 8:32: ‘He was led as a sheep to the slaughter ...’ 4 For Leo Strauss’s influence on Grant see Collected Works, Vol. 3, 132n5. 5 Jacques Ellul (1912–94), professor of law and history at the University of Bordeaux and a noted theologian and lay member of the Reformed Church of France, was an active member of the Resistance during the Second World War, and later served as mayor of Bordeaux-Ammy. His books include The Technological Society (1964), Propaganda (1962), and Prayer and Modern Man (1970). Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss Reformed theologian, was the leading expo-

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nent of crisis, or dialectical, theology, which emphasized the contradiction between God and the world as revealed in scripture. W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) contains these lines: ‘... the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/ The blooddimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned;/ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.’ Matthew 22: 39–40. ‘And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ See below (387). See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 532–57.

Lessons of the Vietnam War – Cross-Country Check-Up

Laurier LaPierre1 had this brief exchange with Grant during a phone-in discussion about the lessons Canadians had learned from the Vietnam War on the CBC radio series Cross-Country Check-Up on 28 January 1973.

lapierre: And Dr George Grant, author and professor of religion at McMaster University in Hamilton ... grant: What happened, in my opinion, was that the biggest empire on earth decided about a little country right around the other side of the world from it, that it would smash it if it didn’t have the government that the Americans wanted. Now, this was a terrific lesson for Canadians because this wasn’t a crime done by people who were alien to us. This was a crime done by people who speak the same language, who share the same continent, under whose influence we are. And it just meant that we had to learn to live in a world where we were part of an empire that did these kinds of terrible crimes. That’s the lesson I learned. lapierre: Dr Grant, could you talk about the Canadian public opinion in general over the past ten years concerning Vietnam? Weren’t there some waves or cycles? At times people seem to be very concerned about the war. At other times, they seemed almost indifferent. grant: Well, I think that Canadians weren’t very concerned about the war. They made a lot of money out of it. You know, after all, we have been producing a lot of ... I live in a centre where a lot of money has been made out of the war and people fundamentally know they’re

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dependent on the American economy and were willing for that. Now, a lot of them, a lot of Canadians, I think, had hesitations, had more hesitations about a total link with the Americans because of the war than they had had in the past. But I think one thing now that has to come out is that the Americans have won a victory of this. I mean, Nixon, by getting the Russians and Chinese to hold off, has shown he is ... that the Americans are the biggest power in the world and this has been an American victory.2 And I think most Canadians will now go on and say, well, the Americans were making a mistake but they won’t get the point that this is a terrible mistake to make. And I think they ... I think Canadians will now settle down to saying, well, this was just a mistake of the Americans. Aren’t we glad it’s over? lapierre: Dr Grant, quite a few years ago you used to talk at teach-ins with students about the war in Vietnam and protested the war in Vietnam. Those students that you met so many years ago, what have they become and what has the student movement become since then? grant: Well, I think that, in both the United States and Canada, there is a great mood of resignation, that the protest movement that went on about five years ago, that era is over and I think that you find among the young – I think the young learned the lesson of – more than anybody else – of what kind of society they lived in and a society that could do this type of thing. But as I notice with the student movement both here and in the United States, there’s an enormous mood of resignation and impotence and the inability to accomplish immediate political ends. I mean, after all, it was clear what happened in the election in the United States, that when this kind of student movement tried to take over one of the parties, that party was really defeated in its bid for the presidency.3 lapierre: Does this apply to Canada as well? grant: Oh, yes. I think that there’s a great mood of resignation and impotence among students now. I think they are much more aware of what’s going on in the world than they were fifteen years ago. I think a lot of them saw the ridiculousness of protesting against the war in Ottawa. And then they saw their colleagues in the United States trying

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to protest against it in the United States without great success and I think the younger generation have become very apolitical because they see the extreme difficulty of acting politically in the modern world, of changing anything that’s really going on. lapierre: What about the plight of the Vietnamese people? At the beginning, I don’t think anybody cared very much. grant: I think this has been the most wonderful part of the war. The fact that this people could not be beaten by the greatest technological military power on earth. I think this has been just an amazing fact, that the Americans, with all their military might, were not able to finally, absolutely, get their way in Vietnam. lapierre: Could you say that the resistance of the Vietnamese people to the Americans in Vietnam has served as a catalyst to the Canadian nationalist movement? grant: I think you have to distinguish here between the Canadian national movement among French people and in English-speaking Canada. I think a lot of French-speaking Canadians became – the ones I know – became more determined that Frenchness should not disappear in North America and that the lesson of the Vietnam War was in that sense learned. Now, I think this whole question of nationalism is much harder in English-speaking Canada where you have the same culture, the same language, where the pressures of economic control are even greater and I think that there is a fringe nationalist movement, particularly among the young, and I think it’s very important and very powerful and very fine people in it. But I think in the next month it’s going to come up very clearly, we’ll see how strong it is in terms of energy policy, in terms of the Auto Pact.4 And so far, there doesn’t seem much sign that we’re going to win these victories.

Notes 1 Laurier LaPierre (1929– ), television personality, author, editor, and aca-

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demic, taught Canadian history at University of Western Ontario, Loyola College, and McGill (1962–78), and established a national reputation as cohost of the CBC’s popular television program This Hour Has Seven Days (1964–6). He served in the Canadian Senate 2001–4. 2 Richard Nixon (1913–94), thirty-seventh president of the United States (1969–74). See 72n20. 3 Grant is referring to the victory of Richard Nixon over Senator McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. 4 The Canada-US Automotive Products Agreement (Auto Pact) was a conditional free-trade agreement signed in 1965 to create a single North American market for cars, trucks, and parts. Under the agreement, manufacturers were obliged to maintain the same ratio of production to sales in Canada as existed in 1964. Critics have argued that under the pact the industry remained foreign-controlled and American automobile companies spent little on research and development in Canada. In the early 1970s, energy issues became the focus of a broad debate in Canada between Pierre Trudeau’s minority Liberal government (1972–4) and its nationalist critics. The oil industry was overwhelmingly under foreign control and Canada’s energy policies appeared to be increasingly oriented to North American rather than domestic needs. At the time of this interview in 1973, plans were under way to create (1974) the Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA) to review all foreign takeovers of existing businesses. Later, in 1975, the Petro-Canada Act created a crown corporation to enter the oil business at all levels to create a Canadian presence in the industry.

Ramsay Cook Interviews George Grant

The interview with Ramsay Cook1 – about the Second World War, Quebec nationalism, and the problem of feeling at home in the technological world – was broadcast on the CBC TV series Impressions on 5 August 1973.

cook: Well, George, you’re a philosopher and a professor of religion. But a great deal of your writing seems to me to deal with public affairs. Does that get you in trouble with your fellow philosophers? grant: Well, you know, philosophers in the English-speaking world have been mainly interested in certain logical questions and not very interested in the public world. But I don’t think it gets me in any trouble because I don’t think they’re very interested. cook: Well, how do you explain your own ability to escape what you call ‘modern philosophy?’ That is to say, you are a kind of an outsider in terms of modern philosophy. Is it in your education or your family background? grant: Well, with questions about one’s self, one is not a very good observer. I think people are done by generations. I noticed with my older sisters the Depression was the big thing for them ... compared to the war. And these big events that form people do, I think, cast differences between generations. And certainly I would say that the ’39 War was the enormous thing for me. cook: What did you do during the war?

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grant: Well, at the beginning of the war I was a pacifist because I had been brought up ... I had just taken for granted, I’d been part of the generation that thought that ... then I was in England. I’d gone over to study after leaving Queen’s. So when the war got intense, I was in charge of a part of east London that was being very badly bombed and then I went into the British Merchant Navy. God knows, ... to ask me whether I was right to be a pacifist. I just don’t know. But I was of the ... I thought the war was inconceivable, you know. People growing up in Toronto today are much more sophisticated, you know. I don‘t think you can imagine how ... how ... what a simple person, what a simple person I was at that time. cook: Well, I find it hard to believe that you were a simple person, George. You’re ... grant: But society was given much more. You know, I took for granted I was going to be ambitious, get along, sort of become a lawyer or something or go into politics. The forms of society were very much given. Canada was a very small country, after all, about 1940. cook: Your university background in Canada was at Queen’s. Is that right? grant: Yeah. Yeah. cook: And your grandfather had once been the Principal of Queen’s.2 grant: Yeah. Yeah. cook: And then you went ... before you went to Queen’s you went to Upper Canada [College]? grant: Yeah. cook: So in some sense one might say that you were a member or a scion of an establishment family. grant: Yeah.

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cook: Was that your own sense of life in those days — that you could do anything you wanted, go on and do anything you wanted? grant: I don’t think ‘anything you wanted,’ but I took for granted ... I’ll never forget when I was very poor, after the war, I suddenly realized I had to get some money to buy a house. Well, I thought houses ... when I grew up ... My family weren’t rich at all, though there was money around, but I mean I just took for granted houses were given and that you got jobs and the world was very easily arranged. cook: Did you go to Oxford after Queen’s? grant: Yes. cook: To study philosophy? grant: No, to study law. cook: Oh, to study law. So that you really had intended very explicitly to be a lawyer? grant: Yes. cook: Well, at what point did your mind change about that? grant: Over the war. cook: The war did that? grant: The war. And ... you know, through the bombing and later, I saw a great deal of violent things and found the war pretty unsupportable. But I think I was converted. I would only say I was converted. I was totally brought up at the centre of a certain – not the centre, but it was a very dominant thing in the eastern seaboard of the United States and certain parts of Canada and in England – a certain kind of liberalism and for a vast variety of reasons, some totally private and others – the war, I think – that I came to realize that this ... this had come to ... this was coming to an end, this could no longer be believed.

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cook: You mean by liberalism a belief in the perfectibility of man or in the perfectibility of society, do you? grant: What I mean by English-speaking liberalism is really a certain form of secularized Christianity. And ... for a long time, the death of Western Christianity was not clear because a kind of secular Christianity, either in American liberalism or, in a certain way, in Marxism, sort of kept it going. But I think both of them are through, cannot be thought, cannot be thought any more. cook: Some years ago now – I suppose eight years ago – you wrote a book called Lament for a Nation in which you said that it was really ... that Canadian nationalism was dead, that it had become ... homogenized in this process. Could you tell me, George, what do you think it was that died, what was it about Canada that had made it a different country than its neighbour to the south or to the English-speaking world in general? grant: This now gets hard! Well, you know, Canada originally was put together by two groups of people who didn’t have much in common but didn’t want to be American. I mean, this is ... I’ve been saying this to you who know more about this certainly than I do. And I think the French have gone on knowing, to some extent, though they are very deeply influenced by technique and by great corporations, I think the French have gone on knowing why they are not American. I think it’s very hard for English-speaking Canadians to know why they’re ... cook: Do you think [in] the French Canadian case it was the continued strength and importance of their religious values? grant: I don’t like the word value. I think of their religion and of their ... of their speech. Now, they’ve ... largely given up their religion. Or at least they’ve given up a very ancient and very remarkable religion for a rather cheap one at the moment, I think. But they’ve ... and what is going to happen to them without that religion is very hard to say. I don’t know enough – you know much more about French Canada than I do – much, much more – but I don’t see much hope in this kind of Marxist French nationalism. I don’t think they’re going to build in Que-

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bec a society that keeps itself different from the United States in that way. I just don’t see any hope in that. cook: In other words, where some French-Canadian nationalists these days would say that they are modernizing their society and building a new and different society in North America, in your terms they’re really becoming more like the rest of us. grant: Yes, I would think so in many ways. cook: In the very sense of modernization. grant: Yes, in many ways. In many ways. cook: Well, to go back to the English-Canadian side of this for the moment, you have a sense, however, that our society, our Englishspeaking society, was once much more differentiated from the United States than now. grant: Well, anger is a bad motive for a philosopher at any point and I had to defend darling Mr Diefenbaker in part, so therefore some of the things I said were rather extreme. But I think this, too. You know, the possibility that English-speaking Canadians were going to be different from this great, enormous empire down to the south, it may have been an impossible hope from the very beginning. And, mind you, one thing that is very hard – and people who have been brought up in liberalism find it very hard – I think it is much harder to resist a capitalist empire than a communist empire. So the communist empire works through the state and directly moves in with brutal injustice. But a capitalist imperialism is a very subtle and amazing thing, as we know from the great corporations. And it’s extremely hard for indigenous organizations to withstand it. cook: You mean in the sense that it produces a certain amount of pleasure in the course of ... rape. grant: Yes. Yes.

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cook: Do you think the rest of us would have a better chance or a poorer chance of surviving if we didn’t have French Canada? grant: I don’t think we’d have a chance at all. I mean, it is inconceivable to me to have Canada without French Canada. Do you know what I mean? These people who talk about being Canadian nationalists and then are hostile to French Canada, just don’t even know what they’re talking about. I just haven’t got ... I just literally don’t know what they’re talking about. cook: People talk about something that we ... the kind of society we live in these days as a technological society, and it seems to me that when that term is used it means, in effect, that the world is full of machinery and technology and so on. But when you use the term technological society, you mean something much more all-encompassing than that, don’t you? In fact, you don’t use the word technological society. You use the term – you used it a moment ago – you use the term technique. grant: Yes, well, I think technological is just ... it was a neologism invented in the United States in the 1850s and you wouldn’t talk about life as biology. You know, biology is the study of life. Well, technology is the study of technique. That’s why I like the word technique better.3 cook: Technique is not all that machinery out there, but technique is the way that Man thinks about his world. grant: Yes, I think just the fact that science looks at the world as object means it looks at the world in a particular way. It relates to the world in a particular way. People are saying, all the little inventions of technique don’t influence, or can be used one way or another. The automobile doesn’t impose on us the ways it should be used. Well, the automobile has ... we can use it but it has entirely shaped us in a certain sense. It has entirely shaped the history of this country, for instance. When you take an automobile, which is the same ... which we needed, you see, in a certain sense, I mean, it shapes us. I just don’t think that you can look ... I go from the automobile to the most extreme theoretical other way – algebra. Algebra is a particular notation and it’s extremely interesting –

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the Greeks turned their back on algebra directly. Now, algebra is a particular abstract notation which dominates the way you look at the world and in that sense you see certain things and not other things. This is why I so greatly admire a philosopher who’s not much admired in the English-speaking world but I think was a very great philosopher, Nietzsche. I think he saw this early, with enormous clarity, that modern science was a great – an amazing theoretical and practical achievement, but he saw, at the same time, he utterly accepted it and yet saw how killing it was to men at a certain point. cook: One of the aspects of modern technological society or the impact of technique on modern society, as I understand it from your writing, is the creation of an increasingly homogeneous world. grant: Yes, yes. cook: That all cultural or national differentiations are being wiped out. grant: Of course. cook: Is this one of the consequences of technique, that it makes everything uniform? grant: In terms of modern science, it sees the world entirely as object and the world as object is the same, one place as another. You know, we find this with all this question about Canada and universities. And you can never get chemists to see any of the point because chemistry is the same wherever it is done. cook: You mean the question of whether Canadian universities should be different from American or some other? grant: Yes. Quite, quite, quite. But I mean, the point is that at the heart of science is summoning forth things to stand before them to give their reasons. That is, to be objects for them. And objects are the same everywhere. Now, in that sense, scientific society led to homogenization. But I think also modern moral philosophy believed – and it was a rather fine, you know, a fine belief – that the end of history was to build the

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universal society of free and equal men. And that with all these local differences that had caused wars and everything like that, I think modern liberalism went directly with modern science. They came out of the same spirit and they went together. Now, the question remains whether this universal society of free and equal men, if that, as a goal of human striving, does not lead directly to tyranny. That is the question. You know, whether the consequence of this extreme homogenization is not tyranny. cook: Some kind of general tyranny of the developed world? grant: What tyranny will be like when it has enormous technical weapons is very hard to say, but we are clearly moving towards that in a sort of series of great imperial powers at the moment who control within certain areas. And now, I think one of the strange things about modern tyranny, is that it is not going to appear often very nasty, it’s not going to be a wild, crazy, romantic tyranny – I mean, romantic as the nasty word – like national socialism. But I mean, there is a kind of ... well, let me say what I think the tyranny of the United States is going to be. At a sort of late state capitalist stage, it’s going to be the Mental Health State. It’ll be the Mental Health State. It’ll be the tyranny of the mental health organization. cook: This all sounds very Orwellian. Is Orwell4 a thinker in your ... grant: To go back to the other thinkers, I would be closer to Old Huxley.5 I think Brave New World is a clear ... I don’t think it’s going to be ... I think it’s going to be done in a much smoother way. Do you know what I mean? I mean, you will be able to control – with the morning after birth control pill you’ll be able to ... and people could have to get licensed to get children. I think it will be done much more ... you know, Orwell’s is much too violent, I think. I think the violence will be much smoother. cook: You would see this problem of the way in which the Canadian university has expanded at such a rate and has brought in large numbers of non-Canadians into the universities as being a very central one in the question of continued survival of even a marginal culture in Canada.

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grant: Well, it’s the one I am concerned with because I’m in it. You know, I’m in a university and I’m just a university person. cook: What have been the major changes in the – what shall I say? – the goals of the Canadian university in the years that you’ve been teaching in it? grant: Well, university is a common word but, you know, if you compare, let’s say, the U of T with what it was in 1937 to what it is now, I think the word multiversity is much better. And it is a university ... it is ... and these multiversities are more and more directed to the end I have called technique. To the masterful control of human and non-human nature. And that certainly dominates the universities to a very great extent and I think the basis of this is a long thing in terms of ... The word education meant leading out, you know, leading out. It was Plato’s word. It was leading out from the shadows and imagining to the eternal order. Now, practically nobody believes there is an eternal order, therefore what is to be known but organizing within? Therefore, the universities have become sort of corporations for organizing the technical society. cook: Do you think anything very helpful has come out of the unrest of the late 1960s for us in the universities? grant: This is hard. You know the time I liked the revolt in the United States, the time I liked the most was when Savio was at Berkeley,6 because I mean, God, I’d been to Berkeley and it just seemed to me a knowledge whorehouse. Do you know what I mean? And I admired these youngsters ... Now, I think therefore the first step is to see the lack in modern society, to be able to look at the past. Now, I certainly find with a lot of youngsters they are more willing to ... but this is a prodigious activity to understand how we came to where we are. cook: Well, there of course are some people who have read your ... some of your writings and have seen them as merely a lament for the decline of the British characteristics of Canadian society. But that’s an unfair reading, isn’t it? grant: I think there were certain goods incarnate in certain traditions

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in Canada that we call British traditions. And as practical things I’m sad for them to go, with certain things. But that they have gone. Why talk about it? It’s just gone. And I think also I’m incomparably more interested in the faith of man in technical society, because that is a universal problem and a problem that is just inescapable. And I mean, and much greater traditions are going to go than minor Loyalist traditions. You know, I’m sorry that certain things go and I think that practical things can be lost in this. I like parts of our tradition. I mean, the constitutional sort of parliamentary tradition, well, that’s great, as long as it goes on. Now, I am increasingly concerned with issues like what is the nature of modern science, what is the nature of modern reason, what is the eternal and things like that? My first business is to be a professor of religion. cook: And all of this rather puzzles me, George, because here you are, the Canadian nationalist on the one hand and yet, on the other hand, you’re saying the questions which really interest me are universal questions and not really, in any profound sense, Canadian questions at all. They’re Canadian insofar as they’re part of the universal questions. grant: But I mean, if the greatest ... if the greatest question is how can Man be at home, if technological society makes a homeless world and the great question is how one can be in any sense at home in the world, then one is always at home in the world in a particular place. Do you know what I mean? The status of particularity is a universal question, if you see what I mean. And that’s a sort of a smart-assed way of answering it. But you see what I mean? I mean, I think the great question, what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God,’ went with the death of people having any home. One eats and sleeps and fornicates in motels, you know, just anywhere, and they’re all the same in North America. Why does one move from suburb to suburb? Why is one at home, etc. etc. etc.? I mean, the question of how people can live in this kind of universalized world is how you can move back to be a being at home; having passed through the most extreme homelessness seems to me a universal question of something. But it affects me – and I’m not only a philosopher, I’m also a father and it affects me in terms of what they’re doing to Dundas, Ontario, those highways ... Or what they’re doing to Nova Scotia, and all those kinds of things.

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cook: So the problem of ruthlessness. grant: Yes. cook: The problem of alienation in a contemporary jargon. grant: Yes. cook: Well, the Marxist explanation of this is that it’s capitalism that creates alienation. Now, I got it from your writings that while you have a considerable admiration for Marx and a considerable disdain for the modern capitalist system, you’re not a Marxist. grant: No, certainly not. cook: Why not? grant: Well, I think on the one side, the two great public systems in the world are Marxism and American liberalism. And at a certain level, the ideological battle seems between those two and the American liberals say, well, we have ... the universal world will come in best through liberalism ... and the Marxists say it’ll come best through the Marxist. But I think behind them both what distinguishes them is not nearly as great as what unites them: the belief in the building of the universal and homogeneous society through the conquest of human and non-human nature, through science. I mean, American liberalism and Marxism are very close in some ways. And I would see them as products of modernity, public products of modernity but modernity not at its height. cook: So that the ideological surface has an underpinning of the same kind of view of Man and view of society that they’re both modern philosophies and they’re both messianic. grant: Oh, very close, very close. cook: And they’re both very powerful. grant: And both very powerful. Yes. Though less and less powerful, in a way. They’re less and less powerful.

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Notes 1 George Ramsay Cook (1931– ), professor of history at York University 1971– 96, is the author of Canada and the French-Canadian Question (1966) and The Maple Leaf Forever: Essays on Nationalism and Politics in Canada (1971), which includes an essay on Grant. He received a Governor General’s Award for The Regenerators: Social Criticism in Late Victorian English Canada (1985) and is an officer of the Order of Canada. In 2005 Cook was a recipient of the Molson Prize in Social Sciences and Humanities. 2 George Monro Grant (1835–1902), Presbyterian minister and educator and Grant’s paternal grandfather, was principal of Queen’s from 1877 to his death. 3 Shortly after this interview, Grant changed his mind on this point and began to use the word ‘technology,’ because it expressed the modern phenomenon of the coming together of knowing and making. 4 George Orwell (né Eric Blair) (1903–50), English novelist, essayist, and journalist, was the author of the popular satires about the threat of tyranny, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). 5 Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894–1963), English novelist and short-story writer, explored the threat of world domination by scientific totalitarianism in his satirical novel Brave New World (1932). 6 Mario Savio (1942–96) was a student activist who led the protest at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s against the university administration and against the war in Vietnam. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 404n3.

Exchange with Peter Gzowski on This Country in the Morning

Peter Gzowski1 talked with Grant about Lament for a Nation (eight years after it was written), Canada, ‘the mental health state,’ and Archibald Lampman’s poem ‘The City at the End of Things’ on the CBC radio series This Country in the Morning on 10 October 1973.

gzowski: George Grant, author, Rhodes scholar, professor of religion, now at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, is also, I hope he will not be embarrassed to hear me say, something of, if not a cult figure, then a folk hero of sorts to many people. Principally, I would say, Professor Grant, because of your book, Lament for a Nation, dated 1965, which I had the pleasure of reading then and browsing through again last night, wondering how, if at all, your views had changed about the nation whose departure from this earth you were lamenting, in a way, in 1965. Have they changed? grant: Yes, if they don’t change over eight years, you’re a fool. I think that at first a lot of young people have learned ... in the fifties and the early sixties, most young people in Canada thought the United States was the Mecca and the hope of the world. And when they were moved, they were foolish enough to be moved by a fellow like Jack Kennedy.2 Now, I think that has changed and that is good. I think, mind you, they haven’t changed in a basic way, that we still have to face the enormous power of the greatest empire that has ever been, with which we share a continent. gzowski: You are a conservative, both small ‘c’ and upper ‘C’ conserva-

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tive. You make no bones about that fact. And yet, the people you had the most influence on in the 1960s are people who have emerged as figures of the left since then, as people who have led the movement toward economic nationalism. Has that confused you in any way? grant: No. I don’t take immediate politics ... as colossally important beyond a point. And I would ... I could change my vote tomorrow, you know, if what I’m interested in is the preservation on the north half of this continent of something that is ... that keeps its ability to be autonomous, to run itself. And the reason I have backed the Conservative party in a kind of practical way sometimes, is that I think that unless you get some of the bourgeois, if you want to use that language, the middle class, to be for nationalism, it’s going to be defeated. And I care about nationalism, you know, and I don’t want it to be defeated. And now, in my opinion, in English-speaking Canada, the big technocratic corporations and the managers around them have largely gone for the Liberal party in a big way for a long time. And there is more hope to me ... you know, it may be a minor hope, but remember my view of politics is what Thomas More said. When you can’t get the best to happen, prevent the worst from happening. And I’m not an optimist in politics. I know that nationalism has to have support from some of the middle class or it’s finished in English-speaking Canada. I would say if I was a Québécois, I would also have some sense of, like Lévesque has, of getting the middle class into his party. And I just don’t see any hope for nationalism without that. gzowski: Very early in Lament for a Nation you write, ‘Now that this hope has been extinguished ...’ and the hope that you say has been extinguished – this is in 1965 – is, I’ll quote again, ‘To build a more ordered and stable society than the liberal experiment in the United States.’3 But you say, ‘Now that this hope has been extinguished’ in 1965. What would you ... would you re-write that sentence in 1973? grant: Pretty hard to re-write it, I think. When you think of the power of multinational technocratic liberal[ism] from the United States, when you think that Brezhnev has had to come crawling to it, I think one sees ... I mean, it is a way of life.4 It is a way of life that has swept through

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Western Europe more and more and we are very near to it and it’s going to be extremely hard for us to have any kind of alternative way of life to that. Now I’m not a person who thinks he should only fight for causes that are going to win in the long run, for God’s sake. I mean I think that’s always ridiculous in life. gzowski: But you don’t think that things have changed since the middle 1960s, that there is, in Canada, a greater sense of itself, perhaps less strident nationalism, perhaps ... grant: Oh, I think I agree with that. I agree with that. There’s a much greater sense of itself, and particularly, you know, I’m surprised all the time with ... I mean, the part of the world I know best is Hamilton and I’m surprised all the time with the number of youngsters who, ten years ago, would have thought nationalism was outdated, who really ... they don’t quite know what Canadian nationalism could be, but they ... the American Dream has left them. gzowski: Well, that I think seems to me ... if I can offer an observation ... that perhaps people have stopped talking about it and started doing it. They’ve stopped talking about being Canadians and they have more and more just become Canadians. They are pretty much being themselves, in a way, that in the 1960s, when Lament for a Nation was a necessary and important book, they were not. grant: Well, I’m a teacher of religion, not an economist, but there are enormous ... I mean, if you’re going to control your society, you have to have control of its economic basis. And whether Canada is going to ... whether we are able to do that remains to be seen. I mean, when the crunches get tough, I haven’t seen it happening in the federal government in Ottawa recently. Also, I think Canada as a nation, it seems to me, only exists for something beyond itself, namely to build something better, to deal with technological society better than the Americans have. Now, whether this is going to happen ... you know, people praise Toronto very highly ... whether this is going to be a viable form of life is another matter, isn’t it? I’m just not sure. gzowski: Yes, but if you say the question has not yet been answered,

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then you cannot write, ‘Now that the hope has been extinguished’ because as long as the question has not been answered, surely the hope is still afire. grant: Now, mind you, I wrote that book from a very bad philosophic motive, namely anger. And the anger was hatred of what the rich and the clever were doing to Diefenbaker ... in other words, what the ruling class was doing to Diefenbaker. And therefore, it was written in anger and that accentuates a book too much, doesn’t it? gzowski: Well, I was ... it was interesting to me, on re-reading it, how much it did centre around John Diefenbaker, particularly in the early passages. Because that is not the thing that had remained in my mind about the impact of Lament for a Nation. But suddenly I pick up and, right on Page 1 we’re talking about John Diefenbaker and I’m ... and as you say, you keep talking about the dominant classes and the Toronto Tories and the people who ... grant: Well, I didn’t mean the Toronto Tories. I meant the Toronto Liberals. gzowski: Well, but also the Toronto people who ... who ... grant: Yes. Well you know, I was brought up in that class. And I’d watched people from Toronto and Montreal, the wealthy, sell out their country for twenty years. You know, as people say, rot of the society starts at the head, like a fish. And I think the people who really hurt this country most of all were the very wealthy and powerful. Without a doubt. And I think they did this. gzowski: I want to ask you about John Diefenbaker in particular, but you have demanded a question about how from within that structure could you detect its rot and what would throw you out of it, you as an individual, a man whose grandfather was the Principal of Queen’s University and you yourself a distinguished scholar and, as you say, part of that class structure? When did you suddenly say we’re the bad guys, I want out?

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grant: Well, I don’t think personal life is very important at a certain level and I don’t want to talk about my psyche. It would be revolting. But I think I was, for a lot of personal and social reasons and intellectual reasons, I was ... I saw the utter failure of that class and that is what ... that was basically behind it. I suppose one of the things that was behind it, too, I lived in that home of all greatness, Nova Scotia, for fourteen years. gzowski: When you were at Dalhousie. grant: Yeah. And I decided to come home to where I came from, to Ontario. And Ontario just seemed to me economically like a conquered province. The power of the international corporations was everywhere. Everybody was telling me who they thought was their ruler, like in a generation before they’d thought Roosevelt was their ruler. They thought Kennedy was their ruler. None of them seemed to ... they wanted a foreign policy like Pearson’s that just went along with anything the Americans wanted.5 It was out of that that the book was written. Now, the book may have been too immediate; it was a polemical book, a book written in anger. gzowski: About John Diefenbaker. He, as you say so forcefully in the beginning of the book, he was vilified by the press and by the kind of people you’re talking about, from 1963, let’s say, ’til ’65. Since then, he has become something of a folk hero. The very people who were laughing at him now are celebrating him as ... a figure of great national importance. Do you agree with that? grant: Yes, but he can’t touch them now. You know, he’s long past power. They got him out of power. I don’t want to praise Mr Diefenbaker’s political wisdom too highly. I thought he was terribly wrong in the Saskatchewan election last year. Just terribly wrong. But what I admired in Diefenbaker was, in an era where everybody’s opinions are changing, you know, in a fast-changing technical society you have ... everybody changes their opinions every minute. Diefenbaker had certain sort of primary elemental loyalties that he didn’t give way on. That’s what I admired. And do admire about him so greatly. Now, sometimes those loyalties take him in very, I think, unwise directions but ...

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gzowski: At least they’re steadfast and ... grant: You know, they are something. He isn’t a corporation smoothie. gzowski: Let me pause briefly for a couple of minutes and I’ll be back with Professor George Grant ... ... Continuing now a conversation with Professor George Grant, author of Lament for a Nation and other books, I should hasten to add. About, what, seven or eight altogether, Professor? grant: Three or four. gzowski: Three or four. Well lots of articles, then. He was talking about some of his views particularly as expressed in Lament for a Nation. There’s a fundamental dilemma in there that interests me, but just before I pose it to you, you mentioned ... there’s a phrase that I scribbled down last night as I was reading it. ‘Branch plant economies have branch plant cultures,’ you wrote. ‘The O’Keefe Centre symbolizes Canada.’6 What did you mean by that? grant: Well, I think it’s clear. If people don’t control the way they make their living, if they don’t control their natural resources, if they don’t control the way they make their living, if they don’t control their water, if they don’t control their destiny, then what they do in the way of ... the theatre does not make a culture. I mean by a culture a way of life. In that sense, I think a person like Mr Diefenbaker or Mr Claude Ryan of Le Devoir are cultured.7 They’re rooted in the earth. In their own. And whipping to a cocktail party or to a ballet is not to me culture. Now, obviously the O’Keefe Centre, when I wrote that book, was just a home for plays for New York, that’s all. The slick musicals that were written to go on to the movies, finally. You know, and that has nothing to do with culture in the sense of ... gzowski: It has nothing to do with who we are. grant: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. gzowski: The dilemma seems ... I daren’t quote from my own notes because I used a rather naughty word in the middle of them, but I said

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that the dilemma of the lamenter, I wrote to myself, is how to maintain people’s will to change while pointing out that things have gone to – and then I wrote a naughty word – and you wrote in your book, ‘When a man truly despairs, he does not write. He commits suicide.’ But ... so the dilemma, it seems to me, is your book of ... your lament for Canada, your book in which you wrote that ‘... hope has been extinguished.’ Your outflow of anger, saying that ‘It is too late. We have sold out.’ How do you resolve that as a philosopher with the idea of keeping people wanting to make things better, to preserve the kind of society that you want to see preserved and developed? grant: Well, I think first ... to talk directly ... hope has always been, for people of my tradition, a supernatural virtue. You know, let me put it ... you don’t have hope just because things are going well and you ... if you look at the history of the world. If you were a Chilean today, you might say my goodness, what is going to ... what is it going to be like?8 That would be no reason not to have hope in your existence and hope within ... I have no idea what it would be to now act in Chile, of one kind or another. But I agree. I think people have taken my book as a thing to take away hope. Now, I have, by nature, being a religious believer, I have very great hope. And hope in the world, too. And by hope in the world I don’t mean hope in progress because I certainly believe in some sense in the eternal recurrence, that things go up and down and around, you know, endlessly. But I don’t think it’s any good ... there’s an awful lot in North America which it seems to me comes, above all, from a kind of secularized Protestantism. Wherever everybody gets up and substitutes a sort of YMCA optimism. You can even say YMHA optimism. For really facing a situation as it is. Now, it doesn’t seem to me any situation should absolutely take away one’s hope. gzowski: And yet, you say … you compare your own lament and you emphasize that word several times throughout the book as well as in the title. You say you can lament a dead child and at the same time what you are doing is celebrating the goodness of its presence on earth. So to me there is such despair in that analogy that reading it now, reflecting on it in tranquillity eight years later, forgetting the way I responded to it at the time, reading it now I think why wouldn’t that kind of despair make me say ... oh, to hell with it, I’m just going to become an American.

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grant: Well, for myself, I couldn’t. It just would be out of the question. I don’t say I think this is an extreme dilemma for human life at all times and all places, the dilemma you’ve put. I mentioned Chile, but you can just go back, think of being a slave in the slave revolt of Spartacus against Rome. gzowski: Yes, but if I’d been a slave in the slave revolt of Spartacus, I would have said let’s revolt. I would not have said it’s too late, we’re all in chains forever, which is the message that I thought could be taken from Lament for a Nation. grant: Well, I didn’t mean that message. I didn’t mean that message for one minute. I think people who even if, at the very last moment, one is going down, one should go down with all guns blazing and all flags flying. I’m a Cape Breton Scot by origin, who comes from a people who went down before the English, a finer society, like clan society in Scotland, went down before the English. We all come from societies where things have gone down and not gone well. ... You know, I have no doubt at all that despair is the worst human evil. I’ve just no doubt at all about that. And certainly I didn’t mean it. Now, mind you, that book was not written as a philosophic book ... you have to have motives to write a book, and my motive was rage that they’d brought atomic weapons into Canada. Just rage. And that, after all this yacky[?] talk of Pearson about the United Nations and everything, he was the person who brought them in at that period.9 But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that one has to go on. Otherwise, I try to do practical things and try to do theoretical things. I don’t see why, if one sees a situation clearly, that is any cause for despair. gzowski: Yes. I’ll quote again what you said. ‘When a man truly despairs, he does not write. He commits suicide.’ And so ... grant: Right. Well, that’s why I think it’s so crazy about all these books, a lot of these very despairing books that have come out of the Existentialist movement in Europe. Why don’t they shut their traps? You know, if they think that being is hideous, to be in the world, to be a human being is a hideous and abyssful thing, then I don’t see why they should want to tell other people. You only write if you think that it’s good to be.

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gzowski: Well, I want to move into another area, but I have to stop again and I’ll return very quickly with Professor George Grant ... Professor George Grant, with whom I am talking, has been called a ‘red tory’ and while I’m not a great fan of labels myself, I’d like to ask him now if you, Professor Grant, are as intrigued as I am by the fact that so many of the people who are activists today, radicals, if you will, people who are involved in trying to change things in Canadian society – or trying to stop things – they’re becoming ... they are conservatives, in many ways. Stop James Bay. Stop the expressways.10 Stop development, in many cases. It’s become ... radicalism and conservatism have become curiously intertwined. Do you agree with that? grant: Yes, I agree. And this is, in practical, Canadian terms, a great difficulty because there are going to be a lot of people who want to be able to get out in the country and see something nice. There are going to be a lot of people who want to well, let me put it this way, stop the Mental Health State. I think the next stage of capitalism is going to be the Mental Health State. gzowski: What does the Mental Health State mean? grant: I mean, in the contradictions of capitalism that arise, the mental health industry will be the means whereby people are kept in order. I’m sure that is the next stage in North American development. Now, if you want to stop that ... all politics is concerned with two things: making good things happen and preventing bad things happening. And both are equally important. Unless you are just a progressive who thinks that good things are going to inevitably happen – and that’s crap, it’s just nonsense – then it seems to me that you have to be aware that if bad things are going on they should be stopped. And it seems to me that if we’re going to ... I mean, do you think it’s going to fulfill the greatness of human life to build Don Mills from coast to coast? No, that’s not what Canada was, it seems to me. And clearly people have become aware that unlimited expansion is just destruction for them as people. And therefore, they want to stop this happening. gzowski: Isn’t that easy for an academic to say or a philosopher to say, but perhaps a little difficult for a guy sitting in Come-by-Chance, New-

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foundland ... who wouldn’t have a job if John Shaheen didn’t bring that refinery in there?11 It’s quite easy for you and I ... grant: I quite agree. A very fine man, the Premier of New Brunswick once said this to me. You know, Hatfield.12 He said it’s all very well, but just drive through New Brunswick and see the poverty and doesn’t it ... But I mean, this surely has to be balanced. I totally agree with that. I utterly agree with your criticism, that these people who got what they want, the bourgeois around Toronto and now think, so that they can have places to fish, want to stop any development. That’s crazy. I agree. But surely, you take a province I love very deeply, Nova Scotia. On the one hand, one wants to eliminate some of the poverty in Nova Scotia. On the other hand, does one want to make it Toronto? You know, what one loves in Nova Scotia is greatness of human life. Now, I mean, it’s the balance. I agree with your point utterly and I think a lot of people are foolish sentimentalists who don’t accept it ... But I mean, surely politics is always balancing, always moderate in that sense. And our position is to balance economic expansion without letting it just demolish everything that is around. gzowski: Professor George Grant. Lament for a Nation, an important book when it appeared in 1965. I would suggest an important book in 1973. Could you stay past the news and talk about this one more aspect of Lament for a Nation I’d like to talk to you about? grant: Sure. Sure. I don’t mind. gzowski: Good. I’ll be back after the news with a little more with Professor Grant. I’m Peter Gzowski. ... Back now with Professor George Grant. And Professor Grant, I let you get away with the Mental Health State. And you said it was coming and you said we should stop it and it has ominous sounds. But I’m not quite sure what you mean by the Mental Health State. Does it mean we must all think as the psychiatrists tell us we should think? grant: Yes, it means there is no profession that has been given more power in our society than the medical profession. And it’s taken over ... it’s taken over psychiatry, that is, the mind or the soul, whatever you

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want to call it. And it seems to me that what is going to happen is to keep public order, you’re going to put in this thing that anybody who steps out of line is not going to be ... in the old days they could be called mad. Or could be called even wicked. But now they’re just going to be fitted in, and with the enormous powers that the medical profession has and fitted in to a society. And as the contradictions of our present stage of corporation capitalism develop, I think this is going to be an enormous authority used by people. gzowski: Take your little tranquilizer, Jones, and stop complaining about the work condition? Is that the sort of ...? grant: It’s in all kinds of means. All kinds of means will be used. I mean, the psychiatric profession will move to increasingly strong, you know, not only physical means but all kinds of means of persuasion. To fit people in to the society as it is. I’m sure that that is going to happen. And the two big professions on whom the future of this society depends more than anything else are the police and the doctors. And I don’t know if either are going to be controlled. And the doctors certainly have the bit in their teeth and think that they know what is good for people under all circumstances. And I can see it as an enormous instrument of tyranny. Kenneth Keniston, who’s a professor of psychiatry at Yale has written a lot about this. Sees it in the United States. Or Robert Coles at Harvard has written a lot about this.13 gzowski: Changing the individual to suit the society, rather than having the individual change the society. Is that ... am I over-simplifying it? grant: Yes. As you know, in a society whose public rhetoric is freedom, it’s hard to maintain order, and these will be instruments of maintaining the very strictest order. And a very tough order. gzowski: I have a poem I want you to hear and talk about. Before that, though, can I ask you one question based again on Lament for a Nation, in which you write — this grows out of a comment on Diefenbaker, but I’ll leave that aside. You write, ‘The keystone of the Canadian nation is the French fact. The slightest knowledge of history makes this platitu-

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dinous. English-speaking Canadians who desire the survival of their nation have to cooperate with those who seek the continuance of Franco-American civilization.’14 Now I’d ask that ... you wrote that in 1965. Again, do you have the feeling, do you have any feeling that French-Canadians have already responded to their George Grants, have created their own nation, are now existing in a way that they do not need us and that they are, in fact, going from Canada? Do you have that feeling? You said earlier that if you were in Quebec you would be a separatist. grant: Oh, I didn’t quite say that. gzowski: Well, maybe didn’t quite say that. You didn’t quite say that. grant: I certainly didn’t say that. gzowski: Well, you came awfully close. grant: I would say, if I was a French Canadian and one had to guard on this continent a very precious possession, because, one’s culture, one’s language, all that kind of thing, is one’s virility in the deepest and richest sense of that word. And therefore, to throw it away to General Motors and Esso, you’ve thrown away something that goes to the very core of your being. Now, I don’t know enough about French Canada. The French-Canadians came in with English-speaking Canadians and said we will for ... they didn’t like each other very much, but we both have one alternative thing. We want to keep our separateness from the United States. Now, whether French-Canadians have given up on federalism, I just don’t know enough to say. I hope they have not because I am sure that if they have given up, it leaves us in a terrific position. gzowski: Terrific in the sense that it’s something to be terrified of. grant: Yes. gzowski: Will you listen, then, to this poem? This is by Archibald Lampman. It was written in 1895. I think that you will hear in it some of the things that Professor Grant has been talking about and then maybe

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perhaps we can get a response from him. This is a poem read for us by Henry Raimer. Archibald Lampman’s poem, ‘The City of the End of Things.’ [reading of poem]15 gzowski: ‘The City of the End of Things,’ written in 1895 by Archibald Lampman and sub-titled ‘A Vision of Canada.’ Professor Grant, does that ... is your vision of Canada in the seventies reflected somewhat in Lampman’s words? grant: Well, I think it’s a tremendous poem. I think what men all over the earth have come to is, with the conquest of nature, what then? Now, this is the what then of an absolute conquest of nature that ends in just blackness, you know, just an idiot ... bumbling. And I don’t think that we can tell that, I don’t think we can be sure that that is the future, because there might, on the other hand, be, as there have been in the past, enormous cataclysms and mountain people coming down and starting a new civilization. You know, there are all kinds of futures. There might be an endless tyranny. One thing I didn’t like about the poem is he talked as if this state of the sort of final conquest of nature would be a harmony. Now, harmony, I’m an enormous lover of the Greeks, harmony is to me the most perfect word and therefore I didn’t like him saying there would be harmony ... there would be emptiness and desolation. One thing I loved about the poem is that he makes clear that in very fast-moving technical societies memory goes. And, you know, if memory goes, men and women cease to be men and women because memory is one of the most prodigious preservers of good in the world. You can memorize bad things and can be terrible, but without it one is lost. Oh, I thought the poem was very beautiful. But I don’t think that one can know that that is the future. No. I can see why it came up in Canada because Canadians have always had this sense of the elemental nature that cannot be destroyed in an era when nature is being destroyed. And therefore I can see why he writes that poem. Lampman must have had an enormous sense of nature as a Canadian. All Canadians have always had this. And ... and he sees it being destroyed and is terrified. But I don’t know that that is the future at all and I think it would be foolish to say it was. I mean, I think there are all kinds of alternatives that may be in the future. Two thousand years of

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terrible tyranny, great cataclysms, some kinds of ... I just don’t think one can know. gzowski: We’ll have to stay tuned to find out. Professor George Grant, a great pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for coming by.

Notes 1 Peter Gzowski (1934–2002), broadcaster, writer, editor, became a household name as the host of CBC Radio’s lively, eclectic This Country in the Morning (1971–4). After trying TV unsuccessfully and writing several books, he returned to CBC Radio in 1982 as host of Morningside. 2 John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63). See above 72n20. 3 See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 279. 4 Leonid Ilich Brezhnev (1906–82), Soviet Russian statesman and Communist Party official, was, in effect, the leader of the Soviet Union as first secretary (1964–6) and general secretary (1966–82) of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Grant is presumably referring to Brezhnev’s initiation of ‘detente’ with the United States, leading to his signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT 1) with President Nixon in May 1972. 5 See Lament for a Nation, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 277–367, for Grant’s analysis of Pearson’s foreign policy. 6 See ibid., 305. 7 Claude Ryan (1925–2004), journalist and politician, edited Le Devoir 1964– 78, was leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, and campaigned for the Non side in the May 1980 referendum on Quebec sovereignty. Despite losing the referendum, René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois defeated the Liberals led by Ryan in the 1981 provincial election. 8 The elected socialist government of Chile led by Salvador Allende was overthrown by military coup on 11 September 1973. During an attack on the presidential palace Allende was murdered. 9 See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 246n1. 10 The James Bay Project, a monumental hydro-electric-power development on the east coast of James Bay initiated in 1971, involved damming rivers to create massive reservoirs that destroyed the hunting grounds of the indigenous population. The project generated enormous resistance and the State of New York, under pressure from environmental and native groups, withdrew its agreement to buy Quebec power. In 1971 Premier William Davis forced a halt to the Spadina Expressway, a

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Exchange with Peter Gzowski (This Country in the Morning) superhighway that would have cut through downtown Toronto, which had been vigorously opposed by neighbourhood groups. Come-by-Chance, a village in Newfoundland, gained national prominence in the 1970s with the building of a $120 million oil refinery in a deal worked out between Premier J.R. (Joey) Smallwood and the American oil baron John Shaheen. The refinery went into receivership in 1976. Richard Bennett Hatfield (1931–91), lawyer, businessman, and Progressive Conservative politician, was the longest-serving premier in the history of New Brunswick (1970–87). See Grant’s review of Robert Coles’s book on Simone Weil (855–66). Robert Coles (1929– ) is professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School and James Agee professor of social ethics at Harvard. Kenneth Keniston (1930– ) was in 1973 professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Yale. He is the author of The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (1965) and Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (1971). See Lament for a Nation, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 290. Archibald Lampman’s poem, ‘The City at the End of Things,’ first published in 1895: Beside the pounding cataracts Of midnight streams unknown to us ’Tis builded in the leafless tracts And valleys huge of Tartarus. Lurid and lofty and vast it seems; It hath no rounded name that rings, But I have heard it called in dreams The City of the End of Things. Its roofs and iron towers have grown None knoweth how high within the night, But in its murky streets far down A flaming terrible and bright Shakes all the stalking shadows there, Across the walls, across the floors, And shifts upon the upper air From out a thousand furnace doors; And all the while an awful sound Keeps roaring on continually, And crashes in the ceaseless round Of a gigantic harmony. Through its grim depths re-echoing

Exchange with Peter Gzowski (This Country in the Morning) And all its weary height of walls, With measured roar and iron ring, The inhuman music lifts and falls. Where no thing rests and no man is, And only fire and night hold sway; The beat, the thunder and the hiss Cease not, and change not, night or day. And moving at unheard commands, The abysses and vast fires between, Flit figures that with clanking hands Obey a hideous routine; They are not flesh, they are not bone, They see not with the human eye, And from their iron lips is blown A dreadful and monotonous cry; And whoso of our mortal race Should find that city unaware, Lean death would smite him face to face, And blanch him with its venomed air: Or caught by the terrific spell, Each thread of memory snapt and cut, His soul would shrivel and its shell Go rattling like an empty nut. It was not always so, but once, In days that no man thinks upon, Fair voices echoed from its stones, The light above it leaped and shone: Once there were multitudes of men, That built that city with their pride, Until its might was made, and then They withered age by age and died. But now of that prodigious race, Three only in an iron tower, Set like carved idols face to face, Remain the masters of its power; And at the city gate a fourth, Gigantic and with dreadful eyes, Sits looking toward the lightless north, Beyond the reach of memories; Fast rooted to the lurid floor,

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Exchange with Peter Gzowski (This Country in the Morning) A bulk that never moves a jot, In his pale body dwells no more, Or mind or soul, – an idiot! But some time in the end those three Shall perish and their hands be still, And with the master’s touch shall flee Their incommunicable skill. A stillness absolute as death Along the slacking wheels shall lie, And, flagging at a single breath, The fires shall moulder out and die. The roar shall vanish at its height, And over that tremendous town The silence of eternal night Shall gather close and settle down. All its grim grandeur, tower and hall, Shall be abandoned utterly, And into rust and dust shall fall From century to century; Nor ever living thing shall grow, Nor trunk of tree, nor blade of grass; No drop shall fall, no wind shall blow, Nor sound of any foot shall pass: Alone of its accursèd state, One thing the hand of Time shall spare, For the grim Idiot at the gate Is deathless and eternal there. Archibald Lampman (1861–99), was a member of the ‘Confederation’ group of poets that included Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, and Duncan Campbell Scott.

Ideology in Modern Empires

This essay appeared in John E. Flint and Glyndwr Williams, eds, Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham1 (London: Longman; New York: Barnes and Noble 1973), 189–97. An earlier version of the paper was given to McMaster graduate students in 1971–2 under the title ‘Some Comments on Ideology.’

The classical way of asking ‘what is politics?’ was the unhistorical question ‘what is the political?’ What is that common quality which belongs to any event that we call political, the absence of which makes an event apolitical? Clearly if the word political means anything more than what happens, then some human events are not such. Modern common sense starts from the judgment that the political has to do with the activities of the state. But immediately a theoretical difficulty arises. If we are not totalitarians, we imply in so naming the political that there are some activities which transcend state control. For example, many modern men do not want education or religion to be totally controlled by the state, because they recognize that knowing and reverencing are not acts which are properly realized under political control. Within modern common sense we express this by saying that ‘society’ is a more comprehensive term than ‘state.’ But here the theoretical difficulty arises. The Greeks from whom we receive the words ‘politics’ and ‘the political,’ and whose philosophers first thought consistently about these things, did not make any such distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society.’ Politics was that which had to do with the ‘polis.’ The polis was the community which included all communities, while itself being included by none. For this reason it is a mistake to translate the Greek ‘polis’ as ‘city-state,’ because this implies the modern distinction be-

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tween ‘state’ and ‘society.’ We can see the difference between what the political means for us and what it meant for the originators of our vocabulary when we remember that Plato says a central political fact is the way that music is taught to the young. Some liberals, like R.H.S. Crossman, have made out from such remarks that Plato was a totalitarian.2 Such a shallow misinterpretation is only made by those who are unable to think outside the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘society.’ But the refusal to make the distinction does not imply totalitarianism. The possibility of this distinction is the central issue politically between the deepest ancient and modern thinkers. This theoretical point is only made here to illustrate that when we think about the political from within modern common sense, we start from large assumptions which may or may not be true. In terms of the modern common sense definition of the political as that which has to do with the activities of the state, it is clear that the modern practice of politics is increasingly occupied with the simply administrative. There is political conflict in the world because there are certain situations which some human beings want to change or preserve, while others want to prevent such changing or preserving or want to carry them out through different means. The decision that cars will stop at red lights and go at green is strictly administrative, in the sense that once the convention has been decided on, there can be no sane conflict about the rationality of the convention. On the other hand, there are some Québécois who want to preserve French culture in North America and believe certain political steps are necessary to counteract its menacing by the English-speaking institutions of the continent. At the same time, most English-speaking North Americans, when they are aware of the issue, want to integrate Quebec into the imperial continental heartland. This is not an administrative problem because in no fair definition of sanity can we say that those on either side of the conflict are necessarily irrational in taking one side. Admittedly there are many English-speaking North Americans who talk as if it were a question of insanity. What is all the fuss about? Why don’t the French just settle with the continental system of private and public corporations and become like the rest of us? Many Québécois will not settle for these benefits because they believe to do so would be to throw away their particular humanness - or to use a misused word in its richest sense, to throw away their virility. One side want to preserve Quebec-ness because it

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appears to them their particular good; the other side are willing to sacrifice that quality in the name of goods they consider higher. In short, the political which is not administrative has to do with matters of potential conflict, and the ultimate basis of conflict is a division as to what is good. Unlike the question of traffic lights, this division is irreconcilable by any negotiable standard of rationality. It is clear that within the Western world since 1945 there are fewer and fewer serious examples of the non-administrative political, and more and more of the purely administrative. In the English-speaking world elections have often been thought of as events where the political presents itself in its non-administrative form. Journalistic rhetoric is widely used to preserve this belief. But elections are more and more plebiscites in which the masses are asked to choose between alternative groups of the elite within the determined administrative system. No wonder the multitude largely grasp such politics as a spectator sport, sometimes amusing but more often boringly shallow. Indeed the ways to victory in these plebiscites can be increasingly ‘routinized.’ It is clear why the political is becoming increasingly the administrative. There is almost no conflict in the Western world as to what is the political good. The highest political good is thought by the vast majority to be the building of the technical society by the overcoming of chance, through the application of the natural and social sciences. The political only arises in disagreement about means. For example, should the realized technical system be brought in largely under the control of the English-speaking empire, or should state capitalist power be more divided between competing blocks within the northern hemisphere? (The Vietnam war seems to have helped solve that one.) In the relations between the Western world and other societies the questions become less administrative. There is some real conflict between state capitalism and state communism. There are even societies in the southern hemisphere who would like to have some power over their own place in technical civilization. Not only in the West, but in a worldwide context, questions move towards the purely administrative because there are few public doubts about man’s highest political pursuit. Most of us must earn our living within one of the private corporations or within the coordinating public ones, and in such an environment there is no serious conflict about political good. Indeed the modern project has from its origins in the dreams of think-

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ers believed that in the end politics would disappear except as administration. The end towards which the modern project was directed was the universal and homogeneous state – the worldwide society of free and equal men in which all but a few idiots would be open to the knowledge of science and philosophy and therefore increasingly ruled by it. As all men would be open to the dictates of reason, and these dictates would lead them to agreement about what was good, there would be no conflict, and thus communal life could be ordered by administration. Lenin, who took up with enthusiasm certain partialities of the modern dream a century after it had come to bloom in Western Europe, said that in an advanced technical state, ruling would be so simplified that it would be open ‘to every non-illiterate.’3 ‘Under socialism,’ he wrote, ‘all will rule in turn and quickly get used to the fact that no one rules.’4 To transcribe the rhetoric of Utopian Marxism into my language, ruling will be a matter of administration. Lenin did not live long enough after he came to power to face how quickly is quickly, but he was willing in the interval to ‘teach’ those who had not yet reached the modern conception of good. Certainly in the West we have not ‘got used to the fact’ that nobody rules or that administration is open to every non-illiterate. What remains of the liberal hope is that at least within the confines of particular blocs, living well together will be achieved by administration. As the secularized eschatological framework disappears because men can no longer hope for it what remains in the practice of modern politics is the purified conception of technical rationality. Whatever general or particular criticisms should properly be levelled against the thought of Max Weber,5 he laid before us what ‘rationality’ means in the souls of those who are most often influential in the realm of modern politics. It may appear perverse to state that in this age the practice of politics has been procrusteanly reduced. Has there ever been a time so taken up with public events of conflict, when men have expected so much from the practice of politics or been willing to do so much in the pursuit of that practice? Is it not also perverse to say that men have come to understand the political as calculating rationality in an era when there have been sudden outbreaks of uncalculated irrationality from the very centres where such reason seemed incarnate? Indeed in their allegiance to the great ideologies – communism, English-speaking liberalism, national socialism – men have seemed to commit themselves to the belief that salvation is attained in the political. Two such consummately

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modern thinkers as Hegel and Nietzsche both emphasized: the reading of the morning newspaper has taken the place of the morning prayer. At the beginning of the day when we need to pay attention to what is necessary to our good we turn that attention to reading about public events, not to the eternal. Nevertheless men may concentrate on something without being aware of its nature. For example, there are more books written about the practice of sexuality in modern North America than ever before. But who would say that modern North Americans are aware of the essence of sex – that they know what it is suited for? In our concentration on politics there is a clear reduction of its scope from what was included under that royal techne by traditional theorists. Moreover, the outbreaks of obvious ‘irrationality’ from the very centres of modern ‘rationality’ may be seen under the old tag naturam expellas furca etc.6 The study of politics has been as technicized as the practice of it. The same modern account of ‘rationality’ operates in its study as in its practice. One supposes that departments of political science are the places where politics is most consistently studied; there the dominant method since 1945 may best be characterized (albeit generally and loosely) as behaviourist. Even in an essay dedicated in admiration to a noble historian, it is not my purpose to search out the origins of behaviourist social science. I will not even indulge in the comic description of why this conception of social science, first formulated and pursued by Germans, was taken up so enthusiastically in the English-speaking society, just after that society had expended itself in two wars against the Germans. On the surface (and it is always best to start thinking about anything from its surface) the dominant characteristic of contemporary behavioural political science is the insistence of its practitioners on a clear cut distinction between what they name the ‘normative’ and the ‘empirical.’ At the surface, the most evident methodological assumption of this science is the distinction made between judgments about ‘fact’ and judgments about ‘value,’ and the assertion that the scientist qua scientist is concerned only with facts, or with the values as psychological facts. Its practitioners are concerned with what happens in politics, not with making judgments as to what are good or bad purposes in politics. Judgments concerning what is valuable are considered beyond the purview of reason, and therefore have no place in the science qua science. In formulating this methodological principle, Max Weber did not

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simply desire to get on the anti-teleological bandwagon of modern physics and biology, but had also a pure political motive. Among the intensities of pre-1914 Germany, Weber was concerned that the study of political matters in the universities be free of the ideological pressures of the public world. The assertion of ‘objectivity’ in the human sciences, against Dilthey’s formulations,7 was understood by Weber as a means to the transcendence of ideology. He was fearful of how easily the human sciences could be used by the passions of the world, whether by the ideology of democracy or of communism or of Bismarckian statism. It was not only in the name of an anti-teleological science, but in the name of independent universities that he enucleated the method of a value-free social science.a As is the case in so many German influences on North American life, the idea of a ‘value-free’ social science has been turned around to be used for a different purpose. Above all it has been used as an instrument of justification in the rhetoric of liberal pluralism. The chief domestic justification of our imperial state capitalism is that we live in a pluralist society in which the individual is free to pursue his life according to his inclinations. Therefore the classical view that the clearest minds could know what were the best purposes for human life seemed a particular enemy of our liberalism. It seemed to imply that certain ‘dogmatic’ and a priori conceptions of human excellence should be given official sanction at the expense of the individual’s freedom to follow his individuality. By turning the language of good and bad ends into the language of values, and by removing any discourse about the goodness of such values from within the clear light of science, the Weberian methodology seemed to eliminate at one and the same time not only the traditional enemies of modern science, but also the enemies of the free life of the individual. Value-free social science was enthusiastically greeted in North America not chiefly for the protection of the free university, but rather for the protection of democratic pluralism. It is no wonder that a political science dominated by a conception of objectivity taken from modern natural science, and seeing itself as serva It is interesting how close this motive is to a continuing one found in the life of G.S. Graham. In the Canadian context (so different from that of Germany) Graham and such close colleagues as H.A. Innis were concerned that their historical studies remain independent by not being handed over to the service of the ideological pressures, official or otherwise, which are always rampant and rapacious in North America.

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ing the public rhetoric of democracy, should have become so much a servant of the ruling class of its society – a technique to be used in administration. An ‘object’ is a thing that has been thrown in front of us. Thrown in front of us, it lies there as at our disposal. Objectivity is a relation between things and our disposal.b The relation of all modern science to technical use is not therefore something accidental, but is at the very heart of our apprehension of things (human or non-human) as objects. When the social scientists united this concept of objectivity with the rhetoric of pluralism, it followed that their work in the universities should become the servant of the administrative needs of the public and private corporations. ‘Value-free’ social science seemed to Weber an instrument for maintaining the independence of the universities; in North American hands it was a means to the universities becoming servants of the public realm. The word ‘servant’ is appropriate even when particular social scientists, such as Galbraith, or Huntington, moved from their role of scientist into the role of influential adviser.8 The independence of the university is put just as much in question by being a recruiting ground of personnel as when its science is directed to immediate public usefulness. The ‘objective facts’ were used along with the men who discovered them. W.W. Rostow’s ‘facts’ about the breakthrough necessary to the development of underdeveloped areas, were used, along with his person, in deciding American actions in Vietnam.9 Bacon’s account of science was realized.10 The use of the universities by the powers of this world is not surprising. It is surprising how little protection these liberal social scientists had against such use. What is essential about North American society is not its pluralism but its monism. We are the inheritors of the European beliefs of the last centuries that the best society would be built by the overcoming of chance through the knowledge reached by the ‘objective’ sciences. Power in that society is incarnate in the public and private corporations which organize the pursuit of that overcoming of chance. The rhetoric of pluralist liberalism was an extra tacked onto the monolithic certainty about the public good. What this extra in fact meant is that individuality is allowed, but only in the ‘private’ realm of b One clear cause why ancient thinkers so concentrated on questions of good was just because these questions were not objective and therefore not easily negotiable.

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sexuality and religion and art. As the objective facts of social science belong to the public realm, it is inevitable that they be used not in the interests of pluralism, but by the public and private corporations which control what happens in the public domain. It is surprising how little the good-willed social scientists expected their ‘value-free’ science to be so used – that is, saw the political consequences of their own methodological assumptions. As discussion of the goodness of ends (or, as they are called, ‘values’) has no place in political science, there is no reason within the science why its discoveries about the objective political behaviour of human beings should not be at the disposal of wicked men. The scientist qua scientist does not think about whether the practical rulers of his society are decent or wicked. By conceiving their science as ‘value-free’ the social scientists may have thought that they were clearing the ground of religious and metaphysical superstitions, and establishing their independence. But what in fact they have been doing is clearing out of the universities any coherent discussion of the political good, and so eliminating small barriers which stood in the way of the general public identification of that good with the totally technicized and administratable society. Whatever else may need to be said about the student rebellions of the 1960s, it is clear that among some of its members there was a recognition that the leading social scientists, in eliminating the question of ends, had in fact given themselves over to serving the ends of state capitalism at great profit, and at the expense of the independence of the university and the education of the young. It is impossible to predict in any detail what these changes in the practice and study of politics will entail. It would be a foolish person, indeed, who thought he saw clearly into our future. So new is the society built on the principle of the conquest of human and non-human nature that who would dare predict the consequences of its working out. The future stretches before us as trackless, and the chief compasses of the Western past (revelation and philosophy) have ceased to be readable by most of us. However, I am going to speculate about the future influence of one political fact. Ideology is a particular characteristic of the modern world and it is likely that our future will be characterized by outbreaks of it. Ideology was not part of pre-progressive empires. It has arisen in modern societies because of certain presuppositions of the progressive age. Before the modern era, the wisest Westerners believed that the practice

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of both religion and philosophy were necessary if tolerably decent communities were to exist. But they distinguished these two activities. The proper relation between them was considered an extremely complex question and was at the root of many controversies of the preprogressive era. One mark of modern thought has been to believe that philosophy should not only play its old role, but that it also should take over the role once assigned to religion. But the need for reverence continued to be pressing for men and women, even at a time when the traditional reverences were under sustained public criticism, and when people were being told by the clever that philosophy was open to them as a substitute for religion. In that situation ideologies rose like demons out of the depths to fill the void created by progressive assumptions. Put one way: ideologies are surrogate religions pretending they are philosophies. Put the other way: they are surrogate philosophies trying to fulfil the role of displaced reverence. To repeat, the three leading examples of the recent past are Marxist communism, national socialism and American liberalism. They do harm to the political fabric because they consolidate the confusion about the proper place of religion and philosophy in communal life. Ideologies make public the modern denial that reverence is the matrix of human nobility; but as surrogate religions they slip reverence in. It is, however, reverence for something not truly worthy of reverence, such as the state, the race, the multitude, the nation. Those of us who are Jews or Christians would say they are idolatrous in the worst sense of the word. On the other side, they claim to be rational, scientific, and philosophic, and therefore to be giving knowledge of what is happening, when in fact they do not. In this sense they are destructive of common sense and moderation – the two great protectors of the health of the political realm. The fact that ‘value-free’ multiversities can do little to restrain these demons is evident. English-speaking people are well advised to remember the German experience. The Germans were the first to build universities in which ‘objective’ science and scholarship was exalted above all questions about good. The scientists and scholars pursued their ‘objective’ work and scorned thought about ends as extra-scientific. Many of the most brilliant and ardent young therefore had to seek answers to such questions outside the discipline of coherent study, among the raucous voices of public ideology. The fact that our ruling classes have become technicized and that our universities have largely

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excluded from the curriculum the serious study of the most important questions, makes us open to the same occurrence. This process is already far advanced in our society. At the beginning of the 1960s an influential American social scientist, Daniel Bell, wrote a book called The End of Ideology.11 In that book he described how North Americans had transcended that stage in the past in which men argued and indeed fought about ultimate good. All sensible men could now agree about the proper direction of American society. The ‘value-free’ sciences in the multiversities would play their role in thinking about the means to the further realization of the state-capitalist society. By ‘ideology’ and its end he clearly meant the dying away of debate, even when philosophic, about propositions that transcended the ‘objective.’ Soon after the book was published, Mr Bell's own multiversity was rent apart by a student uprising, the leaders of which claimed that that multiversity was not ‘value-free,’ but rather a servant to the ideology of the American empire.12 Peace at the ‘value-free’ university was re-established by the occupation of the campus by the New York police. The lack of sympathy one may feel for some of the rebels’ actions, is surely equalled by a lack of sympathy for Columbia which had progressively excluded from its midst over several generations anything but ‘objective’ science and scholarship and technology, while many of its faculty made their fortunes by selling these to government and business. Be that as it may, ‘the end of ideology’ had not ended in an end of ideology. The behaviourist doctrine helped to open the university to the full force of ideology, whether that of the establishment or of the radicals. While our species has existed, there seem to have been outbreaks of public madness of one kind and another. In this technical era, it appears that corporate madness will increasingly manifest itself in ideological forms. The question of how it is good to live cannot be eliminated from the world while human beings remain human beings. The attempt is made to eliminate that question from the public realm by thinking that political conflict can be solved by the techniques of administration; the multiversities try to eliminate it by conceiving the pursuit of reason as technique. Nevertheless, the question of how it is good to live continues to present itself to those of noble minds and open hearts. However those who seek an answer to it are driven by this official exclusion to seek that answer in terms of ideology – that is, outside the theoretical discipline of philosophy and outside the ecstasy-sustaining discipline

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of received reverences. As the public realm is given over more and more to the iron maiden of realized administrative technique, the question of good will present itself in increasingly illicit and urgent forms to those who find no comfort in that iron embrace. As spontaneity has been excluded from the public realm, the desire for it, as part of human good, has asserted itself, and has been expressed in ideologies which are hostile to the public ideology of ‘ideology-free’ liberalism. The time of conflict between the public ideology and the illicit ideologies cannot be happy for those who, in the name of philosophy or religion or prudence, fear both sides. It will be increasingly difficult to know how properly to respond in particular manifestations of that conflict. On the one hand, sensible people must have respect for the necessities of public order, yet they will find that that public order is expressed in the form of un-spontaneous administration, backed by all the growing powers of physiological and psychological technique. On the other hand, sensible people may sympathize with the manifold, if impotent, revolts against this order, as expressing a fumbling towards human good, and yet be fearful as they are expressed in the form of illicit and even mad ideologies.

Notes 1 Gerald Sandford Graham (1903–88), Canadian historian and Rhodes professor of imperial history, University of London, was one of Grant’s teachers and mentors at Queen’s. His works include A Concise History of Canada (1968) and A Concise History of the British Empire (1970). On Grant’s contribution to the book for Graham, see William Christian George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 295. 2 Richard Howard Stafford Crossman (1907–74), English Labour politician and journalist, held various posts in the government of Harold Wilson (1964–70) and was an influential writer for the New Statesman (editor, 1970– 2). For his comments on Plato see his Plato Today (London: Allen and Unwin 1959), in which he called the Republic ‘a handbook for aspiring dictators.’ See also his essay ‘Plato and the Perfect State’ in T.L. Thorson, ed., Plato: Totalitarian or Democrat? (New Jersey: Prentice Hall 1963), 39. 3 Vladimir Ilyich (Nikolai) Lenin (né Ulyanov) (1870–1924), Russian revolutionary and politician, was the chief ideologist of Bolshevism in its original form and the first leader of the USSR after the 1917 revolution.

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4 See V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution, in Selected Works in Three Volumes, vol. 2, 396: ‘In socialism, the mass of the population will rise to the level of taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in everyday administration of affairs. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.’ 5 Max Weber (1864–1920), German political economist and sociologist, contributed to the foundation of the structure of modern sociology. His most famous work is The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism (1904). 6 Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret might be translated as ‘You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she will always come back.’ Horace, Epistulae, book 1, no. 10 7 Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), German philosopher, extended Kantian thought to the field of the ‘Geisteswissenschaften,’ the sciences of the spirit, including the writing of history. 8 John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006), Canadian-born economist, taught at Harvard and Princeton and served in government positions in the Second World War and after, returning to Harvard in 1949. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 364n123. Samuel P. Huntington (1927– ), political scientist, was associate director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia 1959–62, served as chairman of the Harvard Department of Government 1967–9 and 1970–1, and was later director of security planning for the National Security Council in the Carter administration (1977–8). He is the author of the influential book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). 9 Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003), American economist, worked at MIT’s Centre for International Studies 1950–60 and became special adviser to Presidents Kennedy (1961–3) and Johnson (1966–9). He supported military intervention in Vietnam as an adviser to each president. Grant is referring to his important book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960). 10 Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English philosopher and politician, lord chancellor of England 1618–21, is best known in the history of philosophy for his advocacy of reasoning by induction. He resigned as lord chancellor and withdrew from public life after pleading guilty to charges of bribery (1621). Thomas Hobbes was his secretary and amanuensis during the last years of his life. Grant was not an admirer of Bacon’s thought (Collected Works, Vol. 1, 147–8), although he praised Bacon’s ‘wonderful’ description of Pilate’s encounter with Jesus (John 18:37–8): ‘“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate and would not wait for an answer.’ See Collected Works, Vol. 2, 121. 11 Daniel Bell (1919– ), American sociologist, taught at Columbia and Har-

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vard. His The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960) was enormously influential. 12 The student protest at Columbia shut down the university on 23 April 1968 and entered a second phase on 17–18 May at the same time as the massive student uprising in Paris that convulsed France and led to President de Gaulle’s temporary flight to an air force base in Germany.

English-Speaking Justice

English-Speaking Justice, like Grant’s previous book Time as History, was written as a series of lectures, in this instance the Josiah Wood Lectures, which he delivered at Mount Allison University in 1974.1 Grant then extensively revised them for publication. Because the first edition was privately published by Mount Allison in 1978, it had a limited circulation.2 Oliver O’Donovan, Regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Oxford, whose wife Joan O’Donovan had written her PhD dissertation on Grant, drew the book to the attention of the theologian Stanley Hauerwas.3 He and Alasdair MacIntyre, the general editors of ‘Revisions: A Series of Books on Ethics,’ published by the University of Notre Dame Press, were so impressed that they asked Grant to allow the re-publication of English-Speaking Justice as part of the series.4 A re-set second edition was accordingly published in 1985, in the United States by the University of Notre Dame Press, and in Canada by the House of Anansi.5 This edition included a brief editorial introduction by Hauerwas and MacIntyre providing a summary of Grant’s earlier writings, which was aimed at an American audience unacquainted with his work. The two editors state that ‘the only changes from the original [Mount Allison] version consist of one correction of a minor typographical error and of fuller references in a few footnotes.’6 The 1985 edition is the one used for the Collected Works; we have noted the alterations made to the notes of the 1978 edition. The 1985 edition was reprinted by Anansi in 1998. Hauerwas and MacIntyre’s introduction was replaced by one by Robin Lathangue, ‘In the Perspective of the Citizen: The Public Philosophy of George Grant.’7 Lathangue’s introduction is designed to acquaint a new generation of readers with Grant’s thought, but it barely mentions the book itself. An extract from English-Speaking Justice has been published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader.8

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English-Speaking Justice is a further development of the themes explored by Grant in Lament for a Nation (1965), Technology and Empire (1969), and Time as History (1971). In Lament for a Nation he moves from the defence crisis that brought down the Diefenbaker government in 1963 to a general consideration of Canada’s destiny in the era of the ‘universal homogeneous state,’ as exemplified by the United States of America. Grant argues in his next book, Technology and Empire, that the emergence of the universal homogeneous state was a product of hypotheses about human and non-human nature that had become so deeply embedded in Western thought as to be accepted without question. Belief in unlimited human willing has led to the triumph of modern technology, as well as to the assumption that progressive societies like the United States are entitled to dominate countries which reject this world-view. Grant sees liberalism, the ideology of progress through science and technology, as the foundation of the new universal order exemplified by the American empire. In Time as History Grant explores the thought of Nietzsche, which he sees as the most powerful account of the death of traditional beliefs and how humans can live without them. In Nietzsche’s visionary writings, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the ‘superman’ or ‘overman’ has the courage to accept the death of God and respond positively by willing his own selfcreation. Grant regards Nietzsche’s philosophy as lying at the heart of the contemporary world, asserting that ‘the destruction of the idea of such an eternity has been at the centre of the modern project in the ... scientific and technical mastery of chance.’9 English-Speaking Justice begins by defining modernity as being most fundamentally expressed in the word ‘technology.’ ‘As in all marriages, this new union of making and knowing has changed both parties, so that when we speak “technology” we are speaking a new activity which Western Europeans brought into the world, and which has given them their universalizing and homogenizing influence’ (198). The responsibility to understand technology is imperative for English-speaking people, for although the intellectual achievements upon which it is based in many instances originated elsewhere, the English-speaking world has made technological civilization universal. Grant sees as a ‘fact’ the close relationship between political liberalism and technological development, and in the English-speaking world liberalism has long been the dominant ideology (199). There is much to be admired in this tradition in its emphasis upon the necessity of political liberty, which ‘must be reaffirmed ... when

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our tradition seems often to have degenerated into an ideology the purpose of which is to justify the uninhibited progress of cybernetics, and when therefore it is very easy for decent men to attack English-speaking liberalism as a shallow ideology’ (201). The significance of liberalism as a political language is evident in the need for those advancing religious or moral arguments to conform to liberal principles if they are not to be marginalized to the private realm; liberalism is the language within which moral truth must be formulated today. Nevertheless, Grant asserts, the reality that liberal moralism does not affect technological development is made evident by American support of oppressive governments when in its political interest. He dismisses liberal belief that in time such regimes will become democracies as progressivist faith rather than a matter of fact. The separation of liberal and technological reason is also evident in the emergence of techniques of human control, particularly through computerization. Is the exercise of authority by vast public and private bureaucracies reconcilable with the free choice basic to liberal society? Increasingly people retreat from the public realm into the private, because the social contact between free and relatively equal citizens becomes meaningless in contemporary life. Grant wonders whether this was always a hidden flaw in the liberal vision: This leads to asking: was the affirmation by those founders that justice is based on contract ever sufficient to support a politics of consent and justice? This questions modern liberalism at its theoretical heart. (207)

Grant then turns in part II to the way in which liberal principles are formulated in the technological era, as exemplified by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls defends the contractualism of Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, which is based upon individual rights, against the utilitarian belief in the greatest happiness of the greatest number: [Rawls] believes that if one is to push to the point of philosophic clarity the idea of justice implicit in social cooperation, the conception of social contract becomes necessary, because without the social contract it is not possible to show that the acceptance of justice is to the advantage of the freely calculating individual. (210)

Grant compares Rawls’s account of the social contract to that of his

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‘avowed masters,’ Locke and Kant (210). For Locke, the Aristotelian account in which humans could grasp the highest good through their understanding of the order of nature had been demonstrated by the new science to be untrue. In the light of the inadequacy of classical philosophy, Locke proposes that justice is not natural but contractual; although the highest good is hidden from humans, they know from experience truths such as the reality of death, and a social contract, which protects their rights and improves the possibility of comfortable existence: ‘Justice is those convenient arrangements agreed to by sensible men who recognize the state of nature, and what it implies concerning the greatest evil’ (212). While Rawls, like Locke, understands justice to be based on self-interested calculation, he begins not with experience but by positing an imagined ‘original position’ in which the individual chooses principles of justice under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ i.e. without any detailed knowledge of his/her position in the world. Accordingly, it will be in a person’s interest to select principles that will be to everyone’s advantage (212). Grant asserts that an agreement based on Rawls’s ‘original position’ makes it very different from Locke’s contract, which is rooted in human experience of the dangers of the state of nature. The need to develop such an abstraction from empirical reality is dictated by Rawls’s acceptance of modern analytical philosophy, which rejects the ‘naturalistic fallacy,’ i.e. the possibility of deriving propositions about how humans ought to act from metaphysical positions based on experience of the world (214). This separation between nature and freedom leads to the thought of Kant, for it is dependent upon Kant’s assertion that freedom transcends nature: Within this view of freedom as transcending nature, the principle of equality is extended to realms unthought of in the earlier contractualism of Hobbes and Locke. It becomes no longer simply a matter of equality in legal rights, but an equality also of goods and powers to be distributed fairly by the rational will of the community (216).

Kant’s conception of the social contract is based on his assertion that ‘morality is the one fact of reason’; in the light of reason humans can know that the only good is a good will, which they must exercise to bring about justice. Grant points out that the Kantian position is crucially different from that of Rawls, who does not accept the argument that morality is the one fact of reason: ‘Justice, therefore, cannot be justified as coming forth from

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the universal morality given us in reason itself ... His account of philosophy does not allow him such statements about the supreme good’ (219). When Rawls defines a ‘free and rational person,’ he simply means that humans must make choices rather than participate through their very humanity in the form of reason itself (221). Accordingly, he can give no answer, for example, as to why ‘equality’ is a good, unlike Kant, who argues that it is a good because all human beings can have good wills regardless of other distinctions of talent or social contribution. More specifically, Rawls cannot explain why ‘better calculators’ should not have fuller legal rights than the less able calculators, or, indeed, why ‘persons’ are intrinsically valuable (222). Grant then examines the success of Rawls’s attempt to maintain a contractual account of justice without the metaphysical support relied upon by earlier thinkers such as Kant. To Rawls, the principles of justice enable individuals to live together in society while pursuing their own interests. They are the product of rational calculation, which Grant calls ‘American bourgeois common sense’ (223), reached, it will be remembered, through imagining an ‘original position’ in which persons, operating under a ‘veil of ignorance’ in which they know they have interests but do not know specifically what they are, would make choices ensuring, in Rawls’s words, that ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others’ (223). According to Rawls, self-interested justice necessarily requires equality as well as liberty; this is due to the universal need for ‘primary goods,’ such as food and shelter, which all require but of which there is not sufficient for everyone to have an equal share. Again, under a ‘veil of ignorance,’ which denies a person knowledge of how many or much of ‘primary goods’ he/she possesses, or even the degree of technological development of his/her society, Rawls argues that a person will opt as a rational calculation for the measure of equality that he expresses in his second principle of justice in the following words as quoted by Grant: Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, – and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. (225)

Grant calls this second principle ‘American progressivist common

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sense ... Welfare egalitarianism can be united with the individualist pluralism of the constitution in an advanced technological society’ (226). Rawls’s theory of justice is typical of American liberalism in presenting the substance of justice as uniting bourgeois individualism and progressive equality, while attempting to overcome the difficulties raised by analytical philosophy for traditional contract theories (227). An obvious weakness of Rawls’s theory, Grant argues, is that it is abstracted both from the reality of modern life as shaped by big corporations and big government, as well as from the imperial role played by the United States abroad. Its most important limitation, however, is the inadequacy of Rawls’s deriving ‘justice as fairness’ from a contract based on self-interest (228). Plato argued that it was always in humans’ interest to be just, but his understanding of self-interest was quite different: Justice is what we are fitted for. We come to know that through the practice of philosophy, which gives us knowledge of the nature of things, of what we are fitted for and what the consequences are for our actions in being so fitted. In philosophy we are given sufficient knowledge of the whole of the nature of things to know what our interests are, and to know them in a scheme of subordination and superordination. In this account, justice is not a certain set of external political arrangements which are useful means of the realization of our self-interests; it is the very inward harmony of human beings in terms of which they are alone able to calculate their self-interest properly. (229)

Grant turns in part III to consider why liberalism continues to be ‘the dominating political morality of the English-speaking world’ (230). In the case of England it proved a satisfactory basis for the bourgeois society that developed since 1688. British intellectuals felt little need to pay attention to the European critics of Hobbes and Locke such as Rousseau, Kant, or Nietzsche; the stability of British political life meant that political theory reflected, rather than transcended, common opinion. ‘[T]his long consensus about political good, and the resulting poverty of thought, did much to inoculate the English from those theoretical viruses which have plagued continental Europeans’ (233). The liberalism that has shaped English political philosophy also shaped the American constitution, for the political and legal structures of the United States are more completely rooted in Locke and Hobbes than

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those of Great Britain. The development of the United States through waves of immigrants, combined with the growth of corporate power, meant that the common good was expressed by defining rights contractually. The absence of traditional sources of loyalty existent in older societies, such as an established church, meant that contractual relations have assumed an overwhelming significance in the United States. ‘The crossing of the Atlantic to a society which had no history of its own from before the age of progress brought a flowering of the contractual principle in its purest form’ (236). The importance of contract to America was reinforced by the nature of American Calvinist Protestantism: ‘Indeed one can say that the extraordinary compact between God and man in Calvinism strangely prepares people for contractual human relations’ (238). Protestantism gave a strength to justice in American constitutionalism that it would not have had simply from contractual theory. However important this was in the past, Protestantism in the United States today has so diminished that it lacks the moral force to control technology. Without the moral authority of Protestant belief, Grant asks, how can it be explained on the basis of contract theory, which is grounded in self-preservation, why humans should sacrifice themselves for the common good? The influence of Protestantism upon liberalism is ongoing despite the secularizing effect of both modern science and philosophy. With the decline of Calvinist belief, Calvin’s emphasis upon divine will has been transmuted into the belief in the power of humans as free and autonomous beings to shape themselves and natures: ‘As the Protestants accepted the liberalism of autonomous will, they became unable to provide their societies with that public sustenance of uncalculated justice which the contractual account of justice could not provide from itself’ (242). In the final section of English-Speaking Justice (part IV) Grant examines the landmark decision of the American Supreme Court on a woman’s right to an abortion, the case of Roe v. Wade (1973), which he sees as exemplifying the dangers of contemporary English-speaking contractualism. Justice Harry Blackmun, writing for the majority, asserted that rights cannot be allocated on the basis of any knowledge of what is good. Instead, rights must be weighed in relation to conflicting claims between persons and legislatures. Furthermore, he asserted that foetuses have no rights because until the age of six months they are not persons (246). Roe v. Wade reflects modern liberalism because it is based on contrac-

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tual principles that defend rights as being prior to good, with the state regarded as morally neutral in a pluralistic society. Grant regards the decision as raising ‘a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism’ because the court’s ruling that foetuses are not ‘persons’ is an ‘unthought ontology’ (246); Blackmun’s opinion that foetuses are not persons is simply an assertion without biological foundation, and opens the possibility of questioning whether other members of the species, such as the handicapped or the infirm, are fully persons. ‘What is it, if anything, about human beings that makes the rights of equal justice their due? What is it about human beings that makes it good that they should have such rights?’ (247). The philosophic questions made explicit by Roe v. Wade have been hitherto obscured, in Grant’s view, because for centuries the West has lived with a basic philosophic contradiction (248). The bringing together of logos and techne in modern science involves accepting that the universe is ruled by necessity and chance. However, in matters like justice, the West has continued to rely on ancient science, ‘in which the notion of good was essential to the understanding of what is’ (248). The thinkers of early modern Europe, for example Locke, Rousseau, and Marx, attempted to reconcile the new knowledge with what was given about justice in the writings of the ancients. In this attempt, as in their desire to retain Christianity’s emphasis upon charity and equality, these philosophers were ‘secularized Christians’ (249). However, the contradictions they attempted to reconcile were exposed by Nietzsche, who ‘laid down with incomparable lucidity that which is now publicly open: what is given about the whole in technological science cannot be thought together with what is given us concerning justice and truth, reverence and beauty, from our tradition’ (250). Grant maintains that Nietzsche revealed that humans can overcome the dichotomy created by attempting to preserve traditional teachings, while accepting the new science, by acknowledging that they are not defined by clinging to illusory fantasies such as God and eternal moral principles. The strong will confront the reality that they create themselves and their values, just as they create their technology. There is, accordingly, no need to pay heed to traditional restrictions on abortion that come from obsolete philosophical and theological teachings: ‘Once we have recognized “history” as the imposing of our wills on an accidental world, does not “justice” take on a new content?’ (252).

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This Nietzschean account of the self shapes technological society, and allows no place for traditional accounts of justice dependent upon the soul’s inward harmony based on its relation to the eternal. Contractual justice can accordingly become the means by which the ‘creative’ can impose their wills upon the weak and helpless, as shown in the case of Roe v. Wade. ‘Oblivion of eternity’ may prevent justice from transcending technology (258): Analytical logistics plus historicist scholarship plus even rigorous science do not when added up equal philosophy. When added together they are not capable of producing that thought which is required if justice is to be taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in the technological era. (258)

Henry Roper

To Alex Colville and Dennis Lee10 two artists who have taught me about justice PART I During this century Western civilization has speeded its world-wide influence through the universal acceptance of its technology. The very platitudinous nature of this statement may hide the novelty which is spoken in it. The word ‘technology’ is new, and its unique bringing together of techne and logos shows that what is common around the world is this novel interpenetration of the arts and sciences.11 As in all marriages, this new union of making and knowing has changed both parties, so that when we speak ‘technology’ we are speaking a new activity which Western Europeans brought into the world, and which has given them their universalizing and homogenizing influence. Kant’s dictum that ‘the mind makes the object’ were the words of blessing spoken at that wedding of knowing and production, and should be remembered when we contemplate what is common throughout the world.12 The first task of thought in our era is to think what that technology is: to think it in its determining power over our politics and sexuality, our music and education. Moreover (and this is surely proper to say at

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Mount Allison because of the great origins of this institution) we are called to think that technological civilization in relation to the eternal fire which flames forth in the Gospels and blazes even in the presence of that determining power.13 We English-speakers have a particular call to contemplate this civilization. We have been the chief practical influence in taking technology around the world. Russians and Chinese have often communicated with each other in the language of a small island off the west coast of Europe. Bismarck said that the chief fact of nineteenth century politics was that the Americans spoke English.14 To assert this practical influence does not imply the absurd suggestion that technological civilization is mainly a product of the English-speaking world. Names such as Heisenberg and Einstein remind us that the crowning intellectual achievement of modernity was not accomplished by English-speakers.15 Descartes and Rousseau, Kant and Nietzsche, remind us that those who have thought most comprehensively about modernity have often not been English-speaking. Nevertheless, in theory and practice we English-speakers have universalized technological civilization; we have recently established its most highly explicit presence in North America. In the very fullness of this presence we are called to think what we are. As a small part of this multiform task, I intend in these Wood lectures to start from one fact of our situation: the close relation that there has been between the development of technology and political liberalism. By thinking about that relation, I hope to throw light on the nature of both, our liberalism and technology. Over the last centuries, the most influential people in the Englishspeaking world have generally taken as their dominant form of self-definition a sustaining faith in a necessary interdependence between the developments of technological science and political liberalism. Most of our scientists have been political (and indeed moral and religious) liberals; the leading philosophic and journalistic expounders of liberalism have nearly always tied the possibility of realizing a truly liberal society to the potentialities of modern mastering science. Indeed that close interdependence appears most obviously in the way that some convinced modern liberals put forth their creed as if it were a product of modern science itself; that is, speaking about it in the very language of objectivity which is appropriate to scientific discoveries, but not to an

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account of the political good. The expression of that close relationship has greatly varied. On the one hand there have been those who held the identification because they believed political liberalism was the best means of guaranteeing the progress of science. (Freedom’s great achievement was that it allowed modern technology to appear.) On the other hand, there have been those who emphasized that modern science was a means of actualizing the good which was liberal society. (Technology’s great achievement was that it allowed freedom to flourish.) Whatever these differences of emphasis, however, that close identification rested finally in a widely shared belief that the same account of reason which resulted in the discoveries of science, also expressed itself humanly in the development of political regimes ever more congruent with the principles of English-speaking liberalism. This assumed relation of modern science and modern liberalism is still our dominant form of public self-definition, whatever vagaries it has suffered in the twentieth century. Indeed, what do we English-speaking people possess of the political good, if we do not possess what is given in our particular liberalism? It might be argued that I am incorrect to summon forth one side of that relation by the word ‘liberalism.’ It is indeed true that North American journalists often obscure practical issues by opposing ‘liberalism’ to ‘conservatism.’ A clearer way of speaking is to call the practical opposite of ‘conservatism’ ‘progressivism.’ Liberalism in its generic form is surely something that all decent men accept as good – ‘conservatives’ included. In so far as the word ‘liberalism’ is used to describe the belief that political liberty is a central human good, it is difficult for me to consider as sane those who would deny that they are liberals. There can be sane argument concerning how far political liberty can be achieved in particular times and places, but not concerning whether it is a central human good. It may seem therefore that the use of the word ‘liberal’ about our explicit political faith during the last centuries does nothing to specify that faith clearly, other than to state the platitude that it was part of the broad tradition of sane discourse in the Western world. Would it not be better to use for the purposes of general description the phrase ‘English-speaking progressivism’? Despite this argument, I will use the phrase ‘English-speaking liberalism,’ because it makes clear the two following points. First, the institutions and ideas of the Englishspeaking world at their best have been much more than a justification of

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progress in the mastery of human and non-human nature. They have affirmed that any regime to be called good, and any progress to be called good, must include political liberty and consent. It is not simply a racialist pride in our own past that allows us to make that boast. This must be reaffirmed these days, when our tradition seems often to have degenerated into an ideology the purpose of which is to justify the uninhibited progress of cybernetics, and when therefore it is very easy for decent men to attack English-speaking liberalism as a shallow ideology. Secondly, the use of the word ‘liberalism’ rather than ‘progressivism’ emphasizes the necessary point that our English-speaking variety is not liberalism itself, but a particular species of it. This is often forgotten amongst us with the result that our account of liberalism is taken to be the only authentic account, rather than a particular expression of it. This arrogance has often made us depressingly provincial, especially in our philosophizing.a 16

a This second point, which would appear to be obvious, has been greatly obscured by recent propagandists for English-speaking liberalism, who in their desire to defend that tradition have denied that other traditions of liberalism have any right to be called ‘liberal’ at all. At its silliest this kind of writing is to be found in Professor K. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, particularly in its polemics against Plato and Hegel. It is obviously the proper work of political philosophy to argue, as Montesquieu does so brilliantly in The Spirit of the Laws, that the modern English polity is a higher regime than the Athenian polis, and that modern philosophers understand the good of liberty in a fuller way than the ancients. Whether Plato understood the good of liberty as well as Locke is a question for serious and difficult argument. But to argue, as Popper does, that Plato and Hegel denied that political liberty was a central human good, and were indeed progenitors of modern totalitarianism, must have required such a casual reading of these two writers that his book can only be considered trivial propaganda. How is it possible to read through The Apology or The Philosophy of Right and believe that the writers of either did not believe that political liberty was a central human good? Rather similar arguments have been advanced by English-speaking liberals against the tradition of European liberalism which originates with Rousseau. See for example Bertrand Russell’s account of Rousseau in his History of Western Philosophy or J.L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. The danger of such writings is that they have encouraged in our universities a provincial approach towards the history of political thought, just at a time when our situation required the opposite. For the continuing health of the liberal tradition, what we least needed was a defensive exclusion of the classical and European traditions from the canon of liberalism. At a time when massive technological advance has presented the race with unusual difficulties concerning political liberty, what was needed from our academics was an attempt to think through all that was valuable from the great Western traditions which could help us in dealing with these difficulties. Instead, what we

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Two general propositions seem true about our contemporary liberalism. On the one hand, it is the only political language that can sound a convincing moral note in our public realms. On the other hand, there are signs that modern liberalism and technology, although they have been interdependent, may not necessarily be mutually sustaining, and that their identity may not be given in the nature of reason itself. These two propositions are fundamental to this writing. The first appears to me indubitable. If argument is to appear respectable and convincing publicly, it must be spoken within the broad assumptions of modern liberalism. Arguments from outside this tradition are put out of court as irrational and probably reactionary. This response is so part of the air we breathe that we often forget its existence. For example, reactions against liberalism emerge on our continent based on local patriotisms and parochialities. These reactions are rarely able to sustain any national control of public policy, partially because the moral language in which they express themselves can easily be shown to be ‘irrational’ in terms of liberal premises, by the dominant classes of our society and their instruments of legitimation. Or again, the language of traditional religion can sustain itself in the public realm only insofar as it responds to issues on the same side as the dominating liberalism. If it does, it is allowed to express itself about social issues. But if there is a conflict between the religious voices and the liberalism, then the religious voices are condemned as reactionary and told to confine themselves to the proper place of religion, which is the private realm. It was not surprising that an influential liberal philosopher defined religion as what we do with our solitude, and in so doing turned around the classical account of religion.17 Or again, people who wish to justify certain moral positions are forced to pay lip service to modern liberalism if their arguments are to be convincing. The paying of lip service is always evidence of the dominance of a particular way of

got from men such as Russell and Popper was a procrustean affirmation of the selfsufficiency of English liberalism. To put the matter crudely: in a time of great intellectual confusion, our crimes at home and abroad should not prevent us from trying to see what good is present in English-speaking liberalism, any more than the crimes of the Soviet Union should prevent us from trying to see what good is present in the tradition that proceeds from Rousseau, or indeed any more than ancient slavery and imperialism should prevent us looking clearly at classical political philosophy.

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thought. There was a time when lip service had to be paid to Christianity. In our present world, lip service must be paid to liberalism. For example, the bell of liberalism sounded in the fall of Nixon.18 The waves of public indignation which made possible his fall were too sustained to have been produced simply because the wind machines were owned by his enemies. The fact that so many had an obvious interest in bringing about his fall must not allow one to forget that they finally depended for their success on the disinterested voices of those who truly believed in the universal principles of liberal government. Indeed, the surprise in other parts of the world that the Americans were getting rid of an effective president, simply because of a few domestic crimes, showed unawareness of the strength of political liberalism in the heartland of that empire. Those who were surprised showed that they only understood the United States as an object – that is, from outside. The reason why modern liberalism is the only language that can seem respectable in the public realm is because the dominant people in our society still take for granted that they find in it the best expression of moral truth. This must be stated unequivocally because some of us often find ourselves on the opposite side of particular issues from that espoused by the liberal majority, and do not accept the deepest premises, which undergird liberalism, concerning what human beings are. It is disturbing to find that a belief that does not appear to one rationally convincing is nevertheless the dominating belief in the world one inhabits. If one wants to communicate, it is constantly necessary to use language which cannot express one’s own grasp of reality. The escape from this can be paranoia, which expressed itself in the US as the belief that the dominance of modern liberalism was produced simply by a conspiracy of ‘intellectuals,’ ‘media people,’ ‘the eastern establishment’ etc. Paranoia in any form is always the enemy of sanity and charity. This particular paranoia is especially dangerous because it closes the eyes to the essential fact that modern liberalism has been dominant because the dominant classes in our society have taken for granted that it expressed what is good. For a century the majority of people have at the centre of their education received the belief that the modern liberal account of justice is the best account. To accept the implications of the fact is a sine qua non of any sane vision of English-speaking societies. To turn to the second proposition: it is not difficult to point to facts

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which suggest that technological development does not sustain political liberalism. Abroad, the tides of American corporate technology have not washed up liberal regimes on the shores of their empire. Indeed, to put it mildly, the ferocious determination of the Americans to keep Indo-China within the orbit of their empire made clear that the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness might be politically important for members of the domestic heartland, but were not intended to be applicable to the tense outreaches of that empire.19 In the light of these facts, the argument is still presented by liberals that unfree regimes arise in colonial areas when they are first being modernized, but that in the long run they will develop into liberal democracies. By this argument the identity of technological advance and liberalism is preserved in thought. The strength of the argument is necessarily weakened, however, as fewer and fewer colonial regimes remain constitutional democracies. The question is then whether the argument is an appeal to progressivist hope, or to facts; or whether progressivist faith is indeed fact.b 20

b It is of course true that the dilemma arising within liberalism, because of its imperial as well as its domestic role, existed as much in the European empires of the nineteenth century as in the American. Indeed, Plato’s sustained attacks on Athenian imperialism, and its close relation to democracy, deals with a comparable situation, except for the presence of technology in our day. In England, modern liberalism was above all the creed of the new bourgeois, in that the insistence on political liberties was related to the liberation of dynamic commercial technology, and thus with the expansion of that dynamism around the world. The claim to legal and political freedoms at home was not a claim that could be universally applied abroad to alien races who had to be made the subjects of that commercial technology. This was an even more pressing difficulty for the French, because after the revolution their ideology more explicitly universalised the rights of man. Western principles of right in claiming universality became at one and the same time the basis for anti-imperialism both at home and abroad, yet also a justification for Western expansion as the bringing of enlightenment into ‘backward’ parts of the world. Liberalism as a justification for imperialism can be seen very clearly in the work of Macaulay. His account of English history is a panegyric to modern liberalism, with the world-historical good of England’s greatness. In India he was the chief instrument in westernising education, and above all for substituting English for Sanskrit in that education. He once said that ‘All the lore of India is not equal to Aesop’s fables.’ In the intense competition for the world’s crassest remark, this one has a high claim. On the other hand, as imperialism developed, the Western critique of it came forth largely in the name of liberalism. The anti-progressivist critics of imperialism, such as Cunninghame Graham, spoke after all in voices which were not easily understood in modern Europe. Indeed the dilemma became increasingly obvious; in so far as modern liberals put their trust in the development of commerce and technology, they were inevitably identifying themselves with the

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However, it is in the heartlands of the English-speaking empire that the more fundamental facts appear which put in question the mutual interdependence of technological and liberal reason. The chief of these facts is that the development of technology is now increasingly directed towards the mastery of human beings. In the words of Heidegger, the sciences are now organized around cybernetics – the technology of the helmsman.21 To state part of what is given in that thought: technology organizes a system which requires a massive apparatus of artisans concerned with the control of human beings. Such work as behaviour modification, genetic engineering, population control by abortion are extreme examples. The machinery reaches out to control more and more lives through this apparatus, and its alliance with the private and public corporations necessary to technological efficiency. The practical question is whether a society in which technology must be oriented to cybernetics can maintain the institutions of free politics and the protection by law of the rights of the individual. Behind that lies the theoretical question about modern liberalism itself. What were the modern assumptions which at one and the same time exalted human freedom and encouraged that cybernetic mastery which now threatens freedom? Moreover, what can be the place of representative government in the immense society ruled by private and public corporations with their complex bureaucracies?c The great founders of our liberalism believed

spread of imperialism; in so far as liberalism became explicitly a universal doctrine of human rights, the liberals had to become critics of their imperialism. A similar dilemma was present from the beginnings of American imperialism, and erupted into immediate political significance over the Vietnam war. The party of F.D. Roosevelt at one and the same time was domestically the liberal party, and abroad established the highest tide of American imperialism. Yet the dominant force in the American protest against that war came from people who protested in the name of liberalism. However ashamed we English-speaking people should be of that war, it should not be forgotten that the strongest anti-imperialist protest in Western history occurred in the USA. It may be that the majority of protesters accepted the high consumption due to their imperialism, nevertheless that protest says something about the authenticity of American liberalism. c The word ‘hierarchy’ is still often used as the political opposite to ‘equality.’ This is bad usage because the subordinations and superordinations of our bureaucracies are not intended to be ‘sacred orders’ given in the nature of things. There seems to be no current positive word which expresses clearly the opposite of equality. Is this because our liberal language has become increasingly egalitarian, and the lip service we pay to this principle makes it impossible to find accurate words to express what is happening in our institutions?

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that the best regime required that the choices of all its members should have influence in the governing of the society. It was also hoped that free and equal individuality would be expressed in our work as a field for our choices. The free society would require the overcoming of the division of labour, so that our individuality could be expressed in an egalitarian variety of work. How are either of these possible when the dominant decisions come forth from private and public corporations? In this situation, the institutions of representative government seem increasingly to wither in their effectiveness. Lip service is paid to them; but institutions such as elections and parliaments seem to have less and less constitutive authority. The work of most human beings is intensely specialized, and proceeds from routines which have little to do with individual spontaneity. The widespread concentration of most North Americans on private life, and their acceptance that the public realm is something external to them, takes us far away from the original liberal picture of autonomous and equal human beings participating in the government and production of their society. Indeed, the current concentration on private life, and the retreat from the public realm as something which is other, raises questions beyond the practical failures of our liberalism. It raises fundamental questions about what is being spoken about human beings in that liberalism. Its theoretical founders asserted that justice was neither a natural nor supernatural virtue, but arose from the calculations necessary to our acceptance of the social contract. In choosing the benefits of membership in organized society, we choose to obey the contractual rules of justice. But is not the present retreat into the private realm not only a recognition of the impotence of the individual, but also a desire to leave the aridity of a realm where all relations are contractual, and to seek the comfort of the private where the supracontractual is possible? For example, the contemporary insistence on sexual life as the chief palliative of our existence is clearly more than a proper acceptance of sexuality after nineteenth century repressions. It is also a hunger and thirst for ecstatic relations which transcend the contractual. After all, mutual orgasmic intercourse cannot finally be brought under the rules of contract, because it takes one beyond the realm of bargains. Therefore human beings rely on its immediacy partially as a retreat from the arid world of public contractualism. In this sense, the retirement of many from the public realm raises deeper questions about modern liberalism than its practical failure to achieve its ideals. It raises questions about

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the heart of liberalism: whether the omnipresence of contract in the public realm produces a world so arid that most human beings are unable to inhabit it, except for dashes into it followed by dashes out. But such a tenuous relation to the public realm is far from the intentions of the early founders of modern liberalism. This leads to asking: was the affirmation by those founders that justice is based on contract ever sufficient to support a politics of consent and justice? This questions modern liberalism at its theoretical heart. To sum up: we are faced by two basic facts about our moral tradition. First, our liberalism is the only form of political thought which can summon forth widespread public action for the purposes of human good. Secondly, this liberalism seems presently to speak with a confused voice in the face of the technology it has encouraged, and this confusion puts in question the theoretical roots of that liberalism. These lectures will, therefore, try to enucleate what is being spoken about human and non-human beings in that liberal tradition. Only in the light of such an enucleation can one turn to the more difficult question of what is the relation between technological reason and modern liberal reason. PART II What is being spoken about human beings in our contemporary liberalism now that technology is not simply a dreamed hope but a realizing actuality? I will seek this by discussing a recent writing: A Theory of Justice, by Professor John Rawls of Harvard.22 The centre of the Englishspeaking world has moved since 1914 to the great republic. It is therefore appropriate to listen to contemporary liberalism in an American garb. Harvard has been an intellectual centre of that empire. Since President Eliot, the ends of that university have more and more seemed to be the stamping of liberal ideology on the articulate classes of that empire.23 A book of six hundred pages about justice is a good place to start. Justice is after all the central political question and a carefully composed theory of it, clearly within contemporary liberal assumptions, allows us to hear much of what is being spoken about human beings in that liberalism.d 24 d That Rawls writes within the assumptions of modern liberalism is evident in every page of his writing. Not only does he appeal to Locke, Rousseau and Kant as his masters, but he covers extensively contemporary English-speaking writing on his subject,

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Rawls affirms that justice can only be truly understood when it is known as rooted in contract. He summons forth as his chief teachers the great contractarian theorists of modern liberalism, Locke, Rousseau, Kant; he sees his task as expressing their fundamental contractarian truth in terms which will be acceptable to contemporary analytical philosophizing. Indeed among those who have written about political liberalism in the English-speaking world there have been two main conceptual schemes: those who have been purely utilitarian and those who have subordinated utilitarianism within a firm contractarian frame. Rawls places his liberalism within such a frame and his book is a sustained criticism of pure utilitarianism as the basis for a free society. It is surely not hard to understand that contractarian theory has always protected the rights of individuals in a way that utilitarian theory does not

not only that of fellow teachers of philosophy, but also that of social scientists interested in theories of justice. All this literature lies within the assumptions of liberalism. To put the matter negatively: Rawls does not give any account of those theoretical positions about morals and politics which in the Western world have stood as alternatives to our liberalism. These alternatives can be divided simply into two groups. The first of these is the political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and the modification of that teaching worked out by their Christian and Jewish followers. This group is temporally antecedent to our liberalism. The second group is temporally consequent. It may be quickly typified by calling it the thought dependent upon Marx and that dependent upon Nietzsche. All that need be said about Rawls’ approach to classical political philosophy is that in a book on justice there are four times as many references to a certain professor Arrow as there are to Plato. It would appear that for Rawls the classical teaching about moral and political good is simply a dead alternative of only antiquarian interest. Rawls’ appeal to Aristotelian psychology is used by him as if that psychology did not live as part of the whole body of Aristotle’s teaching. This appeal is therefore not to be taken as an exception to Rawls’ disregard of the ancients. As for the great contemporary alternatives to our liberalism, Marx and Marxism are disregarded and Nietzsche is only casually mentioned. For example, the difficulties which historicism presents for moral and political philosophy – difficulties which have engrossed generations of continental European thinkers since Nietzsche – are not discussed. The advantage of this procrustean stance is that it allows Rawls to hold English-speaking liberalism before us for our undivided attention. We swim in a particular bay whose contours we can come to know intimately, and we are never asked to swim out into the ocean the immensities of which can easily overwhelm us. Reading Rawls’ book is comparable to reading a contemporary book of Roman Catholic thought in which the issues are presented as the differences of interpretation between Maritain and Teilhard, Rahner and Lonergan. In the same way in Rawls’ book we are not diverted from the details at issue within our contemporary liberalism, so that it lies before us to tell us what it is.

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allow, and that this is a pressing issue at a time such as ours when the rights of individuals are assailed by progressive corporate power, acting under the banner of technological necessities. In terms of utilitarianism’s own first principle, why should individuals have inalienable rights, if those rights stand in the way of the greatest happiness of the greatest number? When applied to the actual world of politics, contractarian theory has always supported a legal and political system which grasped the nitty-gritty of justice in its details, while the broad principle of utilitarianism could be used to sweep them away. It is for this reason that contractarian theorists such as Locke and Rousseau have had direct influence on actual politicians to an extent never achieved by utilitarians such as Hume and Bentham. The politicians had to come to terms with the details of justice in terms of individuals. Therefore when Rawls insists on the superiority of Locke to Hume, we seem to be entering a world which is much less flaccid about what can be done to individuals than the world called forth by successors of Hume. Can we do anything to individuals in the name of minimizing the misery of the greatest number? In starting from the great contractarians, Rawls gives us hope that we will meet the complexities and difficulties of political justice in a way that is not possible under the principles of mass hedonism. Contractarian theory may seem an abstraction of philosophers, taking us away from the common sense needs of human beings so obviously faced by the utilitarians in their principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Nevertheless it is more fundamental than utilitarianism because it answers the question: Why should human beings consent to even that minimal social cooperation without which organized society cannot exist? It answers this question in terms of the interests of the free individual. ‘Liber’ and ‘free’ are after all synonymous at the literal level.25 Its answer is that the good society is composed of free individuals who agree to live together only on the condition that the rules of cooperation, necessary to that living together, serve the overall purposes of each member of that society. That agreement or contract, and the calculating implicit in it, is the only model of political relations adequate to autonomous adults. The state must be such that each person can freely agree to the limitations it imposes, and this will only be possible when its free, rational members know that its existence is, in the main, to their advantage. Rawls is in the central tradition of modern liberalism in that his ideal political beings are adult calculators, who freely

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decide that social cooperation is worthwhile because it is to their individual advantage. It is in this sense that Rawls believes that the true principles of justice depend on a social contract. He believes that if one is to push to the point of philosophic clarity the idea of justice implicit in social cooperation, the conception of social contract becomes necessary, because without the social contract it is not possible to show that the acceptance of justice is to the advantage of the freely calculating individual. The vision of society as a collection of free, calculating individuals puts his book at the heart of modern liberalism. The book is the attempt to make clear the nature of that social contract (a) in the light of the new conditions of advanced technological society and (b) in terms acceptable to modern analytical philosophers. To explicate Rawls’ account of the social contract and to see whether it provides a foundation for the principles of justice he builds upon it, it is necessary to compare Rawls’ account with those of his avowed masters, Locke and Kant.e 26 Locke’s account of the social contract is that it is made by sensible calculating human beings, in the light of their recognition of the way things are in the state of nature. In exemplary consciousness of what he is doing, Locke follows Hobbes in substituting the state of nature for the createdness of nature as the primal truth. From this truth his understanding of politics is derived. In short, Locke’s belief in contractual constitutionalism as the best regime is founded upon a new primal teaching about nature which is radically distin-

e It might be thought that the names of Hobbes and Rousseau should be added. Rawls finesses the thought of Hobbes in a footnote, saying that there are unspecified ‘difficulties’ in that thinker. He takes Locke as his master, not Hobbes. Also, why Kant rather than Rousseau? Rousseau was after all the thinker who reformulated contractarian doctrine in the light of his profound criticism of Hobbes’ and Locke’s account of the origins of human beings. Be that as it may, there are more references to Kant in Rawls’ book than to any other thinker. It is well to remember in this connection Kant’s continual statements of his debt to Rousseau. English-speaking academics have been apt to regard Kant as a critical epistemologist, to emphasize his debt to Hume and to disregard the fact that his continual tributes to Rousseau are wider than his tribute to Hume. For one of these tributes, see 219–20 of this text. As the subject of this writing is the interdependence between technological reason and reason as political liberalism, it is well to remember that Kant’s dedication of The Critique of Pure Reason to Francis Bacon is combined with his tributes to Rousseau. One partial way of looking at his three Critiques is surely as the attempt to lay before us modern liberalism and technological science as unified in his account of reason. In this sense Rawls is surely right to turn to Kant as his chief master.

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guished from that which had been traditional to western Europe. The Aristotelian account of nature (which had been strangely put together with the doctrine of creation in the dominant Western tradition) was known by Locke to be untrue, above all because of what was given in a clear philosophic reflection about the discoveries and methods of the new sciences. (It is worth remembering that as a young man Hobbes had served as a clerk in the household of Francis Bacon.)27 For Locke, the Aristotelian teaching could no longer be the framework for the understanding of either the human or the non-human things. In the old view of nature, human beings were understood as directed to a highest good under which all goods could be known in a hierarchy of subordination and superordination. Our lesser goods were seen as pale participations in that highest good. To Locke, the untruth of the traditional teaching means that there is no such highest good given to human beings in their recognition of the way things are. Nevertheless the understanding of the way things are – the state of nature – remains for him the only basis from which a true account of the best political regime can be understood. Put negatively then, for Locke the great question about justice must be: how can the foundations of justice be laid when rational human beings are not given the conception of a highest good? His answer to that question is that justice is contractual, not natural. The state of nature does not provide us with the conception of a highest good; but it does provide us with knowledge of the greatest evil, and the desire to escape that evil. The calculating individual knows that the worst evil is death, and that although we cannot finally escape it, we must escape as long as we can. We must preserve ourselves – if possible comfortably. Reflection on the state of nature makes us recognize this given end (albeit negative) and from it a new political teaching can be laid down. In the social contract, we agree to government and its limitations upon us because it is to our advantage, in the sense that it protects us from the greatest evil. That contract is the source of our rights because we have consented to be social only upon certain conditions, and our rights are the expressions of those limiting conditions. All members of society are equal in the possession of these rights, because whatever other differences there may be between human beings, these differences are minor compared to the equality in our fundamental position: to be rational is to be directed by the dominating desire for comfortable preservation. Justice is those convenient arrangements

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agreed to by sensible men who recognize the state of nature, and what it implies concerning the greatest evil.28 Because of his bland and indirect rhetoric, Locke was to be the chief theoretical influence on generations of English-speaking bourgeois, persuading them to give their allegiance to the new form of liberalism. In so far as they understood his teaching as more than immediate political prescriptions, they came to recognize that in accepting that liberalism they were giving up the doctrine of creation as the primal teaching. To be aware of what is being spoken by Rawls about human beings, it is necessary to state where his account of the social contract differs from that of Locke. Rawls’ central teaching is that the principles of justice are not self-evident to our ‘common sense’; the positing of an ‘original position’ enables us to formulate them. The original position is an imagined situation in which an individual is asked to choose principles of justice for his society under a ‘veil of ignorance.’ This veil conceals from him his particular circumstances, and therefore eliminates from his choosing those motives of self-interest which otherwise would corrupt the fairness of his judgment. In the original position we all would choose fairly because we would be abstracted from knowing the detailed facts about our condition in the real world. Because we would not know who we were in detail (we might be people in the most miserable conditions) we would therefore have an interest in choosing the universal principles of our society which would be good for all its members, not simply to the advantage of some. As we choose under a veil of ignorance, we would choose principles which would be good for all, because we might be one of those to whom partial principles did not apply. Chosen from this abstracted position, the principles of justice are the basis for the constitution of any just society in any time or place. The original position is Rawls’ basic theoretical teaching because from it we can derive universal principles of justice acceptable to all rational human beings. All human beings can agree to say ‘yes’ to a society so based, because it is the one most likely to serve their advantage.29 It is important to recognize that in Rawls’ account of justice as fairness human beings remain essentially calculators of their own selfinterest in the original position. When Rawls speaks of human beings as rational, he means that they are able to calculate their self-interest. The calculations of our self-interest are concerned with what Rawls calls ‘the primary goods.’ These are those goods such as wealth, liberty,

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status, etc. which all sensible human beings will agree are good, however much they disagree as to what is the highest good or whether there is a highest good.30 Calculation concerning these goods is the central activity of the original position, because in it individuals know that they have self-interest, and know the general content of those self-interests. What they do not know is the particularities of those self-interests. They do not know their place in society e.g. wealth, skills, inclinations, ambitions, private philosophies of life, etc. Indeed the original position is made timeless and ahistorical in that it does not include knowledge of the level of technological development the particular society has reached.31 In two essential ways Rawls’ teaching is close to that of Locke’s social contract. (1) For both Rawls and Locke the primary political act from which justice is derived is an act of individualist calculation of self-interest. (2) What men primarily calculate about are those good things which lead to comfortable self-preservation. Nevertheless Rawls’ teaching differs in substance from that of Locke. ‘The original position’ is an abstraction from life, according to Rawls; ‘the state of nature’ is the way things are, according to Locke. Nobody has ever actually lived in the original position; all reflective people are aware that they could easily find themselves in Locke’s state of nature, if the conventions of civil society were wiped away. What holds us in society according to Locke is our consciousness of what we have to lose (life itself) if we do not put up with the convenient rules of the game. The fear of violent death is the reason for setting up those rules and it remains the final reason for staying with them. Rawls’ original position is not concerned with the way things are, it is an imagined abstraction from that. Justice is as much a matter of convenient rules of the game as it is in Locke’s teaching. But the rules of the game are derived from a quite different situation from that described by Locke. They are reached from a stance set up to achieve fairness. Clearly there is a great gulf fixed between a contract for rules of the game founded on a calculation of individual self-interest which is always aware that its chief end must be self-preservation, and a contract concerning the rules of the game founded on an imagined stance abstracted from the way things are.f f For a brilliant and extended account of the difference between the state of nature and the original position see Allan Bloom’s article, ‘Justice: John Rawls vs the Tradition of Political Philosophy,’ American Political Science Review 69 (1975): 648–62.

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One clear cause of this gulf between earlier contractarian teaching and that of Rawls is that Rawls defines the activity of philosophizing in a quite different way from Locke and Hobbes. It is not my business here to describe the history of English-speaking philosophy in the last centuries, or its subtle co-penetration with changes in the continental account of philosophy. In journalistic terms, it suffices to state that since 1900 the ‘subject’ has been increasingly practised in English-speaking universities within a rubric that can be crudely labelled as ‘the analytical.’ Rawls practises philosophy within the broad outlines of that rubric; so what he thinks he is doing is clearly differentiated from what Locke thought he was doing.g 32 In the sphere of morals and politics, analytical philosophers have often expressed their teaching within the negative principle known as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’: that propositions concerning how human beings ought to act cannot be derived solely from factual propositions about nature. Clearly the contractarian teaching of Hobbes and Locke is an example of ‘the naturalistic fallacy,’ because what they both say about justice is founded upon what they claim to know about the way things are. The regime founded upon the social contract is the best regime because of the way things are in the state of nature. Locke unfortunately practised philosophy before the discovery of ‘the naturalistic fallacy,’ the divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom,’ between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Rawls is the inheritor of these later explications. According to him the principles of justice cannot be derived from such metaphysical propositions as the state of nature. To put his difference from Locke in terms of the history of ethical theory, his doctrine of the original position may then be taken as the attempt to preserve the advantages of contractarian over utilitarian foundations for liberal justice, while avoiding ‘the

g It is indeed little more than journalism to state that in the English-speaking world since 1900 there has been a dominating account of what it is to do philosophy and that the best label to pin upon these complex phenomena is ’analytical.’ To become wary of simplifications in this matter, it is only necessary to think of the differences in interest, in method and in doctrine between such disparate practitioners as Russell and Wittgenstein, Quine and Austin; or to think of the subtle intermingling of continental logistics and native English empiricism. Nevertheless it is accurate to say that when youngsters come to study philosophy at our universities they generally meet a curriculum and teachers who require of them certain assumptions as to what that study is. It may be helpful here to remember Walter Rathenau’s aphorism: ‘There are no specialists, there are only vested interests.’

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naturalistic fallacy’ (call it if you will the metaphysical foundations) upon which Locke’s contractarian teaching is based. With the division between nature and freedom, ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ we enter the world of thought dominated by Kant. It is indeed appropriate that in the preface of Rawls’ book we read that his theory ‘is highly Kantian in nature,’33 and that in his index we find more references to Kant than to any other thinker. Kant has been the German philosopher who over long and changing generations has most sustained his influence over English-speaking academics. That influence continued even in the years since 1870 as the English and the Germans moved into increasingly explicit economic and political conflict, and their intellectual worlds became further separate. In the public world, Kant’s great political teacher, Rousseau, exerted a greater influence, first through the French revolutionists, and more recently through Marxism. But it was through the thought of Kant that the tradition of continental liberalism most firmly touched our universities. Generations of professors studied and taught Kant’s writings, so that his influence penetrated the form of our education. For example, when we think about the origins of the distinction between judgments of fact and of value, we are apt to impute the formulation of this assumption to the work of Max Weber.34 Yet not only did Weber’s formulation arise from his study of Kant, but also in our world the long influence of Kant on academic philosophers had prepared the ground for the dominance of this distinction in the social sciences. What is being attacked as ‘the naturalistic fallacy’ is avoided by the distinction between judgements of fact and of value. Indeed Rawls’ notion of justice as fairness seems on first view to take us into the political world of rational choice which was so wonderfully explicated by Kant. The free power of human reasoning is seen not only as overcoming the deficiencies of nature by developing the arts and sciences, (technology), but also as showing us, in its impartial universalising power, why these arbitrary and deficient allocations of nature ought not to be allowed to continue. We not only transcend nature in our technological ability to correct its deficiencies, but also in our moral willing which is the statement that they ought to be corrected. The human species depends for its progress not on God or nature but on its own freedom, and the direction of that progress is determined by the fact that we can rationally give ourselves our own moral laws. Within this view of freedom as transcending nature, the principle of equality is

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extended to realms unthought of in the earlier contractualism of Hobbes and Locke. It becomes no longer simply a matter of equality in legal rights, but an equality also of goods and powers to be distributed fairly by the rational will of the community. At the simplest level of interpretation, the greatness of Kant’s account of justice lies in his assertion that it is irrational for human beings to make favourable exceptions of themselves. It is irrational to ask for goods from our communities that we do not will for other people. Rawls’ account of justice as fairness is obviously close to that Kantian assertion. In the immediate political scene, the equality he advocates is an equality defined in the tradition of Rousseau, not of Locke. It is an equality not only of legal rights but of substantive goods, towards which all communities ought to strive. Such an equality is considered a sane political goal, not only because the progress of technology allows us to put right the blindness and deficiencies of nature, but also because reason teaches us that these deficiencies ought not to be. Yet despite Rawls’ continuous appeals to Kant, it is a dimmed and partial Kant which emerges. Kant is quite clear why the contractually based state founded on the rights of man is the best state. The first sentence of The Laying of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals expresses the ontological basis of that affirmation. ‘Es ist überall nichts in der Welt, ja überhaupt auch ausser derselben zu denken möglich, was ohne Einschränkung fur gut könnte gehalten werden, als allein ein guter Wille.’35 It is not pedantry which makes me write this sentence in German. The ring of its affirmation is lost in all English translations I have read or attempted. ‘It is impossible to conceive anything at all in the world, or even out of it, which can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.’ Yes, but not quite.h According to Kant we can know this to be so, because as he says in The Critique of Practical Reason, morality is the one fact of reason.36 Facts are given and our rationality gives us the very form of justice for all our actions. Indeed, as justice h The underlining is Kant’s. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.J. Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1964), 61. Also the translation of ‘Grundlegung’ as ‘Groundwork’ or elsewhere as ‘Fundamental Principles’ loses the sense of the enormity of the claim made in the title. Why does Kant have to lay new foundations for the metaphysics of morals? – because all the previous foundations will not do. They will not do because freedom has not been understood as autonomy, nor the human species understood as the cause of its own development.

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is present to our wills in the mood of command, reason commands us to the faith that justice is what we are finally fitted for. Our other activities may be what we are fitted for under certain circumstances, but they may not be under other circumstances. Justice is always good and is the final court of appeal for the judging of the goodness of any act. In the command to be just, given us in our very reasons, we are also given the idea that being fitted belongs essentially to us. All the uncertainties about whether we are fitted for anything which arises for us from our sense of nature’s arbitrariness, our knowledge of its mechanism and the relativities of our desires, are overcome in the command, beyond all bargaining, to be just. The categorical imperative presents to us good without restriction. Moreover that justice which is our good depends upon our willing of it. We are the makers of our own laws; we are the cause of the growth of justice among our species. We are not only the species whose good is justice, but also the species who are the cause of the coming to be of our own good. According to Kant, in our ability to will justly we are both timelessly rational, outside the world where everything is relatively good and where reasoning is simply calculation; we are also utterly in the world of time where we make history, where what happens matters absolutely and depends upon our autonomous willing. What it means to say that the good will is the only good without restriction is both the traditional doctrine of the timeless factuality of the moral law; but also the new idea that as makers of our own laws we are called upon to realize justice progressively in history.i Kant’s account of the political in his shorter writings is firmly related to the affirmation that the good will is the only good without restriction. Kant took the contractarian teaching of Hobbes and Locke which was based on the passions of nature and founded it rather on the free-

i It is not my business here to describe the holding in unity of these two sides – timeless good and historical will – as it is laid before us through an account of the modern sciences and arts, in the edifice of Kant’s three Critiques. However, in an era when oblivion of eternity has almost become the self-definition of many of us, it is necessary to insist on the side of timeless and universal good in Kant’s system. Indeed this side is shown with startling clarity by Kant, when despite all the causes which might lead him to propound the philosophy of history, as an essential part of any true philosophical teaching, he turns back from the possibility of such an enterprise because it would involve our moral choices depending on knowledge other than the timeless fact of reason itself. See The Critique of Judgment, paras. 83 and 84.

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dom of human beings to legislate a timeless rational morality which quite transcended nature. It may be said that he sacralized the contractarian teaching. From the side of will in the phrase ‘the good will,’ the social contract represents the consent necessary in any regime proper to human beings whose essence is their autonomous freedom. Because the highest purpose of human life is to will autonomously, the best political regime must be such as could be willed rationally by all its members. In this sense, consent becomes the very substance of the best regime. It must be a state based on ‘the rights of man,’ that is, giving the widest possible scope to external freedom, because any limitations on external freedom stand in the way of the exercise of our autonomy. These rights must be universal throughout society, because all human beings are equal in the sense that they are all open to the highest human end of willing the moral good. Inequalities between human beings are only concerned with lesser goods, such as intellectual or artistic powers. Concerning what matters absolutely we are all equal in the fact that the rational willing of our duty is open to all. From the side of good in the phrase ‘the good will,’ Kant’s contractarian teaching leads to a sharp division between morals and politics, and therefore to a strict limitation on the powers of the state given in the social contract itself. Properly understood, morality is autonomous action, the making of our own moral laws. Indeed any action is not moral unless it is freely legislated by an individual. Therefore the state is transgressing its proper limits when it attempts to impose on us our moral duties. Our autonomous choices of timeless good cannot be so imposed. Indeed, Kant more than any other political philosopher, lays before us that side of liberalism which says that the state should not interfere with the actions of its citizens, except when those actions infringe the external freedom of other citizens. The state is concerned with the preservation of the external freedom of all, and must leave moral freedom to the individual. It is concerned with the relativities of nature understood by Kant within the non-teleological and non-substantialized view of nature given us in modern science. When in his Perpetual Peace he states that the hard problem of organizing a good regime can be solved even for a race of devils, as long as they are intelligent, he is asserting that the state must be limited to those natural relativities, and that the ability to calculate is an adequate account of reason when one is concerned with those relativities.37 Nowhere is

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Kant’s affirmation that the world of nature is strictly relative more lucidly put before us than in his definition of marriage as a life-time contract for the mutual use of the genitals.38 But the limitations of the state to contracts concerning these relativities is necessary in order to guard the individual’s willing of the timeless good, in which he quite transcends those relativities. It is on moral grounds that the morally neutral state is the best state. The state is limited in the social contract because the good will is the only good without restriction.j For all Rawls’ appeals to Kant, the central ontological affirmations of Kant are absent from Rawls. Clearly in Rawls’ account of philosophy there can be no fact of reason. Justice, therefore, cannot be justified as coming forth from the universal morality given us in reason itself. Rawls cannot make the affirmation that the good will is the only good without restriction, or that the good will is that which wills the universal moral law. His account of philosophy does not allow him such statements about the supreme good. What Rawls takes from Kant is partial in a way common among contemporary English-speaking teachers of philosophy. The central import of the critical system is interpreted in a way that leaves Kant essentially a precursor of modern analytical philosophy. His tribute to Hume as having awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers is emphasized; his stronger more positive and more often repeated tributes to Rousseau seem to have been forgotten.39 It is only necessary to quote one of these tributes to make clear that Kant does not take as limited an account of the scope of philosophy as is usual among English-speaking academics: ‘Newton was the first to discern order and regularity in combination with great simplicity, where before him men had encountered disorder and unrelated diversity. Since Newton the comets follow geometric orbits. Rousseau was the first to discover beneath the varying forms human nature assumes, the deeply concealed essence of man and the

j There is no clearer example of how the vagaries of intellectual history turn inside out the teachings of a great philosopher than the way that Kant’s assertion that the morally neutral state is the best state is now generally taken by his liberal successors. For Kant the morally neutral state is advocated on the basis of an egalitarian moral absolutism; today it is often advocated on the basis of moral relativism. The morally neutral state based on sceptical grounds is the strange progeny of the morally neutral state based on absolutist grounds. Perhaps the fate of Kant’s doctrine on this matter may be taken to illustrate the fate of inadequate teachings.

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hidden law in accordance with which Providence is justified by his observations.’k 40 When Kant is taken as essentially a precursor of modern analytical philosophy, certain sides of his thought are being correctly grasped. Obviously he is a great philosopher of science and the greatest critic of traditional Western metaphysics. There is no more wonderful account than his of the darkness in which we find ourselves when we attempt to apply the conception of final cause to the understanding of nature. Our fate is to find ourselves agnostic (in the literal sense) about the purpose of the way things are. He enucleates how that agnosticism has been presented with a new certainty to educated people through the discoveries of modern science. He is as aware as Hobbes or Locke of the consequences of the Galilean physics for our practical lives. Our knowledge of justice cannot be derived from our knowledge of nature (as some once believed) because our knowledge of nature is not teleological. Indeed Kant has as often been taken as a precursor of modern existentialism, as of modern analytical philosophy. We are thrown into a world of otherness. Yet, and it is an enormous ‘yet,’ across the darkness of that agnosticism there is thrown, according to Kant, the beacon light of our knowledge of what is required of us concerning justice. That requirement is presented to all human beings from the earliest days of their reasoning, in the categorical commands of our reason itself. According to Kant, we are not in darkness concerning the one thing absolutely needful for us all. Because there is that beacon (the one fact of reason), Kant’s purpose is not simply to criticize metaphysics as such, but out of his criticism of the traditional metaphysics to lay the foundations of the new one. As he makes consummately clear in the preface to the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, metaphysics must become Rousseau’s ‘Socratic wisdom.’41 It is the laying of the metaphysical foundations necessary to protect that beacon light of justice. These protecting foundations are necessary on the one hand against the intellectual extremities of dogmatists who would deny our moral autonomy in denying our darkness; and on the other hand against the sceptics who would deny that there is this beacon light of justice. This ‘Socratic wisdom’ requires that we affirm statements which are ‘beyond physics’ –

k ‘Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse’ in Immanuel Kant’s Sämmtliche Werke, vol. 8, ed. Gustav Hartenstein (Leipzig, 1968), 630.

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statements about God and about freedom. Clearly the proposition that the good will is the only good without restriction is an ontological proposition. To interpret Kant as if he were simply a precursor of modern analytical philosophy is to lay him upon a bed of Procrustes and cut his thought down to a required ametaphysical shape.42 Rawls passes beyond this in taking Kant as an ethical theorist whose love of egalitarian justice he admires. But by cutting Kant’s ethics off from its ontological foundations, he nevertheless proceeds to the work of Procrustes upon that analytical bed. Rawls’ difference from Kant is seen in his account of ‘the free and rational person.’ According to Rawls, rationality is analytical instrumentality; freedom means that we cannot avoid choices. This is different from Kant’s account of our free moral self-legislation as participation in the very form of reason itself. This difference becomes obvious when it is cashed in political effect around the question of equality. Why is it good that all human beings should live in a society to which they can give consent and in which they are guaranteed an equality of political liberties? Why is it good that human beings should have political rights of a quite different order from members of the other species? Why should equality in legal rights stand above and not be influenced by the obvious inequalities in contribution to progress whether in production, in the arts or in the sciences? To Kant, the answer is quite clear. The only good without restriction is the good will, and that is open to all human beings irrespective of their other differences. Our differences in talent, in education and social contribution count as nothing against fundamental equality, because we are equal in what is essential. In our moral willing we take part in the very form of reason itself. But why does Rawls’ account of the ‘person’ make equality our due? Why are beings who can calculate and cannot avoid choices worthy of equal inalienable rights? After all, some humans can calculate better than others. Why then should they not have fuller legal rights than the poor calculators? Why do either of these human abilities justify the primacy of equality, or the different level of our rights compared with those of other species? Nor can it be said that Rawls’ use of the word ‘person’ illuminates his position. Indeed his use of the word seems at odds with his analytical account of philosophy. To call human beings ‘persons’ is clearly not a scientific description. What is it then? If the word is a true description but not scientific, is it not then one of these supra-scientific metaphysical terms which analytical philosophy would have us eschew? One

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may be glad that Rawls has inherited the noble belief in political equality, and the belief that ‘the free and rational person’ is ‘valuable’ in a way quite different from members of other species. But in an era such as ours, we cannot help hoping that he will tell us why it is so. His writing is typical of much modern liberal thought in that the word ‘person’ is brought in mysteriously (one might better say sentimentally) to cover up the inability to state clearly what it is about human beings which makes them worthy of high political respect. Where Kant is clear concerning this, Rawls is not. In short, Rawls affirms a contractarian as against a utilitarian account of justice, but wishes to free that contractarian teaching from the metaphysical assumptions upon which it was founded in the thought of its greatest exponents. To state how successful he is in this attempt, it is necessary to return to Rawls’ account of how the question of justice arises, and how his teaching concerning ‘the original position’ claims to answer it. According to Rawls, the question of justice arises because all sensible people know that they have interests, and also know that these interests are sometimes going to be in conflict with those of other people. They also know that it is in their interest to live in organized society, not only to protect themselves in the pursuit of their interests against others who may interfere with such pursuits, but also positively to further their particular interests through such means as the division of labour.l 43 In the light of this plurality of interests and the plurality of opinion as to what is good, how can we come to agreement about foundational rules for the social system? These foundations must reconcile the need to live in society with the need to pursue our own interests. Such basic rules are what Rawls means by the principles of justice. They are the basis of any decent constitution. Through the constitution they set the limits to positive laws, and therefore the limits within which all public relation-

l In describing Rawls’ account in terms of ‘interests’ rather than ‘goods,’ I am not denying that these interests are often unified into the pursuit of what he calls ‘life-plans.’ I use the word ‘interests’ to exclude any implication that the word ‘good’ is used by him in the traditional sense of ‘what we are fitted for,’ or any implication that he believes that we can have knowledge of the highest good for human beings in general. The word ‘good’ allows Rawls to make use of Aristotle’s teaching, through which he attempts to deepen his essentially utilitarian account of happiness by seeming to undergird it with Aristotle’s very different account. Commentary on Rawls’ version of Aristotle would require the gifts of Dean Swift.

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ships should take place. This account of the political situation in which the question of justice arises in terms of essentially calculating individuals may be described accurately as American bourgeois common sense. So to describe it is not meant simply derisively. It would be foolish to deride the American bourgeois self-image because it has become dominant in most of the Western world, and views do not become widely dominant without at least some partial sense in them. How are we to come to knowledge of such basic rules? Let us imagine, says Rawls, an original position in which human beings are under a veil of ignorance, so that they know that they have interests, and know that these interests are likely to be in conflict with those of other people, but do not know their own particular ones. In such a position, human beings who calculate sensibly would choose a society in which ‘each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.’44 Rawls’ first principle of justice is identical with J.S. Mill’s sole principle.45 Sensible human beings would choose a society founded on such a principle, because under a veil of ignorance they would calculate that such a fundamental rule would allow them to pursue their own interests at least partially. Without such a rule they would chance finding themselves in a situation where they might even be unable to pursue their interests at all. For example, they might be enslaved. From the original position we reach therefore a universal principle of justice. It is universal in that it would be chosen by any sensibly calculating individual if he were in the position of calculating about interests in the abstract; that is, calculating as if he were everybody, and not simply himself or herself. This abstracted calculation is able to provide the universal principle of justice because it is a calculation about calculating which would be made by all good calculators. To repeat, human beings for Rawls are, in their public role, calculators of their interests. The act of thought in the original position might be called disinterested calculation because it is made outside any knowledge of particular interests; it is not disinterested, however, in that the calculation of interest in general is its very centre. Substantively it provides a first principle of justice because it comes to terms with the basic difficulty of any political thought. It shows how consent can be reconciled with the necessity for organized society. Consent is only possible when we know that the society is organized for the pursuit of individual interests in general. It is important to emphasize that this account of the derivation of the

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first principle of justice appears to Rawls to have the enormous advantage of not requiring any knowledge of the way things are beyond common sense. It does not depend on our being able to attain any knowledge of what human beings are fitted for. Our legal rights, so derived from the original position, in no way depend on any public affirmations concerning what is good. Indeed it would appear that according to Rawls enlightened human beings are quite clear that it is not possible to have knowledge of the highest good. But if many citizens (perhaps even the majority) misguidedly think such knowledge possible, this opinion need not affect the morally neutral state, because its principles of justice can be clearly determined quite outside any opinions concerning that possibility. Indeed the doctrine of the original position claims that at one and the same time it preserves the state as morally neutral, yet also guarantees that such a state protects the rights of free and equal citizens. Moral pluralism about ‘life-plans’ is guaranteed by the law so long as those plans do not harm other people or interfere with their basic liberties. We are thus freed from the bad old days when the powers of the state were used to enforce the monistic opinions of some concerning goodness, on the unwilling lives of others. We are able to achieve this tolerance without sacrificing our certainty about the superior justice of the liberal regime. Moreover in terms of modern theory the chief advantage of the original position is that it enables us to free ourselves from all the difficulties and disagreements of the traditional political philosophy, which arose from its dependence on metaphysical assumptions. We free ourselves from that burden of speculation while remaining quite certain about the principles of political justice. Philosophy or religion become comparable to the question of sexual habit. They are simply a matter of private pursuit, unless their conclusions interfere with the liberty of others. We can think what we like metaphysically or religiously (if we have a taste for that kind of thing) as long as we recognize that these thoughts are our private business, and must have no influence in the world of the state. Philosophy and religion can be allowed to be perfectly free because their conclusions are perfectly private. On the other side of the same coin, the principles of justice so derived will remain utterly impervious to anything we know through scientific discovery. Let us say we reach the conclusion, because of the discoveries of modern science, that human beings are accidental occurrences which have arisen in a world which is completely explainable in terms of necessity and chance. This gives us no reason to doubt that

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all human beings should have the free and equal rights of the liberal regime. As the principles of that regime are derived solely from abstracted calculation about obvious human interests, they will stand as self-evidently true, however the world be explained, or whatever it be. Rawls derives much more than the regime of political rights from the ‘original position.’ Justice requires a regime which pursues equality in all aspects of life, social and economic as well as political. He shows this in terms of what he calls ‘primary goods,’ and our calculation about them in the original position. Primary goods are those goods which any sensible person will know he will need, whatever may be his particular ‘life-plan.’46 To repeat, according to Rawls we cannot know what is the highest good for human beings, or whether there is such. Nevertheless all sensible persons know that certain goods are necessary to any way to life. At an obvious level, these are such things as food, shelter and safety. Rawls, however, adds a long list of liberties and powers beyond these immediacies, stretching from civil liberties all the way to the provision of self-respect. Under the veil of ignorance in the original position, the calculating individual is not ignorant of the fact that he needs as much as possible of these primary goods. He also knows that there are unlikely to be enough of them to go around. What he does not know is the details of his particular possession of those goods. Neither does he know the stage of technological development in his particular society. In this partial ignorance, therefore, the calculating individual decides for a system which strives toward equality in these primary goods. This is a rational calculation because if he were to choose any other regime he would be likely to find himself in a position where he got less rather than more of the pie. Indeed, in certain stages of technological development, if he did not so choose he would be likely to find himself without even a sufficiency. From this rational calculation under the veil of ignorance we reach his second principle of justice. ‘Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, – and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.’m

m Rawls, 302. I have omitted the words ‘consistent with the just saving principle’ from Rawls’ formulation of his second principle, because they are confusing without a long account of his vague descriptions of his compromises between capitalism and socialism, and of the consequent relation he maintains between economics and politics. Such an account is not essential to my present purposes.

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In making substantive equality necessary to the content of justice in his second principle, Rawls passes beyond the bourgeois political common sense of his first principle to what may be called American progressivist common sense. In practical terms, what he is saying is that the works of F.D. Roosevelt must be carried to their completion, probably by the Democratic party.47 Welfare egalitarianism can be united with the individualist pluralism of the constitution in an advanced technological society. The difficulties between liberty and equality raised by de Tocqueville must be overcome; justice requires the union of equality and liberty.48 Although this progressivism has its own American style, it finds its justification in European philosophy. Nature does not supply fairly. The arbitrary deficiencies of nature and society are to be overcome in history in the name of equality. The very definition of history as progress is the coming to be of equality. This philosophic liberalism reached its apogee in Marx. Technology and equality go so closely together as almost to be considered one. It must be said that Rawls takes only partially this European progressivism, because he is always attempting to unite it with bourgeois common sense. This can be seen in the limits he puts on substantive equality compared with Marxism in its originating form. At the centre of Marxism is the belief that the realization of equality will require such a prodigious event as the overcoming of the division of labour. This kind of question is just not present for Rawls. His acceptance of progress as equality is restrained from that hope by his bourgeois common sense. To put it crudely, the overcoming of the division of labour is not likely to be within the imaginative limits of the Harvard professor. Substantive equality yes, but only at the level of consumption and welfare. Indeed what makes Rawls’ book worthy of study is that it is so typical of current liberalism in both the intellectual and practical Englishspeaking worlds. His book combines a theory of justice with an account of the substance of justice. His theory of justice attempts to come to terms with the intellectual difficulties which analytical philosophy has brought against any theory of justice which transcends the analytical. His account of the substance of justice puts together the claims of bourgeois individualism and progressive equality, typical of official American liberalism. This strange mixture has only lately begun to be faced by its contradictions, both from the ‘left’ and the ‘right.’ However, his book is a confident exemplar of what has been the dominant moral strain in our politics.

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In terms of what is happening in advanced societies, it is indeed not difficult to ridicule Rawls’ hopes concerning this union of individualism and egalitarianism. The contradictions in this union have been made explicit both by ‘the left’ and ‘the right.’ Rawls’ account of justice seems simply to abstract from the fact that liberty and equality now have to be realized in a society largely shaped politically by the cooperation between massive private corporations and the public corporation which coordinates their welfare. Indeed his thought seems to abstract from the very existence of these dominating powers. Can his calculating individualism bring forth a doctrine of the common good strong enough to control the ambitions of these mammoths? Can the calculating individual be a citizen in such a world, or does this account of human beings only lead to individuals concerned with consumption – above all entertainment and the orgasm as consumption? Even more surprising than Rawls’ lack of interest in such powers within his own country is his abstraction from their influence in the world as a whole. That is, his theory of justice is written in abstraction from the facts of war and imperialism. He only deals with war around the question of the right of the individual to refuse the claims of the state. The abstraction from the facts of war and imperialism is particularly emptying when one remembers that the modern liberal Englishspeaking regimes have both been great imperial powers. Moreover, his book was written during the period when his country was embarked on a savage imperial adventure carried out under the regimes of Kennedy and Johnson, who advocated domestically the same welfare equality and individualism which he is advocating. Indeed his abstraction is even more surprising when one remembers that the Vietnam war was justified in terms of liberal ideology, was largely planned by men from the liberal universities, the most influential of whom were from Rawls’ own university. Paradoxically, however, Rawls’ abstraction from war and imperialism makes his work even more typical of our liberalism. Most American liberals have discussed the questions of world order under the rubric of internationalism and the relation between equal sovereign states, when in fact they lived at the centre of a great empire. After all, that archetype of modern liberalism, F.D. Roosevelt, used forceful language against war and imperialism at the very time when he was consolidating an empire. Be that as it may, Rawls’ theory of justice is enormously weakened by his failure to relate it to the facts of imperialism or of domestic corporate power.

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Such criticisms of Rawls concerning his apprehension of the technological society must not, however, divert us from the fundamental question about his theory. This question is the following: can the content of justice he advocates be derived from his contractual theory? He advocates many liberties and equalities as the necessary content of a just regime. Sensible people can disagree with Rawls about the details of these liberties and equalities; but surely any decent human being will agree that liberty and equality are at the heart of political justice. Any English-speaker who cares about our tradition must be glad that our regimes have, at their best, attempted to realize such justice. But Rawls’ book claims to be more than a catechism of such goods; it claims to be a theory of justice. That is, it claims to be giving us knowledge of what justice is, and how we know that a regime of liberty and equality is its core. He meets the demands of that claim by stating that we will know what justice is and why liberty and equality are necessary to it when we think the calculation of everybody’s self-interest in general, abstracted from any self-interest in particular. The fundamental question about Rawls’ book is whether such justice can be derived from calculation of self-interest in general. Rawls characterizes his account of justice as ‘justice as fairness.’49 Sometimes in the reading of this long and complex book it may seem that we are being asked to play the old shell game. When we look for the bean of justice under the shell of self-interest, it has moved under the shell of altruism, and vice versa. Nevertheless when we are really able to pay attention to the mover’s hands, we find that the bean is always under one shell – the shell of self-interest. Justice as fairness is under it. Justice is derived from calculation about self-interest in general. The fundamental question about Rawls’ book is then whether justice as fairness can be so derived. Is it possible to believe that the complex apparatus necessary to preserving and extending liberty and equality in the midst of the technological society can be known as necessary to the best regime simply by thinking through the calculation of self-interest in general? It must be insisted (yet once again) that this calculation is carried out within a particular account of what we can know about self-interest. Indeed, Plato’s account of justice might be sensibly described as known by a calculation concerning self-interest. When Socrates tells us that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it, he is saying that it is always in our interest to be just.50 But in his account our interests are known

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through our knowledge of the nature of things. Justice is what we are fitted for. We come to know that through the practice of philosophy, which gives us knowledge of the nature of things, of what we are fitted for and what the consequences are for our actions in being so fitted. In philosophy we are given sufficient knowledge of the whole of the nature of things to know what our interests are, and to know them in a scheme of subordination and superordination. In this account, justice is not a certain set of external political arrangements which are a useful means of the realization of our self-interests; it is the very inward harmony of human beings in terms of which they are alone able to calculate their self-interest properly. The outward regime mirrors what is inward among the dominant people of that regime, and vice versa. Within that account, justice could then be described as the calculation of self-interest, as long as it is understood that at the centre of that self-interest is justice itself. For justice is the inward harmony which makes a self truly a self (or in more accurate language which today sounds archaic: Justice in its inward appearance is the harmony which makes a soul truly a soul). Obviously Rawls means something very different by the calculation of self-interest. His analytical account of philosophy does not allow him to think that our knowledge of self-interest can be derived from what knowledge we have of the way things are as a whole. Such knowledge is not possible according to his account of philosophy. Nor (as has been argued previously) can analytical philosophy allow him even that knowledge of self-interest which Locke claims can be derived from our knowledge of the nature of things as a whole. According to Locke, we can place self-interest in an order of subordination and superordination, because our knowledge of the way things are as a whole (the state of nature) tells us that everybody’s chief interest is the avoidance of violent death. Justice is derived from that knowledge of our highest self-interest.n For Rawls the calculated self-interest in general is not derived from any such knowledge. It is avowedly not derived from any contemporary n The strangest part of Rawls’ book is his appeal to Kant as his chief master. The very core of Kant’s thought is his sharp division between self-interest and fairness. The moral law of fairness appears to us as categorical command, and therefore simply cuts across the claims of self-interest. It is because of the very great difference between Rawls and Kant on this key issue, and because of Rawls’ claim that his theory ‘is highly Kantian in nature’ (Rawls, viii), that I have used the unfriendly metaphor of the shell game about his book.

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philosophic or scientific knowledge. Our self-interests are ‘the primary goods,’ and these are simply accepted as obviously our interest, whatever may be the nature of things as a whole. Indeed, much of Rawls’ book is taken up with showing the superiority of his contractarianism to utilitarianism. Nevertheless his account of ‘primary goods’ is hard to distinguish from the utilitarian account of pleasure. As far as the calculation of the political contract is concerned, self-interest in general is the maximizing of the cosy pleasures. It is taken as self-evident that this is everybody’s self-interest, irrespective of what anybody may claim to know about the way things are as a whole. I do not imply that there is anything bad about cosy pleasures. Much of our life is concerned with them. The point is, however, that Rawls derives justice from a calculation which is in terms of them alone. What kind of regime will result? What must be asked then about Rawls’ theory is not only whether justice as liberty and equality can arise from a social contract reached from a calculation of self-interest in general; but also whether it can be derived from a calculation in which the interests are self-evidently independent of any account of the way things are as a whole. After all, the first question has been on the agenda of political philosophy since our contractarian theory was first enucleated by Hobbes and Locke: Is justice simply pursued because we calculate that it is the most convenient means to our self-interest? Rawls raises nothing new about that question. What he adds, however, is the attempt to justify this contractarianism within analytical assumptions: Is justice pursued because of convenience, even when the calculation is in terms of an account of self-interest reached in abstraction from any knowledge of the way things are as a whole? Is such justification of justice able to support the pursuit of liberty and equality at a time when the conveniences of technology do not seem to favour them? It may be argued that I have made too much of one academic book. One swallow does not make a summer; one academic book does not make an autumn of our justice. However, theories are at work in the decisions of the world, and we had better understand them. PART III Why is it that liberalism remains the dominating political morality of the English-speaking world, and yet is so little sustained by any foun-

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dational affirmations? At the level of immediate historical cause, this is not difficult to understand. The long ascendency of English-speaking peoples, in the case of England since Waterloo, and the United States since 1914, was achieved under the rule of various species of bourgeois.51 Members of classes are liable to consider their shared conceptions of political goodness to be self-evident when their rule is not seriously questioned at home, and when they are successfully extending their empires around the world. Those shared conceptions of constitutional liberalism seemed to be at one with technological progress, particularly as this progress was being achieved above all by Englishspeakers. This unity between progress in liberty and in technology, under English-speaking guidance, was often further guaranteed by being enfolded in such doctrines as the ascent of man. In the case of England, the victory of the Whigs in 1688, and the almost unopposed consolidation of that victory after 1715, provided the political and ideological setting for the development of the first industrial society with its maritime empire.52 English constitutional liberalism was immensely flexible under Whig guidance. As new bourgeois classes appeared in the quick changes of a technological society, they were allowed near power, and persuaded to loyalty to the Whig constitution. The constancy among the articulate classes concerning what constituted the best regime was such that there was little need to wonder as to what was being said about human and non-human nature in the foundations of that liberalism. It was so assumed and so successful that it did not need to be thought. In that bourgeois dominance the notes of comfort, utility and mastery could alone ring fully in the public realm. Among those who wrote political philosophy since Hobbes and Locke, there has been little more than the working out in detail of variations on utilitarianism and contractualism, their possible conflicts and their possible internal unclarities. What do Bentham or J.S. Mill or Russell add to Locke at the level of fundamental political theory? Indeed it is better to put the question: what has been lost in them of his comprehensiveness, subtlety and depth? The confidence of that Whig dominance is illustrated by the way that Burke has been interpreted since his day. He has been taken as our chief ‘conservative’ in contradistinction of our ‘liberals.’ In fact he was in practice a Rockingham Whig, and did not depart from Locke in fundamental matters, except to surround his liberalism with a touch of

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romanticism.53 That touch of the historical sense makes him in fact more modern than the pure milk of bourgeois liberalism. Such figures as Swift and Johnson and Coleridge, who attempted (in descending order of power) to think of politics outside the contractarian or utilitarian contexts, were simply taken as oddities dominated by nostalgia for a dying Anglicanism, and having no significance for the practical world.54 This great confidence in bourgeois liberalism explains why the new continental philosophies of politics, from later stages of the age of progress, never seem to have exerted much influence in English intellectual life. Rousseau’s account of contractarianism, based on freedom, which dominated Europe through the work of Kant and Hegel and Marx, only touched English thought in an academic way. What influential English thinker has ever come to terms with Rousseau’s fundamental criticism of Hobbes and Locke?55 Indeed, till recently, Marxism has had little influence in England, even among the abused proletariat of the first industrial society. Since this European liberalism of freedom little penetrated English thought, it is not surprising that English thinkers hardly recognized at all the attack on that liberalism of freedom which arose in Germany. Nietzsche was not taken by the English as the great critic of Rousseau’s politics, but as an obscurantist pseudo-poet. They did not need to look at his lucid analysis of what we were being told about human and non-human beings in the advancing technological society. Both for good and ill, the English thinkers were sheltered from the extremities of European political thought because of their successes under bourgeois constitutional liberalism. This was for good because the pursuit of comfortable self-preservation, though not the highest end, is certainly more decent and moderate than the extremities of communism or national socialism. There are worse things than a nation of shopkeepers. This sheltered confidence had the ill effect of leaving English intellectuals singularly unprepared to understand the extremities of the twentieth century, particularly because it had weakened the theoretical tradition in its cosy embrace. Indeed English political philosophy has been little more than a praise of the fundamental lineaments of their own society, spiced by calls for particular reforms within those lineaments. Thinkers such as Mill or Russell were too much at home in their world to be political philosophers in the classical meaning of that term, which always

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implied that qua philosophers, they transcended the opinions common to their society. Even the philosophic radicals had drawing rooms. As late as our generation, after the results of two world wars had sapped the confidence of many Englishmen, and when the possibilities of technological tyranny had become obvious, the most popular academic theorizing about politics went no farther than the decent prescription that we ought to pursue ‘piecemeal social engineering’ so as to ‘minimize misery.’56 The only purpose of political philosophy was the valid negative task of freeing us from the delusions of general statements which might encourage a more than piecemeal engineering. Our tradition of justice was so blandly self-evident as to be in no need of further justification. It must be insisted, however, that this long consensus about political good, and the resulting poverty of thought, did much to inoculate the English from those theoretical viruses which have plagued continental Europeans. The very weakness of philosophical life protected them from its modern extremities. The fact that the English received modern political thought in an early form from Hobbes and Locke, and continued to be generally content with that form, meant that they were free from the much more explicit modernity which arose first in France and later in Germany. Their very confidence in their liberalism saved them from taking seriously the traditions which proceeded either from Rousseau or from Nietzsche. They were for example saved from such a manifestation of those political philosophies as ideology. Clearly one of the uniquely modern phenomena has been ideologies, either of the ‘left’ or of the ‘right.’ Ideology is here defined as surrogate religion masquerading as philosophy. All forms of it have been destructive of social moderation. Its modern appearance has been chiefly caused by confusion concerning the related but distinct roles which religion and philosophy play in good societies. This confusion originated above all in the false formulation of these roles made during the French and German enlightenments. The fact that the dominant English political philosophy came from a period before those enlightenments has helped till recently in insulating the English from this virus. As illustration, the greater prestige given to scholars and artists in the German world has often resulted in an ideological politics in that country. Hitler was after all an ideologue who conceived himself as the artist in politics. The very disinterest in philosophy among the English has saved them in the past from

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that lack of moderation which is inherent in modern political philosophy and technology.o To rise above the scholars, Churchill’s writings may be taken as an example of this confidence in liberalism which did not need thought, even at a late date in that British destiny. After 1945 he wrote A History of the English-speaking Peoples.57 Here we might expect to find English liberalism lying before us as ‘monumental history.’ We might even expect to find a Thucydidean telling of why the deeds of those whom he had loved and to whom he had belonged had been both great and good. We might expect a telling freed from that attenuated ignorance of the heat of practice, so common in academic history. Churchill, like Bertrand Russell, came from one of the great landed families who in their rule of England and its imperial expansion had been responsible, more than any other class, for the incarnation of modern principles of liberty into the English constitution. His class had believed profoundly in the inter-dependence of commerce, domestic liberty and scientific progress. Indeed in Churchill’s life of his founding ancestors, both the man and the woman, he had shown them to be substantially responsible for the origins of that Whig rule.58 He was a modern liberal in the sense that in domestic politics he had been an enthusiastic member of that Liberal government which first brought nationalism, social welfare and democracy together.59 He was a liberal in that he always maintained that superior contempt for the traditional religion, except as a useful political tool in times of emergency.p Churchill has often been described as a conservative, but he was only that because he appeared at a time of conflict, when his nation’s constitutionalism was threatened by new alternatives – Marxist communism and national socialism. His intransigent opposition to these alternatives was expressed not only in writing but in war. Indeed he showed himself more than an English nationalist in that he

o As in the previous paragraph I have ridiculed Sir Karl Popper’s political thought, it is necessary to say that what is good in his writing is just his trust in the strength of English liberalism to combat the plague of ideology. Foolishly he has combined this trust with an inability to distinguish ideology from philosophy. This is above all evident in his crass writing about Plato. p This contempt for Christianity lies at the heart of the division between modern liberalism and the earlier liberties of English history. See, for example, Churchill’s letter to The Times ‘On praying for rain.’ Both in substance and style this letter might have come from Russell.

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believed that the American experiment was the authentic continuation of English liberalism, and was willing to sacrifice much of his country’s greatness to guarantee that the torch of world leadership should be passed in our era to the capitalist republic. One might therefore expect Churchill to state in such a late writing what it was about English-speaking liberalism which had made it worthy of loyalty such as his. One could expect an account of substantive loyalties to community goods, which is indeed not philosophy, but the only soil out of which political philosophy can arise. Such accounts carry in themselves an incipient recognition of what is said in philosophy. Particularly at that late date, one might have expected from Churchill such ‘monumental history,’ when the ambiguity of his career must have lain before him. His career had been given to the perpetuation of English power, and yet had led to the decline of that power. However, a presentation of these loyalties in their substance and meaning is quite absent from his book. English-speaking institutions are glorified in the description of deeds, but we are not given the substance of those deeds which made them both great and lovable, other than they just happen to have been our own. Indeed the pure distance in Churchill’s book between his account of action, and what good was being lived and thought in those actions, is seen in the fact that Locke is mentioned only once in the book, and then because of his work on the reformation of the coinage. The most influential thinker of the good of capitalist liberalism is not understood in relation to the deeds of that liberalism, but simply as one of those academics with which influential families decorate their lives. It seems indeed that Churchill’s book is finally an appeal to pure racial will. However, such a reading would be unfair, because his failure to present good does not come from crude arbitrariness of will. He was no existentialist, but a gentleman whose loyalties transcended will. Rather it is the givenness and certainty of his loyalties which does not allow him to present those goods. Even as late as 1945, his confidence in English political greatness, and in the obvious truth of the superiority of constitutional liberalism, so enfolds him that there is no need to articulate what is good and great in the deeds he is describing. The leading makers of the American constitution conceived themselves as influenced by political philosophy, which they took in its modern form. The love of English political philosophy among the French of the enlightenment came back into English-speaking explicit-

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ness among the lawyers and intellectuals of the new world, rather than among the more rooted English rulers. The legal and political forms of the USA are more purely founded on constitutional contractualism than those of the country where that modernism was first thought comprehensively. The pioneering expansion into an unexploited continent gave American liberalism a greater egalitarian tint than in England. However, the coincidence of that expansion with the development of increasingly powerful forms of industrial capitalism always resulted in these egalitarian influences being safely confined within the practical and ideological bounds of a given bourgeois liberalism. The egalitarianism of Paine and the egalitarianism of populism were always subsidiary.60 Indeed, political contractualism and its resultant private pluralism fitted the long term public needs of the later immigrants of non-English traditions. The very pressures of pluralism have encouraged that interpretation of their constitution which would see it as a sheerly contractual document. Issues in the political realm could be decided in terms of the contracted constitutional rights of individuals, while the denser loyalties of existence were left supposedly untouched within pluralism. The ideology of pluralism suited both the institutions of industrial capitalism and the immigrant groups. It helped both the unrestrained monistic power of the corporations, and at the same time the entrance of members of many races (at least those of European origin) into the freedom of the common heritage, seemingly without losing their private traditions. Increasingly, the substance of the common good was expressed rationally only as contractual reason, to the exclusion of those loyalties which gave content to that good in more traditional societies. American nationalism, with effective sense of a righteous destiny, has had to be explicitly affirmed so as to provide for the conception of the common good a substance which transcended the simply contractual. Contractualism was less inhibited even than in capitalist England, where certain disappearing classes maintained remnantial reverences from before the age of progress. In the United States such remnants as Anglican poetry and piety were largely squashed with the revolution, and reverences brought by later immigrants were easily engulfed and legitimized into the public contractual framework. The crossing of the Atlantic to a society which had no history of its own from before the age of progress brought a flowering of the contractual principle in its purest form.

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In the first half of this century the expansion of the United States around the world, as the great capitalist empire, was so fast and successful that the constitutional principles of bourgeois hegemony became even more self-evident.q Even more than in the case of England, the domestic and foreign successes of their system put contractualism safely beyond any serious thought. However much Americans have been impregnated by modern negations in other spheres of existence, there is little serious alternative to the fundamentals of their legal and political framework. Many are still able to exalt themselves as the country of freedom, and in that exaltation it is the essentially contractual which is being glorified. While the theoretical foundations of our justice came increasingly to be understood as simply contractual, nevertheless decent legal justice was sustained in our regimes. This can only be comprehended in terms of the intimate and yet ambiguous co-penetration between contractual liberalism and Protestantism in the minds of generations of our people. I am not capable of enucleating the nature of that relation, and it can only be hinted at here. Indeed one can use of that co-penetration the words of one who battled with it in his own being: there is ‘the sense, in the whole element, of things too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange or even simply too beautiful, for any ease of intellectual relation.’r Perhaps more than any other European country, England’s practical flesh and bones have been fed till recently by its remarkable religious traditions. They may not have been the home of much philosophy, but they were a deeply religious people. The more uncouth and

q It is worth repeating that one of the strangest combinations of events in American life was the way that the brutality of their crimes in Vietnam was followed by the very careful protection of domestic rights in the affair of Watergate. To many Americans the victory of their congress and courts over their President seems to have been above all a means of justifying their own self-righteousness, to the end of forgetting what had happened in Vietnam. To understand how that purging worked as an anodyne would require an understanding of the relation between modern liberalism and imperialism. r Henry James, preface to The Aspern Papers. That relation has been illumined by the massive historical scholarship about it in the last generation; but such a relation clearly cannot be fathomed by scholarship. Even Weber or Troeltsch, as they move beyond scholarship towards philosophy, are still unable to catch that self-definition of our wills which arose from the co-penetration. For my comments see Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: Anansi 1969).

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less integrated Protestantism of North America has sustained certain forms of justice, at least for those of European origin. Several elementary comments about liberalism and Protestantism are necessary to the understanding of our surviving justice. To start at the surface: it is clear why the English free church tradition feared established Christianity, or any close connection between church and state. The Calvinists had only gained political control for a very short period.61 They therefore saw in the secularization of the state a means to their freedom against established religion. Beyond the political, moreover, the fearful solitariness in the Calvinists’ account of the meeting between God and his creatures encouraged that individualism which was at home with a politics essentially defined in terms of individual right. It is not necessary to enter the debate between Marxists and Weberians to recognize the truth understood by both: namely that Calvinist individualism and the development of capitalism went hand in hand, and that the contractualist political regime was a useful expression for both. Indeed one can say that the extraordinary compact between God and man in Calvinism strangely prepares people for contractual human relations. As secular liberalism became increasingly progressivist, the millenarianism in extreme forms of Protestantism often seemed to be saying the same thing as the secular idea of progress. The religion which has in its heart ‘He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree’ must have some connection with equality.62 Less obviously, there was an intimate relation between the development of modern positive science and the positivist account of revelation in Calvinism.s 63 It is often forgotten by those outside theology that English Protestantism was overwhelmingly Calvinist or Anglican, not Lutheran. Such fates are consummate. Modern European history brings forth the comparison: Germany with its philosophy and music, its political immaturities and extremities; England with its poverty in music and contemplation; its political moderation and judgment. Whatever forces were operating, one of them was their differing Protestantisms. Indeed in England the long consensus about political good, which was sustained by this ambiguous union between Protestantism s In the fine writing on this matter recently, e.g., the books of Trevor-Roper, Webster, Yates, etc., it is still necessary to single out the early articles of M.B. Foster as most theoretically illuminating. See Mind 1934-35-36.

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and secularity, had much to do with protecting that civilization from the worst extremities of the twentieth century. Whatever else may be said about England, there has been more moderation in its domestic politics so far than in any of the other dominating Western societies. The English were indeed willing to be more extreme towards non-Europeans than they were at home; but there were some restraints even in their imperial adventures. In his fight for Indian independence, Gandhi had to deal with Lord Halifax, not with Himmler or Beria.64 In the United States, the Protestantism was of a more unflinching, more immoderate and less thoughtful sort than in England. The Puritan seekers after a new world were escaping the public demands of an Anglicanism which at its heart was not Calvinist. This rougher Protestantism was more suited to the violent situation of conquering a new continent, first emptied of its French and Spanish opposition and some easily conquered Indians. Indeed the Puritan interpretation of the Bible produced more a driving will to righteousness than a hunger and thirst for it. As it became secularized in America, that will became the will of self-righteousness, and produced its own incarnation in Emerson.65 Nevertheless, even in the immoderation – indeed the ferocity – which has been so manifest in American history, that Protestantism gave a firmer and more unyielding account of justice to its country’s constitutionalism than would have been forthcoming from any simply contractual account. The continuing power of American Protestantism in popular life today comes from the fact that it has been a less thoughtful species of religion than the originating Protestantism of Europe, and therefore less vulnerable to modernity. That Protestantism is today above all pietist. This has given it the strength to continue even through all the modernizing of rural and small town America. But this pietism has little intellectual bite compared to the Calvinism it replaced, so that its direct practical effect on the control of technology (the central political question) is generally minimal. All this can be easily said by modern historians. It is more important to recognize the dependence of secular liberalism for its moral bite upon the strength of Protestantism in English-speaking societies. Most of our history is written by secularists who see the significant happening as the development of secular liberalism. They are therefore likely to interpret the Protestants as passing if useful allies in the realization of our modern regimes. This allows them to patronize Protestant superstitions in a

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friendly manner, as historically helpful in the development of secularism. To put the ethical relation clearly: if avoidance of violent death is our highest end (albeit negative), why should anyone make sacrifices for the common good which entail that possibility? Why should anyone choose to be a soldier or policeman, if Lockean contractualism is the truth about justice? Yet such professions are necessary if any approximation to justice and consent are to be maintained. Within a contractualist belief, why should anyone care about the reign of justice more than their life? The believing Protestants provided that necessary moral cement which could not be present for those who were consistently directed by contractualism or utilitarianism or a combination of both. This fundamental political vacuum at the heart of contractual liberalism was hidden for generations by the widespread acceptance of Protestantism. At one and the same time believing Protestants were likely to back their constitutional regimes; yet they backed them without believing that the avoidance of violent death was the highest good, or that justice was to be chosen simply as the most convenient contract. The word ‘dialectic’ used about ‘history’ has had such cruel consequences for so many people that one is loath to use it even loosely. Nevertheless the relation between Protestants and the growing explicitness of secular liberals can be expressed in the political dialectic between them. The more Protestants came to be influenced by the theoretical foundations of the liberalism which they had first accepted for practical reasons, the less were they able to sustain their prime theological belief which had allowed them to support justice in a more than contractual way; therefore they were less able to provide the moral cement which had given vigour to the liberal regimes. The more secular liberals were able to make explicit that their belief in freedom was not simply a matter of political consent, but implied that human beings were the makers of their own laws, the less could they receive from their Protestant supporters that moral force which made their regimes nobler than an individualism which calculated its contracts. The long history of the gradual secularizing of Protestant faith would require a detailed discussion of its relation to the discoveries of modern science and the formulations of modern philosophy. Protestant faith was not only undermined by the objective discoveries of the sciences but equally by the affirmations concerning humanity in the dominant philosophies. On the scientific side, for example, it was Dar-

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winism which gave Protestant faith its intellectual coup de grace among so many of our bourgeois. On the philosophic side, as ‘enlightened’ human beings came to express their self-understanding as autonomy – that is, to believe themselves the makers of their own laws – any formulation of Christianity became unthinkable. This co-penetration of Protestantism and liberalism must not be understood in terms of a simply passive overriding in which Protestantism gradually lost itself. It was a veritable co-penetration in which Protestantism shaped as well as being shaped. In writing of the positive influence of Protestantism on our liberalism, one is forced to touch, however hesitantly, upon the most difficult matter which faces anybody who wishes to understand technology. This is the attempt to articulate that primal Western affirmation which stands shaping our whole civilization, before modern science and technology, before liberalism and capitalism, before our philosophies and theologies. It is present in all of us, and yet hidden to all of us; it originates somewhere and sometime which nobody seems quite to know. Nobody has been able to bring it into the full light of understanding. In all its unfathomedness, the closest I can come to it is the affirmation of human beings as ‘will,’ the content of which word has something to do with how Westerners took the Bible as a certain kind of exclusivity. The Calvinist form of Protestantism was a strong breaking forth of that primal and unfathomed affirmation, because ‘will’ and exclusivity were so central to its theology. Calvinist theological voluntarism made it utterly a modern Western theology as distinguished from the theologies of the Platonic world. Hooker saw this with hard practical clarity when he wrote against the Calvinists at the time of their beginnings: ‘They err who think that of the will of God to do this or that, there is no reason beside his will.’t In that sense Calvinists were not simply the passive victims of secularization, but were formulators of it even in their definitions of God and humanity as ‘will.’ Calvinist secularism is as useful a substantive as secularized Calvinism. Because of their rootedness in what is thought in the word ‘will,’ these Calvinist secularists were particularly open to that definition of will as autonomy. This openness is central to the nemesis of their faith. But in that very nemesis, Calvinism remained

t Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, book 1, chap. 2.

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a continuing influence in formulating our new ‘self-definitions.’ An intellectual example from Europe is the fact that thinkers such as Rousseau and Sartre, who were such formulators of human beings as freedom, were both impregnated with Calvinism in their origins. A more important and immediate example is the sheer conflict of competing wills which has characterized the history of American contractualism. ‘Winning isn’t everything; it’s all there is.’66 To turn back from the depths of technology’s origins, it may be said simply that the nobility of English-speaking Protestants often lay in what was given them in the word ‘freedom,’ and the consequences of this for the political realm. Nevertheless what was there given them made them prone to take the meaning of the will to be autonomy. But clearly once that Rubicon is crossed, no form of Christianity can consistently stand. As the Protestants accepted the liberalism of autonomous will, they became unable to provide their societies with that public sustenance of uncalculated justice which the contractual account of justice could not provide from itself. This ambiguous relation between Protestants and secularization was expressed academically in the influence of Kant among generations of professors – particularly those making the first or second steps away from the pulpit, and finding in the teaching of philosophy an acceptable substitute for preaching. Intellectuals wanted to seem emancipated from Protestantism, even as they were strongly held by it. They liked to see themselves as the friends of freedom and the new technologies, while at the same time they needed to believe that the new society would incorporate the ‘absolute moral values’ of Protestantism. They could not accept the account of liberalism given in its strictly worldly forms. Kant seemed to tell them how all these needs could be met. They could be moderns and maintain the ‘values’ of their past. He seemed to show them how they could believe in freedom as autonomy and in an ‘absolute morality’ as well. He offered them a Protestantism purified of superstitions and open to progress. A comparison can be drawn between the hopes of these gentle ministers-cum-professors and the more tragic history of the relations between philosophic Jews and German society. The most remarkable of the ‘neo-Kantians’ was Hermann Cohen, and as late as this century he seems to have been close to identifying the coming of the Messiah with the full realization of the German liberal state.67

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In the United States, contractualism was later to be buttressed by other forms of Biblical religion which came with the later immigrants. Both Judaism and Roman Catholicism gave a firmer bite to the political justice lived out under the American constitution than that implied by contractualism. Nevertheless, because the primal formation of that constitutionalism was in the meeting of Protestantism and secular accounts of legality, it cannot be my purpose here to describe how the later immigrant forms of Biblical religion gave force to justice in those institutions, nor to describe how those religions were transformed by existing within English-speaking institutions.u To sum up: the principles of our political and legal institutions did not need to be justified in thought, because they were justified in life. They were lived out by practical people for whom they provided the obvious parameters of any decent society. Anyone who wished to act outside these parameters had rightly to feel or assume shame. They were identified with the coming to be of progressive technological society; they justified and were justified by that coming to be. Through that long period when our bourgeois societies were not only stable at home but increasingly dominant throughout the world, the liberalism could simply be lived in without contemplation. If those who considered themselves political philosophers questioned whether decent rules of u It is often pointed out that Jewish people remain the most fervent and articulate advocates of our contractualism. Therefore a word must be appended about the relation between Judaism and modern English-speaking regimes. It is obvious why the Jewish community has always welcomed and supported modern liberalism. In Western and Eastern Europe, Jews had lived for centuries under regimes in which some form of Christianity was the official religion, and under which their survival required both fortitude and patience. As the regimes became secularized, they presented Jews with the possibility of living openly in the civil society. Beyond this obvious fact, it is necessary to understand the deeper question of why Jews have exerted such a formative influence on American society, far beyond their percentage of the population. Perhaps it is that in Judaism worship of God is closely bound together with the existence of a particular historical nation, and that this sense of being a people has given Jews sources of strength when they move out into the impersonal and individualistic public realm consequent on contractualism. Its members have been able to live forcefully in the unblinking public light, because they could retire into the shade of a community not only based on the universality of religion, but on the particularity of nationhood, and these two bound together in a quite unique way. In a society in which contractual relations define more and more human encounters, the Jews have maintained a public force from that given union of worship and nationality, which could only exist sporadically among Christians because of the very nature of Christ’s message.

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justice could be expected to come forth from the foundational affirmation that political relations are simply calculated contracts, they were cushioned from clarity by a long tradition of justice otherwise sustained, and new progressivist hopes. Such intellectuals lived in societies which were enfolded in a sufficiently widespread public religion to produce believers who accepted the liberal state, and yet did not believe that justice was good simply because it was the product of calculated contract. The story has been told many times of how most intellectuals in our societies scorned the fundamental beliefs of the public religion, and yet counted on the continuance of its moral affirmations to serve as the convenient public basis of justice. Clever people generally believed that the foundational principles of justice were chosen conveniences, because of what they had learnt from modern science; nevertheless they could not turn away from a noble content to that justice, because they were enfolded more than they knew in long memories and hopes. They were so enfolded even as they ridiculed the beliefs that kept those memories alive among the less articulate. Intellectual oblivion of eternity could not quickly kill that presence of eternity given in the day to day life of justice. The strength of those very memories held many intellectuals from doubting whether justice is good, and from trying to think why it is good in the light of what we have been told about the whole in modern science. This combination of the public successes of liberalism with these memories and hopes inhibited the thought which asks if justice is more than contractually founded, and whether it can be sustained in the world if it be considered simply a chosen convenience. The very decency and confidence of English-speaking politics was related to the absence of philosophy. PART IV English-speaking contractualism lies before us in the majority decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.68 In that decision their highest court ruled that no state has the right to pass legislation which would prevent a citizen from receiving an abortion during the first six months of pregnancy. In that decision one can hear what is being spoken about justice in such modern liberalism more clearly than in academic books which can be so construed as to skim questions when the theory cuts. Theories of justice are inescapably defined in the necessities of legal decision.

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Mr Justice Blackmun begins his majority decision from the principle that the allocation of rights from within the constitution cannot be decided in terms of any knowledge of what is good.69 Under the constitution, rights are prior to any account of good. Appropriately he quotes Mr Justice Holmes to this effect, who, more than any judge enucleated the principle that the constitution was based on the acceptance of moral pluralism in society, and that the pluralism was finally justified because we must be properly agnostic about any claim to knowledge of moral good.70 It was his influence in this fundamental step towards a purely contractual interpretation of their constitution that has above all enshrined him in American liberal hagiography.v 71 In the decision, Blackmun interprets rights under the constitution as concerned with the ordering of conflicting claims between ‘persons’ and legislatures. The members of the legislature may have been persuaded by conceptions of goodness in passing the law in question. However, this is not germane to a judge’s responsibility, which is to adjudicate between the rights of the mother and those of the legislature. He adjudicates that the

v Blackmun’s appeal to Holmes illustrates the uncertainties in current American usage of the words ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ His decision about abortion has been put in the ‘liberal’ column, when it is in fact based on a strict construction of contractualism which is generally put in the ‘conservative’ column. It is well to remember that Blackmun is a Nixon appointee, and tends in his interpretation of the constitution towards ‘strict constructionism,’ and away from that interpretation according to the changing consensus of a progressing people, which characterized the Warren Court. Nixon consistently advocated over many years that the progressive historicism which dominated the Warren Court should be rectified by the appointment of justices who followed the theory of strict constructionism. This involved that their constitution be conceived as a foundational contract which established certain rights unaffected by the passage of time. But this difference concerning judicial interpretation does not alter the fact that both sides to it appeal to a contractual view of the state, related to the acceptance of the consequences of moral pluralism in society. A foundational contract which is viewed as timeless may seem less oblivious of eternity than an historically developing contract; but in both views justice is considered contractual. Indeed, what is meant in the US by ‘conservative’ is generally a species of modern ‘liberal.’ ‘Conservatives’ want to hold onto certain consequences of the earlier tradition of our earlier liberalism which more modern ‘liberals’ are willing to scrap in the interest of the new and the progressive. It is this usage which can be so confusing to people from other countries who may identify ‘conservatism’ with those who have some memories from before the age of progress. But the indigenous memories in the US are never from before the age of progress. Thus American ‘conservatives’ can advocate the most modern technological proposals in the name of ‘conservatism.’ At the judicial level, this strange usage led certain progressivists to call Mr. Justice Frankfurter a ‘conservative’ when he became the clearest advocate of strict constructionism on their court.

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particular law infringes the prior right of the mother to control her own body in the first six months of pregnancy. The individual who would seem to have the greatest interest in the litigation, because his or her life or death is at stake – namely the particular foetus and indeed all future US foetuses – is said by the judge not to be a party to the litigation. He states that foetuses up to six months are not persons, and as non-persons can have no status in the litigation. The decision then speaks modern liberalism in its pure contractual form: right prior to good; a foundational contract protecting individual rights; the neutrality of the state concerning moral ‘values’; social pluralism supported by and supporting this neutrality. Indeed the decision has been greeted as an example of the nobility of American contractarian institutions and political ideology, because the right of an individual ‘person’ is defended in the decision against the power of a majority in a legislature. Nevertheless, however ‘liberal’ this decision may seem at the surface, it raises a cup of poison to the lips of liberalism. The poison is presented in the unthought ontology. In negating the right to existence for foetuses of less than six months, the judge has to say what such foetuses are not. They are not persons. But whatever else may be said of mothers and foetuses, it cannot be denied that they are of the same species. Pregnant women do not give birth to cats. Also it is a fact that the foetus is not merely a part of the mother because it is genetically unique ab initio.w In adjudicating for the right of the mother to choose whether another member of her species lives or dies, the judge is required to make an ontological distinction between members of the same species. The mother is a person; the foetus is not. In deciding what is due in justice to beings of the same species, he bases such differing dueness on ontology. By calling the distinction ontological I mean simply that the knowledge which the judge has about mothers and foetuses is not scientific. To call certain beings ‘persons’ is not a scientific statement. But once ontological affirmation is made the basis for denying the most elementary right of traditional justice to members of our species, ontological questioning cannot be silenced at this point. Because such a w In discussing this case I am not concerned to elucidate the complex question of justice in abortion, whether in individual conduct or positive law. If I were so concerned, I would have to expound these facts of embryology.

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distinction between members of the same species has been made, the decision unavoidably opens up the whole question of what our species is. What is it about any members of our species which makes the liberal rights of justice their due? The judge unwittingly looses the terrible question: has the long tradition of liberal right any support in what human beings in fact are? Is this a question that in the modern era can be truthfully answered in the positive? Or does it hand the cup of poison to our liberalism? This universal question is laid before us in the more particular questions arising from the decision. If foetuses are not persons, why should not the state decide that a week old, a two year old, a seventy or eighty year old is not a person ‘in the whole sense’? On what basis do we draw the line? Why are the retarded, the criminal or the mentally ill persons? What is it which divides adults from foetuses when the latter have only to cross the bridge of time to catch up with the former? Is the decision saying that what makes an individual a person, and therefore the possessor of rights, is the ability to calculate and assent to contracts? Why are beings so valuable as to require rights, just because they are capable of this calculation? What has happened to the stern demands of equal justice when it sacrifices the right to existence of the inarticulate to the convenience of the articulate? But thought cannot rest in these particular questionings about justice. Through them we are given the fundamental questions. What is it, if anything, about human beings that makes the rights of equal justice their due? What is it about human beings that makes it good that they should have such rights? What is it about any of us that makes our just due fuller than that of stones or flies or chickens or bears? Yet because the decision will not allow the question to remain silent, and yet sounds an ambiguous note as to how it would be answered in terms of our contemporary liberalism, the decision ‘Commends th’ ingredients of our poison’d chalice/ To our own lips.’72 The need to justify modern liberal justice has been kept in the wings of our English-speaking drama by our power and the strengths of our tradition. In such events as the decision on abortion it begins to walk upon the stage. To put the matter simply: if ‘species’ is an historical concept and we are a species whose origin and existence can be explained in terms of mechanical necessity and chance, living on a planet which also can be explained in such terms, what requires us to live together according to the principles of equal justice?

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For the last centuries a civilizational contradiction has moved our Western lives. Our greatest intellectual endeavour – the new co-penetration of logos and techne – affirmed at its heart that in understanding anything we know it as ruled by necessity and chance. This affirmation entailed the elimination of the ancient notion of good from the understanding of anything. At the same time, our day-to-day organization was in the main directed by a conception of justice formulated in relation to the ancient science, in which the notion of good was essential to the understanding of what is. This civilizational contradiction arose from the attempt of the articulate to hold together what was given them in modern science with a content of justice which had been developed out of an older account of what is. It must be emphasized that what is at stake in this contradiction is not only the foundations of justice, but more importantly its content. Many academics in many disciplines have described the difference between the ancient and modern conceptions of justice as if it were essentially concerned with differing accounts of the human situation. The view of traditional philosophy and religion is that justice is the overriding order which we do not measure and define, but in terms of which we are measured and defined. The view of modern thought is that justice is a way which we choose in freedom, both individually and publicly, once we have taken our fate into our own hands, and know that we are responsible for what happens. This description of the difference has indeed some use for looking at the history of our race – useful both to those who welcome and those who deplore the change of view. Nevertheless, concentration on differing ‘world views’ dims the awareness of what has been at stake concerning justice in recent Western history. This dimming takes place in the hardly conscious assumption that while there has been change as to what can be known in philosophy, and change in the prevalence of religious belief among the educated, the basic content of justice in our societies will somehow remain the same. The theoretical differences in ‘world views’ are turned over to the domain of ‘objective’ scholarship, and this scholarship is carried out in protected private provinces anaesthetized from any touch with what is happening to the content of justice in the heat of the world. To feel the cutting edge of what is at stake in differing foundations of justice it is necessary to touch those foundations as they are manifested in the very context of justice.

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The civilizational contradiction which beset Europe did not arise from the question whether there is justice, but what justice is. Obviously any possible society must have some system of organization to which the name ‘justice’ can be given. The contradiction arose because human beings held onto certain aspects of justice which they had found in the ancient account of good, even after they no longer considered that that account of good helped them to understand the way things are. The content of justice was largely given them from its foundations in the Bible (and the classical philosophy which the early Christians thought necessary for understanding the Bible), while they understood the world increasingly in terms of modern technological science. The desire to have both what was given in the new knowledge, and what was given us about justice in the religious and philosophical traditions, produced many conscious and unconscious attempts at practical and theoretical reconciliations. It is these attempts which make it not inaccurate to call the early centuries of modern liberal Europe the era of secularized Christianity. It is an often repeated platitude that thinkers such as Locke and Rousseau, Kant and Marx were secularized Christians. (Of the last name it is perhaps better to apply the not so different label – secularized Jew.) The reason why an academic such as Professor Rawls has been singled out for attention in this writing is as an example of how late that civilizational contradiction has survived in the sheltered intellectual life of the English-speaking peoples. Indeed the appropriateness of calling modern contractualism ‘secularized Christianity’ may be seen in the difference between modern contractualism and the conventionalism of the ancient world. Although the dominant tradition of the ancient world was that justice belonged to the order of things, there was a continuing minority report that justice was simply a man-made convention. But what so startlingly distinguishes this ancient conventionalism from our contractualism is that those who advocated it most clearly also taught that the highest life required retirement from politics. According to Lucretius, the wise man knows that the best life is one of isolation from the dynamism of public life.73 The dominant contractualist teachers of the modern world have advocated an intense concern with political action. We are called to the supremacy of the practical life in which we must struggle to establish the just contract of equality. When one asks what had been the chief new public intellectual influence between ancient and modern philosophy, the answer

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must be Western Christianity, with its insistence on the primacy of charity and its implications for equality. Modern contractualism’s determined political activism relates it to its seedbed in Western Christianity. Here again one comes upon that undefined primal affirmation which has been spoken of as concerned with ‘will,’ and which is prior both to technological science and to revolution. This public contradiction was not first brought into the light of day in the English-speaking world. It was exposed in the writings of Nietzsche. The Germans had received modern ways and thought later than the French or the English and therefore in a form more explicitly divided from the traditional thought. In their philosophy these modern assumptions are most uncompromisingly brought into the light of day. Nietzsche’s writings may be singled out as a Rubicon, because more than a hundred years ago he laid down with incomparable lucidity that which is now publicly open: what is given about the whole in technological science cannot be thought together with what is given us concerning justice and truth, reverence and beauty, from our tradition. He does not turn his ridicule primarily against what has been handed to us in Christian revelation and ancient philosophy. What was given there has simply been killed as given, and all that we need to understand is why it was once thought alive. His greatest ridicule is reserved for those who want to maintain a content to ‘justice’ and ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ out of the corpse that they helped to make a corpse. These are the intellectual democrats who adopt modern thought while picking and choosing among the ethical ‘norms’ from a dead past. Justice as equality and fairness is that bit of Christian instinct which survives the death of God. As he puts it: ‘The masses blink and say: “We are all equal. – Man is but man, before God – we are all equal.” Before God! But now this God has died.’74 Particularly since Hume, the English moralists had pointed out that moral rules were useful conventions, but had also assumed that the core of English justice was convenient. Hume’s ‘monkish virtues’ – the parts of the tradition which did not suit the new bourgeoisie – could be shown to be inconvenient; but the heart of the tradition could be maintained and extended in the interests of property and liberty.75 It could be freed from its justification in terms of eternity, and its rigour could be refurbished by some under the pseudo-eternity of a timeless social contract. But Nietzsche makes clear that if the ‘justice’ of liberty and equal-

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ity is only conventional, we may find in the course of an ever changing history that such content is not convenient. He always puts the word ‘justice’ in quotation marks to show that he does not imply its traditional content, and that its content will vary through the flux of history. The English moralists had not discovered that realm of beings we moderns call ‘history,’ and therefore they did not understand the dominance of historicism over all other statements. Their social contract was indeed a last effort to avoid that dominance, while they increasingly accepted the ways of thought that led ineluctably to historicism. The justice of liberty and equality came forth from rationalists who did not think ‘historically.’ For whom is such justice convenient when we know that the old rationalism can no longer be thought as ‘true’? However, it is Kant who is singled out by Nietzsche as the clearest expression of this secularized Christianity.76 Kant’s thought is the consummate expression of wanting it both ways. Having understood what is told us about nature in our science, and having understood that we will and make our own history, he turned away from the consequence of those recognitions by enfolding them in the higher affirmation that morality is the one fact of reason, and we are commanded to obedience. According to Nietzsche, he limited autonomy by obedience. Because this comfortable anaesthetizing from the full consequences of the modern was carried out so brilliantly in the critical system, Nietzsche calls Kant ‘the great delayer.’77 Kant persuaded generations of intellectuals to the happy conclusion that they could keep both the assumptions of technological secularism and the absolutes of the old morality. He allowed them the comfort of continuing to live in the civilizational contradiction of accepting both the will to make one’s own life and the old content of justice. He delayed them from knowing that there are no moral facts, but only the moral interpretation of facts, and that these interpretations can be explained as arising from the historical vicissitudes of the instincts. Moral interpretations are what we call our ‘values,’ and these are what our wills impose upon the facts. Because of the brilliance of Kant’s delaying tactics, men were held from seeing that justice as equality was a secularized survival of an archaic Christianity, and the absolute commands were simply the man-made ‘values’ of an era we have transcended. Nietzsche was the first to make clear the argument that there is no reason to continue to live in that civilizational contradiction. Societies

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will always need legal systems – call them systems of ‘justice’ if you like the word. Once we have recognized what we can now will to create through our technology, why should we limit such creation by basing our systems of ‘justice’ on presuppositions which have been shown to be archaic by the very coming to be of technology? As we move into a society where we will be able to shape not only non-human nature but humanity itself, why should we limit that shaping by doctrines of equal rights which come out of a world view that ‘history’ has swept away? Does not the production of quality of life require a legal system which gives new range to the rights of the creative and the dynamic? Why should that range be limited by the rights of the weak, the uncreative and the immature? Why should the liberation of women to quality of life be limited by restraints on abortion, particularly when we know that the foetuses are only the product of necessity and chance? Once we have recognized ‘history’ as the imposing of our wills on an accidental world, does not ‘justice’ take on a new content?x Against this attack on our ‘values,’ our liberalism so belongs to the flesh and bones of our institutions that it cannot be threatened by something as remote as ontological questioning. The explicit statements of the American constitution guard their system of justice; the British constitution guards the same shape of rights in a less explicit but in a more deeply rooted way. These living forces of allegiance protect the common sense of practical men against the follies of ideologues. Anyway, did not the English-speaking peoples win the wars against the Germans, and win them in the name of liberalism, against the very ‘philosophy’ that is said to assail that liberalism? It is also argued that the very greatness of American pluralism, founded upon the contract, is that out of it have come forth continuous religious revivals which produce that moral sustenance necessary to the justice of their society. Is it not a reason for confidence that in the

x To put the matter politically: the early public atheism of Europe generally came from ‘the left.’ Its adherents attacked the traditional religion while taking for granted almost unconsciously that ‘the right’ would continue to live within its religious allegiances. ‘The left’ could attack religion partially because it relied on ‘the right’ having some restraint because of its religion. Philosophers cannot be subsumed under their political effects, but with Nietzsche the atheism of ‘the right’ enters the Western scene. One definition of national socialism is a strange union of the atheisms of ‘the right’ and of ‘the left.’

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election of 1976 the two candidates competed in allegiance to the traditions of religion, and that there is a renewed interest in religion among the young in the contractual society?78 Where is the atheism of the right in the United States? Does not the greatness of the American constitution lie in the fact that the general outlines of social cooperation are laid down and maintained by a secular contract, while within those general rules the resources of religious faith can flourish, as long as such faiths do not transgress that general outline? The greatness of the system is that the tolerance of pluralism is combined with the strength of religion. God has not died, as European intellectuals believed; it is just that our differing apprehensions of deity require that the rules of the game are not defined in terms of any of them. The rules of the game are defined in terms of the calculation of worldly self-interest; beyond that, citizens may seek the eternal as they see fit. Indeed, any sane individual must be glad that we face the unique event of technology within a long legal and political tradition founded on the conception of justice as requiring liberty and equality. When we compare what is happening to multitudes in Asia who live the event of technology from out of ancient and great traditions, but without a comparable sense of individual right, we may count ourselves fortunate to live within our tradition. Asian people often have great advantages over us in the continuing strength of rite; our advantage is in the continuing strength of right. Also our liberalism came from the meeting of Christian tradition with an early form of modern thought, so that our very unthinking confidence in that liberalism has often saved us from modern political plagues which have been devastating in other Western societies. At the practical level it is imprudent indeed to speak against the principles, if not the details, of those legal institutions which guard our justice.y

y It is well to remember that the greatest contemporary philosopher, Heidegger, published in 1953 An Introduction to Metaphysics in which he wrote of National Socialism: ‘the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man).’ One theoretical part of that encounter was the development of a new jurisprudence, which explicitly distinguished itself from our jurisprudence of rights, because the latter belonged to an era of plutocratic democracy which needed to be transcended in that encounter. Such arguments must make one extremely careful of the ontological questioning of our jurisprudence, even in its barest contractual form.

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Nevertheless, it must be stated that our justice now moves to a lowered content of equal liberty. The chief cause of this is that our justice is being played out within a destiny more comprehensive than itself. A quick name for this is ‘technology.’ I mean by that word the endeavour which summons forth everything (both human and non-human) to give its reasons, and through the summoning forth of those reasons turns the world into potential raw material, at the disposal of our ‘creative’ wills.z The definition is circular in the sense that what is ‘creatively’ willed is further expansion of that union of knowing and making given in the linguistic union of techne and logos. Similar but cruder: it has been said that communism and contractual capitalism are predicates of the subject technology. They are ways in which our more comprehensive destiny is lived out. But clearly that technological destiny has its own dynamic conveniences, which easily sweep away our tradition of justice, if the latter gets in the way. The ‘creative’ in their corporations have been told for many generations that justice is only a convenience. In carrying out the dynamic conveniences of technology, why should they not seek a ‘justice’ which is congruent with those conveniences, and gradually sacrifice the principles of liberty and equality when they conflict with the greater conveniences? What is it about other human beings that should stand in the way of such convenience? The tendency of the majority to get together to insist on a contract guaranteeing justice to them against the ‘creative’ strong continues indeed to have some limiting power. Its power is, however, itself limited by the fact that the majority of that majority see in the very technological endeavour the hope for their realization of ‘the primary goods,’ and therefore will often not stand up for the traditional justice when it is inconvenient to that technological endeavour. The majority of the acquiescent think they need the organizers to provide ‘the primary goods’ more than they need justice. In such a situation, equality in ‘primary goods’ for a majority in the heartlands of the empire is likely; but it will be an equality which excludes liberal justice for those who are inconvenient to the ‘creative.’ It will exclude liberal justice from those who are too weak to enforce contracts – the imprisoned, the mentally unstable, the unborn, the aged,

z See M. Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske 1957).

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the defeated and sometimes even the morally unconforming. The price for large scale equality under the direction of the ‘creative’ will be injustice for the very weak. It will be a kind of massive ‘equality’ in ‘primary goods,’ outside a concern for justice. As Huey Long put it: ‘When fascism comes to America, it will come in the name of democracy.’79 We move to such a friendly and smooth faced organization that it will not be recognized for what it is. This lack of recognition is seen clearly when the president of France says he is working for ‘an advanced liberal society,’ just as he is pushing forward laws for the mass destruction of the unborn.80 What he must mean by liberal is the society organized for the human conveniences which fit the conveniences of technology. As justice is conceived as the external convenience of contract, it obviously has less and less to do with the good ordering of the inward life. Among the majority in North America, inward life then comes to be ordered around the pursuit of ‘primary goods,’ and/or is taken in terms of a loose popular Freudianism, mediated to the masses by the vast array of social technicians.aa But it is dangerous to mock socially the fact of contradiction. The modern account of ‘the self’ is at one with the Nietzschean account. This unity was explicitly avowed by Freud. With its affirmation of the instrumentality of reason, how can it result in a conception of ‘justice’ similar to that of our tradition? In such a situation, the majorities in the heartlands of the empires may be able to insist on certain external equalities. But as justice is conceived as founded upon contract, and as having nothing to do with the harmony of the inward life, will it be able to sustain the inconveniences of public liberty? In the Western tradition it was believed that the acting out of justice in human relationships was the essential way in which human beings are opened to eternity. Inward and outward justice were considered to be mutually interdependent, in the sense that the inward openness to eternity depended on just practice, and just practice depended on that inward openness to eternity. When public justice is conceived as conventional and contractual, the division between inward and outward is so widened as to prevent any such mutual interdependence. Both open-

aa We are fortunate these days when the social technicians are controlled by something as human as popular Freudianism. Whatever its defects, popular Freudianism is surely superior to the ‘new brutalism’ of behaviour modification carried out by behaviourist techniques.

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ness to eternity and practical justice are weakened in that separation. A.N. Whitehead’s shallow dictum that religion is what we do with our solitude aptly expresses that modern separation.81 It is a destructive half-truth because it makes our solitude narcissistic, and blunts our cutting edge in public justice. Above all, we do not correctly envisage what is happening when we take our situation simply as new practical difficulties for liberalism, arising from the need to control new technologies, themselves external to that liberalism. Such an understanding of our situation prevents us from becoming aware that our contractual liberalism is not independent of the assumptions of technology in any way that allows it to be the means of transcending those technologies. Our situation is rather that the assumptions underlying contractual liberalism and underlying technology both come from the same matrix of modern thought, from which can arise no reason why the justice of liberty is due to all human beings, irrespective of convenience. In so far as the contemporary systems of liberal practice hold onto the content of free and equal justice, it is because they still rely on older sources which are more and more made unthinkable in the very realization of technology. When contractual liberals hold within their thought remnants of secularized Christianity or Judaism, these remnants, if made conscious, must be known as unthinkable in terms of what is given in the modern. How, in modern thought, can we find positive answers to the questions: (i) what is it about human beings that makes liberty and equality their due? (ii) why is justice what we are fitted for, when it is not convenient? Why is it our good? The inability of contractual liberals (or indeed Marxists) to answer these questions is the terrifying darkness which has fallen upon modern justice. Therefore, to those of us who for varying reasons cannot but trust the lineaments of liberal justice, and who somehow have been told that some such justice is due to all human beings and that its living out is, above all, what we are fitted for – to those of such trust comes the call from that darkness to understand how justice can be thought together with what has been discovered of truth in the coming to be of technology. The great theoretical achievements of the modern era have been quantum physics, the biology of evolutionism, and the modern logic. (All other modern theoretical claims, particularly those in the human sciences, remain as no more than provisional, or even can be known as

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simply expressions of that oblivion of eternity which has characterized the coming to be of technology.) These are the undoubtable core of truth which has come out of technology, and they cry out to be thought in harmony with the conception of justice as what we are fitted for. The danger of this darkness is easily belittled by our impoverished use of the word ‘thought.’ This word is generally used as if it meant an activity necessary to scientists when they come up against a difficulty in their research, or some vague unease beyond calculation when we worry about our existence. Thought is steadfast attention to the whole. The darkness is fearful, because what is at stake is whether anything is good. In the pre-technological era, the central Western account of justice clarified the claim that justice is what we are fitted for. It clarified why justice is to render each human being their due, and why what was due to all human beings was ‘beyond all bargains and without an alternative.’ That account of justice was written down most carefully and most beautifully in The Republic of Plato. For those of us who are Christians, the substance of our belief is that the perfect living out of that justice is unfolded in the Gospels. Why the darkness which enshrouds justice is so dense – even for those who think that what is given in The Republic concerning good stands forth as true – is because that truth cannot be thought in unity with what is given in modern science concerning necessity and chance. The darkness is not simply the obscurity of living by that account of justice in the practical tumult of the technological society. Nor is it the impossibility of that account coming to terms with much of the folly of modernity, e.g. the belief that there is a division between ‘facts’ and ‘values’; nor the difficulty of thinking its truth in the presence of historicism. Rather it is that this account has not been thought in unity with the greatest theoretical enterprises of the modern world. This is a great darkness, because it appears certain that rational beings cannot get out of the darkness by accepting either truth and rejecting the other. It is folly simply to return to the ancient account of justice as if the discoveries of the modern science of nature had not been made. It is folly to take the ancient account of justice as simply of antiquarian interest, because without any knowledge of justice as what we are fitted for, we will move into the future with a ’justice’ which is terrifying in its potentialities for mad inhumanity of action. The purpose of this writing has been to show the truth of the second of these propositions. In the darkness one should not return as if the discoveries

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of modern science had not taken place; nor should one give up the question of what it means to say that justice is what we are fitted for; and yet who has been able to think the two together? For those of us who are lucky enough to know that we have been told that justice is what we are fitted for, this is not a practical darkness, but simply a theoretical one. For those who do not believe that they have been so told it is both a practical and theoretical darkness which leads to an ever greater oblivion of eternity. In the task of lightening the darkness which surrounds justice in our era, we of the English-speaking world have one advantage and one great disadvantage. The advantage is practical: the old and settled legal institutions which still bring forth loyalty from many of the best practical people. The disadvantage is that we have been so long disinterested or even contemptuous of that very thought about the whole which is now required. No other great Western tradition has shown such lack of interest in thought, and in the institutions necessary to its possibility. We now pay the price for our long tradition of taking the goods of practical confidence and competence as self-sufficiently the highest goods. In what is left of those secular institutions which should serve the purpose of sustaining such thought – that is, our current institutions of higher learning – there is little encouragement to what might transcend the technically competent, and what is called ‘philosophy’ is generally little more than analytical competence. Analytical logistics plus historicist scholarship plus even rigorous science do not when added up equal philosophy. When added together they are not capable of producing that thought which is required if justice is to be taken out of the darkness which surrounds it in the technological era. This lack of a tradition of thought is one reason why it is improbable that the transcendence of justice over technology will be lived among English-speaking people.

Notes 1 Josiah Wood (1843–1927), businessman and politician, was one of the first two graduates of Mount Allison College (1863). He was elected MP (Conservative) for Westmoreland, New Brunswick, in 1882 and appointed to the Senate in 1895, resigning his seat to become lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick (1912–17). He was chosen by acclamation as first mayor (1903–8)

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of Sackville, NB, after its incorporation as a town, an indication of his status as its leading citizen. He served as treasurer of Mount Allison for 46 years (1876–1922). See John G. Reid, Mount Allison University: A History 1843– 1963, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984) and William B. Hamilton, At the Crossroads: A History of Sackville, New Brunswick (Wolfville: Gaspereau Press 2004). George Parkin Grant, English-Speaking Justice: The Josiah Wood Lectures, 1974 (Sackville, NB: Mount Allison University, n.d.). Mount Allison copyrighted the lectures in 1974, but Grant revised them, and the actual publication date was 1978. Hereafter cited as 1978 edition. Oliver Michael Timothy O’Donovan (1945– ), English Anglican theologian, is Regius professor moral and pastoral theology at Oxford (1982) and the author of The Problem of Self-Love in St. Augustine (1980) as well as many other works. Joan Elizabeth (Lockwood) O’Donovan (1950– ), Canadian theologian, whose University of Toronto PhD dissertation on Grant was published as George Grant and the Twilight of Justice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1984); Stanley Hauerwas (1940– ), American Methodist theologian, is Gilbert T. Rowe professor of theological ethics at Duke University and the author of The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (1984) and many other works. This information was given by professor Hauerwas to Henry Roper, 2 October 2004. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (1929– ), British philosopher, is Research professor of philosophy, University of Notre Dame (2000) and the author of many books, including After Virtue (1981). George Parkin Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1985; Toronto: Anansi 1985). Ibid., vii. George Grant, English-Speaking Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1998). George Grant, The George Grant Reader, ed. William Christian and Sheila Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 108–22. Time as History, p. 57 above. David Alexander Colville (1920– ), internationally renowned Canadian painter, was a close friend of Grant’s. He served (1946–63) as a professor of fine arts at Mount Allison University before moving to Wolfville, Nova Scotia, to devote himself full-time to painting. In 1982 he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada. See David Burnett, Colville (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1983). Dennis Beynon Lee (1939– ), poet, essayist, and editor, worked with Grant as an editor for Anansi Press and was a close personal friend. See below 511–19.

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11 techne, art (Gk.); logos, word (Gk.). 12 Although this is a conclusion that can be drawn from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kant does not state his position on the relation between consciousness and the objects of understanding using these words. See I. Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan 1929; rpt. New York: St Martin’s Press 1965), passim. Hereafter Critique of Pure Reason. For a discussion of Kant’s treatment of the mind and its representation of the world, see Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994). 13 The words in parentheses in this sentence were omitted from the 1985 edition. Grant is referring to the Methodist tradition upon which Mount Allison was founded. 14 Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), prince, German statesman, was prime minister of the kingdom of Prussia 1862–90 and first chancellor of the German Empire (1871–90), which he had been instrumental in creating through a series of successful wars between 1864 and 1871. 15 Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901–76), German theoretical physicist, received the Nobel Prize (1932) for his contribution to quantum mechanics. He later formulated his famous ‘uncertainty principle’ concerning the position and momentum of mobile particles: ‘The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known.’ He was the author of Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper and Row 1958) and other works. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), German-Swiss physicist and Nobel prize-winner (1921), who first developed the special (1905) and general (1915) theories of relativity that revolutionized the study of physics. He left Germany upon the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, eventually becoming an American citizen and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. 16 Sir Karl Raimund Popper (1902–94), Austrian-British philosopher of science, published The Open Society and Its Enemies, to which Grant is referring, in 1945; see ‘Plato and Popper,’ Collected Works, Vol. 2, 75–92. Charles Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu (1689–1755), baron, French political philosopher. See his The Spirit of the Laws (1748), trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), part 2, book 11, ‘On the laws that form political liberty in its relation with the constitution,’ chaps. 6–18, 156–84. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) published his Elements of the Philosophy of Right in 1819. In Plato’s dialogue The Apology, Socrates (469–399 BC) defends himself against the charge that he has corrupted the minds of young Athenians.

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Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970), third Earl, English logician, philosopher and essayist, Nobel prize-winner for Literature (1950), published A History of Western Philosophy in 1945. It immediately became the most widely read popular work on philosophy in the English-speaking world, but was regarded by Grant as shallow and inadequate. For Grant’s views on Russell, see ‘Pursuit of an Illusion: A Commentary on Bertrand Russell,’ Collected Works, Vol. 2, 34–48. Jacob Leib Talmon (1916–1980), Israeli historian. Grant is referring to his most famous book, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy: Political Theory and Practice during the French Revolution and Beyond (1952). On ‘procrustean’ see note 42 below. Grant is referring to Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), English philosopher, mathematician, and logician. See A.N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan 1926), 16: ‘Religion is what the individual does with his solitariness.’ For Richard Nixon, see 115n1. The Americans finally withdrew completely from Vietnam in 1975, the year following Grant’s delivery of the Josiah Wood Lectures. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59), baron, English historian and politician, was the greatest exponent of the Whig, or progressive, interpretation of English history in such works as his unfinished History of England from the Accession of James II (1848–61). Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936), Scottish adventurer, writer and politician, founded the Scottish labour party (1888) with James Keir Hardie, and later served as first president of the Scottish nationalist party (1928). For Martin Heidegger, see 316–29, 550–61 and passim. John Rawls (1921–2002), American philosopher, took his PhD at Princeton in 1950. After holding positions at Princeton, Cornell, and MIT, he became professor of philosophy at Harvard in 1962 and was appointed a Conant University Professor in 1979, Harvard’s highest professorial post. In addition to A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1971), he published a number of books and many articles, including Political Liberalism (1993) and Collected Papers (1999). For Charles William Eliot, see 106n7. Kenneth. J. Arrow (1921– ), American economic and social theorist, won the Nobel prize (1972) for his contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory. Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), French neo-Thomist philosopher, who studied under Bergson but converted to Roman Catholicism in 1906, wrote extensively on various aspects of philosophy and theology. He was deeply

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English-Speaking Justice concerned to develop the principles of a liberal Christian humanism in such works as De la justice politique (1940) and Les droits de l’homme et la loi naturelle (1942). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1881–1955), French paleontologist and theologian, argued that nature is evolving towards higher forms of consciousness in such books as The Phenomenon of Man (1955). Karl Rahner, SJ (1904–84), German theologian, achieved world renown for his attempt to bring together Roman Catholic theology and modern thought, playing a significant role at the Second Vatican Council as a theological adviser. Bernard Lonergan, SJ (1904–84), Canadian neo-Thomist philosopher, wrote many books, most notably Insight: A Study in Human Understanding (1957). Liber, ‘free’ (Lat.). Rousseau’s criticism of Hobbes’s and Locke’s account of the origins of human beings is found in the first part of his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind (1755). For Sir Francis Bacon, see 188n10. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, second treatise, ix, #123. Grant’s emphasis upon the evil of death is more reflective of Hobbes than of Locke. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 1, 14, #6. Grant is in error in attributing to Locke the idea that the social contract is the ‘source’ of rights. For Locke, property and other rights exist prior to political society; they are guaranteed by the social contract but are not dependent upon it for their existence. See Two Treatises of Government, second treatise, xi, #134. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (henceforth Rawls), 17–22. Rawls, 62. Rawls, 136–7. Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), German industrialist and politician, served as head of the German economic management department in the early months of the First World War (1914–15) before being forced to resign because of anti-Semitism. He held the positions of minister of reconstruction (1919–21) and foreign minister (1922) before being assassinated in June 1922 by right-wing extremists. For Russell, see note 16 above. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), Austrian philosopher, was a central figure in the history of philosophy in the twentieth century through his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and Philosophical Investigations. Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), American philosopher, wrote many influential works, including Mathematical Logic (1951) and Word and Object (1960). John Langshaw Austin (1911–60), British philosopher, was a leading philos-

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opher of language who developed the idea that speech is a form of action in such works as How to Do Things with Words (1962). Rawls, viii. For Max Weber, see 188n5. I. Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, in Kants Werke, Band IV (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1968), 393. Although Grant cites the translation by H.J. Paton in footnote 8, the translation he includes of the title of the Grundlegung is his own. I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 5:31–2, in I. Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996), 164–65. I. Kant, Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch (1795), trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant on History, ed. and trans. L.W. Beck, Robert E. Anchor, and Emil L. Fackenheim (New York: Macmillan 1963), 112: ‘The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent.’ I. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 6:277–8, in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 426– 7. See, for example, I. Kant, Conjectural Beginning of Human History, trans. Emil L. Fackenheim, in Kant on History, 160–3. Cf. 1978 edition, footnote 11: ‘Kant Fragments, vol. viii p. 630.’ Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Preface to Second Edition’ (1787), 30 (B:xxxi). Procrustes (Gk. ‘he who stretches’) offered strangers a night’s visit on his special bed. After they lay down Procrustes adjusted them to the size of the bed by stretching them or cutting off their legs. He was captured by the Greek hero Theseus, who ‘fitted’ Procrustes to the bed and cut off his head and feet. Hence ‘Procrustean,’ an arbitrary standard to which conformity is forced. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Irish Anglican clergyman and satirist, was appointed dean of St Patrick’s cathedral, Dublin in 1713, holding the position for the rest of his life. His many works include Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729). Rawls, 60. J.S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), ed. Curran V. Shields (New York: Bobbs-Merrill 1956), 13: ‘The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.’

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46 Rawls, 62. 47 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945) was thirty-second president of the United States (1933–45). He was the architect of the ‘new deal’ for Americans recovering from the Great Depression, and led the American war effort during the Second World War. 48 Alexis-Henri-Charles-Maurice Clerel, comte de Tocqueville (1805–59), French jurist, political philosopher, historian, and politician, was the author of Democracy in America (2 vols., 1835, 1840), based on his travels in the United States in 1831–2. For de Tocqueville’s analysis of the tension between liberty and equality, see Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis Bowen, corr. and ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Knopf 1945), vol. 2, book 2, chap. 1, ‘Why Democratic Nations Show a More Enduring Love of Equality than of Liberty.’ 49 Rawls, 3. 50 Republic, ii, 359–iv, 444. 51 The Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) was fought 10 miles south of Brussels in what is now Belgium between a British-German-Dutch army, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, and that of France, led by Napoleon Bonaparte. The allied victory resulted in Napoleon’s imprisonment on the island of St Helena and established Britain’s supremacy among nations for the next hundred years. 52 James II, king of England and Scotland (1685–8) and a Roman Catholic, was forced from the throne in favour of his Protestant daughter Mary Stuart and her husband Prince William of Orange in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. The deposition of James II was led by a group of politicians, the ‘Whigs’ (originally a term of abuse), who supported a Protestant succession, the supremacy of parliament, and toleration for Protestant nonconformists. The Whigs consolidated their hold on power after an abortive rebellion in 1715 led by James II’s son, James Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’ (1688– 1766), against the Hanoverian George I, who became king of England and Scotland in 1714 through Whig influence. The ‘Old Pretender’s’ son Charles Edward, ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ or the ‘Young Pretender’ (1720– 88), led another failed rebellion (1745–6) to restore the Stuart monarchy, which ended with his defeat at the Battle of Culloden (1746). 53 Edmund Burke (1729–97), Irish politician and political philosopher, most famous for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), served as private secretary to the Marquess of Rockingham (1730–82), the leader of a Whig faction that opposed the policies of George III towards the American colonies and supported administrative and financial reform. For an example of Burke’s romanticism, see his A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

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54 Samuel Johnson (1667–1745), writer and lexicographer, was a strong Tory and supporter of the Church of England. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), poet and political philosopher, was the leading defender of the conservative tradition in early-nineteenth-century England. For a brilliant account, by a utilitarian, of Coleridge’s views as contrasted with those of his utilitarian opponents, see J.S. Mill, ‘Coleridge’ (1840), in F.R. Leavis, ed., Mill on Bentham and Coleridge (London: Chatto and Windus 1950; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980). 55 See above, note 26. 56 Sir Karl Popper (see above, note 16), in The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, drew a distinction between ‘Utopian engineering,’ which he argued was ‘inherent in Plato’s thought,’ and which he considered ‘most dangerous,’ and ‘piecemeal engineering.’ This Popper considered to be the only rational kind of social engineering. According to Popper’s ‘negative utilitarianism,’ the primary moral imperative is to diminish suffering. See K.R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1, The Spell of Plato (London: Routledge 1945). 57 Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (London: Cassell 1956–8). Churchill wrote much of the work during the 1930s, intending to publish it in 1939, but was unable to do so because of his return to office at the outbreak of the Second World War. He completed it after his retirement as prime minister in 1955. See Andrew Roberts, ‘History of the English-Speaking Peoples,’ History Today, May 2002. 58 Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 6 vols. (London: Harrap 1933–6). 59 Grant is referring to the Liberal government (1908–15) of prime minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852–1928), in which Churchill served as a cabinet minister in various portfolios, including first lord of the Admiralty (1911– 15). 60 Thomas Paine (1737–1809), English radical republican journalist and politician, had a great influence in shaping anti-British opinion during the opening stages of the American Revolution through his writings, particularly his pamphlet Common Sense (1776). 61 Grant is referring here to the period of the Commonwealth and Protectorate between the execution of Charles I (30 Jan. 1649) and the restoration of his son Charles II as king (8 May, 1660). 62 Luke 1:52 (the Magnificat). 63 Michael Beresford Foster (1903–59), British philosopher, author of The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (1935) and other works. Grant visited Foster while writing his DPhil thesis, and was deeply influenced by his writings on creation and politics. Collected Works, Vol. 3, 753n19.

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64 Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, first Earl of Halifax (1881–1959), British Conservative politician, served (as baron Irwin) as viceroy of India 1926–31. He promised (1929) dominion status for India when faced by the civil disobedience campaign led by Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948). He was appointed British foreign secretary (1938–40) and ambassador to the United States (1941–6). Heinrich Himmler (1900–45), German National Socialist, was an early member of the National Socialist party and was appointed head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (SS). Under his direction the SS became one of the most powerful elements in the Nazi state. Himmler became head of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) (1934) and was the principal architect of the ‘final solution’ or systematic extermination of European Jewry, which resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews. He committed suicide in 1945. Lavrenti Pavlovlich Beria (1899–1953), Russian Communist party official, became head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) (1940) and a member of the Politburo (1946). He was associated with Joseph Stalin’s ‘great purge’ of the 1930s. To illustrate Grant’s point about his brutality, it is worth noting that in March 1940, after the Soviet Union’s occupation of eastern Poland, Beria ordered the liquidation of 25,700 Polish intellectuals, including 14,700 Polish prisoners of war, who were executed at Katyn, near Smolensk. 65 Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), American philosopher and poet, was originally a Unitarian clergyman, but left the ministry over doctrinal questions. Under the influence of Wordsworth, Carlyle, Plato, and Eastern philosophy he developed his philosophy of ‘transcendentalism,’ whose main principle was ‘the mystical unity of nature,’ as expressed in his essay Nature (1836). 66 This is reputed to have been said by Vincent Thomas (Vince) Lombardi (1913–70), American professional football coach. 67 Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), German-Jewish philosopher, was professor of philosophy at the university of Marburg 1876–1912 and the founder of the ‘Marburg school’ of neo-Kantian philosophy. Cohen regarded the strength of Judaism as a religion of reason as due to its focus upon ethics. Judaism was based upon ‘ethical monotheism,’ unlike Christianity, whose emphasis upon faith and such doctrines as the Trinity inhibited its being a religion of reason. Cohen’s systematization of the idea of ‘ethical monotheism’ had a great influence upon modern Judaism. His belief in universal ethics and social justice led him towards an idealistic socialism. 68 The decision of the US Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade, which was brought down on 22 January 1973, related to a challenge to a statute of the state of Texas making it a crime to perform an abortion unless a mother’s life was at

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stake. The case had been filed by ‘Jane Roe,’ an unmarried woman who wanted to end her pregnancy legally. The Supreme Court struck down the Texas law, with two justices dissenting, on the ground that the constitutional right to privacy ‘is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to end her pregnancy’ (Roe v. Wade, 1973). For the text of Justice Blackmun’s judgment, see http://www.tourolaw.edu/patch/roe/. Harry Andrew Blackmun (1908–99), American jurist, graduated from Harvard Law School (1932) and both practised and taught law in his home state of Minnesota. He was appointed a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (1959) by Dwight D. Eisenhower and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1970) by Richard M. Nixon, serving on the court until 1994. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr (1841–1935), American jurist, was born in Boston, son of the poet, essayist, and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes. After service in the American civil war, in which he was wounded three times, Holmes attended Harvard Law School, where he was appointed professor of law in 1882, but resigned in the same year to take up a position on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. He was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1902) by Theodore Roosevelt, remaining on the court until January 1932. Holmes was famous as the ‘great dissenter,’ at a time when conservatives dominated the court, particularly on issues having to do with the rights of labour. He was a proponent of the view that law should evolve with the evolution of society, which is the point that Grant is making about his acceptance of ‘moral pluralism.’ Although politically a Republican, he was thus a pioneer of judicial liberalism. Nevertheless, he supported the idea of ‘judicial restraint,’ i.e., that the court should defer to the legislature on most matters of policy. Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965), American jurist, was born in Vienna, Austria, emigrating with his family to the United States in 1894. After graduation from Harvard Law School (1906), he held legal positions in government before returning to Harvard to become professor of administrative law (1914–39). Frankfurter was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and assisted in the appeal against the convictions for murder of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti (executed 1927). He advised F.D. Roosevelt on the legal aspects of his ‘New Deal’ legislation and was appointed by him to the Supreme Court (1939), serving until his resignation in 1962. He was regarded as a liberal on the court, particularly on civil rights questions. Macbeth, I, vii. Titus Lucretius Carus (c.96–55 BC), Roman Epicurean poet and philosopher, wrote De Rerum Natura (On Nature), a poem that develops a materialist and atomistic account of nature derived from Greek science and the

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philosophy of Epicurus (c.342–271 BC). Grant is referring to the following passage: ‘But nothing is sweeter than to occupy the high and quiet places fortified by the teachings of the wise, from which you can look down upon other men and watch them as they wander to and fro, seeking in their wanderings a way of life, rivalling each other in genius, contending in rank, and struggling day and night with unceasing effort to rise to the greatest wealth and to become powerful in the state. O wretched minds of men! O blind hearts! Amid what shadows of life, amid what grave perils, do you spend your years, few as they are! Are you blind not to see that a man’s nature demands nothing for itself except that in some way pain be banished and kept far from his body, and that, with a mind freed from anxiety and fear, he enjoy a sense of happiness?’ (On Nature, trans. Russel M. Geer [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1965], Book 2, lines 7–20). Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 4, ‘Of the Higher Man.’ See Time as History, 42. Hume uses this phrase in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) to divide religious practices from a belief in God and absolute principles of morality. See F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973), part 1, ‘On the Prejudices of Philosophers,’ #11. For Nietzsche on Kant as a ‘delayer,’ see The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1968), 64, #101; Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1969), 320. In the election of 1976, James Earl ‘Jimmy’ Carter (1924– ), governor of Georgia (1970–5) and a devout ‘born-again’ Southern Baptist, defeated Gerald Rudolph Ford (1913– ), thirty-eighth president (1974–7), becoming the thirty-ninth president (1977–81) of the United States. Huey Pierce Long (1893–1935), American populist politician, was governor of Louisiana 1928–32 and United States senator for that state 1932–35 before his assassination in 1935. Known as ‘the Kingfish,’ Long campaigned on the slogan ‘Every man a king.’ Grant was evidently quoting from memory. Long actually said: ‘Sure we’ll have fascism in America but it’ll come disguised as 100 percent Americanism.’ Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926– ), French politician, third president of the Fifth French Republic (1974–81), supported the introduction of a revised law on abortion (1975), which made abortion available on demand until the tenth week of pregnancy, with the proviso that women were required to undergo counselling on alternatives and observe a one-week waiting period. See above, note 17.

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This essay appeared in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series 4, volume 12, 1974. In a letter to Henry Hicks, President of Dalhousie University, dated 13 February 1974, Grant referred to it as ‘a most difficult paper.’ Sheila Grant recalls that ‘he read this paper in Toronto ... I remember we were horrified by a speech of some famous scientist, to whom the existence of the world, with all the suffering involved, was justified by the achievements of scientific and artistic geniuses.’

Different civilizations and different periods within the same civilization have had differing paradigms of knowledge. The principle of each of these paradigms has been the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. In our present civilization our paradigm is what we call ‘natural science.’ One does not have to be a physicist to know that physics has been the exemplary and most remarkable intellectual achievement of our era. Therefore it is appropriate in discussing ‘the frontiers and limitations of knowledge’ to start from a discussion of that paradigm. Indeed at a meeting of the Royal Society such a discussion is particularly appropriate. In so far as institutions are influential in such subtle matters as definitions of knowledge, our parent institution has for three centuries been closely associated with that paradigm. Yet those of us who are not natural scientists face immediately an ambiguity concerning the propriety of our taking part in any such discussion. One side of that ambiguity arises because of the absurd pretension in speaking of what such scientific activity is, when one does not pursue that activity. When I read Heisenberg’s beautiful books about the work of physicists, I read them in the same way I read Mozart’s

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beautiful letters about his art.1 The reading of either will not make me a physicist or a musician. Nor should such reading encourage me to make grandiose general statements concerning what a great physicist or great musician is about. Rather they should teach one that there are realms of knowing and making which one does not enter but of which it is good to be aware, and which one might better understand were there but world enough and time for long years of preparatory study. One is now aware of them only in the sense of touching the fringes of their garments by means of parables from one’s own thoughts as part of the same world. To put the matter crudely: if I had authority over university curricula, I would eliminate all courses on the philosophy of science taught by people who were not primarily engaged in a particular science, and I would exclude from such courses all students who were not giving a large part of their lives to the practice of some science. Still greater foolishness is to write as if one wished to reform or even replace such science. General discussions about the sciences can only be usefully carried on by those who have given long years to the serious and successful pursuit of some modern science. On the other hand, the outsider is driven back to the discussion of the sciences because of the intimate relation of interdependence between the modern sciences and the arts. No special knowledge is required to be aware of that fact. In seeking an illustration of this fact, it is misleading to take the example of modern science and the arts of war, because many men and women hope that the arts of war will one day cease to exist. Rather one should take one’s illustration from an art such as medicine, because that is an art which it is hard to see disappearing. In the case of medicine, the co-penetration of the arts and sciences in our era is obvious. We are moving on this continent to a society which is best described as the mental health state – that is, a regime in which massive coercion is above all exercised by the practitioners of the art of medicine and its satellite arts. The ability of the medical profession to carry out this work of coercion will depend on its dependence on what we now call ‘the health sciences,’ which themselves depend on more fundamental sciences. This is the ambiguity concerning the propriety of non-scientists speaking about modern science. A true, if incomplete, definition of justice is minding one’s own business. Clearly modern science is not my business. On the other hand, because of the intimate co-penetration of

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the sciences and the arts, it has become the business of all of us. We are going to be patients (and I use the word in its fullest sense) of the mental health state. And patients must try to maintain some ability to speak of their patienthood. It is therefore correct to say that those of us who are non-scientists are called to speak about science because of its evident co-penetration with the arts. But in doing so we must be continually conscious that we are not speaking out of the heart and greatness of modern science. Therefore I would say that the question ‘the frontiers and limitations of knowledge’ presents itself to me more properly as the question ‘the frontiers and limitations of making.’ Not only is that formulation more practically pressing, but it does not hide the fact that our present paradigm of knowledge is one in which the traditional separation between science and making is increasingly overcome. To put the matter personally: people often say to me contemptuously, ‘why do you sound so fearful of modern science?’ This always irritates me, because I am sure that the most comprehensive vision is not that of tragedy, and therefore I do not think that Oedipus was right to stab out his eyes. I am a rationalist. In so far as science is concerned with telling us the truth about what is, how can it be anything but good? What makes one afraid is what can be made and unmade – the making of tyrannies, the making of monsters, the unmaking of species, etc. The uniqueness of the present co-penetration of the arts and sciences can be seen by comparison with how they were once conceived in the West. Our word ‘art’ comes from the Latin ars which the Romans took as their equivalent for the Greek word techne. One way of trying to figure out what the Greeks meant by techne is that it was a kind of poiesis and poiesis has generally been translated into English as ‘making.’ But this does not help much, because making is one of those elementary English words, which in its simplicity can hide from us what we mean when we use it and certainly hides from us what the Greeks meant by poiesis. We get closer to techne when we translate poiesis by the literal sense of the word production – a leading forth. Poiesis was a leading forth, and techne one kind of leading forth. The fish hawk in the Atlantic storm would be for the Greeks a poiesis – a veritable production – as much as this desk has been led forth. The difference is that the chief cause of the osprey’s production is not external to itself; while the chief cause of the desk’s production is external to itself, in an artist, in this

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case a carpenter. Techne (call it if you will art) is the leading forth of something which requires the work of human beings. But led forth and from where? to where? To use this language about the present, we can make desks and microphones; so far we can only unmake the production of the osprey by our use of chemicals which unmake its reproduction. It remains to be seen whether we can remake ospreys when they cease to reproduce themselves. Let me make two comments about this older way of speaking. First, there is in it none of that snobbish difference between fine arts and ordinary arts which has so debased bourgeois culture. For example, music just means the techne of the muses. In this language then, Mozart is an inspired artist, but not an artist in a different sense from a mechanic, a doctor, a politician, or a carpenter. Politics is the royal art, not only because it has to control all the other arts, but because its purpose is to lead into existence the highest thing here below – a good society. For the Greeks, art was indeed one kind of knowledge. As Plato said, for something to qualify as an art the producer had to be able to give his reasons for what he was doing. The artist had to know how to lead things forth, not simply be a tinkerer. Nearly everybody in Canada knows the difference between the garageman who tinkers with one’s car and the mechanic who can make it run. But although art was a kind of knowledge, it was strictly distinguished from theoretical knowledge – that theoretike episteme which through Latin was the origin of our word ‘science.’ They were above all distinguished because they were concerned with different entities. Art was concerned with what might or might not be – in that language, with entities that were accidentally. Science was concerned with what must be – in that language, with entities that were necessarily. Let me say that as a modern person I find it baffling to think exactly what was being thought in that distinction. Be that as it may, what is of concern at this point is that that distinction led to a firm separation between the arts and the sciences. Clearly what is given us in our era from that originating language has been quite transformed as regards science, art, and their relation. The words may be similar but what comes forth from those words is quite different. A great transformation which we sometimes call the scientific society or the industrial society or the technological society, and which has made Western ways world-wide, is nowhere more heralded than in the changed meaning of ‘science’ and ‘art.’ I can speak here,

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among learned people, of the osprey as poiesis, as production, but it is clearly a forgotten, an archaic language. This is not how we now take production. In this province the government has established colleges of applied arts and technology. The division which takes place here, so that the Latin ars is made distinct from the Greek techne, mirrors what has occurred in our civilization. The arts have been divided into those which are co-penetrated with science (and called technologies) and those arts to which this has not happened. In the word ‘technology’ two Greek words are put together, so that we have literally ‘systematic speeches about the arts.’ But in fact we have something new in the world, those forms of making that are capable of being penetrated at their very heart by the discoveries of modern science. In the Oxford dictionary, technology is defined as ‘the scientific study of the practical arts.’ In the seventeenth century, the word ‘technology’ was coined in English to describe the scientific study of the mechanical arts – assuming in that coining the long European division between the mechanical and the liberal. But still this definition will not do because of an ambiguity in the idea ‘scientific study.’ The word ‘science’ is used in two ways to speak either about any systematic body of knowledge, or about the particular paradigm from which I started, particularly modern physics. The general usage is more often found in French or German than in English. For example, in my business the French speak of les sciences religieuses. It tells us something of our place in modern history that this general use of science is rare in English. The statement that technology is the scientific study of the practical arts is then obscuring. It is obscuring because it hides the fact that something new has arisen in the world. It does not make clear that technologies arise not from a scientific study of the arts which leaves them systematized but essentially unchanged, but rather by the penetration of the arts by discoveries of science which changes those arts in their very essence. What has changed is that the giving of reasons in the new ways of making now comes from modern science. To take a negative example: Professor Northrop Frye has led the way in a new scientific study of literature.2 In the literal sense of the word, one could call his work technology. But clearly his art of criticism does not turn that art into what we now mean by technology. His science does not penetrate the art as

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to transform it. His science is that of Linnaeus, rather than that of Newton or Planck. The art of criticism is not transformed at its very heart as is the art of medicine by the science of chemistry. To illustrate that transformation again: during the sixties many of us were required, whether for good or ill, to hear a lot of rock music. Clearly science had touched that art through the application of amplifiers etc. But such application had not transformed the very essence of the art of the muses, the leading forth of the beautiful into existence. Quantum physics has transformed the production of energy at its very heart. Technology comes to us as something new in the world, a production in which science and art are co-penetrated. I used to think that the French and German distinction between the words ‘technique’ and ‘technology’ kept something that was lost in the English use of the single word ‘technology.’ It maintained the distinction between the particular means of making (technique) and the studies from which they came (technology). I have now changed my mind because the single word ‘technology’ brings out that the very horizons of making have been transformed by the discoveries of modern science. Technology may be a strange combination of Greek words, but it expresses what is occurring in the world. I repeat: that this word should have been achieved by English-speakers also brings out the particular formative aspiration to making which has characterized our tradition of science. It is worth remarking that a man very enamoured of that English tradition – P.B. Medawar – should call science ‘The Art of the Soluble.’3 Indeed we can well say that in our world only those arts which can be turned into technologies can publicly be taken seriously. Fortunately it is not my job to say what this has done to the other arts – what have been called the ‘fine’ arts or the ‘liberal’ arts. They have above all been turned into entertainment, decoration, and expressions of subjective fantasy. I do not need to stress the more obvious side of the interdependence. The new inventions in these very arts make possible new discoveries in science. These new arts inevitably call forth thought. Because they are new, this thought is above all questioning. Among the manifold questions, clearly the most important is: what is it in modern mathematical physics which brought into the world a new relation between making and knowing? What are we told about the whole, from the fact that the new

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algebraic equations have lent themselves so extraordinarily to giving us knowledge of a kind which has placed the race in a new relation of control towards the world of objects – including the race itself as object. We often speak loosely of a distinction between theoretical and applied science. ‘Applied’ means originally ‘folded towards.’ But the question I am asking about modern physics is not asked as if the word ‘applied’ had to be added ab extra to the word physics. What is it in the very discoveries of physics which makes the world available to us in a new way, so that the very nature of the knowledge leads to the new technologies? That this new availability is a fact is just a platitude; what it is has never been completely fathomed. To put the matter another way: in the first sentences I said that the principles of different paradigms of knowledge in different civilizations were to be found in the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. What is the central aspiration of modern physics and what are the effective conditions for the realization of that aspiration, what is it in the relation between that aspiration and those conditions which leads to these new arts? That is what I mean by this central question. Let me repeat again as strongly as I can that it would be presumptuous folly for anyone not engaged in modern mathematical physics to believe that he could get very far with this question. It may very well be said: why does such a broad question need to be thought about? Have not physicists and mathematicians enough to do for the progress of their own study? Does not the modern world present us with enough tasks that need to be worked at, without a kind of thought which would necessarily involve a retreat from those tasks? Anyway, is it not already clear enough to any practising scientist what is given in such words as ‘experiment,’ ‘mathematics,’ ‘reasoning,’ ‘objects,’ ‘research’ (the art of the soluble), so that the relation between the sciences and the technologies is clear enough, and what matters is to work for the further progress of the sciences and technologies? In answer one might say that from the very origins of modern physics and mathematics a certain new relation between knowing and making was already given. But what is given in any origins may be hidden from those to whom it is given, and may only become clear in the actualization of what was only potential in those origins. In the last decades we have started to live in the full noon of this actualization, so that what was given in our modern origins can now be thought more clearly.

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There is moreover a great practical incentive to such thinking – namely, the contemporary crisis concerning what should be made. The crisis arises because of the invention of vast new powers of making, and because of the absence of any clear knowledge of what it is good to make or unmake. Both the positive and negative sides of this situation are directly related to the achievements of modern scientists. As the scientists’ discoveries have made possible the new arts, so also the paradigmatic authority of their account of nature has put in radical question the original Western teaching concerning the frontiers and limitations of making. The story of what has happened concerning this negative side has been told so many times that I will not spell it out in detail again. Suffice it to say: for the ancients ‘good’ meant what something was fitted for. Our modern science does not understand nature in these teleological terms. Knowledge of good cannot be derived from knowledge of nature as objects. When the word ‘good’ was castrated by being cut off from our knowledge of nature, the word ‘value’ took its place, as something we added to nature. But now in our time the emptiness of that substitute becomes apparent. The only great achievement of the philosophical movement we call existentialism was to expose that emptiness by showing that the language of ‘values’ has nothing to do with knowledge. This situation is often described by saying that morality has been put in question. Such a description may be true, but it is misleading unless it includes what men meant by morality. Morality was above all concerned with the frontiers and limitations of making. What was meant by traditional ‘moral’ philosophy or theology was the attempt to gain knowledge of the proper hierarchy among the arts. As a modern, I was for many years bewildered in reading Plato to find that the vast body of his writings, which seem to be speaking of what we would call ‘morality,’ was taken up with detailed discussions of techne – the arts. For example, what is the relation of the art of medicine to the art of politics? How is the good life related to the arts of music, mathematics, mechanics, tragedy? etc. etc. What emerges from this greatest ancient authority is a careful account of the arts in which the frontiers and limitations of each art is claimed to be known in subordination or superordination to all the other arts. It is claimed that some people can come to a detailed knowledge of the frontiers and limitations of making. The fact that that claim to knowledge has little surviving authority

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for the modern world can be seen with startling clarity in Mr Justice Blackmun’s decision about abortion in the Supreme Court of the United States. He states as self-evident that the Hippocratic oath comes from a mythical and irrelevant past and therefore has no claim today on any doctor. The Hippocratic oath is a statement concerning the frontiers and limitations of one art. It is considered mythical and irrelevant by the Justice because he believes that the account of the universe on which it is based has been shown to be untrue by the discoveries of modern science. Even if one were to grant some substance to the Justice’s shallow arguments, the question still remains: where do we find any positive knowledge in the modern world that can give frontiers to the technological imperative – that imperative which was expressed so lucidly by Robert Oppenheimer when he said: ‘If something is sweet, you have to go ahead with it.’4 The new technologies are taking us into realms of making which occur as it were necessarily, that is, almost outside consideration of human good. The thrust of these arts is now turned to the making of our own species. Men cannot ‘escape imitating nature as they understand nature.’ This making of our species is thought of as subsumed under the ascent of man in evolution. But when making is directed towards our own species, it becomes clear that one man’s making may be another man’s unmaking. For example, what is one to think of the making in the programs of behaviour modification now so usual in American prisons and asylums? Or again, I read recently the new medical euphemism for the unmaking of the undesired aged – ‘suicide by proxy.’ At my age one casts an interested eye on such phrases. Having solved the problem of the undesired members of the species at their beginnings, the medical profession turns to the problem of the undesired ones at the end. So that this problem can be solved within the language of freedom, the solution is to be called ‘suicide by proxy.’ Fortunately, the monsters have proliferated in the last years. The word ‘monster’ originally came from the word monere – to warn. A monster is a warning. In this sense, the evidence pointing to the possibility of the decay of the oceans is a monster. Indeed the ancient doctrine was that these warnings were evidence of the beneficence of nature. It was beneficent in that it sent up warnings. But there are clearly profound differences amongst us as to what occurrences deserve the title ‘monster.’ I would make one distinction between types of monster. On the one

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hand there are those warnings which nearly all of us would see as monstrous, and which we should be able to deal with technologically, if there be sufficient collective sanity – for example, the decay of the oceans. If we don’t do something about them there will be visible disasters. But there are monsters of another kind. For example, we may soon be able to make a race of human slaves, whether by cloning or behaviour modification, who could be made to be content to be slaves and to live for the sake of their masters. If one called such making monstrous, one could not do so in the name of any visible disaster. Such a seemingly contented tyranny might go on ad infinitum. Nor if we say this is monstrous can we say it could be solved by technology. If it would be monstrous to make such a race of happy slaves, it is something we must know in advance should not be done, whether we can do it technologically or not. What is the knowledge which allows us to judge that in advance? A modern account of the arts which could claim knowledge of their proper frontiers and limitations would require taking into account monsters not only of the first type, but of the second. This is the chief reason why I am frightened by P.B. Medawar’s account of research as ‘the art of the soluble.’ My central objection is to his use of the word ‘soluble.’ The archetypally monstrous event of this century was called by its perpetrators ‘the final solution.’ They thought they could solve what they called ‘the Jewish question’ because it seemed possible to dissolve the Jews. So we can solve the problem of the criminal, by dissolving the imprisoned by behaviour modification. In North America, we have recently decided to solve the population problem by the widespread dissolving of unborn members of our species. To speak of research as ‘the art of the soluble’ only seems harmless progressive rhetoric, if one assumes that the soluble is unambiguous concerning good and evil. But in our era it is just ‘the soluble’ which has become ambiguous in this respect and is therefore before us to be radically questioned. It would be foolish to judge that thought has much immediate influence on events in any era, let alone in ours when a particular destiny of knowing and making moves to its climax. Our paradigm of knowledge is the very heart of this civilization’s destiny, and such destinies have a way of working themselves out – that is, of bringing forth from their principle everything which is implied in that principle. Most scientists seem so engrossed within this paradigm (and at a lower level, so engrossed, like everybody else, in their own advancement within their

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community) that they seem unable to care to think beyond the unfolding of the paradigm, let alone to think about it as a particular aspiration of human thought and to relate it to the highest human aspiration – knowledge of good. Yet in the presence of the obvious disregard of thought in our era, the demand to think does not disappear. The very glory of the scientific community is that it produces some members who cannot avoid thinking beyond the dogmas of the scientific paradigm. The scientific community cannot become an engrossed irrationalism without committing suicide. It is therefore to be expected that some scientists (let us hope including physicists) will go on thinking about the frontiers and limitations of their paradigm at the moment of its most resplendent power, and in so doing help some of us outsiders to think more clearly about the frontier and limitations of making. The influence of such thought on the possible future of this civilization could not now be predicted.

Notes 1 Werner Heisenberg, see 260n15. For Mozart’s letters about his art, see 616– 17. 2 Herman Northrop Frye (1912–91), internationally renowned literary critic and professor, taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto, from 1939 until his death. In addition to Fearful Symmetry (1947) his work includes The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and The Great Code (1982). See Grant’s review of The Great Code (906–10). 3 Sir Peter Brian Medawar (1915–87), British immunologist, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1960 for work on tissue transplantation. The Art of the Soluble was published by Methuen in 1967. 4 Grant frequently used this quotation. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 3, 258, and 561. In some instances he slightly altered the wording of the first sentence of the quotation. The full quotation, as cited in Webster’s Online Dictionary and many other quotation reference sources, is: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.’ J(ulius) Robert Oppenheimer (1904–67), American physicist, taught at the California Institute of Technology before joining the Manhattan Project to construct an atomic bomb, becoming director of the Los Alamos Laboratory (1943–5). He became director of the Institute for Advanced Study and professor of physics at Princeton (1946).

‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’

This essay appeared in Beyond Industrial Growth, edited by Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 117–31. (It was one of six Massey College Lectures presented at Massey College in 1974–5, and broadcast by CBC Radio.) Grant had circulated an earlier version in a graduate seminar in 1972–3 with the title ‘Thinking about Technique,’ containing the analysis of the statement about computers along with an introduction on the novelty of life and thought about what is good in the age of technique. He later used the title ‘Thinking about Technology’ after he decided in 1974 that the North American use of the word ‘technology’ said more about the modern joining of knowing and making than the European use of the word ‘technique.’ We have included endnotes indicating the minor variations found in ‘Can We Think Outside Technology?’ a version of this essay published in 1977 in Tract (Lewes, Sussex: The Gryphon Press) no. 24: 5–23.

‘Beyond industrial growth’ can be interpreted1 with the emphasis on any of the three words. Different issues will arise depending upon which word is emphasized. My task in this series is to emphasize ‘beyond.’2 What will it be like to live on the further side of industrial growth? The other day when I had taken a foreign guest to Burlington3 she asked me on our return to Dundas:4 ‘Where is Toronto?’ I replied: ‘Toronto is on the further side of Burlington.’ (What it is to be beyond Burlington is of course quite beyond my imagination.)5 The thinker who first caught the dilemmas of our contemporary society called his chief exoteric book Jenseits von Gut und Böse, which we translate as Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche claimed to say what it is for human beings to be on the further side of good and evil. Taking a spa-

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tial preposition, he applied it to the temporal unfolding of events. So equally ‘beyond industrial growth’ concerns temporality. It raises for us the uncertainty of what it will be like to live in a future society the chief end of which will no longer be able to be industrial growth. How will it be best to live in a society on the further side of industrial growth? Those of us who have been conscious of living in North America have known what it is to live within industrial growth. To grasp the pure essence of what is given in that ‘within’ would be in Canadian terms to recollect fully the rule of C.D. Howe.6 The uncertainty in ‘beyond industrial growth’ arises from having known what it is to live within it, while we do not know the passage of time to the future which will take us to live beyond it – if indeed we are intended ever to live on that further side. The situation in which we find ourselves seems obvious: we are faced with calamities concerning population, resources, and pollution if we pursue those policies (here designated as industrial growth) which have increasingly dominated societies over the last centuries. The attempt to deal with these interlocking emergencies will require a vast array of skills and knowledge. Indeed it will probably take a greater marshalling of technological mastery to meet these crises than it took to build the world of industrial growth from which the crises now arise. This mastery will now have to concentrate around the conquest of human nature rather than around the sciences concerned with non-human nature, as was the case in the past. As Heidegger has said, the governing and determining science is inevitably going to be cybernetics.7 In North America the government of this science will be increasingly carried out by the dynamically proliferating power of the medical profession. Already this profession has been given control over mass foetuscide, and is more and more an instrument of social control through the mental health apparatus. North American capitalism increasingly attempts to establish itself as the mental health state, with the necessary array of dependent sciences and arts. Beyond the vast list of new arts and sciences – which in their modern combination we call technologies – there will hopefully continue to be the political art. With its proper mixture of persuasion and force within and between nations, that political art is required if human beings are to deal sensibly with the immediate crises. The practical wisdom of politics was called by Plato the royal techne – that art which is higher than all particular arts because it

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is called to put the others in a proper order of subordination and superordination. Clearly I am not presenting a paper in this series8 because of any expertise in the technologies. I have little knowledge of cybernetics. Certainly I have not the practical wisdom which should lie at the heart of politics. Being a practitioner neither of any particular technology nor of the royal techne, what are my credentials for speaking about these crises? Presumably my business concerns the place of ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ in these crises. In the difficult choices which will be necessary if we are to adapt to a new view of industrial growth, it is assumed to be essential that we hold before us ‘values’ which shall direct our creating of ‘history.’ If we are to deal with this future humanly, our acts of ‘free’ mastery in creating history must be decided in the light of certain ‘ideals,’ so that in coming to grips with this crisis we preserve certain human ‘values,’ and see that ‘quality of life’ as well as quantity is safeguarded and extended in our future. For example, clearly the problem of coming to terms with industrial growth involves great possibilities of tyranny; we must therefore be careful that through our decisions for meeting this problem we maintain the ‘values’ of free government. In the ‘ascent of life’ which is our selfcreation, we must see that we create a fuller humanity, a society of ‘persons.’ Because of our secularized Christian tradition of liberalism, there is always someone to ice the cake of technological necessity with some highminded discussion of ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ in the midst of more careful talk about difficult technological requirements. ‘The question is not simply to solve the problem of industrial growth,’ it is often stated, ‘but to solve it in terms which will preserve and extend human values.’ Yet – and it is a long yet – as soon as such an account is given, it forces me to disclaim this kind of talk. Why? The way of putting the task – in terms of such concepts as ‘values,’ ‘ideals,’ ‘persons,’ or ‘our creating of history’ – obscures the fact that these very concepts have come forth from within industrial growth, to give us our image of ourselves from within that within. Therefore to be asked to think ‘beyond industrial growth’ is to be asked to think the virtue of these concepts. If we do not, the significance of the phrase ‘beyond industrial growth’ fades away into an unthought givenness. To show that this is so is the purpose of this paper.9 This may seem a negative job in the light of all the practical things that need doing. Yet it

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is a necessary one. Nearly all our current moral discourse about technological society falls back to rest upon such unthought concepts as ‘values’ and ‘ideals.’ By so doing, it revolves within the hard-rimmed circle of technological society and cannot issue in thought. The moral exhortations of our politicians, our scholars, our psychiatrists, our social scientists are caught in this circle, so that their words become a tired celebration of technological society. Therefore this negative task is a necessary preparation to anything positive which may lie beyond it. I will carry it out by examining at length a statement by a man who works at making and using computers. He said: ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.’ Similar statements are heard about other technical fields and are often generalized into statements about all technologies. Obviously the statement is made by someone who is aware that computers can be used for purposes of which he does not approve, for example, the tyrannous control of human beings. This is given in the word ‘should.’ He makes a statement in terms of his intimate knowledge of computers which transcends that intimacy in that it is more than a description of any given computer or of what is technically common to all such machines. Because he wishes to state something about the possible good or evil purposes for which computers can be used, he expresses, albeit in negative form, what computers are, in a way which is more than their technical description. They are instruments, made by human skill for the purpose of achieving certain human goals. They are neutral instruments in the sense that the morality of the goals for which they are used is determined outside them. Many people who have never seen a computer and almost certainly do not understand what they do, feel they are being managed by them and have an undifferentiated fear about the potential extent of this management. This man, who knows about the making and using of these machines, states what they are, so that the undifferentiated sense of danger is put into a perspective, freed from the terrors of such fantasies as the myth of Dr Frankenstein. The machines are obviously instruments because their capacities have been built into them by men, and it is men who must set operating those capacities for purposes they have determined. All instruments can be used for wicked purposes and the more complex the capacity of the instrument the more complex the possible evils. But if we apprehend these novelties for what they are, as neutral instruments, we are better

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able to determine rationally their potential dangers. That is clearly a first step in coping with these dangers. We can see that these dangers are related to the potential decisions of human beings about how to use computers, and not to the inherent capacities of the machines. Here indeed is the view of the modern scene I have been talking about and which is so strongly given to us that it seems to be common sense itself. We are given an historical situation which includes certain objective technological facts. It is up to human beings in their freedom to meet that situation and shape it with their ‘values’ and their ‘ideals.’ Yet despite the decency and seeming common sense of the statement ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ when we try to think what is being said in it, it becomes clear that computers are not being allowed to appear before us for what they are. To show this, I start from an immediate distinction. The negation in ‘the computer does not impose’ concerns the computer’s capacities, not its existence. Yet clearly computers are more than their capacities. They have been put together from a variety of materials, consummately fashioned by a vast apparatus of fashioners. Their existence has required generations of sustained effort by chemists, metallurgists, and workers in mines and factories. It has required a highly developed electronics industry and what lies behind that industry in the history of science and technique and their novel reciprocal relation. It has required that men wanted to understand nature, and thought the way to do so was by putting it to the question as object so that it would reveal itself. It has required the discovery of modern algebra and the development of complex institutions for developing and applying algebra. Nor should this be seen as a one-sided relation in which the institutions were necessary to the development of the machines, but were left unchanged by the discovery of algebra. To be awake in any part of our educational system is to know that the desire for these machines shapes those institutions at their heart in their curriculum, in what the young are encouraged to know and to do. The computer’s existence has required that the clever of our society be trained within the massive assumptions about knowing and being and making which have made algebra actual. Learning within such assumptions is not directed towards a leading out but towards organizing within. This entails that the majority of those who rule any modern society will take the purposes of ruling increasingly to be congruent with this account of knowing. In short, the requirements

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for the existence of computers is but part of the total historical situation (the word ‘destiny’ is too ambiguous to be employed at this point) which is given us as modern human beings. And the conditions of that situation are never to be conceived as static determinants, but as a dynamic interrelation of tightening determinations. Obviously computers are, within modern common sense, instruments, and instruments have always been things which are made to be at human disposal. However, when the capacities of these machines are abstracted from their historical existence, and when their capacities are morally neutralized in the negative ‘do not impose,’ we shut ourselves off from what ‘instrumentality’ has now come to mean. For example, computers are one kind of technology. But just look at what is given in this very recently arrived word. Two Greek words, techne and logos, are brought together in a combination which would have been unthinkable till recently. The new word ‘technology’ is able to stand because it brings forth to us the new situation: a quite novel dependence of science upon art and a quite novel dependence of art upon science – in fact, a quite novel reciprocal relation between knowing and making. This novel relationship stands at the heart of the modern era. The simple characterization of the computer as neutral instrument makes it sound as if instruments are now what instruments have always been and so hides from us what is completely novel about modern instrumentality. It hides from us what we have to understand, if we are to understand industrial growth. The force of the negative ‘do not impose,’ as applied to computers, leads us to represent them to ourselves as if the instrumentality of modern technologies could be morally neutral. At the same time the very force of the computer as neutral raises up in the statement, in opposition to that neutrality, an account of human freedom which is just as novel as our new instruments. Human freedom is conceived in the strong sense of human beings as autonomous – the makers of their own laws. This also is a quite new conception. It was spoken positively and systematically for the first time in the writings of Kant. It is indeed also a conception without which the coming to be of our civilization would not have been. But it is a conception the truth of which needs to be thought, because it was considered not true by the wise men of many civilizations before our own. In short, the statement ‘the computer does not impose’ holds before us a view of the world with neutral instruments on one side and human autonomy on the other. But it is just that

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view of the world that needs to be thought if we are concerned with ‘beyond industrial growth.’ To go further: how widely are we being asked to take the word ‘ways’ in the assertion that ‘the computer does not impose the ways’? Even if the purposes for which the computer’s capabilities should be used are determined outside itself, are not these capabilities determinative of the ways it can be used? To continue the illustration from the structures of learning and training which are part of all advanced technological societies: in Ontario there are cards on which local school authorities can assess children as to their intellectual ‘skills’ and ‘behaviour.’ This information is retained by computers. It may be granted that such computer cards add little to the homogenizing vision of learning inculcated into the structure by such means as, for example, centrally controlled teacher training. It may also be granted that, as computers and their use are more sophisticatedly developed, the ‘information’ stored therein will increasingly take account of differences. Nevertheless it is clear that the ‘ways’ that computers can be used for storing ‘information’ can only be ways that increase the tempo of the homogenizing process in society. Abstracting facts so that they may be stored as ‘information’ is achieved by classification, and it is the very nature of any classifying to homogenize what may be heterogeneous. Where classification rules, identities and differences can only appear in its terms. The capabilities of any computer do not allow it to be used neutrally towards the facts of heterogeneity. Moreover, classification by large institutions through investment-heavy machines is obviously not carried out because of the pure desire to know but because of convenience of organization. It is not my purpose at this point to discuss the complex issues of good and evil involved in the modern movement towards homogeneity, or to discuss heterogeneity in its profoundest past form, autochthony. This would require a long discussion of Heidegger’s thought. He, the greatest contemporary thinker of technique, seems to be claiming that beyond the homelessness of the present, human beings are now called to a new way of being at home which has passed through the most extreme homelessness. What is at issue here is simply that the statement about computers tends to hide the fact that their very capabilities entail that the ways they can be used are never neutral. They can only be used in homogenizing ways. And because this tends to be hid-

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den in the statement, the question about the goodness of homogenization is excluded from the thinking of what it could be to be beyond industrial growth. To illustrate the matter from another area of technical change: Canadians wanted the most efficient car for geographic circumstances almost similar to those in the country which had first developed a car usable by many. Our desire for and use of such cars has been a central cause of our political integration and social homogenization with the people of the imperial heartland. This was not only because of the vast imperial organizations necessary for building and keeping in motion such cars, and the direct and indirect political influence of such organizations, but also because the society with such vehicles tends to become like every other society with the same. Fifty years ago men might have said ‘the automobile does not impose on us the ways it should be used.’ This would have been a deluding representation of the automobile. In fact, human beings may still be able to control the ways that cars are used by preventing, for example, their pollution of the atmosphere or their freeways from destroying the centre of our cities. Indeed, in Canada, we may be able to deal better with such questions, as the history of the Spadina expressway may show,10 although the history of transportation in Montreal speaks in the other direction.11 Moreover, in the light of the huge crisis presented to Westerners by the awakening of the Arabs to modernity, we may even be forced to pass beyond the private automobile as the chief means of mobility.12 Be that as it may, this cannot allow us to represent the automobile to ourselves as a neutral instrument. In so doing we have abstracted the productive functions of General Motors or Standard Oil from their political and social functions, just as their public relations would want. Moreover, we would have abstracted the automobile from the relations between such corporations and the public and private corporations of other centres of empire. Can one speak about ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ as if unaware of what reliable economists tell us: if the present rate of growth of IBM is extrapolated, that corporation will in twenty-five years be a larger economic unit than the economy of any presently constituted state, including that of its homeland? Because of the suffered injustices in both the Eastern and Western societies, many educated people see the cutting issue to be decided as centring around whether technical advance is to be directed under cap-

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italist or socialist control. What matters is whether the computer is used in ways which are capitalist or socialist. Some of the best of the young in the West are held by Marxism in revolt against our society, while it seems that some of the best in eastern Europe are liberals in reaction against their society. Despite all the abuses committed in the name of Marxism in Eastern societies, this way of thought has remained a powerful minority influence in the West, just because it seems to point to a more equitable development of technical society than is possible under state capitalism. Also Marxism, as a system of thought, is more successful than the liberal ideologies of the West in placing technique within a corporate framework of purpose beyond the individual. At any stage of capitalism the interests of all are contractually subordinated to the interests of some. Marxism has been the chief source of a continuing critique of the facts that our social purposes are determined by private interests and that science is often harnessed to those purposes by calling it ‘value-free.’ On the other side, the liberal ideologists have asserted that our structures lead to a profounder liberation than is possible under Marxist socialism. This assertion is based not only on the negative criticism that communism is inevitably inhibited13 into a rancorous and cruel statism, but also on the positive judgment that capitalist freedom better opens the way to the development of technical science. The claims of the Western empire that their system better liberates technology are neither insincere nor unsubstantiated. The present desire of Russia for American computers surely illustrates that. However, amidst the passionate ideologies, it is well to remember what Marxism and American liberalism (two Western-produced beliefs) hold in common. They both believe that the good progress of the race is in the direction of the universal society of free and equal human beings, that is, towards the universal and homogeneous state. They both assert that the technology, which comes out of the same account of reason, is the necessary and good means to that end. In saying this I do not mean to encourage any of that nonsense about ‘the end of ideology,’ which was put about by a shallow American sociologist a decade ago.14 Those who think that the crucial question about technological societies is whether they develop under Marxist or liberal ‘ideals’ are given in that thought a source of responsibility for our present situation. (Who cannot prefer such ardent people to the vast numbers of the detached who currently retreat into a banal privacy?) Nevertheless, because of their

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belief in these ideologies, they are likely to forget that both sides of the controversy share assumptions which are more fundamental than that which divides them. At the immediate and flaming surface is their common assumption concerning the dependence of the achievement of a better society in the future upon the mastery of the human and the non-human by technological science. And that assumption comes forth from a series of deeper assumptions concerning what is. For example, it is assumed there is something we call ‘history’ over against ‘nature,’ and that it is in that ‘history’ that human beings have acquired their ‘rationality.’ To put it in the pedantic language of scholarship about the history of Western thought: both Marxism and liberalism are penetrated in their ultimate assumptions by the thoughts of Rousseau; and in his thought about the origins of human beings the concept of reason as historical makes its extraordinary public arrival. What calls out for recognition here is that the same apprehension of what it is to be ‘reasonable’ leads men to build computers and to conceive the universal and homogeneous society as the highest political goal. The ways such machines can be used must be at one with certain conceptions of political purposes, because the same kind of ‘reasoning’ made the machines and formulated the purposes. To put the matter extremely simply: the modern ‘physical’ sciences and the modern ‘political’ sciences have developed in mutual interpenetration, and we can only begin to understand that interpenetration in terms of some common source from which both forms of science found their sustenance. Indeed to think ‘reasonably’ about the modern account of reason is of such difficulty because that account has structured our very thinking in the last centuries. For this reason scholars are impotent in the understanding of it because they are trying to understand that which is the very form of how they understand. The very idea that ‘reason’ is that reason which allows us to conquer objective human and nonhuman nature controls our thinking about everything. It cannot be my purpose here to describe the laying of the foundations of that interpenetration of the physical and moral sciences which is at the heart of Western ‘history’ and now of world destiny. Such a mapping of those foundations would require detailed exposition of our past: what was made and thought and done by the inventors, the scientists, the philosophers, the theologians, the artists, the reformers, the politicians. Scholarship is very different from thought, although it often

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pretends to be the same. But good scholarship can be a support for thought, in the same way that good doctors can be a support for health. Suffice it to say here that the root of modern history lies in a particular experience of ‘reason,’ and the interpenetration of the human and non-human sciences that grew from that root. It is an occurrence which has not yet been understood. Nevertheless it is an event the significance of which for good or evil must now be attempted to be thought. The statement: ‘the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ hides that interpenetration. To repeat, it simply presents us with neutral instruments which we in our freedom can shape to our ‘values’ and ‘ideals.’ But the very conceptions ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ come from the same form of reasoning which built the computers. ‘Computers’ and ‘values’ both come forth from that stance which summoned the world before it to show its reasons and bestowed ‘values’ on the world. Those ‘values’ are supposed to be the creations of human beings and have, linguistically, taken the place of the traditional ‘good,’ which was not created but recognized.15 In short, computers do not present us with neutral means for building any kind of society. All their alternative ways lead us towards the universal and homogeneous state. Our use of them is exercised within that mysterious modern participation in what we call ‘reason.’ Participation in that particular conception of reason is the strangest of all our experiences, and the most difficult to think in its origins. To go further: because computers are produced from modern reasoning, the strongest ambiguity in the statement, ‘the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ is that our novelty is presented to us as if human beings ‘should’ use these machines for certain purposes and not for others. But what does the word ‘should’ mean in advanced technological societies? Is it not of the essence of our novelty that ‘shouldness,’ as it was once affirmed, can no longer hold us in its claiming? ‘Should’ was originally the past tense of ‘shall.’ It is still sometimes used in a conditional sense to express greater uncertainty about the future than the use of ‘shall’: (‘I shall get a raise this year’ is more certain than ‘I should get a raise this year.’ The same is in that wonderful colloquialism from the home of our language: ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’) ‘Should’ has gradually taken over the sense of ‘owing’ from ‘shall.’ (In its origins ‘owing’ was given in the word ‘shall’ when used as a transi-

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tive verb.) In the sentence ‘the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ we are speaking about human actions which express ‘owing.’ If the statement about computers were in positive form ‘the computer does impose on us the ways it should be used,’ the debt would probably be understood as from human beings to the machine. We can say of a good car that we owe it to the car to lubricate it properly or not to ride the clutch. We would mean it in the same sense that we owe it to ourselves to try to avoid contradicting ourselves, if we wish to think out some matter clearly. If we want the car to do what it is fitted for – which is, in the traditional usage, its good – then we must look after it. But the ‘should’ in the statement about the computer is clearly not being used about what is owed from men to the machine. What is then the nature of the debt there spoken? To what or to whom do human beings owe it? Is that debt conditional? For example, if men ‘should’ use computers only in ways that are compatible with constitutional government and never as instruments of tyranny, to what or to whom is this required support of constitutional government owed? To ourselves? to other human beings? to evolution? to nature? to ‘history’? to reasonableness? to God? There have been many descriptions of our time as essentially characterized by a darkening or even disappearance of any conception of good. These have often been made by those who are dismayed by the uncertainty of our era and find solace from the suffering of that dismay in nostalgia for some other era. Indeed as human beings have come to believe that their affirmations of goodness are not justified by reason or nature, history, or God, the effect upon many has been what some have called ‘nihilism.’ This belief has had wide political significance because it has become possible for many through mass literacy. Mass training has produced in North America that intensely vulgar phenomenon, popular wised-upness. I include within mass training the present university system. Nevertheless, it is incorrect to characterize the modern West as a society of nihilism, that is, as if people had no sense of what is good. If we use the word ‘good’ in its most general modern sense to stand for that which we approve, and ‘bad’ for that which we deplore, it is evident that the majority of modern people give their shared approval to certain forms of life. Can we not say that for most ‘freedom’ to do what they want in such realms as sexuality is an evident good? Most modern people consider good those political leaders who com-

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bine seeming resolution with evident charm. The very influence of ideologies in our era, whether Marxism, American liberalism, or national socialism, has surely not been a mark of nihilism, but rather a mark of how much human beings wanted the evident goods that were put before them evidently. Therefore, it is deluding if we characterize our novel modern situation as nihilistic. But at the same time we have to be aware that some great change has taken place. To characterize that change, it is best to state that it has fallen to the lot of people who are truly modern to apprehend goodness in a different way from all previous societies. ‘Goodness’ is now apprehended in a way which excludes from it all ‘owingness.’ To generalize this as clearly as I am able: the traditional Western view of goodness is that which meets us with an excluding claim and persuades us that in obedience to that claim we will find what we are fitted for. The modern view of goodness is that which is advantageous to our creating richness of life (or, if you like, the popular modern propagandists’ ‘quality of life’). What is true of the modern conception of goodness (which appears in advanced technological societies and which distinguishes it from older conceptions of goodness) is that it does not include the assertion of an owed claim which is intrinsic to our desiring. Owing is always provisory upon what we desire to create. Obviously we come upon the claims of others and our creating may perforce be limited particularly by the state, because of what is currently permitted to be done to others. However such claims, whether within states or internationally, are seen as contractual, that is provisional. This exclusion of non-provisory owing from our interpretation of desire, means that what is summoned up by the word ‘should’ is no longer what was summoned up among our ancestors. Its evocation always includes an ‘if.’ Moreover, the arrival in the world of this changed interpretation of goodness is interrelated to the arrival of technological civilization. The liberation of human desiring from any supposed excluding claim, so that it is believed that we freely create values, is a face of the same liberation in which men overcame chance by technology – the liberty to make happen what we want to make happen. ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ asserts the very essence of the modern view (human ability freely to determine what happens) and then puts that freedom in the service of

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the very ‘should’ which that same modern novelty has denied. The resolute mastery to which we are summoned in ‘does not impose’ is the very source of difficulty in apprehending goodness as ‘should.’ Therefore, the ‘should’ in the statement has only a masquerading resonance when it is asked to provide positive moral content to the actions we are summoned to concerning computers. It is a word carried over from the past to be used in a present which is only ours because the assumptions of that past were criticized out of public existence. The statement therefore cushions us from the full impact of the novelties it asks us to consider. It pads us against wondering about the disappearance of ‘should’ in its ancient resonance, and what this disappearance may portend for the future. Statements such as this are increasingly common in the liberal world because we feel the need to buttress the morality of our managers in their daily decisions. Indeed, the more it becomes possible to conceive that we might not be able to control the immensity of the apparatus and the constantly changing emergencies it presents us with, the more intense become the calls for moral ‘values’ and ‘ideals.’ Technological society is presented to us as a set of neutral means, something outside ourselves, and human beings are presented as in touch with some constant, from out of which constancy they are called upon to deal with the new external crises. But obviously all that is given us in the technological sciences denies that constancy, that eternality. What happens is that constancy is appealed to in practical life and denied in intellectual life. In such a situation the language of eternality is gradually removed from all serious public realms, because it is made completely unresonant by what dominates the public world. The residual16 and unresonant constant appealed to in the sentence about the computer is the word ‘should.’ But the intellectual life which allowed the coming to be of computers has also made ‘should’ almost unthinkable. I have discussed this sentence at great length to show that when we look at our present situation as if we in our freedom were called upon to impose ‘values’ and ‘ideals’ on technological situations seen as ‘objective’ to us, we are not beyond industrial growth, but within that which brought industrial growth to be. ‘Values’ and ‘ideals,’ ‘persons’ and ‘the creating of history’ are at their very heart the technological speaking. Let me concentrate my essential point in a criticism of a recent writing by professor C.B. Macpherson.17 In his Democratic Theory,

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an early section is entitled ‘The race between ontology and technology.’ It is just such words that I am trying to show as deluding. Macpherson identifies ontologies with ‘views of the essence of man,’ and writes of ‘a fateful race between ontological change and technological change.’ One might ask: is not technological change an aspect of what is, and therefore not something other than ontological change? But what is above all misleading in such words is that they obscure the fact that every act of scientific discovery or application comes forth from an ontology which so engrosses us that it can well be called our Western destiny. Technology is not something over against ontology; it is the ontology of the age. It is for us an almost inescapable destiny. The great question is not then ‘the race between technology and ontology,’ but what is the ontology which is declared in technology? What could it be to be ‘beyond’ it, and would it be good to be ‘beyond’ it?18 The foregoing has not been stated for the sake of increasing the sense of human impotence. Aesthetic pessimism is a form of self-indulgence to which protected academics are particularly prone. In so far as one is aware that one is prone to such sick pessimism, it should be dealt with in privacy and not presented publicly. It always matters what we do. Moreover, at a much deeper level, authentic despair is a human possibility and a very great evil. Therefore it must be prepared for. Our first obligation is to seek acquaintance with joy so that any arrival of despair does not carry us into madness. The complete absence of joy is madness. However, the stating of the facts in any given situation has nothing to do with despair, but only with the possible destruction of inadequate sources of hope – the destruction of which is a necessary part of all our lives. Rather my purpose is to state the profundity with which technological civilization enfolds us as our destiny. Coming to meet us out of the very substance of our past, that destiny has now become, not only our own, but that of the species as a whole. Moreover, this destiny is not alone concerned with such obvious externals that we can blow ourselves up or ameliorate diabetes or have widespread freedom from labour or watch our distant wars on television. It is a destiny which presents us with what we think of the whole, with what we think is good, with what we think good is, with how we conceive sanity and madness, beauty and ugliness. It is a destiny which enfolds us in our most immediate experiences: what we perceive when we encounter a bird or a tree,

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a child or a road. It equally enfolds us in less tangible apperceptions such as temporality. My cruder purpose is to make clear that that destiny is not a situation like picking and choosing in a supermarket; rather, it is like a package deal. When we, as Western people, put to ourselves the question of what can lie ‘beyond industrial growth,’19 we are liable to be asking it as a problem within the package which is that destiny. It is taken as a problem of the same order as that which we are currently meeting because of our dependence on oil and the Arab awakening.20 To say this is not to belittle such problems or to seem to stand in proud aloofness from them. They have to be met and will require great wisdom – indeed greater wisdom than has characterized our English-speaking rulers since 1914. However, even at the immediate level of the pragmatic, the questioning in ‘beyond industrial growth’ begins to reveal the universal which is spoken in technology. We move into the tightening circle in which more technological science is called for to meet the problems which technological science has produced. In that tightening circle, the overcoming of chance is less and less something outside us, but becomes more and more the overcoming of chance in our own species, in our very own selves. Every new appeal for a more exact cybernetics means, in fact, forceful new means of mastery over the most intimate aspects of the lives of masses of people. Particularly among some of those who are the patients of that mastery and among those who keep some hesitation about their part in enforcing it, questioning cannot be wholly repressed. For example, will it be possible to hide entirely what is being spoken universally about our own species in the massive programs of foetuscide which characterize modern societies? Will it be possible to hide what is being spoken universally in the advances in reproductive biology and behavioural psychology, as those advances become part of our everyday lives? Moreover, when what is spoken there universally is listened to, will it be able to be accepted as including in its universality the hunger and thirst for justice? For thinkers, the universal in ‘beyond industrial growth’ must appear as the package deal becomes increasingly explicit. With that explicitness inevitably comes the central theoretical question of this era. Can our thinking be satisfied with the historicist universal? If the universal appearing as historicism can be known as only a masquerading of the

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universal, then it will be possible to ask the following question: in all that has been practised and thought and made by Western human beings in their dedication to the overcoming of chance, what has there been of good? What has perhaps been found? What has perhaps been lost? What have these possible losings and findings to do with what we can know of the trans-historical whole? It looks very likely that amidst the pressing calls for cybernetic organization in our immediate future, there will be little social patience for those who think about these questions. Thinkers will be accused of vagueness and uncertainty, impracticality and self-indulgence in times of crisis. For example, it is clear that the great intellectual achievement of modernity is its physics, and that the scientific community which ultimately feeds on that achievement is the most intellectually influential in our midst. Yet in its pride, that community is, with rare exceptions, contemptuous and impatient of any thought which is ‘beyond’ solutions. Historicist scholarship is tolerated because it is unlikely to pass over into thought. Therefore, I would predict that those who want to think will have to develop a more than usual irony to protect themselves from this impatience. In the face of the complexity, immensity, and uncertainty of that which calls to be questioned, it may, indeed, seem that thinkers are impotent as aids to the inescapable immediacies of the public realm. The originating tradition concerning rationality in the West was that it had something to do with happiness and therefore something to do with throwing light upon the awful responsibilities of time. In the ambiguous heart of Plato’s dialogues, philosophy included political philosophy. This relation to practice may seem to have been lost when thinkers are called to wander in the chasms which have been opened up by education for the overcoming of chance. It may seem that, when thought wanders in these chasms, it becomes useless to the public realm. Yet the darkness which envelops the Western world because of its long dedication to the overcoming of chance is just a fact. Thinkers who deny the fact of that darkness are no help in illuminating a finely tempered practice for the public realm. The job of thought at our time is to bring into the light that darkness as darkness. If thinkers are turned away from this by becoming tamed confederates in the solution of some particular problem, they have turned away from the occupation they are called to. The consequent division between thought and prac-

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tice is therefore even greater than at most times and places. That division is a price that has to be paid by people given over primarily either to practice or to thought, because of the false unity between thought and practice which has dominated our civilization so long in its dedication to the overcoming of chance. That false unity presses on us in the two leading ideologies of our age – Marxism and American liberalism – in both of which thought has been made almost to disappear as it was perverted into a kind of practice. Those of us who are Christians have been told that there is something ‘beyond’ both thought and practice. Both are means or ways. In their current public division from each other, the memory of their joint insufficiency will be helpful to both. What is also necessary for both types of life is a continuing dissatisfaction with the fact that the darkness of our era leads to such a division between them. In this dissatisfaction lies the hope of taking a first step: to bring the darkness into light as darkness.

Notes 1 Cf. ‘Can We Think Outside Technology?’ Tract no. 24 (Lewes, Sussex: The Gryphon Press 1977), 5–23 (hereafter Tract): ‘... can be spoken so that ...’ 2 Cf. Tract: ‘... to speak the words emphasizing ...’ 3 Burlington, Ontario, is located at the head of Lake Ontario, 50 km west of Toronto. 4 Dundas, Ontario, was Grant’s home while he taught at McMaster University. It is located north-west of Hamilton about 70 km from Toronto. 5 Cf. Tract: ‘The other day ...’ to ‘... imagination.)’ omitted. 6 Cf. Tract: ‘Those of us ...’ to ‘... Howe.’ omitted. Clarence Decatur Howe (1886–1960), engineer, businessman, and politician, entered politics (1935) after making a fortune designing and building grain elevators. As minister of munitions and supply during the Second World War he directed Canada’s war production program; in the post-war period he oversaw the country’s return to a free-enterprise system. While minister of trade and commerce (1948–57), his contempt for opposition to his plans to build a trans-Canada pipeline in 1956 played a significant role in the defeat of the Liberal government the following year. 7 See Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins 1977, 1993), 434: ‘No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now

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11 12

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18 19 20

‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ establishing themselves will soon be determined and regulated by the new fundamental science that is called cybernetics.’ Cf. Tract: ‘... I am not writing this Tract because ...’ Cf. Tract: ‘... purpose of this Tract.’ The Spadina expressway, a proposed superhighway that would have cut through downtown Toronto, was vigorously opposed by neighbourhood groups. In June 1971 Premier William Davis intervened and stopped the expressway from being built. Cf. Tract: This sentence omitted. Grant is referring here to the crisis created in October 1973 by the imposition by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) of an embargo upon the shipment of oil to countries that supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Cf. Tract: ‘... inevitably contracted into ...’ See Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press 1960). Cf. Tract: ‘... of traditional “goods,” which were not created ...’ Cf. Tract: ‘The remnantial and unresonant ...’ Crawford Brough Macpherson (1911–87), political theorist and professor, was educated at Toronto and London and taught for four decades in the department of political economy at Toronto. His various writings on the development of liberal-democratic theory brought him international acclaim. His works include Democracy in Alberta (1953), The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), The Real World of Democracy (1965), Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (1973), The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (1977), and Burke (1980). Cf. Tract: What follows is identified as ‘II,’ that is, part II; in Rotstein there is only a space and no indent to indicate a new section. Cf. Tract: ‘... put to ourselves the question “beyond industrial growth?”, we are liable ...’ Cf. Tract: ‘... the Arab awakening to modernity.’

Brief Comment in Time Magazine on Trudeau’s ‘New Values’

The comment appeared in Time (Canada) 107, 5 January 1976, 10.

I think that on the whole, there is going to be less to go around in the North American economy, making it tougher to divide the pie than in the past. I regret it, but I think there is going to be an increase in class struggle. I am not a Marxist and I regret that tougher actions will result from the divisions in the economy. When there are tough actions, the weak suffer. I think that more and more people live within the orbit of some great corporation which protects them. These corporations can be business, trade unions, government or even the university. Fewer and fewer are going to have an independence which in the past we have sometimes associated with the middle class. People not protected by membership in some form of corporation are going to suffer. I’m not sure if people are moving to the right politically, but the elections in Australia, New Zealand, and British Columbia would indicate that people are voting for a safe course and I think they think the right is more safe at this point than the left.1 In tough situations people choose caution. I would like to say a word about Trudeau’s ‘new values.’2 When the governments talk about new values, they mean that people are going to have to live getting less. But people know that rhetoric from government leaders. In capitalistic, individualistic society, where rewards fall within that context, you can’t deny people those rewards and call it new values. People will not be convinced.

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Notes 1 In Australia Malcolm Fraser and the Liberal Party won a majority in both houses on 13 December 1975, defeating Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and the Labor Party, who had won the 1972 election. The election followed a political crisis brought about by a controversial intervention by the Governor General, Sir John Kerr, who dismissed Whitlam from office on 11 November 1975. In the 1975 New Zealand general election, Robert Muldoon and the National Party won 55 seats, defeating the Labour Party that only won 32, reversing the results of the previous election of 1972, and in British Columbia the Social Credit party under William R. Bennett won 35 seats, defeating the NDP that won only 18 after ruling the province from 1972–5. 2 Prime Minister Trudeau spoke on TV and radio before Christmas 1975 to announce his plan for a wage and price control program, to address an economic crisis which included steep inflation and high unemployment. Because Canada was a mixed economy of free enterprise and government regulation, he argued, business and labour would have to accept strong government intervention.

‘Obedience,’ edited by Gerald Owen

Gerald Owen edited and published these notes on ‘obedience’ from 1976 (juxtaposing them with some others on ‘postponement’ that possibly date from 1972) in The Idler, no. 29 (August 1990): 23–8. Sections 10, 11, 12, and 14 (indicating pages in the notes) include excerpts from ‘Technique(s) and Good’ (1972) (118–43). In his ‘Introduction’ (below), Owen describes the materials he found among the Grant papers and explains how he organized some of them into this presentation. EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

In George Grant’s study there are many papers. A box marked ‘Grant, 5 Notes on Techné Book’ contains many fragments of a projected book, which he seems to have been working on in 1976. Looking through this box after his death, Sheila Grant, his wife, was particularly struck by a group of papers on the theme of obedience. Many of George Grant’s notes are points jotted down, often as outlines for possible essays or book, often as a series of noun phrases: headings more than sentences, which served him as reminders but cannot communicate much to anyone else. There are also many rough drafts, paragraphs of incomplete writings. But sometimes, as with the set of foolscap sheets on obedience, there is a series of propositions and clauses, not yet in paragraphs, but rather one above another, almost unpunctuated. Most of these propositions can communicate something, each by itself. Reading them I at least imagine I am seeing his mind at work. Not everything in that group of pages is closely related to the theme of obedience, and towards the end there are outlines rather than complete thoughts. So in editing I have excluded some things, and instead added (and edited) other fragments from the same box that I think are thematically connected; I have numbered this version by ‘pages’ but those from

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‘page 8’ on are partly the result of re-arrangement. Professor Grant’s handwriting is difficult (he was after all making notes for himself) and Mrs Grant and I are not certain of every reading; some bits I just had to leave out. I have ventured to do some re-touching, sometimes in the hope of clarifying, sometimes in the hope of harmonizing the tone and flavour. All errors of judgment are mine. Sheila Grant’s help has been generous, intelligent, and irreplaceable. Gerald Owen

1. suffers, yields What do I mean by obedience what was its relation to the old view of what is good what does obedience mean to the new – The classic case of obedience is X.1 the lamb led to the slaughter – suffers, Yields X. commands by beseeching One way of looking at obedience is to ask the question backwards why does the ancient view of good include the idea of obedience (therefore) write down what was said about good Good was what we were suited for As animals we were suited for life, pleasant life, procreating life As thinking we were suited to thought As thinking animals living together we had to think not only of our own goods, but those of others Why: a. others were our own – parents & children b. there was a good for which others were suited

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& we had to see, within possibility, that they realized that, when it was crossed by a. the interests of others b. accident We were desiring beings Desiring means lack of good & goods In thought do we always lack – (as we do now the cause, the good cause of the world) is what thought lacks trust, & therefore we long for trust? Is this the argument for supernatural good, namely, that as we think about nature, we are aware of goods & evils & as we think of these – as we think of the affliction of the world, we at the same time want to think the world has a good cause – that is, that the whole thing is to some purpose which is good & so submit to that purpose 2. What do I mean when I say we are called to obedience & what is the relation of obedience to thinking obedience is 1st to X. & who or what is X.? We are called to obedience to X. because he is obedience X. is the perfection presented to us of the offering up of himself to good to good which commands obedience because it is in some sense blank It is the blankness of the good, the absolute unfathomableness of it, which makes it present itself to us as obedience Obedience is a demand on our love

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when we do not see that which we love What is the relation of our love of what is present & our love of what is only hinted at in the present & is therefore in some sense absent But what do we mean by good? What we are fitted for What we aspire to What is the divide that N. & H.2 seem to have crossed about good There are still goods for N. & in some sense for H. But what there is not for them is obedience The question then is what is taken out of the word good when you use it without the presence of obedience. & what is told us of the word good when we use it with the word obedience. (What I hear in Mozart is obedience – indeed his music is obedience Yet there is in the music that note of sadness – because obedience in its blankness is in some sense sad.) There is in N. & H. a certain kind of obedience – a being unto death – that terrific symbol of obedience – But there is not obedience to that which is lovable, morally lovable, that is, to good Is this not perhaps a circle then in my thought: I am saying that what is absent in them is good which includes obedience, but then I say that their obedience is present, but it is not obedience to good What is it exactly that I find missing? See also, passive & active obedience 17113 – as by X.’s passive obedience

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we are freed from the guilt of sin, so by His active obedience we are invested with righteousness obedience to obey I come not to destroy the law but to fulfil it. the relation of authority good does not face us in the same way necessity does 3. The two questions I am having difficulty with are maybe the same 1. N’s affirmation that Christianity is Platonism for the masses 2. In the West, the division between those who say that nature is the source & move from nature to transcendence & those to whom nature is not, like S.W.4 it is a kind of nothingness through which one has to move to transcendence Which is Plato? 4. how thought drives one out of society – how much & in what way The difficulty with that position is that the language of good may have gone, so how does one perform the job You can’t be open to obedience You must have said yes or no Obedience may be the product of thought but it is in that the enemy of thought5

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5. Subordination – fixed limit – demand – manifest his commandments take the form of asking he is attention without distraction mastery means masterlessness equality & techné6 6. ordinary men on the whole still think there are goods & evils it is self-evident that starvation is an evil bad is warped or spoiled or inhibited, says Farrer7 good & evil are terms of mutual contrast, says the dualist heresy But this to confuse things with our awareness of them Cadiz earthquake good things are doing what they are suitable for The question is, why such a high destiny The difference between Strauss8 & Xianity seems to be the following: There are all kinds of beings, for Strauss, fitted for different things: carpenters – statesmen – philosophers they can be in good or bad societies & accomplish or not accomplish their goods & the highest good is thinking. Across that breaks S.W. saying, yes, the great thing is to love supernatural good

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& that is open to all, despite differences of function What is the difference between the good in the first & the second one comes across the absolute Law in both – where does the difference come? thinking is perhaps the best good of goods – but it is not the supreme good or the total good. pleased to give obedience 7. obedience always means in part transcendence duty & delight in Farrer I do not get what I thought about prayer because I always turn away from it because I know I am not willing to give myself away How much is Mozartian tragedy & sadness the response of giving oneself away? But then think of the last movement of 5039 8. novelty summons us to attention summons to wonder wonder goes with the Greek good astonishment may not resistance to the novelty may be within those who believe in novelty – but cushion that novelty – as in ‘the computer does not determine how we ought to use it.’ Spreading out to the deepest, from ‘it is not merely an instrument’

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to ‘master of the earth.’ We must be careful: the results that any human being must accept or not accept the results that that nobody can accept except in the deepest nihilism the great lights for the Western world, Platonism & Christianity, these lights have been dimmed 9. thought is under obedience H. denies this you wish to assert this thought is free to roam & say what H. says when it is free from obedience the greatest writer on what technique is turns his back on obedience I have to say I write as a Xian I must say clearly what I object to in H. H. is let’s think it it’s new therefore it will be difficult to think therefore we must not rush. Postponement 10. postponement & why what has happened is so ambiguous not to postpone prescriptions which depend on descriptions these descriptions liable to be clear-cut & to break in & settle certain questions before they start Prescriptions must be based on descriptions

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Prescriptions must lead to action what is postponed & delayed the relation of the sexual act to birth Finally we have to postpone whether this has been good or bad for mankind: modern technique Danger of postponement – remote – but clear Necessity of postponement in our situation postponement under obedience – & thought but it is an obedience not of the public kind – it is a momentary obedience to the past – being in that way very difficult 11. postponement under obedience but postponement where one tries to think obedience obedience is given in general, not in particular & yet obedience obeys particulars how can we think obedience 12. We do not know where we are It may be all right to plunge right ahead but the signs are great: Nietzsche’s end; the sea We must be really agnostic at the point where we ask, can man be the master of the earth those who will to will simply carry on the story that has brought technique to be

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therefore they cannot stand over against it 13. openness or thinking closedness or obedience It would be dishonest to pretend in that openness that one stands above obedience Is not obedience a closing down of openness? So we are back, always a closing down thought & obedience – – modern thought has darkened obedience what Strauss misses are the saints yet obedience is dark how nice it would be to be one of those to whom the darkness of obedience is not – Ellul10 – Barth11 & those for whom obedience & the modern do not come into conflict Not being such 14. Those fortunate people for whom obedience has not been darkened darkened not simply in the sense of what they should do immediately but what is obedience12 Happy are those such as Ellul & Barth – who live through what is obedience – to escape thought, they have been told Happy are those who can face the Greeks – without thinking of modern mathematical physics

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Happy are those who can get rid of ontology in their sense of the Bible 15. madness as the relation of the darkness to the light – madness as the very form of the darkness – seen in the beings The particular madness of technique Speak of darkened, not extinguished N. thought that transcendence was extinguished I think that it is darkened, as a believer. But that one can think transcendence easily is just not so

Notes 1 Grant often used ‘X’ for Christ and ‘Xianity’ for Christianity. 2 ‘N’ stands for Nietzsche and ‘H’ for Heidegger. 3 The editors cannot explain ‘1711.’ Gerald Owen wonders if Grant is referring to a Bible verse such as John 17:11: ‘And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.’ 4 Simone Weil. 5 The original set of notes contains the following passage at this juncture: ‘Insight this morning about myself. Do I simply want to discover that we are within good and evil so that I can assert transcendence because I can’t accept this world in its own terms? Or do I go at it properly in the sense that transcendence arises from joy, and some kind of apprehension in joy?’ 6 The original set of notes contains the Greek words gnosis and episteme at this juncture. 7 Austin Farrer (1904–68), Anglo-Catholic theologian, taught at Oxford 1935– 60. His works include Finite and Infinite (1943), The Glass of Vision (1948), and Freedom of the Will (1958). Farrer speaks of evil as the spoiling of a nature, the inhibition of an activity, the frustration of an aim, or the saddening of an existence which we take to be good. See Austin Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (New York: Doubleday 1961), 30.

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8 Leo Strauss (1899–1973), American political philosopher, emigrated from Germany in 1938 and taught at the New School for Social Research, Chicago (1949–68), Claremont, and St John’s College. He is chiefly known for re-examining the quarrel between the ancient and modern political philosophers and siding with the ancients. His work includes a critique of modern liberalism and egalitarian democracy, modern political science, and historicist hermeneutics. At the same time he argued that liberal democracy, with all its limitations, is preferable to its twentieth-century competitors, communism and national socialism. See Collected Works, vol. 3, 132n5 and passim. 9 W.A. Mozart, Piano Concerto no. 25 in C major, K. 503 (1786). 10 For Jacques Ellul, see 143n5. 11 Karl Barth (1886–1968), Swiss reformed theologian, was the leading exponent of crisis theology or dialectical theology, which emphasizes the contradiction between God and the world as revealed in scripture. 12 The original notes have the following words at this juncture: ‘Obedience and thought (big passage)/ obedience a limit to openness./ the psychoanalytical ambiguities of my obedience – mother and yet truth/ start, – good imperative/ obedience and self-realization/ SW Need for Roots on science p. 241/on utilitarianism p. 242’

Miscellaneous Notes on Technology, Good, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Other Subjects

Grant’s papers include several files of notes most of which date from the period 1972–6 (when he was thinking about Nietzsche’s understanding of modernity and Heidegger’s account of technology) as part of writing two possible books that he did not complete, tentatively titled ‘Techniques and Good’ and ‘Good and Techniques.’ (Parts of these became important published essays, ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used”’ (280–98) and ‘Justice and Technology’ (525–35).) Some of the notes are part of his preparation for a third book on Heidegger, Plato, and Christianity that was never completed. (See ‘Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche’ (550–61).) These notes contain excerpts found in Notebooks V (1973), R (1976), T (1972–6), and b (1970s), together with a selection from note files titled ‘Notes for Techniques book on Nietzsche and Heidegger – 1971–2,’ ‘Notes on good and technique 1972,’ and ‘Heidegger Notes.’

Reflections Recorded in Notebook V (1973) Did Nietzsche ever write about comedy? Perhaps this is what is most wrong about him and perhaps about Heidegger. There is a romantic egocentricity about Nietzsche and Heidegger that I find hard to stomach. If one sees that historicism is true but that it is deadly to the soul – then one way of opting out of the deadliness of the situation is to go in for myth-making (are they delusions?) as a way of escaping from the natural [or perhaps actual?]. There is something like might in all history. Hysteron-proteron is when you put first things last – and last things first.

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Why is it that people pretend that life is other than it is? The greatness of Nietzsche is that from an early age he did not pretend. How does one raise this lack of phoniness in a philosopher? It is not only Nietzsche’s greater comprehensiveness than Freud – it is his greater lack of pretense. Ex umbris et imaginibus. Nietzsche and technology – the only thing he did not most deeply see, it seems to me, was technology and the will to power. Technology not something external to us – but the way we look at the world. Nietzsche – preparing the people who will only have power and change the world was not a busy bureaucrat like Thode1 – but a solitary like me? In a certain sense – but only a certain sense – it could be said that Nietzsche takes the Greek as primal. Marx in a strange way Christianity. Kant called prayer ‘a superstitious vanity.’ Central. If modern thought is ambiguous for us in having made technology and not therefore able to judge it, ancient thought is ambiguous for us in having been dead by technology and therefore we are not excluding its presence. Technology and science are together in the modern world. In the science of the ancient world, philosophy or science, the philosopher happy – in the modern world the belief is that science can make all men happy. But here the question arises of egalitarianism and its relation to techne and science. Why if it is a world in which what is ultimately so is good and good seen in some sense (in the Biblical tradition) in terms of moral law – that is, if our lives have to be lived out in terms of that law – are our origins predetermined and caught in patterns which arise out of instinct and out of chance – e.g. in my mother’s case – I think her will was pretty good yet out of that good willing came a twisting of instincts? Why if the end is the desire of the good, is the beginning instinct?

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Frank articles on Plato and Aristotle2 – for GPG how is the knowledge of justice and physics different? Remember you don’t have to have sorted out all questions to write this book – e.g. Platonism and Christianity – what you have to do is what you know and have already thought about. What is essentially true in Simone Weil’s Platonism is that she sees that mathematics is to be studied according to Plato for the sake of the agathon. My concentration on justice as against epistemology and metaphysics is difficult for it meets people who live in an imperial age when ethics is almost out of the question (particularly ethics as politics). Therefore this is one reason why academics return to epistemology and metaphysics – as harmless but understandable problems. God is only to be grasped by similes – but justice is the supreme simile. For Kant the good will is the only thing which is not a gift. It is the thing for which we are entirely responsible. See the relation of this to techne within our power. Obedience and independence in Kant. Kant on giving the law to yourself. GPG subject and subjection The idea of the subject is as absolute freedom yet subjection is slavery. If the good will was to discover the law then the law and not the good will would be the highest good. GPG Discovering? without willing as thinking without willing. GPG The merchant and veracity[?] Is it perhaps that Heidegger’s view of truth as not correctness goes with his lack of interest in morality which is a strait gate? This very important to work out – need him on Plato’s doctrine of truth.

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Notes from Notebook T (1972–3) [On Heidegger and Nietzsche related to projected book on techniques and good.] Heidegger says that questioning is the piety of thinking – thinking being the highest (see Strauss and Denken [thought] higher than poetry),3 but I would say that there are some things that we should not question – closed for example [is] genocide – see Simone Weil – obedience.4 Is there a piety higher than the piety of thinking? Put in first chapter [of projected but never published book, ‘Techniques and Good’ (118–43)] that to say technique is to put modern science to work is to miss the point and miss the analysis of both. In Techne article by Heidegger, see paragraph 64 on obedience and 66 no more laws.5 Obedience never goes with clarity because it has darkened. See paragraph on Kant in 1st chapter [of ‘Techniques and Good’]. Nietzsche in his account of Mozart in Will to Power [#842: ‘Mozart – a delicate and amorous soul, but entirely eighteenth century, even when he is serious.’] does not mention – did he not hear? – that note of the second movement of the clarinet concerto – that stupendous note of desolation and reconciliation combined. Is what I object to in Farrer an historical Christianity?6 Nietzsche – Ecce Homo near end. The condition of the existence of the good is the lie. In Philebus 20b Socrates speaks about a theory that the good is something different from both pleasure and intelligence and better than both. Perhaps quote it at beginning of book.7 Heidegger: Plato’s doctrine of truth – eidos (that which is seen) and idea (Greek) (the look or semblance of a thing, as opposed to its reality) Is the difference between the moderns and the ancients about good that in the latter goodness is obedience to seeing – beholding and our practical life must be seen as obedience to that beholding – while in the modern there is nothing to behold about which we can be obedient, therefore practical life becomes what? But what is the relationship of this to what I fear that my turning away from homosexuality made me see God?

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Notebook R (1976) It is so difficult to argue against transcendence in our era. Because without transcendence when one looks into this society it would be unbearable. It is interesting how there is a certain greater agnosticism in certain philosophers of transcendence e.g. Plato and Nietzsche; while at another point there is greater agnosticism in immanentists like Aristotle and Heidegger. Heidegger on Plato: Do I notice that where for Plato science is a way to what is beyond science, for Heidegger as in the phrase ‘science does not think’ science and philosophy are divided. This division works both ways: the modern positive scientist does not want philosophy – because of the nature of his science; Heidegger does not want science in philosophy – why? Doesn’t Ellul see a relation between his nominalism in theology (theology as technique) and nominalism in technique. His refusal of philosophy means he does not understand its influence ... As I feel with Heidegger so I feel with Ellul that they stress their particular nationalist view of Europe. Ellul his French, Heidegger his German – see Strauss, advantage of North Americans. Notebook b (1970s) [This comment on page 33 of the notebook may be Grant’s attempt to sum up his long disagreement with his colleague James Doull about Plato and Kant (on behalf of the transcendent God) and Aristotle and Hegel (on behalf of the supremacy of philosophy over religion).] Doull wants us not to be creatures. I have understood Aristotelian atheism. Notes on Good and Technique (1972) [This file contains references to a manuscript such as ‘put in intro’ and

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‘put in page 34’ etc., suggesting they may be related to ‘Techniques and Good.’] Nietzsche thought that the transcendence was extinguished – I simply think it is darkened as a believer – but that it is darkened – that one can think transcendence is just not so. Eternity – principles – makes us strangers in this world. But so does existentialism. Is it right to say that the good became for Nietzsche (who I take as the highest) (a) freedom – that is, what is good is to make oneself – that is, one’s project is to realize one’s individuality in the face of chaos? (b) This must be done at high noon – that is, in love of the earth and the body – and the assumption that there is no transcendent good. How does one relate to the fact that in Nietzsche what he is attacking in the past – what he is meaning by ‘beyond good and evil’ – is what he calls ‘morality’ (a modern word) – is it obedience to good which is given? (1) in what sense does he use the word ‘good’? (2) in what sense would he admit the word ‘obedience’? Why is there obedience in the traditional morality? In what sense is it more than temporal? Kant piece. This change hidden for us in Kant. It may be hidden from us in the modern. But it can’t be hidden from us after Kant is laid down. There are goods but no shoulds. No transcendence – no obedience. Kant. Why, as illustration of what?? That the change is hidden from us? Justice before charity in that piece. What I will say later about ‘God is dead’ – clever aphorism, yet like all aphorisms dangerous because they can be used shallowly. Dostoevsky’s aphorism also probably. [probably ‘I would rather stay with Christ than the truth.’] Who would be so presumptuous to say that Dostoyevsky or Nietzsche would use aphorisms in a slick or childish way, but who would say that their followers do not? It is more important to know what good is than anything else – therefore techne a way in. To start from ‘good’ as the most general word of commendation or

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approval and then to compare the modern and public presentations of human good may seem strange. In the one case the word is used as a substantive for which there can be no opposite; in the other as an adjective used with its opposite (bad) for the purposes of mutual contrast. The words ‘commendation’ or ‘approval’ mean different activities in the two cases. Indeed the difficulty in expressing this change in public presentation openly is that the central words of our English language were first moulded within the older presentation and their primal sense is within that presentation. In so far as they can be used to express the modern, they have been changed from the time when they were being moulded out of our French and Germanic traditions. To compare the public presentations of good is to compare the word used as a substantive and used as an adjective – to compare something for which there can be no opposite with a word used with its opposite for the purposes of mutual contrast. It might be said then that the comparison being made does not take us much further than Aristotle’s famous criticism of Plato’s teaching (Nichomachean Ethics 1 vi). Even when we pass beyond the use of ‘good’ as that which we aim at, and interpret the older use of the word as a good word for those activities we are suited to – such as breathing, living together, etc. – it is clear that goods in that sense are included in the modern presentation of good. It may be indeed that modern people think about our species as a kind of animal which has come to be accidental in the course of time, and that the purposes for which we are fitted are not given us by any creator, or by the fact of our nature which has always been in an everlasting species. Nevertheless this recognition does not eliminate all sense of what is suitable to us as human beings. An accidental species can possess certain traits, even if we believe that we can transcend ourselves as a species and become something more than calculation can tell us. To live in a ruined tradition is to be darkened. The only light: What good has come to light in this denial of the traditional goods? What good is absent? Evolution as a substitute for final cause. The rush towards the future a substitute for final cause. God be in my bowels and in my genitals as well as in my head and in my understanding.

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Heidegger, brought up in ancient thought, turns away from it. I, brought up in the apotheosis of modern thought, turn away from that. What I dare not do is to make the claim that I am a philosopher. Our very practicality tells us by what values we should use it. The Englishspeaking world has [been] led [by] Wittgenstein to thinking that we can only know what we can describe – just at the point where we can’t describe the situation we are in. Put in at end somewhere that the belief that being is under the yoke of good is a self-indulgence that is reached because of psychic lamentation, and the attempt to get over lamentation. To close over the void opened by lamentation. Not being able to think it – one is open to thinking it arises in neurotic ways. I have to say that those who are held by the claim can’t think it in terms of the whole. I cannot say whether this is a philosophical or theological work because I do not know where the claim comes from. To think about that which makes a higher claim than thinking. The truth that the good is higher than truth. Put nature under the yoke of good. The good of thought is conditional, only acceptance is unconditional. Acceptance is desire for the good. Why it has to pass through the flesh is that that acceptance is unconditional. Those of us who are without an alternative to call[ing] ourselves in some sense Christians, because the perfection of the claim of perfection blazes forth for us in the New Testament, may seem to have a retreat from the ambiguous disintegration of philosophy in that calling. Is not enough of the stuff of obedience given there that one is lucky even to touch its edges? In the disintegration of philosophy can we not put our trust in theology for the thinking of what technical novelty portends? Central dilemma. If theology tells us that nothing novel has come into the world with the coming of technical civilization, then it must show us how such new ideas as ‘freedom’ and ‘history,’ which belong to the very heart of what that coming to be has been, can go along with theology. (This is what Rahner attempts – but fails.)

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What is the difference between art and thought? See Nietzsche’s doctrine as quoted by Heidegger. Try to say why this is not true. [We need art lest we perish of the truth?] My intuition about Mozart and beauty as against thought. Cf. Mozart and King Lear. Write and think about the word ‘play.’ I am not only going to think technique against the claim, but the claim against technique. Indeed thought does come upon those who can’t refuse that claim to the absent desirable [?] because it is assailed within our own gates – at the heart of our existence. At every lived moment the ordinary (call them if you will the natural) events of the world which to our ancestors were able to proclaim that claim now deny it. That the claim still comes cannot be denied, but it comes despite its being constantly assailed and it comes we do not know from where. Can its presence be held in light for us by philosophy? But what is that? If we live in the modern world do we not know that activity as a baggage we have carried from the past? If ‘philosophy’ is said to be more than logistics, is it not a return to ancient ways of thought which have been shown to be erroneous by recent logic and which must deny what modern science teaches any competent person to be true? Is not such a return to philosophy a selfindulgence only possible for academics who want such a return to cosset themselves from the realities of the present while they live in the advantages of such realities? If that old claim is said to come to us rationally, does it not come to us as some categorical imperative – a duty which becomes blanker and grimmer as it cannot be sustained by desire – the last dry fruit of secularized Protestantism which tried to delay the coming of the modern. Notes about Heidegger In the beginning of writing put the truth of the Popper case – that people who think they know the good are willing to be tyrants etc. GPG you have to work out Heidegger’s formulation that ‘to the ancients being means being present’ with Simone Weil’s comment ‘that which we love is absent.’

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p. 16. ‘whatever philosophy is and however it may exist at any given time it defines itself solely on its own terms’ Does this mean I can’t be a philosopher? see p. 19. My thought is claimed by the Christ. This does not make me a good man – in what sense it is claimed. Speaking about oneself is always bad, yet it must be done here. I suppose my life is claimed by Socrates – but in a quite different way. Volume 2 p. 106. ‘a god who must permit his existence to be proved in the first place is ultimately an ungodly god.’ Very important for me to speak – the how thought and the what thought are inextricably linked. p. 6. Heidegger about Plato. ‘beings have their essence in the “ideas,” according to which they must be estimated: whatever is measures itself on what ought to be.’ grasping ends (?) as good – good is always what they are essentially and what they in fact are. it is necessary. There is no word for ‘ideal,’ and no word for ‘object’ in Greek. The Primacy of the Good In the pre-technical era people in the West generally assumed the primacy of the good; since the coming of this era that assumption has not generally been made by educated people. Indeed the very coming of this era required the undermining of that assumption. What then is given in it? What does it mean to assert that goodness is primary? It means, above all, the affirmation that in so far as anything is, it is good. How was it possible for this to be thought? How is it possible for this to be thought? In my era the most immediate experiences of day to day life would seem to contradict it. It is not now the same way assumed. In what way not assumed? There is ambiguity as to what may not be assumed yet held generally by the less educated. (uncertain) It is not assumed in the clearest philosophers. It is not assumed by the greatest philosophers. And of course for us how can it be believed? What is this which is now said? Differences of saying it. Must be said in philosophic language. The Bible has not, within, its own consistent language. It was not so intended. The good news was not proclaimed in the Gospel as a treatise but as the account of a perfect holy lived life.

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What was given in our knowledge of the whole was a received knowledge of good which we did not measure and define – but by which we were measured and defined. It is not that the being towards good contradicts the being towards death or excludes it. But what is given in each? What does it mean that the being towards death – is open to chaos? the superman Notes about Good (cont.) 505 A, Republic. Socrates says that the Idea of Good is the highest subject of teaching you have often heard. Refer this to the question as to whether it is the beginning of Western philosophy or the end of a long, long tradition. Plato, the highest good is ‘not being, but beyond being.’ To assert the clear light only dawns when human reason has perished, which is present in some mysticism, is certainly not Platonism. Both with Plato and Christ there is the community – the testing (?) point as a basis for the vision – not simply the flight of the one to the one. The soul was not dissolved in formlessness in Plato, – different here from Plotinus. Face to face with the inexpressible the soul does not dissolve but still, though mysteriously, remains intact. ‘Give me that man who is not passion’s slave And I will wear him in my heart’s core, Ay, in my heart of hearts.’8 For Heidegger, ‘thanc’ and ‘thinking.’ Giving thanks always for our essential nature, and our essential nature is our heart of hearts – to think is therefore to take it to heart. In our essential nature – the idea of an inner and an outer world is quite uncertain (?) – remember here Socrates’ prayer in the Phaedrus about inner and outer nature. Heidegger: ‘We take the gift when thought (thanc) goes by giving thought to what is most thought-provoking.’ The height ‘thinking’ is the mode of thankful disposal? – the heart is our disposition. If the height for Heidegger is the thinking, wherein is the priority to that which is – what is the relation of thinking to the saint – the thinker or the saint? You will have to discuss this. Is Heidegger the most unregenerate Platonist, more than Nietzsche even?

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Notes about Good (cont.) Perhaps start with Christ and Socrates as the way in and through that to the suffering of God. (Start by stating the difference between Athens and Jerusalem for Jews and for Christians.) What I owe to Heidegger – perhaps both. Or else start how it is easy to prove finally God’s being from argument from perfection or ontological argument – but then – then – then ... Remember at the beginning of piece. Modern thought is a realm. If one tries to refute it in terms of itself – one cannot, because one just falls into that realm. What is so terribly at stake between Plato and Heidegger and why it drives me to distraction? Why is it such suffering for me? Is that simply my ambition? Note on the Symposium and Miss Weil. In Parmenides Socrates is shown as having a despising for what is low. There is no form of the ugly – ... did Simone Weil have a despising of the lowly? Sherrard. The Greek East and the Latin West.9 Chap. 1 Plato and Aristotle. I have to face the question whether Plato stands at the end of long tradition which is broken by Aristotle – this is what Sherrard and Simone Weil say – or whether philosophy dawns in Greece – Western thought – this is what Heidegger seems to be saying. Plato’s phrase ‘erekeina tes ousia’ – Eruko separate, keep apart? transcendence explicitly stated by Plato says Heidegger Nietzsche and Heidegger as theologians of glory – not of the cross – see Luther. In my own writing I must be careful to accept absolute gratitude to Plato and yet write as if I am writing what is, – not simply a piece about him, otherwise the writing becomes simply academic, and I will then have to get into all the various interpretations of Plato. Sherrard (cont.) see that Plato gives a greater place to the world than Aristotle (see p. 6)

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For the good see how the central question of your writing is Aristotle’s inability to visualize (?) the existence of these forms apart from their sensual manifestations. Why Hegel took Aristotle? The Good the principle which stands above both form and formless matter in a way Aristotle can’t conceive. dianoia – Knowing the forms in matter noesis – directly intuits in principles themselves (see where Sherrard sees that Cochrane10 got it wrong. pp. 12–13) The Modern beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says the good itself – the great dogmatists’ era of Europe. I DON’T WANT SIMPLY TO WRITE AS IF I were trying to take people back to Platonism – what a hopeless thought. The question then arises for the writer or thinker; what is the good of thinking about good? But even here the language has changed – what is the value of this, but just get on with it. What is now the idiomatic use of ‘good’ in English? Whatever it is I must never lose sight of it in trying to pass beyond it. Beyond Good and Evil has been part of this era, ushered in third wave of modernity. Beyond Good and Evil is saying you can’t be certain that there is difference between good and evil. But this is perhaps the one thing we should try to be always certain about. Descartes’ doubt, Plato’s trust. Plato says in the seventh letter that part of philosophy which is to him most important is in no way expressible like other subjects of teaching which are expressible. Any exposition of Plato must seem partial and poor. The Idea of the Good gives Being but is ineffable – the source of Being is not itself Being. One must pass through the Logoi (the students) to reach the inexpressible, ‘not being but beyond being’ A good is to be good and to do good Much good may it do you. A good for nothing (Swift first) That’s a good one (about a story)

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God’s good and what care I (coleridge) I’ll give you a good beating well-being Much good may it do you benefaction. the quality or condition of being good – Goodness To be was to be good. What was this goodness in which this ‘to be’ participated? What is the relation of this to the Beyond Being of Plato’s goodness? Good Immediately we are presented with the political trap that it is bad for people politically to be clear about good, because this will lead to tyrannies, whether they be the tyrannies of the majority or minority. The liberals long before Nietzsche thought the state should not be beyond good and evil, in the sense that its powers would be limited and its basis not dependent on an affirmation about the highest good. (I have heard this argument ever since I studied philosophy and took Plato’s Republic.) How much was the modern based on the secularization of ends and how much on not wanting (?) good? How much upon the not being able to know the good? (See meaning and noein [infinitive form corresponding to nous and noesis] in Heidegger.) and how much on the worldliness of technology – see relation. Wonderful part of Heidegger about fleeing into the praxis of life. That is, escape is not into theory but into practice. See the relation of this to Christianity and the primacy of charity. Plato to be like God – Plotinus to be god What does the phrase ‘the goodness of God’ mean when God is simply goodness? As against Heidegger, goodness is exactly what is not present. It is as intimation but not fully present. Remark by Nietzsche suggests (?) that we do not know what thought without ‘resentment’ would be like. Is Platonic or Christian thought free from ‘resentment’? Is it good to be free from ‘resentment’? Is the way to be so freed the eternal recurrence?

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The question ‘what is that which is (ti to on)’ may be theoretically more fundamental. But ‘what is good’ – ‘what is good for us’ may be more pressing. It is certainly what most people have to think about – while the earlier question is what only some have to think about – this is something for all – ‘what is it good for me to do?’ It is perfectly true that what we sow in thought we reap in action. But it is equally true that what we sow in action we reap in thought. Volume 4 p. 169 What nonsense Heidegger says about the Christian meaning of Good. [‘We say “the Good” and think of “good” in Christian-moral fashion as meaning well-behaved, decent, in keeping with law and order.’] Why does he write his history of philosophy around Nietzsche? Uses almost entirely the will to power book, not others. National Socialism the greatest modernity. Qui verbum Dei contempserunt, etiam eis auferetur verbum hominis11 – Heidegger Where do I say ‘no’ to Ellul? Where I say ‘no’ to Heidegger is beyond good and evil. Where I say ‘no’ to the liberals is that they do not recognize that technical civilization has put men beyond good and evil. But where do I say ‘no’ to Ellul? it is not clear what he is saying. Is it the question how clearly he knows? How does he meet Heidegger’s claim that technique is Christianity via Platonism? the question I have to face and have found partially is the relation of Christianity to philosophy (1) the claim is there (2) we cannot think it (3) we cannot think it in terms of technique (4) it does not tell us what technique is, as Ellul says it does What we thought we had been made for turns out to be an invention of

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our own. No purpose is built in, so we can choose any purpose that suits us. That to which we owed allegiance is discovered to be merely our servant. does Golgotha take the primal terror and horror up into goodness? is that what Christianity is? for those who cannot find in technology and its pursuit that certainty which alone these days can dim the presence of nihilism. Does thought start from astonishment or anguish? Madness and technology I want to get in from myself – my madness – my nihilism GPG Is it perhaps right that Heidegger, because he combines the hope of the rootedness and modernity, is really much more historically hopeful than myself? GPG When I compare Heidegger to the modern Platonists, he at least knows something of what has happened – while the Platonists do not. Possibility of thinking Heidegger only possibility. If you take the great hierarchy of the Symposium – below eternity is the desire for immortal fame. Is it that Heidegger, having put aside eternity, is left with desire for immortal fame? Is this fair or unfair? GPG has to be quite specific somehow in this book that the human being who knows most about technology is one who has put philosophy outside obedience. I reject what Heidegger says about philosophy starting out for itself. I accept what he says about technology. obedience and command.

Notes 1 For Henry George Thode, See 1042n9. 2 Erich Frank (1883–1949), German philosopher born in Prague whose writings played a role in the emergence of the German existentialist movement. Grant refers to ‘The Fundamental Opposition of Plato and Aristotle,’ in American Journal of Philology 61 (1940): 34–53, 166–85.

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3 Source of quotation from Leo Strauss on Heidegger not found. 4 Simone Weil, ‘Necessity and Obedience,’ in Gravity and Grace (New York: Putnam 1952), 38–44. 5 Paragraph 64: ‘Always the unconcealment of that which is goes upon a way of revealing. Always the destining of revealing holds complete sway over man. But that destining is never a fate that compels. For man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining and so becomes one who listens and hears [Hörender], and not one who is simply constrained to obey [Höriger].’ Paragraph 66: ‘Freedom governs the open in the sense of the cleared and lighted up, i.e., of the revealed. It is to the happening of revealing, i.e., of truth, that freedom stands in the closest and most intimate kinship. All revealing belongs within a harboring and a concealing. But that which frees – the mystery – is concealed and always concealing itself. All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open. The freedom of the open consists neither in unfettered arbitrariness nor in the constraint of mere laws. Freedom is that which conceals in a way that opens to light, in whose clearing there shimmers that veil that covers what comes to presence of all truth and lets the veil appear as what veils. Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.’ Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 25. 6 For Austin Farrer, see 311n7 7 For passage in Philebus see Nietzsche lectures (978). 8 Hamlet, III, ii, Hamlet to Horatio. 9 Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in Christian Tradition (London: Oxford University Press 1959). 10 For Charles N. Cochrane, see 382n8. 11 See 96n1.

Foreword to The Liberal Idea of Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Question of Canada’s Survival by James Laxer and Robert Laxer

James Laxer1 brought Lament for a Nation to the attention of fellow members of the New Left in the Student Union for Peace Action (SUPA) at StCalixte, Quebec, in the summer of 1965. After Grant’s disengagement from SUPA in 1966, he continued to respect Laxer, as this Foreword makes clear. The Laxers (son and father) published this book with James Lorimer and Company in Toronto (1977).

This book gives a powerful account of what has been going on politically and economically in Canada during the last decades, and particularly under the Trudeau administration since 1968.2 It is opportune that the book should appear at this time because it describes coherently the complex relation between the political crisis caused by the establishment of the PQ government in Quebec City, and the degeneration in the fabric of our country by our growing dependence on American imperial capitalism.3 The relation between these two central themes of our history has never been easy to understand. Its complexity is illustrated in the fact that the two leading pronouncements about our constitutional crisis have both been made in the United States – M Lévesque’s before the bankers in New York, Mr Trudeau’s to the US Congress.4 If we could watch our country’s history like a play on the stage, this fact would put it squarely within the category of comedy. But our country’s existence is not a stage play. The Laxers’ book gives a coherent account of our present situation at the level of economic, political, and ideological fact. I was helped greatly in understanding the complex co-penetration of these two crises by what the Laxers have written. The expectation that sane political decisions will be made about our country’s future is small enough; but there is less chance of them if a sufficient number of Cana-

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dians do not understand the relation between these two crises. One cannot act sanely through a difficult illness if one has illusions about the diagnosis of that illness. Many powerful people have a strong interest in telling us that the situation is quite different from what in fact it is. The Laxers have written a solid diagnosis, and it is therefore important to pay attention to it. In the next months, the great illusion of many English-speaking Canadians is going to be the simple diagnosis that our national survival depends solely on ‘the battle for the hearts and minds of Quebec.’ This will be something like the following: ‘We English-speaking Canadians all believe in the future of our country. What we have to do is convince a majority in Quebec that we recognize their true interests, and will help them realize those interests, if they will be persuaded to go along with us as we are. The people in Quebec have been temporarily led astray by a bunch of narrow-minded fanatics who just do not understand the real nature of the modern world. We must help them to come back to common sense.’ The language used will be smoother, but that will be the substance. Very powerful forces in Canada have a strong interest in convincing us of this simple account. But the result of believing that this is the real situation will not only prevent us from having any accurate apprehension of what is happening in Quebec, but, what is worse, it will delude us as to what is happening in our society. This can be seen clearly if one looks beneath the attractive rhetoric of Mr Trudeau’s statement to the US Congress. The statement that the breakup of Canada would be ‘a crime against the history of humanity’ must seem attractive to us at first hearing. But what is stated in the actual words? They imply that ‘the history of humanity’ moves forward to bigger and bigger political units, and that any step away from that movement is a step backward. But if that is a true account of history, why should anybody ever have cared that Canada itself exists and should continue to exist? If ‘the history of humanity’ calls for ever more comprehensive units, why should we not all welcome the integration of Canada into the bigger unity of the American empire? As in the past with Pearson and King, the leader of the Liberal party talks about larger units in the attractive language of internationalism, but in fact what is implied are policies leading to imperial continental integration.5 This kind of language should make us hesitant about accepting Mr Trudeau as the champion of our nationalism. We should doubt this plea not only

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because Mr Trudeau is the leader of the party which has been the chief political instrument of continental integration for this country; not only because the policies of his government have so increased our corporate indebtedness to the US as to leave us with almost no freedom of movement; but also because Mr Trudeau has always scorned nationalism as a retrograde force. This has been basic to his political ideology, and necessarily so, because the capitalist politics of cybernetics which he so admires must inevitably work against national identity. Many Englishspeaking Canadian nationalists are attracted by that rhetoric when Mr Trudeau uses it against Quebec nationalism, but we do well to remember that it equally issues in policies which sap the foundations of our own nationalism. Modern liberalism has always claimed that it dilutes and dissolves ideology in the name of the progress of cybernetics as rationality. In fact it is itself a powerful ideology, and one that speaks against the survival of nation states such as Canada. The Laxers’ book describes with accuracy the economic and ideological situation in terms of which Canadian political decisions will be taken. It is particularly good in its understanding of the co-penetration of economic and ideological fact, and very perceptive of the changing forms that ideology has taken in our Canadian context. By the ideology of liberalism the Laxers mean the belief that societies should exist so that individuals can pursue their particular interests, and that such individualistic ambition is the driving force for progress in any society. They therefore quite rightly identify North American liberalism at its heart with the needs of changing forms of capitalism. They are particularly shrewd in drawing out how such ‘liberalism’ was an enormously effective instrument for the spread of dominating empires such as the English, and then the American, but was not a useful ideological instrument for nation states such as Canada. As they write: ‘while liberalism was the ideology of American nationalism, in Canada it was the ideology of continentalism.’ Indeed they show that English-speaking nationalism was divided in its very heart by the fact that most of us accepted this capitalist ‘liberalism,’ even while we tried to assert nationalism at the same time. It has been difficult to seek policies that would strengthen that nationalism because such policies always have to speak against the pure milk of that ‘liberal’ ideology. The book is extremely good in describing how that ideology came to be the dominating force in Canada in the last half-century, and how it has evolved

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politically through King and Pearson and Trudeau to meet the new requirements of power. I wish the Laxers had more clearly distinguished American liberal ideology from what is true about political liberty for all sane people. Their account of the philosophic origins of modern liberalism in Hobbes and Locke is much the least persuasive part of the book. But this is a very small limitation on praise for a book which is so crackingly accurate about what is happening right now in Canada. In an age when we are all particularly prone to that ‘false consciousness’ which makes us pretend that the world is other than it is, this is a book which cuts right through such delusions. At a time when Canadians are faced with the most complex difficulties of their history, it is to be hoped that many will read and think about what it tells us of our country.

Notes 1 James Laxer (1941– ), author and professor of political science at Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, was national leader (along with Mel Watkins) of the Waffle group, a militant socialist and nationalist group within the New Democratic Party, and author of The Energy Poker Game (1970) and Canada’s Energy Crisis (1974). His father, Robert Laxer (1915–98), taught educational theory at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and was editor of (Canada) Ltd. (1973) and author of Canada’s Unions (1976). 2 Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), lawyer and politician, entered politics in 1965 after a career as a journalist and professor of law at the Université de Montréal. He served as minister of justice (1965–8) before being elected leader of the Liberal party, and held office as prime minister, except for a period of nine months in 1979–80, until 1984. Grant’s sympathetic attitude to Trudeau did not survive the crisis in October 1970, when his government invoked the War Measures Act. 3 In the Quebec provincial election of 15 November 1976 the Parti Québécois led by René Lévesque won a decisive victory over the incumbent Liberals, putting in power a government committed to Quebec independence. 4 René Lévesque (1922–87), journalist and politician, served in the Quebec Liberal government of Jean Lesage (1960–5) as minister of natural resources, and was primarily responsible for the expansion of the nationalized hydroelectric utility Hydro Québec (founded 1944). Lévesque led the sovereignist Parti Québécois to power in 1976, remaining premier until 1985.

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5 Lester Bowles (Mike) Pearson (1897–1973), diplomat and politician, had a distinguished career in the Department of External Affairs (1928–48) before entering politics as minister of external affairs (1948–57) in the St Laurent government. He succeeded St Laurent as Liberal leader after the 1957 general election, and became prime minister in 1963, serving until 1968. William Lyon Mackenzie King (1874–1950), politician. King was Liberal prime minister of Canada 1921–6, 1926–30, and 1935-48. His long tenure in office made him the dominant figure in Canadian politics during the first half of the twentieth century.

No Alternative to Moderation

Grant delivered this after-dinner speech on 28 June 1977 in Toronto and it was published in February 1978 in Grant and Lamontagne on Unity (Toronto: Cemasco Management Ltd.), 4–9. The Toronto Star published an excerpt on 7 July 1977 (B6), under the heading ‘Moderation is the only way to save Canada: Professor.’

Canadian politics has had two main questions: (i) how to maintain some independence while sharing this continent with the most powerful modern empire; and (ii) how to maintain workable relations between the French and English-speaking communities. Those two very complex questions can only be thought about clearly if they are thought about together. This country was made up of two founding groups who weren’t very friendly to each other, but who made a contract because they thought such a contract would help each of them achieve their own particular ends – but they were different purposes. The present constitutional crisis has arisen because some of the Quebec elite has received the backing of many voters, particularly young voters, under the affirmation that that contract does not serve their purposes and therefore must be terminated or perhaps clarified. What is the proper response of English-speaking people to such an event? I am sure that it shouldn’t be what has been all too common since that election. Namely – let’s see how we can get those people back in line. Namely – we’ve got a clever fellow up there in Ottawa who promised us in 1968 that he could keep them in line and who was willing to use troops in 1970, and used those troops while most of English-speaking Canada cheered.

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Rather than that approach, I think our constitutional crisis should lead us to three steps: (i) to try and understand clearly why these people are saying that the contract does not work; (ii) to think clearly about what we want – above all, do we really want a country on the northern half of this continent?; and (iii) if we answer question two honestly and in the affirmative, how can we reach a revised contract, that will suit them and us? Let me emphasize that if we really aren’t interested in having a country, there is little point in trying to reach a renewed contract. Why isn’t the contract working in the minds of many French people? Let me take just one issue – language. Up until recently the French did not go in for concentrated technological education but continued Catholic education. (I do not say that as a sneer for as a fellow Christian I have a great sympathy for Catholic education.) Now that they are with technological education, they find the following: (i) they are behind; (ii) the universal language of the most powerful technology is English; and (iii) the only choice they have for control over the technological life of their country is to hold onto French as the language of that country. Why? (iv) their language is the only advantage they have in trying to redress the balance of what has been English-speaking control of their technology; and (v) that advantage might give them ten years to catch up in technological education. I know the people around Dr Camille Laurin, Minister of State for Cultural Development, and know that that is what they are thinking.1 Nobody in English-speaking Canada ever seems to say this or even understand this. Do we have sympathy to allow them to use that one advantage to redress the balance of technological education or do we say we are simply the instruments of institutional business and we are going to prevent them taking advantage of that advantage? For that is clearly one thing that they have said to us unambiguously. They say: the federal government has been keeping Canada’s prosperity going – by selling our natural resources cheaply and piling up an enormous indebtedness in the international community. (Just look at the rate of growth of our international indebtedness since the Trudeau government came to office.) What the Parti Québécois government seems to be saying is that they will take charge of selling our resources, James Bay, etc., because the federal government has not made a very good job

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of it. Is that so different from Premier Lougheed – who seems to me a very sensible man?2 What I fear from my own community is that we will see the present crisis in the following way: we will assert that we all believe in the future of our country and that all we have to do is to struggle for the hearts and minds of Quebec. I don't think you come to sensible contracts from out of such self-delusion. The first priority for English-speaking Canadians is to think what we want, and first in that is to think whether we want to be a country in the northern half of this continent and what we need to do if we want to continue as such a country. (Let me say forcibly in parenthesis that I do not think that the only difficulty here is the business community; scientists and other academicians have been just as equivocal in their relation to their country as have some business people. Universities in English-speaking Canada have increasingly tried to model themselves on Michigan State or California Tech or Yale with little sense of their responsibility to anything unique this country has to offer.) I just do not know what the consensus of English-speaking Canadians will be to this question. Do we care to contract to be a country in the light of this constitutional crisis? I do know that if English-speaking Canadians do have enough sense of wanting to be a country, then we have to get down to reaching a contract with Quebec in which what both parties need can be put together. In that process what will be required above all will be moderation. By moderation I do not mean weakness. Moderation is clear firmness. It is the opposite of intemperance and confrontation. Let me give you an example of how intemperance fails: the federal government and its leaders at several reported meetings went in for confrontation with premiers Daniel Johnson and Bertrand of Quebec. They made a lot of political capital out of these confrontations with these moderate nationalists. In November, 1976, the sons of both premiers, Johnson and Bertrand, were elected as Parti Québécois members.3 I think that is a lesson about confrontation that needs to sink in. Moderation is not only needed from our political leaders, but from the rest of us. I admire the Globe and Mail, but when its chief correspondent in Quebec heads its lead story with the words: ‘Premier Lévesque from his bunker in Quebec City’ – my heart sinks. The leader of a few

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million French surrounded by 250 million English-speaking people – identified by the bunker with a maniac!4 I am more hopeful about moderation since reading the recent paper on language from the federal government. Although my hope is modified by the fact that this government has been one of confrontation in the last ten years and has not succeeded by these means. I am also hopeful about moderation because I think both the people of Quebec and indeed even Premier Lévesque are not ideological separatists. I think he wants to achieve certain purposes and if some of these purposes are achievable within a new contract, I think he would go for such a contract. In short, if you want this country I can see no alternative to the procedures of clear moderation. I am not always optimistic that we will follow such a course. To put it plainly, the 20th century has not been a moderate century and there are many people, including important ones, who may find that they have much to gain personally and immediately by being immoderate.

Notes 1 Camille Laurin (1922–99), politician and psychiatrist, was minister of state for cultural development in Lévesque’s cabinet and the father of the Charter of the French Language (Bill 101), which re-affirmed the 1974 Official Languages Act making French the sole official language in Quebec and defining the linguistic rights of the citizens of the province. It was enacted by the National Assembly on 26 August 1977. Grant is perhaps alluding to Jacques Yvan-Morin (1931– ), minister of education in the government of René Lévesque. He spent a summer with Morin’s relatives when he was a boy. See William Christian, George Grant: A Biography, 33–5. 2 Edgar Peter Lougheed (1928– ), lawyer, Progressive Conservative premier of Alberta (1971–85), created in 1976 the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, which put aside a portion of oil and gas revenues to ensure a healthy long-range future for the provincial economy. 3 Daniel Johnson (1915–68), lawyer and politician, was Union Nationale premier of Quebec 1965–8. He was the father of Pierre-Marc Johnson (1946– ), leader of the Parti Québécois 1985–7 and premier of Quebec in 1985 until the party’s defeat by Robert Bourassa in December of that year. Daniel Johnson was also the father of Daniel Johnson (1944– ), leader of the Quebec Liberal

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Party 1993–8, and briefly premier of Quebec in 1994, until his defeat in the same year by the PQ under Jacques Parizeau. Jean-Jacques Bertrand (1916–73), politician, was the leader of the Union Nationale’s progressive wing and was one of the main architects of Quebec’s demands for constitutional reform. He was premier of Quebec after the death of Daniel Johnson (1968–70) until the party’s defeat by the Liberals led by Robert Bourassa. 4 For René Lévesque (1922–87), see 333n4.

Review of Nietzsche’s View of Socrates by Werner J. Dannhauser

This review appeared in volume 71, no. 3, of the American Political Science Review, September 1977: 1127–9. The book was published in Ithaca, NY, by Cornell University Press in 1974. Dannhauser had reviewed Grant’s Technology and Empire in the Denver Quarterly (vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 1969: 94–8) under the title ‘Ancients, Moderns, and Canadians.’1

The subject matter of this book is of central significance for those who study political philosophy. Socrates is the primal figure for that uniquely Western activity. More than any other modern thinker, Nietzsche placed Socrates at the centre of Western history as the creator of rationalism, and claimed in his own thought to have overcome that rationalism. Therefore, in Nietzsche’s view of Socrates we are near the centre of thinking about the nature of political philosophy. For somebody from outside the US (such as myself) it is a happiness to find that a professor of government at Cornell should devote his thought to so central a subject for our Western self-understanding. I am even happier to say that Professor Dannhauser’s book is very well done. He has read Nietzsche’s writings carefully and comprehensively; he has also read the accounts of Socrates which are given us in Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. Because of the political and economic conflicts between the English-speaking and German peoples in the last generations, English-speakers have not paid sufficient attention to modern German philosophers – the greatest of whom is Nietzsche. Now that Nietzsche is becoming powerful in our society (particularly among the young) his influence often comes to us in the form of a quick and one-sided apperception of his teachings. Indeed, Nietzsche’s en-

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chanting (if terrible) rhetoric encourages that one-sidedness. Therefore, Dannhauser’s care must be highly praised. He has obviously read Nietzsche over many years and knows the extensive and complex corpus intimately. This is a scholarly book in the best sense of that term. The form of this book is to trace carefully Nietzsche’s view of Socrates from the early writings, when Nietzsche was taken up with positivism and modern science, to the last writings where his final encounter with Socrates is put before us. Dannhauser wisely leaves to a separate chapter what Nietzsche says by implication about Socrates in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He treats with proper caution the endless irony of the ambiguous speeches which largely make up that work. One great quality of Dannhauser’s book is that it is unpretentious. By that I mean that his personality does not get in the way of laying before us clearly and carefully what Nietzsche is saying. The book is concerned with Socrates and Nietzsche, not with himself. This is a pleasure these days, when so many books about politics that pass beyond the simply ‘objective’ seem to be mostly an exposition of the author’s personality and problems. If one wants to follow accurately the details of Nietzsche’s changing view of Socrates, this book holds the subject together with accurate care. This is what the book is: a lucid exposition of a central (perhaps the central) issue of modern philosophy and therefore of political philosophy. The present influence of Nietzsche in the US owes much to Professor Walter Kaufmann of Princeton University, because of his extensive translations and his long book about Nietzsche’s life and thought.2 This has been useful in the sense that Kaufmann has helped to free Englishspeakers from the picture of Nietzsche as a wild poet of nihilism, who politically was the precursor of the horrors of National Socialism. Kaufmann has destroyed amongst us, surely finally, the impression that Nietzsche somehow took part in the tradition of German anti-Semitism. He lays Nietzsche before us as the chief influence upon European existentialism, and as a thinker who laid the foundations of what Freud was later to think. In that sense, the influence of Kaufmann’s work has been salutary. On the other hand, Kaufmann has presented Nietzsche as if to make the latter’s writings open and palatable to the social democratic world of American academia. He has done this by presenting Nietzsche first and foremost as the expositor of what is assumed in modern soci-

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ety, rather than as the thinker who wants to overcome what stands against human nobility in the modern world. Kaufmann treats vaguely what Nietzsche took as his ‘most abysmal’ teaching, ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical.’ In short, Kaufmann does not take Nietzsche altogether seriously. What makes Dannhauser’s book welcome is that he takes Nietzsche’s thought at the highest level of seriousness. For example, he confronts the fact that ‘the eternal recurrence’ is claimed by Nietzsche to be at the centre of what he teaches, and therefore cannot be put aside as some kind of ecstatic extra. This is to say that although Dannhauser is finally less persuaded by Nietzsche than is Kaufmann, he nevertheless treats Nietzsche as a greater thinker than does Kaufmann. It is indeed because Dannhauser (as he shows himself in his last pages) is a lover of Socrates, that he is able to treat Nietzsche deeply – namely as the most lucid of all teachers of historicism. As Socrates is the supreme Western figure who taught that historicism can be transcended, Nietzsche’s account of Socrates must be understood, if one is to look at the problem of historicism clearly. As historicism appears to be the fundamental presupposition of the dominant North American social science, Dannhauser’s book is important in our present intellectual situation. I mean by ‘historicism’ the teaching that all thought is determined by belonging to a concrete dynamic context. If our contemporary academia is to face its main task, which is to try to understand the present state of our intellectual tradition, this must include the understanding of Nietzsche’s writing as it is, in all its greatness, as the work of a thinker who not only assailed Western rationalism, but claimed to have overcome it. Because Dannhauser’s book deals with these central issues in Nietzsche’s View of Socrates, it takes us to a more philosophic stage of Nietzschean scholarship in the US. His work is on the level of the best writing about Nietzsche in Germany and France since 1945. When one admires a book, it is likely to sound ungrateful to mention extra things one wishes the book had. Nevertheless there are three points I could wish had been developed further: (a) Dannhauser does not seem to discuss sufficiently what Nietzsche says about Socrates and Platonism in Beyond Good and Evil. Dannhauser’s chief acknowledgment is to the late Leo Strauss as a teacher. One of Strauss’s last published writings was an article on how to read

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Beyond Good and Evil.3 Perhaps it is Dannhauser’s respect for that writing which has made him decide to give Beyond Good and Evil a less central place than in my opinion it deserves. (b) I wish Dannhauser had said more about Heidegger’s work, Nietzsche.4 In my opinion this is the greatest book of commentary on a philosopher which has been produced in our age. Dannhauser refers to it several times, but does not deal with Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche at length. Perhaps this would have made his book too complex, and taken away from the fine clarity of his writing. It would have become a book not only on Socrates and Nietzsche, but on Heidegger, Socrates, and Nietzsche. Nevertheless one is aware from this book that Dannhauser is capable of writing about Heidegger’s interpretation, and one wishes that he had. After all, Heidegger’s historicism is the supreme contemporary understanding of what is implied in the acceptance of that teaching. (c) Most important. In the last pages of his book, where he makes clear that he is a follower of Socrates and not of Nietzsche, Dannhauser writes: Nietzsche’s ‘critique of dogmatisms and systems may hit Hegel, but it misses Socrates and Plato; and many of the attacks on reason, rationality, and rationalism may hit Descartes, but they miss Socrates and Plato’ (p. 272). I wish Dannhauser had greatly expanded this passage, and said why this is so. However difficult such questions are, it is to be hoped that Dannhauser will turn to them in subsequent writings. In this book he presents us with plenty of evidence that he is capable of casting light on these extraordinarily complex issues.

Notes 1 Werner Dannhauser (1929– ), German-American professor and author, studied under Leo Strauss at Chicago and taught political science at Cornell and Michigan State. 2 Walter Arnold Kaufmann (1921– ), German-American professor, author, editor, and translator, taught philosophy at Princeton from 1947, and has translated and edited all of Nietzsche’s major works. He is the author of the critical study Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974). 3 Leo Strauss (1899–1973), German-American political philosopher, emigrated from Germany in 1938 and taught at the New School for Social Research,

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Chicago (1949–68), Claremont, and St John’s College. The essay, ‘A Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil’ was published in Interpretation 3 (1973), 97–113. 4 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (1961), 2 vols., trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 1979).

Conversations from George Grant in Process

Lawrence (Larry) Schmidt edited George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, published by House of Anansi (Toronto, 1978). The book was the product of two symposia held in April and October 1977 at Erindale College, University of Toronto. Conference participants asked questions and debated with Grant on many topics during two long sessions. Professor Schmidt constructed a set of questions and answers from the transcribed tapes of the conversations and then Grant vetted them, eliminating a great deal and editing his answers carefully. What appeared in print is less than one quarter of the original transcribed tapes. The editors of the book originally intended to include the names of the questioners in the text but decided finally to remove them.

Part One: Canadian Politics question: Let’s look back at Lament for a Nation eleven years later. First, do you still think that Canada’s disappearance as a nation is a matter of necessity? Do you think that nationalism has a future as far as Canada is concerned? grant: Obviously no sane person predicts the details of the future. It is quite clear that the central ruling class of the great corporations, national or multi-national, do not think in terms of Canadian independence. Beyond that I find it very hard to believe that the general English-speaking bourgeois want anything particularly distinctive to be built on the northern half of this continent. They seem to want the same things as other North Americans – although sometimes they want these things with a Canadian sign. As for young people and the American dream, I just don’t know.

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question: I have a question that relates to that point. Many of the critics of the Parti Québécois today (and I mean those critics who are favourably disposed to the Parti Québécois, who try to assess what’s going on from within it, and who identify with it) are saying that the whole dream, the whole dream, the alternative that was envisaged by the dreamers of this party, is slowly evaporating, is giving way to something that looks much like the technological society, and that one can see this in figures like Parizeau, in particular, but also in Camille Laurin.1 Now this is said by very sympathetic people, so the question is not only about anglophones in Canada, but is it not a question also about the whole culture? Doesn’t it have something to do with the inevitability of technocracy? grant: I think people such as Premier Lévesque and Dr Laurin were brought up, like everyone of my generation, to assume that an advancing technological society went with an advancing humanness. That has been taken for granted so long in the Western world that it is almost impossible to doubt it. In Dr Laurin’s case he found in his psychiatric work something beyond this. He found that much of the mental illness he encountered came forth from the fact that his patients lived in a culture which was imposed on them from outside. I am sure that much of the Parti Québécois leadership takes for granted that the expansion of technology is almost automatically good. But at the same time they want it to take place as Frenchness, and in that they have to break with established power structures. question: You were making the point that the survival of Canada would depend upon attitudes of the anglophone community particularly, and I’m suggesting it’s a question of the technocratic mind set and momentum. grant: What you say is quite true. Obviously the universalizing and homogenizing power in a technological society is very great. That is the central fact of our destiny. It is for that reason that I have turned in my own work from thinking about the details of Canadian life to the nature of technological society. That is the big question. Also, of course, at a shallow level there has been a lot of phoney Canadian nationalism which is simply imitation Americanism. If they have Portnoy’s Com-

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plaint, we have Duddy Kravitz. We’ll have movies and universities just like their movies and universities, etc. etc. question: In your analysis of Diefenbaker in Lament for a Nation one of the striking things is the ambiguity in his nationalism. He didn’t recognize the rights of community. Isn’t one of our problems that we haven’t had anyone in Canada who has recently been able to articulate a nationalism that’s at all appealing, significant, or attractive to the Englishspeaking community? grant: I think it’s very hard to do. The modern experiment went against this – at the centre of the modern experiment was the universal and homogeneous society. Those who spoke against it (Coleridge, Swift) were speaking against something that made them seem ‘out of it.’ How can a belief in anything else but the universal and homogeneous state seem real to people, particularly in a place like North America? How can such thought have much meaning in terms of the 20th century? question: In relation to French Canada then, how do you understand their nationalism at the moment? grant: They had roots in something much greater than anything the English-speaking world had. They had roots in a very great Catholicism. Their high level of education also put them outside modernity. They had a great tradition that was outside modernity. They were a minority, a people being brought into technology late, far behind, terribly exploited by an alien people. I don’t see English-speaking Canada paying much attention to its nationalism or caring much for its nationalism. Therefore it seems to me good that the French should try some other way of defending themselves for their survival. Take Trudeau, for example; he always speaks and acts (at least to English-speaking audiences) as if all was really great with Canada, except for a bunch of crazy separatists in Quebec, and he is the man to deal with that. Yet since he came in, in 1968, our indebtedness to the US has grown by leaps and bounds. We have gone on with the policy of selling our national resources and the ownership of our country to the US. Why should the French believe that their enormous problems of

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survival as a French-speaking nation of six million, in a continent of 250 million English-speakers, is being helped by being one with Englishspeaking Canada, which has shown so little interest in its own independence? It’s beyond me to conceive why one isn’t glad that the French-Canadians have put up a fight against integration. question: But who is the fight against? grant: Not against anybody. They are being attacked. They want to continue to be something. This is what makes genocide so hideous: once you destroy a people it’s destroyed, as a species often becomes extinct. There are no more carrier pigeons in Ontario and one is sad – why? Because it adds to the diversity of being. Why is genocide more terrible to me than individual murder? Because it wipes out a people who can never be again. I’m not talking of race and racial purity, but there is something about a group of people ... The French stuck down in North America have produced something that is nowhere else. Do you want to see them disappear? question: You misunderstand me. I’m not saying I’m in favour of the French Canadians disappearing, not at all. grant: They were threatened. question: I understand that. They’ve been threatened for three or four hundred years. grant: Yes, but this is one of the worst threats. question: But what is the threat? Is the threat English Canada, as a number of people in Quebec suggest, or is the threat the universal homogeneous state? grant: Obviously the big question in the modern world is what alternative there is to the universal and homogeneous state. But in the meantime, what are people to do if they are going to do anything practical? I think the Québécois are in a very difficult position. I rejoice because they haven’t chosen to go down easily. They are rejoicing because they felt

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themselves as a conquered people for a long time. After all, Englishspeaking people have not for many centuries lived in a position where they felt they were conquered. comment: After the November 15th election2 a French man said to me, ‘I think we may now have another child.’ grant: Clearly the French are interested in getting control of their technology. They are behind. The universal language of the most powerful technology is English. The only choice they have for control over the technological life of their country is to hold onto French as the language of their society. Their language is the only advantage they have in trying to redress the balance of what has been English-speaking control of their technology. That advantage might give them ten years to catch up in technological education. Now technology is a given destiny of the whole modern world, and one may well say that, whatever happens, they are going to be caught up in the massive imperial system of the Western multi-national corporations. question: But to talk that way is to assume that technology is neutral and can be used for good or ill. And this ignores your central point: that in a sense you can’t use technology except in one direction. grant: I am sure that people in Quebec are going to find that out. We in the West are in the midst of a destiny which we have given ourselves, which carries us only in one direction. But in the meantime, what are practical people to do? Are they to put up no resistance to the destruction of their culture? Doesn’t a person such as Parizeau say, ‘If I’m not in charge of the Quebec economy, then Lalonde will be, and isn’t it clear that I, Parizeau, care more about the continuance of French society than Lalonde?’3 Isn’t it just a question of function? For somebody such as myself, the job is to think through what technology is, and to try to show what it portends for the future. But that makes me quite impotent in the practical realm. People whose job is to live and try to do things in the practical realm, have to have feasible immediate alternatives – in this case, alternatives for saving their culture – but this immersion in the practi-

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cal means they can’t be concerned with the long-range questions of destiny. question: Don’t you think that the present nationalist establishment of Quebec has deliberately uprooted itself from those traditions which you say are the sort of thing that make Quebec nationalism workable? I mean, René Lévesque really is a renegade liberal. grant: Yes, I think that is in a certain sense quite true. What the PQ want is that their technology be in their own hands. But you have to see something more in Lévesque. Why did he turn away from success in the English world? He was a star, and something in him said no to this. Also Lévesque has been too busy doing important and vital things to think through the nature of the technological society. This is surely one of the complexities of life – that those who are taken up with doing necessary and practical things just don’t have the time to think through the central issues of their society. This is the cause of the division between the practical and philosophic lives. question: I don’t understand why you’re so happy about the Parti Québécois and this resurgence of French nationalism, when that appears to be having the effect of weakening Canada and making the process of integration of the whole of Canada into the American empire just that much more simple. grant: My answer would be something like the following. Canadian politics has had two main questions: first, how to maintain some independence while sharing this continent with the most powerful modern empire; second, how to maintain workable relations between the French- and English-speaking communities. Those two very complex questions can only be thought about clearly if they are thought about together. This country was made up of two founding groups who weren’t very friendly to each other, but who made a contract because they thought such a contract would help each of them achieve their own particular ends – but these ends were different. The present constitutional crisis has arisen because some of the Quebec elite have received the backing of many voters, particularly young

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voters, under the affirmation that that contract does not serve their purposes, and therefore must be terminated or perhaps clarified. question: Do you have any fear that what is going on in Quebec may cause disorder and violence, which are things not to be sought after, almost under any circumstances? I’m thinking of the argument against French-Canadian nationalism, which says that what is happening is an attack against a deliberately balanced system of order, and that an attack on this system opens the door to violence. grant: I would say two things. First, that system of order has not been serving the French in recent years. Take the breakup of traditional Catholicism, and the use of the birth-control pill in Quebec. This meant that if they were going to survive, they had to have control over immigration policies in their society. But second, and more important, people often delude themselves when they say the violence has come from the French Canadians. This is six million people in a sea of 250 million English-speakers. After all, the last big case of violence was the federal government bringing in its troops in 1970 to meet two kidnappings. The English-speaking people pushed technology into Quebec and rushed for fast technological development. There is something analogous in the relations of the Russians to Western Europe. People are always saying that the Russians are the chief aggressors in the world. But it was Western Europe that time and again invaded Russia. I see Marxist communism as the Russians taking a very brutal and terrible technological system, so that they would have the power to stand up to the expansionist Western Europeans. It has been horrible medicine for the Russians – but this was always Stalin’s argument: ‘If you don’t have an authoritarian technological system, you can’t stand up to the rest of the world.’ In the same way the French Canadians have had modernity pushed in upon them under English-speaking auspices, and they have decided they want to control it for themselves. The James Bay project is, after all, their big ace in the game they are playing.4 Now of course when you move a people quickly into technological society, as Quebec has been moved, there is a lot of political craziness around. But is there any more craziness there than in our society? The great question is whether in such a situation there is going to be enough political moderation on either side to work something out. Of course,

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the first priority for English-speaking Canadians is to think what we want, and first in that is to think whether we want to be a country in the northern half of this continent, and what we need to do if we want to continue such a country. There is something specious and dishonest about English-speaking Canadians saying to French people – ‘the only difficulty is you. We really want to be a country’ – when in fact we have done so little to protect our own society. We have in fact let it go in the interests of making a quick buck, quickly. question: In an article you and your wife wrote on abortion, you seem to base your whole argument on the inalienable rights of individuals. Aren’t you then drawing heavily on the very same liberal tradition you attack elsewhere? grant: What one says depends on where one writes. We were writing that piece for the Anglican Church, of which we are members. It was written to persuade the particular members of our church that they ought to be horrified by the mass foeticide that’s going on, and in which our church seems to acquiesce. But nearly all Anglican church members are modern bourgeois Canadians and such people take the language of liberalism as the only moral language they’ve got. Therefore one has to use it in speaking about such matters. One has to be ironic, in the classical sense. This takes me back to something which is central to any discussion of politics at all. Certainly I don’t believe that one should be easily cut off from the practical life around one. Also practical or political life is concerned with doing the best that seems possible, however bad the circumstances. Thomas More’s statement about politics is my favourite: ‘When you can’t make the good happen, prevent the very worst from happening.’ There are some good things left in modern technological Canada; among them, certain legal traditions from liberalism. One doesn’t want to attack them – even though they’re going down the drain because of other influences. questions: Are you saying that the origin of the legal tradition in the classical 18th and 19th century liberalism is laudable? grant: No. But remember that the common law tradition has its roots

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in something long before Locke and Bentham – in the Natural Rights traditions of the West. Also there are worse accounts of politics than Locke’s. There are worse views of the world than that the end of life is comfortable self-preservation. There’s even Montesquieu’s argument that the English constitution is higher than the Athenian because it substituted commerce for honour, and commerce is a more feasible basis for society than honour. I think we have all suffered enough from capitalism to know that is not true. Nevertheless, we also know that there are worse regimes than plutocratic democracy. There was a lot of good in the English constitution. question: You’ve introduced the category of irony as the sense that one has when one lives within a double vision: eternal justice and those caricatures of justice which parade before us in the conventional world for our approbation. It’s a very consistent Platonism – the sense of having been outside the cave, but having to live, because one has children, most of one’s life inside the cave. One carries around with oneself a kind of doubleness, and I take it that you do in that way. grant: I will say yes to that, without saying that I have been outside the cave, because that I don’t know. Life teaches one all kinds of ironies. I think irony is necessary if you’re going to have your car fixed, and you can hardly live without a car in twentieth century North America. How can one live as a Christian in a modern university without irony? If a Christian spoke frankly in a modern multiversity, he would have to leave. Yet is one just to give up these institutions? Therefore I don’t think irony is dishonest or wrong at such points. All of you know that. question: The difference between calling it irony and calling it realism is that the realists believe that this realm of convention is what is ultimately valuable; and the ironists know that it’s ultimately trivial, and that the eternal realm is ultimately valuable. grant: That I think is quite right. In dealing with the gas station, the realist might carry the irony so far that it would be unjust, and that must be avoided. question: To get back to nationalism, I would like to question the gen-

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eral assumption that Canadian nationalism would be a desirable thing. I can understand your being concerned to prevent the universal and homogeneous culture of the Great Republic from flooding Canada, and wanting to preserve alternative values and calling for a Canadian response in defence. But it’s one thing to seize upon nationalism as a defence against nationalism, and another thing to laud nationalism as a good thing. If there’s any insidious part of modernity it is the idea of nationalism, which goes hand in hand with technology. Nationalism is precisely the idea that produces the universal and homogeneous state. It becomes in France, for example, the way of generalizing the Parisian culture and destroying Brittany. It became in the United Kingdom the principle for the generalization of Anglophone culture and destroying the Scots. If nationalism is our salvation in Canada, we will buy into the worst of modernity. How could anyone like yourself, rooted in the truly cosmopolitan Greek and Christian tradition, be seeking salvation from nationalism? grant: I think, in terms of the modern world, the practical political choice has often been between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. But cosmopolitanism has generally been a mask for a particular imperialism. In the Canadian case the opposite to nationalism has always been said, by people like Pearson and Trudeau, to be cosmopolitanism. But what that, in a word, comes down to is immersion in the culture of the United States, and subservience to the purposes of the American empire in the world. Also, cosmopolitanism is an appeal to a universal culture which is shallow beyond measure, and denies all the particularities of our roots. It means, as well, the loss of politics as a real activity for human beings. In the great cosmopolitanizing of our English-speaking society we are all retreating into private life, and there is no place for people to take part in politics in a meaningful way. Is that not a real loss? Is it not right to lament it? question: I certainly think it’s a loss, but I think the ideology of nationalism is the major factor contributing to demise of politics in the modern world, and my argument would run something like this. By nationalism I mean that general conviction that the life, purpose, and organization of a people is rooted in, and a function of their being part of, a nation, which is usually defined as a linguistic cultural group. This

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allows the government to assume that it knows what the general good of the whole people might be, rather than consulting either the individual or particular institutions which have structures utterly transcending the nation. The differentiated character of society, as composed of many different institutions having different functions, is overlooked. Individuality is overlooked. So is the aloneness and separateness of the soul before God, if one wants to think about Simone Weil.5 I think that politics arises precisely when persons become aware of a life in God which calls them to stand to some extent within, and to some extent over against, the present situation, and in that primal way the world is differentiated. That’s why I see nationalism as the enemy of politics. Bernard Crick, in his little book, In Defence of Politics, makes this very point far better than I.6 grant: That is a very powerful case. Also what I have said about it being good to take part in politics is a strong case. How do you put together the truth of both these sides? Very difficult. I am not sure that I know. question: How do you understand the relation between politics and nationalism? It seems to me that at some points you see nationalism as necessary to the retaining of politics. grant: I don’t know about that, because the nation is a different thing from the polis. Whether you can have politics in a nation is another matter. I found myself brought up in a society which was made up of two traditions that were in some sense deeply distinct from the traditions of the United States, and it may have been those traditions that made me very hostile to the sort of capitalist individualism of the United States. I thought of nationalism as a governmental means of preserving and allowing to expand certain traditions that were different from those of the United States. question: Would you accept the distinction between nationalism and patriotism, and accept the idea that, generally speaking, nationalism now functions as a progressive force at the leading edge of modernity, introducing more and more homogeneity? Patriotism could and in some cases does have the opposite effect. it could be a force for the maintenance of tradition.

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grant: I agree with that. What it seems to me to come down to is the tension between love of your own and love of the good. That is a very deep tension. On the one hand, love of one’s own must ultimately be a means to love of the good. On the other hand, people who are deracinated, so that they have nothing which is really their own rarely can move to the good. How to express a proper love of one’s own within a Christian life? That is very hard – a very difficult question. And yet I know that most people who are cosmopolitan lack something essential. That is one reason I distrust Trudeau so greatly.7 He is such a cosmopolitan. You feel in him a real dislike of ordinary French-Canadian life, and even a dislike of the deeper roots which made French Canada distinct. Whatever Lévesque’s mistakes, one does not feel that superior cosmopolitanism in him. One feels a love of his own in all its rough particularity. Part 2: Intellectual Background grant: In speaking on this immodest subject, let me start by stating that biographies are grossly overemphasized in our era. One of our great categories is personality – politics and art are dominated by personalities, and people making their own personalities public. With this goes the attempt to understand everything in a particular dynamic context – psycho-history, etc. But in thought, what matters is truth – not particular personalities. When one does an arithmetical sum right, that is not an expression of personality; one’s individuality is far more involved when one does it wrong. Perhaps I have sometimes hit on something true in my thought. That is what matters. By which of many possible paths one gets there is of interest to oneself, but to others what matters is the truth. Indeed I have to fight self-importance as much as the next man. One has to learn (and there is much pain in the learning) not to take one’s personality too seriously. Everybody likes to talk about themselves, and I hope that temptation is recognized as I talk about myself. question: Could I start out by asking about the influence of Charles Cochrane on you?8 grant: Cochrane wrote a great book of history, Christianity and Classical Culture, the greatest scholarly book any Canadian ever wrote. It raises

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the central question of the relation between Christianity and philosophy in the era between Augustus and Augustine. But Cochrane was long dead before I’d reached any of those subjects, and I only read his book after I’d begun to think about Christianity. question: How did Harold Innis influence you?9 grant: The person who educated Innis in his later life was Cochrane, because they went for walks around the University of Toronto. He helped Innis move beyond the fur trade, etc., into deeper subjects. I hardly knew Innis and have only read his books in recent years. The great thing about Cochrane was that after the war of 1914, he moved quite outside the traditions of positivist history which have dominated North American scholarship. But Cochrane has had little continuing influence in Canada, because since 1950 our universities have been increasingly run by the American model – the inadequacies of which he saw with such great clarity. question: You studied with Austin Farrer, did you not?10 grant: I went back to Oxford to study philosophy and theology after the 1939 war. Before the war I had studied history and politics and law. But during the war I had been converted, and I wanted to discover what that conversion meant. At Oxford, I found the teaching of philosophy dominated by the narrowest tradition of linguistic analysis – people such as Ryle and A.J. Ayer.11 They simply saw philosophy as the errand boy of natural science and modern secularism. They were uninterested in the important things I wanted to think about. By accident I went to some lectures by Farrer on Descartes, and I recognized immediately this was what I had come to Europe for. He spoke with marvellous clarity and relevance about what had made the European tradition of philosophy and theology – not the minor logical twitterings which dominated Oxford philosophy when I was there. Farrer wrote books not only on philosophy – but about the Gospels. Once when he asked me to come and have a drink with him, I had the only direct vision I ever had. I saw the eagle of St John descend upon him. What Farrer introduced me to was theological rationalism – the heart of Christian intellectual life. What is strange is that I now do not think him a great

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theologian – but my debt to him for teaching me that European intellectual clarity (which North America has never had) was very great. question: You said you were converted during the war. Can you clarify what you mean by that? grant: This must become very self-centred. I had been brought up in Toronto in a species of what I would call secular liberalism – by fine and well-educated people who found themselves in the destiny of not being able to see the Christianity of their pioneering ancestors as true. As a substitute they had taken on the Canadian form of what can best be called English-speaking liberalism. At its shallowest one finds this in American eastern seaboard liberalism. The great experience for me was the war of 1939. The liberalism of my youth simply could not come to terms with it. At the worst stage of the war for me in 1941, I found myself ill, and deserted from the merchant navy, and went into the English countryside to work on a farm. I went to work at five o’clock in the morning on a bicycle. I got off the bicycle to open a gate and when I got back on I accepted God. Obviously, there is much to think about in such experiences. All the Freudian and Marxian questions (indeed, most: The Nietzschean questions) can be asked. But I have never finally doubted the truth of that experience since that moment thirty-six years ago. If I try to put it into words, I would say it was the recognition that I am not my own. In more academic terms, if modern liberalism is the affirmation that our essence is our freedom, then this experience was the denial of that definition, before the fact that we are not our own. question: So the Second World War had the effect on you that the First World War had for many Europeans, such as Tillich, whose whole 19th century world-view was shattered by that war.12 grant: Yes, the war of 1939–45 was the great primal experience for me – as, for example, the Vietnam war was for many young North Americans. I don’t like the comparison with Tillich, however. Tillich has always seemed to me a very shallow theologian. He got on well in the United States because they never have had a theological or philosophical tradition of their own strong enough to see through his shallowness and contradictions.

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question: One of the things I wonder about sometimes is the kind of vision of Canada that would have come down to you through your blood lines – your namesakes, the Reverend George Grant and George Parkin.13 grant: I was brought up in a class which has almost disappeared. Canada, before 1940, was largely a producer of raw materials with a small commercial and industrial fringe. I came from that class of ministers, professors, school teachers, lawyers, and doctors who lived in that essentially agricultural and commercial community. They were the educated professionals of the nineteenth century. Now that class has disappeared all over the world – but it has particularly disappeared in Canada, because it has no real place as capitalism advances. Its heart’s core has also disappeared with the decay of Protestantism. Now I was certainly influenced by ‘the values’ of that class in which I grew up. For example, they quite liked the people of the Great Republic, but they took for granted they wanted to be different. Their ancestors had been all thrown out. They assumed the Americans were badly educated; now most of our professors either come from there or are trained there. But I would say that though I got my prejudice from this disappearing class, what influenced me to philosophy was the knowledge that it was disappearing. As I have said, this was a class which had no future as Canada became integrated into American capitalism. Nothing so much can drive one to philosophy as being part of a class which is disappearing. question: But who really influenced your life, had enormous personal impact on you? grant: Of course, first and foremost and always, my wife, who came from an English tradition of education. But beyond that I would say James Doull, who teaches classics at Dalhousie University. When I was leaving Oxford in 1947, I was offered a job at the University of Toronto. But the rich men on the Board withdrew it when they heard I had been a pacifist and a socialist. But it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, because it meant going to Dalhousie. I had to teach philosophy when I didn’t really know any. Doull, who was my own age and really educated in a way I was not, led me to Kant and Plato. I will never forget once, walking down the street

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in Halifax, he showed me what the image of the sun in Plato’s Republic meant. Everything that I had been trying to think came together. Of course, Doull’s great teacher has been Hegel, and I am not a Hegelian. That has led Doull and me apart. But that doesn’t make one forget one’s debt. He was the person who made me really look at Western philosophy. question: What about your ‘de-Hegelianization’? I’m interested in the process you went through. I can understand why Hegel would swallow up liberalism. What I don’t understand is how you get out of Hegel. Once you jump in, you’re sucked in. grant: What was always the thorn which kept me from accepting Hegel was those remarks in the Philosophy of History, about wars being the winds that stir up the stagnant pools. That is, the idea that good can come out of bad in a way that we can understand.14 To put it in Christian terms, it has always seemed to me that Hegel makes God’s providence scrutable, and that is a teaching that offended me then and now at the deepest level. But of course I wouldn’t have been able to think that out for myself. It was Leo Strauss who has taught me to think this through.15 question: In particular his criticism of Hegel’s understanding of nature? grant: As a young man Strauss worked for an Institute of Jewish Studies in Germany, and was asked to write a book about Spinoza’s criticism of the Bible. His great discovery was to understand that Spinoza accepted Hobbes’ account of nature. From that his work in modern political philosophy proceeded. I learned from that work because it laid before me the reasons why the modern account of human nature and politics is just inadequate compared to the ancient account. question: You have sometimes mentioned differences that may be between you and Strauss about Plato. Are there any major positions of Strauss that you would object to? grant: Let me answer this with hesitation. Strauss is a very great intel-

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lect and was a very wonderful person. He was a learned man in a way I am not. My debt to him is daily. But I would say this. One of the wisest things Strauss ever said was that in Judaism and Islam revelation is received as Law, while in Christianity it is received as the being – Jesus Christ. This difference above all affects the relation between philosophy and revelation in those religions.16 I think in Christianity, philosophy and revelation must be closer than in Judaism or Islam. I think it is this which leads me in great hesitation to differ with Strauss in the interpretation of Plato. But of course Strauss knew much more about Plato than I do. Nevertheless, I think I would differ with him about the Symposium, concerning love and reason. question: But you wouldn’t differ about the Republic? grant: I think we would differ about the meaning of the hyperousia statement in Republic 508; that is, about the Good as beyond being. But now we are getting into very deep waters. Obviously here I must talk of Simone Weil, who has been the greatest influence in my life of any thinker. She has shown me what it is to hold Christ and Plato together. She has shown to me how sanctity and philosophy can be at one. question: How did you get interested in her? grant: By accident. I had to earn my living and the CBC sent me one of her books to review. question: When was that? grant: 1950. Since that date she has been the central influence on my thought about the most important matters. question: When did you begin to read Strauss? grant: 1960. question: So you began to read Strauss after you wrote Philosophy in the Mass Age?

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grant: Yes. questions: Coming back to Simone Weil just for a moment. I have heard it said that she is not respectable in an academic context. grant: How ridiculous. Her brother is probably the most famous living mathematician and he takes her seriously, including her writings on mathematics. They both come from that French love of the intellect combined with the Jewish love of the intellect. If you want sheer intellectual elegance, this family had it in a way that has never even been dreamt of in the North American academic community. That level of education, taking place from the earliest days, can do dangerous things to people – but with her it was a means to knowledge of the highest matters. question: But she’s a mystic. grant: That was much later, after her early life in the proletarian movement in France and in the Spanish war. She was taught by a very able Kantian, and then at the end of her short life understood Plato. She had an immediate and direct encounter with the second person of the Trinity. I take her writings as combining the staggering clarity of her French education with divine inspiration. I take them as perhaps occasionally mistaken in detail, and as sometimes beyond me, but as the great teaching concerning the eternal in this era. question: In what context did you begin reading Heidegger?17 grant: Largely accident. I started reading Nietzsche because one of my children was greatly influenced by him, and I wanted to know why. Till recently it has been almost impossible for English-speaking people to take Nietzsche seriously. He seemed to be a poet who was somehow related to the ghastliness of the Nazis. In fact he is the great understander of the modern. question: Why do you speak about Nietzsche, when you are asked about Heidegger?

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grant: Because the two go together. It is unthinkable that Heidegger would have been without Nietzsche. Why they need to be read is that they are the two thinkers who have most completely thought through the modern Western project from within it. To use Marxian language, they are the modern project conscious of itself. As it seems to me that the great task of philosophy now is to think through the modern project to its fundamental assumptions, then we must study those thinkers who can help us. Simply at the level of academic philosophy, what is breathtaking about Heidegger is the way he shows us what is going on in the philosophers and the scientists who originated the modern project. Take Heidegger’s book on Leibniz, Der Satz vom Grund; I think that is the book which has most illuminated for me what technology is. It takes one to the very fundamentals of what is being thought in the Western world. question: But Heidegger was a National Socialist. grant: The modern era is extraordinarily strange, but this is one of its strangest facts. This consummate thinker welcomed Hitlerism, in the early years of its power. Some silly academics have seen this as a kind of regrettable foolishness, as if Heidegger could be interpreted as a political innocent who simply did not know the score in practical matters. But that is a childish view, which makes out that philosophic questions are just games played in useless ivory towers. In the last ten years this fact has become a symbol of what I want to think about. How could this amazing unfolder of the nature of modernity, this person who can illuminate the philosophic past, how could he opt for National Socialism at the political level? This is much more than an historical question about Europe in the 1930s. If one uses it as an oyster knife to open up his brilliance, the whole question of the destiny of modernity can be revealed. question: Nietzsche’s writings were probably the most comprehensive critique of Christianity and Platonism ever written. How is your study of them related to faith? grant: As I have said, Nietzsche and Heidegger are those who have

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thought through most clearly what is happening in modernity, and thought it within the acceptance of the basic assumptions of that modernity. The negative side of that thinking-through is their assessment of what is wrong about Christianity and Platonism – why human beings thought they were true in the past, but why no sane person should do so now. Somebody such as myself, inescapably bound to Christianity, must try to understand what it is to think at a superlative level, with Christianity put aside root and branch. And I do not mean this rejection as a kind of intellectual abstract game, but including Nietzsche’s whole account of how Christianity perverted sexuality, and how this perversion is for him central to Christianity. Therefore, it is not a negative activity to read him, but a positive one, in the sense that through his critique one comes to see what are the essential assertions of Christianity, and what it is to think them true. Moreover, as far as philosophy goes, it is almost impossible for anybody to try to apprehend the whole except in terms of the modern assumptions. If that is the case, how then can one even get near to apprehending what Plato is asserting? One apprehends it through modern eyes, and what Plato is asserting is thought in terms of quite other assumptions. How does one then ever move out of the circle of our present destiny? Seeing modern assumptions laid before me at their most lucid and profound in Nietzsche and Heidegger has allowed me (indeed only slightly) to be able to partake in the alternative assumptions of Plato. It is by looking at modernity in its greatest power that one is perhaps able even slightly to escape its power. All this, of course, sounds much too academic in the shallow sense of that word. Philosophy must arise from the most immediate and concrete experience of our lives, both public and private. I never forget returning home to Toronto after many years in Halifax. Driving in from the airport, I remember being gripped in the sheer presence of the booming, pulsating place which had arisen since 1945. What did it mean? Where was it going? What had made it? How could there be any stop to its dynamism without disaster, and yet, without a stop, how could there not be disaster? And part of that experience was the knowledge that I had come home to something that never could be my home. Philosophy arises in the wonder of such lived experiences. The study of the great Western thinkers has to be co-penetrated with such experiences, if one is to grasp what is in those writings.

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Part 3: Theology and History questions: In what you do I note two things of methodological interest. You continuously say, ‘well, not on this level, not on that level.’ And you do it so often that I sometimes feel you are essentially speaking things that are contradictory, but don’t have to admit it, because you say, ‘well this is on a popular or vulgar level, but really, on the higher level, etc., etc.’ You distinguish a kind of esoteric in-group level, where we know certain things that we dare not talk about to those outside. This is philosophy. Politics is something else, where we tell, as in Plato, helpful and truthful lies. There’s also Christian eschatology, which contradicts everything in philosophy, but is absolutely true. grant: Some of that criticism I agree with, some not. You talk of speaking of things that are contradictory. Isn’t it necessary to distinguish between contradictions which arise from sloppiness, and contradictions the presence of which are the very stuff of life? To live in the face of these contradictions is to be human. Don’t serious people have to live in the presence of the contradiction between the perfection of God and the affliction of human beings? Christianity flashes its light into that contradiction – but also makes it a deeper contradiction. The light does not overcome the contradiction between perfection and affliction – except perhaps for the greatest saints. Christianity is only a kind of beacon flashing into darkness. That beacon does not overcome the necessity of philosophy in the way that certain theologians seem to think it does. And immediately there is the attempt to seek knowledge of the whole – that is, philosophy – different levels are present in themselves, and for different sorts of people. At all times and places human beings have had to talk at different levels of intelligible discourse, not only because of the difference of the people they are talking with, but also because of the strange situation of knowing and not knowing. Different levels are forced on us by our gnosticism and our agnosticism. But in our era, the levels have become amazingly complex. Because we live in a civilization which has lost its originating assumptions, and can’t find any others. We live in a time when everybody is in darkness about the most important matters, unless they delude themselves. The only clarity is in certain of the pos-

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itive sciences, but they do not provide us clarity about the most important matters. How can anybody deny that the Western world lives today in intellectual darkness, and that it affects anybody who is serious? This involves talking at many levels to different people at different times. question: You often speak about your dependence on the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem. Obviously the tradition of Athens, and of Plato in particular, is present in everything you say. But what is less obvious is what you incorporate from the tradition of Jerusalem. I can see the New Testament there but I wonder to what extent the Old Testament, the so-called Hebrew Bible, and the whole Hebraic background of Christian faith, is of vital importance in your thought? grant: Let me say first that I do not like talking in public these days of the differences between Judaism and Christianity. I don’t think any political good is served by talking of such differences, because it would be taken in the basest and most vulgar way. But that does not mean there aren’t grave intellectual differences between Christianity and Judaism. Clearly, for myself, I’m on the side of Christianity that is farthest away from Judaism, and nearest to the account of Christianity that is close to Hinduism in its philosophic expression. I would accept what Clement of Alexandria said: some were led to the Gospel by the Old Testament, many were led by Greek philosophy. This same applies today when there are many ways into the apprehension of what is universal about Christ. What I object to in many modern theologians (particularly the Germans) is that they make Christianity depend on the religious history of a particular people, as told in the Old Testament. They make Christianity such an ‘historical’ religion that its universal teaching about perfection and affliction is lost. question: It seems to me your use of the term ‘tradition of Jerusalem’ is really an empty use. If you take the Hebrew element out of the religion, what you have left is a pale Hellenism. grant: Obviously there are wonderful and true things in the Old Testament. There are also the exclusivist parts. What I want to insist is that the universal truth of Christ is not tied too clearly to the religious life of

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a particular nation, and that Christianity is not tied to an account of God’s dynamic activity in the world which appears to me to be unthinkable and to lead directly to atheism. Both Western accounts of Christianity – Protestant and Catholic – have emphasized the arbitrary power of God in a way which seems to me fundamentally wrong and which has produced a picture of God whom one should not worship. I think those emphases on the power of God are related to that exclusivity and dynamism which have led to some of the worst sides of Western civilization. We in the West are called to rethink all this, which started somewhere close to St Augustine. What seems to me sad is that just when this rethinking is so necessary, many theologians are reemphasizing this God of dynamism in the name of the Bible. question: Let me go back to the religious implications of what you were saying in the discussion of politics. You defended nationalism as the love of one’s own, and said that we move from love of one’s own to love of the good – God. I’m asking you what keeps human society unified, rather than simply falling apart into a multiplicity of diverse groups, all of which glory in that which is particular to them? What are our obligations to the universal community? You talk about the universal and homogeneous state, and speak against it. But there is another universal community – the one holy Catholic Church. grant: I am sure that the world-wide universal state would be a tyranny. To whom am I asked to give loyalty in this world-wide community? When it comes down to it, I am asked to give loyalty to one of the great empires. That I won’t do. They should be balanced off, one against the other. Beyond that, about the Church; it seems to me you have a central point. It makes some claims to universality, however much it has failed in detail. How does one put together the love of one’s own in a particular century, with the love of universality? How would you express your loyalty to the universal human community? question: Well, I express my loyalty to the universal human community by refusing to acknowledge any part of it as my own. That is to say, there is nothing human that is alien to me. It seems to me the height of idolatry to talk about a movement from love of one’s own to love of the good, finding God through one’s own particularity, rather than in the

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repentant turning away from that which belongs to me, and seeking to find God in the face of a stranger. It’s been hard for me to realize that my mother and my wife and my children are just people, and in the plan of God not closer to me than any person in this room or any person elsewhere in the world. grant: You talk as if people didn’t have bodies. response: I am a Platonist. grant: That’s not Platonism. Plato always recognized that people had bodies. response: I would say this about the body: we are created by God for eternal life. There will be no bodies, at least as we know them. The body, therefore, is not essential. grant: It’s a transitory dispensation; that I grant completely. response: It’s purely pedagogical. It’s like a canteen on a pilgrimage. When you get to the end you put it aside. The primacy of the body, especially in Heidegger and contemporary philosophy, is part of the very modernity which is the source of so many problems. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, and before the face of God, therefore, marriage and parenthood fall away as we are incorporated within one family of God, and we have only one father and one mother. The debate within Christian theology is about the degree to which these eschatological realities are susceptible of realization in the order of space and time. Are they merely prefigures sacramentally, or are they factors that begin to fill space and time and reshape political life here and now? grant: Most of what you have said I accept as true, except some of the remarks about eschatology, which I have never thought through, and therefore simply do not understand. I would make some qualifications, however. To say that the body is pedagogical is to say a lot. In the dispensation we live in now, the body is our infallible judge.18 What we do

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to our own bodies and to other peoples’ bodies, is our partaking in justice here and now. We can’t learn anything about justice apart from bodies. Also I’ve spent much of my life having to learn not to hate myself as a body. And I think that since I have not hated myself as a body, I have been better able to love the universal good (though of course not well) than when I did hate myself as a body. There was a side of North American Protestantism that was around me in a secular form that wanted one to learn to love good out of neglect of the body, or even hatred. All it made was a kind of resentment and a pretended love of the good. The present erotomania in North America may be foolish and degrading, but it is a reaction to that torture of the body in North American Protestantism. Just because we must dislike that reaction, it does not mean that we should go back to what it is a reaction against. I may emphasize this too much just because my life has required that I overcome that neglect of the body which could be such a cause of phoney love of the good. I’m sure you’re right to say that the body is a temporary dispensation, and must not be taken too seriously. That is the fundamental thing to say. I’m also sure that the Catholic tradition was wiser about this than certain forms of English-speaking Protestantism. One can see this in so many Catholic priests and sisters. They took on the religious life, not because they hated the body, but because they saw it as a passing dispensation. comment: I would like to hear something about the role of the universal visible community and the good which transcends love of our own, and the place that they play in political philosophy. That’s what I haven’t heard when you speak about nationalism. question: What do you mean by universal community? response: Everybody on earth. There’s a sense in which what is my own is everybody’s on earth. comment: How do you get this ‘everybody on earth’? It seems to me such an abstraction. I thought that what Grant was arguing about nationalism is that the route to this broader community is through your

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own. There can be no authentic international horizon unless you start with your own social and human collectivity. The acceptance of imperialism and a type of colonialized mentality prevents you from having any real contact with an international community. grant: I agree with the last point. In Canadian terms, when one is asked to serve the international community, it comes down to doing what IBM or the American government wants. That is our difficulty in specifying the international community in Canada. Internationalism generally means just being a servant of English-speaking capitalism. At the university it is often said ‘science and scholarship are international.’ What that means generally is ‘let’s hire a lot more professors from Cal. Tech. or Harvard.’ I have heard the ruling class of Canada say ‘let’s take on atomic bombs in the name of international commitments.’ That is just liberal nonsense. But beyond that is the question of how one comes to love the universal good, except in terms of first loving what is near and close to one. If faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love,19 then how can human beings learn to love if the beginning of love is not love of one’s own? It is in this sense that I think love of one’s own is connected to love of the good. It is not the element of possession or of extension of self, which makes one’s ‘own’ so important, but rather its availability for being known by us, and known as good. question: Isn’t it true that in the modern world the notion of freedom and will have changed? In the Bible, true freedom is perfect obedience to God, and justice is therefore the structuring principle of our actions. Whereas in the modern world, freedom has been separated off from the structures of justice, and is identified now with creativity. In the university the idolatry of the sciences is technology, and the idolatry of the humanities is aestheticism and the worship of beauty as coming out of human creativity. Is it not this transformation of the notion of freedom and will which you oppose? grant: Yes, this is what I have been trying to say. I would add to what you say about the Bible, that Plato also is very close to what you are saying. The union of happiness and justice is almost the same as the union of freedom and obedience. Clearly, the union of happiness and

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justice cannot be thought of in any purely immanent sense. What seems to me central to the whole modern experiment is the exaltation of freedom and will outside any given structure of justice. The given – what the scientists call data – is chaos; we create within that chaos. One of the central moments in the arrival of that view of will occurred when Kant affirmed the autonomy of the will. Freedom had never meant that we made our own laws before that. Of course the whole matter is confused, because the words ‘freedom’ and ‘will’ have come to have so many differing and unclear meanings. When we talk of political freedom, what sane human being could be against that? The word only becomes dangerous when it is tied to will, and it comes to mean man’s power to make the world as he wants, outside any received structure of justice. What you say about the modern exaltation of human creativity seems to me essential. Just recently I sat on a panel with two famous physicists. They both said that the only things that give meaning to the world are scientific and artistic ‘creativity.’ This is an idolatry which excludes meaning from most people’s lives. The possibility of thinking that our lives are concerned with the opening up of structures of justice, in which we can partake, was excluded for these very clever men by what they took to be the consequences of modern thought. This is just one example of what one hears everywhere – namely that the Englishspeaking elites are fast becoming Nietzscheans, whether they have ever heard of him or not. What a terrifying vision of justice is going to arise from that! This is what scares one about the modern enterprise. question: Is the problem that the use of the will per se is wrong, so that everything that belongs to the order of will is, if not bad, at least a deviation from the primary purpose of life, which is contemplation? There are things you’ve said in certain of your writings about contemplation that lead us to believe that you hold the view of Augustine, who never found a way to will anything in this world which was not marred by concupiscence. Or is the problem not in the use of the word ‘will’ per se, but in the disordered use of the will? grant: That raises a whole series of complicated and interrelated questions. First let me speak of contemplation. It is a word I like less and less. It is so tied to the notion of the thinker as living the highest life –

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the account of the philosopher which one finds in Aristotle, and which is to me so distasteful. The vision of human life which sees it producing at its height great thinkers seems a kind of blasphemy. If that is the way the universe is, then I simply say ‘no’ to it. The supreme acts seem to me open to any human being, and do not depend on the degree of our intelligence. There may be good arguments against equality at a political or natural level, but if one is a Christian, there can be none at the supernatural level. That seems to me to take one to the very core of Christianity. Anybody whose life is given over to philosophy needs to read the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians regularly. Anybody is open to love, and that is the supreme act. As I have said, faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love. I mean by love, attention to otherness, receptivity of otherness, consent to otherness. If contemplation means at its centre, love, then I don’t mind the word; but if it carries the implication of the thinker as the height of human existence, then it seems to me a dangerous word. This is above all why I would call myself a Platonist, and why I so fear the Aristotelian tradition. Plato proclaims that dependence of intelligence upon love in a much clearer way than Aristotle. What I don’t like about the modern apprehension of will is that it implies that we stand over against love. I recently heard a very practical bureaucrat describe human beings as ‘mobile, electronic command centres.’ Such a description takes one close to what is now meant by will. question: What then is sin? grant: I find much of the language of Western theology very opaque at this point – the language of sin and fall, of choice and will. This may simply be my lack of understanding and perception. What seems to me given in the Gospels is that the highest is to give your will away. But this does not seem to be a matter of choice, but of being chosen. There is a low level of life – in which most of us live – where will operates. Moral evil or sin is there the liberty of indifference. We can talk about sin as being indifferent to loving that which is truly lovable. To think this way necessarily implies the doctrine that evil is not the opposite of good, but its absence, and that moral evil is finally an indifference to good, to otherness. I think here once again Kant was of great significance in turning around the tradition. He taught that evil was radical, and not simply an

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absence of good. This was another way in which the wills of human beings were exalted and turned into the first cause of events. response: I do not think there is such agreement between your opinions and Christian theology as you make out. In the Bible, freedom is perfect obedience, and what is at stake is that the will expresses itself in a distorted manner. I sense that you are saying that the expression of the will itself is evil. grant: No. I am simply saying that the height is to get rid of the will. response: But that’s not Biblical, that’s Platonic. grant: Everybody is always saying that something is not Biblical. The question is what is in the Gospels, and this is what I find. At the height Christ surrenders his will. We certainly seem to see that the saints have no love of their own, and what is more one’s own than one’s will? People such as myself have no direct experience of that. But we see it in the saints, and all of us have dim intimations of what it is to give ourselves away. comment: I’d like to pick up some of the historical implications of what you’re saying. There is no doubt that our modern emphasis on will arose through thinking about will that took place within the Western Christian tradition. It is only in the early Middle Ages that voluntarism begins. A lot of this reflection on will was influenced by the scriptural accounts. The medieval reflection on will had to do with God’s will, and with man’s conformity to it. Then somehow thought about God’s will got transferred to thought about man’s will, and so you come to the emphasis on autonomy. For the medievals, God’s will created the good, whereas modern men began to talk of their will as if it created values. grant: I agree with you entirely, and also about how difficult it is to sort this out. Let me ask you a question, because you know much more about this than I do. Do you think it wise these days to attribute will to Deity? I prefer the word ‘love.’ Indeed in the modern world the word ‘love’ has been sentimentalized, but the word ‘will’ has been brutalized. How much is it necessary to use the word ‘will’ about Deity?

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response: The question is how much you associate ‘love’ with ‘will.’ I must say that I have experienced some of the same opaqueness about the word ‘will,’ even in reading within the Patristic and Scholastic traditions. I have a very great difficulty in understanding what they mean by will because of the confusion with the modern notion. grant: I have the same difficulty. Also I am lost with the theological and metaphysical questions when they reach a high level. Yet I am sure they are the most important questions, despite all the modern contempt and indifference to them. They are indeed essential if we are to come to any clear vision of what technology portends. One thing I am sure about is that if you carry the language of ‘will’ about Deity too far, you are led into all the language of miracle which has plagued and confused the West. You use language which implies that God interferes with secondary causes in an arbitrary way. Then any sane person asks, why is the torture not stopped that is going on this minute? I do not mean by this that events which we call miracles have not happened. Obviously they have. But we must not carry the talk of God’s arbitrariness so far that these events become absurd. All I am saying is that these events should not be talked about in the arbitrary language of power. On the other hand, one can get into a kind of shallow rationalism which is just the modern attempt to try to make the ways of God scrutable. This seems to me to lead to saying that good is evil and evil is good.20 But how are we to think the truth of theology in the face of the coming-to-be of technology is the great question. Part 4: Philosophy question: What exactly do you mean by modernity? grant: I mean by modernity the society that has come to be in the Western world and which has arisen since Western people have concentrated on what is best called ‘technology.’ I used to think that the continental European use of the word ‘technique’ was better than the word ‘technology,’ because ‘technology’ was a poor neologism made by putting together the two Greek words techne and logos. But I changed my mind for the following reason. Technology puts together what the Greeks could not possibly have put together, making and knowing. It expresses

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a new union between the arts and sciences – a union of the greatest complexity. It seems to me that modernity comes forth, above all, from this new union of the arts and sciences, and what it portends for us. I was led into thinking about modernity through political philosophy and theology, and certainly modernity involves enormous changes in how we look at political things and the possibility of theology – but at its heart is this new interdependence of the arts and sciences – ‘technology.’ This is obvious at every lived moment. The deepest account of modernity is found in the writings of Heidegger. He is a genius on this subject, however fearful one may be of his political and moral stance. questions: I am very interested in what you said about Heidegger and that you’ve learned a great deal from Heidegger concerning modernity. I’d be very interested in some of the particulars in which you are fearful of Heidegger. grant: Let’s not go into his political opinions in detail. We could discuss their complexity all day. Let’s say no more than two things. Anybody who in 1953 could publish his Introduction to Metaphysics, which he had written in 1935, and say that all errors were corrected, yet nevertheless include the phrase, ‘the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism,’ is saying something that makes one fearful. But second, the greatest book for understanding Heidegger is in my opinion his first volume on Nietzsche – an amazing book. What he declares about justice in that volume is, it seems to me, the modern view of justice taken much further than what we find in American liberalism or Marxism. It is a turning away from what is given about justice in Platonism or in Christianity and Judaism, a turning away which in my opinion bodes ill for the future. What seems to me true is the connection between this new view of justice and historicism. It seems to me that Heidegger is the most perfectly thought historicist that I have ever read. There is a debate about that – whether he is or not – but I am sure that he is. And that that historicism is, above anything else, responsible for the undermining of the older traditions of justice which I hope many people in this room would accept as true. question: May I interrupt to ask about a connection here? The first

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thing that you said about modernity is that it’s that kind of society that has emerged from this new integration or understanding of the relationship between the arts and the sciences. grant: Which we call technology. question: Yes, and that seems to suggest that you’re offering an analysis and description in your work, of this social phenomenon. Then you move from there to speaking about Heidegger as a primary example ... grant: As an illuminator of what modernity is. In his book on Leibniz he just lays down what technology is, as I have never read elsewhere. question: Is modernity, then, another way of speaking about historicism? grant: Historicism is surely a principle of method, which is the profoundest principle governing not only the social sciences but the natural sciences. There is clearly a profound relation between historicism and Heisenbergian physics.21 Now I am not competent enough to think about that relation. I just don’t know enough. But I do begin to grasp in talking to physicists that there is something of historicism in their work. As a physicist said to me the other day, ‘what quantum physics is saying is that being is never still.’ The science of the modern world in its most serious form, physics, and in biological and social sciences, is dominated by this central affirmation – historicism. Historicism is the intellectual end-product of modern Western European society, and dominates what is most important about any society – its conception of knowledge. Let me add, modern historicism seems to me rooted in a primal affirmation about will which lies behind that historicism. That affirmation about will has something to do with Western Christianity. Here you are faced with the simple fact that the chief historical event which came between the greatest of modern thinkers, for example, Kant, and the greatest of ancient thinkers, Plato, was the rise of Christianity – I mean Western Christianity. Therefore it seems to me if one wants to see the difference between ancient knowledge and modern knowledge (call it, if you will, science or even philosophy), it is of crucial importance to

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understand the influence of Christianity in making that difference. This is of particular importance to those of us who are Christians. And for Christians this also raises the whole question of what is Christianity, and is it to be identified with a particular manifestation of it, Western Christianity? Let me also say, as strongly as I can, that I do not know what modernity is or what it tells us about the whole. For example, I do not want to say that I simply reject modernity. People have often said that I do. They do so because their faith is so completely given to the modern enterprise that when they hear somebody speak against it, they like to see it as simple reaction – as a simple rejection. But that is not the point. The point is to try to understand what the coming-to-be of modernity means in terms of the whole. Western technological society, which is now world-wide, has come to be. What does that coming-to-be mean? That seems to me the great modern philosophical task. And the prodigious difficulty of that task of judgement is that we who have to do it are all moderns, and are therefore held by the modern account of knowledge, and can only judge modernity in its own terms, and that is just not good enough. question: You’ve accepted then the word ‘technology,’ it seems to me, as really capsulizing what modernity is. Would you also accept the notion of ‘technocracy’ as an expression of what has happened to politics within modernity? grant: I would prefer to put it that there is a tendency in all modern societies to overcome politics and turn it into administration. Horkheimer, of the Frankfurt school, a Marxist, had the view that in the coming-to-be of technology there are all kinds of revolts of nature going on – a wonderful conception – and there are revolts of people who want to return to politics, as a natural form of human activity.22 I think in this modern world everything moves towards politics becoming administration (I would rather use this expression than technocracy, because administration is a substitute for politics as Plato or Aristotle meant it). All kinds of revolts against administration are going on. How long those revolts will last, no one can predict. We are living in one now, in Canada. There is much to be said about what is happening in Quebec – but doesn’t one feel triumphant that administrative effi-

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ciency in the North American context wasn’t able to win – wasn’t able to make them want to give up their language? Dr Laurin is in politics because he found out in his psychiatry that taking away any people’s language meant taking away their womanhood and their manhood, taking away their nature. If you say there is such a thing as human nature (and I am not saying that it is easy to think that, in terms of modern knowledge), then there are going to be revolts against administration in the name of politics. I am sure that we can say there is such a thing as eternal justice. There are therefore going to be those revolts, and I think one should rejoice in them. There are going to be revolts against the tendency towards the universal and homogeneous state which is run by administration. question: Are you saying that even before we get to the union of the techne and logos, there is a development in the West of the primacy of the will that will not endure eternal justice, that revolts against eternal justice? grant: An extremely difficult question. First, the word ‘will’ has meant so many different things to so many different people through the ages. What does it mean in the modern world where it has become the dominant affirmation of reality – as human will? Secondly, how and why does it enter the Western world as a new affirmation? By the time of Kant, it is right out into the open. When Kant says that human beings are autonomous, the makers of their own law, the idea of will is right out into the open, proclaiming something about reality and humanness which is quite new in the world and quite easy to see. But before that, how is that idea coming to be? For example, when Leibniz says the monads are appetitus et perceptio, I know that something new is being said about reality – but what it is that is being said is too difficult for me. These final ontological questions which lie at the heart of what technology is are beyond my capacity. question: You have sometimes described the heresy of modernity as liberalism, the notion that man’s essence is his freedom – a different way of putting it than the combination of techne and logos. grant: But surely both these propositions are saying the same thing.

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Isn’t the question to understand exactly how the affirmation that man’s essence is his freedom lies at the heart of technology, and how technology as something new leads human beings to define their essence as freedom? What has to be understood is that primal apprehension of being, out of which both liberalism and technology come. It is this which is so difficult. question: I myself feel more at home in trying to locate the origins of what you mean by modernity in this line of thought: the notion of man’s essence being his freedom, beginning in the late Renaissance or probably earlier, provided the indispensable condition for the development of a variety of things including technology and the kind of society we have, because it seems to me that saying man’s essence is his freedom means you can no longer speak about justice. grant: Yes, I agree with that. You can either say that you can no longer speak of justice, or you can say that when you start to think in this way, justice comes to mean something quite different from what it did in the traditions of the Greeks and the Bible. This is why I think Nietzsche and Heidegger are so important. They affirm that with the coming-to-be of technology, justice becomes something new. This is what Nietzsche means by the transvaluation of all values. Before them, thinkers such as Rousseau and Kant had accepted the coming-to-be of the new technological science, but thought that would go with the great tradition of Western justice, rendering each human his due. question: But Nietzsche says outright that justice now means something new. It is human, creating and annihilating. You can’t talk of justice or hang on to the ancient conception of justice – as rendering each human being his due. grant: Perhaps you can in a way, except that under the new conception of justice some human beings have no due. I think this is both the greatness and the terror of Nietzsche and Heidegger; they recognize that the new affirmation of reality in technology brings a new account of justice. I think the English-speaking world is only beginning to see this; namely, that the new affirmation of reality in technology means a new conception of justice. This will be a terrible realization in the English-

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speaking world. It is to this new account of justice as a human creation that I fundamentally say no. And it is because this new account of justice goes with the technological society that that society is terrifying for Christians. Of course in all this there are the intellectual questions that we as philosophers have to think out. Very difficult. One of them is the enormous difference between ancient materialism and modern materialism. Why is it that in the ancient world the materialists were the private apolitical thinkers, while the Platonists were interested in the public realm, whereas in the modern world the [materia]lists are so politically directed? Right at the centre of modern materialism is this idea of man’s essence being his freedom. If you try to see the difference between the two you always come back to this fact: Biblical religion came between the two outbreaks of philosophy. To say man’s essence is his freedom is to say something new about will. question: Jacques Ellul is a person who has written at great length about technological society.23 What do you think of his account of modernity? grant: When I first read Ellul’s The Technological Society, it seemed to me a wonderful account of what was going on – the illustrations of the central fact that the unfolding of technology was determinative in the modern world. That dominance was a destiny which transcended all else and to which all else in the modern world had to be related. One gets so sick of the liberal and Marxist ideologists and their accounts of technology as a means at the disposal of human freedom. When they speak that way they forget that both capitalism and communism are but predicates of the subject, technology. Ellul’s description of technology was quite outside such a shallow account, and he faced what was actually happening with his lucid French and Christian common sense. He just seemed to state the score. But then I began to read his other books and to think more carefully about what he was saying about technology, and it has become clearer and clearer to me that he does not get to the heart of the matter of what is happening in the modern world. question: Is it that his account of technology is tied to the kind of Cal-

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vinist tradition that seems to have fallen so easily into the acceptance of secularism? grant: Ellul’s account of modernity seems to me to fail because it comes out of a type of Christianity which scorns the discipline of philosophy. Obviously there has been a side of Protestantism – what one might call positivist Protestantism – which tries to cut off Christianity from philosophy. It seems to me Ellul’s writings about technology exactly show the failure of such a position. It fails to understand what technology truly is, because it refuses to come to terms with reason, except as a human instrument. question: It is remarkable, however, that somebody, coming as he does out of the self-conscious re-appropriation of the Calvinist tradition, should see so clearly what is going on in technological society. grant: Yes, he sees it with great clarity at an immediate level. But our need is to think through modernity to its very foundations. What is being said about reason in the modern enterprise? I am grateful for his hard-minded common sense; but I am sad that his positivist Christianity prevents him from going deeper. His failure to take that step is intimately bound up with his particular type of Christianity. It prevents him from asking the basic question: to what extent is modern technological society connected to, and a product of, the Western interpretation of Christianity? This is very hard for Christians to ask, because it may seem to bring into question our fundamental loyalty to Christianity itself. It was an easy question to face when Western society appeared an unequivocal triumph. Then one could simply say: look at what Christianity is responsible for. But now that modernity appears, not only in the greatness of its achievements but in its ambiguities, it is a more difficult question to face. We may easily refuse to try to fathom the relation between modernity and Western Christianity, because we may think such a fathoming may put in question what is most dear. But that is not the point. What we are called to do is to think through how the Western interpretation of the Bible was responsible not only for the greatness of modernity, but also for what is frightening in it. This kind of questioning cannot be faced by a Christianity that envisages reason simply as a human instrument, and therefore cuts itself off from philos-

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ophy. To understand technology requires that we try to understand what is the true relation between love and reason. Did Western Christianity go wrong in its understanding of that relation? The whole attempt to understand modernity cannot be cut off from the attempt to understand both philosophy and Christianity and their relation. The temptation is always to try to understand technology from within technology.

Notes 1 Jacques Parizeau (1930– ), economist and politician, served as premier of Quebec 1994–5, resigning after the defeat of the referendum on Quebec sovereignty of 30 October 1995. Camille Laurin (1922–99). See above 338n1. 2 See 117n11. 3 Marc Lalonde (1929– ), lawyer and politician, held various portfolios under Pierre Elliott Trudeau and John Turner, and, as minister of energy in the Trudeau government, was the architect of the national energy policy in 1980–2. 4 The James Bay Project is a major hydro-electric-power development on the east coast of James Bay (begun 1971) involving massive water diversions. The project raised controversy for its effect on the native people and the environment. 5 On Simone Weil, see 771–7. 6 See Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson 1962). Sir Bernard Crick taught at Harvard, Berkeley, the London School of Economics, Sheffield, and Birkbeck. 7 On Pierre Trudeau, see 332n2. 8 Charles Norris Cochrane (1889–1945), Canadian classicist, was educated at the University of Toronto and Oxford, taught at the Department of Classics at Toronto after 1919, and is considered among the leading 20th-century historians of classical civilization. His works include Thucydides and the Science of History (1929) and Christianity and Classical Culture (1940). 9 Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952), internationally renowned political economist, economic historian, and pioneer in communication studies who influenced Marshall McLuhan, taught at the University of Toronto from 1920 until his death. His early work on economic history includes The Fur Trade in Canada (1930) and The Cod Fisheries (1940), and his later work on communications includes Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951).

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10 On Austin Farrer, see above 311n7 and below 535n7. 11 Gilbert Ryle (1900–76), English analytic philosopher, was Wayneflete professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford and editor of the journal Mind for nearly 25 years. His best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), which criticized Cartesian dualism. Sir Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–89), English analytic philosopher, was Grote professor of the philosophy of mind and logic, University of London (1946– 59) before his appointment as Wykeham professor of logic at Oxford. He achieved fame at age 26 with his book Language Truth and Logic (1936). Later works include The Problem of Knowledge (1956). 12 Paul Tillich (1886–1965), German-American theologian, became a professor in Germany before the First World War. Tillich fled Germany in 1933 to take a position at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, where he wrote a number of books synthesizing Protestantism and existentialism, most notably Systematic Theology (1951–63) and The Courage to Be (1952). 13 Sir George Parkin (1846–1922) was Grant’s maternal grandfather and George Monro Grant (1835–1902) his paternal grandfather. Both men were supporters of the Imperial Federation Movement. 14 Cf Philosophy of Right, section 324: ‘War has the higher significance that by its agency ... the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be a product of prolonged, let alone “perpetual peace.”’ 15 On Leo Strauss, see 312n8. 16 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press 1952), 18–19. 17 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has had an enormous influence in France, Italy, Japan, and North America as well as in Germany. His works include Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927), Identität und Differenz (1957), and Nietzsche (2 vols., 1961). 18 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 364. See discussion of this claim of Simone Weil that ‘matter is our infallible judge’ in ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in Compass version (387) and in Technology and Justice (622). 19 See discussion of this definition by Simone Weil, ibid., 609–10. 20 The reference is to Luther’s 21st Heidelberg thesis: ‘The theologian of glory says that evil is good and good evil; the theologian of the cross says that the thing is as it is.’ See Collected Works, vol. 1, 157–66 and Collected Works, vol. 2, 64n14. 21 On Werner Heisenberg, see 260n15.

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22 For the revolts of nature, see ‘Means and Ends,’ chap 1 in Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press 1974). Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), together with Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, was a leading exemplar of the ‘critical theory’ associated with the Institute of Social Research known as the Frankfurt School. 23 On Jacques Ellul, see 143n5.

Faith and the Multiversity (1978)

‘Faith and the Multiversity’ was delivered as a lecture, ‘Christianity and the Modern Multiversity,’ in 1977 in a series jointly sponsored by Trinity College, University of Toronto, and St Thomas’s Anglican Church, Toronto. Grant delivered the lecture again, under the title ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ to the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences held in San Francisco in November of the same year.1 It was published in The Compass in the autumn of 1978, as well as in The Search for Absolute Values in a Changing World (vol. 1), the Proceedings of the Conference on the Unity of the Sciences.2 We have chosen The Compass version as the copy-text. The Compass, a critical literary review, was founded in 1977 by students of C.Q. Drummond of the Department of English at the University of Alberta.3 Its purpose was defined in the editorial in issue number 1 (August 1977): ‘We shall take our bearings from the best that is thought and known, wherever it can be found, in order to make it prevail in Canada.’4 John Baxter, one of the editors, wrote to Grant in February 1977 explaining the editors’ intentions for the new publication, and requesting a contribution.5 Grant responded enthusiastically: ‘From what you write it seems to be a marvellous idea. I agree with you from what you say we should be allies ... [Although I have] foolishly let myself get behind in everything ... one of my first priorities will be to write something for you and I will think what it should be.’6 Grant kept his promise, although it required some gentle prodding by Baxter. After several further letters to which he received no reply, Baxter wrote on 28 February, 1978: ‘I hope you have not forgotten us, or worse, that we have offended you in some way.’7 Within a week of receiving this letter Grant submitted a slightly modified version of his Trinity College lecture, now titled ‘Faith and the Multiversity.’8 Baxter was delighted: ‘The

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editors of The Compass are extremely grateful for your essay, which better than anything we have yet printed sustains our aspiration to find the best that is thought and known.’9 Grant adapted ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ for his San Francisco lecture and publication in 1978 by replacing the introductory paragraphs of the Trinity College lecture with a brief one-sentence paragraph, and by making a few other minor changes. We have decided to include in the endnotes the original introductory paragraphs and three omitted sentences. Four years later Grant republished with minor changes ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in Richard L. Rubenstein, ed., Modernization: The Humanist Response to Its Promise and Problems.10 We have noted the variants between this version, the one published in the 1978 conference proceedings, and that published in The Compass. Grant radically revised ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ for Technology and Justice (1986), making it a very different essay. We have decided, accordingly, that it is necessary to include both versions of ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in The Collected Works. Henry Roper

‘Faith and the multiversity’ is a subject which could be tackled from many angles, both practical and theoretical. The essence of the question is, however, the relation between faith and modern science.11 You may well say – not that terrible old chestnut once again! Hasn’t there been so much discussion of this over the last centuries that there is nothing worthwhile left to be said about it? My answer is no. The relation between modern science and faith lies at the core of the relation between faith and the multiversity; and thought has not yet reached that core. Many Christians turn away from this relation because they want there to be no conflict here. Nevertheless it remains the fate-filled question of Western intellectual life. What is faith? ‘Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.’a 12 What is given in that definition of course requires a careful analysis of each of its terms: – experience, intelligence, illumination, love. As that analysis is not possible here, let me quickly make

a Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon 1948), 148. My translation.

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four comments, particularly about the use of the word ‘love.’ This word has lost its clarity in contemporary language, particularly in theological usage. (1) ‘Love’ is attention to otherness, receptivity of otherness, consent to otherness. Such an account sounds abstract until we give it content through all the occasions of life, from elementary human relations to the very Trinity itself. When we love other human beings, we know those human beings because we have paid attention to them, have received something of what they are, and consented to what they are as good. Indeed in this example, consent is easily joy, because of our obvious need of people close to us; whereas consent may not easily be joy in the more difficult reaches of love. The interdependence of love and knowledge is most clearly manifest when we try to understand what it is to love justice – (and it must be remembered that the love of justice is what all human beings are primarily called to). We can only grow in our knowledge of justice in so far as we love what we already know of it and any new knowledge of justice then opens up the possibility of further love which in turn makes possible fuller knowledge. The road to this perfecting is what we mean by the lives of the saints. Most of us are at the most elementary level in this process, but we have to start where we are, paying attention, receiving, consenting to justice as it is required of us in daily life. In our daily attempts to be just the central fact about human love is made plain. Love is only love in so far as it has passed through the flesh by means of actions, movements, attitudes which correspond to it. If this has not happened, it is not love, but a phantasy of the imagination by which we coddle ourselves. As far as love is concerned, and particularly love of justice, ‘matter is our infallible judge.’13 (2) As the definition ‘faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love’ is difficult to fathom, I will mention two writings, one a novel, one philosophy, in which the sentence is clarified. In Simenon’s account of one of Chief Inspector Maigret’s criminal investigations in Paris (which in English has the title Maigret’s Mistake) the meaning of this definition is beautifully illustrated.14 The definition is philosophically clarified at the centre of Plato’s Republic. In Plato’s account of the movement of the soul to perfection he speaks metaphorically in three images, known as the Sun, the Line and the Cave. In his account of knowledge he uses the metaphor of sight.15 What he is

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describing through that metaphor is what I mean by love. As would be expected from our highest philosophic authority, Plato hits the perfect note perfectly. Love and intellect must be in unity if we are to gain the most important knowledge. If we are ever to get near to understanding the Republic, we must recognize what is given in that metaphor. This is extremely difficult for us moderns because most German and English scholars have, for the last two centuries, read it though Kantian eyes (a great darkening) and Catholics through Aristotelian eyes (better, but still a darkening). (3) Such an account clearly makes faith something open to all human beings at many levels and does not reserve faith to describe our responses to certain Christian teachings. The only claim of those of us who are Christians is that the unity between love and intellect can be seen in Christ. If I may speak technically for a moment as a theologian to those who study theology, it is well to remember the universality implied in that definition of faith. We are bombarded by the works of German historical theologians, who have been defeated by the philosophers of their own country without even knowing it, and are trying to rescue themselves from that defeat by making Christianity dependent on the particularities of ‘history.’ Faith properly defined is necessary both for philosophy and theology, whether they are practised in East or West. (4) If faith is an experience, it is clearly not a matter of will or of choice or of merit. Experience is always something given us. Faith is a matter of luck or, if you prefer a slightly different language, a matter of providence. I prefer luck. Luther was often misguided, but he hit the nail on the head in his blunt way when he said that Christ had nailed merit to the cross.16 It is necessary to state this for the following reason. When a theologian such as myself defines faith as the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love, I am making no claim for my own ability to love. To be quite particular, I spend a lot of my life in meetings with colleagues and to put it mildly, my intellect is not lit up by love. This side of the truth concerning the dangers of the intellectual life is very beautifully expressed in St Francis’ writings about the philosophers.17 When one says that faith is an experience, it is essential to emphasize that the possession of it, however limited, is in no sense dependent on willing. This is particularly necessary to say because nearly all Western human beings are impregnated (whether they know it or not) by that account of

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will which was enucleated by Leibniz and Kant and Nietzsche. When one says that faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love, it must be made clear that we are talking about something concerning human beings at a higher level than that at which will as activity properly operates. It is essential to insist that love and will are different. Love knows itself as needing; will now thinks itself as creating. As has been beautifully said: ‘One degrades the mysteries of faith in making them a matter for affirmation or for negation, when they ought to be matters for contemplation.’b Now to turn from Christianity to the multiversity. It is very important to be clear what is meant by the multiversity particularly because it is an institution which has only realized itself recently in Europe and the US during this century – although its coming to be was a slow emergence over the last four centuries. In Canada it has only been realized in the last thirty years. I often meet people of my generation who went to university in the 1930s, and who speak as if the institutions their children or grandchildren are now attending are really the same as those they went to. But this is simply an illusion. The names for these places are the same, but they are such different places that they should have different names. To say what they now are, it is necessary to describe the dominating paradigm of knowledge which rules in them and is determinative of what they are. Different civilizations and differing periods within the same civilization have differing paradigms of knowledge, and such paradigms shape every part of the society and particularly its institutions of learning. The principle of any paradigm in any civilization is always the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. The question then is what is given in the modern use of the word ‘science.’ This is the paradigm which has slowly reached definition over the last centuries, and has since 1945 reached its apogee of determining power over our institutions of higher learning. Of course, it would be folly to attempt to summarize in a paragraph that brilliant progress of self-definition by philosophic scientists as to their activity over the last centuries. Suffice it simply to say that what is given in the modern word ‘science’ is the project of reason to gain objective knowl-

b Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, 149.

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edge. What is meant by objective? Object means literally some thing that we have thrown over against us. Jacio, I throw; ob, over against, therefore ‘the thrown against.’ The German word for object is Gegenstand – that which stands against. Reason as project, (that is, reason as thrown forth) is the summoning of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so that it is forced to give us its reasons for being the way it is as an object.18 Our paradigm is that we have knowledge when we represent anything to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons. That summoning and questioning requires well defined procedures. These procedures are what we call in English ‘research,’ although what is entailed in these is more clearly given in the German word Forschung.19 Often people in the university like to use about themselves the more traditional word ‘scholar,’ but that word means now those who carry on ‘research.’ Those procedures started with such experiments as balls running down an inclined plane, but now the project of reason applies them to everything: stones, plants, animals, human beings, societies. Thus in North America we have divided our institutions of higher learning into faculties of natural science, social science and humanities, depending on the object which is being researched. But the project of reason is largely the same, to summon different things to questioning.20 In the case of the humanities the object is the past, and these procedures are applied to the relics of the past. For example, I live in a department of religion in which much work is done to summon the Bible before the researchers to give them its reasons.21 This paradigm makes it accurate to use the ugly neologism ‘multiversity.’ Each department of these institutions, indeed almost each individual researcher, carries on the project of reason by approaching different objects. The limitations of the human mind in synthesizing facts necessitates the growing division of research into differing departments and further subdivisions. ‘[However] much use is made of algebra and instruments, science (as a synthetic activity) will always largely depend on man’s intelligence and physique, which are limited, and do not become less so with the passing of centuries.’c This paradigm of knowledge makes it therefore appropriate to speak of the multiversity.

c Simone Weil, Sur la science (Paris: Gallimard 1966). See ‘La science et nous.’

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The achievements of the modern project are of course a source of wonder. The objects have indeed given forth their reasons, since they have been summoned forth to do so over the last centuries.22 The necessities that we now can know about stones or societies surely produce in us astonishment in its beautiful sense.23 These achievements are not simply practical, but also have theoretical consequences. All of us in our everyday lives are so taken up with certain practical achievements, in medicine, in production, in the making of human beings and the making of war, that we are apt to forget the sheer theoretical interest of what has been revealed about necessity in Einsteinian physics or in Darwinian biology. It is not my business here to speak of the appropriateness of these procedures in giving us knowledge of the human things through the social science and the humanities, or to raise such difficulties as that we cannot use experiment when the past is summoned before us as object to be put to the question.24 The purpose of this paper is to ask what is the relation of science to faith. The question is now defined as: what is the relation between this paradigm of knowledge and the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love? Or to put the matter practically: how do those who know that the second statement is true live in institutions dominated by the paradigm? The relation between the modern scientific project and what I have called love can only be clarified in terms of certain distinctions. For example, it is clear that from the earliest days of the modern experiment, the motive for mastering nature was often the desire to alleviate the human condition – that is, it was undertaken from love of human beings. This was often the motive for the attempt to overcome chance by knowing the reasons why objects behaved the ways they did, because chance, whether in the form of hunger or disease or the necessity of labour, produced such agonies. Those who worked for the development of the new arts and sciences and their union (which we call technology) were spurred to their work by their hope of better human conditions. How can we not wish to interfere with chance in nature, when chance is the cause of so much suffering? The new science was the intellectual underpinning of intelligent interference, and as such was motivated by love. This is, of course, true to this day. However much there may be good cause to fear certain researches, which are possible because of the discovery of the structure of DNA, there is no

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doubt that many who advocate the pursuit of such researches are doing so, not because of pure curiosity, but also because they think that such researches will lead to the overcoming of certain chances which have up to now plagued human existence.25 The same is clearly true of many who pursue the researches which are at the heart of modern psychology.26 The consequent sufferings of the dogs or rats or pigeons are justified by what may result to limit human suffering. Within a utilitarian calculus, experiment on human beings may be justified in terms of the greatest good of the greatest number. But it is clear that the love involved in the modern project here is not given to or received from the objects of the research, but to other beings who will be the recipients of the goods which result. To go further: it is also clear that many people who have given their lives to the pursuit of the modern project have been held by the beauty of what they were studying and discovering. Beauty is the cause of love, and therefore one can say that their intellects were illuminated by love of what they studied. Can one read Heisenberg’s books about his studies without becoming aware of that?27 There is a dear account of Charles Darwin by a friend who walked with him in the country. ‘Nothing escaped him. No object in nature, whether Flower, or Bird, or Insect of any kind, could avoid his loving recognition.’28 But the very dearness of the description must not prevent us from seeing its ambiguity, which lies in the use of the words ‘objects’ and ‘loving recognition’ in the same sentence. Darwin’s loving recognition of the flowers, birds, insects, means that he was receiving them as more than objects. However, Darwin’s most general scientific truths concerning animals are statements about them as objects, and are true whether or not animals are greeted or not greeted with loving recognition. Indeed it is clear that the modern project of reason as projected towards objects summoned before us to answer our questions is not an activity which depends on the love of the objects studied. Objects can be summoned before us without love for the things summoned.29 This is true, whether the object summoned is a tree, a beast, a human being, a society or the past; that is, whether our researches fall under the natural sciences, the social sciences or the humanities.30 Therefore as this paradigm of knowledge becomes increasingly all pervasive, faith as the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love, must have less and less significance in the central work of the multiversity. Indeed, what has happened in modern society as a whole is that knowledge qua

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knowledge is detached from love qua love. In this context it is impossible to avoid mentioning the ‘fact-value’ distinction. Facts are now identified with objects and are abstracted from things in their wholeness. The rest is labelled ‘values’ and is tucked away as part of one’s own subjectivity. Values are detached from ‘objective’ being. But justice and beauty are not values which we subjectively ‘create.’ Nor are stones, plants, animals and human beings simply objects. They only become objects when they are placed in a certain relation to us – that of being at our disposal. This is luckily not the place to discuss the disunity between love and intelligence, as it affects the destiny of Western civilization as a whole. It must be remembered also, that those who partake in the truth of the Vedanta have not dissimilar problems in relating to that paradigm as those who would partake in the truth of Christianity.31 My task is confined to Christians in the North American multiversity. For many generations youngsters have been coming into the universities which were fast becoming multiversities, and those who came from one or other established religious traditions have faced the complexities of that relation. There was no escape from the multiversities, for those institutions were made to serve the social purpose of imposing the standards of professionalism and professionalism is the very fabric of our American society. (Fabric in the sense that there is no successful life outside its borders. Successful in the sense that what is deemed successful by the dominating classes is just that professionalism.) If I were going to describe that past history as comedy one could start from that description of the personnel of the YMCA: ‘People went into it to do good and then used it to make good.’32 The problem of working through the relation between faith and modern knowledge at an earlier time was easier, because the established Protestant Churches were still socially powerful, and the institutions of higher learning had not yet been thoroughly integrated into the new paradigm of knowledge.33 But it seems to me more useful to forego history and to talk about today. It is always easier to be more certain about the past because we have had time to contemplate it, while the present is difficult to fathom, particularly in a quick changing technological society like ours, in which the unchanging is hard to apprehend. The difference between my generation and the young people today is that the latter come to institutions of higher learning from schools which are already integrated into the modern paradigm of knowledge. They

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have been taught at school by people who have themselves been taught within that paradigm. The teachers may not have been taught well within that paradigm, but they have been taught within it. Those youngsters who wish to go on with higher education come to the multiversity not to learn some new paradigm, but to become professionals within the same. Most of such students have practically no relation to any religious tradition, and the relation of the intelligence to love is not a question which will ever arise for them, except perhaps at some half conscious level of remembrance. If they are clever and ambitious, most of them will become professionals in the outside world, and some within the multiversity itself. These days of course the possibility of that professionalism presents problems for many, because of the diminished North American position in the world. This is particularly pressing in Canada since, because of our strange relation to the North American economy, we are integrated to it as very, very, very junior partners. There is a minority of students who have passed through school with a continuing relation to some religious tradition. The members of this minority vary very greatly according to what tradition they come from, and its degree of religious and/or theological vigour. From those who come from a tradition of some religious vigour, (often Catholicism or some form of fundamentalism), the relation between faith and the technological paradigm may continue to be an issue of intensity. The question is more often to be practical, rather than theoretical. For example, one of the great agonies which is going on today is among those young people who want to be gynaecologists; and who cannot be admitted for such training unless they are willing to take part in the full work of their teachers. As the full work requires that they take part in a steady programme of foetuscide, they are not in a position to gain admission to the training which they desire. That agony and exclusion is not much publicized by the medical profession. As is to be expected in such a situation, many give way to the demands of professionalism. (A distinguished neuro-surgeon has alerted me to this situation.)34 There have been, there are, and there will be attempts within the fabric of the multiversity to live in ways of learning that are outside this paradigm of knowledge. These appear particularly in those areas we call the humanities and the social sciences, because in studies which deal with the human things the project of objectivity most obviously shows its limitations. Some of these minority voices in the multiversity, which stand outside the dominating stream, have their roots in the con-

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tinuance of the truths of religion, others come forth from the radical tradition in politics. But it is clear that these minority voices will not turn the multiversities from their determined end. Civilizations are destinies, and the destiny of Western civilization, as far as learning is concerned, is the project of researched objectivity. The possibilities of living outside it within the multiversity are limited. If I may be allowed an example of those limitations from my own life, I will speak of the attempt to build a department of religion within a secular multiversity.35 The original intuition from which that attempt came was the recognition that the theological colleges had been forced out of the mainstream of the multiversity by their secularized colleagues, and by the secular governments. There was therefore need for an institutional framework in which people could think carefully and freely about religious questions which are part of the Western tradition, and could think about these questions not simply in a Western context, but with all the stimulus which could be thrown into them from the truths that had been received and thought about in other great civilizations. As these truths are not by definition objective, nor for that matter subjective (the opposite side of the modern coin), the hope was to make a situation in which the study would be made neither a matter of technical skill nor an exploration of personal eccentricity. The attempt to do that has been beset by one overwhelming failure. It is caused by the fact that the spirit of the multiversity is just too strong to allow the study of religion to transcend the modern project of reason as producing objective knowledge. Our modern institutions have their carefully worked out reward systems for professors and students; they also have their particular prestige granting systems. The reward system is geared towards the production of objective scholarship; the prestige system is geared to the international market, and international in Canadian terms means chiefly the big American multiversities. There is no alternative for any department but to live within these reward and prestige systems. The result is that the study of religion increasingly tends to become objectified into antiquarianism. The religions become like flies caught in amber, worthy objects for libraries and museums, but not living realities in a living culture. At a time when knowledge is not known as related to love, and when the official churches seem complicit in the civilization that has brought about the disunity, it is bound to happen that many young people seek that unification in new forms outside formal education. The

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desire that there be something eternal which is lovable belongs too deeply to human beings for it to be put aside, just because it has been put aside in the multiversity. People seek the fulfilment of that desire outside the established forms. This can be seen in the strength of Christian pietism and fundamentalism in North America, and in the strength of new religious organizations, some of which have their origins in Asia. The response of the multiversity to these happenings is the following. At the level of study they will be objectified under the sociology of religion; in general they will be ridiculed as outside the stream of established Western rationality. I will not speak here of the more brutal public response of de-programming.36 I think those of us who are Christians should be very suspicious of this hostility by the established bastions of Western rationality to the new forms of religion or the revival of old forms. The recognition that the intelligence is illuminated by love is the recognition (however dim) that there is a lovable eternal. And in the light of that recognition by ourselves, we should turn with the greatest sympathy to young people, who finding that the official organizations have become oblivious of eternity, seek to partake in that eternity in ways that are unexpected to us. Let me put the matter in a cold light. I often find myself rather alien intellectually when I meet members of some of the new religions or some fundamentalist Christians. But then when I talk to them about such matters as mass foetuscide for convenience, I find myself at home in a way which is rarely the case concerning such matters with most of my colleagues in the multiversity, or as far as that goes with members of the larger official Protestant bodies. Not to be close concerning questions as to the way faith is formulated is a small thing compared to the absence of faith itself. To repeat: when the eternal is concerned, matter is our infallible judge. Finally – in saying a strong word of praise for those who try to live faith outside the paradigm of the multiversity, I do not want in any way to downgrade the intellect. What has been learnt through our paradigm of knowledge – in its mathematics, its physics, its biology, its anthropology, etc. – is a great achievement of the intellect. It is always the job of the intellect to teach us of the order of necessity, and the details of that order given us in modern science are amazing to contemplate. To speak of faith as the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love is in no way to imply that love could try to bypass the full knowledge of the order of necessity reached by intelligence. The reason why love

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knows that such a bypassing is futile is of course that only the intelligence, by the exercise of the means that are proper to it, can recognize its own dependence on love for the highest knowledge. Indeed it may be the case that the enormous web of necessity given in the discoveries of modern science will be just the cause of some human beings rediscovering what was given in the word ‘love.’ Both the divine love and our consent to it has under any conditions to cross that order of necessity which separates them from each other. Is not the crucifixion the crossing of that implacable distance? I do not much like to criticize Christianity in public these days when every Tom, Dick and Harry makes cracks at it. Nevertheless it seems true that Western Christianity – both in its Protestant and Catholic forms – became, as it established civilization in the West, a religion which simplified the divine love by identifying it with power, in a way which failed to recognize the distance between the order of good and the order of necessity. Western Christianity became exclusivist and imperialist, arrogant and dynamic by the loss of this recognition. It is now facing the public results of that failure. Perhaps, the scientists, by placing before us the seemingly seamless web of necessity which itself excludes the lovable, will help to reteach us the truth that the orders of good and necessity are different. One of Nietzsche’s superb accounts of the modern world was that Christianity had produced its own gravediggers.37 It was out of the seedbed of Western Christianity that modern scientists had come, and the discoveries of science showed that God is dead. In that sense Christianity had produced its own gravediggers. Perhaps we may say that that formulation gets close to the truth of history, but is nevertheless not true. The web of necessity which the modern paradigm of knowledge lays before us does not show us that God is dead, but rather reminds us of what Western Christianity seemed to forget in its moment of pride: that necessity through which love must cross. Christianity did not produce its own gravediggers, but the means to its own purification. Notes 1 The Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, 25–7 November 1977. 2 ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ The Compass: A Provincial Review, no. 4 (Autumn 1978): 3–14; ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ in The Search for Absolute

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Faith and the Multiversity (Compass) Values in a Changing World, vol. 1: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (New York: International Cultural Foundation Press 1978), 183–93. Hereafter cited as Search. The volume also includes commentaries on Grant’s lecture by Jean-Guy LeMarier of St Paul University, Ottawa, and Herbert Richardson of the University of Toronto. The Compass was published three times a year 1977–80. See C.Q. Drummond, In Defence of Adam: Essays on Bunyan, Milton and Others, ed. John Baxter and Gordon Harvey (Harleston, Eng.: Edgeways Books 2004), ‘Editors’ Preface,’ vii. Hereafter cited as In Defence of Adam. Christopher Q. Drummond (1932–2001), American-born Canadian literary critic (naturalized 1981), received his PhD from the University of Iowa. He joined the Department of English at the University of Alberta in 1969, remaining there until his death. According to Baxter and Harvey, his erudition and rigorous standards were an inspiration to generations of students. ‘Editorial,’ The Compass, no. 1 (1977), 1. John Baxter and Gordon Harvey have written that Grant was one of the intellectual inspirations for the founding of The Compass. See In Defence of Adam, ‘Editors’ Preface,’ vii; see also John Baxter to George Grant (copy), 15 February 1977, where Baxter outlines to Grant which of his writings have led the editors to think of him as ‘an ally in the attempt to establish an evaluative critical review.’ John Baxter (1945– ), Canadian literary critic, professor of English, Dalhousie University, completed his PhD at the University of Alberta. He joined the Department of English at Dalhousie University in 1980, a move that brought to an end the publication of The Compass. We are grateful to Dr Baxter for providing us with photocopies of his correspondence with Grant. George Grant to John Baxter (copy), 22 April 1977. John Baxter to George Grant (copy), 28 February 1978. George Grant to John Baxter (copy), 4 April 1978. John Baxter to George Grant (copy), 5 April 1978. Richard L. Rubenstein, ed., Modernization: The Humanist Response to Its Promise and Problems (Washington: Paragon House 1982), 107–27. Hereafter cited as Modernization. From this point the essay as published follows the lecture ‘Christianity and the Modern Multiversity.’ The previous sentences replace the opening paragraphs of the lecture: ‘It is an honour to be asked to take part in a series sponsored by Trinity [College] and the Church of St Thomas. Honour is higher than pleasure, but it is not so delightful. Therefore let me add that it is also a pleasure to be involved in something connected with Provost and Mrs Ignatieff [George Ignatieff and Grant’s sister Alison Grant Ignatieff], who are so part of the fabric of life itself for me.

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“Christianity and the modern multiversity” is a subject which could be tackled from many angles. Therefore I start by stating some of the angles from which I do not intend to approach it. For example, there is the question of how institutions such as Trinity and St Michael’s [both colleges of the University of Toronto] play their proper role within a secular multiversity. I live in a multiversity which does not have the good fortune to have such institutions connected with it and therefore I do not have the knowledge from which to speak cogently about this subject. Or one might look at the every day pressures on people, young and old, who try to live as Christians in the modern multiversity; for example, problems such as the permissibility of certain researches. But I do not see myself as adequate to the wonderful task of being a spiritual director. Or again, at a more complex level, it would be interesting to ask what is the proper relation of people who would like to be Christians to the churches who carry that tradition. I am tempted to talk about that question when I remember that in the light of the present mass foetuscide in Canada the bishops of my own church [the Anglican Church of Canada] could not provide a quorum to discuss the matter at their synod this past summer. But such a discussion would take one away from the multiversity to the details of ecclesiastical life. Rather what seems to me the essence of the question of Christianity and the modern multiversity is the relation between faith and modern science. That is what I am going to discuss.’ George Ignatieff (1913–89), Canadian diplomat, was the youngest son of Count Paul Ignatieff (1870–1945), last minister of education (1915–17) in the government of Czar Nicholas II. Exiled by the Russian Revolution, Ignatieff and his family lived in England before immigrating to Canada in 1928. Ignatieff was educated at the University of Toronto and Oxford. He joined the Department of External Affairs in 1940, subsequently holding many important diplomatic posts, including that of Canadian ambassador to the United Nations (1966–9). He was Provost of Trinity College, University of Toronto 1972–9 and Chancellor, University of Toronto, 1980–6. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada 1973 and awarded the Pearson Peace Medal 1984 for his work in international relations. In 1945 Ignatieff married Alison Grant (1916–92), sister of George Grant. See George Ignatieff (with Sonja Sinclair), The Making of a Peacemonger: The Memoirs of George Ignatieff (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1985). 12 Simone Weil, Notebooks, trans. Arthur Wills, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1956), 1: 240. 13 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 364. 14 See Georges Simenon, Maigret’s Mistake (Maigret se trompe, originally published 1953), trans. Alex Hodge (New York: Harvest Books 1988).

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15 Republic, vi, 507–20. 16 See, for example, Luther’s ‘Commentary on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians,’ in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 110: ‘Believe in Christ Jesus crucified for thy sins ... This is the beginning of health and salvation. By this means we are delivered from sin, justified and made inheritors of everlasting life; not for our own works and deserts, but for our faith, whereby we lay hold upon Christ. ’For an illuminating discussion of Luther’s theology of the cross, see Harris Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001), 33–48. 17 For St Francis of Assisi, see 685n125. Perhaps Grant had in mind the ‘Letter to St. Anthony,’ (1219) of disputed authenticity, written by St Francis to one of his most famous disciples, St Anthony of Padua (1195–1231, canonized 1232), when St Anthony asked his permission to instruct students in theology at the friars’ school at the University of Bologna: ‘It is agreeable to me that you should teach the friars sacred theology, so long as they do not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotedness over this study, as is contained in the Rule’ (trans. Benen Fahy, OFM). See Marion A. Habig, ed., St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press 1983), 164. 18 Cf. Search, 186, where ‘summonsing’ is used instead of ‘summoning.’ Cf. Modernization, 110, where ‘summoning’ is replaced by the neologism ‘summonizing.’ Grant obviously intended ‘summonsing,’ which he used in Search, passim, and had originally used in The Compass version. He changed his mind after submitting his manuscript to the editors of The Compass: ‘After much thought I have decided to use the word “summoning”’ (George Grant to John Baxter, copy, 24 May 1978). Grant uses ‘summonsing’ in the version published in Technology and Justice. See below, 608. 19 Forschung: ‘Investigation, inquiry, research’ (Cassell’s Compact German Dictionary). 20 Cf. Search. 186, and Modernization, 111: ‘... to summons different things ...’ 21 Cf. Search, 186, and Modernization, 111: ‘... to summons the Bible ...’ 22 Cf. Search, 187, and Modernization, 111: ‘since they have been summonsed ...’ 23 Cf. Modernization,, 111: ‘The necessities that we can know ...’ 24 Cf. Search, 187, and Modernization, 111: ‘... when the past is summonsed ...’ 25 The structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick (1916–2004), English molecular biologist, and James Dewey Watson (1928– ), American geneticist, working at the Cavendish laboratory, Cambridge, England. Crick and Watson (and Maurice Wilkins) received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 for their work on DNA. See James D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of DNA (New York: Athenaeum 1968).

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26 Cf. Modernization, 112, where this and the previous sentence are altered and united: ‘... but also because they think that such researches will lead to the overcoming of certain chances which have up to now plagued the researches which are at the heart of modern psychology.’ 27 For Werner Heisenberg, see 260n15. 28 From a letter by Dr Edward Lane, Darwin’s physician, read at a Royal Society meeting in 1882. 29 Cf. Search, 188, and Modernization, 113, where ‘summoned’ in this and the previous sentence is replaced by ‘summonsed.’ 30 Cf. Search, 188, and Modernization, 113: ‘This is true , whether the object is a tree ...’ 31 Vedanta is a principal branch of Indian philosophy, the anta or essence of the Vedas, the corpus of ancient Indo-Aryan religious literature sacred to Hindus. See below 676n27. 32 Unidentified quotation. The following was included here in ‘Christianity and the Modern Multiversity’: ‘As Canadian examples of how these complexities were worked out, one might take the careers of such men as Sidney Smith of this university, and Dr. Murray Ross of York University. At a more serious level, one might take, as exemplars, two of our best thinkers who transcended scholarship, Harold Innis and Charles Cochrane.’ Sidney Earle Smith (1897–1959), Canadian lawyer, professor of law, university administrator and politician, served as president of the University of Toronto 1945–57. He resigned to become minister of external affairs in the government of John G. Diefenbaker, holding this portfolio until his premature death (1957–9). For Ross, see Collected Works, vol. 3, 3–8. Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952), economic historian, political economist, and pioneer in communication studies, established with his early writings the ‘staples thesis’ as an approach to understanding Canadian political economy in such books as The Fur Trade in Canada (1927) and The Cod Fisheries (1940). See Alexander John Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006), 47–60, which discusses the connection between religion and self-improvement in Innis’s early life. Charles Norris Cochrane (1889–1945), professor of Greek and Roman history, University College, University of Toronto. 33 Cf. ‘Christianity and the Modern Multiversity’: ‘Biographies of such men would be illustrative of how Canadians worked through the relation between faith and modern knowledge at an earlier time, when the Christian Churches were still socially powerful, and the institutions of higher learning had not yet been thoroughly integrated into the new paradigm of knowledge.’

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34 Unidentified source. 35 See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 633–67. 36 Grant is here referring to the activities of ‘de-programmers,’ who attempt to persuade or force individuals to abandon allegiance to religious groups. ‘De-programming’ is justified on the ground that those ‘treated’ by deprogrammers have been ‘brainwashed’ by the ‘cults’ they have joined. The practice has led to controversies over both freedom of religion and civil rights. 37 See above, 39.

Diefenbaker: A Democrat in Theory and in Soul

This article appeared in the Globe and Mail, 23 August 1979: 7.

Why did so many Canadians love John Diefenbaker? Watching his funeral on television, I had to ask myself why I should feel such affection for him, such a sense of debt for what he represented. The trust of his countrymen had enabled him to break the long smooth reign of the Liberals from 1935–57, and had been the basis of the enormous electoral victory of 1958. But this love was even more marked in the elections of 1963 and 1965. In those elections he had the full weight of the powerful classes against him (including its members in his own party) and was still able almost single-handedly to prevent the Liberals from forming majority governments. This was probably his most remarkable political achievement, and certainly a mark of the affection he could summon forth. This affection was not something shared by the clever or the rich or the slick of our society. When he was in power they feared him because he might take Canada off the smooth course they had charted since 1935; when he was out of office they despised him as a silly survivor from a well-forgotten past who did not know the score. A young scion of great wealth in English-speaking Montreal said in 1965: ‘Oh George, how can you support such a vulgarian? Pearson is such a gentleman compared to that yahoo.’1 The remark illustrated what the definition of gentleman had become in our society. Of course, there was something in what the rich and the clever said about Diefenbaker. His rhetoric was indeed antediluvian; his egocentricity often seemed to transcend his principles. He often sounded the note of messianism without content. Above all his appalling choice of

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French colleagues suggested that he did not know the first principle of Canadian politics: no party can properly rule in Canada for long without solid support in Quebec. Why then did he continue to summon up such affection from so many Canadians? The first fact of Diefenbaker’s greatness was that he reached that part of our population which feels excluded from politics. There are about 25 per cent of our population who think of politics as something carried on by ‘them’ for ‘their’ benefit. (Perhaps in a technological era this percentage will grow, particularly among the dispossessed young.) In some mysterious fashion Diefenbaker reached those excluded and inarticulate people and persuaded them that he was on their side. What was surprising to political analysts was that he did this as leader of the Conservatives when socialists were not able to achieve that identification. He did this despite the formality of his dress and manners in public. He still wore Homburg hats and elegantly formal suits. I suppose he did it finally because he really did care for all kinds of people in their authentic individuality. The excluded and the inarticulate recognized this, and responded. He was indeed an honest politician; he was a democrat not only in theory but in his soul. Diefenbaker’s principles were grounded in primary loyalties, and loyalty is the great virtue for political leaders. That it is a virtue is often denied in modern political thinking. Intellectuals are apt to believe that leaders should have well thought out ‘philosophies,’ which have arisen by putting all primary loyalties in question. But this is nonsense for the following reason. The virtues necessary for the political life are not altogether the same as those necessary for contemplative life. The latter requires that one be open to everything, and this includes putting everything in question. In the practical life one is continually faced with making moral decisions, and in doing so one must not put one’s fundamental principles in question, because that only leads to callous opportunism. Diefenbaker’s strength was that his fundamental principles were loyalties which he did not put in question. He did not debate his beliefs in freedom within the law, patriotism, social egalitarianism. He just lived them out as best he could. People therefore knew where they stood with him and loved him for it. In the fast changing world of calculation ‘loyalty’ is often considered outdated and useless for administration. It is therefore becoming a rare

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virtue in our society. But people were wise to recognize it in Diefenbaker and knew they could rely on him. Diefenbaker’s loyalties came straight out of our particular Canadian tradition. Take his populism as an example. It has been said that Diefenbaker was simply a Canadian William Jennings Bryan with his appeal to ‘the people’ against the big interests in the east.2 But that misses the distinctly Canadian flavour of Dief’s populism. It misses the fact that he combined his populism with the British tradition of the primacy and nobility of law. In the opening of the West, individuals went first in the United States and made their own law; in Canada the federal Government went before the immigrants, and the immigrants inherited a tradition of law. Diefenbaker was part of our tradition. He advocated populism, he believed in the rights of individuals, but always within the primacy of law. This was why he gave such strong loyalty to the Crown and to Parliament. Like Macdonald he did not see our democracy as a pale imitator of the American, but as something richer, because it understood better the dependence of freedom upon law.3 Diefenbaker’s nationalism was not ideological; he just took it for granted. It was something given – just as parents are given, both for good and for ill. Because it was not something he constructed as he went along, it had real bite. After all, the nuclear arms crisis of 1963 was the first time since 1935 that a Canadian government really offended the government of the United States, so that it directly entered Canadian politics. (The next time could be if a Canadian government were to find itself forced over energy.) But Diefenbaker was speaking honestly when he said: ‘I am proCanadian, not anti-American.’ He was much too aware of what a dangerous and complex world it is to be ideologically anti-American. He was much too rooted in everyday life, in Prince Albert and Ottawa, not to belong to the continent we share with the Americans. He just assumed that Canada is our own, and the United States is not. He assumed that if we have any pride in our own we must be in some sense sovereign. When John F. Kennedy told Diefenbaker in Ottawa that Canada could not sell wheat to China – and he meant ‘could not’ quite literally – Diefenbaker replied: ‘You aren’t in Massachusetts now Mr President.’4 He was expressing that Canadians must take for granted their

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sovereignty or else have no pride. This was of course a much less worldly-wise assumption than Pearson’s recognition that we are finally part of the American empire. Nevertheless it is a necessary basis if we mean anything more than rhetoric about Canada being our country. Because Diefenbaker’s nationalism was a given loyalty, it often showed inadequacies when he tried to express it in office. He was not able to formulate feasible policies necessary to that nationalism in a technological era. But to be fair to him, who since his day has been able to formulate such feasible policies? Even the wisest patriot of this era, de Gaulle, was not able to prevent France being integrated into the homogenized modern culture.5 The great criticism of Diefenbaker was always that he was ‘out of date.’ In his last years when he had become a respected elder statesman, no longer to be feared, this criticism became a kind of patronizing of him as a fine old dear who was really irrelevant. I always found it unpleasant that Trudeau used to patronize him from this superior standpoint.6 But what does ‘out of date’ mean? It is the language of those who think that our humanity can be made totally intelligible in terms of such concepts as ‘progress,’ ‘history,’ ‘evolution.’ What such words generally come down to in practice is that anything that is technologically and administratively necessary is also good. This expresses that oblivion of eternity which now defines the West. But Diefenbaker’s loyalties were not defined within such a context of calculation. Indeed it is not surprising that his greatest political humiliation should have been arranged by a public relations executive – the very type of job which incarnates the absoluteness of calculation.7 This is why Diefenbaker was so loved by many of my generation – particularly by those of us less clever and less successful. Despite all his bombast, all his egocentricity, all the wild failures of his judgment, one sensed in him a hold on certain principles which cannot be ‘out of date’ because their truth does not depend upon dates. Despite his almost juvenile engrossment in the day to day excitement of the political scene, one sensed some deep hold on certain good things that do not change. About such good things there has to be calculation, but their essence is beyond all bargaining. It is to be hoped that the political scene will continue to allow such men to be produced. The cadence of Milton’s poetry is not the greatest in the English lan-

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guage, but it is very great. It can catch the rhetoric, the tensions and the nobilities of the battling Baptist lawyer from the prairies. Among innumerable false, unmoved. Unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.8 Not everybody is false in the modern world, but there are great pressures on all of us in that direction. At the political level Diefenbaker was always a lesson. Whatever else he may have been, he was not false.

Notes 1 For Lester Pearson, see 134n5. 2 William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), populist politician, ran unsuccessfully three times as the Democratic candidate for the US presidency (1896, 1900, 1908). 3 Sir John Alexander Macdonald (1815–91), lawyer, politician, and principal architect of Canadian Confederation in 1867, was Conservative prime minister of Canada 1867–73 and 1878–91. 4 See Grant’s account of Diefenbaker’s relationship with Kennedy in Lament for a Nation, in Collected Works, Vol. 3, 297–300. 5 For Charles de Gaulle, see 73n25. 6 For Pierre Trudeau, see 333n2. 7 Dalton Kingsley Camp (1920–2002), advertising executive, writer, and politician, was the Progressive Conservative Party’s national president (1964–9) who helped to organize the removal of Diefenbaker as the party’s leader. Camp achieved prominence in advertising and later as an author and columnist. See Geoffrey Stevens, The Player (Toronto: Key Porter 2003). 8 Paradise Lost, book V, 898–9.

Inconsistency Ruled in Canada’s 70s

This article appeared in the Globe and Mail, 31 December 1979.

Canada tottered through the 1970s with the same political problems that have occupied us from our beginnings. When René Lévesque won a large electoral victory, the fact that we are two cultures (call it, if you will, nations) within one state was at last forced even into the bland consciousness of English-speaking Canadians.1 The divisions of economic interest between the various regions of the country, which had always been recognized by people out West and in the Maritimes, were made unavoidably clear to the people of Ontario by the need for oil. The third and fundamental of our contradictions, as to whether a nation is at all possible when we share the continent with the giant heartland of the American empire, was often glossed over by our leaders during most of the seventies, but towards the end of the decade began once again to be pressing. This pressure took shape from the fact that the United States was becoming a much weaker empire with its defeats in Vietnam and Iran.2 Would it then put more pressure on us over such questions as energy and water? Would we be in any position to deal with such pressure? These themes of our political life have never been separate from each other. In their intertwining they modify each other. In the 1970s many English-speaking Canadians said (generally in private) that if their French compatriots were going to be difficult about their interests, should we not just join the United States? And this theme was not new. In 1849 the wealthy English-speaking Montrealers had signed the Annexation Manifesto urging that we join the United States when the French majority had been granted political control.3 The same question

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is still with us. As English-speaking Canadians we have to ask ourselves whether we still want to live with French Canada, despite all its growing political demands from Lévesque or Ryan,4 or do we really prefer to join up with our American neighbours who have all been ‘willing to talk white.’ One thing is perfectly clear, the relation between English- and French-speaking Canadians is intimately related to our relations to the United States. These old themes of our politics took new forms in the 1970s, largely because of the staggering development of scientific technology. In the 1970s, the desire to conquer human and nonhuman nature was on an exponential curve. This desire has always been at one with the political idea that human beings all over the world would gradually be made the same, and thus all be able to be members of one universal and homogeneous state. For example, in the communications area, satellites and new little gadgets developed in Japan will give every household the choice of hooking into TV channels from all over the world. Apart from the intellectual indigestion which that will produce in all of us, it also raises the question of whether some space will be reserved in the midst of this cosmopolitan hodge-podge for anything uniquely Canadian. It was this kind of problem that made many French-speaking technocrats so strongly nationalistic in the seventies. In the face of this new technology, how could Quebec culture exist if they did not take their political fate into their own hands, if they did not control cable and satellite communication? Similarly, as the technocrats of life and death in the medical profession organized mass foetuscide, and we decided to replace our population by importing cheap labour from abroad, French bureaucrats saw the need to control immigration policy. Quebec people were killing off nearly as many of their children as we were in Ontario and Alberta and therefore there was a need to replace them in Quebec with Frenchspeaking immigration. During the seventies, federal politics which had to deal with these matters were dominated by the figure of Trudeau. (Surprisingly, as this is being written, it has become possible that we may have another period with the chap in the 1980s.)5 For Canadians, Trudeau was above all the attempt to have something of the Kennedy style right here at home. The child of new wealth seemed to old and young in the suburbs the symbol that our society could be beautiful. He was modern North

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America at its smartest and (to use a word long since dead) most swinging. But within the patina of jet-set wealth, Trudeau had one principle which gave unity to his political career. He firmly believed in bringing the French-Canadian people fully into the mainstream of North American life. This desire to homogenize made him truly a modern liberal. He had no sympathy for the powerful desire of some sections of Québécois to continue to exist as a people. It was this faith which led him to the extremity of imposing the War Measures Act on the people of his own province.6 Trudeau’s consistent concentration on this principle meant that his government often seemed almost uninterested in the other two great themes of Canadian politics, regional interests and our independence vis-à-vis the United States. As far as the West was concerned, Trudeau acted as if its interests had no place in his scheme of things. With the St Lawrence Seaway the geo-political capital of Canada had moved from Montreal to Toronto; with the oil crisis that geo-political centre began to move from Toronto to the West. Trudeau often seemed unaware that power had passed from Montreal to Toronto; he seems to have been completely unaware of its incipient move westward. The result is that we move into the 1980s with all the political decisions required by that change largely unmade. No wonder that Westerners increasingly voted against him. He did not come to terms with their interests. It was not likely that the Trudeau administration would or could do much about the growing integration of Canada with the United States, either economically or culturally. This was a Liberal administration, and since 1935 that party had been the spearhead of continentalism in Canada. Nor indeed was there much push on the part of the electorate for nationalistic policies. Most of us were naturally contented with the prosperity engendered by the market and by the selling of our resources on the continental market. Indeed in all the three major parties during the seventies the nationalist wings became subsidiary. In any case, it was not to be expected that in an administration directed by Trudeau there would be much interest in the questions of national independence. All around the Western world a central division in political thought has been between those who made cosmopolitanism central, and those who concentrated on nationalism. As in all such divisions, there was much of good in both positions. Cosmopolitanism stood against the narrow-mindedness often associated with the

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parochial; nationalism understood that all human beings have the need for roots. But in terms of that division, there could be no doubt where Trudeau stood. As a convinced and believing modern liberal, he was a cosmopolitan of the clearest stamp. It is therefore not surprising that his administration was almost indifferent to policies which might have been undertaken to buttress what was left of our independence. Indeed, what made Trudeau attractive as a figure was the firmness of his cosmopolitanism. Behind the politician concerned with the manipulation of interests lay a true believer in modern liberalism. Insofar as there is any coherent ideology among literate Canadians, it is modern liberalism. And clearly there is much in that ideology which is attractive to any sane human being – tolerance of differences, insistence on the rights of the individual etc. etc. However, at its core is cosmopolitanism, and that is not a belief that can do much for Canadian identity. Since 1918 cosmopolitanism has come to mean in the Western world Americanism. Canadians more than any other people lived intimately with that modern cosmopolitanism. We therefore had to transcend that principle if we were going to continue to exist. But this was very difficult to do. As the great master of spy fiction, John Le Carré, has said, educated Canadian are the last people in the Western world who still believe that liberalism is the truth about humanity.7 It was above all this which made many Canadians think they had found a leader in Trudeau worth something more than the average politician. His articulate rhetoric appealed in its sincerity to other true believers of the same ideology. His platitude ‘The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation’ seemed to many a remark of true liberation.8 The failure of the Trudeau administration to be interested in our independence had its effects on what did interest Trudeau – the relations between English- and French-speaking Canadians. Trudeau’s appeal to French Canada was essentially an appeal of cosmopolitanism. He asked them to put aside their separateness and turn out to the wider world of Canada as a whole. Yet within his own stance, why should that wider world stop at Canadianism? Was he not really asking the French elite to take part in the much larger sea of English-speaking North America? Many French-Canadian leaders had believed in federalism, just because they saw it as an opportunity of preserving French culture. This was considered a possibility because the smaller political context of a federal Canada stood between them and the immense sea

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of North America as a whole. The lack of interest of Ottawa in the 1970s in preserving Canadian nationalism convinced many French-speaking leaders that a federal Canada was not a sufficient bulwark for the survival of French culture. In this sense Trudeau’s cosmopolitanism vis-àvis the United States was closely related to his failure to make an effective appeal to the French elites to be federalists. Never was a political prediction shown so quickly to be absurd as his statement ‘separatism is dead’ – made just a couple of years before the Parti Québécois gained a large majority at the polls. The dominant pattern of most of our lives is determined by our desire to have it both ways. We are all liable to seek at the same moment objectives that are contradictory. Some of us want to become wealthy and yet to do our own thing. Others want to seek the widest reaches of sexual experience and have a unified family life at the same time. Students want to become great writers and yet cannot be bothered with work. Parents want their children to be happy and also want them to be obedient. Those of us who are religious want to be good Christians and yet not to take His yoke upon us. And wanting it both ways applies perhaps even more in public matters than in private. The 1970s seem above all a time when Canadians wanted it both ways politically. Not only did we have this perennial human desire, but we had it with a charming and articulate man as our political symbol. We could make affirmations of Canadian unity without coming to terms with the very serious questions asked by French Canadians. We could greatly increase our nation’s expenditures and not calculate that the consequent deficits would have anything to do with inflation. We in Ontario could count on Western oil to keep us driving and not think that Albertans might be worried about what would happen when their oil was gone. We could build massive educational establishments which were proudly proclaimed Canadian, and never ask what it meant that they were so largely staffed by Americans. We could acclaim the proclamation of the War Measures Act and think that it was really helping national unity. Indeed wanting it both ways is not so bad because it seems a necessity of the human condition. Life is too hard to try to be consistent. The seventies were prosperous and why should we ask for a political administration which dealt with the underlying questions of our nation’s life? Consistency is not a virtue which pays off among politicians, as Robert Stanfield discovered in the 1974 election.9

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Nevertheless it looks as if the 1980s will be a less bland time in Canadian life than the 1970s. A decade which opens with declining prosperity, growing inflation and growing unemployment is not likely to be a time of political ease. Whatever the results of the referendum in Quebec, French-English speaking relations in Canada will require almost superhuman moderation on both sides. Whatever the long-term fate of a gasoline-driven civilization, the immediate relations between the West and Ontario will require the same kind of moderation. What will it be like to live with any independence next to the United States at a time when American power is in decline? Only fools predict the future, particularly as the complex technological civilization totters to its apogee.

Notes 1 For René Lévesque, see 117n11. 2 The US pulled out of Vietnam completely in 1975. The Iran affair came about as a result of a nationalist and Islamic revolution that deposed the USbacked Shah of Iran (1979). A series of clashes between the Islamic government under Ayatollah Khomeini and the US culminated in the seizure of the American Embassy in Teheran (November 1979). 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days. The long hostage crisis contributed to President Carter’s defeat in the 1980 presidential election. 3 The Annexation Manifesto (1849) was produced by a group of Montreal business leaders in response to the repeal of laws such as the Navigation Acts that provided imperial protection for Canadian goods and commerce. The Manifesto declared that in the absence of imperial protection Canada must join the United States. 4 For Claude Ryan, see 173n7. 5 For Pierre Trudeau, see 116n2. 6 See 116n9. 7 John le Carré (1931– ) (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell), English writer known for spy novels such as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), and Smiley’s People (1979). He told a Globe and Mail reporter in January 2004 that he has a soft spot for Canada. ‘You have a temperament which I greatly enjoy, and it’s not just about differentiating yourselves from the United States.’ 8 See 116n5. 9 Robert Lorne Stanfield (1914-2003), lawyer, politician, and premier of Nova Scotia (1956-67), became leader of the federal Progressive Conservative Party but lost in three successive elections and gave up the leadership in

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1976. A photograph of him dropping a football in May 1974 appeared on the front page of papers across the country, becoming a ‘defining image’ that may have helped him lose the election of that year to the athletic Trudeau.

Convocation Address, University of Toronto

Grant received an honorary degree from the University of Toronto in 1979. He accepted another from the University of Guelph a year later and talked again on the same subject, Canada and Quebec.

Mr Chancellor, Mr President, fellow graduands, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for this honour. Love demands that I begin by paying tribute to a great member of the University of Toronto whom many of you did not know because he died in his tenth decade this year. Burgon Bickersteth was Warden of Hart House in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.1 He was one of the many people who made this a great university. He lived the necessary union of love and knowledge – what is expressed in the phrase, ‘then shall I know, even as also I am known.’2 I do not mean by love anything at all to do with sentimentality – but simply the recognition that others are, in the fullness of what they are. This recognition is less widespread among human beings than most of us like to admit and the dependence upon love for knowledge concerning the most important matters has been greatly dimmed in technological society. A university in which it is absent becomes a multiversity. Because Bickersteth lived this union of love and knowledge, he was one of those who ought to be praised in the annals of this university. It seems an appropriate occasion to speak for a very few moments of the crisis in relations between the French-speaking and English-speaking cultures in this beloved country. Living in south-western Ontario I have met two rather opposite tendencies both of which have surprised me. On the one hand, there seems to be a large degree of good will toward the French, often from people one would not altogether [have]

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expected it from. On the other hand, there seems to be a widespread lack of understanding as to why many serious people in Quebec have come to doubt that their purposes are served by our present arrangements. So often people say: why are the French making all this fuss? Isn’t this a great country – one of the most fortunate in our unfortunate world? Why do these people want to break it up? And the next logical step from this is to see our difficulties as a product of a lot of bloodyminded fanatics who have been working on the masses in Quebec. This is what one reads in the column from Quebec by [William] Johnson in the Globe and Mail – day by day English-speaking Canadians are told in that column that the present government of Quebec is made up of sinister, but clever, fanatics.3 The failure of that account of the matter is that it does not come to terms with the central fact which the French inescapably have to face. That fact is how can a French society continue to survive on this continent in the face of the homogenizing power of the North American technological empire – particularly when this capitalist empire is English-speaking. The difficulty of that survival is as real and pressing for Mr Ryan as it is for Mr Lévesque.4 The difference between them is not any difference as to whether that is the French problem; their difference is about the correct constitutional response to that situation. English-speaking Canadians who do not recognize this fact which the French face, are not likely to be helpful in reaching the kind of settlement that will work for Canada. Moreover in not recognizing what the crisis is for the French they show that they are not sufficiently alive to the facts of their own destiny. For, is not the central affirmation of our English-speaking Canadian destiny that we have tried to build on the northern half of this continent a nation that was friendly to, but different from the US? In that sense we also seek ways of guaranteeing an authentic existence. That is, the principle which underlies our political existence is a very similar principle to that which underlies all serious Quebec politicians whether they be federalist or separatist. If we in Canada want to be a country we have to stand on some principle which preserves some communal individuality in the face of the persuasive power of American homogenization. We, therefore, are in a contradictory position if at one and the same time we want to be a country ourselves and yet are saying to the people of Quebec that they are foolish to be worried about being swallowed up in the American dream.

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This is what makes repugnant such actions as the moving of the head office of the Sun Life Insurance Co. out of Montreal.5 It must be remembered that the Sun Life was kept solvent during the depression of the 1930s by the direct action of the government of Canada. Yet when the country which had protected it, is itself in grave trouble, the company is quite unwilling to do anything for that country and takes an action harmful to that country. If enough Canadian corporations or individuals follow its example, it is clear that we will have no country at all. People used to say that a country had an economy; now it is becoming common to say that the country is its economy. But if Canada is nothing but an economy, then we would be better off being part of the US. But let us be clear that every step we take in that direction is stating that Mr Lévesque is right in what he is saying to the people of Quebec about us and that Mr Ryan is wrong in what he is saying. These kinds of consequences are going to be hard to remember just now when we are all suffering (particularly the young) from the fact that our economy is in bad shape because of the carelessness of the last years. In this situation, what will be required from most of us over the next years is above all the wonderful virtue of moderation. That is, moderation will be required if we want a country. I do not mean by moderation weakness or fuzzy-headedness. I mean by it exactly what Plato says it is in the Republic – restraint over the passions – in this case the political passion of anger (particularly self-righteous anger) and greed and arrogance. As an example of a political action of our situation that was not moderate I would cite the imposition of the War Measures Act in 1970 by the federal government. And the immoderation did not lie only in the government, but in the large majority of English-speaking Canadians who thought it was a splendid action – when in fact it was greatly responsible for the Parti Québécois coming to power. It is surely a great source of pride in the wisdom of the voters of Prince Edward Island – that the only MP who had the wisdom to vote against it – Mr David MacDonald of that province – is now Secretary of State in Ottawa.6 At a time when there is going to be a referendum in Quebec, other elections, crises of various kinds, it is impossible to specify the particular situations in which moderation will be required. The kind of thing I mean is not supporting any person who tries to make political capital by forcing a confrontation in negotiations with Quebec. Or another example: not falling for the politics of theatre and confrontation which

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it is always in the interests of certain sections of the mass media to foster. Moderation means tact in speech – saying certain things carefully and leaving other things unsaid. Last winter David Crombie of this city made the wise remark, ‘Let’s keep on talking with Quebec.’7 The media jumped on him for being wishy-washy and weak. But surely it is not weakness but strength when any community is in stress – from a family, to a university, to a business, to a country – to keep on talking; the alternative is disruption or war. The graduates of this great university who have the benefit of education, surely have an obligation to help moderation win out in our present difficulties. And moderation will be particularly required from the people of Ontario: this is so because the changes in structure which are coming in Canada arise not only from the self-assertion of Quebec but self-assertion of other parts of the country from Alberta and Saskatchewan to Newfoundland. This is hard for some people in Ontario to understand because Ontario has been the keystone of English-speaking Canada and has over the years attained the greatest advantages from Confederation. When a change in structure is taking place it is hardest for the keystone of the tradition’s structure to understand that change. To use the analogy from the family again: sometimes I find it hard as a father that my children are not only independent but often understand the interests of the family as a whole better than I do myself. Of course this plea for moderation is predicated on the assumption that most Canadians truly want their country to be. Against this some may feel that the continuance of Canada is a small thing to work for in the face of the wider problems of modern technology. Such gigantic questions as: what future is there for Western technological society? Why give attention to the particularities of Canada in the midst of the world-wide problems? The answer to these problems are being researched in that apogee of technological power, the United States. And we should just join them in that great continental search. Then there are others who are bored by the limited opportunities in Canada and seek more exciting personal ambitions in the worlds of New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. I gather there are these days Canadians who find wider opportunities in the civilization of Texas. My answer to such visions would be that there is a strange mystery to fate. In technological society much has been found but also much has been lost. And some of the good things that are utterly gone in the

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completely contractualized society of the US can dimly and strangely survive in our midst because we are only on the edge of the empire. Therefore this experiment on the northern half of this continent seems worth preserving. Let me also say that those who find this country boring surprise me. Just think of our recent Prime Ministers, R.B. Bennett, Mackenzie King, Pearson and dear Mr Diefenbaker, and Mr Trudeau.8 If a writer with the psychic understanding of Dostoevsky described a country that had had these men as its leaders – the answer would be: you must be kidding. Don’t let your imagination run away with you. – But the fact is we have had them. Of course, finally a country and its traditions are not ends in themselves. They are only means of partaking in the eternal. But nevertheless we come upon that eternal justice through the mediation of particular traditions and the particular traditions of Canada in their wide diversity are worth loving and working for on the northern half of this contractual continent. Notes 1 John Burgon Bickersteth, MC, MA (1888–1979), warden of Hart House 1921– 47, was a close family friend of the Grants. He had come from England first to Western Canada in 1911 and then to Ontario in 1921. He visited Grant in Bermondsey in 1941 (see William Christian, George Grant: A Biography [Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993], 74–9). 2 1 Corinthians 13:12: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ 3 William (Bill) Johnson, journalist and author, was Globe and Mail correspondent in Montreal, Quebec City, and Washington 1966–86, and later Montreal Gazette national affairs correspondent in Ottawa (1987–96). His aggressive stance as president of Alliance Québec, an organization formed in 1982 to defend the interests of English-speaking Quebeckers, led to his becoming known as ‘Pit Bill.’ Alliance Québec became defunct in 2005 when the Department of Canadian Heritage, which provided 90% of its funding, discontinued its grant. See Gary Caldwell, ‘Alliance Québec,’ Canadian Encyclopedia online (thecanadianencyclopedia.com). 4 For Claude Ryan, see 173n7. For René Lévesque, see 117n11. 5 Sun Life’s moving its head office from Montreal to Toronto was seen by both

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sides as a powerful symbol of the perception among the powerful that Québec separation from Canada had become distinctly possible. 6 David Samuel Horne MacDonald (1936– ), clergyman, politician, was ordained in the United Church of Canada (1961) and elected a Progressive Conservative MP for Prince (PEI) in 1965. He served as Secretary of State (1979–80) in the government of Joseph (Joe) Clark. 7 David Crombie (1936– ), teacher and politician, lectured at Ryerson Polytechnic and was a central figure in the civic reform movement of the late 1960s in Toronto. In 1973 he was elected mayor of Toronto and then elected Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament for Rosedale (1979–88). In 1988 he became commissioner of the Royal Commission on the future of the Toronto waterfront. 8 Richard Bedford Bennett, Viscount (1870–1947), lawyer and politician. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 350n30. For William Lyon Mackenzie King, see 134n5. For Lester Pearson, see 134n5. For John Diefenbaker, see 116n2. For Pierre Trudeau, see 116n2.

The Battle between Teaching and Research

This article appeared in the Globe and Mail, 28 April 1980: 7. For the circumstances leading up to its publication see William Christian, George Grant: A Biography, 326–30.

Most of us try to act from what we know or think we know. Therefore, if we are to understand society, we must understand our educational institutions. In the Sixties a great change took place in the universities of Ontario. They were expanded in numbers, size, and wealth by the Government. Like most things in Ontario, this change was initiated because of what was happening in the United States. This change should be associated with the name of President John F. Kennedy.1 The question was asked in terms of Sputnik: Can it be possible that US education has fallen behind that of the Soviet Union?2 If so, we must immediately do something about it. Beyond this response, there was also the nobler positive affirmation: Let us see that everybody in society can reach his highest potential through education; let us expand the frontiers of knowledge; let us build a noble technological society of highly skilled specialists who are at the same time people of vision. It came to be believed that the university would become central in building a humane and liberated technological society. Ontario naturally followed the continental pattern and established a great network of universities. The new university system came into existence at a time when the account of knowledge which had dominated the Western world for three centuries had reached its height of influence. Every civilization has produced its own account of what constitutes knowledge, and has

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been shaped by that account. Such accounts spring forth from a particular aspiration of human thought in relation to the effective means for its realization. Our dominant account of knowledge in the West has been positive and progressive science. The aspiration of thought from which it sprang was, above all, the desire to overcome chance so human beings would be the controllers of nature. The effective condition for its realization was what we now call research. Research is the method in which something is summoned before the court of human reason and questioned, so we can discover the causes for its being the way it is as an object. Research made its appearance on the public scene of history when Galileo ran balls down an inclined plane. Now research is applied to everything from matter to human beings, from modern society to past societies. The amazing achievements of research are before us in every lived moment – in the achievements of modern medicine and communications, of modern food production and warfare. If one ever has doubts about the goodness of many of its achievements, it is well to remind oneself of penicillin. It is the method of scientific research that had made Western civilization a world civilization. It is at the heart and core of our lives, and as such at the heart and core of our education. Yet there are great questions which present themselves to all thinking human beings and which cannot be answered by the method of research. What is justice? How do we come to know what is truly beautiful? Where do we stand toward the divine? Are there things that can be done that should not be done? One just has to formulate these questions to see they cannot be answered by research. Yet thinking people need to be clear about such questions and therefore they cannot be excluded from the university. Education about these questions was carried on for centuries by the method of dialectic. Dialectic just means conversation – sustained and disciplined conversation. It takes place between students and students, between students and teachers. It takes place by means of the spoken and the written word. (If one writes an essay for a teacher, one is having a conversation with him.) We have to talk with the great minds of the past. To think deeply about justice requires sustained conversation with Plato and Kant. This method of dialectic demands a different form of education from that required when the product pursued is research. It is a much more erotic

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kind of teaching than that which has to do with knowing about objects – erotic because what is to be known about justice or God or beauty can only be known when they are loved. This is why I have such a sense of failure as a teacher. The older forms of education took place in Arts faculties. But the research paradigm of knowledge is becoming so powerful in those faculties that the tradition of dialectic is gradually being driven out. Energetic professors soon come to know that prestige is to be gained from research, and therefore pursue it. The reward system of the institutions teaches young professors that if they are to get on they must produce. This not only turns them away from the business of teaching, but it also turns them away from educating themselves in a broader context. What was necessary for the traditional form of education was to become an educated human being through a sustained life of study. Obviously there is need of research in the humanities. Who could not be glad that C.N. Cochrane from Toronto wrote the great book Christianity and Classical Culture?3 But Cochrane was not first and foremost a specialist; he was first an educated man who looked at the ancient world from out of his long life of sustained self-education. Of course, in the older Ontario universities such as Queen’s and Toronto the tradition of dialectic has more continuance. This is also true of Trent, which was modelled on the Canadian pattern of the colleges at Toronto. But in the universities whose ethos developed in the 1960s, the dominance of the new paradigm of knowledge becomes stronger and stronger. It is around this question of principle that the large influx of US professors into our universities should be understood. Germany was the country where universities were first oriented around research. US higher education was more influenced by German patterns than by any other source. Flexner is the man most associated with that influence.4 On the other side, dialectical education was stronger in England than anywhere else, largely because of the powerful influence of Oxford and Cambridge. Canadian higher education was more shaped before 1945 by English influences than by any other. The influx of US professors in recent decades has brought a powerful push toward the researchoriented university. The nature of that influence does not turn on the particular nationality of particular people. No decent human being should judge another solely in terms of the accident of where he was

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born. But the problem still remains. The influx of US professors brought with it certain German ideas which have greatly cut across many of our traditions. When I was growing up in university circles in the 1930s, it was taken for granted that Canadian universities were probably better (at least different) from their US counterparts. Since 1945, Canadian confidence in its own traditions has continually weakened, because of our belief that the US model is determinative. This abstruse question of educational principle may seem far away from the realities of life. Yet it is not. You cannot have a free and vibrant society unless there are free and vibrant people in it. Obviously there are large numbers of free people in Canada who have no touch with higher education. Their freedom has other sources. Nevertheless, it is important for the health of any society that there are people in it whose sense of freedom is sustained by having thought in a disciplined way about the supreme questions of human life. When our Arts faculties are centred around research they produce a culture which is essentially a ‘museum culture.’ Museums are places where we see past life as objects – as flies in amber. We do not see them as existences which light up our existence. Never has so much money been spent on the organized study of the past, and never has the past had less meaning in shaping the real life of our present. Art and religion and the passion for justice will continue, but they will be more and more cut off from the rationality the universities should offer them. Technological excellence plus museum scholarship are not enough. When they are considered sufficient, the mass of students will become listless. Scholarship is a means to thought, not a substitute for it.

Notes 1 John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917–63), thirty-fifth president of the United States (1961–3). 2 The launching of the first satellite into earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 inaugurated the Space Age and is generally credited with spurring the dormant US space program into action and starting a North American movement to strengthen scientific and technological education. 3 For Charles Norris Cochrane, see 382n8.

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4 Abraham Flexner (1866–1959), American educator, had a far-reaching influence on American universities through The American College (1908) and The Flexner Report (1910), a study of American medical education sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation. In 1930 he published Universities: American, English, German and co-founded the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, becoming its first director.

‘Céline’s Trilogy,’ edited by Sheila Grant

Sheila Grant explains in the preface that follows how she edited this writing on Céline1 for its publication in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 11–53.

Editor’s Preface by Sheila Grant When I began this preface, its title was going to be ‘Why did George Grant write about Céline?’ However, I found myself repeating the answer he himself had given. It seemed more useful, therefore, just to say why I thought it worthwhile to piece together Grant’s notes for his unpublished and unfinished book on Céline, and present them here as an imperfect whole. The condition of Grant’s notes on Céline was extraordinary. There were often groups of consecutive typed passages, most of them quite long, one passage having six different versions. Numerous handwritten pages were included, some being the origin of the typed pages, some quite separate. There were short notes, long notes, and fragments of paper containing two or three words, none of which were assembled in any sort of order. However, the relation of the short notes to the longer pieces was often evident. Sudden changes of focus were not unusual: a philosophic discussion, for example, might unexpectedly give way to memories of childhood. At points the style would be enigmatic and concise, elsewhere rambling. This material was so entirely different in style, form, and content from everything else Grant wrote, including his manuscripts of other unfinished books, that it occurred to me that some readers might like to look at it, if only from curiosity.

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The work presented here is mainly about Grant’s love for the trilogy of books based on Céline’s wartime experiences, D’un château l’autre (Castle to Castle); Nord (North); and Rigodon (Rigadoon).a Grant wrote a discursive meditation on these three books, and moved from their story to the nature of stories in general, and to some extent to the nature of poetry. He wrote as a reader, and that gave him a new freedom. He did not have to protect himself from attack by summing up the history of Western civilization in every other sentence. Never did he produce such relaxed writing, certainly not on philosophy, which always required a painful degree of discipline. The reading of Céline’s trilogy gave Grant such enjoyment during the last ten years of his life that I wanted to make his account of the experience readable, despite the daunting condition of the material. I could usually understand his brief notes, because the subject was so familiar. We had spent innumerable hours discussing both Céline and the wider questions raised by Céline’s work. In all seasons but winter we would often bring our lunch to York Redoubt, an old military enclosure outside Halifax, and discuss Céline while walking the dog and watching the sea far below. It was a particularly good place for talking about Céline, the fascination his trilogy held for Grant, and the enigma of Céline’s racism; also for talking about reading and stories, and about poetry and the unanswerable questions such subjects aroused. There was no hurry to find the answers. Grant never brought some of his speculations to a firm conclusion. This is evident in the rather disjointed final section of this piece, printed here with the title ‘Why Am I Enraptured?’ Why did Grant not finish the book? There are several possible reasons. In 1983 he agreed to contribute an article on Céline to Queen’s Quarterly, which I knew might be enough to turn him away from finishing the book. He would not listen to my warnings, and felt it was appropriate to publish something in the journal his father had helped to start. In the article he discussed Céline’s anti-Semitism more fully than in the unpublished material available to me.

a Grant’s quotations from Céline’s trilogy were taken from the Ralph Manheim translations published in New York by Penguin in 1975–6. The original French editions were published in Paris by Gallimard in 1957, 1960, and 1969, respectively. Gerald Owen and Edward Andrew in their essays in Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity [see headnote] use other editions of the novels.

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Another reason for dropping the book might have been that he had not made up his mind about some important matters, such as Plato’s account of poetry. The most likely reasons were that philosophy was claiming his attention, and that his energy was being depleted by bouts of ill health. He wanted to write a book on Rousseau and the idea of history, and the incomparably formidable challenge of Heidegger lay ahead. He was, admittedly, a great planner of never-to-be-written books, and the one on Céline would have been a luxury rather than a duty. I have taken three kinds of liberties in putting together this text. First, many passages that addressed the same subject were widely separated, and sometimes needed an added sentence or two to bring them together. Secondly, I added some quotations from Céline’s text that had not been written down by Grant but were often mentioned to me as he read and reread the trilogy over the years. As Céline’s books are not easily available, it seemed important to provide some of the passages that Grant described. Finally, I expanded some of Grant’s brief notes where the meaning was clear to me from remembered conversations. This was done mostly in the last section. All the ideas in this section are Grant’s, but I could not be sure of the order he would have intended. Therefore this section must be treated as incomplete. I moved the quotation from Simone Weil from the beginning of the piece to the end, where its relevance might be better understood. All Grant had written was, ‘might begin with S.W. – bread and hunger.’ Introduction The purpose of this book is to try to state what is so enrapturing about Céline’s trilogy. It could be said: what a silly thing to do in a world where two grotesque empires accumulate nuclear weapons. Surely one should be doing something more important than this, and what is more important should be evident to someone who has the luck to be a Christian. My answer would be: at all times and places the apprehension of the divine has had a lot to do with the apprehension of the beautiful. In our era of late state capitalism vast numbers of people find their way to the absolutely lovable through art in one form or another. In many cases the authenticity of that experience is inhibited by the fact that the experience degenerates into consumption of entertainment. How can it

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not be so in our kind of society? Without going into the extremely ambiguous distinction between high art and popular art, it is clear that much of the experience of unequivocally great art falls away into much less than it could be, when it is experienced as entertainment to be consumed. I heard the chairman of the Ontario Arts Council unite South Pacific to The Marriage of Figaro as of the same order of being. (The very greatest art can defend itself by its own weight. I remember being at Stratford, one of a huge audience of southern Ontario bourgeois and New England tourists, and we settled down for a nice afternoon’s entertainment – and then Lear fell on us!) In this book I want to write about literary art and its reading. We live in an era where there has never been so much printed material and yet where reading, except for technical and entertainment purposes, has declined. Whatever qualifications may be put on the work of Leavis, one surely must rejoice in the centre of his work for his country. He showed how much the substance of his community depended on the serious partaking of its own works of the imagination, and therefore also the importance of the teaching of such reading.2 I have spent most of my life trying to teach young Canadians how to read the great works of Western political philosophy and theology. Those works are of course related to the work of the poets – from Plato’s relation to Homer to Heidegger’s relation to Hölderlin. Plato called some of his most wonderful writing a likely tale. I now want to write about the reading of a very great artist, Céline, and the place of such reading in a lived existence. The fact that I am not a trained professor of literature puts limitations on my ability to do this well. There is in our day an immense proliferation of the study of literature, but ironically it comes at a time when there has been a break and confusion as to what the purpose of education should be within the new technological realism. Writing about reading is of course only a very second-order activity, compared to the reading itself. The same applies to writing about music. I consider a day wasted in which I do not listen to one of the Mozart piano concertos. In relation to that desire, I have read such a fine book as Girdlestone’s analyses of these concertos.3 Such books have been helpful to my enjoyment of the works. But obviously such writing is only of second order interest, and its purpose is to add to the rapture of listening. The present writing is of the same order. Beyond Céline’s particular work I am going to try to say something general about the pur-

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poses of contemplating great works of art in this time of late state capitalism. It is not meant in the least blasphemously when I say that my purpose is the same as Grünewald gives to the Baptist’s pointing arm in the Eisenheim altarpiece.4 Pointing at any artist is extremely minor compared to pointing at our Saviour, but this does not mean there is no need for such minor pointing. And perhaps pointing at a great literary work of art, may, if it leads to the reading of that work, have some connection to that highest pointing. Whether Céline’s trilogy has any relation to Christianity can only be judged when the book has been read. Does the experience of the beautiful help to overcome our oblivion of eternity? A preface is just a preface, not a place for justification. Nietzsche has written that philosophers should approach the discussion of art from the attempt to understand what it is to make it, or in his blasphemous language, to ‘create’ it. This seems to me simply misplaced arrogance. It arises from the belief that the philosopher is himself a creator and as a greater creator than the artist, can stand above the creation of the poets. Even if there are philosophers who can stand above the poets and tell us what it is they do, I am not claiming to be such a one. I have little idea of what it would be like to be Shakespeare or Mozart or Raphael. It would seem to me pretension itself to claim to understand their position. I simply want to try to state what it has been like for me to read Céline, and to proceed hesitatingly to make some general comments about being enraptured by the beautiful in art. Reading any good writing is an act of trust. One must simply wade in with attention. One cannot expect to read Plato as casually as le Carré.5 I remember the exact moment when I knew that Mozart was near the centre of my soul; my wife had told me and told me to listen, and suddenly I knew what she meant. I had often read Céline before I recognized the extent of his greatness. The difficulty of wading in with attention requires an act of trust that one will be rewarded. Even in the case of Shakespeare that trust may not always be guaranteed. The ability to wade in with attention declines in an electronic democracy. So people write books about the decline of the importance of print. This book is about reading, and is written from the standpoint of a particular reader. I hope of course that in my remarks something of interest about reading in general will emerge. It is about the reading of a work of art, Céline’s trilogy about his journey through Germany at the time of its conquest by the American and Russian empires in 1944–5. My first purpose is to state that the three books of the trilogy, Castle to

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Castle, North, and Rigadoon are among the great masterpieces of Western art. But such a statement runs in with other things. I found I wanted to state why this writing so enraptured me, and the corollary of that, why was it so beautiful? What were its perfections? Of course it is another matter to write down one’s thoughts on these subjects. Right through life we read writings which thrill us, enlighten us, inspire us, and we may wish to present these to and discuss them with our friends. But this does not mean that we have to write down our opinion so that it will become public. In Céline’s case there was a particular reason for paying homage to him publicly: so that others might be encouraged to read the trilogy. It is very little known in Canada, and Céline’s name is remembered, if at all, for the infamy of his early anti-Semitism. (I have discussed this in an article for the Queen’s Quarterly, autumn 1983.)6 Now that the political storms of the 1930s and 40s, in which Céline was involved, are a little less pressing, some critics are willing to state that Céline is a fine writer of this century, and there is talk of his stylistic influence on some North American writers. But the concentration is on his two novels of the 1930s, not on the trilogy, written at the end of his life, which is the cause of my love. In a museum culture like North America there is too much analyzing and talk about art, and not enough living in its joy, producing it. But my excuse is the trilogy’s exclusion from the canon. Only twice in my life have I been so ravished with love for the works of an artist that the very substance of my soul seemed to be within these works. The first time was when I really listened to the music of Mozart in my twenties; the second when I read Céline’s trilogy in my sixties. I am not denying that I have lived all my life in the supremacies of such artists as Bach and Shakespeare. At a different level I have had a long flirtation with Henry James. As a child I had gobbled up the stories about Doctor Dolittle. I speak here of that sudden ravishment which changes consciousness, no more profoundly than the long sustenance of Bach or Shakespeare, but which happens so suddenly, and therefore surprisingly, that it can be compared to love at first sight. It is the unexpected, which means that one will never be again as one was.b

b This phrase, ‘one will never be again as one was,’ taken from the final words of The Wings of the Dove, was a favourite of Grant’s. His love for Henry James was less trivial than the word ‘flirtation’ might suggest.

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By bringing Céline and Mozart together around an unimportant fact of my individuality I do not mean to compare them in any other way. There is certainly no need and no competence here to write further of Mozart. With Céline, as I have tried to explain, it is quite a different matter. Reading is different from watching drama or listening to music which has already been interpreted by someone else. But the reader is at least required to be open to the intention of the writer, or else he falls into the laziness of pure subjectivity. I remember a wealthy patron of the Toronto art gallery saying fervently, ‘I don’t care what it meant to the artist, I care what it means to me.’ On the other hand, Wanda Landowska was surely being too arrogant in her putdown of Rosalyn Tureck when they disagreed about the playing of a passage of Bach: ‘Let’s not quarrel. You go on playing it your way, and I’ll just go on playing it Bach’s way.’7 It must be admitted that reading can easily become a vice. I have spent large portions of my life reading trash. Who can always do without drugs? Such reading can be like the mirror of the Lady of Shalott, confining one’s experience to a safe and dreamlike vision.8 But great literary works are the very smashing of the mirror, the restoration to reality – or to use R.G. Collingwood’s metaphor, ‘medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.’9 This of course raises the mystery as to why someone else’s account should sometimes be able to restore one to reality more completely than one’s own experience. Simone Weil’s description of language is worth pondering here. She says that language is a mean proportional between thought and the tangible. Céline might have agreed. What follows will not be a contribution to literary criticism, for which I am not equipped. There will be many question marks, because I do not fully understand why reading can so enrapture us. It will simply be an attempted tribute to something loved. The Trilogy as Story I must start by saying what kind of writing the trilogy is, what name should be given to it. We distinguish company reports from textbooks, detective stories from minutes of a meeting, treatises from dialogues, epic poetry from lyric. ‘What-is’ questions have been discarded in mod-

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ern philosophy (particularly among its English-speaking practitioners) and definitions are pursued only instrumentally. Naming may not be the last word in understanding something, but in reading it is a help. We read different kinds of writing differently, and different people read them with different attention and skill. I am sure the president of a bank knows how to read a company report better than I do, and would read it with greater attention and skill than myself, because of the nature of his work and interests. But some pieces to which we give the greatest attention may be opaque for us, because we are wrong, or not sure, about what kind of writing we are reading. All my adult life I have tried to read Plato’s Symposium with the greatest attention of which I am capable. Yet I was held back from understanding it because I read it as a treatise and not as a dialogue, and did not know what a dialogue was. I have watched and listened to Don Giovanni often, and for years came away confused as to its unity in a way I was not confused by performances of The Marriage of Figaro or Così fan tutte. When I read on the score that Mozart had named it a ‘drama giocosa’ I became much clearer about how one should take the whole, how one should watch and listen to Giovanni’s damnation. I was enlightened. Many people have taken Céline’s trilogy as a self-justification or apology. Whether apologies be noble or base (and one must remember that the noblest bears that actual name), Céline’s trilogy is not one of them. To take it as such has led to much wrong reading. It is certainly not the same genre as Newman going over and over in his limpid prose just why it was so important that he changed from being Anglican to Roman Catholic.10 Nor is it the same as Rousseau’s account of why each time he got on top he became more godlike.11 Nor is it the same genre as St Augustine’s wonderful account of his life, addressed throughout to God.12 Falsely naming to oneself can lead one astray, and therefore the attempt to name correctly may be useful to reading. Anyway, it has been required of us since Adam’s great work. Céline called his work a ‘chronicle,’ and he certainly knew best what he was doing. The worst trap for commentators or critics is to write as if they knew better what a great author is doing than he knows himself. (The silliest victim of that trap in our era was Freud.) I would translate Céline’s ‘chronique’ as ‘story,’ however, simply because the English word ‘chronicle’ has a more antique and more limited sense than chronique in French. Indeed in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, where he writes of

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the ‘chronicle of wasted time,’ he also refers to the ‘antique pen’ by which it was written. The French word chronique is much less antiquarian than the English word chronicle, because French in its very essence and history is so much closer to the classical languages than is English. Chronicle is defined in the OED as ‘a detailed and continuous register of events in order of time.’ This definition seems to me inadequate to summon forth all the reaches of deed and event, of humour, tenderness, and horror that make up the trilogy. Therefore I will translate Céline’s ‘chronique’ as ‘story,’ but without any implication that I know better than he did. The word ‘story’ arose in English as a shortening of what had come into the language from the Greek ‘historia.’ The Greek word had originally been used to denote certain inquiries. It referred to inquiries about events concerning which one had to get a report, by asking an old person or someone in another country. The word for ‘inquiry’ came gradually to mean an account of what had happened. I am not going to try to sort out the multiform uses of the word ‘story,’ but simply to say what I mean by the word as a form of spoken and written communication, and why I think it is the best word to catch the essence of Céline’s trilogy. The story in this sense is a marvellous part of being human. We start to enjoy it in very early childhood, from the age of two, perhaps, sometimes making additions of our own. I remember a little later my nurse would say, ‘Don’t tell stories,’ when she knew my account of events had been made up by the heady drives of my imagination, to save myself from the consequence of having thrown some turnips down the lavatory. But when I was sad I would ask her to tell me or read me a story, and I did not mean lies. It never entered my head that what was happening to Doctor Dolittle had been made up. When I cried at the fate of the blacks in Uncle Tom’s Cabin she would say, ‘it is only a story.’ So, although my elders emphasized the lack of factual basis in a story, I could not realize this, because for the young child the factual basis or its absence is irrelevant to the richness of the experience. I remember the joy in identifying with other, more exciting lives, like that of P.J. the Secret Service boy. I say all this about my own early life because I think children’s hunger for the ‘story’ is probably universal. The joys of identification are obviously not confined to children. There are many subtle possibilities in the story or the novel. Rousseau in his

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Émile describes the imagination as enlarging the bounds of possibility for us, whether for good or ill. Simple identification is a pleasant means of escape; but there can be further value in vicarious experience, if only to confirm our membership one of another.13 For adults also there are some times and places in which the need for stories is particularly strongly felt. Early English-speaking Canada was one of those times and places. The influence of the Scots was important here. They had come to Canada when their peasant past had been smashed by the English invasion, and they had to recreate their bardic past amid the alien corn. Settled or indigenous people have fewer stories. The isolation of pioneering life fostered the story when print was expensive and there were no electronic media. It is difficult to know how much storytelling goes on now, when fast moving changes make us lose the past, when there is a breakdown of the extended family, and the electronic media proliferate; I can remember the stage as a child when our growing interest in the Rudy Vallee and Eddie Cantor Hours would cut into my mother’s reading aloud of Dickens and Scott.14 There was still time to listen to stories. When a little older I used to visit various elderly family friends, often in retirement homes. They might tell me first of the difficulties of their present lives – how crazy a sister-in-law was, how strict an attendant, that there was not enough to eat, that it was awful. Then suddenly they might begin to talk of their adventures in the Boer War, or how they had so loved Lady Borden, or their life in the wilds of pioneering Idaho. My mother used to tell us stories of how poor she had been as a little girl in New Brunswick, and these would pass into stories of the suffering of her ancestors when they came north, when the people down there had broken with the Crown. I hope that when I am older people will listen to my stories, and that they will be true. Some stories were told to make a point, claiming at least a basis of fact; how lucky I was, and yet how unfortunate, not to have lived in the majestic times of my dead grandfathers; or how easily young people could be led astray by bad women. However, one discovered early that the best stories were those told with no didactic purpose, and I still hold that to be true. One did not need to be taught over and over again that Mackenzie King was a twister who loved the Americans too much. One learned that storytelling was at its best an art, and as with high art, any purpose beyond itself was difficult to define.

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The greatest storyteller of my life has been a Scottish maid who told me of her youth in the slums of Edinburgh, and how she came to Canada as an immigrant to work for the wealthy in Toronto. While memory holds, can I forget her sitting there with the butter from the beets running down her chin, while she told me of rushing around the diningroom table at Government House, trying to escape the embraces of the lieutenant-governor, while she cried to him the warnings of St Matthew against adultery? I suppose one could say that such a story had some didactic point: that the man who was received with such respect at my mother’s tea table had a life which was quite different from the life shown there, and was difficult for his employees and for his wife. But the glory of the story was not in its didactic point, but rather in the richness of the saga of my friend’s life, told with such brilliance by a woman who had no formal education because she had been sent out to work at age seven. People often say that so-and-so at some party is a good storyteller. But generally the person in question is making some point or conveying some information, if only an amusing piece of gossip. It appeared to me when young and it appears to me now that the greatest stories have no point except that they are enrapturing. We must not say that the purpose of a beautiful work of art – as, for example, Las Meninas, Mozart’s K. 488, or King Lear – lies outside itself.15 Yet at the same time we must also say, always with the greatest hesitation and bewilderment, that it points beyond itself. What I mean by story, as distinguished from other kinds of communication, is the telling by word of mouth (whether or not written down) of events in which the teller at least had a part, or which came down to him by word of mouth. When one hears a story there is also a storyteller. A great story must be told by someone who is more than egocentric, yet sufficiently egocentric to be taken up with the events he or she is describing. He or she must be there as an individual, and yet open to otherness. The accounts of marriage breakdowns one hears in pubs are seldom real stories, and only charity requires one to listen to them. In the way in which I use the word, the teller of the story will be an integral part of it. Even in Doctor Dolittle it is Stubbins, the Doctor’s assistant, who tells the story. Our Scottish maid was not absent from her telling, and was not some abstract, perfect person. She was a hater of the rich, a lover of Christian virtue, who put first her right to eat, and second her right to have good shoes to save her feet. So in the trilogy

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Céline is always present, whether as the hero of 1944, or as the dying old writer of twenty years later, sufferer of years of persecution by the elite intellects of the left. The trilogy is the most perfectly realized ‘story’ I know in print. Céline’s very style of writing is the style of speech. He often said that the point of his style, with its breakdown of the classical sentence, and the three little dots, was to catch the way French was spoken by proletarian people in Paris. The whole trilogy is just Céline telling you. If Hollywood had not degraded the phrase by using it to describe the gospel of our salvation, I would call Céline’s trilogy ‘the greatest story ever told,’ entirely realized on the printed page.16 The nature of the story as a kind of communication is seen more clearly when distinguished from the novel on one side and historical writing on the other. This might take one into the hardest reaches of both literary theory and historical methodology, but as I have said earlier, I am not competent in this area. To distinguish story from history, and to say that story can be poetry, must also raise the question why the ancient philosophers said that poetry was higher than history. But that question must be delayed until I have said more of Céline’s excellences. I am writing this book as a reader of literature, who has spent long sections of his life reading philosophy. Let me then plunge immediately into the distinction between events which actually happened and those which are imaginary. When comparing story and novel, we all take for granted a difference of genre between The House of the Dead and The Idiot. One is Dostoevsky’s account of a part of his life; the other is a novel.17 As a reader one is immediately aware of the distinction. It is not just that between imagined events and actual events; both novel and story require imagination, but the difference is between differing acts of the imagination. In the story the imagination is linked in a more dependent embrace with particular memories. Nastasia Philipovna in The Idiot is summoned before us by an act less tied to particular memories. When the dead Nastasia lies covered by oilcloth, with candles at each corner, while the Prince and Rogozhin play cards at the foot of the bed, we do not believe it ever happened; yet it remains in my memory more vividly than most real scenes, although I have not read it for forty years. In some mysterious act of the imagination Dostoevsky made a world in which these events took place. That this world can now exist for us

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depends entirely on the author of it. In Céline’s trilogy, however, although his description of Laval stopping a riot on a railway station comes to us uniquely from his words, it is an event to which we might have other entrances. Of course the difference must not be pushed too far. The making of Nastasia Philipovna was not a creation ex nihilo. I am sure that with all the apparatus of literary research in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, many of the connections between the character Nastasia and people Dostoevsky knew in his life will have been traced, in a way that cannot be done in the case, for example, of Cordelia. Nevertheless, the distinction between novel and story seems to me a good one. It can be seen in Céline’s own writing. Journey to the End of Night, although connected with Céline’s life in early manhood, is clearly a novel in a way that the trilogy is not.18 Without going into the immense apparatus about method which now surrounds the academic practice of history, one may say that history has something in common with the story which the novel does not have. However, they are clearly different. In the case of history, imagination must be more strictly controlled. ‘When Nixon walked into the Oval Office to resign, he thought to himself etc.’ is an extreme example of the wrong kind of imagination. It is obviously to be eschewed, unless Nixon is known to have stated somewhere what he was thinking at the time. The historical novel, however, has its place as a literary genre. Who would dare chase Scott out of the canon, just because Mary Renault’s and Marguerite Yourcenar’s achievements have been exaggerated by bored and lazy readers?19 The place of the historical novel does not, however, excuse history being written like a novel. This is not to say that the historian must be unimaginative. Von Ranke’s Innocent III has been imagined in a noble way.20 But clearly the historian’s imagination has to be strictly controlled in the interest of the purposes he is pursuing, and these purposes are different from those of the storyteller. Without spending time over the old chestnut whether history is an art or a science, it seems to me obvious that history is in some sense a science. At the very least one asks the historian to tell us certain things ‘objectively.’ To use that word literally, the historian must hold away from himself the documents which he uses, so that he can examine them with proper distance. Von Ranke’s Innocent III may have much to do with the movement to objectivity and its transcending which is present

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in Raphael’s and Velásquez’s wonderful portraits of the popes. The historian may be a great literary artist, but he must keep the necessary distance. The great storyteller is not constrained by these purposes, but is engrossed in his own experience of past events, and the very loosing of his memories as he imagines them is what makes him a great storyteller. It is the immediacy of his imaginings as they are put into a disparate unity which delights us. If I were to write the history of a lieutenant-governor chasing a Scottish maid around his table, I would first have to supplement my friend’s story with an account of the lieutenant-governor, his wife, and his other servants. I would have to look at the structure of class relations in Ontario of the 1930s, and the history and structure of proletarian Calvinism which had made her cry forth the blessed words of St Matthew. Céline’s account in Castle to Castle of the defeated French politicians may have been taken by some historian as evidence for lives he was writing about Laval or Pétain or Bichelonne, and the historian would also have access to the wonderful wild old man who is telling it.21 But the story does not enrapture us because it is raw material for a certain history, any more than Shakespeare’s Richard II enthralls us because we learn about the victor of the Lancastrian Plantagenets. Obviously there is overlapping and uncertainty in the simple schema novel – story – history. Is Tristram Shandy a story or a novel?22 The Remembrance of Things Past is certainly a novel, and yet autobiographical in that it is part of the history of Paris.23 One could call Boswell’s Life of Johnson the greatest English biography, and so put it in the history basket.24 Yet it is also the story of a friendship told with tenderness by one partner about his friend who was a genius. (As I am always ready to question Aristotle’s thought, it is well to ask, does not the Life of Johnson correctly contradict Aristotle’s teaching about equality and friendship?) The delight in reading it does not depend on wanting to be an eighteenth-century specialist, or on any detailed knowledge of English history. At another great height, War and Peace is a novel and a history.25 I have only used this schema as a means of clarifying the nature of Céline’s trilogy. It is story par excellence. One other genre might be mentioned. Could the trilogy be called an epic? Certainly Céline’s style makes it difficult to use the prose/poetry distinction in order to answer this in the negative. The rhythms are extraordinarily complex, and arose partly from watching professional

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dancers. The word ‘epic’ has been debased by the American entertainment business but it can still be used properly. The OED defines it as ‘pertaining to that kind of narrative which celebrates the achievement of some heroic personage of history or tradition.’ The trilogy is indeed a consummate narrative and as a story of the losers in a great defeat it has sometimes been called, rather appealingly, an epic of the afflicted. It could be called an epic without heroes, demigods or God. Strictly, however, an epic cannot be written by the protagonist of the story. Also, the trilogy is in no sense a celebration – what is there to celebrate? An epic must have some public declaration in it, whereas the whole teaching of the books is ‘hide yourself in this era.’ This is not an epic, however much the compelling narrative and the sense of the spoken word can tempt one to call it so. It may be asked: who cares about such naming? Isn’t life busy enough and difficult enough to allow us to read the best books our tradition gives us without such cataloguing? I care because I think Céline’s trilogy should be part of that high tradition, and I am afraid that it may not be, because of reasons external to its merit. Before praising its perfections, I wanted to say what it is. There is something very wonderful about any work that takes a particular genre to its completeness. A Description of the Trilogy Why is this trilogy such a wonderful story? The first question to ask must be, ‘What is it about?’ A story of some small private incident (a maid at the lieutenant-governor’s) may well delight us. But a great story must be about great events. When Father Zossima bows down before Dmitri at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov, we know that the novel is going to be about the relation of suffering to the salvation of these brothers.26 We are prepared for greatness. Céline’s trilogy tells us of a high historical moment: the collapse of Germany before the Allied forces of Britain, the United States, and Russia. It may indeed be the fault of the Europeans that this is happening. Be that as it may, it is a high historical event. Céline tells us about it from the side of the losers, as Euripides does in The Trojan Women.27 To put it more generally, the subject is the final throes of a technological war that has been lost. I do not know whether Aristotle is correct in saying that war is coeval with human beings. It certainly has been central to human life so far. Here is

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war in its modern technological form, in both its violence and its extremity in the sense of what peoples can and will do to each other. Of course, it is not yet nuclear war. That was to be started a few months later by the Americans against Japan. But this is the story of a once great civilization being brought to its knees by the most intense technological attack up to that point. All three books are about the same subject, the fall of German-dominated Europe, and all three see this chiefly in terms of what is happening to Céline, his wife Lili, and their cat Bébert. Their friend Le Vigan, a famous French movie-star, is with them in the first two books, but escapes to Italy at the beginning of the third.28 Though clearly the chronicle is a trilogy, each of the books has a separate situation, which is mirrored in a difference of mood. In Castle to Castle our hero and heroine and the cat Bébert are at Sigmaringen. As the regime in France collapsed before the English-speaking armies, the Germans found a place of refuge for their leading French friends in and around an old Hohenzollern castle on the Danube. The occupants are the pro-German French who (except for a few crazies) know that they have backed the losing side and are desperately looking for some escape from the revenge which will follow from the Allies and the French ‘left.’ They are there in serried ranks from Pétain and Laval on down. In this ‘sauve qui peut’ situation, Céline moves among them as a doctor, also having the means of suicide that some of them want. Little can be saved, and the central issue is usually food. Céline was above all a French nationalist, and here he is among his own countrymen. His pictures of Laval and Pétain are wonderful accounts of political leaders who have tried greatly and lost. Pétain is dignified even in his failing prostate. This is the most difficult to read of the three books, because it is necessary to use a glossary of French politics to follow it. This breaks up the reading and makes it a lesser book than the later two. Unless one has an interest in the old French ‘right,’ one might be put off continuing the trilogy, and that would be a pity. This is the volume which of the three is most nearly a history. In the second book, North, the Célines are mostly in a small Brandenburg town where they have been sent on their arrival in Germany. They listen and watch and smell the burning of Berlin by the Western air forces, and know that the Russians are getting nearer and nearer across the European plain from the east. Here there is no need for a glossary

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because the characters are all Germans and not public figures. Prussian aristocrats, shopkeepers, minor officials, the ragtag and bobtail of Eastern prisoners, conscientious objectors building coffins – they all parade before us. The situation is very tense, because the Germans hate the refugees and particularly such famous figures as the Célines, who put them in jeopardy by association. To Céline the Germans are entirely foreigners, and therefore are described with an intense ‘objective’ distance, and often with contempt. He kowtows to them, flatters them, mends them as a doctor, ridicules them, makes bitter asides about what shits they are, how nobody is to be trusted, and how everybody has some hidden agenda. One of the unforgettably funny moments in the blackness of North is when Madam Inge leads Céline into a wood and tries to seduce him – her real agenda being to persuade him to get her some poison to kill her defective husband. Céline’s comment to himself is, ‘Crude stuff, my lady, crude stuff’ (North, 274). He and Lili are aware that they may at any time be killed in some dark corner. They only survive because they have a defender in Professor Harras, President of the Reich Medical Association. He admires Céline because they have worked together on plague control. In other words, the regime has not yet entirely collapsed. The mood of North is very dark, yet in some ways trivial, because the primary issue is getting enough food to stay alive, and everybody lies about it. The atmosphere is again sauve qui peut, because they all know the war is lost, and want to find some haven in the conquest. Commentators have found it strange that North comes second in the chronicle when it happened first in time. The explanation seems clear. Céline had written Castle to Castle in 1957 for two reasons. First, he needed to make some money. When he returned to France in 1951 he was deadly poor, under continued persecution (he hardly dared go outside). All his possessions and manuscripts had been stolen and his royalties confiscated. Knowing he would die before long, he worried about his wife’s future. Also, having been cleared by a military court of all charges of collaboration, he wanted now to justify his actions and those of his friends who had been expurgated in the great purges of 1945–7. This was possible in 1957, because the French intellectual community was not so much under the control of the communists as it had been in 1945. In the event, Castle to Castle was a bit of a financial success. There-

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fore he expanded the story to keep himself, his wife, and his animals alive. The order of the chronicle is simply a matter of accident, determined by financial necessity. He once mentions the question of temporal order in North and simply says that he must be allowed to tell the story his own way: ‘I’m telling you all this every which way ... the end before the beginning! ... what does it matter? ... the truth alone matters! ... you’ll catch on’ (9). Rigadoon is the last dash across a Germany in total collapse and under massive bombing. Churchill has put ‘Bomber’ Harris in charge, and the promise of revenge is being fully realized, even as the society falls apart.29 Rigadoon is the name of a dance for two people, and here it is danced to the music of saturation bombing. The characters who appear are the wounded and desolated civilians who are simply trying to exist in a violent madhouse. Against this background, Céline, Lili, and Bébert are making a desperate attempt, always on the point of failure, to cross Germany and escape to Denmark. There Céline has some royalties stashed away and he feels that Denmark may afford them some chance of survival. (In fact, he was put into solitary confinement, though not executed as he would have been in France at that date.) Trains are bombed almost out of existence, buildings burned to the ground, people are dying all around them. Céline is seriously injured, but staggers on in pain and hallucination. They are nearly buried in debris. Lili often has to go into danger to rescue Bébert. Céline remembers he is a doctor first and foremost, and tries to help whoever is near him. Towards the end, this includes a group of retarded children, for whom he and Lili have assumed complete responsibility. At last they escape into Denmark, through the kindness of a Swedish Red Cross doctor who stands together with another doctor. The book ends with the release of an achieved escape, but the release has a note of the sinister; in the last scene in Copenhagen they walk in a park, and some strange birds, escaped from a zoo, seem to threaten Bébert. Céline will soon be in the hole in Denmark, facing a sentence of death in France. Rigadoon is the great climax of the trilogy – the supreme account of technological war as suffered by civilians. This extraordinary story of the chances of necessity leaves the trilogy on an ambiguous note. As in all masterpieces, the trilogy is to be understood in terms of its height – in this case the height of saturation bombing, and the chance escape to

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Denmark. The account of the French losers in Castle to Castle, and the German losers in North, is completed by the carnage in Rigadoon. The chronicle is given its momentary and chancy release. Céline died the day he finished his masterpiece. To me this is deeply moving, as is the thought of Mozart putting down his pen for the last time, having written the wonderful opening notes of the Lacrimosa.30 When we are told stories by word of mouth, the storytellers are always present at the moment of telling, in all that they are in their immediate being; yet at the same time they take us into a past which is not there now, and is not ours. The three books of Céline’s trilogy are stories, and therefore Céline is doubly there, both as participant in the action in Germany in the 1940s, and as the world-weary, persecuted storyteller of the 1950s. Indeed in the first 125 pages of Castle to Castle we never reach the past in Germany. It is about his present forced retirement in the suburbs of Paris, about the cold and his need of money, the calumny against him by the literary ‘left,’ and the tricks of his publishers, the nuts who want to interview him, the anguish of his patients, his run in the death cell in Denmark, and his wonder at the animals. The first 119 pages of Rigadoon are similar. Then, when the storyteller is there in all his wild concreteness, the present suddenly drops away, and we are now with Céline and Lili and Bébert in the midst of Germany’s collapse, in all its horror and comedy. The Céline who dominates now is a much less broken character, a doctor who never ceases to be a doctor in his obligation to other people’s bodies. He does not have the selfpitying inwardness of the excluded outsider, and he is aware that his occasional rages about his later ruin are tiresome to his readers. His preoccupation now is with the actions necessary to the immediate situation, to survival and escape. When he is injured in an air raid, there is an unforgettable account of his hallucinations, but they are part of the story, not a self-indulgence; the old storyteller must move on from his memory of this cataclysmic experience, just as the injured man in Germany had to struggle to recover from it, and to make himself return, with Lili’s help, to the necessities of the situation, back to the flames, the dying, the broken, the falling buildings. The double time-scheme gives an unusual character to the story itself, because what is only implied in most stories becomes in the trilogy a substantial element, a sort of double identity.

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Style How are these wonders achieved? Much has been written about how it is impossible to divide substance and style, how indeed this unity is a prime mark of a great work of art, and how in literary work this is clearly illustrated in poetry (if we make the distinction between poetry and prose). All this appears to me true when I think about it as an amateur. However, I am not someone who has spent his working life understanding and analyzing literary art. This writing is about reading, and why a reader enjoys reading. Moreover in my working life as a political philosopher I am a follower of Plato, in the sense that I think understanding is higher than reason, rather than the opposite, which has generally been assumed since The Critique of Pure Reason.31 Above all I would not want to seem to analyze Céline’s style in a way that might imply that I could stand above it. My gravest hesitation about Plato’s thought is what he writes about the poets. Within this context, I have little right to speak of Céline’s wonderful style, other than to repeat some remarks of his and to make some glosses on them. Céline said that the purpose of his ‘famous style,’ with its breakdown of the classical French sentence and its ubiquitous three little dots, was to catch French as it is spoken by ordinary people in Paris, and to put it on the printed page.32 He also said that the rhythms of his writing had been greatly influenced by dancing, above all by watching professional women dancers. He gave the height of this trilogy the name of a famous dance. He also said that his style required very hard work, and commented bitterly that he had to write 1500 pages to produce 250 that would be published and for which he would be paid. This careful style which conveys the spontaneity of speech seems to me perfect for the story. There are some aspects of the style which affect the story even in translation. The almost constant use of the present tense is an obvious example. The three little dots are of course more important, though I can say nothing of the rhythms of colloquial French achieved by them. (But even in Manheim’s brilliant translation, the flexibility given by them makes easier the conjunction of the storyteller in the 50s and the events of the 40s.) It also allows the digressions which properly belong to a story. He can suddenly be off on his remembrance of Sartre’s persecu-

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tion of him, then equally suddenly come back to the chronicle with an ‘I must stop ... we were in Ulm etc.’ That flexibility allows the total recall of present and past which is the mark of a great storyteller. I had a Russian relative who, if he was telling you about a government department in Ottawa, would take you through the difficulty of getting a good meal in Panama, the eccentricities of his wife’s English relatives, the mining industry in India, before you got back to the details of the bureaucracy. The three little dots also give the opportunity for withdrawal. Between the sentences and the non-sentences there is this break in which can be given the writer’s withdrawal into remembrance and thought. In Rigadoon, for example, at a complex and dangerous moment, Céline has to take Bébert out of his musette bag, but is trusting his cat to keep close to him: ‘if he sees anyone coming he’ll jump up on my shoulder, one jump ... he knows ... he’s an experienced traveller ... he sure was ... he made it back here to Meudon, he’s buried out there in the garden ... looks as if we’ll be marching up this avenue ... arm in arm, me playing blind ...’ (93). This brief withdrawal into the past tense is strangely moving. The flexibility given by the three little dots allows both the reality of the storyteller and the reality of the story to exist together. Céline’s most interesting account of what he is doing in writing appears at the end of his life, in Rigadoon, in the extraordinary setting of the bombing of a city by moonlight. Céline has been hit on the head, his mouth is full of blood, and his back is wet with it. But Lili and Bébert are still close to him: there, I can tell you, we had nothing left ... our last rags and knapsacks had disappeared in the smash up! the cave-in! seven hand trucks under the torrents of bricks, two three house fronts and forged iron balconies! ... ah, moonlight! you’ll never see such settings and tragedies in the movies! ... much less on the stage! ... they tell us that Hollywood is dead! ... they can say that again! how can the movies deliver after what’s happened for real! ... which is why I personally can’t even look at a photograph! ... to translate is to betray! right! to reproduce, to photograph, is to putrefy! instantly! ... anything that existed makes you sick to look at! ... therefore transpose! ... poetically if you can! but who tries? ... nobody! (144)

(I hope that this passage will give pause to anybody who thinks of making a movie or a TV serial out of the trilogy. The necessities of democ-

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racy and profit do not make possible the impossible. It is impossible to transpose properly what is already a great transposition.) As a definition of transposition this passage is admittedly obscure. But it makes a complete distinction between ‘transposing’ and ‘translating,’ which is not done in the interview with Claude Sarraute. Translation betrays, putrefies, and is a reduction to an inferior medium. Transposition, as seen by Céline, lifts the subject to a richer one. It can lift prose into poetry. It is more than putting the spoken word into writing, though this is a beginning. The kind of poetry Céline achieves has what Coleridge calls the ‘property of exciting a more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at, whether colloquial or written.’33 In the same paragraph in Rigadoon about translation and transposition from which I have quoted, Céline extends the idea of transposition to a non-literary context. The crusaders transposed their Christian loyalties into fighting the heathen in the Holy Land. Christians in modern France express their religious aspirations differently: ‘they ceased to transpose’ ... what were the crusaders for? ... the crusaders transposed themselves! ... now they get themselves ejected from their sixteenth floor in Passy by air-conditioned super-jet direct to Golgotha ... seven minutes ... get their pictures taken on the Mount of Olives ... Monsieur as Joseph ... Madame as Mary ... the children? angels naturally ... home again for cocktails ... (144)

Prodigality Another quality of Céline’s storytelling – a matter of content rather than of style – is the prodigality of his presentation. An extraordinary range of characters are brought before us, both in the places of refuge and the journey of the escape. Ruined soldiers, factory workers, flights of children, collaborators, SS leaders, aristocrats, always the tenderness of aging women, station masters, train drivers, small and great bureaucrats, and the animals, etc., etc., etc. – taking and running, cheating and dying, loving, fearing, scheming, defecating everywhere, from Pétain on down. Here is a complex and recently triumphant society, now defeated in war, in the last moments before its actual conquest in unconditional surrender. These widely various characters play out their vir-

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tues, their fantasies, their vices, all in unique individuality. This is the art of total recall. In the hands of a bore, total recall can drive one nearly mad. When presented by an artist, it gives his art one of the marks of greatness – prodigality. I must pause to state carefully what I mean by prodigality, and its place in the art of the novelist and the storyteller. For us it must be a pregnant word, because it is used in the English translation of one of Christ’s parables. The OED defines it as ‘lavishness to the point of waste,’ therefore the word may not seem appropriate to the highest art. Who would dare to say that there is waste in Shakespeare or Mozart or Raphael? Yet what other word will do for this ability to range over vast territories of human passion and action and thought, both important and unimportant, which is the mark of great literary art? Profligacy is the word for the moral vice, and the distinction implies that prodigality is not necessarily vicious. Profuseness is a synonym and means literally the ability to pour forth. But it sounds ridiculous to say that Shakespeare or Mozart was profuse. Indeed the use of ‘prodigal’ in the translation of our Saviour’s parable points to its meaning in the present connection. The fact that the son had pursued sensuality on a lavish scale is related to the particular joy in the father’s welcome home – the joy which annoys the careful other son who had been disciplined, but not generous. An analogy may also be taken from nature. In nature there seems to be an extravagant waste which would not be the case if it had been planned by a sensible human being. Yet if we are to say against the moderns that insofar as anything is, it is good (and it appears to me that Christians must attempt to think this thought), then nature is good, and part of its goodness is its obvious prodigality – its ‘lavishness to the point of waste.’ This prodigality seems to me present in the highest art. As Polixenes says in act 4 of The Winter’s Tale, ‘The art itself is nature.’34 Mozart’s range presents us with the utterly separated worlds of Figaro and the G Minor Quintet.35 Within one genre, the piano concerto, he writes twenty-seven works which cover extraordinary reaches of feeling and technique. There is not only amazing range in Shakespeare’s plays and forms of verse, but his prodigality is in the fact that some minor character, like a gatekeeper, appears on the stage for a moment and we see the human being in the round. Of course, prodigality can be attempted in much lesser works of art. There is pleasure in the vast variety of For-

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sytes that Galsworthy shows us.36 At a much lower level, prodigality is imitated in those long historical and family chronicles which now fill up the market of a bored readership, insatiable for sustained entertainment. At their worst, the writers seem to strain like prostitutes who are forced to imitate the spontaneous motions of intercourse, yet once again, for money. Obviously true prodigality has nothing to do with strained commercialism on the one side, nor on the other with lack of discrimination. Racine has few characters on the stage, and yet his plays are prodigal in their pouring forth.37 Shakespeare does not put a lot of characters on the stage apart from the necessities of the work. Prodigality is the quality of achievement over a great and various range. One thing that lifts Céline’s art to a higher level than that of James or Proust or Joyce is that the purity of his apprehension of character and event is realized with prodigality. The Characters However masterly the style of the writing, I do not deny that the success of the book – that which enables us to partake in it as a lived experience – depends on the fascination of the story being told.c The story of the novel, or in this case the story of the story, is what matters. And this in turn depends on the characters around which the deeds and events take place. One does not so much have to like the people as to know them, so that their deeds and suffering can be experienced, in the sense of knowing that can make their lives our own. One does not admire Catherine in Wuthering Heights, and at moments Heathcliff is a sadist, but we know them in the sense that I have used the word.38 Ulysses is not particularly attractive, but we know him as a man of phronesis, and therefore the great events of his journey matter to us. (Shakespeare’s consummate political judgment puts his greatest speech on politics in the mouth of Odysseus.39 Phronesis and tenacity in the service of loyalty are basic if one is to be great in politics.) At a lower level, Aeneas is certainly more than a bit of a shit, and yet the work holds us by the sense of the purpose he sees himself fulfilling.40 The Greeks could see the Troc Grant wrote in a bracket on this page, ‘note on anschauen [to look at, to see, to view] and erleben [to experience]. ’These two German words always interested him, but they do not appear again in ‘Céline’s trilogy.’

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jans in their greatness; the Romans who saw them as their mythical origin could not. Dr Destouches and his wife Lili are there in the trilogy so that we know them in this way. We have, of course, the double vision: there are the detailed accounts of what goes on in Céline’s mind in the 50s, but the characters of Céline and Lili in the 40s are made known to us in a simpler and more certain way – in their actions. The primacy of action in the story can be well-illustrated by how their marriage is shown. This is one of the greatest accounts of an absolute marriage ever written.41 Yet nothing is said of it. Lili acts with great courage, with noble pride and skill. Because she is a dancer, she is wonderfully agile, often rescuing Bébert from awkward places, and once stopping a slow-moving train single-handed in order to get some children on board. She often warns her husband to be subtle in dealing with someone. But the absolute relation between them is never spoken about. It does not need to be. Céline had said in another connection that the shame which arises from offending modesty forbade him describing the deepest parts of his life in the way so many modern writers are willing to do. Céline’s own self-portrait is given in his actions and above all in his relations to others. It is not that of a hero. There is a lot of the man who has learned you have to go along if you are going to survive. In his earlier novel, Death on the Instalment Plan (Mort à crédit), he had described himself as a little boy who had to travel around with his uncle, who used to beat him. Whatever the uncle said, even before he had finished it, the little boy would say, ‘Mais oui, mon oncle.’ There is lots of ‘mais oui, mon oncle’ from Céline in Germany. His ambiguous relation with Harras is an example of this. Harras lives in luxury, and is at some points willing to provide food and some kind of shelter and some token employment for Céline, Lili, and Le Vigan. But Céline is clearly somewhat ashamed at accepting such help from ‘this smiling, opulent Harras,’ ‘a Boche, hundred percent Nazi.’ ‘Plenty compromising, no question, but our first fatal crime was leaving our country’ (North, 62). Céline does not have to pretend to admire Hitler – he can say anything to Harras as long as he says it in French, a language Harras greatly loves. But Céline does not quite trust that Harras will not quietly get rid of the three of them. Céline often shows himself cheating and lying and deluding. He never sees himself as doing anything particularly heroic; he is just

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escaping. He is moral in that he does what he can to help people, but he is not there as a saint who would be required to give up his wife and his escape, and stop to tend all the dying and needy who surround him. In Rigadoon, for example, he and Lili are on a train, packed to overflowing with refugees. When in the middle of the night the train stops at a huge area of empty fields, and they see hundreds of decrepit refugees being hauled out of the train by force, they ask an acquaintance what is happening: He didn’t tell you? it’s the Nietzschean technique ... Oberartzt Haupt is a Nietzschean ... natural selection! ... survival of the fittest! the cold, the snow, stark naked, it invigorates them, especially the wounded! ... the weak die and get buried ... Oberartzt Haupt’s technique ... they clear the cars, they put the bodies out in the field ... and leave them there ... two days ... three days ... in the cold, in the snow, stark naked ... the ones that are able to get up are invigorated ... you can see them, even on one leg ... they start for Rostock ... then they sort them out ... some go to the hospital for surgery ... the rest are put to work ... digging pits for the dead: the ones that don’t move after two or three days ... (43)

Céline makes no moral condemnation of this ‘technique’; he knows he can do absolutely nothing to stop it. But he takes for granted, because he is a doctor, that when somebody in need is inescapably put in his path, he does what he can directly and clearly, but without sense of righteousness. In Rigadoon, for example, when a dying woman, who is in charge of a group of retarded children, can go no further, he and Lili take them over. He screams and yells at them, calling them his ‘droolers’ and ‘slobberers,’ pushing them on and off trains, rescuing them from getting lost among the rubble, sharing his bits of food with them. The distinction between what he says and what he does is particularly vivid in this context. His responsibility is categorical. It might be argued that my feeling of knowing Céline and caring about him is just the result of a literary master’s trick. Is not the trilogy finally a work of self-justification? If the story is at its core a self-justification, then my claim for it is sullied. One begins to doubt the story, for self-justifications are seldom true. Does this not take away from what seems to me central to the majesty of the work – that it is the supreme account of the truth about technological war, from the point of view of

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the losers who are suffering it? The essence of great art is to show truth about reality. About this I would say two things. First, there is indeed a lot of selfjustification from the Céline of 1957, and he means there to be; his wildness and rhetoric of self-pity are how the storyteller presents himself as a storyteller, and he knows how boring his paranoia and justifications can become despite their wit. This is highly articulate. But in the story of the escape from Germany he does not see himself as heroic, and he is very seldom interested in justifying anything. I do not care for Céline because he is particularly noble, or, for that matter, particularly ignoble. One has just got to know him by living with him through so many intense happenings. Let us put aside the nonsense that was once talked by American journalists against one of their Republican presidential enemies: ‘you have to know him really well to dislike him.’ Smart, but journalistic untruth.42 A follower of Plato has been taught about the interdependence of knowing and loving. (One may wish that Bacon and Darwin had learned this. But more of that later.) Another reason I would deny that self-justification is basic to the trilogy is that Céline was too proud for it. He knew that he could confound his readers by his sheer talent. The supreme telling of his story, not the making of himself something that he was not, was the way to silence his critics. Of course ‘character’ may be called a kind of hypostatization. But suffice it to say here that I do not think the self-portrait of Céline as central character vitiates the truth of the story told. I can only speak for myself when I say that the couple and their cat who emerge in the action are lovable, in the way that all heroes and heroines must be if a story is to hold one for long. The proof of this for me is that when at the end it is touch-and-go whether they will escape to Denmark, or be swept up by the Allied army, I am as much on the edge of my seat as when I read at ten of P.J. the Secret Service boy escaping from some doom prepared by his grim opponents. From outside knowledge, I know that Céline and Lili and Bébert will succeed. Yet when they get at last into the Swedish train with their band of retarded children, I sink into relief. The only comparable relief in my reading experience was when my father handed me the book which showed that Holmes had not been killed in his last encounter with Moriarty.43 Now, at the age of sixty-five, I rejoice again.

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Not only the central characters are given us with this purity of apprehension. An enormous gallery of people are presented to us in the most immediate way, one after another in the intricate circumstances in which they are caught. Of course, many of the people are in extremis. Germany is crumbling under massive and continual bombing, and the approach of armies from east and west is imminent. Everyone is attempting to run for cover before the conquest is complete. Therefore most of the characters are not acting as they might under easier conditions. Céline describes the desperation in Rigadoon. ‘If you’ve ever passed through armies in flames, through jellied cities and empires, and desperate panting populations, offering you, oh yes! their babies, their wives, and then some ... anybody! anything! ... just so the damage! the lightning! should come down on you! and not them! not them! ... nothing will ever surprise you any more’ (95). This is a cast of losers, whether they are German aristocrats who are learning for the first time to be losers, or people who have been losers all their lives. Each is a realized individual, despite the fact that they are actors in the story, and as such are always seen in relation to Céline’s desire to save himself and Lili and Bébert. However wild the situation, the people Céline encounters in the fall of Germany, whether in Sigmaringen, at the Simplon Hotel in Baden-Baden, or in the desperate journey across to the Swedish train, are unforgettable human beings who are held before us just as they are. One could cry out with Lear on the heath, ‘This is the thing itself.’ The completeness of apprehension and the ability to put it on the page is the mystery most difficult to fathom in thinking about literary art. The people are not there over a long introspective haul, as with Maggie and Charlotte in The Golden Bowl.44 But we know them as immediately, indeed we know them more completely because we know them in the round of the flesh and the details of the flesh in a way we never do with Henry James’s characters. We know them in the completeness of realization that is achieved when Natasha, in War and Peace, comes into her mother’s bedroom to tell of her engagement. (Such a mystery when one considers that it is a man writing of two women alone.)45 Céline’s characters are as much before us in their independent completeness as are those in Las Meninas.46 Of course the reader can question me, asking how do I know that this is the way people are? Am I not enraptured by Céline simply because he sees people as I see them? He feeds my prejudices. In our

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modern ‘subjectivity’ we are all entitled to see anything the way we want to see it. The fact that Céline sees people the way I see them is no reason to call his apprehension ‘pure,’ and assert this as central to the beauty of his trilogy. Suffice it to state my position without argument: Céline’s grandeur stands or falls by the claim that he brings before us people as they are. Was Céline Mad? What about Céline’s supposed madness? Most of the literati have been forced to recognize the power of his books, and then have put them safely into quarantine by saying that he was crazy, that he must be kept in a corner, out of the main tradition, because his art was corrupted by madness. Kind words are poured forth, saying he was not responsible for what he did or for the extremities in his books, because of his head wound suffered in 1914. (He had been wounded in Flanders, with severe head and arm injuries, resulting in a 75 per cent disability rating. At this time he was awarded high military honours.) (Note. See chronology in Castle to Castle.) I would be glad to be able to think that he was not responsible for his period of vicious anti-Semitism, but there is not evidence to support this. As for his ‘madness’ having corrupted his art, such critics ignore the very clear evidence to the contrary. We have before us in the trilogy a work of art in which the inward and the outward are most beautifully at one. With extraordinary realism the poet lays his madnesses before us as part of the story he is telling. Before considering in more detail in what sense he might be called mad, I will mention two periods of his life which are relevant to this question. Céline had grown up in the lower reaches of the small bourgeoisie, in that class which was always trying not to be proletarianized, never having enough to eat and always having to kiss ass if they were to stay out of destitution. As he wrote in the account of his youth in Death on the Instalment Plan ‘if you haven’t been through that you’ll never know what obsessive hatred really smells like ... the hatred that goes through your guts all the way to your heart.’47 That hatred is deeply present in all his books, and understood and ridiculed within them. In the trilogy there is no more savage anti-Semitism. His racism has spread so wide it is diluted into a kind of fantasy. He rails at every nationality, including his own. The crazy old storyteller sees the final

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enemy being the Chinese – the ‘yellow’ races – because they will genetically dominate the rest of mankind. Whatever his obsessive hatred did to his character, it did not corrupt his art, nor prevent him from seeing himself clearly. Nor did it affect the way he acted towards individuals. Secondly, he lived through the years in Europe between 1914 and 1945, in full openness to their violence. He called himself the ‘chronicler of grands guignols,’ and can you be a chronicler of such without the full expression of paranoia?48 In 1944 he had the whole French left on his back, calling for the death penalty, with Sartre at the head of the pack. (I like to hope the plagiarist of Heidegger will be remembered as the man who worked for the death penalty for Europe’s greatest writer and who, if he had succeeded, would have prevented the existence of this masterpiece.) French politics has a quality of vengeance, both from the left and the right, and the left was deep in innocent and uninnocent blood in 1944, and was baying for more. Céline was pursued remorselessly till his death, although he had been cleared of any crimes by a French military court. I am forced to the old cliché, ‘to be paranoid doesn’t mean you aren’t being persecuted.’ Taking paranoia to be what the OED calls it – ‘chronic mental unsoundness characterized by delusions and hallucinations’ – I have to make some distinctions. ‘Mental unsoundness’ is nonsense about somebody who can bring the world before us with such clarity. To say it of Céline reminds me of what Dr Johnson said of Kit Smart: ‘His madness is not noxious to society. I would as soon pray with Kit Smart as with any man.’49 Delusions and hallucinations of course. But who in the world is entirely free from these? The framework from which the German trilogy is set is given in the first 125 pages of Castle to Castle, and in this he describes the raging difficulty of his current forced retirement just outside Paris, in the late 50s. He lived in extreme poverty, a doctor to the poor who could very seldom pay him, still tormented by slander and persecution. (He was not a storyteller who spent his life in the Café de Flore.) Paranoid with resentment he was. But only a sane and great artist could so perfectly convey the paranoia. Some commentators who write of Céline’s ‘madness’ say that he is so utterly engrossed in his own self that what is other to the self is lost. We are told that hallucination and reality are confused and can no longer be distinguished. Let us look at one of the wildest and most detailed hallucinations, the attack of malaria in Castle to Castle, and see

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whether these criticisms ring true. Even in this fearful vision of Charon rowing the dead across the Seine, after bashing their heads in with his oar, when Lili at last finds him her figure comes through the visions with the same clarity as always, calm, not arguing, doing what is necessary, even paying some attention to the lost hedgehog, Dodard (‘he doesn’t ruffle his quills, he knows us’). And when Céline is safely in bed, tossing in fever, he is still worrying about Madame Niçois, his dying cancer patient, whose dressings are going to need changing. During hallucinations one does by definition confuse delirium and reality. Even a careless reader may do so at moments. But not the writer. The other great account of hallucination (again with a clear physical cause) occurs in Rigadoon, when Céline is hit on the back of the head with a brick in an air raid near Hanover. It is interesting to remember that unlike the vision of Charon in Castle to Castle, which occurred near the time of writing about it, the Hanover air raid happened in 1944. Any of us might hallucinate if we stopped a brick; but which of us could describe our sensations twenty-five years later in utterly convincing detail? In the middle of it, the storyteller’s voice breaks in speaking to his readers: ‘telling you about it 25 years later ... I hem and haw, I’m all balled up ... too many bits and pieces ... you’ll have to forgive me.’ Then to himself: ‘Stop spluttering ... just tell us what happened’ (Rigadoon, 138).50 In Germany Céline does not indulge in paranoia. He is too busy. In his asides from Meudon, especially when his writing is interrupted by unwelcome visitors, he does. In this context, critics have condemned Céline for the degree of inwardness in his art, denying the wonderful combining of inward and outward that he achieves. The books are a story, and Céline is telling the story. The inward is indeed present as the storyteller of the 1950s, and also as the storyteller who was in the story. The artist is not there with the pure consciousness of the categories in the modern scientist; nor is he there as the slightly academic ‘being towards death’ of the existentialist. God knows he is too much involved in dangerous activity to be there as the id, ego, and superego of the Freudians, or the construct of behaviourist psychology. He is there as an intelligent and compassionate French doctor, taken up with the hates and loves, both private and political, which have come from his intense life. He is there as a man who very shrewdly is trying to escape being murdered by his political

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opponents, and who has now lived through and survived twenty years of sustained vilification in the media. He is not attempting in his art ‘to see life steadily and see it whole.’51 If I were to use a colloquial title for this present writing, appropriate to the master of whom I write, it would be ‘Up yours, Matthew Arnold.’ We have been told that the saints in prayer can contemplate the whole steadily; it is reported that the philosophers can understand the meaning of the parts within the whole. But for the rest of us, seeing it steadily is not seeing it whole, and only a well-heeled bourgeois could have claimed that it was. We only see it steadily when we don’t attempt to see it whole. It was inevitable that the tired, but comfortable, aesthetic pessimism of Matthew Arnold should have asserted that part of the secular creed which says that art is what gives life meaning, and so have exalted the artists. But Céline was too noble to fall into that blasphemy. To those who would call his unsteadiness ‘madness’ I would suggest that there is something wrong about people who are not mad in this era. Céline was a doctor who became a great poet. His book would not be a true story if all parts of the whole were seen steadily. In terms of the universal, is not the story of somebody driven by public events – the anguish of the refugee – a universal story of the twentieth century? And is it not more universal than our story, television watchers at the protected centre of our empire? Those who write of Céline’s madness would do well to consider this. Nevertheless, when the folly of calling Céline a mad artist has been laid aside, a more difficult question remains. The professors would call it a question in aesthetics. Céline is very much a modern artist. The word ‘modern’ arises in the present connection because one of the great facts of modern existence has been the centrality of individuality in modern life and thought. This is manifest in nearly all modern art. It is certainly manifest in Céline’s writing. To say that his writing in these books does not come forth from distorting madness is not thereby to say that the presence of ‘individuality,’ which penetrates all which is modern, does not make it inferior to that which came forth in eras when ‘individuality’ had not yet been brought ‘out of concealment.’ At this point the question must be left undiscussed. It must be left undiscussed here because individuality and subjectivity came into the world above all because of Western Christianity, and can only be discussed in the light of how one considers Western Christianity.

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At a less profound level, however, we can observe that individuality and subjectivity are among the central concerns of the Western literary tradition. It is not accidental that Augustine, the thinker who more than any other was influential in the coming-to-be of Western Europe as against the ancient Mediterranean civilization, wrote his Confessions. Nor does it seem to me accidental that Protestant modernness was first magnificently proclaimed by Luther, who had once been an Augustinian monk. Nor that at the height of the Enlightenment another great philosopher, Rousseau, who was to be a patron saint of much modern art, should have written another Confessions. We are hardly aware of Sophocles when we are enraptured by his tragedies. Even though Plato’s greatest writings are perhaps dramas and not treatises, he is wonderfully unpresent in these dramas. It is important to distinguish the sense in which Céline is entirely modern, and the sense in which he is not. The utterly modern is the utterly American, and Céline, in holding on to everything European, cannot be called that. Nor is he turfing the grave, in Bacon’s sense. The last thing he wants to do is to pretty up reality. ‘The thing is as it is’ (Luther).52 Nor does he believe in the irreplaceable uniqueness of the individual, particularly as this applies to himself. Nevertheless, as hero and observer of the events in Germany and Meudon he is constantly aware of his own subjectivity, his self-consciousness; but it is part of the story, not the point of the story. This is a very personal judgment, but I am intensely bored by Proust’s self-absorption in À la recherche du temps perdu, whereas I am fascinated by M de Charlus and Mme Verdurin.53 I hate the self-centredness of modern art – but Céline is not like this. I quote again from Rigadoon: ‘such dramatics! this “me me” chronicle’ (143). Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Sartre in his café – can there never again in the modern world be the noble and the base, as with Lady Dedlock in Bleak House?54 I do not know whether Céline’s subjectivity is like everyone else’s, but it is like mine – not in content, but in form. He was a man full of selfpity, yet not self-indulgent. He has the modern emptiness, yet is not empty. He is not describing the world as it is without God, but the world as it is whether there is God or not – a very different matter. Another kind of modernity is often imputed to Céline. In the long journey of eighteen months there are of course many moments of high comedy, particularly in the first two books. Many writers in the United

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States who have learned from Céline claim that he is the originator of ‘black comedy,’ that is, writing which makes you laugh but excludes all felicity from itself. To me, ‘black comedy’ is a contradiction in terms, because there can be no sane laughter if it is not within some overarching framework of felicity. It might be argued that in Journey to the End of Night, and in Death on the Instalment Plan, there is the origin of black comedy, in that they produce a grim laughter with no framework of felicity; and for having written these Céline may be called an originator of this kind of humour. But in the trilogy he has become a greater writer of comedy – of the kind which produces more than a grim and insane laughter. The trilogy is a chronicle, not a novel, and his purpose is to tell the truth however much enlivened by his wit. There may not be much felicity, but a sane and courageous loyalty is itself a kind of felicity. This is more fundamental than his overt cynicism. Among the horrors and afflictions of civilians at the end of a war, his loyalty is unfaltering – first to Lili and Bébert, then to all the desperate people he tries to help as a doctor. For instance, at the colossal orgy at the railway station in Castle to Castle (187–91), Céline is trying, for fairly self-serving reasons, to rescue a teenage girl, daughter of Major von Raumnitz, and one of the ‘nymphettes of Sigmaringen.’ The situation is black, Céline’s account of it is very funny, but it lacks the indifference which is basic to black comedy. My conclusion is that Céline’s trilogy withstands the objections I have brought forward. Neither inwardness, unsteadiness, nor blackness destroy its beauty or make it less than human. Only people who are modern liberals, and think of charity without the cross, could think Céline mad. Why Am I Enraptured? Still the question recurs: why does Céline’s trilogy enrapture me? Friends, who are rationalists in the sense that they want others to learn and become educated, have told me that Céline’s art delights me because I learn from him what Western human beings are like in the twentieth century; if we are to think accurately or act wisely in this difficult era, we must think about what is going on, and Céline helps us to see this. I just do not think that this is so. Indeed it is true that Céline is above all an artist of the twentieth century, and as such lays before us in

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detail that the world is ruled by chance and necessity. But I do not think I needed Céline to teach me that, or that most other people would. As it happens, I have had much experience of the bombing of civilians. But even those who have not do not need Céline to imagine what it is like. To anyone with a modicum of sensibility, the TV can do that.d Nor when I say that Céline can make me cry out, ‘Thou art the thing itself,’ do I think that I learned that from Céline.55 When one says that Céline describes the human condition, one is just saying that he sees it as one sees it oneself. One does not learn it from him. Perhaps the question should be more general. Why does beautiful writing enrapture us? It is lucky, faced with such a difficult question, to be able to start with a statement by a famous writer at the beginning of our tradition, which answers the question, though in a false and corrupting manner. Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained; but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join what nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; ‘Pictoribus atque poetis’ etc. It is taken in two senses in respect of words or matter. In the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter it is, (as hath been said) one of the principal portions of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse. The use of the feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and d I think Grant would have wished me to remind readers here that this was written before the Gulf War.

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more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.56

This passage at least disproves with clarity the belief of those who claim that Bacon wrote the plays we say are by Shakespeare. Could the man who wrote this have written King Lear or Antony and Cleopatra? I start from the assertion that great art does not turn us away from the truth of what is, but towards it. But the question is: what is the truth with which it presents us, and why is that truth enrapturing? Here, at the beginning of the modern era, poetry is belittled, not only to make the poet’s activity more difficult, but also the enjoyment of poetry more difficult – or even making it less possible for human beings in a technological age ‘to live on earth poetically’ (Heidegger).57 Here poetry is taken out of its proper place in the order of enlightenment. Modern mechanistic science teaches us what is true about what is; art is the business of prettying up what is, so one can turf the grave. One of the great destroyers of the tradition puts the axe of his ‘ressentiment’ to the root of poetry. He does this above all by brilliantly describing bad poetry and then identifying it with poetry itself. It is well to remember that Blake wrote on his copy of The Advancement of Learning, ‘good news for Satan’s kingdom.’58 One can imagine how Céline would laugh to scorn the idea of his chronicle as ‘feigned history,’ or the suggestion that it may be ‘styled as well in prose as in verse.’ The writer of chronicles, the teller of stories, the supremely subtle stylist cannot be contained within Bacon’s description. Third- and even second-rate literature can be. Most of us have our beloved means of escapism, whether mystery stories, historical novels, romances, or others, and these are helpful when our lives are narrow or

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boring or bitter. Bacon describes this kind of entertainment quite acceptably. But great prose or great poetry is a different matter, and the joy it gives, the enrapturing, has little in common with the pleasure and relaxation of our escapist entertainment. Bacon has only clarified the enrapturing by an eloquent description of what it is not. Bacon is speaking of poetry, but more importantly he is defining the imagination whose product may be prose or verse, and whose subjectmatter can be anything but reality. It may be that the delight of reading is indeed a response to the imagination of the writer, but we need a more adequate account of that imagination. One might turn to Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria, the end of chapter 14: The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of Imagination. This power ... reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with a more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm profound or vehement.

This could as well be a description of music as of poetry – a Bach fugue as well as Milton’s ‘sober certainty of waking bliss.’59 It can also be applied to Céline’s writing, in which a seemingly wild and fragmented consciousness can be expressed by means of a disciplined and meticulous craft. It blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinating art to nature, ‘the manner to the matter.’60 Coleridge does not see ‘poesy’ or imagination as a fanciful escape from the nature of things, but rather as an exploration of reality.e Nietzsche speaks for the modern when he claims that art has more value than truth; at this point Céline is nearer Coleridge. e Grant had at this time some thought of rereading Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction, which gives an almost ontological account of metaphor in poetry.

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Some Thoughts about Music When thinking about imagination in general, music is often uppermost in my mind. Bacon also associates music with poetry, and consigns both to ‘rude times and barbarous regions.’ One wonders what kind of music he is thinking of. There is not a great deal about music in the trilogy. But there is one chapter in Rigadoon which shows Céline transposing his immediate experience into music, for himself. I have mentioned many times the bombing of Hanover, particularly with reference to his style, and his effort, as storyteller, to transpose the terrible scene before him, including the pain of his own battered head, into words. That is the business of the old storyteller, who can only use words, and his memory, to convey it to his readers. But what Céline at that time in Hanover was doing for himself, spontaneously, was transposing the whole terrible experience into music: I’d even call it a melody ... can you imagine? ... untrained, untalented, forced to bumble snatches of melody ... I can hear the tune in my head ... pretty sure the tune is right ... but the notes? ... the exact notes? ... were they too high or too low? ... as I’ve said, magnificent! as magnificent as the panorama ... symphonic melody, so to speak, just right for this ocean of ruins ... this fiery surf ... pink ... green ... and little crackling clusters ... the souls of the houses ... grotesque memories ... in snatches ... you can’t have grandiose melodies without counterpoint. (Rigadoon, 142)

This incomplete music continued to haunt him, even after his return to Meudon: ‘through myriad adventures, amusing and much less amusing moments, I kept wondering if I had my musical setting ... oh, I have no great pretensions ... three or four notes ... pleasure notes, so to speak ... that’ll do’ (Rigadoon, 145). This is interesting. Music had never been Céline’s medium. Yet when he was looking at an amazing scene of destruction, his head racked with concussion, it was music that expressed the experience for him. This is not brought in by the storyteller to convey to the readers the nature of the scene. This happened to Céline himself. For us he transposed his experience into words – for himself, at the time, into music. I am not suggesting that Céline was ever in his imagination attempting program music. He knew what words can and cannot do; he was

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not transposing words into music, or thinking of music as a kind of metaphor for language, but perhaps as a metaphor for reality. Music and story can never be reduced to each other, any more than music and poetry. But there may be something to our enjoyment of them that is common to both. (I do not mean at the obvious level of emotional or aesthetic enjoyment.) There are things in the form and structure of both that hold our attention at a basic and elementary level, irrespective of the quality of their particular content. It is of the very stuff of music that when at the beginning a theme is introduced the ear should ache, whether consciously or not, for its return. Both music and story are like a journey in which the sure object of desire is perhaps obscured, put at a distance, never entirely lost, returning in repetitions and variations and new developments, until at the end one’s desire is fulfilled in some kind of return and completion. These elements are present in most music – even in a song – but most explicitly in the sonata form, the fugue, and the theme and variations. (The Goldberg Variations are certainly an image of human life.)61 Mozart told us that he heard his music altogether and at one moment. But most of us have only the moving image, and our experience as listeners and as readers, and indeed as living human beings, is grounded in temporal sequence. The growth of complexity out of an original simplicity may be an archetypal pattern of our experience, more fundamental even than the aesthetic. But I am digressing, for it is not only at this level that I am enraptured by the trilogy. If that were the case, the journeys of Doctor Dolittle or the mysteries of Elizabeth Daly might do me as well.62 So far I have mainly tried to describe Céline’s late writing and the miracle of its achievement. To use Heidegger’s strange language, Céline is an artist of Dasein. By this I mean to say two quite different things at the same time. The first is what Céline calls his ‘magic lantern show,’ by which he gives the reader the sense of being directly present in the midst of events. This I have tried to describe. It is enchanting enough. The second sense of Céline’s Dasein is quite beyond any magic lantern show, yet it is equally the truth of ‘being there.’ What I want to say is something more universal, and therefore something more opaque and difficult of expression. In reading these books I find myself saying that this is what human beings are like always and everywhere, in one respect particularly. Our purposes and passions, both great and small, are somehow in the order of necessity doomed to

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a kind of incompleteness in this life. I do not mean by incompleteness such things as failure, necessary deficiency, or frustration which might imply pessimism. Nor do I mean by this the obvious fact that we are beings who know we are going to die. To repeat, I mean simply that our purposes and projects and passions somehow are incomplete (it is the only adjective I can find). Of course the situation which Céline is writing about, the losing of a great war, makes this clear in an immediate way. Also Céline knew, as one who was raised poor, that this incompleteness is more present in people struggling for food than in the bourgeois who can cover the void by eating, drinking, coupling, the pursuit of ambition etc. But it seems to me that the incompleteness of all human purposes, projects and passions everywhere and always is recognized in Céline’s very apprehension of human beings. The tenderness in his presentation of other people in these last volumes (even when he is raging at somebody who is set to betray him, or when he knows the ferocity of which some human being has been capable) seems to me to arise from the recognition of this universal incompleteness and therefore vulnerability, both of flesh and spirit. It is the constant presence which makes me want to cry out about his characters, ‘Thou art the thing itself.’63 Obviously the question arises: how does one know that this is a universal fact about the human condition? To discuss this properly would require too long a digression. It would require a discussion of the greatest accounts of this fact – that is, in the West in terms of Christianity, or in terms of the full immediacy of the first noble truth of the Buddha, that all life is sadness. How Céline would have ridiculed somebody who took his writing as a means of making obiter dicta about the truth of the great religions! Yet in terms of Céline’s art something must be said about why the sense of this grave limitation in human life has been so lost in the West. The cause of this seems to me first and foremost that Western Christianity, particularly because of St Augustine’s thought, so emphasized the power of God in its teaching that it forgot the truth of the weakness of God. The doctrine of the fall of man was indeed a very inadequate account of this fact. (The history of Western Christianity is strange when we consider that it centred around the rite of the Eucharist, surely a celebration of the weakness of God.) When Christian belief was secularized into the doctrine of progress it gave almost unlimited opening to a belief in our own power as a means to the forgetting of our

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limitation. At least its forgetting by liberal Christianity is more generous than that. This fact must be expressed hesitantly because it can be so easily used to justify the impossibility of any useful politics in this era. But it does not imply the impossibility of politics, only their grave difficulties and dangers. It is not only in other people that Céline sees the brokenness. He is very much aware of his own. He is a witness to the weakness of God and the fragility of the flesh. In Germany he became so physically weakened that he was at times entirely dependent on Lili’s help. All his political passions are long since spent; there only remains the passion for survival – for himself, for Lili, and for Bébert. For the old storyteller his disaster has happened – all his hopes have been broken, many by his own fault. What matters now is to make enough money to support Lili when he is dead, and the only way to do this is by very good writing. Mozart felt the ice around his soul, but he still had the consolations of loveliness. Céline did not. His consolations were to write his grim stories, but poverty, old age, and constant interruptions made that difficult. Lili was his consolatrix, but also his responsibility. What he saw in the eyes of the retarded children, his band of droolers – the dignity and simplicity with which his dog suffered and died – these were mysteriously beautiful, but the love they evoked was nearer pain than joy. He was indeed a witness to the tenderness of the flesh. This is near the heart of what moves me most in Céline. But I still cannot easily describe it. He hated generalities, despised philosophy, had no use for religion, and quite consciously avoided statements about the whole. He did not find meaning in the world; the beautiful had no purpose beyond itself. If there was God, he only saw the absence. He has been called the poet of the empty tomb. One never knows out of what depths of suffering other people’s vision of the whole may have come. Why then should I be so enthralled by him? I think it is the very mixture of cynicism and love in Céline that moves me most; because both those rather conflicting attributes are used by him to express the nearest he can get to the truth of what is. This is what distinguishes him from a nihilist or a liberal. Human beings are not often very good – we are selfish and devious and broken. Céline does not talk about good and evil, nor does he confuse them. Never does he equate bad action with good. It always matters what one does, but that is to be taken for granted, like a conditioned reflex, and never thought of as virtuous.

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He works as a doctor hard and lovingly, both in the emergencies of war, and home in Meudon. Because the tenderness of the flesh is his business, he takes it as an imperative that one does what one can. He has no illusions that this will amount to very much. Loyalty is also taken for granted; to his friends, to anyone who has been good to him, to his long-suffering companion Bébert. (He and Lili are so close that loyalty is not an appropriate word.) When asked for practical help all through the terrible journeys in Rigadoon he grumbles, and does what he can. He is without illusions. If he finds himself indulging in them he laughs bitterly. The one thing he will not say is that things are better than they are. The thing is as it is. Yet he says that he is dominated by the desire for perfection – death’s cousin. The soul only knows for certain that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. A child does not stop crying if we suggest to it that perhaps there is no bread. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty.64

Notes 1 Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) (Louis-Ferdinand Destouches), physician and novelist, practised medicine in a Paris suburb for much of his life. Céline wrote anti-Semitic works in the late thirties; after his return to France in 1951 he produced his trilogy, Castle to Castle (1957), North (1960), and Rigadoon (1961). 2 Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978), English critic influenced by the ‘Practical Criticism’ of I.A. Richards, introduced, in the tradition of Arnold and Ruskin, an almost religious seriousness to his criticism, inspiring a generation of followers. 3 Cuthbert Girdlestone, Mozart and His Piano Concertos (New York: Dover Publications 1964). 4 Grünewald’s Eisenheim (or Isenheim) Altarpiece (c. 1513–15) was executed for the hospital chapel of Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Isenheim in Alsace and is now at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, a nearby town. Matthias Grünewald [Mathis Gothart] (c.1475–1528), German Renaissance

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5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

Céline’s Trilogy painter, supported Martin Luther but executed commissions for the Mainz diocese nonetheless. For John le Carré, see 413n7. See 473–88. Wanda Landowska (1879–1959), Polish-French harpsichordist, taught and played in Paris until she moved to the USA in 1940. She is considered responsible for the revival of interest in the harpsichord in the 20th century. Rosalyn Tureck (1914–2003), American pianist, was a leading interpreter of Bach’s keyboard music. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1832). The Lady never looks out of her window but instead weaves pictures from a mirror’s reflections of the scene. She dies when she looks at Sir Lancelot riding by. Robin George Collingwood (1889–1943), The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1938), 336. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864) by John Henry Newman (1802–90) describes the changing convictions that led him to become a Roman Catholic. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1782). St Augustine, Confessions (397 AD). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762), especially book 4. Hubert Prior (Rudy) Vallee (1901–86), singer, actor, bandleader, hosted ‘The Fleischmann Hour,’ the first radio talk show and live variety revue (debut in 1928), nationally known as the Rudy Vallee Hour, which attracted millions of listeners. Edward Israel Iskowitz (Eddie Cantor) (1892–1964), comedian, singer, actor, songwriter, hosted the very popular Eddie Cantor Radio Show in the 1930s. Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour) by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599–1660). W.A. Mozart, Piano Concerto in A major K.488 (1786). Grant preferred Arthur Schnabel’s recording. The book referred to is Fulton Oursler’s The Greatest Story Ever Told: A Tale of the Greatest Life Ever Lived (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1949). Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), The House of the Dead (1862). Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit, 1932) trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions 1983). Mary Renault (Mary Challans) (1905–83), English novelist, is most famous for her historical novels about the ancient world, such as The Last of the Wine (1956) and The Mask of Apollo (1966). See Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick (London: Secker and Warburg 1955). Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), The History of the Popes, Their Church and State, trans. E. Fowler (New York: Colonial Press 1901) and The History of the

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Popes during the Last Four Centuries, trans. Mrs Foster, rev. G.R. Dennis (London: G. Bell 1912). Pierre Laval (1883–1945), French politician, was four times prime minister of France, the last between 1942 and 1944. He fled with other members of the Vichy government to Sigmaringen, was handed over to the French authorities in July 1945, convicted of high treason, and executed by firing squad. Henri Philippe Pétain, Marshal (1856–1951), French soldier and politician, was a hero of the First World War (‘the saviour of Verdun’) and was made commander-in-chief of the French army (1917). He entered politics during the inter-war period, becoming a leading advocate of appeasing Nazi Germany. He was appointed head of state after France’s defeat in 1940, signing an armistice that gave Germany control of three-fifths of the country, including Paris. The remainder was governed by Pétain, to whom the French Chamber of Deputies and Senate ceded absolute power. After 1942 he became a figurehead ruler, and on 7 September 1944 he and the rest of the Vichy cabinet were moved by the Germans to Sigmaringen. Pétain was returned to France in April 1945, tried for treason, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by Charles de Gaulle and Pétain died in prison in 1951. Jean Bishelonne (1904–44), Mining professor, director of railroads, and secretary of state for industrial production under Laval. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of a Gentleman, Tristram Shandy (1760– 67). Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Moncrieff and Terrance Kilmartin, 3 vols. (London: Penguin 1989). James Boswell (1740–95), The Life of Samuel Johnson LLD (1791). Count Leo N. Tolstoy (1828–1910), War and Peace (1865–9). Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Euripides, The Trojan Women (415 BC). Robert Le Vigan (né Coquillaud) (1900–72), French film actor, starred in many French films before and during the Second World War. Accused of collaboration, he joined his old friend Céline at Sigmaringen in 1944, giving up his role in Marcel Carné’s masterpiece of French cinema, Les enfants du paradis (1945). Le Vigan was tried and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for collaboration in November 1946. He was released in 1948, moving to Spain and Argentina, where he died in poverty. Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris (1892–1984) was in charge of the Allied air campaign against Nazi Germany 1942–5. His policy of saturation bombing of cities, causing great destruction and civilian loss of life, has been a source of controversy from both a moral and strategic perspective.

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30 ‘Lacrimosa dies illa’ (That day is one of weeping) is the seventh part of Mozart’s Requiem Mass in D minor, K. 626, composed, but not completed, just before his death in 1791. 31 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin’s Press 1965). 32 Paris Review, 1 June 1960, interview with Claude Sarraute, repr. in LouisFerdinand Céline, Castle to Castle, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, Inc. 1957), v–xviii. 33 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, near the end of chapter 14. 34 The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 89–97, Polixenes to Perdita: ‘Yet Nature is made better by no mean/ But Nature makes that mean. So, over that art/ Which you say adds to Nature, is an art/ That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry/ A gentle scion to the wildest stock,/ And make conceive a bark of baser kind/ By bud of noble race. This is an art/ Which does not mend Nature – change it, rather, but/ The art itself is Nature.’ 35 W.A. Mozart, Le Nozze de Figaro, K. 492 (1786); String Quintet in G minor, K. 516 (1787). 36 John Galsworthy (1867–1933), novelist and playwright, published his series of novels collectively known as The Forsyte Saga between 1906 and 1921. 37 Jean Racine (1639–99), French poet and ‘classicist’ playwright, author of such works as Phèdre (1677). 38 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847). 39 Troilus and Cressida, I, iii, 78–137. 40 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. C. Day Lewis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday 1952), which tells how the Trojan Aeneas founds Rome. 41 See Edward Andrew, ‘George Grant’s Céline: Thoughts on the Relationship of Philosophy and Art,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 95. 42 A reference to Richard Milhous Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States. See above 72n20. 43 Sherlock Holmes appears in sixty stories written between 1887 and 1927 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Holmes’s arch-opponent, Professor James Moriarty, appears in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) and The Valley of Fear (1914–15). 44 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (1904). 45 See ‘Natasha’s bedtime talks with her mother,’ War and Peace, book 6. 46 See above 468n15. 47 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Instalment Plan (Mort à credit, 1932) trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions 1971). 48 Guignols: ‘puppet shows.’

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49 ‘My poor friend Smart [Christopher Smart, poet] shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question ... I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.’ James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 281. 50 See ibid., 94. 51 Matthew Arnold (1822–88), wrote about Sophocles as the friend alleged to have seen life steadily and whole in ‘To a Friend’ (1849): ‘Business could not make it dull, nor passion wild/ Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole,’ ll. 11–12. 52 Luther’s statement is made in his ‘Heidelberg Theses’: Thesis number 21 states: ‘A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.’ Harold J. Grimm, ed., Luther’s Works, vol. 31, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1957), 40–1. 53 See chapter 2, ‘The Verdurins quarrel with M de Charlus.’ 54 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853). 55 Lear to Edgar on the heath in King Lear (III, iv, 104f.): ‘Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here’s three on ‘s are sophisticated. Thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.’ 56 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, book 2, pt 4, iii. 57 See Martin Heidegger (quoting Hölderlin) ‘... Poetically man dwells ...’ [‘... dichterisch wohnet der Mensch ...’ (1952)], in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row 1971), 211–29. 58 William Blake (1757–1827), English poet, engraver, and painter. 59 John Milton (1608–74), Comus, 263: ‘But such a sacred and home-felt delight/ Such sober certainty of waking bliss/ I never heard till now.’ 60 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, chap. 14. 61 J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988), were the last in the series of keyboard music published under the title of Clavierübung. Bach wrote them for Count Carl Reichgraf von Keyserlingk (1696–1764) and it is possible they were played for him later by harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727–56). 62 Elizabeth Daly (1878–1967), American mystery novelist, wrote sixteen mys-

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teries between 1940 and 1954 and was a favourite of Agatha Christie, and of George Grant. 63 King Lear, III, iv, 105. 64 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Collins 1959), 162.

Céline: Art and Politics

This article appeared in volume 90, no. 3 of the Queen’s Quarterly (Autumn 1983): 801–13. It appears here out of chronological order in order to have it follow ‘Céline’s Trilogy.’

O saisons, ô châteaux, Quelle âme est sans défauts?1

English-speaking people may find it difficult to recognize that Martin Heidegger, the leading philosopher of this Western era, and Louis Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961), its greatest literary artist, were both acquiescent (at the least) towards the National Socialist regime in Germany. I do not make this claim for Céline because of his two famous novels of the 1930s, Voyage to the End of the Night and Death on the Instalment Plan, but because of his three books about his wanderings around Germany during its collapse in 1944–45, Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon.a The first purpose of this article is to state that this trilogy is one of the great masterpieces of Western art and the greatest literary masterpiece of this era. It would be more prudent to flatter this age which worships ‘individuality’ and confine the claim to my ‘personal’ opinion. Aesthetics would be a ‘subjectivist’ way of looking at the matter. But let’s leave these clever difficulties aside for the moment.

a It would be pompous to give the title of Céline’s books in French. It is indeed hard for a foreigner to read Céline in French, because of his use of colloquial Parisian and because of his wonderful breakdown of the classical French sentence. Luckily these three books have been superlatively translated into English by Ralph Manheim. Also the earlier novels use the colloquial more widely than the last books.

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Such homage to Céline appears necessary because in the present literary scene in the English-speaking world his works have been shunted aside, because of his anti-Jewish pamphlets of the 1930s and his passive acceptance of the German occupation of Paris in the 1940s. The contemporary way of writing about him is generally the following: here is a writer whose two main novels in the 1930s were stylistically immensely influential, and for these he will be remembered; but in the later 1930s he degenerated into mad and vicious polemical writing and collaborated with the Nazis. He will remain in the history of literature for those two remarkable early novels, but his later writings are not worth our attention. Some go much farther than this ‘benign neglect,’ and these are not only the French polemicists of the Left, who continue their vendetta even when Céline is no longer alive to be shot. For example, in March 1983, John Bayley, the Wharton professor of English at Oxford University, could write: ‘When a worthless or odious self happens to predominate (Céline, Montherlant, William Burroughs) it is the defects themselves which skill must concentrate and carry to the limit and beyond.’b 2 As this is not a theological writing, I leave aside the firm prohibition against saying about another human being that he or she is worthless. It has been traditionally affirmed that it is proper to judge the actions of others, but never themselves. If one did not know the propensity of eager professors of literature to learn by writing and not by reading, one might simply leave the answer to this statement as ‘tolle, lege.’3 The answer to such attacks can only be in the reading and above all the reading of this last trilogy. To all the contempt that has surrounded Céline the central answer is just to say, ‘Read.’ To say this, however, is not to deny that questions arise if one reads Céline with any knowledge of his life. In the light of all the nonsense that has been written about him and in the light of his greatness, it is necessary to proceed carefully in the formulation of the question. At its most simple, the question might be: How can one be enraptured by the art of somebody who wrote anti-Jewish pamphlets in the thirties? But this is not the best formulation. Dostoevsky’s dislike of the Jews does not stand in the way of being enraptured by his novels. To go farther with the formulation: the present writing is not a life of Céline and

b Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1983, 255.

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therefore I cannot go into the details of the three pamphlets at issue.4 The one that appears to me the most distorting – L’école des cadavres – is about the approach of the War of 1939. It is quite beyond the limits of discourse acceptable in a constitutional regime. Even if Céline’s plea for peace at all costs between Germany and France were sensible, even if he was correct that the Jews were in favour of war between the two nations, even if he could not be expected to predict what crimes the National Socialists would come to before they were through, it is nevertheless wrong to publish such inflammatory writings against fellow citizens at any time. It is wrong because the constitutional regimes require a certain moderation of discourse between the citizens of the society if they are to exist. Indeed, the French regime of the time understood this and banned the book. But lack of political moderation in an artist is not enough to condemn him to the extent Céline has been condemned. Degas’ painting has not been excluded from the canon because he was anti-Jewish. At a much lower level, the absurdities of Shaw’s political and philosophical assertions do not prevent us from laughing at his plays. In an era such as ours, in which Western thought and tradition lie in ruins, it is not surprising that artists should be subject to the confusions of the age, and therefore should be more than usually excused. The question can be best formulated in a slightly different way. Céline’s judgments of the thirties make suspect for us the actuality we seem to be given in the trilogy about the fall of Germany. We are forced to ask as we drink from the chalice of his art whether its ingredients are not poisoned and therefore not to be commended to our own lips. If in the 1930s he can write as if the crisis of imperial technological Europe can be explained primarily in terms of the responsibility of the Jews, then is his art not marred at its core by simple failure of vision? To put the matter in the limited terms of my own experience: I am given in the trilogy the wonderful sense that this is the way things are; this is a monumental chronicle telling the truth about a great event in terms worthy of Homer. Then that apperception falls away as made suspect by the remembrance of the particularity and violence of his political judgments of the 1930s. I prefer this formulation of the question to those that are based on some supposed understanding of the worthlessness and odiousness of his character. I prefer it to those who say that he ought to have had better political judgments. It is best to say that the extremity of some of his earlier writing makes suspect the very substance of his later art.

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In terms of that formulation, it is necessary to discuss (a) Céline’s ‘madness’ and (b) his politics. These two questions are, of course, closely related. But I will discuss the first one simply in terms of the evidence for it in the trilogy. The second will be discussed in terms of a knowledge of the details of his life. It may seem tiresome antiquarianism to raise in detail the political questions of half a century ago. However it seems important to do so, because of the claims I am making about Céline’s genius. First it is necessary to say something about what the trilogy consists in as a story. These three books describe how Céline and his wife Lili and his cat Bébert struggle through collapsing Germany in their effort to escape to Denmark. He had reason to want to escape. The French Left were baying for his blood. To put it violently but accurately: the plagiarizer of Heidegger was calling for his execution.5 The journey takes place while the Russian armies get closer and closer, and while the American and British bombers flatten and reflatten the cities. Roosevelt’s unconditional surrender is in full swing. Europe is being demolished by the two great continental empires with the help of the British. Céline’s chronicle is of the collapse of that Europe and is laid before us with prodigality. From that last sentence three points must be expanded. First, it is a chronicle – a chronicle ‘of wasted time.’ Céline keeps saying it is a chronicle, and one must take it that he knew best what he was doing. Second it is a chronicle of great events. A great subject is necessary but not sufficient for a serious work of art, as the novels of Hemingway and Mailer tell us negatively.6 I do not know whether Aristotle is correct in saying that war is coeval with humanity. But up to this point it has been. Therefore it has been a central subject of art. In our era war has been particularly prevalent because of technology, and has taken new forms because of technology. What distinguishes our civilization from all previous ones is the science which issues in the conquest of human and non-human nature. Nuclear science may scare us out of certain wars (who knows?) but in the meantime modern technological science had led both to a great increase in war and a great increase in its intensity. Céline chose for his last masterpiece technological war. (He died the day that Rigadoon was completed.) Third, it is a chronicle told with prodigality. I must pause to say carefully what I mean by ‘prodigality,’ because its presence in Céline is central to this tribute. For us it must be a preg-

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nant word, for it is used in the English translation of a parable in divine revelation.7 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary says that it means lavishness to the point of waste. Therefore the word may not seem appropriate to great art. Who would dare say that there is waste in Shakespeare, Mozart or Raphael? But what other word will do for this essential quality which seems common to the great artists? ‘Profligacy’ is the word for the vice, and the distinction therefore implies that prodigality is not of necessity vicious. ‘Profuseness’ means the ability to pour forth. But it sounds ridiculous to say that Shakespeare or Mozart was profuse. Indeed the use of the word in the translation of Christ’s parable points to its meaning in the present connection. The prodigality of the son is related to the particular joy in the father’s welcome. An analogy may also be taken from nature. In nature there seems to be an extravagant waste that would not have been the case if a sensible human being had made it. It seems that all the very great artists share in this mysterious lavishness. This appears not only in the fact that a gatekeeper in Shakespeare is on the stage for a moment, and yet is utterly realized. It is shown also in the range of the great artists. Mozart can achieve the seemingly utterly separated worlds of Figaro and the G minor quintet.8 It is this prodigality which above all raises Céline’s art to a different level from that of Proust or Joyce, James or Lawrence. The chronicle is spread out before us – ruined soldiers, refugees, collaborationists, SS leaders, dying women, the animals, etc., etc., talking and running, cheating and dying, loving and fearing, defecating everywhere from Pétain on down.9 About the magic of the art in which the dance of the prodigality is achieved – well, it is magic, and I cannot speak of it here and perhaps not at all. What about Céline’s ‘madness’? I do not mean by madness here that divine frenzy which Plato tells us is necessary to the greatest poets. I am the last person to say that Céline did not possess that ‘mania.’ But those who write of Céline’s madness do not mean that. They mean paranoia as the OED defines it: ‘chronic mental unsoundness characterised by delusions and hallucinations.’ When people speak of his madness they mean some unsoundness which makes him distort reality in his art. Is his art corrupted by such distortion, as indeed much art has been? In such art reality is not laid before us so that we can take it to heart; what is laid before us are the compulsive fantasies of the writer as if they were the truth.

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Two preliminary remarks are necessary before I proceed to the question. First, the old cliché: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you aren’t being persecuted.’ To repeat, throughout the 1940s and 50s the Left in France called for his blood. When he was writing these books he had been allowed back into France, after ‘solitary’ in Denmark. He had been cleared of any collaboration by a French military court.10 However, the Left continued its excoriations of contempt. His death was kept quiet till after the funeral because it was feared his funeral would be broken up. When he came back from the Soviet Union in the 30s he had spoken of ‘commissars with asses like archbishops,’ and the Left had not forgiven him. Secondly, hatred is present in all his books. He had grown up in the lower reaches of the small bourgeoisie; in that class which was always trying not to be proletarianized, never having enough to eat and always having to toady in order to stay out of destitution. He describes it in the account of his youth in Death on the Instalment Plan. ‘If you haven’t been through that you’ll never know what obsessive hatred smells like ... the hatred that goes all through your guts all the way to your heart.’11 But are hatreds the mark of madness? Aren’t all of us, other than the saints, full of hates of one kind or another? To deny that most human beings hate is to confuse the immediate facts with the highest end, and to deny that that end is supernatural. To return to the centre of the question: Is reality distorted in the trilogy by Céline’s madness? Those who think so fail to grasp what the book is. Céline is telling the story of himself and his wife and his cat wandering around a bomb-wrecked Germany. He is there as a storyteller, and he is there acting in the story. It is not some novel where the writer lives ‘standpoint-less’ outside the book. Céline’s art may give the impression of madness because he is able to hold inwardness and outwardness together in a marvellous way.c Céline is always present in the 1950s as well as in the 1940s. For example, the first 125 pages of the trilogy are about his enforced retirement in the suburbs in the 1950s. The old storyteller emerges as he goes on about the tricks of his publisher, the cold, the anguish of his patients, the nuts who come out to inter-

c If I were a modern I would use here the language of subject and object, rather than inward and outward. But the language of subject and object was developed above all as an instrument for the advance of technological science and distorts the truth of both poetry and philosophy.

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view him, the memories of the hole in Denmark, the good sense of his wife and always the animals. It culminates, when he has a return of malaria, in a vision of Charon taking people to the underworld. Then when the storyteller is there in all his concreteness the 1950s drop away and we come to Céline in the midst of Germany in its collapse. The old dying genius is there to tell us the story as we move into the chronicle itself. Or again, often he will drop away from some intense moment when Lili and he are nearly getting their throats cut, back into the France where he is now recollecting. The intensity of the chronicle overwhelms the storyteller and he comes back to the moment of telling. Near the very middle of the trilogy he once calls Lili by her full name, Lucette, as if her courage in the story brings back his love for her at the time of recollection. When at the height of the highest of the three books, Rigadoon, he is in the midst of the destruction of Hanover by the flying fortresses, we are present in his hallucinations when he is hit by a brick. But is this madness? How can one better tell what it is like to be in the midst of saturation bombing? When one says this, it is well to remember that English-speaking people have done most of the bombing in this era, not so much suffered it. Céline’s inwardness is not madness, but the art whereby he is present in the books both as a storyteller and participant. Old men like to tell stories about the events of our lives. In comparison with the unity of the inward and outward in Céline’s writing, Proust seems a Trollope of the Faubourgs and Joyce’s Mollie Bloom a literary device.12 This is not somebody who would qualify as the ideal of what psychiatric social workers want us to become. But it is worth remembering that the society which lives under this ideal is not one which seems to produce great works of art. If I were to use a colloquial title for this writing, it would be ‘Up Yours, Matthew Arnold.’ To see life steadily and see it whole is an admonition that is likely to be self-defeating for poets.13 Yet those who call Céline mad would have liked to have lived by it. To repeat: it is reported that the saints in prayer can at moments touch that love wherein ‘the tears, the agony, the bloody sweat’ can be loved. But for the rest of us all too often the attempt to see it steadily is a method for not seeing it whole. Only a well-heeled bourgeois whose country and class were the most powerful in the world could have united the two, outside the supernatural love. Those who devote themselves to practice

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have to see life steadily to the extent that they have to get on with the job. It means, however, that they have to cut themselves off from trying to see life whole. This is why poets and philosophers know they are always in conflict with the workings of society, however much they must try to hide this fact. They must try to see life whole, but the parts of that whole can hardly leave them steady. Céline was a dedicated doctor who at the height of his poetic art wrote of technological war with incredible tenderness. A steady story of what he had lived through would have been a distortion and corruption. The definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ must be given greater respect than the ‘steadiness’ business, because it comes from a greater poet than Arnold.14 After Céline had been cleared by the court, he had enough immediate tranquillity to write his epic poem. Recollection certainly required tranquillity at that basic level. But why should the storyteller in the suburbs pretend in his recollecting that he is some jolly old reconciled gent who has put on a mantle deemed appropriate by those who feed our academic fodder machines in cosy universities? Indeed it appears to me that those who write of Céline’s madness and how it vitiates his art are in fact trying to put aside the truth he is telling us. They often seem to go further and wish for him to be mad so that what is told herein can be emasculated. This is of course closely related to the opinion that he must be mad, for how else could he have held such political opinions? What then of Céline’s politics? I must first state that it seems to me unimportant to take seriously the political judgments of most of us. They are caused mainly by necessity and chance – occasionally a little by good. They are better understood in terms of comedy than by behavioural science. And this still remains the case despite our extreme politicization in the technological age. It certainly applies to Céline’s politics. They are only to be described because they have stood in the way of the proper recognition of his art – particularly in the English-speaking world. It is useful therefore to look at his politics – albeit they have no contemporary significance and are an historical curiosity. Céline’s first political principle was that war between France and Germany should be avoided at all costs. As a youngster he had been thrown into the carnage of the 1914 War, and had been badly wounded. He wanted the Europeans to stop killing each other before they were swallowed up by the alien empires which surrounded them. His ac-

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count of the European situation was very close to Heidegger’s statement of 1935: ‘This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on the one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy.’d Céline wanted to save Europe (for him, above all France) from tearing itself up, and from invasion by the two continental empires which waited in the East and West. It must be remembered that some English Conservatives shared this opinion. One of Chamberlain’s reasons for the Munich pact was to keep both America and Russia out of Europe. Clearly by 1939 a majority of the English followed Churchill’s acceptance of Canning’s principle of bringing in the new world to redress the balance of the old. This was not however possible in the same way for French traditionalists, because they did not speak the same language as the Americans. Bismarck had said, a century before, that the chief fact of European politics was that the United States spoke English. Céline was no lover of the church or of the army. But he was a French traditionalist, in that his loyalty was given to the small-bourgeois life of his country. As war approached, Céline thought that the Jews and the English were trying to push the French into war with the Germans, and that this should be avoided at all costs. Added to this essentially European pacifism must be the fact that Céline was close to another dictum of Heidegger’s, namely that capitalism and communism are both predicates of the subject technology.15 As a slum doctor he had come to hate capitalists who were the beneficiaries of slum misery. He had gone officially to the USSR as the author of the early novels which had been taken by the communists as great documents of the proletariat. He came back to write an indictment of the system. He said of the regime in the early 30s that only three things worked: the police, propaganda and the army. He had been at Ford in Detroit and had not admired that edition of technology. Although he did not discuss the meaning of industrialism in any systematic way, he clearly was not a utopian about its results for human beings, and thought it was not likely to be improved, whether it was organized by ‘the Left’ or by ‘the Right.’ d Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), 31.

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When war came in 1939, Céline automatically tried to volunteer, and when turned down as unfit became a doctor on a ship which was torpedoed by the Germans. He saw no reason not to live in Paris under the Occupation. He did not have much to do with the Germans although they tried to court him as a great writer. In 1940 he already said the Germans were going to lose the war, and after the end of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1941 with the invasion of Russia, he knew his life was more and more at risk as the Left became identified with the Resistance. With the invasion of Europe from the west in 1944 he knew he had to fly. In thinking of these French questions, English-speaking people do well to remember a remark of de Gaulle’s in 1944. He had just had a tumultuous reception at Nantes where two months before Pétain had an equally tumultuous reception. De Gaulle pointed out that the same people cheered at both. It is also well to remember that more French were murdered by French after the Allied invasion than during the years of Pétain. The Left were ferocious in revenge during 1944–46. Yet something must be said about Céline’s attitude to European politics. In the 1950s he often uses the phrase ‘Europe ended at Stalingrad.’ It may be true that the defeat of the German armies meant that Europe would henceforth be under the control of the Eastern and Western continental empires. It may be true that something essential to Europe would be lost when its civilization came to be shaped by the worlds of the US and the USSR. But it is clearly an implication of the statement ‘Europe ended at Stalingrad’ that the price of it not ending would have been a large German empire in Russia, and a slave empire at that. Whatever may be said against Soviet society, Russia as a German colony is surely as appalling as the Soviet conquest of Europe. It was of course a German argument that as the English and the French had world empires it was only fair that the Germans should not be excluded from empire. Moreover they maintained that the English and the French could only hold on to theirs if they let the Germans take part in the common European imperialism. At a wider level it was claimed that either in 1914 or 1939 the Americans and the English, the Germans and the French should have come together to set up an international system which would have been incomparably more secure than the present one. Something like this seems to lie behind Céline’s opinion that this era marks the collapse of the ‘white’ races. What seems so extraordinarily absent in this diagnosis is any recog-

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nition that in recent centuries the European races have been the dynamic imperialists. European civilization had brought forth that universalizing and homogenizing science which issues in the conquest of human and non-human nature. In Heidegger’s dictum about Europe lying in the pincers of two continental empires dominated by technological frenzy, he forgets that Europe itself had brought into being that two-headed monster of technological science and dynamic imperialism. To speak of Germany alone, one simply has to remember its theoretical contributions to that frenzy – relativity and quantum mechanics. The US obviously, and the USSR through Marxism, are but epigonal products of that Europe. After all, Marx said his thought was the union of English political economy, French revolutionary politics and German philosophy. The chief influence on the American Constitution was the thought of Locke, which helped to loose technological frenzy. At the core of Céline’s loyalties is a love of particularity – in part the particularity of the nation against the universalizing and homogenizing power of the cosmopolis. Yet the natural and moral sciences which would destroy particularity were themselves a creation of that Europe which he wished to save. Céline’s politics is an abstraction from that science the consequences of which he describes so brilliantly in detail. But failure of understanding at this point hardly puts the greatness of his art in question. A more pressing political question is the relation of Céline’s art to his writings about the Jews in the 1930s. How seriously can one take the art of somebody who could put such emphasis on the Jews in explaining the crisis of imperial technological Europe? To speak of that question requires one to contemplate the mystery of the Jews. I use the word ‘mystery’ to distinguish it from ‘problem.’ It is out of the question ever to speak of the Jewish ‘problem’ because the answer to problems are solutions and we must have before us always in any such discussion the remembrance of that atrocious crime ‘the final solution.’ To mysteries there are no solutions; one simply lives in their presence with reverence and good judgment. The mystery of the Jews is the continuation of this people through different civilizations in which the push to integration has been brought against them in vain. It is not necessary to speak here of the survival of the Jews in civilizations dominated by ancient paganism, by Christianity, or by Islam. We are here concerned with modern anti-

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Semitism. Indeed, my change of language from anti-Judaism to antiSemitism illustrates the new situation. The traditional Christian antiJudaism changed into an intellectual anti-Semitism, based on nationalism and later, worse, on race. This change happened at the same time that the Jews were pouring into Western Europe from the East. For obvious and seemingly sensible reasons, many Jews welcomed the political world of the Enlightenment and wanted to share in it. The politics of the Enlightenment expressed above all the belief that we were moving towards a universal society of free and equal human beings, in which differences about the eternal would be matters of opinion and therefore unimportant politically. Many Jews welcomed such beliefs as helpful to them, compared to those of the older Christian world. Indeed many Jews became secularized, and believed the universal creed of that secularism – whether capitalist or communist progress. But in so far as many Jews remained Jews, that integration could not be absolute. Believing themselves a nation chosen of God, the Jews kept their distinctiveness and their interconnectedness across national boundaries. That is, they came into the universalist world of technology with strong exclusivist characteristics. This new but partial integration of the Jews produced the new antiSemitism in a secularized Europe. To many European intellectuals, the Jews appeared to want the benefits of the homogenized society while maintaining as final their loyalty to their particularist community. On these grounds there had been anti-Judaism from Voltaire, and his position was restated a century later by Marx.16 Worst, believing that religious belief was an illusion and yet wanting to attack the growing presence of the Jews, many intellectuals made the appalling step of basing their attack on race and so claimed to be giving it a ‘scientific’ underpinning. The consequences of this secularism can be seen in the fact that the great logician Frege wrote racialist pamphlets against the Jews.17 At the other end of the scale, many of those who remained Christians thought that the acceptance of the Enlightenment by intellectual Jews was just a method whereby they could attempt to weaken religious belief other than their own. It was believed that Jews wanted all faiths to be weak save their own. Beyond intellectual anti-Semitism lay nationalist anti-Semitism. The Jews often appeared to take the side of internationalism and cosmopolitanism in the life of their own countries, and so to hurt the interests of

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those countries. They could be disliked at one and the same time as supporters of international revolution and as central to international capitalism. Both were cosmopolitan positions. This nationalist antiSemitism led into the deeper and more sustained levels of populist antiSemitism. This penetrated those classes particularly at risk under the new regimes. The very solidarity of the Jewish community helped them to be successful in the impersonal world of the new technological states. It allowed them to be tough in the economic world, because they were more freed from the straining loneliness which was consequent on the impersonal world of mass civilization. They could treat the public world without thinking of the consequences of destroying it, because they had a nation other than the nation which the public world manifested. They could retreat into their national and religious community in a way the Christians could not. The intellectual attack on Christianity was the more immediately devastating to simple people because Christianity was not a nationalist religion. People who were deprived of their particularism in technological society came to resent the Jews because their particularism had so obviously not been demolished. The economically weak in the mass cities saw their pasts taken away by finance capitalism. They came to see the Jews as the masters and creators of a world in which they could not function. Just read Hitler’s account of his agony of loneliness in the gaudy decay of pre-World War I Vienna, and his identification of the Jews with that society, to understand an immediate cause of the immense calamity. Céline’s dislike of the Jews was of this populist variety. (It is hard, therefore, to know whether to call it anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism.) He was to say that the Stavisky scandal in France and his work as a doctor for the League of Nations brought it to life in his writings.18 It was, however, essentially populist. What made it of such consequence for the future recognition of his art was that it came to the surface at a time when terrible events were brewing in Germany. Céline’s intensity of desire that there should be no repeat of war between Germany and France led to his politicized writing, based on an inadequate premise – namely, that the overriding cause of the European crisis in the 1930s was the Jews. He certainly must be credited with a major mistake in political judgment and a great lack of moderation in writing about it. Beyond this, he must certainly also be seen as somebody whose life and art are packed full of the modern ideas that had come to flower in the

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last centuries and which swept over Europe at the time of its collapse as a civilization. But this last has been a state common to all Western art and thought in this terrible era. Its consequences have, of course, been worse for philosophy than for art. Céline at the best of times was, both for good and for ill, a singularly unphilosophical being. He had all the contempt of the deprived for theories. This was good in that the immediacy of his art is not thinned by general ideas; it was for ill in that the absence of philosophy left him open to the ‘spirits’ of the age. Céline often spoke of his ‘disaster’ – the period of his life from 1930 to 1950. He seems to have meant that period when he wrote of the public world, and the consequences he paid for it in persecution. Indubitably that long disaster is something to be regretted in the life of a great artist. In that disaster what is marred for us in Céline is his judgment, albeit at a time when such failure was widespread. By the time Céline is writing this trilogy in the 1950s he is all political passion spent. His hopes have been burnt out of him by prison and persecution, by poverty and by age. The splendour of his art lays before us Europe’s collapse. Indeed the very high splendour of his art is somehow related to the fact that his hopes have been burnt out. In this sense the question about this writing can be answered negatively. The greatness of his art is not corrupted by the follies of his ‘disaster.’ His trilogy is not a poisoned chalice. We drink from it the truth of the human condition.e

Notes 1 From a poem by Arthur Rimbaud (1854–91). The following translation is by Oliver Bernard (Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems [1962]): O seasons, O castles, What soul is blameless? 2 Henri Millon de Montherlant (1896–1972), French novelist and playwright, advocated action untroubled by bourgeois sentiment to overcome conflicts. William Seward Burroughs (1914–97), American author, became a heroin addict while working in New York and wrote about his experiences in Junkie (1953) and Naked Lunch (1959).

e W.L. Grant had much to do with starting the Queen’s Quarterly ninety years ago. This article is, therefore, dedicated to my father, as memory.

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3 ‘Tolle, lege’ (Latin): Take up and read! 4 The three pamphlets Grant is referring to are Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’école des cadavres (1938), and Les beaux draps (1941). See Edward Andrew, ‘George Grant’s Céline: Thoughts on the Relationship of Philosophy and Art,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and Subversion of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 81. 5 Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), French philosopher, dramatist, and novelist, was the best known existentialist philosopher in the 1950s. He was influenced by Heidegger but recast Heidegger’s thought, presenting existentialism as an atheistic humanism. See Grant’s ‘Jean-Paul Sartre’ in Collected Works, vol. 2, 123–36. 6 Ernest Millar Hemingway (1899–1961), American novelist and short story writer. Grant is referring to his novels about the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Norman Mailer (1923–2007), American novelist, journalist, and polemicist, based the novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) on his experiences in the Pacific theatre during the Second World War. 7 Luke 15:11–32. 8 During the same period in Vienna Mozart wrote The Marriage of Figaro (1786) and the G minor Quintet for violins, violas, and cello (K. 516). 9 For Henri-Philippe Pétain, see 469n21. 10 Céline was convicted of collaboration by a French civil court in 1950, named a ‘national disgrace,’ and sentenced to a year in prison in absentia. He was pardoned in 1951 and returned to France from Denmark, where he had lived in exile 1945–51. See Patrick McCarthy, ‘Occupation and Exile, 1945–51,’ in William K. Buckley, ed., Critical Essays on Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Boston: G.K. Hall 1989), 204–26. 11 Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Instalment Plan (1936), trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: New Directions 1966). 12 Marcel Proust (1870–1922), French novelist, wrote his multi-volume novel (1913–27) In Search of Lost Time (also translated Remembrance of Things Past) about the world of upper-class Paris, which was centred on the fashionable Faubourg St Germain section of the city. Anthony Trollope (1815–82), English novelist, is best remembered for his series of Palliser and Barchester novels, which chronicle in realistic detail political and religious life in Victorian England. Mollie Bloom’s inward soliloquy constitutes the final section of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). 13 Matthew Arnold (1822–88), English poet and literary and social critic, wrote in ‘Sonnet 2 – To a Friend’ about Sophocles as the friend alleged to

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Céline: Art and Politics have seen life steadily and whole. See above 471n51 and see also ‘Céline’s Trilogy’ 457. William Wordsworth (1770–1850). See ‘Preface of 1800’ in appendix to Lyrical Ballads (with Samuel Taylor Coleridge) (London: Oxford University Press 1959; 1911), 246: ‘I have said that Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.’ See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper 1977), 3–35. Heidegger portrays technology as essentially ‘a way of revealing’ the world in all modern societies whether capitalist or communist. François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–1778), French writer who embodied the ‘enlightenment,’ is often cited for his secular and philosophical distaste for the Jews and his comments that they are singularly different from the rest of mankind and pose a problem that might become deadly for the human race as a whole. Karl Marx (1818–83), German social, political, and economic theorist. His essay On the Jewish Question is called anti-Semitic by some critics because he equated Jewry with merchant-huckster, that is, with the commercialism of the new bourgeois order. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), German mathematicianlogician, was one of the founders, along with the British mathematician George Boole (1815–64), of modern mathematical logic. He disliked both democracy and socialism and his diary apparently showed a deep hatred of the French, of Catholics, and of Jews. See below 686n17. Serge Alexandre Stavisky (who was connected with politicians in the Radical Socialist Government of France [1933–34]) sold quantities of worthless bonds and either committed suicide or was murdered at Chamonix while attempting an escape in January of 1934.

Balance in Broadcasting

This paper was probably delivered in 1980.

The Western figure of justice holds in her hand the balance. The weighing machine stood as the guarantee of a just sale. It also stood for a balanced and fair relation between crimes and their punishment. Above all it stood for the fact that justice required the maintenance of equilibrium in society. Equilibrium meant literally an equal balancing of discordant forces, a balance between individual passions and public order, between private economic powers and the needs of the majority, etc. etc. Balance has been considered in Western history the very core of justice and therefore to write of balance in broadcasting is to write of justice in broadcasting. It is also well to remember that the Latin word for balance ‘libra’ has a common root with liberty. Freedom as well as justice is intimately connected with balance. Broadcasting, however, cannot be abstracted from the society in which it takes place. And Western society (of which Canada is a part) is a very unbalanced society. This is so because for the last centuries with increasing momentum one goal has dominated all others. That goal is best given the name ‘technology.’ By that word, I do not mean simply the sum total of instruments external to human beings and at their disposal, but the desire on the part of human beings to be the masters of human and non-human nature. In the case of human nature that control means the control of some human beings by others. This dominance of technology over all other human goals begins to reach its apogee in our immediate time. Clearly also fast-moving technological change brings with it fast-moving political and moral change – rapid change in what human beings think they are and in the ways they carry

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on their lives here below. Therefore in such an era, one element in any social equilibrium – the element of continuity – is increasingly lacking. Nor should the question of balance in broadcasting be defined as if it were a question of how balance is maintained in the midst of fast technological change. For to look at it that way tends to make us speak as if broadcasting was something outside or abstracted from technology in general. Particularly as technology has moved from its early stage when it was concerned with machines, to its present stage when it is centred around cybernetics (the art of the helmsman), broadcasting is at the very core of that which stands against equilibrium in our society. This is very close to the view which sees broadcasting as a whole apparatus of instruments made by human beings which are at the disposal of their free choices and purposes. Such a view is correct at a certain shallow level but not finally true. This is so because broadcasting itself shapes the human beings and their purposes so that we do not stand over against it as an external instrument we control, but deal with it from within its own necessities which it has imposed on us. That which we are now encompassing and are encompassed by in broadcasting is of course being quickly enlarged by the enormous new physical developments such as satellites. It is only necessary to mention that every household will soon be able to have a fairly simple apparatus which will allow it to hook into broadcasting from all over the world and even beyond. As all readers of this paper must be aware of such extraordinary developments there would be no point in a catalogue of them here or a catalogue of the new questions of balance they will bring. It has often been maintained by some Canadians that our past has given us a society in which there is greater balance than in the United States because the claims of public order are given a greater place against individual initiative. This has been claimed to be shown in our railway and hydro policies and in the fact that in broadcasting we have a powerful public system as well as private systems. Indeed it was the case that when Canadians had first to deal with broadcasting there was a stronger sense of public order here than in the United States. Moreover Canadians were faced with the fact that as their nation was strung out along the border with the great Republic, they had no alternative to a strong policy of control if our country was to have any existence as an independent national entity.

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The increasingly complex questions surrounding balance in broadcasting developed not only with the intoxicating power of television in all our lives but with the changing shapes of Canadian population and economic power which have taken place over the same period. As far as English-speaking Canada goes the great event of those years was the consolidation of the industrial complex which stretches from Oshawa to Detroit, the heartland of which is metropolitan Toronto. (Note: This paper simply abstracts from the question of broadcasting in Quebec because the writer knows nothing about it.) The shift of geo-political power from Montreal to Toronto is now being followed by a shift farther west. However, as the elections of 1979 and 1980 illustrated, the weight of numbers and therefore the political weight upon control of broadcasting in Ottawa is still highly determined by the Ontario industrial complex.1 It appears to me that the ‘consumption’ of television in such a society is the core question if one is to be clear about balance in broadcasting, and that subsidiary questions such as the place of government in control or how far Canadians should go in producing programmes for that consumption turn essentially on that central question. The majority of wage earners in that society move from their public life working in some large corporation or other back into their private life in some house or apartment. The contractualized life of the public world has an increasingly dog-eat-dog quality. This is particularly so as the industrial machine has required continual new waves of immigrants to do the dirty work of that expanding society. The society therefore has the quality of increasing racial disparity. It is also a society which is intimately part of the Great Lakes region of North America as a whole. Much has been written of how television is consumed in such a society – the best known of such writing being that of a Canadian, Professor McLuhan.2 Yet about this central question of consumption it seems necessary to be highly tentative. It is ‘too deep, too numerous, too obscure for any ease of intellectual relation.’3 Therefore what follows appears to me the centre of this writing and yet it is that about which I am most doubtful. Television is largely consumed within the confines of the private boxes where people go to rest and to live with more comfortable standards of behaviour than are possible in the public contractual realm. In these boxes television is therefore consumed as essentially entertainment – relaxing and stimulating. The proportion between relaxation

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and stimulation required depends upon the diversity of human beings in the boxes and the degree of their boredom. If it is the fate of people in this society to become increasingly bored then the degree of stimulation required from the producers will increase. In a society in which the redeeming end is more and more concentrated around the manifold forms of sexuality (both as a participatory and spectator sport) it is likely that the doses of stimulation required will have to be increased. At the present moment when the strongest stimulations are only receivable on pay television, the average consumer is alerted to keep listening when ‘parental supervision required’ is flashed across the screen. The relaxed side of entertainment requires a careful balancing of sports and news, situation serials and movies. Election results can be a longer horse race than what happens at Woodbine. A sustained scandal such as Watergate has a more engrossing but shorter range influence than Mary Tyler Moore in the seventies.4

Notes 1 The Liberal and NDP parties held 114 and 26 seats respectively in the 1979 election following which Joe Clark and the Progressive Conservatives formed the government with 136 seats supported by Social Credit (6 seats). The Liberals led by Pierre Trudeau returned to power in the 1980 election with 147 seats against the Conservatives’ 103 and the NDP’s 32. In both elections the bedrock of Liberal support was in Ontario. 2 Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) taught English at Toronto (from 1946) and became the director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology (from 1963). Grant is referring to Understanding Media (1964). See also The Mechanical Bride (1949), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), and The Medium Is the Massage (1967). 3 See 73n29. 4 Watergate refers to the major US political scandal that began with the burglary and wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s National Committee headquarters in Washington on 17 June 1972. Grant is referring to the televised hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities (May 1973) chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina. Allegations of wrongdoing eventually led President Nixon to resign in 1974. Mary Tyler Moore (1937– ) played ‘Mary Richards,’ a single woman in her thirties ‘making it on her own’ in 1970s Minneapolis, in the very popular ‘Mary Tyler Moore’ show (1970–7).

The Case against Abortion

The article appeared in Today Magazine on 3 October 1981. Appearing below the title are the words: ‘If we don’t respect the lives of the unborn, we don’t respect human life at all.’ The article includes a graph indicating ‘Abortions Per 1000 Known Pregnancies’ for 14 countries, with the USSR at 700 in 1970, the USA at 653, and Canada at 148. Walter Stewart, the editor, wrote a column in the same issue of the magazine entitled ‘The Case against the Case against Abortion.’

In 1978 more than 62,000 Canadian women had their children killed before they could be born. An increase in these numbers takes place every year, so that by the end of 1981 we may nearly have reached the 100,000 level. The percentages are similar in Western Europe. They are greater in the Soviet Union. Obviously, one cannot be against abortion when the woman’s life is at stake, but that situation is now exceedingly rare. The present mass foeticide takes place almost always for convenience. The medical professionals tell us that 95% of abortions are now done to kill the healthy offspring of healthy women. (In Canada they are all called ‘therapeutic.’) How has it happened that this quiet medical slaughter of our own species has become part of modern societies everywhere? The strongest argument to justify the killing is that it is required for women’s right to choose. Why, the argument goes, should women be subjected to an inconvenience that men never experience? Should not women be in charge of their own bodies, and so be able to rid themselves of what they call ‘a little blob of jelly’ that would otherwise take over their lives for at least nine months and usually much longer? Those who stand against mass abortion threaten the right of women to choose – the right to choose what children they will have.

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This argument breaks down because of the undisputed fact that the unborn child is not part of the woman’s body. From the moment of conception, the foetus has her or his own genetic code, a code quite different from the mother’s, one that will characterize every cell of his or her body until life comes to an end. By 18 days a heart is beating; by six weeks there are brain waves. By nine weeks the baby is sucking its thumb in the womb. Most abortions are performed between nine and 12 weeks. Why am I so scared by the large-scale slaughter of children that is going on in all advanced industrial countries? It has always been true that human beings have exploited other human beings for their own convenience. We have had slavery and murder and oppression since the world began. Children have long been starved and killed. The foetuses are generally killed quickly and with little pain. They are scraped out with a knife, or pulled to pieces by a vacuum machine. This may be a pity, and it would be nicer if it did not happen. But all human life has been the survival of some at the expense of others. Why get too excited about it? The freedom of some requires the death of others. We are the lucky ones who survived. The reason I do not accept this is that I am scared by what mass foetcide portends. Mankind’s greatest political achievement has been to limit ruthlessness by a system of legal rights. The individual was guarded against the abuses of arbitrary power, whether by the state or by other individuals. Building this system required the courage of many. It was fundamentally based on the assumption that human beings are more than accidental blobs of matter. They have an eternal destiny and therefore have the right to rights. But the large-scale destruction of human beings by abortion questions that view. In negating all rights to the foetus we are saying something negative about what he or she is. And because the foetus is of the same species as the mother, we are inevitably faced by the fundamental question of principle. What is it about the mother (or any human being) that makes it appropriate that she should have rights while the foetus does not? The stark comparison between members of the same species unveils inescapably the terrible question. What is it about our species that makes it appropriate that we have rights at all? If the foetuses are accidental blobs of matter, aren’t we also? It is this that is frightening about those who argue that the foetus in the womb has no rights. In that affir-

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mation is implied a view of human beings that destroys any reason why any of us should have rights. In the modern era we have seen the basic political assumptions of freedom radically denied by Nazi and Communist regimes. Programs of extermination have been carried out against not only political opponents but whole races and whole classes of people; within those groups the aged and the very young were the first to go. And where the doctrine of rights has been denied (above all, the basic right to existence), this has been based on the belief that human beings have no eternal destiny but are accidental conglomerations of matter – mere ‘blobs of jelly.’ It is no wonder that in the Soviet Union abortion has become so commonplace. If tyranny is to come in North America, it will come cosily and on cat’s feet. It will come with the denial of the rights of the unborn and of the aged, the denial of the rights of the mentally retarded, the insane and the economically less privileged. In fact, it will come with the denial of rights to all those who cannot defend themselves. It will come in the name of the cost-benefit analysis of human life. ‘Every child a wanted child’ is a humane and civilized slogan. But when it is used to mean that we should destroy those who are not immediately wanted, then it becomes a slogan for extermination. Should our very existence depend on our mother having accepted her pregnancy with immediate joy? It is indeed a sad fact that human beings are not always wanted. We may not want a retarded child, a drunken husband, an aged parent. This does not mean that we should be forced to live with them; but it also does not mean that we should have them killed. Two facts about unwanted children must be remembered. There are large numbers of people longing to adopt babies. Also, studies of battered children have shown that a high percentage of them are directly planned by their parents; a substantial percentage are named after the mother or father. That our children should be wanted depends on deeper loves and more efficient social caring than is signified by the easy slaughter of abortion. People often say that if we do not allow legal abortion we will force women to go to backroom butchers. But the argument that because illegal abortions may be dangerous we should permit the mass slaughter of children is disproportionate. It is rather like saying that we should make racial persecution legal in order to discourage secret racism fes-

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tering in the back streets. Anyway, my argument is not against abortion in the rare cases of physical danger to the mother. It is against abortion done in the name of convenience. In the last analysis, I cannot but agree with Ronald Reagan’s flat remark: ‘How do you get away from the fact that it is murder?’1 I do not agree with President Reagan about many things, but there he hits the nail on the head. This is not to condemn any woman who has an abortion. God surely forgives abortions as much as he forgives the rest of the crazy acts that we do all the time. Many of us have been tempted to commit murder for the sake of our convenience. But the state tells us that we will be punished if we do. What is happening now in Canada is that the state has lifted that ban as far as the unborn are concerned. This is a recent and great change in a society that once considered itself based on Christian principles. It is almost certain that it will not be the last lifting of that ban. We have done this in the name of freedom of choice, and freedom of choice is a great good for men and women and children alike. But when freedom of choice means surrender of fundamental respect for human life, we may well ask where we have been travelling in the last decade. The old proverb has much to it: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ Especially when the intentions are a matter of convenience.

Note 1 Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911–2004), film and television actor and politician, served as Republican governor of California 1967–75 and then as the fortieth president of the United States 1981–89. We have not identified the quotation Grant attributes to him but it reflects the views he expressed as president in his article ‘Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation’ in Human Life Review, Spring 1983.

Why Read Rousseau?

Grant delivered this talk in the summer of 1981 to a session of the Canadian Political Science Association held in honour of his friend and colleague James (Jim) Aitchison.1 He prefaced his talk with these words: It is a great honour to take part in a meeting to praise J.H. Aitchison. He is a man who combines integrity and judgment – judgment being the ability to bring together properly the particular and the universal. If I had to use one word to describe Aitchison, I would use the Greek word phronesis. It is a word for which there is no exact equivalent in modern Western languages; nevertheless it is a word which is at the heart of what Plato and Aristotle write about the political. It is appropriate that I should speak of Rousseau at such a meeting. Many years ago Aitchison used to say to me ‘You should pay more attention to Rousseau,’ and in my smart-assed way I used to go ‘Ho, ho, ho – not a systematic thinker etc.’ As usual, Aitchison showed phronesis and I did not. If was many years before I read Rousseau’s Second Discourse carefully. ‘Then I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.’2

During the early eighties Grant was re-examining the importance of Rousseau and Darwin to the triumph of ‘historical’ thinking in the 18th and 19th centuries, which can be seen in the writings of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, perhaps because he was thinking about his book engaging Heidegger (550), whom he called the greatest historicist. Judy Steed of the Globe and Mail interviewed Grant on this work (9 July 1983), quoting him saying, ‘I suddenly saw “history” in a new way. I hadn’t understood Rousseau or Darwin and I had to.’ They ‘understood that man was a being who acquired abilities through the accidents and chances of time. History was the acquiring of skills, and this goes to

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the very heart of man.’ For Grant, according to Steed, the struggle was to relate the idea of eternal truth – of the immutable nature of justice – to the constantly mutating world. ‘Why Read Rousseau’ was published in The George Grant Reader, 311–17.

To start with an obvious fact: English-speaking people have rarely paid serious attention to the two most comprehensive thinkers of the antiteleological tradition – namely Rousseau and Nietzsche. (If I were speaking simply politically I would have said atheist thinkers.) This is an interesting fact about us. Of course, such neglect has required justification. In this case the justification has been that neither Rousseau nor Nietzsche were philosophers in the serious sense of that term. As English-speaking teachers of philosophy have generally been secularized Protestants or Jews, lack of seriousness was therefore considered a serious accusation. Indeed both Rousseau and Nietzsche had a high sense of the comic. Rousseau has been taken as an unsystematic poet – a man of intense, if misguided insights, quite incapable of the sustained and disciplined thought necessary to the true philosopher. Such an account is found in many places from Bentham to Popper.3 One can find it perhaps in its barest folly in Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.4 One might have expected that Russell would have turned his ire most vehemently against Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Aquinas. But no: it is in the chapter about Rousseau that his contempt and anger reaches its height. Rousseau should not be called a philosopher; he is a self-indulgent poet. His thought is filled with contradictions of such an obvious nature that they could be discovered by any high school student of average ability. His insights culminate politically in National Socialism, etc., etc. Moreover in this long chapter, précis are given of Rousseau’s chief writings. In those précis I cannot recognize the originals. Why have such interpretations of Rousseau been so consistently sustained within our tradition? After all, modern English thought has also been anti-teleological in its intent. My purpose in this paper will be to touch upon the causes of this lack of attention and to say why it has had a bad effect on our self-understanding. It will not be possible to substantiate the major premise of my argument in the course of a short paper. To show that Rousseau is a compre-

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hensive metaphysical philosopher of a very high order would require a long book of commentary. That premise will simply have to be granted hypothetically if one is to follow what proceeds. The causes of the lack of attention to Rousseau in the English-speaking world are not difficult to determine. The long ascendency of the English-speaking peoples – in the case of England from Waterloo till about 1880, of the United States since 1914 – was achieved under the rule of various species of bourgeois. (The word ‘bourgeois’ is itself almost a Rousseauian invention.) Members of classes are liable to consider their shared conceptions of political right to be self-evident, when their rule is not seriously questioned at home, and when they are successfully extending their empires around the world. Constitutional liberalism went with technological progress and was justified by various permutations and combinations of Lockean contractualism and utilitarianism. Older elements of our tradition from before the age of progress, such as Protestantism, continued, but till lately in weakened political influence. There were outbreaks of more modern political thought, such as Marxism in the United States of the 1930s and 1960s. However, these were but bubbles on the surface of a Lockean ocean. English-speaking writers on political philosophy have largely been concerned with emendations of the Lockean account. That Locke should be taken as the master of this tradition is always clarified for me in the fact that a deist wrote a book entitled The Reasonableness of Christianity.5 Why then should we read Rousseau?6 The reason we should read Rousseau is the presence of the concept ‘history’ on the English-speaking stage. I mean by the word ‘history’ that temporal process in which beings are believed by some to have acquired their abilities. Because of the ambiguity of the word in English, I must insist that I am using it not to denote a form of study but a realm of being. At this point German is clearer with its distinction between the words ‘Historie’ and ‘Geschichte.’ I use it here as the Germans use it in a phrase such as ‘Die Geschichte der Natur’ – the history of nature. (In so using it I neither assert nor deny here that Geschichte is horse-Geschichte.) For English-speaking peoples ‘history’ took its place upon the public stage inescapably with Darwin. The historical sense was, of course, present in English intellectual circles long before that. But with Darwin it became central for the English because it was at the heart of the most important activity of the age – natural science. To use a too common

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German word, it entered our Weltanschauung. It is often said by interpreters of Darwin that his essential discovery was not ‘evolution’ but how ‘evolution’ took place – namely by natural selection. After all the word ‘evolution’ had been part of the intellectual baggage of Europe since Diderot.7 This is true. But listen to Darwin himself, writing to Gray in 1863: ‘Personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the question of Creation or Modification’ (Life and Letters, vol. II, p. 371). Obviously he is right, modification is the central issue. And obviously also modification in this sense is just a synonym for ‘history.’ Once ‘history’ is part of our intellectual baggage, what happens to the political science of Locke? Lockean contractualism is ahistorical. This difficulty of holding together history and ahistorical contractualism is above all what has made English-speaking political philosophy thinner and thinner to the point of the sheer formalism of the analytical tradition. On the other hand, the freedom of our thought from historicism has in practical affairs helped to save us from some of the crimes of communism and national socialism. Nevertheless my concern here is not with the practical world but with the inanition that this disregard of the implications of the idea of ‘history’ has caused in our thought. The attempt to maintain contractualism freed from any ontological statements simply fails because it requires that science be taken in phenomenalist and instrumentalist senses. It may be possible to attempt this about the small results of academic technological scientists; it is quite impossible to assume it about the results of a great synthetic scientist such as Darwin. He knew that he was talking about what is. When one is taught Darwinism at school one is not taught it alone as a useful hypothetical tool, only of interest for those who are going to be specialists in the life sciences. The present controversy in the US between those who want Darwinism taught in the schools and those who want creationism cuts across all the clever talk by the analytical philosophers. Both parties know that what is at issue is ontology. (Let me say in parenthesis that I think the dominant academic community on this continent has been unwise to patronize these people known as the moral majority. My involvement with such people in common Christian tasks has taught me to the contrary.) What is at issue here as far as political philosophers are concerned is that you cannot hope to combine successfully an ahistorical political philosophy with a natural science which is at its heart historical.

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With the idea of history – call it if you will modification – we are inescapably led back to Rousseau. For it was Rousseau who first stated that what we are is not given us (by what in the ancient language was called nature) but is the result of what human beings were forced to do to overcome chance or to change nature (in the modern sense of that term). Human beings have become what they are and are becoming what they will be. We are the free, that is to say the undetermined animals, who can be understood by a science which is not teleological. We can be understood ‘historically.’ It is well to bear in mind that late in his life Rousseau said that the Second Discourse was his boldest writing. It was in it that he risked most to say openly what he meant. [Grant wrote ‘Insert B, p. 5’ here. The following passage is taken from a handwritten document found in the Rousseau file:] [To put the argument of the Second Discourse – simply but I hope accurately, it was the following. Locke and his great teacher Hobbes had said that human beings are not naturally social – but they calculate that they are better off if they make a contract to enter society. The resulting kind of capitalist individualism we all see as American society becomes world wide. In the Second Discourse Rousseau agrees with Locke that humans are not naturally social but says the modern theory [is] the next step forward. But neither are humans naturally rational and therefore the Lockean theory will not do. How could they have made the calculation of the social contract till they were rational – that is, at least capable of calculation. Therefore the question of the Second Discourse becomes how did human beings acquire reason and the book is a new account of that process. Now this is, of course, old hat to us. It has been thought for two hundred years and become the stuff which is taken for granted. But think what a change this was. Since Socrates at least, humanity had been defined as ‘the rational animal.’ This had been taken into Christianity and become the central teaching out of which the civilizations of the West had come to be. Yet here in the Second Discourse it is denied. Humans can’t be defined as rational animals – because reason is something that we have acquired and are acquiring. What we mean by history is the process of that acquiring. That is, for Rousseau, humans are not the rational animals but the undetermined animals who make themselves. As Rousseau’s great contemporary epigone Abbé Rossignol8 puts it so well – Humans can become what they wish.] Why we must read Rousseau is that when we look at the sciences today we see that they are everywhere historical. I have quoted before

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the title of von Weizsacker’s book Die Geschichte der Natur.9 And when we seek the originating moment of that idea of history we come upon Rousseau. Indeed to use for a moment the modern way of talking which distinguishes the words ‘philosophy’ and ‘science,’ it seems to me that always when there is a great outpouring of scientific activity – in my present example the nineteenth century historicizing of nature – there lies behind that activity some philosopher who in his thought about the whole had made a breakthrough as against all previous thought. When I say ‘breakthrough’ please do not think I am speaking in terms of the progress of truth. To put it extremely simply, breakthroughs can be into error. To say whether Rousseau’s idea of modification was true or false is not a question I am qualified to answer. But to bolster my amour propre: who is? We must wait and perhaps see. What I am able to say, however, is that Rousseau as the originator of that idea of history is an example of another strange fact. Often the originator of a great breakthrough in thought understands the thought he is thinking in its implications more comprehensively that those who follow him and live within that thought, modifying it and clarifying it. In its primal moment – or, to quote Heidegger, in its coming out into unconcealment – that thought appears in all its ambiguity. What makes Rousseau such a master is that he ponders the implications of the idea of history with such care. If one reads, for example, one of Rousseau’s most influential epigones, Marx, one does not find that battling with the contradictions raised by the idea of history that one finds in Rousseau. It is indeed this battling with these contradictions which has often led English-speaking commentators to take Rousseau as a weak thinker whose inconsistencies can be pointed out in some desultory tutorial at Oxford or Harvard. The contradictions which professors of philosophy often find in Rousseau come forth from his refusal to avoid the ambiguities which he finds in what he is given to think. To praise Rousseau is not to forget his critics; to remember his critics is to speak of Nietzsche. Nietzsche may have had greater targets such as Plato for his contempt-laden rhetoric, but in terms of his own era it is Rousseau whom he singles out as most responsible for the decadence of European thought. Rousseau is the thinker who attempted to Christianize secularism. He is the epitome of that secularized Christianity which Nietzsche despises more than authentic Christianity itself. Yet, and it is a great ‘yet,’ a ‘yet’ which shows one the very power of Rous-

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seau, Nietzsche accepts from Rousseau belief in the fact that we are historical, that we acquire our abilities in the course of time in a way that can be explained without teleology. Nietzsche indeed thinks that he is the first human being who has understood ‘the finality of becoming’ in an historical way. I am always loath to think that as a teacher of philosophy I can in any way transcend my betters. Nevertheless, I often wonder whether it be the case that in his anger towards Rousseau, Nietzsche fails to recognize how much of what he is thinking in the finality of becoming has already been thought by Rousseau. After all, we have been taught in the greatest book of political philosophy that anger is an emotion that corrupts the ability to be open to the whole.10 Nietzsche’s hatred of equality, democracy, socialism, etc., however brilliant, often seems to fall over into anger – indeed perhaps finally into madness. Did that anger obscure for him his debt to Rousseau? Perhaps somebody here with greater learning than myself knows for certain whether Nietzsche had read the Second Discourse. We could, of course, never know whether this is not the case. But it would be interesting to know whether it is the case. The understanding that human beings acquire their abilities through the course of time expresses itself contemporaneously in that doctrine we call ‘historicism,’ and historicism is the fate of all branches of knowledge in our era. It is only necessary to remember that the outstanding thinker of this era is an historicist from beginning to end, however much some of his thought appears to be a quarrel with that fate. Indeed Heidegger has expressed the consequences of historicism for the history of thought with greater clarity and profundity than any other writer. The attempts to refute historicism from within the tradition of English-speaking liberalism (for example, Sir Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism [1957]) are wellintentioned but feeble. Even Wittgenstein’s effort in this direction is one of the most inadequate moments in his thought.11 It is sufficient reason why we should read Rousseau carefully that all efforts to know what it behooves human-beings to know are today touched with the deadening hand of historicism. To end at the level of the particular: This charming scoundrel, this enchanting paranoid, this man who often had no place to lay his head and had to flee from country to country, yet at the same time was cossetted and beloved of the great ladies of the court, this man who expounded the meaning of child-centred education and who left his

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own five children at the foundling hospital, this man who was the great teacher of the institutor of the Terror and the great teacher of the delicious sweetness of dalliance, this great democrat who loved the salons and the boudoirs of the powerful, this man who wrote a very sane proposal for the government of Poland and who believed the height of life was to drift in a boat with his hand trailing in the water – it is a source of high comedy that he was also a careful and comprehensive philosopher. It certainly raises again the old question about which Plato and Aristotle were in disagreement: what is the relation of the moral virtues to the philosophic life? Even a Platonist such as myself, who considers that what we can know is closely tied to what we love, is moved by the case of Rousseau to look again at the Aristotelian position. Whatever the truth of this difficulty, it certainly appears to me that Rousseau’s influence over Europe should make us hesitant in affirming the scrutability of Providence. Perhaps it might lead us to apply analogically the attribute of comedian to Deity.

Appendix: History and Justice Grant drafted several ‘beginnings’ for a book that did not get written, a book he might have entitled ‘History and Justice’ or ‘History as Justice.’ Sheila Grant found these fragments in a file folder of typewritten legalsized sheets. He did the writing some time after Time as History (delivered in 1969, published 1971), and before the late 1970s when he came to focus the discussion of history on Rousseau and Darwin rather than Marx and Darwin (as he did in these ‘beginnings’). Grant was still working on ‘History and Justice’ as late as 1982 according to a letter he wrote to Joan O’Donovan that year: [I]t is only this year that I discovered that Rousseau was a greater former of the modern than even Nietzsche. The result is that at the moment I am writing a long piece called ‘History and Justice’ which is an attempt to understand the atheism of the left better than previously. Rousseau takes my breath away with how clever he is in destroying the old tradition by saying that reason is acquired by human beings in a way that can be explained without teleology. To try to demolish Rousseau (and, therefore,

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Marxism) seems to me essential these days to free people from that which can hold them from ever thinking that Christianity might be true.

We present here, as an appendix to the later piece ‘Why Read Rousseau?’ a selection of two beginnings, together with a few extracts.

The belief that the nature of things is ‘historical’ has occupied human beings in the last centuries. When this belief was related to human matters, it became, under the rubric of ‘progress,’ the determining concept by which and through which many human beings made judgments concerning justice. ‘History,’ justice, and technology became intimately interrelated. Progress in technology was often thought of as the very substance of any just making of history; the development of technology was speeded by the belief in progress becoming a dominant human motive. Among certain circles whose occupation is to read and write, it has become current recently to speak of ‘the end of history.’ This seems to mean, at the least, that no thoughtful person can any longer think that the historical process is intelligible and that the belief in ‘history’ cannot provide that in terms of which we can come to judge what is just. Despite these current doubts, nevertheless masses of human beings are still held by the belief in progress, not only in non-European countries where people yearn for advanced technology but also among many people in the Western world, particularly in North America. Moreover, and what is more important, the belief that the nature of things is ‘historical’ remains central in the modern scientific community – that community which is so central to modern society. To put it simply, every scientist, even if his studies are not directed primarily to the life sciences, must learn about the evolution of life, that is, the history of life. Modern scientific explanation has been in terms of answers to the questions ‘through what?’ and ‘out of what?’ something comes to be, leaving the question ‘what is something?’ as antique questioning we have passed beyond. The beautiful theorem of modern physics that all events are fundamentally irreversible and incapable of repetition is a more general statement about ‘historicity’ than even Darwin’s account of the evolution of life or Marx’s account of the development of society. When the science of the age is so fundamentally ‘historical,’ the belief in

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the historical nature of things is hardly ended. And indeed as human beings inescapably think about how they ought to live in terms of the way they believe things to be, scientists have expressed their accounts of justice in historical terms, as for example ‘taking evolution into our own hands’ etc. etc. Because it is premature to speak of the ‘end of history’ it is useful to think of why the idea has so dominated the West and necessary in the context of this book to discuss its relation to our conceptions of justice. (Note. Elsewhere I have discussed ‘history’ more generally in Time as History.) It is indeed a mark of the power of the belief that the nature of things is ‘historical’ that when I attempt to understand the nature of that belief and its relation to justice, I seem to be driven to face it in terms of its intellectual origins. The history of philosophy or of science is not necessarily philosophy or science as many textbooks teach us. Nevertheless so opaque because of its complexity has the Western tradition become that it appears necessary to turn to what was being thought in the historical origins of the historical understanding. In that task, the difficulty is to know where and how deep to let one’s line down in that ocean. Let me do so with a generality from our present: among Englishspeaking people the belief that the nature of things is historical is likely to be associated most closely with the work of Darwin; among many other peoples it is more likely to be associated with the thought of Marx. In the present connection it is better to start from Marx because in his thought the historical sense is more directly integrated to the question of justice than in the case of Darwin and this thought is so closely connected with those who are known as ‘the left.’ And it is ‘the left’ above any others who have identified progress and justice. To put negatively the case for starting from Marx rather than Darwin. [The following words are crossed out in the text: it is surely true that thinkers from the ruling bourgeois of the English-speaking world have found some difficulty in putting together their unhistorical political liberties from an earlier modern period with what they have learnt from the historical discoveries of Darwin.] [The second and third beginnings were not selected.] [An extract from another beginning with handwritten titles – ‘Technology and History – Marx’ and ‘Darwin – the tool-making animal’]

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To think of justice as derived from the belief that there was ‘history’ is to think immediately of the thought of Marx. There may indeed have been human beings who thought more comprehensively what it was to think ‘history’ than did Marx, but it is a remark of supererogation to state simply in terms of influence that it has been Marx who has taught more human beings to think historically about their own species. Yet it is also clear that Marx’s thoughts did not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. He seems almost to assume that there is such an entity as history. It is historically interesting to search out where he came upon that idea. He himself stated that in these basic philosophic matters his debt was to Hegel. And of course when we think about Hegel, there is no alternative but to think about Rousseau. [Another beginning is included for its autobiographical information.] ‘History’ has meant many things to many people. In our era the word has been so formative in giving the whole to human beings that those who do not apprehend the whole through glasses with some such tint in them are not, whether for good or ill, moderns at all. Indeed it is only perhaps ‘history’ or the attempt to overcome that concept which can excuse the words of autobiography which follow. In my own case the historical sense and what it led me to make of ‘history’ has been the spur paining me to thought. The English edition of progress – that is, the modern liberal account of history – might be doubted or ridiculed in small detail in the Toronto of my youth, but was accepted in a way that made it, in Nietzsche’s words, monumental history – something that made us what we were. My father happened to be an historian but that meant that he illuminated clearly, fairly, and perhaps even beautifully certain parts of what was given in that great monument in its British form. ‘Scientific history’ has never much been seen in conflict with monumental history except in periods of stress or by people in stress. There were disagreements still in Canada in the 1920s and 1930s about the integration or lack of integration between Protestantism and the liberal account of history; but these in no way unsettled agreement about that liberal view. Of course there were flaws in that monument. The fact that we were loyal Canadians as well as modern liberals made it difficult to come to terms clearly with the fact that our ancestors as well as those of our

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French compatriots had been people who in some degree of theoretical certainty had not accepted the liberal view of history in its fullest terms. At that time, perhaps even more than now, it was not exactly consistent to be both a Canadian and a modern progressive, whether liberal or Marxist. A more destructive flaw in that faith had been caused by the war of 1914. Unlike the war of 1939, Canadians died in droves under horrible conditions between 1914 and 1918. For the sensitive this slaughter could not but cast doubts upon the idea of history as progress. It could not but raise doubts as to whether ‘history’ was what it had once been thought to be. In a practical way that war guaranteed that our ruling class should be unequivocally those who envisioned history without qualification as the development of technological capitalism. Such crudity was to bring onto the Canadian stage in opposition to itself many varieties of that philosophy of ‘history’ known as Marxism. In a way that is idiosyncratic among Canadians, the war of 1939 taught me, truthfully or not, that there is no such thing as ‘history.’ So determinative was the experience of that war for my being, that it drove me, as it were, not only out of the liberal view of history which was common in our country, but out of the opposition to it in Marxism, and even out of the historical sense itself, and out of the scientific account of that sense in Darwin, that is, out of the modern world itself. This happened at a time when history was extending itself in time through the wonderful instruments of the exact sciences into the billions of years that make up the history of our planet and the millions of years of our developing species. Of course to think that there is no such thing as history requires one to think what it was that made people think that there was such a realm. What has it been to think ‘history’? [The following extract is included for its treatment of the non-Englishspeaking progressives’ attraction to Marx rather than Darwin.] The political ‘left’ in the English-speaking world has pushed for reform from out of a general sense of progress in ‘history’ but not generally from out of Darwinian propositions or for that matter from the lucid account of history in Marx, till recently. It is perhaps a pity that Darwin neglected the possibility of friendship offered him by Marx. Be that as it

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may, it is the case that the idea of history given to the English-speaking bourgeois through Darwin has never been made central in determining their public conception of justice, as it has been with those countries who learnt of ‘history’ through Marx. It is therefore better to let down one’s line near Marx if one is to catch the modern relation between ‘history’ and justice. With Marx history, justice, and technology are integrated with remarkable unitive power. Through their control over the forces of production human beings have been making an increasingly universalized society and those who understand the course of that history will be able to build the just society – the society of free and equal human beings. We come to know what justice will be by understanding ‘history.’

Notes 1 James H. Aitchison (1908–94), political scientist, was Eric Dennis Memorial Professor of political science at Dalhousie University 1949–73. He was a colleague of Grant’s in the 1950s and remained a close friend for the rest of his life. 2 John Keats, ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,’ 9–10. 3 For Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), English philosopher and reformer, see 897n5. For Sir Karl Popper, see 260n15. 4 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (New York: Simon and Schuster 1945). 5 John Locke (1632–1704), The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). 6 The following words were deleted from the draft copy: ‘By “we” I mean people concerned with political philosophy. If I were addressing modern political theories at this gathering, I would have written a different paper and employed the style of Céline’s three little dots.’ 7 Denis Diderot (1713–84), philosopher and writer of novels, plays, satires, essays, and letters, was the chief editor of the Encyclopédie. His Pensées philosophiques (1746) was banned for its anti-Christian ideas. 8 Jean Joseph Rossignol (1726–1807), French Jesuit priest and writer, was a correspondent of Rousseau. 9 Carl Friedrich Freiherr von Weizsäcker (1912–2007), German physicist and philosopher. Die Geschichte der Natur (c.1949) was published in English as History of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1962).

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10 See The Republic, IV, 441–4. 11 The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (see 262n32), taught philosophy at Cambridge. For some of his observations pertaining to historicism see Vermischte Bemerkungen (Oxford: Blackwell 1977), ed. by G.H. von Wright with Heikki Nyman, and trans. by Peter Winch as Notes on Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell 1980).

Dennis Lee – Poetry and Philosophy

This essay was published in Tasks of Passion: Dennis Lee at Mid-Career, edited by Karen Mulhallen, Donna Bennett, and Russell Brown (Toronto: Descant 1982), 229–35; in Descant, Dennis Lee1 special issue, no. 39 (Winter 1982): 229–35; and in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 361–9.

It is surprising for modern readers to find that a fifth of Aristotle’s great book on ethics is devoted to friendship. I intend to write of Dennis Lee as friend because friendship is a form of love and love illuminates the intellect. In that illumination we come to know things about other people. The Platonic affirmation that our intelligences are illuminated by love has been darkened in our era both because our chief paradigm of knowledge concerns objects, that is, things held away from us so that we can master them, and also because the pre-eminence we give to sexuality leads us to interpret all forms of love as too simply dependent on instinct. For example, Laurel and Hardy have been interpreted as completely understandable as homosexual lovers.2 Such a procrustean statement prevents us from understanding the many forms of love. I mean by friendship a relation between equals interested in certain common purposes which transcend either partner of the friendship. Such a relation allows one of the parties to see things about the other party. When one of the parties is a poet such things are of more than personal interest. Yet I am very hesitant to write of Lee just because he is a poet. The accidents of my life have left me with a deeply neurotic fear of poetry. Apart from the uninteresting personal reasons for this, it is clear that the rejection of poetry in its completeness is widespread in modern society, and is closely related to the rejection of philosophy as more

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than analysis and ideology. The central reason for those rejections is that the control which is necessary to human beings who would be masters of the earth is the enemy of receptivity, without which there cannot be poetry or philosophy. By receptivity I do not chiefly mean that which is necessary in listening to poetry, but that which is necessary to writing it. Plato was indeed exalting poetry when he said that it was imitation; moderns denigrate poetry (indeed make it impossible) when they say that it is creation. To talk of ‘the creative artist’ is a contradiction in terms. For the poet is the being who must be immediately open to all that is, and who proclaims to others the immediate truth of what is. That openness, that receptivity, that imitation, is an ability difficult to sustain in a world where control for mastery is the paragon of human endeavor. Of course, poetry is so fundamental a stance, belonging to the deepest level of what it is to be human, that it cannot be destroyed amongst us; but it is liable to appear in our society as entertainment, as a turfing of the grave. As such its proclamations can neither be easily proclaimed nor heard. Indeed at the heart of the tradition there has been a debate (of central importance in understanding politics) about the relation between the proclamations of poetry and those of philosophy. Is Heidegger right in saying that poetry and philosophy live at the top of two separate mountains?3 Or is Plato right that politics demands that poetry be ministerial to the truths of philosophy? But this debate can only be private and even secret in this era where only with the greatest difficulty can we participate in philosophy or poetry, as they are in themselves. When people have to hang on to what little they can make of these saving graces in the midst of the drive to change the world, it is hardly necessary to debate their relation. What is needed is to experience their healing balm. My hesitation in writing about Lee’s poems is then because the modern drive to control has vitiated my listening to what poetry proclaims. Therefore I must proceed to thinking about them through the memory of meeting him when he was a young man. Memories can, I trust, throw light on his poetry. It was in the baleful glare which the Vietnam war threw on the United States and Canada that I first had the good fortune to become a friend of Lee’s. In a fast-changing technological society, memory is put in question. It is difficult even to remember how many people were illu-

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mined by the sinister light of that war, whatever little public consequence that illumination has had. What struck me about Lee at that time was that of all the academics who were rightly moved by the searchlight of that war, he was the one who saw that at the heart of those events was an affirmation about ‘being.’ That affirmation (call it, if you will, a statement about the nature of the whole) shaped what came forth in the actions of our dominant classes. Along with many others he saw that Canada was part of an empire which was trying to impose its will by ferocious means right around the other side of the globe. He saw with many others that Canada was complicit in the acts of that empire and that that complicity was expressed in the politics of Lester Pearson.4 He saw with some others that the technological multiversity was not outside that complicity but central to it. This was true not only in the obviously technological parts of the university, but had taken hold in the very way that the liberal arts were practised. It is more difficult to express what Lee so evidently saw beyond this. As words fail, let me try. He understood that at the heart of our civilization lay an affirmation about ‘being’ which was that civilization’s necessity. The rampaging decadence of imperial war was not to be explained (within liberalism) as an aberration of our good system; it was not to be explained (within Marxism) as something understood in terms of the dynamics of capitalism. In the very roots of Western civilization lay a particular apprehension of ‘being.’ From that apprehension arose not only imperial war, not only the greedy structure of our society, but also the nature of the multiversity and of poetry, the culture of the cosmopolis and the forms of our sexuality. When Lee left Victoria College he was not only saying with Chomsky that through research and consultation these institutions had become part of the war machine,5 but that their very understanding of knowledge, and in particular the understanding of poetry, came forth from an affirmation of ‘being,’ the essence of which made poetry part of a museum culture. In that sense it determined what could be ‘poiesis.’ Lee saw that the turn of the screw in that situation was that this affirmation of ‘being,’ which was so necessary to articulate if we were to be free of it, was almost impossible to articulate because the very language which we could use for that articulation arose from the affirmation itself. It was therefore almost impossible to transcend it by knowing it. Lee expressed so clearly the baffling search to find language to speak

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what we are, when what is determining what we are has taken hold of language to fashion it into an instrument of its controlling power. The attempt to articulate our ‘being’ was therefore to enter the sad walks of impotence. What had happened to language was not only in the absurdities of advertising, the literature of entertainment and the pretensions of journalism, but in the very studies of language in which Lee had been trained so well. Language described as the house of being is likely to hide the extent to which we are squeezed in that vice. It is perhaps Heidegger’s continuing pride in his Europeanness (despite all that has been) which makes this description slightly more cosy than Lee as a North American would allow. Lee has not rested in this impotence, or he would not be a poet. Instead he has turned the experience itself into poetry. The last verse of ‘The Gods’ achieves a magnificent stance, while acknowledging the price he must pay – a limitation on his speaking, a limitation of his knowing. Naturally, his own words describe it best. for to secular men there is not given the glory of tongues, yet it is better to speak in silence than squeak in the gab of the age and if I cannot tell your terrifying praise, now Hallmark gabble and chintz nor least of all what time and dimensions your naked incursions announced, you scurrilous powers yet still I stand against this bitch of a shrunken time in semi-faithfulness and whether you are godhead or zilch or daily ones like before you strike our measure still and still you endure as my murderous fate, though I do not know you.6

It is Lee’s openness to the whole which enables him to face the position from which as poet he must struggle to be. The question of the whole is present for him in all the parts including the parts which are his own living. What is meant by openness to the whole has been dimmed because the modern era has become a self-fulfilled prophecy. Modern scientists like the modern thinkers in Swift’s Battle of the Books explain nature, human and non-human, without the idea of soul, and not surprisingly they have produced a world where it is difficult to

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think what it is to be open to the whole. Ancient thinkers are compared to the bee which goes around collecting honey from the flowers; modern thinkers are compared to the spider which spins webs out of itself and then catches its food in that web. If the search for honey is not the source of poetry, what is? Indeed, Lee has described that openness beautifully when he described his vocation as listening to cadence (‘Cadence, Country, Silence,’ Open Letter, Fall 1973, Toronto). The importance of the idea of cadence for understanding what poetry and music are can be seen in the fact that the most appropriate comment on it are the words about his own art by a genius of the supreme order. The question is how my art proceeds in writing and working out great and important matters. I can say no more than this, for I know no more and can come upon nothing further. When I am well and have good surroundings, traveling in a carriage, or after a good meal or a walk or at night when I cannot sleep, then ideas come to me best and in torrents. Where they come from and how they come I just do not know. I keep in my head those that please me and hum them aloud as others have told me. When I have all that carefully in my head, the rest comes quickly, one thing after another; I see where such fragments could be used to make a composition of them all, by employing the rules of counterpoint and the sound of different instruments etc. My soul is then on fire as long as I am not disturbed; the idea expands, I develop it, all becoming clearer and clearer. The piece becomes almost complete in my head, even if it is a long one, so that afterwards I see it in my spirit all in one look, as one sees a beautiful picture or beautiful human being. I am saying that in imagination I do not understand the parts one after another, in the order that they ought to follow in the music; I understand them all altogether at one moment. Delicious moments. When the ideas are discovered and put into a work, all occurs in me as in a beautiful dream which is quite lucid. But the most beautiful is to understand it all at one moment. What has happened I do not easily forget and this is the best gift which our God has given me. When it afterwards comes to writing, I take out of the bag of my mind what had previously gathered into it. Then it gets pretty quickly put down on paper, being strictly, as was said, already perfect, and generally in much the same way as it was in my head before. (Mozart’s Briefe, ed. L. Nohl, 2nd ed., 443–4)

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These words are perhaps not a perfect fit for what Lee is saying about cadence. Yet I always hold both statements together because in both of them the difficult question of the relation between hearing and seeing – the sense so related to time, the sense so related to space – is understood as this relation is illuminated in poetry and music. (I never reached Lee’s poems so well as when I heard him read them). Both these accounts cut through the ghastly language about ‘creative artists’ found now on the pens of journalists and professors of English, of university officials and Canada Council executives. Obviously artists make things (not create them) but if anything great is to be made they do so by paying attention – by listening and seeing. (This is the trouble with Irving Layton’s poetry.)7 To repeat, creation is a dangerous word, because it denies the primacy for art of what is listened to or seen. The expression of Lee’s openness is evident not only in his writings, but practically in his work as an editor. That wonderful English word ‘generosity’ (for which there is no German equivalent) penetrated his work in setting up the Anansi Press and his editing a vast variety of writings. Whether for good or ill, a tiresome old manic-depressive such as myself would never have put the writings he cared about into a book if it were not for Lee’s sane encouragement. And he dealt with equally queer types among the young and the middle-aged, always with that generosity which in human dealings is the mark of openness. With hesitation I must now turn to Lee’s long poems – the hesitation of my impotence before the proclamations of poetry. What I will say is at a lower level than the essential. There is a great change between Civil Elegies to The Gods and The Death of Harold Ladoo. To compare the rhythm and form of Civil Elegies with that of The Death of Harold Ladoo is to know that much more immediately happens in the second poem than in the first. My comment upon this must be made in the accents of philosophy (ich kann nicht änders). To put the matter perhaps too simply: existentialism is the teaching that all thought about serious matters belongs to the suffering of a particular dynamic context; while traditional philosophy taught that thought was capable of lifting that suffering into the universal. Both teachings require openness, but traditional philosophy believed that the truth present in existentialism was only a preparation for its transcending. It would appear to me that Civil Elegies is written out of the struggle which makes human beings existentialists; while the two later poems have somehow raised up the sufferings of

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the particular dynamic context. The Death of Harold Ladoo moves back and forth with the fluidity of music, from ‘the dynamic context’ of a particular friend’s particular death to the statements of self and otherness, love and hate, living and dying. Never does the particular dissolve into the merely general, nor does the universal flatten out into abstractions. Because the later poems are more universal, they are more immediate. Cadence is more upon the page. This is not meant paradoxically in any sense. Immediacy and universality require each other. Even at the end when Mozart writes that ‘the ice is around my soul’ he is still able to receive and imitate that which includes even that ice. It is dangerous and indeed pompous to try to state what is universal in the Iliad, Las Meninas, the clarinet concerto, or King Lear, but to say that there is nothing such present in them is just the modern denial of the proclamation which is the work of art. Certainly the truth of existentialism is included in them all, but it is also transcended in them all. The beautiful is the image of the Good, and this includes the truth of existentialism because the perfectly beautiful has been crucified. It is easier to write of Savage Fields for the simple reason that Lee has written about it so lucidly himself. (‘Reading Savage Fields,’ Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Spring 1979). Lee spells out there as in a finely honed legal document what he was doing in the book. It is therefore unnecessary to speak of its surface ambiguities when this has been done so lucidly by its author. Anyway, when at the height of his own enunciation of Beautiful Losers Lee comes to the point where Cohen drops away from what he might have reached, it becomes quite clear why Lee calls his book ‘an essay in literature and cosmology.’ Nevertheless let me end where I started with the relation of poetry and philosophy. At the end of Savage Fields Lee writes: ‘Thinking proceeds by objectivity and mastering what is to be thought.’ He asks: ‘What form of thought can arise which does not re-embody the crisis it is analysing?’ The first statement is clearly true of our modern destiny. The second must drive anybody who asks it not only to what may be in the future but also to thinking of what was before the modern paradigm. The fact of this great change can be seen in Kant’s statement that ‘reason’ is higher than ‘understanding’; while Plato meant by ‘the ideas’ that ‘understanding’ is higher than ‘reason.’ I am not so foolish as to suggest that in the very midst of the modern fate we should try to avoid it by simply returning to ways of thought, the criticism of which was in the

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very substance of our fate. What I am saying is that as one looks at the height of modern philosophy in Heidegger or the height of poetry in the works of Céline, one must see the grandeur, the truth and suffering in both, but one must also see the ravages which are expressed in both.8 To overcome those ravages (which are oneself) one must look for sustenance to times when poetry and philosophy had not been ravaged in this way. In God’s name I do not will Lee to become a scholar of poetry or philosophy: but rather to live in the midst of these ravages, and to try to re-collect what those proclamations were. To do so is not to become simply a useful scholar or an amusing entertainer, but to take upon oneself the mystery of things. Lee, of course, has done much of this. He is a highly educated human being. But Savage Fields says to me that he must do more, because the milk of the joy of eternity must be more substantially present, if the ravages of fate are to be looked on, and one is not to be turned to stone. Perhaps it is not possible for the modern poet to reclaim poetry’s power from the honey of the past. The ambiguity that makes Céline the poet of European modernity (in his last books about war), is that the light of eternity is not absent, even for him. On the other hand, who can rest in Céline’s proclamations of the word? Céline and Heidegger both must be known as inadequate if there is to be any real proclamation. In the apogee of technological science the attention necessary for re-collecting and detrivializing can only be a fearful and consummate act. As an older friend watches Lee at the height of his powers, one cannot help wondering what we will owe to him in this re-collecting and detrivializing. Luckily it is nobody’s business but his.

Notes 1 Dennis Beynon Lee (1939– ), poet, teacher, editor, critic, was the founder and chief editor at House of Anansi Press 1967–72, where he edited Grant’s Technology and Empire (1969). His recent work includes Nightwatch (New and Selected Poems 1968–96) (1996), Body Music (1998), and Un (2003). His two best known books of poems for children are Alligator Pie and Nicholas Knock and Other People (1974). See also 259n10. 2 Stan Laurel (Arthur Stanley Jefferson) (1890–1965), English actor, and Oliver Hardy (Norvell Hardy) (1892–1957), American actor, have been considered by many to be the funniest comedy team of all time. Two of their finest films were Sons of the Desert (1933) and Way Out West (1937).

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3 See ‘Postscript to “What is Metaphysics,”’ in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), ed. William McNeill, 237: ‘We may know much about the relation between philosophy and poetry. Yet we know nothing of the dialogue between poets and thinkers, who “dwell near one another on mountains most separate” [Hölderlin].’ Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), German thinker, has had an enormous influence in France, Italy, Japan, and America as well as in Germany itself. His works include Sein und Zeit (Being and Time, 1927), Identität und Differenz (1957), and Nietzsche (2 vols., 1961). 4 For Grant’s account of the politics of Pearson see Lament for a Nation (1965) in Collected Works, vol. 3, 277–367. On Pearson, see 134n5. 5 Noam Avram Chomsky (1928– ), American linguist and public intellectual, teaches modern language and linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1965 he has been a leading critic of US foreign policy. His influential book American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) argued against American involvement in Vietnam. 6 In the book The Gods (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1979), 32. 7 Irving Peter Layton (1912–2006), poet, essayist, and professor, taught at Sir George Williams (later Concordia) University and published many books of poetry including A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), which won the Governor General’s Award. 8 On Louis-Ferdinand Céline, see 467n1.

Foreword to Neo -Vedanta and Modernity by Bithika Mukerji

Dr Mukerji asked Grant to write this foreword to her book Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (Varanasi: Ashutosh-Prakashan Sansthan 1983), after attending his graduate seminars at McMaster.1 She writes in her preface that after her experiences in Geneva she ‘learnt much more about the Western tradition from Professor George P. Grant at McMaster during the years 1973–77. Whatever is right and perceptive about the West, in this book, I have gathered from him and what is partial or wrong is my own interpretation of it.’ She also expresses deep gratitude for the assistance received from Grant’s colleagues teaching Indian philosophy at McMaster, Professors J.G. Arapura and K. Sivaraman, who supervised the thesis that became Neo-Vedanta and Modernity. An excerpt of the foreword is published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 460–1.

It is both an honour and a pleasure to write a foreword to Dr Bithika Mukerji’s book. But it is more than that, because the central issue which is always present in this book is of such great importance for all thoughtful human beings, whether they be from the East or the West. What is the relation between modernity (call it if you will ‘technology’) and the great truths of the religious and philosophical traditions from before the age of progress? Dr Mukerji looks at this issue in terms of India, but it is clearly of equal importance in Europe, China, Russia, and the Arab world. Perhaps it is most pressing in North America (from where I write) because we are the only civilization that has no history from before the age of progress. Many people in the world believe that technology is an instrument which human beings can use for their own purposes. Technology is

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believed to be external to the human purposes which are given in philosophic and religious traditions. It is believed that these traditions are not radically put into question by technology. This is contradicted by the fact that such countries as Russia and China have used Marxist forms of government to technologize their societies quickly. Of course, Marxism is not a philosophy which stands above technology, but a system of thought which is but an aspect of what was given in that great Western emergence which we call ‘modernity’ or ‘technology.’ Also of course that capitalist ‘liberalism,’ which is an alternative system of government for the modernizing of societies, is also but part of what came forth from the primal affirmation of the modern West. The difference between capitalism and communism is a subsidiary difference to that between modern and pre-modern civilizations. As Heidegger, the greatest Western philosopher of our era, has written: communism and capitalism are both predicates of the subject technology.2 It is a vain delusion to believe that technology is an instrument that human beings can use as they choose. It is an affirmation about Being and as such penetrates every aspect of a civilization when it becomes the way of that civilization. ln the light of that oblivion of eternity which so characterizes the dynamic civilizations of the West, it is well for Dr Mukerji to ask what happens to the apprehension of the ontology of the Vedanta in the context of modernity. Dr Mukerji has made herself enormously qualified to write about such a subject. She had taught the truth of the Vedanta for many years in India. She then came for a time to the West. She did not study Western thought from the safe distance of India or from the pleasant confines of an Oxford college, as did Radhakrishnan.3 She first came to Geneva and then to a heartland of modernity, the Great Lakes region of North America. She came to a steel town and worked in a university dominated by the computer. Steel and computers are after all two central substances of modernity; steel of an earlier era, computers of the latest reign of cybernetics. She studied such great makers of modernity as Hobbes and Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger. That is, she lived modernity in her daily flesh and bones, and thought it in her studies. She therefore has the right to speak of it not in some abstract way, but as it is in itself. She is greatly qualified to understand what it means as the context of the Vedantic ontology of bliss. To a westerner such as myself, uneducated in the truth of the

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Vedanta but with knowledge of what has happened to Christianity in the face of the modern, Dr Mukerji’s chapters on the thought of A.C. Mukerji and Kokilesvara Sastri are of the greatest interest.4 I am not qualified to speak with authority on Indian thought, but having read these chapters with close attention, I can affirm that Dr Mukerji’s argument is beautifully expounded. The thesis of that argument is that the impact of Westernization on Indian thought has resulted in obscuring what was meant by ‘bliss’ in the Vedanta, and therefore distorting that philosophy. Certainly, ever since I listened to the lectures of Radhakrishnan, it has appeared to me that he greatly distorted the ‘idealism’ of Kant and Hegel to make them seem to be at one with the Vedanta and at the expense of eliminating that mastering modernity which makes them both so revolutionary. Indeed the English word ‘ideal’ has had much influence in leading to that misunderstanding. It is a modern word and cannot well be used by anybody who takes the ancient traditions seriously. This is seen in the fact that its opposite is the modern word ‘real.’ But to Plato, that Western thinker who has most in common with the Vedanta, the distinction ‘ideal-real’ would be a distortion. The ‘idea’ was the true reality; idea was not ideal. Above all, what is particularly wonderful in Dr Mukerji’s book is her enucleation of the ontology of Ananda. This is breathtaking for any Western listener. How right it is that the word ‘Ananda’ be translated as bliss. The word ‘joy’ would be too subjective and miss the knowledge that what is spoken of here concerns Being. What has come to be in the dynamic civilization of North America – indeed in all those societies which express in themselves the thoughts of Locke and Marx, Rousseau or Darwin or Hume – is the restless search for bliss which escapes one because it cannot be known as being itself. Modern life has become the joyless pursuit of joy. One of the truly great stories of the English-speaking world is called ‘Bliss.’ (It is also written by a woman.) The story recognizes beautifully the crying need that bliss be more than the subjectivity of feeling, but rooted in the Being of beings.5 What is more pressing for us Westerners than the understanding that there is an ontology of bliss? That this should be unthinkable is perhaps the greatest price that we have paid for modernity. For those of us who are Christians, it is the elimination of the understanding of the Trinity as bliss which leaves Christianity floundering in the midst of the modernity it

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so much made. What is sad in the Western world is the deep desire to participate in bliss, for instance through the detached pursuit of the orgasm, which because it is outside any ontological understanding of bliss results in the good of the pursuit often being blackly negated. Much silliness has been written in the modern world about the meeting of East and West, by both Westerners and Easterners. Such a meeting must not sacrifice the greatness of either side – Dr Mukerji’s book understands that the true and authentic Vedanta must not be obscured (albeit temporarily) to make possible that meeting. Both Westerners and Easterners should read the book with close attention.

Notes 1 Bithika Mukerji studied an ‘Indian brand of neo-Kantianism’ under A.C. Mukerji in India and later discovered that Kant was not fully understood by her Indian teachers. After going to Geneva in 1972, where she led a seminar on Christianity and Hinduism, she studied at McMaster University 1973–7, completing her thesis that was later published as the book containing Grant’s foreword. 2 Grant may be referring to Heidegger’s statement that ‘Europe lies in a pincers between Russia and America, which are metaphysically the same, namely in regard to their world character and their relation to the spirit’: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press 1959), 45. 3 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975), Indian philosopher and statesman, taught at Madras, Mysore, Calcutta, Benares, and Oxford, where Grant heard him lecture. He followed Shankara in his Vedantic interpretation, sought the unity of the world’s religions and philosophies, and adopted Idealism as his philosophic position. 4 Professor Bithika Mukerji deals with Anukul Chandra Mukhopadhyaya (A.C. Mukerji) and Kokilesvara Bhattacharya (Sastri) in chapters 6–10 of her book. 5 The story by Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) can be found in Bliss and Other Stories (1920) or in The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield (1945). As the character Bertha Young tells the story: ‘What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending

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out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? ...’ ‘Oh, is there no way you can express it without being “drunk and disorderly”? How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?’ See Bliss and Other Stories (London: Constable and Co. 1920), 116.

Justice and Technology

This article was distributed and presented to the second meeting of the George Grant Symposium at Erindale College in October of 1977. It was adapted from a paper Grant had distributed in his graduate seminars in the mid-1970s. Later it was published in Theology and Technology: Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis, edited by Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (Lanham, MD: University Press of America 1984), 237–46. He revised it after publication and the new version, presented here, first appeared in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 435–44.

Christ said: Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.1 Socrates said that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it.2 It is not my purpose here to discuss the relation between these two statements. That would be to raise the question which in Jewish terms is the relation between Athens and Jerusalem, and in Christian terms the relation between Socrates and Christ. I will simply abstract from discussing whatever possible differences have been said to distinguish these two statements and take them as saying something common about justice. Nor is it my purpose to discuss the even more mysterious fact that one may be grasped by the truth of Christ’s proposition, even when one’s own hungering and thirsting is not much directed toward justice. It is never one’s business to concern oneself with other people’s ultimate hungers and thirsts; but I know something about my own, yet am still grasped by the truth of that proposition. Put generally, this question is: If the intellect is enlightened by love, and therefore access to the most important knowledge is dependent on love, how is it possible to assent to the truth of a proposition which is made from way beyond one’s own capacities of love?

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My intention is to discuss the relation between technology and the statements of Christ and Socrates. I do not mean by ‘technology’ the sum of all modern techniques, but that unique co-penetration of knowing and making of the arts and sciences which originated in Western Europe and has now become worldwide.a Behind such descriptions lies the fact that technology is an affirmation concerning what is; it remains unfathomed, but is very closely interwoven with that primal affirmation made by medieval Westerners as they accepted their Christianity in a new set of apperceptions. That affirmation had something to do with a new content given by Western peoples to the activity of ‘willing.’ ‘Technology’ is the closest, yet inadequate, word for what that new affirmation has become as it is now worked out in us and around us. But to use that inadequate word is to grant the unfathomedness of the affirmation. Leaving aside the crucial question of what it would be to live or think ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’ that apprehension, it is certainly true that all of us are in it in the sense that its manifestations, both outward and inward, make up most of our daily lives. For example, as university people [we see that] the institutions we work for are in their heart and movement becoming more and more attuned to that apprehension in its modern moment. Moreover it would be foolish to say that ‘technology’ dominates chemistry departments and not religion departments. Much scholarship in religion sounds the pure chord of the affirmation I have called ‘technology.’ This paper is about an ambiguity in the relation between technology and justice (in its fullest sense). Clearly technology has been an affirmation concerning justice. I need not press the obvious point that among its originators and its practitioners, it was thought that the progress of the arts and sciences would alleviate the human estate. Negatively it would eliminate many injustices which had characterized the past; positively it would open new apprehensions of justice by making a greater percentage of the population wise. Many of those in all parts of the globe who presently are most deeply engrossed in the progress of the arts and the sciences still see their engrossment in terms of the realization of justice. The ambiguity I wish to point to is not the practical one a See, e.g., my ‘Knowing and Making,’ Royal Society of Canada: Proceedings and Transactions, 4th series, vol. 12 (1974), 59–67.

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that from this technology have come forth powers that can be used for purposes that speak against justice. It is not my business here to describe behaviour modification, the organization of the mass destruction of the unborn, the corporate bureaucracies in which human beings are engulfed or, at a less immediate level, the destruction of such intermediate institutions as the family or the country. We could all make our lists of such issues which are now coming forth from technology in its most obvious sense, and which threaten justice in its most obvious sense. Indeed many of the best people engrossed in that apprehension which I have called ‘technology’ are aware of these difficulties, and want to carry that apprehension to its limits in the hopes of making the world more congruent with justice. The enormous array of cybernetic techniques being used by the environmentalists is an example of what I mean. In so doing such people are denying that these present difficulties constitute a real ambiguity in ‘technology.’ (Of course, all of us as practical people living in our civilization must inevitably be concerned in the name of justice with trying to do something about one or other of these problems.) The ambiguity with which I am here concerned is not that which arises from difficulties such as these. Rather it has to do with the fact that the realization of technology has meant for all of us a very dimming of our ability to think justice lucidly. The ambiguity is that technology, which came into the world carrying in its heart a hope about justice, has in its realization dimmed the ability of those who live in it to think justice. Something has been lost. It is for this reason that I started with statements by Socrates and Christ. At a common sense level it is clear what I mean by that dimming or that loss. ‘Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice.’ What can the identity of the just and fortunate mean to people who take their representation of reality from the terms given in technology? At all times and places, the unity between happiness and justice, even when it is affirmed by the greatest in the civilization, must appear mysterious to common sense. But to say in our civilization that happiness is for those who are hungry and thirsty for justice seems particularly incredible. (It is necessary to say in parenthesis why I have cut out the completion of the statement. ‘Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice because they will be satisfied.’ I have done so to leave out any discussion of what that satisfaction will be. I take for granted

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that Christ did not mean any satisfaction or reward external to or other than justice itself. One could translate ‘they will be satisfied’ by ‘they will have their fill of it.’ Often when I am feeling vengeful, as Canadian Scots often are, for instance against the American oil corporations and their greed, I might say ‘I hope they have their fill of it.’ So one can say of the saints, ‘Happy are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice for they will have their fill of it.’ Indeed what makes one tremble when one thinks about the saints is that one knows how painful is going to be their journey to that joy.) Most of our influential contemporaries would deny that anything essential has been lost in our ability to think justice during the realization of technology. At the centre of this denial would lie the pungent assertion about justice which was in the heart of ‘technology’ from its origins. Progress in the control of nature is essential for the improvement of justice in the world. And what is justice apart from its existence in the world? Progress in the control of nature has freed human beings from such obvious injustices as labour and disease. It has not only freed us from the bonds of necessity which held us in unjust situations, but also in that liberation has given us time to care about the realization of justice in a way that was not possible when we were bound to immediate tasks. Those who justify the modern with explicit ethical doctrines would assert, beyond the practical claim, that justice can now appear to thought with greater clarity than ever before, because it can now be understood as utterly the work of human beings. This assertion would be common to English-speaking liberals, to Marxists, to Nietzscheans and to those who hold some combination of all three. By saying that justice depends on a contract maintained in a formal democracy, or on the proletariat when it has become conscious of the needs of all human beings everywhere, or on the great persons who want to use our conquest of nature beautifully and nobly, we have allowed justice to appear ‘authentically’ by taking away from under it those safety nets which guaranteed it as being in the nature of things. As for hungering and thirsting for justice, that is more widely present than ever before. Democrats hunger and thirst when they work to see that the contract will become complete; Marxists hunger and thirst when they strive for a society in which justice is not only formal but substantial; the noble and the beautiful hunger and thirst when they think beyond being masters of the earth and impose beauty and nobility upon that mastery.

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Where is then the loss? We have been freed negatively from those ‘otherworldly’ interests which diverted us from and allowed us to put up with the injustices of this world. We have been freed positively to take our lives into our own hands and to know that it depends on us alone to give them a just and noble content. What is then this talk of a loss concerning justice which has occurred with the coming to be of modernity? I long to be able to express it with superb clarity, but am quite unable. The following, though inadequate, is as near as I can get: in affirming that justice is what we are fitted for, one is asserting that a knowledge of justice is intimated to us in the ordinary occurrences of space and time, and that through those occurrences one is reaching towards some knowledge of good which is not subject to change, and which rules us in a way more pressing than the rule of any particular goods. In the Phaedrus Plato writes of the beauty of the world, and Socrates states that that beauty is what leads us to justice. Beauty is always seducing while justice often appears unattractive. If in this world we could see justice as it is in itself, it would engulf us in loveliness. But that is not our situation. Its demands make it often unattractive both to our conveniences and in our apprehension of the situations which call for our response. Because the harmony of beauty is in some sense immediately apprehended, it is the means whereby we are led to that more complete harmony which is justice itself. (The unseducing side of justice described by Plato always seems similar to Isaiah’s statement that the redeemer will not be externally charming. This is well to remember in these days of charming political ‘redeemers.’)3 This affirmation about justice can be put negatively by saying that if we are realistic about our loves and realistic about any conceivable conditions of the world, and if we apprehended the unchangingness of justice, we must understand that justice is in some sense other to us, and has a cutting edge which often seems to be turned upon our very selves. I have tried to express elsewhere the unchangingness of justice as given us in the fact that we can know in advance actions which must never be done.b What is meant by realistic about our loves is that justice is very often not what we want in any recognizable sense of ‘want.’ What is

b See my Philosophy in the Mass Age, 2nd edition (Toronto: Copp Clark 1966), 78–81. (Collected Works, Vol. 2, 310–407.)

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meant by realism about the conditions of the world is that I cannot imagine any condition in which some lack of harmony in some human being would not be putting claims upon us – the meeting of which would often carry us whither we would not. But as soon as justice as otherness is expressed in that negation, we must hold with it the positive affirmation that we can know justice as our need in the sense that it is necessary to happiness, and we can have intimations of loving its harmony. The holding together in thought of our need and love of justice and its demanding otherness, is expressed in ontological terms by Plato when he writes of justice as idea. To put the matter in a popular way: justice is an unchanging measure of all our times and places, and our love of it defines us. But our desiring need of an unchanging good which calls us to pay its price is theoretically incongruent with what is thought in ‘technology.’ This has been stated unclearly not only for the reason that thinking about justice is not the same as loving it and therefore knowing it, but also because even within thought it is so difficult to balance carefully what is said positively with what is said negatively. It is inadequate either to affirm God in contrast to the world as a vale of tears, or to affirm God as subsidiary to process as in Whitehead.4 For example, one can easily describe realized human love these days as if it were the height for human beings; while some describe it as if it were not qualitatively different from our need for food. How difficult it is to see it neither as the height nor as simply an appetite, but as an intimation of that immediacy of justice which Plato has described as fire catching fire. Let me say in historical parenthesis, that this description tries to avoid both Aristotle’s and Kant’s accounts of the matter. This may seem like a remark of pride against such geniuses, and it would take too long here to express clearly why I want to reject Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s account of idea, and Kant’s assertion of the autonomy of the will. My failure of description is bound up with three difficulties concerning language. First, what is the point of speaking of this loss, in which we live minute by minute, with language which no longer has meaning for those minutes? When I said that Plato spoke ontologically about idea, this used archaic language. Think what ‘idea’ means today. Any use of the word ‘soul’ falls into the same danger. Or again, the phrase ‘oblivion of eternity’ necessarily expresses the loss archaically. Secondly, one must, on the other hand, beware of using language about that loss

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which springs from the new forms of thought which have caused it. For example, the word ‘transcendence’ is now popular with many theologians. It seems to me a dangerous word because it generally comes forth from that account of freedom as autonomy, which is itself just part of the loss. ‘Transcendence’ has been so often used in an existentialist exaltation of human beings’ inability ever to be at peace. Of course there are more dangerous terms, used regularly by theologians, such as ‘historical consciousness.’ The modern world is full of language which arises inevitably and consistently from ‘technology,’ and which is better used by those who do not think the loss a loss. The main task of thought is the purging of such language. Rahner or Bultmann would have been of more use if they had read and thought more, and written less.5 Thirdly and most important, the question of language is difficult because it must never move away from what is pressed upon us concerning justice in our daily situations. This is the difficulty for all of us as thinkers. If we are to speak about the essence of justice we must always start from where it meets us in an immediate way every day. Put generally, this is to say that the language of ontology must proceed from the nerve-racking situations of justice. It is often said these days that the task of thinkers is to reclaim the possibility of ontology, which has been lost in the realization of technology. This is why Heidegger is so popular with many continental theologians. But the difficulty of this position is that modern thought at its height does not deny ontology; rather it asserts an ontology which excludes what is essential about justice. It is not ontology per se which is the heart of our task as thinkers; rather it is the search for an ontology which carries in itself the essence of justice. Even to begin this, one must never turn away from the realities and immediacies of justice in the here and now. To take an absurd example of this from the English-speaking world, it has always seemed to me that Bertrand Russell, for all his crazy negations and confusion about ontology, is nearer to philosophy than his colleague Alfred N. Whitehead, despite the latter’s appeals to ontology. Russell’s thought is filled with the intensities of the modern world, however inadequate his response; Whitehead’s writings taste of secularized Anglicanism seeking a Harvard substitute for prayer.6 To put this in all its terror: ‘Human nature is so arranged that any desire of the soul which has not passed through the flesh by way of actions, movements and attitudes which correspond to it naturally, has no reality in the soul. It is only there as a

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phantom.’c Much modern theology seems to me such academic phantoms, because it gives the appearance of being abstracted from the immediacies of justice. The failure to live in the world of ‘technology’ as it is can be found even in the writings of the best modern Anglican theologian, Austin Farrer.7 He wrote with beautiful accuracy about ontology as the foundation for any teaching of Christianity. Yet, in dispute with the analytical philosophers of his day in Oxford, he could write: ‘The foundations of morality are platitudinous valuations; the subjects of moral discussion are contested priorities. People who discuss the platitudes are intolerable – why try, for example, to make an issue of the question, whether it is good that we should care for other men or for ourselves alone; or whether instinctive appetite should ever be controlled.’d I remember the shock of surprise in reading those words. Why, the man does not really know the world he inhabits! Here is an educated philosophic theologian deluding himself about what has come to be believed with ‘technology.’ If we attempt as thinkers (even in fear and trembling) the great task of ontology, the necessary cutting edge is only maintained by being in the world of ‘technology’ in as full a consciousness as we are able. What has been lost is exposed even in the writing of Heidegger. This fact is itself a great ambiguity, because he is the writer who has expounded, as no other, what is given in the word ‘technology.’ This is not only done in the writing which has ‘technique’ in its title, but in all his later writings. I would single out Der Satz vom Grund (so inadequately translated as The Principle of Reason) as the writing where he most wonderfully brings it forth.8 His call to thought is to think beyond ‘technology’ in the night of the world. But – and what a ‘but’ it is – the ontology he is moving towards excludes the one thing needful – namely, justice in its full and demanding purity. Let me refer quickly to two writings: (1) His discussion of techne and dike throughout his Introc Simone Weil, ‘Théorie des sacraments,’ in Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard 1962), 135. For the published English translation of this passage see Simone Weil, ‘Theory of the Sacraments,’ in Gateway to God (Glasgow: William Collins & Sons 1974), 65. d Austin Farrer, ‘A Starting-Point for the Philosophical Examination of Theological Belief,’ in Basil Mitchell, ed., Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: George Allen and Unwin 1958), 14.

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duction to Metaphysics, and much more important, (2) his ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.’9 In the latter he is criticizing Plato’s account of ‘being’ as ‘idea,’ because it is the foundation of the definition of truth as correctness, and therefore is the foundation of the age of metaphysics. According to Heidegger, this is the originating affirmation from which Western technological rationalism comes forth. The work proceeds from a translation of ‘the Cave’ in the Republic, and a commentary on aletheia in that passage. It is a remarkable writing. However, what is so singularly absent is any discussion of the politeia or the virtues, in terms of which ‘the Sun,’ ‘the Line,’ and ‘the Cave’ were written. The extraordinarily powerful and pain-filled language used by Plato concerning the breaking of the chains, the climb out of the cave into the light of the sun and the return to the cave, are all related to the virtue of justice and its dependence upon the sun. This is absent from Heidegger’s commentary. From his translation and commentary one would not understand that in the Sun, the Line and the Cave, the metaphor of sight is to be taken as love. That which we love and which is the source of our love is outside the cave, but it is the possibility of the fire in the cave and of the virtues which make possible the getting out of the cave. When Heidegger defines good as used by Plato simply formally, as what we are fitted for, he does not give content to that fitting as Socrates does when he says that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it. Heidegger describes Plato’s doctrine of truth so that ‘being’ as ‘idea’ is abstracted from that love of justice in terms of which ‘idea’ can alone be understood as separate. Goodness itself is ‘beyond being.’ This is why I take even Heidegger’s wonderful account of technology as having been written within that loss which has come with ‘technology.’ It is in this sense that Heidegger is an historicist, although the most consummate of the historicists. Some theologians and scholars of the Bible take Heidegger’s ontology as a means of bringing out of concealment the real truth of Christianity, because they think that his overcoming of metaphysics will allow Christianity to be expressed in a way that was not possible in the past. This is a worthy intention; but it is a practice of great peril if it can only be achieved by eliminating from Christianity that hunger and thirst for justice which is certainly absent from Heidegger’s ontology. It is unwise of theologians to play around with ontologies without knowing their source. Many times Heidegger has quoted with approval

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Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Christianity is Platonism for the people.’e If the theologians who use Heidegger read his acceptance of that dictum, they may take it to be applied only to the Christianity which in the past clothed itself in Greek metaphysics. But in using the new ontology, will they be able to hold on to the happiness in hungering and thirsting for justice? The trouble with talking about loss and perhaps even my constant references to Plato is that they may seem to imply a turning away from the present. In modern university circumstances such an implication can lead to the substitution of scholarship for thought, and it will be that historicist scholarship which has done so much to destroy for us the presence of the past. Certainly thought will not be achieved by turning away from ‘technology.’ Meeting ‘technology’ face to face means for the thinker neither acceptance nor rejection but trying to know it for what it is. (I must emphasize yet once again that justice may well require the rejection of particular techniques.) The point of this writing has simply been to emphasize that knowing ‘technology’ for what it is requires the recognition of what has been lost politically and ethically. Equally important would be to understand what has been found in its coming to be. I must finally say that the thought which is the task of most of us, and is indeed important, always waits upon something of a different order – that thought which has been transfigured by hungering and thirsting for justice.

Notes 1 Matthew 5:6. The King James Version reads as follows: ‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.’ 2 Crito 49b–e; Gorgias 474b ff. 3 See Isaiah 59:19–20: ‘So shall they fear the name of the Lord from the west, and his glory from the rising of the sun. When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him. And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the Lord.’

e See, e.g., An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor 1961), 90.

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4 On Alfred North Whitehead, see 217n17. 5 Karl Rahner, SJ (1904–84), German theologian and Roman Catholic priest, taught at Innsbruck, Munich, and Münster. He was influenced by Aquinas, Kant, and Heidegger, and his writings included Spirit in the World (1939), Hearers of the Word (1941), and Theological Investigations (20 vols., 1954–82). Rudolph Bultmann (1884–1976), German theologian, was a friend and colleague of Heidegger’s who taught at Marburg, Breslau, and Giessen. His many works include Myth and Christianity (1958), Jesus Christ and Mythology (1958), and The Future of Our Religious Past (1971). 6 See Grant’s article on Russell in Collected Works, Vol. 2, 34–48 (and see above, 261n16). In addition to Principia Mathematica (with A.N. Whitehead) (3 vols., 1910–13), Russell published voluminously, including The Problems of Philosophy (1912), The Scientific Outlook (1931), A History of Western Philosophy (1947), and The Impact of Science on Society (1951), along with many works on social and ethical questions. 7 Austin Marsden Farrer (1904–68), British Anglo-Catholic theologian, biblical scholar, and priest, served as chaplain and fellow of several colleges at Oxford. Grant was deeply affected by Farrer’s lectures at Oxford and read his work carefully in the 1950s, including Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay (Westminster: Dacre Press 1943) and The Freedom of The Will (London: Adam and Charles Black 1958), but he always felt there was a gulf between Farrer’s approach to theology and his own. See his discussion of Farrer’s influence in ‘Conversations from George Grant in Process’ (357). 8 Der Satz Vom Grund (Pfullingen: Verlag Gunther Neske 1957). The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991). 9 For Introduction to Metaphysics see footnote ‘e.’ ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ is in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press 1998), 155–82. For Grant’s response to this work in 1959, when he first read it, see Collected Works, Vol. 2, 466–7. For an interpretation of Grant’s two responses to Heidegger on Plato see Arthur Davis, ‘Justice and Freedom,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 151f.

A Giant Steps Down

Dalhousie Alumni Magazine published these comments by Grant in volume 1, no. 1 (Fall 1984) on the occasion of his retirement in 1984.

On Canada: Canada is a nation put together of regions. I think that is what this nation is all about. In terms of immediate politics, there has been an attempt by the government to reconcile French-English differences, but no real concern about our independence as a nation ... It’s quite a destiny to live next door to the greatest empire in the world. As a result, it’s hard to maintain our individuality. (The situation) is bound to make people the same. On the Charter of Rights: I believe that rights must be written down, but I don’t want to be part of a nation of litigants. I am against this, but in a mass society individuals in a weak position need the law behind them – and they need the help the law can give them. We have a tradition of individual rights. It’s the greatest gift we have in our society. Let’s not lose it. On having children: We have six children and they are great. I believe that not wanting children signals the destruction of a people. I believe this situation is sad, more so for men than for women. Men will miss out colossally. They will miss a great human experience. On schools: I know the school system through my children. I believe the system is breaking down partly as a result of the breakdown in the family and religious institutions. Burdens have been placed on the system and the teachers which have created undue pressures. Schools were never meant to carry some of the functions they do today. On the media: I think the media is so powerful in North America that it can say or not say anything it chooses. I’m concerned that in both

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Canada and the United States, the media is not telling us about other parts of the world. In a way this prevents us from understanding other peoples, their culture, and their problems. In a sense the media tells what we want to hear, see, or read. In this sense, I’m frightened. The technological revolution: Technology is our destiny. It’s the destiny of the West. However, one has to see that it doesn’t destroy our natures. I hope that human beings will not become less as a result of technological innovations, and I don’t believe that technology is to be worshipped in place of God.

Professionalism

Grant videotaped his delivery of this paper because he could not travel to the University of Victoria for the 1984 meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. His colleague Denis Stairs introduced him and then turned on the videotape. Grant began with an apology for reading the paper, saying he could not communicate clearly unless he had written out what he wanted to say. In the delivery he modified his written text at some points, not making significant changes. We present the paper here as written with a few modifications taken from the oral transcription where they made obvious improvements. He gave his talk the title ‘Professionalism,’ though Denis Stairs introduced it with the title ‘Ethics and Professionalism,’ as it was listed in the CPSA program.

Professionalism is the name of the game in technological societies – whether they be capitalist or communist. There are small differences between capitalism and communism but that is not my business here – which is to speak of professionalism as it is in the corporation capitalism society of North America. Before saying why professionalism is the name of the game for us, it is necessary to say what is meant by technological society. Most of us represent technology to ourselves as the great step forward that human beings made in the invention of instruments for human use. Human beings have since their beginnings developed instruments to help them get things done and just recently we have made a great step forward in that ability. Indeed these days it is popular to define human beings as over against the other animals, by saying that we are the tool making animals. Technology is seen as the whole apparatus of instruments at the disposal of human beings for their

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choices and purposes. It is not simply external objects such as machines and drugs or nuclear power – but also the systems of organization and communication, such as hospitals, television networks, factories, etc. Why is professionalism so central to technological society? To say this it is necessary to look further at what we mean by technology. Techne is just the Greek word for what we express as ‘art.’ And ‘art’ was in turn just a human skill for getting anything done. Carpenters were artists because they made tables; musicians were artists because they wrote songs. There was no difference until recently between ‘fine arts,’ writing symphonies, and a plumber fixing my pipes. They were both arts. Arts were just human skills for getting such things done which needed to get done. A general was a great artist at war when the society needed defending. What some people think is that what makes our society different from others is that we just can get many more things done than ever in the past – we have more arts or technologies. This is what progress is. But this is not quite so and we see the difference when we look at the word technology. Two words in it are techne meaning art and logos the word for science. That is what we have – the union of art and science – that is, technology. In the past many civilizations had arts and had sciences – but they were not united. What makes our modern society is that they are united and this union we express as ‘technology.’ In the past not all sciences had practical effects. Einstein’s science led inevitably to nuclear bombs. When modern scientists tell you by way of selfjustification that there is nothing wrong with science, it is just the way people use it – we should not be convinced. Modern science at its very heart leads to the conquest of human and non-human nature – to modern medicine and modern nuclear war. Now why does this technology and science lead us directly to professionalism? Because the union of the arts and sciences means that all the skilled people have to have some knowledge of science to master their art. In the past in many arts people would carry them out without any science. In the 1920s I remember seeing some isolated people in northern Ontario building a wharf without a tape measure and without a square. Obviously, the enormous expansion of pharmaceuticals – pills of all kinds – means that many levels of the health professions have to have some training in their control. As the arts and the sciences are more and more concentrated – unified if you like – it must mean that

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there are more and more professionals – as there is more and more technology – more and more professions. Indeed if one is to earn one’s living in North America it is pretty well necessary to be a professional of one kind or another. The only alternative is to come from one of the big capitalist families such as the Bronfmans in this generation or the Eatons in the last, where there is so much wealth you never have to earn your living. But that is rare. The rest of us have to be professionals – if we are not to fall into the under-classes who just do the dirty work of the society. The word profession or professional comes from the word profess. This means to declare openly; to announce; to affirm. For example, these days it is very easy to do what I do, to profess that I am a Christian – other times, other places, this was not so. And profess came to mean as far as the arts and sciences went that we affirmed or announced that we were an expert or proficient in some art or science. And so one’s profession became the occupation which one professes to be skilled in and to follow. So gradually professional the adjective came to be taken as a noun and meant one who belongs to one of the skilled professions. Saying that, it seems to me, takes us to the first point about the ethics of professionalism. If one professes to be skilful at some art or science then the first ethical commandment is to be what one professes to be. Of course, some can do the skills brilliantly – but they are rare. Most of us were not meant to be brilliant – but we are asked to be competent and should only be in professions where we can be competent at the art or science or mixture of both which we profess. We all know that this ethical demand is not always met – there are people in the professions who shouldn’t be there because they are not competent. And this is generally not their own fault – but the fault of my particular profession – the teachers who have let people through who are not competent at the profession they profess. Competence is the first ethical demand. But this individual competence does not mean that professional people are self-employed people. It used to be said that professional people were self-employed people and this gave them a particular independence. But this is no longer the case, however much such people talk as if it were. You are not self-employed when the source of your income comes from outside yourself. Take my profession. We were not selfemployed when the private wealthy paid our salaries; we are not selfemployed when the state pays our salaries. Beyond this, of course most

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professionals require a hugely expensive education and only a small percentage of this is paid for by tuition fees, etc. People should not claim to be self-employed as professionals when they have acquired their skills from educational institutions paid for by all the taxpayers. Whatever else the technological society has done in creating the massive proliferation of professional skills necessary to keep the system going, it has made clear that the professional cannot see himself or herself as simply independent – as the self-employed person. The second ethical demand on a professional is that she or he should be turned first and foremost to the art or science they practise and only secondarily to what it pays them. This is a very hard demand in a capitalist society such as ours when it is claimed that the basic motivation for all activity is making money. Also, obviously, we all have to make our livings and I am not saying here that money does not matter. I have raised six children. Nevertheless the purpose of any art or science is to effect something in the world and that is why the skill exists. A few years ago a terrible language arose in North America – people started to speak of ‘the legal business,’ ‘the medical business,’ etc. I remember first hearing it in California when somebody said ‘So you’re in the teaching business.’ I said, ‘No, I am a teacher.’ It is harder to do this about some professions. ‘I’m in the nursing business.’ ‘I’m in the social work business.’ But it has done great harm to certain great professions – in which the economic rewards of the skill become the purpose of its practice rather than the good which is effected by the skill. The business about extra billing by the doctors in Ontario illustrates this point [see below, note 1]. Because we in North America think the body is what matters – we have given that profession enormous prestige and great financial rewards. What is so depressing is that extra billing says that some very prosperous people with great prestige are putting their rewards above their art. Let me repeat that I am not being naive. The professional association of any profession needs to assess whether its members are paid enough. This is very hard in an inflationary situation. It is also, to repeat, very hard in a capitalist society where everyone is being told that wealth is what matters. What I am saying is that a central ethical imperative of the practice of any profession is to care about that skill and what it is for first, and its rewards second. That is a hard doctrine for any of us to live up to (let me say that we in the teaching profession at all levels have

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been some of the worst in living up to it). But arts, skills, technologies – call them what you will – can only be themselves when their chief purpose is to fulfil what they exist for. I think this is crucial when the purpose of the art or skill of the profession has to do with other human beings. It is very easy for all of us, professionals included, to become very fed up with the follies, stupidities, and selfishness of other people. We then begin to see our ‘clients,’ ‘patients’ as objects rather than human beings who are the recipients of God’s love. As a wise human being said to me the other day about certain patients and clients: ‘How would you like it, if everybody whom you had anything to do with was paid for having something to do with you?’ The new technologies for the control of human nature will require at all costs a firm recognition that the practitioners of these arts and skills hold before themselves continually that the purpose of the art lies in what is done for their clients and patients. I think the most important thing in the ethics of being a professional is to keep right before one that the practice of the skill to achieve the good of that skill is what matters and that other motives which are always going to be there in the practitioners – such as prestige, money, sexual pleasure, power, etc. – be kept in subordination to the purpose in the skill itself. A very hard thing for any of us to achieve. Now to my third point: to say what is most important about professionalism in the technological society. I would say this. One central mark of the technological society has been to weaken all those intermediate forms of social organization which lie between the individual and the state. The family has been mentioned as a form of social organization which nurtured the individual – we now have the nuclear family – except for the immense capitalist families. The church has been profoundly weakened as an organization which proclaimed the truth and prayed to the truth. It is now collections of individuals who meet together for certain practices. In this new technological situation the individual stands bare, meeting the state directly with less and less protection from these intermediate institutions. I mean by the state not simply the institutions of government – police, bureaucrats, etc. I mean the whole interlocking system of corporations, in which we all live our lives and which it is the job of the government to coordinate into a system. And this system is not confined to the divisions between individual

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countries but is the total state capitalist system of the Western world, which is concentrated and central in power, above all in the United States. The economic and political institutions of that Western system are largely unified. It is that system within which individuals live out their lives, whether they know it or not. The language of the Englishspeaking world is the language which emphasizes the individual freedoms – but of course those freedoms are exercised within the limits of the greater system. In saying this, please let me make it clear that I am not speaking against the fine system of constitutional government and its liberties which is the political mark of the English-speaking peoples. And which is the best thing about us. All I am saying is that that constitutional system of government and its freedoms now operates within something greater than itself – state-corporation capitalism. Our lives and our freedoms are exercised within that system and that means that often within our technological society it seems as if there is on the one side the state and on the other the individual and there is nothing between them. So many of the intermediate institutions such as the family and the churches have been destroyed. In such a situation it seems to me that the associations of professions carry a great responsibility. This is the third remark about ethics I want to make. In the modern technological society, professional associations can be creative intermediate institutions between the state and the individual and they can be mean-minded vested interests which further polarize the society they are part of with competition against each other and [which] finally serve the system [by keeping] the patients and clients subservient to it. To state the obvious: I think this choice will depend on how much the groups and associations of professionals maintain in their associations some sense of the common good – the good of the whole society – so that they see their skill or art within the needs of the whole and their own need for remuneration within the needs of other groups for remuneration. And by the whole I do not simply mean the whole of the bourgeois world – but the whole which includes the weak within society. One mark of this society is that it is quite good to those who can defend themselves – but very poor to the defenceless. The present large scale massacre of unborn children by abortion in this society is a mark of what happens to the defenceless. If professional organizations keep some sense of the common good

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and carry out their place within the whole then I think they will play a very useful place in this society. They can be some of those intermediate institutions which stand between the individual and the state and such institutions are a blessing in our society. But if professional organizations just become vested interests within the society which are just asking for more and more – and think simply of their own interests at the expense of their clients and patients – then they will simply add to the violence and greed of this society. Professional responsibility to the common good is a key issue of what our society is going to become. And this is really quite hard in a society when the economic system tells us all the time that success is achieved by greed so that people only think they should have increasing cuts of the pie. This is obviously present in the doctors’ strike in Ontario.1 After the establishment of medicare, the doctors got a big boost upwards. By far the highest paid in our society. The troubles this summer seem to arise from the desire of the doctors to maintain their very high privileges at all costs. And the ambiguity of this is that when the professional organization doesn’t provide necessities, the government will just step in and do it. The selfish professional organization will not be a strong intermediate force between the government and the individual, but will in fact increase the power of the government – hence it will force the government to do more and more by enforcement. When I say [on the one hand] that capitalism encourages greed, I must say on the other that the answer to that does not seem to me ever-increased government power. Both sides of the coin, both free enterprise and socialism, need to be avoided and this will depend on the good sense of individual professional organizations. If there is no sense of the common good among competing professional groups, this will mean that the controlling power of the state has to step in and that means greater and greater state power. People just won’t put up with unlimited competition between groups – the alternative is too great government power. The only answer between these hopeless alternatives is moderation. It always used to be known that as far as day to day life went the greatest virtue was moderation – nothing in excess – and Canada was on the whole a moderate country. Outsiders often said that Canada was a dull country. What they often mistook for dullness was the great virtue of moderation. It seems to me recently over the last thirty years Canada has been becoming less moderate. People are demanding, pushing, driving – excessive in language and excessive in

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demands. Let me say in parenthesis that this is greatly increased by the power of the journalists in our society. They encourage the immoderate and excessive – because they are more interesting stories. Excessiveness makes good stories; the virtue of moderation does not. To bring this back to my third point about the ethics of professionalism. I would sum it up in this way. Professional organizations are important organizations between the state and the individual – but they will only fulfil this good role if as organizations they are moderate. And they will only be moderate, if their members play an active role in them. Therefore the third point I am making is that professionals have an ethical responsibility to play a part in the official organizations of their profession. This is often time consuming, boring, and not very rewarding for busy people; we want to leave it to others. These three seem to me the central questions of the ethics of professionalism. First, to be as competent as one can be at the art or skill or practices. Second, to put the purpose of the art first and foremost and not make it subsidiary to other things quite outside the art. This second one is quite the most important of the three. Third, to take part in one’s profession as a whole so that that profession serves the public good and takes its proper place in the social whole. Of course all these three are closely interwoven with each other. For example, we all know that many of the most skilful lawyers in our society devote that competence to making great fortunes by stretching the law in the interests of the wealthy and the greedy – rather than in serving the proper purposes of the law. We all know cases of professionals who do as little as they can for their clients and patients and are solely interested in getting an increasing cut of the pie. This takes us to the big question. It is all very well, you may ask, to just find these three principles – that is not very difficult. How do any of us find the sense to live by right principles rather than taking the advantages of not living by the difficult. It is much easier to be slipshod rather than competent. It is much more usual to think of how much we earn rather than to pay attention to the purpose of our skill etc. etc. No society I have ever heard about is one where those who follow right principle are those who do best in their society. Nor should those of us who are Christians be surprised at this. For Christianity teaches us above all that the absolutely good man – the absolutely just man – was tortured to death on a cross.

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But the basic truth remains. You can’t be a good nurse unless you are a nurse. But equally important you can’t be a good nurse unless you are good. And that applies to all professions everywhere. The deep tendency of the technological society has been to believe that if we as a society produced enough competent people with skills, that would be enough. Justice and beauty will just look after themselves. This was what progress meant – develop technology and justice and beauty will automatically develop with that development. This idea of progress has been the dominant religion of the Western world – in the sense that it was what most people fundamentally believed in. But it just did not happen. The development of technology – that is the development of skill and science – did not bring automatically with it the increase in justice and beauty. The twentieth century has been above all the century of war. War has belonged to human beings always – but never so intensely and unfortunately as [in] the twentieth century. This then is the question of professionalism. How does one find the resource to be a good professional and not simply a professional? Where does one find the resource to be not only a social worker but a good social worker? How does one find the resource to follow the right principles of being a professional? This is the old, old question. How can one learn virtue? How does one learn to fill one’s freedom with the right content? Because that is what virtue is – the right content of freedom. Of course my answer to that would be that one must love God. How one does that is another story. But obviously the central question of professionalism – is how do professionals become virtuous – or at least enough numbers of any profession become virtuous – to keep that profession virtuous.

Note 1 The Canada Health Act, passed in April 1984 under the guidance of the minister of health, the Hon. Monique Bégin, included financial penalties for provinces equal to the amount extra-billed. After a 23-day-long doctors’ strike, Ontario banned extra-charging practices and all penalties were reimbursed.

‘Man and Beast,’ a Review of Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada by Carl Berger

The review appeared in Saturday Night, March, 1984. The book was published by the University of Toronto Press in 1983.

Carl Berger’s Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada is yet another interesting book in his excellent series about Canadian intellectual history.1 In the first half Berger writes of the Canadian essays in ‘natural history’ in which ladies and gentlemen went around cataloguing the facts about rocks and flowers and animals in the new country. This was a Canadian manifestation of the spirit of Linnaeus: the new interest in science was expressed in wanting to know the details of the natural world rather than in putting nature to the question. Linnaeus – the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist – was a modern man chronologically, but philosophically he was closer to the empirical side of Aristotle than to Einstein. The first part of Berger’s book is thus a reminder of a pleasant aspect of the intellectual life of our ancestors; the second part takes us into that side of the nineteenth century where the beasts were arising that were to stalk our century. In this section he discusses the ‘evolution controversy’ which was then and is today the central theoretical issue of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the main character in the second part, Sir William Dawson, the geologist principal of McGill who tried to refute Darwin, is shown as a man of decent heart and good intention who was involved in something beyond him.2 John le Carré wrote in the 1960s that Canadians were the last people on earth with a belief in the decency of reason.3 If this be still the case, the fact that we had such sweet ancestors as Sir William Dawson is probably a small cause. Yet a word beyond this must be said in favour of Dawson and his followers in Victorian Canada. These days, every Tom, Dick, and Harry of

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a Canadian scientist drinks the heady wine of intellectual superiority when he thinks of the ‘evolutionist’ versus ‘creationist’ controversy in the US. The fundamentalist position in that controversy is a non-starter, but are not the fundamentalists after something of great importance which the more complacent scientists just miss? If Darwin is correct and all that exists – including human beings – can be explained in terms of ‘historical’ necessity and chance, are there not very terrible consequences for the possibility of any humane politics? However poorly the fundamentalists express their answers, they confront the question in a way that the English-speaking scientists do not and perhaps could not. What has kept English-speaking scientists and philosophers from facing this major dilemma is that our society has been so dominant that it was content with its political system and did not bother much to contemplate the assumptions that undergirded it. But now this dilemma clearly is so at centre stage that even the most pedestrian scientist or intellectual must be aware of it. If human beings are completely explainable in terms of necessity and chance, why are they worthy of human rights? Our current denial of rights to the weak (in abortion and infant euthanasia) and, above all, to the people of the southern hemisphere, is a growing mark of our Western civilization. In the European world this dilemma was recognized earlier than among us Englishspeakers. A hundred years before Darwin, Rousseau had made plain in his Second Discourse that man had evolved under mechanistic necessity and chance. In Nietzsche the consequences of this ‘historical’ sense are laid bare for all to see. For him modern science is true but ‘deadly.’ It destroys not only traditional Christianity but the secularized version of Christianity which believed in rights, equality, and liberty. Darwin put this question on the English-speaking agenda: how can you have a science which tells you one thing about the world and a politics which tells you another? One therefore comes to more sympathy for the efforts of Sir William Dawson. Carl Berger wonderfully describes him. However innocent Dawson’s answer, he was nearer to raising the essential question than anyone has been in Canadian intellectual life since his day. Berger’s book is clearly, even limpidly written. There is something tender about his description of our intellectual bourgeoisie in a preindustrial time. This is a short but very good read that lays before us

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with charm and sympathy a set of Canadian scientists from an easier age.

Notes 1 Carl Berger (1939– ), professor of history at the University of Toronto, is the author of The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867– 1914 (1970), The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing: 1900–1970 (1976), and other works. 2 Sir John William Dawson (1820–99), geologist and principal of McGill University (1855), was the first Canadian-born scientist of worldwide reputation. He created most of the nineteenth-century foundations of the twentieth-century Canadian scientific community. He was also a devout Christian and a leading anti-Darwinist of the late Victorian period. 3 On John le Carré, see 413n7.

Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche

During the 1980s Grant was preparing to write a major work confronting Heidegger’s four-volume Nietzsche, with the intention of defending Plato and Christianity against Heidegger’s attack on them. He decided to contribute his plan for this work to a proposed (but never published) Festschrift for James Doull.1 After his death Sheila Grant edited the unfinished piece, adding a note to clarify Grant’s intentions further. Extracts from this essay were published in The George Grant Reader, 303–11.

It may seem strange that I pay tribute to a friend (to whom my debt is great) by making some comments about a commentary. But the very nature of the debt is expressed in these comments. Professor Doull has never reduced his study of the past to antiquarianism. Although a remarkable and careful student of the past, he has always known that philosophy is an activity practised now, and that its end is far higher than that of scholarship. The present commentary being discussed here is masterfully achieved at the level of scholarship, but is far more than that. It is a philosopher confronting another philosopher and in that confrontation bringing to explicitness what he considers to be the great tasks of thought in the present. One task of thought today is to try to understand the claims of the moderns concerning the novelty of their experiments. To use Platonic language, it is necessary to think about the novelness of those novelties. A hundred years ago Nietzsche’s writing made explicit (whatever his extravagances) what is and must be assumed if one is within modernity. He did this from his own ‘withinness,’ and with epigrammatic contempt for the deepest traditions of the West. Because of the extremity and high style of his writing, the response to his understanding of

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modernity has often been shallow, particularly among English-speaking people. It has consisted either of patronizing Nietzsche’s thought, or of admiring simply its surface. Heidegger’s gift to us in this commentary is to unwrap it as both profound and careful. I know no other writing about Nietzsche which is comparably useful for the understanding of his thought, and so for the understanding of the modern within its own consciousness of itself. This is done not only at the level of the immediacies with which technological society presents us. Heidegger places Nietzsche within the history of Western thought. He places him within his own wonderful account of how Western life has been determined by that history. (To say ‘wonderful’ is not to say ‘true.’) Anyone who wishes to come nearer to philosophy at this time, must look at this account of its history ‘en pleine connaissance de cause.’ This account of the history turns on Heidegger’s confrontation (one might even say his sustained attack) with Plato. Nowhere, not even within Nietzsche’s writing, has there been a more consummate account of the modern position that Plato led Western thought into its basic misunderstandings. Within that context these lectures may be taken as an important stage of Heidegger’s thinking. They were given between 1936 and 1940, and are clearly at least Heidegger’s second magnum opus – second, that is, to Sein und Zeit. Derrida seems to take them as the centre of Heidegger’s thought, and as the originator of deconstruction he is certainly a remarkable student of Heidegger.2 It is proper to say that my writing about this subject in this place is apposite, because the heart of my debt to Professor Doull lies in the fact that he taught me how to read the central books of The Republic. It is important that this remarkable commentary be studied by English-speaking people interested in philosophy. Many of us are not capable of the German necessary for the original. After the war of 1939– 45, the English retreated into a provincial account of philosophy. As a young man I heard leaders of the analytical school such as A.J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle give a two-evening seminar on Heidegger’s thought, in which they mostly ridiculed it as consisting essentially of obvious mistakes in the use of the verb ‘to be.’3 The later English school of the philosophy of language made central to their work the writings of the Austrian Wittgenstein.4 But they used his works as a coming forth from someone who had taken upon himself the essence of English secularism. At that time, of course, most English people assumed they had won

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a victory in the war, and therefore saw no need to study the thought of their defeated enemies. The popular form of English progressivism had become the union of empiricism in science with utilitarianism in public and private ethics. Such a combination was deemed sufficient to come to terms with the immense uncertainties which were consequent on the growing realization of technological society. That is, they attempted to deal with technological modernity without seeing any need to understand it. They had no reason to study Nietzsche, who a hundred years ago had thought that modernity from within itself. A fortiori they had no reason to look at Heidegger’s enucleation of that account, or his emendation of it in the light of the events of the intervening decades. The Americans, who in fact had won the war, were in the happier position of having little philosophic tradition of their own, other than in politics. Despite the usefulness of behaviourist models for capitalist organization, there were still chinks in the monolith through which alternative models of thought could arise. Into these chinks filtered a greater interest in the history of philosophy than was possible in England. This study was fostered particularly by German Jewish scholars who had been driven from their country by National Socialism. It is by Americans that this excellent translation has been produced. The German text was published in 1961. It was translated into French in 1971. The final volume of this English translation was published in 1982. High praise must be paid to Professor David Krell, who edited all the volumes with care and intelligence.5 He also translated the first two volumes and participated in the translation of the third. He provides an ‘analysis’ at the end of each volume and glossary of English and German words. (I put the word ‘analysis’ in quotation marks because I am not sure that this is the correct word for the useful addenda.) But this is quibbling. All friends of philosophy must feel a debt of gratitude to Professor Krell for his splendid planning and execution of this work. What parts from the original German Nietzsche (two volumes 1961) are in the four volumes of the English? In volume I there is Heidegger’s foreword to all the volumes, and also ‘The Will to Power as Art,’ the corrected lectures from Freiburg 1936–37. In volume II there is ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same,’ lectures at Freiburg in 1937. There is also a public lecture, ‘Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?,’ published in 1954 and not in the original German [edition] of 1961. In volume III

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there is ‘The Will to Power as Knowledge,’ the lectures of 1939. There is also ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same and The Will to Power,’ two lectures conceived as a summing up of the three earlier series, and also ‘Nietzsche’s Metaphysics,’ a text of 1948. These are all in the original German volumes. In volume IV there is ‘European Nihilism,’ lectures delivered at Freiburg in 1940. Also, there is ‘Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,’ an essay composed between 1944 and 1946. Both these are in the German volumes. The English volumes do not include three essays in the original German books: ‘Metaphysics as History of Being,’ ‘Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics’ and ‘Recollections of Metaphysics.’ These have been published elsewhere in English. I do not intend to write synopses of each of these volumes; it would be arrogant silliness. Professor Krell has given an account of the structure of each volume at the end of each. There is no need to repeat those accounts here. Nor am I going to discuss Heidegger’s enucleation of Nietzsche’s thought [which] is wonderfully illuminating. Indeed, what is particularly illuminating about these volumes is that Heidegger concentrates on Nietzsche’s The Will to Power [which] was, of course, published after Nietzsche retreated from writing. But it was intended by Nietzsche to be the basis of his most complete work of philosophy, and what is present in it reveals him at the height of his powers between 1883 and 1888. As would be expected, Heidegger qua scholar shows a mastery of the complex question of Nietzsche’s posthumously published writings. Suffice it to say that I have studied Nietzsche for many years and have attempted to help students read Nietzsche carefully. I know of no other writing which has helped me comparably to follow Nietzsche’s thinking. However, it is not primarily for the purpose of understanding Nietzsche that I write about these books; nor simply for that of understanding Heidegger; but because in these volumes Plato and Christianity are shown as profoundly mistaken. My task is to justify Plato in the face of what Heidegger says. This will necessarily entail understanding what Heidegger is saying about the history of Western philosophy. For him, Plato is the first metaphysician, Nietzsche the last. To elucidate Nietzsche’s thought, Heidegger must say what metaphysics has been. He must face its originator. Heidegger has written elsewhere about Nietzsche, for example in What Is Called Thinking? He has also written

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elsewhere about Plato, notably in ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ – a work contemporaneous with these lectures.6 But it is in these four volumes that he ‘confronts’ both Nietzsche and Plato. Heidegger has said that the only real criticism of another thinker is a confrontation with that thinker. The German word he uses is ‘aus-einander-setzung.’ As a verb it is ‘aus einander setzen.’ It has often been translated as ‘to explain.’ Generally it is difficult to transcribe German words properly into English ones of Latin root. Yet in this case the German words can be almost literally transcribed as ‘confrontation’ and ‘to confront.’ To confront is to place oneself face to face with another. In the sixteenth century the word was used to mean ‘to present a bold front.’ As it is arrogance indeed to confront a genius such as Heidegger, and an even greater arrogance to speak, as it were, for Plato, let me say that I am indeed presenting a bold front to both Heidegger and Plato. Megalomaniac or not, I do it out of my loyalty to Plato. Perhaps even more it is done out of loyalty to Christianity. In these volumes Heidegger only mentions Christianity occasionally, and it is always with the accents of contempt. It hardly needs saying that this also makes my comments apposite in a tribute to Professor Doull. He shares with me the refusal to exclude Christianity from philosophy, or philosophy from Christianity. He has never been one to think that philosophy is a pleasant extra for cultivated human beings, but rather something to illuminate our very existence in the here and now. I am going to try to describe accurately where in each volume the confrontation between Heidegger and Plato takes place. Volume I: The title of volume I, ‘The Will to Power as Art,’ is the title of the fourth chapter of the third book of Nietzsche’s posthumous work. Before proceeding to the direct discussion of art, Heidegger states the basic philosophical intention of his interpretation of Nietzsche: The inquiry goes in the direction of asking what the being is. This traditional ‘chief question’ of Western philosophy we call the guiding question. But it is only the penultimate question. The ultimate, i.e. the first question is: what is Being itself? This question, the one which above all is to be unfolded and grounded, we call the grounding question of philosophy, because in it philosophy first inquires into the ground of being as a

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ground, inquiring at the same time into its own ground and in that way grounding itself. Before the question is posed explicitly, philosophy must, if it wants to ground itself, get a firm foothold on the path of an epistemology or doctrine of consciousness; but in so doing it remains forever on a path that leads only to the anteroom of philosophy, as it were, and does not penetrate to the very centre of philosophy. The grounding question remains as foreign to Nietzsche as it does to the history of thought prior to him.7

As has been said many times, the central difficulty of translating Heidegger into English, as compared for example with translating him into French, is the form of the English infinitive. The structure of the English infinitive, accompanied by any sense of English style, inhibits the translation of the German ‘das Sein’ into ‘the to be.’ Neologisms are not always unacceptable but this one surely is. I think the present translation has used the happiest solution to this problem. It uses ‘being’ for all particular beings and ‘Being’ for the German infinitive, and the substantive derived from it. Nevertheless, in reading the work one must always bear in mind the infinitive form of the verb when the word ‘Being’ is used. Any forgetting will lead one away from the core of Heidegger’s thought. As Heidegger is saying that the grounding question remains foreign not only to Nietzsche but to all thought prior to Nietzsche, he is obviously including Plato. The extremity of Heidegger’s claim about his own thought in this passage must not turn our minds away from trying to reach what Plato would have thought about such a claim. As Heidegger turns to Nietzsche’s account of art, an explication of Plato’s account becomes his means of bringing out the essence of Nietzsche’s position. He states why this is so in the following words: According to Nietzsche’s teaching concerning the artist, and seen in terms of the one who creates, art has its actuality in the rapture of embodying life. Artistic configuration and portrayal are grounded essentially in the realm of the sensuous. Art is affirmation of the sensuous. According to the doctrine of Platonism, however, the supersensuous is affirmed as genuine being. Platonism, and Plato, would therefore logically have to condemn art, the affirmation of the sensuous, as a form of non-being and as what ought not to be, as a form of m• on. In Platonism, for which truth is supersensuous, the relationship to art apparently

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becomes one of exclusion, opposition, and antithesis; hence, one of discordance. If, however, Nietzsche’s philosophy is the reversal of Platonism, and if the true is thereby affirmation of the sensuous, then truth is the same as what art affirms, i.e., the sensuous. For inverted Platonism, the relationship of truth and art can only be one of univocity and concord. If in any case a discordance should exist in Plato (which is something we must still ask about, since not every distancing can be conceived as discordance), then it would have to disappear in the reversal of Platonism, which is to say, in the cancellation of such philosophy. Nevertheless, Nietzsche says that the relationship is a discordance, indeed, one which arouses dread. He speaks of the discordance that arouses dread, not in the period prior to his own overturning of Platonism, but precisely during the period in which the inversion is decided for him.8

To compare the felicitous discordance between art and truth in Plato with the raging discordance between the two in Nietzsche, Heidegger first describes Plato’s account of the matter, and then shows how Nietzsche inverts the Platonic philosophy, and how from that inversion the relation between art and truth is changed. To do this Heidegger first comments on Plato’s discussion of art as imitation (mimesis) in the Republic, particularly the discussion of this in Book X. He then discusses Phaedrus (248a–250a5) which passage is a height in Socrates’ speech on love in response to Phaedrus. Heidegger writes: ‘Plato deals with the beautiful and with Eros primarily in the Symposium. The questions posed in the Republic and Symposium are conjoined and brought to an original and basic position with a view to the fundamental questions of philosophy in the dialogue Phaedrus.’9 It hardly needs saying that the commentaries on these passages are written from out of that closeness of attention which characterizes Heidegger’s writing about other philosophers. Yet it must be also said that the exposition of what Plato is stating in these passages is inevitably expressed by Heidegger from within (the very preposition seems presumptuous) what he thinks thinking to be. At this point it is hard to clarify the implications of this sentence. Suffice it to say that on the one hand I must avoid any implication that what Plato is saying can be laid before others from out of some neutral stance of ‘objectivity.’ Nobody is clearer than Heidegger that the account of one philosopher by another cannot

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be simply a matter of ‘objective’ scholarship. Whatever else may be true of philosophy, it transcends the stance of ‘objectivity.’ On the other hand, to state this must not cloud the fact that what Plato is saying in these passages is, in the very moment of its exposition by Heidegger, placed within the Heideggerian universe of discourse. For example, the Greek aletheia, which has been traditionally translated as ‘truth,’ is there used as that ‘bringing out of concealment’ which is Heidegger’s translation of the word. Beyond such translations, these commentaries assume throughout that Plato is philosophizing without raising what is for Heidegger the ultimate question of philosophy: ‘What is Being (to be)?’ This does not imply anything about Heidegger as trivial as that he begs the question. Indeed, the fact that he so little begs any question is what raises these accounts of Plato to the immediacy of confrontation. To put it barely: the very clarity of Heidegger’s incomparable thinking of historicism, from out of his assertion that human beings are only authentically free when they recognize that they are thrown into a particular historical existence, meets here the clarity of Plato’s insistence that thought, at its purest, can rise above the particularities of any historical context, that indeed philosophy stands or falls by its ability to transcend the historical. Describing this as the central theoretical division in all Western thought is perhaps a mere expression of my struggling uncertainty as to who misses what in this greatest of confrontations. Volume II: Of the four volumes, ‘The Eternal Recurrence of the Same’ is most concerned with the direct exposition of Nietzsche’s teaching. By calling it ‘direct exposition’ I mean to distinguish it from the illumination of Nietzsche’s teaching which places it within the history of philosophy. There is in this volume a lucid account of Nietzsche’s doctrine through the course of his later writing, and a consummate exposition of what it is to think this doctrine as true. Because this is the content, Heidegger’s confrontation with Plato is less immediate than in the other volumes. Of course Plato is present in the negative sense that the very nature of the teaching precludes the possibility that Plato’s position on existential matters could be true. Section 25, towards the end of this volume, is called ‘The Essence of a Fundamental Metaphysical Position; The Possibility of Such a Posi-

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tion in the History of Western Philosophy.’ This is a propaedeutic to the last chapter on ‘Nietzsche’s Fundamental Metaphysical Position.’ The general section (25) must be chosen out as one of the heights of Heidegger’s writing anywhere. As the thinker who announced ‘the end of metaphysics,’ he here lays before us why metaphysics has been at the core of the greatness of Western human beings. Although not by name, Plato is present throughout this chapter as the first metaphysician. Indeed, in any confrontation with Heidegger concerning his account of Plato, the question of the possibility of metaphysics will be near the centre, and the last chapters of this volume must be seen as preparatory to what will be discussed in the next volume. Volume III: It has been frequently said that in the lectures of 1939 and 1940, which constituted volumes III and IV, Heidegger is turning away from Nietzsche and is less concerned with laying him before us than in the first two lecture courses. Be that as it may, the lecture course of volume III, The Will to Power as Knowledge, is a wonderful exposition of what is involved in Nietzsche’s account of truth as a form of illusion. I can only stand by my own experience, which is that these lectures have made clear to me in a quite new way what it is to think of Nietzsche’s account of truth as a kind of error. Heidegger states as ‘the all-decisive question’: ‘What happens when the distinction between a true world and an apparent world falls away? What becomes of the metaphysical essence of truth?’10 The confrontation with Plato in this volume III is only partially explicit, but is of course always present. These lectures are in this sense very close to Heidegger’s work of 1947: ‘Plato’s Teaching Concerning Truth.’ This account of what Heidegger meant by ‘truth’ may indeed have come to him from Nietzsche (here the relations are very uncertain). However, in what he says in volume III about truth he is led beyond [?] Nietzsche. [Manuscript ends here.] Note by Sheila Grant I felt it might be useful to supplement this incomplete chapter with some suggestions as to the main centres of interest in volumes 3 and 4

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where GPG might have disputed Heidegger’s account of Plato as ambiguous, inadequate, or distorting. The following pages consist mainly of quotations from Heidegger or from GPG himself. They are not, of course, intended to express the depth or complexities of the subject, but merely to point to the general direction of GPG’s thought, as far as he had expressed it in conversation. Most of volume 3 is concerned with the nature of truth (die Wahrheit, aletheia), therefore the confrontation with Plato, implicit or explicit, is almost continually sustained. The meaning of truth was central to Plato, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and is clearly a subject which would have occupied a large part of the book GPG had intended to write. The ‘all-decisive question’ posed by Heidegger and quoted in GPG’s last page is this: ‘What happens when the distinction between a true world and an apparent one falls away?’ Heidegger answers his own question: ‘the abolition of the metaphysical distinction between a true and an apparent world forces one back into the traditional, metaphysical, essential determination of truth as homoiosis.’11 He claims that Plato was responsible for establishing the meaning of truth for the whole tradition, which reaches its consummation in the thought of Nietzsche. Heidegger believes that the understanding of truth as ‘correctness of viewing’ was the central flaw in Western metaphysics, involving a disastrous ‘oblivion of Being.’ At this point he dissociates himself from Nietzsche, because to him ‘truth’ must be understood as ‘coming into unconcealment,’ not as ‘correctness’ (homoiosis, adequatio). He sees his own thought as a new beginning, a new openness to Being.12 Clearly GPG’s concern here would involve examining Heidegger’s definition of truth, and questioning his interpretation of Plato. Integral to Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche’s understanding of truth, in volumes III and IV, is the concept of ‘justice’ (die Gerechtigkeit), described as a constructive, exclusive, annihilative mode of thought and finally as ‘the metaphysical essence of truth.’13 Here the implicit confrontation with Plato lies less in the meaning attributed to the word ‘justice’ as in the absence, in its definition, of any application at all to virtue or good action. Some earlier comments of GPG’s on Heidegger’s paper ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ are relevant here: The work proceeds from a translation of ‘the Cave’ in the Republic, and a commentary on ‘aletheia’ in that passage. What is so singularly absent is any discussion of the ‘politeia’ or the virtues, in terms of which the Sun,

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the Line, and the Cave were written. The extraordinarily powerful and pain-filled language used by Plato concerning the breaking of the chains, the climb out of the cave into the light of the sun and the return to the cave are all related to the virtue of justice and its dependence on the Sun. This is absent from Heidegger’s commentary. From his translation and the commentary one would not understand that in the Sun, the Line, and the Cave, the metaphor of sight is to be taken as love. That which we love and is the source of our love is outside the cave, but it is the possibility of the fire in the cave, and of the virtues which make possible the getting out of the cave. When Heidegger defines ‘good,’ as used by Plato, simply formally, as what we are fitted for, he does not give content to that fitting as Socrates does when he says that it is better to suffer injustice than to inflict it. The ontology Heidegger is moving towards excludes the one thing needful – namely, justice in its full and demanding purity.14

Volume 4 is concerned mostly with nihilism, but it contains a striking confrontation with Plato: Heidegger’s extraordinary analysis of ‘idea tou agathou.’ Heidegger has already, in volume II, p. 6, described Plato’s teaching on the Ideas thus: ‘beings have their essence in the Ideas, according to which they must be estimated: Whatever is measures itself on what ought to be.’ GPG has a note on this: ‘is he not wrong? is this not the place to put in the oyster opener?’ In all four volumes, the Greek word ‘idea’ is always translated as the English ‘idea.’ In volume IV, Heidegger identifies the ‘idea tou agathou’ with the ‘proper essence of Being,’ in the very face of Plato’s assertion that the Good is beyond being.15 In this passage the word ‘good’ is carefully stripped of all its meaning, other than ‘the suitable.’ We say ‘the good’ and think of ‘good’ in Christian moral fashion as meaning wellbehaved, decent, in keeping with law and order. For the Greeks, and Plato too, agathon means ‘the suitable.’16 The most appropriate comment here is another note by GPG – ‘What nonsense Heidegger says about the Christian meaning of “good”!’

Notes 1 See Grant’s account of James Doull’s influence on his thought in ‘Conversations’ (359–60).

Confronting Heidegger’s Nietzsche 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

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On Jacques Derrida, see 923n3. On Gilbert Ryle, see 383n11. On Ludwig Wittgenstein, see 262n32. David Farrell Krell teaches philosophy at DePaul University. What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row 1968) (Was Heisst Denken? 1954). ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ (‘Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit,’ 1931/32, 1940), trans. Thomas Sheehan, can be found in Pathmarks (from Wegmarken 1967, 1976), ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 155–82. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume One, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 1991), 67. Ibid., 162–63. Ibid., 167. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume Three, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 1991), 134. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 157. Ibid., 141. George Grant, ‘Justice and Technology’ (1984) 533 above. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume Four, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper 1991), 169. Ibid.

An Interview with George Grant

An interview with Lawrence (Larry) Schmidt1 that appeared in volume 1, issue 1 of the journal Grail (March 1985): 34–47. Professor Schmidt transcribed the tapes from two two-hour sessions and Grant vetted them, reduced the length considerably, and edited his answers.

grail: Many people in Canada know of your ideas from having taken a first year political science course in which Lament for a Nation was discussed. It is now twenty years later, and, if you were lamenting the defeat of Canadian nationalism then, you probably have more to lament today. Could you briefly talk about Canadian nationalism in the 1980s? grant: Let me say first that this is an area where I come from a very different tradition. Traditions are minor in the history of the world, but I come from a different tradition. For example, one of the hardest things I have tried to learn was how dreadful Great Britain had been in Ireland. You know it’s hardest to be against the imperialism of those people one likes. And I am a great lover of the English. But it was very hard for me to learn how iniquitous the English had been in Ireland. Now the quite understandable result of this was to make Irish Catholics, particularly in Ontario, anti-English and not very Canadian, nationalistically. Most of the nationalists in English-speaking Canada were very pro-British, because they knew that against the enormous pull to the United States there would have to be a pull elsewhere. That pull was largely killed by the last wars, because the English and the Germans chose to fight. This meant the end of Europe in a certain sense, and the end of England as a great power – whether for good or ill. In Canada

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this meant that Irish Catholics were inevitably very pro-American and not very nationalistic. There were a lot of Irish in the United States. Canadian Catholics felt sympathy for them; there were things like the Fenian raids.2 My traditionalism comes from a different tradition and one has to cross the gulf of that tradition. grail: It was very difficult for an Irish Catholic to be a Loyalist. grant: Indeed. My mother’s family were Loyalists; my father’s family were Scots, immigrants who had been kicked off their land in the conquest of Scotland by the English. But here, I think, religion came in; they were Presbyterians, the Nova Scotian Scots that my father’s family came from, and this made them very loyal to the British crown. And that’s something that Irish Catholics didn’t have the same feeling for. These are all complex things, but it’s out of these kinds of complexities that what happens in the world does happen. If I raised these questions with my children who are well educated, they would just think I was living in the past. People have made out that my nationalism was a romantic nationalism. But my hope in Canadian nationalism was that on the northern half of this continent you could build a slightly alternative society. Now I think in English-speaking Canada that hope is a thing almost totally of the past. The fact that this has gone on and on, the absolute integration of the economy of Ontario and the economy of the other regions with the United States, means that we are, in fact, closer bound to the United States than Poland is to the Soviet Union. It seems to me we’re too much part of them to be called a satellite. We’re part of this great North American continental-technological machine. Now, I’m not going to go into this, but clearly I think that the French world, which is also a de facto Franco–North American world, has a great language and a great people. It is a different culture with deep and wonderful traditions. I hope that it continues, but I think there’s very little point in nationalism in English Canada. To consider an issue, which is of world significance, nuclear arms: the Liberals brought the Cruise missile in to be tested. I think the Cruise missile’s an atrocious monstrosity, but the Liberals allowed it to be tested. All except one or two Conservatives voted with them. I think that shows very clearly where we stand. In the last years

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there has been a lot of shallow talk about nationalism: we must have a Canadian literature, what I would call Mordecai Richler talk, just about the worst kind of silliness.3 grail: But there’s been no movement to regain the control of our own economy and therefore no real attempt to become autonomous politically. Eric Kierans resigned because he did have some vision of an independent Canadian economy. In his Globalism and the Nation State he argues that at the summit conference at Williamsburg the United States told each of its ‘satellites’ what their economic policies would be, and notes that Canada simply said ‘yes, yes.’4 grant: Quite. Well as you know Mr Kierans has like myself retired to Nova Scotia and is a colleague. You have to realize that all the three major parties kicked out their nationalists: in the Liberal party, fine men like Walter Gordon and Eric Kierans; and the Waffle Group in the NDP; among the Conservatives firm nationalists like Howard Green and Mr Diefenbaker. grail: You have always been very critical of the capitalist class in Canada for having made their priority moneymaking, accepting continentalism as the best way to make money and abandoning any sort of nationalism. grant: Well, the capitalist class was centred in Toronto. ln the old days, let’s say fifty years ago, Montreal was the centre for capitalism, but within the last fifty years it’s moved to Toronto. And that class knew that continentalism was the way to make money and they did it. In an earlier era the figure who stood for this was an old Dalhousie professor, C.D. Howe,5 and there’ve been others. And I think all this nationalism is over. Because people quite rightly want finite hopes, people have read a little book I wrote called Lament for a Nation wrongly. I was talking about the end of Canadian nationalism. I was saying that this is over and people read it as if I was making my appeal for Canadian nationalism. I think that is just nonsense. I think they just read it wrongly. grail: Do you see Kierans’ book, then, and his appeal to nationalism as late as 1983 as simply naive?

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grant: Mr Kierans is a person who has lived in the world very fully, and is a strong, convinced, honest, dignified Canadian nationalist. I don’t think he is a man who is going to give up finite hopes very easily. I think he is an absolutely splendid person who goes on. Mr Kierans is a fine man whom I respect greatly. grail: I quite agree. Now at the University of Toronto if I suggest to graduating students that they should consider who they are going to work for, since Canada has supported them through their entire education, they look at me with amazement. This is a thought that cannot even be entertained. grant: Well, they are being realistic. The universities were very small and faculties very poorly paid during the 40s and 50s of this century. Suddenly when Kennedy started this stuff in the United States, they had to be big in Canada also. They were part of the state capitalist apparatus and had to turn out people for the labour market. At that time the universities needed a lot of professors. And they turned to the United States to get them. It was the quickest, easiest way. And they got them. Many of them were very powerful American imperialists. They thought that they were bringing Enlightenment from the Ivy League to a backward intellectual world. I had always been brought up to believe that the Americans were poorly educated compared to the Canadians. But these people were really imperialists in that they believed that they were bringing Enlightenment to Canada. I remember meeting a very nice American one day. We were discussing giving a woman a job in our department. And he said, ‘The trouble is that her PhD is only from McGill.’ And that couldn’t count. It was so obvious to him. And so, the universities were taken over unless they had some distinctive traditions. McMaster had some Baptist traditions. In the University of Toronto there were some traditions, but in nearly all the Canadian universities there were no traditions to resist this powerful wave of Americans, and of Canadians who were totally educated in the graduate schools in the United States and who thought that their way of education was incomparably superior to ours. Of course, the French did resist this because of language, and resisted it well. But English-speaking Canada just gave way.

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grail: Lament for a Nation really deals with the bringing of the Bomarc missile into Canada, and Canada losing its sovereignty. And you have mentioned Mr Trudeau allowing the testing of the Cruise missiles and how appalling that was to you.6 Some of your reaction was rooted in your Canadian nationalism no doubt, which you feel is a spent force. But there is also your pacifism. Could you speak a little bit about pacifism in your own life? grant: There’s never been one second of doubt in my mind that passing political interests like nationalism are minor compared to how one tries to live within the Christian church, which for me is the Anglican edition of that. Now within Christianity it seems to me from the beginning there has been a consistent tension between pacifism and the just war theory. On the one hand there is the enormous absolute message in St Matthew’s Gospel, the fifth and seventh chapters, the Counsel of Perfection. Those passages could mean that all Christians should be pacifists. This goes with the clear fact on the other hand that we have to live in the world. That clearly means that no large human society could exist for long without a police force and an army. Now this tension in the Christian church throughout all history, between what I would call the Ethic of Perfection, which seems to me just there in St Matthew and in the other Gospels, which you can’t get away from, and the need to live in a sinful world, remains. This may seem ridiculous to people today, but I think Christ could have summoned ten legions of angels and saved himself from the cross. I just think he could have if he had decided not to go to the cross. That is a very powerful argument for pacifism. My life has always been caught between these two in a way that I have never been able to work out. It is just a tension, as you would say, between these two. I was twenty-one when the last world war broke out. Both my wife and I were pacifists. For a while after the war I thought I had been entirely wrong. I now think I may have been right. But I am not sure. The whole thing is so complex, so difficult. One of the difficulties for me is that I don’t live the Counsel of Perfection at other levels. I don’t live a life of poverty. I have had six children. I considered it absolutely my obligation to give them the chance to get an education. That meant earning some money. I haven’t lived by the Counsel of Perfection at other points. When you apply this to the present circum-

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stances, I don’t think for a minute one can expect either of the two great rival empires or any country indeed to be pacifist. I just think that’s nonsense. This was a counsel of perfection and was intended for very few. I am certainly very glad I don’t live in the Soviet Union. Though I have sympathies for the Soviet Union because one must remember that in the last war they lost between seventeen and thirty million people. But I think that the regime in the Soviet Union is not one that any sane man could want to live under. Now in the light of that, one has some sympathy for the doctrine of deterrence in the United States. Beyond that I have an immediate difficulty. I don’t know enough about the details. grail: It seems to me that the option for Christians traditionally is between an absolute pacifism (the Counsel of Perfection) or the just war theory. grant: With regard to the just war theory, I really was deeply impressed by a Catholic, J.M. Cameron from St Michael’s, in an article criticizing Michael Novak.7 With lucid clarity he showed the difficulties that nuclear weapons have put the just war theory in. He makes it clear that nuclear weapons can never be used. And I am in complete agreement with him on that. This has left the Catholic church, which has largely stood on a great, subtle, careful and sensible theory, with an enormous problem. And when I say problem I mean it, for all Catholics. grail: The American bishops also seem to have accepted that the just war theory begins to fall apart when you have these monstrous weapons which are able to destroy entire populations and may lead to the termination of life on the planet. Their conclusion was not that we should unilaterally disarm but that the American government, specifically, should commit itself to a gradual reduction of those weapons over an extended period of time in an effort to show good will to the rival empire in the hope that there would be a response. The bishops’ argument is that as long as the military budgets continue to grow on both sides, many of the more vital issues of the modern world simply cannot be addressed, the issues of global poverty, etc. grant: In this interview I have been very hesitant to give the Roman

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Catholic Church advice, you see. I don’t think that’s my business at all. Plato said the first element of justice was not interfering in other people’s business. I am not a Catholic. Now I’m just going to do what I said I shouldn’t do. The United States in its origins was a kind of secularized Protestantism. The Catholic minority felt out of it. They have now very deeply moved into American life and are at its heart. Because of this acceptance, it seems to me Catholics are now often very optimistic about what can be achieved in democratic politics, and are becoming unrealistic. I see the Americans with a great powerful empire and I don’t expect very much from a great powerful empire as far as sanity about nuclear weapons goes, any more than I would from Russia. I do not take seriously the possibility of changing American policy under either of the two parties in the United States or in Canada. I see Canada very much as a satellite; therefore I don’t think these issues are very important. I found it just ridiculous that Trudeau brought in the Cruise missile and then started the Peace Initiative. I don’t see the possibility of moving this giant society run by corporation capitalism with a powerful military establishment to a position of greater sanity. (Let me say in parenthesis that I have never liked attacking the military like some people do. I think they are still subsidiary to corporation capitalists.) But perhaps I’m wrong. grail: To move it back to a specifically Canadian perspective, as a ‘satellite’ or branch plant society, we nonetheless have a little bit of autonomy. Should that autonomy be used to temper the great beast, to restrain the empire of which we are a part? Or should we see ourselves as simply part of that empire and try to get the best deal within the empire and simply go along with it? grant: This is a very hard question. I wrote a book about what happened to Mr Diefenbaker when he tried to refuse nuclear arms. And I think politicians all know the limits of what they can do. And some of them pretend not to know these things. I think any Canadian politician of any stripe is going to get in only if he knows those limits very well. Now those limits seem to be very close. For example, I don’t think Mr Trudeau much wanted to take the Cruise missile, but he knew he had to if he was to remain in power. In any political system on earth you have to accept certain realities. And this is one of the realities. I don’t think

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that as a politician you can oppose this matter. It’s good for people outside politics to do so. I admire people who go on marches. I’ve been on them myself about the Cruise missile. I think people are often very naive in North America about the possibility of political change at this level. I don’t think anybody would be Prime Minister for very long who went very far in his opposition to these weapons. grail: Your pessimism is rooted in a ... grant: That’s not pessimism. Let me say one word about this because I think it’s imperative. Often I am called a pessimist. Anybody who believes in God (and I would say that I almost know God exists) cannot be a pessimist. The words optimism and pessimism originated with Leibniz and they refer to the nature of the world. I think we live in an atrocious political era. But it is God’s world and if you assert that, you cannot be a pessimist. Politics are not the ultimate issue to me. I think one of the supreme strengths of Christianity is that it says, ‘It always matters what happens in the world.’ If you get out of that you become a person who just says it doesn’t matter that somebody is starving, or something like that. And that’s just nonsense. But one must say also that what happens in the world is seen in the light of eternity. And for Christianity eternity is there. I don’t see how you can get out of that. You don’t have Christianity if you do. grail: Can we talk a little bit about your public stand on abortion, and euthanasia? grant: Oh yes, I think that is the great and cardinal issue of North America (I’m putting Canada and the United States together here). I have always totally admired Roman Catholics for their stand on this and it’s been wonderful that they kept their opposition going in years when there were only silly people around, but it’s a great thing that southern and western Protestantism in the United States has joined them in this, because the mainline Protestant churches in Canada certainly have been awful, and I say this as a member of one of these. Now it seems to me perfectly clear – I don’t think that one has to go into all the details at this point. There are of course small exceptions that might be admitted, but if there are a million six hundred thousand abortions a

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year in the United States, most of these are not exceptions and are done for the simple grounds of convenience. A society where murder is being done for short term convenience is a ghastly place. The most powerful sort of political argument almost within secularism, secularism at its best, is the argument that if people have all these rights, they are of the same species as the children in the womb who are being slaughtered. It seems to me ours is a society which is turning on large numbers of the weak. Foetuses are one of the weakest communities of human beings and are being faced with extremity. It is a fact that the foetus has a unique genetic code, and human characteristics from its very earliest days. There can be no doubt that foetuses are individuals of our species. I don’t very much like the language of ‘persons’; it is a Kantian language; I like the language of soul. Foetuses are certainly something which we have always treated with the greatest seriousness under Christianity until this period in history, and I think it’s shattering that this is happening. I mean, apart from those souls who are murdered, what it does to the murderers is appalling. I don’t mean the women here, because I consider the medical profession much more responsible for this than the women. As far as euthanasia goes, most people think of it in its original sense as for old people – giving them a good death. I am old enough to be aware of how glad everyone will be to have a good death. But I think the great issue of euthanasia now is euthanasia among the young. Euthanasia among the old is a minor issue compared to that. And euthanasia among the young is being carried out all across North America. Take one clear example: I happen to live on a street where on both sides of me there are Down’s Syndrome children, who live very sweet, very lively lives. Now Down’s Syndrome children often need an operation to live, and these operations are being refused, and the children are being starved to death. Many people say: ‘Oh these Down’s Syndrome children are not persons,’ though the two I see every day certainly seem to be pretty lively, pretty sweet people. It is the euthanasia of the young that scares me. There are all kinds of questions one can ask about euthanasia for the aged, and I think one should exercise the highest caution about putting slaughter in the medical profession’s hands. But euthanasia of the young is my chief interest at the moment. grail: In the United States the Catholic bishops have taken quite a

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strong stand on abortion, but they have also attempted under the leadership of Cardinal Bernardin to develop an ethic that is referred to as a seamless garment by linking the issues of nuclear peace, capital punishment, and abortion.8 Cardinal Bernardin, it seems to me, does not want to be caught in the position of holding what might be viewed as a right-wing position on abortion. grant: I see no reason that this is a right-wing or left-wing position. I am not very right-wing. I have come to be friends with many right-wing people and many left-wing people over abortion. Murder surely transcends these kinds of passing American categories. With regard to the seamless garment, I think it is great. Two points, however, have to be made: (a) I don’t think lay people can be doing everything. They have to choose issues. It’s nice to have a seamless garment in your mind, but what matters about practical issues is action (theoretical issues are to be thought about – practical issues require that we do something about them). Most people haven’t got the time to do something about everything. They are busy with family, job, etc. The very best of us do much more than the rather lazy slobs like myself – but you have to choose. I think that is the first thing. (b) I think there is a grave, grave difference between abortion and the other issues. Abortion seems to me crystal clear, while an extremely complex issue like nuclear peace is less clear. My brother-in-law, George Ignatieff, who has studied this issue carefully, has certain views on peace.9 But the difficulty for people like myself, and I’m not saying that I don’t try to think it out, is to see the extremes. There are honest differences of opinion about the pragmatic levels of the question of deterrence. I don’t think that you can ask any great world empire to go in for unilateral disarmament. I think you can ask individuals to advocate it, and advocate it yourself, but I don’t think you can ask the empires. That is talking nonsense. grail: No. The American Catholic bishops didn’t. grant: No. But the difficulty of the seamless garment is that some issues of morality are much easier than others to think out. The person who I said has written extremely well on nuclear peace, a Catholic, is Professor J.M. Cameron in his review of Novak’s article ‘Moral Clarity

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in the Nuclear Age.’ I thought that was just absolutely A-1. He went into the roots of the Catholic doctrine of the just war and explained how it has been robbed of its fabric by the invention of weapons which can never be morally used. But it is extremely difficult for lay people (I mean ‘lay’ here not as against clerical people, I mean as against people who have mastered the technical information necessary to know what is the best position) to make judgments about the merits of deterrence. I am not against having a seamless garment of interest in your life. What was great in Cameron’s article in the New York Review of Books was that he showed how a large part of Catholic teaching in these practical matters had to be rethought right down to the roots. And I think that (I am an Anglican Protestant) this must be the job of all members of the church. I don’t think this is an ecclesiastical function, because I live in a church which has a different doctrine of authority. I think we are living in an era where the undermining of Western civilization is not only a practical problem, it’s not just people acting wildly, it’s not just a million six hundred thousand abortions in the United States, but it involves the absolutely profound theoretical breakdown of the Western world. This is illustrated by the fact that the greatest contemporary philosopher, Heidegger, certainly doesn’t believe there is such a thing as morality. grail: In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Thomas Sheehan has argued that Catholicism is at an end; a liberal consensus which relies on a common method of approach (that is, the historical-critical method) as the means by which one comes to understand the Gospel has emerged among Catholic scripture scholars and theologians.10 In your view does the historical-critical method lead inevitably to historicism, and an oblivion of eternity? grant: In the 19th century out of the Enlightenment came the criticalhistorical method you were talking about, and it was applied first to Biblical studies and is now returning to Biblical studies. That was something that came particularly out of where the Enlightenment was meeting Protestantism and Judaism first. Whether for good or ill (and this is a difficult question), the Catholic church built barriers against the method. Now the barriers have gone, and they have opened themselves to this method in a big way and they think that a bunch of bloody-

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minded professors can tell them about the truth of Christianity. Well, the mainline Protestants and the Jews were very foolish about this, and now I think the Catholics are being very foolish about this. After all, the method is itself part of the whole movement of secular philosophy by Hume, Rousseau and Nietzsche. If you start with assumptions that God does not exist, as these people did, you are going to end with that. I mean the method itself surely should be very greatly called into question. I’ve lived with these Biblical scholars. They either think that they can carry on with their traditional beliefs and then use the method as subsidiary means, or else the method takes them over. Generally the latter. Now as I think very little of the method, I am not worried about its results. When we read the book of Revelation, we do not see the end of the world with the Christian church triumphant and having everybody at its feet. There may be only a few real believers at the end. I think the Roman Catholic church is paying a price for its false triumphalism, and it has to pay it. But this is not to say that Protestantism and Judaism and Christianity must accept this method or its results, for a kind of false triumphalism went with it also, which is to me a far worse error. The churches really joined with the Enlightenment in saying that Providence was scrutable, when we all know that Providence is a doctrine that must be a great mystery. You just have to walk down the street and see a child be run over to know that Providence is inscrutable. Now there was a large loss when the Christian church accepted the doctrine that Providence was scrutable. It adopted a type of essential progressivism that penetrated all elements of the Christian church. There is no doubt at all in my mind, and I have really thought about this man, the greatest historicist is Heidegger; and all this kind of positivistic, historical-critical stuff does end in Heideggerian existentialism. His thought is just greater, more complex, incomparably more systematically thought out than any of these silly little people who are carrying out this scholarship. That’s another factor in the equation. The Christian church is faced with the enormous problem of living in a world where everyone works with assumptions which cannot go with Christianity because historicism is finally oblivion of eternity. And to me eternity is man’s greatest need. I mean eternity in truth, in moral decision, and in beauty.

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grail: Sheehan is arguing that the Catholic church has opened itself to modern scripture scholarship and has developed a liberal consensus, whether you read David Tracy or Karl Rahner, which is indistinguishable from secular humanism or liberalism outside the Church.11 grant: Well that liberalism is everywhere in North America. Everywhere, not just in North America, it’s everywhere in Western Europe. After all, Europe was conquered by North America. grail: But Sheehan argues that any resurgence that takes place within religion seems to be a fundamentalist resurgence; the only way we can avoid the results of historical-critical method and the liberal consensus is by fundamentalism. And you, I’m sure, would argue: No, we don’t have to return to fundamentalism, we have to think about our position. grant: I don’t want to be too hard on fundamentalism. You take the southwestern United States, people who live their whole lives in technology. Everybody likes to ridicule them, but I’m sure they hunger for eternity as much as you or I. They haven’t got all day; they are busy. They have families; they have work. The universities have gone to hell around them. They want something here and now, and fundamentalism doesn’t mess around. The whole modern movement since the Enlightenment – modern philosophy – at its heart was atheist. And the bourgeois churches liked modern thought because it was bourgeois thought. grail: Are you saying that modern thought is basically progressivist? grant: Not only that. That is a hard, difficult and complex question. The heart of it now I see in Rousseau. I used to see it in Nietzsche, but the heart I now see in Rousseau, namely the idea that human beings – Darwin is just a part of it – acquire their abilities, their ‘natures’ in time. Therefore you are making a human nature as you go along. To think that out and its truth against the older doctrines is a whole life’s work. The fundamentalists skip all this. They say, ‘We want eternity now.’ They get it damned crudely, often, but they get something. I think the difficulty for educated Christians is that in facing how they think their Christianity together with modern thought they are faced with thought since the age of progress. Therefore it immediately

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assails their Christianity. Educated Christians should show a kind of character, face all this assailing of modern thought and say, ‘We’ll see, we’ll see, we’ll see. Give us time. We can’t work it all out, but give us time, give us a good length of time.’ Do you know what Hooker said about Calvin? ‘He learnt by writing and not by reading.’12 And I think that applies to Karl Rahner. He has written too much too quickly, spewing it all out, trying to get the two together, progress and eternity, this all without really going to the depths of where the questions came from. Now if I may speak as a Protestant here, the great advantage that the Catholic church had was that it held certain truths about eternity up there and is continuing to do, but one of its difficulties was that theologians like Rahner thought they had the authority of the clergy for putting forward their rather silly and confused ideas. After all, the Protestant church has had generations of liberal theologians, progressivist theologians; so has Judaism. Now Catholics have suddenly got a lot of them, but they seem to be some of the shallowest. I hate to say it, but Küng and Rahner both seem to be very shallow thinkers.13 But I think others will appear, and what is more important than the thinkers, the saints will appear. That will tell them where to stick it. Progressivists have very little place for the saints. grail: Would you see the Catholic church going through in the twentieth century what the Protestant churches went through particularly in Germany and in England and Scotland in the nineteenth century? grant: Let me say one thing immediately to that. That sounds rather patronizing. They went through it in a different era. The great dividing line of the modern era is 1914, when the Western Europeans, in largely Protestant societies, started slaughtering each other in a massive way. Catholics are going through this theological development at the time of the end of Europe, and therefore in a much deeper way. Protestants also have to go through the end of Europe, but they went through the earlier things with all the optimism of Europe behind them. In the nineteenth century one could believe European civilization was going to solve it all, everything was great. But I see 1914 as beginning an absolutely new era. The English and the Germans started massacring each other. I blame Churchill terribly for bringing the Americans into the Second World War to see that the English won in Europe. What has happened since ’45

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has been the unequivocal victory of the English-speaking powers in the world with only Russia against them. And I think the civilization that the English-speaking powers made out of their victory has not been such a great civilization. And I say this as someone brought up in the English world. grail: Could you comment on what you think the paradigm of knowledge that is operative in our educational institutions is doing to the possibility of faith in those same institutions. grant: My knowledge is entirely of the big secular multiversities, the usual form of universities in North America, and of the highly vulgar, secular, public school institutions of Ontario which I know through my children. My knowledge is not of the Catholic school system. The paradigm of knowledge operative is one which comes from Galileo, Descartes, Bacon. The only thing that can qualify as knowledge in those institutions is what gives you control over human or non-human nature. Anything else is not knowledge. Now that paradigm is the great destiny of the West. It is the paradigm which I, in a rather strange way, call ‘technology,’ and it is everywhere. It has penetrated not only the study of nonhuman nature, but of human nature. I don’t think it is entirely applicable to the study of nature, but it’s still less applicable to the study of non-human nature. Now that paradigm is so dominant in the modern world it is a civilizational destiny. It would be impertinent to give Catholics advice. But Catholicism, indeed Christianity, clearly stands or falls with the assertion that there is knowledge beyond this. When I talk of faith, I do not mean a blind act of will. I would take as my definition of faith what Simone Weil said: Faith is the experience that the intellect is illuminated by love.14 And that means that love will teach you about things in a way that control won’t. The paradigm is limited. Now it seems to me that Catholics have to hold onto that and train their teachers to understand that. Within the accepted paradigm everything which pertains to faith is cut off. Of course the Catholic church with responsibility for its students has to teach people to be efficient in this paradigm or else they won’t be able to earn their living. But if they don’t hold before themselves the limitations of that paradigm in

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all that they do, and train their teachers to see the limitations of that paradigm, they will have failed in their task. I see faith as the union of love and knowledge. Now modern science does not see what it studies as an object of love. If people are going to be just, they have to have knowledge of justice, and you cannot know justice unless you love it. This is the difference between scientific knowledge and faith. You can know how many atoms there are in that ashtray without loving the ashtray, but you cannot know the purpose and point of anything (and that’s what justice is concerned with) unless you love. I don’t know anything about the specifics (we’re a long way away from Ontario) but I was rather in favour of what Premier Davis did in extending full grants to Catholic schools. I thought the people who were against it were a bunch of silly-minded secularists. But I would say that with that extension the Catholic church is faced with the task of producing persons to run such an extension, who are wise enough to see to it that this paradigm of knowledge does not demolish Catholicism and its power. grail: Could I pursue that one step further and here specifically from a Protestant perspective? It would seem to me that now would be a good time for those Protestant denominations, who originally had a great faith in the public school system, to move out of it, and to push for a pluralistic publicly supported, but religiously based system. grant: I quite agree. In Ontario, one thinks, above all, of the Dutch Reform Church. But I am too old to do anything about it. I have friends who are out West who run very strong Anglican schools, and I think it’s just great. grail: Are you basically critical of the technological paradigm of knowledge or are you arguing simply, that this paradigm has to be limited in its scope? grant: That paradigm I called ‘the great civilizational destiny of the modern West’; I can express my ambivalence in this way: If my wife didn’t have a washing machine she would be a slave or have servants. I don’t believe in servant classes, and I don’t want my wife to be a slave;

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therefore, one has to face the good side of this paradigm in many ways, otherwise you are being silly. To answer theologically, I don’t know the meaning of that paradigm of knowledge within the providence of God. I don’t know where it will lead. This civilization could be demolished, and another begin. I don’t know. grail: At best it is ambiguous. I think of it practically speaking in this way. If you have an abscessed tooth and you are in great pain, it is not necessary for the dentist who treats you to love you, nor even love your teeth. There is a sense in which his efficiency in treating you is improved – his objectivity is enhanced – by his not having a personal relationship with you. That’s why surgeons don’t operate on their next of kin. There is this terrible paradox: precisely in obtaining objectivity we achieve some control that leads to the lessening of pain. This is true throughout the entire scientific sphere. The botanist often learns about plants by destroying them. But that in turn allows him to cure diseases that may ruin our forests. grant: On the other hand, the forests can be ruined by the science too and by industrial civilization. And beyond that I think it is now clear that the great economic machine through which that paradigm has been put into the world is capitalism. One has to look at capitalist civilization with very suspicious eyes. These days people are all praising capitalism to the skies, but I think one should look at that. I have very little sympathy in any way for communism, or socialism as a total regime. But I think that North American capitalism has been a ferocious and terrible thing in the world, and I think we should face that. When I was young the Bronfmans were bootleggers in Windsor. Now they are the most powerful people in Canada. Is it a very sensible civilization that moves in that direction? A society whose whole end is making money is not going to be a good society. grail: To move to a slightly different but related topic: The Canadian Catholic bishops have recently become interested in and written on the economy.15 It’s a very brief document ... grant: But a very good one. grail: ... and I think a balanced document. One of the things it attempts

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to do is to move Canadian society back from a blind faith in high technology. Are the bishops being simply naive about the nature of a technological society? grant: Bishops are practical men. They are concerned here with the immediate lives of Canadians. I thought their statement was excellent. I think the bishops are quite right to say what they did. It isn’t my business to sit around and say, ‘Do they really see the depth and nature of technological society?’ They have to talk to decent, sane people who have to live now. And therefore there are some things that one just doesn’t say. grail: Do you feel as strongly as the bishops do that the danger of the technological society is the creation of a permanent underclass of people who simply do not have the intelligence or the ability to live in it? grant: I think that is true. I think it also has dangers way beyond this, of an extreme tyranny, which is involved in these great empires. I am always glad that there are at least three great empires and perhaps four with India. Because the more division there is, the better; this is why I’m for Quebec. When people talk of world government they often forget that it could be the most hideous tyranny that has ever been on earth – the technological society. I am for breaking it down. grail: Are you saying that anything that leads to heterogeneity or maintains heterogeneity is good? grant: Yes. But of course there is the practical problem: the creation of this underclass. In the immediate the bishops simply have to deal with this, because they would not be fulfilling their duty if they didn’t. And this underclass is already here, and it must be ministered to by the Christians. grail: At one level you could be understood as espousing social activism or praxis. grant: Well I think Christianity asserts this finally. I am saying this as a philosopher to put philosophy in its place. The supreme figure of the Western world other than Christ is Saint Francis. He asserts the

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supremacy of charity. I think it is important and valid to be philosophical, but if you are a Christian, the saints are it. And remember that Simone Weil was a very mysterious figure insofar as she came from the height of French intellectualism and, in my opinion, became a saint. Though it is not my business to judge who are saints. She is a very mysterious figure and when we mentioned the Counsel of Perfection, she is talking about it right, left and centre. What Simone Weil says seems to be true and I just can’t live up to it. I just can’t live it, I’m just not faithful. Here I am living in bourgeois Halifax, pottering along with my grandchildren. grail: In your writings Simone Weil is always there in the background but rarely talked or written about. grant: At the level of theory, I think that since St Augustine there has been a view of the doctrine of Providence that was too immanentist in Western Christian thought. The greatness of Simone Weil is above all in saying that, given where we are today, that will not do. And this doesn’t seem in any way to attack anything in the Christian world. I think that Augustine was a maker of Western thought. But now that Western Europe has come to an end, we are faced with these problems. The central thing she said was: I am ceaselessly torn between the perfection of God and the misery of man.16 I think her pondering on that mystery is her great intellectual act. And she didn’t ponder on it as sort of a clever fellow in the professor’s office. That’s what fascinates me about her. grail: Are you suggesting that for all of Augustine’s theoretical separation of the city of God and the city of man, Western Christianity seems to have identified them by the assertion that Providence is in some sense scrutable? grant: Yes. It went too far in that direction and that was almost inevitable when under both Catholicism and Protestantism Christianity became a public religion. And Christians may now have to face their weakness as Christianity ceases to be identified with the West. Now this is going to have consequences all over the world, in different ways for different people. But this doesn’t affect the truth of Christianity for a second. It isn’t just a historical religion. All I’m saying is that Simone Weil saw one part of this. It was wonderful, lucid thought.

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grail: You have said that as you get older you begin to care less about the world. Could you explain what you mean? grant: Of all the other great religious traditions in the world, the one I am most sympathetic to is not Buddhism by any means, but Hinduism. And I have worked in departments with a lot of Indians, and therefore I am very sympathetic to certain Hindu practices. I’m sure there are all kinds of failures within Hinduism but one thing I love in Hinduism is the order of life: You do certain things at different periods in life. For most people the end of life is a time to turn away towards eternity, to be peaceful and less busy. I think that whole system in ancient Hinduism is a wonderful idea. There are different ways of doing it. And I’m not saying I do this very well, but that movement in Hinduism from living a very active life to a more contemplative life is good. I’ve lived a very practical and very busy life. I’m glad to be free of that now. This may not be true for the Christian saints, but that is another matter.

Notes 1 Lawrence (Larry) Schmidt is a professor of Religious Studies at Erindale College in Toronto. He is editor of George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations (Toronto: Anansi 1978), and has edited the section on Simone Weil in this volume (771–879). 2 The Fenian brotherhood of Irish nationalists based in the US launched raids on Canada between 1866 and 1871. The Protestant Irish were loyal to Britain and opposed the Fenians. 3 Mordecai Richler (1931–2001), one of Canada’s foremost novelists, left Canada to live in France and England (1951–72). His novels include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), St Urbain’s Horseman (1971), Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), and Barney’s Version (1997). 4 Eric William Kierans (1914–2004), economist, politician, author, and businessman, delivered the Massey Lectures in 1983, which were published by the CBC under the title Globalism and the Nation-State. 5 On Clarence Decatur Howe, see 297n6. 6 The federal government confirmed on 15 July 1983 that the American Cruise missile would be tested in remote areas of Canada. There were widespread protests and questioning of Trudeau’s commitment to disarmament. 7 See J.M. Cameron, ‘Nuclear Catholicism,’ review of Michael Novak’s Confessions of a Catholic and Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age in New York Review

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An Interview with George Grant (Grail) of Books (30/20, 22 December 1983). ‘Michael Novak proclaims himself a Democrat and is no doubt registered as one; but the policies he defends and advocates, in social and political matters, are largely those of the Reagan Administration. One comes across his pieces in such doctrinaire conservative periodicals as Commentary and the National Review.’ Michael Novak (1933– ), Roman Catholic theologian, author, and former US ambassador, is George Frederick Jewett scholar in religion, philosophy, and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Joseph Louis Bernardin, Cardinal (1928–96), served in Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Chicago and was made a cardinal in 1983 after he helped in 1982 to shape and draft the Roman Catholic church’s position statement on nuclear armaments, entitled ‘The Challenge of Peace.’ On George Ignatieff, see 399n11. See Thomas Sheehan, ‘Revolution in the Church,’ a review of Hans Küng’s Eternal Life? Life after Death as a Medical, Philosophical, and Theological Problem, in New York Review of Books 31/10, 13 June 1984. David Tracy (1939– ), scholar, priest, and theologian, was a student of Bernard Lonergan (262n24) and is committed to critical theological reflection speaking within the tradition of radical philosophical and religious pluralism. On Karl Rahner (1904–84). See 262n24. On Richard Hooker, see 725n11. Hans Küng (1928– ), Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, taught at Tübingen (1960– ) and was a consultant for the second Vatican Council by Pope John XXIII in 1962. He questioned papal infallibility and the divinity of Christ in his writings and was banned from teaching as a Catholic theologian in 1979. See ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ 609. See ‘Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis’ by the Canadian Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops, in Gregory Baum and Duncan Cameron, eds, Ethics and Economics: Canada’s Catholic Bishops on the Economic Crisis (Toronto: James Lorimer 1984), 3–18. See the letter to Maurice Schumann in Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (London: Collins-Fontana 1974), 64.

Technology and Justice

Technology and Justice brings together six essays that Grant describes in his preface as unified by their exploration in different ways of what it means to live in a civilization shaped by technological science, a science determined by ‘the conquest of human and non-human nature’ (588). The two longest essays, ‘Thinking About Technology’ and ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ underwent a number of revisions; earlier versions of both can be found in this volume of the Collected Works.1 ‘Thinking About Technology’ was presented as a paper at the 17th World Congress of Philosophy held in Montreal in 1983, under the title ‘Philosophy and Culture: Perspectives for the Future,’ and was subsequently published in the conference Proceedings.2 ‘Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship,’ was first published in Dionysius, an academic journal based in the Classics Department of Dalhousie University.3 ‘Research in the Humanities’ was delivered as a paper at a conference upon the occasion of the establishment of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Calgary in 1978 and subsequently published in Humanities in the Present Day, edited by John Woods and Harold G. Coward (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1979).4 The final two essays, ‘The Language of Euthanasia’ and ‘Abortion and Rights,’ by Grant and his wife Sheila, were published respectively in Care for the Dying and the Bereaved, edited by Ian Gentles (1982), and The Right to Birth: Some Christian Views on Abortion, edited by Gentles and Eugene Fairweather (1976).5 Both of these volumes appeared under the imprint of the Anglican Book Centre, Toronto. ‘Abortion and Rights’ originally had the subtitle ‘The Value of Political Freedom,’ which was omitted from the version in Technology and Justice and the one that appeared in Contemporary Moral Issues, (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1983), 38–45. However, the essay, with both title and subtitle, was repub-

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lished in 1986 in Holy Living: Christian Morality Today, edited by G. Richmond Bridge, the proceedings of a theological conference held at the University of King’s College in May of that year and published by St Peter Publications (Charlottetown, PEI). Variants have been noted between these earlier versions and Technology and Justice. Two excerpts from Technology and Justice were published by William Christian and Sheila Grant in The George Grant Reader.6 ‘Thinking About Technology’ examines the pervasiveness of technology in every aspect of contemporary life. Grant asserts that the creations of technology are not simply ‘an array of instruments, lying at the free disposal of the species which creates them’ (595), and shows the inadequacy of this viewpoint through close analysis of the statement ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ (595). This assertion ignores the reality that computers are encompassed within a ‘civilizational destiny’ (597), which, like all destinies, imposes fundamental presuppositions and ways of living upon those living within it. Among the ways computers do ‘impose’ is their contribution to the increasing homogeneity of modern society. Information processed by computers must be classified before it can be stored, and this classifying imperative shapes the direction and purpose of every activity to which computers are applied (598). At a more general level the notion that technology is ‘neutral’ is false, because it arises from the same mode of reasoning that has produced the various accounts of justice in modern political philosophy (600). In Grant’s words, ‘The instruments and the standards of justice are bound together, both belonging to the same destiny of modern reason’ (601). Grant then considers the meaning of the word ‘should’ in ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.’ ‘Should’ suggests that we ought to use the computer justly. But modern accounts of justice are unclear as to the nature of this obligation and to whom, or to what, it is owed. Moral purpose becomes ambiguous, uncertain, and even absent. ‘As many Europeans came to believe over the last three hundred years that their affirmations about goodness could not find foundations in accounts of God or nature, reason or history, the result for many has been a state of mind which is well described as nihilism’ (602). Because these ‘foundations’ have vanished, the word ‘should’ is no longer grounded in any principle of goodness or moral obligation. Accordingly its use in the

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sentence under consideration implies a connection between justice and the use of the computer that is at best ‘provisional.’ ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used” asserts the essence of the modern view, which is that human ability freely determines what happens ... The resolute mastery to which we are summoned in “does not impose” is the very source of difficulty in apprehending goodness as “should”’ (604). Grant ends ‘Thinking About Technology’ by arguing that the ‘novelness’ of the modern situation is that the very thought and language by which we apprehend technology come from within technological reason itself. In this sense ‘technology is the ontology of the age’ (605). There is therefore no available language to restrain the imperative towards the mastery of nature, an imperative encapsulated by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s bon mot: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it’ (605). Accordingly, Grant concludes, if we are to understand our technological destiny we must try to think outside the categories of thought imposed by it: Western peoples (and perhaps soon all peoples) take themselves as subjects confronting otherness as objects – objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects. Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny: we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny. (605)

Grant returns to the theme of knowledge in technological society in the second essay, ‘Faith and the Multiversity.’ ‘Different civilizations have different paradigms of knowledge, and such paradigms shape every part of the society’ (608). He describes contemporary universities as dominated by the pursuit of ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ reason, by which ‘we have knowledge when we represent anything to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons’ (608). This ‘project of reason,’ or ‘research,’ is based on identical assumptions, whether it be carried on in faculties of science, arts, or social sciences. The multiversity is the logical expression of the contemporary research paradigm in institutional form. Grant then considers this paradigm in relation to faith, as expressed by Simone Weil’s definition of faith as ‘the experience that the intelligence is

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enlightened by love’ (609). He sees the ‘beauty of otherness’ as the central assumption in this statement. However, the beauty of the world is a meaningless concept within the language of modern science, and therefore a disjunction between beauty and truth is central to the modern paradigm of knowledge: ‘What we experience as beautiful in what we make, or in what we do not make, is cut apart from what we know about things in science’ (630). The language of love is also excluded, which means that there is no place in the modern paradigm of knowledge for ‘good’ as understood by Plato or by Christianity. Accordingly, the concept of ‘good’ has been replaced by that of ‘value,’ a word that lacks any clear definition and so can be given any number of meanings (612). ‘Good,’ however, had a clear meaning in traditional language. ‘In the old language, “good” means what any being is fitted for ... Human beings are fitted to live well together in communities and to try to think openly about the nature of the whole’ (612). The Platonic account of justice means giving every person his or her due. Faith as defined by Simone Weil embraces this idea of good. Modern science, by contrast, has no place for thinking about the whole or considering nature in relation to purpose: ‘What has been lost is the belief that justice is something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge. Modern theories of justice present it as something human beings make and impose for human convenience.’ (626). Grant then turns to Nietzsche, the most powerful modern exponent of this notion of justice, whom Grant sees as the greatest philosophic critic of the classical tradition. In ‘Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship,’ he considers an article by H.M. Lloyd-Jones that praises Nietzsche for the illumination of his insights into Greek tragedy and the irrational. Grant acknowledges this to be the case, but points out that Nietzsche’s historicism, that is, his insistence that knowledge is dependent upon historical circumstances, undermines any belief that there is anything present in ancient thought which has relevance for those living today. Traditionally, the classics were studied to learn wisdom. The implication of Nietzsche’s view of knowledge is that classical wisdom has nothing to teach us: ‘The Greeks will be our Incas which we study for their mythology’ (646). Grant states that ‘the teacher who is within the philosophic and religious tradition, and who also takes upon himself the grave responsibility of teaching Nietzsche, must do so within an explicit understanding with those

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he teaches that he rejects Nietzsche’s doctrine’ (648). Nietzsche’s view that justice is created by humans for their own purposes can allow, for example, the extermination of the weak, extreme forms of genetic experimentation, and the ‘mass foeticide [that] is taking place in our societies’ (650). In the fourth essay, ‘Research in the Humanities,’ Grant turns again to the nature of ‘research’ in the modern university, which in the case of the humanities ‘is oriented today towards a “museum culture,” not to knowledge necessary to human existence’ (652). Contemporary scholarship in the humanities has nothing to do with looking at the past to ‘find in it truths which might help us to think and live in the present’ (653). It treats the past as object, adopting a ‘position of command’ (653). From such a position, it is possible to learn about the past, but not to learn from it. This turns all study in the humanities into a ‘museum culture.’ ‘The Robarts library [the research library at the University of Toronto] is not the home of the muses, but their mausoleum’ (652). Grant states that young humanities professors are aware that their research activity has no connection with the life of the culture in which they live; the most imaginative accordingly leave the universities, ensuring that positions are increasingly occupied by scholarly technicians. Grant wonders where and how questions ‘the answers to which cannot be found in the modern sciences of nature or of history’ (655) will be addressed given the triumph of ‘museum culture’ in the contemporary university. The final two essays in Technology and Justice were written by Sheila Grant with Grant’s assistance. They focus on euthanasia and abortion, two questions that he and Sheila Grant saw as indistinguishable from the drive to dominate both human and non-human nature that is at the heart of the technological society. ‘The Language of Euthanasia’ explores the way in which modifications in language can be used to justify euthanasia. ‘Abortion and Rights’ considers the implications of denying the right to existence of the foetus. The Grants argue that the failure to acknowledge this right will result in the disappearance of the rights of the infirm and the disabled: ‘If we come to believe that we are not creatures, but accidents, rights will no longer be given in the very nature of our legal system. The most powerful among us will then decide who are to have rights and who are not’ (671). Technology under these circumstances will obliterate the possibility of justice. Henry Roper

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To R.S.G. and J.R.P. sine quibus non7 Contents Preface Thinking About Technology Faith and the Multiversity Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship Research in the Humanities The Language of Euthanasia Abortion and Rights Notes

Preface These writings centre around the modern paradigm of ‘knowledge’: behaviourist explanation in terms of algebra. This account is at the core of the fate of Western civilization. Because the conquest of human and non-human nature is at the heart of modern science, I describe that science as ‘technological.’ In the first and second essays, I have tried to show why we should think of this account of knowledge as a fate and not something which in our freedom we can control. Because I continue to find it so difficult to understand this destiny, I have tried to think in terms of the Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want, said God – take it and pay for it.’8 This obviously applies not only to individuals but to civilizations. In this book, I have tried to think what we have taken and how we have paid for the discovery of that paradigm of knowledge. Under payment, I have singled out how such a paradigm has shaped our thinking about justice – justice not only in the sense of this or that act, but in the sense of what we think justice itself to be. In the first two essays I deal with that question in a broadly theoretical way; in the last two, in terms of immediate practicality. It will be the last two essays, I suspect, which will raise objections. In capitalist democracy, differences about practice are seen as important,

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while theoretical differences are seen as people’s private business. It is of the very nature of ‘technology’ that this should be the case. All that I write proceeds from sustained discussion with my wife.9 In that sense, she is the co-author of my writing and explicitly named such in the articles about euthanasia and abortion. Dennis Lee is a generous friend who gives of his precious time to help me to think and to write more clearly.10 Larry Schmidt has shown me much care and help over many years.11 Ann Wall and James Polk have taught me what a publisher should be.12 With their different souls, they combine to make being published a pleasure rather than a pain. Some of these essays have appeared in quite different form elsewhere, and a list of acknowledgments with thanks is given at the back.13 George Grant August, 1986 THINKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY In each lived moment of our waking and sleeping, we are technological civilization. Why is it best to characterize what we are encompassing, and are encompassed by, as technological? The answer can be seen in the very structure of the word. The current use of the word ‘technology’ in North America lays before us the particular novelty of our world.14 In distinction from the usage in English of ‘technology’ and ‘technologies,’ the Europeans have generally used ‘technique’ and ‘techniques,’ the former for the whole array of means for making events happen, the latter for the particular means. They have claimed that our usage confuses us by distorting the literal meaning. The word ‘technology’ puts together the Greek word for ‘art’ and the word for the ‘systematic study’ of it, as the word ‘biology’ puts together bios and logos. They claim our usage parallels a similar imprecision in English in which ‘history’ means both the ‘study’ and ‘what is studied.’ Nevertheless, although the European usage maintains verbal purity it does not evoke the modern reality as directly as ours.15 The very American neologism brings before us our novelty. When ‘technology’ is used to describe the actual means of making events happen, and not simply the systematic study of these means, the word reveals to us the fact that these new events happen because we Westerners willed to

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develop a new and unique co-penetration of the arts and sciences, a copenetration which has never before existed.16 What is given in the neologism – consciously or not – is the idea that modern civilization is distinguished from all previous civilizations because our activities of knowing and making have been brought together in a way which does not allow the once-clear distinguishing of them.17 In fact, the coining of the word ‘technology’ catches the novelty of that co-penetration of knowing and making. It also implies that we have brought the sciences and the arts into a new unity in our will to be masters of the earth and beyond.18 The use of the word ‘technique’ for that with which we have encompassed ourselves too easily leaves the implication that our understanding of what constitutes knowing and making is not radically different from that of previous civilizations.19 In fact, the modern ‘technique’ may seem at first to suggest the same kind of meaning as what is given in the Greek techne, as if we have simply progressed in efficiency of making.20 We then attribute our greater efficiency to the modern scientists, who guaranteed the progress of knowledge by clarifying its sure methods, and through that objective knowledge achieved greater ability to make things happen. In this account of progressing continuity, we assume that our modern Western will to be the masters of the earth was taken for granted in the techne of other civilizations. The time was not accidentally ripe; those peoples were not evolved enough to discover the sure path of science, which would have allowed them to realize that will to mastery.21 With such implied ‘histories’ of the race, we close down on the startling novelty of the modern enterprise, and hide the difficulty of thinking it. We close down on the fact that modern technology is not simply an extension of human making through the power of a perfected science, but is a new account of what it is to know and to make in which both activities are changed by their co-penetration. We hide the difficulty of thinking that novelty, because in our implied ‘histories’ it is assumed that we can understand the novelty only from within its own account of knowing, which has itself become a kind of making.22 Indeed the English word ‘technology’ with its Greek parts, and at the same time the novelty of what is given in their combination, shows what a transformation has taken place in our sciences, our arts and

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their interrelation, from what they were in our originating civilization from which the parts of the word come.23 It is very difficult to grasp what is given about art and science in the Greek writings, because we understand previous sciences as preparations for our own, and other accounts of nature as stumbling provisions for our objective understanding of it.24 Nevertheless, at the simple surface of the question, it is clear that what was known in the physics of the Greeks was not knowledge of the kind that put the energies of nature at their disposal, as does modern Western physics.25 It is only necessary to read Needham’s history of Chinese science to see that the same was true there.26 What is given in Sanskrit shows this to be equally true of the civilization founded upon the Vedanta.27 When we speak of theoretical and applied science, the distinction contains something different from its ancient usage.28 ‘Applied’ means literally ‘folded towards.’29 Einstein advised Roosevelt that in the light of the modern discoveries of physics, atomic weapons could be built, and that the Americans should organize to build them.30 Physics was being ‘applied’ not only in deciding that American interests required the making of atomic weapons, but also in the sense that the very discoveries of the science were in their essence folded towards the mastery of the energies of nature, in a way that was absent in the pre-modern sciences. That co-penetration of knowing and making has quite changed what we mean by both the arts and the sciences from what was meant by them in the pre-modern era.31 Why that foldedness towards potentialities of new makings has been implicit in modern science since its origins is extremely difficult to understand, and indeed has not yet been understood. That it has been so folded is expounded with consummate clarity in such writings as those of Bacon and Descartes, as they distinguished modern science from ancient science at the time of its very beginnings.32 The difficulty of understanding how and why it is so folded need not lead us to doubt that the folding is a fact. It is that fact which is given us in the neologism ‘technology,’ and the novelty of that fact declares correct the characterization of our society as technological.33 There may indeed be some other more perfect word to characterize our civilization – some word which will come out of the understanding of what was being revealed when the European peoples brought forth those new sciences and arts.34

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In the meantime, the word ‘technological’ catches best the uniqueness of our civilization at its surface, and indicates the cause of its worldwide appeal.35 In the novelties of our hourly existing, it is easy enough to recognize how much we have encompassed ourselves within technology.36 We sweep along super-highways to work in factories, or in the bureaucracy of some corporation; our needs are tended to in supermarkets and health complexes. We can cook, light, heat, refrigerate, be entertained at home through energy which has been produced and stored in quite new ways. If we have even a slight knowledge of the past we are aware that we can make happen what has never happened before, and we can have done to us what has never before been possible. At a higher level of attention we can recognize that our political and social decisions are interwoven with the pursuit and realization of technological ends. It is not suggested here that the technology with which we have surrounded ourselves is of only superficial or ambiguous benefit. Modern human beings since their beginnings have been moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war on so widespread a scale that at last we could build the world-wide society of free and equal people. One must never think about technological destiny without looking squarely at the justice in those hopes. Let none of us who live in the well-cushioned West speak with an aesthetic tiredness about our ‘worldliness.’ Recently the more clear-sighted of our ruling classes have recognized that progress is a more complex matter than was envisaged by those who had believed that a better society would arise ineluctably from technology. In the past human beings have been responsible for the destruction of all the members of some other species; but today when we watch the osprey’s glory in the ocean storm, there is not only awareness that this beauty may be passing away, because the eggs of the bird are being sterilized by our use of chemicals, but also that the source of life itself may become no longer a home of life. Our novelty lies in the fact that where Plato warned clearly against the dirtying of the waters, he did not face their pollution as a possibility in the immediate future.37 We are now faced with easily calculable crises (concerning population resources, pollution, etc.) which have been consequent upon the very drive to mastery itself. The political response to these interlocking emergencies has been a call for an even greater mobiliza-

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tion of technology, which illustrates the determining power of our technological representation of reality. More technology is needed to meet the emergencies which technology has produced. Much of the new technology upon which we are going to depend to meet these crises in the ‘developed’ world is technology turned towards human beings. The new adage of rulers and educators is that to the mastery of non-human nature must now be added mastery of ourselves. The desire for ‘mastery of ourselves’ (which generally means the mastery of other people) results in the proliferation of new arts and sciences directed towards human control, so that we can be shaped to live consonantly with the demands of mass society. These can be seen applied through the computerized bureaucracies of the private and public corporations, through mass education, medicine and the media etc. Many scientists are now, above all, planners and central members of the ruling class. The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature. This expanding power has generally been developed by people concerned with human betterment. Yet nonetheless, the profession has become a chief instrument for tightening social control in the Western world, as is made evident by the unity of the profession’s purpose with those of political administration and law enforcement, the complex organization of dependent professions it has gathered around itself, its taking over of the cure of the ‘psyche,’ and the increasing correlation of psychiatry with a behaviourally and physiologically oriented psychology. It becomes increasingly necessary to adjust the masses to behave appropriately amidst such technological crises as those of population and pollution and life in the cities. The thinker who has most deeply pondered our technological destiny has stated that the new co-penetrated arts and sciences are now proceeding to the apogee of their determining power around the science of cybernetics.38 The science of the steersman comes to be present in all other sciences. Heidegger’s proposition does not mean anything as ill-thought as the statement, common a few years ago, that natural sciences and engineering are becoming dependent on the social sciences. That statement is shown to be silly by the dependence of all the social sciences (in so far as they are attempting to be modern sciences and not simply covert moralities or ideologies or a mixture of both) upon biochemistry, and of biochemistry upon physics. To put simply

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what is meant: the mobilization of the objective arts and sciences at their apogee comes more and more to be unified around the planning and control of human activity. What must be emphasized here is that the new technologies of both human and non-human nature have been the dominant responses to the crises caused by technology itself. This illustrates how ‘technology’ is the pervasive mode of being in our political and social lives. The name ‘technological’ may indeed be a word too much on the surface for the best articulation of what is being lived and thought in the Western ways which are becoming world-wide. Is there some primal affirmation which is ‘before’ technology – that is, before our science and techniques, before our political and social ways, before our philosophies and theologies? When the ‘before’ in that sentence is thought chronologically (or, as we like to say, historically), was there some originating affirmation made somewhere and sometime when Europeans defined themselves over against the classical civilization they were inheriting? Many scholars have written of the details of the arts and sciences, the struggles and reverences of that originating time; some philosophers have attempted to bring such a self-definition into the light of day. But who has succeeded in laying before us in a convincing unity what it was that gave the Europeans their special destiny, what primal affirmation penetrated their life and thought? Without denial of the unfathomedness of this affirmation, I would be willing to say that Europeans somehow seem to have come to an apprehension of the whole as ‘will.’ That apprehension came to them as they tried to relate what had been given in ancient philosophy to the exclusivity which they had taken from the Bible. Yet such an attempt to understand what is ‘before’ technology leaves one only with dim and uncertain language. As one turns back to the surface, it is adequate to call our society ‘technological,’ because its dominant manifestation is the new co-penetrated arts and sciences. The novelties of that destiny lie before us in every lived moment. However, what exactly constitutes the novelness of these novelties is more difficult to apprehend. How novel are these novelties? When we speak of technology as a new set of occurrences in the world, what do we mean by newness in that context? What constitutes the particular newness or novelness of technology, and what is newness or novelty itself? If following the English dictionary we speak of the new as the

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strange and unfamiliar, how strange and unfamiliar is our technological society? What do we mean by strangeness and unfamiliarity, and how do we ever apprehend it? To descend to the practical, if we are able to apprehend correctly the particular novelty of our technological society, what does it portend for the future? Most of us represent that novelty to ourselves as a great step forward in the systematic application of reason to the invention of instruments for our disposal. Human beings have from their beginnings developed instruments to help them get things done (indeed in our era many distinguish human beings from the other animals by calling us the toolmaking animals). The word ‘instrument’ is not confined simply to external objects such as machines or drugs or hydro power, but includes such development of systems of organization and communication as bureaucracies and factories. Technology is then thought of as the whole apparatus of instruments made by man and placed at the disposal of man for his choice and purposes. In this account, the novelness lies in the fact that in our civilization the activity of inventing instruments reaches new levels of effectiveness because it has been systematically related to our science, and our science has at last discovered the sure path of a methodology which has allowed it progress in objective discovery. This representation of technology as an array of instruments, lying at the free disposal of the species which creates them, seems so obviously true as to be beyond argument. Nevertheless this account of technology as instrument, however undeniable, tends to pare down the actual novelness of our situation, so that we are not allowed to contemplate that situation for what it is. For example, a computer scientist recently made the following statement about the machines he helps to invent: ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.’39 Obviously the statement is made by someone who is aware that computers can be used for purposes of which he does not approve – for example, the tyrannous control of human beings. This is given in the word ‘should.’ He makes a statement in terms of his intimate knowledge of computers which transcends that intimacy, in that it is more than a description of any given computer or of what is technically common to all such machines. Because he wishes to state something about the possible good or evil purposes for which computers can be used, he expresses, albeit in negative form, what computers are, in a way which is more than their tech-

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nical description. They are instruments, made by human skill for the purpose of achieving certain human goals. They are neutral instruments in the sense that the morality of the goals for which they are used is determined outside them. Many people who have never seen a computer, and only slightly understand the capacity of computers, have the sense from their daily life that they are being managed by them, and have perhaps an undifferentiated fear about the potential extent of this management.40 This man, who knows about the invention and use of these machines, states what they are in order to put our sense of anxiety into a perspective freed from the terrors of such fantasies as the myth of Doctor Frankenstein.41 His perspective assumes that the machines are instruments, because their capacities have been built into them by human beings, and it is human beings who operate those machines for purposes they have determined. All instruments can obviously be used for bad purposes, and the more complex the capacities of the instrument, the more complex can be its possible bad uses. But if we apprehend these machines for what they are, neutral instruments which we in our freedom are called upon to control, we are better able to come to terms rationally with their potential dangers. The first step in coping with these dangers is to see that they are related to the potential decisions of human beings about how to use computers, not to the inherent capacities of the machines themselves.42 Indeed the statement about the computer gives the prevalent ‘liberal’ view of the modern situation which is so rooted in us that it seems to be common sense itself, even rationality itself.43 We have certain technological capacities; it is up to us to use those capacities for decent human purposes. Yet despite the seeming common sense of the statement, when we try to think the sentence ‘the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ it becomes clear that we are not allowing computers to appear before us for what they are. Indeed the statement (like many similar) obscures for us what computers are. To begin at the surface: the words ‘the computer does not impose’ are concerned with the capacities of these machines, and these capacities are brought before us as if they existed in abstraction from the events which have made possible their existence. Obviously the machines have been made from a vast variety of materials, consummately fashioned by a vast apparatus of fashioners. Their existence has required generations of sustained effort

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by chemists, metallurgists and workers in mines and factories. Beyond these obvious facts, computers have been made within the new science and its mathematics. That science is a particular paradigm of knowledge and, as any paradigm of knowledge, is to be understood as the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. It is not my purpose here to describe that paradigm in detail; nor would it be within my ability to show its interrelation with mathematics conceived as algebra. Suffice it to say that what is given in the modern use of the word ‘science’ is the project of reason to gain ‘objective’ knowledge.44 And modern ‘reason’ is the summoning of anything before a subject and putting it to the question, so that it gives us its reasons for being the way it is as an object.45 A paradigm of knowledge is not something reserved for scientists and scholars. Anybody who is awake in any part of our educational system knows that this paradigm of knowledge stamps the institutions of that system, their curricula, in their very heart, in what the young are required to know and to be able to do if they are to be called ‘qualified.’46 That paradigm of knowledge is central to our civilizational destiny and has made possible the existence of computers.47 I mean by ‘civilizational destiny’ above all the fundamental presuppositions that the majority of human beings inherit in a civilization, and which are so taken for granted as the way things are that they are given an almost absolute status. To describe a destiny is not to judge it. It may indeed be, as many believe, that the development of that paradigm is a great step in the ascent of man, that it is the essence of human liberation, even that its development justifies the human experiment itself. Whatever the truth of these beliefs, the only point here is that without this destiny computers would not exist. And like all destinies, they ‘impose.’ What has been said about the computer’s existence depending upon the paradigm of knowledge is of course equally true of the earlier machines of industrialism.48 The Western paradigm of knowledge has not been static, but has been realized in a dynamic unfolding, and one aspect of that realization has been a great extension of what is given in the conception of ‘machine.’ We all know that computers are machines for the transmitting of information, not the transformation of energy. They require software as well as hardware. They have required the development of mathematics as algebra, and of algebra as almost iden-

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tical with logic. Their existence has required a fuller realization of the Western paradigm of knowledge beyond its origins, in this context the extension of the conception of machine. It may well be said that where the steel press may be taken as the image of Newtonian physics and mathematics, the computer can be taken as the image of contemporary physics and mathematics. Yet in making that distinction, it must also be said that contemporary science and Newtonian science are equally moments in the realization of the same paradigm. The phrase ‘the computer does not impose’ misleads, because it abstracts the computer from the destiny that was required for its making. Common sense may tell us that the computer is an instrument, but it is an instrument from within the destiny which does ‘impose’ itself upon us, and therefore the computer does impose. To go further: How are we being asked to take the word ‘ways’ in the assertion that ‘the computer does not impose the ways’? Even if the purposes for which the computer’s capacities should be used are determined outside itself, do not these capacities limit the kind of ways for which it can be used? To take a simple example from the modern institutions of learning and training: in most jurisdictions there are cards on which children are assessed as to their ‘skills’ and ‘behaviour,’ and this information is retained by computers. It may be granted that such information adds little to the homogenizing vision inculcated throughout society by such means as centrally controlled curricula or teacher training. It may also be granted that as computers and their programming become more sophisticated the information stored therein may be able to take more account of differences. Nevertheless, it is clear that the ways that computers can be used for storing and transmitting information can only be ways that increase the tempo of the homogenizing processes. Abstracting facts so that they can be stored as information is achieved by classification, and it is the very nature of any classifying to homogenize. Where classification rules, identities and differences can appear only in its terms. Indeed the word ‘information’ is itself perfectly attuned to the account of knowledge which is homogenizing in its very nature. ‘Information’ is about objects, and comes forth as part of that science which summons objects to give us their reasons. It is not my purpose at this point to discuss the complex issues of good and evil involved in the modern movement towards homogeneity, nor to discuss the good of heterogeneity, which in its most profound

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past form was an expression of autochthony. Some modern thinkers state that beyond the rootlessness characteristic of the present early stages of technological society, human beings are now called to new ways of being rooted which will have passed through modern rootlessness, and will be able at one and the same time to accept the benefits of modern homogenization while living out a new form of heterogeneity. These statements are not at issue here.49 Rather my purpose is to point out that the sentence about computers hides the fact that their ways are always homogenizing. Because this is hidden, questioning homogenization is closed down in the sentence. To illustrate the matter from another aspect of technological development: Canadians wanted the most efficient car for geographic circumstances and social purposes similar to those of the people who first developed the mass-produced automobile.50 Our desire for and use of such cars has been a central cause of our political and economic integration and our social homogenization with the people of the imperial heartland. This was not only because of the vast corporate structures necessary for building and keeping in motion such automobiles, and the direct and indirect political power of such corporations, but also because any society with such vehicles tends to become like any other society with the same. Seventy-five years ago somebody might have said ‘The automobile does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ and who would have quarrelled with that? Yet this would have been a deluded representation of the automobile. Obviously, human beings may still be able to control, by strict administrative measures, the ways that cars are used.51 They may prevent the pollution of the atmosphere or prevent freeways from destroying central city life. It is to be hoped that cities such as Toronto will maintain themselves as communities by winning popular victories over expressways and airports. Whatever efforts may be made, they will not allow us to represent the automobile to ourselves as a neutral instrument. Obviously the ‘ways’ that automobiles and computers can be used are dependent on their being investment-heavy machines which require large institutions for their production. The potential size of such corporations can be imagined in the statement of a reliable economist: if the present growth of IBM is extrapolated, that corporation will in the next thirty years be a larger unit than the economy of any presently constituted national state, including that of its homeland.52 At the simplest

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factual level, computers can be built only in societies in which there are large corporations. This will be the case whatever ways these institutions are related to the states in which they are incorporated, be that relation some form of capitalism or some form of socialism. Also those machines have been and will continue to be instruments with effect beyond the confines of particular nation states. They will be the instruments of the imperialism of certain communities towards other communities. They are instruments in the struggle between competing empires, as the present desire of the Soviet Union for American computers illustrates. It might be that ‘in the long run of progress,’ humanity will come to the universal and homogeneous state in which individual empires and nations have disappeared. That in itself would be an even larger corporation. To express the obvious: whatever conceivable political and economic alternatives there may be, computers can only exist in societies in which there are large corporate institutions. The ways they can be used are limited to those situations. In this sense computers are not neutral instruments, but instruments which exclude certain forms of community and permit others. In our era, many believe that the great question about technology is whether the ways it is used will be determined by the standards of justice in one or other of the dominant political philosophies.53 The rationalism of the West has produced not only modern physical science, but also modern political philosophy. Technology is considered neutral, and its just use will depend upon the victory of true rather than false political philosophy. The appeal of the teachings of political philosophers has been massive in our era, because these teachings have taken the form of ideologies which convince the minds of masses of human beings. The ways that computers should be used can be solved satisfactorily if political regimes are shaped by the true philosophy. The three dominant alternatives are capitalist liberalism, communist Marxism, and national socialist historicism.54 What calls out for recognition here is that the same account of reason which produced the technologies also produced the accounts of justice given in these modern political philosophies. It led, moreover, to the public manifestation of those political philosophies as ideologies. The statement ‘the computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ abstracts from the fact that ‘the ways’ that the computer will be used will be determined by politics in the broadest sense of that term.55

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Politics in our era are dominated by accounts of society which came forth from the same account of reasoning that produced the new copenetrated arts and sciences. It cannot be my purpose at this point to show the nature of that sameness. Such a demonstration would require a detailed history of the modern West. It would require above all a demonstration of the mutual interdependence of the modern physical sciences and the modern moral sciences as they were both defined against the account of science in classical philosophy.56 Much of the enormous enterprise of modern scholarship has been taken up with the detailed mapping of what was done and thought and made by large numbers of inventors, scientists, artists, philosophers, politicians, religious reformers etc. Beyond scholarship, the demonstration of this interdependence would require the ability to think what was being thought by the greatest scientists and philosophers.57 By distinguishing the new science from the account of science in the ancient world they laid down the modern affirmations concerning what is. Concerning the conception of justice, it would be necessary to follow how great philosophers such as Descartes and Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche, understood the unity between the findings of modern science and their accounts of justice. Without attempting any of these demonstrations, suffice it to state that the ways that computers have been and will be used cannot be detached from modern conceptions of justice, and that these conceptions of justice come forth from the very account of reasoning which led to the building of computers. This is not to say anything here concerning the truth or falsity of modern conceptions of justice, nor is it to prejudge the computer by some reactionary account stemming from the desire to turn one’s back on the modern. It is simply to assert that we are not in the position where computers lie before us as neutral instruments, and where we use them according to standards of justice which are reached outside of the existence of the computers themselves. The instruments and the standards of justice are bound together, both belonging to the same destiny of modern reason.58 The failure to recognize this hides from us the truth about the ‘ways’ computers can be used. The force of that destiny is to be seen, finally, in the ambiguity of the word ‘should’ in the statement, ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.’ Our novel situation is presented as if human beings ‘should’ use computers for certain purposes and not for

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others. But what has the word ‘should’ come to mean in advanced technological societies? ‘Should’ was originally the past tense of ‘shall.’ It is still sometimes used in a conditional sense to express greater uncertainty about the future than the prophetic sense of ‘shall.’ (‘I shall get a raise this year’ is more certain than ‘I should get a raise this year.’ The colloquialism from the home of our language, ‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ expresses this.) In its origins,’shall’ was concerned with ‘owing,’ when used as a transitive verb. Chaucer wrote: ‘And by that feyth I shal to God and yow.’59 But over the centuries ‘should’ took over from ‘shall’ as the word with the connotation of owing, and could be used for that purpose intransitively. The sentence ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ is concerned with human actions which are owed. If the statement were in positive form – ‘The computer does impose on us the ways it should be used’ – the debt would probably be understood as owed by human beings to machines.60 We can say of a good car that we owe it to the car to lubricate it properly. We would mean it in the same sense if we were to say we owe it to ourselves to try not to contradict ourselves, if we wish to think out some matter clearly. If we want the car to do what it is fitted for – which is, in traditional usage, its good – then we must look after it. But the ‘should’ in the statement about the computer is clearly not being used about what is owed by men to machines.61 The sentence is concerned with the just use of the machine as instrument. ‘Should’ expresses that we ought to use it justly. But what is the nature of the debt there spoken? To what or to whom do we owe it? Is that debt conditional? For example, if human beings ‘should’ use computers only in ways that are compatible with constitutional government, and not to promote tyranny, to what or to whom is this support of constitutional government owed? To ourselves? to other human beings? all, or some of them? to nature? to history? to reasonableness? to God? Because of the ambiguity which has fallen upon all accounts of owing, our era has often been described as a time of nihilism.62 As many Europeans came to believe over the last three hundred years that their affirmations about goodness could not find foundations in accounts of God or nature, reason or history, the result for many has been a state of mind which is well described as nihilism. This state of mind has had wide public influence because the mass literacy neces-

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sary to technological society made nihilism a situation open not only to the few. In North America the organization of training in schools and multiversities has produced mass ‘wised-upness,’ which is the democratic edition of nihilism. Nevertheless it is necessary to be careful at this point. Characterizing technological society as essentially nihilistic prejudges the whole question of what it is. Such a dismayed reaction is as likely to close down thought about its nature as much as does any progressivism. If we use the word ‘good’ in the simplest way as what we approve, and ‘bad’ as what we deplore, is it not evident that large majorities now give their shared approval to certain activities and that from those activities we can apprehend a positive modern conception of goodness? For example, is it not generally believed that freedom for sexual realization in its varying particularities should be promoted in societies? Or, if one has any knowledge of the modern scientific community, is one not aware of the positive expectations about its accomplishments which permeate that community, from which a positive conception of goodness can be deduced? A description of the modern era fairer than that of nihilism is that a great change has taken place in the public conceiving of goodness.63 The enunciation of that change is best made in terms of what is positive in both the past and the prevalently modern accounts.64 The originating Western conception of goodness is of that which meets us with the overriding claim of justice, and persuades us that in desiring obedience to that claim we will find what we are fitted for. The modern conception of goodness is of our free creating of richness and greatness of life and all that is advantageous thereto. The presently popular phrase in the modern account is ‘quality of life.’65 The modern conception of goodness does not include the assertion of a claim upon us which properly orders our desires in terms of owing, and which is itself the route and fulfilment for desire. In the prevalent modern view, owing is always provisional upon what we desire to create. Obviously we live in the presence of the existence of others, and our creating may perforce be limited because of what is currently permitted legally to be done to others. However, the limitations put upon creating by the claims of others, whether nationally or internationally, are understood as contractual: that is, provisional. This exclusion of non-provisory owing from our interpretation of desire means that what

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is summoned up by the word ‘should’ is no longer what was summoned up among our ancestors. What moderns hear always includes an ‘if’: it is never ‘beyond all bargains and without an alternative.’66 Moreover, the arrival in the world of this changed interpretation of goodness is interrelated to the arrival of technological civilization. The liberation of human desiring from any supposed excluding claim, so that it is believed we freely create values, is a face of the same liberation in which men overcame chance by technology – the liberty to make happen what we want to make happen.67 We are free, not only in what we want to make happen, but also in choosing the means. The whole of nature becomes more and more at our disposal as if it were nothing in itself but only our ‘raw material.’ ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used’ asserts the essence of the modern view, which is that human ability freely determines what happens. It then puts that freedom in the service of the very ‘should’ which that same modern novelty has made provisional.68 The resolute mastery to which we are summoned in ‘does not impose’ is the very source of difficulty in apprehending goodness as ‘should.’ Therefore, the ‘should’ in the statement has only a masquerading resonance in the actions we are summoned to concerning computers. It is a word carried over from the past to be used in a present which is ours only because the assumptions of that past were criticized out of public existence. The statement therefore cushions us from the full impact of the novelties it asks us to consider. It pads us against wondering about the disappearance of ‘should’ in its ancient resonance, and what this disappearance may portend for the future. I have written at length about this statement to illustrate how difficult it is to apprehend correctly the novelness of our novelties. When we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments, invented by human beings and under human control, we are expressing a kind of common sense, but it is a common sense from within the very technology we are attempting to represent.69 The novelness of our novelties is being minimized. We are led to forget that the modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves. The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness.

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Indeed there is novelty in how we now conceive novelness itself. That changed conception of novelness also obviously entails a change in the traditional account of an openness to the whole, and therefore a quite new content to the word ‘philosophy.’ A road or a sparrow, a child or the passing of time come to us through that destiny. To put the matter crudely: when we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal. We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness. It is in this sense that it has been truthfully said: technology is the ontology of the age.70 Western peoples (and perhaps soon all peoples) take themselves as subjects confronting otherness as objects – objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects. Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny: we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny. The result of this is that when we are deliberating in any practical situation our judgment acts rather like a mirror, which throws back the very metaphysic of the technology which we are supposed to be deliberating about in detail. The outcome is almost inevitably a decision for further technological development. For example, we can see this in the recent public discussions concerning research into the recombinations made possible by the discovery of the structure of DNA. The victory of those espousing the development of such research was not based simply on the power of the community of scientists to guarantee their freedom under the banner of Robert Oppenheimer’s bon mot about experiment: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.’71 It was rather that those (both inside and outside the scientific community) who were troubled about the possibilities in such research could not pass beyond the language of immediate dangers in expressing their concern. Once the scientists showed how the immediate threats could be met, the case was closed. The opponents of the research could not pass beyond the language of specifiable dangers, because any possible long range intimations of deprival of human good could not be expressed in the ontology they shared with their oppo-

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nents. The ontology expressed in such terms as ‘the ascent of life,’ ‘human beings making their own future,’ ‘the progress of knowledge,’ or ‘the necessity of interfering with nature for human good’ could not be used against itself. But there is no other language available which does not seem to be the irrational refusal of the truths of scientific discovery. Any deliberate ‘no’ to particular researches requires thinking the truth of the distinction made in the old adage, A posse ad esse non valet consequentia.72 (I take this to mean: Just because something can be, it does not follow that it should be.) But the account of existence which arises from the modern co-penetration of knowing and making exalts the possible above what is. It has undermined our ability to think that there could be knowledge of what is in terms of which the justice of every possible action could be judged in advance of any possible future. It is not feasible here (and who indeed is capable of that task?) to spell out in detail how in and through modern science and philosophy, or even in and through the poor remnants of theology (which may be called German theology), the possible is exalted above what is. However, the matter can be put simply: if we hold in our minds the two statements, A posse ad esse non valet consequentia and ‘When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it,’ and when you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success – then is there any doubt which statement is congruent with the sense of our own creativity as knowers and makers? Consequently, for those who affirm that the justice or injustice of some actions can be known in advance of the necessities of time and of the calculation of means, there is a pressing need to understand our technological destiny from principles more comprehensive than its own. This need lifts us up to ask about the great Western experiment in a more than piecemeal way. It pushes us to try to understand its meaning in terms of some openness to the whole which is not simply sustenance for the further realization of that experiment. But the exigency of our need for understanding must not blind us to the tightening circle in which we find ourselves. We are called to understand technological civilization just when its very realization has radically put in question the possibility that there could be any such understanding. Note: The extension in the conception of machine may tend to put in question the commonsense idea of the machine as instrument. This

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fuller conception in computers draws closer the analogy between machines and brains. Without raising the present technical dispute about the relative capacities of the human brain and computers, and also without trespassing on the proper realm of science fiction, it is easy to speculate on a development of machines which would bring the analogy still closer. A synonym for a machine is a ‘contrivance.’ There was once a verb in popular usage ‘to machine’ which meant the same as ‘to contrive.’ These potential machines of the future, if their powers were more nearly identical to the human brain, would indeed be human contrivances, but would they be human instruments?

FAITH AND THE MULTIVERSITY ‘Don’t let me catch anyone talking about the Universe in my department!’ – Lord Rutherford73

I ‘Faith and the multiversity’ is a subject which could be tackled from many angles, both practical and theoretical. The essence of the issues is, however, the relation between faith and modern science. It might be maintained that there has already been enough discussion of this over the last centuries. I do not agree. Thought has not yet reached the core of that relation. Many Christians turn away from the relation because they want there to be no conflict here. Nevertheless it remains fatefilled with conflict. It is important to be clear what is meant by the multiversity, particularly because it is an institution which has realized itself in Europe and North America only in the last half of this century – although its coming to be was a slow emergence over the last four centuries. I often meet people of my generation who went to university in the 1930s, and who speak as if the institutions their children or grandchildren are now attending are really the same as those they went to. But this is simply an illusion. The names are the same, but they are such different places that they should have different names. To say what they now are, it is necessary to describe the dominating paradigm of knowledge which rules them and determines what they are.

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Different civilizations have different paradigms of knowledge, and such paradigms shape every part of the society. The principle of any paradigm in any civilization is always the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its validation. The question then becomes what is given in the modern use of the word ‘science.’ This is the paradigm which has slowly reached definition over the last centuries, and has since 1945 come to its apogee of determining power over our institutions. Of course, it would be folly to attempt to summarize in a paragraph the results of that brilliant progress of self-definition by philosophic scientists. Suffice it simply to say that what is given in the modern paradigm is the project of reason to gain objective knowledge. What is meant by objective? Object means literally some thing that we have thrown over against ourselves. Jacio I throw, ob over against; therefore ‘the thrown against.’ The German word for object is Gegenstand – that which stands against. Reason as project, (that is, reason as thrown forth) is the summonsing of something before us and the putting of questions to it, so that it is forced to give its reasons for being the way it is as an object. Our paradigm is that we have knowledge when we represent anything to ourselves as object, and question it, so that it will give us its reasons. That summonsing and questioning requires well defined procedures. These procedures are what we call in English ‘experimental research,’ although what is entailed in these is more clearly given in the German word Forschung.74 Often people in the university like to use about themselves the more traditional word ‘scholar,’ but that word means now those who carry on ‘research.’ Those procedures started with such experiments as balls running down an inclined plane, but now the project of reason applies them to everything: stones, plants, human and non-human animals. Thus in North America we have divided our institutions of higher learning into faculties of natural science, social science and humanities, depending on the object which is being researched. But the project of reason is largely the same, to summons different things to questioning. In the case of the humanities the object is the past, and these procedures are applied to the relics of the past. For example, I have lived in a department of religion in which much work was done to summons the Bible before the researchers to give them its reasons. Each department of these institutions, indeed almost each individual researcher, carries

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on the project of reason by approaching different objects. The limitations of the human mind in synthesizing facts necessitates the growing division of research into differing departments and further subdivisions. This paradigm of knowledge makes it therefore appropriate to speak of the multiversity. The achievements of the modern project are of course a source of wonder. The world as object has indeed given forth its reasons, as it has been summonsed to do over the last centuries. The necessities that we now can know about stones or societies surely produce in us astonishment. These achievements are not simply practical, but also have theoretical consequences. All of us in our everyday lives are so taken up with certain practical achievements, in medicine, in production, in the making of human beings and the making of war, that we are apt to forget the sheer theoretical interest of what has been revealed about necessity in modern physics or biology. My purpose is to discuss the relation of this paradigm of knowledge to faith. ‘Faith’ is one of the central words of Western thought which has had many meanings. What I intend by it is Simone Weil’s definition: ‘Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.’a 75 Such a sentence, of course, simply moves one from the uncertainty of ‘faith’ to the even greater complexity of the word ‘love.’ Obviously this word has been used to cover a multitude of disparate meanings. Heidegger has used the beautiful metaphor that language is the house of being.76 In our epigonal times that house has become a labyrinth. Nowhere are we more in that labyrinth than when we try to sort out the relation between such words as ‘love,’ ‘desire,’ and ‘appetite’ etc. I cannot attempt that sorting out here, but will simply express what I think is given in the word ‘love’ in the sentence about faith.b What is first intended is that love is consent to the fact that there is authentic otherness. We all start with needs, and with dependence on others to meet them. As we grow up, self-consciousness brings the tendency to make ourselves the centre, and with it the commonsense understanding that the very needs of survival depend on our own

a Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon 1948), 148. My translation. The greater the writer the more hesitant is the translator. b Please see here the relation of what is said in the text to the Appendix at the end [634– 9].

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efforts. These facts push us in the direction of egocentricity. When life becomes dominated by self-serving, the reality of otherness, in its own being, almost disappears for us. In sexual life, where most of us make some contact with otherness, there is yet a tendency to lose sight of it, so that we go on wanting things from others just as we fail to recognize their authentic otherness. In all the vast permutations and combinations of sexual desire the beauty of otherness is both present and absent. Indeed, the present tendency for sexual life and family to be held apart is frightening, because for most people children have been the means whereby they were presented with unequivocal otherness. In political terms, Plato places the tyrant as the worst human being because his selfserving has gone to the farthest point.77 He is saying that the tyrant is mad because otherness has ceased to exist for him. I can grasp with direct recognition the theological formulation of this: ‘Hell is to be one’s own.’c The old teaching was that we love otherness, not because it is other, but because it is beautiful. The beauty of others was believed to be an experience open to everyone, though in extraordinarily different forms, and at differing steps towards perfection. It was obviously capable of being turned into strange channels because of the vicissitudes of our existence. The shoe fetishist, the farmer and St. John of the Cross were on the same journey, but at different stages.78 The beauty of otherness is the central assumption in the statement, ‘Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love.’ Nevertheless, any statement about the beauty of the world is so easily doubted in our era, because it appears meaningless within the dominant language of modern science. Our uses of ‘beauty’ have been radically subjectivized. ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ (But what then is beholding?) At the simplest level it is said that the sentence, ‘We love otherness because it is beautiful,’ is tautologous, because beauty is already defined as what we love. Our loves are determined by the vast varieties of necessities and chances which have constituted our desires,

c The tendency of human beings to become self-engrossed has been encouraged in our era, because the distinctiveness of modern political thought has been the discovery of ‘individuality.’ It is not my purpose here to discuss the good or evil of that ‘discovery’ but simply to state that one of its consequences has been to legitimize concentration on the self.

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and these could ‘ideally’ be explained by behavioural psychotherapists and sociologists. The fact that I call ‘beautiful’ the curves and lights of rock and sea in a North Atlantic bay can be explained by my particular ‘psyche,’ with its particular ancestors. I remember taking the American explorer and scientist, Stefansson, to that bay and saying: ‘A hard country, but beautiful.’79 His response was to say how misleading it was to use such subjective language about terrain, and he proceeded to give me a lecture on modern geology and the modern discovery of ‘objectivity.’ In all scientific explanations we are required to eliminate the assumption of the other as itself beautiful. The Platonic language which asserts that the world is beautiful and love is the appropriate response to it is believed to be based on a fundamental assumption of trust, because Plato was too early in the history of the race to have a proper scientific understanding of subjects and objects. That trust was shown to be a naive starting point by those who formulated doubt as the methodological prerequisite of an exact science. Indeed the language of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ is one of the ways through which the beauty of the world has been obscured for us. This language was of theoretical use in the coming to be of technological science; one of its prices, however, was to obscure beauty. To state the literal meaning of ‘objects’ yet once again: it speaks of anything which is held away from us for our questioning. Any beautiful thing can be made into an object by us and for us and we can analyze it so that it will give us its reasons as an object. But if we confine our attention to any thing as if it were simply an object, it cannot be loved as beautiful. This is well illustrated in the division between useful and non-useful criticism by professors of literature and music who explicate the texts of works of art. For example, many such explications of Shakespeare or Mozart add to our understanding of the works concerned. But one central way of dividing the useful from the non-useful among such criticisms is the recognition by the critic that his work is a means to an end, which is the further understanding of the beauty of what is being studied. When such writing appears stultifying, it is that the critic has stood over the thing studied and therefore the thing has remained an object. Its objectivity has not been a passing means but an end. (It may be said in parenthesis that such failed works often seem to appear because the professors concerned want to share the prestige of objectivity with their colleagues from the mastering sciences.) Only as anything stands

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before us in some relation other than the objective can we learn of its beauty and from its beauty. To say this may seem no more than a linguistic trick upon the use of the word ‘objective.’ But this is not so. The language of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ can easily suffocate our recognition of the beauty of the world. In stating that the beauty of otherness is the central assumption in the aphorism ‘Faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love,’ it is necessary to bring into consciousness the sheer power of the contemporary language of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects,’ so that the statement is not killed by that language. Indeed the central difficulty of using the language of beauty and love, in the affirmation that one knows more about something in loving it, is that in that language beauty was known as an image of goodness itself. Yet through the modern paradigm of knowledge the conception of good has been emptied into uncertainty. The first stage of this emptying was when good came to be used simply in discourse about human ethical questions. In the last century the emptying has gone farther. ‘Good’ has largely been replaced in our ethical discourse by the word ‘value.’ The modern emptying of ‘good’ can indeed be seen in the emptiness of its replacement. Even its chief philosophic originator, Nietzsche, has not been able to tell us what a value is. This vagueness has resulted in the word generally being used now in the plural – our ‘values.’ At a time when the word ‘good’ has been so emptied of content by the modern paradigm of knowledge, it is necessary to proceed hesitantly in trying to say what it meant in relation to our love of the beautiful. It must first be stated that what was given traditionally in the word ‘good’ was not confined to Christians. The majority in the classical Mediterranean tradition would have so used it – Epicureanism being then a minority. A similar conception is in the Vedanta. Christianity’s particular call was not to this language, but to the fact that Christ declares the price of goodness in the face of evil. In the old language ‘good’ means what any being is fitted for. It is a good of animals to breathe; we are not if we do not. The good of a being is what it is distinctively fitted for. Human beings are fitted to live well together in communities and to try to think openly about the nature of the whole. We are fitted for these activities because we are distinguished from the other animals in being capable of rational language. In living well together or being open to the whole in thought we are ful-

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filling the purpose which is given us in being human, not some other type of animal. Good is what is present in the fulfilment of our given purposes. To avoid the modern view of temporality as futurity I use a different example. A child is good, not only as a preparation, but in so far as it is at all. One loves children for what they are now. In this sense the Western word ‘good’ appears close to what the Vedanta means by the word ananda (bliss) – not as a feeling, but as being itself. At the heart of the Platonic language is the affirmation – so incredible to nearly everyone at one time or another – that the ultimate cause of being is beneficence. This affirmation was made by people who, as much as anybody, were aware of suffering, war, torture, disease, starvation, madness and the cruel accidents of existing. But it was thought that these evils could only be recognized for what they were if they were seen as deprivations of good. (It must be remembered that in this account of good and evil the verb ‘to be’ is used differently from the way it is employed in most educated modern parlance.) Clearly this language of the given goodness of what is must be a language founded upon trust. The archetypal expositor of this language, Socrates, knew that doubt was a necessary means to philosophy. But The Republic makes clear that such doubt is within the overreaching assumption of trust. We start with trust in our knowledge of those things we are presented with immediately, and doubt is the means of moving to an understanding of what makes possible that trust in an educated human being.80 The identity of doubt and systematic thought which lies in the origin of the modern experiment was not present in Socrates’ enterprise. The modern assertion that what we are is best expressed as ‘beings towards death’ would certainly have been in Socrates’ mind in what he said at the time of his execution. But it was not for him the final word about what we are.81 At the moment when his death was immediate he made clear that we are beings towards good. It was indeed for this reason that in the scene of his death, Socrates asserts that the absence of knowledge of good is not ignorance but madness.82 The central cause of the modern emptying of the word ‘good’ is that the new technological scientists defined the scopes and method of their activity in terms of their criticism of the old Aristotelian science, which had described things through the conception of purpose. The modern understanding of things in terms of necessity and chance, through alge-

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braic method, has led not only to our conquest of nature, but to an understanding of things outside the idea of purpose.83 The successes of this method are a source of wonder (use the synonym ‘admiration’ if you will) to any sane person. The new science (however one may sometimes flinch at what it says) had some appeal to certain Christians, in the very fact that it had defined itself against the teleological science of medieval Aristotelianism. When this science was used unwisely by official Christianity, in the name of ecclesiastical power, to assert that purpose in nature pointed to an overriding purpose given for the universe as a whole, it is understandable why many turned away from a science so triumphally used. The more representable the purpose of the whole was said to be, the more this natural theology became a trivializing, a blasphemy against the cross. Some of the most depressing episodes in Christian history have been the spilling of much silly ink to show that the universe as a whole vouchsafed a representable purpose of design analogous to the way that the purpose of the automaker is given in the design of the automobile. Nevertheless, it is obvious that faith cannot turn away from the idea of good. Faith affirms that all that is, proceeds from beneficence. If faith is said to be the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love, and love is said to be the apprehension of otherness as beautiful, then the question must arise whether this definition is not the kind of blasphemy of which I have been writing. Is it not saying that the beauty of the world gives us a representable purpose for the whole? Is it not just the kind of distortion which turns us from the facts of the world so that we seem able to affirm what is contradicted by the evident experience of living? Through it are we not led to assert that evil is good and good is evil, and so lose what is essential to any love of truth – namely the continual recognition that the world is as it is? In writing about love of beauty, it is therefore necessary to say something of how the language of good and purpose is used about the beauty of the world without trivializing suffering. It is best to start from works of art, for here there is obvious purposiveness in that they are made by human beings, in some sense comparable to the automobile, in some sense not. They are both purposive in that means are arranged in the light of a purposed end. We can speak both of a well-made car and a well-made concerto. But it is certainly harder to represent to our-

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selves the purpose of the work of art. Certain works of art can be partially understood in terms of their well-defined external purposes. Bach’s Passions were written to help believers focus their attention and their prayers around the originating events of Christianity.84 But when we turn to Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins it is less clear that we can represent its purpose.85 Nowadays much of our time is filled by works of art. Their purpose is to entertain. Entertainment is the agreeable occupation of our attention – in the sense of what we happen to like. What was spoken in the Greek techne became the Latin ars.86 Plows and plays were both made by human beings and the making was named by the same word. In our world the activities called technical and artistic have separated between the practically useful and the entertaining. In both cases means are carefully adjusted to ends to produce a good car or computer, play or concerto. The skilful gathering together of means for the car is for the purpose of getting us around; in the play for the agreeable occupation of our attention. This account is everywhere in democratic capitalistic societies. It is against this account of art that it is necessary to write. It stands between us and any proper apprehension of works of art, and ruins our partaking in their beauty. The purpose of a car can be represented rightly as a means of getting us around; the purpose of a work of art is not properly represented as merely entertainment. Indeed the greater the work of art the less can its purpose be represented at all. The staggered silence with which we can watch King Lear is evidence that something of great import is before us. Afterwards we can study it so that we can better understand the parts in relation to the whole. Whether watched or read, it clearly has a purpose. When we are enraptured we can say that it seems purposiveness itself. But can we ever represent that purpose to ourselves? Who has been able to tell us what is the purpose of King Lear? In a certain sense the purposiveness is nothing but the gathering together of the means employed by its author; in another sense its purpose is present but we cannot represent it. The beautiful at its heights gives us purposiveness but its good transcends us (oh dangerous word). It is not chiefly entertainment that we have consumed when we are consumed by great beauty. This is well illustrated in the non-verbal and non-representational language of music – for example in the last piano concertos of Mozart

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(let us say numbers 14 to 27). It is clear that these are purposive in the sense that the techniques of Italian and German music are here supremely used. It is also clear that we partake in their purpose the more we are able to follow the intricacies of modulation and counterpoint, and understand the unity between the three movements of each work. We can be aware of the moods of majesty and gaiety and desolation which are expressed in the music. We can also know that Mozart needed to entertain the Austrian upper classes to make money. Entertainment is occupying our attention agreeably. But with what? To some cultures and to some people their attention is more agreeably occupied by Rhapsody in Blue than by K.482.87 This fact raises inevitably the question: are there some works that are more worth paying attention to than others? What is given in those that are most worthy of attention? What is it that enraptures us about them, so that even in the desolation of King Lear or K.491 we are enraptured?88 Can we describe that enrapturing as the immediate engrossment in the beauty of the work, which points to good which is quite unrepresentable? Here indeed one must pay attention not only to looking or reading or listening, but to the very making of such works. To do so would be a staggering impudence, had not the activity been described by Mozart himself: The question is how my art proceeds in writing and working out great and important matters. I can say no more than this, for I know no more and can come upon nothing further. When I am well and have good surroundings, travelling in a carriage, or after a good meal or a walk or at night when I cannot sleep, then ideas come to me best and in torrents. Where they come from and how they come I just do not know. I keep in my head those that please me and hum them aloud as others have told me. When I have that all carefully in my head, the rest comes quickly, one thing after another; I see where such fragments could be used to make a composition of them all, by employing the rules of counterpoint and the sound of different instruments etc. My soul is then on fire as long as I am not disturbed; the idea expands, I develop it, all becoming clearer and clearer. The piece becomes almost complete in my head, even if it is a long one, so that afterwards I see it in my spirit all in one look, as one sees a beautiful picture or beautiful human being. I am saying that in imagination I do not understand the parts one after another, in the order

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that they ought to follow in the music; I understand them altogether at one moment. Delicious moments. When the ideas are discovered and put into a work, all occurs in me as in a beautiful dream which is quite lucid. But the most beautiful is to understand it all at one moment. What has happened I do not easily forget and this is the best gift which our God has given me. When it afterwards comes to writing, I take out of the bag of my mind what had previously gathered into it. Then it gets pretty quickly put down on paper, being strictly, as was said, already perfect, and generally in much the same way as it was in my head before.d 89

The combination expressed in these words between the free work of the artist and his receptivity allows us dimly to perceive what that wonderful making must have been. Obviously his mastery of technique has come from long training and attention. We know that the last piano concertos were written after he had studied Bach, late in his short life. His own hard work is united with his receiving of melodies and his hearing of the whole piece all at one moment. Fire has always been the word to describe love, and it has been written that flame touches flame. The making of a beautiful piece is an act of love, a love which illuminates the lucidity in his making of it. Two points may be made, not to add anything to these words, but because the dominant language in modern education may cut us off from listening to the words. First, it has been a central theme in modern

d Mozart’s Briefe, ed. L. Nohl, 2nd ed., 443–4. It is significant that in quoting this passage Heidegger stops before Mozart’s words about the best gift of God. (See Der Satz vom Grund, Pfullingen 1957, chapter 9.) Indeed in his comments on this quotation Heidegger writes of Mozart as ‘the lute of God’ – a metaphor he takes from a poem of Angelus Silesius. But is Mozart’s account of his activity properly grasped in calling him ‘the lute of God’? To put the matter directly, was there not some moment when Mozart could have exercised the liberty of indifference to what had been given him? On the one hand Kant’s insistence on our own autonomy kills a proper partaking in beauty and in its extremity leads to the modern doctrine of art as human creativity (whatever that may mean) and so art is understood quite apart from the divine gift. But on the other hand the metaphor of ‘the lute of God’ about Mozart sweeps away the liberty of indifference which is what we properly mean by freedom, in this case the freedom of the artist. At the height of sanctity Angelus Silesius’ metaphor might be appropriate. But Heidegger uses it here about an artist, albeit a supreme one. There has been some questioning of the authenticity of this passage from Mozart’s letters, but in 1957 Heidegger says it is authentic.

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philosophy that there is no such thing as ‘intellectual intuition.’ This has gone with the teaching that the great mistake of the Platonic tradition has been the affirmation of such. ‘Intuition’ comes from the Latin tueor, to look. When Mozart says that after composing a piece of music he sees it ‘all in one look’ and when he says he understands it all at one moment, he is surely describing an act which can properly be named ‘intellectual intuition.’ Secondly, it is worth remembering when Mozart speaks of understanding (in German the very similar word verstehen) he did so at a time when Kant was exalting reason above understanding, in the name of his account of human beings as ‘autonomous.’ This was to place on its head the teaching of Plato in which understanding is the height for human beings. Indeed the English ‘to understand’ and the German verstehen were in their origins filled with that very sense of receptivity which Kant lessens in the name of our freedom. Critics who write within the historicist assumptions of our time might choose to deconstruct this letter in one way or another. They say that Mozart’s music is a different matter from his justifying explanation of his understanding of it. At another level it might be said in languages of modern physiology and psychology that the language of gift and the fire of love can now be better understood for what they are than in Mozart’s ‘naive’ words. Indeed with our new knowledge it may be said that we will be able to add to the Mozartian corpus by means of the computer. Mozart’s assertion that he understood the whole of a piece in one look and heard it all at one moment can only be wiped away if we speak entirely within the languages of the new sciences. What has been lost as against what has been found in the self-definition of the modern paradigm here appears to me evident. What can be meant by the beauty of the world becomes more ambiguous when we pay attention to those things which have not been made by human beings. At a common sense level, Vico’s insistence that we understand what we have made in a way we cannot understand what we have not made seems correct.90 More importantly, it is difficult to partake in the beauty of the world because of the misery, the hardness, the sadness of so much of our lives, which is caused not only by the ugliness in ourselves, but by the very conditions of the non-human world. As has often been said, the very drive to technological science arose with the desire to overcome these vicissitudes. The key difficulty in receiving the beauty of the world these days is that such teaching is

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rooted in the act of looking at the world as it is, while the dominant science is rooted in the desire to change it. I am not saying that the beauty of the world is vouchsafed above all when untouched by human making. It would be senseless to think of cultivated land as unbeautiful. Race horses are beautiful. Nevertheless, it was possible for Canadians to admire the chthonically beautiful places, where nature existed untouched by human making, and moreover to see these places as beautiful even in the awareness of how rigorous pioneering society had been – my ancestors, for example, were forced to eat the flesh of their dead companions to survive. In the Western world today, fewer and fewer people can ever find nature untouched by technological science. On His return, it may not be understandable for Christ to repeat what He said about the lilies of the field, because if there are any lilies they will have been improved by human skill.91 For most people, animal existence appears as cats and dogs, meat to be eaten or wild animals protected in zoos or wilderness areas. The heavens, the oceans and the mountains are as yet only partially conquered and the heavens may be at points untouchable. Indeed the beauty of the world in its primal sense is rarely present for us, and that assertion need not depend on the ambiguous doctrine of ‘the Fall.’92 It is indeed necessary to call modern science ‘technological’ because in the modern paradigm nature is conceived at one and the same time as algebraically understood necessity and as resource. Anything apprehended as resource cannot be apprehended as beautiful. At some stages of our capitalist development, certain rhetoricians used to say: ‘Canada’s greatest resource is its people.’ That well-meaning sentence expresses what has been lost as well as found in modernity. Of course the beauty of the world manifests itself most intensely for us in the beauty of other people. The manifold forms of love, for example sexual and parental, friendship and admiration, take in each case many forms themselves. Who could in a lifetime write down the ways in which sexual love penetrates every moment of our consciousness and is never absent in any loving of the beautiful – present even when that love is universal? Indeed the manifold ways in which sexual instinct and love are held together and detached from each other make up much of our existing. On the one hand, sexual desire can be the recognition of others as beautiful; on the other hand, it can be the occasion of such calculated self-

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engrossment that other people are made instruments for producing sensations. Sexual desire can be the occasion when we see the truth of what others are, in the flame of its attention; or it can lock us in the madness of ourselves so that nothing is real but our imaginings. So intense are the pleasures of sexuality, so pressing its needs, so detached can the bodies of ourselves and others be from any humanity, that sexual desire can drive love out from its presence. It can become the rock of ‘reality’ on which the search for the beauty of the world founders. In an age in which the paradigm of knowledge has no place for our partaking in eternity, it is understandable that orgasmic fulfilment has been made out to be the height of our existing – indeed that which gives our existing some kind of immanent justification. The materialists have taken it as their heaven. But this modern union of individuality and materialism has meant a transposition of older beliefs about the relation of sex and love. In the older beliefs sexual desire was one means through which love between human beings could abound; in our era love seems sometimes to be thought of as means for the abounding of sexual enjoyment. Because sexuality is such a great power and because it is a means to love, societies in the past hedged it around with diverse and often strange systems of restraint. Such restraints were considered sacred, because their final justification (whatever other justifications were present) was the love of the beautiful, and that was considered sacred. Modern social scientists have changed the original meaning of ‘taboo’ into the socially and psychologically ‘forbidden,’ in the attempt to teach us that restraints are not sacred. This is of course useful to a capitalist society because everything must be made instrumental to the forwarding of ‘production,’ and the sacred restraints cannot be made instrumental. Social scientists follow their creator, because social science was created by capitalist society. It is the reversal in the hierarchy of love and sex which has led in the modern world to the attempt to remove the relation between sexuality and the birth of children. The love of the beauty of the world in sexual life was believed to have some relation to the love of the beauty of the world found in progeny. (In using the word ‘some’ before ‘relation,’ I imply that I am not speaking against contraception.) But if orgasmic fulfilment is the height of all existing, it has no need of such extension. Obviously, love has to be protected by societies, because the human

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condition is such that the tenderness of the flesh leaves everybody at the terrible mercy of others. Yet at this time in ‘advanced’ societies, justice has been massively withdrawn from unborn children. In the pre-progressive societies, however differently (and often perversely) love was brought within different orders, those loves were not considered entirely blind, because they were the way that human beings were moved out of self-engrossment to find joy in the world. Indeed the words ‘to love’ and ‘to know’ were joined. For example, because of the intensity and intimacy of orgasmic love, it was said when people freely participated in it, they ‘knew’ each other. Love was not considered in its essence blind. It was for this reason that the family – in such varied forms as polyandry, polygamy, monogamy, etc. – was given enormous power (sometimes indeed too much) because it was believed that in the main the family was a guardian of the interests of its members. Indeed one of the growing beliefs of our era is the idea that love in its essence is blind. For people of my generation the great teacher in matters sexual and familial was Freud. He seemed a writer who gave sexual life its central place after the repression of the early industrial era. But for all his concentration on love, he (like his master Nietzsche) gave love poison to drink, because he so placed ambiguity at the centre of love as to say that in its heart love was blind. His influence may not be intellectually lasting. But he has been influential, particularly in North America, in placing sexual and familial life under the hands of the objectifiers. The ‘helping’ professions – psychiatrists, social workers etc. – are an important means of bringing people under that objective control. This is largely done by the claim that they understand families better than the families understand themselves. Luckily many people are not much interested in such assumptions and just go on loving or being indifferent or hating. But deep changes in ways of looking at things slowly permeate, particularly in societies whose democratic origins were bound up with the idea that philosophy could be open to nearly everyone. Thus when a popularizer of philosophy such as Sartre writes that ‘hell is other people,’ he makes starkly open the modern division between love and intelligence.93 The results of the division of love and intelligence are evident when one speaks of knowledge of justice. In the older tradition, justice was defined as rendering to anything what was its due. Political justice was

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the attempt to render what was due among human beings. For ourselves, justice was rendering what was due to every aspect of our own being, body and soul, as we were then considered to be. In the nonhuman world it was rendering the proper due to cattle and bears, wheat and stones, to God or the gods. Justice was then not only arrangements to be realized in any given society, but also a state of the individual which was called a virtue. Of course the question arose to thought, why is anything due to anything? Once any due had been granted, the question came to be what was properly due to any being. Socrates shows in his debate with Callicles in Gorgias that life demands the idea of due. He then proceeds in The Republic to show how we come to know what is due to anything.94 What Christianity added to the classical account of justice was not any change in its definition but an extension of what was due to others and an account of how to fulfil that due. Christ added to the two great commandments the words that the second is ‘like unto’ the first.95 At the height of the Gospels we are shown the moment when a tortured being says of his torturers that their due is to be forgiven.96 Despite all the horrors perpetrated by Christians, both in the West and more particularly outside the West, despite all the failures of Christians to understand the consequences of justice for the law, nevertheless the rendering to each being its due, in the light of the perfection of that rendering, could not be publicly denied among Christians. Indeed Christianity calls human beings not only to the reasonable decencies of the particular purposes and goods of this or that situation, but to be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. There is no short cut to this perfection by a mysticism without price. As Simone Weil says, ‘Matter is our infallible judge.’97 Perfection is not isolated from the immediate requirements of the world. We can only fulfil those requirements here below insofar as we partake to some degree in that perfection. Indeed goods in the here and now are only good in that they participate in goodness itself. Our freedom is just our potential indifference to such a high end. Indeed among all the Western criticisms of Christianity the most substantial was that Christianity led to over-extension of soul. It was said that too much is demanded of human beings and this has made steady political orders impossible where the Gospel was influential. The call to perfection made difficult the handling of the necessities of the world, and laid too grave a burden upon individuals. This criticism

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and the replies to it were both made by people who accepted that justice was rendering each being its due. The call to perfection caused the persecution of the saints, not only in communities alien to Christianity (e.g. in the early Roman Empire or in modern secular empires) but in the heart of what was known as Christendom. The call to perfected justice seemed to question the elementary justice possible in the world. The harsh imprisonment suffered by St. John of the Cross was administered at the hands of churchmen because of his desire to fulfil the original Franciscan perfection.98 The intelligence’s enlightenment by love is a terrible teaching (in the literal sense of the word). Contemplate what happens to those who have been deeply illuminated by love! After the resurrection Christ told Peter that he must expect to be carried ‘whither he wouldest not.’99 In the traditional teaching about justice it was recognized that human nature is so constituted that any desire which has not passed through the flesh by way of actions and settled dispositions appropriate to it is not finally real in the soul. The saints are those in whom the desire for justice has so passed through the flesh that it has become transparent to justice. The very call to perfection in Christianity has been above all that which has made so difficult the establishment of proper systems of government. The compromises between the world and perfection were particularly necessary in this area. ‘Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ is a brilliant epigram, but hard to particularize.100 In any given society where Christianity has been influential only few hear the call to perfection and who those few may be is not easy to specify. Most of us make something of trying in a half-hearted way to render others their due. Some lose all sense of others having any due. For most of us it is easier to envisage the unrepresentable end for those near and dear to us. It is harder to envisage it even among those in the same neighbourhood, let alone farther away. Love of the good due to others can easily become little more than love of our own. Saddest is when love of our own becomes no more important than love of our own bodies and our own immediate needs. It was recognized that the wicked were not alone the individual criminals, but those who wished to rule for their own self-assertion. Such people were more destructive of justice even than those who ruled simply in terms of the property interests of one class. They were worse

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than those who climbed the slippery pole of politics to get some place of influence. Because such tyrants were the most dangerous for any society, the chief political purpose anywhere was to see that those who ruled had at least some sense of justice which mitigated self-assertion. For these reasons there were in the pre-progressive societies those complicated systems of education wherein the truth of justice was made central to education. Indeed, the pressing reason for this is given with startling clarity by Socrates in Phaedrus.101 For most of us justice must initially appear as unattractive. Justice is not easy to be loved because it is not, at first sight, beautiful. Socrates also says that the more we come to love it the more we come to find it beautiful.102 Indeed it has been recounted by those advanced in the journey that justice which once appeared ugly or tiresomely distracting comes to appear as overwhelmingly beautiful. As traditional societies were economically limited and therefore the possibilities of education were directed to the few, it was to those most likely to rule that this education was given. Among the young, the cultivation of habit was considered central. Justice was, in its origins, good habit. The early practice of fulfilling some small segment of justice was necessary to the overcoming of self-assertion among the young. For those likely to rule this was not sufficient. It was necessary to understand justice within the whole scheme of the cosmos. When one compares the education of Queen Elizabeth I, or of Gladstone, with that given to nearly all modern rulers, one may come to understand why they were such masters of what Plato called the highest art. Is there anything greater in modern politics than Gladstone’s attempt in his last years to turn England back from the absurdities of expansionist imperialism, which were leading directly to the disaster of 1914?103 In our history this education in justice depended greatly on the careful division of function between church and state. The state was concerned ‘ideally’ with the immediate instituting of justice in the world; the church was ‘ideally’ concerned with holding high perfection in its cosmic significance, and with the education which proceeded therefrom. Obviously at nearly every moment each of these institutions abused their proper functions and trespassed on each others’ prerogatives. Indeed, whatever the difficulties in understanding the origins of technological society in the Christian West, one of the moments where its origin is evident lies in the activity of the pope whose popular name

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was Hildebrand. In this controversy with the empire, Hildebrand not only insisted on the spiritual rights of the church, but also on the control of the world, by the papacy’s power over the naming of the emperor.104 By this vast extension of the church’s power over the world, he turned the church from its traditional role of holding forth the mystery of perfection, to the role of control in worldly affairs. The apparatus of education in the church was turned to the world, including the activity of thinkers. We should not be surprised that Swift’s Battle of the Books places Thomas Aquinas among the moderns, not the ancients.105 The accounts of justice which have become dominant during the age of progress have not been based on its definition as rendering each being its due. This has happened largely because it has not been widely thought in our age that we can have knowledge of what is due to each being. An analogy has often been used to describe the central difference between pre-progressive and progressive theories of justice. In all theories of political justice it must be assumed that some limitation is placed on individual liberty. In the traditional theories this limitation was vertical, received by human beings in what they knew about the whole, which quite transcended any individuality. What was given in our knowledge of the whole was a knowledge of good which we did not measure and define, but by which we were measured and defined. The modern theories depended on a horizontal limitation, which arose from the fact that one human being’s right to do what he wanted had to come to terms with the right of others to do what they wanted. The basis of society was the calculation of the social contract wherein sensible human beings calculated that all had to surrender some part of their unlimited desire for freedom in order to enjoy the benefits of settled society. This contractarian view of the state was as much part of communism through the dependence of Marx upon Rousseau, as it was part of American democratic capitalism through the founders’ dependence on Locke’s rights to ‘life, liberty, and property.’106 In Perpetual Peace Kant put the matter lucidly. He wrote that it would be possible to have a just society composed of a nation of clever devils. If they were smart enough to negotiate the social contract, they could have a just society.107 As it is my intention to state that something has been lost for us with the waning of the old account of justice, it is well to think about what has been gained in and through the modern accounts. Some examples:

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whatever the differences in theory or application between democratic capitalism and communism, clear statements about equality were present in both theories. And before one ever speaks against equality, it is well to remember what it was like for those at the bottom of the ladder when the principle of equality was modified by the principle of hierarchy. It is bad enough for those at the bottom of the ladder under our systems, but at our best this cannot be justified by theory. Or again: Locke was the chief philosophical progenitor of the American pursuit of ‘life, liberty, and property’ and he said what he said about government because he thought the end of life was comfortable self-preservation. It is well to remember how much comfortable self-preservation is a key end in life. The modern union of contractarianism and technological science has, despite all the terrors of modernity, added to many people’s comfortable self-preservation. Or again: the question can be formulated by saying that the pre-progressive thinkers said virtue was the core of a just political order, while the moderns have given freedom that position. It is well to remember how much all of us want to do what we want to do, and do not want to be interfered with by others, particularly when that interference is in the name of some virtue which seems completely alien to us. Nevertheless, it seems necessary to state what has been lost theoretically in the modern definitions of justice. What has been lost is the belief that justice is something in which we participate as we come to understand the nature of things through love and knowledge. Modern theories of justice present it as something human beings make and impose for human convenience. This is done in a physical environment which is understood in terms of necessity and chance. Obviously the traditional belief, as much as the modern, included cognizance that human beings were responsible for doing things about justice. Human beings built cities, empires, etc. and some regimes were better than others. To use the favourite expression of the Enlightenment, human beings have in modernity taken their fate into their own hands. Their theories of justice teach them that our institutions are what we make in terms of our own convenience. The central cause of this great change has been modern natural science. Brilliant scientists have laid before us an account of how things are, and in that account nothing can be said about justice. It is indeed

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not surprising therefore that in the coming to be of technological science the dependence of our objective science upon calculus has been matched by the dependence for knowledge of justice upon calculation. When the world is understood as necessity and chance, then justice has to be made by the ‘authentic’ freedom of human beings, so that conflicts between our pleasure seekings can be worked out. It is not surprising that those studies in our multiversities which depended on our intelligence being enlightened by love, and which were publicly sustained because they taught people to participate in justice, should now have faded into antiquarian research. After all it is not very difficult to know these days what justice is, what beauty is. The first is the result of interested calculation; the second is the means of entertainment. II In discussing the dominance of our modern paradigm of knowledge in the multiversities, I do not intend to make yet another list of goods and ills which have come forth from that paradigm. Who cannot be grateful for the electric light; who cannot be aware that physics has made potential the destruction of all life on this planet? To make such a list would not only require many volumes, but also assume some common agreement about goods and ills. But it is the very possibility of such a common agreement which is at stake. My purpose is rather to illustrate the pressure that people of faith must feel if they attempt to live intellectually serious lives in the multiversities. There are many of us who have found that our intelligences have been enlightened, however poorly, by love. Some of us have contact with the educational system and find that what we are taught there as knowledge is in disaccord with what we know in faith. (That old chestnut again!) There are many good ways for Christians to live with the modern paradigm of knowledge. I am concerned here as one of those who find themselves trying to live seriously in the multiversity. It is not unwise to start such pondering from the science of Darwin. Not only have his discoveries had a determining effect on modern biology, not only have these discoveries made difficulties for people of faith for more than a century, but also he was an English-speaking person and we are the people who have won the wars so far in this century. It

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is therefore apposite to put the question of faith and the multiversity in an English-speaking setting. This appositeness can be seen in some English scientists suggesting recently that 1859 – the date of the publication of The Origin of Species – should be called Year 1, in replacement of the AD dating of the older paradigm.108 This would be more universally accepted by the world as a whole. First two quotations: one about Darwin, the other by him. A friend who talked with him in the countryside wrote: ‘Nothing escaped him. No object in nature, whether Flower, or Bird, or Insect of any kind, could avoid his loving recognition.’109 Darwin wrote to another friend in 1863: ‘Personally, of course, I care much about Natural Selection; but that seems to me utterly unimportant, compared to the question of Creation or Modification.’110 In writing of these two statements it is not my chief purpose to discuss at length the strange way that the great scientist brings together creation and modification as if they were alternative answers to the same question. Yet in parenthesis something must be said on this matter to clear the way for the central point I wish to make. Obviously modification, if described as taking place as natural selection, adds force to Laplace’s dictum: ‘je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse.’111 But modification per se (that is as held apart from natural selection) does not so strike against the teaching of creation. The teaching about creation in theology has been one answer to the question: why is there anything rather than nothing? Modification is an answer to the question of how species came to be in this world. In saying this, two points must be emphasized. (1) The question ‘why is there anything rather than nothing?’ is an abyss in which our minds are swallowed up. That it is an abyss easily leads to the modern assertion that it is not a real question, and therefore not worth thinking about. It is worth repeating that the recent power of the English-speaking peoples has encouraged human beings to ignore that question. (2) The doctrine of creation is not the only answer to this abysmal question; the eternity of the visible universe is another. Be that all as it may, my purpose is to ask what is being spoken about life in Darwin’s great synthetic discoveries, and the relation of what is there spoken to the possibility of knowledge from the beauty of the world. Obviously no one who is thoughtful can contemplate living beings without some clarity concerning the modification of species by

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natural selection.e When we look at the tumult of the cormorants among their young on a rocky island, or the sea silver with mackerel, we know that if we were trained we could come to be clearer about the modifications of these species and the ways in which the mechanisms of natural selection have worked among them. We can know that the mackerel are a resource like electricity or metals, and we know that we do not have to get rid of the cormorants as it is necessary to get rid of rats in war. Is there anything else we can know? Is there anything else that we need to know for these animals to continue to be? A less immediate example: we are now often shown in our homes beautiful pictures of species in many parts of the world. While watching these pictures we are generally told by some biologists how the presence of these beings is to be understood in terms of the modifications of natural selection. Often when the species is known to be ‘endangered’ we are given a sermon by the biologist on saving this species. But nothing is said of anything that can be known as to why we should be glad that there are polar bears or parrots or why they are worth working to preserve. Some of these may be resources for this or that, but it is hard to see why some species are resources for anything. They are of course a tourist resource and we will be able to see certain species of birds in aviaries. As they have come to be by the chancy necessities or perhaps necessitous chances of natural selection, is there anything that we can be told of why it is good that they are and continue to be? The Portuguese used to leave plague-infected clothes covered with trinkets for the natives of Brazil, and (lest this should be thought xenophobic) there are no surviving natives on the island of Newfoundland. To write of the quotation of Darwin’s friend: what is the relation between his ‘loving recognition’ of the beasts and flowers and what he cognized about them? It may well be said that what he knew about them means that no educated person should ever recognize them again in the same way people once did. But the question remains: is Darwin’s love of the beings expressed in what he discovered about them? This is not to deny that he must have rightly loved his own remarkable act of synthesis, but that is a different thing from his love of the beings theme It is neither my business here, nor would it be my competence, to write of the development of truth about evolution since Darwin; e.g., to discuss the correct way of thinking about the units of selection.

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selves. What was the relation of his love for them to what he discovered about them (and indeed about us)? To love something with intelligence is to want it to be. What is it about the animals as the product of modification through natural selection which would make us want them to be? It is not extreme to point out that the era in which Darwin’s explanations have had such power in the life sciences has also been the era in which human beings have been responsible for the destruction of more species than at any other period. Obviously Darwin did not invent the repeating rifle; nor was he on the board of Dow Chemical. Nevertheless at a simple level it must be said that there is some connection between what we think other species to be (let alone our own) and how we treat them. Facts and values are not so disjoined as we have been led to believe. At a deeper level it may also be said that the same technological destiny brought forth Darwin’s science and the human conquest of the environment. It is more important, however, to ask: what is the relation between Darwin’s loving recognition, as reported by his friend, and what Darwin discovered about the animals? Obviously that ‘loving recognition’ was connected to the disciplined attention necessary to his discoveries; but what was discovered about them therein does not itself call forth love for them. To know that human and non-human species are modified through natural selection gives us a greater clarity about ourselves and others. We may indeed love the clarity and comprehensiveness of the formulation. But that which is known in the formulation provides us no reason to find beautiful that about which the formulation is made. It gives no reason why we should love ourselves or other animals. Can we love ourselves and others just because we have come to be through natural selection? The beauty of the world is not in the dominant modern formulation concerning life. The example of Darwin has been used because it is a leading illustration of the deep disjunction which has fallen on Western existence – the disjunction between beauty and truth. What we experience as beautiful in what we make, or in what we do not make, is cut apart from what we know about things in science. (I must avoid the language which would speak of ‘art or nature,’ because the greatest English writer was able to say ‘the art itself is nature.’)112 This disjunction of beauty and truth is the very heart of what has made technological civilization.

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In one of his last writings, Nietzsche stated this disjunction with great certainty. If my readers are sufficiently initiated into the idea that ‘the good man’ represents, in the total drama of life, a form of exhaustion, they will respect the consistency of Christianity in conceiving the good man as ugly. Christianity was right in this. For a philosopher to say, ‘the good and the beautiful are one’ is infamy; if he goes on to add, ‘Also the true’ one ought to thrash him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.f

The force of Nietzsche’s rhetoric may seem here to exaggerate when he says that truth is ugly. Indeed there are many truths which must seem to nearly everybody ugly. Darwin’s discoveries about natural selection do not make the animals ugly, but neither do they tell us why the animals are beautiful. The modern disjunction between the true and the beautiful is made particularly evident in saying that scientific propositions are ‘value neutral’ or ‘value free.’ Obviously people go on loving otherness because they find it beautiful. The issue here is not whether this can cease to be while there are human beings. Rather it concerns what happens when there is a disjunction between their experience of some beings as beautiful and what they are taught about the truth of such beings in the modern paradigm of knowledge. What is the result when they cannot hold in unity the love they experience with what they are being taught in technological science? The results face us in nearly every important circumstance of our lives. One public consequence is given in Nietzsche’s sentence ‘We pos-

f The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage 1968), 435, no. 822 (1888). If this writing was first concerned with the history of thought it would be interesting to trace the similarities and differences between Nietzsche’s words and Bacon’s vulgar patronizing of poetry in the second book of The Advancement of Learning. It was the fate of English thought to understand the early outlines of technological society; it was the fate of German thought later to look its deeper consequences in the face. When we read Matthew Arnold’s comfortable phrases about art taking the place of religion, one should compare them with Nietzsche’s unflinching recognition of the consequences of the disjunction between beauty and truth.

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sess art lest we perish of the truth.’ The avidity for the consumption of art in mass societies is an obvious fact. Yet the distinction I have made previously between art and entertainment can be interpreted unfairly concerning what happens in mass societies. The desire for entertainment, understood in the squalid terms of utilitarianism, is not all that holds people to the production and consumption of art. There is also the hope to find in it meaning in a world where beauty and truth have been publicly disjoined. The question still remains, however, whether this hope can be sustained when artists know, if they are at all educated, that the beauty they are bringing forth is disjoined from the truth of what is. Keats’ apparent platitude has often been ridiculed, but it allowed him to bring forth beautiful poems in great physical difficulty.113 Can we possess art when we perish of the truth? This disjunction lies at the heart of that paradigm of knowledge in which knowing and making are co-penetrated. Who can say what the world-wide dominance of that paradigm portends for the future? But something can be said of what it means for us Christians in the here and now. It could not be my competence to say what it means for fellow Christians in all the manifold occupations and occasions of society (that would be impertinence). But I have spent my life in multiversities, and therefore can speak about what this disjunction means for believers in that context. Yet even within this small compass, I do not intend to write of practical problems.g Rather, what I am concerned with is the dominance of this paradigm over the intellectual life of any university which is left in the multiversity. Many students come to our multiversities with some belief from outside the modern paradigm. Obviously I am not speaking here solely of Christian traditions and what they hand over of the eternal. Indeed it is easy to think that in the long haul it may be the Vedanta which is most resistant to destruction by technology. But in Canadian universi-

g As an example, a great agony arises today among Christians who wish to be doctors. They find it difficult to be admitted for such training unless they are willing to take part in the full work of their teachers. As the full work requires that they take part in a steady programme of foeticide (in a majority of cases simply undertaken for convenience), they are not in a position to gain admission to that training. That exclusion is naturally not much publicized by the medical profession. But such practical dilemmas are not my concern here, except to say again, ‘matter is our infallible judge.’

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ties the chief lingering is Christianity. In most cases that lingering remains as the residual remembrance of morality. To quote again the English vulgarian: Matthew Arnold said that ‘religion is morality tinged with emotion.’114 In their decadence certain Western Christians even suggest that that silly definition is true. The young who come to the multiversity from some tired tradition may not be much concerned with any discussion of ‘faith and the multiversity.’ They can accept the dominant paradigm with open arms because it is their ticket to professionalism and that is the name of the game. Rather I am concerned with the group at the multiversity with some sense of the eternal good which is God, and perhaps even some sense of the declaration of that eternity in Christ. For such men and women, the facing of the modern paradigm in its incarnation will be fairly direct, because they cannot take it as sufficient if they hold what they have been given of eternity. For people in this situation it is fortunate to have the capacity for reflection. This is not to say that reflection is the chief means of coming into the presence of eternity. We have been clearly told that it is not. Nor is reflection a capacity open to many. Nor is it a capacity confined to the intellectually bright with high IQs. For example, it seems clear that most scientists do not need to reflect. Indeed the very practice of the modern paradigm may turn them away from reflection. To do their work successfully generally inhibits them from reflecting on the paradigm within which their work is done. Nevertheless, in as intellectually broken a society as ours, it is good fortune to have the capacity for reflection. But in some ways not. There are loyal Christians (called by their critics ‘fundamentalists’) who generally say that ‘technology’ is not a paradigm of knowledge but a set of instruments – inventions which come from scientific discoveries. As a whole, they do not much reflect on the ontological implications of the modern paradigm. They therefore live with certainty in the modern. Such people often make crude mistakes in theory; but who does not? Nothing fills me with greater aesthetic annoyance than the scorn which has been heaped on such people by clever journalists and ‘intellectuals’ (whatever that word may mean). With or without the capacity for reflection, those who come to the multiversity with some memory, some intuition, some dense loyalty for the eternal good are faced with the modern paradigm which excludes the possibility of any such. They are faced with the implications of that

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exclusion the more their studies lead them to enter the truth of the paradigm. This has led to terrible diremptions. Dostoevsky wrote to Madame von Wisine: ‘I believe that there is nothing finer, deeper, more lovable, more reasonable, braver, and more perfect than Christ; and not only is there nothing, but there cannot be anything. More than that; if anyone told me that Christ is outside truth, and if it had been really established that truth is outside Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ than the truth.’115 But that came from a man who had been brought up surrounded by orthodoxy, who had spent his terrible exiled imprisonment with only the Gospels to read and who wrote the most substantial criticism of the West that I am aware of. The possibility that there is a disjunction between the entirely beautiful and the truth, and Dostoevsky’s certainty that he would stay with Christ, is declared by a great man who had lived on the limits of suffering. But for the most of us who do not and could not live on such heights, this disjunction between beauty and truth can be killing. For the young who really enter the multiversity it may kill them in the losing of those memories, those intuitions, those loyalties to the eternal good. The woman who wrote the definition of faith from which I have proceeded, once also wrote: ‘One can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.’116 That is a great hope given us by a woman who had pure regard and who had gone far. But did she, in the sheer force of her intellect, know how much the rest of us can be diverted by the modern paradigm from that fearful wrestling – and indeed from the pure regard? How is it possible to think that the modern paradigm is sufficient to the needs of human beings? And yet how is it possible, in the midst of that paradigm and its stranger and wilder consequences, to reach into the truth that the world proceeds from goodness itself? Appendix Questions about the history of thought arise concerning this writing. (1) Why ‘use’ the language of a great philosopher – in this case Plato – to describe Christianity, when the Gospels are little concerned with philosophy? (I put the word ‘use’ in quotation marks because philosophy

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always uses the user rather than he or she using it.) (2) Is it not absurd and antiquarian to write now of Christianity in the language of an ancient philosopher (albeit the greatest)? Would it not be wiser to ‘use’ the language of a modern philosopher? (1) The permutations and combinations of the relations that have been between Christianity and philosophy could make up a whole history of the Western world. It is not my business to write ten or more volumes about the history of those permutations and combinations. To speak of them elementarily: it is clear that Christianity is as much ‘the practice of dying’ as Socrates said that philosophy was.117 When we turn to either we come quickly upon the two great deaths which stand at the origins of Western life and thought. Yet these two deaths are very different. The calm, the wit, the practice of thought which are present at Socrates’ death may be compared with the torture, the agony, the prayers, which are present in Christ’s death. Just before drinking the hemlock Socrates makes a wonderful joke; in Gethsemane Christ’s ‘sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.’118 Indeed the difference is also stated in the fact that where Socrates’ wife is absent for most of Phaedo, the two Marys stand beneath the cross.119 Yet it is apposite that in his attempt to invert Platonism and to mock Christianity Nietzsche should have said: ‘Christianity is Platonism for the people.’120 The greatest nineteenth-century thinker was right to understand that the establishment of the highest modernity required not only the liberation of the West from Christianity, but also from Platonism, because of the deep connection between the two. At the beginning of his exoteric work, Beyond Good and Evil, this aphorism lays down the closeness between Christianity and Platonism. It can free the mind from all the nonsense of the assumption, in so much Biblical scholarship, that the achievement of such doctrines as the Incarnation and the Trinity were just mistakes of the Church fathers because they had wanted to Hellenize the Gospels. However much Christ’s life and death and resurrection were the events of divinity, human beings had to think their relation to other events. Because Platonism asserts the primacy of Goodness itself, it was considered the best language for this task. The close connection between Socrates and Christ lies in the fact that Socrates is the primal philosophic teacher of the dependence of what we know on what we love. In the central books of The Republic, Plato uses the image of the sun, the line and the cave to write of the journey

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of the mind into knowledge. In those images sight is used as a metaphor for love.121 Our various journeys out of the shadows and imaginings of opinion into the truth depend on the movements of our minds through love into the lovable. Indeed there are many ways of thinking about Socrates’ ‘turn around’ from interest in such phenomena as the clouds to his later interest in human matters. But one of these is his recognition of the interdependence between knowing and loving. This relation between Christ and Socrates is denied by those who would distinguish absolutely between two Greek words for love, eros and agape.122 Paul’s hymn to love uses the word agape which is best translated as charity;123 Plato’s Symposium is concerned with eros which is best translated as desire. Even as sweet-blooded a popular theologian as C.S. Lewis distinguishes between what he calls need-love and giftlove, which in their essence become for him desiring and charity.124 Obviously it is the case that there is a great range between my liking for scrambled eggs, and Francis loving the lepers.125 (Let alone all those eccentric and crazy desires that seem to make up the substance of most of our lives.) There are clearly very different kinds and examples of love. But this does not seem reason to draw too sharp distinctions between them, and in so doing deny that all love is one. Needs always imply something needed, and therefore the love of what is needed – good or bad. Human beings are in their essence needing beings, and when otherness has become completely absent for us, we are hardly human beings at all. It must be emphasized that for Plato the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but madness, and the nearest he can come to an example of complete madness is the tyrant, because in that case otherness has disappeared as much as can be imagined.126 On the other side, does not the giving of oneself away which we call charity imply some need in that giving? Is it not clear among the saints that they are not simply bestowing on others something by writ, but because they have seen what these others are? When charity is without eros it can become administrative dictate – however necessary the administration. A consequence of charity without need on the part of the charitable was expressed to me by a friend about the retarded and disabled: ‘How would you feel if everybody you had dealings with were paid for those dealings?’ Indeed those who rigorously disunify love by distinguishing needlove from gift-love and so place eros on the side of philosophy and agape

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on the side of Christianity, should remember the fable in Symposium. Eros was begotten at a celebration for the birth of Aphrodite. The parents were two beings called Fullness and Need. Eros not only goes around as a beggar but is in itself the activity of begetting upon the beautiful, both in bodies and souls.127 At a Western height, Francis was able to beget upon the lepers as beautiful. Of course the metaphor of sight as the need of otherness is combined with the metaphor of light which allows us to see. The philosophy of the dialogues is impregnated with the idea of receptivity or as was said in the old theological language, grace. What is given us and draws from us our loving is goodness itself; the perfection of all purposes which has been called God. We are hungry for the bread of eternity. In a way which is almost impossible to affirm, let alone describe, we can trust that we are offered such bread. In much modern thought the core of being human is often affirmed as our freedom to make ourselves and the world. Whatever differences there may be among Christians about what it is to be human, finally there must be the denial of this account of freedom. Whatever we are called to do or to make in the world, the freedom to do and to make cannot be for us the final account of what we are. For Plato freedom is not our essence. It is simply the liberty of indifference; the ability to turn away from the light we have sighted. There is no word in Greek which can be translated into the modern word ‘ideal.’ The modern use of ‘ideal’ means the opposite of ‘real.’ ‘Ideals’ are those thoughts in our heads by which we make ourselves and the world what we think they ought to be. In this essential matter of what human beings are, Platonism and Christianity are at one, as against the thinkers of ‘authentic’ freedom. To exist is a gift. Of course, for both Christianity and Platonism, goodness itself is an ambiguous mystery. In Christianity, God’s essence is unknowable. In The Republic it is said that goodness itself is beyond being.128 Both Christianity and Platonism have therefore often been ridiculed as final irrationality. If the purpose of thought is to have knowledge of the whole, how can we end in an affirmation which is a negation of knowing? It is, above all, these agnostic affirmations which bring Platonism and Christianity so close together. Without this agnosticism humans tend to move to the great lie that evil is good and good evil.129 In Christian language this great lie is to say that providence is scrutable.

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(2) Why not turn to the language of a modern philosopher to present Christ in relation to all that is? The chief argument for so doing would be that the great event between ancient and modern philosophy was Christianity, and therefore most modern philosophy is impregnated with Christian language (even if only in the form of secularized memory). Would it not therefore be wise to use such modern language to explicate the relation of Christ to all that is? My answer to this argument would be in one word – Heidegger. His writings make up the profoundest and most complete modern philosophy – certainly the deepest criticism of ancient thought which has ever been made in the name of modernity. Yet it is a philosophy which excludes something essential to Christianity. Heidegger writes that Nietzsche’s dictum ‘God is dead’ means that the God of morality is dead.130 Now indeed Christianity is not morality; nor is it ‘morality tinged with emotion.’ Nevertheless we have been told, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.’131 ‘Morality’ is indeed a boring word; but finally it is the same as ‘righteousness.’ If God who calls for righteousness is dead, then Christianity’s God is dead. Do we think that we know better than Heidegger what he means, and thus use him to write about Christianity? But if not Heidegger, whom? He speaks more comprehensively and more deeply than any modern philosopher. It is not wise to criticize Christianity in public these days when so many journalists and intellectuals prove their status by such criticism. Nevertheless it seems true that Western Christianity simplified the divine love by identifying it too closely with immanent power in the world. Both Protestants and Catholics became triumphalist by failing to recognize the distance between the order of good and the order of necessity. So they became exclusivist and imperialist, arrogant and dynamic. They now face the results of that failure. Modern scientists, by placing before us their seamless web of necessity and chance, which excludes the lovable, may help to re-teach us the truth about the distance which separates the orders of good and necessity. One of Nietzsche’s superb accounts of modern history was that Christianity had produced its own gravedigger.132 Christianity had prepared the soil of rationalism from which modern science came, and its discoveries showed that the Christian God was dead. That formula gets close to the truth of Western history, but is nevertheless not true. The web of necessity which the modern paradigm of knowledge lays before

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us does not tell us that God is dead, but reminds us of what Western Christianity seemed to forget in its moment of pride: how powerful is the necessity which love must cross. Christianity did not produce its own gravedigger, but the means to its own purification.

NIETZSCHE AND THE ANCIENTS: PHILOSOPHY AND SCHOLARSHIP I It is with an ambiguous mixture of approval and hesitation that one reads an article by the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford on ‘Nietzsche and the Study of the Ancient World.’133 Professor Lloyd-Jones begins by speaking of ‘the unfortunate prejudice which for most of this century has prevented most American and English people from recognizing the immense importance of this writer.’a The purpose of this article is to explain my ambiguous reaction, not only because the relation of Nietzsche to the study of the ancient world is intrinsically interesting, but also because it can be used as a paradigm through which to look at the current relation between scholarship and philosophy. The pedagogical question as to why we should encourage students to read Nietzsche turns into the more important question as to how we can teach students to read Plato from out of non-historicist assumptions.134 It is easy to state the cause of immediate pleasure in Lloyd-Jones’ article. He makes amends for all the misinterpretation and disregard of Nietzsche which has taken place in the English scholarly world. I simply repeat the bare outline of the story of that misinterpretation in Germany and England. When Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy in his twenties, the German scholar Wilamowitz launched a series of attacks on Nietzsche’s scholarship, from which he drew the conclusion that his account of Socrates was not to be taken seriously.135 Wilamowitz’s position had only a short run in Germany, because the relation between philosophy and scholarship was too deeply rooted in that

a In James C. O’Flaherty, ed., Studies in Nietzsche and the Classical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1976), 1–15.

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society. After 1900 it was difficult for educated Germans to avoid Nietzsche’s conclusion that those who faced the consequences of scientific positivism were likely, if they were moderns, to become historicist existentialists. Nietzsche’s portrait of Platonism was clearly a keystone in the thinking of that historicism. He had stated that scientific and philosophical rationalism had come forth from that arch-seducer, Socrates, as a means of turning away from what was given in the art of tragedy.136 Now, after more than two thousand years of dominance, that rationalism had produced in modern science and scholarship the means of overcoming itself. Human beings had at last the means of living beyond its seductions. Because of the power of Nietzsche’s statement of historicism in German intellectual life, the accusation that his account of the ancient world was unscholarly did not have much influence in Germany in this century. It had some influence, however, in that Heidegger took the opportunity to answer it at the beginning of his thousand page commentary on Nietzsche.137 Heidegger is not a writer much given to the use of wit, but he uses the high style of comedy in ridiculing those who claim that there is no need to read Nietzsche because he is not a respectable scholar.b The situation in the English-speaking world was different. That world was entering politically the stage of open competition between itself and Germany – the competition which was to lead to two massive world wars. Everything German, having once been praised, was becoming suspect. Moreover, the English-speaking societies had so long dominated the political world, first in the power of Great Britain and later in that of the USA, that they were immensely confident of their own traditions, which were those essentially of contractual liberalism. Societies which are so confident of their power in the world have little need of philosophy. ‘The owl of Minerva only begins to spread its wings in the dusk.’138 Therefore there was every reason for English-speakers to disregard what Nietzsche had written. The British classical scholars ridiculed or disregarded Nietzsche. The analytical philosophers made out that he was some kind of romantic rhetorician who disregarded the evident truth of modern science and wrote in a style so turgid as to be b Heidegger’s Nietzsche is surely a sine qua non for anybody who would understand Nietzsche. Commentaries of one great thinker on another are so rare that they should never be neglected.

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beyond the pale. This assessment was given added justification when Nietzsche was taken up by the most immoderate and indeed perverted side of the German political spectrum – the national socialists. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Übermensch could be taken, by those who did not need to read him, as a precursor of the most vulgar racism.139 Nietzsche was accused of the anti-Semitism which had been present in the intellectual gutters of Europe, and he was accused of it even in the light of his arguments that it was a terrible contemporary disease, and even when almost his last written words were a cry for the destruction of that gutter anti-Semitism.140 (How interesting it is that Frege is taken as a central founder of mathematical logic, and his wild anti-Semitic diatribes forgotten by the analytical philosophers.141 Nietzsche, who spoke early in the 1870s and 1880s of European anti-Semitism as a secular disease of terrible portent, has been condemned in England as a racist.) This mixture of misinterpretations made Nietzsche a ridiculed, unread and even proscribed writer in the English-speaking world.142 Lloyd-Jones says that he is a classical scholar and not a philosopher (whatever that may be in the current English-speaking context). Nevertheless he has read Nietzsche, not only in his early stage as a classical philologist, but also the main body of writings when he had given up that occupation. For those of us who do not know the details of the history of philology in Europe, Lloyd-Jones is clear about Nietzsche’s place in the various academic schools and their quarrels. He is particularly interesting about Nietzsche’s early philological writings from the time of his professorship at Basle. He clears out the negative political prejudices of the English world. But he is chiefly interested in Nietzsche as the man who first set in motion the movement of scholarship which was concerned with ‘the irrational’ in Greek civilization, ... the great movement that culminates, or seems to us to culminate, in The Greeks and the Irrational of E. R. Dodds ... Nietzsche saw the ancient gods as standing for the fearful realities of a universe in which mankind had no special privileges. For him what gave the tragic hero the chance to display his heroism was the certainty of annihilation; and tragedy gave its audiences comfort not by purging their emotions but by bringing them face to face with the most awful truths of human existence and by showing how those truths are what makes heroism true and life worth living. In comparison with such an insight, resting on a deeper

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vision of the real nature of ancient religion and the great gulf that separates it from religions of other kinds, the faults of Nietzsche’s book, glaring as they are, sink into insignificance. (p. 9)143

One is grateful for this summary of what Nietzsche said about ancient polytheism in The Birth of Tragedy. Yet the gratitude is accompanied by disquiet for the following reasons. How far does Lloyd-Jones want to go with Nietzsche? What will be the effect of bringing Nietzsche onto the stage of English-speaking classical scholarship, especially if it be inevitable that he enter centre stage?144 It is obviously proper for Lloyd-Jones to limit himself to the influence of Nietzsche on classical scholarship. But the question remains: as classical scholarship is but part of knowledge of the whole, can Nietzsche’s influence be limited, even within that scholarship itself? As Nietzsche wrote in his extremity: ‘After you had discovered me, it was no trick to find me; the difficulty now is to lose me.’c 145 This raises the more general question of the relation of any historical scholarship to philosophy. In any sane educational system (and I am not implying that the North American system is that), scholarship must see itself not as an end, but a means in the journey of minds towards the truth concerning the whole. Moreover, any scholarly activity is carried on by human beings who come to know what they know about the past in terms of some assumptions about the whole, that is in terms of some partaking in philosophy, however inexplicit. Nietzsche is above all the thinker who first laid before the Western world the doctrine of historicism radically defined. This teaching has now become the dominant methodological principle underlying most contemporary scholarship. I mean by historicism the doctrine that all thought (particularly the highest) depends, even in its very essence, upon a particular set of existing experienced circumstances – which in the modern world we call ‘history.’ Nietzsche gave us his account of the ancient gods within that historicism, and understands that account as part of the ‘truth’ of that historicism. The question then is whether one can limit his influence upon classical scholarship to the recognition of his interpretation of ‘irrationalism’ in Greek religion. The tensions in the relation between modern scholarship and philosophy are illustrated in E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, which c Letter to Georg Brandes 1888.

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Lloyd-Jones praises so highly. Dodds’ book is a fine product of a long life of scholarly reading among a wide variety of ancient authors. It lays before the reader many aspects of Greek life which had not been emphasized by the scholars who looked at the world through the eyes of a dying ‘idealism.’ To a political philosopher such as myself, whose central reading is not with such authors, and yet who wishes to have knowledge of the ancient world, the book brings much that is not otherwise available. Nevertheless, the facts are presented from out of an assumed British liberalism as that creed was expressed by decent Oxford gentlemen. Dodds goes so far as to identify very closely the ‘rationalism’ of fifth century Athens with nineteenth century English ‘rationalism.’ How far that goes may be seen when he identifies Socrates in Protagoras with Jeremy Bentham.146 Indeed in such an identification, the gap between scholarly and philosophical reading is startlingly present. Also, by the twentieth century, Oxford gentlemen were talking more openly about sex in their scholarship, and Dodds continually refers to his debt to Freud. But Dodds’ Freud is essentially a therapist of sexual difficulties whose view of human life is well contained within British liberalism. The book ends with a peroration that Western ‘rationalism’ (by this he means the English variety) may be able to save itself from ‘the failure of nerve’ which caused the end of Athenian rationalism, because we have the advantage of Freudian therapy which will allow us to come to terms with our irrationalism and contain it within our rational tradition.147 This final peroration is appropriate because it was presented first as lectures in California during the 1950s.148 At that time, the wisdom of American academia insisted on the close alliance of liberalism and psychoanalysis. Dodds’ Oxford Freud is not far from the YMCA Freud prevalent in his day in the US.d 149 The difficulty of such Freudianism united with a good-willed theory of democracy is that one doctrine of man takes over the private realm, while another is asked to rule in the public. Such a compromise may be practically acceptable in a society for a short span, but in the longer term such elementary inconsistency becomes apparent even to busy public men. Why should constitutional regimes be considered superior d An even more complacent book in the same tradition is Sir Kenneth Dover’s recent Greek Homosexuality (1978). The book’s cosiness flattens out all the complexities of that subject.

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to their alternatives if human beings are basically ‘ids’? It is well to remember for the purposes of my present argument that it was not Freud but Nietzsche who first and most consistently expounded the doctrine that human beings are ‘ids.’ Although Dodds’ book provides the reader with interesting facts about the classical world, the mishmash of ultimate presuppositions makes the book a confused read for a political philosopher. Because Lloyd-Jones praises Dodds as the culmination of classical scholarship about the ‘irrational’ in an article praising Nietzsche’s influence in the same field, one cannot leave alone the jumble of assumptions within which Dodds carries out that scholarship. The mixed assumptions raise the question of the relation between classical scholarship and philosophy. They also raise the question of what happens to classical scholarship if it takes philosophy as Nietzsche takes it. I hope it will not be considered impertinent trespass for somebody in ‘another field’ to touch this subject. It seems true to this outsider that classical studies before the Enlightenment were considered chiefly valuable as the necessary preparation for the study of philosophy. This study was allowed by rulers, not because it was thought intrinsically good, but as a necessary preparation for political judgment and theology. The study of Homer, the dramatists and the poets was secondary to this end. In short, classical studies were sustained in the great tradition of rationalism – above all because they led to the study of Plato and Aristotle. Whatever else Nietzsche’s writings may be, they must be taken as the most sustained, the deepest and most comprehensive criticism of that great tradition. The depth of that criticism is sustained throughout all his writings in his pondering on Socrates as the great seducer. From this follows his comprehensive attack on Plato. The purpose of classical scholarship must surely become very different if that comprehensive attack is taken as successful. In this sense the thought of Nietzsche cannot be taken as something that contributes to classical scholarship within a given account of what that scholarship is. It must be taken as something which, if true, will change the purposes of that activity fundamentally. What will be the place of classical scholarship in our universities as historicism becomes more articulate in the English-speaking world? In some ways historicism seems a closer friend of Greek studies than the long tradition of positivism which preceded it, and in which positive

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classical scholarship stood on one side and philosophy on the other, and the gap between them increasingly widened. Historicism has been both a cause and effect of that engrossment with the human past which so characterizes our best modern universities, and which is supported in our societies because of the desire to understand our inheritance in the midst of a fast changing world. This engrossment guarantees the continuance of chairs of classics. In this sense, historicism seems a friend of classical studies. Also historicism, in its grandeur in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger, recognizes that we as Westerners come forth from Socratic rationalism above all, and therefore educated men should study Greek philosophy to understand what they have to overcome. Yet at a deeper level one may ask whether such historicism is really the friend of classical studies. What is the effect on classical studies when crude historicisms in anthropology and archaeology teach that it is equally illuminating to the young to study the Incas and Philistines as to study Greek civilization? Among the various historicist substitutes for philosophy, anthropology now adds its name to that of sociology, economics and psychology. Classical studies will continue in the universities not only because they have been there, but because among the vast variety of past societies Greece and Rome are accidentally our own. But our own will be less important amidst the smorgasbord of the past. In such an atmosphere, classical studies will be further detached from the conception that they bring something unique to be known, and will increasingly be concerned with filling out the details of the past (setting Thucydides right, as the expression goes). To repeat, among the articulate historicists there will be a continuing interest in Plato and Aristotle because we can understand ourselves only in terms of the ‘problem’ of Socrates.150 But this study of the ancients will be a kind of modern therapy – the understanding of them so that we can free our minds of that rationalism of which they were the origin. For the highly educated, that historical therapy is necessary to allow them to become authentic moderns. Socrates turned away from tragedy (and what was given in its truth about sexuality) in saying that what was final was not the abyss, but good. The greatest achievement of modern scientists and philosophers was the destruction of Greek rationalism with its ‘substances,’ its ‘truth’ and its ‘good.’ The greatest height for man was laid bare in Greek tragedy, in that it made plain that the basic fact of existence was our encounter with an abyss – our

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encounter with the finality of chaos.151 Classical rationalism is seen as a species of neurotic fear, a turning away from the elementary fact of the abyss by means of a shallow identification of happiness, virtue and reason. Our study of it must therefore be a kind of historical therapy (similar to the way Nietzsche proposes to free us of Christianity).152 That therapy is a means for the educated to bring themselves to an even greater height than that proclaimed in tragedy. It will be a greater height because it will now take into itself both the primacy of the abyss and the overcoming of chance made possible through scientific technology. This will enable the great and the noble to be ‘masters of the earth.’ The combination of the primacy of the abyss with technology will produce the Übermensch – those who will deserve to be the masters of the earth.153 Humanity has been a bridge in evolution between the beasts and those who are higher than human beings. Nietzsche may have been the great political critic of Rousseau, but he accepts his account of human origins. Reason does not open us to the eternal; its greatness has been to transcend itself in its modern manifestations, so that we are both enabled and deserve to be masters of the earth. Nietzsche is not an ‘anti-technological naturalist,’ but one who believes that modern technology has allowed a new height for men.e For this reason one looks with fear as well as pleasure at praise of Nietzsche from the Regius Professor of Greek. There is some truth in Lloyd-Jones’ statement that Nietzsche was a valuable inspiration to classical studies because he turned attention to the irrational. But is it possible to take Nietzsche in this context and not take him seriously as the most sustained critic of Plato? What will happen to classical studies if they are even further removed from their traditional role as a means to the truth to be received in the study of classical philosophy? If this study is a therapy to allow us to realize that modern philosophy has freed us from the power of Socratic rationalism, will not this further weaken the power of classical studies in Western society? The Greeks will be our Incas which we study for their mythology. Already in the English-speaking world analytical philosophy has done much to weaken the study of ancient philosophy. The discovery of the irrational e See James Doull, ‘Naturalistic Individualism: Quebec Independence and an Independent Canada,’ in Eugene Combs, ed., Modernity and Responsibility: Essays for George Grant (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1983), 29–50.

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among the Greeks may through its historicism seem to enliven an interest in classical matters. But will this interest be of sustained seriousness when it is undertaken within existentialist historicism? It is this which makes one think that the praise of Nietzsche from Lloyd-Jones (and others like him) is a Janus as far as the future of classical studies is concerned.154 II There is no escape from reading Nietzsche if one would understand modernity. Some part of his whole meets us whenever we listen to what our contemporaries are saying when they speak as moderns. The words come forth from those who have never heard of him, and from those who could not concentrate sufficiently to read philosophy seriously. A hundred years ago Nietzsche first spoke what is now explicit in Western modernity. When we speak of morality as concerned with ‘values,’ of politics in the language of sheer ‘decision,’ of artists as ‘creative,’ of ‘quality of life’ as praise and excuse for the manifold forms of human engineering, we are using the language first systematically thought by Nietzsche. At the political level his thought appears appropriately among the atheists of the right; but equally (if less appropriately) it is on the lips of the atheists of the left. When we speak of our universities beyond the sphere of exact scientific technologies, what could better express the general ethos than Nietzsche’s remark: ‘Perhaps I have experience of nothing else but that art is worth more than truth.’155 And of course radical historicism is everywhere in our intellectual life. It even begins to penetrate the self-articulation of the mathematicized sciences. In such circumstances there is need to read Nietzsche and perhaps to teach him. One must read him as the great clarion of the modern, conscious of itself. If the question of reading Nietzsche is inescapable, the question of whether and how and to whom he should be taught is a more complex matter. It is particularly difficult for somebody such as myself, who in political philosophy is above all a lover of Plato within Christianity. The following story is relevant. A man with philosophic eros was recently asked the rather silly question: ‘At what period of time would you best like to have lived?’ He answered that he was lucky to have lived in the present period, because the most comprehensive

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and deepest account of the whole has been given us by Plato, and the most comprehensive criticism of that account has been given us by Nietzsche. In the light of that criticism, one can the better understand the depth of Platonic teaching. That is, one should teach Nietzsche as the great critic of Plato. The difficulty of reading Plato today is that one is likely to read him through the eyes of some school of modern philosophy, and this can blind one. For example, many moderns have in the last century and a half followed Kant’s remark in the first Critique that he was combining an Epicurean science with a Platonic account of morality.156 With such spectacles how much of Plato must be excluded? The great advantage of Nietzsche is that such strange combinations are not present. His criticism of Plato is root and branch. In the light of it the modern student may break through to what the Platonic teaching is in itself. Nevertheless, the teacher who is within the philosophic and religious tradition, and who also takes upon himself the grave responsibility of teaching Nietzsche, must do so within an explicit understanding with those he teaches that he rejects Nietzsche’s doctrine. If I were not afraid of being taken as an innocent dogmatist, I would have written that one should teach Nietzsche within the understanding that he is a teacher of evil. The justification of such a harsh position is difficult, particularly in universities such as ours in which liberalism has become little more than the pursuit of ‘value-free’ scholarship. This harsh position is clearly not ‘value-free.’ Moreover, such a position is ambiguous in the light of the fact that I do not find myself able to answer comprehensively the genius who was the greatest critic of Plato. But there is no need to excuse myself. Who has been able to give a refutation of radical historicism that is able to convince our wisest scientific and scholarly friends? Without such capability, what is it to say that one should teach within the rejection of Nietzsche? Is not this the very denial of that openness to the whole which is the fundamental mark of the philosophic enterprise? Is it not to fall back into that dogmatic closedness which is one form of enmity to philosophy? I will attempt to answer that by discussing Nietzsche’s teaching concerning justice. As a political philosopher within Christianity, my willingness to teach Nietzsche within an understanding of rejection, while at the same time I am not capable of the complete refutation of his historicism, turns around my

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inability to accept as true his account of justice. At least we need have no doubt as to what Nietzsche’s conception of justice is, and the consequences of accepting it. A caveat is necessary at this point in the argument. I am not making the mistake that is prevalent in much condemnation of Nietzsche – namely that there is no place for justice in his doctrine. His teaching about justice is at the very core of what he is saying. To understand it is as fundamental as to understand the teaching concerning ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical.’157 It is said unequivocally in a fragment written in 1885, towards the end of his life as writer. It happened late that I came upon what up to that time had been totally missing, namely justice. What is justice and is it possible? If it should not be possible, how would life be supportable? This is what I increasingly asked myself. Above all it filled me with anguish to find, when I delved into myself, only violent passions, only private perspectives, only lack of reflection about this matter. What I found in myself lacked the very primary conditions for justice.f

This quotation does not give content to Nietzsche’s conception of justice. Its nature appears in two quotations from the unpublished fragments of 1884. ‘Justice as function of a power with all encircling vision, which sees beyond the little perspectives of good and evil, and so has a wider advantage, having the aim of maintaining something which is more than this or that person.’ Or again: ‘Justice as the building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought which proceeds from the appraisement of value: highest representative of life itself.’g 158 What is the account of justice therein given? What is it to see ‘beyond the little perspectives of good and evil’; to maintain ‘something which is more than this or that person’? What is ‘the building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought’? What is being said here about the nature of jus-

f Nietzsche Werke (Leipzig: Naumann 1904), XIV, 385. This translation and the ones that follow are my poor own. How does one translate properly this polysyllabic language of compounds into a language which has reached its greatest heights in the use of the monosyllable? How does one not lose both the substance and the rhetoric of that immoderate stylist? g Nietzsche, op. cit., Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884.

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tice would require above all an exposition of why the superman, when he is able to think the eternal recurrence of the identical, will be the only noble ruler for a technological age, and what he must be ready to do to ‘the last men’ who will have to be ruled.159 That exposition cannot be given in the space of an article. Suffice it to speak popularly: what is given in these quotations is an account of justice as the human creating of quality of life. And is it not clear by now what are the actions which follow from such an account? It was not accidental that Nietzsche should write of ‘the merciless extinction’ of large masses in the name of justice, or that he should have thought ‘eugenical experimentation’ necessary to the highest modern justice.160 And in thinking of these consequences, one should not concentrate alone on their occurrence during the worst German regime, which was luckily beaten in battle. One should relate them to what is happening in the present Western regimes. We all know that mass foeticide is taking place in our societies. We all should know the details of the eugenical experimentation which is taking place in all the leading universities of the Western world. After all, many of us are colleagues in those universities. We should be clear that the language used to justify such activities is the language of the human creating of quality of life, beyond the little perspectives of good and evil. One must pass beyond an appeal to immediate consequences in order to state what is being accepted with Nietzsche’s historicist account of justice. What does a proper conception of justice demand from us in our dealings with others? Clearly there are differences here between the greatest ancient and modern philosophers. The tradition of political thought originating in Rousseau and finding different fulfilments in Kant and Hegel demands a more substantive equality than is asked in Plato or Aristotle. What Hegel said about the influence of Christianity towards that change is indubitably true.161 But the difference between the ancients and the moderns as to what is due to all human beings should not lead us to doubt that in the rationalist traditions, whether ancient or modern, something at least is due to all others, whether we define them as rational souls or rational subjects. Whatever may be given in Plato’s attack on democracy in his Republic, it is certainly not that for some human beings nothing is due.162 Indeed to understand Plato’s account of justice, we must remember the relation in his thought between justice and the mathematical conception of equality.163

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In Nietzsche’s conception of justice there are other human beings to whom nothing is due – other than extermination. The human creating of quality of life beyond the little perspectives of good and evil by a building, rejecting, annihilating way of thought is the statement that politics is the technology of making the human race greater than it has yet been. In that artistic accomplishment, those of our fellows who stand in the way of that quality can be exterminated or simply enslaved. There is nothing intrinsic in all others that puts any given limit on what we may do to them in the name of that great enterprise. Human beings are so unequal in quality that to some of them no due is owed. What gives meaning in the fact of historicism is that willed potentiality is higher than any actuality. Putting aside the petty perspectives of good and evil means that there is nothing belonging to all human beings which need limit the building of the future. Oblivion of eternity is here not a liberalaesthetic stance, which still allows men to support regimes the principles of which came from those who had affirmed eternity; oblivion of eternity here realizes itself politically. One should not flirt with Nietzsche for the purposes of this or that area of science or scholarship, but teach him in the full recognition that his thought presages the conception of justice which more and more unveils itself in the technological West.

RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES The words ‘arts faculties’ and ‘humanities’ are unclear and ill-thought terms by which to describe the grouping together of certain studies. Nevertheless, the word ‘humanities’ is the present convention.164 The chief conflict of roles among the best young professors in the humanities is the same as that in other faculties – the conflict between the demands of teaching and administration on the one hand, and the demands to produce research on the other. There is, however, one great difference between the situation in the humanities and in the other faculties. Research in natural science, medicine, engineering, law, and even the social sciences has significance for the best professors and students, and is related closely to the life of the society they inhabit. Research in the humanities can less and less be seen as having any significance by the best professors and students. This is because it is ori-

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ented today towards a ‘museum culture,’ not to knowledge necessary to human existence. A recent president of the University of Toronto announced a book about that university entitled Halfway Up Parnassus.165 You will remember that Parnassus is the home of the muses. An inaccurate title. The Robarts library is not the home of the muses, but their mausoleum, where they are preserved as Lenin in the Kremlin.166 And this is even truer of the universities in the United States which Canadians now imitate. I use the metaphor ‘museum culture’ because museums are places where we observe past life as object. This present situation is clear in the strange fact that at one and the same time never has so much money been put into the organized study of the past and never has the past had less meaning in our lives. Why is it that humanities research produces only this irrelevant museum culture? The overriding reason is of course that any high culture other than technology is now simply epigonal in Europe, and high culture in the US is an epigone of these epigones, and we in Canada are in turn an epigone of the US. But I want to take one simple point from that destiny – the strange marriage which has taken place between scholarship and research. In any sensible university, scholarship has always been considered a useful means. It has recently been raised to a sacred word to be spoken of in a fruity voice reminiscent of the sanctuary. When human beings are oblivious of eternity, they always make false things sacred. But beyond this false sacralization of scholarship, a deeper process has been going on – a change in the very nature of scholarship itself because of its marriage with research. What then is given us in the word ‘research’? All societies are dominated by a particular account of knowledge and this account lies in the relation between a particular aspiration of thought and the effective conditions for its realization. Our account of knowledge is that which finds its archetype in modern physics with all the beauty given in the discoveries of that science. Our account is that we reach knowledge when we represent things to ourselves as objects, summonsing them before us so that they give us their reasons. That requires well-defined procedures.167 Those procedures are what we call ‘research.’168 What we now mean by research is not then something useful for some ways of knowing and not for others. For us it belongs to the very essence of what we think knowledge is, because it is the effective condition for the realization of any knowledge. Research and team research have pro-

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duced and will continue to produce extensive results in the progressive sciences. What happens when the procedures for ordering objects before us to give us their reasons become dominant in ‘humanities’ scholarship?169 The very procedure of research means that the past is represented as an object. But any thing in so far as it is an object only has the meaning of an object for us. That is why it is quite accurate to use the metaphor of the mausoleum about our humanities research. Moreover when we represent something to ourselves as object we stand above it as subject – the transcending summonsers. We therefore guarantee that the meaning of what is discovered in such research is under us, and therefore in a very real way dead for us in the sense that its meaning cannot teach us anything greater than ourselves. This is why scholarship as research has changed the very meaning of the word. As Heidegger has shown so clearly, the place that experiment plays in the progressive sciences is taken in humanities ‘research’ by the critique of historical sources.170 Previous scholarship was a waiting upon the past so that we might find in it truths which might help us to think and live in the present. Research scholarship in humanities cannot thus wait upon the past, because it represents the past to itself from a position of its own command. From that position of command you can learn about the past; you cannot learn from the past. This stance of command necessary to research therefore kills the past as teacher. The strange event is this: the more the humanities have gained wealth and prestige by taking on the language and methods of the progressive sciences, the less significance they have in the society they inhabit. In the minds of many generous natural scientists ‘the humanities’ are believed to be part of the traditional university, and as such they generously support them. But the assumption they start from is not a fact. The humanities research which is being realized in Canada is not to be identified with the traditional university. It comes forth from intercourse between two very untraditional partners: the post-Nietzschean nineteenth-century German university which mounted American capitalism. In emphasizing that our model is German I am simply pointing out that in intellectual fields particularly, the destiny of technological cultures was first made manifest in Germany, and was an enormous break with the European past. The mating of the German model of the university with American capitalism produced in the fifties its Chica-

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gos and Berkeleys and Yales. Now in the 1970s we are producing our imitations of these in English-speaking Canada. Poor old Canada is enthusiastically taking on the American wave in its decadence.171 I have no right to speak of French-Canadian universities, but I have the right to point out that if their administrators think they are going to be saved from this by their relation with France they should remember that the intellectual culture of France has been increasingly dominated by the same necessary technological forces. What then happens to bright young humanities professors in ‘the museum culture’ they are asked to reproduce? The best of their students think they are going to get something living from the humanities, and when they find they are not, opt for the real culture which is all around them. Outside the official university, there is the real culture of the movies, popular music, and polymorphous sexuality. But there is no relation between the culture of the humanities and the popular culture. The first sterilizes the great art and thought of the past; the second is democratic but at least not barren. Which would you choose? Within the university there is the real culture of exciting research which truly does progress in the natural sciences, medicine, law, the social sciences, etc. ... The young humanities professor must be productive in the industry he is part of; but he must teach students who are not often held by the museum research which the professor must turn out for his promotion. If the teacher is at all bright, he probably wants more from life than to be a junior executive in ‘the past’ industry. For this reason all across North America those of the clearest mind and noblest imagination are leaving the humanities in droves. They leave the field more and more free to the technicians who have narrow but intense ambitions to build careers in this industry. It is all too easy to be comic about the way our scholarship industry lays European ‘civ’ before us in a form appropriate to intellectual tourists. What is more constructive is to try to think why its practitioners believe that their work is of such value. To make that attempt would be above all to think why we Westerners have believed since Rousseau that there is a realm of being called ‘history’ and to try to understand what the science of that realm was supposed to teach us.172 It will have to be thought if the humanities are to escape their present busy and well-paid decadence.173 This decadence (where high ends end in museums) is a civilizational

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destiny which can be little shaped by the activities of university administrators or of government officials. But in thinking about the university of the future, administrators must inevitably be faced by this problem: where are those questions going to be ‘re-searched,’ the answers to which cannot be found in the modern sciences of nature or of history? I take for granted that such questions belong to human beings as long as there are human beings. If these questions are to be thought about within our universities, this will not be much done within the humanities faculty. If not there, where in the university? If not in the university, where in our society? Happily the eternal can take care of itself and therefore these questions, however difficult, are not easily avoided.

THE LANGUAGE OF EUTHANASIA – with Sheila Grant I During the last decade there has arisen on this continent a new threat to the traditional account of life and death.174 Some forms of mercy killing have become acceptable to the public conscience, and there is pressure for these to be widely extended. The idea is not new, but the restraints that held it in check have been severely weakened.175 It cannot be stressed too strongly that the occasions on which euthanasia is being considered as a possible option are likely to be full of anguish and complexity for those concerned.176 They may be suffering from all kinds of contradictory pressures. The time when they need good judgment may be the time when they are least capable of it, being swamped with grief and fear and guilt. Doctors are in a position to exert extreme influence, as they alone have all the medical facts, are responsible for their interpretation, and are authority figures to begin with. But however agonizing the decisions in particular cases, the rest of us do nobody any service by refusing to make judgments about euthanasia with as clear an eye as possible.177 The distinction must be made: one must judge acts but never human beings. What makes discussion of this subject so difficult is that there is a great public confusion about terminology.178 The word ‘euthanasia’ means literally ‘a good death,’ something we all want.179 The current meaning of the word is ‘deliberate intervention to bring about the death

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of another human being,’ usually because the life of that person is judged valueless. Mercy killing was the old word for this practice, but it is not now always appropriate, as mercy is not always the motive for the killing.180 In this writing we will use the word ‘euthanasia’ as it is now employed. It is first necessary to distinguish euthanasia from certain perfectly valid medical practices which are often confused with it.181 The use of large doses of painkilling drugs may have the side effect of somewhat hastening death, but are given to alleviate pain. This is not euthanasia, as its purpose is not to procure death. Another procedure is the refusal to initiate or continue life-supporting treatments, such as respirators, on those who are already in the process of dying.182 To prolong dying is not a doctor’s duty, and has never been considered good medical practice. The current temptation for doctors to do this arises because they now have such good machines.183 It must be forcefully stressed that the proper refusal to prolong inevitable death is quite different from deliberately causing the death of someone who is not already dying. Only the latter is euthanasia. Yet this confusion is widespread.184 The usual response to an expression of disapproval of euthanasia is: ‘So you want to keep all those poor old people on respirators indefinitely.’ In March of 1980 there was a CBC talk show that went like this: Interviewer: ‘Now doctor, tell us what euthanasia is.’ Doctor: ‘It’s killing – because you feel somebody’s life isn’t worth living.’ Interviewer (reproachfully): ‘Are you sure you don’t mean letting someone die with dignity?’ Doctor: ‘No, that is quite different.’

The interviewer immediately turned to keeping the dying alive, and confusion reigned for the rest of the programme.185 If the public rightly disapproves of the abuse of technology on the dying, yet wrongly identifies euthanasia with letting the dying die, then our attitude to euthanasia inevitably becomes more positive. The sacredness of human life becomes overlaid in the muddle as to what euthanasia is and is not. The old distinctions about euthanasia, direct and indirect, active and passive, also obscure more than they illuminate. We will concentrate on the three kinds of euthanasia most used nowa-

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days: (a) voluntary, (b) involuntary killing of aged or comatose people, and (c) ‘benign neglect’ of infants (which is also of course killing). Voluntary euthanasia occurs when a patient asks a doctor or relative to end his life, generally with a lethal drug. It is often called ‘assisted suicide.’ It is not the same as refusing treatment, which is the right of any patient. Suicide is no longer illegal in Canada, but assisting suicide is. So it is not surprising that we have little definite information about the frequency of this kind of euthanasia.186 Most doctors would presumably try to put a patient out of his misery, not by killing him, but by relieving his pain and fear, which may be all he actually wants. There have been no requests for euthanasia at hospices and palliative care units.187 Voluntary euthanasia is being encouraged by societies such as ‘Exit’ in England, and ‘Hemlock’ in California. ‘The right to die’ is called for. In a book published by ‘Exit’ it is suggested that there are only two ways of dying with dignity – by voluntary euthanasia or by suicide. Those who are ready to approve of the ‘right to die’ in our laws may not realize until too late that what they are in fact encouraging is the ‘right to kill.’ Adult involuntary euthanasia takes place among those who for reasons of age, incurable disease, coma, or partial brain damage have a life expectation of very low quality. The future of such patients may involve mental deficiency, pain, hospitalization and expense. We do not know how often this kind of euthanasia is done, though we know that it is done.188 Although most of the medical profession are at present against it, there is strong public pressure for its legalization. The slogan, as Heather Morris suggests, may well be ‘Every granny a wanted granny.’189 In these cases, methods of omission are likely to be used rather than a lethal injection. Ordinary life support may be removed, such as intravenous feeding from a patient who cannot eat enough by mouth. Or life supporting equipment, such as respirators or dialysis machines, may be withdrawn from patients who are not dying, and who need them. (To repeat, this is not to be confused with the removal of a machine from a dying patient whose condition cannot be improved by it.) The law still calls it homicide to bring about the death of a patient, but in the US since 1976, the courts have begun to use ‘quality of life’ judgments in decisions concerning death.190 Extensions of this basis of judgment may eventually cover large segments of the population –

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such as the mentally retarded, whose life expectation is, by definition, deemed of low quality, and therefore perhaps not worth preserving. The third kind of euthanasia, now established and practised widely on this continent, is the medical management of defective infants by killing a selection of them. The practitioners call it ‘benign neglect,’ which sounds better than infanticide. This is the most extreme development yet. It is carried out and written about quite openly. It meets very little opposition. The courts stand aloof, the public is largely indifferent, the medical profession divided.191 In 1971 the Johns Hopkins hospital made a movie about the 15-day starvation of a Down’s syndrome baby, whose parents did not accept their retarded child.192 Since then respectable hospitals in the USA and Canada have announced in the press that this is their practice. Articles in praise of this method of starvation have been written in medical journals and popular magazines. Another method of ‘benign neglect’ used much in England, is slower but somewhat less painful than straight starvation. The baby is sedated and given glucose and water when he or she wakes and cries. As heavily sedated babies do not cry very often, they die in something under three weeks. Proponents of euthanasia talk much about children who are mere vegetables. This term usually refers to anencephalic babies, born without an upper brain. They will die whatever we do or do not do. Their prognosis is quite clear at birth. As they only live a few days or a few weeks, and do not suffer, and as only one such birth occurs in a thousand hospitalized births, it is hardly necessary to open the floodgates of euthanasia to deal with them. One of the commonest defects for which euthanasia is used is spina bifida. This may involve mental retardation, will include many physical disabilities, and will need much surgery.193 But it is possible for many of them to survive the early difficulties and live with some handicaps.194 The hydrocephaly that often occurs can now be controlled, and large advances in treatment have been made in recent years. Doctors are sharply divided about whether this condition should be managed by ‘benign neglect’ or not.195 Under the older medical ethics of the Hippocratic oath, gravely defective infants were treated, like other patients, according to a policy of medical indications alone. They were helped if it was possible. If treatment could not help their condition, they were made comfortable

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and allowed, but not forced, to die. They were not starved to death for their own sake, or for that of parents or medical staff. Particularly in this third kind of euthanasia it is perfectly apparent that the sacred restraints which once protected the life of the weak and the unwanted have now substantially broken down. As the American theologian Paul Ramsey has written: ‘Future historians may record that it was over the dead bodies of our children that euthanasia first came to be accepted in our society.’196 There has been no strong or consistent opposition from the Christian churches. Indeed the Anglican Church of Canada has produced a book which makes a principle of refusing to condemn the principle of euthanasia.197 II In the confines of this writing we are simply going to point to various changes in the application of certain key words and phrases, by which popular language has helped to cover up what has been happening to our society’s perception of human life.198 This language, by its familiarity and ambiguity, can bind together the religious believer and the atheist, people who hold very different beliefs as to the nature of things.199 It is not surprising that the softening up for ‘mercy killing’ and ‘people selection’ should be done by slogans and language changes, since the public view of abortion has already been turned upside down by the same process. The words we are going to examine are: ‘person,’ ‘personhood’ and ‘humanhood,’ ‘death with dignity,’ and ‘quality of life.’200 The first group of words to be examined is ‘person,’ ‘personhood,’ and ‘humanhood.’ Without the new distinctions that have accrued to ‘person,’ it would have been very unlikely that believers and atheists could speak the same language about euthanasia. For many centuries, the most general meaning of the word ‘person’ has been that of individual man, woman or child, as distinct from a non-human animal. From being mainly a neutral word, its meaning has gradually become more precise and more positive, through association with its use in law and the language of democracy. It suggests now an acknowledgment of respect for another member of our species, to whom we grant the same uniqueness and the same rights that we claim for ourselves. Among Christians, ‘person’ has been given still weightier associations by its application in a special sense to the Trinity. Except

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for the Divine Trinity, all other persons are human beings, and until very recently all human beings were persons. As the idea of soul was made opaque under the influence of modern science, ‘person’ was brought in to maintain the dignity of the individual. In the famous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the American Supreme Court decided that foetuses were not ‘persons in the full sense.’201 The concept was still applied to all born human offspring. But in the last years of the 1970s, discrimination between persons and non-persons has become common among doctors, lawyers and theologians. Already the decision of which infants to save and which to neglect is not made on medical considerations alone but according to which is judged a person. In 1972 Joseph Fletcher, once an Episcopalian clergyman, proposed fifteen indicators of what he called ‘humanhood.’202 These indicators have had great influence on this continent. Among them he singled out above all ‘neo-cortical function’ – that is, the functioning of that part of the brain from which come our intellectual activities. He assumed that these activities can be measured by a person’s ability with IQ tests. Thus he writes: ‘Any individual of the species homo sapiens who falls below the IQ 40 mark in a Stanford-Binet test ... is questionably a person; below the 20 mark, not a person.’a Fletcher applies this proposition with shocking consistency. Anybody who has knowledge of the retarded knows that children with Down’s syndrome are usually capable of wonderful powers of affection and communication. Yet Fletcher makes quite clear what he would do with them. ‘True guilt,’ he writes ‘arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down’s is not a person.’b (Notice that the title of the article is ‘The Right to Die,’ when he is in this case talking of the right to kill.) In other words, it is quite proper to kill the baby at birth. Fletcher’s indicator is appalling because it identifies our humanity with our intellect.203 Traditional teaching has always praised intellectual activity, but it has also known that it is subordinate to love and must be used in the service of love. We all know people less clever than ourselves who are much finer persons than we are. On the other hand, anybody who works in a university knows cleverer people than hima Joseph Fletcher, ‘Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man,’ Hastings Center Report 2/5 (November 1972): 1–4. b Joseph Fletcher, ‘The Right to Die,’ Atlantic Monthly (April 1968).

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self who are mean and small-minded. Are we saying that the image of God in the soul depends above all on how well we can think? What then becomes of the account of God as love?204 And clearly the implication is present in Fletcher’s indicators: if the right to claim personhood depends on the degree of our brain power, then we must conclude that the higher the IQ the more perfect the person. What then becomes of St Paul’s great thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians?205 To exalt neo-cortical function says something very strange about God’s love for us. As Paul Ramsey writes: ‘There is no indication at all that God is a rationalist whose care is a function of indicators of our personhood, or of our achievement within those capacities.’c Moreover God’s presence in and for someone else is certainly not dependent on our recognition of it. Surely we cannot tell how God communicates with those who do not make it on the Stanford-Binet test. At this point, agnosticism is the appropriate response. The exaltation of the intellectual activities goes with the phrase ‘mere biological life.’ This is an expression which should make us cautious. As a phrase it is almost meaningless, as every living body is the body of a particular being, in this case an imperfect human being.206 This identification of cleverness with ‘personhood’ must also have obvious social implications in terms of the era we are living in. It should not be forgotten that the country which had the highest rate of literacy and the most advanced educational system in the world was Germany. Yet Germany produced the Hitlerian regime of total war and genocide. Indeed euthanasia was carried out because of the belief that certain human beings were ‘non-persons.’ As a very great German, Luther, once said, a nation which educates itself without love will become a nation of clever devils.207 Faith is the experience that the intellect is illuminated by love.208 What does it portend for the future that the distinction should be made between human beings who are to be called persons and those who are not? If the soul can be measured and its value to God determined by an IQ test, does this not give society the right to rid itself not only of the retarded, but also of the useless aged? From there it is a small step to the permanently ill and then beyond that to the non-con-

c Paul Ramsey, Ethics at the Edge of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press 1978), 205.

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formists and beyond that to the politically dissident.209 Indeed it is just because Christianity proclaims the God who is love that we are asked to be tender to those persons who find it hard to realize their full personhood. Clever technocrats who have dropped their religious beliefs may decide that if you have not reached such and such an intellectual level, then you are not to be counted as a person. But Christians cannot so decide, because we were called to love our neighbours and not just the neighbours who are qualified on the Stanford-Binet test.210 The second phrase to be considered is ‘death with dignity.’ The prospect of death can be unacceptable to all our instincts, the end of our ‘little brief authority’;211 dignity is one of the beautiful rewards of being human. No wonder the slogan ‘death with dignity’ is irresistible. The very concept overcomes one of the horrors in our anticipation of our own death. We want it for ourselves, how can we deny it to others if it is in our power to give it to them? Two main questions arise: can dignity be integral to human death? If so, what kind of dignity will it be? The meaning of the word ‘dignity’ is near to ‘worthiness,’ often the visible expression of the inner strength and worthiness that calls for respect in others. In so far as ‘dignity’ means being in command of oneself and one’s bodily functions, independent of the help of others, free from medical intervention, showing neither fear nor pain, it is irreconcilable with most kinds of dying and with all kinds of death. If that were an adequate account of human dignity, the death of Socrates would be more dignified than the death of Christ, and a well planned suicide better than either. This must be the kind of dignity that the leader of ‘Exit’ referred to when he declared that suicide and voluntary euthanasia were the only ways to die with dignity. Most of us have forgotten our true status. We do not have complete control of ourselves, we are not independent of others, at birth and death we are helpless, and never at any time are we autonomous (the maker of our own laws).212 In much modern theology about death, it seems to have been forgotten that we are creatures, dependent on God’s love, and not simply our own masters.213 Autonomy is far from Gethsemane, and man is never more supremely dignified than when he manages, with whatever agony, to say with Christ: ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’214 This is surely the kind of dignity which St Peter is promised by Christ: ‘When thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldst not.’215 As

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G. K. Chesterton has said: ‘God alone knoweth the praise of death.’216 The third phrase to be considered is ‘quality of life.’ Nearly two hundred years ago Dr Christoph Hufeland wrote: ‘If the physician presumes to take into consideration in his work whether a life has value or not, the consequences are boundless, and the physician becomes the most dangerous man in the state.’217 In 1920 a book was published in Germany called The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, by a prominent jurist, Karl Binding, and a distinguished psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche.218 It advocated that there should be no legal penalty for the killing of ‘absolutely worthless human beings.’ It sold well and was very influential. It paved the way for the later activities of the Nazis. Today the idea of life devoid of value is very ordinary. It is usually expressed by the innocent sounding phrase, ‘quality of life.’ When it is used positively, it suggests the caring professions, working together to improve living conditions for the less fortunate. As a slogan it is similar to ‘every child a wanted child.’ The phrases sound pleasant but they hide their own main point: what is going to happen to those not considered to have quality of life? It is a sad fact that in the context of medical and life-and-death decisions, quality of life becomes relevant mainly when used negatively.219 When a patient is normal and the means of helping him available, he will be given the indicated treatment as part of ordinary medical practice, without any reference to ‘quality of life’ decisions. When a patient is abnormal, ‘quality of life’ arises in consideration of whether his life is worth preserving. Of course, if quality of life criteria are used negatively for stopping life support for a dying patient, no killing is being done. To repeat, letting the dying die is not euthanasia. Hippocrates put the matter well: ‘In general terms, [medicine] is to do away with the suffering of the sick, to lessen the violence of their diseases, and to refuse to treat those who are overmastered by their diseases, realizing that in such cases medicine is powerless.’220 Nevertheless the fact that ‘quality of life’ statements are frequently heard in innocent if unnecessary contexts makes the phrase all the more acceptable when it is sounding someone’s death knell. Should life-saving surgery be done on an infant whose intelligence will be lower than normal (as in Down’s syndrome babies with atresia)?221 Should an elderly patient be refused help because his or her clarity is starting to disappear?222 Should unborn infants be aborted when amniocentesis shows abnormalities which will seriously lower their

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quality of life? Judgments so based can be applied more and more widely. Life-saving treatment can be refused to the retarded, just because they are retarded.223 Decisions for euthanasia based on ‘quality of life’ assume that we are in a position to judge when someone else’s life is not worth living. There is absolutely no evidence that the handicapped or the retarded would prefer to be dead.224 How do we compare an imperfect or restricted life with no life at all? Suicide among the handicapped is lower than among ‘normal’ people. Can we assume that other people would prefer death if they were smart enough to realize how wretched their lives were compared to ‘normal’ people? This argument is often put forward quite seriously. ‘Quality of life’ has a persuasive ring about it. To repeat, we all want a good life. But where do the implications of the slogan lead? When it is used so as to imply that some people have the right to judge that others do not have the right to be, then its political implications lead straight to totalitarianism.225 It must be remembered that ‘quality of life’ was made central to political thought by the philosopher Nietzsche, who taught the sacred right of ‘merciless extinction’ of large masses of men. The three ideas which have been discussed – ‘death with dignity’ and human autonomy, the distinction between ‘persons’ and ‘non-persons,’ and ‘quality of life’ judgments – all have something in common.226 They are all used dogmatically, leading to great confidence in our right to control human life. These are areas where the great religious tradition at its best has been restrained by agnosticism and a sense of transcendent mystery. Some believers have tried to combine these two views of life in a crudely simplistic manner.227 They have identified the freedoms technology gives us with the freedom given by truth.228 The result in the public world, if policy flowed from this identification, would be the destruction of cherished political freedoms.229

ABORTION AND RIGHTS – with Sheila Grant I We are often told these days that the rights of women require the freedom to obtain abortions as part of the liberty and privacy proper to

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every individual.230 When the argument for easy abortion is made on the basis of rights, it clearly rests on the weighing of the rights of some against the rights of others. The right of a woman to have an abortion can only be made law by denying to another member of our species the right to exist. The right of women to freedom, privacy and other good things is put higher than the right of the foetus to continued existence. Behind this conflict of rights, there is unveiled in the debate about abortion an even more fundamental question about rights themselves. What is it about human beings that makes it proper that we should have any rights at all? Because of this the abortion issue involves all modern societies in basic questions of political principle.231 These questions of principle were brought out into the open for Americans, when the Supreme Court of that country made it law that no legislation can be passed which prevents women from receiving abortions during the first six months of pregnancy.232 In laying down the reasons for that decision, the judges speak as if they were basing it on the supremacy of rights in a democratic society. But to settle the case in terms of rights, the judges say that the mother has all the rights, and that the foetus has none.233 Because they make this distinction, the very principle of rights is made dubious in the following way. In negating all rights to the foetuses, the court says something negative about what they are, namely that they are such as to warrant no right to continued existence. And because the foetus is of the same species as the mother, we are inevitably turned back onto the fundamental question of principle: what is it about the mother (or any human being) that makes it proper that she should have rights?234 Because in the laws about abortion one is forced back to the stark comparison between the rights of members of the same species (our own), the foundations of the principles behind rights are unveiled inescapably. What is it about our species that gives us rights beyond those of dogs or cattle?235 The legal and political system, which was the noblest achievement of the English-speaking societies, came forth from our long tradition of free institutions and common law, which was itself produced and sustained by centuries of Christian belief. Ruthlessness in law and politics was limited by a system of legal and political rights which guarded the individual from the abuses of arbitrary power, both by the state and other individuals. The building of this system has depended on the struggle and courage of many, and was fundamentally founded on the

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Biblical assumption that human beings are the children of God.236 For this reason, everybody should be properly protected by carefully defined rights. Those who advocate easy abortion in the name of rights are at the same time unwittingly undermining the very basis of rights.237 Their complete disregard for the rights of the unborn weakens the very idea of rights itself. This weakening does not portend well for the continuing health of our system.238 In the modern era, terrible programmes of persecution have been carried out by regimes of almost every persuasion, not only against political opponents, but against whole races and against whole classes of people, such as the aged and the unprotected young.239 Where the doctrine of rights has been denied (above all the right to existence), whole groups of individuals have been left completely unprotected.240 Mass murder comes when we forget what a human being is, and begin to regard people as accidental conglomerations of matter. A technological vision of man or woman as an object means that we can apply our ‘improvements’ to them as objects with increasing efficiency. Once we deny justice to any human life, then we are well on the road to the kind of thinking that impels a fascist dictatorship to the horrors of the death camp and the purge. Our century’s tragic record of man’s inhumanity to his own kind makes especially frightening the argument that the foetus in the womb has no rights.241 The talk about rights by those who work for abortion on demand has a sinister tone to it, because in it is implied a view of human beings which destroys any reason why any of us should have rights.242 What will be demanded next: the denial of the rights of the aged, the mentally retarded and the insane, the denial of the rights of the less economically privileged who cannot defend themselves?243 Our system of legal and political rights is the crown of our heritage, and it is being undermined. The denial of any right to existence for the foetus has already been declared officially in the United States.244 II The validity of this argument must stand or fall primarily on the assertion that the foetus is a living member of our species.245 It is a fact, accepted by all scientists, that the individual has his or her unique genetic code from conception onwards. He or she is therefore not simply

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part of the mother’s body.246 After 18 days a heart beats; at three and a half weeks, when the mother may not yet know she is pregnant, there are already the beginnings of eyes, spinal cord, nervous system, thyroid gland, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys and intestines; at six weeks brain waves can be detected. It is not necessary to elaborate on the further development. It can be found in any textbook of embryology.247 It cannot therefore be denied by those favouring easy abortion.248 Even Dr Morgentaler, the Canadian abortionist, justifies himself by asserting how very small the foetus is at early stages, as if size were an argument.249 The scientific evidence cannot be denied; it is, however, ignored.250 It is at this point that there seems to be a complete breakdown of communication between those favouring easy abortion and those against it. The central reason for this impasse seems to be a confusion in the use of words to describe what the foetus is. This confusion is a playing with words, which often leads to wishful thinking as to what is being done in an abortion. Therefore it is necessary to look carefully at such words as ‘human,’ ‘human beings,’ ‘person,’ and ‘life.’ What frequently happens is that the primary meanings of these words become lost, because they are overlaid by specific meanings.251 For example, the usual name nowadays for a member of our species is ‘human being.’252 In the Oxford Dictionary the word ‘human’ is defined first in the generic sense, ‘of, or belonging to man,’ then later as ‘having the qualities or attributes proper to a man.’253 This meaning was retained in the word ‘humane,’ (the older spelling of ‘human’), which now means ‘characterized by such behaviour or disposition towards others as befits a man.’254 The generic sense of ‘human,’ which covers all our species, is specialized into meanings which only apply to members of the race at their best.255 Words do not hold their meanings in watertight compartments. We often, and rightly, use ‘human’ in such contexts as ‘human values,’ ‘inhuman cruelty,’ ‘what properly befits a human being’ or even ‘a very human person,’ where the word means much more than ‘belonging to the human race,’ and suggests the characteristics of men and women at their most mature.256 Similarly, the word ‘person’ can mean an individual of our species; but can also connote a mature man or woman, capable of ‘personal relationships,’ ‘personal integrity’ etc.257 In these contexts it is almost identical with the specialized uses of ‘human.’ The Dred Scott Decision in 1857 by the American Supreme Court ruled that although blacks were

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human beings, they were not ‘persons’ in the eyes of the law.258 The 14th Amendment to their constitution was enacted specifically to overturn this, and interpreted ‘person’ as including all living beings.259 So if, with vague 19th century ideas of personal quality in mind, we return to the naming of ourselves as ‘human beings,’ we are then apparently able to exclude the foetus from being thought of as human.260 We may also have no difficulty in excluding other categories of mankind that do not measure up to our view of what is ‘truly human in the fullest and most meaningful sense.’261 A confusion is also found in the use of the word ‘life.’ ‘The foetus may be alive in a biological sense,’ we are told, ‘but human, no.’ It is implied that to talk of our species in terms of biological life is to talk on a very low level indeed. In fact ‘biological life’ is a misleading tautology.262 There is no such thing in nature as a living organism that has merely ‘biological life.’ It must belong to some species, even if it is only an amoeba. If the foetus is alive, yet is not human, what is it?263 No woman has yet given birth to a cat – although the National Council of Women are evidently not quite sure about this. In 1967, they presented a resolution to a Parliamentary Committee in which abortion was defined as the ‘premature expulsion of the mammalian foetus.’264 It is impossible to meet a mammal, pure and simple. One meets a cat, or a dog, or a human being. There is another kind of double-talk about life, which has a place in the US Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade.265 After viability (the date of which will vary according to the sophistication of our current supportive techniques), a foetus becomes legally recognizable as ‘potential life.’266 Presumably ‘potential’ must mean ‘capable of, but not yet possessing.’ By this vague phrase do they mean that the foetus is not alive? If not alive, do they mean it is dead, or what?267 Even the US Supreme Court must know the difference between a living foetus and a dead one. There is no halfway house.268 Beings with only ‘potential’ life do not suck their thumbs in the womb in preparation for the breast.269 It makes perfect sense to say that we are all potentially dead, but it does not make sense to say that the foetus is ‘potential life.’270 It is best to be suspicious of such phrases as ‘potential life,’ ‘person in the whole sense,’ ‘human in the full sense of the word.’ They confuse what is being done in abortion.271 How can the primary or plain sense of ‘human’ be denied to the foetus? What a dog begets is canine: what we beget is human.

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III In our day, the struggle for rights has often been effective. It now runs counter to the temper of our society to challenge the claims of personal freedom. Men and women are grasping towards an understanding which would preclude violence against one another.272 The noble attempt to eliminate capital punishment is a good example.273 Women are struggling courageously for their proper equality. What of children? In the preamble of the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of a Child (Nov. 29th, 1959), it is stated that the Declaration is necessary ‘because the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including legal protection before as well as after birth.’274 It is ironic that at the time of these victories there has arisen a new category of the unprotected.275 Despite the tradition of rights in which we were nurtured, the unborn child in the United States has been deprived of the right to exist, and the pressure for this is mounting in Canada.276 Strangely enough, the unborn still have some rights: they can inherit under a will, they can even be recognized as plaintiffs in a law suit.277 But for the individuals who can be put to death at the will of the very person who brought them into existence, such rights as these are rather a bad joke.278 Some distinctions must be made here between the legal situation in Canada and in the States. In January, 1973, the Supreme Court of the US made its declaration in Roe v. Wade. It affirmed a new right, nowhere mentioned in their constitution but ‘felt’ to be ‘intended.’279 No legislation can infringe the right of a woman to procure the termination of her pregnancy. For the first six or seven months, no reason at all need be given for the killing of the developing child.280 After that time, though still declared not to be a ‘person in the whole sense’ he or she is recognized as ‘potential life.’281 After the sixth month of a foetus’ life, some bureaucratic red tape is required before he or she can be killed; namely, one doctor must declare it necessary for the mother’s health. This is understood as having its broadest interpretation, that of general ‘well being.’282 Canada’s position is slightly different.283 More red tape is required. An abortion may be performed at any time during the pregnancy, on the recommendation of one doctor, which a committee of three doctors ratifies.284 The committee does not need to see the woman.285 The numbers

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of ratifications done in a short time are very large. A disinclination towards bearing a child is frequently interpreted as a danger to mental health.286 In some parts of Canada we already have de facto abortion on demand.287 In 1983, according to Statistics Canada, 61,800 legal abortions were performed, and the number increases each year, although medical necessities decrease.288 It is obvious that convenience, rather than danger, is already often the criterion.289 Yet there is pressure today for still easier laws.290 The only possible extension would be abortion on demand.291 What has happened to our belief in rights, that in the name of a lesser right, the primary one, the right to life, can be denied to members of our own species? Not only is the woman’s own right to life affirmed but it includes her right to freedom and privacy, and well-being, and all sorts of other good things. Yet she herself, her own unique unrepeatable self, was once growing in her mother’s womb. What magic has occurred with the passage of time that gives her all these rights, and denies the foetus any?292 There are, of course, events in which the rights can really be seen to conflict in equality of extremity.293 The tragic cases are where the deepest rights of two human beings conflict, where the choice is between two human lives, not merely between life and difficult circumstances. Girls who are made pregnant at a very early age may be open to extreme dangers both psychological and physical. Doctors may judge rightly that there are circumstances of rape where the foetus should not be allowed to survive. It seems quite clear to us that when the mother will die if there is no abortion, then the foetus should be aborted. This writing does not imply that there are no proper occasions for abortion. But from the statistics of the massive numbers on this continent, it is made plain that only a very small fraction of abortions are done out of medical necessity. What is at stake in the rare cases of proper abortion must be a conflict at the depths of the lives of two human beings – the possibility of survival. Light can be thrown on this denial of rights by looking at a familiar quotation: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are Life ... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.’294 Fine, ringing words, but alas, no longer self-evident. Our world has changed. Many believe

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that we are accidental beings in a world that came to be through chance.295 In such a situation the very foundations of the doctrine of rights have been eroded. All men are not created equal; they are not created at all.296 Justice can become a privilege society grants to some of its people, if they are the right age, and sufficiently like most other people. One can foresee a time when before one can qualify for rights a kind of Means Test may be used: ‘Are you human in the fullest sense of the word?’ ‘Are you still enjoying the quality of life?’ And here is the crunch; as the foetus loses out on this ethic, so will all the weak, the aged, the infirm, the unproductive.297 If we come to believe that we are not creatures, but accidents, rights will no longer be given in the very nature of our legal system.298 The most powerful among us will then decide who are to have rights and who are not. The effect of this undermining of our political tradition is often sugar-coated by talk about ‘quality of life.’ The phrase ‘quality of life’ has a high-minded ring about it.299 Like the slogan, ‘every child a wanted child,’ it is impossible to be against it. Of course it is better for children to be wanted rather than rejected, and for lives to have a high quality rather than a low one. But let us remember for what purpose these slogans are now mainly used. They are used negatively, and with terrible destructive implications. Every child should be a wanted child, so destroy those that do not seem to be wanted. It would seem that only ‘quality of life’ deserves our respect, not life itself.300 Of course, when ‘quality of life’ is urged for constructive purposes, it is indeed a compassionate approach to human suffering, but when we justify abortion for hedonistic reasons, with some lives down-graded as expendable, its proper use is perverted.301 In case this account seems exaggerated, it is worth looking at the list of characteristics drawn up by the Episcopalian clergyman, Joseph Fletcher, by which life may be recognized as ‘human.’302 The list includes ‘self awareness,’ ‘a sense of time,’ ‘self control,’ ‘capability of relating to others,’ ‘the ability to communicate,’ ‘a concern for others,’ ‘control over existence,’ and ‘a balance of rationality and feeling.’303 A bit unnerving, when one looks at oneself. How many of us would qualify? This is an example of the word ‘human’ being made qualitative and then identified with the generic sense. But one cannot really afford to laugh, as Fletcher has had enormous influence.304 It is no accident that he is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Euthanasia Educa-

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tion Council. His criteria for humanity work equally destructively at the beginning or the end of life. Allied to the ‘quality of life’ concept is the phrase ‘the accruing value of life,’ by which the United Church attempted to justify abortion (in Abortion, A Study, 1970).305 Exactly what value is supposed to be accruing is not very clear. Is it physical strength, intellectual development, self consciousness or what? Presumably this accruing quality becomes a declining one for those growing older and feebler. Are clever people more valuable than the rest of us – are the healthy more valuable than the crippled? Once we start grading the right to life in terms of quality, our criteria are seen to exclude more and more groups from human status. What will we be willing to do to these groups? IV The most pressing warning of how far the destruction of rights could go in the Western world took place in Nazi Germany. We, in the English-speaking world, would like to think of this as a monstrous happening which was defeated, and stopped, and which has no relation to ourselves. But if we look at some of the basic programmes carried out by the Nazis towards their own people, we may find that whatever our revulsion, our society seems to be moving away from the clear principles which would condemn these practices. The Nazi programme of euthanasia of the insane and the incurable was extended in 1943 to include children orphaned by the war. These children were put to death in the gas chambers along with the incurable and the insane. The country was thus relieved of the burden of those who could not care for themselves. The techniques of the gas chambers and the crematoria were used first for such people, then extended to the Jews, the gypsies and political opponents. Hitler had to keep these programmes of euthanasia against his own people as secret as possible. Largely through the courage of Bishop Galen, the programmes became known to the public, and evoked great horror among the German people, even though they were living in a totalitarian state.306 We, of course, do not yet kill our mentally ill (except when we treat infants with ‘benign neglect’).307 Nevertheless, we are moving towards ways of thought which could be used to justify such actions.308 Blacks and prisoners, the mentally ill and foetuses have more and more

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become the subjects of experiments. In none of these cases can ‘informed consent’ be a likely reality. The next extension of the denial of rights seems likely to be euthanasia for the aged.309 (What is meant here by euthanasia is deliberate killing, not the withdrawal by a doctor of extraordinary measures to prolong life in hopeless cases.) The euphemisms are ready: ‘a good death,’ ‘death with dignity,’ ‘life without value,’ ‘choosing of the moment,’ ‘assisting nature,’ and best of all, perhaps, because it preserves the illusion of autonomy, ‘suicide by proxy.’ Another frightening one is ‘providing for those who cannot speak for themselves.’ What provisions might not be made, were this to become legal?310 In our movement towards euthanasia, the altruistic principle, the desire to take life in order to spare suffering, is often mixed with more practical considerations about the cost and inconvenience of prolonging unproductive life.311 It will start, of course, with hard cases, and those desiring death, or unable to say whether they do or not. Let us remember the 1969 amendments to the Criminal Code on Abortion; what was intended by the law as provision for hard cases has quickly become provision for convenience.312 Our language is nearly ready for it, our vocabulary is well softened up. If a developing baby can be called (and thought of) as ‘foetal tissue,’ and his or her violent death as ‘termination of pregnancy,’ it is not fanciful to expect many more helpful euphemisms for getting rid of unwanted people.313 If this sounds alarmist, it is well to remember the figures on abortions since the law was amended in 1969.314 In 1970 there were 11,152 legal abortions in Canada; in 1983, 61,800, a figure which does not include those performed at the Morgentaler clinics.315 The situation is clearly self-accelerating. If women know they never need bear a child they have conceived, they are less and less likely to face the initial inconveniences. We have moved fast in a few years toward the point where, in the name of convenience, we say that a woman has an absolute right to an abortion and an unborn child has no right to existence.316 As we move into the apogee of technological civilization, nobody can predict what it is going to be like in every detail. We can expect, however, that technology will be more and more focused upon cybernetics, the art of the steersman, and will be even more intricately connected with the overall direction of society. Will abortion simply become an instrument of cybernetics?

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Of course, abortion is not only a public, but a private matter – a question which individuals have to face in the agony of their own lives.317 About such private matters, writers must remember always that people do their own living as they do their own dying. It is difficult enough to look after one’s own anguishes. Writers can speak generally about what is being done in an act such as abortion: they cannot judge how others cope with the awful responsibilities of time. And yet the public place we give abortion will be a central mark by which it can be known what rights will be given to the weak by our directors. Obviously the justice of a society is well defined in terms of how it treats the weak. And there is nothing human which is weaker than the foetus.

Notes 1 See 280–98 and 385–402. 2 Proceedings of the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy, 1983 (Montreal: Éditions du Beffroi, Éd. Montmorency, 1986), 173–82. 3 Dionysius, 3 (1979), 5–16. 4 Humanities in the Present Day, 45–50. 5 Care for the Dying and the Bereaved, 133–43; The Right to Birth, 1–12. 6 William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998) includes selections from ‘Nietzsche and the Ancients’ and ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ (293–7 and 461–82). 7 R[achel] S[terling] G[rant] (1948– ) is the eldest child of Sheila and George Grant; J[ames] R[aymond] P[olk] of the House of Anansi Press served as Grant’s editor for Technology and Justice (see note 12 below); ‘without which/whom nothing’ (Latin), literally, the plural form of sine qua non, ‘indispensable’ (OED). 8 This proverb was one of Grant’s favourites throughout his life. See his journal entry for 13 December 1942, in Collected Works, Vol. 1, 30. He possibly encountered it in the novel South Riding (1936) by the English writer and pacifist Winifred Holtby (1898–1935). 9 Sheila Veronica (Allen) Grant (1920– ). See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 582n13. 10 Dennis Beynon Lee (1939– ), poet, essayist, editor, was co-founder (1967) and editorial director (1967–72) of the House of Anansi Press, for which he edited Technology and Empire (Collected Works, Vol. 3, 473–594; for Lee’s role in the editing process, see 582n13). He provided Grant with assistance in preparing Technology and Justice. See William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 1993), 356–7.

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11 Lawrence E. (Larry) Schmidt (1942– ), professor in the department for the study of religion, University of Toronto, edited George Grant in Process (Toronto: Anansi 1978), and is the editor of Grant’s writings on Simone Weil in this volume. 12 Ann Wall became involved with the fledgling House of Anansi press upon meeting Dennis Lee shortly after her arrival in Canada from the United States in 1968. She became owner and publisher in 1974. James R. Polk, also an American immigrant, worked in tandem with her at Anansi as chief editor. Wall sold the Anansi press to Jack Stoddart of Stoddart Publishing in 1989. Wall and Polk’s rigorous standards placed the Anansi press at the forefront of Canadian publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. See Roy MacSkimming, ‘Making Literary History,’ http:// www.anansi.ca. 13 This list has been omitted from this volume as the information has been incorporated in the headnotes (583–4). 14 The first paragraph of ‘Thinking About Technology’ replaces the opening paragraphs of the version Grant presented to the World Congress of Philosophy in 1983, and which was published in 1986. Cf. ‘Philosophy and Culture: Perspectives for the Future,’ in Philosophie et Culture / Philosophy and Culture: Proceedings of the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy, 21–27 August, 1983 (Montreal: Éditions du Beffroi, Éditions Montmorency, 1986), 173–82 (hereafter cited as Proceedings): ‘In my assigned task there are three words which carry their freight of ambiguity – philosophy, culture, future. Anybody within the ambience of modern “philosophy” knows that that wonderful Greek word no longer shines forth in clarity. “Culture” in its present sense was coined in the nineteenth century, and in all its affirmation of relativity could not have been spoken in the West before that time. “Future” has always been a word to conjure up the darkness of uncertainty. It is only necessary to use the word “chance” to see how little we can ever speak of perspectives for the future in any detail. This remains the case despite all the efforts of Europeans to overcome chance in the last centuries. For example, is there anybody who knows whether the great bombs are going to be loosed? In such a context the idea of perspectives for the future becomes macabre. The only road for sane public prediction is to abstract from that possibility and I will, therefore, do so. ‘For all the difficulty of substantial prediction, there is one that can be made. The science which issues in the conquest of human and non-human nature (that is, modern European science) is going to be carried to its apogee. This novel pursuit, which arose first in Europe and has now become world-wide, will continue to grow in determining power over all other human activities – political, philosophical, sexual, religious etc. In each

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Technology and Justice lived moment of our waking and sleeping, we now may rightly be called members of technological civilization, and will increasingly live everywhere in the tightening circle of its power. ‘Immediately a verbal difficulty arises: why use the American neologism, “technology”? We see this difficulty in the title of the essay on this subject by our greatest contemporary thinker. Heidegger’s essay is entitled “Die Frage nach der Technik.” It is translated into English as “The Question Concerning Technology.” This verbal difficulty is of importance, because the victory of the Americans in the war of 1945 meant that English has become the dominant language of the world. And indeed English has become increasingly an unphilosophical language in the last centuries.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘... does not evoke our reality as directly as our word.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘... the word brings before us ... a copenetration which had never before existed.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘What is given in the new word is that modern civilization is distinguished from all previous civilizations by the fact that our activities of knowing and making have been brought together in a way which does not allow the once clear distinguishing of them.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘The coining of “technology” caught the novelty of that copenetration. The word does not lay before us some academic study, but rather the fact that we have brought the sciences and the arts into a new unity in our will to be masters of the earth and beyond.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘... cultures.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘It is easy to take the implication that what is given in the modern “technique” is of the same kind as what is given in the Greek “techne” ... in efficiency in making.’ Cf. Proceedings, 174: ‘The time was not ripe ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘... we can only understand ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘Indeed the American word “technology” ... from what they were in our originating culture ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘objective’ is placed in quotation marks. Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘... modern European physics.’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘...the same is true there.’ Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham (1900–95), English biochemist and historian of science, Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 1924–95 (Master 1966–76), was the founding author of the ongoing multivolume series (now continued by others) Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press 1954), which has transformed Western understanding of Chinese science and technology. Vedanta is a principal branch of Indian philosophy, the anta or essence of the

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Vedas, the corpus of ancient Indo-Aryan religious literature sacred to Hindus. Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘... its ancient use.’ According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, ‘applied’ comes from the Latin applicare, ‘to fold.’ One of the meanings of ‘apply’ is ‘to bend or direct to,’ which is perhaps what Grant had in mind. Grant is referring to the letter from Albert Einstein, then a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton after fleeing Germany in 1933, to President Franklin D. Roosevelt of 2 August 1939, which led to the creation of ‘the Manhattan Project,’ a national crash program to develop atomic weapons before they were obtained by Nazi Germany. This sentence is not included in Proceedings, 175. This sentence is not included in Proceedings, 175. Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘That fact is given ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘...to characterize our “culture” ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 175: ‘... and catches the cause of why it has become worldwide.’ This and the next nine paragraphs are not included in Proceedings. They replace the following paragraph (Proceedings, 175–6): ‘The unfolding of the sciences which issue in the conquest of human and non-human nature – what I have hypostasized as “technology” – can be predicted. What that unfolding will disclose in detail cannot be. What that novel unfolding means as part of the whole is everywhere opaque. Indeed its very novelty has put in question the idea that openness to the whole is the mark of the philosopher. The first necessity in any understanding of this great novelty is to recognize that it is not something external to us. The representation of technology as an array of external instruments lying at the free disposal of the species that created them is the chief way that North Americans close down the possibility of understanding this happening. Rather “technology” is an account of the whole in terms of which we are led to our apprehension of everything that is. Here our language falters because we moderns have so long ridiculed the use of such words as “destiny, “fate” etc ... It sounds ridiculous to us to say that technology is our “fate.” Yet if we do not understand how much we are enwrapped in all we think and desire by this novel “destiny,” then our philosophy simply becomes part of it.’ Phaedo, 110a: ‘For this earth and its stones and all the regions in which we live are marred and corroded, just as in the sea everything is corroded by the brine, and there is no vegetation worth mentioning, and scarcely any degree of perfect formation, but only caverns and sand and measureless mud, and tracts of slime wherever there is earth as well; and nothing is in

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Technology and Justice the least worthy to be judged beautiful by our standards’ (trans. Hugh Tredennick). Martin Heidegger, ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ trans. Joan Stambaugh, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: HarperCollins 1977, 1993), 376: ‘No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves will soon be determined and steered by the new fundamental science which is called cybernetics.’ In its Greek origin, kubern•t•s means ‘steersman.’ The source of this quotation is unidentified. Cf. Proceedings, 176: ‘Let me illustrate this enwrapping by a very usual statement made recently, usual in the sense that it might be heard at any scientific convention, business luncheon or on educational television. A computer scientist said about the machines he helps to invent: “The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used.”’ See also note 1 above. Cf. Proceedings, 176: ‘... and only partially understand the capacity of computers ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 176: ‘... this sense of anxiety into a perspective freed from such terrors as the myth of Dr Frankenstein.’ In Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), Dr Victor Frankenstein creates a living being out of the parts of dead bodies and then recoils in horror from the monster he has brought to life. Cf. Proceedings, 176, where the preceding four sentences beginning ‘His perspective ...‘ are replaced by the following: ‘the perspective is that the machines are instruments, because their capacities have been built into them by human beings, and it is human beings who set operating those machines for purposes they have determined.’ Cf. Proceedings, 176: ‘... which is so rooted in us North Americans that ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 177, where ‘objective’ is not placed in quotation marks. Cf. Proceedings, 177: ‘Reason as project is the summoning ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 177, where ‘qualified’ is not placed in quotation marks. Cf. Proceedings, 177, where the remainder of this paragraph is not included. This and the following paragraph are not included in Proceedings, 177. This and the preceding sentence are omitted from Proceedings, 177. Cf. Proceedings, 177: ‘Canadians wanted the most efficient car for almost similar geographic circumstances and social purposes as those of the people who first developed a car usable by the majority.’ Cf. Proceedings, 178, where this paragraph is not included. Cf. Proceedings, 178: ‘... in what a reliable economist has stated ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 178: ‘... the ways it will be used ...’ Cf. Proceedings, 178: ‘... national socialist existentialism.’ Cf. Proceedings, 179, where ‘the ways’ is not in quotation marks.

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56 Cf. Proceedings, 179: ‘... mutual interdependence of the modern “physical” sciences and the modern moral “sciences” ...’ 57 Cf. Proceedings, 179, where this sentence continues: ‘... who articulated the accounts of the human and non-human matters.’ 58 Cf. Proceedings, 179: ‘... bound together as both belonging to ...’ 59 Troilus and Criseyde, book 3, l. 1649. This quotation is not included in Proceedings, 180. 60 Cf. Proceedings 180: ‘... from human beings to machines.’ 61 Cf. Proceedings, 180: ‘... from men to machines.’ 62 This and the following paragraph are not included in Proceedings, 181. 63 Cf. Proceedings, 180: ‘A great change has taken place in the Western conception of goodness.’ 64 Cf. Proceedings, 180: ‘The enneucleation [sic] of that change ...’ 65 Cf. Proceedings, 180: ‘The presently popular words in the modern account are “quality of life,” “values,” etc.’ 66 Unidentified quotation. Cf. Proceedings, 180: ‘Its evocation always includes an “if.”’ 67 Cf. Proceedings, 181, where ‘values’ is in quotation marks. 68 Cf. Proceedings, 181: ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used” asserts the very essence of the modern view (human ability freely to determine what happens) and then puts that freedom in the service of the very “should” which that same modern novelty has made provisional.’ 69 Cf. Proceedings, 181, where the word ‘technology’ is in quotation marks. From the end of this sentence to the end of the version in Proceedings, the texts differ: Cf. Proceedings, 181–2, where the paragraph continues, followed by three concluding paragraphs: ‘It leads us to forget that the modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves. The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness. The foregoing was not written from out of historicism. I mean by historicism the modern doctrine that all thought about the whole belongs only to a particular dynamic situation. Its opposite may loosely be called Platonism – the teaching that thought in its perfection is impersonal, and stands above every context. Historicism appears to me the highest methodological principle of that destiny I have called “technology.” Therefore it would contradict my intention if anything here written implied historicism, even at its clearest. As an unregenerate Platonist I would affirm that philosophy stands or falls with its ability to transcend history. What I have written con-

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Technology and Justice cerns only the very grave difficulty of moving to that transcending in this era. Indeed in speaking about perspectives for philosophy I would say that in the homogenized societies of the future, the hope of philosophy will lie with those who understand that thought can partake in that which is not dependent on any dynamic context. It will lie with those who can rise above the historicism which has permeated Western thought since Nietzsche, by having thought which is given in Nietzsche “en pleine connaissance de cause.” I end with two misrepresentations of that idea that thought must stand above history. First, the most engaged and passionate Marxist or existentialist is probably nearer to the truth than some professor of philosophy who thinks he stands above history as he lives comfortably in the suburbs of New England. The possibility of standing above “history” must depend on having lived through the awful responsibilities of time. Simone Weil taught that in her last great sentence: “matter is our infallible judge.” Secondly, no implication must be taken against that scholarship which attempts to understand what is given in the science and philosophy of the past. In the present ruin of the Western tradition we must know what that tradition has been, how it has come to be “technology,” what has been lost and what found in that coming to be. Many analytical professors of philosophy talk as if we were born yesterday (yesterday meaning Frege). To partake of philosophy in the sense of the word “Platonic” does not mean to stand above history as if the race originated yesterday. Rather it means touching eternity – if only the hem of its garments.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 115ff. Grant frequently used this quotation. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 3, 258, and 561. In these instances Grant slightly altered the wording of the first sentence of the quotation. The full quotation, as cited in Webster’s Online Dictionary and many other quotation reference sources, is: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.’ For J. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Los Alamos laboratory (1943–5) that produced the first atomic bombs, see 279n4. ‘From a thing’s possibility one cannot be certain of its reality’ (Latin proverb). Although this remark has been frequently quoted in the literature on Rutherford, its origin is obscure and it may be apocryphal. Ernest Rutherford

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(1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson) (1871–1937), New Zealand experimental nuclear physicist, was educated in New Zealand and at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became professor of physics at McGill (1898–1907), Manchester (1907–19), and Cambridge (1919–37), where he also served as director of the Cavendish Laboratory. A number of his pupils later worked on the ‘Manhattan Project,’ which built the first atomic bomb. Rutherford won the Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on radiation (1908) and later discovered the nuclear nature of atoms. Cf. ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ The Compass: A Provincial Review, 4 (1978), 385 above, where the quotation attributed to Rutherford is omitted, as it is from the 1978 version in The Search for Values in a Changing World, vol. 1 (New York: International Cultural Foundation Press 1978) and the 1982 version in Richard L. Rubenstein, ed., Modernizaton: The Humanist Response to Its Promise and Problems (Washington: Paragon House, 1982). Forschung, ‘investigation, inquiry, research’ (Cassell’s Compact German Dictionary). ‘La foi, c’est l’expérience que l’intelligence est éclairée par l’amour.’ See also 399n12 above. For Simone Weil, see below, 786–804. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1949), trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in collaboration with J. Glen Gray, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 193: ‘Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.’ See also 236ff. Republic, ix, 573–5. St John of the Cross (1542–91), Spanish mystic, poet, and theologian, was the author of Spiritual Canticle, Dark Night of the Soul, Burning Flame of Love, and other works of mystical theology. He was beatified in 1675. See note 98 below. Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879–1962), Canadian arctic explorer and writer, was born and raised in Manitoba. He participated in many Arctic expeditions and played a key role in bringing the Arctic region and its peoples to the attention of the general public. He was the author of many books, including My Life with the Eskimos (1912) and The Friendly Arctic (1921). From the mid-1920s until his death he spent most of his time in the United States. Republic, vi, 509–21. Phaedo, 67c–68d. Republic, ix, 573–5. See above, 604. Grant is referring to the Passion settings by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685– 1750), the St Matthew Passion (1727) and the St John Passion (1724).

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85 J.S. Bach, Concerto in D minor for Two Violins and Strings (1717–23). 86 techne (Gk.), craftmanship; ars (Latin), skill. 87 Rhapsody in Blue, for piano and orchestra, combining classical and jazz elements, by the American composer George Gershwin (1898–1937), was first performed in New York in 1924; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), Piano Concerto no. 22 in E-flat major, K. 482 (1785). 88 W.A. Mozart, Piano Concerto no. 24 in C minor, K. 491 (1785–6). 89 Angelus Silesius (Johann Schleffer, 1624–77), German counter-Reformation mystic and poet, primarily wrote short mystical poems in the form of ‘Alexandrines.’ 90 Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). See 910n3. 91 Matt. 6:28–9. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ 92 Gen. 3. 93 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944), in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books 1955), 47. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 425n3. 94 Gorgias, 481b–527d; Republic, iv, 441–4. 95 Matt. 22:37–40. ‘Jesus said unto him, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”’ 96 Luke 23:33–4. ‘And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”’ 97 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 364. 98 See note 78 above. In 1567 St John of the Cross met the Carmelite nun St Teresa of Avila (1515–82) after he entered the Carmelite order of friars and took up her efforts to reform the order that began with her founding the ‘Discalced’ (barefoot) Carmelites (1562). He was imprisoned by the ‘Calced’ Carmelites (December 1577–August 1578), suffering terrible hardships, before making his escape. 99 John 21:18. ‘Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.’ 100 Matt. 22:21.

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Phaedrus 247d, 248. Ibid., 250–6. See 887–92 below. St Gregory VII, né Hildebrand (pope, 1073–85), initiated the protracted struggle between the papacy and secular authority known as the Investiture Controversy by asserting in his Dictatus Papae (1073) that only the pope could appoint bishops and had the power to depose emperors. Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor, 1056–1106) resisted Gregory’s attempt to elevate the power of the church over the state. Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, in Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings, ed. Miriam Kosh Starkman (New York: Bantam 1986), 409. The phrase ‘life, liberty, and property’ comes from the first Resolution of the ‘Declaration of Colonial Rights of the First Continental Congress,’ 14 October 1774. John Locke asserts these rights in chapters 1–5 of the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1690), and explains the purpose of political society in chapter 8: ‘Men being, as has been said, by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent. The only way whereby any one devests [sic] himself of his Natural Liberty, and puts on the bonds of Civil Society is by agreeing with other Men to joyn and unite into a Community, for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a Greater Security against any that are not of it’ (italics in text). John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: University Press 1960), 330–1. I. Kant, Perpetual Peace, in Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant on History (New York: Macmillan 1963), 112. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Species in the Struggle for Life (1859). See 401n28. We have corrected Grant’s error in dating this quotation as 1887; Darwin died in 1882. The quotation is taken from a letter to the American botanist Asa Gray. Francis Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1898), vol. 2, 371. See also Niles Eldredge, Darwin (New York: Norton 2005), 53. Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), French mathematician and astronomer, was the author of Mécanique céleste (1799–1825), a foundational text in mathematical astronomy. He made the reply to Napoleon when asked why he had made no mention of God in his great work: ‘I have no need of this hypothesis.’ The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 95–7. ‘This is an Art/ Which does mend Nature – change it rather; but/ The art itself is Nature.’

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113 John Keats (1795–1821), ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ concluding lines: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”’ 114 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma (Boston: Osgood 1873), 46. ‘And the true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion’ (italics in text). Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), English poet, essayist, and critic, professor of poetry, Oxford University 1857–67, wrote many influential works on aesthetics, education, and literature, of which the most famous is Culture and Anarchy (1869), which attacked the provincialism and materialism of English culture. His best-known poem, ‘Dover Beach’ (1867), is the quintessential expression of the Victorian crisis of faith that followed the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. 115 Letter to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina [von Wisine], February 1854. See Fyodor Dostoevsky: Complete Letters, Volume 1 (1832–1859), ed. and trans. David Lowe and Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor: Ardis 1988), 193–6. See also Collected Works, Vol. 1, 416, 419n8. 116 Simone Weil, ‘Spiritual Autobiography,’ Letter 4 to Father Perrin, in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1951), 22. 117 Phaedo, 64a, 65a–67e. See also Collected Works, Vol. 1, 326, 403n8. 118 Phaedo, 118a. Socrates’ last words were: ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget’ (trans. Hugh Tredennick). Asclepius, son of Apollo and the mortal Coronis, was the god of medicine and healing, and his staff, entwined with a snake, remains the symbol of the medical profession today. Luke 22:44. 119 John 19:25. The two Marys are Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. 120 Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973), 14 (Preface): ‘But the struggle against Plato, or, to express it more plainly and for “the people,” – the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – for Christianity is Platonism for “the people” – has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit such as never existed on earth before: with so tense a bow one can now shoot for the most distant targets.’ 121 Republic, vi, 502–vii, 521. 122 Grant is referring here to the influential book by Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press 1953). 123 1 Cor. 13. 124 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace 1960), 11–21. Clive Staples (Jack) Lewis (1898–1963), Irish literary scholar, novelist, and Chris-

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tian apologist, renounced atheism in the late 1920s, becoming a Christian in 1931. Although the author of important scholarly works, such as The Allegory of Love (1937), written mostly while a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–54) before being appointed to a professorship at Cambridge (1954–63), his international fame is due to his enormously popular theological writings and fantasy novels. His many books include The Problem of Pain (1940), Mere Christianity (1962), the autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955), and the Narnia series of fantasy novels for children. For Grant’s contact with Lewis while he was at Oxford, see Collected Works, Vol. 1, xxx. A central event in the conversion of St Francis of Assisi (1181–1226), the son of a wealthy merchant who had spent his youth and early manhood in riotous living, was his encounter in 1206 with a leper. Although repelled by the leper, Francis overcame his revulsion and embraced him. Afterwards he exclaimed that what formerly had been bitter had become sweet, and what was formerly sweet had become bitter. Republic, viii, 562a–576b. Symposium, 203b. Republic, vi, 508. This is a reference to one of Grant’s favourite statements of Martin Luther: ‘The theologian of glory says that evil is good and good evil; the theologian of the Cross says that the thing is as it is.’ See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 486n.b. For Grant and the theology of the cross, see Harris Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001) and Marc Poulin, ‘George Grant and the Origins of the Modern Experiment?’ in Don Carmichael, ed., From Philosophy to Politics: Essays in Memory of Dimitrios Panopolis (Edmonton: Department of Political Science, University of Alberta 2005), 274–83. See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God Is Dead”’ (1943), in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 53–112. Matthew 5:6. See above, 42–5. Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1922– ), British classicist, was Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford. His works include translations and critical editions of Greek texts (especially the tragedies) and collections of essays and lectures such as The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press 1983) and Blood for the Ghosts (London: Duckworth 1982). For a complete bibliography, see Greek Comedy, Hellenistic Literature, Greek Religion, and Miscellanea: The Academic Papers of Sir High Lloyd-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990), 409–18. Cf. the version of this essay published in Dionysius 3 (1979): 5–18, (hereaf-

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sentence are not placed in parenthesis and this sentence begins: ‘Let me state in parenthesis how interesting ...’ Cf. D, 7: ‘... till recently.’ Eric Robertson Dodds (1893–1979), Irish classicist, was born in Northern Ireland but pursued his academic career in England. He was professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham 1924–36 before becoming Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University (1936). His book The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) reflects his interest in psychology and psychic phenomena. Grant’s questions about Nietzsche’s influence on classical studies led to a response from Rainer Friedrich, who argues that Nietzsche’s understanding of the Greeks was partial and inadequate. See Rainer Friedrich, ‘Aristophanes, Nietzsche and the Death of Tragedy,’ Dionysius, 4 (1980): 5–36. This letter was postmarked 4 January 1889. See Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969), 345, Nietzsche to Brandes, where the passage is translated slightly differently: ‘Once you had discovered me, it was no great feat to find me: the difficulty now is to lose me.’ The letter is signed ‘The Crucified.’ Georg Morris Cohen Brandes (1842–1927), Danish literary critic, wrote many books upon a wide variety of subjects and had an important influence upon the development of the modernist movement in Scandinavian literature. Brandes ‘discovered’ Nietzsche in 1888, and pleased him by describing his philosophy as ‘aristocratic radicalism.’ See Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, 283, Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 3 February 1888: ‘Likewise, an intelligent and combative Dane, Dr. G. Brandes, has written me several letters showing his devotion, astonished, as he says, by the original and new spirit which breathes in my writings, the general tendency of which he describes as “aristocratic radicalism.”’ E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press 1951), 211. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), English philosopher and reformer. See 897n5. Ibid., 253–5. The lectures were delivered at Berkeley in 1949. Ibid., vii. Sir Kenneth James Dover (1920– ), English classicist, held a number of distinguished academic posts in Great Britain, serving as professor of Greek, University of St Andrew’s 1955–76, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford 1976–86, and chancellor of St Andrew’s University 1981–2005. He was president of the British Academy 1978–81. His books include Aristophanic Comedy (1972) and The Greeks and Their Legacy (1989). Cf. D, 11, where the quotation marks are omitted.

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151 Cf. D, 11: ‘The study of the classics leads us to understand that up to this point the greatest height ...’ 152 Cf. D, 11: ‘... (similar to what Nietzsche proposes to free us of Christianity.)’ 153 See above, 50–1. 154 Janus, from the Latin ianua (door) is the Roman god of gates and doors, of beginnings and endings, represented by a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions; hence January, the first month of the year. 155 Grant has probably quoted from memory, and has slightly altered the text, as well as changing the quotation from the third to the first person. Nietzsche is here writing of himself as the author of The Birth of Tragedy. The correct version reads: ‘Except that he [Nietzsche] knows – he has experience of it, perhaps he has experience of nothing else! – that art is worth more than truth’ (italics in text). The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1968), 453 (section 853). 156 For a discussion of Kant’s treatment of Plato and Epicurus in The Critique of Pure Reason see Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press 2004), 359–60 and passim. 157 See above, 51–2. 158 This and the previous two quotations can be found in the more recent Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Ciolli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter 1967– ), vol. 2, part 7, 137 and 186, and vol. 3, 395. 159 See above 47–8. 160 See F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 506, #964. 161 See, for example, G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover 1956), 134: ‘First, under Christianity Slavery is impossible; for man is man – in the abstract essence of his nature – is contemplated in God; each unit of mankind is an object of God and of the Divine purpose... Utterly excluding all speciality, therefore, man, in and for himself – in his simple quality of man – has infinite value; and this infinite value abolishes ipso facto all particularity attaching to birth or country.’ 162 Republic, viii, 557–60. 163 Ibid., vi, 509–11. 164 Cf. John Woods and Harold C. Coward, eds, Humanities in the Present Day (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 1979) (hereafter cited as HPD), 45: ‘Nevertheless, as the word “humanities” is the present convention, I use it before this audience.’ 165 Claude T. Bissell, Halfway Up Parnassus: A Personal Account of the University of Toronto 1932–1971 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974). Claude T. Bissell (1916–2000) served as eighth president of the University of Toronto (1958–71).

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166 The fortress-like fourteen-storey John P. Robarts Library, constructed of exposed concrete in the ‘brutalist’ style of architecture and completed in 1973, is the principal research library of the University of Toronto. The mausoleum containing the preserved body of V.I. Lenin (d. 1924) is situated in Moscow on Red Square, adjacent to the Kremlin. 167 Cf. HPD, 48: ‘That summonsing requires well-defined procedures.’ 168 Cf. HPD, 48: ‘Those procedures of summonsing are what we call “research”. This procedure of summonsing is more clearly expressed in the German word Forschung than in the English equivalent “research.”’ 169 Cf. HPD, 48: ‘What happens when this procedure for summonsing ...’ 170 See Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ 122–7. 171 Cf. HPD, 49: ‘Poor old Canada enthusiastically taking on the American wave in its decadence.’ 172 Cf. HPD, 50, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘That clearly cannot be my concern in these minutes.’ 173 Cf. HPD, 50: ‘But ...’ 174 Cf. Sheila and George Grant, ‘Euthanasia,’ in Ian Gentles, ed., Care for the Dying and the Bereaved (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1982), 133–43, (hereafter cited as CDB), 133: ‘... to the Christian understanding of life and death.’ 175 Cf. CDB, 133, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘Public reaction ranges from an apathetic shrug from the majority, to the enthusiasm of the minority for a new “right.”’ 176 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘The occasions when euthanasia is considered as an option are likely to be full of anguish and complexity for the family concerned.’ 177 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘... by refusing to make judgments about euthanasia or to see it in the light of the gospel.’ 178 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘... is the pervasive public confusion about terminology.’ 179 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘The word euthanasia means, in Greek, “a good death” ...’ 180 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘... but it is not now appropriate in every case ...’ 181 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘... confused with it in the public mind.’ 182 Cf. CDB, 133: ‘Another practice ...’ 183 Cf. CDB, 134: ‘... because such good machines are now available.’ 184 Cf. CDB, 134: ‘Yet confusion of the two is widespread.’ 185 Cf. CDB, 134: ‘... to the subject of keeping the dying alive ...’ 186 Cf. CDB, 134: ‘... little definitive information ...’ 187 Cf. CDB, 135: ‘There are seldom, if ever, requests for euthanasia ...’ 188 Cf. CDB, 135: ‘We do not know how often this kind of euthanasia occurs ...’ 189 Heather Morris, ‘Death before Birth,’ Modern Medicine in Canada, 31/2 (1976).

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190 In the case of Karen Quinlan (In Re Quinlan, 1976), a young woman in a permanent coma, the New Jersey Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling and allowed her to be removed from a respirator which was thought to be sustaining her life, although once removed from the respirator Karen Quinlan lived on in a ‘permanent vegetative state’ for another ten years. 191 Cf. CDB, 135: ‘... is divided.’ 192 Who Shall Survive, a twenty-five-minute documentary (1971), presents the case of an infant with Down’s Syndrome and an intestinal obstruction whose parents refused to allow surgery. The infant was accordingly moved to a corner of the nursery of Johns Hopkins University Hospital and starved to death in 15 days. One of the doctors at Johns Hopkins stated that there had been a number of such cases in which parents had refused to give permission to allow treatment for Down’s Syndrome babies with intestinal blockage. The documentary was shown in 1971 at the Eisenhower Theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. 193 Cf. CDB, 136: ‘This condition may involve ...’ 194 Cf. CDB, 136: ‘But it is possible for many mentally normal people ...’ 195 Cf. CDB, 136: ‘Doctors are sharply divided about whether this disease ...’ 196 Cf. CDB, 136: ‘In Ethics at the Edges of Life Paul Ramsey has written ...’ The quotation is actually taken from ‘The Medical Neglect of Defective Newborns,’ the third lecture of the 1978 Whidden Lectures at McMaster University entitled ‘Issues in Medical Ethics.’ Paul R. Ramsey (1913–88), American ethicist, was professor of Christian ethics at Garrett Theological Seminary and Princeton University. His later writings included Life or Death: Ethics and Options (Seattle: University of Washington Press 1968), Ethics of Fetal Research (New Haven: Yale University Press 1975), and Ethics at the Edges of Life (Yale University Press 1978). 197 Cf. CDB, 136, where this sentence reads: ‘The Anglican Church of Canada’s report, Dying, for instance, presents the arguments for and against euthanasia, but reaches no definite conclusion about the principle of euthanasia.’ 198 Cf. CDB, 137, where part 2 begins as follows: ‘How is it that some Christian people have been led to join ranks with those who do not believe in God or creation, and who see human life as an accidental event on an accidental planet? To explain this strange alliance would require a careful analysis of the decline of clear theological thought. In this chapter we are simply going to point to various changes ...’ 199 Cf. CDB, 137: ‘... can bind together the Christian and the atheist, people who in their hearts hold very different beliefs as to the nature of things.’

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200 These words are placed in italics throughout the CDB version. 201 For Roe v. Wade, see above, ESJ 244–7. 202 Joseph Fletcher (1905–91), American ethicist, was ordained as an Episcopalian clergyman but became an atheist. He taught Christian ethics at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts 1944–70 and was the first professor of medical ethics at the University of Virginia. He served as president of the Euthanasia Society of America (later re-named the Society for the Right to Die). His works include Situation Ethics (1966), Humanhood: Essays in Biomedical Ethics (1979), and The Ethics of Genetic Control: Ending the Reproductive Roulette (1974). 203 Cf. CDB, 138: ‘... is so appalling ...’ 204 Cf. CDB, 138: ‘... becomes of Jesus’ account of God as love?’ 205 St Paul’s hymn to love begins: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling symbol’ (1 Cor. 13:1). 206 The CDB version, 139, contains the following sentences inserted here: ‘It is inevitable that the over-emphasis on intellect as the criterion should involve a degradation of the body. But Christianity’s refusal to give a low status to the body is declared in the Incarnation. The identification ...’ 207 Cf. CDB, 139: ‘... without the gospel of love ...’ Unidentified reference. 208 See above, 609. 209 Cf. CDB, 139: ... beyond this to the non-conformists and beyond this ...’ 210 Cf. CDB, 139, where this paragraph concludes with the following sentences: ‘We would do well to listen to the people who are in actual contact with the mentally retarded – Jean Vanier, for example, who has spent his life working with them, loving them, and helping them to live as fully as they can. In their faces he does not see sub-human non-persons, but Christ. ‘Celui qui est ou a été profondément blessé a le droit d’être assuré qu’il est aimé’ (The one who is or has been deeply wounded has the right to be assured that he is loved – Larmes de Silence). 211 Measure for Measure, II, ii: ... but man, proud man/ Drest in a little brief authority/ Most ignorant of what he’s most assured ... 212 Cf. CDB, 140, which includes the following: ‘Thomas Aquinas puts the limits of our freedom very clearly in the Summa Theologica: “Man is made master of himself through his free will; wherefore he can lawfully dispose of himself as to those matters which pertain to this life, which is ruled by man’s free will. But the passage from this life to another happier one is subject not to man’s free will but to the power of God.”’ 213 Cf. CDB, 140: ‘In much of modern theology, it seems to have been forgotten that we are creatures dependent on God’s love, and not simply our own masters.’

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214 Luke 22:42. 215 John 21:18. Cf. CDB, 141, for the following omitted sentences: ‘A lethal injection would save us an ordeal. But that is only good enough for our domestic animals.’ 216 ‘Ecclesiastes,’ l. 4, in The Wild Knight (1900). Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936), English essayist, novelist, poet, and controversialist, was one of the most prolific writers of his time. An Anglican until 1922, when he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, he defined the ‘chief idea of his life’ as the awakening of wonder, the capacity to see things as if for the first time. 217 Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762–1836), German physician, was Goethe’s personal physician and court physician at Weimar. His most famous book is Macrobiotics or the Art of Prolonging Life (1796). This quotation has been widely cited in articles on the abortion question and apparently dates from 1806, but its origin in Hufeland’s works is unidentified. 218 Karl Ludwig Lorenz Binding (1841–1920), German jurist; Alfred Erich Hoche (1865–1943), German psychiatrist. The first part of this work by Binding argued that the killing of the terminally ill was not murder but a lawful act in the interests of the patient. He also maintained that the incurably mentally ill were living pointless lives and were a burden to themselves, society, and their families. Hoche postulated that killing was justified if it led to other lives being saved; he believed that killing patients who had no value to themselves or society should be allowed. The ideas of Binding and Hoche were influential in the development of the infamous Nazi Euthanasia Programme (the so-called ‘T4 Programme’ named after its headquarters at 4 Tiergartenstrasse in Berlin), which began in September 1939, and lasted officially until August 1941. By that time it had resulted in the deaths at least 70,000 people deemed unfit to live because of mental or physical illness. The killing techniques using gas developed during the euthanasia programme were later adapted and refined for the purposes of the liquidation of the Jews and others transported to the Nazi concentration camps (1942–5). 219 Cf. CDB, 141: ‘... in the context of medical life-and-death decisions ...’ 220 Hippocrates (c.460 BC–c.380 BC), Greek physician, supposed author of the ‘Hippocratic Oath’ or declaration of medical ethics, versions of which are still taken by physicians upon completion of their training. 221 atresia, ‘occlusion of a natural channel of the body’ (OED). 222 Cf. CDB, 142: ‘... clarity of thought ...’ 223 Cf. CDB, 142, where this paragraph continues: ‘Of course, the question of intractable pain is the hardest case of all. All quality of life seems to disappear with intractable pain. But we are told by the medical profession that

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nearly all pain can now be controlled, though hospitals often fail to do so. Is killing the patient the best solution? And if pain cannot be controlled and the patient says life is intolerable, we still need not resort to killing, because sedation is available.’ Cf. CDB, 142: ‘... handicapped or retarded people ...’ Cf. CDB, 142: ‘When it is used to imply ...’ Cf. CDB, 142: ‘... the distinction between persons and human non-persons ...’ Cf. CDB, 142: ‘Some Christians...’ Cf. CDB, 142: ‘... with the freedom Christ promised us.’ Cf. CDB, 142–3, where this paragraph continues: ‘Although Christians and atheists can share some of the assumptions on which these groups of words are based, at one point there is something they cannot share. Christians know that death is not just an end but an opening to eternal life. Because all human beings have an eternal destiny, individuals have no right, even in the name of altruism, to cut short the earthly preparation of innocent human beings. It was for this reason that the prohibition against murder was made absolute. Murder was defined as the deliberate killing of the innocent. We therefore know what is being done in euthanasia.’ Cf. Sheila and George Grant, ‘Abortion and Rights: The Value of Political Freedom,’ in Eugene Fairweather and Ian Gentles, eds, The Right to Birth: Some Christian Views on Abortion (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre 1976), 1– 11 (hereafter cited as RB), 1; and Sheila and George Grant, ‘Abortion and Rights: The Value of Political Freedom,’ in G. Richmond Bridge, ed., Holy Living: Christian Morality Today (Charlottetown: St Peter Press 1986), 28–35 (hereafter cited as HL), 28: ‘... the rights of women include ...’ Cf. also Sheila and George Grant, ‘Abortion and Rights,’ in Wesley Cragg, ed., Contemporary Moral Issues (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1983), 38–45 (2nd ed., 1987, 51–57) (hereafter cited as CMI), 38: ‘... the rights of women require ...’ Cf. RB, 1, HL, 28, and CMI, 38: ‘... all modern societies (Canadian included) ...’ Cf. RB, 1 and HL, 28: ‘... into the open in the United States ...’; cf. CMI, 38: ‘... into the open for Americans in 1973 ...’ For the Roe v. Wade decision, see above, 244–7 (ESJ). See above, 246. Cf. CMI, 38: ‘The foetus is of the same species as the mother, and unless violent action is taken, will be a citizen in a few months. We are inevitably turned back ...’ Cf. RB, 2, HL, 28, and CMI, 39, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘In discussing our laws about abortion, these fundamental issues cannot be avoided.’

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236 Cf. CMI, 39: ‘... human beings are more than accidental conglomerations of matter.’ 237 Cf. CMI, 39: ‘... easy abortion in the name of women’s rights ...’ 238 Cf. RB, 2 and HL, 29: ‘... continuing health of our freedoms.’ Cf. CMI, 39, where the text reads as follows: ‘The view of human beings they are implying destroys any reason why any of us should have rights. This does not portend well for the continuing health of our freedoms.’ 239 Cf. RB, 2, HL, 29, and CMI, 39: ‘In the modern era we have seen our basic political assumptions radically denied by Nazi and Communist regimes. Terrible programmes of persecution have been carried out by these regimes, not only against their political opponents ...’ 240 The remainder of this paragraph has been completely re-written from the version in RB, republished in HL, which reads: ‘And the regimes which have the greatest mass crimes on their records have been those founded by explicit atheists, who openly affirmed that human beings were not the children of God, but rather accidental conglomerations of matter. The first stage in the establishment of all modern totalitarianisms has been the explicit destruction of religion in the name of some pseudo-scientific ideology. And with the destruction of western religion has always gone the undermining of political and legal rights’ (RB, 3). Cf. also CMI, 39, which is the same as the RB version with the omission of the sentence beginning: ‘And the regimes ...’ 241 Cf. RB, 3 and HL, 29, where this paragraph begins: ‘It is this which is frightening about those who argue that the foetus in the womb has no rights.’ Cf. CMI, 39, where the paragraph omits this sentence altogether and begins: ‘The talk about rights by those who work for abortion on demand ...’ 242 Cf CMI, 39, where part of the sentence: ‘... because in it...’ is omitted. 243 Cf. CMI, 39: ‘What will be demanded next: the denial of the rights of the less economically privileged who cannot defend themselves?’ 244 Cf. RB, 3 and HL, 29, where the following sentence is added: ‘Are we going to let it happen in Canada, and open the gates to all the consequences of tyranny which will follow?’ Cf. CMI, 39, where two sentences are added: ‘There is no mention of it in our Charter. Are we going to let it happen in Canada, and open the gates to all the consequences of tyranny that follow?’ The reference here is to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which became law in 1982, the year before the CMI version was published. In the HL version the essay is not divided into sections. 245 Cf. RB, 3 and HL, 29: ‘... is a living member of our species from the time of conception’; cf. CMI, 3: ‘... living member of our own species.’

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246 Cf. CMI, 39, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘Even the blood type may be different.’ 247 Cf. RB, 4 and HL, 29: ‘The facts can be found in any textbook of embryology.’ 248 Cf. RB, 4 and HL, 29: ‘They ...’; cf. CMI, 40, where this sentence is omitted. 249 This sentence is omitted from the RB, HL, and CMI versions. Henry Morgentaler (1923– ), Canadian physician and abortion practitioner, came to prominence in October 1967, when he maintained before a government of Canada committee that all pregnant women had a right to an abortion. He began openly performing illegal abortions in Quebec in 1969. After a series of legal battles there in which, despite spending some time in prison, he was eventually acquitted, he was charged again in Ontario in 1983. Morgentaler was acquitted by a jury, but the decision was overturned by the Ontario Court of Appeal. Morgentaler et al. v. H.M. The Queen was referred to the Supreme Court of Canada, which declared (1988) the law under which Morgentaler was convicted to be unconstitutional. This ruling brought to an end all statutory restriction on abortion in Canada. 250 This paragraph, although nearly identical in the RB (1976), HL (1986), and TJ (1986) versions, the only change being the use of the word ‘specific’ instead of ‘secondary’ in the final sentence of TJ, was worded differently by the Grants for the version in CMI (1983). Cf CMI, 40: ‘It would be difficult to find anyone who would deny that a foetus is a member of our species. Why is this not a possible basis for some agreement between those who differ so much as to the nature of the foetus? There is no disagreement until we try to give a name to our species. The usual one is “human beings.” At these words the chasm suddenly opens between those favouring easy abortion and those against it. Immediate polarization takes place, with one side insisting that the unborn are not really human, and the other that there is nothing else they can be. The reason for this total disagreement is the fact that the word “human” has two meanings. To understand this ambiguity is the first step to any clear thinking about the abortion controversy.’ 251 Cf. RB, 4: ‘... secondary meanings.’ 252 Cf. CMI, 40, where this sentence is omitted. 253 Cf. CMI, 40: ‘In the Oxford dictionary the adjective “human” is first defined in the generic sense: “of or belonging to a man,” the name of our species, covering all of its members. Then a secondary meaning is given: “having the qualities or attributes proper to a man.” With the word “proper” evaluation has crept in.’ An endnote is attached to the sentence having to do with the secondary meaning of ‘man’: ‘The word “man” is

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Technology and Justice used here to include both men and women. This old way of speech now seems discriminatory and should be avoided.’ Cf. CMI, 40: ‘This meaning is retained ...’ Cf. CMI, 40: ‘The generic sense of human, which applies to all our species, is specialized into meanings which are qualitative, and only apply to members of our species at their best.’ Cf. RB, 4: ‘... men and women at their maturest and noblest’; cf. CMI, 40: ‘We often use human ... maturest and noblest. Obviously such a meaning is as inappropriate for the foetus as for the infant.’ The next paragraph in the CMI version is not included here but at a later point in slightly altered form in both the RB and TJ versions (see note 303 below): ‘Further definitions of the word are practically a free-for-all. Joseph Fletcher, a wellknown proponent of abortion and euthanasia, gives a whole list of the characteristics by which life may be recognized as “human.” [The following endnote is attached to this sentence: “Fletcher, Joseph, “Indicators of Humanhood: A Tentative Profile of Man,” Hastings Center Report (1972), pp. 1–4.”] Included is [sic] “self-awareness,” “a sense of time,” “self-control,” “capability of relating to others,” “the ability to communicate,” “a concern for others,” “control over existence,” and “a balance of rationality and feeling.” (A bit unnerving when one looks at oneself!) This is an example of the word “human being” being used qualitatively, and then identified with the generic sense. This is not just confusion, but a deadly double-talk, for Fletcher makes no secret of what can be done to those who fail to meet his criteria. Astonishingly, Fletcher is still taught to student doctors in bioethics classes. It is no accident that he is a member of the board of directors of the Euthanasia Education Council. The criteria for humanity work equally destructively at the beginning or at the end of life.’ For Fletcher, see note 202 above. Cf. RB, 4 and HL, 30: ‘... but it can also connote ...’ This and the following sentence are placed in an endnote in RB, HL, and CMI. It is indicative of changing terminology between 1976 and 1986 that the Grants used the term ‘blacks’ instead of ‘negroes,’ although they used ‘negroes’ in HL. The Dred Scott decision of March 1857 (Dred Scott v. Sandford) is generally regarded as an important cause of the American Civil War. The case involved a black resident of Missouri (Scott) who sued to achieve his freedom on the basis of having previously been a resident of territory where slavery had been forbidden by the ‘Missouri Compromise’ (1820). The southerners who dominated the Supreme Court saw the case as an opportunity to extend legal slavery to all territories of the United States. The Court ruled that no blacks, not even free blacks, could ever become citizens of the United States, as they were beings of ‘an inferior

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order’ not included in the phrase ‘all men’ in the Declaration of Independence. Accordingly, the ‘Missouri Compromise’ was found to be unconstitutional and void. This sentence is an endnote in RB and HL and CMI. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) begins with the words: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, are citizens of the United States ...’ The word ‘persons’ in the Fourteenth Amendment must be understood in the light of the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Cf. RB, 4, HL, 30, and CMI, 40–1: ‘So if, with these associations of quality in mind, we return to the naming of ourselves as “human beings,” we are able to exclude the foetus from being thought of as human.’ Cf. CMI, 41, where ‘truly human’ is in quotation marks but not the rest of the sentence. Cf. RB, 5 and HL, 30: ‘But, in fact ...’ Cf. RB, 5 and HL, 30: ‘... yet is not of the genus homo ...’ The portion of this sentence and the previous one that refers to the National Council of Women is placed in an endnote in RB, HL, and CMI. The National Council of Women of Canada (founded 1893), first passed a resolution asking for the removal of abortion from the criminal code in 1971. Cf. RB, 5: ‘There is another kind of confusion ...’; in RB, HL, and CMI the words ‘Roe v. Wade’ are omitted. Instead there are endnotes; in RB and HL it reads ‘U.S. Supreme Court Reports, Roe v. Wade (Jan. 22, 1973), p. 48,’ and in CMI, ‘Roe v. Wade, p. 48.’ For Roe v. Wade, see above, 244–7 (ESJ). Cf. RB, 5, HL, 30 and CMI, 41: ‘... a date varying according to ...’ Cf. CMI, 41: ‘... it is dead?’ Cf. CMI, 41: ‘There is no halfway.’ Cf. CMI, 41: ‘... in preparation for sucking the breast.’ Cf. CMI, 41: ‘It makes perfect sense to say that we all have potential not yet fulfilled, or even that we are all potentially dead ...’ Cf. RB, 5 and HL, 30: ‘They are used to confuse ...’; cf. CMI, 41, where the rest of this paragraph is changed substantially: ‘The primary, or generic, sense of “human” cannot be denied to the foetus. What a dog begets is canine; what we beget is human. Nor do we need the word “person” to defend the right of the foetus to continue developing. We do not tell the fireman not to bother rescuing the infant trapped in the burning house because that infant is not yet a ‘person in the fullest sense of the word.’ Cf. RB, 5, HL, 30, and CMI, 41: ‘In our society ...’ Cf. RB, 6, HL, 31, and CMI, 41, where the following sentence is inserted here: ‘The fight for Civil Rights in the United States has won great victories, however incomplete.’

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274 Cf. CMI, 42, where the following sentence is inserted here: ‘There is pressure now for this sentence to be omitted from the declaration.’ 275 Cf. RB, 6 and HL, 31: ‘... of these compassionate victories ...’; cf. CMI, 42: ‘... of these many compassionate victories ...’ 276 Cf. CMI, 42: ‘... and the pressure to deny this right to unborn children in Canada is mounting.’ 277 Cf. CMI, 42, where the following sentence is inserted here: ‘Recently it has been suggested that they have a right not to be born with alcoholic syndrome.’ 278 Cf. RB, 6 and HL, 31, where there is an endnote attached to this sentence: ‘Perhaps certain secondary rights have become so emphasized that a whole section of our community has to pay for that inflation by losing the primary right to exist. Those who lose their rights are inevitably those who cannot answer back.’ 279 Cf. RB, 6, HL, 31, and CMI, 42: ‘... nowhere mentioned in the American constitution ...’; there is an endnote attached to this sentence in RB, HL, and CMI: ‘Justice Blackmun spoke for the majority: “We feel the Right is located in the 14th Amendment’s concept of personal liberty” (Roe v. Wade, pp. 37f.). 280 Cf. CMI, 42: ‘For the first six months of pregnancy ...’ 281 Cf. CMI, 42: ‘... the unborn child is recognized...’ 282 Cf. RB, 6 and HL, 31: ‘A little red tape is required after six months before he or she can be killed; namely, one doctor must declare it necessary to the mother’s health – health in the widest possible sense of the word, that of “well-being”’; cf. CMI, 42: ‘A little red tape is required, after six months, to abort the foetus; namely, one doctor must declare it necessary for the mother’s health, “health” in the widest possible sense of the word, that of “well-being.”’ 283 Cf. RB, 6: ‘... (unless Dr. Morgentaler and his supporters succeed in their crusade before this book is published).’ For Dr. Henry Morgentaler see note 249 above. Cf. CMI, 42, where the second sentence is omitted and the following sentences inserted: ‘The law grants no “right to abortion.” Abortion is still on the Criminal Code as a punishable offence; but an exception is made to the general prohibition in the case of danger to the life or health of the mother.’ 284 Cf. CMI, 42: ‘An abortion may be performed, anytime during pregnancy, on the recommendation of one doctor, ratified by a hospital committee of three doctors.’ 285 The procedure outlined here by the Grants, which came into law in 1969 as an amendment to section 251 of the Canadian Criminal Code, was, along with section 251, declared unconstitutional by the Canadian Supreme Court in 1988. See note 249 above.

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286 Cf. RB, 7 and HL, 31, where there is an endnote attached to this sentence: ‘The former Justice Minister, the Hon. Otto Lang, has spoken out strongly against the way the law is being misapplied by hospital committees.’ Otto Emil Lang (1932– ), lawyer and politician, served as minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada (1972–5; 1978) in the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968–79). Lang lost his Saskatchewan seat in the 1979 federal election. Cf. CMI, 42: ‘... is usually interpreted as a danger ...’ 287 This sentence is omitted in CMI, 42. 288 Cf. RB, 7: ‘In 1974 ... 48,198 legal abortions ...’; HL, 31: In 1984, 61,800 legal abortions ...’ and CMI, 42: ‘In 1980 ... 65,751 legal abortions ... ’CMI, Cf. CMI, 42: ‘... although the medical necessity of abortion decreases.’ 289 Cf. CMI, 42: ‘... is already the usual criterion.’ 290 Cf. RB, 7, HL, 31, and CMI, 42: ‘... is mounting pressure today for still easier laws.’ 291 Cf. CMI, 42, where this sentence continues: ‘... which already de facto exists in many parts of Canada, for example Ontario and British Columbia.’ 292 Cf. RB, 7, HL, 31, and CMI, 43: ‘... and denies any to her unborn child?’ 293 This paragraph is not included in RB, HL, and CMI. 294 The American Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776. 295 Cf. CMI, 43: ‘... that came into being ...’ Cf. also RB, 7 and HL, 32, where the following sentence is inserted here: ‘Christianity has become so secularized that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish it from atheistic humanism.’ 296 Cf. CMI, 43, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘But in that case, why are they equal?’ 297 Cf. CMI, 43: ‘... as the foetus loses out, so will the weak ...’ 298 Cf. CMI, 43: ‘If we come to believe that we are nothing but accidents ...’ 299 Cf. RB, 8 and HL, 32, where the following sentence is inserted: ‘It sounds well in sermons.’ 300 Cf. RB, 8 and HL, 32: ‘Only quality of life deserves our respect, not life itself – so we deny rights to those who do not measure up.’ The same version is in CMI, 43, although broken into two sentences at the dash. 301 Cf. RB, 8 and HL, 32, where a rewritten version of this sentence becomes the first sentence of a separate paragraph: ‘When “quality of life” is urged for constructive purposes, it is indeed a compassionate approach to human suffering; but when it is used to down-grade some lives as expendable, because of their absence of quality, its proper use is perverted. It can then justify abortion for hedonistic reasons, and euthanasia when we are too self-centred to look after the old.’ The text of CMI follows that of RB in its opening sentence, but the rest of the paragraph reads as follows: ‘It can then justify “selective abortion,” or getting rid of the defective. Although our law makes no provision for “selective abortion,” it is already widely

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Technology and Justice practised in Canada, and is the purpose of the well-known test, amniocentesis, that identifies certain defects in the foetus. It is wonderful when medicine can eliminate certain diseases, but it is not at all the same thing to eliminate the patients suffering from them. Once we take the cost-benefit approach, and start grading the right to life in terms of quality, our criteria exclude more and more groups from human status. What will we be willing to do to these groups?’ See note 256 for the placing and wording of this paragraph in CMI. See note 256 above. Cf. RB, 8 and HL, 32: ‘... enormous influence on the Episcopal Church through his “situation ethics.”’ Cf. RB, 9 and HL, 32, where the reference is placed in an endnote: ‘Abortion: A Study (1970), p. 19.’ This paragraph is omitted from CMI. Clemens August Graf von Galen, Bishop of Munster, Cardinal (1878– 1946), was an implacable opponent of the Nazi regime, which he regarded as neo-pagan. He preached three sermons denouncing the Gestapo and the euthanasia program in July and early August 1941. Despite the government’s control of the media, these led to such a public outcry that Hitler officially terminated the T4 Euthanasia Programme (see note 218 above) on 24 August, three weeks after Galen’s third sermon, although the killings of the insane, handicapped, and ill did not actually cease. The assertion of the Grants about the killing of children orphaned in the war, if they are referring to children of ‘Aryan’ parentage, is incorrect. Cf. RB, 9, HL, 33, and CMI, 44: ‘We, of course, do not live in a totalitarian regime and we do not yet kill our mentally ill.’ Cf. RB, 10 and HL, 33, where the following sentences are inserted here: ‘Many of our current infringements of rights can be described as necessary for medical research. Experimentation is passing beyond the lower animals to human beings.’ In the CMI text these sentences and the rest of the paragraph in the TJ text are omitted. Cf. CMI, 44: ‘We are starting to arrogate to ourselves the power to decide not only who should live, but who really wants to live. Despite all the evidence that retarded people, or the very old, are frequently as happy and as unhappy as other people, we are coming to know better. They may seem happy, but if they were normal, they would agree that as defective or old they are really better off dead.’ Cf. RB, 10 and HL, 33, where the sentence in brackets is omitted and the following sentences inserted: ‘There are going to be too many old people, and too few young people to look after them. They will be a “burden on society and on themselves.”’ Cf. RB, 10 and HL, 33, where this paragraph concludes with the following sentences: ‘We are starting to arrogate to ourselves the power to decide not

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only who should live, but who really wants to live. Despite all the evidence that retarded people, or the very old, are frequently as happy and as unhappy as other people, we think we are coming to know better. They may seem happy, but if they were “normal” they would agree that, being defective or old, they would really be better off dead.’ This and the following four sentences are omitted from CMI. See note 285 above. Cf. RB, 10, where the following sentence is inserted here: ‘One can hardly doubt that the same process would take place should euthanasia become partially legalized.’ Cf. RB, 10 and HL, 33, where the following endnote is attached to this sentence: ‘Legislation called the “Death with Dignity Bill” has already been passed in the lower house of the Florida legislature.’ Cf. CMI, 44: ‘If this sounds unjustifiably alarmist ...’ Cf. RB, 11: ‘... in 1974 there were 48,198’; HL, 34: ‘... in 1984 there were 61,800’; and CMI, 44: ‘... in 1980 there were 65,751.’ An endnote is attached to this sentence: ‘Figures derived from Statistics Canada.’ There is no mention of the Morgentaler clinics (see note 249 above) in RB. There is a sentence inserted in CMI: ‘Certainly the rare medical necessities have not increased, for medical techniques have improved.’ Cf. RB, 11 and HL, 34, where this paragraph, and the essay, end with the following sentences: ‘Such an absolute denial of right to unborn children has moved Canada down the road to a society where no rights are safe, and where the sanctity of the individual is openly rejected. The end of this road is tyranny – a tyranny in which legal protection is based on power. Is our church not called to speak with clarity about this erosion of rights, and to point out how it denies the fundamental teaching of Christianity?’ Cf. CMI, 44, which ends with a similar but not identical text: ‘Such an absolute denial ... society where the sanctity of the individual is openly denied, and where the idea of rights may gradually disappear. The end of this road is tyranny – a tyranny in which legal protection will be based upon power. The erosion of rights will be smooth, for when tyranny comes in North America, it will come cosily and on cats’ feet. It will come in the name of the cost-benefit analysis of human life, sugared over with liberal rhetoric about quality of life.’ This and the previous paragraph are not included in RB, HL, and CMI.

Review of If You Love This Country: Facts and Feelings on Free Trade, edited by Laurier LaPierre

The review appeared in Books in Canada, January–February 1988, under the heading ‘The fate of the willing – The Americans proclaim themselves a country and eschew the word empire, while their battleships try to impose their will in the Persian Gulf’; it was reprinted in The George Grant Reader, 151–3. The book was edited by Laurier LaPierre1 for McClelland and Stewart (Toronto, 1987).

This book comprises statements by forty-seven thoughtful Canadians who oppose the Canada-US free-trade agreement. The contributors vary widely: from Margaret Atwood to Frank Stronach, from David Suzuki to Peter C. Newman.2 It is divided into three sections: ‘What We Think,’ ‘What We Know,’ ‘What We Feel.’ Most of the contributors are people who believe that free beings ought to be able to decide rationally what will happen in the world. That is, the good-mannered and liberal left predominates. Different voices deal with different problems: many with the economic issues, some with the social, cultural, and political issues. Taken all in all, this is a powerful statement of what a turning point the free-trade deal will be in Canadian life, and why it bodes ill for our nationhood. Much of the argument deals with the practical issues directly: why Canada would be better served, for prosperity and independence in a technological age, by other strategies. Here James Laxer and Abraham Rotstein are A-1.3 Several of the writings argue that Canada will be forced to give up social programmes that have expressed community solidarity. They will have to be given up so that we can maintain costcompetitiveness with the Americans. Here the appeal has been strongly made by such labour leaders as Shirley Carr and Bob White.4 But I

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think the best understanding on this matter is found in Denis Stairs’ article.5 He understands that community responsibility, and indeed the continuing basis of Canada, has lain in the primacy of the political in our national life. He states: ‘The treaty is only partly about securing access to the American market and subjecting Canadian industries to the salutary cleansing of the cold shower. It is also about ‘deregulating’ Canadian society – that is, about diminishing (after the American model) the role of the state in Canadian life.’ Or again: ‘The fact remains that the proposed treaty not only embodies but, if implemented, will further encourage a conception of government and society different from the one that Canadians currently enjoy. Canada will be a less relaxed, a less gentle, a less tolerant place in which to live.’ He of course realizes that this is not an absolute difference between Canada and the United States. I wish he had carried over his splendid argument about the primacy of the political into how the three Canadian parties destroyed their nationalist wings: the squashing of Walter Gordon by Lester Pearson when the former annoyed the business community; the removal of the Waffle from the NDP when it angered the unions; the destruction of Diefenbaker and his followers by Camp and the business Tories.6 At the level of the immediate issues, Stairs’ statement about the necessary primacy of the political over the economic should be central to any argument about free trade. There is one statement in the book, that moves quite outside the careful assumptions of practical decision. This is Farley Mowat’s.7 He is not concerned with how we should deal immediately with the Americans. He recognizes the arrival of cosy totalitarianism at the centre of the American empire, and hates it. This is the statement with which I feel the greatest sympathy. It is not filled with progressive talk about free human beings being able to make the world as they choose. He sees what corrupts the possibility of politics at this stage of raging technological change. His statement just expresses clear hatred. Hatred is not a typical Canadian emotion or one that Canadians admire – greatly to their credit. Nevertheless some things deserve to be hated – the friendly tyranny of corporation capitalism and the consequent Bodenlösigkeit. (The English word rootlessness catches less well what is happening than does the German.) Love and hate are necessary to each other except among the saints.

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There is one phrase that recurs in this book that I find unwise: ‘Our two countries.’ This is what might be called the rhetoric of Broadbent - the rhetoric he has used since he was used to drive the nationalists out of the NDP.8 But it is also the ‘liberal’ rhetoric by which American journalists legitimize themselves to themselves. They proclaim themselves a country and eschew the word empire, while their battleships try to impose their will in the Persian Gulf. I would have wished, in this book, for a sharper understanding of what imperialism means, and particularly the workings of capitalist imperialism. This is necessary even if we are perhaps faced by a fading Western empire. I think there should have been more understanding in the book of how the central stage of world history now moves from Europe to Far Asia, as China is developed with Japan. What does this mean for Canada, living on the very periphery of that Western empire? In our present case, some of our shrewder capitalists may be calling for continental solidarity as a necessity of this situation. Truth cannot be much spoken in the public realm. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt [The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling]. What is great about this book is that its writers are splendidly stating their unwillingness to be dragged. It is surely a nobler stance to go down with all flags flying (even our present Canadian one) and all guns blazing, than to be acquiescently led, whether sadly or gladly, into the even greater homogenizing of our country into the America mass.

Notes 1 Laurier LaPierre (1929– ). See 146n1. 2 Margaret Atwood (1939– ), Canadian poet and novelist, has won many literary awards, including the Governor General’s Award (1968 and 1985) and the Booker Prize (2000), achieving international fame for both her poetry and such novels as The Blind Assassin (2000) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Frank Stronach (1932– ), Austrian-Canadian industrialist, is the founder of Magna International Inc., an international automotive parts company. David Takayoshi Suzuki (1936– ), geneticist and broadcaster, is a leading environmentalist and is the presenter of the CBC-TV series The Nature of Things. Peter Charles Newman (1929– ), author, editor, and journalist, immigrated to Canada from Czechoslovakia (1940). The author of many books, he has

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also worked as a columnist and editor at the Financial Post, Maclean’s, and the Toronto Star. On James Laxer, see 333n1. Abraham Rotstein (1929– ), author and professor of economics at the University of Toronto, was a leading economic nationalist during the 1960s and 1970s. His many influential books include The Precarious Homestead: Essays on Economics, Technology, and Nationalism (1973). Shirley Carr, labour leader, served in executive positions in the Canadian Union of Public Employees and then as executive vice-president of the Canadian Labour Congress in 1974 and later president in 1986. Bob White (1935– ), labour leader, led the Canadian members of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) to secede from the UAW to form the Canadian Automobile Workers. Denis Winfield Stairs (1939– ), professor of political science emeritus at Dalhousie University, is the author of The Diplomacy of Constraint: Canada, The Korean War, and the United States (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974). Walter Lockhart Gordon (1906–87), public servant, politician, and author, as finance minister under Pearson brought forward a budget proposal for a tax on takeovers of Canadian firms (1963), but withdrew it under pressure from the business community. The Waffle, a militant socialist and nationalist caucus within the New Democratic party led by James Laxer and Mel Watkins, was purged from the Ontario NDP in 1972. Dalton Camp (see 407n7) led the group within the Progressive Conservatives that forced Diefenbaker out of the leadership in 1967. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 392n7. Farley Mowat (1921– ), author and naturalist, wrote such popular books as People of the Deer (1952) and Never Cry Wolf (1963). He was denied entry to the United States during the Reagan administration. John Edward (Ed) Broadbent (1936– ), politician and political scientist, was leader of the federal New Democratic Party 1975–89. He served as director of the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development 1989–96. He briefly returned to the House of Commons 2004–6, but retired because of his wife’s illness.

‘Sacrifice and the Sanctity of Life’ by Sheila and George Grant

This article appeared in New Life: Addressing Change in the Church, edited by Mark Haslett et al. (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1989), 78– 99. It was written in 1988.

There are new and threatening developments in our society about which the Anglican Church of Canada has, as far as we know, spoken very little.a Human life, as we know it, is faced with changes which may be summed up under the word bio-technology, or the engineering of the life process. We can now make human life in the laboratory; we can synthesize, split, and change living substances at will; monkeys’ brains are being transplanted; cattle and sheep have been cloned; scientists in the USA are engaged in a three-billion-dollar project, working out the full chemical data base of human genes. ‘An attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little.’b However, recently a more familiar attack on human life – abortion – is demanding attention because of the striking down of the abortion law by the Supreme Court of Canada (January 1988). Despite clear

a See the Appendix to the report of the 1974 Task Force on Human Life, ‘Abortion, an Issue for Conscience,’ 43–6. The Synod in 1971 called for an inter-disciplinary study of current issues in medical ethics. The Task Force was to aim at a definition of human life in its application to subjects such as abortion, transplantation, and medical experimentation. There is some account of the nature of questions raised, but it is only a very tentative beginning. Perhaps some further progress has been made. b Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row 1966), 52. A translation of Gelassenheit by John M. Anderson and E. Freund. Originally published in 1959 by Verlag Günther Neske, Pfullingen.

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statements about abortion from the General Synods in 1973 and 1980, very unclear qualifications were added in 1983 by the second Task Force on Human Life report, The Abortion Question. This left Anglicans with considerable uncertainty as to the real position of the leaders of the church. However, since the first draft of this present paper, a new ‘small task force’ on abortion, appointed by the primate, Archbishop Peers, has produced a report in response to the striking down of the law by the Supreme Court.1 This report differs considerably from those produced under Archbishop Scott.2 The purpose of this writing is not to discuss the issue of abortion in general. It is rather to look at certain theological statements that have been made in the context of abortion, and to consider how these might affect the discussion of the bio-technological challenges that threaten human life itself. This paper will include a detailed analysis of three paragraphs from The Abortion Question, a brief survey of what is going on in the technical mastery of human reproduction and genetic engineering, and a glance at certain statements in the Task Force on Human Life 1980 report, Dying. The two subjects, abortion and scientific mastery, are different, but the principles that determine our views of both must be related. Our opinions will depend on what we think human life to be. The church is surely called to a clear theological position on these matters, even if it is one that may divide us from the secular majority of our society. I First it is necessary to give a brief account of the Anglican opinion on abortion. When the Supreme Court struck down the law in January 1988, the Nova Scotian Diocesan Times quoted on its front page the resolution by the General Synod of 1980: ‘This General Synod, in proclaiming a gospel of Life and Hope and Compassion for all of God’s people, rejects the principle of “abortion on demand,” or for the reasons of convenience or economic or social hardship.’ However, the national paper, The Canadian Churchman, gave, as its response to the Supreme Court, an editorial headed, ‘Church should reconsider its statement on abortion.’ This article praises the position of the United Church, which holds abortion to be a matter for the private autonomy of the woman, and supports social reasons as sufficient to justify it; indeed, the general

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persuasion of the article is almost identical with that of the United Church as well as that of some of the Supreme Court justices. This point of view is of course quite common among Anglicans, as can be seen in many articles and letters and in the booklets by the primate’s Task Force on Human Life, Abortion, an Issue for Conscience, in 1974, and The Abortion Question, in 1983. Both these publications assert strongly the sacredness of unborn life as human and God-given, but almost every assertion is followed by a list of exceptions, centering on social or economic difficulties. It is impossible to equate the main thrust of The Abortion Question with the statement of the 1980 Synod or with the report of the new ‘small task force.’ Both of these justify abortion only in cases of serious threat to life or health. The new report speaks of the need to establish whether a true life-for-life situation exists before an abortion can be justified. There is still some ambiguity about health, but it is at least clearer than anything in the former reports, in which health is extended to mean well-being or happiness, and where the foetus is said to have its own ‘conflicting rights and obligations.’ We will now look at the theological passages from The Abortion Question – the first recommendation of Part II of the booklet, entitled ‘Some Underlying Principles.’ It is said of these principles that ‘we consider some assertions morally relevant and beyond dispute by reasonable persons.’ The booklet is recommended as a pastoral resource for personal and congregational study by the Most Reverend Edward W. Scott, primate at that time. The fourth underlying principle is as follows: Christian theology does not support the view that the sanctity of human life means that it should never, under any circumstances be taken. Nor does it support the claim that a life may be taken only when the physical life of another is threatened. The value of a human life lies in the living relationship between that person, the Creator of life, and all of the created order, not in a God-given ‘life-force’ or soul. The sacrifice of one life for the sake of another can, in certain circumstances, contribute to the sanctity of human life as a whole. There is, unquestionably, great ambiguity in extending to an unborn foetus this principle of the sacrificial surrendering of life. But in the symbiotic relationship between mother and foetus there is mutual and reciprocal obligation, however one-sided it may seem at first glance. To accord rights to the unborn is, by the same

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logic, to accord it obligations. It is not reasonable to maintain that the mother must be the only one prepared to sacrifice her life or health or sanity for her unborn child. The foetal ‘right to life’ is a diminished right if ... it stands in the way of the woman’s health or sanity. The myth of foetal ‘innocence’ must be abandoned, for none of us asked to be conceived; yet having entered the human fold we are not innocent of duties and obligations to others, and not least to the person whose life would have to support ours for a long time, well beyond birth. Maternal ‘innocence’ too is a myth. However conceived, a life is at stake when a woman seeks an abortion; the pregnant woman is not in a position of absolute first rights. But in the circumstances of her life, she may be physically or psychologically unable to bear the weight of her obligations, and subjectively unable to understand and accept them. Such conditions can diminish her duty and lay the burden of sacrifice on the unborn. The decision in such cases, where the good of one cannot be achieved without the sacrifice of the other, must always be fraught with tragedy and moral ambiguity for Christians.c

Is this not saying that the foetus has an obligation to sacrifice herself for the sake of her mother? What can this possibly mean? How can a foetus be capable of sacrificing herself? Surely this is only possible when there is consciousness of this purpose? A foetus cannot undertake to surrender her life. Nor can she have duties and obligations, since she cannot conceptualize. When this booklet contradicts these obvious facts it becomes nonsense. The idea is dressed in pretentious theological garb, but it is nevertheless nonsense. The authors of these paragraphs may conceivably think that what they are really writing about is proxy consent by the mother on behalf of her unborn child. This would mean that the foetus, if she were a reasonable adult, would agree to have been killed in the womb for her mother’s sake. It cannot really be self-sacrifice the authors are referring to, but the sacrifice of one human being by another. The purpose of this sacrifice is not to make the crops grow, nor to placate an angry god, but to ‘contribute to the sanctity of human life as a whole.’ The foetus is not sacrificing herself for this purpose, but is being sacrificed to it. The

c Bruce Alton, ed., The Abortion Question (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre 1983), 23–4.

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word sacrifice has central associations in Christianity. It is therefore repugnant to see it used in this manner. The authors of this writing seem to be claiming that the obligations of the foetus have logical status. ‘To accord rights to the unborn is, by the same logic, to accord it obligations.’ By what logic? In Canadian law the rights of those who have to depend entirely on others, for reasons of age or infirmity, are simply the rights to protection, if necessary by the state. The legal phrase is ‘welfare rights,’ and of their very nature they do not entail reciprocal obligations and duties. The infant has no moral obligation to her mother; any more than the mother, if later senile, would have any obligations to her daughter or to anyone else. One feels a need to state the obvious, perhaps to dispel from one’s mind gruesome visions of three-year-old children having the obligation to sacrifice their lives for their mothers. The whole argument about sacrifice must be intended to make more palatable the including of social and economic considerations (as distinguished from medical ones) as justifications for abortion. These had been explicitly excluded by the 1980 Synod. Unless the Task Force differed from the Synod, there would be no need for their extraordinary arguments. Would not all Anglicans agree that if a woman’s health or sanity is truly endangered, an abortion should be allowed? The authors of the booklet are trying to have it both ways. They state abortion ‘is never to be sought unless the woman’s well-being can be secured in no other way.’ Once the word health is extended to general well-being, we move close to abortion on demand, for who has perfect well-being? Many of the hardships mentioned by the writers as possible reasons for abortion are not caused by pregnancy nor cured by abortion. Indeed, they are social and economic hardships that urgently require our help,d but the best means of such help is not the advocacy of freedom to kill the unborn. (Of course, anything Christians know of

d The new ‘small task force’ report gives an excellent detailed account of the unhappy conditions and inequalities that most require Christian and governmental help. But even this report seems to imply that abortion is only a problem of the economically and socially deprived. It ignores the passionate cry for ‘abortion on demand’ among professional women. Indeed, this last report seems to have a certain class bias. Of course much abortion occurs among the poor and unhappy, but the fact that it is widely practised for convenience by the bourgeoisie is somehow passed over. This perhaps arises because the church itself has now largely a middle-class membership.

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God tells us that his judgment of hard-pressed, poor women who have abortions would not be the same as that of prosperous women who do it for convenience.) Pregnancy is not, after all, a venereal disease, and children have been known to bring happiness even to poor people. Poverty and unhappiness are obviously evils to be fought, but did Jesus ever imply that they necessarily diminished sanctity? The beatitudes are not about quality of life.3 He did not say, ‘Blessed are the comfortable, the successful and the well adjusted.’ But he did ask, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?’4 It is necessary now to go back a little in the first paragraph quoted, to examine the meaning of the phrase ‘the sanctity of human life as a whole,’ to which the foetus’s self-sacrifice is said to contribute. The usual meaning, apparent in the first sentence of the above passage, is that human life is an unqualified good – that human beings must be treated with the greatest respect and hedged around with protections. An individual may not take the life of another, except in defence of his own life. The reason for this is that human beings are children of God, who himself became a human, and who has called us to eternal life. The English law from the earliest days adopted the religious account of the sanctity of human life and defined sanctity as inviolability; individuals are not to be treated with violence unjustifiably. Our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is informed with the same idea. Our medical ethics also grew up within this concept.e When the authors of The Abortion Question state: ‘The sacrifice of one life for the sake of another can, in certain circumstances, contribute to the sanctity of human life as a whole,’ they cannot be referring to the concept we have discussed. The statement sounds Christian enough at first reading, until it becomes clear that the sacrifice referred to is not self-sacrifice, but the sacrifice of another for one’s own sake. Clearly, when the authors use ‘the sanctity of life’ in this context, they are confusing it with quite a different idea, ‘the quality of life.’ The sanctity of life is a belief about the nature of human life which is either true or false. It is not affected by anything the foetus or the mother does or does e The roots of this basic principle lie not only in Christianity, but throughout the great civilizations of the world. For a brilliant discussion of this, see the short book by C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943) (Collins, Fount 1978).

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not do. But the quality of life of the mother or of society may, indeed, be affected by abortion. The authors again use sanctity, when they really mean quality of life in the following paragraph: There is also no innocence at the social level. Whatever the intent and success of social or legal reform in the matter of abortion, conflicting rights and obligations will continue to arise in some pregnancies. These will have to be decided by the woman in consultation with the father, doctors, friends, clergy, and other counselors in a world which has not yet fully realized the kingdom of God, and where it is still tragically true that the sanctity [italics added] of life cannot always be maintained without sacrifice. In our partial realization of the reign of God, Christians are called to minimize such violence and take it with the utmost seriousness.f

What improves living conditions for someone evidently improves the sanctity (quality) of life as a whole. If this is what is meant, why not say so, as the United Church does? This confusion of meaning helps to justify the sacrifice argument. How can it not be good to maintain the sanctity of life? This thought brings us to the theological position raised in the passages quoted. What kind of world is envisaged by this expression of Anglicanism? It is a world full of ‘agonizing ambiguity’ at every turn. The authors may have wanted to avoid a sense of the supernatural because they are dealing with a grim option of practical living. But the three paragraphs quoted hardly allow for that explanation. This tragic, half-realized ambiguous world is all we have. There is a kind of miasma, almost Kafkaesque, of unspecified guilt. Not even the unborn child is innocent: ‘The myth of foetal “innocence” must be abandoned ... having entered the human fold we are not innocent of duties and obligations to others.’ This pervasive sense of unspecified guilt and ambiguity seems to be related to the absence of any over-riding commandment about good or bad action. Our position of ambiguity is such that we can never know in advance that there is anything that we should never do. That is in effect to say that there is no moral law. Under the old dispensation of

f Alton, 24.

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sin and redemption, guilt could be faced and dealt with. But in this vision of the world, guilt seems to be ingrained in the nature of things. The soul itself is dismissed as a ‘life-force’; the value of life only exists in relationships.g You’re OK and I’m OK, but even from the mother’s womb we are all tainted. In true existentialist manner, we can never have clean hands. We cannot even look at a baby and see ‘the dearest freshness deep down things.’5 That is an illusion and must be given up. In this booklet there is one moral imperative: act so as to contribute to the sanctity (quality) of life as a whole. This must be done in the context of ‘our reverence for the gift of human life.’ (A little Schweitzer is a dangerous thing.)6 We have to act ‘in a world which has not yet fully realized the kingdom of God, and where it is still tragically true that the sanctity of life cannot always be maintained without sacrifice.’ Does this mean that the reign of God exists now in fact, or is it only partial until the world has fully realized it? Does realized here mean achieved? There is a contradiction involved. The necessity for abortion for non-medical reasons only exists now because God’s kingdom is not yet fully realized; ‘in a more perfect world abortions would rarely be performed’h – yet apparently abortion, by sometimes maintaining and contributing to the sanctity/quality of life, can be a means of bringing the kingdom nearer. This contradiction cannot be dismissed as another tragic ambiguity. It is as illogical as saying, ‘Murder would seldom happen if the kingdom of God were fully realized; so it is good to commit murder when necessary to hasten the coming of the kingdom.’ Good ends cannot be served by base means. This suggests a further corruption of T.S. Eliot’s famous lines about the final treason: ‘To do the wrong thing for the right reason.’7 The language in the passage discussed is indeed theological, but the thought, as far as it is accessible at all, seems to boil down to the ethic of utility. This is the fate of most ethics that depend on the concept of quality of life. ‘If the existence of one individual, however useless, may be g This relational theology is familiar to Anglicans from Dying, the Task Force book of 1980. In this and in many other discussions of euthanasia, Richard A. McCormick, SJ, is the authority. The dismissal of the value of the soul in human life may refer also to the attempt to move away from the dualism of soul and body, which at one time was supposed to be influenced by Greek thought, as opposed to Hebrew. See James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford University Press, 1961). h Alton, 19.

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sacrificed for the benefit of any person, however useful, then we have acknowledged the principle that rational utility may justify any outcome.’i A theology of unspecified guilt, which is so ambiguous as to have no moral law, leaves us breathing a theological fog. No wonder Evangelical fundamentalism is having such success in the English-speaking world. But Anglicanism is grounded in reality, and clearer theology is necessary to express the truth of that reality. II We now turn from abortion to a discussion of bio-technology and the engineering of the life process. The two subjects are connected because both have to do with human beings’ increasing desire to interfere with the reproductive process. In most of the new bio-technologies one may sum up the ethical dilemma for Christians as follows: there is on the one hand the pressing desire to take over control of reproduction, and on the other hand the growing danger that this control will lead to the desacralization of human life itself. The subjects to be considered are: in vitro fertilization, experimentation on live embryos and foetuses, medical use of foetal tissues, and genetic engineering. In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) When IVF is presented as a new medical treatment which can bring great happiness to infertile couples, it is hard not to be enthusiastic about it. It can be thought of as assisting nature, like other helpful medical procedures. The technique may improve the quality of life for some infertile women. However, when one looks more closely at IVF many kinds of difficult questions arise. One concerns the embryos that, having been fertilized in the laboratory, are not chosen to be implanted and are either thrown away, kept for experimentation, or frozen for future use. This might come under the category of self-sacrifice by the embryos for the

i John A. Robertson, ‘Involuntary Euthanasia of Defective Newborns: A Legal Analysis,’ Stanford Law Review 27 (1975): 256.

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good of the woman who wants, in this case, to be a mother. But would the Synod of the Anglican church see it in this way? Another serious difficulty concerns the embryos that are implanted in the womb, one or more of which may become a child. IVF is still a very experimental technique; its failure rate in Canada is said to be ninety per cent. The technicians (or doctors) have to learn by doing. Animal work is not conclusive. It has been admitted that it is impossible to be 100% certain one is not damaging the embryos when manipulating them into being, testing, and implanting them. If the tests are exhaustive they may cause damage. It is surely immoral to bring into the world new humans whom one has fabricated oneself, unless every possibility of damage has been foreclosed. But this can never be known. Gross deformities and genetic abnormalities will be caught and the foetus aborted, but what of subtler defects? Embryos are now frequently frozen before implanting, but only one hundred babies have been born by this method. It is admitted that not enough use has yet been made of this method to find out whether the frozen embryos that do grow to be babies are statistically more or less prone to birth defects than non-frozen embryos.j Some more learning by doing is deemed necessary. And the doing is all done to beings who did not exist until we manufactured them. This seems a danger inherent in the whole enterprise of IVF. The third consideration is whether women and their embryos are patients or research specimens. It is indeed questionable whether IVF is a medical procedure at all. If infertility is a clinical defect, one would expect it to be remedied by medical means, (like reconstruction of the oviducts, from which thirty per cent to fifty per cent success has been reported).k If we construe as a medical procedure the manufacturing of a possible human being where none existed before, we have to see the purpose of medicine as the satisfaction of desires, not the curing of a medical problem. This leads us to the fourth point, a much broader consideration that moves out of the medical field altogether, into that of social engineering. It is clear that the vast worldwide enterprise of IVF is not just to help the individual women who now want it. Are Christians, who

j Globe and Mail, 9 Feb. 1988. k Paul Ramsey, ‘Shall We Reproduce?’ JAMA 220 (1972): 1481.

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believe human life to be a God-given gift, willing to see the procreation of human life turned over more and more to the scientific researcher, and the whole process divorced from the loving act which had once brought it forth? Women themselves are beginning to realize how much they are being used. A coalition of women’s groups is asking for a royal commission to study the impact and regulation of the new reproductive technologies, both IVF and surrogate motherhood. At a news conference in Toronto, sociologist Margrit Eichler said that the change in society brought about by the advances in the production of babies is comparable to ‘the splitting of the atom and the effect that this had on the world.’ A spokesman for the coalition was insistent that policy on these matters must not be left to doctors and lawyers.l What is foreseen is not simply a new way of forming a family. It is a new eugenics. Techniques will gradually be extended to cover the whole period of gestation in the laboratory. At present the medical scientists are working at each end. They are learning how to extend the life of man-made embryos and to preserve ever younger premature births. In the end these processes will meet. There will be choice as to the sex and quality of the products. Sperm from high IQ donors is already available in the US. Mistakes can usually be eliminated by eliminating the foetus. If anyone thinks this is exaggeration let him read L’oeuf transparent by J. Testart. He was in charge of the project which made the first IVF baby in France. After many years at this work, he has refused to continue his researches, and this book most eloquently tells us of his reasons.m Foetal Experimentation There are four kinds of experimentation to be considered: on an embryo in vitro, on a foetus in the uterus, on a foetus before abortion, on a foetus after abortion. Experiments on an embryo in vitro: This is a complex subject. The Medical Research Council in Ottawa has just issued new guidelines for research on live human embryos manufactured in the laboratory.n The l Globe and Mail, 29 March 1988. m J. Testart, L’oeuf transparent (France: Champs Flammarion 1986). Not yet translated. n Globe and Mail, 5 March 1988.

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MRC funds research of this kind. Human embryos may now be experimented on for seventeen days, longer than any other Western country allows. (The longest others had allowed had been fourteen days.) The research is supposed to be for the purpose of improving IVF techniques. But the council wants to avoid the creation of laboratory factories that would produce foetuses solely for experimentation or for the mass production of tissues and genes for medical treatment. ‘It is not acceptable at this point (emphasis added) to create embryos in vitro for research as opposed to therapeutic purposes.’ The most interesting statement in the newspaper report of these guidelines is one highly relevant to our subject. The MRC does not want limits on experimentation to be put into law. Such prohibitions are too sweeping and not suitable for individual cases. ‘No one should interfere with the therapeutic freedom of the treating physician.’ What used to be called engineering is now always called therapy. The word therapeutic combined with freedom has almost indefinite elasticity, which is clearly what is wanted for the guidelines. Public opinion needs to be brought along gradually in its struggle to keep up with what scientists can do. Step by defensible step, we can be brought along to accept almost anything. This is made easier if it is associated with authority figures in white coats, members of the healing profession who care for us. ‘Before it is realised that the objective has ceased to be the treatment of a medical condition, it will be too late.’o Experiments on live foetuses in utero: These experiments are only allowed with the mother’s informed consent, and if they are not harmful to the foetus. Separated tissue may be obtained from the foetus for research purposes. (It has not been made clear whether the term separated tissue could be applied to a live aborted foetus, now separated from the mother.) Experiments on foetuses before abortion: Controversy has arisen about whether the prohibitions against experimenting should be relaxed when the foetus has been scheduled for abortion. If the mother has decided that the foetus is to be destroyed anyway, why should not doctors experiment, in any way useful, on the foetus while still in the uterus? Even if it is harmful to him, it is not likely to be nearly so violent as the abortion that awaits him. He can help the doctor to help other foetuses who are wanted, and thus dignify his short existence, with, of o Ramsey, 1485.

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course, his mother’s consent. But here’s the rub – is she in any position to give consent for further harm to be done to the foetus she has already consigned to destruction? A parent’s right to make proxy decisions for her child is based on the assumption that she has the best interests of the child at heart. Much has been written about this dilemma. May the wrong of harmful experiment be added to the wrong of violent death? Or we could word it: may an experiment for the advantage of future wanted children be performed on a foetus who is soon to be legally terminated? Or a third way of putting it: may the quality/sanctity of life be improved for others by laying the burden of double sacrifice upon a foetus? We clearly need some help here with our language and our thinking. Should the answer from Anglicans to all three versions of the question be a categorical no? Is the imminence of death sufficient to warrant the use of a foetus as an experimental animal? Do we experiment on those criminals condemned to the death penalty? You cannot be a philanthropist with someone else’s money. Experiment on live foetuses (after abortion): Experiment on live aborted foetuses is rare, because the usual methods of early abortion kill the foetus. It is only possible on those aborted at a late date by hysterotomy, by which time they would probably be viable. According to Canadian law (section 206 of the Criminal Code), such foetuses, if alive when removed from the womb, are human beings with full rights. It is very hard to believe that no experiments take place, but we are certainly not likely to hear about them. One famous experiment, on brain oxidation, did make the media in 1973, when three living, second-trimester foetuses were decapitated and the heads kept alive as long as possible by perfusion.p A similar experiment in 1968 was performed on a living twenty-six-week-old foetus, without decapitation.q It failed because a cannula slipped out. The Medical Use of Foetal Tissue We now turn to the use of tissue from dead foetuses.r 8 It has been much

p ‘Post abortion foetal study stirs storm,’ Medical World News (1973), 14-21. q Geoffrey Chamberlain, ‘An Artificial Placenta, ’American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 100/5 (1 March 1968): 624. r It was indeed heartening to read point V on page 11 of the report of the new ‘small task force,’ referring to this subject.

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in the news since 1987, particularly with regard to new treatment for Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. In this case, the foetus used is dead, so there are no more moral problems than in the use of cadavers in general. But the problem that does arise in this context is that of sufficient access to foetal tissue of adequate maturity. It is significant that of the 204 transplants of foetal pancreatic tissue so far performed, China has done 89, and has had much the best results. The reason for this is thought to be because they have been able to use thirty-week-old foetuses. Such late abortions are rare in the West, and the foetuses would be viable. So far, foetuses of eight to eighteen weeks have been used, but the success rate has been minimal.s Many other uses are predicted for foetal tissue – Huntington’s chorea, Alzheimer’s, leukemia, and many nerve disorders. This dramatic possibility adds a new dimension to the abortion controversy. Will women be persuaded to have later abortions? Will they conceive children with the intention of aborting them for sale or donation to research programs? Kate Michelman, executive director of the National Abortion Rights League, warns: ‘There is a potential for abuse in this whole thing, and it worries us.’t The amount of tissue, of the right age, needed for research, is very great indeed; but nothing like so enormous as the amount needed actually to treat these diseases, should the research be successful. Is it any wonder that foetal hatcheries are on the horizon? Are unique developing humans to be brought into being, killed, and used to improve the condition of other human beings? There are only two possible sources for sufficient supply – foetal hatcheries or women with advanced pregnancies. Obviously any sane person desires the diminution of disease. But are we to say yes to either of these means to this end? Genetic Engineering and Eugenics Eugenics means the making of a superior population, usually by genetic engineering. The idea is far from new. David Suzuki has reminded us

s The Medical Post, 10 Feb. 1987. Prof. John Turtle, head of endocrinology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, reported to a media conference on world-wide attempts to transplant pancreatic foetal tissue into diabetics. t ‘Medical use of tissue from foetuses adds fuel to debate over abortion,’ Globe and Mail, 17 Aug. 1987.

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lately that early in this century geneticists and anthropologists were enthusiastic at the prospect of improving society by encouraging ‘superior’ people to reproduce and preventing the ‘inferior’ from doing so. It helped to establish the social climate for the adoption of race purification policies by Nazi Germany. Suzuki suggests we use history as a guide to the changing relationship between science and society.u We will take his advice and look at certain policies of the present government of West Germany. Their abortion law is restrictive. The Constitutional Court noted that this principle was to be understood ‘in the light of ... the spiritual-moral confrontation with the previous system of National Socialism.’v The rest of the Western countries have treated this statement as if it were a private concern of the German people which need not affect anyone else’s thinking on the matter. There is more to come: in February 1988 it was announced that West Germany plans to ban research on human embryos, outlaw surrogate motherhood, and curb artificial insemination. New legislation will forbid production of human embryos for research, the choice of a child’s sex in artificial insemination, and attempts to breed mixtures of humans and animals. The justice minister has said that ‘limits have to be put on the freedom of scientists when experiments affect human dignity.’w The West Germans have learnt from the terrors of twentieth-century history; we do not seem to have done so. On 22 February 1988 there was an article in the New York Times that is worth quoting. It was called ‘Life, Industrialized,’ and began with three items which are quoted below: Item: The National Academy of Sciences last week advocated a three-billion-dollar project to work out the full chemical data base of human genes. Item: On a farm in Wheelock, Tex., seven genetically identical bulls have been produced by a new technique for cloning cattle. The inven-

u David Suzuki, ‘Scientists aren’t evil-prone, but possess all human flaws,’ Globe and Mail, 12 March 1988. v In introduction to text of West German decision. John Marshall, Journal of Practice and Procedure 9/3. w Globe and Mail, 11 Feb. 1988.

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tors plan to provide cloned embryos of prize bulls for gestation in ordinary cattle. Item: The Patent and Trademark Office has ruled that farmers who breed from patented, genetically improved animals must pay royalties on the offspring to the inventor for seventeen years.

Just as alarming as these items is the attitude taken to them in this article. At present US law forbids the patenting of any human life. Congressman Charles Rose of NC wants to suspend the granting of patents even on animal life, while Congress considers the matter. But the New York Times editorial comments thus: ‘That’s a recipe for inaction; Congress’s duty is to keep up with the technology, not slow it down ... Life is special, and humans even more so, but biological machines are still machines that can now be altered, cloned and patented.’ Some readers may admit the economic imperative which is the basis of the New York Times article but feel that in this writing we have exaggerated the sheer technological drive. One must not forget Robert Oppenheimer’s famous saying about experimentation: ‘When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.’9 You can argue about it afterwards. We do not wish to catalogue a lot of horror stories. A few are enough. Readers would find many examples in Testart’s book, L’oeuf transparent. He quotes one of his colleagues, a famous embryologist who has already engineered a sheep-goat, as saying: ‘Give me a mouse egg and a human egg, and I will make you a monster.’ This was to be taken as a black joke, but Testart saw the blackness rather than the fun. Here is an example of the experimental drive from Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for unravelling the structure of the DNA molecule. ‘There is going to be no agreement between Christians and any humanists who lack their particular prejudice about the sanctity of the individual.’ The proposal Crick was discussing was the making of a child whose head would be twice as big as normal. Men simply want to try it scientifically.x ‘What happens in a society that has both the technology to manipu-

x Wolstenholme, Man and His Future, 380. Quoted in Paul Ramsey, The Patient as Person (New Haven: Yale University Press 1976), 146.

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late the genetic code and a social biology that suggests that we are no more than the genes that make us up? It is a dangerous combination moving us ever closer to a eugenic civilization.’y Some of us care nowadays about endangered species and acid rain; but as C.S. Lewis said, we should ‘not do to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself.’z The Christian surely cannot identify the realization of God’s kingdom with the approximation, increasing yearly, to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1980 the General Synod condemned abortion except for grave medical reasons and asserted the sanctity of human life. Three years later The Abortion Question extended the justification of abortion to social ‘quality of life’ considerations. As medical reasons are very rare and social ones very common, this meant that the Task Force was justifying a great extension of the occasions when abortion can be right. This is not just an expression of valuable tolerance of different opinions. It is symptomatic of a fundamental division about the very truth of Christianity given by the church. The theology expressed in The Abortion Question goes far beyond the subject of abortion, and approaches, as we have seen, a kind of utilitarianism. It also denies the Christian doctrine of the soul. The authors claim their principles to be ‘above dispute by reasonable persons,’ and assert that they should ‘inform our thinking’ about the question of abortion. But one may fear they could easily be extended to inform our thinking about bio-technology as well. We cannot fail to be partially reassured by the new statement of the ‘small task force.’ It certainly has moved away from the earlier publication. But how can anyone feel confident about what may be said next? There is another Task Force report, Dying, published in 1980, which contains sections highly relevant to our subject. It includes an account of freedom which might easily be applied in support of the modern ‘therapeutic’ enterprise. We have to accept in the light of reality the freedom that modern technol-

y Jeremy Rifkin, president of Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, DC, ‘Ethics in Embryo,’ Harper’s Magazine, Sept. 1987, 38. z Lewis, 47.

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ogy gives, always remembering our relation to our Creator and Redeemer. ‘Christ set us free, to be free men.’ (Galatians 5:1 NEB) The freedom to exercise our co-responsibility with God concerning decisions about sickness, life and death, is given to the fellowship of those who care ... to reject this responsibility and freedom is to deny the stewardship with which we are entrusted ... Our values are continually evolving, and we should question whether values established in the past about man and society are still applicable to the new challenges and problems that confront us today.aa

This of course was written in the context of euthanasia, but how can its application be limited to that? Should it be? The freedom given us by Christ – the Truth shall make you free – is identified in the booklet with the freedom of technological advance.10 But are they the same? If man is ‘a steward of all that has been given in creation, including the gift of life,’ can we do anything whatsoever in the name of stewardship, if we are to be accountable to God?ab The passage from Dying is written in the language of progressive theology, not in the existential language of unspecified guilt which we mentioned earlier; but what they have in common is an inability of the faith so expressed to place any limits on the spread of technological society. We have already seen the ‘sanctity of life’ doctrine become so flexible it can be identified with quality of life and thereby justify abortion. Are we going to see Christian freedom and stewardship used to justify the increasing takeover of the life processes by the medical sciences? We hear much about the evolution of moral values. Does this mean we must evolve beyond the two commandments of Christ? Are we now to evolve beyond the Sermon on the Mount? If so, why should we be Christians at all? Why should we not follow the majority and become modern secularists who have no reason for believing in the sanctity of life and no reason to believe in the self-giving love of sacrifice? Christianity will of course survive. Christ promised that it would. Nevertheless it may be that the voice of Christians will not be able to

aa Lawrence Whytehead and Paul Chidwick, ed., Dying (Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre 1980), 24. ab Whytehead and Chidwick, 23.

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stem the secular desire to control absolutely the life processes. But as the great Anglican theologian Hooker said centuries ago, we still must speak, so that ‘posterity may know we have not loosely, through silence, permitted things to pass away as in a dream.’11

Notes 1 Archbishop Michael Geoffrey Peers (1934– ) was primate of the Anglican Church of Canada 1986–2004. 2 Archbishop Edward (Ted) Scott (1919–2004) served as primate of the Anglican Church of Canada 1971–86. 3 Matthew 5:3–10. 4 Mark 8:36. 5 Gerard Manley, ‘God’s Grandeur’ (sonnet), l. 10: ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’ 6 Albert Schweitzer, The Teaching of Reverence for Life, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Hold, Rinehart and Winston 1965). 7 ‘The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.’ T.S. Eliot Murder in the Catherdral (1935). 8 In response to the Supreme Court decision of January 1988 striking down the provisions in the Criminal Code regulating abortion (section 251), Archbishop Michael G. Peers, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, appointed a ‘small task force’ to study the issue and make recommendations. The task force consisted of Phyllis Creighton, Diane Marshall, and the Rev. James Reed. Its report was received and endorsed by the National Executive Council of the Anglican Church on the 13 May 1988, and received on 7 November by the House of Bishops, which recommended that the report ‘with minor revisions’ be printed and made publicly available. It appeared as Abortion in a New Perspective: Report of the Task Force on Abortion (Anglican Church of Canada, April 1989). The Grants worked from the original typescript version. Recommendation #V, which appears on p. 19 of the printed report, reads as follows: ‘Because of current scientific developments in the use of fetal cells and tissue, for example for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, severe anemia, or diabetes, and the possibility of deliberate abortion for such purposes – fetal farming – we believe that legislation is needed to ban commercial transactions in human genetic material and to identify protections for the right of the unborn. The royal commission on reproductive technologies, for which women have been calling, might serve as a vehicle to examine these concerns and develop legislative measures.’

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9 See above 279n4. 10 John 8:32. 11 Richard Hooker (c. 1554–1600), Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: Dent 1964), Preface I.1.

The Triumph of the Will

This essay appeared in The Issue Is Life: A Christian Response to Abortion in Canada, edited by Denyse O’Leary, 155–66 (Burlington, ON: Welch Publishing Co. 1988), and was reprinted in volume 1, nos. 3–4 of Jeremiad (Fall–Winter 1988–9): 3–6, and in Ian Gentles ed., A Time to Choose Life: Women, Abortion, and Human Rights, 9–18 (Toronto: Stoddart 1990), and, finally, in the The George Grant Reader, 142–50. We present the first version here.

The decision of the Supreme Court concerning abortion could be seen as comedy if it did not concern the slaughter of the young. Any laughter is quelled by a sense of desolation for our country. Yet the comedy too must be looked at to understand our political institutions. The comedy arises from the fact that the majority of the judges used the language of North American liberalism to say ‘yes’ to the very core of fascist thought – the triumph of the will. Their decision is a good example of Huey Long’s wise dictum: ‘When fascism comes to America it will come in the name of democracy.’1 The court says yes to those who claim the right to mastery over their own bodies, even if that mastery includes the killing of other human beings.a Indeed, the advocates of abortion have shown since the decision how much they are believers in the triumph of the will, when they ‘demand’ that the government ‘must’ immediately guarantee access and payment for all abortions. That is, the state must pay for these proa I do not intend to show in this writing that the foetus is a developing individual of our species from conception. This was shown beyond doubt in the testimony of the famous French geneticist, Jerome Lejeune, before a committee of the American Senate.

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cesses, even when they are not medically necessary. The triumph of the will realizes itself when its advocates understand that the individual will is only liberated to its full power when it can dominate the state. The imputation of fascism to those with whom one disagrees is indeed a dangerous game. People of the left call Mrs Thatcher a fascist, when, whatever she may be, she is not that. People of the right call Castro a ‘fascist,’ when, whatever he may be he is not that. To speak of incipient fascism in the present case requires that one discuss what fascism is. That is a useful public task, because fascism is a growing possibility in advanced industrial countries. If one does not look clearly at such phenomena, one cannot think how to deal with them. The English-speaking liberals quite correctly saw the European examples of fascism as despicable tyrannies. What they could not express was the difference between such totalitarian tyranny and most of the tyrannies of the past. The Marxists saw clearly the partial truth that fascism was made possible by a late stage of a decaying capitalism. They had no explanation for the fact that certain fascists spoke so violently against Western capitalism. The Americans and the Russians united to defeat National Socialism in battle. As Stalin so rightly put it: ‘The Americans gave money, the British gave time, the Russians gave blood.’2 But the defeat in battle has not enabled us to understand what fascism was. Its core was a belief in the triumph of the will. The result is that when the triumph of the will manifests itself politically in our societies, we just cannot know it for what it is. What is meant by the seemingly simple word ‘will’? In the pre-modern world it had a certain meaning which was particularly emphasized in Christianity, because the words which were spoken in Gethsemane – ‘Yet not My will but Thine be done.’3 – were paradigmatic for Christians. It meant appropriate choosing by rational souls. With the coming of modernity, it has come to mean something different. When ‘will’ is thought modernly it means the resolute mastery of ourselves and the world. To understand this modern illumination of the word ‘will,’ it is necessary to put aside entirely that old faculty psychology, in which will was understood as a power or faculty of the soul, having to do with free choices. Rather, will is the centre of our aiming or seeking, the holding together of what we want. That greatest modern definer of will, Nietzsche, said that everything was ‘will to power.’ This has often been misinterpreted by traditionalists as if he was substituting power for

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happiness or pleasure, as that which was worth aiming at. But in the phrase ‘will to power,’ he is not describing what we aim at – something outside the will. Rather he is saying that will is power itself, not something external to power. What makes Nietzsche such a pivotal thinker in the West is that he redefined ‘will’ to make it consonant with modern science. ‘Will’ comes to mean in modernity that power over ourselves and everything else which is itself the very enhancement of life, or, call it if you will ‘quality of life.’ Truth, beauty, and goodness have become simply subservient to it. How did this new conception of ‘will’ come to be central in Western civilization? Obviously, first as science. Modern science is a particular form of science – that which issues in the conquest of human and nonhuman nature. This is why it is right to call Western science ‘technological science.’ Technology produces ‘quality of life.’ This science understands nature as outside the idea of purpose. Nature is understood as a product of necessity and chance – not of purpose. That is, modern science laid nature before us as raw material to be used as we dispose. How then should we dispose? In the early years of our science, Christian purposes were still operative, and later the purposes of various kinds of secularized Christianity. (Propriety forbids me a bow to Mme. Justice Wilson for her decision in the present case.)4 These secularized Protestant purposes were above all expressed in the English-speaking world as the greatest happiness of the greatest number through capitalist technology. In the Marxist world these purposes were expressed as the building of the classless (and therefore egalitarian) society, through the communal ownership of the means of production. But both these ethical systems depended on something outside ‘will’ itself. Why should I aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Why should I ‘will’ the classless society? These aims were outside will and therefore inhibited enhancement of life, by imposing on will aims from outside will itself. Therefore, the deepest movement of modern thought was to take the great step that our aim was the power of will itself. That is what is meant by ‘the triumph of the will.’ The Triumph of the Will is, of course, the title of Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary about the National Socialist Party’s convention at Nuremburg, a brilliant title for a brilliant documentary.5 Is it not absurd, therefore, to relate the apotheosis of such an occasion to the freedom of women to have abortions as they deem it desirable? Is it not particu-

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larly absurd when the height of the Nazi occasion is essentially masculine, and women are shown by a women in the stance of adulation? Several points, however, need to be made about fascism (call it, perhaps more accurately, national socialism). In the film, Hitler is seen, not as the liberator of his own will, but as the man who through his own liberation can make possible the liberation of each individual will in his nation. From the moment that he descends from the skies in his airplane and walks hesitantly forward, he is the ordinary German who through his own liberation apotheosizes the liberation of all Germans. It must be remembered that national socialist doctrine despised the submergence of the individual will in the rationalized collectivism of communism, as much as it did the impotence of the individual in capitalist democracies. The doctrine was that each individual will would finds its liberation in unity within the National Socialist Party. Anything that was ‘given’ in a situation, so that it could not be changed, was seen as an unacceptable limitation on the triumph of the will. The Jewish community was strong in German-speaking lands. The Jews were thought of as internationalists and cosmopolitans. Therefore, according to the national socialists, they stood in the way of the triumph of German will. Therefore they thought they had to get rid of these masses of human beings, this given part of Germany, who stood in the way of what they considered to be the quality of German life. Of course, when the national socialists gathered they were being beaten in war, this terrible extermination was speeded up in the name of their will’s revenge. Nothing given could stand in its way – even the givenness of other human beings. Is it not true, however, that national socialism is a thing of the past and therefore pointless to bring into debate about today’s issues? It was a revolting regression from the modern age of reason, a finished nightmare to be put aside. I am saying something very different. When one strips away the particularities of the German situation after the intense defeat of 1918, one finds that that situation was a particular possibility for the manifestation of the triumph of the will. That doctrine expresses very closely what human beings think to be true in modernity, when they seek to express their search for meaning in a universe which is known as purposeless. This doctrine has therefore continued to be present in the English-speaking world which has been

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dominant since 1945. It has particularly expressed itself in the dealings of the US with its empire abroad. It was evident in the determination of the American leaders to have their will by airpower right around the world in Vietnam. It can be seen at home, for example, in the work of medical research to find means of mastery over the reproduction of the species. It is not surprising that leaders of the women’s movement seeking to overcome the injustices of a long standing patriarchal tradition, should express themselves in the modern language of the triumph of the will. As the presentation of modernity to itself, it is in all of us at some level explicit. It is to be expected that this language should become dominant among the leaders of the women’s movement, because they are so aware what it is to live in modernity. Of course, ever since patriarchal society began all women have had to face the fact that the enjoyment of sexuality left them with the prodigious possibility of pregnancy, while men could go forth free from that enjoyment. Perhaps this was even resented by some women in matriarchal times, in which the whole society turned on the recognition of birth as central. (We just do not have the records of matriarchal society and its overthrowing.) In earlier patriarchal societies, religious control had some effect sometimes, in forcing men to assume some responsibility for pregnancy. Where land was the essential cause of wealth, owner families had a very great interest in forcing men to bear responsibility. In modern technological society, most bourgeois women, and those who wish to become bourgeois, find themselves in a position where at one and the same time the emancipation of sexual desire is advocated from the earliest age, and yet where if they are to be anything socially, they must go out to work in the world where what matters is the emancipation of greed. This is achieved under corporate capitalism through mastery over oneself and other people. How can such modern women put up with unexpected pregnancies (whether within marriage or without) which can demolish their place in the corporate market and push back their ambitions in relation to the ambitions of other people at the same level? Abortion on demand then appears a necessity under the conditions of corporation capitalism, as it presumably also does under corporation communism. Indeed, women’s position as potential mothers becomes particularly pressing in all advanced industrial societies, because their skilled or unskilled labour, their low or high ambitions

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are wanted in the marketplace. This happens at a time when the overcoming of the unfairness of their sexual position seems at last possible. It is no wonder then that the leaders of the women’s movement take on the language of the triumph of the will when they are seeking to get the state to fulfil their purposes, and when they are opposed by those who must be against abortion on demand for the clearest reasons. The ambiguity is that the famous feminist phrase ‘biology is not destiny’ must be true for all Christians, because we have been told that in Christ there is neither male nor female. At the highest reaches of human life and love, gender is simply unimportant. The question is, at what levels of life and love is gender important, and how should that difference manifest itself? It is not that the women’s leaders say that to be truly free, women must get rid of their gender. They do not seem to want to build an entirely androgynous society. It seems rather that, in their desire for liberation, they want not only to keep their gender, but also to use it as they will. But their ability to use their gender, and not to be controlled by it, requires their life and death control over beings other than themselves. For the ‘given’ which their wills need to control is those individual members of their own species within their bodies. ‘Otherness’ which must be dominated has always been that thing in terms of which the language of the triumph of the will arises. In this case, the need for liberation arises not against the absence of the vote or inequality in the marketplace, but against developing infants. This is the terrible pain which leads certain women to the language of the triumph of the will. They feel trapped by their gender, but the means of liberating themselves from this entrapment must often include killing. The language of the triumph of the will is a means of escaping from that trap, because it frees one from the traditional restraints against killing. What is saddest for the modern future is that belief in the triumph of the will seems to bring with it an intensity of propaganda in which the general public is prepared for the killing which is to ensue. For a decade the national socialists had been saying that the Jews were not truly human, that they were parasites living off the healthy society. It hardly needs saying that Jews are as truly human as the rest of us. Nevertheless, the fact that the opposite was a lie did not prevent its dissemination and influence. Those who disseminated it believed it. The most effective dissemination of lies is by those who believe them. So in the

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coming of mass abortion in our society untruths have been spread by those who do not know they are untruths. Current scientific knowledge tells us that a separate human life is present from conception, with its own unique genetic pattern with all the chromosomes and genes which make it human.b It is of the very heart of fascism to think that what matters is not what is true, but what one holds to be true. What one holds to be true is important because it can produce that resolute will tuned to its own triumph. However, it must be said that where the clarity about truth which belongs to modern science has allowed us to know what the foetus is in a matter-of-fact way, more difficult implications arise when modern science is used as if it provided the whole truth about life. This has sometimes led to a belittling of human life and to the arising of the doctrine of the triumph of the will. All this has often been denied or refused by advocates of abortion on demand. It has been said that the foetus is a few cells attached to a woman’s body that can be easily clipped away. It has been said that it is simply a parasite which has attached itself to a woman’s body. Lies have been told or truths neglected to loosen up people to be prepared to accept the mass foeticide which now characterizes our society. Post-Darwinian biology has set before us an account of all animals essentially understandable as matter in motion. What is made final for all animals is that they are driven by the necessities of the struggle for existence. To say the least, such an account of life makes it problematic whether there was something about human beings which should make us hesitant to kill them. National Socialist ideology was impregnated at its heart with Darwinian biology. In terms of such an account of life, why should we care about the life of a foetus when it conflicts with the will of a fully developed woman? But then, of course, we are led inexorably to the next stage. Why should we care about the lives of human beings outside the womb if they are only an accidental conglomeration of cells, and if they stand in our way? The science which explains everything in terms of necessity and chance has been the basis of our obvious progresses, but at the same time its intellectual victory over all other

b For an account of this which led a great expert in IVF [in vitro fertilization] away from certain researches, see L’oeuf transparent by J. Tesford (Paris: Flammarion 1986).

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kinds of thought has left Western human beings questioning whether their own life has meaning other than in terms of the triumph of the will. After the Supreme Court decision, the victorious advocates of abortion on demand paraded with signs, on some of which was the slogan ‘Abort God.’ They were right to do so. What they meant was ‘abort the idea of God because it has held human beings back from liberation.’ What is given us in the word ‘God’ is that goodness and purpose are the source and completion of all that is. Only in terms of that affirmation can we dimly understand why our lives and others’ partake in a meaning which we should not hinder but enhance. It is in the name of the fact that the human foetus is a member of our species, called to partake in meaning, that in the past we have turned away from abortion, except in extreme cases. All this was affirmed not only in the teachings of Christians but the Hindu Vedanta – that greatest Eastern teaching. Those who see life simply as a product of necessity and chance are inevitably more open to foeticide, because they do not see the destiny of meaning to which human beings are called. This is the prodigious predicament that the intellectual triumph of modern science has cast upon us human beings. To say all this is not to imply that North American society is yet close to fascism as a form of government. There are many influences in our society which hold us back from that. Obviously, all sane people hope that these influences will continue to prevail. What I am implying is that these influences are fragile in the face of the doctrine of the triumph of the will. Nor am I saying that North American fascism would be, in outward appearance, much like the national socialism of Europe. The trappings of romanticism in North American fascism would be quite different from the trappings of German romanticism. It is interesting that, alone among Western countries, West Germany has a law which gives the foetus a legal right to life, with some conditions. The Constitutional Court says that this is to make plain the German historical experience and ‘the present spiritual-moral confrontation with the previous system of National Socialism.’ In 1988 West Germany has forbidden surrogate motherhood and the production of human embryos for research. The Germans have the great advantage over us of already having faced the political incarnation of the triumph of the will. I am, however, saying two things: The triumphs of the will as an indi-

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vidual view of life passes over into politics, and even into government, in advanced industrial societies, when those societies see themselves as threatened or fading or even at the point of defeat. It was certainly the smashing of Germany by the allied powers in 1918 and the ruthlessness of the defeat imposed upon them, which led to fascism in Germany. The unequivocal victory of American capitalism in 1945 meant that we had no need of fascism. But if in some unpredictable future the power of American capitalism seems to be fading before the power of Japan and China, and if the economic powers in America recognize the consequences of that threat, then very different forms of government might arise within the bounds of their democratic constitution. Secondly, the living forth of the triumph of the will among the strongest advocates of complete liberty for abortion does not imply that such advocates are in any sense a core for fascist politics. They simply give us a taste now of what politics will be like when influential groups in society think meaning is found in getting what they want most deeply at all costs. They illustrate what pressure this puts upon a legal system rooted in liberalism, whose leaders have not been educated in what that rootedness comprises. Even in its highest ranks the legal system in its unthinking liberalism simply flounders in the face of those who find meaning in the triumph of the will. This has been shown in both of the liberally appointed American and Canadian judiciaries. When society puts power into the hands of the courts, they had better be educated.c Fast technological change is always accompanied by fast moral and religious change. It is good therefore for Christians to look clearly at what the advocates of abortion on demand portend in the way of unrestrained politics. The politics of the triumph of the will are less and less controlled by any considerations of reason, let alone by tired liberal reason which expresses itself only in terms of a contract. However important these question about politics, more immediate is the massive slaughter of the innocent which goes on and on. (Note: Another long article would be required to spell out the causes in legal and general education which lead to the jurisprudential shallowness among the judges. As much as abortion, this question goes to the very roots of modernity.) c The more the justices quote philosophy or religious tradition the less they give the sense they understand what they are dealing with.

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Notes 1 On Huey Long, see 268n79. 2 Harry Hopkins (1890–1946), President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal emissary to both Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin reported that Stalin had summarized the contributions of the major allies to the Second World War, declaring that ‘The British gave time, the Americans gave money, and the Russians gave blood.’ 3 Luke 22:42 ‘Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.’ 4 Bertha Wilson (1923–2007), Canadian lawyer and judge, was born in Scotland and emigrated to Canada in 1949 with her husband, the Reverend John Wilson, a Presbyterian minister. She graduated in law from Dalhousie University (1957) and after practising in Toronto was the first woman appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal (1975) and the Supreme Court of Canada (1982). Justice Wilson wrote the momentous ruling striking down the Canadian abortion law in early 1988. 5 Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), actress, film director and producer, and photographer, achieved her greatest success with the documentary Triumph of the Will, filmed during the 1934 National Socialist Party rally (Reichparteitag) in Nuremberg. It has been praised as a great work of cinematic art as well as vilified as National Socialist propaganda.

‘George Grant and Religion’ – A Conversation with William Christian

Grant was not able to vet this transcript of his conversation with William Christian because he died while it was being prepared.1 William Christian published it in volume 26, no. 1, of the Journal of Canadian Studies, Spring 1991: 42–63, with the following preface: These interviews with George Grant were supported by Saturday Night Magazine and encouraged by its editor, John Fraser. What follows is not a complete record of the recorded conversation we had over those two days. Those familiar with him know that his conversation was like a spaniel exploring a field, setting off in one direction, then veering in another. It would be impossible to convey the sense of being in the presence of pure thought itself that this conveyed. I have not tried. I have merely attempted to give the sense of his reflections. When George Grant spoke to me, he did not know that he was ill. In fact he was feeling stronger and happier than he had for years. It was only a month later that he learned the news of his cancer. It is difficult for me to re-read his observations about death and his hopes for his philosophic endeavours in the future without a compelling sadness.

Professor Christian stated in 2004 that he made no complete transcription of the interviews, but worked directly from the tapes to produce the published version. He ‘eliminated many of Grant’s ellipses or blind alleys and cut out as much of his own contribution to the conversation as he could while still leaving the dialogue intelligible and authentic.’ The conversation was not rendered verbatim but he did not substantially rearrange it or leave out anything of substance. The footnotes and additions in brackets are Professor Christian’s and the endnotes have been added by the editors of this volume.

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16 July 1988 william christian: The first question I wanted to ask was, why, given your interest in religion and your background,a you haven’t written anything about religion. I think the only thing you’ve ever written about religion was forty years ago. Is that right? george grant: Yes, but let me say first, I am never sure what people mean by religion. I know what are particular religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity. But religion is a strange, unknown [thing]. Some people think it means what binds people together; I’m not sure. I’m afraid of talking about religion in general. Take the reach between the very great ones, such as Christianity and what we would call in our language, an atheistic religion like Buddhism. In its pure form it seems to me that it’s not a bad description, though it probably wouldn’t be acceptable to Buddhists. What I am saying is that I would talk about religion and I am within one of them, I mean Christianity. Therefore what I wrote in ‘Faith and the Multiversity’b is an account of why I am a Christian. Though I would also say, and this is really the central thing, I have written indirectly all my life for one reason and one reason alone: I think there has been – I don’t think, I’m sure – in the last four centuries in the West, an intense and sustained attack on Christianity from within, and particularly by intellectual people. And I don’t mean here, like some people, Communism and Marxism alone. I mean by all forms of progressive people. They wanted to clear the ground of anything that stood in the way of making the world as they wanted it; and certainly traditional Christianity stood in the way of that. There has been a sustained attack on Christianity. Therefore I would see my work as a defence of two figures, Socrates and Christ, for different [reasons]. And therefore I have always written indirectly because I knew that the intellectual world or the world I inhabited was very hostile to both the figures I chiefly admired. That’s why I haven’t written directly. Once, very early a Grant’s doctoral degree, at Oxford under Austin Farrer, was on the philosophy of religion. For much of his academic career (1961–80), he taught in McMaster’s Religious Studies Department. b George Grant, ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto, 1986). See above 607–39.

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on I wrote a piece directly about Christianityc and got my ass kicked thoroughly in a way that was quite expensive, in the sense that it cost me quite a lot. And therefore I knew from that you had to write fairly indirectly if you wanted to live, particularly in the academic community. christian: Why do you say that? The view that we normally have about the academic community in Canada is that it is a place where you can speak your mind without much fear of consequences. What would have happened by pursuing Christianity within an academic context? Do you mean the secularism? You wouldn’t have been taken seriously? grant: I don’t want to go into all the details of this. That’s too personalized. I think you’re right at one level; I want to be taken seriously by university people and this was very hard because various forms of secularism were probably stronger in 1947 than now. The world that the progressives have made hasn’t exactly gone splendidly, to put it mildly! Therefore, there are more people [now] who are hesitant about these matters, but I certainly had to be aware that at the time I came into the Canadian universities and the next years, if I wanted to have anything to say in them, I had to speak very indirectly. It was probably alright to talk about Socrates, but it was not alright to talk about Christ. I think the main thing is that there has been a sustained hostility to Christianity which was powerful but hidden. After all, to be really nasty, the progressives have been as self-righteous as any ruling group in history. I think that is true. They were so in charge of intellectual life in Canada, sort of the basic running of intellectual life; I soon recognized this. I don’t want to put this in the language of paranoia. The language I want to use is the language of the recognition of this as a fact. I think that many of the people within this tradition had never recognized what they were doing. christian: Many might have recognized what they were doing but they thought it was ...

c According to Mrs Grant: ‘I remember that his article “Philosophy” for the Massey Report in 1951 [‘Philosophy’ in Royal Commission Studies, Ottawa: King’s Printer 1951]. shocked the philosophic community to the core. He had criticized the teaching of philosophy in Canada for completely ignoring the Christian tradition. This may have prevented him from ever being offered a job at the University of Toronto.’

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grant: Right to do it. That’s true. christian: I was going to raise the question of the abortion debate, because that’s surely one point where the progressives think they are attacking religion in the name of human freedom. grant: Of course, of course. And I don’t think they recognize sufficiently how profoundly they are really influenced by their own secularism. I think they think they are just snipping off a piece of matter. Because of secularism’s ontology, because in a way you could say that ontology has been excluded from modern thought, these people who think they’re speaking in the name of freedom don’t recognize the ontology that they represent. That may be unfair to them, but I think it goes quite deeply. christian: In the Phaedo Socrates says that to know that suicide is wrong requires us to know that we are God’s creatures, God’s possessions, and that to harm ourselves is to harm something that belongs to God and not to us. Is it possible within the context of secularism to know that abortion is wrong, or does it require a religious belief, a revelation? grant: Well it certainly doesn’t. And I don’t want to get into the extremely complex question of the relation of revelation and reason; but it’s certainly true that in the Vedanta suicide is forbidden.d Clearly implied in what I’ve said up to now, I certainly am on the Platonic side. I wouldn’t take the Thomistic-Aristotelian account of reason and revelation as held apart. For that matter, I think they are held apart more in Judaism than they are in Christianity. But I would certainly take the position that reason at its best is a kind of illumination. Do you see what I mean? christian: No. grant: I would just point to the central books of the Republic. But this is getting us far from religion.

d The monastic Hindu philosophy founded on the Upanishads.

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christian: What I understand Plato to be saying is that we are born with certain talents that will make us suitable for philosophy, and then, by grace, we are turned from this world and oriented toward the transcendent world. That plus the love that we have for the Good and the desire to be united with it, draws us in that direction. All reason can do is understand the geometrical things, the mathematical things, the beings, the forms, justice and beauty. What we can’t understand through reason is the goodness of the whole. And that requires a special kind of illumination, which is not earned, but which is the undeserved act of grace. grant: Yes, I agree, I agree. I agree, because my whole life now is occupied with the greatest modern attack on Plato. I turned to this as you’ll see in a minute, because what you have said is exactly what he is arguing against. I’m occupied with trying to see why a work of the highest genius, Heidegger’s book about Nietzsche, is wrong.e And how can somebody of not the highest genius write about somebody who had philosophic genius if anybody ever had it? I am interested in the book because it is a sustained criticism of Plato’s account of what is. While he is explicating Nietzsche and explicating himself, he is also sustaining a very prodigious attack on Plato. Therefore I have been thinking about Plato. Therefore I say yes to what you’ve said. christian: When you say that the people who support abortion don’t have an ontology, don’t they have the historicist ontology that Heidegger has, the sense of history as a working out of Dasein,f of what’s there, working itself out through the spirit? grant: We’re now talking about this in the English-speaking world. Let me say why I prefer Heidegger to J.S. Mill. I think Mill says we’re get-

e Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. D.F. Krell, 4 vols. (San Francisco: Harper and Row 1979). Grant read the work originally in a French translation, and then studied it again as the English volumes became available. f According to David Krell, Dasein is Martin Heidegger’s central ontological concept. ‘Man questions his own Being and that of other things in the world. He is – in no matter how vague a way – aware of his being in the world. Heidegger called the Being of this questioner who already has some understanding of Being in general “existence” or Dasein.’ Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 21.

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ting rid of Christianity and isn’t it great. And Heidegger is saying, we’re getting rid of Christianity and Platonism, and this leaves us with a supremely tragic view of life. You see, I prefer the German one to the English one. It seems to me aesthetically more what the world is like. Now what I’m saying about this, in terms of abortion [is this]. In English-speaking Canada I would say – there are all reaches of opinions – but within it the ontology is historicist and extremely this-worldly historicist. You can be an historicist as sort of a methodological principle of science, and still think of the beyond. But I think that the people who are supporting abortion do not; [they] have historicism plus an extremely worldly ontology, for they can easily think of the beings they are so willing to kill as little bits of matter to be manipulated. Apart from this, this sustained attack on Christianity and Plato has left the Western world more confused as a civilization. I was talking to somebody the other day about the origins of the First World War, and saying that the First World War was a colossal disaster for Western society – everybody who doesn’t think that is just a fool, it seems to me. We were talking about how people could have walked into it, and this person, who is an historian, said that in the West people were extremely restless and willing to do anything because the basic meaning of what the West had been had already disappeared. I think that is a fact. That the English, the Germans, and the French walked into the First World War is almost unbelievable. The folly, if they cared about Western civilization at all! This has been a catastrophic era for the West, it seems to me. No doubt about it. And that has been perhaps why the West looks so much for external enemies: it is always easier than facing the catastrophe within oneself. I was very unphilosophical when I was converted to Christianity, but I think you hit the central thing when you were talking about Plato and said about the whole being good, because that is the sense that is lost now. There are all kinds of reasons why people want Christianity in this society, for what they would call moral reasons. It seems to me Christianity, speaking only of this religion, is nothing if it hasn’t within it adoration. That would be the word I would use. It keeps going as a public thing, and as various other things without adoration. It’s adoration of the source of that goodness, adoration for the idea tou agathou.g

g The Idea of the Good. See Plato, The Republic 508e.

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This is the hard thing. To speak in Christianity’s favour, thinking of the death of Socrates and the death of Christ, the thing one finds hardest to forgive God is that human beings are capable of torture and human beings are capable of being tortured. And therefore the idea that goodness itself, or God, or whatever you might want to say, has taken upon himself [the suffering of mankind?]. I don’t like the personal language very much. Whatever else has happened to Christianity, you can’t get the Cross off the altar. And the Cross is the suffering of God. I would put the Cross on the altar beyond all the divisions that have characterized Western Christianity. christian: The forms of Christianity which are the most powerful today, except perhaps Roman Catholicism, are the Pentecostal forms, and these are the forms which see the Platonic interpretation of Christianity as a mistake. They want to get back to the original, primitive forms of Christianity, the true meaning of Christianity. grant: That’s true, though they share this with the extreme people like Heidegger. Heidegger, after he says the most terrific things against Christianity, then says, of course I’m all for the teachings of Jesus. I have some sympathy for the Pentecostals. But as they get back closer and closer to trying to overcut the interpretations that the Church [imposed, they run into difficulties]. If they don’t take seriously the arguments about the Trinity, where are they going to end? They have to face that. If they want a continuing, sustained tradition, it must be a tradition that includes the intellect. They will find they have philosophy without knowing it. You take the great argument between the East and the West about the filioque clause; you know the thing that split the Eastern Church from the Western Church, was the clause which said: ‘proceedeth from the Father and the Son.’ The Eastern Church did not want the filioque clause;h but

h Mrs Grant explains it thus. ‘The filioque clause began to be added to the Nicaean Creed in the fifth century, in the West. It figured in the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Church in 1054. The East rejected the addition of filioque by the West, and continues to this day in the certainty that the Spirit proceeds only from the Father. Profound theological and philosophical differences are involved, not only about the Trinity, but about the relation of God to the Church and to the world. The Western account was strongly Aristotelian; East was rooted in Plato. (See Philip Sherrard, The Greek East and the Latin West [London: Oxford University Press 1959].)’

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it had the most profound reasons about the mystery and majesty of God. When I read the arguments, I’m on the Eastern Church’s side, because it’s essentially Platonic against the Aristotelian. Apart from that, what I’m saying about the Pentecostal church [is that if] any sustained church is to keep anybody who is able to think in it, they have to come up against the kind of questions that were raised from the earliest days in the Church. And they were raised very early. Whatever else you say about the technological world, it is a society that requires people to train their intellects just to keep it going. Are you going to exclude all people from your form of Christianity who train their intellects, or make them live in two worlds? I think that is about what it leads to. One thing you can say about the technological world is that it has a lot of highly trained people in it. Does one not want to speak to them in some sense? christian: How does Christianity address them? If it’s true that the Pentecostals do not, for the most part, share the intellectual tradition of the West ... grant: It’s not just of the West; it’s of the East, too. christian: ... but also the technological elites of our society do not embrace Pentecostal Christianity. What is it about Christianity that puts it in this position, namely that it has lost its hold over the hearts of the educated elites of this civilization? grant: One of the things that really surprised me and made me understand I really didn’t understand the United States was this revival of Pentecostal religion, because naturally I found myself on the same side of the issue about abortion. It seems to me true that people simply cannot live in the pure technological society. And at the same time, most people cannot spend much time being concerned with thought about ultimate matters. Therefore, Pentecostal religion was a great thing in the sense that people wanted some meaning beyond technology. In an extremely confused society like this, Pentecostalism comes with a clear, fine light compared to vagaries of a purely secular society. But I would say the same thing still remains. Think of the media’s willingness to ridicule the Moral Majority,2 as they ridicule what they call fundamentalist Islam, as if there were something wrong with the word fundamentalist. Fundamentalist means going to the fundamen-

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tals. Anybody who has lived any length of time at all, particularly if they have children, wants to think about continuity. Without clear, lucid willingness to enter the world of the intellect, you can’t sustain continuity. Sects have always gradually fallen away. I find the Dutch Reformed have recognized this and are trying to think out the continuity of their tradition intellectually. christian: It seems, then, that the Pentecostals in the modern world represent faith without reason, and the technocrats represent reason without faith. grant: I’m saying this is not true of the Pentecostals entirely. And I don’t think that you can say reason in the Platonic sense [for the technocrats]; they represent a particular modern reason. christian: Why, for the most part, does Christianity not appeal to educated people in the Western world? grant: I think one thing, to be fair to the clergy. The Western world for generations now, in Canada later than the others, starting about 1900, in the United States and England before this, put every pressure to keep clever people out of the clergy. Everybody thought it was just a disaster when people went into the clergy. The universities did everything to persuade potential clergymen who were there to get out of the clergy. Therefore how can you expect, even in the established Protestant churches, much educated clergy? They’ve been excluded from this world for so long. It’s only the Catholic world who stood up to this with any force. It is just a fact that educated people in the English-speaking world were for generations and generations driven out of the clergy. At a level of what I would call straight theological as against philosophical debate, this is why C.S. Lewis has such power over the evangelicals, because they know from what he says that they can trust him as a Christian.3 He isn’t very interested in philosophy, but he’s extremely acute about theology. This is why he’s so overwhelmingly popular in the fundamentalist world in the United States. He faces difficulties about Christianity in a theological and not a philosophical way. christian: What do you mean by the difference between philosophy and theology?

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grant: I’ll say just this: philosophy above all means openness to the whole, but as this is a very difficult business and a very rare business, it’s very difficult to get much clarity about it. Theology is taking the tradition of Christianity as given. It avoids the uncertainty and wonder that is present in philosophy. This has its killing side among philosophers as the practicality can have its killing side among theologians. Theology is a much more immediate, much more practical science. christian: I was thinking about Plato and the corruption of the philosopher at the hands of society, and what Simone Weil said about the Great Beast in her essay ‘God in Plato.’i grant: One thing you can say about Simone Weil is that very few people have the good fortune to come from such an extremely advanced educational level. She’s so absolutely the opposite of Heidegger. Leaving aside the sanctity of Simone Weil, she’s still in Heidegger’s league as far as sheer learning. It’s something that we [in North America] don’t have. When Heidegger’s dealing with Plato, it’s leading me to greater mastery. I want to say where it’s wrong; but the sheer mastery of how he early on knows the Phaedrus is just outstanding, and knows how to expound it in enormous lucidity. What that high level of education is within Christianity is a very hard thing to say. But certain forms of Protestant Christianity have worked against it in North America, as well as the secularism which has worked against it. But we just don’t have that level, do we? Even the very best American writers do not have that kind of education. christian: Jacques-Yvan Morin, who wrote the preface to the French edition of Lament, takes exception to your analysis because in Lament in the original 1965 edition you argue that with the declining role of the Church Quebec would lose its distinctiveness, its character as a nation. grant: Yes. christian: He argues that Quebec has secularized, but has transformed itself into a different kind of society where the language and i Simone Weil, ‘God in Plato,’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987), 74–88.

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culture are the focus of its existence, and that these forces are strong enough to preserve. Therefore you were wrong in your analysis that Quebec was bound to decline as the Church declined. grant: Well, I have for a long time noticed, not only with Morin but with people like Lévesque, that many of the people who were fighting for the continuation of French society in North America were also quite anti-Catholic. I thought this was a grave mistake, because I think Catholicism has been as deeply under attack in Quebec as Protestantism was sixty years, seventy, eighty years ago in English-Canada. But I don’t see, first, as a simple thing about the past, that the Church wasn’t an enormous influence in sustaining the continuity of French-Canada. You only have to think of the fights in the Church between the Bishop of Trois Rivières and Duplessis.4 Duplessis went to that college that runs Brother André’s shrine [College Notre-Dame in Montreal. Afterwards he attended the Séminaire de Trois-Rivières]. He came from a deeply rooted Catholicism, and was in his strange way a very strong French-Canadian nationalist of the right. I think that the left has just got the influence of the Enlightenment on them to such a degree that they are not wise in how they hope to defend under the enormous attack which is now present in French-Canada. I think that language is a great thing [in maintaining a culture], but I really never know what culture is (and here I am using it in the singular) apart from a religious tradition. I just don’t know what culture is, how it continues, how it maintains itself without the overriding influence of religion. I think they are just deluding themselves, these people like Morin. After all they are not doing terribly well, are they? I don’t mean only politically. I don’t think that they have come to terms with the power and force of the secularism. I don’t think they understand how powerful American secularism is, even if in the world as a whole it is rather going down. It is still the basic form of world secularism, in a certain sense. Gorbachev says, ‘Join us in the mastery of space.’5 I don’t think that people like Morin have faced sufficiently clearly how much under attack French-Canada is. Language is a marvellous protection for a world, but it cannot last beyond a point. What they should do is to look every day at the business section of the Globe and see all the French-Canadian names that are being given powerful jobs in a world where not only French culture is rather redundant, but where the whole Canadian culture in general is rather redundant. I don’t think they

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know how much they are under attack. Morin still lives in a very cultivated French-Canadian world. I haven’t lived in this kind of cultivated Canadian world since 1939. I don’t want to speak against cultivated worlds; I am glad they exist anywhere they do exist. christian: Do you mean that it would be possible to maintain a Quebec that spoke French, but that Quebec which speaks French, without Catholicism, is simply to have French-speaking Americans who happen to live in the Province of Quebec? grant: Yes. I am glad in a limited way that Mulroney is breaking down, it seems to me, the Liberal monopoly in Quebec.6 I think that is one thing he has done well. One thing that Mulroney does not have, but which harmed Diefenbaker, was that old, tough Protestant suspicion of Quebec. christian: In 1962, Diefenbaker’s support was siphoned off by the Social Credit. grant: One thing which I think is very greatly over from that era is populist movements either in French- or English-Canada. I think that advanced technology just cuts out populist movements. The only populist movement you have in the United States right now is Jesse Jackson, which is because of the oppression of black people.7 Populist movements are dying, aren’t they, at every point? If there was a violent recession there might be clear populist movements, but they wouldn’t be quite populist. They would be revolts, wouldn’t they? christian: I am not sure. Populism is something that comes and goes anyway. grant: Is it not dependent on a certain degree of agricultural society? The great populists – Diefenbaker, the La Follettes – these movements were possible in certain forms of Protestant agricultural societies or French agricultural societies; but I don’t think they are possible any longer.8 I think other forms of revolt may come and go, but I am not sure that populist revolt does. I am being more historicist here than you are. Populism does not belong to the nature of man. To a great extent it is killed by advanced technological society.

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Do you want me to say any more about Morin? I think I was right in that debate. I think that Morin is deluding himself; but I don’t want to be rude about Morin, because he is such a delightful gentleman. christian: Why did the Church collapse so quickly in Quebec? grant: It was assailed by powerful forces. These semi-secular liberals and secular progressives like Trudeau had the full support of Englishspeaking Canada in ridiculing their own traditions. One thing I’ve always found is that [although] Duplessis was in many ways unpleasant, I have found it impossible in liberal-intellectual circles to say anything good about Duplessis. That’s just a fact. There were certain sides of fascism which attempted to deal with modern technological society, and for which one can have some limited sympathy. In politics what you need are close distinctions, clearly made, lucidly thought, not only philosophical distinctions but practical distinctions. And I find the loss of it just terrible. Sir John A. Macdonald was not a theoretical man, but he maintained his common sense in a way that many modern political people have lost. Ideology can not only destroy philosophy, it can destroy common sense too. The destruction of common sense is part of the American tradition; it is strange that a Lockean society should end up like this. christian: Is the abortion debate different because there is a strong Catholic tradition now in English-Canada. grant: I think that some of the Tory red-necks, who aren’t letting the issue drop, probably come from a fundamentalist world. Even Reagan who did very little at least tried to get the Supreme Court to be of a kind to limit abortion. In this country, some of these people on the red-neck wing of the Tory party have prevented it from getting away with quite as much as it might have. christian: Do you think that there has been a change in the Canadian tradition from a Protestant one to a Catholic one? Has there been a change in the public life of Canada as a consequence of this? grant: You have to think of what kind of Catholics they are. A lot of

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them are the kind of Catholics who are just half a generation away from the kind of people who are United Church. They’re not Catholics who are going to risk things in politics. I think [Manitoba Progressive Conservative MP Jake] Epp is probably willing to risk more for his religion than most of the Tories.9 I think there are things one gets cut off from as one gets older in understanding a society. You know what they always said about Socrates’ daimon, the daimon which was outside philosophical talent, was that [thanks to it] he could judge human beings. He had a kind of direct insight into the nature of human beings. For example in the Meno he knows that Meno is going to be a tyrant, is going to be a betrayer of his country, is going to work for the Persians. The daimon is a kind of insight directly into human character. And I think that unless you have that, which I don’t, you have to be very careful. In any political philosophy or theology, there is a necessity for practical, common sense. There are things that can be said without it, but I have to be very careful that I’m just not missing a lot that’s going on in Canada. Philosophy is so redundant in Canada, and Christianity is so redundant in Canada, that one is not likely to have to ask whether one is willing to be a martyr. Martyrdom is not really an open question in Canada because Christianity and philosophy are so redundant in Canada that nothing that one will raise is really going to annoy people sufficiently. It’s only in societies in extreme crisis that this kind of thing arises. Therefore I greatly admire the side of [BC Social Credit Premier] Van der Zalm that is prepared to risk something for abortion, whether he did it wisely or unwisely being another question.10 I would have been glad if he had shown more political savvy, but I admire him nevertheless for what he [attempted], that he was willing to stand on an issue of this kind. Whether it is wise to stand on an issue of this kind, I don’t know. By wise I mean whether he would have been wise not to raise it. It is always a question whether you can do the good you want to do under the counter by keeping your opinions quiet. I don’t know about this issue; there comes a point where one shouldn’t be so quiet. But that is a question of phronesis [practical wisdom or prudence] in the real sense of the word, and political phronesis is not something I really know about, because I have not been in that world. I think we live in a world which is characterized by extremity in politics and the willingness to destroy other people in politics through the

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media and other means, both on the left and on the right. I think restraint or moderation, if you want to call it that, is as Plato says the great political virtue. It’s not the greatest virtue but it’s the most essential virtue for politics, and I think it’s going fast in North America. And if positions get extreme, if the situation gets extreme, it will probably go faster. I can see this lack of moderation, if the situation for North America got bad, really leading to a kind of total corruption of constitutional government. I think moderation and restraint in language about other people is essential to constitutional government. And it seems to be going, and going not only among the politicians, but going because of the media and their willingness to open all this gutter stuff. That’s what I think first. That is just a preliminary to the big thing. There has been one wing of Christianity which one could call the Church Wing, which wanted a great gathering of Christians and held them together by compromise; and the Sect Wing, where the position of Christianity was put out in great clarity, but where they had little influence on the society as a whole. Now I think that both clearly have their place in Christianity, but they lead to different activities, don’t they? I think one thing one has to say about ‘religion,’ as against philosophy, is that religions involve great masses, great movements in which there are all kinds of contradictions. When you think what has been put together within Hinduism, of the most extreme and various kinds. You can’t have philosophical judgment over religion. All kinds of things are going on at this level and they’re all within these movements which are large, extraordinary things. And I think the individual has to find his place within that as to how much he is interested in the Church Wing of Christianity as against the Sect Wing. One’s actions will be determined to a great extent by which way one sees them. If one is in the Church Wing, one might not raise issues, because one wants to keep the thing together. Now I think within both, and this is a question of the differences between different forms of speech, for in political life restraint in speech is nearly always a good. But clearly in theoretical life, or in certain forms of life within Christianity, restraint in speech is bad. Even within that I don’t think extremity of speech, which is trying to tell other people how to behave, is ever very good, because I don’t think it does any good for anybody. I think these kinds of complex distinctions are necessary.

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christian: What was it that led you into the reflective life rather than a more public career such as politics? grant: Now religion is all tied up with this, but I think it was the last war, the big war. I was so horrified by the war. The war had seemed to me a great, unequivocal disaster. I think it was the war, and the sense that my past up to the war was entirely changed by the war. Now this goes with religion, because conversion came to me at the worst stage of the war. Now many people might say – Heidegger would say this so it’s not a foolish remark – that this was just a way of looking for a safe, other world because I couldn’t bear this world. But it happened. From then really, I just wanted to think out [the consequences of this conversion]. When I came back to Canada and settled back into Canadian life, I lived with people all of whom were very deeply held by progressive liberalism. And therefore I had to spend my life thinking out what were the consequences of not thinking progressive liberalism. I think that was the basis of why I became [a philosopher]. It just seemed to me an over-riding necessity to understand what were the consequences in thinking that there was an eternal order by which we are measured and defined. That’s why I have spent so much of my life doing this, whether successfully or not; I question every day how far I’ve got. It was a great turn around for me, the last big war, a terrific turn around of a kind that drove me to thought. Whether for good or ill [I don’t know, since] I don’t think I was highly qualified to think. It was this event that certainly moved my thought, that made me think, because I had to rethink [the idea] that the kind of very nicely cultivated secular liberalism and progressive liberalism I had been brought up in would not do. I have been trying to express why it would not do. christian: Why were you a pacifist during the war? grant: Overwhelmingly what influenced me was the group of people I met at Oxford. All these things are accidents; I don’t know what accident means, but I know that you can’t talk about the world without using the term. That’s just the case. I met a group of people whom I greatly admired who took me into a world that was utterly different from anything I had known, people who really did not see things rela-

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tively. This intoxicated me. One of them was A.D. Lindsay [Baron Lindsay, 1879-1952, philosopher and Plato scholar at Oxford], though he wasn’t really a member of this group.11 He certainly didn’t see things relatively. Now I remember one of these people who I was just intoxicated by – you could say it was love, I don’t know what it was – I thought they were just the most marvellous group of people I had ever met. One day we were talking over dinner, and I said something, and he just said: ‘Pragmatism from its native heath; indeed pragmatism from its native heath!’ Now this was a very shrewd thing to say because he heard what I was saying. I came across people who were not pragmatic, in the modern sense of pragmatism. I was a sharp, ambitious little pragmatist and I just sort of fell in love with them. I thought they were the greatest people. christian: When was it you converted? grant: The end of 1941. These people were before I had had any touch of the war. To hear language that was not pragmatic, it was like hearing a new language to me, language I had never heard. 17 July 1988 grant: What I don’t think I emphasized sufficiently [yesterday] is what a dark era this appears to me, what a dark era! That the age of progress has ended up in this, do you see what I mean? And that it’s deeply tied to what I call the science that issues from the conquest of human and non-human nature. This is to most people in the world the hope of the world, as much the hope in Asia as well as in North America; but it seems to me that this is particularly serious for the Western world. I never really think that one has much right to talk about what is the essence of the Eastern world. It’s tied up with the idea that everything proceeds from the Idea of the Good and that Being is therefore good. That has gone. And that this is a very hard thing to believe anyway. christian: Do you mean Being in the Platonic sense? grant: In the Platonic sense in so far as anything is, it is good. Evil is

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the absence of good, and relative non-being is the cause of evil. There isn’t absolute non-being as there is in Heidegger. Heidegger says the abyss is primary.j Nothing. Nothing is primary. Strange. christian: The difficulty I have with evil as the absence of good is that I see that the Good is a power, a dunamis [Greek: force, energy], ... grant: Yes. christian: ... something that works in the world, not simply something out there. Good works in the world. grant: It’s also absent from the world. christian: Oh yes. It works, it diffuses, it pulses. grant: Quite, quite, quite. christian: Justice does the same thing. Justice works on you, and works on me. It’s not just something out there. grant: Quite. christian: The idea that evil is the absence of good does not capture the sense of Hitler. There was an absence of the good in Hitler, but more than that in Hitler evil was an active power, not simply an absence. grant: Let me respond to that at first theoretically. That evil is the absence not the opposite of good was most formidably thought by that great Platonist, St Augustine, because otherwise you were led – and he had been a Manichean – to a kind of dualism. That’s why they went in for all these complex accounts, which I don’t altogether understand, of the Fall of Man. They were arguing essentially against Eastern dualism, which said that there were two principles fighting it out in the universe. j Mrs Grant writes: ‘The German for abyss is Abgrund, and Heidegger used the concept a great deal around the time of writing Sein und Zeit (1927).’

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They certainly scorned, in the name of this mixture of Platonism and Christianity, this view of God. Why can’t you concentrate on the immense evils of this century, whether coming forth from communism or national socialism or for that matter American progressivism? Why do they have to be seen as positive evils, if you see them the way I see them. I think it is true if you get on to Simone Weil. People have always accused her of moving near to a dualism, but I think she turned her back on it finally. You’re saying the Good is not Good, or that God is not God, aren’t you? Just theoretically here you are saying this. I don’t see how you can have fallen nature and all kinds of things in between, but you can’t set up a principle of evil. I’ll tell you a crazy moment when I saw this with great clarity. When General MacArthur came back from the East, he said: ‘Communism is going to kill God.’12 Well, you can’t kill God! You see, in the Platonic sense, it’s quite impossible. Do you see what I mean? christian: I have a sense of the activeness of evil, in the world, in Hitler, in [Kampuchean Khmer Rouge leader] Pol Pot, in Manson, in Clifford Olson.13 How can you torture and kill children without evil? grant: Of course. christian: The sense of this just being an absence of good does not seem to capture the experience. grant: Remember one thing which I think is very interesting in Phaedo is that the opposite of knowledge is not ignorance but madness. You can have all sorts of doctrines. Let’s say you believe in the Devil, which has been believed in; but you always say he is a created being, a fallen angel. I don’t see any reason to believe in the Devil. I sort of see the Platonic Ideas as angels. I mean the Ideas coming down into the world. They’re messengers. christian: Socrates was the messenger. grant: He’s Eros, isn’t he?

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christian: No, he represents Eros and shows us how love mediates between man and God, but he’s also the angel. He says so quite explicitly in the Apology. ‘I’m God’s gift to Athens. God sent me to you.’k grant: Oh quite. If you take angels that way; but all I’m saying is that you can see the principle of evil which is the total absence of good as a fallen angel. Dualism in this era is a popular [belief]; it’s going to grow increasingly popular. You know what Marlowe says in Faust, when Faust says to the Devil: ‘How comes it then that thou art out of hell?’ And the Devil says: ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:/ Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God/ And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,/ Am not tormented with ten thousand hells/ In being deprived of everlasting bliss?’l That is a marvellous account. I’m not saying I know about this business; but let’s say we take some of these terrible activities [which you mentioned such as Hitler’s, though] I would also include a war lord like Churchill, [although he was] not quite with the others. If you’re not led to dualism, you’re all right. All these modern Christians are always accusing Plato as the person who has corrupted Christianity, because they say he denied the flesh. It drives me crazy. To say that the flesh is a passing dispensation is to me obvious; if you don’t say that I don’t see what people are saying about life at all. christian: Well, that was exactly Nietzsche’s criticism of Plato, wasn’t it? grant: Oh yes, but a deeper criticism was that the rationalism which asserted the unity of virtue, reason and happiness had been imposed by Socrates on the abyss, because he would not face the abyss; what makes human life is its encounter with nothingness, with death. This is what Heidegger says yes to Nietzsche about, profoundly; namely, that all the previous philosophers up to Heidegger did not understand nothingness; and that this led to a rationalism and the identity of reason, happiness and virtue, nonsense. I’m so afraid of people seeing the modern

k See Plato, Apology 22a, 23bc, 30de. l Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, scene iii, 77–82.

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thing as simply a dropping away from Platonism. It is a droppingaway, but it is also an assertion of something positive, a new sensuousness, because it sees sensuous being as the whole of being. But not in a crude or easy [way]. That is why, although positivism has been so powerful in academic circles, what is fundamentally more popular is what positivism finally results in – existentialism. I would simply say that if you assert a positive doctrine of evil which in a sense Kant did in his doctrine of radical evil – you see a lot of these modern evils above all in Kant – you are led either in the direction of a dualism unsustainable if you hold Platonism or Christianity for other grounds or you are led to a kind of ethicless sensuality which lay at the basis of National Socialism, making the world as you want it, the will to will. christian: What I’m thinking of in terms of Christianity is that there is a sense of evil. Part of what religion does is to try to make sense out of the world of our experience, and one of the things that we experience is evil as a positive force. Another question I want to go on to, tied to that, is Homeric polytheism ... grant: Oh yes, that’s another matter. christian: ... when I read the Iliad or the Odyssey, I get out of them a genuine sense of religious experience and religious awareness ... grant: Of course. christian: ... and there are two particular incidents. The one occurs when the goddess appears to Telemachos in the guise of Mentor, this is simply saying that growing up, the coming to manhood, is an experience that is tinged with the divine, and that we experience this as something exceptional in human life. The more important experience is when the gods – Ares, Aphrodite, Athena – are portrayed as fighting or quarrelling either on Olympos or on the battlefield, and Zeus is able to keep them in control but only by threats and bullying and shouting at them – this captures a very real experience we have about the nature of human existence that these forces do not seem as Platonism and Christianity tell us they are, subordinated into a comprehensive unity. Rather

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we experience them in conflict as fundamentally irreconcilable, as being able to be held together, but not held together in a harmony. grant: Yes, I see, yes. I insist on one remark. Remember that Christ said on the cross: ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ That is evil as an absence of knowledge. I just say that. But now to get on to the main thing. I think what you have raised is very difficult. Heidegger is clearly a polytheist. And he says in his last great public appearance, the only public appearance he was willing to make, his great phrase was: ‘Only a god will save us.’m And he knows the difference between a god and God. Heidegger was unequivocally a polytheist. And for I think very much the reasons you have just spoken. And it certainly goes back to his appeal to the heroic era of the Greeks before the great deluder Socrates came along and broke into it. I just entirely agree with what you say; but I haven’t thought it out. Now mind you, Simone Weil, because she’s always speaking against those people who are against idolatry, she’s always saying that if you don’t have this kind of idolatry or what people were calling idolatry, this kind of polytheism, that you will have pure, cold monotheism, which produces a very violent society. You see, she is saying that you can hold this kind of polytheism within Christianity and Platonism. Remember she didn’t live very long, she never thought this out, and I have never really thought it out. Let me say first and foremost about this that I take exactly what you mean and have not understood it. I don’t mean that I have not understood what you said. What I mean is I don’t know how they fit into one. You must believe in this ... what you said ... if you don’t believe in an unequivocal technological rationalism. I mean this is the only way in which an unequivocal technological rationalism can be fought. And this may have something to do with these born-again Christians. I don’t know how, quite. But I think these bare monotheisms are the most violent. You know what an Indian has said: ‘The West has war, we have

m According to Mrs Grant this sentence, ‘Only a god can save us now,’ comes from a conversation with the German magazine Der Spiegel, 31 May 1976. The conversation had taken place in September 1966, but Heidegger did not want it published during his lifetime.

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poverty. Now which do you prefer?’n [I fear] the violence of these bare monotheistic religions. All I would say is that I think what you have raised is a central question; and how it can be brought back into the West in a technological society, how you bring the particular and immediate ecstasies of polytheism back into the unrestrained rationalistic world, I don’t know. I mentioned Simone Weil, but I don’t think it will be outside what is true in Platonism and Christianity. And remember Socrates doesn’t attack Delphi; he praises Delphi. You know, there are all kinds of things going on. He has this account of a theophany in the last days, in the Crito and the Phaedo, how God had come to him. It is this extremely difficult linguistic business of making clear that the god or a god are different from God. I’m putting a god and the god together because you can talk of the god. To use a very crude language that was used much in the nineteenth century, how do you get an immanence filled with gods, as against the prodigious transcendence that is present in Christianity and Platonism? To say that the Good is beyond being, which I think is essential, is a fantastic transcendence. It’s what Heidegger can’t bear. I mention Heidegger because he’s on my mind. I haven’t thought this through, but I’m sure what you said was exactly right. christian: Is the situation Plato accepts, polytheism for the many, monotheism for the few? grant: Yes, that may be. But when you get down to the practical business of the Laws, polytheism is perhaps the public religion, that is for the many, but the Nocturnal Councilo also has to insist in a certain way on the proof that there is God, don’t they? It’s a mixture; it’s a very complex mixture of polytheism and monotheism. And I take the Laws to be his practical [proposals], you know what he thinks should happen in the world, rather than the Republic. It’s very matter of fact and down to earth. In the tenth book when he is talking about, in the general sense, his theology, it is a strange mixture. I haven’t thought about it; I’ve just taught it as what is there; but I’ve never really thought out its truths.

n This probably refers to one of Grant’s colleagues from McMaster with whom he had frequent discussions about Hinduism. o In Plato’s Laws the Nocturnal Council is charged with the spiritual welfare of the community. Plato, Laws 908ab.

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This is a crude thing to say, but the point of your coming down, for me, might have been just to make those remarks about polytheism just at this moment when I need to hear them. You have to remember that it is Protestantism that above all cut out all these mediators. The Protestants have often accused the Catholics of being polytheists, and of course the worst form of Protestantism, the Unitarians, have talked about even the Trinity as a kind of polytheism, nonsense. I don’t think that the Trinity is the solution to this at all, I mean to the question you raised. But it was the Protestants who cut down the mediators, and made the Absolutely One, the mediator-transcendant as the only mediator. But I think, above all, the big question is how this can be truly sane in an advanced technological society, for the reason that it seems to me [to contain] all kind of crazy, imminent polytheisms. They have to be authentic gods, don’t they? They can’t be made up by a group of intellectuals or a group of crazy people having a cult. They have to be authentic appearances of God somehow, and I don’t know how this will come. Now the gods have to come. The one thing I find extremely difficult about Heidegger is that the two people who most deeply influenced him other than the ancients went crazy, Hölderlin and Nietzsche, both went crazy. But it’s from Hölderlin that he gets the gods.14 Hölderlin he sees as beseeching the gods to appear in the midst of this rancid, secularized, monotheistic world. I can’t imagine what the epiphany of the gods will be; but I think they have to come. And it may just mean that it won’t happen in the West. I don’t know. I have a feeling it will not come in Japan. Of course, it’s always present in India. What it will be for the gods to make their appearance, I have no idea. You have to believe in the appearances; you have to say the epiphanies have occurred. It can’t be done in any way that isn’t authentic; it can’t be put on as a sort of intellectual extra, added to the bourgeois life. But where the epiphanies of the new gods will come, I don’t know.p And what their relation is to the other gods, [I

p In a letter Mrs Grant writes: ‘I know that he often did talk about Heidegger as if he agreed with him, just because he was so enchanted by his brilliance. But as you know the whole point of the book he was hoping to write would have been that Heidegger was wrong about Plato and about Christianity. It was Heidegger and not George who was always writing about our need for “new gods,” and Heidegger certainly did not mean the incarnation of the Good.’

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don’t know either]. I think there is something very dangerous in the monotheisms, the pure monotheisms, that have cut down all the intermediate forms. But I don’t know. I’m glad you said that, because I think it’s absolutely true. I probably have not thought of it because I don’t think that it will be part of my life to understand it; but that it must come back, I am sure. We have cut ourselves off from the divine, but we remain secular Protestants; we’ve cut ourselves off from a bare monotheism in North America. Protestantism and Judaism are both bare monotheisms, and therefore we were cut off already in a way.q And whether it can happen in an urban society, I don’t know. Whether it can only happen after whatever calamities will arise, it’s so hard to think. christian: You talked about ... ‘forgive them for they know not what they do.’ Compare the death of Socrates with the death of Christ – ‘My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Christ not only suffers agony at His death – physical agony, but he also experiences spiritual agony. But, as Plato presents the death of Socrates, Socrates dies ... grant: Beautifully. Consummately beautifully, with a joke at the end. It just is an entirely different death. christian: This is one of the difficulties that I have with Christianity, – it’s not just the absurdity of God dying like a slave on the Cross, and the bad taste of it all – Platonism seems to be on this account a firmer faith than Christianity. grant: Let me say in response to that. This is strange, I just wrote about those two deaths. Doesn’t this account of death go more to the heart of what life is than Socrates – the fear, his sweat was these great drops of blood falling to the ground. All this is what convinces me of Christianity; it seems to me important. This is more what life is like. I mean one thing I thought of recently is what a blessing it was considered in olden times to die in your bed. It was considered a great blessing, because most people died in anguish. Many still do. I mean the absolute absence q Mrs Grant believes this is misleading. ‘... did he actually say Protestantism is a bare monotheism? He often described Judaism and Islam that way, but surely Protestantism is as trinitarian as Catholicism.’

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of God from God, if you want to put it that way, in the crucifixion, is so complete. Didn’t the absence have to be complete? I mean, it’s strange; this is exactly what makes Christianity attractive and necessary, as well as Platonism. It so expresses the absence of God from God, the absence, the total forsaking of God by God. It is this that holds me to Christianity. I think the death of Socrates is consummately beautiful and noble and a great and wonderful death which everybody should look upon. But it seems to me death is more like the other, though not now for this particular [civilization]. The claim of technological civilization is that it allows everybody to die in their beds, well comforted. christian: The claim of technological society is that no one will die in their bed. They’ll all die in hospitals. If they die in their own bed, they would feel that they had not availed themselves of all the resource of technology that would have kept them alive days or months longer. grant: Of course, of course. I’ve been in hospital so much in the last four years; it’s an extraordinary experience. It is, for one thing, [just like] what Erving Goffman wrote about total institutions.15 Are those hospitals total institutions! Just total! They have you absolutely. christian: To get back to the two deaths, I think that Christ died in the way in which we will die, in doubt and in pain. grant: Yes. Terrible pain. And one hopes with you, because you’re older than Christ it doesn’t matter to me because I’ve reached the age where it’s perfectly reasonable to go – but I mean, it is unreasonable to go in one’s early forties. One hopes it won’t happen to you; I mean, one hopes for everybody. That’s why, I think, one finds the death of children and young people so much worse; people [like me] have had a fair rounded picture, and therefore it isn’t such as great disaster. But it is for the young. I think it is terrible. I think this is why people are so shattered at the loss of children; I have, thank God, escaped this. We will be drugged; it’s very likely we will die not in the kind of extremity of Christ, will we? christian: No, but the pain that we’ll have is the pain of facing death, facing annihilation ...

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grant: Yes, yes. christian: Christ expresses the doubt that we all fear; that’s what makes him attractive. But it also at the same time makes him lacking in comfort. Socrates died as somebody whose faith was total. grant: Yes, but the people who were administering the death were much more civilized, weren’t they? They would have let him go on a bit; but he really decides. It must have been a very pleasant way to die. christian: No. grant: The hemlock wasn’t? christian: No. I had assumed that on the basis of Plato’s description, but when I asked my next-door neighbour who is a doctor, he checked on hemlock poisoning. It’s not a pleasant way to die at all. It’s a progressive paralysis starting with the legs, and then when it gets to the chest, there’s asphyxiation, and when it gets to the heart there’s heart seizure. It’s not a wildly painful death, but it is a painful death. There are convulsions. grant: Why doesn’t Plato say this? christian: He says ekinethe, he moved. That’s all he says to describe the convulsions. I take it that Plato doesn’t say this because what happened to Socrates’ body is a matter of no importance. He had already said this to Crito – you worry about how to dispose of my body ... grant: Yes. christian: Socrates’ death is really a matter concerning his soul; the last details of how his body expires are not of any significance, and might give a misleading impression. grant: Exactly. That’s absolutely right. christian: If he emphasizes, as Christianity does, the physical suffer-

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ing, it would draw our attention away from the spiritual peace in which Socrates dies. grant: Yes. And Christ certainly does not die in spiritual peace. But then there’s this fantastic thing: he rises from the dead – which I don’t disbelieve, but it has been believed. He harrows Hell, whatever that might mean. You have an entirely different way of looking at the matter, don’t you? These differences between Christ and Socrates are as important as their sameness. Their sameness is certainly present. But their differences are absolutely present. I just think that. I was brought up to believe that death was just not thought about, it was something that was out of the picture. You’ve just raised another great question. I just feel myself so identified with that death; I think Socrates’ death is consummately beautiful. I saw a lot of violent death during the last war; and it isn’t consummately beautiful. I just saw people blown up, left, right and centre. I suppose this may have had something to do with it. I was twenty-one and I was full of force and the Wille zum Leben [will to life]. I remember the first time I saw shelters blown up, the way people were dying. I was at the Surrey Docks, the part that was very badly bombed and I persuaded a man whose wife had died to send his child away. I said, ‘You must get the child out of there.’ Later I received a message that said that the child had gone down to the country, and drowned. And I had to go and tell this man. That was moment number one when I grew up! I’ll never forget that to my dying day. The violence of death in war, I suppose, that’s probably what has held me more than anything else to this death rather than the other death. Now, as for the resurrection, certainly something occurred, of a fantastic variety. But what it is, I do not know. christian: What’s the role of the Christian churches in capitalist societies? The overwhelming consensus ranging from the Mennonites to the United Church to the major elements in the Catholics and Anglican churches too is that the church’s main responsibility is to moderate the main excesses of capitalism in a practical way, by providing food, shelter, comfort, a suicide hotline, and marriage counselling and things like that. Now is that how you see the role of Christianity in the capitalist world, as a social welfare adjunct? grant: I think Christianity, my Christianity (and I’m saying mine in the

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most immediate sense) is very barren. I try and be nice, but I don’t go out and do good deeds. Here is to me the point where Christianity and Platonism come into conflict. I want to have time to think out certain things. I see that as my job. I want to be around to say why Christianity must turn from modernity at its most highly thought, namely Heidegger. And I can’t do that [if I spent all my time engaged in good works]. I mean I would try to be kind and decent to the people around me, in a moderate way that has nothing much to do with Christianity. I think this is a great conflict; this is where the conflict between Christianity and philosophy arises. Another point is how you pass your time. I want to pass my time thinking, being able to state absolutely clearly why Heidegger is wrong about Platonism. And this does hold one from doing the kind of thing [you were talking about]. My son, whom you saw yesterday, spends his life working with the retarded. And William is not a Christian believer; he’s much nearer Christianity than I am. christian: In Plato eros, Love, is towards the Good. But whereas the Good, God, created the world, not out of love but out of an appreciation of beauty ... grant: Yes, yes. christian: ... in Christianity God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. God loved the world as we love God. There’s a reciprocal love in Christianity, whereas in Platonism the love is only a one-way love. grant: Oh, is it a one-way love? christian: Does Plato’s God love us? grant: Well, there are these epiphanies, aren’t there? And as you said about the Good, it’s a kind of given. In a way, Platonism is a great language of grace, isn’t it, and in that sense it is a two-way street. If Platonism is a matter of grace, and the breaking of the chains, [we must ask] who breaks the chains? This is the side that brings it close to Christianity, isn’t it? And there’s another sense where it is different. But I think this is very hard, because there are great similarities and great dif-

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ferences. Nietzsche did say it very well when he said that Christianity is Platonism for the people. I think that is a brilliant statement. christian: Yes, Christianity for the people in the sense that it’s a vulgar Platonism... grant: Oh yes. He certainly means that. christian: ... but also for the people in that it’s a pandemic, a popular religion, for everyone, even Quasimodo. ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’16 It’s open to everyone. It’s Mozart who poses a problem for Platonism, because Mozart did not, from all we know of him, suffer ... grant: He had a terrible life! christian: He didn’t practise death and dying, and he didn’t spend his time in the sort of disciplined philosophical studies that Plato recommends. grant: But mind you, he must have thought because he says at the end of his life, whether this is true or not, that he could never be a Protestant because they don’t understand the doctrine of the agnus Dei. That’s pretty profound. christian: I’m not saying that Mozart wasn’t profound; he was unquestionably profound. grant: I really object to this because I really objected to that movie [Amadeus] making him into a sort of American teenager; I really found that pretty, pretty terrible. He was a very subtle being. christian: My point about Mozart is that Mozart has understood the human and the divine so deeply, without having experienced what Plato says is necessary for him to experience. Mozart’s life seems to be proof of the Christian position, that this grace is open to all human beings, and not only to a few. grant: Oh, I think that’s true. But I mean grace is open in Platonism,

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more than some people have made out. Heidegger makes a lot, that I’d never thought of before, of the fact that the Demiurge in Plato is for the demos. You know, he relates demiourgos to the demos, to the many. And this is one thing I had never thought of before Heidegger raises it. Certainly what you are saying is that the greatest reaches of experience are limited only to a few in Plato. And in Christianity they cannot be. Do you know a writer I admire greatly, [Georges] Bernanos, the French writer [1888–1948], who wrote a book called Un Journal d’un Curé de Campagne? I think it’s a wonderful novel, The Diary of a Country Priest; it’s greater than Mauriac. It ends with the priest, who is the picture of a saint, a little proletarian man; and he dies saying that grace is everywhere. His last words are: ‘Grace is everywhere.’ I think that is true for [Christianity], and it must be true in some sense for Plato. But the individual doesn’t come in for Plato in the same way. I think it’s the question of the individual. Christianity in some sense brought individuality into the world, in a very strange way. Whether rightly or wrongly is very hard to say. christian: Well, certainly Plato has a strong sense of the individual. Not only does he characterize individuals separately in the dialogues, but he also makes clear in the tenth book of the Republic the responsibility of the individual for the care of the soul. grant: Oh, of course, of course. Well, that I agree with. That’s what I was trying to say before. Let me say on the other hand that I think [Leo] Straussr is right in saying that the highest argument in Plato is the argument between the poets and the philosophers. In some sense Christianity has exalted the poets as against the philosophers. Of course in the modern world it’s gone crazy with Heidegger and Nietzsche. You see it in the whole democratic world. Art and entertainment is everything. There is nothing beyond it. That is a very extraordinary position; that’s taking the modern position to its extremity. I think one of the central [ideas is] that art is for Plato mimesis, imitation; in the modern world they talk about it as creation. The more atheist they get, the more they

r Leo Strauss was a German/American political philosopher whose writings, especially Natural Right and History, influenced Grant’s thought about politics.

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talk the language of creation. I would love to work this out. It seems to me that something has gone wrong when you say art is creation, as against imitation. I just haven’t got round to it. I’m just coming to these things.

Notes 1 William Christian, professor of political science in the Department of Political Studies, University of Guelph, is co-author of Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (3rd ed., 1990) and has written extensively on Canadian political and social thought. He is the author of George Grant: A Biography (1993), editor of George Grant: Selected Letters (1996), and co-editor with Sheila Grant of The George Grant Reader (1998). He has also edited reissues of Grant’s Philosophy in the Mass Age and Time as History. 2 The Moral Majority movement was an organization made up of conservative Christian political action committees which campaigned on issues it believed central to upholding its Christian conception of the moral law. In 1981 a series of exposés by Memphis reporter Mike Clark led to the condemnation of the interactions between the Moral Majority and the Republican Party. The organization officially dissolved in 1989 but continued in the Christian Coalition initiated by Pat Robertson. 3 For C.S. Lewis, see 684n124. 4 Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis (1890–1959), lawyer and politician, was premier of Quebec (1936–9, 1944–59). He was a strong Quebec nationalist, and the party he founded in 1936, the Union Nationale, was dedicated to preserving French Canada through provincial rights and traditional institutions such as the Roman Catholic church. Grant’s memory has misled him here. Duplessis was a native of TroisRivières, which he represented in the Quebec National Assembly from 1927 until his death. He was on good terms with successive bishops of Trois-Rivières, and in general with the Roman Catholic hierarchy. One of his bestknown remarks was: ‘The bishops eat from my hand.’ His relations, however, with Joseph Charbonneau, archbishop of Montreal (1940–50), were stormy because of Charbonneau’s support for the strike in 1949 of the workers in four asbestos mines near Thetford Mines and Asbestos, owned primarily by the Johns Manville Corporation. Grant is probably thinking of this conflict between the archbishop of Montreal and Duplessis. Archbishop Charbonneau was forced to resign by the Vatican, partly because of pressure from the premier, following the Asbestos strike. For a detailed analysis of Duplessis’s relations with the Roman Catholic clergy and

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George Grant and Religion (Conversation with William Christian) church–state relations in Quebec generally, see Conrad Black, Duplessis (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977), 497–580. Mikhail Sergeivich Gorbachev (1931– ), Russian statesman and reformer, led the Soviet Union from 1985 until its collapse in 1991. Among his many achievements, Gorbachev established a new working relationship with Western governments, ending the Cold War. Martin Brian Mulroney (1939– ), lawyer, politician, and prime minister of Canada (1984–93). Mulroney attempted to negotiate a constitutional settlement with Robert Bourassa, premier of Quebec, under which the Quebec National Assembly would approve the Constitution Act of 1982. The subsequent Meech Lake Accord failed in 1990. Jesse Louis Jackson (1941– ), American civil-rights leader, Baptist minister, and politician, was a close associate of Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was the first African-American to make a serious bid for the US presidency in the Democratic Party’s nomination races in 1983–4 and 1987–8. Robert (‘Fighting Bob’) La Follette (1855–1925), American politician, was a leading figure in the Progressive movement, running for president as the Progressive Party candidate in 1924. He served as governor of Wisconsin (1901–6) and Republican senator for Wisconsin (1906–25). La Follette was an implacable enemy of corporate power. His son Robert Jr (1895–1953) succeeded him in the U.S. Senate (1925–47) and was a strong supporter of the labour movement. His other son, Philip (1897–1965), served two terms as governor of Wisconsin (1931–3, 1935–9), implementing at the state level many of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ measures. Arthur Jacob (‘Jake’) Epp (1939– ), high school teacher and politician, was minister of Indian affairs and northern development in the Clark government (1979–80) and in the government of Brian Mulroney, minister of health and welfare (1984) and of energy, mines, and resources (1988). Wilhelmus (‘Bill’) Nicholaas Theodore Marie Van der Zalm (1934– ), horticulturist, businessman, and politician, was premier of British Columbia 1986–91. In 1988 he vigorously opposed access to abortion in BC. On A.D. Lindsay, see Collected Works Vol. 1, xxx. Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), American general, commanded the Southwest Pacific Theatre in the Second World War, administered postwar Japan during the Allied occupation, and led UN forces during the first nine months of the Korean War, before being dismissed by President Harry Truman because of his insistence on the need to strike supply lines in China and his refusal to accept presidential authority over military policy. Pol Pot (né Saloth Sar) (1925–98), Cambodian Khmer Rouge political leader, whose communist regime (1975–9) forced the mass evacuation of cities, leading to the deaths of over a million people.

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Charles Miller Manson (1934– ), American criminal and cult leader, inspired his followers to commit a series of murders in California in 1969, including that of the film actress Sharon Tate. Clifford Robert Olson was arrested in 1981 for the murder of 11 children. In January, 1982 he pleaded guilty to 11 counts of murder and received 11 concurrent life sentences. 14 Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), German lyric poet, succeeded in bringing Greek verse into German and combining his dual allegiance to Christianity and the classical Greek gods. Being a poet meant, to him, mediating between gods and men, gods as living forces appearing to humans in sun and earth, sea and sky. 15 Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books 1961). 16 John 14:6: ‘Jesus saith unto him, I am the way the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.’

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George Grant on Simone Weil

This section of the Collected Works brings together Grant’s unpublished and published writings on the French philosopher, mystic, and social critic Simone Weil, his greatest Christian teacher. Weil was born into a prosperous secularized Jewish family in Paris on 3 February 1909. Her father was a medical doctor who served in the French army during the First World War. Her mother, an accomplished musician from an aristocratic Russian family, personally directed the exceptional childhood education of Simone and her older brother André (1906–94), who became one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century. Simone attended the Lycée Henri IV, where she came under the profound influence of Alain (Émile Chartier)1 and went on to complete her classical education at the École Normale Supérieure. Before the age of twenty she identified herself as an anarcho-syndicalist. She was attracted to the philosophy of Marx but refused to join the Communist party. During the depression, Simone Weil spent a number of years teaching philosophy at provincial French lycées (LePuy, Auxerre, Roanne). At the same time she involved herself in the syndicalist movement and in adult education for workers.2 Her earliest sustained social analysis, ‘Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression,’3 was written in 1933–4. It provided a critique of Marxism that Albert Camus judged the most profound of the twentieth century.4 In 1934–5, Simone Weil took a leave of absence from teaching in order to work in factories in and around Paris. She was shattered by the experience, which convinced her that many forms of industrial labour could not be humanized and ought to be suppressed. Exhausted both mentally and physically, and suffering from migraine headaches, she accompanied her parents to Portugal in 1935. There she had the first of her mystical experiences that convinced her, as she later wrote to Father Perrin, that ‘Chris-

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tianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.’5 From that time on, Weil explored explicitly religious, though not exclusively Christian, themes even as she continued her social and political engagements in the labour movement. Her writing continued as she involved herself in the Spanish Civil War and anti-colonial activities.6 The last years of her brief life involved the painful renunciation of her pacifism in the face of Nazi aggression, through support of the French resistance in and around Marseilles. In 1942 she accompanied her parents who were fleeing the anti-Semitism of the Vichy regime for America. In the hope of getting back to France she went to England, where she linked up with the Free French led by General de Gaulle. In 1943 she died in a sanitarium at Ashford (Kent) and was buried in a pauper’s grave, with only seven people in attendance.7 While Simone Weil was alive, most of her writings were unknown beyond a small circle of French intellectuals. They remained unpublished until after the war, when Albert Camus began to collect and edit them for the French publishing firm Gallimard.8 Only slowly were her writings translated into English. L’Attente de Dieu was published as Waiting on God in 1951.9 In the following year George Grant reviewed this book for CBC radio, and he continued to read Weil’s works as they became available in French and English.10 In his early writings, there are only a few mentions of Simone Weil. Grant’s first explicit reference to her was in the last of the lectures published in 1959 as Philosophy in the Mass Age.11 The writings of Weil became more important as Grant was struggling to break free of Hegel’s progressivism. His initial references to her were to The Notebooks published in English in 1956; he quoted her in his lectures on ethics at Dalhousie in the late 1950s and in the radio talk on Dostoevsky delivered in November 1958.12 George Grant’s early writings on Weil comprise three manuscripts and a course notebook. The first typescript, entitled ‘Some Comments on Simone Weil and the Neurotic and Alienated,’ is undated but appears to be from the late fifties or early sixties, prior to Grant’s decision to undertake his 1963 research trip to Paris to interview her mother Selma, her brother André, and her friend (and later her biographer) Simone Pétrement.13 This earliest reflection is more about Grant himself than about Simone Weil, but it raises for the first time the difficulties which will colour all his attempts to write about the woman he would refer to as a saint. For Grant, she was possessed of the ‘genius of sanctity,’ which cannot be

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easily attended to in our era. This meant that she was able to give herself away not only in body and spirit but also intellectually. ‘In her the ways of love and of knowledge are inextricably bound together.’14 In his first typescript, Grant is wrestling with the question, How do those of us who have botched and bungled selves, who are alienated, socially, intellectually, or sexually, give ourselves away?15 Later, he will ask: How do those of us who are unable to love because we have no selves to give away judge the truth of those writings which express the deep faith of a person whose ‘intelligence is enlightened by love’?16 The second typescript, entitled ‘Introduction to Simone Weil,’17 seems to be the basis for a public lecture delivered around 1969.18 In it Grant gives a brief summary of her life and recounts the events that led up to her direct experience of Christ. Here he adds little to what Simone Weil herself had written in her letters to her friend Fr Perrin. Grant describes the publication history of her writings, which he divides into two broad categories, first the social and the political, and second the philosophical and the religious. He also sets out to place the thought of Simone Weil in the Christian tradition. Grant argues that she cannot be understood within the context of Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, or their offshoots, liberalism or Marxism. Rather she must be understood within the context of Eastern Christianity, which was last articulated in the Languedoc region of France before the Cathars were wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade. Theologically this means that for Weil belief or unbelief is never a matter of will, that is, choice or commitment, but of intellect and attention. ‘In other words, one cannot force faith on oneself. The intellect should be entirely free to go where the necessity of the argument leads it. This approach to the divine is of course essentially Greek.’19 Grant concludes this second manuscript with a discussion of the reasons for Weil’s rejection of personalism20 and the liberal understanding of the centrality of ‘personal’ fulfilment. He argues that her notion of personal decreation21 is of a piece with her kenotic conception of the Trinity. God becomes less than God in creating the world; the Word becomes less than divine in becoming incarnate; and Jesus becomes less than human in submitting to the Passion as a common criminal.22 We become part of God in giving ourselves away in love. Many of the themes of the second typescript reappear in a third written between 1970 and 1975. Entitled ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil,’ its purpose was to persuade people to read Weil’s corpus. ‘Tolle!

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Lege!’ (Pick up and read!) was Grant’s message. ‘There is much that it is important for a person to read in the short span of existence and among what is of the highest importance I would assert that the writings of Simone Weil are included.’23 Grant set out to demonstrate the coherence and consistency of Weil’s thought, which was obscured by the fragmentary nature and confused publication history of her writings. He planned to make ‘a map of her writing as a whole.’24 Grant thought this was necessary because ‘the circumstances of both her life and writing and of their publication make it difficult for those who wish to read her writings to find their way among the extensive volumes under her name.’25 He wished also to relate those writings to the life of this remarkable woman whom he considered a ‘great saint.’ And he intended to examine the significance of her sanctity for her thought about justice. To this end Grant hoped to describe Weil’s account of the divine perfection, her understanding of the human condition, her grasp of human history, and her analysis of practical politics. The manuscript attempts to introduce Weil’s writings to an audience formed by an ethical liberalism that Grant does not share and that, particularly in the light of the Vietnamese War, he has come to see as pernicious. [Men] have come to believe that morality has to do with freely choosing agents who through their wills bring value into the world ... For those of us in North America [this morality] draws on the most powerful and persuasive elements of our tradition: Protestantism, worldly liberalism and our understanding of the modern scientific achievement. And even behind these immediate traditions, it draws sustenance from the very origins of a Western theology which came to be as it used such words as ‘person,’ ‘will,’ and ‘power’ about Deity itself. So powerful is the vision of men as the creators of value in their freedom that it is difficult for philosophers and for non-philosophers to think of themselves or society outside it.26

The thought of Simone Weil represented a profound Christian alternative to the liberal Protestantism within which Grant had grown up and from which he had been wrenched by his conversion experience in 1941.27 ‘[T]o even consider [this thought] as possibly true – it is necessary to recognize that her account of morality and indeed of the human condition in general consciously and explicitly is outside this [liberal] vision.’28 Grant

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never completed a book on Weil, and after 1977 there are no unpublished manuscripts dealing with her thought. It appears that his original Weil project was made more difficult and less pressing by the appearance of Simone Pétrement’s La vie de Simone Weil,29 which was published in French in 1973 and which Grant referred to as ‘the definitive biography.’30 This made aspects of the biographical and historical elements of his proposed book unnecessary. Miklos Vetö’s La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil 31 was published in 1971, and Grant later acknowledged that it was the most careful among many good books expounding the theoretical structure of Weil’s thought. While not totally satisfactory, it revealed the connection between the apparently disparate elements of her account of reality and her commentary on the works of Plato. As for the relationship between the greatness of her thought and the sanctity of her life, this seemed to require (as E.B. and D.R. Heaven pointed out)32 silence from someone who considered himself less than a great thinker and certainly not a saint. The final unpublished manuscript, sections of which are included here, is made up of Grant’s notes for his graduate course on Simone Weil given at McMaster University in 1975–6. The notes are as important for what they reveal about Grant’s understanding of teaching and the university as they are for his understanding of Weil. For example, Grant asks the general question: ‘[W]hy in this world study philosophy or theology? That is, attempt to think about the whole, when that activity is much scorned in the modern world and in the modern university ...? ... Even this department becomes more and more a place in which philosophy and theology will be excluded and replaced by the techne of scholarship etc.’33 In such a context, Grant says, ‘[t]eaching is a strange occupation for one who had a not very good North American and modern education. At best, one’s teaching is largely one’s instruction of oneself.’34 When in 1980 George Grant left McMaster University for Dalhousie in Halifax he was preparing to bow out of academia. He was sick of fighting the research establishment, which downplayed the significance of teaching. It is significant that at Dalhousie he supervised only one graduate student, James Calder, who was not enrolled in the classics, philosophy, or political science departments but in the department of education. Calder’s approach to Weil reflects Grant’s interests at the end of his career. His thesis was entitled ‘Labour and Thought in the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Preface to a Philosophy of Education.’35 The argument of the thesis

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gives plausibility to the view that Grant was, at the end of his life, relying more and more on Weil’s analysis of modern science as the basis for his critique of the technological society. It forms the background to Grant’s essays in Technology and Justice that, as he says in his preface, ‘centre around the modern paradigm of “knowledge”: behaviourist explanation in terms of algebra. This account is at the core ... of Western civilization.’36 Algebra is the language that enhances and expands our power over aspects of nature and human nature through technology. The control that we gain over nature is bought at the price of giving up our freedom to the collective and destroying our roots in a culture that encourages thought.37 As we have seen, Grant never completed his book on Simone Weil. Among the writings published while he was still alive all we have that focuses explicitly on her thought are two relatively brief book reviews and an essay. The first review, which appeared in the Globe and Mail in February of 1977, expresses high praise for Simone Pétrement’s biography Simone Weil: A Life, translated by Raymond Rosenthal and published in English in 1976.38 In the class notes of 1975–6, Grant shows familiarity with the French original published in 1973. The essay ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ written in 1977 and published in its final form in Technology and Justice in 1986, it does not expound or explain Weil’s writings; rather, those writings inform his meditation on the difficulties of articulating one’s Christian (or other) faith (understood as ‘the experience that the intelligence is illumined by love’) in the modern academy. ‘[T]he dominant paradigm [‘behaviourist explanation in terms of algebra’] [will be accepted by most students] because it is their ticket to professionalism and that is the name of the game.’39 But Grant is ‘concerned with the group at the multiversity with some sense of the eternal good which is God, perhaps even some sense of the declaration of that eternity in Christ. For such men and women, the facing of the modern paradigm in its incarnation will be fairly direct because they cannot take it as sufficient if they hold what they have been given of eternity.’ At the end of the essay Grant acknowledges his debt to Simone Weil, who wrote: ‘If one turns aside from [Christ] to go towards the truth, one will not go very far before falling into his arms.’ He asks: ‘Did she, in the sheer force of her intellect, know how much the rest of us can be diverted from that fearful wrestling [with the truth]? George Grant’s final publication on Weil was his penetrating critique of Robert Coles’s Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage. It appeared as ‘In

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Defence of Simone Weil’ in The Idler in 1988, the last year of Grant’s life.40 He deals with some of the vexed questions raised by what he takes to be Coles’s misinterpretation of Weil’s anti-Judaism,41 which, Grant argues, cannot be made intelligible except by understanding her conversion and belief in the context of ‘Eastern Christianity.’42 He returns at the end of the review to the preoccupations that inform his love for Weil. ‘At a time such as this when, on the one hand the Gospels stand in their indubitable perfection, while on the other hand the civilization ... has become mainly technology, it is well to read carefully a thinker of consummate intelligence and love who understood that Christianity becomes meaningless if the creating of God is detached from the passion of God.’43 Lawrence E. Schmidt

Notes 1 On Alain, see below 802n2. 2 See David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon Press 1990), chap. 3, ‘Teacher and Anarchist.’ 3 Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1973), 37–124. 4 See Albert Camus, ‘Introduction’ to Oppression and Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1958): ‘Western social and political thought has not produced anything more penetrating and more prophetic since Marx,’ as quoted in Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon Press 1990), 91. 5 Simone Weil, Waiting on God (New York: Harper and Row 1973), 67. 6 See Simone Weil, Simone Weil on Colonialism: an Ethic of the Other, ed. and trans. J.P. Little,(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2003). 7 Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon 1976), 538. 8 Gallimard has since 1988 been engaged in the editing, annotation, and publication of the Oeuvres complètes of Simone Weil. 9 Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons 1951). 10 See William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 229. 11 George Grant, Philosophy in the Mass Age (Toronto: Copp Clark Publishing Co. 1959), 99–100; Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 2, 380. 12 George Grant, Collected Works of George Grant, Vol. 2, 380, 415, 455.

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13 See George Grant: Selected Letters, ed. and intro. William Christian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 216–19. 14 ‘Introduction to Simone Weil,’ 791. 15 In his graduate lecture on Nietzsche in 1969, Grant publicly expressed his anguish about his inability to unify his thought and his life as his ‘greatest teacher’ did. ‘For ten years I have been in the horrible position of thinking this position to be true and yet turning away from it. Why do I make this rather egocentric remark? Because the following is true: “Human nature is so constituted that any desire of the soul in so far as it has not passed through the flesh by means of actions and attitudes which correspond to it, has no reality in the soul. It is only there as a phantom.” [‘A Theory of the Sacraments,’ included, in a different translation, in Gateway to God, ed. by David Raper (London: Fontana 1974), 65.] That is, the supreme truth of Christianity – the Incarnation – everything divine has to come to us by passing through our flesh. ‘That is, this doctrine, which I think to be true, I do not consent to it, because I do not consent to it passing through my flesh. Therefore there is something very strange in my passing this doctrine on to you as true, when I do not consent to it in desire. Indeed, there is one saying in the Bible which is indubitable: ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’ [Hebrews 10:31]. (And I make bloody well certain that I do not.)’ Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 3, 672–3. 16 Grant has translated this phrase himself and uses it twice in his essay ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ in George Grant, Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986) (above, 609 and 614). See endnote 1 (p. 132 [609 above]) which reads: ‘S. Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce, Plon, Paris, 1948. The greater the writer the more hesitant is the translator.’ In Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil: Volume One (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1956) 240, the phrase is translated: ‘Faith is the experience that the intelligence is lighted up by love.’ 17 Later published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 238–53. 18 The manuscript is not dated, but the reference to 27 years since Weil’s death means that it was written in 1970. 19 ‘Introduction to Simone Weil,’ 800. 20 See Eric Springsted, ‘Beyond the Personal: Weil’s Critique of Maritain,’ Harvard Theological Review 98 (2005): 209-18. 21 See J.P. Little, ‘Simone Weil’s Concept of Decreation,’ in Richard Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings towards a Divine Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). 22 See Philippians 2:6–8 and Weil, Waiting on God (1973), 145.

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23 ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil,’ 809. Grant did not offer a course on Simone Weil’s corpus until his 1975–6 graduate seminar, but between 1967 and 1972 he briefly discussed her in his course ‘Myth and Reason.’ He subtitled one lecture, on ‘Orphism and the Pythagoreans,’ ‘Simone Weil and the Hunger.’ In this lecture Grant states that his understanding of Pythagoreanism is not ‘something I could have discussed by myself. I owe it mostly to a writer I spend my life studying – Simone Weil – and I consider her an inspired writer in that she claimed at the end of her short life of thirty-three [sic] years that she had finally been possessed by Christ. And I accept after studying her writings and her life that her claim was true.’ 24 ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil,’ 807. 25 Ibid., 807. 26 ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil,’ 811. 27 See Larry Schmidt, ed., George Grant in Process (Toronto: Anansi 1976), 62. 28 ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil,’ 811. 29 Simone Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil (Paris: Fayard 1973). 30 ‘In Defence of Simone Weil,’ 858. 31 Miklos Vetö, La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil (Paris: Vrin 1971), trans. Joan Dargan as The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil (Albany: Suny Press 1994). 32 See Edwin B. and David R. Heaven, ‘Some Influences of Simone Weil on George Grant’s Silence,’ in Schmidt, ed., George Grant in Process. 33 Class Notebooks (1975–6), 814. 34 Class Notebooks (1975–6), 819. 35 James Calder, ‘Labour and Thought in the Philosophy of Simone Weil: Preface to a Philosophy of Education,’ unpublished PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, 1985. 36 George Grant, Technology and Justice, 588. 37 See J.G. Calder, ‘Against Algebra: Simone Weil’s Critique of Modern Science and Its Mathematics,’ Explorations in Knowledge: An International Journal in the Philosophy of Science 4 (1987): 47–73. 38 See note 7 above. 39 Grant, Technology and Justice, 633 above. 40 Republished in Christian and Grant eds., The George Grant Reader, 256–65. 41 See Thomas Nevin, Simone Weil: Portrait of a Self Exiled Jew (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1991), esp. chap. 9, ‘A Stranger Unto her People, Weil on Judaism,’ as well as George Steiner’s review of Richard H. Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993): ‘Sainte Simone: The Jewish Bases of Simone Weil’s via negativa to the philosophic heights,’ Times Literary Supplement, 4 June 1993.

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42 In the lecture on ‘Orphism and the Pythagoreans’ (see note 23), Grant stated: ‘Christianity in the West has consistently and increasingly, starting with Augustine, defined itself as essentially a Semitic religion. All I can say is that Semitic religion or what Christians call the Old Testament seems to me in many ways a very dangerous and unspiritual and false religion. It is not my place or purpose here to say why. But insofar as this is true, I consider Christianity to have been false when it so defined itself. Against that I see Christ as the perfection and completeness of all that Greek spirituality was expressing’ (Collected Works, Vol. 3, 724). 43 Grant, ‘In Defence of Simone Weil,’ 864.

Some Comments on Simone Weil and the Neurotic and Alienated

This paper was written in the early 1960s, shortly after Grant was made chairman of the Religion Department at McMaster University, but before he went to Paris to do research for a book on Simone Weil.

It is all very well to talk of giving yourself away, but you must first have a person to give away. I am sure that S.W. [Simone Weil] is right that personality is a passing phenomenon and that the purpose of life is for it not to exist so that one can be just God loving Himself. However I am struck over and over again by what a forceful sense of herself S.W. had from an early age – that indeed from the earliest age she had a personality. One can speculate on what had led to this clear wonderful personality. The solidity of the love between her father and mother; the certainty of the social tradition in which she lived – the social tradition of an incroyant doctor who knew his social usefulness in a very profound way; as she grew up her partaking in the self-confidence and nobility of the French intellectual tradition. One sees in her writings from beginning to end that certainty that French intellectual life is a glory even when she was criticizing the very roots of intellectual modernity which after all came from the enlightenment which had made that intellectual tradition. There is a certainty about her own being – intellectually, socially and sexually (I will return to this last later) from which her moral directness and intensity could proceed. She can easily say that the point of life is to know the ‘I’ as nothing because the ‘I’ as personality is so fully and so early there. But what about people who just do not know who they are, socially, intellectually, sexually and to whom most of life is finding out who they are. When I speak of those people who have not found themselves I do

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not mean especially those people who are rooted sexually and socially from an early age but who have to have some time just to live it out. (I just do not know how many people of this sort are there in a civilization such as ours and perhaps the very condemnation of our civilization such as ours is that it militates against there being such people. It is in this sense that self-consciousness is a blight as well as a good in a way the existentialists do not seem to understand.) I mean rather those (and they seem to be a growing number) who are so alienated at an early age that they simply do not know who they are. For them so much of life must be finding the ‘I’ – the person. Before they have a person how can they give it away and know they are good? I think it is wrong to describe the forms of this alienation in too limited a sense as does much modern psychotherapy. For example, in my own case I am sure that I was alienated in a very deep way early sexually, but not socially or in North American terms intellectually. The result is that much of my life has been (and is yet) finding what I am sexually as a person. But socially, the very rootedness that my parents gave me, has enabled me to give myself away socially not well but not badly. It has cost me some pain, but it has been on the whole a rational process (even at the moments with Ross)1 in a way that my sexual life has never been. But I would say that many of the students I come in touch with find a terrible alienation both socially and intellectually. (This division is of course arbitrary in so far as social and intellectual alienation have their carryover into sexual life and vice versa.) It would be quite inadequate to see their social and intellectual alienation as simply rooted in some sexual or familial dilemma. For example, children brought up in certain strata (nearly all) of Hamilton cannot surely find any rootedness or meaning in their society if they have any intelligence and are just alienated socially. This of course will have all sorts of mutual interdependence with sexual alienation, but in short Freud needs some kind of social theory like Marx. But beyond this where both Marx and Freud are both wrong (both having had the benefits of the traditional European education) is that many youngsters are alienated from their own intellect because they have had such lousy educations at school and college. (This could by Marxists be called a form of social alienation. For obvious reasons I do not [call it this].) This kind of alienation of the person S.W. just never understood because she took the intellect for granted being highly gifted and also (the also is crucial)

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having had a very very good education. It is something I find difficult to understand because by North American standards my education was as good as available. My main point about S.W. is that one cannot say to people who have been alienated in their persons either sexually, socially or intellectually – give your person away – this is the point of being human – till in some sense they have their person in the three ways. To be specific, you cannot say to a boy who in so far as he sees his sexuality at all sees it as a chaos of homosexuality and impotence – give yourself away. What has he got to give away? His ‘I’ is not. And what is particularly dangerous (and I know I have been guilty of this in my teaching) is to say to somebody who is not a person sexually, bypass this nothingness and give yourself away socially and intellectually – in other words turn away from your sexual chaos to philosophy or social reform. (I do not mean by this that people in certain sexual positions should not cut themselves off from particular sexual actions because I think they should. But they should do so consciously knowing what they are doing and should not use philosophy or social involvement as a means of hiding their sexual desperation from themselves.) A fortiori one should not say to a youngster in this position what matters is giving yourself away – that is, saying it in any way that implies such giving of himself is a means of directly escaping his sexual difficulties. One premise I must bring in before going at S.W. directly is that I personally find it very easy to see the absence of personality vis-à-vis sexuality in young men. I do not find it easy to see what forms of chaos this takes in young women. I am also inclined to think (though this may be simply my good fortune with Sheila and also part of my mythology) that when one thinks the difference masculine-feminine one of the differences is that women can be more easily alienated socially and intellectually than men, but are probably less prone to losing their very personalities sexually. This may not be so and I must investigate for instance (a) the place of penis envy and (b) sexually destroying masochism in women. Now I am sure that S.W. was in a remarkable way not alienated intellectually or socially – that is, that she was able to reach the truth here in a direct and immediate way just because she was so rooted – so much an ‘I’ here from the earliest age. I am not nearly so sure of her sexual existence. Certain facts arise: (a) Dr and Mme Weil were in their differ-

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ent ways, I would gather, sexually, intellectually and socially very realized people. (b) What about the relation of André to S.W. and later to Mme W.? My suspicion is that she was a very integrated person sexually. Therefore the form of the argument about her should not be as the Thomists (see Ottensmeyer)2 have about her: her sexual unbalance prevented her from seeing the truth of the Aristotelian-Thomist argument about the natural virtues. The argument more crucial is surely: did her very good fortune as a person allow her to give a place in her philosophy for the way for the more chaotic people? One immediate point to ask about her sexual life is her doctrine of ‘impossible loves.’ She identifies the greatness of Plato and of Languedoc with this doctrine. In the case of Plato, homosexuality known as ‘impossible’ was a lever by which men reached to the supernatural. So also ‘courtly love’ as ‘impossible’ was used in the same way. Now in an obvious way this is a suspect doctrine in a Freudian and humanist age. Yet I am sure she is right in what she says explicitly: that just as the movement of the intellect from the world to God must proceed from negation to contradiction, so also in the practical life (and at more levels than the sexual) there are negations, acts which must not be done. Why this is so intense at the sexual level is just that sexuality is life itself, negated at the most crucial point. Negation, both intellectual and moral, she justifies in the sense that without the void the perfection of God would not be perfect. An immanent God is just not what we worship. I have no difficulties in her thought here. Of course there are difficulties of a different sort. (a) Did she experience an impossible love? As there are many kinds of these, I am not in saying this implying or excluding Lesbianism. On the whole I exclude the possibility of any ‘impossible’ love in her personality because of the sheer immediacy and radiance of her personality. The form of this argument is the following: (i) she knew the truth, (ii) the truth she knew was not a partial truth of abnegation – it was not an empty or formal supernatural reached by having simply to forego and negate an ‘impossible love,’ (iii) she would not likely have known that truth so early and authoritatively if she had had to spend her energies on mastering such a love. Her battle scars are not at all of that variety. Nevertheless other questions remain about the definition of the impossible love. How do you define ‘impossible love’ in the modern

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world? This is related to the full difficulties she sees in the definition of obedience. Even more important, how do you define ‘impossible love’ without any note of increasing people’s sexual alienation by the definition? That is, it must be a definition that fulfils those held by such loves rather than further alienating and driving them either to unbelieve or to the cycle of repentance and sin. But after all this is said one is left with the main question: Does her doctrine which ends and I am sure rightly with the idea of giving away the personality give place for the individual who has first to find himself, sexually, socially, or intellectually before he can give his personality away in the radiant and direct sense that she did?

Notes 1 Murray Ross, president of York University, in 1960 offered Grant a job as founding chair of the Philosophy Department and later accepted his resignation when Grant objected to the terms of the appointment. See William Christian, George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), 198–203, and Collected Works, Vol. 3, 3–8. 2 Hilary Ottensmeyer, Le thème de l’amour dans l’oeuvre de Simone Weil (Paris: Lettres modernes 1958); Simone Weil, Perspective chrétienne (Paris: J. Minard 1958).

Introduction to Simone Weil

Originally written after George Grant’s research trip to France in 1963, this paper was edited in 1970 when he took up the task of introducing Simone Weil to an English-speaking audience. It was initially presented as a speech to the Hamilton Association, a non-profit cultural organization that annually sponsors eight free public lectures. It remained unpublished until it appeared in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 238–53.

There must always be something unsatisfactory in writing or speaking about the productions of the great. For example, musicologists can write of Mozart’s mastery of certain forms, his use of certain keys, his debt in the later part of his life to the Bachs, etc. etc.; but finally they must simply say – listen, be silent, pay attention, study – here one is in the presence of the highest. Indeed, much of the attitude of the expositor should be that of John the Baptist as depicted by Grunewald1 in the Isenheim altar. As you will remember, he stands there pointing at the figure on the cross. So it must be in speaking of the life and writings of Simone Weil. My muddy and confused words seem so tedious compared with the cutting clarity of her language. Of course, to the young one must do a medium amount of talking so that they do not miss their encounters with the great – those sudden encounters which are the joy of education – and this talking has a particular use in a society in which the tawdry is all around them. There is, however, more reason to talk of a recent genius than an ancient one, because many people may not have read her works. Simone Weil died in 1943 and the 27 years since then have been wordy and noisy ones, particularly here in North America. Ours is not an era in which the note

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of genius is heard through the avalanches of print, and this applies particularly to the genius of sanctity. There is therefore perhaps some purpose served in speaking of Simone Weil. But I must insist that my purpose is not to interpret her thought for you – that is, to put my own clumsy self between you and her, but rather to persuade you to read her works, to pay attention to her genius. My paper is meant as an introduction to the reading of Simone Weil – to describe her life and her writings for such reading. First, let me sketch the outward going of her existence. Simone Weil was born in Paris in 1909. Her parents were prosperous French who had come from the tradition of European Judaism. She had one older brother who is today a famous mathematician. She was brought up by her parents and brother in that civilized humanist agnosticism of the enlightenment, which so characterized middle-class European culture before 1914. But it was that culture in its finest form. Whatever else she was to become, it must be remarked that she partook of two remarkable traditions; both her Frenchness and her secularized Jewishness gave her that intense love of learning and cultivation of the intellect, which may not of themselves be enough, but are the seed-ground from which even higher activities can proceed, and without which society and individuals are likely to become mediocre or even base. French education of the very clever is prodigiously difficult and highly competitive. Her achievement is therefore remarkable in taking her baccalaureate at the age of fifteen (the usual age being seventeen or eighteen) and in receiving a mark of nineteen out of twenty, when the usual clever youngster considers fifteen a high mark. She proceeded to the lycée and the Collège Henri IV and on the École Normale Supérieure. Alain,2 the famous teacher of philosophy, considered that she had the philosophic genius of the first order. That is, in a country where the education of the elite was the best the West had produced, she was known as having shining intellectual eminence. There is in her, however, from the very beginning something beyond the pattern of French brilliance, or for that matter beyond any intellectual brilliance. No sooner had she become a teacher of philosophy than she became part of a group of workers who produced a paper called the ‘The Proletarian Revolution,’ and soon after took leave of philosophical teaching and became a worker in the Renault motor works. The best comment on that life is what she wrote later to her friend, Father Perrin;

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‘What I went through (in the factory) marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received for ever the mark of slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.’3 In 1931 and 1932 she had been in Germany, and writing (at the age of 21) in the proletarian magazine she made clear the reasons for the inevitable fact that the Nazis must win the struggle for power – as in fact they did a year later. In 1936 she went to Spain to work for the Republican army on the Catalonian front and experienced war in its savagery. In 1937 her parents moved in and took her out of the public world, as by this time she was physically broken and was to suffer for the rest of her life from that hideous curse, migraine. With the fall of Paris to the Germans in 1940 she moved to unoccupied France, was later involved in clandestine activity, while working as a farm labourer for 12 hours a day and continuing her studies in Greek and Sanskrit. In 1942 she was persuaded to move to New York by her parents, who as Jews obviously had to emigrate. But the six months in New York she considered a mistake, and immediately began to pester her friends who were high officials in General de Gaulle’s entourage to send her on some mission to France. She was brought to London in December 1942 but her obviously Jewish physique and the brokenness of her health would not allow the officials to send her into France. She worked in London on reports about the kind of society which should be established in France after the war. One of her greatest writings ‘The Theory of the Sacraments’4 was a private letter to Maurice Schumann5 now Foreign Secretary. In the spring of 1943 she was in hospital, and dead in August 1943. Cause of death listed as suicide from not eating. This capsuled account of her life sounds singularly uninspiring, and my failure saddens me. I now must turn to that aspect of her life which is even harder to describe than outward events – what I would call the possession and distinction of her existence by God. This difficult subject cannot be avoided because it is in this fact that the greatness of her writings can only be understood. What gives her writings their startling force is that she writes of the divine (call it, if you will, reality) with an immediacy, certainty and directness. Let me explain what I mean by this

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quality of her writings by making a comparison between two writers of our era. Both people like William Masters in his reports and D.H. Lawrence in his novels write of sexuality.6 Masters from his studies knows a lot about the outlets and climaxes of American men and women. But he clearly knew almost nothing about human sexuality in itself. Can anybody imagine going to Masters to deepen their consciousness about the place of sexuality in their own life? The very idea is high comedy. Lawrence, on the other hand, knows what sexuality is because he has existed as a sexual being and knew others who have also so existed. My analogy is that Simone Weil writes about the divine like Lawrence, not like Masters. It is therefore necessary for me to say something of those events between 1936 and 1943 whereby God’s perfection became immediate to her. (And I use the word ‘immediate’ in the sense that we see each other right now.) But let me say that in doing so I have very great hesitation – and would like to cover my head with a cloth as Socrates did when he spoke with Phaedrus about most difficult matters. Let me begin by quoting her words which set the context of the problem: ‘I may say that [I] never at any moment in my life sought for God ... I do not like this expression and it strikes me as false. As soon as I reached adolescence I saw the problem of God as a problem of which the data could not be obtained here below, and I decided that the only way of being sure not to reach a wrong solution, which seemed to me the greatest possible evil, was to leave it alone. So I left it alone. I neither affirmed not denied anything. It seemed to me useless to solve the problem, for I thought that in being in this world, our business was to adopt the best attitude with regard to the problems of this world.’7 Let me read you one extract about these events. In doing so one must remember it is part of an account written to an intimate friend8 which she never thought would pass beyond him: ‘In 1937 I had two marvelous days at Assisi. There, alone in this little twelfth-century Romanesque chapel of Santa Maria degli Angeli, an incomparable marvel of purity where Saint Francis often used to pray, something stronger than I was compelled me for the first time in my life to go down on my knees.’ In 1938 I spent ten days at Solesmes, from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, following the liturgical services. I was suffering from splitting headaches; each sound hurt me like a blow; by an extreme effort of attention I

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was able to rise above this wretched flesh, to leave it to suffer by itself, heaped up in a corner, and to find a pure and perfect joy in the unimaginable beauty of the chanting and the words. This experience enabled me by analogy to get a better understanding of the possibility of loving divine love in the midst of affliction. It goes without saying that in the course of these services the thought of the Passion of Christ entered into my being once and for all. There was a young English Catholic there from whom I gained my first idea of the supernatural power of the Sacraments because of the truly angelic radiance with which he seemed to be clothed after going to communion. Chance – for I always prefer saying chance rather than Providence – made of him a messenger to me. For he told me of the existence of those English poets of the seventeenth century who are named metaphysical. In reading them later on, I discovered the poem of which I read you what is unfortunately a very inadequate translation. It is called Love. I learnt it by heart. Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say it over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me. My arguments about the insolubility of the problem of God had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard tell of things of this kind, but I had never believed in them. In the Fioretti the accounts of apparitions rather put me off if anything, like the miracles in the Gospel.9 Moreover, in this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile on a beloved face. I had never read any mystical works because I had never felt any call to read them. In reading as in other things I have always striven to practise obedience. There is nothing more favourable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I only read what I am hungry for, at the moment when I have an appetite for it, and then I do not read, I eat. God in his mercy had prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it should be evident to me that I had not invented this absolutely unexpected contact.

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Yet I still half refused, not my love but my intelligence. For it seemed to me certain, and I still think so to-day, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.10

Such events cannot, of course, be spoken of simply. For instance, her involvement in the twentieth century through becoming a member of the industrial proletariat and through experience of war, shows that there was in her something beyond intellectual brilliance, namely what in the West is called that attention of the will (or better, love) and which has always been considered necessary to the highest knowledge. This already present attention was what led her into the afflictions of the century, even before she knew what she was doing, and in turn the afflictions are the condition of her amazing attention. Moreover the afflictions of modern civilization taught her to question the philosophic principles on which modern civilization is based, and so enabled her to read and participate directly in what the Greeks and Indians have said about alternative principles, in a way that is quite impossible for most men. Yet in saying that her involvement in the afflictions of the world is central to the understanding of her sanctity, we must avoid being led to that anti-intellectual position which sees possession by deity as an happening which has little to do with intellectual life. (This I may say is a position very popular in many circles these days.) For it is perfectly clear from her own testimony that her reading of the Bhagavad Gita, the Iliad, and above all Plato and the Gospels, were the very means of her receptivity. What I am saying is, in its most general form, the following: in the tradition, and I can only speak of the Western, there has been much controversy about the respective places of the way of love and the way of knowledge, and indeed some followers of the way of love have been so presumptuous as to ridicule thought. This is not true of Simone Weil. In her the ways of love and of knowledge are inextricably bound together. It is particularly necessary to say this in our present society in which knowledge and love are so disastrously bifurcated that each falls into its own particular errors and perversions. What is one to make of such a sentence as: ‘It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took pos-

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session of me’?11 I believe, of course, that what happened is exactly what she says happened. And yet this seems to me highly surprising; for I do not like or trust the writings of most mystics and am full of suspicion of their claims. Also as a twentieth century person, I am inclined to a certain image of the relation of sexuality to religion and therefore such language as Christ taking possession of people is highly suspect – particularly from women. Yet I am sure it happened for the reason that what she knows and writes about elsewhere is I am sure true, and whatever her faults I cannot think they were those of self-delusion. This comment is of course in no sense a proof because I could not prove it unless someone would sit down and read in detail and discuss with me in detail what she has said about affliction and the beauty of the world in her notebooks. Let me also say that I think that official, institutional Christianity has been quite right in being so firmly suspicious of these claims to direct contact which we call mysticism, because of the obvious and manifold abuses to which they may lead. But when it happens, I am sure it happens, and I am convinced it happened here. To turn from these absurd little comments of mine, I will now describe her published writings. First I must mention several complications in sorting them out, which make it difficult to approach her thought at all or to understand it as a consistent whole. These stem from the fact that the most important of her writings were written in notebooks for her own purposes, not those of publication, and have only seen the light of published day since her death and under the editorial hands of other people. (Alain’s teaching about writing.)12 The comparison can be made between her writings and Pascal’s Pensées.13 After 1945 her friends in the south of France, M Gustave Thibon and Fr Perrin, published some of the manuscripts she had left in their hands. Thibon produced Gravity and Grace,14 a set of extracts from her notebooks; Perrin Waiting on God which are her letters to him and certain of her essays. These publications by her Catholic friends presented a particular difficulty. When they appeared in France they were met by the highest adulation. French writers of all kinds – whether believers or not – heralded them as the work of genius. In this fact Catholics were faced with an inevitable ambiguity. Here was a writer of clear genius and one who had entered the heights of the Christian life, and yet who had unequivocally and at great length stated that obedience did not call her to membership in the Catholic Church – indeed one who had written

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penetrating attacks on the form of the Church and some of its most authoritative teaching.15 She remained, she has told us, at the intersection of Christianity and everything that is not Christianity: all the ancient wisdom of mankind that the Church had repudiated and excluded, the traditions banned as heretical, even the limited goods that resulted from what was hypostasized as the Renaissance. ‘I remain beside them all the more’ she wrote to Father Perrin, ‘because my own intelligence is numbered among them.’16 In her eyes the Church fails as a perfect incarnation of Christianity mainly because it is not truly Catholic. ‘So many things are outside it, ... so many things that God loves ... Christianity being Catholic by right but not in fact, I regard it as legitimate on my part to be a member of the Church by right but not in fact, not only for a time but for my whole life if need be.’17 This may sound as if she were advocating a foolish syncretism or asserting the Church should embrace falsehood as well as truth. But of course politically she was in no sense a liberal (that is, an optimist about the results of falsehood) and so she recognizes the Church’s duty to guard the truth and warn the public against error. But this guarding has been done in the wrong way by use of force and anathema. This rejection of the church meant of course that she excluded herself from the Eucharist which she knew to be a priceless treasure. Now clearly it is difficult (I do not know whether it be possible) for a Roman Catholic to accept at its face value Simone Weil’s position that it is Christ who demands for her the obedience of remaining outside the Church. It would be folly to say impossible considering the river of divine charity which with the last years has flowed from the Roman Catholic Church which must make the rest of us humble.18 The alternative is to say that at the centre of her existence she had been in some way mistaken, [that] she confused obedience with spiritual pride and Cardinal Daniélou19 has said that. It is quite honest to interpret her this way and in the last years there have been many books by Roman Catholic theologians explaining the sources of her errors. My point about her writings is it is quite evident that the extracts published by Thibon were affected by the contradiction on the one hand of his friendship and admiration for her, on the other the desire to play down her total thought. Obedience to their Church meant that M Thibon and Fr Perrin could not be expected to edit her manifold manu-

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scripts properly. There were too many passages to which they were entirely unsympathetic. Nevertheless the effect of their early editing on her public image still remains. Thibon’s Gravity and Grace was the chief way her writings became known in English and it is a very one-sided set of extracts. Fr Perrin’s book, Waiting on God, is fairer, and is indeed a good first volume to read (also cheaply available in English). However, it must be noted that Fr Perrin’s introduction to that book has been withdrawn, and he has published elsewhere a more cautious and less enthusiastic account of her. Now that her manuscripts are edited, not as extracts, but more in the way she left them, the central difficulty remains however of seeing her thought in unity, because her main writings were not intended for publication. This unification of her thought is further complicated by the fact that for a person who died at thirty-three, and spent most of her adult life as a labourer, her writings are voluminous. Since the end of the war this immense mass of material has been brought out by the French presses. Let me say that many of the theologians who have written books or articles about her have singled out certain aspects of her thought at the expense of others and therefore have interpreted her totality in a very limited way. Some of the descriptions of her in American journals could only have been written by people whose reading had been to say the least partial. There is such a desire on the part of scholars these day to get into print that they sometimes write about that of which they do not know enough. (Susan Sontag and Fr Daniel Berrigan recent articles.)20 For the sake of clarity I will divide her writings into two main classes: her political and social writings and her philosophical, scientific and religious writings. Obviously this division is arbitrary because each depends on the other; it is simply a useful division. There are three main books about politics and society. First, L’Enracinement (The Need for Roots). (In giving an English title, I am not implying any lack of French in my audience, but simply stating that there is an English translation of the work. Where there is no translation I will give only one title.) This is the only book that she wrote for a public purpose – indeed her only book which is not a collection of pieces. (Schumann a great friend was Gaullist foreign minister.) It was written as a report for the Free French government in London as the principles on which French society should be based after the war. It is divided into three sec-

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tions: (a) the needs of the soul in any society, (b) the causes of modern uprootedness, and (c) the possibility of enrootedness in advanced industrial society. By ‘uprootedness’ she means what Marx means by alienation, but uses it in a wider context because she has a fuller understanding than him of the demonic aspects of bureaucracy. This is the least absolute of her books because it was written as a report to practical men, who knew they would soon have the responsibility for the reconstruction of a conquered society. Second, Oppression et liberté (Oppression and Liberty). This group of essays is in my opinion her most remarkable writing about politics, and is a good place to start the study of her thought. Albert Camus also thought it was one of the masterpieces of European political philosophy. At its centre is a long essay called ‘Reflections on the causes of liberty and social oppression,’ which is at base an understanding not only of the causes of social oppression in general, but of the particular forms of oppression which arise in societies which are oriented to the future, that is, which are progressive. This volume also contains her amazing critique of Marxism. I must emphasize that this criticism of Marx is not of the order of those we have got used to in North America since 1945 – criticisms which miss the point because they distort Marx and therefore do not come to grips with his thought. Simone Weil has a profound understanding of Marx’s greatness and therefore what she says is truly a critique, not the passing wind of propaganda. Third, La condition ouvrière. At the centre of this volume is her diary while she worked for the Renault factory. This is however no personal affair but comments about the relations between men and machines and men and bureaucracy. It also contains an essay on the conditions necessary if industrial work is not to be servile. Besides these three main works there are two volumes of miscellaneous essays on social and political subjects, ranging from several analyses of French colonial policy21 to essays on the Cathar religion, and the civilization of Languedoc, that is the Albigensians.22 Two of these essays I would particularly single out. A long essay called ‘Reflections on the origins of Hitlerism’23 turns out to be a sustained and detailed criticism of the civilization of Rome. I single this out not only because it helps us escape some of the more comfortable platitudes about Roman history, but because in it is expressed her central theme about history in general – namely the nobler and better does not necessarily survive, indeed because of the ultimate rule of force over the world, truth and

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beauty can only be tenuously held in the being of any society. She agrees with Plato that society is always and everywhere the Great Beast or the Cave. The other essay I would single out is ‘Human Personality’24 in which she maintains that what is sacred in man is not what is individual or personal but what is impersonal. Seen negatively, this essay is an attack on so much popular modern writing, both inside and outside Christianity, which is based on a sentimentalizing of personality and mankind. These essays have been published in English by the Oxford Press under the editorship of Sir Richard Rees, who is the leading English exponent of her work. The core of her philosophical and religious writing indeed the core of all her work is found in her Notebooks. The first batch of these which cover her life in France have been published in English in two volumes under the title Notebooks. Her later notebooks written in the US and England have been published in French under the title La connaissance surnaturelle,25 now translated in English.26 This I think is the most remarkable but the most difficult of all her writings. What are all these notebooks about, taken as a whole? They are a sustained commentary on what she has been thinking, reading and experiencing. She continually returns to such themes as the history of philosophy, the nature of ethics and religion, the Indian sacred writings and Christian scriptures, northern and ancient mythology, French literature, the worship of the future, mathematics, physics, art, war, work, industrialism and sexuality. Perhaps if one were to single out one subject that more than any other binds the whole together one could put it in her own words; ‘I am ceaselessly and increasingly torn both in my intelligence and in the depth of my heart through my inability to conceive simultaneously and in truth, of the affliction of men, the perfection of God and the link between the two.’27 Or, in other of her words: ‘As Plato said, an infinite distance separates the good from necessity ... the essential contradiction in human life is that man, with a straining after the good constituting his very being, is at the same time subject in his entire being, both in mind and in flesh, to a blind force, to a necessity completely indifferent to the good.’28 This contradiction above any other is for her the means by which the mind is led to truth. I quote again: There is a legitimate and an illegitimate use of contradiction. The illegitimate use lies in coupling together incompatible thoughts as if they were

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compatible. The legitimate use lies, first of all, when two incompatible thoughts present themselves to the mind, in exhausting all the powers of the intellect in an attempt to eliminate at least one of them. If this is impossible, if both must be accepted, the contradiction must then be recognized as a fact. It must then be used as a two-limbed tool, like a pair of pincers, so that through it direct contact may be made with the transcendent sphere of truth beyond the range of the human faculties. The contact is direct, though made through an intermediary, in the same way as the sense of touch is directly affected by the uneven surface of a table over which you pass, not your hand, by your pencil. The contact is real, though belonging to the number of things that by nature are impossible, for it is the case of a contact between the mind and that which is not thinkable ... There is an equivalent, an image as it were, very frequent in mathematics, of this legitimate use of contradiction as a means of reaching the transcendent. It plays an essential role in Christian dogma, as one can perceive with reference to the Trinity.29

Her Notebooks are indeed a sustained exercise in this legitimate use of contradiction, that is, in making clear as can be the factual nature of the contradictions that human existence presents, and then in using those contradictions as pincers. One point I must make in passing is about the word I have translated as ‘affliction.’ This word, which is central to her thought, is in the French ‘malheur.’ There is no word in English with the complete connotation of that French word. I use affliction, but if anyone can think of a better word I will be deeply grateful. For any of you who may be interested in the history of philosophy, I single out her continuous commentary on the dialogues of Plato, which runs like a thread throughout all her notebooks. As well as her comments in her notebooks there is a group of essays on the same subject which has been published in English with the inapposite title of ‘Intimations of Christianity.’30 In these essays about Greece she writes not only on Plato, but on the Iliad, the Electra, the Antigone, Pythagoras and Greek mathematics. As I have more right to speak about Plato than the others, I would say that her comments on his writings go to the heart of the matter in a way that much modern scholarship does not. Most modern students of the philosopher start with the presupposition that since they came later than Plato in time they must be able to judge that thinker from a superior height. The result of such a standpoint is that

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instead of seeing what Plato thought, they say that he was really saying what he ought to have said if he was a modern intellectual. It is because the assumptions of modernity had been smashed in Simone Weil that her commentary on Plato is illuminating. (Strauss and her.) I must finally mention three books of hers that do not fit into my division. The first is Sur la science; remember her brother. The second is Lettre à un religieux (Letter to a Priest). This a long letter she wrote to an American Roman Catholic priest, putting down in detail why she did not become a member of the Christian Church. The other volume is a play she worked at for many years but never finished called Venise sauvée.31 Let me now attempt to place Simone Weil within the tradition. In doing so, however, I in no way imply that such historical placing has anything to do with the question of whether what she says is true. I am not an historicist, and do not think that truth of the philosophical or religious order can be reached by historical analysis. To say that Simone Weil belongs to the extreme wing of Greek Christianity is not to imply that this tradition incorporates the truth more fully than Western Christianity. The statement of historical fact simply leads forward to the fuller and more difficult question of truth. This evening my paper has been concerned with a description of the life and writings of a person and I intend to leave aside for this occasion the incomparably more difficult question of the truth of what she says. The inference, however, must be made explicit that since I spend a great part of my life reading and thinking about this woman, it must be that I think I am there drinking a fountain of divine truth. To place Simone Weil squarely within Greek Christianity is, however, to make one fact apparent. What she says will appear extremely alien and unlikely to Western Europeans or to North Americans because this form of Christianity has not played a significant role in our world for many centuries. To be a Western person is to think within Western Christianity – Catholic or Protestant – or within one of Christianity’s secular offshoots – Marxism or Liberalism. Indeed so powerful has been the West that it is possible almost to say that to be a man at all is to think in a Western way. But of course Christianity included in itself things that have been lost in the West. But in saying that Simone Weil belongs to this Greek Christianity, I am not saying that she was near to the institutionalized form, namely the Greek Orthodox Church – because I am taking Greek Christianity to be something much wider than this – I include in

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it much that has disappeared from the world. Its last appearance in the Western world as more than an individual phenomenon was, according to her, in the civilization which was extirpated by the Dominican order and the feudal knights of northern France, in what is known euphemistically as the Albigensian crusade. (History is indeed written by the victorious.) This Greek Christianity is nearest of any of the forms of Eastern[?] religion. While of course to take Hegel’s dictum ‘en pleine conscience de cause’ that progress moves from East to West, North American Christianity is farthest from them. Indeed she saw Europe in its Mediterranean form as a halfway house between America and India. It is not accidental then that Simone Weil should have written of the civilization of Languedoc as the highest that Europe has known; nor is it accidental that she should have learned Sanskrit and considered the Bhagavad Gita as a work of revelation to be accepted at a level of authority only just lower than the Gospel according to St John. Indeed, to state the matter in a trite historical way, Simone Weil’s value as an object of study could be put thus: she was a person who as much as anyone I know experienced the twentieth century – knowing its wars and its intellectual assumptions, its hopes and its factories. In the full sense of the word she was incarnate in the twentieth century – that is, she knew it not only as an observer, but its afflictions became her flesh. It was because all that the twentieth century has been was immediately and mediately known, that she was able to transcend it and rediscover certain treasures which our world had lost for many centuries. Her pierced and piercing apprehension of our immediate world enabled her to overcome that loss in ourselves, so that the ancient religion can appear to us as more than an academic curiosity. I end by singling out two aspects of her doctrine that clearly illustrate what I mean by placing her in the tradition of Greek Christianity. In stating her doctrine, I will compare what she says with the more usual Western view on the same matter. First she stands unequivocally on the side of saying that the affirmation of the being of God is a matter of knowing and not of willing – that is, that belief or unbelief is never a matter of choice or commitment, but of intellect and attention. As the West has been without faith, faith has often been interpreted by men of faith who wished to get on with modernity as if it finally came down to an act of their committal by the will. For instance, my experience of the clergy has often been that when

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one raises difficult intellectual questions, their answer is likely to be ‘Have Faith,’ and when one asks them why one should have faith they are likely to say ‘Commit yourself to it’ as if faith were not a gift but a free act, a Kantian act. More and more, religion is talked about in the West as if it were some kind of choice or opting, despite or even against the evidence. In present-day Christianity, it is now leading to the pitiful grabbing at existentialist philosophy as a buttress to faith – Rahner and Heidegger. For existentialism is after all the dead end of voluntarism in philosophy. Against this praise of commitment, Simone Weil makes clear that the belief cannot ultimately be based on choice. In her own words: The consent of the intellect is never owed to anything whatsoever. For it is never in the slightest degree a question of choice. Only attention is voluntary and thus is the only matter of obligation. If one wishes to provoke in oneself a voluntarily consent of the intellect, what is produced is not consent to truth but auto-suggestion. Nothing more contributes to the degrading and enfeebling of faith and leads to the spread of unbelief than the conception that one ought to believe in anything.32

In other words, one cannot force faith on oneself. The intellect should be entirely free to go where the necessity of the argument leads it. This approach to the divine is of course essentially Greek. Second and more difficult, she rejects the language of personality as individuality as the final truth about human beings. This language is of course basic to the way that Western people talk of the human condition. Today in our present world we see the consequences of such talking in the belief that religion is in essence warmth of feeling to other people. This worship of warmth, coated with the more comfortable parts of the Gospel or Judaism, takes a myriad of forms in the superstructure of talk which justifies our society, but its philosophical and religious basis is in Western philosophy and religion, which asserts that the individual qua individual is an ultimate irreducible in reality. So deep does this go in our culture that thinking outside personality language is very hard for us. Yet this is what we must do if we are to read Simone Weil. The concrete, the personal, the particular has some preliminary meaning in talking about human beings, but it is according to her not ultimate. In as much as we partake in the universal we partake

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in the divine. In this sense Plato is her master and she takes him seriously in a way that nobody can who makes the language of personality final. Let me read you some words of hers which show clearly where the denial of personality language leads – words which could not be written by anyone who saw the Western tradition as sufficient: God created; that is not to say that he produced something external to himself, but that he withdrew, allowing a part of being to be other than God. To this divine renunciation answers the renunciation of the created, namely, obedience. The whole universe is nothing but a compact mass of obedience studded with luminous points. Each of these points is the supernatural part of the soul of a rational creature who loves God and who consents to obey. The rest of the soul is part of the compact mass. The rational creatures who do not love God are only fragments of the compact and dense mass. They are also fully obedient, but only in the manner of a stone which is falling. Their souls are matter, psychic matter, subject to a mechanism as inexorable as gravity. Even their belief in their own free will, the illusions of their pride, their defiances, their rebellions, are, simply, phenomena as strictly determined as the refraction of light. Considered in this way, as inert matter, the worst criminals are part of the order of the world, and for that reason, part of the beauty of the world. Everything obeys God; everything is therefore, perfectly beautiful. This universal love belongs only to the contemplative faculty of the soul. He who truly loves God leaves to each part of his soul its proper function. Below the faculty of supernatural contemplation is found the part of the soul that responds to obligation, and for which the opposition of good and evil must have as much meaning as possible. Below this is the animal part of the soul, which must be carefully instructed by a skillful combination of whip-lashes and lumps of sugar.33

Such a statement helps us to understand why according to her affliction is the lot of all human beings. It always includes in itself physical pain, but is more than this. It is the pounding in upon men that they are really nothing, by the blind force of necessity and of social and personal degradation. The final affliction to which all come is death. The only difference between people is whether they consent or do not consent to necessity. What most supports the possibility of this consent is our

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attention to the beauty of the world. For that beauty is our one image of the divine. And of its very nature it is not known as purposeful, but only lovable, in the sense that a great work of art has no purpose outside its own being. In her language, the beauty of the world is caused by the divine son because it is the mediator between blind obedience and God. In terms of this very difficult language she would see the human condition in the following way: The portion of space around us, limited by the curve of the horizon, and the portion of time between birth and death, in which we live, second after second, and which is the tissue of our life, are together a fragment of that infinite distance crossed by divine love. The being and life of each of us are a small segment of that line whose ends are two Persons but one God; and back and forth on this line moves love who is also the same God. Each of us is but a place through which the divine love of God for himself passes.34

Notes 1 Mathis Neithardt, later called Matthias Grünewald (1475–1528) was a German painter and contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. His greatest work, the Isenheim Altarpiece, originally executed for the hospital chapel of St Anthony’s Monastery at Isenheim in Alsace, is now at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, a nearby town. 2 Émile Chartier, known as Alain (1868–1951), French philosopher, writer, journalist, and professor, was Simone Weil’s most influential teacher at Lycée Henri IV in Paris. 3 Simone Weil, Waiting on God (New York: Harper and Row 1973), 67. 4 Simone Weil, ‘La théorie des sacrements,’ in Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard 1962), 134–47; ‘The Theory of the Sacraments,’ in Gateway to God, ed. David Raper (London: Collins Books 1974), 65–72. 5 Maurice Schumann (1911-98), French politician and hero of the Second World War, served as minister of foreign affairs under Georges Pompidou in the 1960s and 1970s. 6 William Howell Masters (1915–2001), a gynecologist and psychology researcher, and Virginia Eshelman Johnson pioneered research into the

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10 11 12

13

14 15 16 17 18

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nature of human sexual response and the diagnosis and treatment of sexual disorders and dysfunctions from 1957 until the 1990s. David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930), English novelist, was vilified for obscenity after the private publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928, which was banned in the United Kingdom and the United States as pornographic. The ban was overturned in the UK in 1960 and the US in 1959. Weil, Waiting on God, 62. Fr Perrin. Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assisi (The Little Flowers of St Francis of Assisi) is a collection of legends about St Francis. Its origins are obscure; the first existing manuscript dates from 1390. For St Francis, see 685n125. Weil, Waiting on God, 67–9. Ibid., 69. Alain taught his students to write constantly to clarify one’s thoughts for oneself. Simone Weil kept cahiers for this purpose and filled them with her jottings. They were published in English as The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vols. 1 and 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1956) and Simone Weil: First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press 1970). Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher, whose Pensées, published posthumously, remain one of the most influential books in the Christian tradition. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Putnam 1952). See particularly Letter to a Priest (New York: Penguin Books 2003), a translation of Lettre à un réligieux (Paris: Gallimard 1951). Weil, Waiting on God, 77. Ibid., 75. Grant is referring to the Second Vatican Council, the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church, which was called by Pope John XXIII and met in Rome from 1962 to 1965. It issued a number of conciliatory statements regarding the Catholic church’s relationship with other religions and other Christian denominations. Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), which repudiated the teaching that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation,’ was particularly important to Protestants like Grant. Jean Cardinal Daniélou, SJ (1905–74), theologian and historian, was a member of the Académie Française. See his article on Simone Weil in J.M. Perrin, ed., Réponses aux questions de Simone Weil (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne 1964). See Susan Sontag, ‘Simone Weil,’ New York Review of Books 1/1 (1963). We have been unable to find the relevant Berrigan article. See Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, ed. and trans. J.P. Little (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield 2003).

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22 See Simone Weil, ‘The Romanesque Renaissance,’ in Selected Essays, 1934– 1943 (London: Oxford University Press 1962), 44–54 and ‘A Medieval Epic Poem,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943, 35–43. 23 See Simone Weil,‘Reflections on the Origins of Hitlerism,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943, 89–140. 24 See Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943, 9–34. 25 Simone Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard 1950). 26 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press 1970). 27 Simone Weil, Seventy Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965), 128. 28 See Simone Weil, ‘Fragments, London, 1943,’ in Oppression and Liberty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1973), 159. 29 Ibid. 30 Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Ark Paperbacks, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987). 31 Sur la science (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) was a collection of essays on science written between 1930 and 1942. The most important essay for Grant was ‘La Science et Nous,’ translated as ‘Classical Science and After’ in On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, trans. R. Rees (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1968). Letter to a Priest, trans. A. Wills (New York: Putman 1954) was published in French as Lettre à un religieux (Paris: Gallimard 1951). Venise sauvée was the only play by Simone Weil, written and rewritten at different points of an exile that began with the Nazi occupation of Paris, in June 1940, and ended, with the play unfinished, at Weil’s death, in London, in August 1943. 32 Weil, Letter to a Priest, sec. 27, 60. 33 Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, 193–4. 34 Simone Weil, ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, 197.

Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil

The section included here represents George Grant’s final attempt to write a monograph on Simone Weil. The typescript concludes with a series of repetitive sections which have been omitted. The difficulty of the task of introducing Weil became more apparent and the need became less pressing with the publication of Miklos Vetö’s La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil (Paris: Vrin 1971) and Simone Pétrement’s biography of Weil.

Simone Weil was both a saint and a philosopher. These terms are used at this point without definition except to say that they are here used as they have been in the past by Christians who paid attention to the works of the Greek philosophers. She was a saint in the sense that she gave herself away to the divine charity. She was a philosopher in the sense that she wrote carefully and clearly about those matters which in the tradition philosophers have considered the most important. The word ‘potential’ should perhaps be appended to philosopher because she died at the age of thirty four and immersed herself in her particularly violent era (1909–43) so that she had little time for sustained contemplation or writing. The life of the saint is a literary form of which there are few successful examples from any era. The assumptions of our age work particularly against its successful accomplishment. The perfecting of the will is a process which takes place in secret. The incidents of action and passion through which the perfection is accomplished are in some sense public and therefore historical; but the movement of the divine love within them is hidden and eternal. If this were not so, the reading of the gospels would be irresistible. Warriors and founders, statesmen and bureau-

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crats, even artists and scientists accomplish expressible results and their biographies take shape from these. With the greatest artists a surd of mystery remains untouchable because the models which they imitate do not belong to space and time, so that no biography can prepare us for what we will hear when we listen to Mozart’s music. Nevertheless the music is there to be listened to and the biography is of some assistance to that listening. But the saints are those who empty themselves, who give themselves away. Charity may be positive, but it presents itself to the world as the negative of the self-assertion which is the prerequisite of life in space and time. Passion is more difficult to describe than action. At the level of history, the saint gives up his personality to that which is not changed by the incidents of history. In the language of the theologians grace may be everywhere but it is only describable in negative terms. The saint’s life is always therefore the denial of biography. In our present age this difficulty is intensified because the most important public assumptions lead to widespread admiration of the dynamic personality which is the opposite of the saint. The greatest philosopher of our era has written that it is not important to know whether Caesar was chaste or not, it is important to understand his part in the overcoming of the contradictions of the Roman republic. With such assumptions the saint must appear socially unimportant and even morbid, the surrender to the good simply banal and saccharine. It is also true that the lives of the philosophers are not a successful literary form. What is interesting about philosophers is the result of their contemplation, not where and when they contemplated. And even if the book concentrates on the thought of the philosopher, the writer is likely to stand in the way of truth when we try to describe the thoughts of the wisest. Philosophers know better than scholars what they meant to say and why they said it the way they did. Modern academic writing is strewn with impertinent historicist précis written by those who think they can say in different (and sometimes fewer) words what wiser men than they have said differently. ‘The Thought of Plato,’ ‘The Philosophy of Leibniz’ are likely to be what the scholar wished they had said. Why write an introduction to the reading of Simone Weil? Why not content oneself with persuading others to read her by whatever rhetoric and instruments for rhetoric may be at one’s disposal? Many commentaries turn out to be inadequate synopses and are often chiefly

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concerned with what the commentator thinks important rather than with the work of genius. Commentaries from other eras are likely to be more useful because they generally stick more closely to particular texts; while modern commentaries are likely to try and synopsise the whole writings of a genius. It is part of the spirit of the age that such a title as ‘An examination of Plato’s doctrines’ or ‘The philosophy of Leibniz’ should proliferate so that students increasingly find that the works of genius are mediated to them through the prejudices of modern academics.1 God forbid that I should add to such productions or that I should think that I would help in the study of Simone Weil by my synopsis of her work. Despite my desire to avoid this trap, I think that an introduction to the reading of Simone Weil is useful for the following reasons. I. The first reason is purely literary: to make a map of her writing as a whole. There is much that is important to read in the short span of our existence and I would assert that the writings of Simone Weil are included in that list. Nevertheless the circumstances of both her life and writing and of their publication make it difficult for those who wish to read her writings to find their way among the extensive volumes under her name. The difficulty can be put in this form. Here is a writer who although she lived only thirty four years left writings that deal with an immense subject matter. Nearly all the central questions of philosophy, religion and the history of both are commented upon, as well as the most besetting practical problems of the twentieth century. Yet because of the circumstances of her life, her writings on these matters are found in occasional essays, in letters and above all in notebooks which we cannot know if she ever intended to publish. It appears to me indubitable that there emerges from her work an account of what is which is magisterially sustained in its consistency. Yet because of her life and early death, these writings come down to us, almost in the form of extracts, the relation of which to each other may appear disparate. The reader who comes on her writings casually and is held by their genius on particular points may find it difficult to discover how to move towards her meetings [meanings?] as a whole. This difficulty has been made more pressing by the way her works were published. Simone Weil died in London in England in 1943 at the height of a great war. She had left her manuscripts in many places and in different hands. After 1945, with the first publication of any of her writings there was an

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immediate recognition from many quarters that in the light of her obvious genius the rest of her writings should be published. Yet because her manuscripts were dispersed, they were published under various different auspices. One result of this was for example that parts of her approach to one subject were issued by one publisher and one editor, others by another editor and publisher. For example, two volumes of her writings about Greek thought (of which there is no more important subject for the understanding of her thought) were issued separately under two titles: Intuitions pré-chrétiennes2 and La source grècque.3 The very titles chosen by the respective editors show the difference of approach to what was written. Or to take a more extreme example. In 1948 La pesanteur et la grâce4 was published: a series of extracts made by M Gustave Thibon from those of her notebooks which Simone Weil had left with M Thibon. It was to a great extent through this work that her thought became known to a wide public in the French and Englishspeaking worlds. Yet the choice of extracts made in this work puts her thought in a context which is hard to reconcile with the body of her notebooks as a whole. Indeed when a writer of genius appears men often desire to use that writer for their own ecclesiastical, political and even ideological purposes. The result has been that Simone Weil has been characterized in some short and easy phrase such as ‘a revolutionary who was converted to Christianity’ or as ‘a Jew who became a Catholic – but not quite’ etc. etc. Such simplified characterizations (so popular in an age in which the literati want to appear knowledgeable without study) distort the truth of what the writer said and the human being did. This distortion is more difficult to overcome if one has no clear picture of what the body of her writings in fact were. For this reason it is useful to make a map of her writings so that there is clarity as to when and where each of her writings were composed and as to when and where each of her writings were published. The reason why I study the writings of Simone Weil is that I learn from them. Of all the twentieth century writers, she has been incomparably my greatest teacher. But such a statement does not justify the writing of a book. Most philosophers have learnt from studying the writings of Plato, but God forbid that all those who have so learnt should write for publication a synopsis of what they have learnt therein. All such synopses are only partial gleanings from the philosopher and are often more

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concerned with the beliefs of the commentator than the thoughts of the philosopher. A comparable result is inevitable in this account of the thought of Simone Weil. ... [What has been given to the] public is a book of extracts taken unofficially from the fuller context of her notebooks in a way difficult to reconcile with the body of her work as a whole.5 The combined result of these facts is that it is a difficult for the reader to find his way to a systematic reading of her works. (This difficulty is increased for those who choose to read her in English by the fact that only some of her writings have as yet been translated into our language.) There is a need therefore to make a map of her writings as a whole; to state what has been published and what is yet to be published; to state where and when each of these writings were composed and to try and fit them into the body of her life and writings as a whole. There is much that it is important for a person to read in the short span of existence and among what is of the highest importance I would assert that the writings of Simone Weil are included. Therefore those who are embarking on the study of her thought in a more than desultory way may be aided by such a map. This sheerly literary task is the first purpose of this book. Beyond this technical task, however, there is a greater and more difficult one. From the body of her work there emerges an account of reality which is massively sustained in its consistency. That is to say, writing on a vast range of subjects, she enunciates an account of the whole and the parts that does not seem to me to have internal contradictions. Yet this massive consistency does not immediately emerge because of the form of her writings. Her early death, her immersion in the practical life, her desire to write on subjects of immediate importance, did not leave her time always to unite explicitly what she said on one subject with what she said on another. Her fate as a person did not include the writing of books of the type of Spinoza’s Ethics. Even her many notebooks – every page of which includes writings of the highest authority – are written as entries on particular subjects which occupy her mind at a particular time and so mark the movement of her mind from subject to subject. Indeed the notebooks are given a unity from the fact that at least one reason for her writing them was that she looked forward [to] a work on the religious genius of all the peoples of the world and the entries were in part a preparations for such work. (Note:

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Simone Pétrement6 of the Bibliothèque Nationale and an intimate friend of Simone Weil is the source of this statement.) To say the least, the notebooks do not give the impression of a casual diary of disconnected thoughts and impressions, but of a magisterial mind pondering all facets of the truth. Nevertheless this does not mean that this central source of her thought is in systematic form. The remarkable consistency of her thought has to be drawn from works that were not necessarily intended for public consumption and which were published posthumously. For example, Simone Weil carried on in her writings a sustained commentary on the works of Plato which returns again and again to nearly all the Platonic writings. This commentary is found in certain short essays, in casual fragments and in recurring entries in her notebooks. My second task is illustrated in saying that I would like to bring all these statements together and attempt to state what she is saying about Plato as a whole. Indeed to generalize the example, I would like to bring together her writings on certain specific themes which recur throughout all her writings and try to state what she is saying about these matters and then to relate the interdependence of these themes. To repeat, this is necessarily a task which must be undertaken with a prior knowledge of an unsatisfactory result. The synthesizing of works of genius by somebody of lesser capacity can hardly be adequate. What must be avoided at all costs is any hint that by such synthesis anything has been added to the works of genius. Yet it is perhaps worth doing because of the fact that somebody who has had the time and opportunity to spend many hours studying these writings may be able to help others who are starting that study. But above all it must be insisted that the purpose of a commentary does not lie in itself, but in aiding the fuller reading of that which is commented upon. The command given to St Augustine was to take and read. It does not seem to me blasphemous to say that my central intention in this book could expressed in the same words. The ultimate question must be of course why I consider it of such great importance that people should read Simone Weil carefully. My answer to that can only be that Simone Weil is a teacher of the truth and that [it] is the truth which makes men free. To state this however is not argument but simply an assertion of opinion. I would therefore put my answer less directly in the form of two ...

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Most contemporary accounts of the moral judgment centre around the concepts ‘freedom’ and ‘value’; SW’s account centres around the concepts ‘desire’ and ‘obedience.’ To place many varying and subtle ethical theories together as ‘most contemporary accounts of the moral judgment’ is of course to concentrate on their sameness and to forget their differences. What is the same about such differing traditions as existentialism, empiricism and the general tradition of liberalism is surely the idea that the wills of persons are the inevitable sources of moral value and that therefore we must in some sense talk of persons as free. The argument of Kant that only those actions that proceed from the choice of an agent can be designated ‘morally’ gives human action a creativity in the realization of value and places freedom at the heart of any moral system. Unless human beings can choose, there is no such thing as morality and therefore any moral system which does not proceed from freedom is not dealing with morality. Ethical systems which describe men as heteronomous are just not ethical systems at all. It is not necessary to trace the sources of tradition whereby men have come to believe that morality has to do with freely choosing agents who through their wills bring value into the world. It is not necessary to describe the history whereby Western ethics has substituted freedom for virtue as its central concept. To say the very least, such a history would be in large measure what makes modern civilization what it is. For those of us in North America it draws on the most powerful and persuasive elements of our tradition. Protestantism, worldly liberalism and our understanding of the modern scientific achievement. And even behind these immediate traditions, it draws sustenance from the very origins of a Western theology which came to be as it used such words as ‘person’ ‘will’ and ‘power’ about Deity Itself. So powerful is the vision of men as the creators of value in their freedom that it is difficult for philosophers and for non-philosophers to think of themselves or society outside it. To enter into the thought of SW – that is to even consider it as possibly true – it is necessary to recognize that her account of morality and indeed of the human condition in general consciously and explicitly is outside this vision. ‘I am ceaselessly and increasingly torn both in my intelligence and in the depth of my heart through my inability to conceive simultaneously and in truth of the affliction of men, the perfection of God and the link between the two.’7 (include date and occasion of quotation) This sen-

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tence serves as a starting point for the exposition of the thought of Simone Weil because it includes certain of the central themes of her writing. (a) the perfection of God, (b) the affliction of men, (c) contradiction and (d) love. Many contemporary persons are ceaselessly and increasingly torn both in their intelligence and in the depth of their hearts by the affliction of men, but do not understand what it would be to be torn by the inability to conceive the relation of that affliction to the perfection of God. The latter phrase has little if any meaning for them. It therefore seems best to begin an account of the thought of Simone Weil by some attempt to state what she means by the perfection of God. The argument for divine perfection is an argument from the character of human life. Human life is in essence the moral life. Human beings are such that they are good and bad, can become better or worse. But it is a fact that they cannot become better by trying to be less imperfect. They can only become better by paying attention to and desiring perfection. (Note: find the particular passage where this is worked out most completely. Also perhaps quote PsO8 136 ‘Only desire directed directly towards the pure good, perfect, total, absolute can place in the soul a little mere good than was there before.’ That is, the moral life is unthinkable without the desire for perfection. But only desires for what is real can be effective in making us better. Therefore perfection is real. In other words, ‘the essential knowledge about God is the good. All the rest is secondary.’ (PsO, p. 47) This proof of the divine perfection is what has been improperly called in the tradition the ontological proof. It is not only valid, but the only valid proof of God’s reality. (PsO, p. 136) To make an obvious point she has placed herself in the Platonic tradition and has excluded those arguments for God’s reality which proceed from Aristotle’s writing and which are made explicit in their Christian form in Aquinas. SW recognizes that this argument appeals to the nature of desiring and as this is something which men do differently and interpret differently, this argument which has been in the tradition since the Republic (give reference) has not convinced all these who have been able to understand the form of philosophical argument. Surely this is a particular difficulty in an era in which the moral life is sometimes said not to be and more often is described as something quite different from what she describes it. If, therefore, the force of her argument is in any sense to

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be seen, it must proceed from an account of what she conceives the moral life to be. To such a description I will now proceed. In doing so, the argument is thrown back from divine perfection to man, but only as a means to better understand the former.

Notes 1 Grant is here alluding to the writings of Ian M. Crombie and Bertrand Russell. Ian M. Crombie (1917– ) was a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford (1947–83). See Grant’s unpublished review of his book Plato on Man and Society, in Collected Works, Vol. 3, 15–20. For Russell, see 261n16. 2 Simone Weil, Intuitions préchrétiennes (Paris: La Colombe 1951). 3 Simone Weil, La source grècque (Paris: Gallimard 1953). 4 Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Paris: Plon 1957). 5 Grant is referring to Gravity and Grace, a posthumous collection assembled from the unpublished notebooks by Gustav Thibon, a friend on whose farm at St Marcel d’Ardeche Weil had worked in 1941. It was the first book translated into English and shaped – some would say distorted – English readers’ impressions of Simone Weil. 6 The author of Simone Weil’s biography, whom Grant met when he began his research in Paris in 1963. 7 Letter to Maurice Schumann in Simone Weil, Seventy Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1965), 128. 8 Simone Weil, Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard 1962), 136.

Excerpts from Graduate Seminar Lectures on Simone Weil, 1975–6

In 1975–6, Grant’s graduate seminar in the Religion Department at McMaster University focused on the writings of Simone Weil. Grant’s notebook for this course ran to 140 pages. It contained the notes which he used to help him direct the class discussions. These notes are at times fragmentary, elliptical and unintelligible but the excerpts presented here provide a sense of his teaching style and his immense appreciation of the Christian philosopher who in Grant’s view was also a saint.

Read Crashaw.1 ... Let us go back, which is always good, to a central question: What are we doing sitting here studying her? This would be the question at its most elemental – why in this world study philosophy or theology? That is, [why] attempt to think about the whole, when that activity is much scorned in the modern world and in the modern university, i.e., institutions, more and more technological, medical schools, etc.? It won’t help you much in earning a living. By irony, and writing about other subjects I have been able to get the right to be paid, but not much place. Even this department of religion becomes more and more a place in which philosophy and theology will be excluded and replaced by the techné of scholarship etc. But this is a general question which might be applied equally to Kant, e.g. Therefore let me put the question about SW by comparing it with the study of Kant ... And this takes us to the how question. The very great difficulty of studying a great thinker like Kant is this: E.g., Kant and time: Time [is] the form of our intuition. How do we know? How do we know this is true? (a) Follow it as it is worked out through the immensity of the critical system. (b) Compare with Heisenberg’s doctrine and Newton’s, Plato’s and Hegel’s and Einstein’s but still left

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[is the question] if it is true. Enormously difficult. And the difficulty is compounded by the fact that her writings are not in the form of systematic treatises. But there is an added difficulty much greater than this in studying SW. Let me say that it is not the question of Athens and Jerusalem, or as Christians would put it, Socrates and Christ ... It is not the question one finds in reading Aquinas or Maimonides, the question of how to put together revelation and philosophy, for that is in all Western thinkers since the beginning of our own. Indeed one unequivocal thing we find in SW is an attempt to state the truth which quite overcomes Tertullian’s question: Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?2 No, the difficulty is something else. It is the question of sanctity and philosophy. (Now in parenthesis, to explain, let me say something quite unequivocal. It would be foolish for me to deny that no other thinker is so influential to me and it is her life and thought together. But none of you have to accept this. This is a secular department of religion. You need not take this course, and if you do you do not have to agree with me. Yet in speaking of her it would be absurd of me to deny that for me in her presence I am not only in the presence of a great thinker but also of sanctity. Now that being assumed, what is the question it raises of difficulty in studying her? At the simplest level it is the distance set between herself and myself as commentator who does not live such a life, who has not been called to that terrible destiny, sanctity. Let me compare [Weil] with Kant. I am aware of the great distance between his consummate thought and my ability to think. But as human beings [we are] not very different ... It isn’t very important to know his life, or indeed for that matter Nietzsche’s. But the distance between SW and oneself is quite different. If one wants to put it simply, it is the distance between what she loves and what the commentator loves. Or, put better in her language, because she says it is a great decadence when we turn from discussing God’s love for us to our love of God. That is, the distance between what love has possessed her and my own life. (The impersonal word raises a central issue about personal-impersonal language about deity which one of you might take as your topic). ‘It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of God.’3 Yet as soon as one speaks of distance – it cannot be a distance because one remembers: ‘Prennez votre croix et suivez moi,’4 or 13th Corinthians. It is that distance and not-distance which makes the attempt to study her writings so extremely difficult. Any questions about that? Now we must take from her ‘Letter to a Priest’ [that] her negations

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must lead us to her affirmations. All negations stand in affirmations. That is the central great Platonic teaching although Plato is the father in the West of negative theology, as Aristotle has been taken as the father of positive theology. Nevertheless that distinction must be overcome finally because all the via negativa rests finally on positive affirmations, and that Plato understands with the doctrine of the good. It is clear I think that any of the great universal religions have had many varying and different manifestations in the world. It also seems clear to me that in Western history the most important manifestation of the most important Western religion, Christianity, has been Roman Catholicism. Now, of course within Roman Catholicism there have been many varying manifestations but the most influential manifestation has been that which centres around the name of St Thomas Aquinas and his marvellous elucidation of Catholicism in his writings. It is also obvious that SW was not a Roman Catholic. Her writings make that clear but she was somebody who deeply admired Roman Catholicism particularly when she compared it with the lesser Western traditions which were hostile to Roman Catholicism. Now our chief purpose here is to see what SW is saying ... Now in thinking about a great thinker, we all have different ways of approaching it, because of our differences in tradition and education. But clearly one of the best ways is by seeing the differences between him or her and another great but different way of looking at the same questions. e.g. Kant or Aristotle. For some of you a useful way of beginning to understand SW would be to face the criticisms of her thought implicit in Thomistic teaching. The book where this can best be found in my opinion is Réponses.5 A subsidiary question ... the use of Plato and of Aristotle in Western Christianity. Now as in SW and with myself you will hear words in praise of Plato – but let me recommend a good book saying why Thomas so used Aristotle: Father Regis’ Epistemology6 – first section, ‘The Epistemological Public.’ The Need for Roots.7 She is appealing across left and right in de Gaulle’s group to patriotism of both left and right, and that was what de Gaulle attempted. One gets the sense how tragic this is in the sense that what she wanted in France has utterly failed (the same failure in Canada) ... Just before her death she writes a letter (find in Pétrement, 505–9) where she resigns from France Combattante and speaks very despairingly of politics and its possibility. Nevertheless, this is a political book written for a purpose. Two parts: The Needs of the Soul [Body.]

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What is good at any time and place politically. Uprootedness which describes the particular evils of modern industrial society. She starts from rights and the fact that thought which proceeds from rights is always inadequate. The Needs of the Soul: (a) necessary and unnecessary – discuss in Plato based on teleology – [and] (b) the soul – modern word would be ‘persons’ or ‘self’; see the ‘Person and the Sacred’8 essay. Questions? Today we proceed with L’Enracinement.9 (a) Let us abstract in our discussion [from] the part of the book which deals with the question of France after the defeat of the Germans. We do not read SW to learn about her advice to General de Gaulle. Nor do we read her to learn about her interpretation of the history of France except [as] subsidiary. We also remember that one essential mark of a technological society is destruction of political memory. What happened ten years ago is ancient history. We do not need to discuss why that is so, or its results on the political good. What we have still to discuss are the questions such as what are roots etc. etc. But beyond that in the third section of the book we are again in the central questions – very great affirmations; all science is science of the good; her doctrine of truth, etc. Now we cannot much longer keep from looking at these affirmations. Therefore my suggestion is that two weeks today we start looking at the central question of her thought, what she means by good. And I suggest that we start that by looking at Plato who is her philosophic master. What we are concerned with is what Plato means by the word ‘Good.’ Therefore you must read Republic 502D–509D inclusive; that will be the central text. But of course how to understand what is being said there, this is surely the most important writing in Western philosophy. Therefore its shortness or even seeming simplicity must not delude you. How to study it so that one knows what one knows about it and what one does not know, what one understands and does not understand. Remember most modern commentators look at it through modern eyes. The great era of Platonic scholarship, the 19th century, saw it through Kantian eyes, or even worse Hegelian. So watch when you read commentators. I will make only two points: (a) the greatest commentary on this passage is I believe a later writing of Plato – Philebus. But it is itself a greatly difficult dialogue [and] (b) The most remarkable and sustained attack on what is said therein is Heidegger’s writing, ‘Plato’s Teaching Concerning Truth.’10 Also see Aristotle’s Ethics, Bk. 1 chapter VI. In

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reading this put before yourself everything in modern science, mathematics, art, politics, morality etc which stands against this. So be aware how difficult it is for any modern person to think what is being thought there. Now let me say one other thing before we proceed to the easier questions of the 2nd and 3rd sections of L’Enracinement. And the question I ask is why does one ‘turn away’ from these fundamental questions in SW. I have spoken of this before but want to say more. (1) It is a turn from modernity, from all that we live with. This university and all the science is a science of the good, what I live with. (2) It is so difficult what she says, and I am afraid of my ignorance being exposed. (3) It exposes one as so inadequate. ‘I come not with peace, but with a sword.’11 All the pleasant sides, aren’t we nice being scholars etc. But we will have to today leave the questions about good and science at the end of L’Enracinement, and turn to the more immediate questions there. The good in Plato: We are going to discuss the good in Plato’s Republic today ... (1) a simple linguistic comment – The Greek adjective agathos which we translate ‘good,’ now the relation of agathos to the Teutonic forms gott, gut, good etc cannot be noticed – for Greek g would be represented by Teutonic k. Therefore ‘good’ has been for us protected by what the Greeks meant by ‘agathos.’ It is the latter question which concerns us here, not the purely etymological question. (2) I repeat we are in the central question of all Western philosophy: how we interpret P1ato. There are many ways of this: Strauss, The City and Man.12 (Gadamer13 teaches here we are so lucky.) The closeness of Aristotle and Plato. You have to decide about these if you are interested for yourselves. I am clearly on the side that makes the strong distinction. Erich Frank (American Journal of Philosophy in 1940-1941) puts my position.14 I just say this about the difference to illustrate (a) what a fundamental question is, and (b) you must come to terms with this. It might have been wise if I had asked you to read earlier: Glaucon and Adeimantus, brothers of Plato (360 Republic and following, read what they ask.) Justice freed from all prestige. Is justice good when freed from all prestige? Christians have always taken the impaled man as an intimation (intuition) of Christ, and SW does. Aristotle’s words about method: (a) knowledge, (b) practically living together justly. Knowledge and justice are natural. (Let me say in paren-

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thesis why this has broken down in the modern world. (a) Darwinism: species are not eternal but historical, (b) We can choose what we aspire to, therefore freedom not central. Therefore the idea that good is what we aspire to does not give any content – mightn’t modern world say good is what we aspire to, but then it is just a tautology – good is what we aspire to, we aspire to good – just mean the same thing.) Now let us turn from that modern criticism of Aristotle and see further. We start with the definition of good as ‘good is what we are fitted for.’ But then we find in the passage we are discussing that Plato passes quite beyond the definition of good as that which we aspire to, that which we are fitted for. He starts to talk about the Idea of the Good, the Good itself. Aristotle says this is a false transcendentalizing of good – a substantializing of it, a hypostasizing of it, in transcendence – a phony transcendence. In this passage the good is beyond being – hyper ousia – beyond knowledge. This is the attack, and from that attack we can begin to see, it seems to me, what Plato is saying. Therefore we are right in the issue of transcendence – not finite transcendence, but an infinite transcendence. Now I think we can get into this issue by looking at this: What does the question ‘is justice good?’ mean? And why does this lead him to posit the Good Itself, or the Idea of the Good? And I think we can reach this by starting from the fact that Socrates turns away from the direct discourse – expressing his inability – and uses a comparison with the Sun. Therefore what I would say is in the comparison of Goodness Itself with the Sun, what is the faculty of the soul which is compared with sight by Plato? And this seems to me the great dividing line in the interpretation of Plato. For some people have made, it seems to me, the great error of saying that Plato is talking of intelligence as sight – I am sure following SW, he means love. Let us discuss that, because this seems to me the key of the interpretation. Then go on to happiness etc, knowledge – their relation etc. 1st principle: What we love determines what we think. Necessity: Teaching is a strange occupation for one who had a not very good North American and modern education. At best, one’s teaching is largely one’s instruction of oneself – while for the fine young people it appears that at best it is a minor irritant which one hopes drives them to instruct themselves for with very few exceptions they will get little instruction in our modern universities. I say this because on the weekend I have

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been thinking out such things as the harmonic mean – geometric mean – things I should have had at my finger-tips. I speak of my own selfinstruction because this is the most difficult course I have ever given. For example, how many of you have read ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine’?15 Also the complexity of SW’s thought leads me to say that I am not going to speak to the two central questions of last day. Our purpose here is to understand SW’s doctrine – not my opinions – and we have not yet got far enough with that doctrine. Therefore let me proceed directly to what she means by necessity. As her teaching stems here above all from Greek thought I asked you to read ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine.’ Let us start from the Greek word ananke. Now when I look at the big Greek dictionary I find the strange combination in its use up to and including Plato – force in practical life, and unavoidability in intellectual life. Necessity in the practical sense – it is necessary that we are going to be destroyed because our enemies have the greater force – the Melian dialogue; and necessity in the mathematical sense of A = B, B = C therefore A = C. We see this in our popular usage. We often say this colloquially when we say your argument has force. We all know necessity in art. The greatest art always has that note it could not have been otherwise. Lear’s ‘Come, let’s away to prison.’ J. S. Bach in the St Matthew Passion, Mozart’s 488 slow movement. We do not expect it, and yet we know it could not have been otherwise in detail. Now let us turn to what SW says and go slowly, because remember what she says here is very foreign to us. I have taught in the past often Leo Strauss’ refutation of modern political philosophy, and found that students did not get exactly what he was saying because they were held by their early education not to be able to conceive that he was thinking what he was thinking. Well it is much more intense here. What she is saying is fundamentally different from what we have been taught in our education: (1) It is clear that SW always thought, at all stages in her thought, that everything was completely determined by necessity, and this applies to human beings who in their bodies and mental faculties are perfectly submitted to the domination of necessity. Now that proposition is very foreign to us because we struggle to believe really that there is the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. (2) It is also clear that that necessity appears to her above all as mathematical. That is, as a network of

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immaterial relations, without force and yet, to quote The Need for Roots, harder than any diamond. Those abstract and pure relations are the essence of everything that is. Read ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine’ in English, p. 192. (3) It is also clear that viewed from this perspective, as she says in ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ necessity to the eye of the contemplative or to the intelligence of the mathematician is a sublime spectacle of intelligibility in which intelligibility and reality can finally be known to coincide. At the same time if the acceptance of destiny as necessity can be achieved by the contemplative – to the ordinary person this majestic impersonal destiny must appear as completely arbitrary and as cruel, as it is completely indifferent. Moreover these two stances towards necessity present themselves to the same human beings. The greatest mathematicians or thinkers are subject to torture, enslavement, death, afflictions (malheur) of all kinds. Therefore being, as necessity, comes to us both as a source of the beautiful intelligibility and as terrible affliction. Here below we have reasonable creatures whose lives are submitted to the mastery of necessity which is not only a principle of order but which distributes the afflictions to which we seems to be blindly abandoned. Now I can only begin to discuss what SW thinks of this in terms of the question: Is necessity to be charged to God? ‘Charged’ is a difficult word in this connection because there is no charge against God in necessity appearing to us as pure intelligibility – yet there is for all of us a charge against God when it appears to us as affliction, particularly the affliction of the innocent – remember Dostoevsky’s ‘Pro and Contra.’16 I use the word ‘charged’ – her French word is ‘importable.’ As she says, we have to think how necessity is ‘importable à Dieu’? Charged to God – but ‘importable’ also means to be divided from God. I think in discussing this we can see more what she means by necessity, and the relations between what she takes from Plato about the absolute distance which separates the order of necessity from the order of good. And let me start by citing two phrases which she takes from Christianity and seem to me to lead us to what she means. She continually refers to the Book of Revelation, 13, 8. ‘The lamb that was slain from the beginning of the world.’ You will find this in the Last Notebooks – the lamb of God central to the Christian liturgy. (Quote also Mozart’s remark about this – saying the Protestants have never understood the

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Agnus Dei.) The other remark from the earlier Notebooks (vol III in French) is – ‘La crucifixion de Dieu est une chose éternelle.’ – translate ‘chose’ as matter or affair. This goes even further. Just hold these remarks in your head as texts. Now let me say the most difficult thing I have said this year. The question of how necessity is to be related to God is for SW the following: ‘Before’ (in quotation marks) creation, God was all in all. Now there is something other than God. How is it possible to think that with the ideas of divine perfection? ‘Before’ in quotation marks because for us human beings ‘time’ is not a temporal act, because the very act of creating is the creation of time. Therefore ‘before’ in quotation marks. ‘Before creation’ the Eternal was its own perfection; ‘now’ (in quotation marks) it is related to something other which we call the universe. SW’s answer is clear: creation was not expansion, but a renunciation, a retreat of God.17 The creation as renunciation is an act of love as we see it in the Passion, not a means of expansion, but rather the form in which love clothes itself as renunciation. In some Christian theological speculation the Creation and the Passion are opposed to each other, but to SW they are finally one. Now clearly this fundamental humility is a radical contrast with the image of God we have as power: Rex tremendae majestatis (Dies irae).18 How do we put together this humility of God with His power? His abdication with His power? Does not power conflict with love? According to SW the true sense of the metaphor of power is that when we understand it, we know that power as necessity. Thus in her writing the two different faces which God presents to us are presented as two different causalities, the necessary and the good. This is what she takes Plato to be saying in Timaeus when he talks of the necessary cause and the good cause. In her writings the necessary cause of the Timaeus, which is the cause of the blind and dark events of our lives, that is in Kantian language of the world as phenomena, is integrated with the marvelous mathematical clarity which our intelligences find in the structure of phenomena. Let me put this great thought in a simpler way: SW continually returns to her attack on the concept of miracle.19 Why? Because it signifies a direct intervention of the first cause on the functioning of the secondary causes. Why does she dislike that? If God intervenes at some points, why not at others, in the name of love? At this moment people are being tortured unjustly all over the world. Why does God not inter-

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vene? That argument against the conception of miracle is so clear that nothing else needs to be said. But at the same time on the other side, what is the relation of the perfection of God to the fact that there is something which is not perfection? Trying to think there of two arguments together which at first seem to point in opposite directions leads one to think what she is thinking when she speaks of the order of necessity. Now that is the first thing I want to say, and to think what she is thinking there is a key to understanding her. Second, I want to turn to another way of approaching this question which is more directly related to the ‘Pythagorean Doctrine,’ and which may seem at first easier, but leads to questions of the nature of science and of mathematics which are the most difficult of all modern intellectual questions. What is the relation of our intelligences to necessity? Let me put the question this way in a very simple form. In knowing necessity as necessity does not our intelligence transcend necessity? This is close to the old argument against the skeptics. To say we know nothing is self-refuting in the sense that we say it is the truth that there is no truth, and that is self-refuting. Now in a profounder form this kind of argument seems to arise against SW in her clear affirmation in ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine’ that the principal representative in the order of necessity, as far as human beings are concerned, is intelligence. I therefore want to state what her teaching is here. In intelligence, which is the supreme form of necessity in this world, necessity seems to climax or terminate upon itself. Let me try to put this more clearly. It becomes its own mirror when it explicates itself in all its own clarity. All the terror of existence, of necessity as we encounter it in the world, is taken into the light of its mathematical nakedness. In this moment intelligence contemplates necessity peacefully, in a way that a reader submits himself to the text of what he is reading, gives attention only to the text, not himself. Remember what she said about attention in the ‘School Studies’ article.20 Intelligence is like a mirror the virtue of which is to be nothing but the image it reflects. A perfect mirror has nothing of its own that it reflects. It is a bad mirror if it has darkness of its own. Where SW writes of this most wonderfully is in ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine’ where she talks about the cube21 – and we see the cube under perspective – never as a cube; and what we have to do in mathematics is to dissolve our perspective – that is, dissolve ourselves as persons. Her writing about

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perspective here is almost the central writing of what she means by attention. ... I want to make some comments about our discussion last day concerning justice and God. When one is paying attention to a thinker of great complexity, it is always wise to hold on to certain fixed points in one’s own thought (by that I mean certain truths which are elemental for one) and when the thinker in question clearly asserts something contradictory, not to go any further in that thinker than that contradiction, and battle it out with oneself – either giving up the element in one’s own thought or finally saying there is something wrong about the thought of the thinker. Two examples from my own thought: (1) Hegel and means and ends. (2) Plato and choice (existential choice). Now I think we came upon a simple elemental of that kind last day. Namely that SW asserts over and over again it is not possible to think the idea of justice without thinking the idea of God. I use ‘idea’ here because I want this relation to be as general as possible. I mean justice in general (not specified) and so also God in general (not specified, that is, for example not necessarily a creator God in the Western sense of creation). Now many students asserted that this is not an elemental from which they can start. Clearly in thinking about SW, those who disagree with her about that elemental must concentrate their minds on that and decide whether what she is saying is true or false. This is what philosophic education is. By concentrating on what a great thinker asserts elementally one clears one’s own mind, e.g., Hegel. Hegel is obviously a great thinker. In struggling with him over means and ends, and in the very rejection of Hegelian teaching I have clarified my mind about politics. In Gorgias, Socrates asserts that it is better to suffer any injustice than to commit injustice – and as you will know, that is a startling proposition to the other members of the dialogue. What can ‘better’ mean? It certainly does not mean in terms of worldly success. Now from that statement we reach the very simple formula – V = H. Justice is one of the virtues. In the practice of the virtues we find happiness – happiness being that state for which we all strive, which comes from doing what we are fitted for. Now Aristotle’s commentary on that it seems to me can be expressed

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by adding one term to that equation.22 V + e = H; by e I mean equipment. He discusses Priam, as against the absolutely just man in the Republic. (How right SW is to take the Iliad seriously.)23 Priam is taken as the virtuous king, yet at the end he was not happy according to Aristotle – because he did not have the equipment. Therefore V + e = H. Now let us move to the modern era. One of the brilliant remarks, which is one of three remarks which stand at the beginning of a whole era, is Locke’s remark that classical virtue fails because it is an ‘unadmired virtue’ – a remark that one must contemplate.24 What Locke means is that classical virtue – that is, including the classical account of justice – cannot tell one why it is in one’s self-interest to be just – while the modern account of justice can. Socrates cannot say why it is better to suffer injustice than to practise it.25 The modern can; the modern says that justice is a convenience which we accept contractually so that we can have the benefits of society. Our chief self-interest is to avoid violent death, we need society for that purpose, society needs justice, therefore in entering society we contract to be just. That is, justice is tied to our chief self-interest which is the avoidance of violent death. By tying justice to self-interest we make it an admired virtue; we can see why it is good to practise it – in a way that this was not clear in the classical account of justice. Now the great protest against this was made by Rousseau and even more by Kant (and let me say in parenthesis that there are two philosophers who most deeply form SW’s mind: Kant and Plato). Kant just divides virtue/happiness as you will remember. Now perhaps as one thinks about what can be meant by happiness and what can be meant by virtue, one can move towards thinking what we were thinking about last day. And do remember that obviously I imply in that thinking that the question will arise whether in our era both the concepts virtue and happiness cannot be thought. (Oscar Wilde: ‘pleasure always, happiness never’). Be that as it may, find the points where you disagree with a great thinker and that is how one can become educated, and perhaps even begin to think the thought of that thinker. Now the central question is as I have said the relation between our human loves and supernatural love. Now within the tradition there have been two poles, what have been called positive and negative theologies. Positive theology has always emphasized that all loves are one. And all loves are good. At its extreme it would say that it is better to be

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sexually attracted to alligators than have no love at all. Hell is to be one’s own. At its height this positive theology is found in Dante where Beatrice is identified with Christ26 and where the girl who makes possible the vision of Beatrice is identified with John the Baptist. Negative theology has always the need to break down human loves in the name of divine love. Remember Christ’s remark about giving up your father and mother. Now clearly these poles are only poles and the emphasis in each is always limited in response to the claim of the other. Now, let me say a word about Plato’s doctrine: in Plato negative and positive theology are wonderfully combined about love. In the account of the soul’s progress to supernatural love in Symposium, it starts from human love. It starts when one is young, when one falls in love with another person, that consuming flash first wakens us to supernatural love. Now what is clear about that flash is being in love with somebody of the same sex, that is homosexual love; and it is made perfectly clear that the realization of that love in orgasmic intercourse is forbidden. Indeed in the recognition of that forbiddenness the soul takes its next step, and in that sense we can say that Plato is a negative theologian. But it starts not from the forbiddenness which is second, but from the goodness of that falling in love which is first. In Plato you have the combination of positive and negative theology. On the one hand, the Phaedrus, the mouth of the black horse is torn and bleeding and this is not only sexual love – but ambition, prestige etc. The Republic, for example, I would take as above all teaching of Glaucon that he must negate ambition. But on the other hand the Cave in the Republic is not nothing; the shadows and the objects of the cave are something. Let me say finally ... how does one make the distinction between different human loves so that we can act towards them, if they all must be negated? Is love for husbands, wives, friends, children, on the same level as the tyrant’s love of prestige, or the miser’s love of possessions? Now indeed as I know only too well love of children can be corrupted into love of possessions or prestige, but does that mean that such human loves must be so corrupted and have no continuity with supernatural love? I want to say some simple things about what SW means by attention for the following reasons. It has to do both with the paper last week, because it is clear that what she means by attention is certainly the means whereby human beings move to participate in supernatural love; it also has to do with the question concerning sight in the meta-

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phor of the Sun, and the question of whether sight is to be taken as love or intelligence. Obviously the question turns around what she means by attention. She is always turning away from the account of reason that has been dominant in the Western world for several centuries. Therefore it is very hard for us to understand because we look at it through the eyes of that modern account of reason and therefore find it difficult to see what she is saying. One of the causes of my fear of being a professor (particularly to teach SW) is that in the modern world the people who get on in the university are those who just accept the modern world assumptions, and proceed to produce in terms of them. Therefore my study of SW inhibits me because if one takes it seriously, one spends one’s time pondering modern assumptions, and that is not the way to success in the modern university. Also I am hesitant to speak of this because I do not know how clear I am myself. In fact I know how unclear I am. Before facing the question directly let me say two things: (1) I think those who are intimate with the Sanscrit tradition will have a great advantage here over Westerners. Let me put it directly: when I was in Paris looking at SW’s manuscripts and books, her copy of the Bhagavad Gita was shown to me, and in the margin she had transcribed in French certain lines one of which was: ‘He who can see inaction in action and action in inaction, such a being is wise, etc. She took this as a text of authority, writing of what she called in French ‘l‘action non-aggressante,’27 the non-acting acting; and it seems to me this phrase takes one to the heart of what she means by attention. As you will know, those who have read her writings, the Bhagavad Gita becomes in her last writings in the New York and London Notebooks a text of comparable authority with the gospels. She returns again and again to the meeting of Arjuna and Krishna and she took Krishna to be the incarnate God. Now clearly I have no right to speak of such matters in the way that I can speak of Plato or the gospels. But nevertheless I must point out this fact. (2) Within the general philosophic tradition the place where I find writings very close to what she means by attention is in the late writings of Heidegger. Now there are clearly very great differences between Simone Weil and Heidegger (which I need not discuss here) but when one reads what Heidegger writes in Was Heisst Denken?28 (which is translated in English as What Is Called Thinking29 – a translation which does not get the full weight of the pun in the title)30 one is very close to what she means by attention. The first half of the

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book is a commentary on Nietzsche as the apotheosis of modern thinking, and he turns in the second half to a fragment of Parmenides, and brings out that thinking is ‘letting lie before you and taking to heart the “to be” of beings.’ Whatever that may mean, it seems to me to take one close to what SW means by attention. Or in Heidegger’s writing about Gelassenheit,31 when he points to a thinking without willing, one is close again to SW. Now let me turn to her writings directly. Let us start with the simple thing she says in the article about education.32 To pay attention truly is not to contract the muscles etc. but to leave oneself empty, disposable, open to that which we wait upon. The essential difficulty of understanding what she means by attention is that it is concentrated on nothing in particular; attention is finally attention to the void. Let me try and say what this means. It is waiting for something to appear, to manifest itself, to reveal itself. In contemplating a picture, we may have heard the picture is beautiful and give it a glance before deciding to pay attention to it. But the beauty of the picture only appears to us when we have surrendered to something external and real; one has to open oneself to the void so that one can let something appear as itself. Now as I understand so little of this let me say what it is not. She writes in the Notebooks that the wrong form of attention is attention attached to a problem. Now clearly here she is outside modern science and scholarship. Because they always have a problem to be solved. (I have just written about this in the last issue of the Transactions of the Royal Society.)33 Science is the art of the soluble; of problems. As Heidegger so wonderfully says, what the scientist does is to a summon the ‘object before himself to give its reasons.’ Bacon: putting nature to the question. And this is true of much historical scholarship. It summons the past before itself to give its answers. As Kant says, the mind makes the object, and in science he means the human mind. Now it is exactly the opposite of this that SW is clearly meaning by ‘attention.’ It is opening oneself to the void so that the thing itself can appear as what it is. My word: admire or wonder. One point where I think her language is less wise than Heidegger’s is her constant use of the word ‘object.’ She was brought up in the French Cartesian language of subjects-objects; one has already entered the thinking with ‘will’ in German, and this clearly applies to English because of being forced to give its reasons. We summon it forth.

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This is what Heidegger means by his famous statement that ‘science does not think.’34 Now I am not going to say any more about attention except to say what it does for human beings. SW writes: ‘the attention is always directed to the object, never towards the self.’35 In turning us out from ourselves towards the exterior it empties our spirit of the purposes of the self. We are all taken up with our own purposes. Attention empties us of these purposes and therefore leads us to decreation. (To return to modern science I think she would say that the purpose of mastery is always in it.) In thinking of this I was reminded of St Paul’s great phrase in Philippians 2:11, ‘Christ who being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be equal to God but emptied himself ...’ That is what attention is from its simplest to its highest, the emptying the self of its purposes, its sense of autonomy. Now just let me make one last point about this. In an early lecture I said that the intelligence was the culmination of the necessary and thus something distinct from supernatural love and consent. Now it is at this point that we must qualify that statement. It seems to me true concerning SW that the operation of the intelligence belongs to the realm of necessity, but that by the use of intelligence in attention, if the intelligence is directed by attention, we are raised in that use to the realm of good. If one alone pays attention for brief moments, so that the purposes of ‘I’ are lost, in that suspension of the ‘I’ one is raised to the realm of the good. In that sense we must read the remarks, particularly in her writings about the Greeks, where she emphasizes the closeness of intelligence to love and consent. It is attention that makes that closeness. Leo Strauss once said, and I think what he said was brilliant, that Islam and Judaism are together in the question of revelation, while Christianity is different.36 Because in Islam and Judaism revelation comes in the form of law, while in Christianity it comes in the form of a being. And Strauss said that because of this, Christians and Jews look at the relation of philosophy and revelation in quite different ways. That seems to me enormously true. It would seem to me that SW is continually trying to cut religion off from an immanent form of providence and in our era the immanent form of providence is tied above all to the idea of history, as a process which we can understand in immanent terms. Where in the ancient world the immanent view of providence was tied up with Aristotle’s

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teleological account of nature ... in the modern world the immanent view of providence is tied to what modern men call ‘history.’ We identify that above all with Hegel ... Now it seems to me that before the age of progress, both Judaism and Christianity asserted the doctrine of providence, but always insisted that it was inscrutable to our intelligence. I would insist on that as far as Christianity went ... Now indeed SW took the inscrutability of providence to great lengths, above all to oppose those like Hegel and Marx who had made it scrutable in terms of history ... Certainly SW is not, as I have said, in the tradition of Western Christianity, either Protestant or Catholic in this matter. SW’s work is swarming with contradictions, paradoxes, gaps – and part of the interest in studying her is to come to terms with those gaps, paradoxes etc. Many people have said that if she had lived longer she would have better organized her work and that is indeed likely. But nevertheless I think that however long she had lived, her work would have remained in this state – because it seems to me openness to the whole – which she certainly has – does not necessarily make one’s writings easily systematic, because the whole presents itself to us as staggeringly ambiguous. Her great master Plato wrote in dialogues, from which it is hard to systematize out his doctrine, because the whole appears to him as such a mystery. System is for armies and bureaucracies; openness to the whole is philosophy. Difficulty between practical and theoretical men; practice is closing down; justice limits. Theory opens up. (In connection with student’s essay on education). I see the North American system in detail very clearly, and as I think about it I find the thinker who knows most clearly what is being spoken in that educational system is Heidegger, read one thing: ‘The Age of the World Picture.’37 Now clearly that view of education is becoming increasingly powerful and self-enclosed in North America and indeed in the rest of the world. For example, OISE.38 Now the question I raise about SW is what does her view of education mean in the light of that enormously dominating view of education? ... For SW the question one must put is how does her doctrine of God come to terms with that coming to be – and what does she think is spoken in that coming to be? ... Now clearly SW is thinking that question. To speak biographically, what turned her round (call it if you will conversion) was her experience of two central technological facts: (a)

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the factory, and (b) technological man. Therefore one returns to the question, what does she think her educational doctrine has to do with technological education? Two small biographical points, (a) a student asserts she was a good teacher. But was she? For young women, perhaps. My position as a teacher makes people not successful in the technological world, although I clearly make many more compromises than she does. (b) Alain, her great teacher, praised technological society very highly. He seemed to believe that the kind of philosophical Cartesian and Kantian education he believed in would go on. But in fact it doesn’t – it is destroyed. Was she caught in this? Did she take for granted that it would? In her later writing – and remember the ‘Right Use of School Studies’ is written after her immense turning round in Marseilles – her doctrine of education is further and further away from what educational theory becomes in an ordered technological society. What is the relation of her doctrine of education to that doctrine, and what is she saying about technological civilization and her expression of that relation? Now particular questions: (1) Algebra – discuss in terms of Kleina – why did the Greeks turn their backs on algebra? A very great question. (2) Imagination. The early teaching in her Notebooks. ‘Imagination is the false divinity.’39 Very Platonic. St Augustine: ‘ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem.’40 Why does the Platonic education turn away from imagination? Why does modern education see imagination as very central? Herzberg,41 Bronowski:42 art and science, and progress in them, the justification. I want to make some parting comments about reading SW’s works on mathematics and physics, and particularly her breathtaking article called in French ‘La science et nous,’ or with the good title in English Classical Science and After43 (although let me say in parenthesis that the word ‘science’ has a wider ring in French than in English). This is indeed a breathtaking writing, a writing of genius of the first order. I know no modern writing – not even any of Heidegger’s – which I would put as equal to it in genius or as going right to the heart of what is our present Western predicament. But from a statement such as that

a Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934), trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1968).

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(and I make it aware of what I am saying) certain difficulties arise, and these I want now to discuss. (1) Let all of us in this room never pretend to know things we do not know. This applies to all of us. Leo Strauss once very wisely said that the great thing in all teaching is when one does it to be aware that in the room with one there probably may be somebody of clearer intellect and nobler heart than oneself. And when I say all of us should not pretend to know, I make it in the light of that statement. God (call it if you will Goodness Itself) does not require from any being that he or she should know things that their education and their talents have not made possible. This does not deny that those of us who are called to be students are called to hard work, to paying attention and to the virtues of moderation and courage required for that attention. Nor does it deny that some of us in this room (and I being the oldest person present am the greatest authority on this) have wasted time and could have done much better. In the great play Richard II says: ‘I wasted time, and now does time waste me.’44 After all one of Socrates’ greatest dicta is ‘The wise man is the man who knows that he knows not.’45 In this case, what I do not know is mathematics, except Grade 13. What I do know is a great deal about the moral, religious and political traditions which made up the West, and I know that the co-penetration of the moral and physical sciences in the West has been very great ... SW puts that co-penetration very well, and in a way I take over from her in ‘Knowing and Making,’46 when she says that every paradigm of knowledge has had its principle in the relation between an aspiration of human thought and the effective conditions for its realization. In this sense our moral sciences have helped us to define our natural sciences, e.g., Bacon: science for the relief of man’s estate meant a particular kind of physical science. And vice versa, Bacon’s view of science and Hobbes’ and Spinoza’s view of political philosophy. Expand. Now when one sees that co-penetration and the extra necessity to understand that, one can be easily led into pretending one knows when one does not know. In this writing one is right in the middle of that, because it is about that co-penetration which she is incomparably writing of. It is exactly at that point that one must be extremely careful. One is so concerned; and yet ill equipped. Because of her education and genius she is able to do it. (See André Weil47 re: the relation of SW’s life to her thought.) Up to about 1935 etc. her thoughts are largely modelled on her teacher, Alain,48 and the great tradition of Descartes and Kant which he exemplified. Afterwards she is concerned with Plato and

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Christianity. Now let me put that change in its simplest form. The philosophy of Alain (of Descartes and Kant) is above all a philosophy of will. Now to use these very general statements, her thought after 1938 is a philosophy of mysticism – however you like that word – some of you did not like last time the word ‘grace.’ Now let us be clear about two things: (a) the philosophy of will and the philosophy of mysticism are contraries; (b) this is very difficult and very important and very general but must be said: the philosophy of the Western world for several centuries has with greater and greater explicitness declared itself a philosophy of will. Let me say why I admire Heidegger as a thinker, although so despising him for his political thought: Heidegger has laid before us in his commentary on Western thought that it has been about will. Of course for myself the interest of SW’s thought is this prodigious turning around from the modern at just its central point. For clearly two things seem evident to me: (a) The Western world now meets in its life the full presence of the philosophy of will (historicist existentialism) and in my opinion is dying of the philosophy of will. (b) Those of us who are Christians must face that it was in Western Christendom that the philosophy of will came to be – in the division between classical civilization and modern above all, Christianity in its Western form. For all of us, not only those who are Christians, the death of Western Christianity in its becoming the pure philosophy of will is a prodigious event. The importance of Simone Weil is her attempt to express the truth of Christianity outside the philosophy of will. But that is prodigiously difficult to follow because (i) we are all raised within the enormous thing which is Western civilization, and that civilization at every point is expressing the truth as will. Therefore we must recognize the extremity and root and broadness of what she is saying. (ii) We are unlikely to have her genius or her experience. I think the details of her life, as expressing that turn away from will as ultimate truth, are very clearly put before us in Simone Pétrement’s life49 of her but most of you won’t read that. I simply do not think it is my task to synopsize those facts except to say: after 1935 her life in the factory, then her life in the Spanish civil war, culminating in the appearance of Christ to her, are the centre of that change around. But what concerns us in this class is the result of those events in her thought, which as I say becomes a philosophy of mysticism, which is of its very nature a criticism of the Western philosophy of will at every level, from her criticism of modern

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algebra, of modern politics, of modern art, of modern theology, of modern philosophy etc. Now let me qualify that very general statement by saying that [for] this superbly educated being – I was reading last night how Simone Pétrement gave her the Gilgamesh epic and in three days she had taught herself Babylonian – this change around does not mean that she becomes another human being, nor that at moments in her thought this change around is totally realized. I want to return to the very difficult question of the language of will in modern Western society. What do we mean by it in English? Let me raise just one point: the will as expressing autonomy; the will as expressing that we are autonomous. Kant and the autonomy of the will, in full consciousness, he knew he was adding it to the tradition. Yet for Simone Weil autonomy is just that which stands in the way of knowing we are the image of God. This takes us, it seems to me, to the heart of Simone Weil and decreation. To be created is to think one is autonomous, creation is autonomy. Decreation is our end and it is overcoming our createdness – our creating. Autonomy is the evil which separates God from God. Two difficult questions: (1) a practical one which I always turn to as central. The affirmation of the goodness of autonomy in modern philosophy has gone with the affirmation of interfering with necessity which is technology. That interference surely in some sense is good. (2) At a deeper and more theoretical level, God creates us and to create us is to make us think we are autonomous. Yet the fulfilment of life is consent, which is the denial of autonomy. It is the sense of autonomy which stands in the way of consent. Can we accept this account of God? I wanted to say how good it was the way (a student) answered some comments I had about her paper by referring me to places in the text of SW. That is exactly why teaching can be pleasant, in the sense that (student) made me think about what I was saying more clearly. Please remember that I am a very definite person – and therefore may seem a dominating person – but it is important therefore that you do not let yourselves ever be talked down by me. And let me say that I never resent in a foolish way people being clear about my unclarities. (Re the doctrine of impossible love) Obviously the Greeks had a great taste for actualized pederasty. In the Symposium in which the doctrine of impossible love is put forward half

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the characters in it make speeches in praise of pederasty, but Socrates does not. What is the doctrine? It is for the few who are mystics. Of course the check is not only on sexual love. How about the check on prestige? The check which leads one upwards? Two questions about it: a) Freudian or Nietzschean criticism. Eternity is posited because of the check, because we cannot have, because of our repressions, the impossible love. This is what has been said of Simone Weil often. This is a central teaching in much modernity: the positing of eternity is a result of sexual frustration. Can one institutionalize the doctrine of the impossible love? Indeed it was the non-actualized love, but can one institutionalize this? And what is its effect on un-institutionalized sexuality – the husbands of the wives whom the husbands loved. What is the relation to eternity of those whose sexuality is legitimately actualized? I do not mean only in marriage but people who love each other in a deep way outside of marriage. ... It is interesting to see necessity in the most supreme works of art. At the height, words or notes or paint which could not have been otherwise. The height of magisterial art is always that it could not have been otherwise. Three examples: (a) Lear speaking to Cordelia, ‘Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone shall sing like birds i’ the cage’ etc. (b) J.S. Bach commentary on ‘Es ist vollbracht’ in the St John Passion. (c) Velasques – Las Meninas. This could not have been otherwise. Let me add one further parenthetical commentary: In modern art because it believes art is creation and not imitation – there is no supernatural model, to use SW’s phrase – you never reach this necessity. ‘Creation’ used about human making is against necessity – human beings freely make it. Her play, Venise sauvée.50 (Re: An Essay about Affliction) SW does not say affliction is ineffable in the sense that the immediate apprehension of God is, but it is very difficult to describe, and indescribable to anyone who has had no contact with it. Ivan in Dostoevsky [The Brothers Karamazov] and Camus are not afflicted. The existential anguish over theodicy is not what SW means by affliction. Let me start by discussing the Platonic account of the body. Now clearly two great directions on that, Symposium and Phaedo. Now it may seem there is a division in the two dialogues – their situation different.

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But in both cases enormous control and discipline on the body. Now I am not a person who can talk of this from the inside. Plato said nobody could be a philosopher who ate more than two meals a day. But it seems to me SW has understood Platonic asceticism very well, and what it says about the body. And we must start from there to understand affliction. Let me say that the strongest case against the Platonic doctrine of asceticism is of course Nietzsche’s. Expressed most epigrammatically in his remark, ‘it is the body which has despaired of the body.’51 What we all now face in North America – a society in great revolt against asceticism – is really popular Nietzscheanism, whether it is of the right or of the left. All asceticism is neurotic. (see S. Pétrement, vol.2, 11.)52 Let me also say that asceticism is greatly underrated by modern theologians of all schools. Anybody who advocates asceticism is called a ‘Puritan’ as a term of abuse. Strange about the Puritans – they had married clergy. Now there is a central paradox in any ascetic technique. This paradox is that any ascetic teaching by its very nature is the disciplining of the body but in that very direction it tends always in the direction of seeming not to take the body seriously. Now obviously Plato and SW take that paradox very seriously. Now as you know SW thinks that it is only in facing the full force of contradiction that great philosophic teaching arises. What is the contradiction in that paradox? It is on the one side that the body must be disciplined, controlled. How far that control goes is clear in Phaedrus: the black horse pulling the chariot, its mouth is bleeding as it is controlled by the harness in the hands of the charioteer. On the other hand, there must be nothing in that discipline which leads us not to take the body seriously, for it is only through the body that ‘I’ can be destroyed ... To use her metaphor, the body is a lever by which the soul acts on the soul ... Here she uses a word which explicates a lot – namely she passes from the word ‘corps’ to the word ‘la chair’ the flesh. What she means here seems to me the following. Obviously the body in hunger and thirst and desire for warmth and in sexual desire is good – in so far as [the desires] are part of our life. But they become what she calls ‘charnel,’ that is, those necessary desires become tied to our autonomy, and give our autonomy its energy. (Parenthesis – because I wrote this out quickly and have not got it in perfect order, remember that the centre of Plato’s account of the regimes in the Republic turns on the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires.) In what SW says about la chair, the flesh, she is

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saying that the unnecessary desires take over and give their energy to our sense of autonomy (e.g. the desires of the flesh, such as prestige) and therefore the body has to be used as a lever by which the soul acts on the soul to destroy its own egocentricity, its own sense of autonomy. This is what asketikos is, the suffering involved in that asceticism. What she is saying about human beings is that since it is only through the training (dressage) of suffering that the body frees itself from its attachment to the autonomous and becomes transparent or obedient, this is how we can understand the need of asceticism and of physical suffering as part of it. It is in this sense that she talks of bodily matter and psychological matter. Now let me say clearly that in any account of the whole which really comes to grips with what is given in the whole as contradiction, there is the enormous philosophical fecundity which comes out of living in the contradiction, and there is that fecundity in SW’s account of the body – but there is also the chance of falling over to stress one side of the contradiction in an unwise way. Now in the case of asceticism, what are the two sides one can fall over into and court error. On the one side the error can be what can be called idealism, that is, to deny the importance of the body. Now SW never falls into that error. But on the other side we can fall into the error of what I would call a kind of exaltation of suffering, which becomes a cult of suffering. What the French call, very clearly, ‘dolorisme.’ Now some of her remarks, taken individually, can be interpreted so. And it is this, which has led to the accusation against her of dolorisme. This I may say is an error, which Christians, if they take Christianity seriously, are easily prone to, and must avoid. Now let us move from asceticism and the obvious suffering which is involved in its early stages to the more difficult question: what she means by affliction, or the more beautiful French word, malheur. Now here I am able to speak much less clearly and certainly with great hesitation. Let me start from saying the chief way I have of thinking of this is to compare the two deaths which are for Western people the two archetypal deaths, the death of Socrates and the death of Christ. And in thinking of that comparison, one of the most illuminating things I have ever read is Leo Strauss’ comment on Thomas More in The City and Man,53 61. More writes in his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation,54 Chap. 13: ‘And for to prove that this life is no laughing time, but rather the time of weeping, we find that our Saviour Himself wept twice or

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thrice, but never do we find that he laughed so much as once. I will not swear that He never did, but at the least wise he left us no example of it.’ Strauss goes on to say that ‘Socrates left us no example of weeping, but on the other side, he left us example of laughing.’ Now, as Strauss makes clear, More was a great Platonist – one of the greatest – so he knew. Now the difference between those deaths is very great. Christ’s: the fear, the sweating of blood, the cry of dereliction, etc., etc. And of course, for Christians it is the affirmation that this is the more archetypal death. That is the central way I would approach ‘le malheur.’ Clearly what SW means by ‘malheur,’ to speak of it positively, is that state in which human beings find themselves participating through redemptive suffering in the Cross of Christ. Now to use the (student’s) language of ineffability, that is ineffable to me, in the sense that I do not live it; it is not ineffable in so far as one has seen other people living it. Always we must try and reach what she is saying. The most dramatic and poignant passages of all her writing are concerned with this. Clearly we must come to terms with her definition. Right at the beginning of ‘L‘amour de Dieu et le malheur’ she defines it. (Read Attente de Dieu, 82.55) Physical pain an irreducible element. What is also present is a penetrating inner sense of the uselessness of the suffering. There is no purpose, no end, and above all the uprootedness of life is completed, in the sense that it is disgraceful socially to be so afflicted. What is indeed most terrible about affliction – or le malheur – is that those who are afflicted (les malheureux) come to hate themselves, and will find obscurely that they have been created exactly so that they can be made subject to these treatments by others. And it is this, which means (1) that those in it have no means of escaping or deliverance from it and means (2) that those outside it – their response is to hate the afflicted. One of the most terrible remarks in SW is in A. de Dieu, 85. It is that which makes it ineffable for us, unutterable for us. Why? Our attention turns away with violence from les malheureux because in them is ascribed to us our proper nothingness, in the fragility and vulnerability of another being. That is in the afflicted, the instinct of self-preservation, which survives, leads the afflicted to turn away from their condition by apathy and lying. It makes those who are not afflicted turn away from the afflicted because if they do not, they must say: see ‘The Person and the Sacred,’ Ecrits de Londres, 35.56 It is then necessary to

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pass over into the perspective of God to love the afflicted – and that perspective is another affliction. About that I can say nothing; perhaps other people can. ... As there is no essay today I thought we should go on with the discussion of beauty. This is good because the last day I led the discussion away on to a track which is important but not the heart of the matter – namely beauty and sexuality. I did so for three reasons: (1) I thought ... a very good essay was not quite right as to the relation of consummation and renunciation. (2) It is the case that in Plato’s Symposium (better translated the banquet) he writes of beauty in relation to love – and therefore the question of beauty is very much related to sexuality – and encouraged us in this slightly turning the discussion aside. (3) Anybody like myself is aware of the character of opinion in North America, namely, that any assertions about the eternal are said to arise from a frustrated sexuality. This can be expressed intellectually as the influence of Freud. Whatever Freud may have done for good in our society, it is certainly true that his teachings have been a strong force towards that oblivion of eternity which lies at the heart of North America. Therefore in teaching, I am always aware of that fact, and in this case, did not want Plato and SW’s teaching to seem to be identified with sexual frustration. Nevertheless despite these three reasons, I did direct the discussion from beauty in a wrong way, and therefore am glad that accident allows us to continue that discussion ... ... We are coming to the end of the year of studying SW, and what should be on one’s mind? Western words such as philosophy, theology and thinking have become as technicized as anything else in our world. Philosophy often becomes a kind of analytical criticism; theology becomes a systematizing of packets of given revelation à la Ur-thinking, becomes what clever intellectuals do, appearing in clever magazines. The words for what SW writes so easily disappear. It is certainly philosophy in the sense of ‘friend of the sophon.’ It is certainly theologia – rational speeches about God. It is certainly thinking. But these words, Western words, are losing their meaning in the West. I would say it in other words – openness of the soul to the whole – but then ‘soul’ is also a lost word. Openness of the ‘mind’ to the whole? (Psychology?) This

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has been particularly lost in the English-speaking world. I am just writing about that. Now taking that account, the openness of the soul to the whole. How do we come to that? How are we aided to come to that by partaking in the writings of somebody such as SW? To the first question, two remarks: (1) It is its own reward. One thing there is a lot of nonsense talked about in our society, is that society wants human beings to be open to the whole. Such belief is claptrap. One of the key understandings of Plato is that philosophy is an enemy to the polis. (In his time polis was the form of society.) The polis which is to Plato the best form of social aggregation is today a technological empire which we belong to. It is the cave. It doesn’t want openness to the whole for its members. Nevertheless it must be said that the very lack of openness to the whole in our society may be an incentive to some people, by its very closedness, to the openness. If I may speak about myself, I am one who has not great natural talent for philosophy, yet I have been driven towards a little openness simply by being battered continually by the unmoving closedness of the society I inhabit. (2) This leads me to the second question. How are we indeed to come to that openness by partaking in the writings of somebody such as SW? This is the question of bringing questions to writings – or bringing questions to facts in science. It leads to mastery. Example: Plato and 19th century German scholarship – made him an incipient Kantian or Hegelian. Openness is very difficult, because we need some questioning which has led us to go and look, and yet if we take our questions we may never see what is there. Openness is what student’s essay is about – waiting and attention ... But, of course, that is first but not final – then one comes back to questioning, because one finds differences between thinkers e.g., Plato and Kant and the autonomy of the will. One returns to questioning. Now we have come to the stage at the end of the year to question SW. That questioning takes two forms, one more radical than the other. (a) The more radical: Are there fundamental aspects of the whole to which she is not open? (b) Are there contradictions in her writing? Are these real contradictions, or are they contradictions, which only appear as contradictions, and are not when they are thought through? As we move to the last classes I hope these questions will come up and things that people just do not understand. Do remember that in moving towards openness to the whole, we all start from differing particulari-

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ties and that therefore, the very difference of our approaches can help each other to that openness. Approaches from very different positions and traditions are very helpful ... e.g. [student] at the beginning of the year raised the Western Roman Catholic belief in authority. Lastly, let me say what I stated from the beginning of the year. Our willingness to criticize SW may be inhibited by the fact that what she is saying asks such impossibilities from us ... utterly impossible, that is, for me. I know this in every lived moment of my existence. I simply have not crossed to the supernatural side. Therefore, one is inhibited from raising questions about where her thought is inadequate, because her thought makes one aware of one’s own inadequacy. That bind we must escape, but it is a bind, and one must escape it carefully. This is a particular bind for those of us who are held by Christianity – but we must escape it. If you will forgive a non-objective remark to start this last class on SW: it is constantly in my mind that the two human beings who most move me to admiration in modern Western history – and remember that the primal meaning of ‘to admire’ is what we would now read as ‘to wonder’ – Simone Weil and Mozart. They may not be the greatest – that is another matter – but they just move me the most – these two beings were buried in paupers’ graves in their middle thirties. (Re: An Essay on SW’s View of Time) As is clear, what SW is writing about is not only truth, but a way – one might say way of life. Therefore, I want to speak about her doctrine of time, and what it says about that way ... This is the last class to concentrate upon what I started from in the first class: how her writings are difficult not only because of the truth she is proclaiming, but at one with that truth is the call to a way of life which indeed must seem to any sane human being, difficult, and may seem to some impossible, and to others wrong minded. But these questions all concentrate on ‘time,’ and behind everything I say stands what you (student) have so well enucleated in your essay. (1) As has often been said in very general terms, the modern era substituted orientation to the future for orientation to eternity. What is staggering in SW is the degree to which she says this orientation to the future must be rooted out, and it is in this one sees the extent of her rejection of the central assumptions of the modern era. First, why must it be rooted out? Here I simply wish to make some connections – to see her thought as a whole. Orientation of our lives to the future is the prin-

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ciple of autonomy, because autonomy is at the final point the principle of the unity of the self as an infinitely continuing person. It is the connection between these ideas that we must see together. Let me put what she is saying in the words of somebody else, because other people’s ways of expressing the same thoughts may be helpful. Leo Strauss ends his great lecture on ‘What Is Political Philosophy?’57 at Jerusalem with the words ... (p. 55) Modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion, the notion of eternity. For oblivion of eternity, or, in other words, estrangement from man’s deepest desire and therewith from the primary issues, is the price which modern man had to pay, from the very beginning, for attempting to be absolutely sovereign, to become master and owner of nature, to conquer chance.

There is a fundamental argument but obviously to understand SW one must understand that she goes further that this. What she is saying essentially is that orientation to the future is the assertion of our autonomy, and we assert our autonomy so that we can expand our personality in the future ... so that it becomes a false eternity. Eternity becomes an endless extension of the self. This is why decreation of the personality is necessary, because it is that which in its expansion into the future stands between us and our meeting with the true eternity. Negatively, she is saying what Sartre says about the portrait gallery in Boulogne in La Nausée. But positively, she goes much further, because this negation of the false eternity – or pseudo eternity – is to open the way for the affirmation of the supernatural good. But let me just ask about this orientation to the future, whether individual or collective – can many of us live without some sense of living for some future over which we have some control? And I say it to you. Obviously any sensible human being is aware that he or she may be dead tomorrow, or those they love may be dead; it is also indeed true that of everybody in this room, I am most likely because of my age to be the nearest to the point when there are no more goals for my writing. Therefore, I ask you all to contemplate whether you can so live as to eliminate time as the place where future goals are eliminated? Living only in the present so that one is oriented to eternity.

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Let me speak of this politically for a moment. Clearly in life we have to make some such distinction as that between the public religion and the true religion. What I am saying is that it seems likely that what SW is saying is the true religion – but I do not see how it could be the public religion. That I do not see, and as there is need in all societies for public religion, what will be the relation of this true religion to any possible public religion? I do not mean simply its relation to our present public religion, American liberalism or Soviet Marxism. Obviously it is in direct confrontation with them because they are according to her base pseudo-religions – but how would it be related to fairly reasonable public religions of other societies and other times? Now clearly her answer to that lies in how she sees the relation to our living time apprehended as circular, and how that apprehension, and living time in that way which is positive, is related to decreation. I find that difficult to think: how nature given as circular leads to certain positive natural goods (as, for example, a good account of work) and yet must be transcended in decreation towards the supernatural. This leads on to the following. Remembering very much what you have written about what you call ‘circular time’ let me comment about her position on what she calls ‘monotony.’ I do so because this year we have not much discussed her teachings concerning work, yet those are central to the compass of her work. They are found in her book La condition ouvrière58 – and in that, her ‘Journal of the Factory.’ I say this because our modern education is likely to hold apart those people who do philosophy and those people who do modern social sciences. When I go to any wise Marxist social scientists, and there are not many such, I find them asking fascinating questions about the division of labour, but outside any context of eternity. When I go among religious people I sometimes find them asking questions about eternity – but outside any context of such questions as work. One of SW’s greatnesses is that she holds them together. In La condition ouvrière, in her journal in that book there is the quotation: ‘Monotony is that which is the most beautiful or the most frightful in the world. Most beautiful if it is a reflection of eternity (Gregorian chant). Equally most frightful. The circle is the model of the beautiful monotony; the swinging of a pendulum is the model of the atrocious monotony.’ Remember the shooting of the clocks in the Revolution of 1848 in Paris. SW’s doctrine of time must be thought in terms of work spiritualized, and that is work brought within beautiful

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monotony. In La connaissance surnaturelle,59 47, she says ‘All our sins are the attempt to fly from time.’ Now how is that put together with her clear assertion that sin is the cause of time? And from that do we reach the principle by which we know what is the true overcoming of time and what is the false overcoming of time? I recognize I think quite clearly what she means by the kind of tension in our lives about time. On the one hand time is distance from God, and as I have said, when we assert our autonomy we are really setting up time as an endless pseudo-eternity which turns us away from the true divinity; and in this sense we must always know time as something to be overcome. On the other hand, there is the false attempt to get away from time which is the attempt to opt out of the awful responsibilities by flying away from time and also leads us to a false eternity. I repeat again what Plotinus said to the Gnostics.60 SW understands that. I also recognize that, in her recognition of this tension about time, there is clarity in her thought about what seems to some people a contradiction. This contradiction is that if we accept, as she would have us accept, suffering as belonging to the divine order of the world, does not this acceptance lead us to be indifferent to the suffering of others? She indeed speaks of this contradiction in Bk I, 79 of her Notebooks (my translation): ‘One can’t deny that there is a contradiction between accepting, in advance all events as possible without exception, and at a clearly defined moment in a clearly defined situation to go right to the limit of what one can do to stop such an event occurring.’61 It is what she means by the reality of time which is the foundation of this obligation – which is to use all one’s powers to stop what is happening to someone squeezed by suffering, even though suffering belongs to the divine. She says very clearly what she means by the reality of time and becoming. She writes: ‘The time which separates an event which is going to come from the present is real. One prepares oneself to accept suffering which is possibly coming, but one must not confuse that preparation with the past.’62 These two attributes: a supreme effort to save the life of someone and a perfect acceptance of his death, are both required by consent to the order of the universe. In so far as the other person’s death is not a present fact, in so far as one is separated from it by time, I have the duty to struggle against it. It is because of the reality of becoming that these two very different approaches are both necessary. In this sense it is clear

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that she believes time to be real as well as an absence. Let me say one rather simple thing about this, which I think a person such as myself should always say: SW is speaking very strongly against the society oriented to the future. Yet we must remember that modern society was indeed formed by the science that believed in the conquest of human and non-human nature, but that science did not only come out of a sheer secular view of autonomy, but also out of a certain Christian belief in the duty of interference with the course of nature. In the English-speaking world, which was the center of the technological world, that view of mastering science as the duty of the Christian was deeply involved with Calvinism. Those of you who have studied with me in other courses will know how the new science and technology was deeply related to Calvinism, e.g., the central institutional event being the foundation of the Royal Society. I have written about this at length, and now much later in Western history this has been related to Judaism, and its relation above all to modern medicine. As most of you know, I am not fond of Calvinism theoretically – but what Weber says about it practically is true, and there is much greatness in the Calvinist position he describes. Now the point I am making is the following: Such interference in the natural order in the name of the awful responsibilities of time cannot be simply individual, but must be communal, and does SW’s account of that interference in the name of the reality of time go far enough? The relation of the good that was seen in interference by liberal Christians and Jews has to be related to the oblivion of eternity, which I talked about. That this oblivion of eternity is a new situation in recorded history seems to me indubitable.

Notes 1 Richard Crashaw (1613–49), English poet. Grant quoted his invocation to St Theresa of Avila in his review of Robert Coles’s book on Simone Weil: O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dow’r of Lights and Fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;

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George Grant on Simone Weil See Richard Crashaw, ‘Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa,’ at: http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Richard_Crashaw/ 1531 ‘What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?’ is a quotation from Tertullian (ca. 155–230), a church leader and prolific author during the early years of Christianity. He was born, lived, and died in Carthage, in what is today Tunisia. Weil is not preoccupied with the relationship between reason (Athens/Socrates) and revelation (Jerusalem/Jesus). Hebrews 10:31. Mark, 8:34: ‘Take up your cross and follow me.’ See J.M. Perrin, ed., Réponses aux questions de Simone Weil (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne 1964). This volume includes a number of articles written by Jean Daniélou, SJ, and other scholars articulating a Roman Catholic (and generally neo-Thomist) critique of Simone Weil’s theological views. Daniélou writes: ‘Simone Weil, so pitiless in detecting everything which offends her in the God of Israel, shows an odd indulgence for the gods of Homer’ (28, Schmidt translation). The volume also includes a number of Roman Catholic statements, some from Vatican II, on the primacy and liberty of conscience, compassion in the face of error, and ecumenical dialogue. Louis Marie Régis, Epistemology (Toronto: Macmillan 1959). Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind (New York: Harper Colophon 1971). Simone Weil, ‘La personne et le sacré,’ in Écrits de Londres et dernière lettres, (Paris: Gallimard 1957), trans. as ‘Human Personality’ in Selected Essays, 1934–43 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962). Simone Weil, L’Enracinement: Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (Paris: Gallimard 1949). Martin Heidegger, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, ’trans. John Barlow, in William Barret and Henry D. Aiken, eds, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 3 (New York: Harper & Row 1971), 251-70. Matthew 10:34. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964). Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), German philosopher best known for his 1960 magnum opus Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode). He was on the McMaster campus in 1975–6. Erich Frank (1883–1949), German philosopher born in Prague whose writings played a role in the emergence of the German existential movement. Grant refers to ‘The Fundamental Opposition of Plato and Aristotle,’ American Journal of Philology 61 (1940): 34–53, 166–85. See ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity

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among the Ancient Greeks (London: Ark Paperbacks, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987), 151–201. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, book 5. See Simone Weil, Waiting on God (New York: Harper & Row 1973), 87–8. The phrase, which means King of tremendous majesty, is from the ‘Dies Irae,’ commonly attributed to the mid-thirteenth-century friar Thomas of Celano. It is a hymn customarily sung as part of the Requiem Mass, said for the repose of the deceased. The hymn is a meditation on the Last Judgment, when Christ will come again in glory. See, for example, Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (New York: Penguin Books 2003), 52 Simone Weil, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,’ in Waiting on God (New York: Harper & Row 1973), 105– 16. See Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, 178. By ‘equipment’ Grant seems to mean natural ability or talent, which, when combined with virtue or character, enables a person to flourish. See Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad, Poem of Might,’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks, 24–55. Re Locke on ‘unadmired virtue’: Perhaps Grant is referring to Locke’s statement about Christianity and the philosophers: ‘The Philosophers, indeed, sheued the beauty of Virtue: They set her off so as drew mens eyes and approbation to her; but leaving her unendowed, very few were willing to espouse her. The Generality could not refuse her their Esteem and Commentation, but still turned their Backs on her and forsook her, as a Match not for their Turn. But now there being put into the Scales, on her Side, an exceeding and immortal Weight of Glory, Interest is come about to her; and Virtue now is visibly the most enriching Purchase, and by much the best Bargain.’ See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity; as delivered in the Scriptures, 6th ed. (London: Bettesworth and Hitch 1736), 246. See Plato’s Gorgias, 474c–479e. The Vision of Beatrice is taken from The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet writing about 1300–20. In this work Dante relates a vision granted to him of the soul’s journey after death through hell, purgatory, and paradise. See Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1956), 248: ‘Plato. Intelligence dominates necessity through persuasion. Image of the inward order. Non-active action upon the self. Non-violence with regard to the self. Beauty is the image of this persuasion.’ Martin Heidegger, Was Heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer 1954).

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29 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row 1972). 30 ‘What calls forth thinking?’ as well as ‘What is called thinking?’ 31 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John Anderson and Hans Freund (New York: Harper Torchbooks 1966). 32 Weil, ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies.’ 33 George Grant, ‘Knowing and Making,’ Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, series IV, xii (1975): 59–67. Delivered to the Royal Society June 1974. It was also published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 407–17, and in this volume 269–79. 34 Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1997), 349. 35 See Weil, ‘Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies,’ 111: ‘Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of.’ 36 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press 1952), 9: ‘Revelation as understood by Jews and Muslims had the character of Law (torah, shari’a) rather than that of Faith.’ See also page 18–19: ‘For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law (talmud or fiqh). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense.’ 37 See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row 1977), 115–54. 38 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. 39 See Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, 160: ‘The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar. It does away with the third dimension, for it is only real objects that are in three dimensions. It does away with the third dimension.’ For a discussion of Weil’s understanding of the negative and positive aspects of imagination see Martin Andic, ‘Discernment and the Imagination,’ in Richard Bell, ed., Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture: Readings toward a Divine Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1963), 116–49. 40 ‘Out of the shadows and imaginings into the truth’ (Latin). This phrase of John Henry Cardinal Newman is inscribed on Grant’s gravestone. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 585n35. 41 Gerhard Herzberg (1904–99), German-Canadian spectroscopist, accepted a position with Canada’s National Research Council in Ottawa and was the Director of Physics there (NRC) 1949–69. In 1971 he won the Nobel Prize in

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Chemistry for using spectroscopy to discover the internal geometry and energy states in simple molecules, and in particular the structure and characteristics of free radicals. Herzberg worked at the NRC as a Distinguished Research Scientist until his death at age 94 on 4 March 1999. Jacob Bronowski (1908–74), English-Polish mathematician and biologist, was the presenter of the BBC television documentary series The Ascent of Man. Simone Weil, ‘Classical Science and After,’ in Science, Necessity and the Love of God (London: Oxford University Press 1968). Richard II, V, v. Apology, 20e–23c. See 269–79. See André Weil, The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician: Autobiography of André Weil, translation of Souvenirs d’apprentissage by Jennifer Gage (Basel: Birkhaüser Verlag 1992). Émile Auguste Chartier (1868–1951). See 802n2. Simone Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil (Paris: Fayard 1973), trans. Raymond Rosenthal as Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon 1976). Simone Weil, Venise sauvée (Paris: Gallimard 1955) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1961), 59, part 1, ‘Of the Afterworldsmen’: ‘Believe me my brothers! It was the body that despaired of the body – that touched the ultimate walls with the fingers of its deluded spirit.’ Pétrement, La vie de Simone Weil. Strauss, The City and Man. Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (New Haven: Yale University Press 1977). Simone Weil, Attente de Dieu (Paris: La Colombe 1950). See note 8 above. Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1959), 55. Simone Weil, La condition ouvrière (Paris: Gallimard 1951), 43–145. Simone Weil, La connaissance surnaturelle (Paris: Gallimard 1950). Plotinus, ‘Against the Gnostics,’ Ninth Tractate of Second Ennead in The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, foreword by E.R. Dodds, intro. by Paul Henry (London: Faber 1969). Plotinus argues that the world of sense is the best possible copy of the intelligible world given its spatial and temporal character. See Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, 47: ‘How reconcile ourselves to the contradiction between accepting in advance every possible thing, without exception, in the event of its taking place – and, at a given moment in a given situation,

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going almost beyond the limit of what we are capable of in order to prevent something from taking place?’ 62 See Weil, Notebooks, vol. 1, 48: ‘The duration which separates an event in the future from the present is real. We prepare ourselves to accept one day such and such a possible future woe when it shall have become the past but we do not confuse it with the past.’

Review of Simone Weil: A Life by Simone Pétrement

The review appeared in the Globe and Mail, 12 February 1977: 43. The biography, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, was published by Random House in 1976. The original, La vie de Simone Weil, was published in two volumes in 1973 by Librairie Arthème Fayard in Paris. Grant’s review is found in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 254–6.

Among the greatest teachers of the eternal, there is a small group of particular fascination: those who lay before us the most important truths out of very short lives. Simone Weil was dead at 34, and yet her disparate writings are the supreme statement concerning eternity made in the West in this century. The account of her life by Simone Pétrement has now been well translated into English. The lives of great thinkers are generally not of central interest, what is of interest is their writings. What matters to us about Kant is to understand The Critique of Pure Reason, not how he spent his quiet life in Königsburg. This is, of course, finally true of Simone Weil. What matters is to read such writings as her Notebooks, Oppression and Liberty or La science et nous.1 Yet there are three reasons in her case why a biography is of particular interest. The first is the fact that she was not only a thinker but a saint, and the unity between justice and truth lies at the heart of her teaching. She taught that any desire which has not passed through the flesh by means of appropriate action remains a sentimental phantom, and in saying that she affirms that our apprehension of the most important truths depends on the justice of our lives. One therefore wants to know what kind of a life produced a teaching so terrible in its demands.

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Secondly, her writings are being attacked these days both by Freudians and Marxists, who are saying that the truth she states is vitiated by her sexual or class position. The Marxist attack is not surprising, when one considers that Camus2 called her criticism of Marx the most persuasive ever written. The Freudian attacks are similar to those launched against many women. Her writing is the product of penis envy, and this can be seen in her relation to her brother who is a famous mathematician. The extent of these attacks makes one want to understand the relation between her life and her writings. Thirdly, she wrote in the midst of her intense involvement in the class struggle, and wars of Europe between 1930 and 1943. Most of her work was not written for publication, and was published posthumously. It is, therefore, difficult to comprehend the teachings as a whole and to bring into unity writings which are mostly notebooks, letters and articles. This is particularly hard for English speakers, because some of her greatest writings have not yet been translated. For these reasons an accurate biography is not only fascinating in its own right, but necessary to the understanding of her thought. Simone Pétrement has succeeded in writing such a biography. Pétrement says in her introduction that she is going to put down every thing she knows, leaving it to wiser minds to judge what is essential. In the first half of the book she brings before us the amazing family life which combined the clarity and intensity of both the French and the secularized Jewish tradition, the wonderful education received by the French elite in ‘les grandes écoles,’ and then the ten years of Weil’s life in the French class struggle of the 1930s, in which she made industrial production part of her flesh. Her understanding of Marxism might well be great, for during the decade of the 1930s she lived with Marxists in France, in Germany as it approached Hitlerism and in the Spanish civil war. She was a friend of Trotsky.3 Indeed this biography is not only an account of a particular life but of Western Europe as a whole, in that extraordinary decade leading up to 1939. The second half of the book deals with more difficult events – the possession of her life by God, and the gradual movement from that point towards her death in 1943. It is extremely hard to write of such events with clarity, beauty and restraint. Pétrement succeeds on all three counts. With great precision, she unfolds the steps which lead Simone Weil to be able to receive the truths which were manifested to her. The

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details of her life are combined with lucid descriptions of the writings which poured forth in these last years. ‘Poured forth’ is the right metaphor when one considers the circumstances under which these limpid writings were composed. For example, her remarkable work The Pythagorean Doctrine4 was written while she lived in a crowded hall in North Africa with 700 refugees, while taking her father and mother (who were Jewish) away from Hitlerism to safety. The account that Pétrement gives of how she came to participate in the eternal never falls into the hot and romantic style sometimes used in such matters, but is always plain and clear and sane. Pétrement was a close friend of Weil. Along with Camus she was chiefly responsible for the careful publication of Weil’s work since 1945. It might be argued that a biography written from such closeness could not be ‘objective’ in the strange sense of the word used by modern scholars. It is well to remember that Boswell loved Johnson, and Bonaventure loved Francis, and these are two of the greatest lives in the Western tradition. Pétrement is not only writing as a friend but as a leading French scholar and thinker. Her books about gnosticism5 stand in their own right. She brings to this biography not only friendship but high philosophic training, and that clarity of style which makes French such an instrument of the truth. In this sense the biography will continue to be central to any understanding of Simone Weil. It will replace other accounts which presented her life and thought in a more sensational and one-sided way. Raymond Rosenthal has done wisely in following the French literally and carefully in his translation. Something must be lost in English, particularly in the quotations from Weil herself. French was the instrument of her teaching and the writing is of that rare kind in which the words are transparent to the thought. The English translation has cut some of the philosophic passages from the original French edition. This is perhaps appropriate to its audience, but insulting. In an age when oblivion of eternity has became the fate of Westerners (not least among its theologians and philosophers), it is difficult to read Simone Weil despite the clarity of her writing. Nevertheless, just because Western Christianity has realized its destiny of becoming secularized, it is essential to tear oneself free of the causes of that destiny, without removing oneself from the necessities of our present or from the reality of Christ. At the beginning of this biography, Pétrement puts down the saying of Christ: ‘Happy are those who hunger and thirst for

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justice.’6 Such a statement must be incomprehensible and/or terrifying when we moderns try to think it as true. Where does it lead one? Simone Weil’s thought is a rigorous exposition of what is implied in the terms of that statement.

Notes 1 ‘Classical Science and After,’ in Simone Weil, Science, Necessity and the Love of God (London: Oxford University Press 1968). 2 Albert Camus (1913–60), French novelist and essayist, was active in the Resistance movement during the Second World War and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. His works include The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) and The Plague (1959). 3 Leon Davidovich Trotsky (né Bronstein) (1879–1940), Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist, was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs and then as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People’s Commissar of War. He was also a founding member of the Politburo. Following a power struggle with Joseph Stalin in the 1920s, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union. His ideas form the basis of the communist theory of Trotskyism which remains a major school of communist thought distinct from the theories of Marxist politics espoused by, for example, Stalin or Mao Zedong. In 1933 Trotsky stayed in the Weils’ Paris apartment. See Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books 1976), 187–90. 4 ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in Simone Weil, Intimations of Christianity among the Greeks (London: Ark Paperbacks, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987), 151– 201. 5 See, for example, Simone Pétrement, A Separate God: The Christian Origins of Gnosticism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd 1990). 6 Matthew 5:6.

‘In Defence of Simone Weil,’ a Review Essay on Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgimage by Robert Coles

The review appeared in The Idler, no. 15, January–February 1988: 36–40, and was later reprinted in Best Canadian Essays 1989, edited by Douglas Fetherling (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers 1989), 165–73, and in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader, 256–65. Coles’s book was published in Reading, MA, by Addison-Wesley in 1987.1

The Republic is, at the least, a drama about how Socrates cures Plato’s brother of righteous anger. I need to remember the benefits of that cure in reviewing this book. Dr Coles has written a book about Simone Weil in the Radcliffe Biography series. He is a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. His book is in a biography series but is in fact a commentary on her personality and life, accompanied throughout by an obbligato of quotations from his conversations about her with Dr Anna Freud,2 the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis. I have the temptation to anger because the two writers patronize a great saint and thinker. By ‘saint,’ I mean those rare people who give themselves away. By ‘great thinker,’ I mean somebody who is remarkably open to the whole. Simone Weil wrote with genius about the two most important Western matters, Christ and Plato. It is hard to avoid anger when one’s chief modern teacher is patronized in the sweetie-pie accents of Cambridge, Mass., and Hampstead, U.K. Coles’s and Freud’s commentary reminds me of the following: ‘Shakespeare was really quite a good poet. Some of his verses are to be commended. He obviously did not have our advantages, but he wrote pretty well. His writing shows how neurotic he was, but he can’t be blamed for that. He did not do too badly, considering that he did not have the benefit of our help.’

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To take two examples where Coles’s words lead away from what Simone Weil was: 1. Coles writes: ‘She had no sexual life.’ Simone Weil’s closest friend3 told me in the Gare du Nord in Paris: ‘I can tell you that Simone Weil knew human love in its most complete form.’ Clearly the friend thought I was some kind of American and would therefore judge sexual life as the decisive matter in the discussion of another human being. She cared that I write properly of Simone Weil, and knew that as a North American intellectual I was unlikely to understand the Mediterranean tradition of chastity. But she certainly would not have told me this if it were not the case. Simone Weil wrote: ‘The desire to love another human being as the expression of the beauty of the world is the desire for the Incarnation.’4 Does that sentence suggest that ‘she had no sexual life’? As Coles and Freud are doing the psychoanalytical bit on Weil, it is well to mention the account written for herselfa just as she is preparing to go to work in the Renault factory, at the age of twenty-five. In this account she writes of what she must overcome in herself if she is to be what she wants to be. It is extremely detailed about the particularities of her body and soul. Because it is written for herself it is very intimate, and therefore I have some hesitation in writing of it. But Mlle Pétrement is certainly a wiser human being than I am, and has published it. It is probably true that concerning the saints all evidence must be made public. It is not written in terms of the ‘id’ psychology that Freud got from Nietzsche. It is, rather, a fine example of Socrates’ ‘Know thyself.’ 2. It is now necessary to discuss the much more serious question of Coles’s account of Simone Weil’s relation to the Judaism of her ancestors. Obviously this must be written about with the greatest care because of the terrible events in Europe and the Middle East in this century. I think Coles does badly here for a reason of decency. He wants to open her thought to the students at Harvard, and knows that he must explain her refusal of Judaism if he is to succeed. But in this process he a ‘The account written for herself.’ – This is published in Simone Pétrement’s La vie de Simone Weil (Simone Weil: A Life); in the French, Volume II, pages 11–14, in the American translation, pages 219–22. It must be said that the American translation is often poor. In this passage, ‘jouissance’ is translated as ‘pleasure.’ If possible, it is well to read it in French, especially when it comes to Weil’s own words. She wrote the most luminous of Western languages with a clarity that is breathtaking. Nothing seems to stand between the words and what they are talking about.

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makes bad errors, about her and her family, and about what can best be called the history of religions. It is therefore necessary to pursue this second subject in some detail. Coles rightly calls Weil a Christian, but then makes the error of identifying that Christianity with modern Western Christianity.b To put it religiously, one might say that Christianity on one side has turned towards Judaism and on the other towards the Vedanta. To put it philosophically, one might say that Christianity in its meeting with philosophy, for the purposes of self-understanding has had Aristotelian and Platonic wings. Weil is clearly with the Platonists. Weil’s writings therefore contain a clear and sustained rejection of Roman Catholicism – that is, a refusal of the most important tradition of the West. She criticized it more often than Judaism, though often on the same grounds. The impression that Coles has gathered of Weil’s flirting with Catholicism has some justification, but in essence misses the point. Weil did clearly long to take part in the sacrament of the Eucharist, because that sacrament concerns the suffering of God. She was a Christian in that she accepted the suffering of God. We should remember that some of the classical philosophers, such as Proclus,5 rejected Christianity because they did not believe that God could suffer. Although Weil accepted the suffering of God, nevertheless she could not fulfil her hunger for the bread of eternal life because she could not accept Roman Catholicism on other grounds.6 Categorizing great thinkers is always a dangerous task. It may, however, be possible to cautiously call Weil a gnostic. Yet there must be immediate qualifications. As a follower of Plato, Weil holds within her thought that measured blending of ‘gnosticism’ and ‘agnosticism’ that characterizes her intellectual master. Moreover, ‘gnosticism,’ as a recurring historical fact, has had within it excesses and follies, as have all forms of Christianity. (It would be impertinent to speak of other great religions.) In our time, as good a thinker about politics as Voegelin has wrongly used ‘gnosticism’ as a term of abuse in his fine book, The New

b ‘Identifying that Christianity with Roman Catholicism.’ – Weil had no knowledge of or interest in Protestantism. So far as I can discover, her only knowledge of it was of a Baptist church in Harlem which she admired. Of mainline or fundamentalist white Protestantism, she had no knowledge or interest. As matters of ecclesiastical persuasion influence judgement, let me mention that I am an Anglican Protestant.

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Science of Politics.7 Therefore it is with hesitation that I categorize Weil as a ‘gnostic,’ in order to make clear that it was more than accident that held her from becoming a Catholic. Nevertheless it is not without significance that Simone Pétrement, who has written the definitive biography of Simone Weil, is also a leading scholar of gnosticism. (Her biography is so clear and so complete that it must be ranked among the great biographies.) Coles recognizes in a short paragraph Weil’s closeness to Marcion.8 What he does not seem to recognize is that gnosticism has returned again and again within Christianity, and Weil’s writings are filled with references to these recurrences. To take one example: she wrote frequently of the gnosticism of medieval France, which produced the civilization of Languedoc. The sympathetic have described this movement as the religion of the Cathars (from the Greek word for ‘pure’); its members are also known by the geographic name of Albigeois. Their civilization was extirpated by northern knights under Simon de Montfort, encouraged by the papacy. This extirpation goes by the title of the ‘Albigensian crusade.’ The Inquisition was first founded for the purposes of that crusade, and its ecclesiastical leadership was in the hands of the Dominican order. As Stalin9 said, history is written by the winners, and therefore we have few authentic records of this movement. Most of what we have is the testimony of its adherents under torture. In this century in France there has been a partially successful effort to find out what Catharism was.c Two of Weil’s noblest writings are about the Cathars.10 The reason it is important to mention these historical matters in the present connection is that Coles’s lack of interest or knowledge of them is, I think, determinative of the worst chapter of his book, ‘Her Jewishness.’ Weil was essentially a gnostic saint, and her criticisms of Judaism are similar to those which have appeared through the centuries in gnostic writings: namely, her rejection of the Hebrew Bible and its account of God. Catholics quickly recognized this after her death. Cardinal Daniélou11 edited a book of essays in which she is indicted for her rejection of the Old Testament. Indeed this book goes much further than

c ‘What Catharism Was’ – We are lucky to have a fine historical novel in which the Cathars appear, Zoé Oldenbourg’s The Cornerstone. Her later novel about the Albigensian crusade, Testament of Fire, is such a literal account of the horrors of that extirpation that I can only recommend it to people of strong stomachs.

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Coles’s and Freud’s patronizing psychoanalysis. It directly accuses her of ‘penis envy,’ and her ‘misinterpretation’ of the Hebrew Bible is laid at that door. Unlike Coles, the Catholics have had no doubt that her Christianity was not at one with Western Christianity, but rather with what had been continually rejected by official Western Christianity. Apart from these comments about the history of religions, it is necessary to touch upon the particular details of ‘her Jewishness.’ I am hesitant to do so, because the details of the lives of thinkers are unimportant compared to the universal truths in which they participate. But sanctity is not the same thing as philosophy, and in describing sanctity, details matter. Coles writes of these details in such a way as to impugn that sanctity. Also, the relation between Weil and her parents is one of the tender parts of her greatness, and it is discussed by Coles with a singular lack of feeling. He writes of the hurt to her family when she left Judaism. I talked to Mme Weil at length about this matter. I cannot speak about Dr Weil because I did not meet him, but Mme Weil had obviously been very attached to her husband, and therefore had some right to speak of his opinions. Mme Weil came from a family which had moved west from Russia under the influence of the Enlightenment. Paris was after all the centre of that movement, and of the revolution that had attempted to realize its ends politically. She belonged to the France that believed that human freedom required putting away the superstitions of religion, whether those of Christianity or of Judaism. She early recognized that she had produced two remarkable children. (Her son, André Weil,12 is considered in many quarters to be the greatest mathematician of this century.) She loved the greatness in her daughter, and devoted herself to protecting Simone from its consequences. It was not always easy. When Simone Weil had Trotsky13 to stay with her family, her mother accepted this because her daughter’s ‘left-wing’ opinions seemed only an extension of her particular brand of modern French rationalism. Like many of her generation, Mme Weil had learned to loathe war between 1914 and 1918, particularly from her connection with the wounded patients of her husband, who served the French army as a doctor during the first great massacre. Being a decent rationalist, she had thought of herself as French without any religion. It was almost inconceivable to her to find suddenly that the racism of the gutter had come to power in Germany in 1933. This was a common experience of many progressive Western Europeans. Gershom

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Scholem14 has described it well in his autobiography. Something had come to be in their midst, which they did not identify with a Western country such as Germany, but with the superstitions of a pre-progressive age. Never having thought of herself as in essence Jewish, she now had to realize that she was being forced to consider herself a Jew, because of this modern craziness. At the end of Simone Weil’s life, she indeed used a greeting from Krishna in her letter to her parents. Her parents knew little of her movement to Christianity, and at this difficult time of her dying far away from them, she knew that they might be disturbed or surprised by what had happened to her. But after all, the Bhagavad Gita is an inspired text, and for Simone Weil Krishna and Christ were perhaps the same being. After her daughter’s death, Mme Weil spent her life holding together Simone’s manuscripts, before Camus and Pétrement saw that they were placed in the Bibliothèque Nationale. When I talked to her, she had pondered every line of these manuscripts and thought they were of high truth. Once when I was leaving her flat, she stopped me and repeated Herbert’s15 great poem ‘Love,’ which had been central in her daughter’s life: Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me go slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing. A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I? Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve. You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

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That was not the act of somebody who had been wounded by her daughter’s acceptance of Christ. I have before me Mme Weil’s account, in her own handwriting, of when and where her daughter wrote the ‘Prologue,’16 in which she describes how Christ came to her. Mme Weil wrote it out for me, because there had been some historical confusion as to when the event had occurred. It cuts across what Coles has written about Simone Weil having wounded her parents. It is a document of lucidity and joy. Any confusion she may have experienced by having brought into the world this eagle was utterly subordinated to her acceptance that her daughter had been visited in the flesh directly by Christ. The silliest thing in Coles’s book is what he writes about her letter to Xavier Vallat,d who had the appalling title of Commissioner of Jewish Affairs in the Vichy government. Weil wrote that she could not get a teaching job in Vichy because she was considered Jewish. She says that it is irrational to consider her as Jewish because her intellectual traditions are entirely classical and French. Coles maintains that this was a weaseling letter of a coward denying her Judaism at a time when Jews were being persecuted. It is a long letter of ironic contempt from a wellknown Frenchwoman to a powerful man in a position that Weil knew should not exist in any constitutional government. Of course, such an extreme difference of interpretation could only be decided by a long ‘explication de texte,’ which is not possible in a short review. Two things can be said. 1. Could Weil possibly have expected to get a job after writing such a letter? 2. Does Coles imply that Judaism is a given that one cannot leave? Pétrement describes accurately the content of this letter: If in this letter Simone boldly affirms that she doesn’t consider herself a Jew, it is not in order to disassociate herself in practice from the Jews – she would not disassociate herself from anyone, above all not from people being persecuted, and in Marseilles she did much to help Jews – nor in any way to deny her origins; nor is it to affirm a religious conviction that would have no interest for the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs. Instead, she did this in order to emphasize again the difficulty of defining the

d ‘Her letter to Xavier Vallat.’ – For the letter in full, see Pétrement’s Life, in the French, Volume II, pages 377 to 379; in the English translation, pages 443 to 444.

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word ‘Jew,’ and to show quite clearly that she does not understand its significance and considers the statute concerning the Jews absurd and incomprehensible.17

Of course, the high style of irony is hardly the forte of Americans. The public spirits of the United States are capitalism, imperialism, and a certain form of democracy. Irony is too high a style to be consonant with any of these spirits. The mordant wit that suggests contradiction requires too great an attention for that swift-moving society. Americanpopularized Freudianism has not added to the capacity for irony. This book is indeed a warning to those who write about any ‘kalos kagathos’18 from the position of superiority. One is apt to expose oneself. Of course, Coles has the right and perhaps the duty to defend Judaism. (I use ‘perhaps’ because I do not know whether he is a Jew. If he is, he obviously has the duty to defend Judaism.) Catholics have the right and the duty to defend Western Christianity against Weil’s criticism of it. But the combination of the defence of Judaism with the patronizing tones of the Harvard Medical School is repellent. I am sure that the theologians of Judaism (for example, the Roth brothers in England) have a lot to say about where Judaism is correct and Simone Weil is wrong.19 Theological debate does not sit well with psychiatric imputation as to motive. Beyond matters of debate, it is absurd to impugn the courage of this undaunted woman. Enough about this book. As Simone Weil’s writings are largely in the form of notebooks and essays, it is hard to find one’s way into them. Therefore I hope it will not seem impertinent to mention means of doing so. Simone Pétrement’s biography is much the best. Before sanctity one can either be silent or matter-of-fact. Pétrement’s life is astringent French scholarship at its best. Theoretical comprehension is of course easier than writing about sanctity. For such comprehension, M. Vetö’s La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil is the most careful among many good books. As Professor Vetö is now at Yale, it is to be hoped that his book will be translated into English.20 The centre of what Simone Weil writes is something that human beings must learn for themselves in the terror of thought and prayer. To read her sentence, ‘matter is our infallible judge’ is to understand what Christ meant when he said, ‘I come not with peace but with a sword.’21 At a more theoretical and exoteric level, at a less immediate and there-

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fore more palatable level, she is saying something about what is happening in the Western world. She returns continually to Plato’s statement: ‘How great is the real difference between necessity and the good’ (Republic, 493c). What is given in that sentence cannot but touch what is given in Christian teaching. Weil wrote that she was ceaselessly torn by the contradiction between the perfection of God and the affliction of human beings. How is it possible that human beings are given over to the afflictions of necessity? What is it to contemplate Goodness itself in the light of the afflictions of necessity? She waited upon that contradiction with ceaseless attention. In that waiting she restated the idea of creation, not in a new way in terms of what is given in the Gospels, but in a new way in the sense that her idea has not been primary in modern Western Christianity. The idea of creation is obviously an abyss in which our minds are swallowed up. Despite the absurd contemporary use of the word ‘creativity,’ we cannot think of something coming to be out of nothing. Nevertheless, quite rightly, people have tried to find analogies which can lead us to see as in a glass darkly. For Western Christians – let us say loosely, since Hildebrand22 – creation came to be thought of as an act of self-expansion. For Weil, creation is a withdrawal, an act of love, involved with all the suffering, renunciation, and willingness to let the other be, that are given in the idea of love. For her the passion of God is at one with the creation. In this sense it is one with the teaching about Trinity. It is not possible here to work out how this is so consummately developed in her writings. (To repeat, outside her own writings this has been best done by Vetö.) Nor is it possible to discuss what is thought in the idea of God as love in relation to what is thought in the idea of God as power. It can be said, however, that the two leading forms of Western Christianity are in intellectual chaos. Can one imagine that large elements of Roman Catholicism took and take Teilhard de Chardin23 seriously as a Christian theologian? It is clear that civilizational identity depends on primal religious affirmations, in this case the post-Augustinian self-understanding of Christianity. It is clear that the descent of Western civilizational identity into wild technological scrambling goes with the self-confusions of organized Western Christianity. Moreover Nietzsche’s formulation24 that Christianity produced its own grave diggers in the modern technological rationalists has some historical

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sense to it, but perhaps in a different way than Nietzsche’s positive affirmations would suggest. One must remember that modern technological rationalism was itself more penetrated by Western Christianity than Nietzsche would allow. The self-expansion of the modern technologists attacked certain aspects of Christianity, but took from that which it was attacking the self-expanding power that came forth from the ‘Rex tremendae majestatis,’25 in which creation is utterly defined as power. At a time such as this when on the one hand the Gospels stand in their indubitable perfection, while on the other hand the civilization of the West has become mainly technology it is well to read carefully a thinker of consummate intelligence and love who understood that Christianity becomes meaningless if the creating of God is detached from the passion of God. Simone Weil often speaks of ‘the lamb that was slain from the beginning of the world.’ When in admiration and love I look for a description of Simone Weil, some lines from Crashaw’s26 invocation to Saint Theresa of Avila come to mind: O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dow’r of Lights and Fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;

Notes 1 Robert Coles (1929– ), professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the Harvard Medical School and James Agee professor of social ethics at Harvard. 2 Anna Freud (1895–1982), daughter of Sigmund Freud and British psychoanalyst, was a pioneer in the psychoanalysis of children. She was trained in Vienna and emigrated to England. 3 Simone Pétrement, author of Simone Weil’s biography. 4 See Simone Weil, Waiting on God (New York: Harper and Row 1973), 171: ‘The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially a longing for the Incarnation.’ See also Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 84: ‘Carnal love is a quest for the

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Incarnation. We want to love the beauty of the world in a human being – not the beauty of the world in general, but the specific beauty which the world offers to each man, and which corresponds exactly to the state of his mind and body.’ Proclus Lycaeus (412–485), surnamed ‘The Successor’ or ‘diadochos,’ was a Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, one of the last major Greek philosophers. His is one of the most elaborate, complex, and fully developed Neoplatonic systems. He stands near the end of the pagan Greek development of philosophy, and was extremely influential on later Christian (Greek and Latin) and Islamic thought. See Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (New York: Penguin Books 2003). Eric Voegelin (1901–85), philosopher and historian whose studies ranged from languages, mathematics, and economics to philosophy, law, and political science, fled Germany in 1938 and spent most of his career as a professor in the United States. His publications include Order and History (5 vols.), The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1952), and Anamnesis (1978). Marcion (c.85–c.160), early Christian bishop, founder of the Marcionites, one of the first great Christian heresies to rival Catholic Christianity, was born in Sinope. He taught in Asia Minor, then went (c.135) to Rome, where he perfected his doctrine. Excommunicated from the church in 144, he formed a church of his own, which became widespread and powerful. Marcion taught that there were two gods, the stern, lawgiving, creator God of the Old Testament, and the good, merciful God of the New Testament. He considered the creator god the inferior of the two. Marcion also rejected the real incarnation of Christ, claiming that he was a manifestation of the Father. Joseph Stalin (1878–1953) was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s to his death in 1953 and General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1922–53. The quotation can be found in an essay by George Orwell, published in the English socialist journal Tribune, 4 February 1944, although it has been attributed to Stalin, the historian E.H. Carr, and other writers. See Simone Weil, ‘A Medieval Epic Poem’ and ‘The Romanesque Renaissance,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–1943 (London: Oxford University Press 1962), 35–54. Jean Cardinal Daniélou, SJ (1905–74), theologian and historian, was a member of the Académie Française. See ‘Hellénisme, Judaïsme, Christianisme,’ in J.-M. Perrin, ed., Réponses aux questions de Simone Weil (Paris: Aubier, Éditions Montaigne 1964). André Weil, born 6 May 1906 in Paris, died 6 August 1998 in Princeton, NJ.

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George Grant on Simone Weil He was one of the most influential figures in mathematics (particularly in number theory and algebraic geometry) during the 20th century. Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). See 854n3. Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), German-born Jewish philosopher and historian, is widely regarded as the modern founder of the scholarly study of Kabbalah in academic circles. He became the first Professor of Jewish Mysticism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. See From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken 1980). George Herbert (1593-1633), born in Wales and educated at Cambridge, was a Church of England clergyman from 1630, and has become famous for his distinctive religious poetry. See Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: G.B. Putnam’s Sons 1951), 68. Simone Weil, ‘Prologue,’ in First and Last Notebooks (London: Oxford University Press 1970), 63–7. Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon 1976), 444. Kalos kagathos is an idiomatic phrase used in ancient Greek literature (including philosophy and historiography): ‘good and upstanding.’ Grant is perhaps referring to Cecil Roth (1899–1970), British Jewish historian, the author of many books and the editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica (1965–70). Miklos Vetö, La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil (Paris: Vrin 1971) was translated into English by Joan Dargan as The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil (Albany: Suny Press 1994). Matthew 10:34: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ Hildebrand (c.1020/1025–85). See 683n104. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), Jesuit priest trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, was present at the discovery of Peking Man. His posthumously published book The Phenomenon of Man, which set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the material cosmos, became very popular in the 1960s. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals trans. Walter Kaufmann and K.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage 1967), 159–61. See 847n18. Richard Crashaw (1613–49), English poet, was the writer of ‘Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa.’

Excerpt from Interview by David Cayley – Primarily on Simone Weil

This excerpt is taken from David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995), chapter 8, ‘The Eagle and the Dove,’ 172–87. The conversations that took place in August 1985 were used in the making of a program on Grant on CBC Radio, a three-hour series called ‘The Moving Image of Eternity,’ broadcast on the Ideas series beginning in January 1986.

cayley: Can we speak now about Simone Weil and about what her importance has been for you? grant: Let me start by saying that we’re here in the presence of a being who is quite different from those people we’ve talked about as great thinkers alone. I have no doubt at all that she is, in the traditional categories of the West, a great saint, and you know, many very splendid thinkers aren’t remarkably saintly people, in one way or another. With Simone Weil you have to combine this staggeringly clear intellect with something that is quite beyond the intellect, namely sanctity. And I mean by saint those beings who give themselves away. Now, there’s a low order of giving oneself away which you see in people who are absolutely occupied by a particular vice and have in that sense given themselves away; but I mean giving themselves away in love. Simone Weil to me is the supreme teacher of the relation of love and intelligence, and one must be very hesitant about somebody like this. What is it for a person like myself to look at somebody who exists not just at the level of intelligence but at the level of some thing which is clearly more important, as far as I am concerned – the divine love and that love in human beings. How can I say what I have learned from her?

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Here one lives a fairly ordinary life, doing one’s best, making mistakes, full of vices, etc., and here’s somebody who, in some absolutely majestic way, has passed beyond all that. When one faces a being like Francis of Assisi, or Christ, one passes right outside the great interest in the history of philosophy and things like that. I mean, St Francis – and I take this as a fact – received the stigmata, he received on his body the wounds of Christ because of his love of the afflicted and the poor. Now, I feel that with Simone Weil I’m talking of a being like that, and this is therefore extremely hard. I just wanted to say that first. cayley: You’ve described her as both an intellectual and saint. Is there a tension between her sanctity and the importance she attaches to philosophy? grant: Well, there have been intelligent saints. You can’t be much smarter than St John of the Cross, who was kept by the church in a ghastly cell where he could neither stand up nor sit.1 And yet, if one reads The Ascent of Mount Carmel, it’s extremely intelligent. Certainly Francis is extremely intelligent, but it is true that, in his case, he attacks philosophy outright; he says, you should just be lovingly afflicted, because philosophy takes time. St John of the Cross is nearer to Simone Weil. There isn’t the same conflict in the Indian tradition. There’s a wonderful, serene tranquillity about India in many ways, with all the hunger and wars and things. The greatest tradition of Hinduism has a magnificent, serene tranquillity. I don’t mean by this anything like complacency, I just mean that in the West there is a greater tension than there is in the East. In any event, Simone Weil certainly combines high intelligence with the supremacy of charity. Charity has become such a lousy word, I just like to use love; for human beings, charity is just loving what is other than yourself, so I use that word for that reason. Simone Weil came from an outstanding intellectual tradition. You know how tight the French intellectual tradition is, and she graduated with much higher marks than Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Someone said to me about her brother André that what Einstein is to physics he is to modern mathematics. So she was surrounded by people who combined the wonderfully sharp, clear, French interest in the intellect and the Jewish interest in the intellect, because her family were by tradition Jewish, though not

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believing Jews. Do you remember what Crashaw said about St Theresa: ‘For all the eagle in her, all the dove.’2 Simone Weil is the eagle and the dove, this wonderful, formidable power of intellect, with this life of giving herself away to the afflicted of the world. cayley: One of the questions on which you have acknowledged a debt to Simone Weil is the relationship between necessity and the good. Could you speak about that? grant: Yes, well, this she takes from a famous quotation of Plato’s in The Republic, in which he says that there is an infinite distance which separates the order of necessity from the order of good, and from this quotation so much of her thought comes.3 One means by ‘necessity’ simply that if I tripped, I would fall. Necessity is like gravity, as she says, it’s something that we are all part of: we are all going to die; if you eat too much, like myself, you get fat, etc. And this order of necessity exists also in human things, where we now think our freedom is greater. In politics, there are certain necessities. A lot of people who think about politics think there aren’t, but there are necessities; people are moved by class interests, people are moved by sexual interests, etc. In all realms, there’s necessity. The order of the good enters the human world when human beings are moved by their love of perfection. There have been in our tradition arguments for the being of God, and Weil’s argument, if you want to use that word, is always the argument from perfection, or as it has been called in the tradition, ‘the ontological argument,’ namely that it is clear that human beings cannot get better by their own efforts, they can only get better insofar as they have partaken in an idea of perfection. To her that is an argument for God’s being. And as in Plato, the word good, in its completeness, would be for her an identical word with God, would it not? It just means the same thing. She says about love, and this is an extreme statement but there is something to it: ‘A village idiot who loves the good knows more than Aristotle.’4 Necessity is for Simone Weil that order which God must cross to love God. I don’t like at all language about God which uses personal pronouns, but you don’t improve on those who say ‘God himself’ or ‘God herself’ by saying ‘God itself.’ Therefore, I have a difficulty; I just want to say ‘God,’ and if God is love, then God clearly is not, as I’ve said, a

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simple unity. God is love means that God is love! It means God is loving right now. For love to be perfect to Simone Weil it has to cross an infinite distance; the highest love is that love which crosses an infinite distance. This is what the crucifixion means to her: on the cross Christ expresses his love for his enemies, he expresses his desolation, the cry of dereliction in which he feels cut off from God’s transcendence, and yet he crosses that infinite distance. Simone Weil is very much like that tradition which has been central in parts of Christianity. She is essentially a theologian of the cross. The infinite distance between God and God is necessity. The necessity which God has to cross to love God is the cross.5 That’s what she is saying. It is impossible to think of God as a simple unity if you say that God is love, because love is always a relation.a cayley: Where, by way of contrast, would God be conceived as a simple unity? grant: I think this is what made her leave Judaism. She felt in Judaism that God was thought of too much as a simple unity as indeed would be the case in Islam too. This is Christianity’s criticism of Judaism and Islam, and I want to say it in the gentlest fashion. It explains why Christianity seems in a certain way closer to Hinduism than it does to its fellow religions that arose in the Middle East. cayley: Can you say more about how Simone Weil conceives of God’s relationship to the world? grant: Simone Weil is the being who expresses most deeply, as far as I’m concerned, the moment of God’s absence from the world. In Christian theology there have been two traditions: the positive tradition and the negative tradition. The positive tradition moves to God through the world; the negative tradition moves to God by negating the world. The negative tradition is in its essence Platonism, and the positive tradition

a A point of clarification here: Grant means that God is present in the world and absent from it; this is the distance between God and God. If God is love and therefore a relation and not a simple substance, then there is a difference and a distance between God and God.

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is in its essence Aristotelianism, and certainly Simone Weil is on the side of the negative tradition. The negative tradition is expressed, it seems to me, in her statement, ‘I am ceaselessly torn by the perfection of God and the misery of human beings.’6 The fact that we see here below the affliction of human beings has always been the deepest traditional argument against God’s being. How can you look at this world and say it comes forth from love? It seems to me that almost anybody who has thought at all must have thought of this very early, and Simone Weil was brought up in this extreme and very noble French secularism. Coming to belief in God was for her an entire surprise. Her parents, who loved her very dearly, did not know at the time she died that she believed in God, because when she wrote to her parents she did not use the word Christ. They were very loving, wonderful people, but she thought because they were traditionally Jewish it might offend them, or at least surprise them, so she always used instead the word Krishna, the great incarnate God of India. It is a staggering event which one hardly dares talk about, but she says Christ came down to her as immediately as you and I are sitting here. And I believe this happened; I just think it happened. These things happen very occasionally and are very strange and what are we to say about them? She had been in the Spanish Civil War, she had worked in a motor factory and experienced the extreme unpleasantness of French proletarian life in the 1930s and how the wealthy French exploited the poor. And she says Christ came to her just as immediately as you and I are here in this room. This was three or four years before she died, and it was in terms of this that she turned to look at philosophy as it was given by Plato. You see, in the kind of high French mathematical and philosophic education that she had, she must have learned Descartes and Kant and the modern philosophers just backwards to do as well as she did. But now she wanted to understand what Plato means by the idea of good – that is God, or ultimate purpose – to take it seriously in a way that modern philosophy had never taken it seriously, and to try to understand the affliction of the world in terms of an acceptance of this perfection. She says often that when you contemplate God, you should have in your mind the seventy thousand slaves that Crassus crucified when he put down the slave rebellion in Rome as a symbol of the appalling affliction that has occupied human life.

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cayley: I’m not sure just what it is in Plato that helps Weil, or is necessary for her understanding of her experience of Christ. grant: Well, Plato is the philosopher who says very clearly that the intelligence is enlightened by love. If you take so much of the modern way of looking at things, one says that one knows things by holding them apart from oneself as objects, that love really darkens the intellect. If we’re going to be objective about people, we shouldn’t love them. And there’s some truth in this in the law, for example. Judges should disqualify themselves from decisions regarding their own children. This is perfectly clear. And it is perfectly clear what the objective spirit has achieved in modern science. But for some things you only know them as you love them. This is my fundamental criticism of the contractual view of justice, that justice is a contract between human beings that they have calculated. But if that is so, why should people love justice? People come to know justice by loving it, don’t they? This is presumably what the saints are: people who have done, probably early on, some acts of justice, and then, in the light of these acts, have seen more and more about human beings and gone on to higher and higher acts of justice. I don’t like at all the Western language that holds apart love and justice. You know how people talk this way. It’s a bad form of talking. I would say the crucifixion is a supreme act of justice on Christ’s part – not that he was crucified but that he submits to crucifixion. It’s a supreme act of justice to love his enemies. I just don’t like the view in the Western world that justice is something elementary and then there is love beyond it, because I don’t see, on that view, how there could be any justice. One sees this very clearly in the fact that when people saw other races as non-people – that is, they had no love for them – then they could not be just! cayley: I’m still worrying this question about what it was that Simone Weil took from the ancient Greeks, that completed or complemented what she took from Christianity. grant: Let me say two things: First, if you have an immediate experience of the perfection of God, you then have to think it, do you not? Simone Weil was a perfectly practical person; she had run unions, she

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had worked as a school teacher, she had fought in Spain, and all this had to be thought in relation to this immense experience. She found that what is given in Plato allowed her to think the two together. The second thing I would say is that she had seen in some very deep way that there was something wrong with the modern experiment, both practically and theoretically. She knew the great modern thinkers, as I have said. She knew Descartes and Kant in detail. She had lived with the writings of Marx. She was a friend of Trotsky, a great friend of Trotsky. Trotsky always called her ‘la vierge rouge,’ and they had a very comic and amusing friendship. Her family protected Trotsky and his guards in their own house at the time when assassins from Russia were after him. Now, knowing all this about the modern, she still said a fundamental ‘no’ to modern thought and to much of modern practice. So when she came to this great experience, where was she to find some means of thinking this experience and thinking what she was thinking about modernity, unless she turned to something before modernity, and of course Plato is the supreme before-modernity. cayley: What was the basis of her rejection of the modern? grant: It’s not easy to say, because remember that Simone Weil – and this is the great difficulty about reading her – was immensely busy all her life. During the last years of her life, after her experience of Christ, the war was going on. Her parents had to be got out of France when the Germans approached because they were Jewish, and they would have been killed. So she got them over to America and then came back and tried to get de Gaulle to drop her into occupied France. Therefore, most of her writings are in notebooks. She had been trained by her teacher, if she had half an hour in the day, to always write something down to get her head clear, and consequently, nearly all her thinking is in these small extracts from notebooks. One of the things she wrote that I think is central is quite a short piece, called ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in which she takes Pythagoras as the foundation of Platonism.7 Her mother told me that she wrote it in two days during their escape from France.b These Jews were kept in a hot, hot waiting place in Tunisia, a great big hall b Grant called on Mme Weil during a visit to France in 1963. See Christian, George Grant, 228ff.

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where they were all just packed in. Dr and Mrs Weil were against a wall; so was Simone. They had nothing to do, so she sat down and wrote ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine.’ It is just out-of-this-world. I mean, can you imagine – the bathrooms, the water, etc. They had escaped from France but were still in de facto occupied territory in a crazy place. She wrote things under these conditions. The only writing of hers intended as a book, and even it is not completed, was done in London, just at the end of her life. She was working for de Gaulle, and he asked her to write a piece about what France should be like after its occupation by the Germans was over. She wrote in a very penetrating way about changes in schooling. Of course, de Gaulle thought she was a maniac. He had been thinking of how to organize municipal government and things of that kind. But one thing about the French tradition you have to realize is that quite apart from economic class, there are these people who have gone to the grandes écoles, the great schools of central France, and they all know one another. De Gaulle would have known about Simone Weil from way back because she had been a very great star of these écoles. But when he read what she had written, he could not see that it had any thing to do with any future that this very practically minded, political general could possibly think about. cayley: So you’re saying there’s no simple way to answer the question what was the basis of her rejection of the modern? grant: No, because it just seems to take place. There was a period just before she had to get her parents out, when she had a little spare time to write, and the manuscripts she produced at that time are just a change over from her earlier writings. She’s always writing about about what she calls ‘la source grecque’ and the Pythagorean doctrine, and therefore, it is clear by implication that she has found Descartes and Kant inadequate, but she never says it. cayley: There’s a striking section in The Need for Roots where she says that what is fundamentally at fault in the development of materialistic science is an incorrect notion of providence.c c Weil, The Need for Roots, 242.

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grant: I’ve never thought of it in this language, so say more. cayley: Well, I think she’s saying that the notion of a personal God who providentially and selectively interferes in human affairs creates a split between science and religion. It collapses ‘the infinite distance which separates the order of necessity from the order of good’ and forces science to separate itself from religion, because science, to be science, must insist that the reality it studies is pure necessity and not subject to this kind of capricious intervention. She quotes, in support of her view, the passage in the Gospel of Matthew in which it is said that God ‘makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.’d Weil seems to me to be saying, in other words, that true science and true religion are quite compatible. The trouble comes when religion is corrupted and science reacts by banishing the idea of the good altogether. Is that how you understand her? grant: I think this is exactly what she’s saying, but before I address it, let me first make another proviso. I understand neither ancient mathematics nor modern mathematics, so I have little right to speak about either. Indeed I wrote to her brother, who, as I said, is a very great mathematician, and just asked, ‘Is what she is saying about Greek mathematics and modern science adequate?’ He wrote back that she had gotten one detail wrong about quantum mechanics, but he added that in general her writings on mathematics are to be taken with the greatest seriousness. Now, this is a person who would not say this if he did not think it. I think what you have said is very well put. The division between science and other forms of knowledge is just folly itself, and the separation of science from the idea of the good is certainly the cause of this disunity. But as I said, I am extremely hesitant to speak about this because of my lack of knowledge of mathematics. That’s why I wrote to her brother – because I wanted to know, and he did know. There’s a connection here also with Leo Strauss. Strauss had a friend named Klein, who was a student of Heidegger’s, and he came out here and wrote an outstanding book called Greek Mathematics and the Spirit of

d Matthew 5:45.

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Algebra.8 The Greeks didn’t have algebra; algebra and calculus are the great modern forms of mathematics. Now, I have had students who do know some mathematics read this and explain it to me, but I do not feel confident in talking about it. To understand the difference between modern algebra and Greek geometry and the steps that were taken whereby all mathematics was turned into algebra in the modern world would have required of me a lifetime of study, and I have been thinking about other things. I don’t want to appear to know things I don’t know. cayley: Of course. In this same section of The Need for Roots to which I just referred, Weil says, ‘The true definition of science is this: the study of the beauty of the world.’ Has this idea of the beautiful in her thought been important for you? grant: Yes, this is something that I have come to think about more and more. I realized when I was trying to think what love was that we only love what appears to us beautiful. What was so miraculous about St Francis was that he could find beautiful things that we don’t generally find beautiful. And this was also the thing that came to me as such an enormous surprise about Simone Weil: the absolute centrality for her thought of the doctrine of the beauty of the world. This was somebody who had seen war, so how can one then think the beauty of the world? I’ve been thinking very hard about this, and one thing that has become clear to me is that the paradigm of knowledge given in modern science excludes from its origins the idea that one is given knowledge through love of the beautiful. I see this. I see it, for instance, in Bacon. Bacon, one of the great founders of modern science, says that poetry is just the way we speak when we are trying to convince ourselves the world is pretty when it’s not really pretty. Bacon just says this directly in The Advancement of Learning, and it’s no wonder that this has had such a terrible effect – why art has done so badly in the modern world.9 In the original Greek, poetry is just the word for making; it is strangely translated in the modern word production as ‘leading forth.’ Anything that any human being leads forth in a great work of art is poiesis, it’s poetry. Poetry was supposed to teach people things, teach them the truth about things. And cutting this off, cutting the beautiful off from science, except as an experience of the scientist, has I think had a very terrible effect on the way we look at the world.

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cayley: ‘Cutting it off except as an experience of the scientist’ – you mean that the scientist takes his experience of beauty for a purely subjective feeling? grant: Yes. Scientists say, if they have a formula whereby they can understand the world, that they find the formula beautiful, but they aren’t finding the world beautiful. If you take The Origin of Species, it isn’t telling you the world is beautiful, is it? It is certainly telling one something that is true, but beauty is somehow detached from truth in modernity, isn’t it? You don’t find this cutting off of the beautiful from the true in Plato’s Symposium or Phaedrus. Everybody is interested in art now, but what they expect to learn from it has nothing very much to do with truth. Art has more and more become entertainment, which it clearly is not with Mozart. It entertains; Mozart knew as well as anybody you had to entertain people, and he damn well did, in a marvellous way, but that’s quite different from saying that art finally is entertainment. I remember when the head of the Ontario Arts Council said to me that Figaro was just the South Pacific of its age, and I knew the Ontario Arts Council would never get to first base. South Pacific was an early musical comedy with Mary Martin, and it’s quite an amusing musical comedy, but it is not the greatest comedy ever written, which is Figaro, and which teaches one endlessly about the relation of beauty and truth. cayley: Let me ask a final question about Simone Weil. Her idea of necessity understood both as beauty and affliction, is something you would have been familiar with from when you first read Waiting for God in the early 1950s. Later you read Strauss, and one of the great points Strauss makes is that technology as the overcoming of chance is, in a sense, the overcoming of necessity. Did you in some way connect these two thinkers? grant: Well, I have partaken of these thinkers only partially, but of course all questions are one because truth is one. To deny that God is a simple unity is not to deny that God is a unity and that God is truth. One comes at questions from different directions depending on the accidental and unimportant facts of one’s own life, but that does not mean that one does not have to try and think them together.

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Now, I am trying at the moment to write down something based on Simone Weil’s saying that faith is the experience that the intelligence is enlightened by love. I’m trying to think what this means. It is clear that modern science, or what I would call modern technological science, has not believed that the intelligence is directly illuminated by love. The scientist can love doing what he’s doing, he can love wanting to know what the nucleus is, but she is saying something beyond that, that only in loving something do you know what it is. Therefore, I am trying to write some thing about how the knowledge that the intelligence is enlightened by love has been put aside in our multiversities, and about how it can be reclaimed as knowledge. That’s what all my thoughts are turned on now. Having learned a great deal from Strauss and Heidegger and people like that, I am now almost entirely thinking about what Simone Weil thinks about. I hate to say ‘thinking positively,’ because so many BSers in the United States talk that way – asses talk about thinking positively – but I want to think less about what is wrong with the modern and more about the truth of what is not present in the modern.

Notes 1 For St John of the Cross, see 681n78. 2 For Richard Crashaw, see 845n1. 3 See Plato, The Republic, book 6. See Simone Weil, The Notebooks of Simone Weil, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1956), 402: ‘Necessity is the screen placed between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we can cease to be. We shall never pierce through it unless we understand that God lies beyond at an infinite distance and that good lies in God alone.’ 4 The Grant quotation may be from some other source, but in ‘Human Personality’ Weil writes: ‘A village idiot in the literal sense of the word, if he really loves truth, is infinitely superior to Aristotle in his thought, even though he never utters anything but inarticulate murmurs.’ See Simone Weil, ‘Human Personality,’ in Selected Essays, 1934–43, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press 1962). 5 See Simone Weil, Waiting on God (New York: Harper and Row 1973), 123–4. 6 See ‘The Moving Image of Eternity,’ CBC Ideas series, Part 3, 10 February 1986, produced by David Cayley. Transcript, 19. The exact statement by Weil, which Grant often paraphrased, is in a letter to Maurice Schumann in Gateway to God (ed. David Raper [Glasgow: Collins-Fontana 1974], 64–5): ‘I feel

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an ever increasing sense of devastation, both in my intellect and in the centre of my heart, at my inability to think with truth at the same time about the affliction of men, the perfection of God and the link between the two’ translated from Écrits de Londres, Gallimard). 7 Simone Weil, ‘The Pythagorean Doctrine,’ in Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks (London: Ark Paperbooks, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987). 8 Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1968). 9 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, book 2, part 4, iii.

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Book Reviews Published in the Globe and Mail

Between 1 March 1975 and 7 May 1983 Grant published nine book reviews in the Globe and Mail. We have decided to publish these together in the order in which they were written, with the publication date attached to each review. The subjects covered in what are really review essays rather than simply reviews reflect Grant’s broad interests, particularly his deep knowledge of British history.

Review of The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot: Volumes V–VIII, The Political Writings, edited by Norman St John-Stevas

This review appeared in the Globe and Mail 1 March 1975, 31, under the heading ‘If you crave bourgeois liberal cream, Bagehot is your man (bajet).’ The volumes were published by The Economist in 1974.

English liberalism is worth thinking about, even as its presence fades in the world. It was one of the ways of existing that spread modernity around the planet, and as such must be understood if one is to understand modernity. Also it was one of the more attractive practical forms of modernity, particularly when one compares it with the alternatives which are taking its place. Now that the country of its origin has ceased to be so influential, that liberalism continues to be a present force of belief through what remains of it in American life. Indeed one of the graces (if not saving graces) of the United States lies in its legal institutions, and they owe so much to England and to English liberalism. This is clearly also true of Canadian political and legal life. At the height of English power in the middle of the nineteenth century, Walter Bagehot (1826–77) was her greatest journalist. He was The Economist – that periodical voice of the educated bourgeoisie. The Economist is now bringing out twelve volumes of his collected writings; the present four are his political writings. They are the work of a great journalist and attractive reading for anyone who wants to know what bourgeois liberals were thinking at their educated height. The volumes are appropriately dedicated to the late Lord Crowther;1 appropriately, because Crowther, like Bagehot, used The Economist to express the world-wide interests of the educated bourgeois, the difference being that in our generation the bourgeois have had less educated minds. Bagehot is often claimed by politicians to be a conservative rather

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than a liberal. This is nonsense. All the great foundations of English liberalism are assumed in his writings. He takes progress for granted; he believes that the heart of public life is commerce and production; he assumes that society is based on contract. He hardly has a word to say about Christianity or the Church, and in what he does say clearly assumes it is nonsense. Nonsense may be useful because it gives cohesion to society. But it is still nonsense, and we have been taught that by modern science, particularly Darwin. The journalists who write of Bagehot’s ‘conservatism’ identify with the English Conservative party of the last hundred years, which has believed that within the pervasive assumptions of liberalism it could govern the country with more recognition of the facts of life than its more consistent and ideological opponents. The victory of capitalist liberalism was so complete in England after 1689 that no serious opposition to that blossoming way of life existed in the English-speaking world. For instance, when people appeal to Edmund Burke as a conservative, they are showing their ignorance. He was a whig from first to last. He may have disliked Rousseau’s advanced liberalism, but he was essentially a liberal of the Lockean tradition. Men such as Swift and Johnson who opposed the dominant liberalism on rational grounds were outsiders with no voice in the public realm.2 Bagehot was a shrewd journalist who saw the limits of the politically possible much more clearly than ideologues such as J.S. Mill but his basic assumptions were in essentials those common to English liberals.3 For example, Bagehot appealed to ‘reverence’ as necessary to the cohesion of society. But he did not mean by reverence an attitude toward the eternal order, but an attitude to the royal family. Reverence was seen simply as a worldly necessity to keep things comfortable for the bourgeois. Reverence was not the matrix of human nobility, but the matrix of comfortable self-preservation. Indeed what is particularly interesting in Bagehot is that when he passed beyond English liberalism he did not appeal to the great traditions (e.g. Christianity), but moved forward towards the more explicit formulations of modernity which were going to break into the world with Nietzsche. He was, of course, not a great comprehensive thinker as was Nietzsche. After all it was not the destiny of the English to need great thinkers after Hobbes and Locke. But Bagehot was remarkably aware in a realistic way of the forces of human passion and instinct

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which shape society, and which were so forgotten in the utilitarian psychology of his day. For example, the private and unspoken bedroom always seems to be there as a presence for Bagehot, whereas it is just absent in J.S. Mill’s writing. (Perhaps in the light of Mill’s relation to Harriet Taylor it was in fact absent for Mill.)4 Behind all the public world of contract and progress and commerce, Bagehot was aware of the tides of instinct which are men and women too, and which must be taken into account in our political judgments. But his account of this recognition does not point him ‘conservatively’ to what was known of this before the age of progress, but points him to what is going to come forth in the great German thinkers. His rejection of utilitarian psychology makes him nearer to Freud than St Augustine. In terms of his own country, the person who was going to carry this side of Bagehot even further was Oscar Wilde.5 Bagehot was a professional journalist as well as a banker. He wrote and wrote and wrote. These four volumes contain essays on nearly all the political questions of Europe, America, and Asia exercising his day. Being a lazy Canadian, I feel both tired and guilty just picking them up. Out of the mass, two central writings emerge as most important: ‘The English Constitution’ in volume V and ‘Physics and Politics’ in volume VII. In ‘The English Constitution’ we find the writing of a very shrewd journalist who has lived thoughtfully near the centre of a ruling class and ponders the structure of government which allows his regime to function. (How typical and how right of Bagehot to call it the English and not the British constitution.) It is an account of how English government works in the period between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867. Bagehot’s own class, the property owning bourgeois, are more and more in charge, and in charge of a political regime which he considers far the best in the world. He interprets to his own class what it is which makes that regime so successful, and how careful that class must be not to upset the very subtle balancing of both powers and illusions which allows bourgeois parliamentarianism to work. He is above all saying to his own class that bourgeois ‘economism’ is not self-sufficient. The bourgeois must understand and cultivate a generous politics. This description of Bagehot is not meant nastily. One does not have to agree with him that this is the highest political regime ‘of the evolutionary process,’ to recognize that it was quite a good political regime. Indeed

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there is something rather fine in the confident way that he thinks his own nation and class are just the best ... For an empiricist and liberal he has a strong sense of the common good. It may be a vulgar account of the common good, but it is fairly decent and moderate. The events of the twentieth century can surely convince us that Nietzsche is at least wrong on this score: there are worse things to be dreaded in politics than vulgarity, as long as that vulgarity has some touch with moderation. ‘Physics and Politics’ is a more theoretical book – the journalist attempting to be philosophical. Bagehot is here trying to put together the moral teachings of English ‘political economy’ with what is spoken about human existence itself in Darwinism. What are the political requirements of progress, when progress is thought within a Darwinian scheme? He cannot be blamed for his failure to overcome the dilemmas which are at the heart of this difficult question. Who in the English-speaking world since his day has done any better? Indeed most have done a lot worse. Bagehot is in the dilemma that he wants to hold on to such virtues as moderation and justice which come to him from the secularized Protestantism of England; at the same time he wants to think as a modern. One can only be grateful that he holds on to the tradition of English decency by sacrificing consistent thought. Bagehot was a journalist in the sense that Walter Lippmann was.6 They took the passing show of pressing events and interpreted them to the dominant class of their powerful societies. They appealed to them to respond to those events with the best common sense they were able. Bagehot did this more consummately than Lippmann just because he lived at a time when he was given a much better education than Lippmann, and also at a time when the class he was appealing to had much deeper moral roots than the products of Yale and Harvard. As the writings of a journalist of a hundred years ago, it might be thought that these present volumes should only be read by those who still have some interest in studying history for its own sake. This is not so. The full weight of the ambiguities of modernity have often been avoided by the prosperous classes of the English-speaking world. But they now fall ineluctably on that world. In such a situation, it is important that some people think what the assumptions of our political tradition have been, in a more than propagandist sense, whether pro or contra. In Bagehot’s journalism, the assumptions of English liberalism are exposed to us in a way which allows us to think them.

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Notes 1 Geoffrey Crowther, Baron (1907–72), English economist, was editor of The Economist 1938–56. 2 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, and clergyman. See ESJ, 263n43. On Samuel Johnson, see ESJ, 265n54. 3 John Stuart Mill (1806–73), philosopher and social reformer, was a leading figure in the British utilitarian tradition. 4 Mill maintained a Platonic relationship with Harriet Taylor, a married woman, for nearly twenty years. They married in 1851, two years after her husband’s death. 5 Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854–1900), Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, poet, and wit. 6 Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), American liberal journalist, was one of the founders of the New Republic magazine (1914). He was chosen by president Woodrow Wilson to assist in developing his Fourteen Points peace program and was a member of the United States delegation at the Paris Peace Conference (1919). He became internationally famous for his nationally syndicated column ‘Today and Tomorrow,’ published in the New York Herald Tribune 1931–61. Lippmann opposed both the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Review of The Gladstone Diaries: Volumes III and IV, 1840–1847, 1848–1854, edited by M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew

Globe and Mail, 20 September 1975, 35, under the heading ‘Gladstone the elemental – the scourge and the proper ordering of the passions.’ According to Sheila Grant her husband admired Gladstone greatly – much more than he did Disraeli – for his principles, particularly his approach to the Irish question, and defended him against all attacks.

Gladstone is like Tolstoy, the only word for him is elemental. Their lives present the elements of what it is to exist humanly and lay before us the grandeur and greatness of those elements. The old phrase ‘larger than life’ will not do, because it has a note of envy in it. Rather such people show us how large life is. Tolstoy is always present in the Russian history of the last 50 years of the nineteenth century; Gladstone is in English politics from the 1830s till nearly 1900, and his figure increasingly dominates that politics. Tolstoy was a very great artist; Gladstone a very great ruler. Yet it is more than simply greatness in their vocations that gives them this fascination of the elemental. Their fascination lies in the sheer presence of humanity unfolding such unexpected potentialities. This is not to say that their grandeur can be comprehended within Nietzsche’s account of greatness as ‘beyond good and evil.’ As they rush and totter, bewildered and ecstatic, their greatness is unfolded utterly as under their encounter with God. This does not mean, God knows, that either of them is an exemplar of moral perfection, either publicly or privately. One remembers that a member of Gladstone’s Cabinet said that he did not mind the old man always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but he did object to the old man thinking that God had put it there.

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In these volumes we have Gladstone’s account of scourging himself in his forties, to free himself from the impurity of reading pornography. (What would it be like today if it were known that William Davis scourged himself because he felt ‘my trusts are Carnal’?1 It would be tittered about in all the media and his opponents would get prominent psychiatrists to issue tut-tutting statements of superiority about how the sad man was too ill-adjusted for public life.) Indeed neither Gladstone nor Tolstoy produced that wonderful and reserved awe one feels before the saints as lives possessed by the supernatural in a way that ours are not. Neither do they produce that respect which is owed to the great contemplative philosophers. Rather they give us joy because their lives play out in full intensity the immense issues of piety, of regret, of ecstasy, of passion, of responsibility, of achievement, which are also played out in our own lives within a small scale. Their follies make them impossible in an unforgettable way; our follies in a small way. Their accomplishments are amazing; but our accomplishments also count. They show that encounters with good and evil are unavoidable and their successes are as wild as their hypocrisies. But it is always the same world as our own. With these people we are encountering more the presence of Elizabeth I than that of Simone Weil.2 Greatness such as this is indeed under good; but nobility is not sanctity. For example, it must be remembered that the Greeks use the same word for noble and for beautiful. Men and women such as Tolstoy or Gladstone always have a remarkable physical presence. It is not accidental that the beauty of Gladstone’s masculinity was reported as breathtaking. When one thinks how gentle and harmless Anglicanism has become, it is good to remember that Gladstone’s great draughts of light and torment were given utterly within our tradition. These present volumes are numbers three and four of the diaries which Gladstone left in the hands of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and which are now being published under the direction of an academic committee at Oxford. Each volume is about 700 pages and together they cover the period from 1840–1854. When one thinks that Gladstone dominated English politics till 1894, one can imagine what a feast awaits those who survive for the production of the rest. The books are well produced both editorially and physically. There is a long and able introduction to the third volume by H.C.G. Matthew, which is only marred by the slight sense that it would have been better for all con-

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cerned if Gladstone had been a shrewd utilitarian humanist such as Maynard Keynes or Harold Wilson.3 They do not seem to me, however, books to be bought by ordinary people like myself, but rather by libraries and book collectors. Borrow them from libraries and dip into them as a wise preparation for the night. This is not only because they are inevitably expensive these days, but also because the vast percentage of the entries are abbreviated memos of his enormous days, lists of people and meetings, of his staggering correspondence, of family duties, of the place of his devotions etc. ... These are interspersed only occasionally by long statements of the greatest interest, analysing political crises and problems, his journeys in Europe, the immensities of his life of prayer or the tumults of his passions concerning sexuality and ambition. Each page is admirably explained in editorial footnotes so that the panorama of English nineteenth century upper class life lies before us in detail. Of course, as soon as these diaries appeared recently they took on a popular interest because of Gladstone’s account of his sexual turmoil. A crisis in this turmoil extended over the end of the 1840s to the beginning of the 1850s, and was connected with economic difficulties in the family, and with secular and ecclesiastical controversies in the public realm. Many of us have sexual crises when there are other causes of exacerbation in our lives. As always, what was so wonderful in Gladstone was that this crisis was taken to the heights of intensity, au grand serieux. Its manifestations were twofold. First a group of Anglican friends had an association the purpose of which was to persuade prostitutes to give up their way of earning their living. Gladstone spent a lot of time in central London talking and taking tea with these girls in their rooms at night. What pressed on him was that although he and the girls did not have intercourse, he was nevertheless transported by desire for them during the conversations. Secondly, in his enormous reading and book buying, he started to be interested in books which appeared to him pornographic, because the reading of them excited him sexually. (They seem to have been classical and Restoration writing, rather than pictures.) He turned to scourging himself, to subdue such reading. The diary is often marked with the sign of the scourge. The scourging was always related to the pornography and not to his conversations with the girls, which were to continue throughout his later life, even while he was Prime Minister. When as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was

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approached by a blackmailer concerning these conversations, he immediately turned the blackmailer over to the police and the courts. These accounts by Gladstone of his sexual turmoil have produced much interest on their publication a century and a quarter later. Other people’s sexuality has always been of interest, but never more so than in bored, democratic North America. Behind the production of a little excitement in the suburbs lies theoretically the partly concealed antiChristian animus of the still dominant Freudian psychiatry in the United States. Both behaviourists and Freudians have an interest in explaining the religion of men such as Gladstone as an obvious epiphenomenon of their frustrations. It is to be expected that with the publication of his diary the psycho-historians centred at Harvard University are going to have a field day with Gladstone. They will explain the politics of this great ruler and the prayers of this great pilgrim within the categories of psychoanalysis. The best of them, Professor Erik Erikson, has already put a great politician and pilgrim of our era, Gandhi, in his place under the rubric of psychoanalysis.4 A lesser practitioner of this art has even made Richard Nixon sympathetic by his interpretations of that sad man.5 What is one to think when the horizons of Cambridge, Mass. attempt to comprehend the horizons of Gladstone? But beyond this: how far can even the fine ironic atheist Jew from Vienna stand above and comprehend the causes of the life of a great political practitioner, of those of a great artist and technologist such as Leonardo. Freud’s arrogance led him to some startling claims of historical interpretation and these claims are being extended from the pettier standpoint of American academia. The question is not whether psychoanalysis tells us anything about the development of our sexual life. Obviously it does (although exactly what this is needs some careful definition in light of its large claims). But the claim of psychoanalysis to dominate the study of great historical figures raises the pressing questions: what effect will this assumption have on the coming forth in our society of great politics and great religion, great art and great philosophy? This is in no sense to imply that the upper class Victorian account of sexuality given in Gladstone’s society was a good one in terms of which to live in and through sexual crises. For example, the restraints upon intercourse during pregnancy and nursing were clearly not in the best interests of marriage. Nevertheless, considering the contemporary tit-

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tering that has gone on about Gladstone’s difficulties, several points can be made. First, Gladstone seems to have had a remarkably successful marriage and family. Catherine Gladstone was a beautiful, loved and loving woman, of great judgment, from whom her husband learnt much in their discussion of political life. Secondly, for all one’s hesitations about much of the Victorian framework, there is one inescapable question with which Gladstone came to grips – the facing of which is singularly absent in the writers about democratic sexuality. At the simplest level, this question is how to achieve a proper ordering of the passions without corrupting the liberation of eros towards the eternal. At a deeper level, one can use Gladstone’s own language: how can monogamy be transfused by purity? (Obviously, I do not mean by purity anything to do with abstention from the full claims of sexuality.) The prodigious call to perfection which is at the centre of Christianity is made to men and women both inside and outside marriage, and the claims of that call have always something to do with eros, whether it be sexual, artistic, philosophical or political. Gladstone’s tottering bewilderment as he plunges hectically through the full variety of life in the light of that claim, is certainly not the great response, but it is wonderfully noble and human. Thirdly and immediately, it must be pointed out that at the height of his scourging, Gladstone produces in one year the most famous English-speaking budget, which opened up new vistas of fiscal policy for industrial nations; he reviews at length in the leading intellectual journal, Montalembert’s Des intérêts catholiques au XIXeme siècle;6 he pays long attention to his wife’s patrimony, and his children’s development; he is a central figure in the Cabinet and Parliament; he translates Farini’s Lo Stato Romano;7 he carries on his vast correspondence with all sorts and conditions of people in church and state; etc. etc. Cracks about the Protestant ethic do not comprehend such achievement. At the public level, the diaries are concerned with the movement of Gladstone’s thought and practice as he brings his traditional Christianity to confront the necessities of the new industrial society. His fine generosity makes him give up institutional arrangements he has greatly loved because he knows that the new industrial situation must be met. What is implicit in these early diaries will become clearer in the later ones, as Gladstone becomes the archstone of the Liberal Party. He is, after all, the greatest Liberal. One looks forward to reading the later dia-

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ries and watching this noble and highly intelligent figure rush elementally into the waves of politics and passion which break around him.

Notes 1 William Grenville Davis (1929– ), lawyer and politician, was premier of Ontario 1971–1985. Elected as a Progressive Conservative member for Brampton in 1959, he became education minister in 1962 and presided over an extraordinary decade of educational change. 2 On Simone Weil, see 771–879. See also ‘In Defence of Simone Weil,’ an essay reviewing Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage by Robert Coles (855–66). 3 John Maynard Keynes, Baron (1883–1946), English economist, journalist, and financier, was best known for his economic theories on the causes of prolonged unemployment, advocating a remedy for economic recession based on a government-sponsored policy of full employment. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 351n36. (James) Harold Wilson, Baron (1916–95), English Labour politician, was prime minister of Great Britain 1964–70 and 1974–76. 4 Erik Homburger Erikson (1902–94), American psychoanalyst and professor, studied at Harvard with Anna Freud and taught and trained psychiatrists at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, San Francisco, and the Menninger Institute. His best-known works are Childhood and Society (1950) and Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958). 5 Grant is alluding to Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry (1972). 6 Charles Forbes René, comte de Montalembert (1810–70), French liberal Catholic historian and politician, wrote the pamphlet ‘Les intérêts catholiques au XIXeme siècle’ in 1852. 7 Luigi Carlo Farini (1812–66), Italian statesman, wrote Lo Stato Romano in 1851. Gladstone’s translation in four volumes was entitled The Roman State: From 1815 to 1850 (London: J. Murray 1851–4).

Review of Essays on Politics and Society, Volumes XVIII and XIX, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by John M. Robson

Globe and Mail, 6 August 1977, 30. The books were published by the University of Toronto Press in 1977.

It is appropriate that the University of Toronto should be issuing the definitive edition of the collected works of John Stuart Mill. The formative ideas of that university in its heyday were essentially Millian. In his introduction to these volumes, Professor A. Brady points out again and again that Mill was a ‘rationalist.’1 What he is saying is that Mill’s account of ‘reason’ is the same as that which dominated the University of Toronto. That is what ‘rationalist’ is. Indeed university life in Canada, before the American invasion of the sixties, was largely congruent with Mill the archetypal British bourgeois philosopher. This was true, not only of our intellectual life, but of our politics. Just think of people like Mackenzie King, L.B. Pearson, O.D. Skelton – progress as technology, liberty as individualism and property.2 These two volumes (XVIII and XIX) are made up of Mill’s writings on politics and society, except for his Principles of Political Economy which is in a separate volume. The two central pieces are his long essay On Liberty (1859) and his book Considerations on Representative Government (1861) – the most influential writings about politics coming from Britain at the height of its power in the nineteenth century. Many other shorter pieces are made easily available in these volumes. Above all, it is good to find Mill’s two long essays on de Tocqueville on Democracy in America.3 Here is Mill coming to terms with a great writer of his age. At a time when those of us of British tradition are called on to reassess our past, it is useful to have the writings of its most influential secular expositor laid before us in such clear and handsome form. Professor

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J.M. Robson is to be congratulated as the chief textual editor of this collected edition.4 All the labour of presenting the works efficiently and accurately has been well done. The volumes have been competently and pleasantly printed by the U of T Press. They are not expensive, considering the price of things these days. It is all too easy for a person of my temperament, thoughts and convictions to describe J.S. Mill as a figure of high comedy. Through the decades from 1830 to 1870 he lectured the English people on how they must improve themselves. This is, of course, a very familiar role for ‘intellectuals’ in a society with Protestant traditions, and would not alone make Mill a figure suitable to the talents of Aristophanes or Jane Austen. Rather it is that he dons the robes of justice, while at the same time his account of the whole leaves no reason why anybody should take seriously an appeal to justice. The mantle of the tireless preacher is worn without any seeming recognition that if what he is preaching is taken seriously there is no reason why it is good to be just. Mill is indeed the very archetype of the secularized Protestant. He wants it both ways. He is part of the long tradition of English empiricism, and affirms that pleasant life in space and time is what matters; at the same time he affirms a call to justice as rights, which comes forth from the very Protestantism which he rejects theoretically. Indeed, in his attempt to have it both ways, he decently tried to improve the utilitarianism of Bentham and his father,5 in which he had been educated. In their utilitarianism, happiness meant the sum of pleasures, and pleasures were to be calculated quantitatively. Although the anointed successor of this doctrine, Mill cannot quite accept it, because to him some pleasures are to be encouraged in society, while others discouraged. He therefore introduces into his utilitarianism the doctrine of higher and lower pleasures. But by wanting at the same time both a teaching about higher and lower pleasures and his empiricism, he becomes inconsistent. He is too secularist to give up utilitarianism; he is too Protestant to give up higher pleasures. The comedy is for a philosopher to sacrifice consistency to decency. He continually inveighs against the reactionary results stemming from the dogmatic religion of his country (that is, Protestantism), while his intuitive and imaginative responses are tied to the very religion he inveighs against. The pedantry of his expository style combines the exhortations of the pulpit with the flat substance of secularism, so that he achieves the very difficult result

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of making de Tocqueville appear a bore. Indeed the comedy appears not only from his thought but from his life. Here is a man who affirms that the purpose of life is maximizing pleasure, and yet may never have achieved intercourse in his long years with Harriet Taylor.6 Mariage blanc is a strange enough conception even within the more austere reaches of Christianity and Judaism, but it is even stranger in a man who lectured his compatriots on maximizing pleasure. Nevertheless, to approach Mill as a figure of comedy is worse than inadequate, it is intellectually irresponsible. Here is a man who articulated the political thinking of the dominant class of the dominant society of his era, and at a time when that class stood at the height of its world influence. One is not implying the truth of Hegelianism, if one states that the philosophy of a world historical class must be looked at with high seriousness. By seriousness I mean that one must first look for what is true in such an articulation. Any class which has been greatly influential in the world has incorporated some aspect of political truth in the formation of its mission. A century before Mill, that shrewd philosopher, Montesquieu, had said that the highest regimes of the Western world had been the Athenian and the English.7 The modern was higher than the ancient, because the English had wisely substituted the pursuit of commerce for the pursuit of honour as the pulsating heart of their constitutional regime. The pursuit of commerce was the best foundation of a free political order. It may be that the earlier voices of English secular liberalism, Locke in particular, were more comprehensive, more consistent, subtler than Mill in formulating the principles of the regime that Montesquieu so praised. But in Mill the articulation comes forth when this class was fully realizing its destiny, and it includes the idea of progress in a way that Locke did not. Therefore one must try to look at what is being said of truth in Mill’s thought. Moreover, whatever needs to be thought about the inadequacy of bourgeois liberty, the regimes that have blossomed as later forms of modernity, for example communist and national socialist regimes, have been so much worse than the plutocratic democracies that one cannot but look with some sympathy at Mill’s articulations. Whatever barrenness there was among the bourgeois English in such forms of activity as music and contemplation, politically they have been the best that modernity has to offer.

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Indeed, for those of us who live in English-speaking regimes, there is a particular need to think about Mill’s principles. Despite the disintegrations and contradictions of our regimes, liberal principles are the only political principles we’ve got. What other principles could possibly give more cogency to our processes than something quite close to what Mill is talking about? And beyond the practical, it is true that ‘the owl of Minerva only begins to stretch its wings in the dusk.’8 If our dusk is the twilight of our liberal regimes, then the stretching of any remaining philosophical wings must include letting those principles lie before us. In his essay On Liberty Mill states clearly the central affirmation of any modern liberal regime. The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used by physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.9

To many of the best people in our society, that principle is fundamental to our politics, and so self-evidently true that it is outside thought – the foundation stone of liberal regimes. What is necessary is not to think about it, but to see how it can best be implemented in full recognition of the difficulties in advanced technological societies. It is so selfevident that to think about its truth is a silly waste of time, worthy of irresponsible professors who should be kept busy with some productive research. Yet the passion of astonishment perhaps cannot finally be destroyed even in America. To let this principle lie before one and ponder its truth is first to ask what is being said in it about human beings. Why are humans beings such as to merit regimes of freedom? It was indeed these kinds of questions that Mill did not ask, largely it seems because his confidence in his world excluded him from the passion of astonishment. He could combine his secularism with his care for the rights of the individual without being astonished at that combination.

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In our era, however, when the individual is so terribly threatened (literally torn from the mother’s womb), that combination appears more astonishing. The question of the fundamental principles of a decent regime arise in a more primal way than they could for Mill. One is grateful that the University of Toronto is bringing out the texts of a significant ancestor. Scholarship is not thought, and indeed is generally in our current multiversities the enemy of thought, because it is used as a substitute. But scholarship can sometimes be a propaedeutic to thinking. If these volumes lead some people to think about the fundamental propositions of our secular liberalism, they will have been worth producing.

Notes 1 Alexander Brady (1896–1985), professor of political science at the University of Toronto. 2 On William Lyon Mackenzie King, see 134n5. On Lester Bowles Pearson, see 116n3. Oscar Douglas Skelton (1878–1941), Canadian political economist and public servant, taught at Queen’s from 1909–25, and as under-secretary of state for external affairs (1925–41) was the architect of the modern department of external affairs. His publications included Socialism: A Critical Analysis (1911) and Life and Letters of Sir Wilfrid Laurier (2 vols., 1921). 3 Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) travelled to America in 1831 and wrote his famous Democracy in America (1835, 1840). 4 John M. Robson (1927–95), professor of English at Toronto, was the editor of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1963–91). 5 Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), English jurist and philosopher, was one of the world’s most effective reformers. He founded the philosophy known as utilitarianism, although he preferred to call it the ‘greatest happiness principle.’ He equated happiness with pleasure in the broad sense, and he believed it was possible to calculate the best possible course of action, including legislation, with a view to maximizing ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’ James Mill (1773–1836), Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist, J.S. Mill’s father, was a leading proponent with Jeremy Bentham of utilitarianism. 6 See 886n4.

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7 Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), French philosopher and jurist, after visiting England and studying Locke, published his influential De l’esprit des lois (1748), in which he praised the English constitution. 8 T.M. Knox, Philosophy of Right by G.W.F. Hegel, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1958), 13. 9 On Liberty with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 13.

‘Torture in Greece,’ Review of The First Torturer’s Trial 1975 by Amnesty International

Globe and Mail, 11 June 1977: 41. The book is available through Amnesty International, Ottawa.1

Torture is obviously the central crime against justice. Justice is rendering others their due. The shattering of the moral will by the systematic infliction of pain is the most complete denial that anything is due to human beings. Indeed justice is affirmed in the fact that all of us, when we suffer injustice, cry from the centre of our souls that this is not our due. And this cry must never ring more terribly than from those who endure sustained torture. When I have met people who have so endured there is always a grim distance in their eyes which is the recognition that they have suffered the inexcusable. Clearly torture is most unjust when it is employed by the state. Yet it is a useful means for any government. Therefore as torture is at the same time both useful and a crime against justice, its control is a continuing problem. As its limitation must always be difficult of achievement, the proper means towards that limitation is one of the key questions of political philosophy. The present volume is an account of the trial in 1975 of 32 Greek military police officers and soldiers on charges of acts of torture, carried out under the rule of Greece by the junta of colonels from 1967–74. It is an appalling account. As torture is the temptation of all governments, it is well to read this record as to what takes place when a government overtly throws away limitations upon what it is permitted to do. The record of this trial is of particular significance, because it is rare in our era for regimes which have indulged in massive torture to have then been brought down, so that their record could be exposed to the light of day.

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Most torture in the modern world takes place under regimes which are not likely to be brought down. In this case the regime fell because of its folly towards Archbishop Makarios, and therefore its crimes have been exposed.2 Decent people owe Amnesty International a debt for presenting an English record of this trial about what happens when a regime finds it useful to put aside limitations upon torture. It is an exemplary document which should be read by students and teachers in our law faculties and police academies, as an example of what above all needs to be politically avoided, and as a preparation for thought as to how such avoidance is achieved. Who were responsible? As torture should be forbidden against anybody, whether they be ‘Fascists’ or ‘Communists’ or whatever, this is a much more important question than who were the victims. At the top were the leaders of the junta who were faced by problems of the greatest political difficulty. They lived in a society on the edge of the eastwest conflict; they were nationalists who envisioned their opponents as betraying their country to a foreign empire. They believed that a high level of public order was necessary if they were to modernize their country quickly without it losing its national traditions. From this they were led into the belief, so prevalent in all the varying forms of modern thought, namely that if one’s ends are good, one has the right to achieve them by any means. Underneath the leaders were the officers who were actually responsible for these abominations. From this report one gets the sense that when ‘political necessities’ unleash torture, there is a natural tendency for those who get pleasure from the infliction of pain to gravitate to where these methods of investigation and prosecution are taking place. The attempt to limit this terrible tendency is therefore one of the key responsibilities of those who are the final guardians of law and order in any society. At the lowest level were the soldiers who carried out orders from their officers; this was for me the greatest point of tragedy in the report. Young conscripts were trained to be torturers by having been themselves tortured in their training. Always the plea in court was that those responsible were just carrying out orders, and indeed blame is a quite inadequate response to such a report. Blame is generally the language of self-righteousness when it comes from people in our easier situation. The essential lesson of this report cannot be blame, but rather the neces-

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sity that those responsible for investigation and prosecution and punishment in any society should be educated as to what actions are impermissible, and why they are impermissible, and should be aware that they are open to prosecution when they pass beyond the limits of the permissible. In Canada, which may be moving towards more stringent necessities, care about such education has become a priority. In highly advanced societies, public decency depends above all on the medical, legal and police professions. Their religious education is the central core of the control of torture. One cannot be optimistic about that core, because of the weakness of such education in these professions. This education is the sustaining force behind formal constitutional guarantees. In the twentieth century discussion of torture has been too often carried on within the framework of ideology. People of the ‘left’ affirm that torture is a phenomenon of the ‘right,’ [who in turn] concentrate on the extremities of the communists, and gloss over their own extremities. In the ‘democratic’ world it is often implied that we have passed beyond torture, and that it is only a phenomenon of non-democratic regimes. Such ideological talk makes people forget that torture is a political problem at all times and places. In the modern era it is returning not only in its old form but in new forms. The quick changes and expansions consequent on technology make the maintenance of public order difficult, and torture an invitingly useful instrument. At a subtler level, the central driving force of our society is the science which puts nature ‘to the question,’ and why should that ‘putting to the question’ stop with nonhuman nature, when it is useful or convenient to control human beings? Despite the advantages of our English-speaking constitutional systems, all kinds of new forms of social control are arising which verge on torture or are directly torture. The growth of deprogramming in North America is a simple example. Our torture of non-human species grows and is taken for granted. Beyond the pressing needs of practice, thoughtful human beings are ceaselessly torn by the contradiction between the perfection of God and the misery of man. Torture is the height of that misery. The fact that the central symbol of Christianity is an instrument of torture has made that religion the supreme way of contemplating that contradiction. But one must think about it in the realities of injustice which are going on now. Amnesty International does a notable service in opposing torture in

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whatever regime it arises. One aspect of that opposition is bringing out books such as this which keep the reality before us.

Notes 1 Amnesty International, founded (1961) by British lawyer Peter Benenson, is the world’s largest international organization for defending human rights. 2 (Mihail Kristodoulou Mouskos) Makarios (1913–77) was archbishop and primate of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus and president of Cyprus (1960–74, 1974–7). On 15 July 1974 the ruling military junta in Greece staged a bloody coup in Cyprus to achieve immediate union with Greece. Makarios, who had sought a long-term process leading to union, was deposed, leading to a Turkish military intervention. Makarios returned to Cyprus after the fall of the junta.

Review of The Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, edited by William Christian

Globe and Mail, 31 May 1980, E12, under the subheading ‘A good read. But the best way to digest these ideas is to take a few each night and savour them.’ The book was edited by William Christian1 and published by the University of Toronto Press in 1980.

H.A. Innis was a Canadian who was outstanding at what he did, by any standards anywhere in the world.2 He became a famous historian of the fur, fish and lumber trades early in his life. But he did not stick with his specialism. By the end of his life he was writing books which looked deeply at the question: what is a human being? For example, his thoughts about the different means of communication (speech, books, radio, TV) and what can be communicated by each particular means were the influence from which the writings of Marshall McLuhan have come forth. But beyond such particulars, anybody who has read his last books will know that they cannot look at human history quite the same way again. He became a famous man in the Western intellectual world and was offered big jobs in the powerful American academia and the cultivated British version. He stayed in Canada because it was his own and he ambiguously loved it. His admirers were grateful to the University of Toronto when it gave his name to one of its colleges after his death in 1952. This present book puts in print a text which was found in Innis’ papers. It is a file in which he kept together his comments on all the vast range of human history which interested him in the last years of his life. So illuminating are these comments that it was necessary that they be put in book form so that they would not remain limited to archives. The

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task of editing this complex material was luckily put in the hands of Professor William Christian of the University of Guelph. It was a difficult job and he has done it extraordinarily well. We have in front of us a readable and fascinating book. The sheer range of Innis’ interests must have made editing difficult. In a couple of pages he can move from comments on American and Canadian politics to the influence of India on Christian ideas, to the dependence of modern journalism on cable rates, to the worship of Isis, to the significance of the elevator for business. To present such far-seeing curiosity in readable form was difficult, and Christian has succeeded. Wisely, he edited the material in chronological order, so that we can see Innis’ thought unfold in the last pregnant years of his life. When I say it is a good read, I mean that in a particular way. One cannot read it like John le Carré’s stories – a breathless suspense-filled pursuit into the middle of the night.3 One cannot read it like Bleak House – an engrossment in a unified work of art with all its magic and wonder.4 This book is made up of small entries (six or seven a page) ranging over the reaches of human time and space. One simply gets indigestion if one reads too much of it at a sitting. I found the best way to read it was to put it next to my bed, read five pages a night, pay attention to what interested me, and then put out the light. In the best sense of the phrase, it is a book that puts one to sleep. One takes into one’s dreams the strange thoughts circling through time and space. What was Innis? A philosopher? A social scientist? A historian? Little category boxes may seem procrustean. Nevertheless it is necessary to ask the question, because in trying to answer it, one makes explicit what one is learning from his writing. Certainly he was not a social scientist in the dominant sense of that activity. He did not see knowledge as something which gave us control, but as to be pursued for the sake of sheer curiosity alone. At the practical level, he wrote with brutal clarity about what would happen to universities which became servants of the institutions which dished out the research grants. He saw the proper university as the institution in society which served the pure desire to know, even if that meant that it remained small and poor and uninfluential. His account of social science is then very far from that in the great modern apparatuses of science. On the other hand, Innis cannot be called a philosopher. He was a scientist in the sense that what he asked about anything, past or present,

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was how it worked. He did not ask those questions which belong traditionally to philosophy. What for? Whither? And what then? He was too much the secularized sceptic not to believe that those questions really had little point. His explanations were all in terms of the modern account of explanation: how did this social organization work? To put it mildly, the eternal was not his dish. Innis never seems to have come to terms with this division in his work: he took his methods from the moderns, but his motives for doing science came from the ancients. He was at one and the same time both toughly cynical about modern social science, and sadly doubtful about the claims of the older science. The result is a kind of sadness in his work – even if it is a sadness well penetrated by wit and even anger. Perhaps it is this ambiguity which has prevented Innis from having the continuing influence appropriate to a person of his high style. Nevertheless, it would be a shame if Innis did not continue to be read, particularly in the light of how tedious modern social science often is. His writing continually lights up whole areas of human history. And we need this light.

Notes 1 William Christian is professor of political science in the Department of Political Studies, University of Guelph. He is co-author of Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada (Toronto: McGraw Hill, Ryerson 1974), author of George Grant: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1993), editor of George Grant: Selected Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), and co-editor, with Sheila Grant, of The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1997). 2 On Harold Adams Innis, see 382n9. 3 On John le Carré, see 413n7. 4 Charles Dickens (1812–70) wrote Bleak House in 1852–3.

Review of The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop Frye

Globe and Mail, 16 October 1982, E16, under the heading ‘A well-educated, secularized Protestant looks at the Bible through modern spectacles. Literature as the religion of our age.’ The book was published by the Academic Press in Toronto in 1982.

This book about the Bible is written by a distinguished Canadian professor of English literature.1 I do not use the adjective ‘Canadian’ to qualify ‘distinguished,’ but rather because it is pleasant to associate distinction with one’s country. The title of the book comes from William Blake’s remark: ‘The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.’ The second half of Frye’s title is slightly ambiguous because it might imply that he is primarily discussing how the Bible has influenced the literature of the West and English literature in particular. This is not the case. Rather, he is concentrating on the Bible itself, and using his powers as a careful student of literature to explicate what is present in it. Reviews of books often have the perfectly proper function of making a synopsis of a book so that others can be saved the trouble of reading it, either because of a lack of interest in the material or because they already know it. I think this would be inevitably procrustean in this case, and therefore I am not going to do it. The Bible is a large collection of very disparate books. Frye has read these books. He writes at length about them not only as a professor of literature but as a person ready to make assertions coming from many fields of study – particularly theological and anthropological. Those who wish to know what is in Frye’s book have no alternative to reading it. Rather, I wish to say what kind of book this is, and where such a kind fits into the history and present state of studies. Art, in the sense of fine

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art, often is a kind of religion in our age, because it appears as a means of transcending society at a time when other means of such transcendence are no longer available for many people, particularly the educated. This deepest desire of human beings finds itself frustrated, and seeks its satisfaction in the arts, both past and present. At the same time, our era is concentrated on the science which issues in the conquest of human and non-human nature. The search for this knowledge has been institutionalized in our multiversities. When these two tendencies come together, the arts are brought into the universities to be classified. But of course literature is not an object at our disposal, as the atom may be. Its organization does not result in bombs. The scientizing of literature is carried out by methods comparable with the work of Linnaeus. He catalogued and categorized the plants and animals so that they would lie before us in an intelligible arrangement.2 Frye has been the leader of this form of the study of literature. In modern language, he has brought system to the given which lies before us. (The ancients thought that system was something appropriate to things such as armies, not to studies.) In this present book, the Bible is laid before us by the categories of language, myth, metaphor, and typology. Frye has read this literature with thoroughness. So many of us academics are lazy and Frye is free of that vice. Indeed, Frye’s interest in these writings both aids and stands in the way of his science as objective. It stands in the way because what often seems to lie before him are not those writings as they were in their originating moment, but rather as the Protestant Bible, which has come down to us from five centuries of English-speaking Calvinist reading. This may seem to be contradicted by the amount of time that Frye gives to arguing with contemporary fundamentalists. But this is rather the impatience one feels toward relations who have not arrived socially. Be that as it may, Frye’s passionate interest in the Protestant Bible gives a bite to his science. I think chapters six and seven are the best in the book because here the Bible itself is most present. To repeat, there is much in the book beyond the science of literature. There are many general theological pronouncements. (By ‘theological pronouncements’ I do not mean statements about theological pronouncements, but direct theological statements.) Some of these hit the nail right on the head with that fine shrewdness which is so much a part of Frye’s writing. But in a way which is again very Protestant, he makes

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these statements (for instance, his remarks on prophecy) as though they were factual rather than his interpretation. That is, he writes theology as though it were not dependent on philosophy. When these theological obiter dicta are directly philosophical, the confusion in his method and material is compounded. For example, Frye uses the words ‘the master-slave dialectic on which the whole of human history turns.’ Presumably, he knows that in making this statement, he has affirmed that modern political philosophy is superior to ancient political philosophy. After all, it is this affirmation more than any other which distinguishes modern from ancient political philosophy. In saying this, Frye shows he is judging the Bible through the eyes of modern philosophy. Why does he then not say so? It would make things easier. This comes out clearly in Frye’s relation to the seventeenth century Italian philosopher, Vico.3 He uses Vico’s account of three stages in the history of language. With a philosopher of the order of Vico, one cannot accept such a part of his thought without being in closeness to his thought as a whole. Frye understands this because, later in his book, he expresses agreement with Vico’s verum factum (we only know what we make). But in such agreement, he has committed himself to look at the Bible a certain way – that is, through modern spectacles. To put the same point in another way: one has chosen to look at the Bible not as its writers looked at it. For example, it is inconceivable that any of the writers of the Gospels could have thought the verum factum a true account of truth. It is of course quite proper for Frye to look at the Bible as a modern. But, to repeat, this should have been made much more explicit. It would then be clearer to the reader that what we get about the Bible in this book are not only conclusions from the science of criticism, but also what a welleducated secularized Protestant gets from a careful reading of these books. Such a reading cannot but be deeply unsympathetic to what was believed to be known about the Bible from that long co-operation between philosophy and Biblical scholarship which was at the heart of centuries of the tradition. The great Islamic theologian al-Farabi wrote that Plato’s Republic was the most important writing about prophecy.4 Whatever other differences there were between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism over the centuries, the leading theologians would have been in near agreement about such a statement. For example, there were no

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equivalents in the Bible for ideas such as ‘nature’ or ‘history’ and therefore thinkers knew that they had to look elsewhere for such necessary means of interpretation. This was not to lower the status of scripture, but to exalt it as prophecy. Frye does not seem nearly as aware as the older scholars of the need to find the best means for understanding the Bible. His interpretations in terms of modern philosophy are not laid before us en pleine connaissance de cause. The part of Frye’s book in which he seems to come nearest to unthoughtful prejudice contains his remarks about polytheism. He assumes that polytheism as a believable option only existed at a more primitive time in the history of the race and that educated human beings could only look at it as archaic. By ‘believable option,’ I mean that educated men could think that there are gods. It is a fact, nevertheless, that the greatest thinker of our era, Heidegger, was a polytheist. When the founder of modern existentialism thought through the consequences of existentialism, he stated that there are gods. Heidegger does not make mistakes in logic or grammar, and he has said, ‘Only a god can save us.’5 He is not confused about the difference between ‘a god’ and God. A saint of our era, Simone Weil, has written of the terrible consequences of the destruction of idolatry within Christianity.6 The patronizing eye that Frye casts upon polytheism seems again to arise from the limitations of his scientism in its Protestant form. Philosophy is always and everywhere the enemy of the opinions of any society, however much philosophers may have to conceal that enmity. The reason that Frye does not make his assumptions explicit may be because he is such a good friend of modern society. His account of what is present in the Bible as seen through the categories of metaphor, language, myth and typology is full of interesting understandings. It is the product of hard work and of a zetetic intelligence. But it is a modernized Protestant intelligence. And such intelligence has been the most formative basis of our North American society.

Notes 1 On Northrop Frye, see 279n2. 2 Carl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus) (1707–78), Swedish naturalist and physician, was the founder of modern scientific binomial nomenclature of generic

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and specific names for plants and animals, which permitted the hierarchical organization later known as systematics. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Italian philosopher and historian, was professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. In his New Science (1725) he attempted to trace the history of natural law and to discover an ideal pattern of universal history. This and his other writings have had an influence upon modern writers as diverse as W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Martin Heidegger. Vico opposed the Cartesian view that clear and distinct ideas are the source of truth. Humans can understand what they have made, but not what God has made: ‘The world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and ... its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or civil world, which, since men made it, they alone know.’ Quoted in Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the ‘New Science’ (Cambridge: University Press 1975), 72. Abu Nasr al Farabi (878–950), Muslim philosopher, was regarded in the Arab world as the greatest philosophical authority since Aristotle. He made the Greek heritage available to Arab thought. Martin Heidegger (see 383n17) stated, ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten’ [‘Only a god can save us now’] in a Der Spiegel interview (1966). See ‘Only a God Can Save Us’: Der Spiegel’s Interview with Martin Heidegger (1966)’ in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993), 91–116. One reference that might help us understand Grant’s point is Simone Weil, Lettre à un Religieux (Paris: Gallimard 1951), 32: ‘L’Europe a été déracinée spirituellement, coupée de cette antiquité où tous les éléments de notre civilisation ont leur origine; et elle est allée déraciner les autres continents à partir du XVI siècle’ (Europe has been spiritually uprooted, cut off from antiquity where all the elements of our civilization have their origin; and it went on to uproot the other continents from the sixteenth century on). See also her account of the ‘Metaxu’ in Gravity and Grace: ‘What is it sacrilege to destroy? Not that which is base, for that is of no importance. Not that which is high, for, even should we want to, we cannot touch that. The metaxu. The metaxu form the region of good and evil. ‘No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul, and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.’ Gravity and Grace, ed. Gustav Thibon (New York: Routledge Classic 2002), 147.

Review of Benjamin Disraeli: The Early Letters, Volumes I and II, edited by J.A.W. Gunn, John Matthews, and Donald M. Schurman

Globe and Mail, 8 May 1982, E15, under the subheading ‘Evidence of a worldly man with external gusto and an ability to be both shrewd and likeable.’ The two volumes (1: 1815–1834, 2: 1835–1837) were published by the University of Toronto Press in 1982.

First a word of high congratulation is in order. The editors have done a magnificent job, searching diligently to make this collection as complete as seems possible, and then laying the letters before the reader with all the aids of scholarly clarity so that they are a delight to read. The University of Toronto Press has produced beautiful books at a reasonable price for these expensive days. This is scholarship at its best. When one thinks that these two volumes only take Disraeli up to his entrance into Parliament in 1837, and that the great man goes on until 1881, what a treat awaits us. These volumes are not only useful for people who want to study the nineteenth-century European world professionally, they will be a delight for anybody who wants to contemplate the life of a great political leader. Politics is, as Plato showed, the royal art. In the golden afternoon of England’s authority as the first of the industrialized nations, she was fortunate to have such outstanding practitioners of that art as William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.1 When one compares their level of education and character with that of the people who run our societies today (Canada included), one may have a word to say for aristocracy as against the undiluted triumph of capitalist democracy. For my part, I put Gladstone slightly higher because he had the perspicacity to try to limit English imperialism at the height of its power. But Disraeli was also a splendid politician. Even more than Peel,2 he

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was the founder of the modern Tory Party, and through all the cataclysms and aberrations of the modern era, that party more often than not has stood for good sense. That is a lot to say of any institution. To take a small influence: one cannot understand the conservatism of Canada (Macdonald, Whitney, Borden, Ferguson, Bennett, Diefenbaker) without thinking of Disraeli.3 This may be a tradition that has decayed in Canada before the ravages of capitalist liberalism, but it was a great part of this country. Another Canadian connection in these volumes is that there is a nasty picture of Lord Durham, whose report did much harm in Canada by failing to recognize the French for what they were.4 These two volumes only take us through the early years, culminating in the disappointment of the unfair failure of his maiden speech in Parliament. A sweet letter from his school in Blackheath is followed by accounts to his sister of trips around Europe and the Levant. These are followed by letters in which he tries to establish himself in the literary and political scene of the New World that is coming forth after the Reform Act of 1832. He has difficulties with his publishers, he has continued failures at the polls but he never flags in his determination to establish himself in the ruling classes. Why shouldn’t he? Neurotic ambition can be a corrupting vice but Disraeli’s ambition seems singularly free of the neurotic. He just wants to get on and achieve what he knows himself capable of, in a country which he thoroughly likes. Compared to Gladstone again, he does not start with an established position. He has to make his place in the world and he does so in a direct and healthy way. What comes forth from these letters is a very worldly human being. By worldly, I do not mean a non-religious man. He seems to take religion for granted, as something quite given in the nature of things and to be properly respected. What I mean is that he likes the riches of experience. This comes out in his long letters from abroad. He describes what he has been doing and seeing with external gusto – often in a way that may bore us moderns who are more used to subjective analysis. But this love of the surface and of the immediate is the mark of his health. Many successful politicians are often neurotic insofar as they pursue power to assuage their subjectivity; but the best politicians are those who like the world. One trusts Disraeli because his shrewd and interested acceptance means that he is not a hater. It seems natural that he should be the

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fellow countryman and near contemporary of the delightful and insightful Jane Austen.5 One particular mark of his health is how much Disraeli loved women. I do not mean by this that he was in pursuit of the continual Giovannian orgasm which in our age is often implied when one says that somebody loves women; such pursuit is for much less sane human beings than Disraeli. What I mean is that he writes to all kinds of women with a delicious interest in their doings and his own. Some of the best letters in the first of these volumes are to his sister Sarah (he addresses her sweetly as Sa), and there is a halcyon quality about their obvious mutual affection. Clearly from the later letters he used his aristocratic mistress Lady Sykes to advance his career but there is no sign that there was anything particularly nasty in this. It is often said that Disraeli manipulated Queen Victoria for his own purposes. We will obviously have to wait for the later letters to see whether this was the case. But from these letters, I doubt whether manipulation is the right word. Interest in and understanding of other people is the basis of intimacy. Disraeli had interest and understanding for many ladies, from his grandmother to his sister and a wide variety of intelligent and aristocratic women. To take that as manipulation is to miss the point that he had empathy for their worlds. To state the obvious: it is surprising to consider how few human beings really like the members of the opposite sex. Yet it must be insisted that these volumes depend on what lies ahead. Nobody would be publishing these letters if they were not a preparation for what is going to happen in the future. They are of interest because they come from the young man who will be trying in 1878 to prevent Europe from tearing itself apart in war. Perhaps one begins to see in this loving and ambitious young man the later man to whom Bismarck would pay his great compliment.6 Perhaps one begins to see why a great aristocrat, Lord Salisbury, given above all to the defence of the Church of England, would work so happily as his second in command.7 Shrewd men are often not likeable; likeable men are often not shrewd. As a young man, Disraeli is obviously both. Above all, he has loyalties (not principles) which quite transcend his own ambitions. He loves his country, the landed aristocrats, and his family. Loyalties rather than principles are the mark of the conservative. This is one reason

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indeed why conservatism is so difficult in a technological age. It cannot be said too often that fast technological change goes with fast moral and religious change. Disraeli’s loyalties were strong enough to see him through. I await with eagerness the volumes which follow when he becomes a great practitioner of the royal art.

Notes 1 William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), statesman and four-time prime minister of Great Britain, moved from conservatism to liberalism during his political career. See Grant’s review of the Gladstone Diaries (887–92). Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Viscount Hughenden of Hughenden (1804–81), British statesman and novelist, was twice prime minister (1868, 1874–80). 2 Sir Robert Peel, second Baronet (1788–1850), twice British prime minister (1834–5, 1841–6), was responsible for the repeal (1846) of the Corn Laws restricting the import of grain. He is considered to be the founder of the modern Conservative Party. 3 On John A. Macdonald, see 407n3. Sir James Pliny Whitney (1843–1914), lawyer, politician, and premier of Ontario (1905–14), headed an administration noteworthy for its reforms, including the beginning of Ontario’s publicly owned hydroelectric power system, and its creation of an enduring political machine. Sir Robert Laird Borden (1854–1937), lawyer and politician, was Conservative prime minister of Canada 1911–20. George Howard Ferguson (1870–1946), lawyer and politician, was Conservative premier of Ontario 1923–30. Richard Bedford Bennett, Viscount (1870–1947), lawyer and politician, was Conservative prime minister of Canada, 1930–5. John Diefenbaker (see 116n2) was Progressive Conservative prime minister of Canada 1957–63. The crisis over Canadian defence policy faced by his administration and the implications of the crisis for the country and its future are the subject of Lament for a Nation, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 277–378. 4 John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham (1792–1840), British reformist Whig statesman, governor general of Canada, was the author of the Report on the Affairs of British North America (1839). Among his several recommendations he strongly urged that the French-Canadians be assimilated by the English-speaking population of Canada.

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5 Jane Austen (1775–1817), English novelist, published six great novels, including Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815). 6 Grant may be referring to Bismarck’s comment when Disraeli represented Britain at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. The two apparently discovered their similar imperial political approaches and Bismarck considered Disraeli’s snatching in 1878 of Ottoman Cyprus ‘a progressive move.’ Disraeli was called ‘the lion of the Congress’ and Bismarck is supposed to have said about him: ‘The Old Jew, that is the man.’ 7 Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, third Marquess of Salisbury, (1830– 1903), Conservative political leader, three-time prime minister (1885–6, 1886–92, 1895–1900), was a man of strong religious faith who might have chosen the church rather than politics. During his seven years in Disraeli’s ministries he came to regard Disraeli with admiration and affection.

Review of Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters by Hans Mayer

Globe and Mail, 16 October 1982, E16. The book was published by MIT Press in 1982.

Outsiders is by a well known German literary critic.1 The subject is three types of people who are considered by Hans Mayer to be ‘outsiders’ in modern society – strong women, homosexuals, and Jews. He describes the place of these three types in the European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He occasionally goes further back in time, as for example in his analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.2 His purpose is not solely the literature in itself but the use of the literature to show the place of the outsider in modern ‘bourgeois’ society. This American translation of the book is filled with self-advertising about its great influence in Europe since its original publication in 1975. Mayer has read enormously. If you are interested in the complex details of the literature and criticism of Germany in the days of the Weimar Republic, you will find it here.3 He has also read widely in English and French, but the same does not apply to Spanish and Italian. It is interesting to see Western European literature eaten in great chunks, and mercifully digested without the vocabulary of contemporary ‘comparative literature.’ Nevertheless, my chief impression of the book is that it is out of date. It is, or course, foolish to use the phrase ‘out of date’ about writers such as Plato or Tolstoy, who are telling us what is true of all times and places. But this is a book describing a particular society, and written within historicist assumptions, and therefore the phrase may be appropriately used. It is ‘out of date’ in the sense that the great experience in terms of which he interprets all other experiences seems to have occurred for

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Mayer in the twenties and that experience is given a kind of timeless quality. As the absolute experience for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau seems to have been Montreal in the forties, resulting in a vague cosmopolitan liberalism,4 so for Mayer his Marxism was defined in the Weimar Republic. But the ‘dynamism’ of modern society makes the great experiences of particular times and places soon inadequate as the archetypal interpreters. Marxism has taken many forms and not least of these was Marxism as German humanismus. What this comes down to is Marx plus lots of quotations from Goethe and Schiller, plus the sense that, come the revolution, the liberated proletariat will be content with endless performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio and compulsory Bertolt Brecht.5 Many of the humanismus Marxists were Jewish and they had to leave Germany in 1933. Some of them truly learned from their experience of North America, but the senior members, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, could not get back quickly enough to German culture in 1945.6 Mayer lived in Switzerland during the war so that the experience of Weimar Marxism seems to have stayed on unadulterated. It is appropriate that on the cover of the book there is a famous picture by Lindner7 in which the decadence of Weimar society is exposed. To be fair to Mayer, he does recognize that atrocious acts against outsiders have been carried out by regimes which were officially Marxist, but he still continues to interpret modern literature and society under the categories of ‘humanist’ Marxism. It is impossible to say in short space why Marxism can never be true humanism in its essence, or why Marxism is so inadequate to interpret the decline of Europe in this century. But it does indeed leave this book out of date, not only in its interpretations but in its very subject matter. Can we say that Jews are outsiders in the world when they exert such power over the politics and culture of the world’s most powerful empire? Can we say that homosexuals are outsiders in modern culture? (Let me say that I take the greatest exception to the fact that the complex subject of homosexuality is covered under the title ‘Sodom’ in this book.) It is perhaps true that strong women are not yet given an adequate place in our society, but surely they are moving in that direction. This is a book which comes out of enormous reading and which takes us into many interesting byways of European literature. But having said this, I do not in any way understand why the MIT Press has

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built it up in the way it has. Perhaps an institute of technology has so little touch with what we need to know beyond the technological that the members of its press can think this is a more important contribution to literary and social studies than it is.

Notes 1 Hans Mayer (1907–2001), German academic and literary critic, taught at Leipzig in the Soviet zone in 1948 and then, after 1963, was a freelance critic, writer, lecturer, and broadcaster in Tübingen. 2 Marlowe’s play Edward II (1594), one of the earliest English history plays, deals with the reign and violent death of Edward II (King of England, 1307– 27), who was a homosexual. Although Edward’s homosexuality is hinted at in the play, it is never made explicit, although modern productions give it greater emphasis. 3 Between 1919 and 1933 Germany was governed under a republican constitution named after the city of Weimar, where a national assembly drew it up. This period is accordingly known as the Weimar Republic. 4 On Pierre Elliott Trudeau, see 116n2. 5 Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio (1805), is about the liberation of the political prisoner Florestan by his faithful wife Leonore (disguised as a boy named Fidelio). (Eugene) Bertolt (Friedrich) Brecht (1898–1956), German poet, playwright, and theatre director, achieved fame with The Threepenny Opera (1928), produced in collaboration with Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. His later works include Mother Courage and Her Children (1938) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945), created during his time in Scandinavia (1933–41) and in the USA (1941–7). He returned to East Berlin in 1949 and formed the theatre company the Berliner Ensemble, which he directed until his death. 6 Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), German social philosopher, was director of the Institute for Social Research first in Frankfurt (1930) and after its migration to New York (1934). Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–69), German philosopher who also wrote on sociology, psychology, and musicology, immigrated to England in 1934, spent time in America (1938–48), and returned to Frankfurt with Horkheimer in 1949. 7 The Lindner painting on the cover of the book Grant is reviewing is ‘The Meeting’ (1953). Richard Lindner (1901–78), American painter, grew up in Nuremberg, Ber-

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lin, and Munich, left for Paris in 1933, and for America in 1941. He taught at the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and later in Hamburg. His paintings used the sexual symbolism of advertising and investigated definitions of gender roles in the media.

‘Literature and the Uncertainty of Modern Criticism,’ a Review of The World, The Text and the Critic by Edward W. Said

Globe and Mail, 7 May 1983, E18. The book was published by Harvard University Press in 1982.

Since the decay of philosophy and theology, literature has become the means whereby the educated masses are being introduced to many forms of knowledge which may not be given through the study of the modern sciences. This has produced an immense apparatus for the teaching of literature in our schools and universities. As English has become the chief world language, its pursuit has become the most influential non-technological study in the world. It is indeed providential that before the age of progress, this language had been used by the incomparable Shakespeare, and others such as Chaucer, Johnson, and Swift. The barren halls of New Haven and Berkeley have had something to look upon. At the top of the apparatus are the critics – generally leading professors of literature – who teach us how we should approach a text. That this enterprise has become uncertain is but part of the modern world. Uncertainty about any form of knowledge but technologized science is our present destiny. It is a source of hope that a person of Edward Said’s high intellect and wide learning should be one of our leading critics.1 He is a professor at Columbia. This book is a collection of his writings bound into unity by the question: what is criticism? Indeed, the content of the book is accurately expressed in its title. Said writes about the relation between the world, the text, and the critic, trying not to lose any of them in his discussion of the others. As he puts it: ‘I want to discuss some of the ways by which texts impose constraints upon their interpretation or, to put it

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metaphorically, the way the closeness of the world’s body to the text’s body forces readers to take both into consideration.’ For example, Said describes the distinction between ‘filiation’ and ‘affiliation’ and points out that most modern writing deals with the relation of ‘affiliation.’ This casts a bright light simultaneously on our literature and our society. It also distinguishes them sharply from other literatures and other societies. Seven essays give one a lucid picture of what is going on in contemporary criticism. Supplementing these are illuminating essays on Swift, Conrad and Schwab.2 Throughout the book, there is a continued discussion of the relation between Western literature and Western imperialism, and this culminates in a fine essay, ‘Islam, Philology, and French Culture: Renan and Massignon.’ If I had to pick just one part of this book (which would be a pity), it would be the discussion of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault – two influential contemporary French critics.3 To an outsider, such as myself, one of the reasons Said is such a fine critic, and such a fine critic of critics, is that he has read Marx carefully. From my experience, this is rare among professors of English literature. This means he looks at the texts and the task of the critics as though they had something to do with the passionate and anguished world outside our studies. He savagely attacks those who see literature as an ‘isolated paddock in the broad cultural field’ and ‘the harmless rhetoric of self-delighting humanism.’ He is aware of the rough detail of the world. Yet as soon as one praises this awareness, one must speak of its limitation. There is nothing in this book which tells us why works of art can be enrapturing. How indeed can the modern critic – American liberal or Marxist or a mixture – speak of the enrapturing? It seems that what allows Said to transcend these tiresome secular alternatives is that his work is given bite (a far stronger bite than Marxism) by his presence in the wonderful world of Islamic learning. There is a sharp edge to what he sees in Western literature and the apparatus of modern criticism. This appears explicitly in his continual return to the theme of the relation between the texts of Western literature and Western imperialism. He is continually reminding the reader that the large majority of the world’s population is not Western. This does not mean that in any way he patronizes the texts which it is his business to teach, but rather that it allows him to hold the world and the text together.

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There is always something ungenerous in stating what a good author does not do. I regret that he does not seem to read the great Western philosophers. For example, his account of Derrida would be much strengthened if he stated more clearly that Derrida’s attempt to destroy Platonism in literature is simply a direct application to literary questions of Heidegger’s sustained attack on Platonism. To fail to make clear that Derrida’s account of language is simply epigonal to Heidegger is to give criticism a kind of independence from the terrible fate of historicism which has fallen on all the forms of Western knowledge.4 The second thing I regret is that there is no reference to Céline in the book.5 To write of twentieth century literature without mentioning Céline is rather like writing of sixteenth century literature without mentioning Shakespeare. This takes me back to the enrapturing. What I want to know from professors of literature is why Céline is enrapturing. If you are interested in those kinds of questions, you will not find them in Said’s book. ‘I’ve seen the snaffle and the curb. But where’s the bloody horse?’6 Nevertheless, this is a very good book. It is illuminating about the world, the texts, and the critics. It is filled with judgments about many subjects which are the product of a shrewd and learned mind, if not a philosophical one.

Notes 1 Edward W. Said (1935–2003), professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, was the son of a Palestinian living in Egypt. He became a leading intellectual spokesman for the Arab world in the West. His best known work at the time of this review was Orientalism (1978). 2 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Irish clergyman, satirist, and poet, wrote The Battle of the Books (1697), Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), and Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Joseph Conrad (Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) (1857–1924), Polish-born English novelist and short story writer, spent 20 years as an officer in the British merchant marine and wrote many novels, including Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), and Nostromo (1904). Raymond Schwab is the author of Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press 1984), trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking, with a foreword by Edward Said.

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3 Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), French philosopher and critic, born of assimilated Sephardic-Jewish parents, was influenced by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, and Weil among others, and taught extensively in America as well as in France. His best known writings on philosophy, language, and literature were published 1967–84, when his work began to be integrated under the designation ‘deconstruction.’ Michel Foucault (1926–84), French historian of ideas, wrote Madness and Civilization (1961), The Order of Things (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of Sexuality (1976–84). Most of his work, influenced by Nietzsche, argues that power shapes human knowledge and social and individual identity. 4 On Martin Heidegger, see 383n17. 5 Louis Ferdinand Céline, see 467n1. 6 From a poem by South African-born poet Roy Campbell (1902–57), who lived mostly in Spain and Portugal. He wrote the following about some South African novelists: You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I’m with you there, of course. They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where’s the bloody horse?

Some Letters to the Editor of the Globe and Mail

Published 30 July 1977, under the heading ‘Kill the retarded? Cause for despair.’

Dear Sir On July 27, the Globe ran an interesting and well written story on its front page concerning a report by a committee of the Anglican Church recommending the killing of severely retarded children. How can such recommendations not fill any member of the Anglican Church with despair? This has been an era filled with social engineering, which has increasingly denied or put in question the great respect for human life which was central to the Western tradition of law and ethics. But to hear this denial being encouraged by a committee of one’s own church is a real cause of wonder. It is clear that a report such as this will have plenty of support from those who see themselves as the technocrats of life and death. But what has it got to do with Christianity? Christ did not say: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, as long as they are capable of quality of life.’ The principle of ‘quality of life,’ as that by which we should decide who will be allowed to exist and who will not, has nothing to do with what Christ says about who is our neighbour. By defining ‘human’ in a new way, the report assumes that human life is not at stake in its recommendations. But which of us will not be endangered if our right to exist depends on some social engineer’s definition of ‘quality of life’? It is sad that the writers of this report seem so patently unaware of where their recommendations are leading. Is there not evidence from our civilization that there are great forces at work cutting down the principle that there is a sanctity to human life which quite transcends the nature of its quality? By recommending the elimination of unfit infants, the writers of the report further open the door to

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the worst plans of the worst social organizers. This hardly seems a wise action for Christians. The editor of the report compares unfit infants with household pets. To hear such a comparison used in the name of the Christian church takes one’s breath away. In the last decade great advances have been made in Canada in the care and education of the mentally retarded. It has also been recognized that a retarded baby’s future cannot be totally foretold at birth, but will greatly depend on the kind of care he or she receives. The recommendations of this report are likely to do nothing but harm to the cause of the mentally retarded. As a church member one gets used to a high level of silliness from church committees, but this is worse than silliness. George Grant Hamilton Published April 13, 1978.

Dear Sir Recently the Globe has carried some interesting stories about a very fine writer, Elizabeth Smart,1 who is Canadian by origin. In these stories it has been implied that Canadians showed their insensitivity by completely disregarding her novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, when it first appeared. Canadian disregard of this book was not caused by insensitivity. Elizabeth Smart’s father was a wealthy lawyer and a valuable supporter of the Liberal party. He asked Mackenzie King, who was then the Prime Minister to prevent the book entering Canada. King had all copies stopped at the border and pulped. This is worth recording because it excuses Canadian inattention to this beautiful book. It is also an example of one of the reasons for the continuing power of the Liberal party in Canada. It is efficient at looking after its own. Sincerely, George Grant Professor of Religion Written in 1984 or 1985 but not published.

Dear Sir Congratulations to the Globe for running the story about CSIS interfer-

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ence with This Magazine2 on your front page. The idea that This Magazine is subversive is so ridiculous that it is not even worth discussing. What is important is that This Magazine has brought a very high order of intelligence, good writing and compassion to the wasteland of Canadian political and intellectual debate. When we consider how boring and how bland the three main political parties, the universities and the churches etc., etc. have become, we can only thank God for This Magazine. Perhaps the CSIS is right. This Magazine is subversive of the milk-sop irrelevance of Canadian debate. On these grounds it might well be investigated. Yours sincerely, George Grant professor, Department of Political Science Dalhousie University Published 22 November 1983.

Dear Sir If one were making a dictionary of silly sentences Mr Henry Makow’s in the Globe of November 19th would make a good entry. He writes: ‘In 1962, as a psychology professor at Harvard, Timothy Leary helped to popularize LSD, which produced visionary experiences similar to those described by William Blake and Saint John of the Cross.’3 I am not qualified to speak about William Blake. But it can be said with certainty that St John of the Cross wished to eliminate all visions from his experience. He says with great clarity that this is the centre of his way. Most of us can have a mediated vision of the divine – mediated to us through human love, thought and science, beautiful things, just actions etc. For those of us lucky enough to be Christians the divine can be mediated to us through Christ. But for the very few who are called to know God immediately in this life, it is required that they put aside all visions. It is, therefore, reserved for those whose personalities have been broken, and is therefore not a way that most of us could be called to. To compare Timothy Leary’s visions with St John’s attempt to break down all his visions is to distort a central aspect of the human tradition.

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The nobler the object of such distortion, the greater the silliness of the writing. Yours sincerely, George Grant Published 28 December 1981.

Dear Sir Your story concerning the dismissal of Derek Bedson,4 the chief Manitoba civil servant, by the new NDP Government raises a general issue about Canadian history. (Ex-Activist Named to Manitoba’s Top Post – 27 Nov) Since 1900 there has been a struggle in Canada to establish a top civil service that had some continuity despite the vagaries of political change. The attempt was to follow the British tradition rather than the American, where the leading civil servants were generally related to the political parties. The point of our effort was to guarantee that people of high competence would give their careers to public service. This was not likely to happen if such people knew that their jobs were at the whim of every ideological change. From the side of the civil servants, this required that they would serve loyally any government which was elected democratically. This state of affairs was not always perfectly realized in Canada but its foundation as a principle is seen in the career of O.D. Skelton who served loyally both Conservative and Liberal governments in Ottawa as their chief civil servant.5 By all accounts, Mr Bedson was a fine representative of that Canadian tradition. This principle is always under attack because of the exigencies of political patronage, and the Premier of Manitoba has, therefore, taken a retrograde step in the dismissal of Mr Bedson. In the long run great harm will become apparent in the establishment of ideological civil services. Ideologies have a way of quickly changing in a technological society. The undermining of this tradition may seem palatable to the NDP, but it does not serve this country well. George Grant Department of Political Science Dalhousie University Halifax

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Notes 1 Elizabeth Smart (1913–86), Canadian novelist and poet, published her most famous novel, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, in 1945. Her family owned a summer home in the Gatineau hills next to that of Mackenzie King. Smart had rejected her family’s way of life for one of bohemian adventure in England and elsewhere. 2 The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) was established in 1984 as the principal intelligence-gathering agency of the Canadian government. This Magazine was first published in 1966 as a radical educational journal, This Magazine Is about Schools. It continues to appear as a general-interest leftwing periodical. For This Magazine see Collected Works, Vol. 3, 462n6. 3 On Timothy Leary, see 75n5. On St John of the Cross, see 681n78. 4 Derek Bedson (1920–89) was a close friend of Grant’s to whom (along with Judith Robinson) he dedicated Lament for a Nation. This letter was prompted by Bedson’s dismissal as clerk of the executive council of the province of Manitoba in 1981. 5 Oscar Douglas Skelton (1878–1941) had a brilliant academic career at Queen’s University before entering the civil service in 1925 as undersecretary of state for external affairs. Although Mackenzie King’s most trusted adviser, he continued at this post during the government of R.B. Bennett (1930–5).

Lectures at McMaster University in the 1970s – A Selection

By 1970 the Department of Religion at McMaster University had grown rapidly to the point where most professors were teaching graduate courses and supervising MA and PhD theses. There were thirty-six PhD students at the thesis level in 1971 and the department chair reported concern among professors that their load might lead to a weakening of the undergraduate program. Grant taught graduate seminars and supervised many theses, but still managed, along with teaching his section on Christianity for the department’s introductory course, ‘World Religions’ (1b6), to design and deliver two new undergraduate courses. In 1973 he began to teach ‘The Meeting of Christianity and Philosophy’ (4f6) and described it as follows: ‘The course will concentrate on how the receivers of Christianity took Plato’s writings as the means to understanding their religion. It will concentrate on this process as found in the writings of Augustine. The study will be of the writings of Plato and Augustine.’ In 1978 he began to teach ‘The Question of Good in the Technological Age’ (2l6) describing it as follows: ‘An exploration of the private and public questions concerning right action in modern Canadian society. What light do religion and philosophy throw on these questions?’ Grant’s papers include thirty-six notebooks from the 1970s and 1980s. These contain mainly responses to students’ papers and lectures prepared for undergraduate classes and graduate seminars during the period. He wrote the undergraduate lectures and delivered them to students in 1b6, 4f6, and 2l6. He wrote lectures for seven graduate seminars through the decade: ‘The Relations between the Western Religious Tradition and Technology,’ designated as Religion 775 (1970–1); ‘Heidegger and Technology,’ Religion 781 (1971–2, 1978–9); ‘Selected Topics in Religion and Modernity,’ Religion 781 (1972–3); ‘Kant,’ Religion 781 (1973–4,

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1977–8); ‘Nietzsche,’ Religion 781 (1974–5); ‘Simone Weil,’ Religion 781 (1975–6); and ‘Plato and Aristotle,’ Religion 781 (1979–80). We have selected some lectures and excerpts to give readers a glimpse into Grant’s classes and seminars during his second decade at McMaster. From the undergraduate courses we chose a group of ‘five lectures on Christianity’ prepared by Grant for his section of 1b6, and three excerpts of lectures from 4f6. From the graduate seminars we chose, in addition to the selection from the Simone Weil lectures that appears with the Weil materials above (814–50), passages from the lectures on Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Strauss, and Aristotle. We provide a list of the 36 notebooks and a list of the courses taught during the 1970s at the end of this section. The decisions about the selection of lectures to be published have been difficult and sometimes controversial. Some persons close to the Collected Works project have argued that the lectures were never intended for publication and most would be best left in archives for future research. Because they are taken out of their original context of the classroom where Grant could bring them to life in the delivery and exchange with students, readers may not be able to give the lectures their due. Grant included phrases in his composed lectures that seem to be jumping-off points for longer explanations. Readers can only guess what he might have said. Supporters of publishing some of the lectures, on the other hand, point out that the thoughts that appear in the published work often began with an attempt to express them to students. They argue that it may be helpful to some readers to have access to that intimate engagement with students that was such a vital part of Grant’s life work. No doubt his own students will be the best readers because they will remember the extraordinary intensity of his engagement with other thinkers in the seminars. It will be more difficult for others, and they are asked to remember that they are not reading documents finished for publication. In the final selection we have compromised between these different opinions and selected lectures and excerpts for their interest and merit and also for their possible historical and biographical interest. We also note that this selection illustrates only some aspects of Grant’s teaching in the 1970s. For example, there are no lectures from a course that was of great importance to him, ‘The Question of Good in the Technological Age,’ and none from the graduate courses on Plato. Arthur Davis

Undergraduate Lectures

Table of Contents 1 2 3 4

Five Lectures on Christianity – 1b6 The Beautiful and the Good – 4f6 Resurrection – 4f6 Two Ways of Teaching Plato and Augustine in the Modern World – 4f6

FIVE LECTURES ON CHRISTIANITY Grant delivered these lectures to the Religion Department’s introductory class. Approximately 180 students attended the course in 1975–6, with sections on different world religions taught by different professors.

I am going to lecture you for five weeks on Christianity. I hate so starting, but it is only right to be quite clear. First the nuts and bolts questions of how this section will proceed. As previously, I will lecture once a week, and there will be two tutorials a week. The part of the exam on Christianity will be worked out by the tutors in conjunction with myself – so that what is discussed in these lectures, and what is discussed in the tutorials will be important for the exam. Now reading – what is required for the Christianity part of the exam? Let me show this by speaking about what my five lectures will be about. It is slightly different from the lists laid down here but is related to them.

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(1) Today – method – the way of studying Christianity. (2) Next day – the classical world into which it came. I want you to read the extract given in the Appendix on Plato’s Republic. (3) Lecture directly on the Gospels. Reading assignment. Add Passion narrative in St Matthew, chaps 26–28, Revised Standard Version. (4) The coming to be of Western Christianity. I am asking you to read extracts from 19th book of The City of God by St Augustine, which I will lecture about. (5) I will continue to lecture on Western Christianity and would ask you to read Dostoevsky’s ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ part of his great novel The Brothers Karamazov. You should also read part on Christianity in the text book.1 Now these readings are required in the sense that when the tutors and I get together to make the exam, we will assume that you have read these readings and that reading them will help you get a good mark on the exam. These are also a very well chosen set of readings which are a great help, which cover many questions in the history of Christian thought and practice. After all we are faced in this section with discussing in five weeks the theory that has modelled the Western world more than anything else – each section one could spend a whole course on. We are trying to give an overall introduction to Christianity. Therefore the tutors and I have to say clearly what you have to do to pass the exam. It is of course another matter what you read to come to know what Christianity is. In the way our conventional system is set up, one has to make clear the distinction between knowing what is necessary for exams and what is necessary for the soul. Is that all clear? Let me also say – break in at any time with questions. If I do not stop just force me to stop – and if there is anything you want to ask me, my office is 114, University Hall. I love to discuss these matters. Lecture One – Method Now I want to spend the rest of this lecture trying to make some clear remarks [about] what it is to study Christianity – to come to know what Christianity is. Let me start with the words ‘objective’ and ‘objectivity.’ Our model of knowledge in the Western world had been for a long time the objective knowledge of the natural sciences. Water freezes at 32

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degrees Fahrenheit. – objective knowledge. What is meant by the word object? Ob – against, ject from throw, from jacere. (Write on board) An object literally means something thrown against. An object in a court of law – for example, Hearst case.2 When we say ‘objective knowledge’ we mean knowledge reached by throwing something against us and forcing it to give its reasons. Now this is the model of knowledge in our society – the technological society, techne – logos etc (write on blackboard). ‘Objective’ is a certain way of representing the world to ourselves – as something we can control. Now that paradigm of knowledge has been almost universal in technological society. We see everything as things we can control. But this is clearly not so. Human love, great works of art. (Why the study of [?] [?] can be so ghastly.) Now the difficulty of studying any religion today – not only Christianity but the Sanskrit tradition – is that our paradigm of knowing something is controlling it as an object – but this very way of knowing a religion denies what the religion claims to be. For example, Christianity does not claim to be something we can measure and define, but something that measures and defines us. I think we must face this fact right at the beginning – the very form of what we are told knowledge (or science) is, in all our education, makes it difficult for us to know what Christianity is, (or, as I have said, any other religion). (See the chapter on the meaning of science.) Let me put the same point in another way. Christianity is at its heart a series of statements about the way things are – it is a statement saying ‘this is what is,’ and from these statements are deduced statements about how it is good for human beings to live. The word ‘good’ (write on board) has meant ‘what we are fitted for.’ Good to breathe – example from breath. A good horse runs fast. A good man does what he is fitted for. Now clearly what we are fitted for depends on the way things are. E.g. If we understand the world to be the war of each against each, which people deduced from Darwinian biology, there is no reason why we should be just. Nietzsche, the great philosopher, (write on board) made this clear. He said to modern men – you have described the way things are, and yet you expect people to go on thinking it is good to be just. But of course justice is not what one is fitted for, if this is the way things are – namely that we are only an accidental species on an accidental planet. Now what I am saying about method is the following: Religions

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make the claim this is the way things are, therefore it is good to live this way. But our modern paradigm of knowledge divides between knowledge which has to do with objective facts, (and the objective tells us the way things are), and then says how it is good to be depends on our values – and values are not objective but subjective. Those of us who are studying social science will have heard of the fact-value distinction – judgments of fact – judgments of value. But in this way you have a great division between the subjective and the objective. But all religions are affirmations of the unity of the objective and the subjective. They are affirmations of this is the way things are, and therefore this is how it is good to live. Therefore the very method in the modern sciences or modern knowledge cuts us off from having knowledge of what the great religions are. Now I think that all of us should be aware of that difficulty when we start to try and reach knowledge of Christianity – which is clearly the purpose of this section of the class. Questions? Second section: What I have just said about method applies to our modern ability to have knowledge of any religion; what I am going to say now is a particular difficulty about knowing Christianity. Let me put the difficulty this way: Christianity is for Western people above all our own. It is our own in the sense that we are Western people – Europe and North America. Abendland (write on board) Occident – Orient. Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes – the West. (write Untergang and Christianity.) Now as far as the West goes, it was more made by Christianity than by anything else – our science, our art, our books, [?] in technology, our politics, our [?], and our account of sexuality were formed by Christianity. What we mean by the West is the civilization that came to be out of the classical world, and that was above all made by a particular kind of Christianity, Western Christianity. It is not Christianity, but Western Christianity. Distinguish. And what is the staggering destiny of that Western culture? – It is, in some way, being more than a Western culture, a world-wide culture. Now to know one’s own is always difficult. (One’s own family as an analogy.) Yet it is our own in a strange way, because the history of the Western world in the last three centuries above all has been the history of the secularizing of Christianity. ‘Secularizing’ means making Christianity worldly (write ‘secularism’) – time is all – oblivion of the oppo-

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site of time, which is eternity – expressed vaguely as timelessness. Yet this very secularism is Christian secularism. Santayana and Russell.3 If we look at the two different ideologies, American progressivism and Marxist progressivism, why I do not call it American liberalism is because the opposite of conservative is not liberal but progressive. Both of these, both American ideology which holds us and Marxist ideology, are products of Western Christianity. The difficulty in method is the following: we look at Christianity through the eyes of products of Christianity. Notes and glosses And this very very much confuses us, – modern scholarship, for example, in the text book. I think one has to be aware of these difficulties if one is going to try and reach knowledge of Christianity. Questions? (If anything else necessary, speak about lecturing about something from within – not within Western Christianity, but Christianity.) Lecture Two – Platonism I will be in 114 after class and am delighted to talk about the matters with people. Now it may seem strange to start a description of Christianity by talking about Greek philosophy. But I do so for the following reasons: (1) What we are discussing is the height of the world that Christianity came into, and it seems to me a lot of nonsense has been talked about the relation of Christianity to that world. Picture dramas of Christianity simply at enmity with that world (the movies [?][?]). But St Augustine said that Plato knew the whole of Christian truth except that the Word (logos) had become flesh. St Clement of Alexandria – outsiders come to the Gospel via the Old Testament, civilized men via the paideia – the proper education – the paideia is what we are discussing today. (2) No religion can stand unless those who are in it can think that religion [and] understand it. But in the Bible there is no systematic language for that self-understanding. No words in the Bible for ‘nature’ or ‘history’ etc. This language we are looking at today was by and large the language in terms of which Christianity understood itself for many centuries. (3) Obviously any serious universal religion – that is, which claims to be teaching universal truths about the way things are – must be more than

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tied to certain particular historic events. Let me say, for example, if three or eighteen civilizations beyond this [one], there was no knowledge or memory of Jesus Christ left in the world, would Christianity not be true, that is, would it not be the truth about the way things are? Of course it would, in my opinion. To say that is in no sense to take away from Christ; that is impossible – because He is perfection. And you can’t take away from perfection. But if human beings lose all memory of that perfection, that would not deny the truth of what is given in that perfection. Now to turn to the Platonic writings. The Republic is a book in which Socrates discusses with some friends the question: What is justice? These passages you are reading are the height of the book, in which he discusses the divine, and how we come to have knowledge of the divine. Let me say when in these passages the Good or Goodness itself is talked about it is just another language for what we call God. Indeed the passages are the most famous philosophic writings on God in Western history. Now what is the question about justice which leads him to these discussions of the eternal? It is the question, ‘Is justice good?’ Good, I said last time just means what we are fitted for. The question is, then, whether justice is what we are fitted for? Now clearly it is a good question. Anybody who has lived with their eyes wide open in the world knows that the just (to use vulgar language) get screwed. In worldly language, acting justly clearly does not much pay. Not only ... people like Stalin. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, everybody knows this. Socrates and Plato knew it – Socrates was put to death by the democracy of Athens. Indeed we can ask of ourselves, do any of us believe that justice is what we are fitted for? ... The central question is: is justice what we are fitted for? Now that raises two questions. (a) What is justice? That Socrates has dealt with earlier in the book and we must [?]. I hope you would read it. It is the account of the world in which it can be shown that justice is what we are fitted for. In the modern account it is not possible. (b) Are we fitted for anything? To say we are fitted for something is, to put it crudely, to say that there is a purpose in living. Modern thought has so much said that we are accidental creatures on an accidental planet and that we make up our own purposes as we

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go along. Money, pleasure, power etc. Nietzsche – Beyond Good and Evil – means we know we are not fitted for anything. Now already in the Republic there has been the argument about purpose, namely we are fitted for certain purposes and not for others. Now in the passages we are reading we have passed beyond that to the question: what fits us for what we are fitted for? That is, how do we come to have knowledge of God, or Goodness Itself? Clearly, what we mean by what fits us for what we are fitted for has been traditionally expressed by the word ‘God.’ Now Plato uses three images to say what he means. (a) The Sun: to explain what he means by the Good, he uses a simple example from the world of sight. The sun is the cause of light and the cause of our eyes. (There could not be animals on this planet with eyes if there was not the sun.) The sun is the cause of our seeing, both as the cause of our eyes and of light, and he says that it is a good image of what Goodness Itself is in the world of the mind. (Sight – love. Love and knowledge – their relation. Difficulty of objectivity.) (b) The divided line: it is his account of what it is to know, and what may be known in the long struggle of our lives from the shadows and imaginings of childhood into the highest knowledge of what fits us for what we are fitted for. A simple image for his epistemology – episteme, logos. To use other language, ‘Itinerarum Mentis in Deum’ from the 13th century. This is what the line is. (c) The Cave: It is a picture of human beings chained in a cave, and some break away and crawl upwards into the light of day to escape from the cave, drawn there by the light outside. This is his picture of society, for society is the cave, and his picture of education. The word education comes from this very passage (e – out, duco – lead). Education means to be led out of the cave. Also the word conversion comes from this image, con-vertere. To be converted is to be turned around. Now of these three images, I am sure for the understanding of Christianity in this course, the first – the sun, and the third – the cave, are the two important ones to concentrate on. If I were lecturing on the philosophy of science – the second – the line, would be the important one, because it deals so closely with the nature of mathematics etc. I could not cut the image of the line from your readings, and I hope you will

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read it – because it is certainly the most famous writing on the question ‘What is knowledge?’ in Western history – but I just do not have time to give you lectures on the nature and limits of mathematics in these five lectures. Therefore let us concentrate on the sun and the cave – because they are the two great religious images in terms of which more than any other philosophic writing, Christianity has understood itself. To talk about the sun image, let me make two simple distinctions as a way of understanding it, (a) the distinction between knowledge and opinion – that is, from the world of thought, and (b) the distinction between pleasure and happiness – that is, from the world of practice and living. First, knowledge and opinion. Another word for opinion is belief. Now knowledge never changes – opinion always. Opinions may be true, but they may be false. Knowledge must be true. Opinions – example Trudeau – changing. An opinion: a generation or two ago, most Westerners would have said God is; now a great percentage of Canadians would say God is not. They did not know or they would not have changed. It was their opinion. Knowledge: If A = B and B = C, then A = C – a very simple example. One can never doubt that it is necessarily true. It must be. But knowledge not only in our minds but about the world. That is, our minds are intelligent and the world is intelligible. What is science but that? Now what Plato means by the Good is at this level what it is that makes our minds intelligent and the world intelligible. It is the source of that intelligence and that intelligibility. As in the image the sun is the cause of our eyes and the cause of light which allows us to see, so the Good is the cause of our knowing and that the world is knowable. Second, the distinction between pleasure and happiness. Now we are here talking about the central fact of human life, namely that we [are] beings who desire. Now if you take pleasure as solely what we are fitted for, then you see human life as largely a conflict between desires. The desire to pass exams and therefore study is in conflict with the desire to see Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ A conflict between desires. But this conflict between desires is not the central human condition according to Plato. The central human condition is contrarity [being contrarily disposed?] towards the same object of desire. Example: In lying about somebody else to get oneself out of trouble,

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one is contrarily disposed to that lying, and this implies the idea of happiness. Happiness is that in which not this or that part of ourselves will be satisfied, but in which we as total beings will be satisfied. In terms of that distinction between pleasure and happiness, the Good Itself is that in which desire is utterly satisfied. It is the highest object of desire. What is being said in the sun image is that the Good Itself is both that which makes the world intelligible and the mind intelligent, that it is the cause of knowledge and also the highest end of desire. This is indeed what the word, ‘God’ has meant in the Western world, – the cause of knowledge and the highest end of desire. And that is said most clearly in what he says about the sun. The cave if time. Describe the situation. Lecture 3 – The Gospels Today we come to the thing itself. The supreme figure, Jesus Christ. And to understand what Christianity is we must understand why for those of us who are Christians this is the supreme figure. That is what I am going to talk about today, and please stop me because it is hard to describe what one loves. One of my sons thinks the music of a group called the Grateful Dead very beautiful, and he has succeeded in showing me why that is so – but it has been hard. Now the Gospels are to me where one finds the entirely beautiful and that is hard to describe. By the beautiful I mean the image of the Good in the world. The answer to this is in the title we give the books. The Gospels – written by what one calls the Evangelists – The good news. This is the good news – the good news about the whole, not about this or that, but about the whole – the news that ‘to be is good.’ Now why do we need such news? All of us from the earliest days suffer – things go wrong, people we love die, and we come to think that to be is not good. It is only good under some circumstances. I know [that if] somebody came through that door now and told me my wife had been killed, I would not think it good to be. But we pass beyond ourselves in this matter. The terrible things that happen to others, in general and in detail, the enslavement of whole peoples, the victory of the unjust and the conquerors in his-

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tory – the earthquakes, etc., etc. I need not pile it on. Suffering is the very heart of human life, and animal life. Now in the face of that there are two responses, (1) those who say that world is a mad chaos and there is no purpose to anything, that is, God is not. That is despair, and despair is considered the greatest evil for a human being. (2) The second response is to be continually thinking for our adult [lives] how one puts together the perfection of God and the sufferings of the world. Can I believe that justice is good, that is, that God is just? The study [is called] theodicy (theos dike), trying to understand how we can think God is just in the light of the terrible afflictions of human beings. Now Christ’s life is the Gospel, is the good news, because it answers the contradiction (contra diction – speaking against) between the justice of God and the sufferings of human beings. Now if you want to overcome a contradiction falsely you wipe one side away, and then there is no contradiction. But that is not an overcoming of the contradiction, that is just a denial of it. In this case, the perfection of God denied, you get out of the contradiction with atheism. You deny the suffering of human beings and you just pretend that the world is other than it is. Now Christianity does not deny either side of the contradiction, but overcomes it by taking suffering up into God. Here is this entirely beautiful, absolutely just being, that is, perfect being – that is, God, who is afflicted by the worst suffering life has to offer, and overcomes that suffering. That is, the supreme contradiction of life between the perfection of God and the suffering of human beings is overcome, not in the general principles of thought – but in the actual here and now events of the world. This is what is meant by saying these writings are Gospels. They are the good news of a completely concrete (if you like the word, existential) kind that justice is good. To use the language of Paul in the New Testament, what the gospels are about is the self-emptying of God. We all know that suffering, any real suffering, is self-emptying. People in mental hospitals. Now in the terms of that statement, how is that carried out in the Gospels? (1) The Teaching and Life of Jesus. (2) Then the Passion or Suffering.

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The teaching The Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5 and 7, a perfect account of justice (righteousness or justice) Beatitudes – Blessed are the meek – Blessed are those who hunger and thirst ... I prefer the word ‘happy’ to ‘blessed’ – the union of happiness and justice. Happiness is what we are fitted for. What is breathtaking also in the teaching is its immediate clarity and comprehensibility. Take the great parables – stories. The Good Samaritan, Luke 11.29. The Prodigal Son, Luke 15.11. What is wonderful about the Prodigal Son, for example, is that it is perfectly clear on the surface and perfectly deep however many times one reads it. Now this combination of clarity and depth meant that Christianity was equally open to all human beings. Why it spread so quickly through the Roman Empire was just that. The parable of the Prodigal Son just lays before people in the simplest story the truth of the relations between God and human beings, yet that very simplicity is absolutely profound, so that the greatest thinker can never come to the bottom of it. This is why ‘equality’ has been central to Christianity. The cleverest or the most powerful ruler, or the greatest artist, are in the same position before that story as the simplest non-literate. All can learn from it equally. But of course the life and teaching of Christ is but a preparation for what has been called the Passion of Christ. This is true of all of us, our deeds are more important than our words. As was once said about another human being – ‘what you do speaks so loudly that I can’t hear what you say.’4 Christ said it very clearly. See above and read Matt. 25:34–35. Why these deeds of Christ have been at the centre of Western history is because they are the supreme drama – drama is just the Greek word for deeds done. That is why I think the most important readings for this part of the course on Christianity, is an account of the deeds in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 26 to 36 and following. Gethsemane and Golgotha. The greatest commentary on this is not in words – but in music, Bach’s Passion according to St Matthew. I chose this rendition of the events because of that commentary. Much better than words – the great art which combines most profoundly the abstract and the erotic. I will nevertheless try some words to describe those deeds. Here is the entirely beautiful being destroyed by the forces of the great authorities of his day, and by the religious authorities of his day,

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and that destruction met by the one who is being destroyed with complete justice. At the height of his destruction on the Cross, in the midst of extreme physical pain, he says about those who are destroying him, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23, 24) This remark of Christ’s is the completely just remark. Justice, as I have said, is to render each human being their due. Here he says what is his torturers’ due – to be forgiven because they are fools, – they do not know what they are doing. They do not know the way things are, therefore they torture him. Here is the perfect living out of justice by good, even under extreme affliction. I think one first has to see the extremity of that suffering. To compare: I said last day that two deaths have dominated the thought of the Western world, that of Socrates and that of Christ. Now it is the extremity of the suffering in Christ’s death which has made these events more dominating in the Western world than the death of Socrates. Socrates had a calm serene death. He tells a joke just before he takes the hemlock. Apollodorus.5 But the death of Christ is a death of such blackness. The scene in Gethsemane. St Luke reports that He sweated blood. We all sweat when we are scared out of our wits. It is above all the destruction of our prestige. All of us are able to maintain ourselves in life above all by some form of prestige. We convince ourselves we are something by how others see us in the world. I have been much flattered in the last years, and what is so horrible is how one eats it up. Flattery will get you everywhere. Now what is staggering in the Gospels is the complete destruction of his prestige. Here is this beautiful being coming into Jerusalem in great acclaim [?] and then his destruction, including the destruction of his prestige. This is in the cry of dereliction on the Cross, Matthew 27.41. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Even the very foundation of his life, the relation of God to God, is destroyed. Cry of dereliction – a psalm, yes indeed. But it is the very absence of God from God. Suffering is absence. Lecture 4 – The Resurrection Start with miracles – a bad modern way of talking – 1st cause, chain of secondary causes – morally repugnant – arbitrary – see three things. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Jack Nicholson. Still lecturing on

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the Gospels because I haven’t dealt with what is given us in the Resurrection of Christ – later in the lecture I will go on to St Augustine. Now in the modern world there is one thing that stands in the way of getting near what is given in the Resurrection, and that is our modern account of miracles. Therefore I have to start from a description of that to clear it out of the way. We all know that the world is a great network of causes. What we are doing in science is to try and understand that network of causes. Now those of us who assert that God or Good is assert that God has set up this great network of causes. He is the first cause of these secondary causes. We often call God the first Cause. But it is also clear that there is a great independence of this great network of secondary causes – we call the world the cosmos. Now the modern account of miracles is that a miracle occurs when the first cause interferes with the usual network of secondary causes and makes something happen that would not otherwise happen. Now this account of miracles is nonsense for the following reason. It makes of God an arbitrary and immoral tyrant. Why, if God can interfere arbitrarily with the great network of secondary causes, does he not do so when people are being tortured, or when babies are born mongoloid? This modern view of miracles was invented by those who wanted to hold apart science and religious truth – but it is quite unthinkable when one starts to think it – because it makes God or Good arbitrary or wicked. Sawing off the branch. If that kind of nonsense is got out of one’s mind – what are the wonders that have occurred throughout the history of all religions, and happen to this day? All over the world in any society there are certain powers associated with those who love greatly. What does the word ‘charity’ mean? It is much abused these days. What charity means is those people who give themselves away to other people. The powers granted to such people are fantastic. I have seen such powers. Second Part about Resurrection There is a ghastly way of speaking of it in the modern world which I call the faery-tale way. A prince (or princess) is dressed in rags and everybody [scorns him], and suddenly he pulls them off and appears in his prince’s costume, and everybody treats him well.

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Applied to Christianity. The central symbol of Christianity has always been the Cross. Clearly in some sense the Resurrection takes place on the Cross: All the language of St John about Christ being lifted up, elevated. Christ says on the cross ‘it is consummated.’ Marriage is consummated, sexually fulfilled. As I have said, on the Cross justice is consummated – because the absolute absence of justice is met with justice. Let me put it another way. At the height of the dinner Christ has with his friends just before he is arrested, He says (St John’s Gospel, 16:33) don’t be afraid of what is going to happen, ‘I have overcome the world’; – or better translated ‘I have been victorious over the cosmos.’ Now the cosmos or the world just means that network of necessary secondary causes of which we are part. Now what do these words mean? Justice is always in a certain sense absent from that order of necessity of secondary causes. But in Christ’s life and death these secondary causes have been made to serve justice. He has conquered the cosmos because he has submitted to all the injustice of the cosmos – justly. Now of course one of the central things of the order of the cosmos is death. In that sense the Resurrection means that in being victorious over the cosmos on the Cross he overcomes death, in a way that people have always known since that time. Any questions? Now we get on to the history of Christianity since that date. We will skip immediately to St Augustine, who more than any figure is the founder of Western Christianity. The great division in Christianity is between Western and Eastern Christianity. Within Western Christianity there came to be divisions associated with what we call the Reformation. But these divisions are minor compared to the great division between Eastern and Western Christianity. Now what do we mean by two statements: (a) what is Western Christianity? and (b) what do we mean by saying that Augustine is the central figure in its foundation? (a) Western civilization is the civilization which arose in Western Europe after the fall of classical Mediterranean civilization, which developed in Western Europe and spread its roots outside of Europe in the Americas, ourselves included; which civilization was held together above all by a certain account of Christianity. This civilization has, in

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recent years, spread its power out into the other civilizations of the world, China, India, Russia etc. so that it is in some sense now world wide. But in becoming world wide it is now dying. History is certainly a great story of the rise and fall of civilizations, and of one thing I am certain – we are now living at the time of the end of Western civilization. It is clearly dying all around us. (b) What does it mean to say that St Augustine was as much as anybody the founder of Western civilization? The extract which you are being asked to read is from his book, The City of God. That book was written just after the sack of Rome – 410 A.D. Think what it meant – the sack of Rome – the sack of his civilization. ([Imagine] New York etc.) We are reading a small part of the 14th book – but the book as a whole is 22 books, just describing why Roman civilization was inadequate and therefore why it doesn’t matter that its empire is falling. Why Augustine fascinates modern Western people – the study of him is enormously popular in our world – is that people see a great similarity between his situation and ours. He lived at the end of Roman civilization as we live at the end of Western civilization. Now let me say that I am rather sad that I chose this extract from him. It is a great extract, but it is a rather negative one. To understand Western Christianity we had to have something from Augustine, but this extract is fairly negative, because he is turning back to say what was wrong with classical civilization and classical philosophy. If you want to read him in his more positive mood, read his Confessions. Read it in a modern translation. (the failure of Victorian translation) Augustine has been called the first modern man because of the Confessions. One thing that makes Western civilization is our enormous [?] tendency to self-analysis, and there is no more staggering book of self-analysis than Augustine’s Confessions. Now in this extract which you are asked to read, why is Augustine shown to be the founder of Western Christianity? First, go back to Plato. The good means what we are fitted for. And the Good (capital G) means what fits us for what we are fitted for, namely God. What Augustine says in this extract is that classical philosophy has been enormously divided about the human good – He shows that, according to the famous Roman philosopher, Varro, there are 288 possible accounts of human good, and he shows how that division has taken place.6 What

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he says about Christianity is that against that uncertainty about human good Christianity declares unequivocally what human good consists in – Peace in Eternal Life. Now I think that you should get two things that in my opinion have above all characterized Western Christianity, Certainty and Transcendence. Certainty. This was certainty in Christianity that life has a purpose, and what that purpose is. Certainty – both for good and ill; for good in the terrible uncertainty of life – for ill in the ability of Christianity to move out into the other civilizations of the world, so certain. Exclusivity gave it that certainty – less pleasant. Transcendence. What Augustine says in unequivocal terms is that the purpose of this life is in the world – but quite transcends the world. This has been the enormous power of Christianity – transcendence and immanence. What modern people mean by the death of God is that transcendence has gone. Certainty and transcendence weigh against each other – but this is a strength. Lecture 5 – Dostoevsky’s Christianity That question ‘What is Christianity’ is not easy in five lectures, or for you to have to try to come upon it for the purposes of a class. I have not said much about the history of Christianity and simply left it last day that in the history of Christianity there comes to be, with St Augustine as the elemental founder, a particular species of Christianity – Western Christianity. Now by Western Christianity I mean by way of civilization – the civilization which centres in the North Atlantic, France, Germany, Holland, England. The dynamic heart of civilization from the Mediterranean (just look at the map), Greece and Rome, to the North Atlantic countries and their chief extensions abroad, North America. Probably the origin of the word ‘religion’ is ‘what binds together’ (Latin word) and what binds together that North Atlantic civilization is what I call Western Christianity, that is, both Protestantism and Catholicism. It was the destiny of that civilization to be world wide. Take Marxism, which is a kind of public religion in Russia and China, a totally Western product – a product of Western Biblical religion – part Christianity, part Judaism. It is impossible to think of Marx’s

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view of history without seeing it as coming out of Biblical religion. It is the secular Biblical religion. Indeed the two great public religions of the world today are Marxism and American progressivism, and those two religions are late outcrops of that Western civilization, the religion of which we call Western Christianity, and, as I said last day, that Western civilization founded on Western Christianity seems now to be tottering to its end. Therefore in asking the question – What is Christianity? – we have to make a very careful distinction between Christianity and Western Christianity. It is for this reason that I chose as the last piece of the readings the extract from Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ – because that writing is a criticism of Western Christianity in the name of Christ. I might have used this last lecture to talk of the history of Western Christianity, such questions as the Protestant Reformation – the great break within Western Christianity between Protestant and Catholics. Such questions are important and I hope you have discussed them in your tutorials. But I am going to use this last lecture to talk about Dostoevsky’s attack on Western Christianity in the name of Christ. Who was Dostoevsky? A Russian novelist ([wrote from] 1860s– 1880s). No doubt Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are the supreme writers of fiction, Shakespeare the great playwright. Dostoevsky lived in the West, but turned back to assert Eastern Christianity – what is known as orthodoxy. His writing is a great attack on Russia being Westernized. For example, The Possessed (or The Devils) is a great prophecy against the Western revolutionaries who are going to take over Russia in the coming revolution. If God is not, anything is permissable; there is no reason we can’t do anything, however brutal. When we think of Stalin – his ferocious tyranny under Marxism. 16,000,000 Kulaks. This novel The Brothers Karamazov is the last, and his great masterpiece. I hope someday some of you will read it. This small extract is a story one brother tells another. It is about the meeting of the Grand Inquisitor and Christ, and it turns on the account of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness – three great temptations (Matthew chap 4) – Now to face this writing of Dostoevsky’s I would say two things. (1) ambiguity – saying something that points in two or more directions, double meanings to everything. He was the great master of what we call today black comedy. This makes his writing difficult to read.

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(2) All the words are put in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor. Christ only does two things – he heals somebody at the beginning, and kisses the Grand Inquisitor at the end. The silence of truth. We live in a world dominated by words and pictures, the media dominate our lives. We live in a world in which there is little silence. Old Testament, ‘Be still and know that I am God.’7 Dostoevsky is emphasizing the silence of truth. But Dostoevsky also puts a very powerful case in the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor, and to see what is being said in this passage you must see the strength and persuasiveness of what is being said by the Grand Inquisitor. His case is to Dostoevsky the case of Western Christianity in all its dynamism, and attraction and exclusivity – put forward most clearly. Let me say how important this is in life. If you are going to show what is untrue about any opinion, you must see that opinion at its best, not at its worst. Otherwise you cannot refute it. American view of Russia – Russian view of America – both pretend the other has a weak case. Therefore they can never see the other person’s case. Unless one is really touched by the possible truth one will never really look at it. You must see the great strength of the Grand Inquisitor’s case, because it is a case which most of us really think is true often. Now the Grand Inquisitor puts his case and the three temptations of Christ. After his meeting with John the Baptist, Christ went into the wilderness, and his three temptations are described: (1) turning stones into bread. (2) jumping off the temple, a public miracle. (3) taking over all the powers of the state. Now the Grand Inquisitor says that Christ was wrong not to have done these things. Why was Christ wrong? According to the Grand Inquisitor, if Christ had done these things he could have built a world where all people were comfortably happy on earth, and that is what human beings want and need. Christ offered them freedom and that is not what human beings want and need. Therefore Christ led human beings away from worldly happiness and that was a great evil. Western Christianity, according to the Grand Inquisitor, has corrected that mistake of Christ’s. It has made human beings happy, by giving them bread and miracles and authority. Those are what human beings want and need, and Western Christianity has provided them with that. It took over the power of the state and gave them what they wanted. What they wanted was to live in a harmonious ant-hill, and this is what Western Christian-

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ity has achieved – and what Christ threatened by offering them freedom. What men wanted was to get rid of their freedom which only torments them and makes them unhappy – to give up their freedom of conscience – so that they could have the comfort of living securely in the world – where they do not need to think or to be uncertain, and where they live with the certainty of authority. Human beings are just too weak to want what Christ offers them. It was therefore foolish to offer them this, and Western Christianity has got over that mistake of Christ’s. The only way Christ could have united all human beings in worship for ever was by giving them earthly bread, and earthly authority and earthly entertainment (miracles), and he threw away the chance. Now there are three things I would like to say by way of commentary. (1) The sheer strength of the Grand Inquisitor’s case. Is it not a fact that what men both want and need most is a comfortable life here on earth? In terms of the language I used earlier for Plato and Augustine – is this not man’s highest good, that is, the purpose of life? Is not man’s chief purpose to have a comfortable life here on earth? (a) to get that does he not need bread? (b) to get that does he not need, beyond bread – entertainment, the mass entertainment which is now so much the centre of our lives? (c) to get that does he not need authority, to keep things in order, so that he can enjoy things here on earth? Take, for example, the fact of war. Isn’t life here on earth particularly ruined for human beings by war, and isn’t above all authority necessary, the authority of the state, and finally the authority of the one world-state to eliminate war. What I am saying is that the Grand Inquisitor’s case is very strong. How can we doubt that the purpose of life is a comfortable life on earth and this requires bread and entertainment and authority. Any way this is what most human beings want. As the Grand Inquisitor says to Christ, ‘you will only have the few; we will give peace to all.’ (2) I would like to say, isn’t the picture of what the Grand Inquisitor says that Western civilization under the drive of western Christianity has offered human beings – a very accurate picture of the ideals that this civilization has offered the rest of the world and persuaded the rest of the world that it is best to have the harmonious ant-heap. This is surely why North America is the centre of the world – because it is the

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society where that is most completely realized. The Great Lakes region – our world. In that sense, when you think of what Dostoevsky is offering through the words of the Grand Inquisitor, you should think above all of the society you inhabit. The mental health state – the next stage of capitalist society. We have conquered the question of bread; beyond bread the essence of a happy life is a happy sexual life, and that is arranged by the psychiatrists. If people step out of line the mental health apparatus will bring them back into line. (3) What does Dostoevsky mean by the freedom that Christ offered them, and which the Grand Inquisitor says a good society must get rid of? This is difficult for us to understand, because we live in the society the Grand Inquisitor offers and therefore it is hard to see what is absent in that society. Freedom means for us external freedom. We mean by freedom when we want to do something, nothing stands in the way of us doing it, and that political freedom is surely a great good. To put it at its crudest: if I want to do it with a girl or a boy or an animal, there is an identical Holiday Inn everywhere in North America for me to do it in. Now clearly this external freedom is not what Dostoevsky means by freedom. The Russian word for freedom is ‘svoboda,’ and it is nearly the same word as the word for God.8 I would think what he means by freedom or svoboda is best translated as openness to eternity. But you must think about that. What the Grand Inquisitor offers human beings is everything except that freedom which I have translated as openness to eternity.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD On the ‘staggering unity’ in Plato’s dialogues of the ‘cosmological approach with the ethical-religious approach.’ This lecture was delivered to a 4th-year seminar course, sometimes attended by graduate students, designated as ‘The Meeting of Christianity and Philosophy.’

I am loath to lecture (a) because of laziness, (b) because of ignorance, and (c) I do not want to conceptualize into a tight framework of my

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poor partaking, the amazing account of reality here presented. But I thought I would say a bit about the beautiful and the good as far as I understand the matter. I will put it in simple language. I have a barrel full of lectures on Plato in my file and I cannot use any of them because they were too foolishly complex. Let me start with a simple remark. What I find is most perfect in Plato is that there is a total union in his thought of what is in lesser philosophers either separated or one part of which is not present. That is, he combines in a staggering unity the cosmological approach with the ethical-religious approach. What I mean by these two is the following: the cosmological approach is the question ‘What is the nature of the cosmos? What is real and how can I know what is real?’ Or, to use other language, it puts the philosophic question as ‘What general and universally valid conclusions about the cosmos can I draw?’ On the other hand the ethical-religious approach starts from the questions ‘How shall I live? What is worth doing? To what shall I pay my allegiance, my reverence. How shall I find happiness?’ And if you want, as I certainly do want, to use directly religious language, ‘How can I come to know God and to be like Him,’ or as Plato says, ‘His friend?’ Now many philosophers either concentrate on one of these sides but not on the other, or separate them. But what happens when they are separated? If the cosmological is taken alone, philosophy becomes an abstract remote discipline that has no connection with our life and our existence. And this is what has happened in an age when philosophical analysis has become the handmaid of the natural sciences and when philosophy becomes more and more logic and particularly the logic of the sciences. It is against this that that wonderful philosophical movement, existentialism, has made its protest. As existentialism says, I start from my existence and try to find its meaning. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard, that early existentialist and the first exalter of Christianity against philosophy, could still have such enormous respect for Socrates, whom he described as ‘a passion of inwardness in existing,’9 and we will indeed come to this when we come to discuss Phaedo next, where Socrates talks of how he turned from the scientific philosophy of his day to the effort to know himself. On the other hand, if the ethical-religious approach sacrifices the cosmological, philosophy is also lost, because the questions how shall I act, what shall I reverence, must be concerned with the nature of things

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as they are, and the effort to know those things as they are. We can only know how we should live if we know what kind of a universe it is. And that is where existentialism, for example, fails. It is not concerned with science – that is, with the desire to know systematically the nature of things and of the cosmos as a whole. Now what is so wonderful in the Platonic writings taken as a whole is the holding together of the cosmological and systematic view of philosophy with the ethical-religious view. Now in this class we are first of all concerned with dialogues which clearly fall in their emphasis on the side of the ethical-religious. Particularly the Symposium and Phaedo are the dialogues of life and of death and are passionately existential – though in them the cosmological is not far away. In the Phaedrus we are nearer the unity of the two, so we shall study it last. But we are not studying the great cosmological dialogues of which the Sophist and the Parmenides are, in my opinion, the greatest. Nor are we studying the last great dialogues in which the cosmological and the ethical-religious are at one, the greatest of which in my opinion is Philebus – that supreme philosophical writing. Nor should we think that the immense generality of metaphysics is higher than the practical – because the last work of Plato, The Laws, is concerned with such concrete subjects as how much wine a man should drink at different ages, and at what age one should marry. Now I have said this to begin to talk about the Good, and to point out that the Good as seen in the Symposium is seen as the supreme object of desire. But let us remember that the Good and the One are the same. In the Republic the argument for the speculative life – the argument for knowledge from God’s existence – is combined with the argument from desire – so that the Good is not only seen (a) as the highest object of desire, but also (b) [as] the cause of knowing – that is, that which makes the world intelligible and our minds intelligent – and also (c) as the cause of being – that is, the cosmological and ethical-religious are very closely bound together. In the Symposium we are chiefly concerned with desire. But in the Symposium, though our concentration is on desire or love, we must always be aware that the Good is both the supreme object of desire and of knowledge. They are at one. The love and the good are the same.

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Now let me say also that I interpret Plato as unequivocally believing in the love or the good as transcendent – that which is the supreme object of our love is absent. Let me quote to you the Republic 508–509.10 To make this clear I would have to comment on Parmenides at great length, and as that is impossible let me only say this. What does it mean to say that the highest object of desire and of the intellect is ultimately unknowable? Philosophers mostly agree that it belongs to the nature of mind to seek unity. Now they seem to disagree at this point as to the nature of that unity – or see it from the side of desire to seek meaning. Those who I may quickly characterize as the immanentists would say – ‘though it is difficult to understand what meaning the world has, we do however know in principle the kind of meaning that complete insight would reach’ – though of course the immanentist would admit that what we know in principle we cannot know in detail. Now what the believer in transcendence would say is that this unity which we seek we can neither know in principle nor in detail. To put it in theological terms, God’s essence is unknowable. (Read Dionysius in The Descent of the Dove p. 61.)11 This is the idea that the One or the Good or God is beyond knowledge. (in parenthesis let me say that those of you who are interested in theology will always...) [half page missing] ... That fundamental awareness that makes experience possible is dormant, potential, and its actualization requires an external stimulus. But this is only a stimulus, it does not produce that awareness. The human soul has by nature, by being a human soul, the truth within itself. There is a natural harmony between the human mind and everything, that is, between the human mind and the whole. Man has a kinship with the whole, that is to say with the good of the whole, with what makes the whole the whole. The good of the whole makes intelligible the place which man occupies within the whole. This is the singular dignity of man, the fact that man is a singularly privileged being, and at the same time not the highest being, for his privileged position is not his work but given to him. This we can say was the basis of classical philosophy, and not only the classical, because it is of course also the view of the Bible.

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RESURRECTION Resurrection. I am inhibited because over these stupendous questions I have no right to speak. I am sure of one thing in my life; the saints are higher than the philosophers. By the saints, I mean those people who give themselves away. They are the people who can speak truly about these matters. Also, as I have said and said, it is a difficult era in which to understand Christianity – because we are in an era, it seems to me, when two great accounts of Christianity (Protestantism and Catholicism) are fading, and a new account has not come. In such an era it is an easy response simply to try to think outside Christianity – but that is childish. In the light of that I want to say some very tentative and inadequate things propadeutically. What this course has taught me to pay attention to is Paul’s great words – Christianity is foolishness to the Greeks and a scandal to the Jews.12 As I have said, volumes have been written about this matter – but they don’t much think why ‘foolishness’ – they know God is – the suffering of God – why a scandal? Now to say some things about the Resurrection. It must not be thought apart from the Cross. Read Luther comment carefully. [The theologians of glory say that good is evil and evil good. But the theologians of the Cross say that the thing is as it is.]13 ... Now that, I think, is the dominating principle with which to think of this matter. The second thing is to read the accounts. I would read the last chapters of St John. One phrase – ‘I have overcome the world’ – is what Heidegger does not understand. How it is possible to think what is being said there.14 Now I looked up some of the modern existentialist and Biblical theologians to see if what they wrote was a help. All I can report is that I did not find this so. They take the given fact of the Resurrection but do not help me think it, what it is. (I do not want to inhibit you from reading them (Rahner, etc.)15 All I can say is that they do not help me, because they do it in terms of a German philosophy – particularly Kant – which stands in the way.) So to see what Western human beings and probably our forebears, English-speaking people, thought of it, I turned to a very great tradition of the English – poetry. I have disregarded the route from the philoso-

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phers. Now the poets are the makers. So I read a lot of English poetry last week. Two I would mention, from 17th and 19th centuries. 19th century, Hopkins; 17th century, Donne – read and comment, the language of alchemy. Excerpt from ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’ – Gerard Manley Hopkins ... ........................... Enough! the Resurrection, A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.16

Excerpt from ‘Resurrection, Imperfect.’ – by John Donne ... As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale. Whose body having walk’d on earth, and now Hasting to Heaven, would, that He might allow Himself unto all stations, and fill all, For these three days become a mineral; He was all gold when He lay down, but rose All tincture, and doth not alone dispose Leaden and iron wills to good, but is Of power to make e’en sinful flesh like his. ...17

For myself if I am thinking theologically, I think above all with Simone Weil, ‘Pensées sans ordre concernant l’amour de Dieu,’ in Gateway to God, Collins Fontana, Glasgow, 1974 Gallimard, Paris, 1962, 1, last two (Théorie des sacrements, Dernier texte).

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TWO WAYS OF TEACHING PLATO AND AUGUSTINE IN THE MODERN WORLD Let me say a word. What I would say above all is do not worry about what you know or do not know. As I have said often here, we live at a period when what positively made the West has been criticized so vehemently and rigorously with the result that that criticism, that negation, has become our tradition – and also with the result it is extremely difficult for anyone to know what they live by positively. It is a fortiori extremely difficult therefore to grasp what is being said positively in Plato and Augustine – because it is just that positivity of what they are saying which has been for several centuries under relentless attack. It is therefore very difficult to appropriate. Therefore don’t worry about what you understand or do not understand. Let me say, however, a word about why I should feel guilty. If, as I have, one has been driven by the vicissitudes of a long and crowded life to see truth in Platonism and Christianity, there are only two ways of communicating in the modern world, if one wants to speak theology – I mean by theology what it means literally, speeches about God. First way – what we might call the positive way. That is, to take the parables of the present and show how those parables in which human beings live – the tales generally [?] in terms of which human beings experience this world – (and try to show) how, if one thinks these parables clearly, one comes to the eternal. This is for example what Augustine is doing in this twelfth book. He is taking the parables of Aristotelian science – the Aristotelian account of cause and matter – and showing how they break down – but through them one can be led to understand creation out of nothing. Aristotelian science had to believe in the sempiternity of the visible world and that God does not know the world. Now Augustine, because of the Gospels, does not believe in the sempiternity of the visible world – and he does believe in God knowing the world. Therefore he has to pass beyond those parables of Aristotelian science, but he uses them as a means of lifting men’s minds to the truth. Now if I followed this positive method I would have to take the modern parables and try to show how they can be used to lift human beings beyond them to the eternal truth. For example some of us here went to a meeting on ‘Women and Madness’ yesterday.18 If I was going

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to use this positive method with the able speaker there, I would take the fact that she had a lot to say about good and evil, and I would use the parables in which she spoke of these matters, and say how they could lift her into the knowledge of the eternal, which in other aspects of her words she was denying. One has to use modern parables to talk to modern people. And this is one difficulty in your reading St Augustine is that he is using the science of his day (not ours) as his parables from which to start. Now clearly this positive method of parables has great uses for theological speech and teaching. This is what many do to lift people to theological talk, because this positive method allows us to attempt to integrate the truths of theology with any situation. But clearly I do not much use this positive and helpful method – but a second or what one might call a direct but negative method. Now the second way of living in modernity as a believer is to plunge oneself into the modern directly and simply so engross oneself in the modern by taking its parables – not as parables, but as what those who use them think them to be – a true account of what is, a world in which there are no parables, because no eternity, and therefore hold up the ancient religion against the modern. Now both these methods have their advantages and their disadvantages. The advantage of the first method is that one can use the modern to pass beyond the modern. Its disadvantage is above all superficiality. It leads us to say that the modern world is not really saying what it is saying – if it really knew what it was saying it would be asserting eternity; and the danger in that is that one may not even listen to what is really being said in the modern parables. It leads one to turn away from the authentic darkness in the modern which has in fact cut most of us off from apprehending the eternal. The danger is that one excludes oneself from the darkness of modernity. One is not aware of the depths of that darkness. Let me illustrate what the results may be. If I took the parable of good and evil the woman speaker used yesterday, and tried to move her from it, I might have only the result of leading her to a more complete modernity. To use language I have been using recently, her leftwing enthusiasm still keeps within itself a lot of good. But waiting in the wings as yet in the English-speaking world is a more terrible atheism; and the likely effect of trying to move her philosophically would not be to lead her to a greater apprehension of the eternal, but to a more devastating atheism. This is the great danger of teaching philosophy.

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The advantage of the second, negative method is that one is aware of the superficiality of the first method. Its great disadvantage or danger is to the person who practises it – because it may lead the person concerned to madness, or to reclusiveness (the inability to live in the modern) – one or the other, not both. Now let me apply this to what we have been studying this year. At the height of what we are reading today, Augustine says: ‘Let me not be my own life.’ This is almost the height of what is being said in the ancient religion in contradistinction to the modern religion. Now, it would be quite possible for me to take some parables from modern artistic, scientific, or moral experience, and use those parables to lead to why such an affirmation could be made. But if one did so, one would be liable to be led to superficiality, because as one looks at the modern parables, one would find that they deny this remark of Augustine’s – for example [student]’s psychoanalytical parables entirely are based on the affirmation ‘Let me be my own life.’ If, on the other hand, without parables one simply tried to face immediately the statement of ‘let me not be my own life’ – I am unable to do that because although I can point to writings such as Simone Weil’s where this is asserted to be true, or I could tell you stories of other people, it would be a kind of terrible insincerity for me to say that I understand the truth of that statement directly. [At top of page (I could tell you stories of other people. Connie Parker)]19 The result is that I have been very hesitant in this class and simply left it as questions. That is indeed unsatisfactory. But it is the best I can do because of my position.

Notes 1 The text book for the course has not been identified. 2 Patricia Campbell (Patty) Hearst (1954– ), American newspaper heiress, was kidnapped by an ‘urban guerilla’ group, the ‘Symbionese Liberation Army’ (SLA), on 4 February 1974 and subsequently participated in an armed robbery of a bank during which she was photographed carrying an assault rifle. The defence at her 1976 trial argued that she was coerced, but she was nevertheless convicted and spent three years in prison until her sentence was commuted by President Carter. 3 ‘Catholic atheism is different from Protestant atheism’ was a phrase that

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Grant often quoted, capturing the essence that emerged from an exchange between George Santayana and Bertrand Russell (see 261n16). This is the popular version of the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802–82) in Letters and Social Aims (1876): ‘What you are stands over you the while and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.’ Apollodorus of Phaleron, one of Socrates’ students after 397 BC, was present, according to Plato, at the death of Socrates. Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), Roman scholar, was described by Quintilian as the ‘most learned of the Romans.’ Psalm 46:10: ‘Be still and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.’ The active verb ‘to free’ is osvobozhdat, and the modern word for God is bozhe. Sören Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote a dissertation at the University of Copenhagen called The Concept of Irony: With Constant Reference to Socrates (1841). In Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) he described the possibility of living by faith and emphasized the importance of the individual and subjective truth. ‘Now, that which imparts truth to the known and the power of knowing to the knower is what I would have you term the idea of good, and this you will deem to be the cause of science, and truth in so far as the latter becomes the subject of knowledge; beautiful too, as are both truth and knowledge, you will be right in esteeming this other nature as more beautiful than either; and, as in the previous instance, light and sight may be truly said to be like the sun, and yet not to be the sun, so in this other sphere science and truth may be deemed to be like the good, but not the good; the good has a place of honour yet higher.’ (Translated by Benjamin Jowett) The quotation taken from the pseudonymous mystical theologian the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius,’ known in the Middle Ages as ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ (c.400 AD), is in Charles Williams, The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church (London: Faber and Faber 1950), 61–2: ‘Once more, ascending yet higher, we maintain that It is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding; nor is It any act of reason or understanding; nor can It be described by the reason or perceived by the understanding, since It is not number, or order, or greatness, or littleness, or equality, or inequality, and since It is not immovable nor in motion, or at rest, and has no power, and is not power or light, and does not live, and is not life; nor is It personal essence, or eternity, or time; nor can it be grasped by the understanding, since it is not knowledge or truth; nor is It kingship or wisdom; nor is it one, nor is It unity, nor is It Godhead or Goodness; nor is It a Spirit, as we

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Lectures at McMaster University – 1970s understand the term, since It is not Sonship or Fatherhood; nor is It any other thing such as we or any other being can have knowledge of; nor does it belong to the category of non-existence or to that of existence; nor do existent beings know It as It actually is, nor does It know them as they actually are; nor can the reason attain to It to name It or to know It; nor is it darkness, nor is it light, or error, or truth; nor can any affirmation or negation apply to it; for while applying affirmations or negations to those orders of being that come next to It, we apply not unto It either affirmation or negation, inasmuch as It transcends all affirmation by being the perfect and unique Cause of all things, and transcends all negation by the pre-eminence of Its simple and absolute nature – free from every limitation and beyond them all.’ 1 Corinthians 1:17–24. Grant strongly opposed the conception of the resurrection as a heroic triumph over the crucifixion seen as a defeat. For an account of his affinity with Luther’s theology of the cross see Sheila Grant, ‘George Grant and the Theology of the Cross,’ in Arthur Davis, ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity: Art, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, and Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1996), 243–62, and Harris Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross: The Christian Foundation of His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001). John 16:33: ‘These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.’ On Karl Rahner, see 262n24. Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (London: Penguin 1953), 65–6. E.K. Chambers, ed., Poems of John Donne, vol. 1 (London: Lawrence and Bullen 1896), 169–70. See also Donne’s other sonnet on the Resurrection, ibid., 155–6. Students brought Phyllis Chesler to speak at McMaster. Chesler (1940– ), American feminist psychologist, wrote the best-seller Women and Madness (1972). According to Sheila Grant, Connie Parker was a woman she and George Grant knew who was nearly blind, and had five children, one of whom died. Her priest said blindness was God’s punishment and she kept her temper in sympathy with his presumed intention (to justify the ways of God to men).

Graduate Lectures

See the introduction to the lectures (929–30) for a list of the graduate seminars Grant taught in the 1970s. Generally the seminars had fifteen to twenty members, mostly from religious studies and other departments like political science and philosophy. There were also occasional and regular visitors who sometimes annoyed registered students by drawing Grant into what seemed to be time-wasting debates. Participants recall that Grant lectured, commented on class presentations, and recommended secondary works to supplement the primary texts and themes of the course. The notebooks show that detailed responses to student papers were very important for Grant. In addition, we have included an excerpt from David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995) as a supplement to Grant’s lectures on Heidegger.

Table of Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6

Excerpts from Lectures on Nietzsche, 1974–5 Excerpts from Lectures on Heidegger, 1972 and 1978 Excerpt from Interview on Heidegger (edited by David Cayley) Excerpts from Lectures on Kant, 1973–4 and 1977–8 Excerpt from Lecture on Strauss, 1972–3 Excerpts from Lectures on Aristotle, 1970

EXCERPTS FROM SEMINAR LECTURES ON NIETZSCHE, 1974–5 These lectures were delivered to a graduate seminar given jointly by the religion and political science departments in 1974–5. They can be found in Notebooks c1 and c2.

Introduction It may seem strange in the midst of this even stranger modern world for a set of young people in their twenties to sit down and study for a year the writings of Nietzsche under the guidance of somebody in his middle fifties. Let me start with a few words about why that is worth doing and then a few words about how we will do it and that will give you some basis for deliberating on whether you want to do it. It is to me clear that human beings are beings open to the whole and the question of what constitutes the good life, which it seems to me is an unavoidable question for each one of us. It becomes clear that there is some connection between what knowledge we can have of the whole and what is the good life for us. Let me then say that as we look at the whole, in our immediate surroundings, we see that there is something about the whole which is novel – namely a worldwide society based on the pursuit of the conquest of human and non-human nature. Now let me say immediately that as soon as one utters the word ‘novelty’ it is necessary that one speak with great exactness and this exactness is particularly important for people such as myself who are followers of Christ and of Plato and therefore no admirer of thinkers such as Whitehead and Teilhard who speak of novelty in a way which appears to me intellectually and morally repugnant.1 Let me say what I mean by novelty and the society dedicated to the pursuit of the conquest of human and non-human nature as such. Such a society is not novel as a potentiality. If one reads Plato with any care one will see that he understands that such a society was a human potentiality. But he turned away from such a society as not conducive to human good. I think for very many men such a society has always been known to be a human potentiality. As a potentiality it is not therefore a novelty. But it is now an actuality and as an actuality it is a novelty. We will call that novelty – modernity.

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Now in my opinion Nietzsche is the thinker who in welcoming that modernity as an actuality has thought what is being thought in that modernity more comprehensively and completely than any other thinker. Comparisons are foolish – but let me say that I think he has thought modernity more consummately than his great predecessors Kant and Hegel and his only great epigone Heidegger. That is why I think he is worth thinking about. Let me also say why I think he is worth thinking about in a course which is given jointly in the department of religion and the department of political science. Let me put them together because it seems to me unwise to divorce the question of what constitutes the good political order and what it is proper for human beings to reverence – certainly Nietzsche never divides [them]. Now in the modern world the two dominant ideologies through the eyes of which most men see the unfolding of the technological are liberalism and Marxism (and let me make clear what I have written clearly elsewhere, that by ideology I mean a hybrid between what [was] traditionally called philosophy and religion). And those two ideologies are both dominant both politically and religiously in the West. And these are both secularized editions of Western Biblical religion – whether Christianity or Judaism. And what is abundantly clear, nobody ever ridiculed liberalism, democracy, and socialism with greater acuteness than Nietzsche – that is, nobody has ridiculed secularized Christianity with greater acumen than Nietzsche. But we must remember that he did not do so in the name of a pious way of thought – but in the name of an even greater modernity. To be specific, for example, I often have a word of praise for Plato as against the secularized Christianity of Kant and Hegel or a word for Christianity against secularized Christianity. Nietzsche’s unforgettable attack on liberalism and socialism is not done in the name of ancient doctrines but in the name of a clearer, more advanced modernity. For one must understand that behind his attack on secularized Christianity is his attack on Christianity itself, and behind his attack on Christianity is his attack on the greatest of ancient philosophers, Plato. For, as he says so clearly, Christianity is Platonism for the people. At the heart of Nietzsche is his attack on the Western conception of truth. Therefore it seems to me we study Nietzsche as the greatest modern philosopher in the sense of the being who saw modernity with the greatest clarity and welcomed what he saw. Now all [those] are rather obvious platitudes

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or truisms which however I hope you will take seriously because, as Chesterton said, the point about truisms is that they are true.2 Now to be more specific, how are we going to carry out the study? If one looks at Nietzsche’s writings as a whole – it is not false to divide them into four stages. The first stage which we can identify with The Birth of Tragedy in which he sees contemporary German society as a great ascent symbolized by the music of Wagner.3 The height in the world up to this has been Greek tragedy – Dionysiac tragedy which enabled man to rejoice at the use of the destruction of the most beautiful – but now in modernity we have come to a greater height. The second stage which we can identify with Joyful Wisdom in which he comes to terms with modern science and enlightenment and [in] which the works are dedicated to that prince of the enlightenment Voltaire.4 These marvellous negative writings in which he shows that modern science and history are the highest truth – but they are deadly, killing to man. The third stage which is to me incomparably the highest where he looks at the truth and deadliness of science and makes his great affirmations. The height of that of course is Zarathustra which he calls his greatest work.5 [It also includes] Beyond Good and Evil which is a commentary on Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals.6 The fourth stage includes those books written just before he gave up writing to become what people call his madness and I think Heidegger is quite right when he says that these last books are a great scream. Whether one says that that scream is a scream of anguish, I am not sure, because I am not sure what one means by Nietzsche’s madness. Now of these four stages I am sure we should concentrate on the third stage and read this year Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Genealogy of Morals. Now I am clear that we should end with Zarathustra because it is a book of such consummate difficulty and complication that I for one can only just begin to be able to see a few things in it and miss much. Therefore we will look at it at the end of the year. But there remains the question of whether we should read Beyond Good and Evil or The Genealogy of Morals first. When I saw many of you in the last weeks I said we were going to read Beyond Good and Evil first, but since then I am hesitating and I want to put the arguments on both sides for proceeding either way, and then you might then express your preference.

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On the one side of starting with The Genealogy of Morals, the subtitle is, as you can read, ‘a Polemic’ – he calls it a polemic. That is, unlike the esoteric heights of Zarathustra he is going down into the popular arena where he must write very directly and exoterically. Also in the German edition, but not the English, it has the words ‘added to Beyond Good and Evil as a clarification,’ again [meaning] simpler, more popular, incomparably less ironic than Beyond Good and Evil. That is one side of the argument to start here with this clarification. But on the other hand, with Beyond Good and Evil we start with the greatest problems. Look at beginning. Pure spirit and the good in itself. Christianity, Platonism for the people.7 (Parenthesis about translations – not only my preference for what the British once were to what the Americans now are.) It might be best to start with the most difficult and then descend. Also a subsidiary reason, the Genealogy, though marvelously clear and polemical, is the beginning of the screaming and it sometimes puts people off from the greatness of Nietzsche. [Three pages of instructions to students] Introductory Remarks about The Genealogy of Morals Now as I implied last day there is something strange in thinking about the whole as one is doing when one thinks of a great thinker such as Nietzsche. At a time when every social pressure in the modern world is pushing people to scramble into the partial technical slots in which they can make some kind of comfortable living in a contracting economic situation. But thinking about the whole is a destiny that some people are called to despite the fact that it is not a socially approved activity. I accept the great Platonic dictum that philosophy and the city are in opposition to each other – as he saw incarnated in the death of Socrates. At different periods of my life I have lived this conflict of thought and earning my living out in different ways – as I am sure you will live it out in different ways in your lives. But whether for good or ill if one studies Nietzsche one is trying to open oneself to the whole and that is what we are doing. Now I said also last day that in Nietzsche what I called modernity is consummately thought and I want to make a distinction here about our approach to it. Remember he wrote it almost a century ago and much of

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what he is thinking for the first time has become common parlance so that it won’t seem very original to you. It may be indeed the assumptions that you take for granted. For an example, an easy example, Nietzsche when he is talking about the noble life is always talking about ‘values.’ Where really up to his writing, man talked of goods – it is good to breathe, to love, to eat, to think etc. etc., he turns that into the language of values. Now that language has become universal in the West, one can hardly listen to a social scientist, a politician, a clergyman, or go to a convocation or listen to a television program without hearing that what matters is our values. Therefore what Nietzsche says may seem to us platitudinous, not very new, or very great. But remember, he first made that language mandatory. Also, and more important, remember that he thinks very lucidly the consequences of such language and this one may miss and think that this [is] obvious [and] you can have [the language of values] without the other consequences. People who think they are firm religious believers use the language of values – in how many sermons is the language used? But remember that Nietzsche knows and I am sure he is quite right, that the language of values is unequivocally an atheist language. One cannot use this language and put it together with religious belief – they come from two different conceptions of reason. Therefore these parts of Nietzsche which seem self-evident to you, be careful when you accept them that you recognize what Nietzsche is thinking in thinking them. (Quote letter to Georg Brandes8). That is, in thinking about the whole one is thinking about oneself as part of the whole – you will remember the great Socratic doctrine about philosophy, ‘Know Thyself.’ What makes the study of Nietzsche extremely taxing is that it cannot be an externalized study. One must follow through what he is talking about and see it – not only about a world outside oneself but as a world in which one is included. Let me take one example from myself as a person I know better than any of you. One of the central themes of this section we are reading today – put here simply and put with greater depth in Beyond Good and Evil and with even greater depth in Zarathustra is that the desire for the eternal, the unchanging, the non-perishing, always comes from lack of loyalty to the earth, and that lack of loyalty to the earth comes from the spirit of revenge (what he means by revenge or ressentiment we will have to discuss in great detail). We cannot be loyal to the earth because our

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botched and bungled instincts seek revenge on their botchedness and bungledness. Now to apply that to myself. The great event of my life was over three decades ago when I turned from the secular liberalism in which I was raised to be seized by Christianity. Now without going into the unimportant details of personal confession, I know myself thoroughly to be impregnated both in my conscious and unconscious life by the spirit of revenge, and I know that spirit of revenge to arise from my very botched and bungled instincts. That is just fact. Therefore the study of Nietzsche is always for me a great intensity. Is that desire for the eternal which expresses itself in me in the priceless treasure of Christianity simply a delusion produced in me because I am too botched and bungled to be loyal to the earth? And this is not simply a psychotic question because clearly Nietzsche understands technology, that mastery of the earth which so contemporaneously works against loyalty to the earth, to be the highest and greatest product of Christianity – as it has become secularized. What I am saying then in general is that thought about the whole is not only not a very rewarding task universally but it is also a very taxing task. Now if any of you have questions or comments about this passage we are concerned with today let us turn to them. [Three pages of discussions with students.] Now the important question. How does Nietzsche use the word truth, true, etc.? (Let me say that this will have a lot to do with all we study from now on.) Why must we question truth as it has been thought in the West? In order to [?] the ascetic ideal we must question the value of truth. We must question truth because it kills life. And why does it kill life? Because life is purposeless and the pursuit of life just ... Now we could have turned in many directions. For example, to another early writing, The Use and Abuse of History, where he shows that scientific or scholarly history is killing.9 Men need horizons and science teaches there are no horizons. There is no being, simply becoming. And go on about the debt that the West owes to Christianity – the long discipline of truth-seeking which was produced by the ascetic ideal in Christianity which produced modern science – that is, the greatness of Christianity for Nietzsche is that it produced its own grave-diggers.

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But I didn’t want to go over that because I have written it out clearly in my little book about Nietzsche and therefore you can read it there – if you desire.10 Let me say in parenthesis, if you will allow me a personal remark about teaching because some of you are going to be teachers. Let me say this: try always as much as you can in teaching – to deal with something where your mind is just moving to. Don’t repeat things which your mind has already grasped and put in perfect order. That is, always teach what is really grasping you because otherwise teaching becomes a routine in which one is killed or else one becomes a pompous propagandist. And that is true at any level of teaching from kindergarten to PhDs. My father who was the first professor of Canadian history in Canada gave it up to run a school because he wanted to teach English and Greek poetry to adolescents. Now indeed when I was young, economic necessity forced me to teach a lot I was told to – but even this was not too bad for I was just one chapter ahead in the text book and it forced me to learn things I otherwise would not have learned. But why I am burdening you with this personal reminiscence is that it is a waste of your time and mine, if I just repeat what I thought about Nietzsche six years ago when I last taught him. If you are concerned with what I thought six years ago – read it. I am concerned this year with trying to think through what Nietzsche means by his overcoming of Platonic and Christian rationalism and overcoming means taking into thought what is greatest in that rationalism – and what is greatest in that rationalism is technology – that is, that mastery of the earth which came forth from Christianity – that is, with understanding what Nietzsche thinks will be the noble society in terms of the mastery of the earth. That is, I am not going to discuss now the whole history of how for Nietzsche modern reason – that is, modern science and thought – or modern truth-seeking – has shown us that life is without purpose. A science without teleology. If you want to see that clearly, read Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? pages 40–55 – the modern solutions. Or else read a private paper of Strauss called ‘The Three Waves of Modernity’ of which there are many copies around in this department.11 [Discussions with students.] Rather I am going to try to say for a moment what Nietzsche thought the ideal of the true had been in the West.

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Now this is the sentence I have really had to work towards: Nietzsche thinks of the true as that kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live. Let me repeat that – because I have thought it out thanks to Heidegger’s account of Nietzsche. Now this is often put crudely as if Nietzsche is asserting the notion (so common these days) that something is true if it is of use to what he calls ‘life’ (life-affirming). But this is not adequate to understand Nietzsche for the following reason: because it fails to see that for Nietzsche the highest life is freedom. Now freedom required the stabilizing of becoming – if we know it is true that water freezes at 32 degrees under certain pressures, we are able to stabilize becoming. We are free in the sense the pipes in our house do not burst. That is the positive side of truth as a value – it allows us to establish the conditions for life – higher and higher life. Not only the modern conditions of our pipes not bursting – but higher and higher – the justice of any society, for example. This, for example, was the greatness of Plato, the idea culminating in the idea of the Good. Allowed men to live in the presence of what is final, the terror of existence. Read The Will to Power, No. 533. [‘... Thus it is the highest degree of performance that awakes the belief in the “truth,” that is to say, reality, of the object. The feeling of strength, of struggle, of resistance convinces us that there is something that is here being resisted.’]12 But its negative side – this exaltation of the value of truth – is that it closed down in the highest vision – tragedy (Dionysos) – in this sense it was error. The true as the highest value has to be overcome just because it is that kind of error without which a certain kind of living being could not live. But now in the historical or [?] process we have passed beyond that kind of highest being we call the rational animal and this very value (truth) which produced that type of being, so that we can come to a higher type of being, the Overman, Superman (Übermensch). Man is the bridge between the beasts and the Superman. [Discussions with students] ... tragedy itself and what is said about tragedy – rejection of Aristotle by Nietzsche. I must always insist on the obvious that I mean by tragedy an art – not a fact of existence. I said about tragedy and the effect of Christianity on tragedy, one would have to compare Oedipus with Lear, but we would of course obviously have to compare the other

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great European tragedy, Racine, and I suppose the supreme example of his tragedy is Phèdre. And remember Racine is much more classical drama than Shakespeare and yet at the same time much more evidently open to Christianity because of the influence of Jansenism on him.13 Parenthesis: Speaking of Jansenism, when you study Nietzsche always stop when he mentions directly or indirectly Pascal – because Pascal is for him the religious man, par excellence. And remember what I have said before ... Pascal is the religious man at his most noble for Nietzsche.14 To return to tragedy: there is no great tragedy in Germany – can one take romantic dramas like Schiller’s Maria Stuart or Wallenstein to compare with Shakespeare and Racine?15 You see the Germans are the late comers into modern European civilization – above all because of the catastrophe of the Thirty Year’s war. So that they became a particular culture when modernity had already killed the roots of classical civilization in the West, and with it, tragedy. Now for Plato clearly the question is which is the true height – philosophy or tragedy. These are the only alternatives. Nietzsche in his attack on Plato says philosophy is a decadence – a decline of tragedy. Now I say all this because we are looking in this class to have somebody who has thought about these matters as they have been thought about in a great civilization other than the West, namely India, and I was going to ask [a student] if she would give a paper on how these matters are thought about in India. I do not want to use the words tragedy and philosophy because they are Western words – but about comparable notions in India. [Discussion of students’ papers] ... Now let me say again what I said at the beginning, why wait upon Nietzsche. [A student] implied cynically last day that I wanted you all to wait upon Nietzsche because I wanted to persuade you all to be good little Platonists and Christians. There is something in that in so far as anything one thinks one knows to be true, one wants to make clear to other people one cares about. But it is not adequate because I think it is unclear what I mean by saying that I am a Platonist or a Christian. I am not clear what I mean by saying that for example I clearly can’t think together quantum physics and Platonism. Therefore I cannot be a Pla-

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tonist in the reactionary sense. Or take Christianity, it is clear to me that in any sense in which I can think I do not know what the doctrine of creation as it has been interpreted in Western Christianity or Judaism can possibly mean. Therefore in stating I am a Christian, I do not mean to be returning people back to something I do not understand. Why do I then think that it is worthwhile waiting upon Nietzsche? To repeat, (1) it seems to me that more and more every moment of our living shows us all that we move into the high noon of modernity – a higher man which is a staggering experience not least of which is that it is no longer simply a Western experience – but a universal experience. (2) It is a destiny which has been a long time coming. And has the most complex and interwoven roots. (3) It is a destiny which many of us accept as an experience but when we come to try to know what it is, we are either aware of our ignorance or else opt for very partial accounts of what is occurring. (4) It is an occurrence, indeed, which has put into question our very ways of making judgments of any occurrence – that is, has put into question both philosophy and theology. We are therefore called to understand when it is extraordinarily difficult to understand what the modern experiment is. And that is why it is worth waiting on the thought of Nietzsche. Now it is a very dangerous thing to do – because it might drive us mad – like it drove him mad and therefore I think if one waits upon Nietzsche seriously one should take precautions and you may say that these very precautions deny that one is waiting upon him seriously. Let me illustrate. In Plato’s Gorgias the second interlocutor with Socrates, Polus, makes a very base remark and Socrates doesn’t attempt to show him what is base about the remark, he simply says hush Polus, that is, this is something that should never be said. Why not? Because no human being should open up for himself or others such possibilities of action. Now I think there are such things in Nietzsche – what he says about eugenic experiments in the future [for example]. But let us remember that we live in an era when these practical horrors are all around us. Now of course it is true that in all human eras we know anything about, horrors have been going on – but what is important is to make a distinction between horrors that go on and are known as such and horrors that go on and are considered good. For example, I gather there is in this university a place where aborted foetuses are kept alive for the sake of

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the progress of medical science. And that is quite understandable because the Supreme Court of the United States had declared that foetuses have no rights. Now in an era where that is happening I think people of learning have to be more open to contemplate the practical possibilities than in eras where the public awareness is saner than is ours. But as I say it is dangerous to wait upon Nietzsche and we should take precautions. Now what is the upshot of this? I think your precautions should be primarily with enucleating the heart of what is going on in any particular passage of Nietzsche and remember that the greater the thinker the more the whole of his thought is present at every part and that is of all modern thinkers par excellence so in the case of Nietzsche. ... I said last day that it seems to me that above all the end for Nietzsche was perspectival – the title a philosophy for the future – where in ancient philosophy there would be no ubiquitous philosophy. This has of course become in a very vulgar way part of the modern world. People talk of my philosophy of life – my values etc., etc. But of course without debating whether some humans can arise above the perspectival, there is an obvious common sense truth in recognition of perspectives. We are all different with different formative experiences. Therefore the difficulty of discourse – what they now call communication – because we are caught in our perspectives and think them just the way things are. Therefore in turning to Nietzsche let us ask what perspectives we look at in Nietzsche – both yourselves and myself. As I have often said it seems to me we are trying to learn from a great thinker who sees many things with great clarity and depth and there is much to be learnt from him and what we do is to learn it from within our perspectives and so hope to broaden our perspectives. As I am in the position of having to give some of you marks at the end of the year, let me say just this, that I do not much care that you have the same perspective as myself (that would for all of us anyway be impossible) but that rather you come to define your own perspectives and in terms of it what questions you put to Nietzsche and how clearly you see the answers you get back from Nietzsche concerning those questions. Some of you will be more interested in what he says about art, others about politics, others about religion. Beautifully put by Nietzsche in aphorism 87 [Beyond Good and Evil] about how we should study Nietzsche. [‘Heart in bond, spirit free. When

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one places one’s heart in firm bonds and keeps it locked up, one can afford to give one’s spirit many liberties. I already said this once. But people do not believe me – unless they know it already ...’] But the question arises why we should study him at all. Now the general answer which applies to only philosophers and theologians is the following. It is a great discipline for any of us to try and live within any great thinker – to follow the complexity of his openness to the whole. But why in particular Nietzsche – and here it is inevitable that I speak a bit, I hope not egocentrically, about my own perspective, because it is I who chose to study Nietzsche. Let me put my perspective this way. Most of us when we are young have great public events that influence us. In my youth that event was being involved in the violence and intensity of the ’39 to ’45 war and that event. That war taught me that modern Western civilization was a civilization based above all on one assumption, namely that human beings would achieve their highest point in a society given over to the conquest of human and non-human nature, and that this civilization was now not only Western but had become world-wide. It also taught me that the ways of thought in which I had been educated were inadequate to understand that society – namely that most modern thought – liberalism, Marxism, etc. – are not at heart able to understand that civilization because they are in themselves the bubbles thrown up by the great movement of that civilization. They do not comprehend it; it comprehends them. Now not to go further with that predicament, I would simply repeat that Nietzsche has taught me more how to think that civilization than any other modern thinker and therefore it seems worth teaching. But I would now add this proviso that in the last years I have seen Nietzsche in a slightly new way, that is, not simply as the thinker who catches the very swell of the ocean of modernity, but also as somebody who is [not] content to swim with that current – but find other currents than that. Now this takes me to some general comments on ‘nature’ – I put it in quotation marks as Nietzsche does – Now let me put the question in various but simple ways. First religiously: Nietzsche recognizes that atheism is a central force in the West. In his day, of course, it was a much more visible force in continental Europe than in the English-speaking countries, but now in our societies, widespread atheism is equally visible. But unlike the hope of liberalism and Marxism he is quite clear that the popular atheism of the West is leading to a much lower type of man

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than was produced by the theism of the past. The death of God according to Nietzsche is opening up this great degradation of man – the last men who are lower than past men who lived under theism. But Nietzsche also contends that the death of God makes possible a higher form of man – the super-man. Not super-human God who by his absolute perfection depresses man, but the superman. In Zarathustra we must see this. The superman is the alternative to the last man and we, like him, stand at the parting of the ways. Now what I am saying in putting it this way is that Nietzsche is swimming against the more obvious current of modernity in that he is perfectly clear that theistic man produced higher beings than modern atheism. (Let me say in parenthesis, here is one question we must be continually aware of – what it means that the death of God is an assumption in Nietzsche.) Now let me put the same question in other language – the language of moral or political philosophy (I use the words synonymously). Let me start by the traditional language. It was generally accepted in Western society before the age of progress that there were natural rights. That is, that right for man was something not made by human beings, either individuals or society. It is given in the nature of things. Now it would require a whole history of modern thought to show how this idea was given up in the West. What I have recommended to you to read about this is Leo Strauss’s essay ‘The Three Waves of Modernity.’ ... It is not my business here to go over that long story. It can be summed up quickly by saying that having given up the standard of nature, men went into first the standard of reason (Kant, Descartes) and then the standard of history (Hegel). And it is there that Nietzsche takes on the question. Now Nietzsche raises the question first in a very early essay called ‘The Advantages and Disadvantages of History’ and this is the second of four essays in a book called Thoughts Out of Season – I emphasize that title.16 Now what does he do in that essay? Nietzsche accepts the historicist position that man in his thought about the highest matters (that is, what is right for him) is radically historical. This was more or less common among the intellectual descendants of Hegel at that time. Nietzsche admits that historical relativism is the case. There is no thought that man can ever possess, which will not prove to be in need of radical revision. But then he said something new to his era, the recognition that this is deadly. We cannot live on the basis of the purely

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personal and relative character of our principles. And Nietzsche proposes a solution which reminds us of what Plato says in the Republic – let us have non-relativism as a noble lie. But Nietzsche does not say this; he was too much a modern man who cares about honesty in the way the ancient philosophers did not. But Nietzsche understood historical relativism brilliantly and he saw where it came to grief. It comes to grief in those men who are historians. If the historian acts on historical relativism, he cannot be a historian. Why? The historical relativist, the man who sees the changes of values and principles as a panorama, stands absolutely outside of the historical process and violates it. He is not animated by that which animated the historical actors, he cannot enter into that spirit. Examples: can you write a good history of music if you are not musical? Of course not. If you are not moved by the problems of life? Of course not. Now the people who came after Nietzsche, the existentialists, put it this way – there is an objective truth and a subjective truth. What science, including history, is concerned with are objective truths. But these objective truths do not give us the real content of history. They give us only the outside. E.g. Mozart. Mozart was born on that day, in that town etc., etc., but that is of little interest to someone interested in Mozart. The understanding of Mozart’s work is possible for a man only to the extent to which he is animated by something comparable to that which animated Mozart. Now what is that subjective truth? Now what is said in language later than Nietzsche about this subjective ‘truth’ in quotation marks – this subjective truth is a ‘project’ which they have formed about their future. Only men grounded by such a project and animated by it can understand other men animated by such projects. What I have called subjective truth consists in one having such a project and one’s commitment to it. But there are of necessity a variety of such projects to which we can be committed. What I have called subjective truth is manifold – many. It is the only important truth yet it is manifold – not one. It is a project, a commitment. This it seems to me is how the existentialists interpreted Nietzsche. Now my difficulty in teaching Nietzsche is that I have come to see that that existentialist interpretation of Nietzsche will not do. They are quite right I think to say that for Nietzsche the answer to the question of right has to be in terms of a free project, of a free creation. In that way he is quite modern. But he also says that this goal of man – this project –

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must have its roots in nature – that it must be nature. Why he says this second seems to me at a certain level clear. His great admiration for the Greeks. In his admiration for the Greeks he conceived of culture as more than historical, as idealized nature. This now seems to me the great question with which Nietzsche struggled: how do you find your way back to nature as the standard for man – without denying all the difficulties which the moderns have raised against having nature as the standard. All the difficulties which are most present in modern social and physical science. Now I do not know at this point in my life the full implications of how Nietzsche works this out. I hope to find out more about this by studying this year. But I do begin to see that this makes Nietzsche more than a thinker who simply takes the modern wave and rides it to the full and in so riding it explains it to us. He is also saying no to the modern wave of society based on the conquest of human and non-human nature in a very profound way. That is not very clear – so tell me how it is not clear. ... Somebody said to me that I had been ridiculing democracy in class and because that was not my intention, I wanted to say a word politically which may be repetitive but needs saying again to be quite clear. If you like the language right wing and left wing, which I don’t altogether but it is used popularly, one can say that atheism was a left wing phenomenon up to Nietzsche – the right wing had supported the throne and the altar. Marx, Feuerbach, etc. Now Nietzsche the first great explicit right-wing atheist. Now intellectually I think Nietzsche quite sees the issue. Remember from Zarathustra: ‘The mob blinks and says, “We are all equal. Man is but man; before God we are all equal” – Before God? But now this God has died.’17 That is: modern left wing democracy, socialism, egalitarianism, liberalism is really a form of secularized Christianity. And that is a nonsensical combination: modern reason combined with the ethical norms of Christianity – it can’t be thought says Nietzsche and I am sure he is quite right. But let me say, leaving the theoretical alone, as a practical person I obviously much prefer the regimes such as English-speaking constitutional government to the totalitarian (a modern phenomenon) and authoritarian (de Gaulle) which was certainly a project of right-wing atheism. Indeed I would go further – though I am contemptuous, intellectually, of left-

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wing atheism, I think it is morally preferable to the right-wing atheism just because it is secularized Christianity and Judaism. But above all let me emphasize that I don’t think it’s up for discussion that constitutional government is better than tyranny. I don’t intend in a civilized classroom to discuss whether torturing children for your own pleasure or genocide is good. So I won’t discuss whether totalitarianism is good. But let me also say that it appears to me that the advance of modernity increasingly puts constitutional government into danger ... And I think the practical activities will come both from atheists of the right and the left. Indeed they may be in agreement – will the mental health state be left-wing or right-wing? – a mixture of both. But all this is no reason to attack or ridicule what elements of constitutional government we are left with. I have wanted you to approach Nietzsche directly but of course there are commentaries and useful ones at many levels and of course the most important one is Heidegger’s – at many points in his writing. But of course in his volumes called Nietzsche.18 ... I can now read it in French and if you want to read a very great commentary on Nietzsche as metaphysician particularly in what is being thought in the thinking of will to power and eternal recurrence – read Volume 1. Extremely difficult. I am going to read it this month. [Discussion of student’s paper] Now I want to say two things more about the study of Nietzsche. I am not sure which to say first because one of the points is more important ontologically – the other is more important in the sense of immediacy – we might say psychologically – and it is very hard to chose between the immediate and the ontologically higher. For example in the 1960s I had great sympathy for young people who sought the immediate – I was sympathetic because technological society, because of its very definition of rationality, kills the immediate. Therefore people had a great yearning for immediacy. But in that yearning they often confused the immediate with the ontically more important. On the other hand one must remember that the immediate may have prior claim for other reasons than its immediacy. Story about Bonaventura – who he was, then story.19 And I am going to put the ontically more important first. This is the question in this section that he passes beyond the think-

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ers to the saints and those of us who put the saints higher than the thinkers, his attack on the saints is more terrible than his attack on the thinkers. Yet any defence we may have is more difficult because clearly the exaltation of the saints above thought is difficult to defend by thought. It is at this point that the word revelation comes into the tradition and we move beyond philosophy. But arguments in defence of the saints are more pressing for those of us who say the saints are the highest, than his attack on the metaphysicians. But I think I should make it clear to you that I do not in saying this in any sense imply in my own thought a very strong division between thought and the saints or if you prefer between thought and charity. There are people who make in the tradition a great division between Athens and Jerusalem – I just deny that division. There is indeed a division between the saints and the thinkers, but the greatest thinkers have recognized that the saints are higher and in so doing have related the saints to thinking. Let me quote you my favourite passage of Plato. Philebus 20b. Memory and dreams. (‘I remember a theory that I heard long ago – I may have dreamt it.’) [‘Socrates: ... and, moreover, a god seems to have recalled something to my mind. Philebus: What is that? Socrates: I remember to have heard long ago certain discussions about pleasure and wisdom, whether awake or in a dream I cannot tell; they were to the effect that neither the one nor the other of them was the good, but some third thing, which was different from them, and better than either. If this be clearly established, then pleasure will lose the victory, for the good will cease to be identified with her: – Am I not right?’] As a parenthesis let me say that this is why I think Plato is a better thinker for Christianity than Aristotle. For Aristotle God is thinking thinking thinking, or if you prefer thought thinking thought. For Plato he is not. But what I want to say is that Nietzsche’s attack on the saints here is for some of us a more important attack than his attack on the philosophers. And very difficult to face in the proper way. Now the more immediate issue we have left aside up until now – but cannot any longer; Nietzsche clearly more than any thinker brought clearly into the light of day the modern conception of sexuality. Freud indeed was to be more publicly influential in North America than Nietzsche – but he did not think it so clearly – though in more detail – therefore we have to look at Nietzsche’s view of sexuality. Now here immediately language arises. Should we use the word

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sexuality – too objective – human love – too extensive. I will therefore use the word – the ‘erotic’ – and I will use it trying to answer the question neither in a modern nor ancient sense because if one does one is likely to answer the question by the very language one uses. Now this is a very difficult question to raise and discuss for the following reasons: (1) All of us, all men and women believe that the erotic has sounded secretly for them alone in a unique way. This is true of all of us. It is particularly true in the modern Western world because of our intense subjectivity. It therefore is very difficult for us – about no subject does it seem to me is it more difficult to reach a proper universality (I prefer that word to objectivity) to answer the question what is the erotic. (2) It is difficult because of a mix-up in our tradition. It is often said in the last few decades (indeed Nietzsche may have started this way of talking) that Christianity turned man away from sexuality or the erotic. That seems to me to confuse a certain stage of bourgeois culture with Christianity. Because one must remember that Christianity started with the doctrine of the Incarnation. That is, deity and the flesh were united so that the flesh was divinized and with that the erotic becomes overwhelmingly important. Remember the greatest statement about that was non conversione divinitatis in carnem sed assumptione humanitatis in Deum. Not by the conversion of divinity into the flesh, but by the assumption of humanity into God. If indeed one is going to make an attack on Western Christianity – and I am full of them – it would be that it made human love too important in the sense that it brought into the world the idea of romantic love. Just remember where romantic comes from – Romanesque churches, pre-Gothic. (Indeed as parenthesis I would say that Aquinas’s Aristotelianism is as much as anything an attempt – a failed attempt – to turn back romanticism – to a more classical conception of human love). Read de Rougemont’s famous book Love in the Western World.20 Very good book. Nietzsche’s attack on [the] bourgeois is an attempt to turn back the full tide of romanticism and romantic love. But as always in attempting to turn back, Nietzsche, it seems, leads forward to a more explicit modernity and that modernity is no more present than in his account of the erotic. A very good question I might give you at the end of the year would be: what would Nietzsche think of Masters and Johnson?21 Because in that question you would see the central ambiguity, of which

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Nietzsche is so marvellously aware, between his expanding and accepting of modernity and his attempt to overcome it. And this brings us to the third and most pressing reason it is difficult to reach a clear understanding of Nietzsche’s view of the erotic. (3) Many of us in this room react against what Nietzsche says about politics, or about Christianity, or about epistemology or metaphysics but I would say that most of us in this room live within Nietzsche’s account of the erotic (generally without knowing it) and about nothing is it more difficult to be clear than about those ideas that have really penetrated our perspective. They are so incarnated in us that it is difficult to see them clearly. We will have to go on thinking about this in the next section of aphorisms. But do remember how much Nietzsche’s turning around of the erotic already holds us. The question we must ask is what is human love according to Nietzsche? Now this takes me to the last thing I must say to [student]. Telos means purpose, end, limit and in the name of completion, consummation. Consummatum est. Teleology – just means speeches about telos. Now I think what makes clearest what Nietzsche is saying about human love is that in [the writings of] the man who most has completed Nietzsche’s work, Heidegger. When Heidegger says life is not consummatable – he uses in the original the German word which Luther uses to translate words in St John’s Gospel. Consummatum est – or as it is badly translated in the King James version: It is finished. Now in terms of that let us try and think what Nietzsche is saying about sexuality, human love – the erotic. Questions? ... Now I want to say as clearly as I can that these words have become opaque for me. And I am very unsure what they all mean. I do not mean this in the sense that certain modern English thinkers despise these words.22 Those thinkers one can call analytical thinkers. (I was after all a student of Ryle and Ayer and these people and came to despise them as thinkers). I despise them not because they are sceptics – but because they are too clear in their scepticism. They think they have passed into an era when knowledge can generally be identified solely with positive science. This is obviously nonsense. Rather I would say that these words have become opaque for me – but I greatly regret that they are opaque and would like to overcome that fact. Of the words that are opaque – the one that is clearest to me is philosophy. It is clear

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to me in the sense that I have some knowledge of what Plato meant when he talked of a philosopher. Therefore I am going to say something about that because it is related to Nietzsche. Plato says what a philosopher is by distinguishing him or her from the sophist and the statesman. Plato in that discussion makes clear that philosophy seeks knowledge of the whole – this is possible because the human soul is the only part of the whole which is open to the whole. Now in our knowledge of the whole and of the parts which make up the whole we find a great division. On the one hand, we find knowledge of homogeneity. This we find particularly in mathematics – but also in all the techniques which we employ. Techniques would not be possible without the homogeneity of what is – identity. On the other hand we find knowledge of heterogeneity and this we find particularly in our knowledge of purposes of the different things we can pursue. It is this world of all these different purposes that the statesman and educator has to deal with according to Plato. Now the philosopher for Plato seems to be the being who tries to think this homogeneity and heterogeneity together, not sacrificing the truth of technique and mathematics to heterogeneity – on the other hand not sacrificing the question of good human purposes by trying to understand everything homogeneously. That is, all as matter or all as mind etc. materialists and idealists, etc. In this sense Nietzsche is clearly a philosopher. Putting it in another way (which I take from Strauss’s article in Interpretation23 which I have mentioned before, p. 100), in aphorism 34 of the second chapter, Nietzsche draws our attention to this same distinction I have talked about in Plato in the form of saying there is a fundamental distinction between the world which is of concern to us and the world as it is. (Read Aphorism 34) [Beyond Good and Evil] [No matter from what philosophic point of vantage one looks today, from any position at all, the fallaciousness of the world in which we think we live is the firmest and most certain sight that meets our eye. We find reason upon reason for this, and they would lure us to surmise a deceptive principle in ‘the nature of things’ ... Why don’t we admit at least this much: there could be no life except on the basis of perspectival valuations and semblances. And if, with the virtuous enthusiasm and ineptitude of many philosophers, you wanted to get rid of the ‘world of

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semblance’ altogether (assuming you could do this), well, there would be nothing left of your ‘truth’ either ...]

Now this is surely the same distinction between the world of ends, the world in which we have to think about what is the good life – and the world of science which tells us what the world is. Let me illustrate. Sunday evening on television a program on protons and quarks. Then a very good serial, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’24 – the world of ends and purposes. Now Nietzsche in the teaching about the will to power seems to be saying he has overcome this distinction between the world which is of immediate concern for us and the world in itself. The world as will to power is both the world of concern to us and the world in itself. Aphorism 36 puts forward the doctrine of the will to power. [... Assuming finally that we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctual life as the development and ramification of one basic form of will (of the will to power, as I hold); assuming that one could trace back all the organic functions to this will to power, including the solution of the problem of generation and nutrition (they are one problem) – if this were done, we should be justified in defining all effective energy unequivocally as will to power. The world seen from within, the world designated and defined according to its ‘intelligible character’ – this would be will to power and nothing else.]

In that sense Nietzsche is a philosopher in the sense that Plato is a philosopher. Now I cross into something very difficult and which I for one do not wholly understand. If what I have just said is true then one can begin to see what Heidegger means by saying that Nietzsche is not to be seen first and foremost as the great breaker with the ancient tradition of metaphysics but rather as the completion of that tradition of rationalism. Which of these two accounts of Nietzsche is the right way of looking at him, is, it seems to me, the fundamental thought one has to think about Nietzsche. I, for one, see it is the fundamental thought to be thought, but can’t yet think it through. Now let me say yet once again (a) we must take Heidegger’s interpretation with the greatest seriousness, because he is a great thinker, and (b) I cannot in this class give you a long exposition of his interpretation. That would be a separate class, Heidegger’s interpreta-

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tion of Nietzsche. If you want to understand that, read his volumes on Nietzsche. But let me say one thing: when Heidegger begins to write the very central section of his account of Nietzsche as metaphysician, that is, the section on ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical will to power’ he puts as the quotation which he says Nietzsche has given us to inspire the enucleation – [it] is not from Zarathustra but from the section we are reading today. No. 150. – translation – world. [‘Around the hero all things turn into tragedy; around the demigod, into a satyr play; and around God all things turn into – did you say, “world”?’] Let me simply say one thing about this. It has been my experience from the greatest philosophical writings that they lead up to a height in the middle and then drop away. Republic, good beyond Being; Symposium: Diotima, begetting, upon the beautiful 296 aphorisms, thus 150. Perhaps Heidegger is right to say this is the height. I only say perhaps. [Students’ papers] Now there is no evidence that Nietzsche had read Marx but he had read Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel – who Marx so much depended on – with care. As in the class up to now I have emphasized the disagreement between Marx and Nietzsche – Nietzsche’s attack on secular Biblical religion – let me start by emphasizing their agreement. Turn to the end of the third sentence of 203. Here perfect agreement between Nietzsche and Marx. [3rd sentence of #203: ‘To teach man the future of humanity as his will, as dependent on a man’s will, and to prepare for great exploits and comprehensive attempts of discipline and cultivation, so as to put an end to the horrifying domination of nonsense and contingency which up to now has been called “history” – the nonsense of the “greatest number” is only its latest form.’] The pre-history Marx calls it – now history. What Nietzsche is proposing as Marx thought he was proposing was not only a change, a change from one kind of values to another kind. He is proposing the change from the rule of chance, to the rule of man, of the human will. Both Nietzsche and Marx – the overcoming of chance. The technological society – that is what is meant, the society dedicated to the conquest of human and non-human nature. The age of chance – in Marxian language pre-history – the age of our history ... The Communist Party – the proletariat – conscious of itself – on Marx’s grave – quote. [‘Workers of all lands Unite. The Philosophers

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have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’] Agreement, agreement, great agreement. But then in same sentence disagreement. Greatest number. Marx once said he was putting together English economics (or utilitarianism), French revolutionary politics, and German philosophy. Put the disagreement in its simplest way, in its political essence. Marx was an egalitarian. Nietzsche was not. Now this is the great political question I have spent much of my life trying to think out. We must try and think of it clearly in this room – this year. The two dominant ideologies of our day, American liberalism and Marxism both pay lip service to it [egalitarianism] – the great alternative ideology (national socialism) which owes so much to Nietzsche and Heidegger does not. Ideology I mean [to be] different from philosophy. Let me put it in the most moderate way. Both Nietzsche and Marx and American liberalism accept modern technique – the overcoming of chance. Where they disagree is the overcoming of chance for what? Where Marxism, or the clearest left-wing atheism, makes its great appeal morally is the overcoming of chance from the overcoming of the division of labour; egalitarianism demands the overcoming of the division of labour. What Lenin said clearly – any literate person will be able to spend a few hours ruling – playing golf – philosophy. Now in this chapter and in Zarathustra Nietzsche attacks profoundly this – the overcoming of the division of labour in the name of egalitarianism – he does it in the name of what? Let me say something difficult here almost in parenthesis. This is not a question which can be taken apart from very difficult philosophical questions. [A student pointed out] the difficulty of the word nature in this section. In section 188 ‘nature’ in quotation marks, then at the end not in quotation marks. Now there is much to be said about this and we will come back to it again and again, but let me say shortly, its relation to the question of egalitarianism. By the quotation marks he means the popular usage of nature in his day. When he throws off the quotation marks he means his usage. Therefore the popular usage not his usage. But what was his usage? Now clearly by the popular usage he means the modern conception of nature, which has come to be through modern science, evolution etc. – including the science of history. Nietzsche from his early works clearly accepts this as he clearly accepts what I have called ‘technique’ or technology and the negative side of that acceptance is the rejection of the classical Platonic-Aristotelian view of nature. You

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cannot talk of the nature of man because all that man is has been conquered. This he quite accepts. But 199 saying not innate – morality historically acquired – but not innate – but not natural? But he does not by these quotation marks accept the modern view of nature or totally reject the Aristotelian and Platonic conception of nature. [#199: ‘Since at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have been human herds (clan, unions, communities, tribes, nations, states, churches) and very many who obeyed compared with very few who were in command; since, therefore, obedience was the trait best and longest exercised and cultivated among men, one may be justified in assuming that on the average it has become an innate need, a kind of formal conscience that bids ‘thou shalt do something or other absolutely, and absolutely refrain from something or other,’ in other words ‘thou shalt’ ... The strange limitation of human evolution, the factors that make for hesitation, protractedness, retrogression, and circular paths, is due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience is best inherited at the expense of knowing how to command.’] Why? What I am going to say now is one part of the why. The Aristotelian and Platonic conception of nature includes the order of rank within nature. The non-egalitarian society is natural to Plato and Aristotle. While the modern conception of nature is related to egalitarianism. Nietzsche wants the modern conception of nature – but he wants it in a way which will include the order of ranks against egalitarianism. Any questions at this point? [Students’ papers] Now I think one way in which I can express how your [a student’s] essay misses, is that you go towards certain deeper things without touching the surface of what he is saying and the surface is necessary if you are going to pass below the surface. Now on the surface here is the most brilliant account of the modern university. I think this is staggering that in the 1880s he would say something which seems to me goes to the heart of modern university life, including modern North American university life. Let me discuss this for a while. In discussing it let me say I am very confident when I speak about the academy because I was brought up in it and lived my whole life in it. When I am with other institutions or a committee with the head of the Steel Corporation or talking to a politician, I often don’t think I know, but in the academy I

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am pretty sure I know because I have spent a long life amidst it. If you want to know what I think, clearly put: [read] ‘The University Curriculum’ in Technology and Empire.25 Now in talking this way about this university, I may seem to be leading us from Nietzsche but let me answer that: (a) We cannot study Nietzsche as scholars, simply objectively – we study him to teach us where we are now and as all of us are now in the academy – we better know where we are – and I think Nietzsche says more brilliant things than anybody else, and (b) He calls this ‘We Scholars,’ this and the next [part 7, ‘Our Virtues’], the only places he uses the 1st person plural. He is more than a scholar as you [a student’s paper] say, a creator of men. Now the new question must be: How does a man who knows German universities tell us about our modern ones in North America? The answer to that is clear and sometimes not recognized. The American universities from about 1900 on decided increasingly to follow the German model. President Eliot of Harvard the great figure here.26 Because the English persuaded the Americans twice to join them against the Germans it is often forgotten that in some things the Americans followed the German model. Strangely. President Wilson and Dean West – Institute at Princeton.27 We in Canada stayed out longer with the British tradition – [and the] Catholic tradition. But both of these have collapsed. There is a certain side of myself which can be seen as fighting that surrender – or retreating before the surrender. But it has happened everywhere in Canadian universities and I have really surrendered to it. Why I love having Professor Clifford here – he is par excellence the British model.28 But certainly that is over, in both French-speaking and English-speaking Canada – the essential German model has now [won] through the American victory. Now of course the German model has been modified to live in the midst of social democracy – that comedy I need not go into. But at the great universities Harvard, Berkeley, Wisconsin, etc., the German model is what people are defending when they defend the university against the masses. Complication of Jewish immigrants from Germany. Why I so admire Leo Strauss. Therefore let us turn to Nietzsche and what he is saying. As always, he is saying first the Enlightenment has destroyed once and for all the traditional Western view of education. What was that view? It is given in the very word education: E-duco – lead out. The

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word comes directly from Plato’s Republic at the centre of which is his account of education and at the centre of which is the story of the Cave – describe what study is – to lead out of the Cave. St Augustine puts the matter very clearly – Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem. [Out of shadows and imaginings into the truth.] The order of studies worked out – grammar, rhetoric, science, etc. Leading to philosophy – St Augustine, a leading professor of rhetoric before he became a philosopher and later a theologian. And if one believed that beyond philosophy, that is, what we can know by our free insight about the eternal order, there has been given revelation – then one moved from philosophic study to theological, etc. But [thanks] to Nietzsche we have discovered there is no eternal order. Nietzsche’s Sprach, Gott ist tot. Now I do not think we need discuss today the causes of the destruction of the old order – but rather (a) this situation it has put us into and (b) what according to Nietzsche needs to be done to move us beyond that situation. As I have said, Nietzsche is par excellence a modern – but he is a modern who sees with consummate clarity the situation of modernity and the contradictions in that situation. Therefore let us look first at what he sees the situation to be. The key word of the German account of the universities is Wissenschaft – after Nietzsche and working out Nietzsche, the German philosopher Dilthey divided Wissenschaft into Naturwissenschaft – that is, what we call natural science – and Geisteswissenschaft, that is what we now call the humanities (or we scholars). Also a man who was profoundly under the influence of social science, Max Weber, tried to revive that distinction – with social science. So we have at this university apart from the professional faculties a division of studies into: natural science, social science, humanities. My friends here have for instance taken psychology into natural science. Northrop Frye in English literature turning it into a science. Now let us put aside the natural scientist and the social scientist for a moment and look at what we now call the humanities because that is the ‘we scholars’ he is essentially looking at. What is the situation and what [are] the limits of the situation. Sec. 207. A lot on this, the Walpole factory.30 [Fragments; Students’ papers] [Nietzsche on Femininity]

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... (1) I want to make some preliminary remarks about that discussion as a preliminary to our discussion of it. [Walter] Kaufmann’s relation to this is ridiculous. His hero, Nietzsche, is here speaking in a way which is not popular with Kaufmann’s audience – so he just discounts what Nietzsche says. Now it seems to me quite clear that you can’t chop and choose with a great writer like Nietzsche. What he writes he means, if you can seek out the meaning, therefore one can’t just cut it out. And particularly in such an eminently important subject as femininity. Let me say that I have always judged thinkers as great in so far as they come to terms not only with the most universal subjects e.g. the definition of goodness but also see them in terms of what is most pressing for us. Now certainly for men and women, for all human beings, the fact that it is a bi-sexual world is a very pressing matter. And the philosophers who do not in their writings deal with this or deal with it shallowly makes them lesser thinkers. I find the lack overwhelming in Heidegger. It is one of the lacks in him that I find very sad. Or take another example: Abelard certainly to be taken seriously as a philosopher, but when you read the letters between him and Eloise (not the 19th century novels about them) Abelard is so immensely shallow about their relation compared to Eloise – that one begins to ask what is it lacking in his thought and has this lack anything to do with the great argument between him and St Bernard about the Trinity. Now what I am saying is one must look clearly at what Nietzsche says about femininity and not take it as an extra. One must ask seriously first what is he saying and then second is it true. (2) Let me add historically that this teaching like most of Nietzsche was used and I think misinterpreted – not only by official national socialism in Europe, but also by the male homosexual writers who in Europe were very much tied to the side of reaction which backed national socialism. In North America, the male homosexual writers have been very much related generally to extreme liberalism, but in Europe they were deeply tied to certain forms of reaction and often took a certain interpretation of Nietzsche as justifying what they were saying. I mean by homosexual writers not all writers who were homosexual but those whose writing was chiefly directed to express the goodness of homosexuality. There have been clearly many great writers who practised homosexuality but had passed beyond such justification

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in their writings. I mean writers who were first and foremost in their writings interested in showing the goodness of that practice. (3) It is clearly part of Nietzsche’s greatness that he sees the question of the rights of women as central to the modern West in the 1880s. A hundred years later it is simply self-evident. Now in turning to the discussion of this, I think it would be sensible to ask first for comments in the class from women present concerning Nietzsche’s writing about women. I am sorry there are not more women but we have some very fine ones – so let us proceed. (Women to speak. Then others.) [Students’ papers] ... a more difficult question. Let me put the question – and then talk about it before you answer. The question is strongest political[ly]: when Nietzsche speaks about the need for the unification of Europe – he speaks of a unity which will be a more complete unity than a union of nations. It will be a union run by great heroes who have overcome nationalism. Why does he want this rather than a Europe of the fatherlands? Let me put this question in a modern perspective. In the last decades there has been a great debate about this very subject. On the one side was one Frenchman de Gaulle – on the other side another Frenchman, Jean Monnet. De Gaulle said clearly he wanted Europe unified but not an organic unity – but [rather] a Europe des patries – of the fatherlands. While Monnet wanted an organic unity. And de Gaulle put his argument with great clarity and I quote: an organic US of Europe would be run by ‘faceless, stateless, traditionless bureaucrats’: His words. He won.31 Now de Gaulle and Nietzsche are united at two points: (1) They both rejected the unity which would come with social democracy, under socialism. (2) They both rejected the inclusion of England for rather dissimilar reasons. But on the central matter Nietzsche stands for a greater unity, not de Gaulle. One thing we must get clear: in Europe since Nietzsche, one of the continuing debates has been between cosmopolitanism and nationalism – that debate also in Canada – see de Gaulle for a compromise which kept nationalism. Nietzsche not for such a compromise. He is against the cosmopolitanism of the left – but for a new

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European cosmopolitanism limited to Europe – but not a Europe of the workers. Not the universal and homogeneous state of the liberals and Marxists. That is the question. Why? Now some general questions about this amazing passage [part 8 of Beyond Good and Evil, ‘Peoples and Fatherlands’]. At a certain level we could read it as the most brilliant journalism, the journalism of [?], brilliant understanding of what is coming, because it catches the Europe of his day and what is happening to it with brilliance. What is so fine about Nietzsche is that he grasps both the most immediate and the most universal – both. [I] have lived a lot of my life with philosophers. I get very impatient with philosophers who can talk with great confidence of ‘being’ – transcendence, logic, truth, etc. – and yet when you talk about such immediate facts as the relation between the Steel Company and McMaster don’t know anything or when you talk about the self evident facts of politics or sexuality come out with the conventional wisdom of the suburbs. That is one way one can always know that people are professors of philosophy not philosophers. A.J. Ayer – clear but in 1975 his view of politics kooky[?]; Gadamer very clear on Husserl’s logic but not very clear on immediacies.32 What makes Nietzsche so great is this combination. E.g. music – staggering two passages about Mozart and Beethoven. Not only the particular – but the musical taste of a society directly related to its politics. Remember Plato’s Republic where he says the most important [?] political fact of any society is how its children are taught music ... and what Nietzsche says later about the English. Whatever one may say against Nietzsche’s view of the English, and I have much to say later about that – he hits immediately[?] one of the most consummate facts about the English. The nature of Calvinist Protestantism and Lockean liberalism in England killed great music in that country. When one thinks of Byrd and Purcell, Tudor and Stuart music – then almost silence – he goes right to the great absence in England. And an absence directly related to their politics – the greatest political people of the Western world. This is a consummate passage and one which takes very great partaking in a great civilization to get. Starts with Mozart, ends with Wagner. Any questions? Now let us turn to the central question. What does the question of ‘peoples and fatherlands’ have to do with the whole book. The book is Beyond Good and Evil – that is, beyond morality. It is also a prelude to a philosophy of the future. Now what have peoples and fatherlands to do

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with these questions. Now you will remember at the very beginning in the Preface he is attacking the pure mind of especially Plato – but not only Plato. [Preface: Supposing that Truth is a woman – well, now, is there not some foundation for suspecting that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have not known how to handle women? That the gruesome earnestness, the left-handed obtrusiveness, with which they have usually approached Truth have been unskilled and unseemly methods for prejudicing a woman (of all people!) in their favor? One thing is certain: she has not been so prejudiced. Today, every sort of dogmatism occupies a dismayed and discouraged position – if, indeed, it has maintained any position at all. For there are scoffers who maintain that dogma has collapsed, even worse, that it is laboring to draw its last breath ...]

Now according to Nietzsche, the specific sexuality of human beings and the specific ethnic character of a human being reaches into and determines the highest realms of the mind. This is why in the previous section he had focused on sexuality and now this one on ethnicity. Now do you see that in this he is very influential on modernity. We all know Freud – the highest reaches of mind determined by sexuality. We all know the philosophical difficulties about this e.g. Freud’s account of Leonardo and Erikson’s of Gandhi, but we also know how much we are influenced by that.33 So also with ethnicity and the highest reaches of mind. See this department. Asian and western, etc. But this is why Nietzsche turns to this. Sexuality and ethnicity reach into the highest regions of the mind, therefore we must understand them. Questions? ... Let me make a digression here about this because it is one of the deepest things I think about. I have talked about this before[:] Nietzsche says perfectly clearly that you can judge a person’s philosophy best by his political prescriptions. In this he is very close to Marxism and liberalism in the primacy of practice of these modern ways of thought. If you look at the ancients there is the clear subordination of politics to philosophy. One’s participation in the eternal through philosophy determines one’s political wisdom. This is a very great difference and one I am not going to discuss. But what is so extraordinary is the difference between the archetypal figures they produce, and that I want to discuss. Nietzsche lives his life

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in the most extraordinary solitude – when he advocates the primacy of politics. Socrates lives his life always surrounded by people, then he asserts the primacy of theoria. As Rosenzweig – the great Jewish thinker – said, he went on talking almost up to his death.34 Now how do you put this together? Any questions? Now let us turn to what he says about the leading peoples and fatherlands in this order – although it is not the order of [the] text quite: the English / the French / the Germans / and let us add, because he discusses them, the Jews. Let me say something first about the Jews. Nietzsche talks about a particular question[,] the Jews in Germany and especially about that hideous movement, German anti-Semitism. I want to say something about the phrase anti-Semitism because my wisest Jewish friends have always told me what a silly phrase that is. I have talked about it before – but want to again because it has importance these days. Anti-Semitism a queer phrase because clearly it is meant to say anti-Jewish while in fact clearly the Arabs are a Semitic people. How did this term arise? In the West there was a long sad history of being anti-Jewish on Christian grounds. Or in Islam on Islamic grounds. Now the modern people wanted to be anti-Jewish not on religious grounds, [and] that was not sufficiently scientific. Therefore they used the terms Semitic and anti-Semitic – giving it a pseudo-scientific basis of race which one sees in all its disgustingness in the National Socialists.

LECTURES ON NIETZSCHE, 1974–5 (continued) The second half of the Nietzsche lectures in notebook c2.

What is the chief prejudice of the philosophers[?] They believed they had discovered the truth. And Nietzsche’s counter assertion is that far from being theoretical, contemplative discoverers, they are rather creators or inventors who have imposed their will on things. That is, philosophy as it has been, has become ambiguous for him, and, as we have to find out, what will become dominant is psychology. ... Now another way of putting it – turn to Preface [Beyond Good and

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Evil]: The alternative to Nietzsche is Plato and in his first phase Platonism for the masses – read in Preface. [‘... But the fight against Plato, or – to speak plainer and for “the people” – the fight against milleniums of Christian-ecclesiastical pressure (for Christianity is Platonism for “the people”), this fight created in Europe a magnificent tension of spirit, such as had not existed anywhere before ...’] This is the alternative to Nietzsche. He doesn’t believe that the modern rationalists or empiricist philosophers [are] in any important way different from the greatest of all earlier philosophers – Plato – and this – Plato’s view that there is a pure mind which perceives the truth in itself – the truth which is the good, that is, the opposite pole to Nietzsche. And there is one expression which to me expresses Nietzsche more than any other. That all thought, all life and hence all thought, is perspective – that is, we view things in a specific perspective. That is, the opposite of Platonism – that there is a pure mind which perceives the truth in terms of perspective – to Plato there is only one perspective and not a variety of perspectives. This is the theme, in the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil – the variety of perspectives and the problem caused by it. We can therefore return to what I said the first day – for the variety of perspectives is the same problem as the problem of history. (what was said about philosophers not having the historical sense in the Genealogy of Morals). ... But though philosophy has been ambiguous for Nietzsche – it is still ‘the most spiritual will to power’ – whatever he means by ‘spiritual.’ By philosophy Nietzsche means what has been called in the tradition ‘metaphysics,’ what is. He is attacking metaphysics. This uninteresting because we all know metaphysics has been replaced by science. Positivism has told us that. But hasn’t Nietzsche a metaphysics? Zarathustra, p. 137. [Listen now to my teaching, you wisest men! Test in earnest whether I have crept into the heart of life itself and down to the roots of its heart! Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.] 35

I found – this is not an invention or creation – but a discovery. So Nietzsche has a metaphysics and he rejects all metaphysics. How do we explain this? I will now give the possible explanations. (1) A simple

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one: Nietzsche tried to overcome metaphysical dogmatism, but he relapsed into it – with a metaphysical, theoretical assertion. But in section 22 of our present reading of Beyond Good and Evil at end, read. [And yet he might end by asserting about this world exactly what you assert, namely that it runs a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course – but not because it is ruled by laws but because laws are absolutely lacking, because at each moment each power is ultimately self-consistent. Let us admit that this, too, would only be an interpretation – and you will be eager enough to make this objection! Well, all the better.]

It is better that it is an hypothesis than a proved demonstration. This speaks against the belief that he simply relapsed back into metaphysics. So we go to [another] possible explanation. (2) It is better that the will to power be a hypothesis than that it be a demonstrated proven assertion. The will to power is an hypothesis. An interpretation among many – an experiment as Nietzsche also says. This, therefore, speaks against the possibility that Nietzsche simply relapsed into dogmatic metaphysics. Therefore the second possibility is that the doctrine is not meant to be true in itself but a creation of Nietzsche which may become true if men act on it. If men are sufficiently touched by it, then it will become a reality. But the difficulty of this possibility is the following. Nietzsche also teaches that the will to power doctrine was always true; only man did not know that truth (see Will to Power, 1067). Therefore this interpretation of Nietzsche is questionable. I am not sure I am right. Therefore (3) a third possibility. The doctrine of the will to power is superior to all earlier metaphysical assertions. It is a metaphysical assertion which takes into consideration things which the earlier doctrines have not taken into consideration. It is the best possible doctrine now. But it cannot be simply true because we know that it belongs to a certain perspective, historical perspective – that of Nietzsche, or the age of Nietzsche, the late nineteenth century. Each age, each individual, however great is limited by a specific perspective, but he can’t know this perspective. One could state this interpretation basically as: we can know that it can’t be the last word, but we can’t know the reason why it is not. Dilthey said man is surrounded by the conditions of his era as by walls. But that does not make sense here since you know there are certain walls which obstruct your view in some sense already over the

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walls. That is, this possibility – this doctrine ‘the will to power’ is the best word now but not the last word. There is (4) a fourth possibility that Nietzsche’s doctrine as he understands it belongs to a specific perspective, late nineteenth century and Nietzsche and other things – but this perspective is the absolute perspective. In other words, something similar to what Hegel claimed, that he is the son of his time, but his time is the absolute time. Now there may be other possibilities – but I am not aware of them. [Instructions to students] Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a book for all and no-one At end of second Treatise of The Genealogy of Morals he says he is not Zarathustra. In Ecce Homo he gives [the] explanation: Zarathustra founder of moralism in Persia; now through intellectual honesty (itself a moral virtue) is going to overcome moralism. Zarathustra a founder of a new religion beyond Christianity. A new Bible – a new ironic bible parodies the Bible while overcoming it or claiming to overcome it. A book for all – easy to understand, a book not only for learned men. He wanted popular art. Horizon[?] failed, however. A book for the people. One might say a book for all is the New Testament – a book for very few is Plato’s Laws or Republic or Sophist or Timaeus. As a religious book Zarathustra is a book for all; as a philosophic book a book for no one. But a philosophic book in the past a book not for no-one – but for few. But here for no-one. Because philosophy for Nietzsche is finally one’s own thoughts and is not communicable to anyone else and certainly not applicable to anyone else – why truth radically individual and not fully communicable; read again the last section of Beyond Good and Evil, [9th article: ‘What does “distinguish” mean?’] a look forward to seeing what he means by the self. Now the bulk of Zarathustra is his speeches but these speeches are preceded by Zarathustra’s prologue. Now if you look at that Prologue, part 5, p. 47ff. Heidegger read Zarathustra’s Prologue, not the same as Nietzsche’s Prologue. Zarathustra’s Prologue is only his speech to the people. The speech in two parts (a) superman, (b) last man. That is, Zarathustra’s prologue is a speech to the people – followed by speeches to find living companions. In the same way Plato’s Socrates makes one speech to the Athenian people – Apology. The rest of the speeches are to

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find potential philosophers in the city ... one might make a distinction between Christ’s speeches – the Sermon on the Mount and the end of St John’s Gospel – esoteric. [Ten pages of notes on soul and self and discussions with students] As will be clear to you from this year, what is above all present to me is Nietzsche’s knowledge of the tradition of Western thought and his conscious turning around of that tradition. And what will be clear to you also I am sure is that that work of turning around the tradition seems to me at one and the same time of higher genius and at the same time monstrous – in the literal sense of that word. But that above all it is something that we must understand, if we are to understand the study of religion or of politics in this era. Let me also say that in stating this I am above all remembering the good comment [a student] made several weeks ago. He used the word ‘cerebral’ particularly I think about my discussions of Nietzsche and I think his good comment was a very Nietzschean comment. ‘Cerebral’ means literally belonging to the brain – but I think what he really meant in using that very good word [is] that they belong to the ego (call it if you will [the] subject). Now this is almost inevitable in the university situation – but I want to say something beyond that in relation to the fact that I speak of Nietzsche particularly in relation to the tradition of philosophy. What it comes down to is the different stage of life I am at, compared to most of you in this room. As I have said I used to teach as an older brother – now I teach as a great uncle. When one is young, philosophy appears to one in the wholeness of life – in the immediacy of life. When you have reached my age, philosophy itself becomes the immediate. Therefore one is immensely taken up with what may appear the academic or the cerebral. Always remember that the word ‘particular’ is as much a universal as the word ‘universal.’ Now to turn to this section. My main point is to do with the first of the speeches which I would best translate as ‘Of Joy and Passion.’ (Von dem Freuden und Leidenschaften). Now the thesis of this section is that just as man is body in essence, so his virtue is in essence passion. Now I want to emphasize how much this is turning around the traditional teaching. In the Pla-

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tonic teaching the virtues are conceived as radically different from the passions. The passions meant the way we are affected – pleased or pained. The virtues are quite different in a way I will speak about in a moment. But what is important is simply to say that virtue is radically different from the passions. Now of course the identity of passion with virtue was made long before Nietzsche – indeed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by such figures as Hobbes and Spinoza, Hume and Montesquieu – later Rousseau. Some of you I believe are studying Spinoza’s influence on the interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures – well one of the central things in understanding Spinoza is to understand how he followed Hobbes in identifying passion and virtue. Now (1) what was the traditional teaching against which they rebelled (2) what was the cause of their change from that teaching? And (3) how does Nietzsche take this even further? ... Let me say at the beginning. In the early part of the year I kept saying do not too quickly judge Nietzsche – in some sense wait upon him and see what he is saying first. I did this because my purpose in teaching Nietzsche is that I think the first task of thinkers these days is to understand modernity and in Nietzsche modernity is laid before us consummately. If one judges too quickly one does not get what is being said. Speaking only to my fellow Christians, I have always been surprised by modern official Christians’ willingness to get into bed with modernity, many of them thinking that they were going to impregnate modernity with the truth of the Gospel, when in fact what was going to happen was that they were going to be impregnated by modernity. Therefore my chief purpose in teaching has been to expand what modernity is. That is why I wanted you to wait upon Nietzsche – though not in the absolute sense that one speaks of waiting upon God. Now that in the recent essays we seem to be getting closer to what Nietzsche is saying, I think we can move our stance gradually to question Nietzsche and what he is saying. Of course we have to go on waiting in the sense of seeing what he means by the will to power, the superman, the eternal recurrence. But nonetheless we can begin to question. I am surprised that the essays that get near to Nietzsche seem to be increasing as we reach Zarathustra because simply at the level of

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rhetoric, what in the less accurate way is called style, I so much prefer Beyond Good and Evil to Zarathustra. A lover of Mozart cannot feel much sympathy for the rhetoric of Zarathustra – because of its romanticism. [Discussion with student] At the end of last day’s class I said that these speeches we are dealing with seem to coalesce around the word ‘love.’ What is difficult in Nietzsche is not to see his prodigious attack on the tradition (e.g. last day I talked about his turning around of the word ‘virtue’), and his assertion of the one goal – but to see what content he gives to the one goal. What does he mean by ‘love,’ ‘will,’ ‘creation,’ etc. This is indeed rather similar to Marx. It is not difficult to see in Marx what his attack on the tradition means and to think sympathetically about it, as one does about Nietzsche’s – but when one comes to the positive good of the future it is harder to say what that is. This seems to me basic for modern thinkers who are oriented to the future – as against those who are oriented to eternity. Be that as it may, I have a lot of questions about what Nietzsche means by love, etc. today. [Discussion with student] Now I am going to start with simpler ones and move on to the more difficult ones. [Further discussion] The first one is not altogether a philosophic one. I will make a statement and then ask you to comment on it – partially philosophic, partially not. Let me start with the non-philosophic point. When one turns to speeches 18 and 20 [‘Of Old and Young Women’ and ‘Of Marriage and Children’], my first reaction to what he says about women is that they are the writing of a vulgarian, of a very cheap and clearly romantic order. I simply can’t take them seriously. They just seem to me shallow beyond measure and worse than shallow – a clear return to the primitive by a man who has had no experience of the greatness of the female sex. I can’t imagine changing my opinion about that under any circumstances because they deny the core of my own life – my relations with my grandmother, my mother, my aunts, my sisters, my wife, my daughters and my female friends. Women don’t know friendship? But beyond that certainty a philosophic question arises. Nietzsche

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seems caught here in a conflict. On the one hand, he is returning to nature in the sense that he is saying there is a profound difference between male and female nature – at the same time in his proclamation of the goal of the superman he is saying that by what he calls creative willing we can move from man to the superman. Nature is plastic stuff which can be overcome. Therefore I put the question why if nature is overcome-able, why does he not think it good that the distinction between male and female can be overcome? This is certainly part of the modern world to say it is no longer necessary. We do not need it for continuing the race – because we may be able to control the race without this distinction – by foetus or other means. What do you think Nietzsche means? Friendship – another kind of love – very important – philia, philosophic friendship. So strange in Aristotle’s Ethics Books VIII–IX on friendship, compared to our ethical books where there is little discussion. Now I want to make only one comment about this – a difficult, but important one. I haven’t worked this out completely, so bear with me. The classical view of friendship is fundamentally based on a possible harmony, a cosmos of ideas, a moral cosmos. You will remember Aristotle’s remark in the Ethics about truth and friendship and Plato.36 Now Nietzsche’s denial of that moral cosmos leads him to a different view of friendship. He wants to assert this kind of love and yet can he? If there is finally not harmony – but conflict – (greatness comes from antagonism) then the passions that go with conflict are surely condoned. Envy and hatred for example. But Nietzsche simply rejects these passions. Why? Let us look at friendship another way and compare Nietzsche with the classical doctrine. Now in Nietzsche there is a more radical solitude than there is among the ancients, Plato and Aristotle. And even, I may be allowed to say, in Gethsemane, there is not radical solitude, because although Christ’s friends sleep – throughout there is the friendship of the Trinity. Now in Nietzsche indeed there is a friendship – the only real friendship – which is on the other side of this radical solitude. These who have passed through the radical solitude – that is, those who have said a radical no to all given law and have given themselves their own law – that solitude culminates in a society – the society of the superman. But it is a friendship without need and that is what I find difficult to understand. Now it is possible to point out here that in his life

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Nietzsche did not have friends in the sense of equals – after the breakup with Rée and Lou Salomé.37 It would be also possible to point out that he had needs. His disciples had to come tearing over the Alps when he had his breakdown. But what is important to say [t]here is a clear account of need in the classical doctrine of friendship. All individuals in the classical position need friends, I do not have to go into that in detail. But why in the classical teaching when you become a philosopher, do you have this need? Why has he not passed beyond need, as one feels Nietzsche and Heidegger claim? Finally because to the ancients philosophy is dialectic, the philosopher needs this exchange without which his pursuit is not possible. And so we come back to that cosmos of ideas which is associated by the ancients and denied by Nietzsche and all I can say is that I am unable to think what Nietzsche means by friendship without that cosmos of ideas. Let me say finally why I do not like the word ‘philosophy’ being used of people since the 17th century – [philosophy] is, let me take it literally, friendship of the sophon. It is not only the sophon that is absent – but the friendship. Speech 21. On Free Death. One point I must be allowed to make and which requires no comment. In that speech he is saying that the ultimate affirmation of life is the free choice of death by suicide when the creative powers begin to fade. We can discuss that universal proposition later; it is not that which I wish to state. It is what he says about Jesus Christ. Let me point out first that the only proper name in the book is Jesus, there are no Greek names. But what I am called on to say is that Nietzsche speaks falsely when he says Jesus was sick of life.38 Nonsense. Gethsemane – Let this cup pass from me. Le frayeur jusqu’au mort, les grands gouts de sang [The dread unto death, the great drops of blood]. I have often said and say again that to come close to the Western world one must understand the two great deaths at its beginning. That of Socrates and that of Christ – contemplate them carefully and carefully means in detail. What Nietzsche says here is a bad mistake. Speech 22 [‘On the Gift-giving Virtue’], two parts. Now in this speech he is saying yet once again that the gift-giving virtue is a new virtue (and remember what I said about virtue last time and how he changed around its meaning)[;] it is not something belonging to the unchangeable nature of human beings. And in the first divi-

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sion of the speech the emphasis is on the critique of hedonism and utilitarianism (the modern) while the critique of Christianity is in the background. But it is the second part of the speech I want to talk about and not the main part of the speech. The main part of the speech emphasizes the novelty of his teaching. But in the middle of it he says something of the greatest importance to understand him politically. He says that there is a radical change, chance and accident will disappear – read in Hollingdale [‘We are still fighting step by step with the giant Chance, and hitherto the senseless, the meaningless, has still ruled over mankind’ – 102]. Now this shows how much for all his criticism of modernity he is a modern. When I put American liberalism, Marx, and Nietzsche together it is that they all make central the overcoming of chance by technology (expand). This is what unified the modern dream. And can we not want it? When my children are sick, I want penicillin. This makes Nietzsche very close to his great modern opponent, Marx. Both in the future. For Nietzsche the coming of the superman, for Marx the coming of the perfect society – and both made possible by the overcoming of chance by modern science. But there are two differences also that must be shown. (1) Marx argued against Hegel for an open future – but the essential character of that future is known: complete freedom and the abolition of exploitation. This will come necessarily. But for Nietzsche there is no necessity for the superman. He may not come. History is open. (2) For Nietzsche after the high noon of the superman, there is a movement to evening[?] and then another morning[?]. I think Nietzsche is clearer here than Marx. In Marx you get freedom. It is then[?] history but not quite. But because the science that gives us the overcoming of chance also teaches us entropy. Marxists don’t bother with this because it is millions of years away. But after all the length of our stay is philosophically not important. What Nietzsche is saying is that we cannot look at modern science simply programmatically. (That is really what I objected to the other night in discussion with the Marxists.) And here the question arises for both Marx and Nietzsche – if the realm of Marxist freedom or Nietzschean superman comes to an end is there not a new victory of chance and accident over man’s will which goes wrong? Can this victory of chance following the superman be understood as a victory of the human will? Nietzsche tries to answer

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this affirmatively later on in the book – but whether he does is another matter. [He] uses the word superfluous about people – that is a word that has rung through the twentieth century. [Students’ papers] Now I think your essay is quite right to emphasize that this part of the book is deepening in intensity and is a propadeutic. I thought this very good in your essay and of course it is preparing for the most abysmal thought – the eternal recurrence. I would put the matter this way – which you almost say – the section in which you have dealt with ‘On Redemption’ is the centre of Zarathustra. Here eternal recurrence is just touched upon and the grounds for thinking it laid down. Therefore we have to as it were pull ourselves together – not only to try and remember the grounds for that abysmal thought, but also to start to sum up what we have been doing in studying Nietzsche and to sum up what was answer[ed] from that study. That is, try to hold in our minds all at once what has been said about for example ‘nature,’ ‘truth,’ ‘morality,’ ‘the will to power,’ ‘perspectivism’ etc. Very difficult. Let me start at the beginning. My wife [is] here because I have to justify to her the teaching of Nietzsche. Done very fast and not utterly systematic. It is clear that before any of us awake to awareness of what is central to human life, we have already made up our minds, or our minds have been made up for us by others. Before we begin to think for ourselves, we already possess opinions or convictions. In a society like ours those opinions frequently stem from philosophies or ideologies. There are always in societies like ours ruling schools of thought with which we grow up through our parents or schools. Now in the past these opinions came to most men through great religions – that is great traditions – like Christianity or Buddhism or the Vedanta, etc. – but in the West since the Enlightenment, there has been a sustained attack not only on particular traditions but on the very idea of tradition (call it if you will religion) so that people reach their opinions not through tradition – but through schools of philosophy directly. I need not go into now the extreme danger for us all of that situation. But one thing is clear – if we are to save ourselves in any way from that danger we must hold together at one and the same time both being

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respectful to those various schools of philosophy and at the same time withhold our respect from any of those schools as final. This is an extremely difficult tension of respect and withholding respect from any of these schools of philosophy which have been the substitute for tradition or religion. Now this makes clear it seems to me why I thought it worthwhile to study Nietzsche. In my opinion he understands with greater clarity what were the presuppositions of the schools of philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which had taken the place of tradition. And moreover his thinking starts from these presuppositions. He holds them. He is a modern in that he proceeds to thought from the prejudices of the modern era – the central one being of course God is dead. Therefore first we see in his thought more clearly than elsewhere these prejudices. Indeed it will be clear that I do not hold these prejudices and believe many of them to be false – but I do not believe that one can escape from these modern prejudices without seeing them for what they are – without seeing what is there judged. That is the first reason for studying Nietzsche. But, Nietzsche not only starts from the great modern prejudices – he also passes beyond them more than any other modern and that passing beyond them is expressed in the eternal recurrence. Let me say in passing – that is why so many moderns take the eternal recurrence as a kind of poetic extra in Nietzsche – because they do not want to think it as arising from their prejudices. To look at that doctrine I want to speak today in the light of [a student’s] essay why the section on redemption seems to me the centre of the book and in doing so prepare the way for a discussion of the eternal recurrence and also on the side perhaps add something to the questions [students raised] about what I said about the overcoming of chance – for it is evident that in this section he makes the move from the overcoming of chance to the stance of the redemption of chance. This means turning away from what he says about important matters in the other sections – but that must wait. Now this speech continues the argument of the speech on self-overcoming. The self-overcoming is not only the self-overcoming of the lower by the higher will, but of the will as such. It must be in some sense redemption from the will. That is why we can say that this is the centre of the book. He is preparing to say how that is possible. Remem-

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ber in the first part – the camel – the lion – the child. The spirit of the camel – you shall; the spirit of the lion – I will; and the spirit of the child – he did not say what it is. He is now going to do so. Read [Hollingdale] 160–1 [‘... To redeem the past and to transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus!” – that alone do I call redemption!’], and page 102, the gift giving nature – also Hollingdale page 97, read – the superfluous ones should never have been born [‘... Die at the right time: thus Zarathustra teaches. To be sure, he who never lived at the right time could hardly die at the right time! Better if he were never to be born! – Thus I advise the superfluous ...’]. Or read in Ecce Homo [and] later in the chapter in the Birth of Tragedy ‘Giving new poverty of life takes with its hands the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of the human race, including the merciless extinction of everything decadent and parasitical.’ Does not the conquest of chance, practically speaking, consist of a eugenics programme undertaken from beyond good and evil – the extinction of the low[?], the sick, and the degenerate? But this is not the highest in Nietzsche. In this speech as is clear he turns from the overcoming of chance – to its redemption. But redemption of chance is not conquest but affirmation of chance of the past, of the fragments. Or should one say that: if one thinks of Marx. Marx says clearly that the redemption of the past is implied in the fact that the past is the basis of the future. Redemption in Marx is implied in the conquest of chance. All the suffering and folly of the past was required to bring about the completion. Last year when we studied Kant’s historical writings – Kant first made this point about progress – and it was taken up by Hegel and Marx. But Nietzsche goes further. And this going further culminates in the doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Read on p 161, Hollingdale. [‘To redeem the past and to transform every “It was” into an “I wanted it thus” – that alone do I call redemption!’]. The previous teaching regarding the will was fundamentally incomplete because it did not consider the essential character[?] of the will. And to see the continuity in Nietzsche, in The Advantages and Disadvantages of History, the expression ‘it was’ occurs with great emphasis at the beginning. There he says that man is an animal which cannot forget. The non-human animals can forget. But man lives in the memory of the past, not only his own as in psycho-analysis, but all, and remembering the past he cannot be as direct or sincere as the non-human animals.

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Only to the extent that man can forget – that is, be [?], can he be creative. But this kind of forgetting of the past does not liberate us from the past. Here in Zarathustra he takes up this argument. The will desires to be sovereign to be creative, but it depends on the given, on the past – and the will finds it is impotent towards the past – it cannot will the past. The past is the very character of time itself – to pass away. But can we not be entirely oriented to the future as the [past] progressed[?] The past is a condition of the future and thus the past is willed when the future is willed. Yet this fails to look at the fact that the past was, without being willed, the willing comes in only afterwards. Will then is frustrated by time and its passing. What does the will do in order to counteract its defeat by time? Hollingdale, page [16]3 [‘Has the will become its own redeemer and bringer of joy? Has it unlearned the spirit of revenge and all teeth-gnashing?’]. To put this in terms of chance, as Nietzsche has said hitherto chance ruled – the fragmentedness of man and now chance is to be overcome in the superman. But then the great change takes place, not the conquest of fragmentedness and chance but the redemption of fragmentedness and chance. This redemption does not consist in the conquest of chance, in that you would then be saying that the conquest of chance has been made possible by chance, but redemption consists in the willing of fragmentedness – the affirmation of chance. Revenge. All previous thought of any greatness was characterized by the spirit of revenge on time – on the essential passingness or perishability of time. All previous thought culminated in the conjecture of something timeless – eternal – in order to escape time and therefore got its revenge on time. All previous thought culminated in the conjectural eternal – always conjectural. Nietzsche is aware that nothing which is not eternal can satisfy a thinking man. This is the great superiority of Nietzsche to Marx because that understanding is lacking in Marx and liberalism. There is a terrible self-complacency in Marx and liberalism – namely that we do not desire the eternal. Nietzsche is wonderfully free from that complacency – but the eternity we are offered is offered in terms of the premises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the eternity of becoming and perishing. To go lower: the spirit of revenge had been mentioned earlier in the section on the tarantula – the egalitarian revolutionary. Therefore we have to ask what is the connection between e.g. Plato, a very inegalitar-

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ian thinker and the egalitarian revolutionary. As regards Plato and Christianity – the peaks in previous thought – it is clear what revenge is – the revenge or revolution against nature as coming into being and passing away. They both transcend the natural by the supernatural and therefore degrade the natural. But the egalitarian revolutionaries also degrade the natural because they insist on rights – which are universal principles which stand over against the passingness of time. I saw this the other day with clarity when I spoke in public about abortion with extremely radical women attacking me. They say with the modern that life is accident but then they appeal radically for rights. But the idea of rights is to the modern most completely thought – a kind of exaltation of the universal against time. This is what connects revenge among the Platonists with revenge in the egalitarian revolutionaries. To sum up: the superman becomes possible through deliverance from the spirit of revenge, from every need for the eternal which is beyond the perishable. The flux is willed. Time and the past are willed and that means to will the return of the past. Willing the eternal return is the peak of the will. Through liberation from the spirit of revenge the will becomes properly willed because it has freed itself from that which frustrates the will. Now this does not mean that Nietzsche ceases to be a modern in that he abandons the will to the future. He wills the future while willing the past – in one and the same act. But he passes beyond the great progressives such as Marx because the willing of the past means the return of the past. We will the future and the past – but that is only possible if there is a circle – a recurrence of the past. That is developed in the third part of Zarathustra. Now I want to make some statements about the relation of Nietzsche to the tradition of philosophy and religion in the West which are a kind of commentary on the study of Nietzsche. If they seem too much taken up with academic comparison, there may be for some of you some help in that. (1) You may remember that although in Plato there is a vast interest in life and what he considers nature to be – namely eros – e.g. in the Symposium – in Phaedo – the account of Socrates’ death – Socrates says that philosophy is the practice of dying – philosophy is meditation upon the fact of our finitude – upon death. And this remained so throughout the Christian period – perhaps deepened because at the

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centre of Christianity was a death. Also it is to be remembered in the origins of modern times, Spinoza said clearly that he was turning around philosophy and mak[ing] it no longer a meditation upon death, but upon life. And we know that in popular humanist thought today there is a lot of talk about the good thinkers being for life and the bad thinkers being for death. At a deeper level we may say that following Spinoza, there is little doctrine of death in such great progressive thinkers as Marx. Now in the light of that we can say that the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is Nietzsche’s meditation on death. What I have said all along is that although Nietzsche is utterly modern, accepting the prejudices of our era, he passes beyond them and this is one way he passes beyond them by bringing back into philosophy meditation on death. Indeed the thinker who is his greatest follower, Heidegger, carries this further in his unfolding of what we call existentialism, by saying that the human being is the being towards death. But we need not follow that further. (2) It is often said that in Plato’s thought there is also the eternal recurrence. Some followers of Plato took the doctrine to mean that Socrates had lived and taken the hemlock an infinite number of times in Athens. You will remember that in The City of God Augustine argues against what he calls the ‘damnable circles’ of the Greek philosophers and at the height of that argument he asserts that they have been refuted by the doctrine of redemption. He says ‘Christ died once and for all for our sins.’ And you will remember that in the arguments about the Eucharist in 16th century Europe between Protestants and Catholics this became an issue. In the prayer of offering in the Anglican Eucharist – there is included the words ‘that sacrifice, once offered’ – that is, under the influence of Protestantism and its insistence on what it took the Bible to say – without philosophy – it insisted on the uniqueness of Christ’s sacrifice and to make it sense one must remember that Cranmer who wrote those words was burnt to death.39 Let me state my sympathy for the doctrine of eternal recurrence in stating that when I hear the Anglican offertory prayer I always express to myself my non-agreement with the words ‘once offered’ when the priest says them. (I will discuss this a great deal next year in discussing Simone Weil who clearly asserts the eternal recurrence was Christian-

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ity.) As these issues are therefore very central to the thought which really lays below the surface of Western history, it is very important to see at least at a shallow level what is the difference that is being stated in Plato’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence and Nietzsche’s. Let me put it simply. For Plato nature is eros. For Nietzsche nature is will to power. Both say nature is becoming and perishing as distinguished from anything eternal. But the difference is enormous. Because eros is aspiration toward something beyond itself to something eternal, unchanging, perfect, and final. Will to power is not eros, it has no end in itself. Therefore although there is the account of time as eternal recurrence, it is the aspiration to pass beyond time and deathlessness as he says in the Phaedrus is to pass out of the cycles, to pure mind, to the Good in itself. To end where we began with the study of the book Beyond Good and Evil one sees how consummately Nietzsche understands the history of Western thought and the task he is to carry out when he quickly summons up the matter in the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil. We must return to the question of perspectivism and what it means for his teaching of the eternal recurrence of the identical will to power another day. [End of lecture] Being paranoid, I knew from the beginning of this year that it would be my fate to be lecturing on April Fool’s Day on the eternal recurrence of the identical will to power. [Discussion of students’ papers] The fourth part of Zarathustra in my opinion returns to deal very brilliantly with the more immediate things of his Europe but passes down from the heights or shall we say up from the abyss of the eternal recurrence in part III. The fourth section appears to me to deal with how long before the appearance of the superman, Zarathustra [?] the best men in Europe. In that sense it is more difficult to penetrate in particulars than the third section, yet not as great a height as the presentation of the eternal recurrence. I am disappointed with what I have to say today and my apologies. It is very hard to bring out all that needs to be brought out in Nietzsche

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and some days one is clearer than others. Nietzsche said this era means we either have to be specialists or swindlers. What a clever comment. And after seeing the specialists I would rather be a swindler in some ways. One obviously cannot learn anything of Nietzsche by being a specialist – but then one becomes afraid that one is becoming a swindler – my fear today. Now last day I approached the eternal recurrence from the standpoint of why it had to be spoken as against the progressive philosophers – Marxists et al. Why the [?] to the future which Nietzsche shares with them is not enough for Nietzsche. I related this to the point in Nietzsche where he passes on from the question of the overcoming of chance to the question of the redemption of chance. Today I want to try to say why Nietzsche passes beyond the kind of positivism which has been much more dominant in the Western world – particularly in educated or scientific circles. Here the choice of words is important. Should we say positivism, liberalism, or perhaps the best word is ‘relativism.’ Those of us in universities might say we meet it above all as ‘social science relativism.’ Perhaps – and remember when Plato and Aristotle use the Greek word for perhaps – it is their marvellously [?] way of saying what we mean by indeed – perhaps the word ‘relativism’ is the best and obviously such a discussion requires a discussion of what he means by perspectivism and its relation to what is said concerning the eternal recurrence in section two. ‘On the Vision and the Enigma,’ and section thirteen ‘The Convalescent.’ [I] only can deal with these two – much else in the book, much, much else. I would love to deal in detail with the references to the New Testament, e.g. with Mark on this. Let me start from my beginning again. For all of us there are particularly formative public events which shape us deeply. I am sure that is true for many of you here although for some of you the particular public events that may be determinative of your lives may not yet have happened. The great public event which shaped me was the great war of 1939 to 1945 and what it did was to drive me out of the bourgeois atheistic liberalism in which I had been raised because of the enormous, almost limitless repugnance I felt towards the modernity which had manifested itself in what I had seen in the war. This led me to think about and live in the world in terms of Christianity expressed philosophically in Platonic terms. I am sure it is clear to you that that limitless repugnance carries over

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to the contemplation of Nietzsche’s teaching of modernity. I have never felt that repugnance so greatly as in thinking about Nietzsche this year. Nothing could be more repugnant than the doctrine of human beings as creative – indeed of philosophy itself as creative. Yet one must make two very large provisos concerning that repugnance. (1) There is something intrinsically beautiful in understanding something very clearly. Nietzsche in his acceptance of modernity enucleates with such clarity what it is that he accepts, that there is something lovable in that clarity. So many people from lack of thought want it both ways. They fool themselves about what they want – e.g. a lot of relativism and a little bit of natural law at one and the same time. Nietzsche’s lovableness is just that he does not want it both ways. (2) At the height of his teaching – that is, the doctrine of eternal recurrence – Nietzsche seems to be battling to pass beyond modernity and one sees that most clearly in what he says about the eternal recurrence and the redemption of chance. Let me put that passing beyond in the following way, because that is what I want to talk about today – what is Nietzsche’s perspectivism and how he here begins to try to pass beyond it. In the title of Section 2 the doctrine of eternal recurrence is said to be a vision and an enigma. We may well say that the very concept of an enigmatic vision combines cognition or knowledge together with creation. On the one hand the doctrine of eternal recurrence is not simply pure creation – utterly subjective. On the other hand, it is not pure awareness. It is on the one hand a doctrine of the trans-historical whole of nature. But it is not in itself, nor is meant to be, a rational doctrine. It is a strange mixture of the two – an enigmatic, that is, allusive, vision. Also in ‘Convalescent,’ read Hollingdale, p. 232. Eternal return obeys Zarathustra but Zarathustra also obeys it. The doctrine is both creation and contemplation. To see what he means by that I must say more. But let me first insist on the one side – it is a teaching of the trans-historical whole of nature and in that sense he is passing beyond modernity. Let me put it this way: the teaching concerns the universal. Now it is above all and at the centre of modernity – the fact that the universal is lost. We see this in all our studies: what the modern historicist says, for example, about the traditional teaching concerning natural law – that the doctrine of the Stoics is an expression of a certain stage of classical antiquity. This stage of classical antiquity was something real and was then projected into

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this doctrine of natural law. What this is saying is that this supposedly universal doctrine, the doctrine of natural law, is only seemingly universal because its root is something particular – classical civilization. This can be seen very clearly in the way criticisms of other doctrines in ancient philosophers could be expressed without the statement of proper names except incidentally. What matters in classical writing is the universality of the particular doctrine. In modern thought based on the historical consciousness, proper names are always right at the heart and occur in the most important passages. Why? Because if the human race is rooted in the particular this is necessary. Now clearly in the tradition universality cannot be avoided because of the fact that we are rational beings and universality is the expression of our rationality. Now what makes Nietzsche to me lovable in the doctrine of eternal recurrence is that here is the human being who more than any other attacked, more clearly than any of his modern predecessors, the account of man as rational and yet this teaching about the eternal recurrence brings back the universal in the sense that it is a teaching concerning the trans-historical whole of nature. He knows that the universal cannot be avoided as modernity has tried to avoid it. Let me say [w]hat I want to say in this class above anything else, that he returns to the universal at the level of nature but not at the level of reason. To turn to the beginning again: For Nietzsche there is nothing eternal. There is no pure mind. All knowledge is perspectivity and belongs to a specific perspective. All knowledge is a function of life, i.e. of historically specified life. All truth is said to be subjective. The world as it is understood by anyone is the apparent world – the world as it appears to us (in Kant’s words) – and for Nietzsche the real world is a meaningless term. All knowledge is interpretation – that is, creation. Now that is the side of Nietzsche which has been taken up by modern social science and which we all are surrounded by and which often seems to be taken as limiting Nietzsche to perspectivism, but here in the doctrine of eternal recurrence he does not leave it there. Why does he not leave it there? Therefore let me try and say what it seems to me are the difficulties which Nietzsche sees. Let me say I am using the words ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ in the way they are used in current natural and social science and I am not taking into account that extraordinarily brilliant analysis of what is given in these words which are found in Heidegger. To do so

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would be a different lecture and take us too far from Nietzsche. Therefore take the words ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ as it were in quotation marks used in the way the sensible modern scientists use them. First difficulty which Nietzsche sees incomparably more clearly than most scientists since his day. (1) The statement that there is a variety of subjective truths – a variety of comprehensive world views is itself an objective truth. That is, the statement that historicism is true. It is true that all truths are historically determined raises a great difficulty. It seems itself to be an objective truth about the many subjective truths – but why does it not fall under its own axe? The truth that all truths are historically determined – is not that truth historically determined? Now this knowledge regarding knowledge –namely that it is historically determined – is second order knowledge. It is knowledge about knowledge. Let me say in parenthesis that it is Weber’s thought about this side of Nietzsche that led to the basic establishment of sociology. Because of this question what becomes the highest science is the sociology of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge which was so dominant in the West accepted that any knowledge came from a particular perspective – but did not worry that that knowledge was perspectivism. It seemed to me it escaped that conclusion by giving a certain universality to modern science by accepting that the Westernization of all man had given modern science a seeming universality. But Nietzsche will not stop there. This leads to the second difficulty which is: the objective truth that all truth is historically determined is a deadly truth. Nietzsche’s understanding of this is clear from his earliest writings e.g. The Use and Abuse of History and throughout his writings. There are passages about this in all his writings. I quote: ‘The doctrines of the sovereignty of becoming, of the fluidity of all concepts, types, and species – are true but deadly.’ Third difficulty is related [to] this: This objective truth of historicism – call it if you will God is dead – because of this ambiguity in it, is incomplete and therefore must be interpreted and completed, and that interpretation can be either noble or base. I could remind you here of Nietzsche’s earlier distinction in Zarathustra between the noble man and the knower. That is, according to Nietzsche, historicism can be interpreted basely according to him – as ordinary relativism – or nobly, that is, creatively. Objectively there is no reason to prefer the noble to the

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base interpretation. Most academic relativists according to Nietzsche say that the base interpretation of historicism is more scientific than the noble interpretation. But Nietzsche affirms that both interpretations are quite outside science. Historicism as a [?] is neutral[?] and therefore incomplete. Now why does Nietzsche turn to the noble interpretation? (a) What is the noble interpretation? The noble interpretation of historicism interprets it in terms of human creativity and this creativity is defined by Nietzsche more precisely as the will to power. But to understand historicism creatively the individual must have some experience of creativity, he must to some extent have become a creator. This is the noble interpretation of historicism because it is based on creativity – whereas the base interpretation in terms of academic relativism lacks this experience. And this noble interpretation is not a mere postulate because it is based on an experience. The noble interpretation, the most comprehensive perspective, is based on the self-awareness of one’s own creativity. The fundamental error, from Nietzsche’s position, in the base interpretation of historicism is not a mere theoretical error, but is rooted in the spirit of revenge, as the spirit of gravity or heaviness, in those who make the base interpretation – that is, in a particular form of the will to power. What I have been saying is that the enigmatic vision of eternal recurrence – the height of his teaching – as enigmatic vision – part created, part contemplated – presumes against the ancient metaphysicians the principle of historicism, that there is nothing eternal except individuals in their individuality – it is in accordance with the deadly truths of evolution and historicism but at the same time it allows an infinite affirmation of life with all its sufferings and defects in a way that is not possible in the base interpretation of historicism which I have called academic relativism. Now I cannot say anything more here about the enigmatic vision. Not only because I am unable – but to do so would take us into Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche and Heidegger’s refutation of historicism in terms of that criticism, and that would take me into my attempt to show that Heidegger’s historicism is false because it does not understand the proper teaching about good and that stems from Heidegger’s misinterpretation of the Platonic account of truth. It is unlikely that I will ever achieve the stating of that sufficiently clearly. I simply want to descend

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to make one comment about the section on ‘The Convalescent’ which points up certain things said in the eternal recurrence. (1) Read Hollingdale, p. 234. The animals, the beings without speech, are here represented as stating the doctrine of the eternal recurrence and they can state it without suffering because for them there is no future – whereas the thought of the future is essential to human beings. This living without future and without past is what distinguishes the beasts from the human animal. Now I have during this course said often that Nietzsche is a great critic of Rousseau but here seems to me a similarity. The state of nature, as Rousseau describes it, is a state in which man was not yet truly man, because he did not yet possess reason, he only had the ability to acquire reason. Therefore man in the state of nature was a stupid animal. In spite of this, Rousseau’s teaching at its height, calls for a return to nature – that meant a return to nature on the level of humanity. Let me say in parenthesis for those interested in the history of philosophy – that this side of Rousseau was not taken up by his most influential followers – Kant, Hegel, Marx – who concentrated on the progressive side of Rousseau’s view of history. It is this side which recently has made Rousseau so popular not only in hippie circles but for example in the anthropologist Levi-Strauss. At the end of Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques (one of the most delightful of all modern books)40 there is a great encomium to Rousseau as the greatest of all anthropologists because of this. Read it. Something similar is being said here in Nietzsche. A return to nature on the human level because Nietzsche who conceives the superman and the superman himself is not a beast. But he shares something with the beasts which distinguishes both the superman and the beasts from historical man, namely the harmony and unity with the cycle of nature. In making out this closeness between Rousseau and Nietzsche, I must insist as always that what is first with Rousseau in the evocation of man and nature, is the sweetnesss of existence, while what is primary for Nietzsche in that evocation is suffering. [Instructions for students] As I have made historicism and Nietzsche’s attempt to overcome it so central in the last classes, let me say an extremely good article on ‘historicism’ in German [is] in one of the non-translated Eranos Jahrbuch,

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Jung’s writings. In [a student’s] essay he has a look at the eternal recurrence through the eyes of the greatest of Nietzsche’s epigones, Heidegger. Let me say how unworthy it is to call Heidegger an epigone – because he would not like it. Now there is one great difficulty in that and I want to ask you about that shortly – because we must not end our discussion of Nietzsche with a discussion of Heidegger, with all its different and strange language. Heidegger thinks that he has transcended the eternal recurrence. Indeed he thinks he has quite quite transcended Nietzsche. Indeed at the simplest level he thinks he understands Nietzsche better than he understood himself. Nietzsche is, according to Heidegger, the last of the metaphysicians while Heidegger has transcended metaphysics. This despite the fact that Nietzsche repeatedly attacks metaphysics. Nietzsche is according to Heidegger the most complete (the end) Platonist, although Nietzsche denies he is a Platonist. If you want to see this spelled out there is an article called ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche Interpretation’ by Lawrence Lampert – in Man and World, vol. 7, no. 4. I like Lampert’s writing because he has written by far the best account of my thoughts.41 And if you want to see the difficulties in Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation, it is a good article.

Notes 1 Alfred North Whitehead, see 261n17. Grant wrote in ‘Justice and Technology’ (531) that Whitehead’s writings inadequately affirmed God ‘as subsidiary to process’ and tasted ‘of secularized Anglicanism seeking a Harvard substitute for prayer.’ On Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, see 262n24. 2 G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man, part 1, chapter 6, ‘The Demons and the Philosophers’: ‘Perhaps there are no things out of which we get so little of the truth as the truisms; especially when they are really true.’ 3 Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book was The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, (1872), trans. Francis Golffing, (New York: Doubleday 1956). It was dedicated to the German late romantic composer Richard Wagner (1813– 83), whose music and writings were an inspiration for his views on Greek drama and civilization. 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, (1882), trans. Thomas Common (New York: F. Ungar 1960).

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5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All (1883– 91), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Viking 1954). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1966) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday 1956). 7 ‘Preface,’ Beyond Good and Evil (Chicago: Henry Regnery 1955), xii. 8 Perhaps Grant quoted: ‘You see what posthumous thoughts occupy my mind. But a philosophy like mine is a tomb – it seals one off from the living,’ from letter to Georg Brandes, December 1887. 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1874) trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Liberal Arts Press 1949). 10 George Grant, Time as History (38). 11 Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1959). Grant distributed photocopies of Strauss’s essay ‘Three Waves of Modernity’ to all his graduate classes in the early 1970s. Later it was published in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1989), 81–98. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage 1968), 290. 13 Jean Baptiste Racine (1639–99), French poet and ‘classicist’ playwright, whose most well-known play was Phèdre (1677), was educated by Jansenists who believed in predestination over free will (see note 14). Some scholars have linked the story of Phèdre, whose fate outweighs her attempts to overcome it, to Jansenist thought. 14 Blaise Pascal (1623–62), French mathematician, philosopher, and theologian, was perhaps the most famous of the Jansenists, named after the theologian Bishop Cornelius Jansen of Ypres (1585–1638), who emphasized the necessity of divine grace and predestination for salvation. 15 Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805), German romantic playwright, poet, and thinker wrote Maria Stuart (1800), about Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, and the drama trilogy Wallenstein (1796–9) about Albrecht von Wallenstein (1583–1634), Bohemian soldier and politician, who led his army under Ferdinand II in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). 16 See note 9 above. Thoughts Out of Season (often translated as Untimely Mediations) were published between 1873 and 1876. See Untimely Mediations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 17 See Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1954), ‘On the Higher Man,’ 286. 18 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vols. 1–2 and 3–4, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins 1991).

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19 St Bonaventura (Giovanni Fidanza) (1217–74), Italian scholastic philosopher, bishop, and cardinal, was an Augustinian Platonist in orientation and was elected minister general of the Franciscan Order. He is the author of The Mind’s Road to God, trans. George Boas (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill 1953). See Grant’s critical comment on Bonaventura in the 1950s in Collected Works, Vol. 2, 527. 20 Denis de Rougemont (1906–85), Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York: Pantheon 1956). 21 On Masters and Johnson, see 802n6. 22 Unfortunately, Grant does not specify the contents of ‘these words’ he finds opaque beyond the one example of ‘philosophy.’ 23 See Leo Strauss, ‘Note on the Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil,’ Interpretation 3 (1973). 24 ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ (1970–5) was a British TV drama set in a London mansion in the early years of the twentieth century showing the lives of both the servants downstairs and the masters upstairs. 25 Collected Works, Vol. 3, 558–76. 26 On Charles William Eliot, see 106n7. 27 Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) won the governorship of New Jersey in 1910 and the presidency of the United States in 1912. In 1905 he had been active in the shaping of the curriculum of Princeton University when he had found himself in a struggle with Andrew F. West, Dean of the Graduate School, over the erection of a luxurious elite graduate college off campus (the ‘Institute’ to which Grant refers – likely the Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, NJ). Wilson was defeated by West through the intervention of wealthy patrons, some of whom had opposed his attempt to close off campus eating clubs that encouraged snobbishness and elitism. 28 Professor Paul Clifford, who founded the department of religion at McMaster in 1959–60, had been educated in England. 29 On Max Weber, see 188n5. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), German philosopher, is best known for his epistemological analysis of Geisteswissenschaften, or cultural studies. 30 See ‘The University Curriculum,’ in Collected Works, Vol. 3, 567. ‘If one has a steady nerve, it is useful to contemplate how much is written about Beowulf in one year in North America. One can look at the Shakespeare industry with perhaps less sense of absurdity; but when it comes to figures such as Horace Walpole having their own factory, one must beware vertigo.’ Grant often used ‘Walpole industry’ or ‘factory’ as a shorthand for literary scholarship of a not very worthwhile nature. Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717–97), English writer, connoisseur,

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and collector, wrote The Castle of Otranto, which initiated the vogue for Gothic romances, and was a prodigious and witty writer of letters. On Charles de Gaulle, see 73n25; Jean Monnet (1888–1979), French stateman, was instrumental in the creation of the European Union. On Hans-Georg Gadamer, see 846n13. Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), German philosopher, was professor of philosophy at Freiburg 1916–28, where he was Heidegger’s teacher. Husserl had an enormous influence as the founder of phenomenology, a major school of philosophy in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality, trans. A.A. Brill (New York: Vintage c.1947) and Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth (New York: Norton 1969). Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), German Jewish religious philosopher, wrote The Star of Redemption. Source of remark about Socrates unidentified. ‘Of Self-Overcoming,’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Hammondsworth: Penguin 1961), 137. See Nicomachean Ethics, bk 8, 1156b. Nietzsche wrote the first part of Zarathustra in 1883 as he recovered from a deep depression following the loss of Louise (Lou) von Salomé (1861–1937) to a friend, Paul Rée. Hollingdale (trans.), 98: ‘As yet he knew only tears and the melancholy of the Hebrews, together with the hatred of the good and the just – the Hebrew Jesus: then he was seized by the longing for death.’ Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, made a major contribution to the introduction of the Book of Common Prayer (1549), leading the Church of England in a Protestant direction. He was burned at the stake (1556) for treason and heresy during the reign of Mary I who had been raised a Catholic and wished to restore the country to its former faith. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John Russell (New York: Atheneum 1965). See Laurence Lampert, ‘The Uses of Philosophy in George Grant,’ in George Grant in Process: Essays and Conversations, ed. Larry Schmidt (Toronto: Anansi 1978), 179–94.

EXCERPTS FROM SEMINAR LECTURES ON HEIDEGGER, 1972–3 AND 1978–9 These lecture fragments on Heidegger are from Notebooks T and F which contain materials from Religion 781, a graduate course entitled ‘The Relations between the Western Religious Tradition and Technology,’ including sessions from both 1972–3 and 1978–9. The main text for the course, Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’1 was translated in the 1972–3 session as the course progressed by a graduate student, Ed Alexander. Twelve students attended that first seminar. The fragments are supplemented by an excerpt from David Cayley’s George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995).

Lectures on Heidegger’s Technique (1972–3) ... Let me make two preliminary comments before we start on (1) the extreme difficulty of translating Heidegger, and (2) why we are giving this small writing such attention in a department of religion. (1) On translation: Heidegger is difficult to translate because in his writing he is reforming the German language. Philosophy is for him a Western occurrence. There are two and only two great philosophical languages, Greek and German. And he is trying to reform German. Why? Nietzsche said in the fourth book of Zarathustra that man had at last come to be masters of the earth and he asked the question who will deserve to be such. Heidegger thinks he is now generating the thinking that will produce human beings who will so deserve and that thinking is a radical new beginning and requires this reforming of language. There are very few good writings about it. But there is a good one on what he means by the beginnings in the Review of Metaphysics, December 1971, called ‘Heidegger’s Notion of Two Beginnings,’ by J.P. Fell. (2) Why start with the reading of this writing on technique in a department of religion? Let me just say this. The origins of the West are in two great roots. They could be called by Jews: Athens and Jerusalem, by Christians Athens and Christ. Let me as a Christian use the Jewish terminology, Athens and Jerusalem. The interplay of these two primary

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sources has been Western civilization. Now modern civilization, which I would hypostatize as technique – in which the West is more than our civilization – but in which its civilization is becoming world wide – came to be in the West partially out of these roots and partially as a sustained and powerful criticism of both Athens and Jerusalem. That criticism one might say began with the natural science of Galileo and the moral science of Machiavelli and for the last four centuries has built positively out of that criticism, the society of technique. The last and most extreme wave of that criticism arose in Germany and we may associate it with the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger in which the crisis of the modern Western world is expanded in the light of our origins. In my opinion nobody I have read sees modernity with such lucidity as Heidegger. I am quite frankly breathless with admiration at his account of modernity. And if we are to understand what religion or politics or anything is in modernity, we have an obligation to ourselves to try and partake in his vision. Yet what makes it difficult for me and perhaps for some of you – not others – is that that vision of modernity excludes that to which I pay my highest reverence and which at my age I know I will never give up reverencing – if I am allowed to remain sane. I want to make a comment on the word Dasein, because it is central. Now in the contemporary West, there are two dominant intellectual movements, positivism and existentialism. They both have a vast variety of forms. Positivism surpasses existentialism by far in academic influence and existentialism surpasses positivism by far in popular influence. Existentialism is a movement which like all such movements has a flabby periphery and a hard centre. That centre is the thought of Heidegger ... And at that centre is Dasein. Literally, to be there – man. Let me just say a word about what is being said there in terms of the history of European thought. Most of the great Western philosophy since Descartes said that the fundamental task of philosophy was its analysis of scientific thought – its theory of scientific experience. This was worked out in European thought particularly in the mighty thought of Kant. Now at the beginning of this century, Husserl2 – his [Heidegger’s] teacher and the founder of the new popular school called phenomenology – came along and said the following – we must face the fact that science is derivative – this is what European thought is forgetting. It is

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derivative, said Husserl, from our primary common sense of the world of things. And if we do not recognize this, that science is derivative from something more elementary than itself, then we will misunderstand science. Therefore the task of philosophy is not just science – but the dependence of that science on what is prior to it – philosophy must start with the understanding of the sensibly perceived thing – that is, our pre-scientific world, and then show how science is derived from that common understanding of the world as sensibly perceived before all theorizing. That is what phenomenology means, statements on the study of immediate phenomena. Husserl started with the pure consciousness in man of things outside us. Now Heidegger. What Heidegger said to his teacher Husserl was the following. Husserl did not go far enough back. Husserl he said started with the pure consciousness of objects. But, said Heidegger, this is as much an abstraction as science because the inner consciousness of man is always a consciousness which knows itself as finite in time, a consciousness which is constituted by the knowledge of its own death. The primary thing is that man is a being towards death who knows his own time is finite – Sein und Zeit. Dasein is the being which knows itself as such. The being towards death, that is before all science, before everything. Pascal – the thinking reed. What is first is man knowing himself as a finite being [who] lives with things in a particular historical way, using them, looking at them. The purpose of the present article [The Question Concerning Technology] is why our particular historical way is to look at them as technique. Let me say, in his analysis of Dasein Heidegger draws out his implication of this. Man is a totally historical being. Man is a being who has to act resolutely in the face of the knowledge of his own finitude in a particular historical situation. (I could digress here on Heidegger’s politics – the relation of this to his national socialism. Let me say there has been much written about this. Much the best is by a young Frenchman, Palmier, a book called La Politique de Heidegger.)3 I would also like to say at this point for those who are interested in theology[:] There are a lot of theologians who are cozying up to Heidegger as the greatest modern philosopher. The two great archetypal accounts of death in the West – are the account of the death of Socrates in Phaedo and of Christ in the Gospels. Both these accounts are said by Heidegger to be illusory. Socrates’ in his ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.’ He is more hidden about Christ – but it is equally clear to those who read

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carefully. Our Saviour said at his death ‘consummatum est’ – it is finished or completed. Es ist vollbracht, in German. Perhaps the supreme moment in European art is Bach’s commentary for contralto voice in the St John Passion – Es ist vollbracht. Listen to it. In Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, he says directly, death is inconsummatable.4 I wish theologians would pay attention to such a remark. That is, what Dasein is saying is that man is a totally historical being. Paragraph three [of Frage nach der Technik] ... There is a lot said in that paragraph, all, it seems to me, particularly brilliant. The central word is representation. Vorstellen – place before. Now this takes us to the centre of what Heidegger says in this essay. Modern science is based on a certain form of representation. We represent things to ourselves as objects. That is why modern science reaches objective conclusions – there is objectivity in it. Now what he is saying in this writing is that in technical activity we are representing things to ourselves as Bestand ... We represent things to ourselves as potential resources. Anybody who lives in North America and Canada in particular must recognize that Heidegger is not being remote and academic here but speaking literally the truth – do we not represent our country to ourselves as resources? [Procedural comments] ... But let me say one thing about the last sentence – not neutral. The representation of machines as neutral instruments is a central tragic aberration to Heidegger because it is based on something not neutral. The essence of technique is the representation of things and people to ourselves as resources and that is not neutral. In my own writing I am going to give to you, I have ten pages showing that the representation of computers as neutral is a great delusion.5 [Para. 4–6] ... I have no comment except to point out that Ellul uses the instrumental definition of technique and that is why in my opinion he can’t distinguish between modern technique and ancient technique. One of the shallowest parts of The Technological Society is where he calls on Engels’ account of how a sufficient change in quantity leads to a qualitative change – and so distinguishes modern from ancient technique. What Ellul does not seem to be aware of is the essential connection between modern science and modern technique where there is no

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such connection between ancient technique and ancient science. Heidegger is brilliantly aware of this as we shall see. [Para. 7, 8] He is here speaking of the correct (or the exact) and the true – the difference between them. Now we may later have to get into his account of truth as the unhidden – we could spend the year on it. But at the moment let me just say that the difference – the inadequacy of correctness in para. 8 we all know at a simple level every day. Teaching: what you get from computers, secretaries, about people is correct. X went here, there, etc. Or as a direction correct, he weighs 170 pounds, etc. But as you come to know the person – the truth of that person emerges. To say instrument is correct – but what technique is in its essence does not emerge. Heidegger says that correctness or exactness is always concerned with our practical relation with something, that is, for the sake of doing something. That is why when we see technique as an instrument we are trying to master it ... (read sentence) Then he goes on to say that we must therefore see what instrument is – that is, what instrumentality is. And he says that where there are instruments then there is causality. Therefore he will look at causality and he proceeds to take the traditional Western account of causality which originated with Aristotle. And from that he brings out what techne was for the ancients in a marvellous way. Therefore paragraphs nine to twenty-four, I think we should read together as the first movement by which he brings out what technique meant in the ancient world. Therefore let us take that passage as a whole ... [Discussion of causality and Alexander’s translation of aitia] Second class: What we are doing. I said this year we would be discussing technique around the question – what does technical civilization portend of good and evil for human beings? To say something about that one has to try and see what technique is[.] In my opinion this writing is the clearest I know on that subject. There is a subsidiary question which is appropriate to a department of religion. In The Question of Being,6 page 61, a writing for Ernst Jünger (note on Jünger – man as worker – a great writer of this century hardly known in

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the English-speaking world)7. Heidegger quotes with approval Jünger’s remark: ‘Technique, as the destroyer of every faith in general, is also the most decisive anti-Christian power which has appeared hitherto.’ Now the meaning of that remark: it is necessary for us to come close to – is it true? But for now, what does it mean? The great attacker of transcendence – self-transcendence as finite but no infinite transcendence. ... As I said last day – modern technique has made us the masters of the earth – who will deserve to be that? The great experience which has to be thought is that we have here to be masters of the earth. But in that coming to be of our mastery of the earth, we have lost the old sign posts by which we answered what for, whither, and what then. Nietzsche’s great phrase – Gott ist tot. If you are concerned to know what I think of what that means you can read it in chapters three and four of a little book I wrote called Time as History [pp. 30–52] about Nietzsche. What Heidegger is saying is – man is an entirely historical being – that is, there is no eternal order – or an image of that order in the world – we call nature or human nature. What is worthy to be thought now is that modern technical science has made us masters of the earth – but it has at the same time destroyed our traditional answers to the question of what will be worth doing with that mastery. Therefore we have to see what that technical mastery is – because in saying what it is as a dominating spirit we can see how we can transcend the limitations of that spirit so that we can face the new historical task of not only mastery – but mastery which is for great and noble purposes. To see what modern technique is we must see how it came to be and we must see how it is differentiated from what the greatest ancient thinkers thought what technique was. Now what does he say from paragraph nine to thirty that ancient technique is[?] He says that it is above all a kind of poiesis. Now the simple English translation of poiesis is making. Dunbar’s poem – greatest Scottish poem.8 And techne is human making. Now there is another Greek word, physis – which we translate via the Latin as nature and which also for us [is] the origin of physics – and of course modern physics is the great intellectual achievement of the modern world – comes from that word, the study of nature. The greatest of modern physicists, Newton, called his work ‘natural philosophy.’ One of the difficult things in the word for us is that we can talk of the nature of nature. Just think of the phrase ‘the nature of nature’ – if you want to

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see how difficult it is to know what we are saying when we use the word ‘nature.’ One other point to make us think about the change in the word ‘nature.’ When one wants to know what we mean by a word – see what it is distinguished from. When modern man uses the word ‘nature’ as meaning ‘everything,’ then it just has no meaning. But in the modern world we generally distinguish nature from history and by history we mean what has to do with man. The natural sciences – the social sciences. The Germans distinguished Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. Nature and history – or nature and freedom. What is natural is what does not belong to the world of freedom. Now what one must see about the Greek meaning of nature is that it is not distinguished from history – but from convention and the Greek word for convention nomos is the same as the word which we translate as law. That is, we often think when we think nature – the physical, we think of the non-human. But for the Greeks, cities, human beings, gods (and here gods and God mean something quite different) are all natural or physical. Let me say in parenthesis particularly to those of you who are Catholics how strange it is that from the Greeks was taken the idea of natural law – the basic ethical doctrine of the Stoics and later of Catholicism was the doctrine of natural law. But for Greek thought this is very strange, for what is right by nature is contrasted with what is right by convention or law. If you read Plato’s writings what he is above all saying is that political philosophy is bringing what is right by convention into line with what is right by nature. But all societies start with a difference – (end of parenthesis). Now to see what the Greeks mean by technique we have to bring together nature (physis), making (poiesis), and art (techne) – for art is the Latin translation of techne. Do you see how the words have been turned around in modernity? This university, for example: Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science and Engineering. But as Heidegger makes absolutely clear there is no distinction in the Greek word between techne as making a table – what we might call a craft – and making a play which we might call fine art. Techne included both for the Greeks. Now there is another distinction which Heidegger does not speak of here or anywhere I know – what the Greeks call te musike, that techne which is inspired by the muses whoever they may be.

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But what we would call in general poetry, the Greeks would call te musike – the adjective for the Muses – musical. In a Greek play – tragedy – the goat dance – there was no division between what we call music – poetry – dancing – all of it would be musike. What the Greeks call poiesis – making – is a much more general term than what we call poetry. Physis or nature is a central poiesis – making – a bringing forth, a production in Latin, leading forth, of animals, man, trees, etc. etc. And techne for the Greeks is that pro-duction – that leading forth into presence of those things which can only be led forth into presence by man. [Instructions about paragraph 22] ... Techne is concerned with truth – because truth – the original word aletheia – truth means for Heidegger the unconcealed, not, as he clearly says in paragraph twenty-four, the correctness of propositions. Truth is not concerned with propositions but with coming into unconcealment, coming out into presence. Therefore, as he says in paragraph twentyeight, techne is knowledge in the broadest sense, for knowledge is what brings things out into unconcealment. E.g. the techne of the polis – the political art as we might call it – brings cities into being – with fuller and fuller unconcealment. As he writes 133 et seq. in An Introduction to Metaphysics man is the violent one who makes to come into unconcealment – the cup is led forth into being – or the temple, or the statue of Apollo – but more he brings into unconcealment cities and thrones and powers or in this age as flowers[?] which daily die. But he even brings into unconcealment his own tragic destiny. Heidegger sees Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as the great manifestation of Greek Dasein because he most radically and coldly asserts its fundamental passion for disclosure of being. His being as the murderer of his father and the desecrator of his mother. Techne for the Greeks is a species of poiesis – that making which brings into unconcealment those things which do not have the cause of their unconcealment in themselves – as he says in the quotation from Plato, passes from non-presence into presence. For those of you interested in philosophy, I would make one point in parenthesis: paragraph 13 – hyle, an invention of Aristotle. There is no such word for matter before Aristotle. Very difficult point which I do not want now to continue with.

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Now he turns from 31 to 58 to say what is the sameness and what the difference between ancient and modern technique. I am leaving the translation for a moment just to say that in 31 he says clearly the central question is why do technique and science have a particular reciprocal relation in the modern world – that is, technique can use modern science and modern science can use technique. Nuclear reactor – in this university. Dr Thode, a very pure scientist, wants to discover new isotopes – scientific pursuit – but he needs the great technical apparatus of the reactor for his science. In turn the isotopes he has discovered are used in metallurgy and through them in the steel companies. And also Thode starts a medical school because isotopes are used in modern medicine, etc. etc.9 I saw this reciprocal relation with the greatest clarity when I sat on a committee to choose a new president – the heads of the great steel corporations spent a minute with scientists and myself (and let me say a couple of students totally out of their depth) choosing somebody who could ‘represent’ (do you know the verb) that reciprocal relationship. This is what Marxism and liberalism – this reciprocal relationship – are utterly unable to understand. Read Russell (Scientific Outlook)10 a liberal thinker says this – what Heidegger is saying – is not true. There is a reciprocal relation between modern technique and modern science which is because of the essence of both – language the [?] to this[?]. Now to get at that reciprocal relation one has to get at the essence of modern technique and this is what he proceeds to do in the next paragraphs. [Discussion about Alexander’s translation] Introduction: ... Somebody from this class said to me: why study Heidegger? Is he not put out of court because he said national socialism in Germany was an occurrence of truth? Now my answer to that is the following – it is not to discuss Heidegger’s politics – we can do that later as it is a subject I think I understand in detail – but rather to say: the extremity of modernity has hit the English-speaking world: Vietnam. And by the English-speaking world I mean Canada as much as the United States. The election in which we are voting today makes perfectly clear that in basic issues we go along. The last time I spoke to Mr Trudeau, he said

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directly to me, just before he became prime minister, George, I would lose all influence here at all, if I pressured over Vietnam. What I am saying is that anybody who is part of the English-speaking empire must face that what we are members of has been part of this appalling war and it will be necessary to remember this when the whole legitimizing force of our society tells us rather our mistake is over. We can now go on. This is not what has happened. What I am saying is that Vietnam was the signal that the Englishspeaking world had entered the place where politics must ask extreme questions. And Heidegger is above all the philosopher of extremity – of modernity at its most extreme. [Instructions to students] ... It is clearly Sein (Being) which to Heidegger puts a claim upon man, what concerns man claims him, to which later in this writing one must be a listener, etc. etc. Now I am going to turn away from what Heidegger means by Sein – to be – for the following reasons. (1) Heidegger says that any thinker only thinks one thought and the thought he has thought is Sein. Therefore to discuss it, one would have to discuss all his works. Some day I may do this in a class. (2) I am not really capable of doing it. If I did it, I would have to be a thinker. (3) If I did it, I would be transcribing Heidegger into Platonic language. For the following reason: Christianity tells me with certainty that what Heidegger is saying is not so. I have been told it is not so (what I mean by that will I hope be made clear in the paper of my own I am presenting to you about technique and good) and I have long since known that the only way I can think what is given in Christianity is in some kind of thought near Platonism. But it would be scandalous, outrageous, to transcribe Heidegger into Platonic language (at a lower level this is the kind of foolish teaching which is done in North America – e.g. transcribing Marx into modern liberalism and then say you have refuted him). It would be scandalous because Heidegger has said absolutely clearly – that the great moment of the arising of Gestell was Socrates’ and Plato’s rationalism. That Plato is the originator of what Heidegger is criticizing above all, metaphysics – the originator of Western rationalism which is the original [?] of Being out of which Gestell arises; as he says, technique is the metaphysics of the age and his purpose is to overcome metaphys-

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ics. Therefore to transliterate what Heidegger means into a highly thought Platonism like my own would be just to try to turn you away from looking at Heidegger properly. [Discussion of student papers and instructions] ... Gestell as (composite, framing, standardization) but it must get the reciprocal provocation. He compares it to the idea in Plato. Now the idea in Plato – to put it simply is that which makes our minds intelligent and the world intelligible – knowledge. Both the world and our minds partake of idea, therefore knowledge possible. Gestell – both man and the world reciprocally provoke. The danger is that man’s essence is exhausted in obeying the provocation of Gestell in a restless and neverending fashion and becomes fixated as a labourer so that other modes of his life atrophy. The saving is that man finds through Gestell his freedom – that he has a creative role in the occurrence of unconcealing – he is a Hörender (listener) not a Höriger (bondman). It has taught him a new relation between Being and man. Whenever you hear the words ‘freedom’ or ‘creative’ you are with the modern ...

1978–9 Class The following lectures are from Notebook F, containing material from Religion 781, a 1978–9 graduate course called ‘Heidegger and Technology.’ Grant shows how Heidegger, Strauss, Nietzsche, and Plato intersect in his thought at this time.

Clearly the question of importance is of course whether Heidegger’s teaching is true. But we must be careful in facing that question too immediately for the reason that here undoubtedly one is faced with a thinker of the highest order – so that one must be hesitant of one’s own ability to judge. What I fear in much North American education is the tendency to put even the very great into neat pigeon holes and therefore safely put away. This is part of technological training. The thinker in question is placed at our disposal like standing reserve is made accessible to us.11

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Let me say why I think this is dangerous with Heidegger for two reasons. (a) First there are parts in Heidegger which are not accessible to me – I might add, as yet. For example, I am coming a bit to understand what he means by Sein (to be) – but certainly not entirely. (b) Second and more important, what he has said about modern science has been staggeringly illuminating to me and I know that the truth which he has there laid before me, I would never have understood if he had not shown me. For example his writing on Leibniz, The Principle of Reason, Der Satz vom Grund12 where he shows that principle is central to the modern scientific technological enterprise, has just made me understand the technological society as no other writing. Another example – his exposition of what Nietzsche is thinking in the eternal recurrence in the first volume of his Nietzsche – till I read that exposition I do not think I had ever thought what was thought in what Nietzsche calls his most abysmal thought. For these two reasons I do not want to pigeonhole Heidegger. Now it seems to me it is clear why in speaking of technology we turn to Heidegger. (1) As I have said because he states with crystal clearness what was being thought in the scientific-technological experiment. You have read some of this in this book of essays [Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays]. I would add again Der Satz vom Grund and I would add Part B, section I, of What is a Thing?, which is translated, probably the fifth chapter, ‘The modern mathematical science of nature.’13 (2) He puts the scientific-technological experiment of Western man within a whole scheme of history. Barrett describes that position quite well, but not adequately in his chapter 10, ‘Technology as Human Destiny.’14 You should read that chapter with care and we should discuss it – perhaps you will have questions about it after I have finished speaking. I could at this point simply talk about that account of the age of reason which according to Heidegger occupies Western Europe from Plato to Nietzsche and is now over and how that age came to be with Socrates, how modern science is both its culmination and its gravedigger. I could look at that account of history and explicate it and say where I think Barrett’s account of it is not sufficiently complete ... [Paragraphs on student paper]

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Rather I am going to say something about what the radical historicism of Heidegger [is] and to say it at a very simple level. In parenthesis let me say one reason I do this is that I think Barrett is here weak. Let me say that I think the weakest parts of his account of Heidegger are his writing about Nietzsche and about Hölderlin. Let me say that one way into Heidegger is to state that the two figures which he takes as his greatest immediate teachers are Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and one must take it directly before one that both these people, the poet and the philosopher, went mad and were what we call mad for the last half of their lives.15 As an individual who lives much of his life in madness, I do not want here to say what I mean by madness except indirectly. It is a horror to be avoided and yet one must look at it in the wonderful positive way that Plato expounds madness in Phaedrus. One fascinating side of Heidegger is that his two great German teachers went mad, he is aware of that and yet almost never writes of madness directly. I know much more about Nietzsche than Hölderlin and I think Barrett’s writing about Nietzsche is just wrong, untrue. I think the meaning of that may become clear if we look at radical historicism. Let me start by reading what Leo Strauss writes and I asked you to read on p 26 of ‘Political Philosophy’16 of what historicism says to scientific positivism (just [the] beginning): [After having reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man’s thinking orientation in the world ...]

Now let me take #(2) of these and say in a very simple way what it is saying because I think this is fundamental to Heidegger. Modern science has not been able to fulfil the promise which it held out from its beginnings up to the end of the nineteenth century. That it would be able to tell us the true character of the universe and the truth about human beings (this is determined by bioethics etc. these days). I’ve talked so often of the assertion that judgments of value are

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impossible to the scientist qua scientist and to the social scientist in particular. What this says is that while the pursuit of science has increased man’s power in ways previously undreamt, it is quite incapable of telling human beings how to use that power. This is a platitude said everywhere. But from it, is not often drawn the consequence which follows from it and which is a greater question – namely that from within science itself you can’t answer the question whether and in what sense the pursuit of science is good. It is this which is meant by the end of the age of reason. For several centuries it had been believed that science and reason were man’s highest power, but now scientific reason is saying that it cannot say this because it cannot make value judgments. Let me put it this way – one often hears these days the terrors that are arising from the flight from reason – the perversity of that – but that flight does not arise from anything but modern science itself. For if science (and/or) reason cannot answer the question of why science is good, of why able and gifted people fulfil a duty in dedicating themselves to science – then the choice of science is not rational. We are then confronted with an enormous apparatus – an ever-increasing apparatus – which cannot tell us why it is good. No longer can science conceive itself as the perfection of the human mind; it states that it is based on hypotheses which must always remain hypotheses. It is this which in terms of philosophy that Nietzsche made so crystal clear and he made it clear in the country in which the greatest wave of modern physics was occurring – Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, etc. He made clear that the [?] towards knowledge, that the reflective scientist’s ground of his own work is a groundless drive of our freedom – groundless in the sense that it is a choice finally made in front of the abyss of reasonlessness. It is his clarity as far as that is concerned which makes him the founder of existentialism. Existentialism admits the relativity of everything – including knowledge – and realizes that that relativity is deadly. As Strauss writes on p 54, politically [probably, ‘For Nature has ceased to appear as lawful and merciful. The fundamental experience of existence is therefore the experience, not of bliss, but of suffering, of emptiness, of an abyss.’]: I would say that the clarity with which he (Nietzsche) saw this was what drove him mad. To put it slightly differently, existentialism begins with the realization that at the ground of all rational knowledge we discover an abyss. All truth, all meaning is seen

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in the last analysis to have no support except man’s freedom. Man freely originates meaning, he originates his horizons. Human beings are human beings in virtue of these horizons – forming projects. To exist is to be a project. It becomes necessary then to make as fully explicit as possible the character of human existence – to bring to light the structures of human existence. This is what Heidegger does in Sein und Zeit, which is incomparably the greatest existentialist book. Heidegger calls this the analytics of Existenz – which brings to light the unchangeable character of Existenz. This is what philosophy now is. Let me put this by comparing it with Greek philosophy. Heidegger thought of the analytics of existence as the fundamental ontology. He took up again the question, What is being? What is that by virtue of which a being is said to be? But where according to the Greek philosophers to be in the highest sense means to be always, Heidegger contends that to be in the highest sense means to exist, that is, to be in the moment, in the moment in which man is; to be in the highest sense is constituted by mortality. That is why his book is called Being and Time. ... But now I must turn from Heidegger’s statement of existentialism to the brilliant part of his life after 1935 – when he has made clear why existentialism will not do. After the war in 1945 he wrote to his French friends a writing[,] ‘Letter on Humanism,’ a central letter.17 You will remember that Sartre had written a book entitled Existentialisme est le vrai humanisme,18 and this letter is a destruction of that book. Let me say that where I think I understand that letter – I do not follow all that comes out of it in Heidegger. Indeed it is at this part of what I do not follow and think that I should not follow that I am taken into the writing about Plato which we will hear about next day – but please be aware of my limitations here. Before trying to put simply the grounds on which Heidegger says that existentialism does not do – let me first try and say something which brings the whole question back to technology and politics – questions where I am much clearer than I am about some others. Let us remember that all great philosophers have an account of the political things. (The folly of Hannah Arendt about Heidegger ...) Let me start by saying that in saying that modern science is one way of looking at the world – he does not mean that it is not true. What is truth for Heidegger – it is bringing something into unconceal-

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ment – and modern science has brought immense amounts into unconcealment. Just think of modern physics, modern biology. The account of subjects bringing objects before themselves and by analyses and experiments making the world its servant has brought great truth and human beings can never turn back on that. He is never attacking technology. It is now coming into its fullest era and he never says anything that would make us doubt that that is our fate. Whether one agrees with that or not, that is what Heidegger is saying. In the light of that let us look at his politics. Let us start with the politics of Nietzsche. Marx and the English liberals had held up in the light of technology the picture of the world wide society of free and equal human beings. They believed in a world society which presupposed (and which would be established forever) the complete victory of the time was the [victory?] of the West’s ways over Eastern ways. Communism claimed to be the completion of democratic egalitarianism and modern liberal freedom. Now as you know Nietzsche’s response was to say that this society of free and equal human beings – that is, the universal and homogeneous state – would be the society of ‘last men,’ that is, it would be the society of the extreme degradation of human beings. But Nietzsche also believed (a) in the greatness of the truth of modern science, and (b) that all political reactions or conservatisms were futile. All merely backward-looking positions are doomed according to Nietzsche. He saw the 20th century as the age of great world wars leading up to the universal rule of the planet. And this rule would be exercised by a united Europe. And the enormous tasks of that rule could not be discharged by weak governments dependent upon democratic opinion. They would require the emergence of a new aristocracy – and that aristocracy would be composed of those who were completely loyal to the earth. For every concern for a ground of the world outside the world alienates man from this world. Belief in a ground of the world outside the world comes from the desire to escape from the terrifying character of reality – to cut down reality so that we can bear it. Belief in God is rooted in a desire for comfort. The new aristocracy (the supermen) will deserve to be the masters of the world-wide society (what technology has made possible) because they will have looked at the abyss of the eternal recurrence. Now it seems to me that it was in the view of that hope that Heideg-

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ger gave his support to the National Socialists. These were the nearest thing he could see to the new utterly worldly concentrated rulers who rejected both the democratic capitalism of the West and the communism of Russia, both of which first proposed the society of the last men. But by 1934–35 he was disappointed and withdrew from that hope – early. What did that disillusionment with the National Socialists teach him? Read page 31 in Introduction to Metaphysics. [Grant probably meant page 38: ‘The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline (taken in relation to the history of “being”), and to appraise it as such.’] Nietzsche’s hope of a united Europe ruled by a new aristocracy itself ruling the world is over. Washington and Moscow about the same (towards the end of his life he said he would in many ways prefer East Germany to West). But those societies Heidegger calls ‘the night of the world’ – it is the victory of the ever more completely urbanized, technologized, arguably Westernly[?] thought society over the whole planet. Now what hope is there in this world under technologized society? His answer is essentially religious but that does not mean he believes in God. He awaits the coming of a God in the night of the world. (Please see the article before god in ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten.’) The old religions will not enable human beings to master the power of technology – to make a world culture out of the world technological society which is coming. The world society will be only human if men are united by a world religion. Nobility and greatness and authenticity in the name of which he scorns the world-wide society of last men – are only possible in the name[?] of a God upon which we wait. But for this religion – which will unite East and West – the West has to recover its own deepest roots which are before its rationalism. [Student’s paper] ... I am not going to speak of my own response to that – which is different from Heidegger’s – I am going to speak of Heidegger’s. Heidegger is thoroughly aware of the limitations of rationalism which are seen in the Biblical tradition. His thought from beginning to end is penetrated with the extreme side of [the] Biblical account of the limitations of rationalism ... But to him the Bible is one form of Eastern thought and if

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one takes the Bible as completely authoritative one prevents the understanding of other forms of Eastern thought – namely the Buddhism he so wonderfully elucidates. What, according to Heidegger, is now the Western destiny is to understand that by virtue of which beings are – to be, sein, être, esse. Now here I fail, but, as I said earlier: To be, for Heidegger, is a synthesis of the rationalism of Plato – with the side of God in the Bible which most expresses the limits of rationalism.

EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW BY DAVID CAYLEY ON MARTIN HEIDEGGER This excerpt is taken from David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Toronto: Anansi 1995), chapter 4, ‘The Third Wave,’ 124–31. The excerpt was also published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 300–3. The conversations that took place in August 1985 were used in Cayley’s presentation of Grant’s ideas on CBC Radio: a three-hour series called ‘The Moving Image of Eternity,’ broadcast on Ideas beginning in January 1986.

cayley: Earlier in our interview you described Martin Heidegger as the consummate thinker of our age. Why? grant: In his first great book, Being and Time — and there you have historicism right in the title, don’t you? – Heidegger describes man as a being towards death.19 He says that human beings, insofar as they are conscious, are the beings who at every moment of their lives know they are going to die. Death is a temporal event and he is saying, I think with enormous clarity, that the centre of the modern world is choice, anxiety about death, and extreme individualism. All thought arises from the concrete, dynamic situation of the individual. This is what he says in Being and Time, and what I have called historicism. Now, I would say – and this is just my judgment – that since his experience with national socialism and his experience of the war and the smashing of Europe in the war, all of his later thought has been an attempt to escape from this historicism. When I talk about historicism I think of it as just an expression of existentialism. Existentialism is the heart of it; and when you

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think of the philosophic movement called existentialism the rest are nowhere compared to Heidegger. In a certain sense, Sartre is just a plagiarist of Heidegger. They’re all little people who’ve just borrowed bits from Heidegger. For Germany, existentialism was intellectually what national socialism was politically. I’m not saying that Heidegger was trying to free himself from guilt or anything – that’s not Heidegger at all. He had other reasons for trying to say what the limits of existentialism are in his writing since 1945. Right after the war, when he was prevented from teaching in Germany by the allied forces and the French were longing to see him, the first thing he wrote was a letter to a French friend, called ‘A Letter on Humanism.’20 There he expresses most wonderfully his dissatisfaction with existentialism as a category and says he wants to try to go on thinking. He doesn’t say that this great and wonderful book Being and Time is wrong but he says he wants to say more. I’m trying to express this in a spirit of fairness to Heidegger because he’s been so abused in the Western world. This was a very great genius – I have no doubt at all that he is the great philosopher of the modern era. For myself, for instance, nobody has spoken so wonderfully about what technology is, and this goes beyond any question of agreement or disagreement. Heidegger has seen what the modern phenomenon that we call technology is, and seen it with prodigious attention. I mean modern in the sense that there wasn’t anything like what we call technology in the ancient world. There was technique, and there were arts, but technology is essentially a modern phenomenon, and it is to me the overwhelming phenomenon. Heidegger expressed this in a marvellous way when people asked him about capitalism and communism, and he said that capitalism and communism are just predicates of the subject technology. I think that is true. They make a difference; they are predicates and they are very different predicates. One can speak very profoundly against communism and, indeed, speak very profoundly against capitalism and their different vices; but I think Heidegger has seen that the essential event of Western civilization at its end is modern technology, which is now becoming worldwide. cayley: Heidegger, in a very beautiful passage, says that we’re ‘too late for the gods and too early for being.’ ‘Being’s poem, which is man,’ he says, ‘has just begun.’ So ‘we must be claimed by being, we must be

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willing to dwell in the nameless.’21 And this reminds me of your own insistence that we must be willing to really experience the darkness of our time, and listen for what you have called ‘intimations of deprival.’ grant: I have to say that, for me, this is like talking about Mozart: I am honoured when you say I share anything with Heidegger, but here one is in the presence of genius I could never be near, and I must say that. Heidegger does say that ‘we’re too late for the gods,’ but he also said towards the end, ‘Only a god will save us.’22 Now, in the Western world, if you use an article before God, you’re not talking about the god of the Bible, who is just God. You’re talking about gods, in the sense that Apollo was a great god; and I think Apollo was a great god, and not just, as we now say, a ‘myth.’ Now, I think it is indubitably true that Heidegger is in some sense reaching for polytheism again. When he says we are too late for the gods, he does agree that we are too late; but in a way he is hoping, because he thinks that polytheism, the return of the gods, would be a wonderful thing. I can’t really speak about this without coming back to technology because it seems to me he is speaking about passing outside the position where everything is an object and our relation to it is to summon it before us to give us its reasons. What he means by ‘being here’ is very close in a certain sense to the ancient tradition, expressed not just in Christianity but in India, and in a different way in China, and the Mediterranean world. He is speaking against a view of life in which we are totally summed up in technology, in which all our relations are relations to objects which we summon before us to give us their reasons. He’s speaking against everything being controlled, and in favour of waiting upon what is. We must not stand before what is in the relation of subjects who want to control objects. We must be open to what is and wait upon it. This is not so much said in Sein und Zeit, where he just lays down existentialism with consummate, extraordinary brilliance, but in the later works where he turns to the very great German poet Hölderlin.23 The poets are those who listen to what is. This is the point of his quotations from Mozart.24 It’s all the language of participation in the later Heidegger, in his attempt to say not that existentialism is not true but that one must pass beyond it. I think he was very appalled by the existentialist movement and its silliness.

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cayley: He quotes from Hölderlin the line, ‘Where the danger is grows the saving power also.’25 He seems to feel that in our extremity a god will appear, because the nature of the extremity opens us to being. Is this a view that you share with him? grant: Yes, certainly, if one says that this polytheism is in some sense within Christianity and all I mean by within Christianity is allowing the gospels to be present and allowing philosophy to be present. So I share it with him, but I have to make the qualification that I think Heidegger has in a very deep way – though there are things that say the opposite – said no not only to the details of Western Christianity but to what seems to me always true of Christianity. And I don’t want to say yes to this. One of the interesting things about Heidegger, and something which I think is very central, is that all the previous great German philosophers had been in their origins Protestants. Many of them later forsook it, but they were in their origins Protestant. Heidegger is the first very great German philosopher who was in his origins a Catholic. He was going to be a Catholic priest, though he left it a very long time ago. His origins are in Aristotle, and he is, it seems to me, the greatest commentator on Aristotle who has ever lived. But my origins are not philosophically in Aristotle, they’re in Plato, and I want to be careful that this separation between the eternal and time, which is so central to Platonism, is maintained, and I’m not sure it is maintained in Heidegger. That’s why I’m being cautious. cayley: In what sense is this distinction not maintained in Heidegger? grant: Well, this is a queer language to use, but whatever Christianity may be, it cannot get away from the crucifixion. Whatever Christianity may be, one sees here the just man being most hideously put to death, and this means to me that in Christianity there is always not only the presence of God but also the absence of God. I would say that this is central to Christianity and that all the talk about what it is and what it isn’t has often been an argument between the presence and the absence of God. Now, my question is how much the absence of God is maintained in Heidegger, and how much the absence of God is maintained

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in polytheism. I want to be very careful because the very substance of what I have thought about anything would go if I couldn’t believe in the absence of God. And I’m not sure that this is maintained in Heidegger. This takes us to Simone Weil, who understood the absence of God with consummate genius. It may be slightly opportunistic, but what I have learned from Heidegger is the meaning of technology. Nobody has written about it comparably or in such wonderful detail. Beyond that, I haven’t really gotten that far with Heidegger, but I am inclined to think that the absence of God is not present. That’s immediately talking in a contradiction, but emphasis on the absence of God seems to me to be necessary for Christianity and for anything which attempts to be true. cayley: Your calling Heidegger a polytheist reminds me of a passage I recently ran across in a book about William Blake by Kathleen Raine, the British poet.26 In this passage she calls Blake a Christian polytheist, something I would have thought a contradiction in terms before she put the idea in front of me. What is your own view of polytheism? grant: Well, I have thought a lot about what Apollo was for the Greeks, and I certainly lack sympathy for that side of Christianity which in the early Christian days wanted to destroy the vestiges of paganism. Christianity in its early expressions often spoke against the polytheism of the ancient world, and I think that’s nonsense. But I am unwilling to speak about this because I don’t know enough. There is a popular modern Catholic theologian whom I think little of, Karl Rahner, and he had a brother, Hugo Rahner, whom I think a lot of. He wrote a book called Greek Myths and Christian Mysteries, which I think is awfully good on this, seeing the relation and bringing them together.27 Now, I would be utterly on that side, but I’m not saying that I know what a god is because none has descended to me. I do know with very close Indian friends, who are very wise people, that they do not think polytheism is simply something that exists in Indian religion as a useful thing for the simpler masses of India. They think it is something much deeper than that, but what it is I do not know. I think it would be very fascinating to know. I can understand why the early Christians demolished many of the things around them that were good, but I think it was tragic. There is a

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story of a ship – and this is well authenticated – travelling between Greece and Italy; it passed an island which was supposed to be completely uninhabited and the mariners heard a great chorus wailing, ‘Great Pan is dead.’ I never speak against Christianity as such, but one can speak against the actions of particular Christians, and I think the sheer savageness of the early Christians’ attack on paganism was unfortunate. Mind you, the pagans had been quite savage to them and there was much reason. The beginning of St Augustine’s City of God is an attack on the old Greek religion, as found in Rome. It had become very decadent by the time of Rome – I don’t mean decadent in the sense of sexually loose or anything, I just mean that it was a tired-out old religion by this stage – but I think in the change much good was lost. There is in Islam and Judaism this bare monotheism, which makes me hesitant about their accounts of polytheism. It’s very strange that Islam and Judaism should be politically at war now because I find in both of them the same thing, something I am frightened of, the overwhelming power of this very bare monotheism.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row 1977). 2 On Edmund Husserl, see 1018n32. 3 Jean-Michel Palmier, Les écrits politiques de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de l’Herne 1968). 4 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press 1959), 158. ‘All violence shatters against one thing. That is death. It is an end beyond all consummation [Vollendung], a limit beyond all limits.’ 5 Grant refers to his essay ‘“The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used”’ (280–98) 6 Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New York: Twayne 1958). 7 Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), conservative war hero, novelist, and writer, was most well known for Storm of Steel (Stahlgewittern, 1920), On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939), and The Worker: Dominion and Gestalt (Der Arbeiter, Herrschaft und Gestalt, 1932). Heidegger wrote The Question of Being in response to his friend Jünger’s Over the Line (Über die Linie, 1950).

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8 William Dunbar (c.1460–c.1520) wrote the poem ‘Lament for the Makers’ about the dying poets, with the refrain, ‘Timor mortis conturbat me’ (‘The fear of death confounds me’). 9 Henry George Thode (1910–97), chemist, directed the McMaster University nuclear reactor 1957–61, was president and vice chancellor of McMaster 1961–72, and presided over the founding of the faculty of medicine in 1966. 10 Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: Allen and Unwin 1954). 11 Grant is following Heidegger’s usage. ‘Everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by, to be on call for further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve [Bestand].’ See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question concerning Technology,’ trans. William Levitt (New York: Harper & Row 1977), 17. 12 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991). 13 Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton, Jr and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: H. Regnery Co. 1967). 14 William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press 1978). 15 On Hölderlin, see 769n14. 16 Strauss’s ‘What Is Political Philosophy?’ in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1959). 17 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in Basic Writings from Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964) (New York: Harper and Row 1977), 193–242. 18 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Eyre Methuen 1973). 19 See, for example, sections 51–3 in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press 1996), 233–46. 20 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 239–76. 21 See ‘The Thinker as Poet,’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row 1971), 1–12. 22 ‘Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,’ Der Spiegel no. 23 (1976), from an interview held on 23 September 1966. 23 See Hofstadter, trans., Poetry, Language, Thought. 24 Grant also quoted from one of Mozart’s letters (alleged to be spurious by some Mozart scholars) in ‘Faith and the Multiversity,’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986), 47–8; note 4, 132–3. See (616–17). 25 See Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 28.

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26 Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), English poet and scholar of William Blake and Platonism. Her works on Blake include William Blake, (New York: Thames and Hudson 1985, 1970), The Human Face of God: William Blake and the Book of Job (London: Thames and Hudson 1982), Blake and the New Age (London, Boston: Allen and Unwin 1979), Blake and Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1977). 27 Hugo Rahner, SJ (1900–68), German church historian, in addition to Greek Myths and Christian Mysteries (1963), is well known for Church and State in Early Christianity (1992) and Ignatius, the Theologian (1968). Karl Rahner, SJ (1904–84). See 262n24.

EXCERPTS FROM SEMINAR LECTURES ON KANT, 1973–4 AND 1977–8 Grant’s lectures to two graduate seminars on Kant in the 1970s are found respectively in Notebooks J and K. In the 1977–8 lectures he covered many of the same themes of 1973–4. We decided to publish excerpts from the two sessions with emphasis on those that cast light on Grant’s changed approach to Kant in the mid-1970s. He reports (in 1973–4) that he has come to see Kant through Socratic eyes (in part because of Nietzsche’s account of Kant as ‘the great delayer’ of modern subjectivity).1 In contrast, during his years at Dalhousie in the 1950s, he had seen Socrates through Kantian eyes. He credits Leo Strauss and Nietzsche for helping him to call modern subjectivity more radically into question by asking, ‘What is meant with religious and political liberalism in the modern world?’ His changed approach was not a rejection of Kant, whom he had formerly embraced, but rather a new, deeper understanding of the difficulty faced by an advocate of both duty and obedience inside modernity. Grant’s colleague Professor Ian Weeks helped with the 1977–8 seminar, lecturing occasionally and commenting on papers. Professor Weeks recalls that he and Grant responded to papers presented by students (from both political science and religious studies) and that occasional visitors to the seminar included Roger Scruton, Claus Pringsheim, Malcolm Muggeridge, and James Wiser. Two passages from these lectures from Notebook K, as noted below, have been published in William Christian and Sheila Grant, eds, The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1998), 223–6. We have appended a talk Grant delivered in the late 1970s on the subject of ‘Kant and the Bible.’ Arthur Davis

1973–4 Lectures ... I want to speak about how the question [of history] appears to Kant. As we have seen from the Critique he is going to reform metaphysics in the light of the thought of Hume and Rousseau. English-speaking philosophers have concentrated on what he says about Hume (woke him

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from his dogmatic slumbers), but let us see for a moment what he says about Rousseau. (We are not discussing Rousseau in this class but only Rousseau as he affects Kant. Don’t try to do too much.) Let me read two quotations [what follows is the second quotation; see square brackets below for the first which was not in the text]: I myself am an inquirer – a scholar. I sense the whole thirst for knowledge and the greedy unrest to make progress – There was a time when I believed that this all would make out the honour of mankind and I despised the vulgar who knew nothing. Rousseau straightened me out. This illusory preference disappeared. I learned to honour man, human beings, and would regard myself as much less useful than common-day labourers if I did not believe that this consideration would give a value to all others by establishing the rights of mankind.2

‘Rousseau hat mich zurecht gebracht’ – a good translation: Rousseau brought me into the right way. Now in that quotation it is very clear what he is saying. Rousseau taught him the primacy of morality and that morality is the rights of mankind – equality of all men – but with this positive goes also the negative, the primacy of contemplative theoria knocked down. This [contemplation] has a long history in Christianity. St Francis. What is the first quotation saying? [The first quotation is: ‘Newton was the first to see order and regularity combined with simplicity ... and since then comets move in geometrical paths. Rousseau was the first to discover ... the deeply hidden nature of man and the concealed law in accordance with which Providence is justified through his observations ... Since Newton and Rousseau God is justified.’ Kant, Fragmente, Philosophische Bibliothek, VIII, 329.]3 I am sure he is comparing Newton and Rousseau because of Rousseau’s second discourse. Rousseau is the Newton of the moral world. Newton showed how this marvellous order of the visible universe is intelligible without any miraculous entering – it is shown to be intelligible in terms of some simple laws. So [in the same way Rousseau’s thought is] being an explanation of the simple development of man’s social life – human perfectibility. What is being assumed by Kant here is that miraculous intervention by God redounds less to God’s glory than rational construction. God has constructed the nature of the world in such a way that it brings about everything with-

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out any miraculous intervention, and how he has done that in the visible world has been understood by Newton and how he has done that concerning morality is understood by Rousseau. Or to put it another way from this first quotation – theodicy – the question of God and evil – can now be answered in a way it could not be in the past because evil is understandable in terms of the fact that men have had to be free to make themselves in history – human freedom justifies why God has allowed evil. That is what Kant sees in Rousseau. ... We turn particularly to his writing, the second discourse, The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.4 This book is explicitly a history of the human species. A history read, as Rousseau puts it, not in books but in nature – the books of man lie, but the book of nature never lies. It is a history of man from the state of nature to civilized life. We must look at the doctrine of the state of nature therefore, and we must look at it not only as it appears in Rousseau but in its origins in Hobbes and Locke. (1) Now the first thing I would like to say about that teaching is that it takes the place of the Biblical account of man’s origin. The state of nature means that, contrary to the Bible, the beginnings of man were most imperfect. Also, for Locke and Hobbes, the transition from the state of nature to civil society is an unqualified progress, whereas in the Bible the founding of the city is ascribed to Cain.5 Perhaps one might say of Kant that one of the central things he is doing in his metaphysics is to try and take this doctrine of the state of nature – bad beginnings – and try and put it together with a doctrine of God, and secularize it. Where it is clearly a completely materialist doctrine in Hobbes and Locke and really in Rousseau, because clearly the Second Discourse is modelled on the fifth book of Lucretius – the great Epicurean poet6 – in Kant the doctrine is related to a doctrine of God. We will have to see how he tries to do this – whether successfully or not we will have to judge later. (2) I thought it might be helpful to say something about the state of nature doctrine and the old doctrine of natural law. Let me put it this way – the traditional doctrine of natural law is a strictly non-historical doctrine; this doctrine which arises from the account of the state of nature is historical. And let us see the problems that this poses for Kant.

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Let us look at the first, first. There is a passage in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Part I question 46 where he says that natural reason cannot know whether the world had a beginning – creation – or whether the world was always. But this did not affect the traditional natural-law teaching for the following reason. Whether you say the world was created or had been always – under each of these doctrines there were always addressees of the natural law (call it if you will the moral law). That is, if you take the doctrine of creation the perfect Adam was an addressee or if you take the Aristotelian doctrine there were always addressees – this [?] [?] who rebuild civilization after the great cataclysms. In every stage of the world there are always addressees of the law of nature, the moral law, the primitive monotheisms, the sophisticated dwellers of cities – they are all equally equipped to understand the principles of the moral law. That is, the natural law doctrine is not historical. Rousseau and Locke deny this. Man is not always an addressee of the law of nature, since all knowledge and even reason itself is acquired and therefore human beings at the beginning were completely unable to understand any moral principles – that took a very long time. We will see that this is a very important difficulty for Kant: How was reason and therefore the knowledge of moral principles acquired? As we have seen, the most fundamental fact for Kant [is] the moral law, but the earlier thinkers who spoke of the moral law (Plato, Aquinas, etc) were not confronted in the same way with the question, are there always addressees of the moral law? But this question exists for Kant. Could the most extreme savages possibly know the moral law and, if not, what was the meaning of their lives? And Kant’s turning to the philosophy of history is to explain that, and it is Rousseau’s account of human freedom from perfectibility which explains that. (3) This is the hardest part about Rousseau for us to understand – because it is his attack on Locke and Hobbes – or those people whom he was the first to [have] called the bourgeois (he made the term [?], let us not forget) and we have generally taken in with our mother’s milk the state of nature doctrine in a bourgeois, that is, a Hobbesian or probably Lockean form. Let me say on this point I find Leo Strauss in Natural Right and History – the chapter on Rousseau – particularly illuminating. Rousseau put it perfectly in a letter of explanation he wrote to the Archbishop of Paris about his writings.

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The development of intelligence and of vice always takes place in the same proportion, not in the individuals but in the peoples, a distinction which I have always carefully made and which none of those who have attacked me has ever been able to understand.7

Let me say about that several comments. (a) I think Rousseau is right that this has been little understood, particularly in the English-speaking world, e.g. Bertrand Russell. Indeed books such as Simpson’s, used in this department, about the doctrine of progress,8 accuse Rousseau of the most flagrant contradictions because they do not imagine that Rousseau has understood something they have not. This does not lead to contradictions in Rousseau’s thought, but [to] an antinomy. Let me explain what I mean by this difference. Kant uses the word antinomy at the height of the Critique of Pure Reason, e.g. freedom and determinism. A great political philosopher like Rousseau, or a great philosopher, [is] not trying to deny facts but to see how facts which speak in different directions can be brought and thought together without losing either. Therefore any of the contradictions people find in Rousseau arise from their failure of vision, not Rousseau’s. But Kant did see this side of Rousseau and tried to bring it into his thought. What people find hard to see in Rousseau is his relation to progress. (1) On one side it is clear that the idea of progress is central because of the thought of Rousseau, not only in spite of it but because of it. The fact [is] that the great thinkers of progress – Hegel and Marx – are unthinkable without Rousseau. Let alone [that] he is the obviously superior intellectual influence on the French Revolution. Robespierre and St Just would quote him at the Jacobin Club as the Bible,9 the book. (2) On the other hand it is clear from the first Discourse, and he never turns his back on it, that progress in the arts and sciences is not moral progress, and that moral progress is the ultimately valid standard of progress.10 Now I am not able to say how this is worked out in Rousseau, particularly in his great political writing, the Social Contract, and his great writing on education, the Émile. That would require a whole year. (Let me say in parenthesis that the whole politics of Marx is unthinkable without the Social Contract and that all the vast movement we call progressive education finds its fons et origo [source and origin] in the Émile). But what I do want to emphasize as we turn to Kant’s philosophy of

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history, his politics, his morality, and his metaphysics, [is] that he is very much aware of this antinomy in Rousseau. (a) We must think progress, (b) we must think the centrality of morality, and (c) we must think that theoretical progress, that is, progress in the arts and sciences, goes with moral retrogression, not in individuals but in the peoples. Put at its crudest level, Rousseau clearly sees, as we saw last time about the Critique of Pure Reason, [clearly] understands modern science at the basis of which is the idea that man can be the master of nature. To master nature means to understand nature – to understand nature means the projection of reason to make or construct a deterministic, [?] natural science which is the basis of human beings’ progress. Rousseau accepted it and understood that. But at another level Rousseau seems to deny the fact of progress and even to suggest apparently a return to the primitive, the historical state of nature. The pre-agricultural savages are better and happier than us and even happier than the people in the ancient cities, although we are intellectually and technically their superiors. But, says Rousseau, we cannot return to this state. Because better, for Rousseau, does not mean more moral – goodness and virtue are pulled apart; happiness and nature are pulled apart. Morality has arisen with civil society and now we have to perfect morality. That is what history is about. Now Kant is very much aware of that side of Rousseau. ... If I may be allowed an important personal word. I said the other day that I had been led behind Kant to Socrates. I meant by that not that I thought Kant false and Socrates true. In no written word[s] have I shown that. What I meant was that previously I saw Socrates through Kantian eyes particularly through this writing we are reading [Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals]. (I have been reading my lectures given on this book twenty years ago – ... Now I see differences which previously I did not. But that does not mean it is easy to choose between these differences or to know who is right. ... Equality. In the European tradition two great bases for equality before Kant (i) for the Biblical revelation we are all children of God, (ii) [for] Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we are equal because we all share a common end – self-preservation and the fear of violent death. Kant is saying a new ground for equality; all men, great rulers, great artists,

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postmen and garbage collectors are all capable of the highest good – a good will. Of which there is no higher, not only among humans, but for other beings, if there are such – God, gods, angels, etc. We will have to look back to this justification of equality when we deal with his political writings, [such as] ‘Perpetual Peace’ after Christmas. As I have said, Social Purpose for Canada made equality absolute and in a Kantian way.11 That is, equality is based on that for which man is responsible. Man is not responsible for the gifts of nature or of chance – but we are responsible for the good will – the great genius as much as the lavatory cleaner and vice versa. But this not only has a political implication but a clear theological one. Let us see the difference between Kant and the theological tradition. St Augustine says in the City of God [that] ‘man was created with a good will. The good will was an original gift.’ Why? Because otherwise man would owe more to himself than to God. And it seems to me that that is what Kant is here rejecting. Kant is isolating the domain in which man is absolutely and legitimately sovereign. This is a conscious liberation of man from his dependence. In morality there is a sphere in which he is absolutely independent and legitimately so. The good will is the only thing which depends entirely on man himself: it is in no way a gift. The will may be a gift, but the good will cannot be a gift. I can’t emphasize this point too strongly. I think this is the great issue of theology today – which side of this issue does it take. The tradition or Kant’s. Now to continue with this line. If Kant is concerned with isolating that which is entirely in our power, he must also be thinking of that where we are not independent, but also that where we are dependent. Now what does he say is the basis of dependence? Human beings have needs, desires. And the goal of those needs and desires is happiness. Man is by nature inclined to happiness. Our inclinations are the gifts of nature. We are given them. From this it is clear why the good will must be radically distinguished from happiness (that is, our inclinations). The good will is the work of man, the inclinations the gift of nature. Now this leads us on to what I think is the great issue with which Kant contends in this book – the relation of this independence to his account of morality as duty. There is a certain level that when we think of doing our duty in a direct and obvious way – we are thinking of obedience and not of independence. Kant uses this imperative mood in speaking of morality and not only the imperative mood but of categor-

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ical, not hypothetical, imperatives and it seems to me the centre of this book is how he puts independence and obedience together. Now to see the difficult as it is expressed in today’s reading, let us turn to the three propositions he makes about this proposition. Two propositions are negative: (a) morality does not proceed from inclination or civilization[?] and (b) the moral worth of an action not in the purpose to be achieved by it. The Third proposition, (c) is positive. Read page 68. [‘The third proposition, which is a consequence of the two preceding, I would express as follows: duty is the necessity of an action from respect for law.’]12 I started out by saying that what we must think about is why the good will and nothing else is the highest good. Now here is the great difficulty. ... If the moral law is that which makes my will a good will – is not then the moral law the highest good because in being a good will I subject myself to the moral law. I regard the moral law as higher than my will. The good will is the will determined by the law, conditioned by the law, dependent on the law. How then can he say that the good will is the highest good? There can only be one answer: the moral law must be the same as the good will and that he has to show in this writing. That to me is a wholly unintelligible proposition – but it is necessary for Kant to make it and therefore we must try to understand it. ... We return to the question why the moral law must be self-given? If the moral law is imposed on men by God or by nature, we would first have to know that nature or God was good before we bow to a law which they impose. Therefore autonomy must be self-given. Morality requires the emancipation of morality from God and from nature. ... What I am concerned with is that I see the political and religious basis of Western civilization lying in ruins – and I am particularly concerned with these ruins in the English-speaking world and with the question of how it is best to live and what concerns us most to think about as we live as part of that ruin. Now this very much affects how I teach Kant and particularly the words I say about him for the following reason. There is the task, and a great task it is, of just being clear as to exactly what Kant is saying, of just being aware of the enormous number of considerations he has in his mind when e.g. in the case we are

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now concerned with he lays the foundations of the metaphysics of morals. On the other hand when I comment on it I am likely to take one central point which is of particular significance for Kant’s influence in the modern world. But these may work against each other. The task of saying what Kant said may be hindered by pointing out these crucial facts. Last day, for example, I was insisting that in his exaltation of the good will, Kant is insisting – against the tradition – on the work of man, on self-legislation, autonomy of the will. While for Augustine the good will was a gift, for Kant it is the work of man, that this is implied in this simple yet very attractive proposition the good will is the only good without qualification. I was doing that for the following reason. We often think of the modern political rationalists Hobbes and Locke (those who so influenced the English-speaking world) as the supreme emancipators of Western man from the tradition that came out of the Bible and Greek philosophy. By saying that man was directed to self-preservation, they served to emancipate man from the old tradition that he was directed to natural and supernatural virtue. And Kant seems enormously attractive by leading us back to the primacy of morality – the primacy of an absolute morality. But [what] I was saying was that the emancipation of man offered in Kant was a more radical emancipation than the rationalist emancipation of Locke and Hobbes. Because where they offer an emancipation based on something quite low – self-preservation, survival, the control of nature – Kant offers an emancipation which is based on something higher – morality, and on a new interpretation of morality. In that simple and attractive proposition about the good will being the only good without qualification, the traditional interpretation of morality is done away with – morality takes on an entirely new meaning. All the modern formulations of morality as self-determination, self-realization, etc. which are all around us, stem from that. The decisive step is taken en pleine connaissance de cause that the moral law cannot be higher than the good will. ... The chief reason I had for wanting to establish a department of religion was that I had found in Canadian universities (if we can use that adjective) that there was a total split between studying the philosophic tradition of the West and studying the religious. Example – skip from

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Greek philosophy to Descartes. But what [is] the chief fact that distinguished ancient civilization from modern? Christianity had been the chief Western religion. Yet it was utterly abstracted from as if it did not exist. The result was an abstract account of the West. Equality, for example, [was] the central political idea of the modern West. But was this thinkable outside the influence of Biblical religion? ... On the other hand, people went on with theology as if it could remain unchanged by the change in the philosophic tradition. As I have said, theological liberalism unthinkable apart from Kant. Now one of the most difficult and deepest sides of Kant is his relation to Christianity. On the one hand, he is always making hidden remarks against the possibility of revelation; on the other, in this book we are reading, he uses the phrase ‘our religion.’ What does he mean by it? He did not write loosely. That is why I spoke about it. As Nietzsche said so clearly political equality is secularized Christianity – liberalism is secularized Christianity. To look at Kant outside these limits is a mistake. ... To put the matter in its crudest light we might put the ambiguity and complexity of this chapter [chapter 3 of Kant’s Groundwork, which ‘is meant to deduce morality from a higher principle’] in the form of a simple contradiction: Kant says it is necessary to deduce morality. That is said throughout the book. But he also says it is impossible to deduce morality. Now the point in saying this is not to do anything as foolish as to try and catch a genius like Kant – but rather to see why Kant is taken up by this contradiction and why he comes out in the Critique of Practical Reason to overcome it by coming out on the side of saying you can’t deduce morality from any higher principle. Let me first say one difficult point about this. In the tradition of the West before the Enlightenment, it was said that the moral law was not the highest principle for the following reason. Rational creatures (human beings) are not absolutely necessary. They have been created by an act of love (that was what creation was). The moral law is only necessary, if we suppose the creation of the rational creature. The moral law is necessary to rational creatures, but it presupposes the creation of rational creatures. Now it seems to me what Kant is saying when he asserts the necessity of the moral law as an absolute necessity – the only absolute necessity – is that the moral law takes the place of God in the traditional theology. I think I am on Kant’s side in this – but I have not

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yet thought it out sufficiently. Dostoevsky. But in this writing he has not crossed this great Rubicon. He seems to be debating with himself whether there isn’t a deduction of the moral law. ... [3 pages of commentary on students’ papers] What do we mean by man being a needy being. It means human beings lack many things, they are incomplete. Man’s neediness implies, therefore, the desire for completeness and the common term for that completeness is happiness. So, if the moral law is in any way rooted in man’s need, it would necessarily have happiness as its basis. But Kant says clearly in the Grundlegung, that need cannot be the axis of the moral law. Because need is relative to happiness and happiness is radically distinguished from duty. Morality does not originate in man’s needs but in his freedom. But when we hear that we cannot but think of Plato’s dialogue Symposium. Because there the most beautiful account of need is given. Do you remember the story about the birth of eros? We would translate eros as desire or love. Who are its parents according to Plato – poverty and wealth – two radically different parents. Poverty, otherwise you would not lack something. But on the other hand if both parents had been poor, eros wouldn’t know anything of fullness and would therefore not strive towards it. So if you apply this analysis, morality was from eros – which holds together man’s need, the neediness of the human mind with the other side which is man’s fullness. Eros as the very core of the human mind to Plato – implies both the fullness of the mind – and its need. Both. Kant cuts out the need – and bases morality on the sovereignty of the human mind – freedom. This [is] very much related to his account of technology in nature which we have to talk about today. (to student) Why are we studying Kant? It seems to me we are studying Kant because if we are to understand either religion or politics in the modern world or what has become of them in the modern world – we must understand very clearly what has made the modern tradition, and Kant is to me the greatest systematic thinker who historically ushers in the modern as he thinks it. But then the question can well be asked, why do we study Kant through these small writings of the philosophy of history (and

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particularly today in these reviews of his) rather than in the three great critiques? And my answer to that is that I think we can see certain things about Kant in looking at these writings of the philosophy of history that are very important to understand the modern world. Let me put it this way in a dialectical way. On the one side Kant moves towards the philosophy of history. That is clear. On the other hand, he is very hesitant – one cannot say more – about the philosophy of history. What is the source of his hesitation? We will see this clearly in the writing Conjectural Beginnings.13 Kant is hesitant to say that these passions he mentions, avarice, ambition and so on, are to be blessed for having brought man from a state of stupid simplicity towards the state of perfection. Hegel and Marx were less hesitant. Hegel – ‘the cunning of reason’ central. Marx also – you can see it in the way that on the one hand he praises capitalism and on the other hand criticises it. This is by no means a contradiction in Marx, it is just a Rubicon he has crossed, ‘the cunning of reason.’ But this is a Rubicon about which Kant is hesitant. And we see that Rubicon very much in the modern world – very universally apprehended. On the one hand, we are very much dominated by the progressive philosophy of history particularly, whether in Marxist or American liberal form. These actions are necessary because they lead to progress. Oppenheimer – If something is sweet you have to go ahead with it. On the other hand, there are the great pessimistic wars against that philosophy of history. Particularly in existentialism. Kant at the very beginning moves to the philosophy of history and yet is hesitant about it. ... And Kant thinks he has overcome this conflict [between Epicurus and Plato].14 And he does so by the distinction between phenomena and noumena. We can know phenomena – we can think but not know noumena. By realizing that modern science only deals with phenomena and that phenomena are not the reality, you see the limited status of naturalism, etc. By realising that we can have no knowledge of noumena, you see where Platonism fails. Do you see that Kant is here shown to be the very basis of modern positivism. Both rationalists and spiritualists are talking meaningless metaphysics – because they are both transcending or going beyond the legitimate sphere of theoretical knowledge. In the modern language of

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analytical philosophy or positivism – they are raising meaningless questions. One reason to study Kant is he is an originator of positivism and existentialism, two of the great modern movements. Now to apply this to his practical writings. [It] means theoretical knowledge cannot but be based on experience (sense-experience). Moral knowledge cannot possibly be based on experience. Now he says very clearly in his writing about Plato why moral knowledge cannot possibly be derived from experience. Read page 311.15 He is saying the fundamental Platonic thought about morality, that we cannot possibly recognize as imperfect – human beings or institutions – if we do not have some idea of the perfect. But read page 313.16 What Kant is saying is that ‘the ought’ can never be refuted by the fact that it is never fully realized. Without that, Kant says, we are bound to degrade morality. That is as simple a statement as we can find in the Critique of Pure Reason why moral knowledge must be purely a priori, in no way based on experience. But let me point out, particularly to political science students, what an enormous influence this distinction between is and ought has had. In modern social science the division between judgments of fact and judgments of value first put forward in the modern world by Weber but taken on by [the] English-speaking world comes straight from Weber’s reading of Kant but it is now used for great cynicism[?] when one says a concentration camp is cruel or certain mental health practices are cruel one is told that is just a judgment of value and non-scientific. In short, this distinction, which was made by Kant to destroy the basis of any moral cynicism, is now used in the modern world to show morality is just a matter of opinion or subjective. You have your values, I have mine, etc. Let me repeat that this passage has dominated all interpretation of Plato since that date. We are nearly all taught Plato as if he were a Kantian. Read note page 311.17 By interpreting Plato in terms of the distinction between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ and in terms of freedom – you get the idea of the ideal. In how many classes and how many books is Plato’s Republic – a Politeia – better-called since Kant, the ideal state. But in my opinion that book is concerned with the best regime. This is why I am so concerned to say over and over again that the Greeks had no word for the ideal. Why does one insist? Because the opposite of ideal is real and therefore you have the division between the ideal and the real. The real is the state of nature – how men and things are – and then you have the

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ideal, some airy fairy dreams generally for the future. The realists are those who tell you what politics is like; the idealists what it ought to be. Read page 312.18 Plato, to the best of my knowledge, never says anything like that: The idea is the real to Plato and what our task in the cave is, as best we can, to bring our regions here in the cave into line with that real. The division between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in Kant results in this division between ideal and real. And this of course ties up with what we are discussing in Kant’s philosophy of history. For Plato indeed the possibility of idea being realized here below is a great question. But in Kant’s reinterpretation of Plato in terms of freedom the degree of realization is changed. Because of freedom there can be no assignable limit to the approximation. Infinite progress towards the idea is essentially possible for Kant. This essential possibility of infinite progress cannot possibly be refuted according to Kant, by an appeal to experience, because the ground of the idea is beyond experience. The essential possibility of infinite progress is necessary to the idea of the rational society. ... We are students of politics and of religion. Now one thing that binds these activities together and distinguishes them from philosophy is that they are both more immediate, they are directly first and foremost concerned with our relation to the other, that is, to the question always central for them both: what is the good life? They are immeasurably more practical studies and this is what has always bound them together. Let me just quote you the famous remark of Avicenna – the Islamic Aristotelian19 – in his book On the Division of the Natural Sciences. He says, ‘the treatment of prophecy and the Divine Law is central in Plato’s Laws.’ Now Plato’s Laws is his most immediate book on politics. Plato’s Republic is not such a book. That is, what Avicenna is saying [is that] Plato deals most completely with what we call religion in his most immediate book on politics. This is clearly so because politics and religion are the areas of human life most taken up with what is the good life. This is an immediate question for all men whether they are capable of thinking or not. Now combine this with the fact that seems to me indubitable and which is the fact which you will all think that I return to ad nauseam, is that we now live in a world dominated by technique – as you know I do not mean by that word the sum total of techniques – and that under that

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domination the old beacons by which men thought they could steer their lives have disappeared. Indeed we can well say that these old means of steering have been replaced by cybernetics (which after all literally means the science of steering) and which, as Heidegger says with consummate clarity, is now the dominating science.20 (And let us say in parenthesis because of Indians present, this situation in the West is going to become world wide. Western civilization will have won even if those who run it turn out to be Japanese, Russians, or Chinese, etc.) Now let me say clearly about that fact that I am not speaking about whether that is good or bad, noble or base for the human race. Heidegger’s position that this is a bringing into unconcealment of new, historical potentialities for man – new potentialities of Being, I have never directly spoken against. That enormous question I leave always open. But our job as students of politics and religion is to see with clarity what new potentialities have been brought into unconcealment in the present and that is why above all I am interested in studying Kant because it seems to me he brings into unconcealment new potentialities. ... Let me dare to criticize Nietzsche and what I say is the following. Nietzsche owed more to Kant than he expressed. Nietzsche’s will to power comes from Kant’s will. ... Kant says that morality can’t be derived from happiness – but from freedom, because happiness is radically distinguished from duty. Now what is happiness but the fulfilment of need. Morality arises in Plato from eros – whose mother was need. Now Kant makes the great change. Morality does not originate in need but in freedom. It was for the sovereignty of the human mind. Nietzsche’s will to power is the opposite of Plato’s eros and he gets the idea of will from Kant’s will with its lack of need. The sovereignty of the human mind presupposes the absence of need and that absence of need is most consummately exposed to us when Kant places the origin of the moral law in freedom. That is why I think Kant a more radical emancipator of human beings than the previous modern moral philosophy. Now it may seem that Kant is turning back from the utilitarianism of Hobbes or Hume or Locke or Montesquieu. They said the end of life is comfortable selfpreservation and Kant reinstates morality at the centre. But that does

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not seem to me the case, because the end for the earlier philosophers is happiness – even if a lower view of happiness than Plato or Aristotle. The new radical emancipation of man which is present in Kant is just because it is an emancipation based on morality – but a new, utterly new, interpretation of morality. Morality based on freedom becomes self-legislation, self-determination, etc. etc. We all know this new interpretation of morality. Freedom is made, if not higher than God, at least equal. It is this which marks Kant much more than the great delayer but also the great emancipator of man. And if you apply this to politics, to external, juridical freedom which, as Kant defines it, is the privilege to lend obedience to no external laws except to those to which I could have given consent; he is a great emancipator in so far as freedom rather than nature becomes the centre of the best regime. Indeed to pass beyond this in politics to what he says about the just regime being realizable in a nation of clever devils. What he is saying there en pleine connaissance de cause is that the actualization of the best regime can be achieved by the utterly selfish passions – that is, as has been said, the best ordering of human life politically can be brought into being by human activities which are in no way moral. Here surely Kant is again a great emancipator and leads forward to the politics of the left-wing atheists and right-wing atheists which characterize our day (and of course the consummate left-wing thinker was Marx and the consummate right-wing [thinker] Nietzsche. I use atheist here in its strictly political sense). What all the various political movements which have come forth from modernity have shared in common is the belief that the highest political order can be sought for in a manner or by means that are ruthless. Although Kant had hesitations about the belief that the selfish inclinations can lead to the right order and it was these hesitations which makes him hesitant about the philosophy of history, we must not forget that he is in fact the first systematic philosopher who did search for a philosophy of history and in the sense that he finally did say what he said about justice being achievable by selfish desires under contract, that he was in this sense a great emancipator of man – in emancipating these desires. Now I started this all to say why we looked at Kant this year not by entering immediately into his greatest theoretical work the Critique of Pure Reason but with his writings on ethics, politics, history, etc. It

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seems to me they open to us this side of Kant as a great emancipator. There are some commentators on Kant (particularly Christian and Jewish ones) who look at him the following way. He is a master at understanding modern science. If we just take his understanding of modern science and try to incorporate it in the traditional metaphysical theology – then we will be able to go on thinking the traditional metaphysical theology. I think that is a great mistake and leads to a dead end and I think if one reads carefully his writings on human things one will see why that is a mistake. ... 1977–8 Lectures I want to apologize for being an unclear director of this class for two reasons: (a) I wanted to find out what you know. There are people present of very differing kinds. (b) I have been extremely agnostic for the last weeks. I find my life alternating between periods of great darkness and then some light and that the periods of darkness are bad when one is teaching. I am sure that is why Nietzsche gave up teaching very early. Let me say a word about philosophy today. Philosophy is always ambiguous to itself but now more ambiguous than ever when the tradition [is] so shattered. Doing chemistry or medicine [you can] just go ahead and do it. Bacon: ‘method makes all men equal.’ You know the right method, you do it. You don’t have to know the whole history of chemistry to do chemistry. Now it certainly is true that philosophy stands or falls finally by its ability to transcend history, including the history of philosophy. But although that is true we live at the moment in the great darkness of the following position: philosophy has come either to be trivial (that is my opinion of the analytical tradition) or else it is closed in the darkness of historicism. Therefore a person such as myself is studying the history of philosophy to try and understand what has brought philosophy to the position it is in today. Therefore I look at Kant not only in himself – but as one of the supreme influences which has brought us to where we are today. ... Let me put it this way – which is just my language. Faith is the experience that the intelligence is illuminated by love.21 When we love

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somebody or something do we not at least have a concept of an intuition which extends beyond sensibility and says something positive about the noumenon, even though it is accompanied by sensible intuition as well[?] This illumination does not give us knowledge of an object, but nor is what it gives us a mere unknown something ... Much more to be said of this but why does Kant take for granted that there is no such thing as intellectual intuition? What is the relation of understanding to the categorical imperative? How does one hear a command that is given by oneself to oneself without knowledge of that command? Is not the categorical imperative a kind of intellectual intuition? When he says that morality is the one fact of reason – is he not saying that we do have intellectual intuitions? My questions are all from the man whose name I have forgotten who said that you can’t enter Kant without noumena, you can’t stay with him – if they are granted.22 ... Kant a part of the great agnostic tradition in thought ... This seems to me agnosticism at its purest and noblest – cosmological agnosticism. My first impression – breathtakingly brilliant[ly] written. Philosophy is saving practical reason. But this stands as so wonderful in itself as the sheer consummately clear exposition of a certain kind of agnosticism. I am extremely hesitant before such genius of exposition as I am sure you are. Now it seems to me there are ... fundamental questions. The third antinomy: What does he mean here about freedom and in the affirmation for freedom in the interests of morals and religion?23 I have spoken before that one of the deep abysses Kant’s thought takes us into, is his attempt to reject the whole idiom of first causality with the reintroduction of the idea at the level of ourselves as first causes, as moral beings. Kant’s doctrine of the primacy of practical reason is to insist that freedom is a sort of first causality to which one can assign significance in terms of the moral life. Now in what sense is such freedom as first cause – the assertion of the thesis of the third antinomy – in the interests of religion? Hesitations in speaking of religion. What it is. I started a department of religion here. My best conversations at the university are with students of the Vedanta. Yet I do not like to speak of religion in general – because it seems to me impertinent. I can only speak within a particular religion – Christianity – and that very hesitatingly. Religion means to me above all adoration. The height of the Christian religion is certainly the lives of the saints

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and what is a saint? Somebody who gives themself away. Charity – the divine charity, or love, what word you wish – is giving oneself away. And surely that giving oneself away is the very opposite of freedom as a first cause. Free will as a first cause. What does he mean by saying that the thesis of the third antinomy is in the interest of religion? Does he mean it nominally? More difficult: in what sense is the thesis of the third antinomy in the interests of morality. This is getting one right down to what he means by freedom. Central to the Kantian teaching is ‘ought implies can’ – this is a teaching which implies a strong view of freedom. Since Kant’s day many philosophers have followed him in believing that his account of the freedom of the will [is] necessary to morality. Indeed this is a possible interpretation of Kant – what I will call the existentialist anti-metaphysical account of Kant – the ‘we are thrown into freedom’ account of morality. This is anti-metaphysical in the sense that it says that the universe of the speculative metaphysician is a closed universe in the sense that it seeks to embrace all time and all existence within itself and therefore never takes seriously the actuality of human freedom. The universe of moral action must be an open one – a creative one, the argument goes. Moral freedom is what we do when we come to the end of the evidence – it is beyond the theoretically all-embracing. The anti-rationalist account of morality. This is what I have called the existentialist account of Kant and of course existentialism is unthinkable, as all later philosophy, outside Kant’s formulations. Morality requires that authoritative creative freedom. Now I do not think that this is a complete account of Kant because of the categorical imperative. But nonetheless philosophers can be understood partially in terms of where they lead – and one of the places to which Kant has led is that existentialism. He holds together the two propositions that it is at the level of the practical life that we face the ultimate – not on the theoretical or artistic life – and that the centre of our practical life must be seen as this open freedom. (Let me say in parenthesis that it was the first of these propositions that made Kant so attractive to generations of Christians and I think I may add Jews). Note: matter is our infallible judge.24 But do the two propositions go together? If one asserts the primacy of the moral life – that it is in that moral life above all that we have to do with the

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ultimate – does one also have to assert freedom as a first cause. In what sense is he correct in saying that the interest of practical reason is in the thesis that asserts freedom? And if he does what does he mean by freedom? [First excerpt from The George Grant Reader] Thinkers such as Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume seem to be emancipating human beings from the past because they turn from the eternal to something immediate and ordinary – self-preservation, survival, control of nature, etc. and this seemed an enormous emancipation from the old tradition. But here in Kant the emancipation is much more fundamental than these earlier emancipations because it is not based on something ordinary like self-preservation – but an emancipation which deals with the highest things in human beings – morality, freedom, etc. This is what sometimes makes Kant difficult to understand – because people see that Kant is showing the absoluteness of morality as central – they do not see what a radical emancipator he is. That the very promises of the absolute morality are the very basis of the emancipation – the emancipation which is far more radical than the emancipation of Bacon, Locke, etc. I remember after the war being intoxicated by Kant’s absolute morality. My position – brought up in liberal pragmatism – could not go with the war – was longing to understand the absolute – the unconditional – and therefore was intoxicated by Kant’s account of morality. It freed one from all the vulgar liberal pragmatism and thus made it very difficult to see what a radical emancipation of man is being stated. What makes this so difficult to see is above all that at a certain level Kant seems to be returning to the ancients and to Christianity. Where with Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, etc. there is a clear break with the ancients and with Christianity – they are saying they are wrong – [while] Kant seems to be returning to the ancients – saying what is fundamentally true in Plato which must never be forgotten – appealing to the ideal which is in the Gospels, God and immortality – that is, he seems to be taking up all that was great in the European past and including it in the European future – and this in itself makes it difficult to see as more radical than the earlier accounts of the modern which clearly are a break with the past – is this not a return to something

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which is less a break with the past than his modern predecessors? Yet in the sense of the good will being the only good without qualification, he is much more emancipating the race than his predecessors. ... [Second excerpt from the Reader] But I want to say now how much I see Kant as a supreme moment in defining what is in terms of the liberation to the new freedom which is the essential fact about modernity, and that this holds together what Kant is saying about objective knowledge with what he says about the autonomy of the will. Let me say categorically that to see the modern as essentially this liberation for new freedom is not to affirm or to deny at first whether this liberation has been for good or ill. That is a later question. If I may be allowed to speak as a person – it is necessary to say this because the people who write about my writings often say that my writing is essentially taken up with showing that this liberation for the new freedom has been a matter of ill. Let me say again categorically that this is not the first purpose of what I write or speak. The first purpose is to see what this liberation for this new freedom is. Only when it is entirely before one could one speak about whether its unfolding, its coming-to-be, has been for good or ill. Obviously in saying that this year in studying Kant I have come better to recognize what that unfolding is, is a good reason not easily to speak about the question whether that unfolding is for good or ill. To be immediate, this says something about the relation between philosophy and life as we have to live it. For example, in our practical lives we are faced now in every lived moment with that unfolding of that liberation to a new freedom – a very good example of that liberation is recombinant DNA research. In so far as such research is our business (as, e.g., it is, once one is on the Board of McMaster) then one can practically say no to the unfolding of that new liberation. But to do that is a different thing – though part of the same life – [than] thinking philosophically whether that liberation unfolding is for good or ill. In short, we can neither say that philosophy and life are separated – nor can we affirm the unity of thought and practice. Particularly at the level of philosophy in a seminar one must assert that one’s prime duty is to try to think what is being thought in the

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unfolding of this liberation destined towards the new freedom. Certainly in the study of Kant one’s prime duty is to understand how he brought into the light of day what is being thought in this liberation and at the same time how he bound this new freedom. It is not possible here to give a history of how the sovereignty of human beings as subjects came to be in modern times. Everybody thinks first of Descartes – and the cogito ergo sum – and this as the basis of science. But then one thinks of Baconian science – as putting nature to the question and a similar subjectivity is in that definition. You know the American text book history of modern philosophy. Continental rationalism, English empiricism – put together by Kant at the level of epistemology etc. etc. But what lies behind this – what was the primal affirmation from which both Descartes and Bacon came? But to turn from that depth: Suffice it to say here, the subject (human beings as subject) became that before which must be heard everything which is and through which everything which is, is justified for what it is. The human being (call it if you will with generic sense, man) based on his own subjectivity becomes the foundation and the measure of all which is. We see this so beautifully described in the passage which we may call the Copernican Revolution in the Critique of Pure Reason, in which an approach to the world if we want to know it, is man interrogating the world. The world is represented to us as an object which we as subjects interrogate and over which we have jurisdiction. One must see that this is a new way of representing the world to us and we would see this well if we were to compare it with the older receptive views of perception in the ancient tradition. Modern science and modern morality come out of this new view of the sovereignty of man as subject. As I have said the unfolding of this man as subject – the world as object – is this liberation of man for a new liberty. As I have also said the fundamental basis of this human event from which pours forth this new liberty is not clear to me – as I have tried to say clearly in what I write about Kant in English-speaking Justice. But what can be seen with clarity is that the account of reason so brilliantly expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason which holds the world before itself, representing it to itself as object which is the basis of truth – positive truth is the basis of the new liberty which is going to exercise its domination over the whole earth. Man establishes himself as sovereign over the totality of all that is. What Kant says on the Copernican

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Revolution about reason and what he says about the autonomy of the will in the Grundlegung are at one as they are both man taking his fate into his own hands. Henceforth man sets out from himself and for himself. It could be said at a certain level that in Kant ‘to know’ and ‘to will’ are held apart. We are commanded to will the categorical imperative in the midst of a world we do not know for what it is in itself and which we can only know as appearance – that is, we can only know the relation between appearances so that justice is something commanded us and quite other to what we know with certainty – yet on the other hand it must be said that at a deeper level to will and to know are not held apart – because in the very archetype of theory for Kant – modern science – what is the Copernican Revolution but the summonsing of objects before us to give us their reasons and that summonsing makes the very act of knowing a kind of willing? What is modern science but an act of the subject’s willing? Now of course this understanding of the new liberty in the sense of an autonomous legislation on the part of humanity as the basis of truth first had to assert itself as liberation from the certitude of Western Christianity and because it asserts itself first against Christianity, it remains in its expression in relation to Christianity – a relation which is determined by itself as rejection of Christianity. That is why when we look back at this point of history we can look at it – look at Western history as the secularization of Christianity. But, and this is an enormous but, in looking this way, we must remember that when people talk of modernization as the transfer into the world of what is Christian, it must be remembered that ‘the world’ into which Christianity is taken is something absolutely other than Christian. It is only in the case of such a world that secularization could install itself and develop itself. And of course at the core of any account of truth is the truth about justice and the liberation to the new freedom can only finally justify itself in terms of a new view of justice. [Grant’s summary of his new understanding of Kant] Now it seems to me that this is what is so fascinating about Kant. As much as anybody he lays before us the new essence of truth in which humanity as subject interrogates all that is, and in which humanity

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installs itself as sovereign over all that is and in which humanity understands itself as autonomous legislator to master all that is and to enact what the world will be like – but then at the height of that new system of representation – namely in the question of justice, he does not cross the Rubicon to the new account of justice which is required of the new account of truth proceeding from the new account of reason. He offers the categorical imperative, that morality is the one fact of reason, he offers a fundamental equality of persons – that is, an account of justice which comes out of the older account of truth which was based not on the first principle of subjectivity – but on the eternal order. Now let me say that in saying what I have said I do not mean in any sense to imply that I have caught Kant out in some kind of contradiction. I think it is the very greatness of Kant that he turns back at the point of his doctrine of justice from the consequences of the modern essence of truth. And indeed since his day that turning back has been a central fact of the intellectual and practical life of the West. I tried to say in the piece I wrote about English-speaking justice why Kant was for the Western world the very incarnation of that turning back. When Nietzsche calls Kant the great delayer, one can well reply does one not want to delay the realization of the account of justice in Nietzsche? (Not indeed that the account of justice in Nietzsche is the perfect statement of what is implied in the modern account of the essence of truth – but it moves in that direction.) Why one is filled with foreboding concerning the doctrine of justice given in the modern account of the essence of truth is of course another question which one must leave to another time.

Appendix: ‘Kant and the Bible’ This short talk, probably delivered in the late 1970s, is in Notebook b.

This afternoon [we are] going to talk about Rousseau and then Friday about Kant and Hegel on the study of religion and the idea of the discovery of history. I might prefer to call it the invention of history. I think this is central, if one is to understand the study of religion, to know through what eyes one studies it (Eddington and the net)25 and certainly our eyes greatly come from the [?]. Also right to start with Rous-

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seau whose work was carried out by Kant and Hegel and indeed Marx and Weber. I do not want to just give you a preview[?] of that. I want to speak about the following: Kant and the Bible. Now it is perfectly clear I think what Kant thought of the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels. Sometimes helpful, sometimes false moral tales from the folk past – the moral value of which had to be judged by reason as it had come to be defined in the modern sciences of the human and non-human things and particularly as that reason had been made clear in his three Critiques – particularly that most influential of all modern books, the Critique of Pure Reason. Think of the title: the Enlightenment creator of the critique. Let me say that I am not ridiculing Kant in saying this. I think the Critique of Pure Reason is the greatest work of modern philosophy, and the book that has best defined modern reason. ... Now having said this about Kant and the Bible, I want to discuss this interesting fact. Why was it that Kant, having declared better than anyone else what modern reason is, put the Bible – the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels – under its control? Why was it that nearly all the Western Biblical religions, first Protestantism, later Judaism, and now Catholicism, took Kantianism as true and expressed their religion as essentially Kantianism? What is liberal Protestantism, liberal Judaism, liberal Catholicism? Essentially Kantianism with Biblical clothes. That is an extraordinary fact. Kantianism survives more than its emendation by Hegel. Herman Cohen; Ernst Cassirer; English theologians, essentially Kantian. (Parenthesis about Plato – all the scholarship through which we receive Plato is Plato in Kantian dress. Good reason to study Kant. Indian religion – Radakrishnan).26 Let me make perfectly clear how extraordinary that fact is. By definition Kant denied the possibility of revelation ... It is only necessary to go to the centre of Kant’s teaching to see that he denies the possibility of revelation. Primacy of practical reason. Primacy of morality. What does he say [about] morality? Morality a morality of freedom. The centre of our morality is our autonomy – word central, maker of our own laws. Now revelation if told to us by God – would make us heteronomous. But that is to deny all morality. Therefore there can’t be revelation. An ethics of freedom. Kant in the use of morality and freedom above revelation – a more profound denial even than Epicurus’[?]. Let me say something about that. In the past, Christianity, Judaism,

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and Islam had taken their ethics from Plato and Aristotle (difference not important here). Ethics of need, as against ethics of freedom – no autonomy. Plato’s eros in Symposium, fullness and need. The exact opposite of Plato’s eros is Nietzsche’s will to power and that will to power in Nietzsche was from Kant’s sovereignty of the human mind expressed in our autonomy. That is, at the very heart of Kant there is the denial of the possibility of revelation. Yet it was through Kant’s eyes above all that (a) the leaders of Biblical religion in the West saw their religion and (b) it was through Kant’s eyes above all that most Biblical secularizing was done. Extraordinary fact. To me that fact [demands the question] what did the modern world learn from Kant?: (a) the most comprehensive account of modern reason – including the clearest account of objective science (object – Gegenstand – the project of reason), (b) an absolute morality, the categorical imperative, (c) God as a postulate of morality, (d) liberal, democratic politics; contractual politics – egalitarian politics; the [?] liberal in politics and modern liberalism one must surely take as better than its political alternatives. But they got that at the price of saying no to revelation. Wanting it both ways. Now clearly throughout both Christian and Jewish history – and indeed of Islam too – there has been the need of relating revelation and philosophy. Athens and Jerusalem. How does one put them together[?] Plato and Aristotle put together with the Bible in many forms. But here in Kant as in many ways the height of modern philosophy – you have a philosophy which says revelation impossible because of human freedom, human autonomy. What did this mean for (a) the practice of the Biblical religions in Christianity and Judaism in the West, (b) what did it mean for Biblical scholarship? Both the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel claimed in themselves to be the basis of revelation. They also clearly needed philosophy for their interpretation. Yet the greatest modern philosophy denied that claim. The result was modern Biblical scholarship. One got the fundamentalist account e.g. the Barthian form. Just remove philosophy. A silly account. Now to end. If you want to discuss the details of Kant’s thought – I am delighted – because if there is one modern philosopher I have studied it is Kant. And therefore I am for once speaking about a subject in which I am qualified. For example – the ought and is, fact-value, nature,

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etc. comes from Kant. What nobody should forget is how much our modern ways, our modern ‘metas’ – these metaphors – were most clearly defined for us by Kant. Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage 1968), #101. ‘Kant: inferior in his psychology and knowledge of human nature; way off when it comes to great historical values (French Revolution); a moral fanatic à la Rousseau; a subterranean Christianity in his values; a dogmatist through and through, but ponderously sick of this inclination, to such an extent that he wished to tyrannize it, but also weary right away of skepticism; not yet touched by the slightest breath of cosmopolitan taste and the beauty of antiquity – a delayer and mediator, nothing original, just as Leibniz mediated and built a bridge between mechanism and spiritualism, as Goethe did between the taste of the eighteenth century and that of the ‘historical sense’ (which is essentially a sense for the exotic), as German music did between French and Italian music, as Charlemagne did between imperium Romanum and nationalism – delayers par excellence.’ 2 Immanuel Kant, Fragmente, Philosophische Bibliothek VIII, 322. See also Paul A. Schilpp, Kant’s Pre-Critical Ethics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1938), 47–8. 3 See H.J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1948), 162. 4 Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin 1984). 5 Genesis 4:17. 6 On Lucretius, see 267n73. 7 For Rousseau’s letter to the Archbishop of Paris see Leo Strauss, ‘The Crisis of Modern Natural Right,’ Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953), 252–93. 8 Unidentified. 9 Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758–94) and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (1767–94), French revolutionaries, were leading Jacobins and key members of the Committee of Public Safety during the period of the ‘terror’ (1793–4). 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, First Discourse (1750), ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1992).

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11 George Grant, ‘An Ethic of Community,’ Collected Works, Vol. 3, 20–48. 12 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press 1997), 13. 13 Immanuel Kant, ‘Conjectural Beginnings of Human History,’ in Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant on History (New York: Bobbs Merrill 1963), 53–68. 14 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan Education 1929), 427 n. a: ‘... he [Epicurus] showed in this regard a more genuine philosophical spirit than any other of the philosophers of antiquity. That, in explaining the appearances, we must proceed as if the field of our enquiry were not circumscribed by any limit or beginning of the world ...’ 15 Ibid., 311: ‘... if anyone is held up as a pattern of virtue, the true original with which we compare the alleged pattern and by which alone we judge of its value is to be found only in our minds.’ 16 Ibid., 313: ‘... Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done, or to impose on them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed.’ 17 Ibid., 311 n. a: ‘He [Plato] also, indeed, extended his concept [of the ideas] so as to cover speculative knowledge, provided only that latter was pure and given completely a priori. He even extended it to mathematics, although the object of that science is to be found nowhere except in possible experience. In this I cannot follow him, any more than in his mystical deduction of these ideas, or in the extravagances whereby he, so to speak, hypostatised them – although, as must be allowed, the exalted language, which he employed in this sphere, is quite capable of a milder interpretation that accords with the nature of things.’ 18 Ibid., 312: ‘... it is therefore quite rational to maintain, as Plato does, that in a perfect state no punishments whatsoever would be required.’ 19 Ibn Sina (latinized as Avicenna) (980–1037), Islamic philosopher and physician, wrote The Divisions of the Intellectual Sciences, in addition to works on medicine. 20 See Technology and Justice, 678n38. 21 See 609. 22 See Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume Über Den Glauben, oder Idealismus and Realismus (New York: Garland 1983), 222–4. 23 The third antinomy is the conflict of the transcendental idea of freedom as causality and the laws of nature. See Critique of Pure Reason, 409–15. The third antinomy (or paradox) is one of four ‘antinomies of pure reason’ that exemplify Kant’s ‘sceptical method’ of provoking a conflict of assertions in order to reach clarity and certainty about the contradictions and misunderstandings generated by any attempt to apply the principle of reasoning

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beyond the limits of experience, that is, when theorizing about the world as a whole. The third antinomy juxtaposes what can be called metaphysical freedom to scientific determinism. The thesis is: ‘Causality in accordance with laws of nature is not the only causality from which the appearances of the world can one and all be derived. To explain these appearances it is necessary to assume that there is also another causality, that of freedom.’ Its antithesis is: ‘There is no freedom; everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature.’ The problem is that both thesis and antithesis seem equally reasonable. 24 Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees (London, New York: Oxford University Press 1970) 364. 25 Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944): ‘What my net can’t catch isn’t fish.’ English astrophycist, Plumian professor of astronomy, Cambridge University, Eddington was a leading English-speaking interpreter and popularizer of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. 26 Sarvepalli Radakrishnan (1888–1975), Indian philosopher and statesman, taught at Oxford as well as in India. He sought the unity of all religions and philosophies and more specifically Indian Vedantic philosophy and British Idealism.

EXCERPT ON LEO STRAUSS AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FROM A LECTURE ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE TRADITION This lecture in Notebook M was delivered in 1972–3 to a graduate course on the relation of technology and the Western religious and philosophical tradition. It shows how Grant at a particular moment in his thought was deeply influenced by Strauss but it should be remembered that Grant did not consider himself to be ‘a Straussian’ because of important differences with Strauss about religion and therefore also about the relation of reason and revelation in the tradition. Arthur Davis

... Now to turn to what we are going to discuss for several weeks, political philosophy. Let me speak about what it is and its relation to natural science and to philosophy in general. Let me say in parenthesis that what I am going to say about political philosophy obviously follows what is said by Leo Strauss. Late in life in my forties certain difficulties in my own thought as a philosopher became very pressing for me. These difficulties were that in general philosophy I believed the moderns – particularly Kant – to be true, but when I faced them clearly with political [questions] (or moral questions – the same) I found this same teaching unacceptable. How was I to face this contradiction? I accepted Kant’s account of metaphysics rather than Plato’s or Aristotle’s and yet could not accept his account of the practical. For example, Kant defines marriage as ‘a life-long contract for the mutual use of the genitals.’1 I could not accept that. Or again I accepted Hegel’s metaphysics and yet found in him the central assertion that the political good was to be achieved by bad means. I could not accept that – I had seen its effect too clearly in Hegel’s great epigones, the Marxists. How was I to reconcile this obvious contradiction in my thought? It was my great good fortune to find that these very difficulties were being discussed with consummate clarity by Strauss and through that discussion I have been able to bring political philosophy into my thought. Let me say that in describing political philosophy in Strauss’ language, I feel secure because over the last decade I have been able to think for myself what he has thought. Let me also say that clearly in

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some points there must be differences between Strauss and myself – apprehended I hope in humility by myself. He is a Jew – albeit as he says an unorthodox one – I am a Christian and nobody has written more brilliantly than Strauss about the relation of philosophy to revelation. One of his most illuminating remarks is the difference in the relation between revelation and philosophy as it is found in Judaism and Islam on the one hand and Christianity on the other. In Judaism and Islam revelation comes as law – in Christianity it comes in a particular being and Strauss has pointed out that that difference in revelation clearly leads to a difference in the formulation of the relation of philosophy to revelation.2 Be that as it may, it is clear that my account of political philosophy comes from Strauss. Now Strauss has written much but I would recommend as basic, two writings by him. In a book of his called What Is Political Philosophy? the first essay is of the same words. It is a careful extension of what I have given you in ‘The Three Waves of Modernity.’ A public book called Natural Right and History. My own commentary ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’ which you will find in a book of mine Technology and Empire ...3 Philosophy is a Western activity which arises in Greece. Political philosophy as part of philosophy arises with Socrates. Previously to Socrates philosophy does not seem much concerned with the political things. But in Socrates there is a turn to the political things, an immense interest in the political things. This seems to come from a great turn about in Socrates’ own life – this turn in his own life is described in Plato’s Phaedo. In prison because of censures, mechanical or moral. This turn about can be seen from Aristophanes’ account of Socrates in the Clouds. There Socrates is described as a man in a think-tank thinking only about what we would now call physical science – clouds, etc. Aristophanes attacks Socrates for not being interested in justice – outside the city. Then the turn around towards the human things; he seeks knowledge of human ends – knowledge of what makes human life whole or complete – that is, human happiness, that is, knowledge of the human soul, psyche. And the human soul is seen as the only part of the whole which is open to the whole and therefore more like the whole than anything else. Therefore the whole is interpreted in terms of the highest we know in it. Nature is interpreted in terms of soul – the virtues – justice – moderation, courage, and wisdom are seen as natural.

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Socrates’ turning around of the human things to the good was for the West one of the great events in terms of which man’s view of himself and his place in the whole was defined for a millennium. Christianity and Judaism may have modified that account – but basically the greatest Christian and Jewish thinkers interpreted revelation as at one with that account. But one must see that that account of man in Greek political philosophy and its coming to be in Socrates has been seen in the modern West as a disaster. Both Marxists and positivists have said clearly that by turning to the question of man and man’s ends – by judging the whole in terms of man and human ends – it turned men away from the objective science of nature and the control of nature – it led to an anthropomorphized view of nature in a way that prevented modern science and the modern control of nature from arising. The turn of Socrates is seen therefore as a disaster for Western man. One of the central historical doctrines of all modern thought is that this was a disaster – and whatever else may be different in the great modern philosophical systems – positivism, existentialism, Marxism – they are all agreed that Plato is a great obscurantist. Now what is Strauss saying about modern political philosophy and why is he interested in looking at this turn of Socrates in a different way from other modern thinkers? It is clear from the history of the modern West that modern natural science and modern moral science both came to be as criticisms of Greek natural science and moral science. And the history of the modern West must be seen in terms of these criticisms. We have seen how the Newtonian science of nature required the withering of the Greek doctrine of substance. But equally it required the withering of the Greek moral and political philosophy. And the two criticisms go together. We can’t have a moral science of one kind and a science of the non-human of another. Clearly the question of the nature of man points to the question of the nature of the whole and the nature of the whole includes what the sciences of the non-human tell us of their part of the whole. A thinker who wants to think about the whole has to think both about the nonhuman world which in modern science is a world understood outside the idea of purpose and at the same time about the human world which is inevitably concerned with the question of purposes and ends. Let me illustrate this in terms of the interpretation of Kant. It does not seem to me an exaggeration to say that in understanding modern thought there

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is no thinker who brings together in a greater synthesis the modern, than Kant – a stupendously comprehensive thinker. Now in understanding and interpreting Kant the interpreters have concentrated on the great tribute he paid to the Scottish thinker Hume. Hume taught him about the effect of modern science on metaphysics. He taught him, Kant says, the consequences of the Newtonian discoveries on philosophy. And these interpreters of Kant who concentrate on this side of Kant see his work as essentially work in the philosophy of science leading to positivism. But they often forget that Kant paid an even greater expression of debt to Rousseau – because where Newton taught him [?] about the science of non-human things, Rousseau taught him about the human things, and it is Kant’s purpose as a philosopher to put together, to synthesize, what the modern is saying about the non-human world of purposeless mass and force with what we know of the human world of purposes and ends. And he puts these two worlds together in his great account of the whole. Now Strauss says that there are three great waves in which the modern account of the human things comes to be: the first starts in a hidden way with Machiavelli (and if you are interested in that you can read his book called Thoughts on Machiavelli which is my favourite of all his books)4 and which comes out into the open world with the thought of Hobbes and Locke. It establishes itself particularly in the Englishspeaking world and as you will all know it is Locke’s thought about the nature of the human things which above all is incarnated in the American revolution. (Let me say in parentheses to those of you who are Americans and probably those of you who are Americans and Catholics – one of the strangest parts of the Cold War era, theoretically, was when Father Courtney Murray wrote that the American Declaration of Independence was easily reconciled with the thought of Aquinas.5 The difficulty was that Aquinas’ political philosophy was based on Aristotle in which men by nature were directed to virtue – while in Locke’s thought men are directed by nature to comfortable self-preservation and the virtues are not ends worth pursuing for their own purposes, but as means to that. Justice is not natural, but conventional – a means of achieving comfortable self-preservation). Be that as it may, I was unable to persuade any of you to write a paper on Hobbes or Locke – so we pass immediately to the second wave of modernity which Strauss takes as originating in Rousseau and

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the discovery of history – and which passes with the West through the great tradition of German idealism in Kant and Hegel and into the whole world through the greatest of their epigones, Marx. This is what we must discuss today, how in the thought of Rousseau the idea of history enters the West, so that in the West the central distinction becomes that between nature and history rather than the classical distinction between nature and convention – and in which man is seen as an historical being making his own history and in which, therefore, the virtues, and particularly justice, are not natural but historical – things that are coming to be in history. Before proceeding to that discussion, I must just mention the third wave of modernity as political philosophy ... and which Strauss identifies with Nietzsche and of course his greatest epigone Heidegger. Let me also say just an obvious word about the relation in Strauss’ thought of this third wave of modernity and the return to look at Socrates. This is something I have never said or written before and it becomes increasingly clear to me. Let me put two points together: (1) Nietzsche’s greatest exoteric book is called Beyond Good and Evil, Übel und Böse, Beyond Moral Good and Evil. And it is clear that this lies at the heart of this third wave of modern political philosophy. Nietzsche’s great enemy was Rousseau and what Nietzsche is saying is that the attempt of Rousseau and his epigones to secularize Christianity – to make morality historical is just as much unthinkable as Christianity or classical morality. And Heidegger makes this equally clear – the impossibility of ethics. Now if you put this fact together with another fact, which is that (2) in the great modern thinkers who think in terms of Nietzsche – that is, above all, Heidegger – there is an increasing assertion of the impossibility of politics – this is particularly clear in Heidegger’s writing since 1933 – that is, since he learnt the lesson of National Socialism. And it is also clear in the other great philosophers of this era – e.g. Whitehead. Modern thought at its height is led to be able to say nothing about how it is best for man to be together – it is led to have to be able to be silent before the most important question for man – what is the best life for man? – in what does human happiness consist? – in a more than private, in a public way. Modern theory has been at one in discarding the Socratic turn towards the human things and the interpretation of the whole in the

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light of the human soul and its needs, but this has led it to be silent about something which is of the greatest importance for man – what is the political good? – what is the best form of political organization for man? Therefore perhaps there is something wrong in the long arguments of modern political philosophy against ancient political philosophy. Do we not now have a need to look again at classical political philosophy and see if there are not truths known that have been lost in the coming to be of modern thought. Read Strauss, pp. 39–40.6 ...

Notes 1 See ‘The Natural Basis of Marriage,’ in Immanuel Kant, The Science of Right (trans. W. Hastie): ‘Marriage is the union of two persons of different sex for life-long reciprocal possession of their sexual faculties.’ 2 See Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press 1952), 9: ‘Revelation as understood by Jews and Muslims had the character of Law (torah, shari’a) rather than that of Faith.’ See also 18–19: ‘For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law (talmud or fiqh). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense.’ 3 See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1953) and What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press 1959). Grant refers to Strauss’s essay ‘The Three Waves of Modernity,’ which he circulated in his graduate classes before it was published. The essay can now be found in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1989), 81–98. Grant’s essay ‘Tyranny and Wisdom’ is in Technology and Empire, Collected Works, Vol. 3, 532–57. 4 Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press 1958). 5 John Courtney Murray, SJ (1904–67), American Roman Catholic theologian whose liberal views angered Church conservatives, argued in We Hold These Truths (1961), according to Grant, that the American system of democratic and republican government finds its basic moral roots in the doctrine of natural law, as expounded by St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), that there are immutable standards of personal and public morality to be derived from the proper understanding of man’s essential nature. 5 Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy?

EXCERPTS FROM LECTURE ON ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS These two excerpts from lectures on Aristotle in Notebook a probably date from a graduate class in 1970.

These comments on Politics so cursory, a first reading, because it is a consummate book. Difficulty of taking another period seriously – seems far away. ‘The historical sense,’ the great modern thing. One can patronize with the historical sense. One can take Plato and Aristotle as the heights for the Greeks but simply antiquarian – but if one takes them as possible alternatives to what thinkers such as Hegel and Locke and Nietzsche thought – then they become difficult and difficult to enucleate. And this must be seen as a cursory first reading. As I look at the great tradition in the West there are two questions which I have long since isolated as of preponderant importance for me. (a) what is the relation between the writings of Plato and Christianity? (b) what is true and what false in Aristotle’s criticism of Plato? And here in Book II [Politics] we come upon (b) in its political form. These two questions I have pondered on for several years – but they are questions of such profundity that a person of my abilities can only scratch the surface – and I am very hesitant of saying anything. And in saying that I think what I have to say is much deeper than most contemporary thinkers such as Sabine, etc.1 I would recommend very highly ... the last chapter of Leo Strauss on Hobbes2 – a marvellously subtle and careful piece of writing which will take you near the centre, politically – if not at the deeper questions. ... I want to make a comment on one part of what Aristotle says about the communism of the Republic and I think this is a comment which is hard for people of our era to get. If we use modern language the body and the mind in a way we look at it – the mind is the most private part of us – while the body is the public part. Marx after all built a communist state – a state where the private is played down at the expense of the public – communism – on the basis of the body being the real – reality – dialectical materialism. Now I would like to point out that the issue in Book II is seen within a different way of thinking. What makes private property necessary to

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Aristotle is the body and the needs of the body. The body is the private – the mind, or in their language the soul is the public. Let me say Simone Weil – ‘The Person and the Sacred’ in Selected Essays is what made me see this most clearly.3 The mind – of the faculty for the universal is the public part of us – the part which is capable of unity – the body, the private. We are apt to think of the individual in existentialist critiques as what is unique and what is unique is valuable. But what is valuable and this is asserted by both Plato and Aristotle is the universal and the mind is that. As Simone Weil says 2 u 2 = 4 when we seek the truth, we are universal – 2 u 2 = 5 – mistake is personal, truth is universal. This difference is the cause of what I always quote and which is very clear – the ancient world – those who believed in political philosophy were those who exalted soul as the ruler of the body – while the naturalists Epicurus, Lucretius not interested in politics. While in the modern [?] version Marx, etc, Marcel[?], Whitehead, religion what you do with your privacy. Now if one takes this difference with the present debate in Book II between Plato and Aristotle – one finds as I say that it is the needs of the body which lead to private property. Now I suppose you could have a system, a barracks without private property and with privacy, but unlikely. If your take the Republic as I take it as abstracting from the body and Plato’s Laws as not – then you can see that the communism in the Republic arises from that abstraction. And Aristotle’s insistence on private property an insistence on privacy. Let me make perfectly clear that there is nothing in Aristotle of a right of property which transcends politics as in the capitalist’s theory. Politics always higher than economics (see Rousseau-Hegel-Marx against the British tradition). ... Parenthesis: What does it mean for philosophy to be the height for man? I do not know because I do not know what philosophy is. As I have said it is not professors of philosophy. But deeper the activity is lost for us in the modern world. Therefore when I say Aristotle says that philosophy the height – I see that he says it – but I do not know what he means. I do not say I am a philosopher. The best recapturing of what philosophy is: Heidegger’s What is Philosophy?4 It is something Greek. But the question is helped and hindered for me by being a Christian. As a Christian I am cut off in a certain sense from knowing what philos-

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ophy is to the Greeks because it is not the height – there is something higher – therefore a different thing. Rather than proud contemplation, obedience to charity (quite different). Parenthesis: because desire more important in Plato, Plato nearer to Christianity than Aristotle. But though Christianity cuts me off it also helps me – because Christianity makes me know what it is to say that something transcends the city. Many moderns (particularly followers of Hobbes and Locke) cannot know very deeply anything which transcends the society – except a crude individualism. But Christianity is clear about that – the kingdom of God or charity transcends the city. Therefore it makes me open to understand what is meant by an activity transcending the city – not simply as a finite transcendence – but absolutely.

Notes 1 See George Holland Sabine (1880–1961), A History of Political Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1961). 2 See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elso M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1952). 3 See Simone Weil, Selected Essays, 1934–1943, trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press 1962). 4 See Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? trans. William Kluback and Jean Wilde (New York: Twayne Publishers 1958).

APPENDIX A: GRANT’S UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE COURSES, 1970–80 Undergraduate 1970–1 1971–2 1972–3

1973–4

1974–5 1975–6 1976–7 1977–8 1978–9

1978–9

(1b6 – 168 students) Introduction to World Religions – Grant taught Section on Christianity. Leave – Killam Grant (1b6 – 267) (4k6 – 6) Myth, History, and Reason ‘A discussion of the different conceptions that Western men have had about the place of myth and reason in the apprehension of reality and the influence of these differing approaches on what they have conceived human history to be.’ (1b6 – 206) (4f6 – 13) The Meeting of Christianity with Philosophy ‘The course will concentrate on how the receivers of Christianity took Plato’s writings as the means to understanding their religion. It will concentrate on this process as found in the writings of Augustine. The study will be of the writings of Plato and Augustine.’ (1b6 – 151) (4f6 – ??) (1b6 – 181) (4f6 – ??) Sabbatical leave (4f6 – 12) (4f6 – 11) (2L6 – 28) The Question of Good in the Technological Age ‘An exploration of the private and public questions concerning right action in modern Canadian society. What light do religion and philosophy throw on these questions?’ (2L6 – 49)

Graduate 1969–70 1970–1

(762 – 16 students) Nietzsche: His Account of Religion (775 – 25) The Relation of the Western Religious Tradition and Technology

Lectures at McMaster University – 1970s

1971–2 1972–3 1973–4 1974–5 1975–6 1976–7 1977–8 1978–9 1979–80

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Leave – Killam Grant (781 – 12) Selected Topics in Religion and Modernity Heidegger (781 – 8) Kant (781 – 13) Nietzsche (781 – 9) Simone Weil Sabbatical leave (781 – 6) Kant (781 – 10) Heidegger (781 – 7) Aristotle Arthur Davis

APPENDIX B: LIST OF NOTEBOOKS, 1970s AND 1980s We compiled this list of thirty-six notebooks found in Grant’s papers, from which we selected lectures published in this volume. The books were designated A to Z and a to k by Sheila Grant, and are listed here in alphabetical order. We could not always assign exact dates and the brief notes about contents are not exhaustive.

Notebook A Notebook B Notebook C Notebook D Notebook E Notebook F Notebook G Notebook H Notebook I Notebook J Notebook K Notebook L

1975–6

5 Lectures on Christianity. See 931–50. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics 1979–80 Lectures for the course ‘The Question of Good in the Technological Age’ (2l6). 1970–1 Notes on Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ 1972–3 Notes on John Rawls and Kant 1973–4 Lectures for course on Plato and Augustine (4f6). See 956–60. 1978–9 Lectures on Heidegger 1970s Lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics early 70s Lectures on Aristotle’s Politics 1982–3 Notes for Aristotle seminar, Dalhousie 1982–3 1973–4 Lectures on Kant 1977–8 Lectures on Kant 1970s Notes on Aristotle’s Ethics

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Notebook M

1970–1

Lectures on political philosophy; on Bonhöffer; and for course on ‘The Relation of the Western Religious Tradition and Technology’ including Strauss, Nietzsche, Arendt, Heidegger, and Rahner Notebook N ? Fragmentary notes Notebook O ? Lectures and Notes on the Republic Notebook P ? Miscellaneous notes Notebook Q 1971–2 Notes on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals Notebook ? 1975–6 Simone Weil Notebook R 1976 Miscellaneous notes Notebook S ? Miscellaneous notes on Heidegger and Aristotle Notebook T 1972–3 Lectures on Heidegger. See 1019–36. Notebook U 1975 Miscellaneous notes on Ellul and Pascal Notebook V 1973 Reflections on Nietzsche Notebook Z 1969 Lectures on Zarathustra. See Collected Works, Vol. 3, 669–75. Notebook a late 60s Comments and Lectures on Aristotle’s Politics Notebook b late 70s? Lecture on ‘Kant and the Bible.’ Notebook c(1) 1974–5 Lectures on Nietzsche Notebook c(2) 1974–5 Lectures on Nietzsche Notebook d ? Lecture-fragments and notes on Nietzsche Notebook e 1974 Notes on Aristotle’s Politics and on Nietzsche Notebook f 1971 Lectures on Plato’s Laws Notebook g 1974? Noted reflections on various thinkers including Kant and Philip Sherrard Notebook h 1970–1 Lectures for technology course; fragmentary lectures Notebook i 1974 Note on Philip Sherrard’s book The Greek East and the Latin West: A Study in Christian Tradition Notebook j ? Two short lectures on Rousseau’s 2nd Discourse Notebook k ? Lectures on Plato’s Phaedo Arthur Davis

Appendix 1 Radio and Television Broadcasts by George Grant, 1971–89 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

The list of Grant’s broadcasts, 1971–89, was compiled from CBC records and from Dr Grant’s letters. It is as complete as available records allow. The entire list beginning in 1949 can be found in Collected Works, Vol. 3, 763–70.

71/12/07

‘To Be a Tory’: George Grant is among those interviewed by Larry Zolf in this one-hour documentary on the Tories in the television series Tuesday Night.

73/01/28

Lessons of Vietnam War: A phone-in discussion of the lessons Canadians have learned from the war, on the radio series Cross-Country Check-Up, includes comments by George Grant.

73/08/05

Ramsay Cook interviews George Grant on the Second World War, French Canadian nationalism, and the problem of feeling at home in a homogeneous technological world, on the television series Impressions.

73/10/10

A program includes George Grant discussing Lament for a Nation, Canada, Lester Pearson, and the ‘mental health state’ on the radio series This Country In the Morning.

74/03/05

A program on the need for changing attitudes: George Grant on the Gross National Product in the light of reevaluated goals, the James Bay Project, and Quebec, on the television series Canada Tomorrow.

75/03/27

‘The Technological Imperative’: The fourth of five lectures

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Appendix 1

in the ‘Beyond Industrial Growth’ series on the radio series Ideas. The lecture was originally delivered at the University of Toronto on 31 Jan. 1975, and later published under the title ‘The computer does not impose on us the ways it should be used,’ in Beyond Industrial Growth, ed. Abraham Rotstein (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976), 117–31. A revised version of this same essay appeared as ‘Thinking about Technology’ in Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi 1986), 11–34. 77/10/20

Segment (e) of a ninety-minute program. Peter Gzowski interviews Peter Newman, Dalton Camp, and George Grant discussing Diefenbaker’s memoirs on the television series 90 Minutes Live.

80/02/13

‘The Owl and the Dynamo’: A one-hour profile of George Grant produced by Vincent Tovell and narrated by William Whitehead on the television series Spectrum.

87/05/10,17 Peter Meggs interviews Grant about Technology and Justice on the radio program Open House. 87/05/31

‘George Grant Profile’: Linden MacIntyre reports from Halifax on the television series Sunday Morning. Clips of George Grant on Canada, Diefenbaker, Vietnam, Abortion, Mozart, Technology, Conversion, walking in the park, and the fact that he is a believer not a pessimist.

88/02/13

‘On the Morgenthaler decision’: A five-minute talk on the radio series Commentary. Sheila Grant says letters requesting copies of the script came in from all over Canada.

88/09/28

‘Tribute to George Grant,’ by David Cayley during hour three of the radio series Morningside.

88/10/02

‘Reflections’: Tributes to George Grant and bp Nichol, with clips from the 87/05/31 program, on the television series Sunday Morning.

89/08/24

‘Tribute to George Grant,’ by David Cayley (repeat of 28 Sept. 1988) on hour three of the radio series Morningside.

Appendix 2 Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods Applied in Volume 4

The purpose of the edition is to provide readers with a complete collection of reliable reading texts. Editorial interventions identify the sources of the writings; explain Grant’s allusions to persons, places, and events; and describe any changes made to the writings during the preparation of the volume. They consist of headnotes, annotations, and a chronology of Grant’s life. A general index of names and topics is provided for each of the volumes of the edition.

Copy-Text The material included in this volume did not pose difficult questions regarding the versions that ought to be chosen as copy-text, that is, the ones closest to the author’s intentions and preferences. No substantially different earlier versions of these particular writings have survived, as far as we know. Hence the copy-texts consist of the works as they were published and unpublished writings as they were found in Grant’s papers. Accuracy of the Text We have corrected the human and mechanical errors that occurred in the process of scanning the documents into computer files. In addition, we have checked the original sources of Grant’s quotations for accuracy. Headnotes We have provided short headnotes for each piece of writing to identify its source and date. For Time as History, English-Speaking Justice, and

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Technology and Justice we have provided more substantial introductions. We have also written longer headnotes to introduce the selection of lectures and the Simone Weil materials. All headnotes are in sans serif type to distinguish them from Grant’s writings. Annotations Annotations are intended to supplement and clarify Grant’s references as unobtrusively as possible. The notes have been kept concise. They identify persons, events, or places that might puzzle or confuse some readers. Again we ask for patience from readers who may find that some of the notes give information that seems obvious to them. Our information has been drawn from many sources, but we are again indebted to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Year 2000 edition, editor-in-chief James H. Marsh (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart 2000), which has been of invaluable assistance. In the four volumes of The Collected Works, where many annotations appear along with Grant’s original notes, we have reproduced Grant’s as footnotes and ours as notes at the end of each work. Notes that explain revision and emendation of texts as well as minor textual notes are included in the annotations. Correction, Regularization, Standardization, and House Style When we judged that absolutely no question of meaning was at stake, we silently corrected minor typographical and punctuation errors in Grant’s texts. Whenever we judged that a correction might affect the meaning of the text, the error has simply been flagged with [sic]. We have corrected mistakes that obviously occurred because of an oversight by either Grant or the typists who prepared the original works. For example, Grant regularly used the expression ‘that is’ without a following comma. We have added commas in such cases. Grant’s frequent slip ‘loose’ has been corrected to ‘lose.’ All foreign words have been italicized. Grant’s own spelling was not invariably consistent and there is considerable variation in usage in the published texts used for this volume. In some cases we have retained Grant’s spelling and punctuation because we judged they were essential parts of his voice and presenta-

Editorial and Textual Principles and Methods: Volume 4

1089

tion in the time and place he was writing. We have not kept his spelling of words with -ise endings that now tend to be -ize endings in North American usage. All instances of ‘judgement’ have been changed to ‘judgment,’ and we have opted for ‘Western’ rather than ‘western.’ Texts adhere to the University of Toronto Press house style. We have used the inverted style for dates. Single quotation marks are used; quotation marks are removed from displayed quotations; punctuation (except for colons and semi-colons) is placed inside closing quotation marks in accordance with the prevailing modern practice; dashes are removed when put beside a comma; periods have been removed from abbreviations such as ‘Dr’ and ‘St’; hyphens are added or removed in accordance with current practice; and, finally, the serial comma is used. Regularization, standardization, and house style emendations have been done silently, without annotation. Selection of unpublished work This volume required some difficult decisions concerning which lectures should be selected for publication. The final selection is a compromise that reflects the work and advice of many readers over a considerable period of time. Preparation of handwritten material The handwritten manuscripts prepared for this volume are passages from Grant’s notebooks and lectures delivered to his McMaster classes in the 1970s. The editors worked with photocopies of the originals found in Grant’s study. Sheila Grant deserves special mention for her indispensable contribution in interpreting Grant’s sometimes difficult handwriting and fathoming his meaning. We have checked the finished text against the original by having one person read the original while another corrected the computerized version.

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Index

Note: Writings of Grant printed in this volume are only listed here when referred to outside their primary location. abortion: Anglican Church and, 352; case against, 493–6; and Christian fundamentalism, 396; debate and religion, 739; language of, 659–60; and the medical profession, 394, 409; Reagan and U.S. Supreme Court, 748; and rights, 587, 664– 701; Roe v. Wade, 244–8, 266–7n68; Roman Catholics and, 569–72; Supreme Court of Canada on, 706– 7, 726–34; U.S. Supreme Court, 277 Abortion, an Issue for Conscience (Task Force on Human Life), 708 Abortion Question, The (Task Force on Human Life), 707–8, 711–12, 722–3 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 917, 918n6 Advancement of Learning, The (Bacon), 876 affliction, 835–9 Agee, James, 174n13 Agnew, Spiro Theodore, 85, 90n8 agnosticism, 857 Aitchison, James H., 497, 509n1 Alain (Émile Chartier), 771, 787, 792, 802n2, 803n12; philosophy of, 832– 3

Albigeois, 858 al-Farabi, Abu Nasr, 908, 910n4 alienation: ‘impossible love,’ 785; social and intellectual, 782 Allende, Salvador, 173n8 Amnesty International, 899–902 amor fati (love of fate), 8–9, 54–5, 57–8 Amour de Dieu et le malheur, L’ (Weil), 838 Anansi Press, 516 ancient thought, on technology, 134– 40 Anglican Church of Canada, 659; on abortion, 352, 707 Annexation Manifesto (1849), 408, 413n3 Anthony of Padua, Saint, 400n17 anti-Semitism, 34, 484–5 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 135, 625 Arapura, John, 71n10 Aristotelianism, 614, 871 Aristotle, 66, 128, 372, 824–5; account of nature, 211; classical political teaching, 137; and the closed question, 101; criticism of Plato’s teaching, 319

1092

Index

Arnold, Matthew, 471n51, 487–8n13, 633, 684n114 ‘Art of the Soluble, The’ (Medawar), 274, 278 arts, and sciences, 272 Ascent of Mount Carmel, The (Saint John of the Cross), 868 asceticism, 836–7 attention, 848n35; meaning of, 826–9 Atwood, Margaret, 702, 704n2 Augustine, Saint, 367; teaching, 956– 8; and will, 371 Austen, Jane, 913, 915n5 Austin, John Langshaw, 262n32 automobiles, society and, 287 Auto Pact, 147n4 Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules, 357, 383n11 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 615, 681n84 Bacon, Sir Francis, 80, 183, 188n10, 211, 461–3, 876 Bagehot, Walter: review of collected works, 882–6 Barth, Karl, 143n5, 312n11 Battle of the Books (Swift), 625 Baxter, John, 385, 398n5 Bayley, John: on Céline, 474 Beautiful Losers (Cohen), 517 Bébert (cat), 441, 476 Bedson, Derek, 927, 928n4 behaviourism, 20, 181, 186 Bell, Daniel, 186, 188–9n11 Benjamin Disraeli: The Early Letters, 911 Bennett, Richard Bedford, 419, 912, 914n3 Bennett, William R., 300n1 Bentham, Jeremy, 231, 643, 894, 897n5 Beria, Lavrenti Pavlovlich, 266n64 Bernanos, Georges, 766 Bernardin, Joseph Louis, 582n8, 571

Berrigan, Daniel, 794 Bertrand, Jean-Jacques, 337, 339n3 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 5, 47–8, 83, 280, 325; Christianity and Platonism, 635; Dannhauser on, 342–3 Beyond Industrial Growth (Rotstein), 118 Bhagavad Gita, 791, 799, 827 Bible, 322; First Corinthians, 372; and Frye, 907; New Testament, 320; Old Testament, 366; Revelation, 573; as a source of modern ‘Westernness,’ 30 Biblical theology, propositions of, 123–5 Bickersteth, Burgon, 415, 419n1 Binding, Karl Ludwig Lorenz, 663, 692n218 bio-technology, 706, 714 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 639, 642, 686n135 Bishelonne, Jean, 439, 469n21 Bismarck, Otto von, 199, 481, 913, 260n14, 915n6 Blackmun, Harry Andrew, 196–7, 244–8, 267n69, 277 Blake, William, 906 body, in North American Protestantism, 369 Borden, Sir Robert Laird, 912, 914n3 Bourassa, Robert, 114, 117n10, 338n3 Brady, Alexander, 893 Brave New World (Huxley), 155, 722 Brecht, Bertolt, 917, 918n5 Brezhnev, Leonid Ilich, 161, 173n4 Broadbent, John Edward (Ed), 704, 705n8 broadcasting, balance in, 489–92 Bronowski, Jacob, 849n42 Bryan, William Jennings, 407n2

Index Buddha, 39 Buddhism, 581 Bultmann, Rudolph, 531, 535n5 Burke, Edmund, 231, 264n53 Burroughs, William Seward, 486n2 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Smart), 925, 928n1 Caesar, Julius, 39 Calder, James, 775 Calvin, John, 575 Calvinism, 241–2, 845; and capitalism, 238; and Frye, 907 Cameron, J.M., 567, 571–2 Camp, Dalton Kingsley, 703, 407n7, 705n6 Campbell, Roy, 923n6 Camus, Albert, 771–2, 853, 854n2, 860 Canada Council: letter on ‘Technique(s) and Good,’ 141–2 Canada-U.S. Automotive Products Agreement (Auto Pact), 147n4 Canadian Churchman, The, 707 Canadian Pacific Railway, 73n27 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), 928n2 Canning, George, 481 capitalism, 84–5, 133, 564, 578; and American universities, 653–4; corporate, 538 Carman, Bliss, 176 Carr, Shirley, 702, 705n4 Carter, James Earl ‘Jimmy,’ 268n78 Case of Wagner, The (Nietzsche), 34 Castle to Castle (Céline), xxiv, 430–1, 473 Cathar religion, 795, 858 Catholicism, 12, 65, 243, 367, 572–7; American, 135; and the body, 369; traditional, 351; and war, 567–8; and Weil, 857

1093

Cayley, David, xxiv, xxv; interview by on Weil, 867–79; interview by on Heidegger, 1036–44 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 116n9; 1969 Massey Lectures sequel (Grant and Malik), 62; Cross-Country Check-Up, 14; Impressions (TV), 148–8; This Country in the Morning, 160 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, xxiv–xxv, 467n1, 473, 922; the characters, 449–54; chronicle of post-war Europe, 476, 479; contemporary criticism, 474–5; conviction of by French civil court, 487n10; Grant on the trilogy, 428–32; his art and writings about the Jews, 483; his ‘disaster’ (1930–50), 486; ‘madness,’ 454–9, 476, 477–8; medical doctor, 480; paranoia of, 455, 477– 8; politics of, 480, 483; prodigality of, 447–9; Sheila Grant’s preface, 426–72; style of, 445–7; trilogy as story, 432–40 Chamberlain, Neville, 481 chance, and the future, 22–3 Chartier, Émile (Alain). See Alain Chaucer, Geoffrey, 602 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 663, 692n216 Chicago Seven, 75n44, 85, 90n8 Chile, socialist government of, 173n8 Chomsky, Noam Avram, 513, 519n5 Christ, 39; death of, 761–2; defence of, 737–8 Christian, William, xxv, 3, 904, 905n1; conversation with Grant, 736–69 Christianity, 31, 39, 127; Dostoevsky, 946–50; eschatology, 365; experience of time in, 12; Gospels, 939– 42; and Judaism, 366; Malik-Grant

1094

Index

dialogue, 64, 66; and philosophy, 635; Platonism, 935–9; Resurrection, 942–6, 954–5; secularized, 249; teaching of, xxii Christianity and Classical Culture (Cochrane), 356–7, 423 Churchill, Winston S., 234–5, 265n57, 481, 575, 755 ‘City of the End of Things, The’ (Lampman), 171, 174–6n15 City and Man, The (Strauss), 837 Civil Elegies (Lee), 516 Classical Science and After (Weil), 831 Clement of Alexandria, 366 Cochrane, Charles Norris, 325, 382n8, 423; influence of, 356–7 Cohen, Hermann, 242, 266n67 Cohen, Matt, xxvi Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 232, 265n54 Coles, Robert, 170, 174n13, 776–7, 854n3, 855–66 Collingwood, R.G., 432 Columbia University: student protest, 186, 189n12 Colville, David Alexander, 259n10 Come-by-Chance (Nfld), 174n11 common good, 227, 236 common sense, 194–5, 212, 224, 226 communication, cable and satellite, 409 Compass, The, xxii, 385 computers: machines and brains, 607; society and, 283–6, 288–92, 584; Soviet Union and United States, 600; use of, 595–6, 598 Condition ouvrière, La (Weil), 795; ‘Journal of the Factory,’ 843 ‘Confederation’ poets, 176

Connaissance surnaturelle, La (Weil), 844 Conrad, Joseph, 921, 922n2 conservatism, 84–5, 200 Conservative party, 161 Considerations on Representative Government (Mill), 893 constitutional contractualism, 236 constitutional crisis, 335–6, 350–1 constitutionalism, 84 constitutionality, in modern era, 86 constitutional liberalism, 235 continentalism, 332, 564 contractarian theory, 208–10, 214, 217–18, 222, 230–1, 625–6 contractualism, 192, 500; American, 196, 243; modern, 250 contractual liberalism, 256 Cook, Ramsay, xxiv, 159n1; interview with Grant, 148–58 corporations, power of, 599 cosmopolitanism: as political choice, 354, 356; of Trudeau, 411–12 Crashaw, Richard, 814, 845n1, 864, 865n26, 869 creationism, 500 Crick, Bernard, 355 Crick, Francis, 721 Critique of Practical Reason, The (Kant), 216 Critique of Pure Reason, The (Kant), 17, 220 Crombie, David, 418, 420n7 Cross, James, 117n9 Crossman, R.H.S., 178, 187n2 Crowther, Lord Geoffrey, 882 cybernetics, 205, 281, 295–6, 593 Dalhousie University, xxiii Daly, Elizabeth, 464, 471–2n62

Index Daniélou, Jean Cardinal, 793, 803n19, 858, 865n11 Dannhauser, Werner J., 340–3, 343n1 Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy, vision of Beatrice in, 847n26 Darwin, Charles, 36, 42, 392, 627–31; historical thinking of, 497–504 Darwinism, 240–1, 500 Dasein: Céline as artist of, 464; Heidegger’s concept of, 740 Davis, Rennie, 86, 90n8 Davis, William, 173n10, 577 Death of Harold Ladoo, The (Lee), 516– 17 Death on the Instalment Plan (Céline), 450, 454, 473, 478 deaths, of Socrates and Christ, 635, 837 de Gaulle, Charles, 73n25, 113, 116n7, 482, 873 Dellinger, David, 86, 90n8 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 893 Democratic Party, 226; Vietnam War and, 111–12 Democratic Theory (Macpherson), 293–4 Democritus, 87 de-programmers, 396, 402n36 Derrida, Jacques, 554, 921–2, 923n3 Descartes, René, 17, 325 Des intérêts catholiques au XIXeme siècle (Montalembert), 891 Destouches, Dr, 450 de Visser, John, 107–10 Devoir, Le, 165 Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (More), 837–8 Diary of a Country Priest (Bernanos), 766 Diderot, Denis, 509n7

1095

Diefenbaker, John George, 112, 116n2, 152, 163–5, 403–7, 419, 564, 568, 703, 747, 912, 914n3; in Lament for a Nation, 347 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 188n7 Disraeli, Benjamin, 911–15, 914n1 Disraeli, Sarah, 913 DNA, 391–2, 400n25; molecule, 721; structure of, 603–4 Dodds, Eric Robertson, 642–4, 687n143 dominance, bourgeois, 133 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 318, 437–8, 634 Doull, James, 359–60, 550–1, 554 Dover, Sir Kenneth James, 687n149 Dred Scott Decision, 696–7n258 Duplessis, Maurice Le Noblet, 746, 748 Durham, Earl of, 912 Dutch Reform Church, 577, 744 Dying (Task Force on Human Life), 722 Eastern Church, filioque clause, 742–3 Easton, David, 20, 72n19 École des cadavres, L’ (Céline), 475 Economist, The, 882 education: dialectic method, 422; Weil’s view of, 830–1 Edward II (Marlowe), 916, 918n2 Eichler, Margrit, 714–16 Einstein, Albert, 199, 260n15, 591, 677n30 elections, national (1979, 1980), 491, 492n1 Eliot, Charles William, 102, 106n7, 207 Eliot, T.S., 713 Ellul, Jacques, 128, 130, 143n5, 317, 327; on modernity, 380–1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 239, 266n65

1096

Index

Émile (Rousseau), 434–5 End of Ideology, The (Bell), 186 energy issues, 147n4 England, industrial society in, 231 ‘English Constitution, The’ (Bagehot), 884–5 English-speakers, 411 Enlightenment, 31, 484 Enracinement, L’ (Weil), 794–5, 817, 818 Epp, Jake, 749 equality, 215–16, 226; in primary goods, 254–5 equipment, 825, 847n22 Erikson, Erik Homburger, 890, 892n4 eschatology, Christian, 365 Essays on Politics and Society (Mill), 893 Estaing, Valéry Giscard d’, 268n80 eugenics, and genetic engineering, 719–24 euthanasia, 570, 587, 589; language of, 655–64 existentialism, 59–60, 756, 909 Expo 67, 113, 116n6 fact, use of word, 125–6 faith, 388; and modern science, 386, 391; and the multiversity, 607–39; and technological paradigm, 394 ‘Faith and the Multiversity’ (Grant), 776 Farini, Luigi Carlo, 891, 892n7 Farrer, Austin, 311n7, 532, 535n7; historical Christianity and, 316; theological rationalism, 357–8 fascism, 729 Faust (Marlowe), 755 Ferguson, George Howard, 912, 914n3 Fidelio (Beethoven), 916–17, 918n5

filioque clause, 742–3, 742n.h Fletcher, Joseph, 660–1, 671, 691n202, 696n256 Flexner, Abraham, 423, 425n4 foetal experimentation, 716–19 foeticide. See abortion Ford, Gerald Rudolph, 268n78 Ford, Henry, 65, 78n79 Ford Motor Co., Detroit, 481 Foreign Investment Review Agency (FIRA), 147n4 Foster, Michael Beresford, 265n60 Foucault, Michel, 921, 923n3 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 388, 400n17, 579–80, 685n125, 876 Frank, Erich, 328n2, 818, 846n14 Frankfurter, Felix, 267n71 Fraser, Malcolm, 300n1 Frazer, Sir James, 101 freedom: and history, 320; to Rawls, 221; and will, 371 Frege, Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob, 484, 488n17, 641, 686n141 French Canada, threats to, 348–9 French-speakers, 411 Freud, Anna, 855 Freud, Sigmund, 48, 76n60, 255, 313, 621, 643, 890; influence of, 839 Freudianism, 255, 643–4 Froines, John, 90n8 Frye, Northrop, 3, 273–4, 279n2, 906 fundamentalism, 574, 743–4, 748; in North America, 394, 396 furniture, Canadian, 107–10 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 3, 183, 188n8 Galen, Clemens August Graf von, 671 Galileo Galilei, 17, 66 Gandhi, 239

Index Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert Arthur Talbot, 915n7 Genealogy of Morals, The (Nietzsche), 4–5, 37, 49–50; Grant’s introductory remarks about, 965–92 General Motors, 287 genetic engineering, and eugenics, 719–24 German tradition, 33–4 Gershwin, George, 682n87 Geschichte der Natur, Die (von Weizsäcker), 502 Gladstone, Catherine, 891 Gladstone, William Ewart, 887–92, 911, 912, 914n1 Gladstone Diaries, The, 887 Globalism and the Nation State (Kierans), 564 Globe and Mail, The (Toronto), 416; letters of Grant to the editor, 924–8 gnosticism, 857–8 Gnostics, 844 God, and justice, 315 ‘God in Plato’ (Weil), 745 ‘God is dead’ (Nietzsche), 39, 40, 638 ‘Gods, The’ (Lee), 17, 514 Goffman, Erving, 761 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 101 good, 314, 318–20, 326; and evil, 38, 83–4, 89–90, 125–6, 132, 280; idea of, 4, 45; language of, 82, 120; meaning of, 586; primacy of, 322– 5; question of, 82; Socrates on, 316; and technique notes, 317–21; traditional, 290–1; value and, 612–13 ‘Good and Technique’ (Grant), 118 Goodman, Paul, 3 goodness: modern conception of, 603–4; owingness, 292 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeivich, 746

1097

Gordon, Walter Lockhart, 564, 703, 705n6 Graham, G.S., 182n.a, 187n1 Graham, Robert Bontine C., 261n20 Grant, George, 774; automobile accident, 3; influences on, 359–60; as ‘red tory,’ 168; retirement comments, 536–7; and sexual life, 782 Grant, George Monro (paternal grandfather), 159n2, 359, 383n13 Grant, George Parkin, 259n2 Grant, Sheila Veronica Allen (wife), xxiv, 71n11, 302, 504; preface to Céline’s trilogy, 426–72 Grant, William Allen (son), 4, 65, 71n6, 764 Grant, William Lawson (father), 105n2 Gravity and Grace (Weil), 792, 813n5 Great Code: The Bible and Literature, The (Frye), 906 Greek civilization, as a source of modern ‘Westernness,’ 30–1 Greek language, 14 Greek Mathematics and the Spirit of Algebra (Klein), 875–6 Greeks and the Irrational, The (Dodds), 642–3 Green, Howard, 564 Gregory VII, Saint (Hildebrand), 683n104 Grünewald, Matthias, 802n1 Gunn, J.A.W., 911 Gzowski, Peter, xxiv, 160–76, 173n1 Halfway Up Parnassus, 652 Hamilton Tiger-Cats, 56, 77n74 Hanover, destruction of, 479 Hardy, Oliver, 511, 518n2 Harras, Professor (Reich Medical Association), 442

1098

Index

Harris, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber,’ 443, 469n29 Harvard University, 102, 106n7, 207 Hatfield, Richard, 169, 174n12 Hauerwas, Stanley, 190 Hayden, Tom, 90n8 Hearst, Patricia Campbell (Patty), 958n2 Hegel, Georg W.F., 18, 181, 360; influence of, xx Heidegger, Martin, 62, 65, 127–8, 139, 205, 281, 313, 320, 922; Cayley interview on, 1036–44; Dannhauser and, 343; on Europe, 483; and historicism, 502; on language, 609; lectures on technique of, 1019– 36; and modernity, xxiii–xxiv, 327– 8, 375–6; modern philosophy, 638; and Nietzsche, 321, 362–3, 638; on Pentecostalism, 742; on Plato, 317, 322–3; and Plato’s doctrine of truth, 316, 817; ‘Plato’s Teaching Concerning Truth,’ 817; polytheism, 909; primacy of the body, 368; and technique, 286; on technology, 532 Heisenberg, Werner, 199, 260n15, 269–70 Hemingway, Ernest Millar, 487n6 Herbert, George, 860, 865n15 Herzberg, Gerhard, 831, 848n41 hierarchy, 205n.c Hildebrand (pope), 625, 683n104, 863 Himmler, Heinrich, 266n64 Hinduism, 581, 750, 868; teaching of, xxii historicism, 12–13, 71n13, 341–2, 376– 7, 679–80n69; in English-speaking world, 644–5; Heidegger and, 573; national socialist, 600; radical, 647– 8

history: of heritage furniture, 107–10; and justice, 504–9; significance of, 13–14; teaching of, 97 History of the English-speaking Peoples, A (Churchill), 234 History Society, U of T, 105n1; address to, 97–105 History of Western Philosophy (Russell), 498 Hitler, Adolf, 46–7, 76n54, 233, 754; euthanasia under, 672 Hitlerism, 363 Hobbes, Thomas, 84, 188n10, 211, 232–3; contractarianism, 230; liberalism of, 195–6 Hoche, Alfred Erich, 663, 692n218 Ho Chi Minh, 68, 78n80, 78n82 Hoffman, Abbie (Abbott), 40, 69, 74n44, 85, 86, 90n8 Hoffman, Dustin, 77n73 Hoffman, Julius, 85, 90n8 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 759, 769n14 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 244–8, 267n70 Homer, 644 homosexuality, 316; ‘impossible love,’ 784 Hooker, Richard, 241, 575, 724 Hopkins, Harry, 735n2 Horkheimer, Max, 377, 917, 918n6 House of the Dead, The (Dostoevsky), 437 Howe, Clarence Decatur, 281, 297n6 Hudson’s Bay Company, 73n27 Hufeland, Christoph Wilhelm, 692n217 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche), 36 humanism, 99 humanities, research in, 651–5

Index ‘Human Personality’ (Weil), 796 Hume, David, 17n.b, 121, 219, 250 Humphrey, Hubert, 90n4 Huntington, Samuel P., 183, 188n8 Huxley, Aldous Leonard, 159n5, 722 IBM, 287 Idea File of Harold Adams Innis, The (Christian, ed.), 903 idealism, 837 ideology, 184–5; defined, 233 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 437–8 Idler, The, 777 If You Love This Country (LaPierre, ed.), 702 Ignatieff, Alison Grant, 398–9n11 Ignatieff, George, 571, 398–9n11 Iliad, 791 ‘impossible love’ doctrine, 782, 784– 5, 835 In Defence of Politics (Crick), 355 individualism, and egalitarianism, 227 industrial capitalism, 236 industrial democracy, 121 industrial growth, 295–6 industrial society, 133, 282 Innis, Harold Adams, 182n.a, 357, 382n9, 401n32, 903–5 Innocent III (von Ranke), 438 ‘In the Perspective of the Citizen: The Public Philosophy of George Grant’ (Lathangue), 190 internationalism, 227; English-speaking capitalism, 369–70 ‘Intimations of Christianity’ (Weil), 797 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 375, 532–3 ‘Introduction to the Reading of Simone Weil’ (Grant), 773–4

1099

Intuitions préchrétiennes (Weil), 808, 813n2 in vitro fertilization (IVF), 714–16 Iran, U.S. defeat in, 408 irrationalism, 641–2 Isaiah 59:19–20, 529, 534n3 IVF. See in vitro fertilization James Bay Project, 173n10, 382n4 James II, king of England and Scotland, 264n52 Jaspers, Karl Theodore, 62, 77n77 Jesuits, 97–8 Jesus, xxi, 64 Jewish Bible, 127 Jews, mystery of, 483–4 John of the Cross, Saint, 623, 681n78, 682n98, 868, 926; The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 868 Johnson, Daniel, 113, 116n7, 337, 338n3 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 72n15, 227 Johnson, Pierre-Marc, 116n7 Johnson, Samuel, 232, 265n54, 883 Johnson, Virginia Eshelman, 802n6 Johnson, William (Bill), 416, 419n3 John XXIII (pope), 803n18 Journal d’un curé de campagne (Bernanos), 766 ‘Journal of the Factory’ (Weil), 843 Journey to the End of Night (Céline), 438 Jowett, Benjamin, 102, 106n8 Judaism, 31, 65, 243, 266n67, 572–5, 760; teaching of, xxii judgments, of fact and of value, 215 justice: civilizational contradiction, 249; computers and modern, 601; as contractual, 237; and God, 824; principles of, 225–6; in The Republic (Plato), 257; and society, 825; and

1100

Index

technology, 525–34; theories of, 207, 211–13, 222, 224 ‘Justice and Technology’ (Grant), xxii, 118 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 18, 36, 128, 198, 210, 242, 314, 315, 318, 377–8; and the Bible, 1067–70; contractarian teaching, 218–19; The Critique of Pure Reason, 648; definition of marriage, 219; on evil, 372–3; human freedom, 285; influence of, 215–16; secularized Christianity and, 251; secular theology of, 124; on social contract, 193–4; and time, 814–15; and Weil compared, 815; on will, 26, 378, 389 Kaufmann, Walter, 341–2, 343n2 Keniston, Kenneth, 170, 174n13 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 72n21, 160, 227; and Diefenbaker, 405–6; U.S. education, 421, 424n1 Kennedy, Robert Francis, 73n25 Kennedy dynasty, 22, 25 Kerr, Sir John, 300n1 Keynes, John Maynard, 889, 892n3 Kierans, Eric, 564–5, 581n4 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 98, 331, 333, 419, 893 Klein, Jacob, 831, 875 knowing and making, 270, 275–6; copenetration of, 606, 632 ‘Knowing and Making’ (Grant), xxii, 832 knowledge: paradigms of, 269–79, 393–4, 588, 597–8, 607–9, 612, 627; in technological society, 585 Kojève, Alexandre, xx, 137 Krell, David Farrell, 552, 561n5, 740nf Kuipers, Jelte, 93–6 Küng, Hans, 575, 582n13

‘Labour and Thought in the Philosophy of Simone Weil’ (Calder), 775 Lalonde, Marc, 382n3 Lambton, John George (Earl of Durham), 914n4 Lament for a Nation (Grant), 4, 151, 160–2, 165, 564, 566; conversations, 345; preface to, 745 Lampman, Archibald, 171, 176 Landowska, Wanda, 432, 468n7 Lang, Otto Emil, 699n286 language: of history, 13–20; of personality, 800–1; poverty of modern, 56; of values, 118–23 Languedoc, 795, 799, 858 LaPierre, Laurier, xxiv, 146n1, 702–5; exchange with Grant on Vietnam War, 144–6 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 628 Laporte, Pierre, 117n9 Lathangue, Robin, 190 Laurel, Stan, 511, 518n2 Laurin, Camille, 336, 338n1, 377–8; and technological society, 346 Laval, Pierre, 439, 469n21 Lawrence, D.H., 789, 803n6 Laxer, James, 330–4, 333n1, 702, 705n6 Laxer, Robert, 330–4, 333n1 Laying of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, The (Kant), 216 Layton, Irving Peter, 516, 519n7 Leary, Timothy, 43, 75n50, 80, 926 Leavis, Frank Raymond, 429, 467n2 le Carré, John: on liberalism, 411, 413n7 Lee, Dennis Beynon, 259n10, 511–19, 518n1, 589, 674n10 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 36, 376, 378, 569; on will, 389 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 180, 187n3

Index Lettre à un religieux (Letter to a Priest) (Weil), 798 Lévesque, René, 115, 117n11, 161, 173n7, 330, 333nn3, 4, 338, 408, 416–17, and Catholicism, 746; and technological society, 346, 350 Le Vigan, Robert, 441, 450, 469n28 Lewis, C.S., 636, 722, 744, 684–5n124 liberal democracy, 134 Liberal government (Great Britain), 234 Liberal Idea of Canada: Pierre Trudeau and the Question of Canada’s Survival, The (Laxer and Laxer), 330 liberalism, 12, 203–7, 204–5n.b, 243, 332; Abbie Hoffman and, 69; American, 185; of the American constitution, 195–6; capitalist, 600; in English-speaking world, 230–44, 358; ideology-free, 187; and Marxism, 288–9; modern, 66, 246; political, 192, 200–1; progressive, 751; and Protestantism, 238; and technology, 191–2, 199; of time as history, 31; U.S. ideology, 5, 21, 158, 185 Liberal Party (England), 891–2 Lili (wife of Céline), 441–2, 476, 478 Lindner, Richard, 917, 918n7 Lindsay, A.D., 752 Linné, Carl von (Linnaeus), 274, 907, 909n2 Lippmann, Walter, 885, 886n6 Lloyd-Jones, Sir Hugh, 586, 639, 642, 644, 685n133 Locke, John, 12, 66–7, 84, 135, 232–3, 499–500, 895; and Aristotle, 193; classical virtue, 825; contractarianism, 229–30; and justice, 193, 211; liberalism of, 195–6, 208–10, 212,

1101

231–2; politics of, 353; and the U.S. Constitution, 483, 625–6 Long, Huey Pierce, 255, 268n79, 726 Lo Stato Romano (Farini), 891 Lougheed, Edgar Peter, 337, 338n2 love, 397; faith and, 386; forms of, 619–20; and will, 374 ‘Love’ (Herbert), 860 Lucette. See Lili (wife of Céline) Lucretius, 249 Luther, Martin, 388, 400n16, 661 MacArthur, Douglas, 754 Macaulay, Thomas, 261n20 MacDonald, David Samuel Horne, 417, 420n6 Macdonald, Sir John Alexander, 748, 912, 407n3 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 66–7 machine, conception of, 606 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 190 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, 76n57, 491, 492n2, 903 McMaster University: department of religion, xxii, xxiii; Grant’s lectures at, 929–60 Macpherson, Crawford Brough, 3, 293–4, 298n17 McQueen, Robert, Lord Braxfield, 90n9 Maigret’s Mistake (Simenon), 387 Mailer, Norman, 487n6 Makarios (Mihail Kristodoulou Mouskos), 900, 902n2 Makow, Henry, 926 Malik, Charles, 3, 71n4; dialogue with Grant on the death of God, 62–70; and Nietzsche, 62–3 Manhattan Project, 677n30 Mansfield, Katherine, 523n5 Manson, Charles Miller, 754, 769n13

1102

Index

Mao Zedong, 24, 73n23 Marcion, 858, 865n8 Marcuse, Herbert, 50; Marxism of, 29 Maritain, Jacques, 261n24 Marlowe, Christopher, 755, 916 Marx, Karl, 6, 87, 488n16, 921; on capitalism, 45; influence of, 58; on justice, 506–9; political revolutions and technology, 91n12; thought of, 483, 484; tomb at Highgate, 27n.d, 29 Marxism, 58, 84–5, 114, 134, 185, 226, 351; and American liberalism, 288– 9; communist, 600; ideology, 5, 21, 158; of Mayer, 916–17; philosophy of history, 508; revival of in 1960s, 86; Utopian, 180 Massey, Vincent, 70n1 Massey Commission, xix Massey Lectures, 70n1; dialogue on the death of God, 62–70; Time as History, 3 Masters, William Howell, 789, 802n6 materialism, ancient and modern, 380 Matthew, H.C.G., 888–9 Matthews, John, 911 Mayer, Hans, 916–19, 918n1 Medawar, Sir Peter Brian, 274, 278, 279n3 medical profession, power of, 593 Medical Research Council, 716–17 medicine, and the arts, 270–2 Meech Lake Accord, 117n10 Métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil, La (Vetö), 775, 862 Michelman, Kate, 719 Midnight Cowboy (movie), 56, 77n73 Mill, James, 894, 897n5 Mill, John Stuart, 223, 231, 232–3,

263n45, 740–1, 884; Essays on Politics and Society, 893 Milligan, Frank, 118 Milton, John, 406–7 modernity, 14, 18–19, 199; Arabs and, 287; meaning of, 374–6; Nietzsche on, 4–5; Nietzsche and Heidegger on, 364; technology and, 191 monism, 183 monotheism, 757–8, 760 monsters, 277–8 Montalembert, comte de, 891 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, 201–2n.a, 353, 895, 898n7 Montherlant, Henri Millon de, 486n2 ‘Moral Clarity in the Nuclear Age’ (Novak), 571–2 morality, 56 Moral Majority, 743 moral sciences, 135, 601 More, Thomas, 161, 352, 837 Morgentaler, Henry, 665, 695n249 Morin, Jacques-Yvan, 745–8 Morris, Heather, 655–64 Moses, xxi Mowat, Farley, 703, 705n7 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 616–18, 765, 877 Mukerji, A.C., 522 Mukerji, Bithika, 520, 523nn1, 4 Muldoon, Robert, 300n1 Mulroney, Brian, 117n10, 747 multiversities, 389, 390; faith and, 607–39; and professionalism, 393; secular, 576 music, 274; language of, 615–18 mysticism, 792 Napoleon I, 39 National Abortion Rights League, 719

Index National Council of Women, 697n264 nationalism, 369–70; Canadian, 412; of Diefenbaker, 405–6; as the enemy of politics, 355; European, 354; Grant on, 562–81; and patriotism, 355; Quebec, 152, 345–7, 347, 350, 353–4 National Socialism, 76n54, 185, 473, 727, 729, 733; and Heidegger, 363; ideology, 5, 21; and Nietzsche’s writings, 34–5 National Socialist Party, 729 naturalistic fallacy, 214–15 natural law, 101 natural science, 269–70 natural selection, 628–31 Nazi Germany, 729; and Nietzsche’s language, 46; race purification in, 720 Needham, Joseph, 591, 676n26 Need for Roots, The (Weil), 794–5, 816, 821, 874 Neithardt, Mathis, 802n1 Neo-Vedanta and Modernity (Mukerji), 520 Newman, Peter Charles, 702, 704n2 New Science of Politics, The (Voegelin), 857–8 Newton, Sir Isaac, 17, 42, 219 New York Review of Books, 571–2 New York Times, 720–1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62–3, 181, 313– 14, 534, 647, 759; on art, 631–2; bridge as metaphor for the human process, 37; civilizational contradiction, 251–2; conservatism, 84; crisis of Western civilization and, 11–20; death of God, 157; English and, 232; God is dead, 318, 638; and Heidegger, 362–3; horizons, 7; impact of his thought, 34–41; on

1103

justice, 250, 586; language of, 122, 647; last men, 7–8, 43–4, 50; metaphor of ‘horizons,’ 39; on modernity, 4–5; on Mozart, 316; nihilism, 7–9, 43–4, 50; revenge and redemption, 41–52; on Rousseau, 502–3; seminar lectures on (Grant), 962– 1018; and Socrates, 340; on technical civilization, 88; and time as history, xxi, 6, 30–41, 52; on will, 389, 727–8 Nietzsche (Heidegger), 552–60 nihilism, 7–9, 602–3; language of, 122 Nixon, Richard Milhous, 22, 72n20, 90n4, 111–12, 173n4, 890 North (Céline), xxiv, 431, 441–2, 473 Notebooks, The (Grant), 772 Notebooks (Weil), 796–7, 809–10, 844, 848n39 Novak, Michael, 567, 571–2, 582n7 Nova Scotian Diocesan Times, 707 nuclear arms, 591; and Diefenbaker, 568–9 obedience, theme of, 301–12 objective, 391, 393; goods, 120; meaning of, 389; work, 185 objectivity: of the historian, 98–9; in human sciences, 182–3 O’Donovan, Joan Elizabeth (Lockwood), 190, 259n3; letter to, 504–5 O’Donovan, Oliver Michael, 190, 259n3 Oeuf transparent, L’ (Testart), 716, 721 Olson, Clifford, 754, 769n13 Olympia (film), 76n54 Oman, John, xix On Liberty (Mill), 893, 896 Ontario, school system, 577 Ontario Arts Council, 877

1104

Index

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 277, 279n4, 585, 605, 680n71, 721 Oppression et liberté (Oppression and Liberty) (Weil), 795 optimism, 42 Orange Order, 97 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), 298n12 original position, 212, 225 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 628 Orwell, George, 155, 159n4 Ottensmeyer, Hilary, 784 Outsiders: A Study in Life and Letters (Mayer), 916 Owen, Gerald, 301–12; ‘Obedience,’ xxv pacifism, of Grant, 751–2 Paine, Thomas, 265n60 Parizeau, Jacques, 339n3, 346, 382n1 Parkin, Sir George (Grant’s maternal grandfather), 359, 383n13 Parti Québécois, 117n11, 173n7, 336– 7, 412; and French nationalism, 346, 350; in power, 417 Pascal, Blaise, 792–3, 803n13 Pearson, Lester Bowles (Mike), 112, 116n3, 331, 333, 334n5, 406, 419, 893; cosmopolitanism of, 354; nationalism, 703; politics of, 513 pederasty, 834–5 Peel, Sir Robert, 911, 914n2 Peers, Michael Geoffrey, 707 Pensées (Pascal), 792 Pentecostalism, 742–3 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 218, 625 Perrin, J.M., 771–2, 773, 787–8, 792, 793 Pesanteur et la grâce, La (Weil), 808

Pétain, Marshal Henri Philippe, 439, 469n21 Pétrement, Simone, 772, 775–6, 810, 833, 856, 858; biography of Weil, 862; gave Gilgamesh epic to Weil, 834; Simone Weil: A Life, 851–4; Weil’s manuscripts, 860–1 Phaedo (Plato), 635, 684n118, 754 Phaedrus (Plato), 529, 556, 624, 745, 826, 836 philosophy, 374–84; analytical, 229; moral, 276; political, 133, 232–3; secular, 573; and theology, 744–5 Philosophy of History (Hegel), 360 Philosophy in the Mass Age (Grant), xx, 361, 772 ‘Physics and Politics’ (Bagehot), 885 Pickersgill, John (‘Jack’), 98, 105n3 Plato, 36, 257, 325–6, 533, 772, 872–3; Beautiful and the Good (lecture), 950–3; and choice, 823; classical political teaching, 137; and the closed question, 101; doctrine of ‘impossible love,’ 784; doctrine on love, 826; good in, 818–19; Gorgias, 824; and metaphysical tradition, xxiv; modern attack on, 740; Nietzsche on, 49, 644; Parmenides, 324; philosophy and theology, 124– 5; polis, 840; on prophecy, 908; on self-interest, 195; Symposium, 324, 328, 361; teaching, 956–8 ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ (Heidegger), 533 Platonism, 127, 368; and Christianity, 364, 764–5, 870–2; of Weil, 315 Plotinus, 844 pluralism, 101–2, 104, 184; American, 252–3; democratic, 182–3; ideology of, 236; and the language of values, 121; moral, 224, 245

Index political philosophy, teachings of, 600 politics, 111–12; Canadian, 345–56, 409; of Céline, 480; nationalism and rationality, 111–17; and the political, 177–9, 181; royal art, 272, 281–2 Politics (Aristotle), Grant’s lecture on, 1079–81 Polk, James R., 589, 675n12 Pol Pot, 754, 768n13 polytheism: Frye on, 909; of Heidegger, 757–8; Homeric, 756 Popper, Sir Karl, 321, 201n.a, 234n.o, 265n56 populism, 747 positivism, 134; Christian, 381 postponement, and moral action, 130–4 Principle of Reason, The (Heidegger), 532 Proclus Lycaeus, 857, 865n5 Procrustes, 263n42 prodigality, meaning of in Céline, 476–7 professionalism, 394, 538–46 progressivism, 200–1, 226; North American, 65 ‘Proletarian Revolution, The,’ 787 Protestantism, 12, 65, 243, 572–5, 760; and abortion, 569–70; Calvinist, 196; intelligence of, 909; liberal, 240–1, 774; North American, 238– 9, 368; and the U.S., 568 Proust, Marcel, 487n12 Puritanism, 239, 836 ‘Pythagorean Doctrine, The’ (Weil), 820–1, 823, 852, 874 Quebec: Official Languages Act (Bill 101), 338n1; separatism, 412, 415– 16; War Measures Act, 114

1105

Quinlan, Karen, 690n190 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 521, 522, 523n3 Rahner, Hugo, 1040, 1043n27 Rahner, Karl, 262n24, 531, 535n5, 574–5, 1040 Raimer, Henry, 172–3 Ralfe, Tim, 116n9 Ramsey, Paul, 659, 661 Rathenau, Walter, 262n32 rational choice, 215 rationalism, 42, 643, 644; administration and, 112; classical, 646; technological, 757; Western, 600 rationality, 180–1; Platonism, 38–9; for Rawls, 221 Rawls, John, xxi, 207–10, 261n22; justice as fairness, 226, 228; social contract, 212–13; theory of justice, 192–5, 222 Reagan, Ronald, 496, 496n1, 748 reason, 132, 216–17; ancient and modern, 55–6; modern project of, 392 Reasonableness of Christianity, The (Locke), 499 redemption, for Nietzsche, 83 Rees, Sir Richard, 796 Reilly, Peter, 116n9 Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, The (Binding), 663 religion: conversation with William Christian, 736–69; and philosophy, 750; public, 843; within a secular multiversity, 395; and technological paradigm, 394; true, 843 remembering, 59–61 Renault, Mary, 438 Renault motor works, 787, 795 René, Charles Forbes, comte de Montalembert, 891, 892n6

1106

Index

Republic (Plato), 101, 257, 323, 359–61, 387–8, 556, 613, 622, 766; cave in, 826; goodness, 637; images of sun, line, and cave in, 635–6; necessity, 869 Republican army, 788 researches: fear of, 391–2; in modern world, 422 ‘Revisions: A Series of Books on Ethics’ (Hauerwas and MacIntyre, eds), 190 revolution, origins of the word, 79–82 Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin), 616, 682n87 Richler, Mordecai, 581n3 Riefenstahl, Leni, 46–7, 75n54, 728, 735n5 Rigadoon (Céline), xxiv, 431, 443–4, 451, 473, 479 ‘Right Use of Schools Studies’ (Weil), 831 Rimbaud, Arthur, 486n1 Roberts, Charles G.D., 176 Robson, John M., 894, 897n4 Roe v. Wade, 196–8, 660 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism romanticism, picture of Nietzsche, 34 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 71n4 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 226, 264n47, 591 Rose, Charles, 721 Rosenthal, Raymond, 853 Ross, Murray, 782, 785n1 Rossignol, Jean Joseph, 501, 509n8 Rostow, W.W., 183, 188n8 Roth brothers, 862 Rotstein, Abraham, 118, 702, 705n3 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 12, 17n.b, 18, 66–7, 219–20, 242, 289, 434–5; contractarianism and, 232; criticism of Hobbes and Locke, 232; equality,

216; historical thinking of, 497–504; liberalism of, 208–9; progressivism of, 574 Royal Society, 845 Rubin, Jerry, 90n8 Russell, Bertrand, 99, 105n5, 201– 2n.a, 231, 498, 531 Rutherford, Ernest, 680–1n73 Ryan, Claude, 165, 173n7, 416–17 Ryle, Gilbert, 357, 383n11 Said, Edward W., 920–1, 922n1 Salisbury, Lord, 913 Sanskrit, 14, 591, 799; culture of India, 12 Santa Maria degli Angeli chapel, 789 Sarraute, Claude, 447 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 242, 487n5; on Céline, 455 Sastri, Kokilesvara, 522 Satz vom Grund, Der (Heidegger), 363 Savage Fields (Lee), 517, 518 Savio, Mario, 156, 159n6 Schmidt, Lawrence E., xx, xxv, 581n1, 589; Grant interview, 562–81 scholarship, objectivity and, 98–103 Schumann, Maurice, 788, 794–5, 802n5 Schurman, Donald M., 911 Schwab, Raymond, 921, 922n2 science, 28; faith and, 607–8; modern use of word, 389; Newtonian, 598; theoretical and applied, 275 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 176 Scott, Edward W., 708 Seale, Bobby, 90n8 Second Discourse (Rousseau), 501 Second Vatican Council, 803n18 Second World War: and Céline, 482; effect of on Grant, 358; and Weil family, 873

Index secularism, 240; American, 746 Sein und Zeit (Heidegger), 65, 139 sexuality, 619–21, 781–3; and religion, 792 Shaheen, John, 169, 174n11 Shakespeare, William, 65–6; Macbeth, 25 Sheehan, Thomas, 572, 574 Sherrard, Philip, 324–5 Sholem, Gershom, 859–60, 866n14 should, use of, 290–1, 293 Silesius, Angelus, 682n89 Simenon, Georges, 387 Simon, Pierre, Marquis de Laplace, 683n111 Simone Weil: A Life (Pétrement), 776, 851 Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage (Coles), 776–7, 855 sin, language of, 372–3 Skelton, Oscar Douglas, 893, 897n2, 928n5 Smallwood, J.R.(Joey), 174n11 Smart, Elizabeth, 925, 928n1 Smith, Donald Alexander, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, 27n.d, 73n27 Smith, S.G. Denis, 112, 116n4 Smith, Sidney Earle, 401n32 social contract, 206–7, 211, 214, 218; Rawls’s account of, 192–3 social democracy, values of, 41–2 socialism, 180 social sciences, 29; values of, 121 sociology, 34 Socrates, xxi, 39, 613, 622; contempt of his court, 85; daimon, 749; death of, 760–3; defence of, 737–8; on the good, 316; and Nietzsche, 340–3; problem of, 645; rationalism of, 45, 756; and technology, 526

1107

Solesmes, 789 ‘Some Comments on Simone Weil and the Neurotic and Alienated’ (Grant), 772 Sontag, Susan, 794 Source grècque, La (Weil), 808 Soviet Union, Sputnik, 421, 424n2 Space Age, 424n2 Spadina Expressway, 173n10, 287, 298n10 Spanish Civil War, 772, 871 Spinoza, Baruch, 360–1 Stairs, Denis Winfield, 702, 705n5 Stalin, Joseph, 727, 865n9 Stanfield, Robert, 412, 413–14n9 Stavisky, Serge Alexandre, 485, 488n18 Steed, Judy, 497 Stefansson, Vilhjalmur, 611, 681n79 Strauss, Leo, xx, 57, 128, 137, 312n8, 342, 343–4n3, 766, 842, 848n36, 875, 877; influence on Grant, 360–1; on More in The City and Man, 837–8; and political philosophy, 1073–8; on question of revelation, 829; on teaching, 832 Stronach, Frank, 702, 704n2 Stuart, James Edward, 264n52 Stuart, Mary, 264n52 Sun Life Insurance Co., 417, 419– 20n5 superman, 46–7 Supreme Court of Canada, on abortion, 726–34 Sur la science (Weil), 798 Suzuki, David Takayoshi, 702, 704n2, 719–70 Swift, Jonathan, 232, 625, 883, 921, 922n2 Sykes, Lady, 913 Symons, Scott, 107, 110n1

1108

Index

Symposium (Plato), 556, 636–7, 826, 839 Talmon, J.L., 201–2n.a Taylor, Edward Plunket (E.P.), 98, 105n4 Taylor, Harriet, 884, 895 technical civilization, 125–6, 136–7, 320 technical society, 130–1 technique(s): of administration, 186– 7; as neutral, 91n12; revolutions and advances in, 87; and technology, 274; use of word, 589–607 technological, word, 592 technological civilization, 294–5 technological development, 599 technological man, and temporality, 21–30 technological society, 4, 138–9, 283, 594–5; Catholic bishops and, 579; death in, 761; and professionalism, 538–9, 541, 543; women and, 780 Technological Society, The (Ellul), 130, 380 technology, 198–207, 254, 374, 376–7, 593–4; in the act of living, 129–30; as instruments, 595; and justice, 379–82, 525–34; modernity and, 191; in 1970s Canada, 409; North American, 133–4; and science, 314; and technique, 274; thinking about, 589–607 Technology and Empire (Grant), 4; ‘A Platitude,’ 4; and historical philosophy, xx Technology and Justice (Grant), xxii– xxiii, xxvi, 118, 776; ‘Abortion and Rights,’ xxv; ‘The Language of Euthanasia,’ xxv

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 262n24, 863, 865n23 temporality, and technological man, 21–30 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 432, 468n8 Testart, Jacques, 716, 721 theology: and history, 365–74; negative, 825–6; positive, 825–6; propositions of, 123 Theology and Technology (Mitcham and Grote, eds), 118 Theory of Justice, A (Rawls), xxi, 192, 207 ‘Theory of the Sacraments, The’ (Weil), 788 Theresa of Avila, Saint, 864, 869 Thibon, Gustave, 792, 793, 808 ‘Thinking About Technology’ (Grant), xxii, 118 This Magazine, 928n2; Grant’s defence of, 925–6 thought: and responsibility, 129; thinking about, 132 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 4, 5, 41, 88 Tillich, Paul, 358, 383n12 Timaeus (Plato), 87 time: as future, 24; as history, 11–20; as mastery, 52–62; as progress, 24; Weil’s doctrine of, 841–4 Titus Lucretius Carus, 267–8n73 Tocqueville, Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clérel de, 264n48, 893, 895, 897n3 Tolstoy, Leo, 57 Tracy, David, 574, 582n11 tradition: and reason, 59–60; and revolution, 79–90 Triumph of the Will, The (documentary film), 728 Trollope, Anthony, 487n12

Index Trotsky, Leon Davidovich, 852, 854n3, 859, 873 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 12, 112–14, 116nn5, 9, 300n2, 333n2, 336, 419, 748, 917; cosmopolitanism of, 354; Cruise missiles and, 566, 568; and Diefenbaker, 406; on ‘new values,’ in Time magazine, 299; 1970s Canada, 409–11; and separatists, 347–8 truth, language of, 38 Tureck, Rosalyn, 432, 468n7 Twilight of the Idols, The (Nietzsche), 84 Übermensch, 8 Underhill, F.H., 3 Unitarians, 759 United Church, 708; Abortion, A Study, 672 United Nations: General Assembly, 3; Rights of the Child, 669; Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 71n4 United States: as capitalist empire, 237, 408; capitalist individualism of, 355; constitution, 235; constitutional contractualism, 236; constitution and system of justice, 252; Democratic Party, 80, 112; Democratic Party Convention, 1968, 75n44, 85; education, 421; expansion of, 133; Protestantism in, 239; relations with Canada, 413n2; Republican Party, 111–12; Supreme Court, 748 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), 3, 71n4 universalism, in Canada, 112–13 universities, expansion of in the 1960s, 421–4; U.S. professors in Canada, 423

1109

University of Toronto, 652 U.S. Supreme Court: Dred Scott Decision, 667–8; Roe v. Wade, xxi, 196–8, 244–8, 277, 665, 668–9, 266– 7n68 utilitarianism, 208–9, 230–1 Vallat, Xavier, 861 Vallee, Hubert Prior (Rudy), 435, 468n14 values, 36; and fact distinction, 393; and ideals, 283, 290, 293; language of, 83, 118–23; moral interpretations, 251–2; multiversities, 186; use of the word, 53 Van der Zalm, Wilhelmus (‘Bill’), 749, 768n10 Vedanta, 522–3, 591, 613, 632, 676n27, 733; and Christianity, 857; suicide in, 739; truth of, 393 veil of ignorance, 212, 225 Venise sauvée (Weil), 798 Vetö, Miklos, 775; La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil, 862 Vico, Giambattista, 618, 908, 909n2, 910n3 Victoria, Queen, 913 Vie de Simone Weil, La (Pétrement), 775 Vietnam War, xx, 58, 68–9, 75n44, 85, 90n8, 111–12, 183, 205n.b, 227, 358; and Nixon, 111–12; U.S. defeat in, 408 Voegelin, Eric, 857–8, 865n7 Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 488n16; anti-Judaism of, 484 voluntarism, 372–3 von Ranke, Leopold, 438–9 von Raumnitz, Major, 459 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich, 502, 509n9

1110

Index

von Wisine, Madame, 634 Voyage to the End of the Night (Céline), 473 Waffle, the, 705n6 Waiting on God (Weil), 772, 792, 877 Wall, Ann, 589, 675n12 war, and imperialism, 227 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 57 Ward, Barbara, 3, 70n1 War Measures Act, 113, 114, 410, 412, 417 Watergate, 492, 492n4 Waterloo, Battle of, 264n51 Watkins, Mel, 333n1, 705n6 Weber, Max, 73n33, 180, 181–3, 188n5, 215, 845; and Nietzsche’s writings, 34 Weil, André, 771, 772, 784, 859, 865n12 Weil, Selma (mother of Simone), 772, 859–60, 861, 873–4 Weil, Simone, 321, 324, 355, 580–1, 622, 745, 859; belief in God, 871; central themes of, 812; concepts of desire and obedience, 811; conversion, 830–1, 833; death of, 786, 788, 807; and dualism, 754; in the factory, 833; on faith, xxiii, 576–7, 585– 6, 609; on idolatry, 757–8, 909; ‘impossible love,’ 782; influence of, xix–xx, 360–2; and Judaism, 856–7; Platonism of, 315; ‘Prologue,’ 861; ‘Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies,’ 848n35; sexual existence of, 781–3; and Spanish Civil War, 833 Weimar Republic, 916–17

Weiner, Lee, 90n8 Wellington, Duke of, 87 Western civilization, crisis in, 11–20 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger), 553–4, 827–8 What Is Political Philosophy? (Strauss), 57, 842 White, Bob, 702, 705n4 Whitehead, Alfred North, 17, 72n18, 256, 530, 531 Whitlam, Gough, 300n1 Whitney, Sir James Pliny, 912, 914n3 Who Shall Survive (documentary), 690n192 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 639, 686n135 Wilde, Oscar, 884 will, 389; freedom and, 371; language of, 834; meaning of, 727–8 William of Orange, Prince, 264n52 willing: language of, 24–8; and reasoning, 28; and thinking, 24–8 Will to Power (Nietzsche), 316, 553 Wilson, Bertha, 728, 735n4 Wilson, Harold, Baron, 889, 892n3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 320, 503, 510n11, 551 women’s movement, 780–1 Wood, Edward Frederick, first Earl of Halifax, 266n64 Wood, Josiah, 258n1 Wordsworth, William, 488n14 Wrong, George, 105n1 Yeats, William Butler, 129 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 438 Youth International Party (‘yippies’), 75n44