Traditionalist conservatives and classical liberals need Charles Darwin. They need him because a Darwinian science of human nature supports Burkean conservatives and Lockean liberals in their realist view of human imperfectibility, and in their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in natural desires, cultural traditions, and prudential judgments. Arnhart's email address is larnhart1@niu.edu.
I have argued that there is a Kantian conservative tradition of atheistic religiosity expressed in people like Roger Scruton and Leon Kass, which resembles the Dionysian religiosity of Friedrich Nietzsche. Atheistic religiosity is for those who want the "magic of religious feeling" as an expression of the human mind's "religious instinct," but without having to believe in the real existence of God independent of the human mind. They don't believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion. And yet they want to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines. They believe that God is dead, but they also believe that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption if they are to escape the nihilism that they fear comes from the death of God.
In the April issue of First Things, Carl Trueman offered a similar interpretation of Scruton's religious longings. Although Trueman saw that religious themes became prominent in Scruton's later work, he wondered "whether Scruton believed in God or whether he simply believed that God was a good idea." He asked, "was Scruton's God a theological reality or an anthropological one?" He observed: "I fear that Scruton is too faithful a student of Kant to engage with the deeper metaphysical claims that, say, Christianity makes. Throughout his work . . . it is always the experiential reality of the sense of the sacred and the good things that flow from it that he addresses. But is that really enough?" He also observed: "Scruton is vulnerable to the criticism that the place he ascribes to the religious instinct simply supports his own cultural and political tastes, granting them a veneer of authority. Is his thinking thus a castle--albeit a magnificent and beautiful castle--floating precariously in mid-air? Or, more controversially, is it a conservative expression of nihilism, with values likely to devalue themselves over time through lack of any solid, transcendent foundation?" Thus did Trueman point to what I have identified as Scruton's atheistic religiosity--affirming the anthropological need for God without affirming the theological reality of God's existence.
In the June/July issue of First Things, there is a letter from Daniel J. Mahoney disputing Trueman's interpretation of Scruton. He writes: "Even after Scruton left his 'apprenticeship in atheism,' as he once called it, he never became or wished to become a theologian or a metaphysician. His approach remained eminently phenomenological, defending those intimations of the transcendent that come to sight in the 'life world' of lived experience and mutual moral accountability. Trueman suggests that this approach, eschewing traditional metaphysics, likely veils the 'conservative expression of nihilism,' defending a 'religious instinct' that ultimately points to nothing beyond itself."
Trueman cannot be right about this, Mahoney insists, because "Scruton was the sworn enemy of every form of nihilism." He cites an essay by Mark Dooley ("Roger Scruton Was No Atheist") as proving that Scruton was not an atheist.
The first problem with Mahoney's argument is that he fails to see that the most fervent critics of atheistic nihilism are themselves nihilists who turn to atheistic religiosity in their attempt to escape what they fear to be the degrading consequences of nihilism. The preeminent example of this is Nietzsche. Even as he announced that "God is dead," he lamented the debasing effects that this would have on human beings who would no longer be elevated by transcendent longings for the divine. To avoid this, he professed his faith in the religion of Dionysus that would allow him to be the most pious of those who do not believe in God.
The second problem with Mahoney's argument is that he concedes Trueman's point that Scruton's God is a subjective projection of the human mind's longing that has no objective reality. Notice that Mahoney admits that Scruton's religion was purely "phenomenological"--rooted in human "lived experience"--but with no foundation in theological or metaphysical truth. So, even though we know that God is dead, we need to feel that He is alive; and that emotional need is satisfied by Scruton's atheistic religiosity.
It should also be noted that in the essay by Dooley cited by Mahoney, Dooley never says that Scruton believed in the real existence of God independently of the human mind. Dooley's point is that Scruton scorned the "evangelical atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Attacking evangelical atheists is exactly what one should expect of a religious atheist.
That was the first sentence of my article in the November 2000 issue of First Things. I argued that conservatives need Darwin because a Darwinian science of human nature supports conservatives in their realist view of human imperfectability and their commitment to ordered liberty as rooted in nature, custom, and prudence. In his response to my article in the same issue of the journal, Michael Behe (a biologist known for his advocacy of "intelligent design theory" as an alternative to Darwinian science) complained: "I'm sorry to be blunt, but the notion that Darwinism supports conservatism is absurd."
I elaborated my argument in my book Darwinian Conservatism (2005), and in a second edition of that book with eight critical responses and my replies (2009). In the fall 2010 issue of The Intercollegiate Review, I wrote about "Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism." I have defended that article against three critics in a post (here).
Over this weekend, I have been thinking about this debate as I pondered the presentations at a conference in Grand Rapids sponsored by the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal: "Prospects for Anglo-American Conservatism in the Tradition of Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton." Although neither Kirk nor Scruton ever moved toward anything like Darwinian conservatism, I see nothing in their defense of traditionalist conservatism that would refute my argument for Darwinian conservatism. Previously, I have written about some of my points of agreement and disagreement with Kirk and Scruton. Here I will respond to some of the presentations at the conference.
THE METAPHYSICAL CONSERVATISM OF CHRISTIAN PLATONISM
James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) spoke about "The Conservative Defense of Christian Platonism" in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution and in the writings of Roger Scruton. He saw both Burke and Scruton as trying to preserve the Christian-Platonic tradition of Christendom that had dominated Western Civilization until it was overturned by the French Revolution. While praising both of them for what they tried to do, Wilson thought their undertakings were weakened by their drawing on modern thought that subverted Christian-Platonist thought. Burke appealed to the sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment when he invoked those "natural feelings" and "moral sentiments" that show "the natural sense of right and wrong" and "the moral constitution of the heart" as the foundation of moral experience. Scruton appealed to Immanuel Kant's Idealism as teaching that while the Ideas of Reason, God, Freedom, and Immortality cannot be proven true by pure reason, we must act "as if" they were true as a necessity of practical reason: these are conscious fictions of the mind.
I believe that Wilson was drawing material from his book The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). But since I have not read that book, I might not have rightly understood his presentation.
As I have argued in some previous posts, Plato's moral cosmology--particularly in the Republic, the Timaeus, the Parmenides, and The Laws--is so implausible as to be ridiculous, and it's not even clear that Plato or Plato's Socrates meant us to take this seriously. I have suggested that while Plato might have thought that a teleological cosmology of divinely intelligent design could be a salutary belief for many people, it could not be a rational account of the cosmos for natural philosophers. Aristotle suggested this in observing that such cosmic myths were little more than traditional folk tales (On the Heavens, 270b1-25, 283b26-284b5, 291b24-292a20, 298b6-299a2; The Movement of Animals, 699b12-31; Metaphysics, 1050b20-25, 1074b1-14). But perhaps Wilson in his book has answered my objections.
Although much of Burke's Reflections seems to defend a Christian Platonic metaphysics, Wilson observed, this is in tension with Burke's empiricist ethics of moral sentiments that shows the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment. As I indicated in my Intercollegiate Review article, I agree with this reading of Burke's Reflections, because I see there a tension between the metaphysical conservatism of Burke's moral cosmology of eternal right and wrong and the evolutionary conservatism of his moral anthropology of the moral sentiments.
But unlike Wilson, I don't see Burke's sentimentalism as weakening his argument for Christian Platonism. In fact, Burke wrote his Reflections as a refutation of Reverend Richard Price's Christian Platonism. Price contended that moral knowledge was a purely rational activity of the mind in grasping the eternal and immutable metaphysical truths of God's mind, and that the French Revolution was the historical fulfillment of those eternal truths. Against Price's metaphysical morality, Burke rightly appealed to the natural moral sentiments as the empirical foundation of moral experience. Later, Darwin adopted this moral sentimentalism as part of his evolutionary account of morality, which was then elaborated by evolutionary psychologists like Edward Westermarck and Darwinian conservatives like James Q. Wilson.
By contrast, James Matthew Wilson scorned moral sentimentalism as mere emotionalism, in which morality is reduced to emotive expressions without any rational apprehension of the human good. But this ignores the fact that the moral sentimentalism of the Scottish Enlightenment--particularly in the work of Hume and Smith--was a reflective sentimentalism. As I have indicated, the Scottish sentimentalists did not argue for enslaving reason to emotion, because they actually argued for moral autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind (reason and emotion), in which the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable. We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments about the world, and whether they promote or impede our happiness.
SCRUTON'S CONSERVATISM OF RELIGIOUS ATHEISM
Wilson also criticized Scruton for embracing Kant's Idealism because this modern Idealism contradicts the premodern Idealism of Christian Platonism. While Kant's ideas are fictional creations of the human mind that do not correspond to any objective reality in the world, Plato's ideas are meant to be intellectual perceptions of what exists in objective reality independently of the human mind.
As I said earlier, I am not persuaded that Plato believed his Eternal Ideas to be anything more than a noble lie. After all, in Plato's Parmenides, Plato has Parmenides refute Socrates' theory of the Forms, and Socrates cannot defend his theory against the criticisms; and in fact, nowhere in the Platonic dialogues does anyone satisfactorily reply to the criticisms.
I do agree with Wilson, however, that Scruton does not really affirm the objective truth of Christian Platonist metaphysics, because for Scruton this religious metaphysics is only a fictional creation of the human mind to satisfy a human longing for the divine. As I have said previously, Scruton makes this clear in his praise for the atheistic religiosity of Richard Wagner's operatic art in the Ring cycle. Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it." "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols. Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine. Art reveals that truth through symbols." In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions. Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics." Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology. Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning. And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption.
The incoherent self-deception of such atheistic religiosity is ultimately self-defeating. How can a fake religiosity satisfy our religious longings when we know it's fake?
Darwinian conservatism offers a better account of the religious longings of the human animal. As I have argued previously, Darwin was a zetetic philosophic scientist who recognized that the natural desire for religious transcendence was part of evolved human nature; and while Darwin himself took the side of reason in the reason/revelation debate, he knew that reason could not refute revelation. He knew that the "mystery of the origin of all things is insoluble by us." In the search for ultimate explanation, the philosophic scientist must assume that nature is the uncaused cause of everything; and yet he cannot refute the claim of the religious believer that God is the uncaused cause of nature. Darwin conceded this in accepting the principle of dual causality, which recognizes natural evolution as the "secondary cause" of everything, while admitting that behind or above nature there might be a Divine First Cause. Thus, Darwin saw that he had to remain open to the possibility of theistic evolution: God does not have to miraculously intervene in nature to specially create every species, because God can choose to act through natural evolution to carry out his creative plan.
This supports a conservative view of religion. The Darwinian scientist respects religious belief in revelation as satisfying the evolved natural desire for religious transcendence. But the Darwinian scientist must also insist that since neither side in the reason/revelation debate can refute the other, and since the disagreement among believers in their interpretations of revelation make it impossible to identify the one true religion, the best regime must secure the freedom of thought and speech that promotes the reason/revelation debate and respects religious pluralism.
Tomorrow, I will see the new production of Richard Wagner's Die Walkure at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This is the second of the four operas in Wagner's Ring cycle. In the spring of 2020, Lyric will have performances of all four of the operas in one week, so that audiences can sit through all 17 hours of the cycle over a few days, as Wagner originally intended.
As I have indicated in my previous posts on Wagner (here, here, here, and here), I regard Die Meistersinger as his best opera, because it shows how a free society with only a limited "night-watchman state" can foster the full range of human virtue, from the low to the high, including the virtuous cultural activities of art, science, and philosophy, and thus it provides no support for Hitler's Nazi statism. By contrast, Wagner's Ring cycle manifests the Romantic conception of art as appealing to the Dionysian emotions of an atheistic religiosity, which was so attractive to Hitler and the Nazis.
It is this Wagnerian art of atheistic religiosity that appeals to conservative philosophers like Roger Scruton, as is evident in his book The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung" (Allen Lane, 2016). Scruton is one of the preeminent theorists of political conservatism; and like many conservatives in Great Britain and the United States, he thinks a religious attitude is essential for a healthy moral order, and therefore that traditional religious experience needs to be defended against a Darwinian science that claims to explain the place of human beings in the natural world without any reference to a transcendent realm beyond nature. And yet--again like many other conservatives--Scruton does not believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion. He wants to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines. We know that God is dead, but we also know that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption. That's the truth that Scruton sees in Wagner's Ring cycle.
Scruton traces that truth back to Kant and to the German philosophers in the nineteenth century whose thinking was shaped by Kant's idealism: "Kant begat Fichte, who begat Hegel who begat Feuerbach; and Feuerbach begat both Wagner and Marx" (16).
I cannot embrace the atheistic religiosity of Kant, Wagner, and Scruton, because this line of thinking is incoherent self-deception, and because it led to the Nazi philosophers of the 1930s. (I have written a post on the Kantian idealism of the Nazi philosophers.)
Scruton thinks that Wagner saw the "bleak truth" that "we are here on earth without an explanation and that if there is meaning, we ourselves must supply it" (36). "The core religious phenomenon, Wagner believed, is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. . . . religion contains deep truths about the human psyche; but these truths become conscious only in art, which captures them in symbols. Religion conceals its legacy of truth within a doctrine. Art reveals that truth through symbols" (40). In other words, "Wagner sees his art as expressing and completing our religious emotions. Art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics" (41). Religion is an "elaborate fiction," because the gods exist only in human imagination, but in Wagner's imaginative art, the gods symbolize truthfully the spiritual needs of our human psychology (56).
Our deepest spiritual need is redemption from a world that has no meaning. And Scruton believes that Wagner's Ring cycle satisfies our human longing for redemption. For Scruton, this is clearest in two parts of the Ring. First, in Act 3 of Die Walkure, which begins with the famous ride of the Valkyries. In the previous act, Siegmund has been killed, and Brunnhilde has taken his wife Sieglinde onto the saddle of her horse to save her from Wotan. Sieglinde sees no reason to live. But Brunnhilde tells her that she must live to save the child--the future hero Siegfried--whom she carries in her womb. The music introduces the motif of Siegfried as hero followed by a passionate climax with the motif of Sieglinde's blessing, which is often called the "redemption motif." This motif is not heard again until we hear it at the very end of the cycle as the last music we hear at the end of Gotterdammerung ("The Twilight of the Gods"). So, the meaning of the whole Ring cycle, it seems, is the artfully aroused emotion of redemption.
I must say that when my wife and I saw the complete Ring cycle at the Lyric Opera in April of 2005--four operas over six days--the closing music did leave us with an ecstatic feeling that might be identified as redemption. (Well, okay, we were also feeling exhausted relief that we had finally made it through the 17 hours of Wagnerian opera!)
But then, as Scruton admits, anyone who wonders about what this really means must ask: redemption from what, to what, by whom? The Christian will answer: redemption from our sinful human condition, to an eternal life of bliss with God, by the grace bestowed on us by Jesus Christ. C. S. Lewis conveyed this thought in his account of his early life in Surprised by Joy. He remembered the first time he saw a book with the title Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods with illustrations of Wagner's Ring cycle. He became totally taken over by Wagner and Norse mythology. He tried to write a heroic poem on the Wagnerian version of the Nibelung story. Here he felt what he called "the stab of Joy" that would later be fulfilled in his conversion to Christianity. Wagner's Ring cycle was a pointer to something else--to the Joy that only Christians can know.
But since Wagner and Scruton deny the truth of these Christian doctrines, this kind of redemption is not possible for them. The only redemption that can come through Wagner's operas is the artistically induced feeling of redemption, which does not require any belief in the literal truth of Christian redemption.
I think Nietzsche was right--during the middle period of his writing career, when he freed himself from his Dionysian enchantment with Wagner--in saying that this is all a magician's trick that gives us the fake emotions of a fake redemption. It's entertainment for atheists who want religious feelings without religious doctrines.
Scruton restates Nietzsche's objections to Wagner (296-99). But, oddly, Scruton doesn't even attempt to refute those objections. His only response to Nietzsche is to point out that in his last years Nietzsche revived the love for Wagner that he had had earlier in his life. "Clearly then, his attacks on Wagner did not cure him of the enchantment, and we are left wondering how sincerely he meant them" (299). Scruton then passes on without any further thought about what this reveals about Nietzsche's struggle with Wagner's atheistic religiosity.
In many posts (some of which can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here ), I have argued that Lou Salome (the woman who turned down Nietzsche's proposal of marriage) understood Nietzsche better than all of the other commentators on Nietzsche. (I have also written about this in my Nietzsche chapter in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker.)
Salome saw that Nietzsche was deeply moved by religious longings that made Wagner's art appealing to him, that he escaped from this only in the middle period of his writing (particularly in Human, All Too Human), when he adopted a scientific view of the world, which was the most intellectually defensible position that he ever took, but then in his later writings, he returned to the religious longings that were expressed in his attempt to create a new Dionysian religion.
In his middle period, Nietzsche understood how the need for redemption had become so strong for human beings that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art. Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music like Wagner's operas that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines. Romantic art in general shows "the magic of religious feeling" as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art. (In his essay "Nietzsche on Wagner," Scruton jumps from Nietzsche's early writings to his later writings, while passing over in silence Nietzsche's middle writings.)
In his middle period, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian science of evolution according to which "everything has evolved." By Nietzsche's Darwinian account, morality does not elevate human beings beyond the natural world, because human morality arises as a natural development of animal nature. There is no need for a redemptive transcendence of nature to give meaning to human life, because life, even in its mortality and contingency, is inherently good in its intrinsic purposefulness without any need for cosmic purposefulness. (I have suggested that this thought is conveyed in Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty.")
Scruton occasionally comes close to saying something like this, but then he insists on the need for redemption in a way that renders his thought incoherent. Explaining Wagner's operatic art, he observes:
". . . it takes the turning points of human life and frames them as religious sacrifices--it is a 'making sacred' of those moments when we must pay the full cost of being what we are. It is not absurd to give to these moments the name that Wagner clung to when attempting to summarize their power--Erlosung, or redemption. He did not mean that word in its Christian sense, as invoking the promise and the purchase of a better life to come. He meant it as a description of the religious rite itself, and hence of the moment of transcendence on the tragic stage: the moment when life is shown to be intrinsically worthwhile, exactly when it is engulfed by the ambient nothingness" (302).
But if we know that life is "intrinsically worthwhile," so that we have no need for "the promise and the purchase of a better life to come," then it makes no sense to say that life's worth depends on transcendence, if only the fake transcendence of operatic emotion. Moreover, it's hard to see how such fake transcendence works if we know it's fake.
I suppose that Scruton would say that it's not completely fake, because the longing for transcendence in human nature is a real phenomenon of human psychology. That's his claim in his new book On Human Nature, which I will take up in my next post.
In a previous post, I have written about Matt Ridley's The Evolution of Everything, which is in a way a modern exploration of the implications of Nietzsche's thought that "everything has evolved."
