Grateful Response

Thinking, Aristotle reminded us, is best done in the company of friends. It is the way we share what concerns us most deeply and thereby gain a heightened awareness of its reality. The image of the philosopher alone with his thoughts is contrary to a central feature the intellectual life. That is, that it is continually carried on in the company of others. Even when we are apart we still carry the voice of the other within us. Conversation is ongoing as we consider what our friends might say, and measure our own thought in relation to an anticipated response.1 For all of these reasons I am deeply grateful for the careful reading my symposiast friends have given to The Priority of the Person. You have lightened the load and shortened the road as we walk along together. Readers affirm the task an author has undertaken by giving some assurance that it is worthy of reflection. That is no small contribution. Your generous and sympathetic reading sustains me in my effort to advance what you affirm is of merit within it. I deeply appreciate the considerable investment of time and attention you have made, one that enables us to carry on a conversation of greater seriousness and depth than most authors enjoy. Thank you for your kindness, especially that of the symposium editor, John von Heyking, as well as the forbearance of the editor of Perspectives, Dan Mahoney, who stands as the silent host of the affair. It is in the same spirit of hospitality that I attempt to address the observations and reservations that have been tenderly raised in the contributions. You have done me the great service of revealing how my work is perceived and in that way you have allowed me to see it in a different light, one more likely to reflect a wider public perception. You prompt me to defend and explain my intentions more clearly, not only to make the ideas that much more persuasive, but also to deepen their hold in my own mind. In the spirit of such collaboration I wish to sympathetically engage the perspective from which your friendly and perceptive observations have been made. While the result may not arrive at uniform agreement it will certainly aim at the concord that in Aristotle’s account is the highest goal of friendship. Even friendly disagreement is a form of mutual understanding. That at any rate is the inspiration that guides my response. I begin with the assumption of general consensus on the challenges that confront our contemporary world, marked as it is by a draining of spiritual authority from the premodern forms of meaning. If one thinks of the axial age as the one that gave us reason and revelation, along with the world religions, then we are clearly in a phase where their historical influence has ebbed.2 Science, and the adventitious appeal to human rights, have not managed to shape a comparable self-understanding for the civilization we inhabit. Militant ideologies, that sought to impose by force a meaning where none existed, may have receded with the totalitarian convulsion that was their apogee. Now we are left with fragments of premodern traditions and shards of failed systems that seem incapable of supporting any broader coherence. What makes our moment particularly acute is that the only modern form that cobbled coherence at a more minimal level, liberal democracy, has begun to show signs of its own unraveling. The crisis of liberal politics evident in the hyper-partisanship that dispenses with constitutional restraints could not have come at a worse time. It means that the restorative forces that resisted totalitarianism now seem to be succumbing to the extremist elements within them. Anxiety about the diminished capacity of liberal institutions to respond to disintegrating forces is well and fairly noted by my interlocutors. Anyone who has honed his political sensitivity on a close reading of Alexis de Tocqueville, as has Jonathan Wensveen, is bound to echo the gloomy foreboding of the second volume of Democracy in America. Yet, as Wensveen himself points out, Tocqueville ultimately counsels the practice of liberty as a way to overcome the inclination to abandon the struggle against a softly despotic security. Often overlooked in this well-known recommendation is the mechanism by which Tocqueville envisaged it succeeding. Appeals to aristocratic pride or to stoic self-responsibility are not the whole of his proposal. There is also the transformative effect he observed in