Philosophy.Com

diverse strands of conservatism

Over at Right Reason some questions about American conservatism are being asked:

"Is modern American conservatism so diverse as to be incoherent? Do the various sub-groups that make up the conservative coalition in America share a common core, beyond the common name of "conservative"?

The response or answer bears on some of the posts on this weblog. The confusions about what conservatism stands for are addressed by mapping the various strands within conservatism in a threefold manner: the paleocon-neocon continuum, the libertarian-state continuum, and the religious-secular continuum. The answer to the above question is that there is a lot of diversity within the conservative tradition.

Robert Koons argues that there is unity within this diversity, if we locate conservatism within the philosophical tradition. He says that:

"Since conservatism is essentially Aristotelianism, it is not surprising that conservatives vary from one another along a number of quantitative parameters. The Aristotelian ideal is that of the political actor who possesses the prudence and judgment required to find, in each circumstance, the appropriate mean. Each mean must be located on along one or more dimensions. Since prudential judgment cannot be reduced to an abstract formula, disagreement among conservatives is inevitable. Despite these disagreements, conservatives remain united by a common Aristotelian ideal and a common set of principles that constrain the disagreements."

I concur with this account. You can see it at work in the conservsatism of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Robert's tradition approach is better pathway than the approach by Irving Kristol.

However, it does not address the positivist position that it is impossible to judge value conflicts, on the grounds that conflicts between different values or goals are not resolvable by reason because they just are personal expressions or preferences.

I would add that Aristotleanism provides an practical reason (phronesis) that overcomes this positivist dead end; as it is an ethical reason that judges the ends of human action in terms of the good life. The good life is unpacked in terms of what constitutes a flourishing life well lived. Hence it is an alternative to an instrumental reason concerned with the most efficient means for pre-given ends. This means that Aristotleanism can provide the ethical/political backbone for lefty's as well as for conservatives.

For instance, in Horkheimer and Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment, we find a discussion of two conceptions of reason, and the ways in which they have influenced our attitudes towards ourselves and our circumstances. Here is an interpretation of that account:

"The dominant form of reason in an alienated world, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, is what they routinely call instrumental reason. This is the capacity for selecting the appropriate means to our ends, whatever they happen to be. That is, we use reason as an instrument to guide us in attaining our ends. To this type of reason Horkheimer and Adorno contrast another, one which they claim is increasingly rare. It goes by several names, mostly frequently that of objective reason. This type of reason is not instrumental, not concerned with the means to our ends, but instead concerns itself with the ends themselves. It asks whether our ends our rational, whether they express our deepest needs and desires, whether they express our longing for freedom.

Horkheimer and Adorno contend that objective reason has been undermined by the Enlightenment, although it should in fact be used to advance the cause of enlightenment. Instrumental reason simply conforms to the ends that we have acquired, telling us how to pursue them in the most effective fashion. Objective reason tells us what our ends should be, and thus it tells us how the world should be, because we are to transform the world in accordance with our rational ends, and thus from how it is into how it should be.

Rather than employing objective reason to discover what our ends should be, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain that our ends are usually imposed on us from without. (This is what Kant called heteronomy.) We acquiesce in what others tell us to think and to do, thereby giving up our independence and failing to achieve autonomy."

Aristotle's phronesis is a form of objective reason that can help us sort out what our ends should be. Simply put the ends of human action is the good life.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 23, 2005 07:29 AM | TrackBack