Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: Politische Philosophie: 2 Wellen; Rousseau: Nature - Kultur; "der allgemeine Wille"

Kurzinhalt: ... nature (satisfaction of needs on the level of organistic spontaneity) and culture; freedom for him was coordinate with the perfectibility of the amiable but brutish human being

Textausschnitt: 2.22 The second wave of modern political philosophy.

18 In his First and Second Discourses, Rousseau laid bare the opposition between nature - now identified with the satisfaction of needs on the level of organistic spontaneity - and culture or civilization. He thus set the stage for the modern use of the term culture. As Bloom has written:

according to Kant, Rousseau in his later works, Emile, Social Contract, Nouvelle Heloise, proposed a possible unity that harmonized the low natural demands with the high responsibilities of morality and art. This unity Kant called "culture." (1990, p. 278)
Rousseau, therefore, unleashed the first cultural critique of the mercenary morality of liberalism. (255; Fs) (notabene)

19 From the point of view of the structure of the human good, we can say that Rousseau's scathing attack was actually an ambiguous breakthrough to the second (social) and third (cultural) levels in reaction to the early modern reduction of all elements to the first level. Both the breakthrough and its ambiguity are signaled by the notorious modern dichotomies between nature and freedom, nature and history, and nature and art, which were exploited till our own day by the movements of idealism, historicism, and Romanticism. No less than Hobbes and Locke, however, Rousseau conceived of liberty without any reference to divine transcendence. Though he did not confine freedom to the limits of scientific calculation and technical control and debunked early liberalism's utilitarianism and instrumentalism, freedom for him was coordinate with the perfectibility of the amiable but brutish human being he uncovered in the state of nature, and its matrix was that animal's "simple feeling of existence," its "conscience" as "the science of simple souls." (255; Fs) (notabene)

20 Out of the framework built with these ideas, Rousseau eventually developed the idea of the "general will." On the one hand, the general will was to be understood in terms of national custom, national "philosophy," or the "mystique of the nation." We have become familiar with these ideas under the guise of such terms as Hegel's Zeitgeist or Whitehead's "climate of opinion." On the other hand, Kant drew out the more idealist implications of the general will, for example, in his moralistic grounding of human rights. Earlier liberalism's "natural" rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were founded not so much in the state of nature theory as on factual evidence on the dominance within human beings of the natural inclinations toward security and comfort. But Kant uses the ability (shown by Rousseau to be human and rational, but not natural) humans possess of universalizing their desire in order to subordinate the older liberalism's self-interest in safety and prosperity to rights conceived of as universal principles that serve to define human beings as free and independent. (255; Fs)

21 One can appreciate the high moral tone of this transformation of so-called natural rights into human rights. It does seem to give primacy to the moral demands proper to the second and third levels. However, the apriorism, abstractness, and formalism of Kant's thought not only divorce his grounding from any concrete practical relevance; but his intelligible ego with its good will is so isolated from the empirically verifiable process of communication within which subjects grow to maturity that we are forced to concede that it is quite utopian (not to say unreal) as well. Kant had no way of tethering his "normative" realm of freedom to empirically verifiable fact; and so he buttressed it with postulates about God, freedom, and immortality, on the one hand; and with a speculative philosophy of history, on the other. Even on Kantian grounds, the former threesome may be argued not to exist; and Kant's philosophy of history finally settles for a distinction between morality and mere legality that represents a compromise of rational faith with Realpolitik. (256; Fs)

22 As a result of the two waves of modernity, there are two chief forms or languages of Western liberalism. They both depart from the modern assumption that the chief concern or issue of modern politics is power. First, commercial democracy is based on consent to governmental power as guarantor of public safety and comfort and on the doctrine of classical political economy that if there are no restrictions to free economic activity other than enlightened self-interest, social harmony and well-being will necessarily prevail. Second, socialist politics of compassion grounds the legitimacy of governmental power upon the extent to which it bolsters equality not merely of opportunity (that is, the political right to endeavor to acquire and dispose of one's property within the limits of the law and the civil right to freedom of expression and to self-government), but of the satisfaction of aggregate societal needs (under the heading of economic, social, and cultural rights to such things as health, housing, education, employment, sanitation, etc.) by attempting to reconcile older liberalism's means with socialist or collectivist ends in what has been since called welfare economics. Both versions of liberalism are staunchly convinced of the efficacy of scientific prediction and control and of institutionally contrived solutions to political problems. In general, and by way of oversimplification, advocates of commercial democracy believe that enlightened self-interest in private good is the operator of common weal, and they preach the ideal of as much freedom as possible for the individual and the equality of opportunity. In the United States we tend to label this stance conservative. Secularist proponents of the socialist politics of compassion depend upon "culture" to supply the link between the self-regarding individual and disinterested respect of the law or the rights of others by generating a secular kind of compassion that educes gentle and beneficent concern for others from natural selfishness. They advocate a greater equality of conditions or results in life and preach equality of influence and power for all. In the United States we tend to reserve the name liberal for people who are considered politically progressive in this sense. (256f; Fs) (notabene)