Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
08-25-2015, 06:32 PM
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/08/conservatism-defined-sort-of.html
Conservatism, philosophy, politics and poetry.--Tyr
Burke and De Tocqueville
Much of the effort over the past six decades to define, delimit, and shape a conservatism tangible for the modern and post-modern western world has rooted itself in the works and thoughts of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. Each received new attention immediately following the allied victory in World War II, and the importance of their respective thought to conservatism has yet to wane. Burke, famously, not only defended American independence and the right of Americans to possess all of the traditional rights of Englishmen but he also offered the first real opposition to the French Revolution and what it unleashed upon the western world, the concept of what would be called “ideology.” In his philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, Burke’s overriding concern was the upholding of the dignity of the humane, whether for the American colonials, the Irish, Asian Indians, or Roman Catholics. In a similar fashion and in the vein of Burke, de Tocqueville too analyzed the western world, especially America
and France, with an eye toward the humane. As de Tocqueville perceptively noted in his Democracy in America, no liberty has ever existed anywhere unpurchased by some sacrificial exertion. Equality comes slowly but meaningfully, while liberty appears only from time to time. Still, as de Tocqueville claimed, no matter how natural or God-given a right, a person must somehow claim what is his or hers. Burke and de Tocqueville each sought to pursue Justice in this world through a proper, Aristotelian form of community as natural to the greatest longings of the human person. Flawed man can, according to this view, only attain his highest gifts and ultimate end, in a community. To live outside of community, each argued, a human ceases to be human.
Conservatism, though appealing to Burke and de Tocqueville, also viewed them as carrying on, or perhaps best exemplifying, all that had come before them in the western tradition. Never shy about selectively reading the past, conservatives over the past six decades have identified a lineage of ancestors, dating from the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, philosopher of the Logos, forward. Others in this line of thinkers include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cleanthes, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Seneca, St. John, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Alfred the Great, Thomas a Becket, St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Dante, Erasmus, and St. Thomas More. For many conservatives of Kirk’s generation, the West had slowly developed its ideas of the humane—domestically and abroad—but civilization floundered profoundly around the time of Machiavelli. As Kirk believed the situation to be, the Socratic West ended with the writing of The Prince and the acceptance of power over love as the primary motive force in world affairs. Sometime during the Renaissance, according to many conservatives, the world entered a new dark age, an age that resented tradition and, by necessity, men. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation attempted to undo the damage of the Renaissance, but failed, leading to the Enlightenment and the secularization of the West. The failures of the French and English Enlightenments led directly to the age of ideologies, a dark age within a dark age but intensely dangerous and brutal as well. Many conservatives saw the so-called “liberalism” of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries as a mere stage between the humane promoted by Christendom and the terror espoused by the Nazis and the Soviets. As T.S.Eliot put it in one of his choruses:
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?”
In sum, Eliot asserted in 1936, “If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Such was the bleak view from the few remaining and stubborn islands of civilization in the 1930s. It was this view, then, that many carried with them as they watched the U.S. government intern Americans of Japanese descent during WWII and the atomic annihilation of two Japanese cities in 1945. These horrors, perhaps more than any other events of the day, shaped conservatism, proving to a whole generation that the “colossal” in government, unions, and corporations would never allow for the humane.
From the perspective of many in the post-war era, Burke, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville represented the culmination of the highest of western thought, with everything coming after them merely a rearguard action, a rout at best. In this way, the conservatives of the twentieth century assumed that Burke, Smith, and de Tocqueville represented the West, coming at the end of an era, or, perhaps, an epoch, in the way that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came at the end of classical Greece, or Cicero at the end of republican Rome, or St. Augustine at the end of imperial Rome, or Sir Thomas More coming at the end of the English Catholic spring. For whatever reason, the greats of the Western tradition seem to have come at the end of an era. In the twentieth century, prior to the 1950s, those carrying on the conservative tradition were Irving Babbitt, a scholar of French literature at Harvard, Paul Elmer More, a classicist at Princeton, Albert Jay Nock, a quasi-anarchist and proponent of the liberal arts, Christopher Dawson, an English convert to Roman Catholicism, and T.S. Eliot, the Missourian turned Englishman and perhaps the greatest poet of the age.
What to Conserve?
Though conservatism never achieved, nor wanted to achieve, coherence or conformity, it is possible for the modern scholar, with some trepidation, to define it broadly through a set of principles to which most conservatives adhered. The most important question a conservative must ask is: “what is to be conserved?” Numerous traditions, of course, promoted the destruction or degradation of the human person. Institutions such as slavery, for example, must be abolished. The conservative, then, must prudently and justly judge what is to be maintained, what is to be rejected, and what is to be reformed within any society. Opposing all systems and ideologies, the conservative is always and everywhere a dogmatist in the proper sense of the term. The true dogmatist promotes a series of “good little truths” without reifying all knowledge as absolute or absolutist, recognizing the importance and humility of partial understanding of things. One man, finite but finite in a manner different from every other finite man, sees A, B, and D. Another sees C and E. Yet, another—the poetic mind—sees the connection from and between D and E. Perhaps, no one has yet discovered G, but every one easily sees F. This is simply the life of a finite person (or people) at any one point in history.
The first principle, then, of the conservative is the preciousness of each
individual human person, each an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom.
Though deeply flawed or, in religious terms, fallen, each man carries some
unique thing or things into the world, each born in a certain time and place,
each bearing the unique image of the Infinite mind and soul of the Creator. To the modern mind, this sounds as though it must be Jewish or Christian. But, the ancient Stoics, such as Zeno and Seneca, embraced a universal Creator, the Logos, as well. From this observation, a man best knows his own place within Justice. “I may assume that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and that, having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us,” Burke explained in 1791. “We have obligations to mankind at large, wh..............................
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Pay close attention to this part designated by me as (1)--Tyr
1. The fourth principle of the conservative is the recognition that the most
important knowledge is poetic knowledge. In 1978, Kirk wrote “Images are
representations of mysteries, necessarily; for mere words are tools that
break in the hand, and it has not pleased God that man should be saved by
logic, abstract reason, alone.” Such images, he continued, “can raise us
on high, as did Dante’s high dream; also it can draw us down to the abyss. . . .
It is imagery, rather than some narrowly deductive and inductive process,
which gives us great poetry and scientific insights. . . . And it is true of
great philosophy, before Plato and since him, that the enduring philosopher
sees things in images initially.” Owen Barfield, one of the most important
of twentieth-century thinkers, explored similar themes in his 1928 book,
Poetic Diction: “Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and
now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors,
which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from
perception. Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationship of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense ‘forgotten’ relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.” Through such Stoic and Christian insights, the person can recognize truth dogmatically, rather than systematically. These ideas also allow us to know our place in the order of existence: for each person is “an allegory,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his former student, famed poet W.H. Auden, “each embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life.”
2. The fifth principle conservatives uphold is an embracing of the classical
and Christian virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope,
and charity. Plato wrote of the first four, the classical virtues, in his
dialogue, the Symposium. Jewish culture adopted these in the deuterocanonical
Book of Wisdom, and St. Paul added the latter three in his first letter to the
peoples of Corinth. These virtues, along with allied ones, form the strongest
character of a person and, thus, serve as the surest guide to order in the soul
and in the commonwealth. The conservative, therefore, never views history as
progressive, but, instead, as revelatory. That is, history reveals when and
where the virtues have become manifest and where the vices have predominated.
With human nature as a constant, man neither becomes better nor worse, he merely
restrains or not, creates or not, embraces the virtues or not. In his highest
capacity, man embraces the greatest virtue, love, a willingness to surrender
oneself for the good of another.
Finally, the conservative tends to distrust all large organizations and
concentrations of power—corporate, educational, labor, bureaucratic, and political
—as hostile to the dignity of the individual person. While rejecting an abstract
and atomized individualism, conservatism does demand a non-conformist society of
talented and eccentric persons, each contributing his or her particular gifts
and talents to the various communities to which the person belongs. A person
understands himself best through community, conforming to the Natural Law but
not necessarily to man’s law. In this way, the conservative seeks long-term
change through the slow and deliberate art of literature, religion, education,
and culture. Politics, at best, sustains a community, protecting it from
immediate disorders, but rarely can it do more than restrain the evil within man.
When politics attempts to shape, it almost always fails, creating distortions
in human persons and communities. While this is true of all large power structures
, such corruption empirically seems particularly dangerous in political
organizations and bodies.
Conservatism, philosophy, politics and poetry.--Tyr
Burke and De Tocqueville
Much of the effort over the past six decades to define, delimit, and shape a conservatism tangible for the modern and post-modern western world has rooted itself in the works and thoughts of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville. Each received new attention immediately following the allied victory in World War II, and the importance of their respective thought to conservatism has yet to wane. Burke, famously, not only defended American independence and the right of Americans to possess all of the traditional rights of Englishmen but he also offered the first real opposition to the French Revolution and what it unleashed upon the western world, the concept of what would be called “ideology.” In his philosophy, politics, and aesthetics, Burke’s overriding concern was the upholding of the dignity of the humane, whether for the American colonials, the Irish, Asian Indians, or Roman Catholics. In a similar fashion and in the vein of Burke, de Tocqueville too analyzed the western world, especially America
and France, with an eye toward the humane. As de Tocqueville perceptively noted in his Democracy in America, no liberty has ever existed anywhere unpurchased by some sacrificial exertion. Equality comes slowly but meaningfully, while liberty appears only from time to time. Still, as de Tocqueville claimed, no matter how natural or God-given a right, a person must somehow claim what is his or hers. Burke and de Tocqueville each sought to pursue Justice in this world through a proper, Aristotelian form of community as natural to the greatest longings of the human person. Flawed man can, according to this view, only attain his highest gifts and ultimate end, in a community. To live outside of community, each argued, a human ceases to be human.
Conservatism, though appealing to Burke and de Tocqueville, also viewed them as carrying on, or perhaps best exemplifying, all that had come before them in the western tradition. Never shy about selectively reading the past, conservatives over the past six decades have identified a lineage of ancestors, dating from the pre-Socratic Heraclitus, philosopher of the Logos, forward. Others in this line of thinkers include Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Cleanthes, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, Seneca, St. John, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, Alfred the Great, Thomas a Becket, St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Petrarch, Dante, Erasmus, and St. Thomas More. For many conservatives of Kirk’s generation, the West had slowly developed its ideas of the humane—domestically and abroad—but civilization floundered profoundly around the time of Machiavelli. As Kirk believed the situation to be, the Socratic West ended with the writing of The Prince and the acceptance of power over love as the primary motive force in world affairs. Sometime during the Renaissance, according to many conservatives, the world entered a new dark age, an age that resented tradition and, by necessity, men. The Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation attempted to undo the damage of the Renaissance, but failed, leading to the Enlightenment and the secularization of the West. The failures of the French and English Enlightenments led directly to the age of ideologies, a dark age within a dark age but intensely dangerous and brutal as well. Many conservatives saw the so-called “liberalism” of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries as a mere stage between the humane promoted by Christendom and the terror espoused by the Nazis and the Soviets. As T.S.Eliot put it in one of his choruses:
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards?”
In sum, Eliot asserted in 1936, “If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.” Such was the bleak view from the few remaining and stubborn islands of civilization in the 1930s. It was this view, then, that many carried with them as they watched the U.S. government intern Americans of Japanese descent during WWII and the atomic annihilation of two Japanese cities in 1945. These horrors, perhaps more than any other events of the day, shaped conservatism, proving to a whole generation that the “colossal” in government, unions, and corporations would never allow for the humane.
From the perspective of many in the post-war era, Burke, Adam Smith, and Alexis de Tocqueville represented the culmination of the highest of western thought, with everything coming after them merely a rearguard action, a rout at best. In this way, the conservatives of the twentieth century assumed that Burke, Smith, and de Tocqueville represented the West, coming at the end of an era, or, perhaps, an epoch, in the way that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came at the end of classical Greece, or Cicero at the end of republican Rome, or St. Augustine at the end of imperial Rome, or Sir Thomas More coming at the end of the English Catholic spring. For whatever reason, the greats of the Western tradition seem to have come at the end of an era. In the twentieth century, prior to the 1950s, those carrying on the conservative tradition were Irving Babbitt, a scholar of French literature at Harvard, Paul Elmer More, a classicist at Princeton, Albert Jay Nock, a quasi-anarchist and proponent of the liberal arts, Christopher Dawson, an English convert to Roman Catholicism, and T.S. Eliot, the Missourian turned Englishman and perhaps the greatest poet of the age.
What to Conserve?
Though conservatism never achieved, nor wanted to achieve, coherence or conformity, it is possible for the modern scholar, with some trepidation, to define it broadly through a set of principles to which most conservatives adhered. The most important question a conservative must ask is: “what is to be conserved?” Numerous traditions, of course, promoted the destruction or degradation of the human person. Institutions such as slavery, for example, must be abolished. The conservative, then, must prudently and justly judge what is to be maintained, what is to be rejected, and what is to be reformed within any society. Opposing all systems and ideologies, the conservative is always and everywhere a dogmatist in the proper sense of the term. The true dogmatist promotes a series of “good little truths” without reifying all knowledge as absolute or absolutist, recognizing the importance and humility of partial understanding of things. One man, finite but finite in a manner different from every other finite man, sees A, B, and D. Another sees C and E. Yet, another—the poetic mind—sees the connection from and between D and E. Perhaps, no one has yet discovered G, but every one easily sees F. This is simply the life of a finite person (or people) at any one point in history.
The first principle, then, of the conservative is the preciousness of each
individual human person, each an unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom.
Though deeply flawed or, in religious terms, fallen, each man carries some
unique thing or things into the world, each born in a certain time and place,
each bearing the unique image of the Infinite mind and soul of the Creator. To the modern mind, this sounds as though it must be Jewish or Christian. But, the ancient Stoics, such as Zeno and Seneca, embraced a universal Creator, the Logos, as well. From this observation, a man best knows his own place within Justice. “I may assume that the awful Author of our being is the Author of our place in the order of existence,—and that, having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but according to His, He has in and by that disposition virtually subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us,” Burke explained in 1791. “We have obligations to mankind at large, wh..............................
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pay close attention to this part designated by me as (1)--Tyr
1. The fourth principle of the conservative is the recognition that the most
important knowledge is poetic knowledge. In 1978, Kirk wrote “Images are
representations of mysteries, necessarily; for mere words are tools that
break in the hand, and it has not pleased God that man should be saved by
logic, abstract reason, alone.” Such images, he continued, “can raise us
on high, as did Dante’s high dream; also it can draw us down to the abyss. . . .
It is imagery, rather than some narrowly deductive and inductive process,
which gives us great poetry and scientific insights. . . . And it is true of
great philosophy, before Plato and since him, that the enduring philosopher
sees things in images initially.” Owen Barfield, one of the most important
of twentieth-century thinkers, explored similar themes in his 1928 book,
Poetic Diction: “Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and
now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors,
which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from
perception. Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationship of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense ‘forgotten’ relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.” Through such Stoic and Christian insights, the person can recognize truth dogmatically, rather than systematically. These ideas also allow us to know our place in the order of existence: for each person is “an allegory,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his former student, famed poet W.H. Auden, “each embodying in a particular tale and clothed in the garments of time and place, universal truth and everlasting life.”
2. The fifth principle conservatives uphold is an embracing of the classical
and Christian virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, faith, hope,
and charity. Plato wrote of the first four, the classical virtues, in his
dialogue, the Symposium. Jewish culture adopted these in the deuterocanonical
Book of Wisdom, and St. Paul added the latter three in his first letter to the
peoples of Corinth. These virtues, along with allied ones, form the strongest
character of a person and, thus, serve as the surest guide to order in the soul
and in the commonwealth. The conservative, therefore, never views history as
progressive, but, instead, as revelatory. That is, history reveals when and
where the virtues have become manifest and where the vices have predominated.
With human nature as a constant, man neither becomes better nor worse, he merely
restrains or not, creates or not, embraces the virtues or not. In his highest
capacity, man embraces the greatest virtue, love, a willingness to surrender
oneself for the good of another.
Finally, the conservative tends to distrust all large organizations and
concentrations of power—corporate, educational, labor, bureaucratic, and political
—as hostile to the dignity of the individual person. While rejecting an abstract
and atomized individualism, conservatism does demand a non-conformist society of
talented and eccentric persons, each contributing his or her particular gifts
and talents to the various communities to which the person belongs. A person
understands himself best through community, conforming to the Natural Law but
not necessarily to man’s law. In this way, the conservative seeks long-term
change through the slow and deliberate art of literature, religion, education,
and culture. Politics, at best, sustains a community, protecting it from
immediate disorders, but rarely can it do more than restrain the evil within man.
When politics attempts to shape, it almost always fails, creating distortions
in human persons and communities. While this is true of all large power structures
, such corruption empirically seems particularly dangerous in political
organizations and bodies.