June 3, 2009
LIBERALISM'S DIRTY SECRET...:
God and John Rawls: a review of A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith by John Rawls edited by Thomas Nagel (Peter Berkowitz, June & July 2009, Policy Review)
There had been earlier indications that Rawls’s philosophical account of justice as fairness and his elaboration of a political liberalism as fair principles of social cooperation drew sustenance from religious sources. In 2000, former students, by then accomplished professors in their own right, oversaw the publication of Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. The book contains notes — in fact, lucid, well-wrought analyses — for lectures on a class in moral philosophy that Rawls gave at Harvard University regularly between his arrival in 1962 and his retirement in the early 1990s. Those lectures center on the great 18th-century German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. So too did Rawls’s interpretation of liberalism: In A Theory of Justice he emphasized that his ambition was to refine and extend Kant’s view that morality must be understood as those principles that can “be agreed to under conditions that characterize men as free and equal rational beings.”Therefore, it was of great interest to learn from the Lectures that in Rawls’s view, Kant’s moral philosophy, both celebrated and denounced for its rigorous rationalism, was only fully intelligible with a view to its religious dimension:
I conclude by observing that the significance Kant gives to the moral law and our acting from it has an obvious religious aspect, and that his text occasionally has a devotional character.
What gives a view a religious aspect, I think, is that it has a conception of the world as a whole that presents it as in certain respects holy, or else as worthy of devotion and reverence. The everyday values of secular life must take a secondary place. If this is right, then what gives Kant’s view a religious aspect is the dominant place he gives to the moral law in conceiving of the world itself. For it is in following the moral law as it applies to us, and in striving to fashion in ourselves a firm good will, and in shaping our social world accordingly that alone qualifies us to be the final purpose of creation. Without this, our life, in the world, and the world itself lose their meaning and point.
Now, perhaps, we see the significance of the mention of the world in the first sentence of Groundwork I: “It is impossible to conceive anything in the world, or even out of it, that can be taken as good without qualification, except a good will.”
At first it seems strange that Kant should mention the world here. Why go to such an extreme? we ask. Now perhaps we see why it is there. It comes as no surprise, then, that in the second Critique he should say that the step to religion is taken for the sake of the highest good and to preserve our devotion to the moral law.
These religious, even Pietist, aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy seem obvious; any account of it that overlooks them misses much that is essential to it.
Given the deep continuities between the Kantian and Rawlsian conceptions of justice, the Lectures made it reasonable to wonder whether scholars had overlooked the religious aspect of Rawls’s liberalism and thereby missed much that is essential to it. The Lectures also made it reasonable to wonder why so few of the many students who heard these lectures over the course of three decades and went into careers as professors of political science, philosophy, and law failed to be moved, or to recognize an obligation, to explore whether and to what extent Rawls’s mature philosophy was bound up with religious notions.1
Rawls’s undergraduate thesis does not in itself offer an answer to these fascinating questions, but it does provide an important piece of the puzzle. Revealing an unusually thoughtful and exceedingly ambitious young mind, it also exhibits the imperiousness that was a significant if generally unremarked feature of the mature Rawls’s work. The imperiousness consists in the laying down of assumptions and the declaration of definitions that severely circumscribe the legitimate forms of moral, political, and philosophical inquiry. Notwithstanding the restrained language and gentleness of tone in both his senior thesis and his seminal books, Rawls’s elaboration of rules of right method and establishment of the range of permissible ideas in both stigmatized as not merely wrong but unreasonable a diversity of plausible and competing perspectives. Although his senior thesis had no impact on academic philosophy, his books, which had a decisive impact, placed off limits inquiry into some of his own theory’s fundamental assumptions and defining ideas. There is certainly reason to doubt that his thesis supplies those assumptions and clarifies those ideas. After all, as Rawls recalls in his autobiographical “On My Religion,” he lost his faith as a result of serving in the Pacific theater in World War II and learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, fundamental features of Rawls’s mature philosophy that on reflection seem in need of further support receive it from the irreducibly religious doctrine developed in the undergraduate thesis.
The young Rawls takes Christian faith as his presupposition — “We assume, then, that God is, and that He is the sort of God that the Bible says He is, and that He revealed His nature in Christ” — and aims to restate its implications for the moral life. To do this, Rawls argues, one must free Christian thought from a tremendously influential but profoundly mistaken doctrine. “Naturalism,” according to Rawls, “is the universe in which all relations are natural and in which spiritual life is reduced to the level of desire and appetition.” Plato and Aristotle are guilty of naturalism, he argues. So, too, are Augustine and Aquinas, Christianity’s two greatest philosophers, whose doctrines, the Princeton senior audaciously charges, miss the essence of Christian teaching. And of course the preponderance of modern philosophy is thoroughly naturalistic and therefore gravely wrong about ethical life. The problem, though, is not nature itself, which is “God’s gift to man.” Rather, “the error lies . . . in extending natural relations to include all of those in the cosmos.” The challenge, to which Rawls devotes his thesis, “is to limit the sphere of nature to its proper limits, and to make room for the heart of the universe, namely, community and personality.”
Christianity properly understood supplies the correct interpretation of personality and community. The properly Christian and philosophically correct view is that a person is “unique” and “not reducible to the possession of a particular body or to the sum of mental states.” Being part of the natural world, a person certainly has desires and appetites, but is distinguished from other parts of God’s creation by possession of personality, or the capacity to enter into a loving relationship with other persons and with God.
Rejecting the impersonal god of the philosophers and the personal but distant and silent God of much traditional faith, the young Rawls, as Robert Merrihew Adams points out in his essay, understands man, human relations, and man’s relation to God in much the same manner as did Martin Buber in his great work, I and Thou (1923), which exercised considerable influence on neoorthodox Protestant theologians. For Buber, the world is twofold: We usually dwell in the natural realm but are always capable of entering the realm of relations. In the natural realm, we perceive, imagine, and want, and we understand things, including other human beings and ourselves, as “its” or objects. In the realm of relations, each individual confronts another as a Thou. Such relations are unmediated and reciprocal and in them grace and will join to allow each to become fully present to the other. Another description for this is love. At the same time, the relation of an I to a Thou always involves a third term, or a relation also to God, the Eternal Thou. To be capable of I-Thou relations and therefore open to God’s revelation defines, from the perspective of the young Rawls, a person.
Persons flourish in community. A community is not an “aggregate of individuals,” but rather the special form of association through which individuals, in and through relations to others and to God, become persons. In becoming a person one recognizes that other human beings are, like oneself, created in God’s image. “The Imago Dei,” Rawls declares, is “that which in man makes him capable of entering into community by virtue of likeness to God, who is in Himself community, being the Triune God.”
Faith, sin, and grace, Rawls maintains, revolve around personality and community. Faith is “the inner state of a person who is properly integrated and related to community.” Sin is the destruction and repudiation of community. It receives expression in egotism, or pride, self-love, and vanity; egoism, or exclusive attention to the satisfaction of natural desire; and despair, or the nihilistic escape from the world. Grace is “the activity on God’s part which seeks to restore the person to community.” It overcomes sin and accomplishes conversion. Since ethics is bound up with community and personality, and community and personality are bound up with God, “there can be no separation between religion and ethics.”
In conclusion, Rawls sketches a few implications of personality and community, sin and faith, grace and conversion properly understood for ethics and political philosophy. Among the most important for understanding the relation between the theological analysis of the young Rawls and the moral and political theory of the mature Rawls is a Socratic point made by the college senior. Modern thinkers go astray, he argues, because their theories tend to be “based on superficial anthropologies”; consequently, they fail to proceed from a correct understanding of “what man is.” This is a crippling defect:
the first problem of ethical theory is to inquire into the nature of man himself. Moral philosophers would do much better if they undertook an anthropological analysis before doing anything else. Unless we understand ourselves, all discussions of the good and the right are left in the air, and hover idly detached from reality. For this reason we have stressed throughout the personality and communality of man, and have repeatedly stated, almost to the point of becoming labored, that such is man’s nature. We stress this point because it is at once so simple and yet so easy to forget. Although Christianity is said by all to be a very simple religion, it is surprising how few people understand it.
One can disagree with the young Rawls about Christian doctrine and human nature’s defining features. However, his conclusion that serious moral and political theory must be grounded in, and constantly informed by, a defensible conception of human nature is as compelling today as it was when Rawls submitted his Princeton senior thesis. Indeed, it as compelling as it was when Plato’s Socrates made the case.
Strangely enough, the mature Rawls’s theory of justice and argument for a political liberalism appear to proceed in the absence of a philosophical anthropology or well-developed account of human nature. One possibility is that on this point the young Rawls and the mature Rawls diverge, and that the manifest achievement of Rawlsian liberalism refutes the young Rawls’s Socratic conviction. Another possibility is that the mature Rawls relied upon but suppressed the religious understanding of human nature that gives life to his liberalism.
...conceded most forthrightly by Richard Rorty, is that without God you can't derive morality, and, therefore, can't make a Rational argument that any of the ends of liberalism matter.