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III. The American Atlantis
John Locke was a preeminent theorist of the emerging liberal order and an undoubted influence on the architects of the American Founding. He is also a decisive figure for the fate of philosophy in the English-speaking world. Even so, he has assumed what is probably an outsized role in the contemporary debate, with critics of American liberalism training their fire on its Lockean presuppositions and defenders such as Reilly assuming that they can deflect this criticism either by minimizing the importance of Locke’s influence or severing his widely-recognized relation to Hobbes. Reilly’s recourse to this strategy is one reason we have had to dwell so long on Locke and his relation to Hobbes. But a more fundamental reason is that they are paradigmatic representatives of a new vision of nature, knowledge, religion, and political order whose general contours were becoming axiomatic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even among otherwise pious and orthodox Christians. They were not the only such representatives, nor were the details of this vision uncontested among English-speaking Protestants. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart would advance a “common sense” philosophy that qualified the social atomism of the earlier mechanists and affirmed empiricism while attempting to refute skepticism. This may form part of the background for Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” and may have been lurking in the back of his mind years later when he wrote that his purpose in writing the Declaration was “not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but to “place before mankind the common sense of the subject.…”[146] Adam Smith, Hutcheson, Lord Kames, and Hume himself, taking up the difficult task identified by Locke in his Essay of putting “mechanism and morality together,” developed new theories of the moral (and aesthetic) sense, as a way of reconciling morality with Newtonian nature and Baconian science. Jefferson subscribed to a version of this philosophy as well.[147] It would be absurd to reduce a complex historical event like the American Founding to a simple incarnation of Lockean or Hobbesian philosophy; yet it would be just as absurd to deny that the Founders assumed, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, the axiomatic ontological and epistemic judgments of their age that these philosophies exemplify. There were none other seriously on offer among English-speaking Protestants of the eighteenth century. Reilly seems to think, however, that in order to harbor a “Hobbesian ontology” (his term, as far as I can recall, not mine), the Founders must either have self-consciously deduced their political philosophy from Hobbes’ ontological principles or be carried along blindly by the force of history, a “determinism” that insults the Founders “rectitude.”[148] Neglected, so he argues, is “the possibility that the change in metaphysics altered the meaning of things only for those who accepted the new metaphysics, and not for those who did not.”[149]
We have seen that the eighteenth-century emphasis on morality and natural law is as much an expression of this mechanical ontology as it is its antithesis. This fact alone is enough to call Reilly’s false alternative into question. This alternative is useful, nevertheless, in showing once again the naïveté of Reilly’s “Whiggish” equation of meaning and intention, with its ham-fisted understanding of the way meaning is transacted in language and its failure to grasp how metaphysical judgments operate tacitly within political and scientific discourse: not as a “system” from which political conclusions are explicitly deduced but as something logically entailed in the basic elements of the discourse itself, and often unarticulated.[150] Entailed in every conception of political order is a conception of nature and the human being, without which the nature and ends of government—not to mention still more basic notions like “entity,” “order,” and “truth”—would be unintelligible. And every conception of nature implies a corresponding conception of God—what God must “be like” if the world is really like this—irrespective of whether he is taken to exist. Metaphysical judgments in this sense need not be thought out loud and do not depend upon a conscious act of judging. They are built in, so to speak, to the structure of concepts by which we judge, and are implicated in our different ways of thinking and speaking about nature, the human being, goodness, truth, or causality, often without our being fully aware of it. Metaphysics in this sense will be found to operate not only “within” these terms, but in the interstices between them. This means that metaphysical judgments are sometimes also evident in what is not said—indeed in what cannot be said or conceived—within a given discourse. One needn’t turn history into an occult force to recognize this; one need only acknowledge the truth of Michael Polanyi’s observation that we know more than we can say, as well as its converse, that sometimes we say more than we know.[151]
The Republic of Science and Its Invisible Foundations
Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Turnbull from Paris in 1789 to request that portraits be made of Bacon, Locke, and Newton for his home at Monticello, referred to them as “the three greatest men that ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical & Moral sciences.”[152] Among those superstructures, we learn, are the great scientific societies like the Agricultural Society of Paris, which Jefferson praises in terms worthy of Dewey in an 1809 letter to John Hollins:
I mention these things, to show the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them. These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation.[153]
We’ve already seen that Jefferson shared with these “three greatest men” a disdain for Plato and the scholastics. We can add to this disdain for Platonism a devotion to “our master, Epicurus,” as Jefferson put it, and to what Robert K. Faulkner calls the “useful and active materialism” of Francis Bacon.[154] Jefferson expounds upon his “creed of materialism” which he took to be the doctrine of Locke, de Tracy, and Stewart, in an 1820 letter to John Adams, confiding that he “cannot reason otherwise” than that “to talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings.”[155] He gives his materialism a particularly Baconian twist in another letter written near the end of his life in 1825. “The business of life is with matter, that gives us tangible results,” he wrote. “Handling that, we arrive at knowledge of the axe, the plough, the steam-boat, and everything useful in life, but from metaphysical speculations, I have never seen any useful result.”[156]
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, patterned after the Royal Society, the latter being the first such institution in the scientific “superstructure,” dedicated to Bacon’s vision of “useful knowledge” and promoting “all philosophical Experiments that let Light into the Nature of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or Pleasures of Life.”[157] The Society would boast Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, and Paine among its members and officers. Jefferson was elected president of the Society as he ascended to the nation’s vice-presidency and enjoyed it far more than government. He would maintain an active presidency for the next eighteen years.[158] The promotion of “useful knowledge” was so essential to the vision of the new nation, it would be inscribed into Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to “promote the Progress of Science and the Useful Arts” through what came to be known as the Copyright and Patent Provision. Madison had advocated for this in Federalist 43.[159]
This “useful knowledge,” Franklin recognized, was indispensable to the growth and unity of the young nation and to humanity’s progress in mastering nature.[160] The “great fraternity” constituted by the Royal Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Académie des sciences in Paris and similar organs is a concrete, institutional bridge between Bacon’s utopian vision in the New Atlantis and its eventual realization in what Dewey called “an intelligent administering of experience”: “a State organized for collective inquiry” that “attacks nature collectively” over generations.[161] It was Dewey’s genius to recognize that the “American experiment” was an experiment in the deepest sense, a perpetual assault on the limits of possibility, that was by nature interminable.
Did Jefferson understand the full depths of the transformation—to our concepts of God, nature, causality, even truth and reason itself—that had to occur in order for his “great fraternity” of societies for the promotion of useful knowledge to exist? Was he fully aware of the manifold metaphysical judgments embodied in their existence? Did he know of the radical transformation of the metaphysical patrimony of the West, all the controversies and changes to the meaning of “matter” itself presupposed by his “creed of materialism”? Was he aware of the earth-shattering consequences of Descartes’ original version (cogito ergo sum) of his “anodyne” or its role in transforming the West’s understanding of nature, knowledge, and God? Did he think upon all the historical and philosophical reasons why he “could not reason otherwise,” when so many who had gone before him could? Were Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Marshall, and Paine aware of the profound transformation of the notion of reason and truth embodied in their Society? Did they intend or even anticipate the subsequent train of causes and effects set in motion by this transformation? In the end, does it matter? Even without understanding the universe of philosophical judgments presupposed in his “creed of materialism,” Jefferson was able to profess it and to enact it even in the small areas of life, such as his banter back and forth with his old friend Adams. As Wittgenstein once wrote, “When I give the description: ‘The ground was quite covered with plants’—do you want to say I don't know what I am talking about until I can give a definition of a plant?”[162]
As it was with Jefferson and the other Founders, so it is with the social order they helped to create. The tacit metaphysics of a people and an era, the sensus communis about the nature of reality that marks them as belonging to a shared world, is visible not only in what they think, or what they say, but in what they cannot think and say. We have seen that the new conception of political order birthed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century—the conception that would determine the shape of the modern world ever since and that finds its exemplary expression in America as the quintessentially modern nation—was premised upon the destruction of a symbolic and sacramental order that bound spiritual and temporal power into a unity even in their distinction, and upon a revolutionary transformation of every sphere of thought (indeed in the meaning of thought itself) that had made this unity intelligible. We have seen as a consequence how liberal order recreates the preliberal world in its own image, transforming antecedent realities that comprehend us, define us, and actuate our freedom—such as God, nature, and the moral law—into possible objects of choice, selected from a new Archimedean point outside of nature occupied by every experimenter confronting a field of technical possibilities.[163] (This is no doubt the deep root of the Whig sensibility and one reason why it is possible to imagine that there is one unbroken “natural law” tradition, unaffected by profound transformations in our understanding of nature itself, that passes from antiquity through to Aquinas, Bellarmine, and Suarez in the Middle Ages, to Hooker, Sidney, and Locke, before it terminates in us.)
If we wish to ask whether liberal order embodies a metaphysics, or whether that metaphysics is in some way “Hobbesian,” we should not only look deeply into how it depicts nature, freedom, God, and the good; we should ask what one cannot see or say from within its conceptual parameters. To say that liberal order recreates the world in its own image is to say that its renunciation of competence in spiritual matters (Murray’s so-called “articles of peace”) is a fiction.[164] Concealed within its alleged metaphysical and religious neutrality is both an extrinsicist theology that makes God incidental to the meaning and intelligibility of nature and a quasi-official ecclesiology whose main outlines are supplied by Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, that regards a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.”[165] In other words, as the transcendental whole that comprehends all things and is comprehended by none, liberal order excludes God and even traditional metaphysics from its official form of rationality. And it requires as a condition of appearance within its borders that every religion be tacitly conceived as a species of Protestant congregationalism. As modern liberals, we “cannot reason otherwise.” To discover whether American liberalism harbors a “Hobbesian” metaphysics, we need only ask whether it is possible for liberal order or the American state to recognize what the Catholic Church is in its true, theological nature as the sacrament of Christ or whether, by contrast, this is “constitutionally” impossible.
The Only Possible World and the Other Country
What is true of the Founders is true of all of us to some degree. We all know more than we can say. And we all say more than we know. This is certainly true of Reilly. He says more than he actually knows, both about Deneen and me and our work, and about the thought of the Founders. And he says less than is actually operative inside his own thought. He does not see what he does not see. That Reilly could act as if a contested and materially empty sense of natural law could substitute for the living reality of the Catholic Church in “limiting the political to be itself,” that he could entertain the idea of “a Catholic Founding” or imply that Catholic political principles are realized for the first time in a political order that is constitutively incapable of acknowledging the true nature and authority of the Catholic Church, raises the question about what Reilly thinks Catholicism is and how deeply his imagination of it is shaped by Lockean presuppositions that are invisible to him.[166] It is not that Reilly would deny the Church’s sacramental nature or universal authority as articles of faith. Rather it is that neither these truths nor the metaphysical judgments necessary to sustain them enter operationally into his basic conception of natural or political order; there is no sense, in other words, that the sacramental nature of the Church has anything to do with the basic ontological structure of the world. And again, what is true of Reilly is true of all of us Americans to some degree, and maybe of the contemporary Church as a whole. We accept “what the church teaches”—or don’t—fideistically, perhaps even living lives of moral rectitude, while otherwise adopting “sociologism” as our unreflective mode of thinking and perceiving the world.[167] This is why Lockean liberalism—with the mechanical world it presupposes and the Baconian world it sets in motion—more perfectly realizes Hobbes’ absolutist ambitions than Hobbes himself does. Why repress the Church when you can entice Catholics to think like Protestants, or even like atheists, without knowing it?
The advent of liberalism and of liberal societies is a transitional moment in the death of God in the modern West, a catastrophe from which the Church is not exempt. The “priority of the political” and the power that politics exercises over our vision and imagination are among its most acute symptoms. This is really the heart of the matter, and why my thought, unlike Reilly’s, is not in the first instance political. The overarching concern that has motivated all my thinking on these matters is not the political concern to “prosecute” the Founders or, conversely, to hypothesize about the best regime. My concern is what John Paul II and Benedict XVI called “the eclipse of the sense of God and man” in the modern West and, particularly, in the modern Church, the dark shadow of which has deprived us of the light even to recognize our own atheism.
Reilly alleges that for Deneen and me, “repudiation of the Founding principles of the United States is a necessary condition for Christian revival, if not survival.”[168] Perhaps this is fair if by “repudiate” he means ceasing to pretend that a false idea is true or refusing to conflate the “path of guardianship”—or, let’s be honest, the victory of Republican Party politics—with our Catholic obligation to serve the common good. But otherwise I think this is neither possible nor meaningful. One might as well repudiate air. America is not an idea, or at least not only an idea, but a place, and in fact an empire whose power vastly exceeds its direct political control. It is also my home—which it inevitably remains whether that idea be true or false. And since there is no “outside” of liberal order—since the empire of liberty has succeeded so spectacularly in eliminating all theoretical and practical alternatives to itself—, its disintegration is likely to be interminable: always falling, never collapsing. Liberal order may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it is the only possible world as far as the eye can see, and I discern no path forward but to undergo whatever fate is set in motion by the death of God within the prison of this order’s immanent horizons.[169] The presence of a tragic flaw in America’s Founding principles or its history does not eliminate the greatness of the American achievement in establishing this empire; nor is there any reason why acknowledging the cracks in America’s foundations should prevent any of us from loving our home or deter us from working in every sphere to make our country the least nihilistic version of itself. Even if liberal order bars the way to a common good that is truly common, we still have a duty to mitigate the harm done to persons in this order’s interminable disintegration.
But otherwise Reilly is half-right. The Church is in crisis in the modern world, which is very much the American world—beset from without by a secular social order that systematically excludes God from its conception of reality, beset from within by a pious atheism that does not know itself. It is a measure of this crisis that the vision—the seeing—that once defined the Christian life and the goal of human existence has all but disappeared both from our apprehension of the world and from our self-understanding. The recovery of a truer and more profound Catholicism and a properly Christian hope in the abiding presence of the eternal God who fills all things coincides with whatever capacity we may muster and whatever grace is granted to us to see beyond the immanent horizons of liberal order and to transcend its fate from within. Given its external power over our form of life and its internal power over our imaginations, “seeing” at present likely means discovering what we are no longer able to see, just as we must experience this truer Catholicism by enduring the wound of its present impossibility and must hope in God’s abiding presence by mourning his apparent absence. At the heart of this vision and this hope is the ancient Christian conviction that we belong to another country more profoundly than we belong to this one, and our only hope of transcending our nihilistic fate is that this conviction might yet again inform and transform our most basic perception of the world. The alternative represented by the civic project is to relinquish the Catholic mind and to inadvertently baptize the death of God and its ensuing fate, acquiescing unawares in that suffocating immanentism and concealing our hopeless unbelief behind a veneer of pious optimism. Transcending this fate does not require from us the impossible task of repudiating America or liberal order—as if there were anywhere else to go—but it does require us to repudiate the Whig Catholicism of Robert Reilly and rediscover the abiding presence of that other country that is our only true hope.
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[146] Quoted in Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, 111. For more on the contested interpretation of Jeffersonian self-evidence, see Cohen, 121-34. See also Scott Segrest, “Common Sense Philosophy and American Political Theology: Preliminary Considerations” (presented at the American Political Science Association meeting, Philadelphia, September 1, 2006), available at https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Scott-Segrest3.pdf.
[147] See Jefferson, “To Thomas Law” (June 13, 1814), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1335-9. For a discussion of Jefferson’s philosophy of the moral sense and its relation to the theories of Hutcheson and especially Kames, see Jean M. Yarbrough, “The Moral Sense, Character Formation, and Virtue,” in Gary L. McDowell and Sharon L. Noble (eds.), Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), 271-303.
[148] Reilly, America on Trial, 312.
[149] Ibid., 310.
[150] See my chapter “Discourse on Method” in Hanby, No God, No Science?, 9-48.
[151] See Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1983), 6. By “say more than we know” I mean two things: first, that sometimes we speak about things we do not properly understand, and second—pace Reilly—that our thought and speech entails assumptions and judgments of which we may not be aware, and meanings and implications that we do not intend or foresee. Both senses of the expression are true of Reilly.
[152] Thomas Jefferson, “To John Trumbull” (February 15, 1789), Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 939-40.
[153] Thomas Jefferson, “To John Hollins” (February 19, 1809), Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1201.
[154] Faulkner, “Jefferson and the Enlightened Science of Liberty,” in Gary L. McDowell and Sharon L. Noble (eds.), Reason and Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 31-52, at 43. Faulkner notes that Jefferson’s dismissal of Plato as “one among the ‘genuine sophists’” as well as his praise for Epicurus as containing “everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us” echoes Bacon. See Jefferson, “To William Short” (October 31, 1819), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1430-33.
[155] “But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter of May 12, on matter, spirit, motion, etc. It’s croud of scepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down, again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur immediately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I feel, therefore, I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction in an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall shew how he could endow the Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the tract of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and, by that will, put matter in motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise.…” (Jefferson, “To John Adams” [August 15, 1820], in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1443).
[156] Jefferson to anon., 1825, in Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jefferson: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 36, quoted in Faulkner, “Jefferson and the Enlightened Science of Liberty,” 43.
[157] Benjamin Franklin, “A PROPOSAL for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,“ (Philadelphia, 1743), available at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0092.
[158] Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 41.
[159] This prompts Leon Kass to say that “the American Republic is, to my knowledge, “the first regime explicitly to embrace scientific and technical progress and officially to claim its importance for the public good.” He goes on to say that “the entire Constitution is a deliberate embodiment of balanced tensions between science and law and between stability and novelty, inasmuch as the Founders self-consciously sought to institutionalize the improvements of the new ‘science of politics,’ and in such a way that would stably perpetuate openness to further change.” Leon R. Kass, Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 133-4.
[160] See Franklin, “Proposal”:
“The English are possess’d of a long Tract of Continent, from Nova Scotia to Georgia, extending North and South thro’ different Climates, having different Soils, producing different Plants, Mines and Minerals, and capable of different Improvements, Manufactures, &c.
“The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the Attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over; and there are many in every Province in Circumstances that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common Stock of Knowledge. To such of these who are Men of Speculation, many Hints must from time to time arise, many Observations occur, which if well-examined, pursued and improved, might produce Discoveries to the Advantage of some or all of the British Plantations, or to the Benefit of Mankind in general.
“But as from the Extent of the Country such Persons are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful Particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Discoverers, and are lost to Mankind; it is, to remedy this Inconvenience for the future, proposed…”
[161] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (London: Forgotten Books, 2005), 95, 37.
[162] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), §70.
[163] Arendt, The Human Condition, 265. “In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.”
[164] See Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 59-86.
[165] Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration.
[166] Reilly, America on Trial, 33, 214 ff.
[167] Augusto Del Noce describes sociologism thus: “The true clash is between two conceptions of life. One could be described in terms of the religious dimension or the presence of the divine in us; it certainly achieves fullness in Christian thought, or in fact in Catholic thought, though per se it is not specifically Christian in the proper sense. Rather, it is the precondition that makes it possible for the act of faith to germinate in man, inasmuch as it is man’s natural aptitude to apprehend the sacred. (I cannot linger here on the definition of this dimension and I must refer to the very beautiful pages by Fr. Danielou.) The other is the conception that ultimately can be called sociologistic, in the sense that contemporary sociologism reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, as expressions of the historical situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures of forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life. So that the progress of the human sciences is supposed to lead to social science as the full extension of scientific reason to the human world, achieving a complete replacement of philosophical discourse by scientific discourse and thus clarifying the worldly, social, and historical origin of metaphysical thought” (Augusto Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, trans. Carlo Lancellotti [Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2017], 219). I would wish to develop his definition further along the metaphysical lines of thought indicated by this present article, but as a placeholder for that project, the description suffices.
[168] Reilly, America on Trial, 314.
[169] For more on the technocratic shape of this fate, see Hanby, “What Comes Next,” and “Before and After Politics,” op cit.