Introduction to Symposium on David Walsh’s the Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries

David Walsh’s The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries is the author’s second volume explicitly devoted to the person.1 It follows the 2016 publication of Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being.2 Both volumes are the product of the author’s working out of the contours of modernity in the trilogy of books: After Ideology: Recovering the Spiritual Foundations of Freedom, The Growth of the Liberal Soul, and The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence.3 The trilogy consists of Walsh’s effort to explain how the person is the aim of modern philosophy and politics. Instead of treating modernity essentially as a derailment from the richer premodern tradition, Walsh insists it is a condition that human beings are obliged to work through: “The modern revolution in philosophy does not so much introduce something new as bring us back, in the manner of revolutions, to the point from which it began. Return is in this sense never simply a return to the beginning. It is a new beginning...” (p. 174). After Ideology explains how figures including Eric Voegelin, Albert Camus, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Fyodor Dostoevsky before them mounted a defence of humanity against totalitarianism’s destruction of humanity. The Growth of the Liberal Soul confronts the so-called crisis of liberal democracy’s foundations by explaining how liberal democratic thinking consists of a series of abbreviations meant to protect the human person whose inner worth can only be intimated. The crisis of liberalism is only apparent because inability to provide theoretical justification marks not the failure of liberalism but reflects how the “liberal soul” exceeds all possibility of articulation. The author turns from liberal practice to modern thought in the Modern Philosophical Revolution by showing how the person becomes its prime subject, with special emphasis on the mark that Immanuel Kant’s emphasis on the priority of practical reason made upon German idealism. Politics of the Person as the Politics of Being places the person not only at the forefront of reflection, but also by thinking from the person, thereby deepening understanding of the person in its fuller amplitude. The Priority of the Person assembles previously published essays on the person. Some trace the “modern philosophical revolution” to the person from Kant to its culmination in Søren Kierkegaard. Others consist of reflections on various thinkers and topics including John Rawls, Benedict XVI, Eric Voegelin, Jacques Maritain, Kierkegaard, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the 2008 financial crisis, and the scientific method in an age when the truth of science is doubtful. While each of these essays stands on its own, each also illuminates the author’s larger project. To borrow a phrase of Maritain’s personalism, the book is a “whole of wholes.” The content of the book therefore nicely matches its form. The reader is able to enter Walsh’s project at any point and at any essay, though the first essay, “The Priority of the Person as the Modern Differentiation,” provides the most comprehensive overview of the project. What, or better, who is a person? Getting this question right is more than a matter of semantics because the turn to the person literally involves a revolution in thought: “There is good reason to suggest that along with the prioritization of the good, the true, and the beautiful, we should add the person as the ultimate priority beyond them” (p. 20). Socrates always chided his interlocutors for incorrectly explaining what something is by listing its effects and instantiations. Instead, Socrates taught us to ask what it is. According to Walsh, this is fine as far as it goes but it obscures knowing the possibility of the question itself. A who, not a what, asks the question, and is the condition for all acting, knowing, and being: “It is futile to ask for a metaphysics of the person, as if anything more substantive could explain the transcendence of the person. We can understand metaphysics,