Redeeming the Enlightenment: Christianity and the Liberal Virtues - Softcover

Ward, Bruce

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802807615 ISBN 13: 9780802807618

Verlag: WILLIAM B EERDMANS PUB CO, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

In this probing book Bruce K. Ward reexamines four of the moral imperatives or "liberal virtues" associated with the Enlightenment -- equality, authenticity, tolerance, and compassion -- and argues that they are, in fact, based on Christian moral ideals. In the current debate surrounding post-Enlightenment secular humanism, Ward contends that we should seek not to reject or reclaim the Enlightenment but to redeem it.

Ward's study largely engages three key modern thinkers -- Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky -- yet also includes such other notables as Kant, Locke, Heidegger, Tolstoy, Kafka, René Girard, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum. The result is a lively and provocative forum for reconsidering and creatively retrieving what is most valuable in Enlightenment thought.

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Redeeming the Enlightenment

Christianity and the Liberal VirtuesBy BRUCE K. WARD

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2010 Bruce K. Ward
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8028-0761-8

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................................xiiiIntroduction...........................................................................11. Equality "Raising Up the Lowly"....................................................312. Authenticity "Becoming Those We Are" and/or The Call of God........................713. Tolerance "We Are All Responsible".................................................1134. Compassion The "Science of Active Love"............................................1555. A Theological Conclusion "Going Further" Than Liberal Humanism.....................195INDEX..................................................................................223

Chapter One

EQUALITY

"Raising Up the Lowly"

That astute French observer of democracy in North America, Alexis de Tocqueville, asserted that the notion of equality is the keynote of modernity: "I might almost say a religion." As a quasi-religious assumption it is all too likely to remain unexamined; yet once subject to examination, the idea of equality in relation to modernity presents us with a paradox. Equality is both the keynote of modernity and under fundamental threat, in both theory and practice. On the level of theory, one need only point to Nietzsche and the enormous influence of his thought and that of his popularizers on contemporary western intellectual life. The fact that the Nietzschean moral perspectivism made fashionable by postmodern thought is frequently — and inconsistently — combined with the affirmation of human equality as a kind of moral absolute is cold comfort to those who worry about the future place of equality in postmodernity. On the level of practice, suffice it to note that it has always been the upholders of equality who have provided us with the evidence of discrepancies between the idea and its reality. The perennial dichotomies of wealth and poverty, power and weakness, have clearly not been substantially transformed by the modern idea of equality. Its capacity to restrain these realities, even merely to prompt a bad conscience, should not be discounted. Yet, always available to the powerful is the "better" conscience derivable from the theoretical critique of equality present explicitly (as in Nietzsche) or implicitly in some of the best modern thought.

It might nevertheless be argued that the theoretical and practical problems associated with the idea of equality are still a long way from constituting a "fundamental threat." Does equality really need defending, given its centrality to modern practices and to the rhetoric accompanying those practices? Those who would answer this question in the negative might do so because they think it is not necessary and/or not helpful to worry about arguing for the idea of equality. That it is not necessary would depend on two presuppositions: that the idea is so widely entrenched within capitalist liberal democracy that it is absolutely secure, and that liberal democracy itself is secure now and for the future as the historically dominant form of human society. In response to the first presupposition, it should be observed that commonplace rhetoric is more effective at concealing reality than creating it, and that practices can alter imperceptibly over time. Practices, after all, are constituted by actual people treating each other in certain ways, whatever the mission statements and ethical codes enjoin. The threat to equality need not be of the dramatic sort embodied by the fascist storm-trooper, with whom one could not and would not debate anyways; it is far more likely to be embodied in the daily decisions made by relatively well-meaning professionals in positions of relative power. One might speak of the achievement of inequality by homeopathic doses. (One symptom of such an incipient development is the increasing popularity of the criterion of "quality of life" in the decisions that are made by doctors, judges, politicians, and ethicists about how others should be treated.)

The second presupposition, that the idea of equality is secured from external threat by the historical hegemony of liberal democracy, is probably more solid. But probability is not certainty, and how much certainty can there be in predicting the future rise and fall of civilizational moral paradigms? If Jean Baudrillard is right, we are witnessing in the wake of 9/11 a morphing of "liberal globalization" into "the opposite form — a police-state globalization, a total control, a terror based on `law-and-order measures.'" History does show with certainty that rhetoric and benign habit are in the long run no substitute for clear conviction among the best in the face of the passionate intensity of the worst.

Some of those who argue that a justification of the idea of equality is not necessary would argue also that it is not helpful, precisely, one suspects, because the difficulty of offering a justification on solely rational grounds exposes the theoretical vulnerability of the idea. Better to leave unexamined what might not be justifiable. Apart from the possible moral and philosophical objection to such a strategic "sacrifice of the intellect," it is not a practical option if what has been said above about the threat to equality has any validity. Proponents of human equality are and will increasingly be called upon, first, to discern when it is actually being violated, and secondly, to justify it.

My concern in what follows will not be with equality as a political or juridical concept, but with something more fundamental on which such concepts and their enactment ultimately depend — the sense of equality as a moral virtue. By this I mean an attitude or disposition central to our treatment of others, an attitude that might best be expressed as respect for the dignity of the other. The question I will be addressing is this: what finally justifies or elicits the fundamentally equal respect we owe to others, whatever their conventional and natural differences?

Our attitude, individually and collectively, of respect for others has everything to do with what we think human beings are. And it is most tested in our encounter with the "lowly," the vulnerable, the marginalized, the humiliated in our midst. As will become clear, my use of the term "lowly" has its provenance in Dostoevsky, who took it from the biblical prophets. It is not intended to be a restrictive socio-economic category (referring only to those below the poverty line); nor should it be interpreted as a vague spiritual category (encompassing everyone who feels "vulnerable"). We might usefully define it as a vulnerability made real by some objective affliction — such as poverty, illness (mental or physical), unjust imprisonment, displacement — which renders someone socially marginal and, as it were, almost voiceless or invisible (a condition described by Giorgio Agamben as "bare life" or by Michael Ignatieff as "the heath"). With these ideas in the background, the primary focus of my reflection will be on the importance of enlivening the capacity for sympathetic perception in our encounter with the lowly. The material for this reflection will be provided by four thinkers who affirmed, in different ways and sometimes for different reasons,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: WILLIAM B EERDMANS PUB CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802807615
• ISBN 13: 9780802807618
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 230
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei