On the Measure and Conservation of Human Things

James
I/: Schall, S.J.

For the truth o f knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is so or is not so that a statement is known to be true or false, and not the revers e.

Commentary on -THOMASAQUINAS, AristotlesMetaphysics, Books,1.17,#1003

A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, t o subsist for very long.

--ALBERT EINSTEIN, Religionand Science: Irreconcilable?, June 1948

Ive come to the damndest watershed in my life-done what I wanted to do in the novel, with linguistics, children grown, sitting down here in the Louisiana autumn. Everything quiet. What now? It would be a good time t o die, but on the other hand, Id as soon not. Its all very spooky. Life is much stranger than art. ... -WALKERPERCY to Shelby Foote, May
14, 1972*

HUMAN THINGS ARE NOT divine things. Feuerbach says, brashly, that divine
V. SCHALL, S.J., is Professor of GovernJAMES ment at Georgetown Universityand author of numerous books including At the Limits of Political PhilosophyandSchall on Chesterton.

things are the product o f human things. Plato and Aristotle describe human things as open to, but not identical with, divine things. They also intimate that it is human, as much as we can, to seek divine things. Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est. The man who sets out only to be human somehow becomes less than human. We ignore the highest things at our peril. Human things are finite, incomplete; nonetheless, they are real and worthy. They are worth keeping. Their very imperfection, indeed their perfection, implies something beyond themselves, some abiding unsettlement or restlessness, as Augustine reminds us. Though we have here no lasting city,we still found cities, preserve them, refashion them, sometimes destroy or a b a n d o n them. We a r e often, as Chesterton said, homesick at home. Still we first need homes that abide so that we might know what this curious homesickness might indicate about our human condition. But human beings can do unworthy things, things both against human things and against divine things. To be unable, in principle, to choose and to do evil things, however, would necessitate a contraryincapacityto do gracious things. f human existence would The drama o f these peculiar cadisappear if either o pacities were lacking to us. We would,
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compared to what we are, be dull, bored beings. Our contentment would be like that of the animals, whereas our actual discontents point beyond us, to the gods. Rewards and punishments have their basis iii hiiman reality, in the consequences o f exercised freedom. f men are set up to reflect The cities o f men who compose them. If the souls o there can be disordered souls, there can be disordered cities. In fact, the maximum disorder in human things reflects itself most clearly and most dangerously in the worst regime. But the origin of this disorder is not in the city itself; it remains in the soul, in that part of the soul that f cities, can do otherwise. Reforms o both for better and for worse, begin and end in reforms of souls. Much of modern political thought has been a deliberate effort to avoid, to obscure, or to deny this truth. Unless we conserve this same truth, however, we will not know what we are. Knowing what we are is the first thing we must keep. To love is to keep. A city that is disordered, however, implies the existence, at least in speech, of a city that is not disordered. Fraud, a disorder, means that we recognize what is not fraud, that it need not have been, but is. The city that is completely ordered, the best regime, is the main philosophic concern of politics insofar as it reflects on its own experience, on its own unique activities. The exact location of the best regime is the true mystery of political things. Politics, by being politics, brings us to things that are not merely political, to things in the order of what is. The best regime of men, because f the it is rare, implies the best regime o f God. In revelation, God gods, the City o is, as it were, using Aristotles phrase, a social and political being,a Trinity. God is neither lonely nor in need either of the world or of us. Will men be like gods? has always been, since Genesis, a question formulated against God, a question that implied that men thought that they
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could make themselves better than God created or redeemed them. This claim to autonomy over what man is,in the tradition, has always been called pride. It means the claim that man is the cause of his cwn being and e! a ! ! that is not his own being, including the gods. In revelation, man is made in the image of this triune God. That is, he is not himself, by himself, a god. His relative perfection does not consist in becoming something else other than what he is, though whathe isimplies his responsibility for becoming this best. Otherwise, he would not be what he is, a being free enough either to reject or to attain what he is. Neither in the state o f nature, nor in the household, nor in the polity, nor in the City of God is it good for man to be alone. Man comes to know what he is through reflectingonwhat he does.Agere sequitur esse. How we act follows from what we are. The being of man implies f man. His being is given, but the good o not by himself; his goodness he must choose to bring about in himself. Man does not make man t o be man, as Aristotle already knew, but taking him from nature as man, makes him to be good man. Machiavelli,in a famous passage, asked us to pay attention not t o what men ought to do, but to what they do do. We are, he advised, to reject the ancient philosophers and tolisten to the modern ones, to himself. He did not flinch at describing some rather terrible things that men d o to each other. Doing such things, indeed, he thought, could be useful. H e explicitly rejects Socratess standard that it is never right to d o wrong. Machiavelli is said thereby to have introduced observation and accurate foundations into politics. In other words, he made politics scientific,as Hobbes was to attempt t o do more systematically some century and a half later. Both thought that they reduced human things to the lowest possible denominator and,
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on this basis, constructed political things independently of moral things. The improvement of mans estate, t o use Bacons phrase, could now be contemplated as a product of our own making if we did not expect too much, if we lowered our sights. We could become more democratic by becoming less noble. We f modern could do this in the name o science. Human things were to be modeled on non-human things so that among human things we could have the certitude o f natural things. This improvement was to be achieved at great cost. But, paradoxically, men and Princes who honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and even murder not infrequently last for a longer time in power than even a scientific Einstein seems to anticipate. How is it, if these are disordered acts, that they last at all? Is time necessary that the results of our acts might become visible, even to us? Politics is the public f our acts, space in which the results o good or bad, appear. MachiavellisPrince, to recall, was empowered with such tools as lies, defamation, fraud, and murder precisely so that he might be successful, so he and his new political regime would last. He was liberated from the restrictions of what we ought to do, from the bonds of virtue, so that he might be successful in staying in power. If this new Prince took the measure o f men, it was so that he might measure and manipulate them for his own purposes. The Prince was not measured by anything but his own criteria. He was not only a new Prince; he was a new man, an unmeasured, unlimited being. Man was for himself. Science, when applied to politics, eliminated what politics was about because the methods of science were not proportionate to the subject matter of political things. Can we find and remove the causes for such disorders as lying, defamation, fraud, and murder, assuming we agree that they are disorders? Revelation was
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f the perplexity o f these matters aware o under the rubric of the Fall. It implied that both politicians and scientists could themselves manifest these disorders; that is to say, there was no political or scientific cure for them-which did not necessarily mean, that there was no cure at all. Could there be a reality whose activities are not subject to scientific method, which sees only what such method allows it to see? Reductionism means, briefly, to identify all reality with what scientific methods allow to be considered. If the method does not reach something, it is assumed not to exist. This is a radical narrowing of reality. Culture, religion, philosophy, in some sense, mean the preservation both of science and, more especially, of what science cannot reach by its own peculiar methods. Those who lie,defame, commit fraud, and murder do, moreover, give us reasons for their acts. Their reasons are designed to make such acts seem noble, necessary, worthy, justified. This explication would not be necessary if such acts were simply what they are, if they did not call attention in their very being t o their opposites, to truth, honor, honesty, and the dignity of life. These same Princes who practice these newer politics likewise complain if these deviant methods are used against themselves, even if they think all men do them. Doesnt this reaction seem odd? Does the denial of a standard indicate the existence of a standard? Machiavellis Prince, in his own terms, might be successful for a time, even a long time, among virtuous Princes. But a Machiavellian Prince among Machiavellian Princes-what advantage does he have? Ought we then to conserve not only f our noble deeds but also the record o the record of our heinous ones-monuments to both kings and tyrants? Or is it possible, as C. S. Lewis intimated in a remarkable little book, a book largely about science and literature, t o abolish
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man?3Andthis abolition,as Lewis conceived it, is not the result of necessary cosmic forces or natural disasters but o f the development o f mans knowledge, of his brain, of his science, along with, perhaps, the cnrruptinn nf his wi!!. This abolition is the product, in other words, s the of mans own choice, of his free will. I ultimate proof or indication that man has liberty, in other words, hisvery scientific choosing not to conserve himself as what he is? Is he initially ill-made in such a way that his own remaking can claim to improve on the divine things that are said by the classical authors to be the highest things about him? When we have done all we set out to do, why, in Walker Percys words, is it a good timeto die?Isthereafinitecompletion to life due to us, a four score years and ten, as Scripture implied? Cicero also seems to think so in his famous essay On Old Age. Is death itself, then, something that we should conserve? Or is deaths elimination, just like altering the processes of begetting and birth, a proper object of science? Would it be an improvement if scientists replaced this four score years and ten man with a four-hundred-year-old man? I s extended f time an improvement on everlength o lasting life in the revelational sense? And why is life stranger than art?We distinguish art and life, yet Aquinas remarks that living things, indeed all things, are the products of the divine art. They all betray the classic questions: Why is there something, not nothing? Why is this thing not that thing? Things do not designthemselves, though many things are subject to mans re-furbishing powers. Michael Behe points out that the human eye, for example, is itself so intricate, so complex that it could not simply have happened or resulted from slow, betrays a design not statistical f o r c e ~It .~ of its own making. This is presumably why, reflecting on what he learns about the eye, a man can invent eye-glasses.
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Does man himself betray the same principle? If he makes himself, is he still himself? Art is a human thing, the relation between what we want to make and what we dn make. !f art or fictian were strange: than life,where would such art or fiction come from?Among us, art seems to come after life; among things, art seems to come first. They are what they are, not of themselves. Knowledge does not measure knowledge. Existing things measure knowledge. Truth is,as Plato said, tosay o f what is, that it is, of what is not, that it is not. And what measures things? Especially,what measures human things? Can human beings, as Einstein, the scientist, seemed to think, d o things that are not human? If they mustdo them, or if they are as good as their opposites, what d o we have to complain about, or even talk about? Our complaints imply a standard, a rule. Our talking implies an effort to distinguish among things. We seek to know, knowing we do not know. In his Reflections on the Revolution in f the modFrance, perhaps the greatest o ern books that distinguish science and politics, Burke comments on those, like Empedocles among the ancients and Buffon among the moderns, who want to use geometry and mathematics as prinf politics. When these state surciples o f their work veyors came to take a view o of measurement, Burke writes,
they soon found that in politics the most fallacious o f all things was geometrical demonstration. They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) to support the building, which tottered on that false foundation. It was evident that the goodness of the soil,the number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their contributionmade such infinitevariation between square and square as to render mensurationa ridiculous standard of power in the commonwealth,and equality in geometry the most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men.5

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This is why Aristotle had already told us that we should not expect more certif a science than the subject matter tude o of that science could yield. Yet, because human things cannot accurately be measured by mathematical or other scientific criteria, it does not necessarily follow that human things have no proper measure of their own. Human things, the things that came forth from reason and will, are as such true on1yforthe most part. Why is this? f circumIt is because of the variety o stance and condition in human things, because there are many different ways to d o almost anything good or bad. N o two human acts, either of good or evil, are exactly the same. Yet they come t o be by human agency. Thus, there is an area or aspect of reality that is unique to human living, that could not exist without it. It exists because human beings exist, the reality of things that proceed from human knowledge and will. The practical sciences, as Aristotle called them, investigate the reality of things that need not be, the things that can be otherwise, things that proceed from human acting and causing. If these things could, at any moment, have been otherwise, we cannot study them as if they were things that would always betray the same properties and activities. We cannot exactly anticif time what they will be. The pate ahead o variety of human things, including political things, thus, is more complicated than f natural and cosmic the diversities o things. But once human acts have been put into reality, it always remains true that they exist in this way, not that way. What kind of a good is science? Science, Aristotlesays, is aperfection of our minds, of our knowing. But it is the knowing not of ourselves but of what is not ourselves. We know ourselves only in knowing what is not ourselves. We seek to know that things are, how things are, why they are as they are. The modern development of science, however, as Leo
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Strauss perceptively observed, came up against one curious obstacle.

After some time it appeared that the conf nature requires the conquest of quest o human nature and hence in the first place the questioning o f the unchangeability of human nature: an unchangeable human nature might set limits to progress. ACcordingly the natural needs of men could no longer direct the conquest o f nature; the direction had to come from reason as distinguished from nature, from the rational Ought as distinguished from the neutral IS.^

This remarkable passage sets the agenda for Lewiss abolition o f man. It f may be that the unchangeableness o human nature is not a necessary thing that cannot be otherwise but a moral thing that we make otherwise at our peril, at the cost of what we are. We can do: it is possible to do what we ought not to do. If we do, the cost o f our so doing is to live with our choices, with the world made by ourselves. The natural needs of men meant that they could learn what they are, even if they did not make themselves, by observing in themselves what they naturally need and strive for. If, however, what mun i s turns out to be itself an indifferent object of science, itself absent o f any norm for its being the way it is, then man no longer is measured by the being he is given. The Isof mans nature is not neutral,as Strauss intimates. For it implies that man does have a natural f measure that is not simplythe product o his own Ought now released from nature and dependent solely on his own constructive, or artistic, reason. Hencef human naforth, the reconstruction o ture in the name of progress will be in terms of, ironically, human rights,themselves presupposed to nothing but what the autonomous intellect, individual or political, seeksto put in place. The rights o f man are divorced from the being o f man and turn upon it. Human nature is no
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longer itself a measure,even though we can compare what science now proposes when it is no longer blocked by an unchangeable human nature, with human nature as it manifested itself in history. we can know, in the name of progress, that we have not improved fundamental things. There is an analysis of modern conservatism, though not the only one, that makes it merely a more cautious version of modern liberalism; neither the one nor the other is based on any unchanging norms.7 If some aberration comes into existence for a long time, if it is reduced to habit or custom, it becomes something embedded, something of the past, f human nature to be something, yes, o preserved. Custom can be as arbitrary as revolution. There is no reason that what men dodocannot itself become a habit. Habits and customs can be good or bad; they require a standard of judgment. Often, as Burke also implied, evil habits or customs can in practice be changed or modified in such a way, still using the same words or manners, that they no longer bear the disorder in which they first appeared. But this approach is not an argument about making things that are evil to be good, but rather about how disordered things can be best modified slowly, in practice. Oftentimes, the effort to change things quickly, even evil things, rather than gradually, produces, as St. Thomas observed, not improvement but something worse. W e are as responsible when our good ideas produce evil as when our bad ideas have the same result. But to understand the difference between good and bad results, we need ideas that are at some level standards, measures, permanencies. We cling to permanent things, the f our being, Russell Kirk once norms o observed, because all other grounds are quicksand.sConserving and keeping are as noble enterprises as discovering and finding. It is perhaps more of a feat to

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conserve good institutions (or good habits) than it is to form them in the first place. What is glorious about our minds is not merely that they exist, but that they put us in contact with the world. Since we can iorget or reject what we have learned, there is a place for keeping, conserving what we have learned about ourselves and about the world that is not ourselves but within which we live. Permanent things, first things, common things -such things remain even in our own rejections. But it is the function o f any true keeping o f things that what is kept is kept because it is worthy. This does not deny that we should know the f ourselves and o f our kind aberrations o as a permanent lesson to us. But the emphasis is on the fact that human things must be conserved, deliberately kept. J. M. Bochenski once gave avivid illustration about the relationship between f the mind and the laws the laws o existing in things, and more especially about the fact that the universal laws are related to concrete things. In the world, he says, laws are really valid. Let us take the following example. When an engineer plans a bridge, he relies on a great number of physical laws. Now, if one would assume, as Hume does, that all of these laws are only habits o f mankind,or more precisely of this engineer,then one must ask how it is possible that a bridge which is correctly planned according to proper laws will stand solid, whereas one in whose planning the engineer has made mistakes will fall apart. How can human habits be decisive for such masses o f concrete and iron? It seems as if the laws are only secondarily in the mind o f the engineer. Primarilythey are valid for the world, for iron and concrete, totally independent of whether anyone knows something about them or not?

If the laws of engineering are derived and known from reality, no less so are the laws of human nature. The primary difference is that the iron or the cement
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has no choice but to be what it is when correctly placed in a bridge. Human beings have to put into effect the laws of their own being. They are like a bridge which knows how to build itself, and Q pari, how not t o build itself. If they make a mistake, the bridge will not stand. If we reject our being, we d o not cease to be, but we do cease to be well. In his What Is Philosophy?, Martin Heidegger cites the following passage from Plato: Plato says (Theatet, 155d): For this is especially the pathos [emof a philosopher, to be astonished. tion] o For there is n o other beginning of philosophia than this.1 What is astonishing about the bridge of Bochenskis engineer is that it works. Who would ever think, looking at it, that a bridge comes from the art that is not stranger than life?What is even more astonishing is that not all bridge designs work. It is possible to err. There is a difference between a good design and a bad one. The origin of the good design or the bad design is the same; it is found in the mind o f the engineer. The engineer, in this sense, is an artist. It seems amazing that things work, yet we know they do when constructed properly. But, to recall Walker Percy, life is stranger than art. That is t o say, why should human life be able to make a bridge? And once a bridge as an idea is formed, many different kinds of bridges can be made. The first mystery remains the connection of mind and being. Attempts are often made to convince people that we have reached the twilight o f the age of certainty in the knowledge o f truth, and that we are irrevocably f meancondemned to the total absence o ing, the provisional nature of all knowledge, and to permanent instability and relativity, John Paul I1 remarked in an f Polish Universiaddress to Rectors o ties.
In this situation, it appears imperative to

reaffirm a basic confidence in human reason and its capacity to know the truth, including absolute and definitive truth. Man is capable of elaborating a uniform and organic conception of knowledge. The fragmentation of knowledge destroys mans inner unity. Man aspires to the fullness of knowledge, since he is a being who by hisvery natureseeks the truth and cannot live without it. Contemporary scholarship, and especially present day philosophy, each in its own sphere, needs to rediscover that sapiential dimension which consists in the search for the definitive and overall meaning of human existence.

What is implied here is that we need f evidence, accept the not, on the basis o movements and philosophies that end f the the twentieth century as definitive o human condition. Man does have an inner unity. H e can develop a coherent set of principles that do explain reality. The meaning of his own existence need not be completely obscure to such a degree f that he can know nothing of himself or o the world. f classical politiOne of the burdens o cal philosophy was t o convince the busy politician that there was reason to let the philosopher philosophize and that even though he might be, like Socrates, a gadfly, if notanuisanceandadisturberofthe peace, his life and activity were important to thepolityitself. What theclassical politician was not so aware of, and this is the situation o f the century we now enter, is not the corrupt politician but the philosopher who rejects what is. Or to put it in another way, it is the philosopher who has corrupted the politician and encouraged him to put into effect ideas that involve the radical reconstruction of man contrary to any good that is inherent in his being. The modern political tyrant, like Callicles and Alcibiades among the ancients, is liable to praise the philosophy of his youth. He is likely to have things
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going for him, personally and politically. The twentieth century has been peculiar because its worst tyrants were often themselves philosophers. The combination of politician and philosopher came to exist in a most unforiunaie maiiner. IS there anything more dangerous than this? It would seem so. What would be worse would be politicians, busy about their own ways, attuned to the philosophers who themselves deny any possibility of knowing truth, of knowing what we are, o f knowing anything but what we make, including our polities. And yet we ought not forget that in classical thought, to know evil things is not to be evil. That is t o say, as Eric Voegelin remarked, there is a certain salutary good in seeing that the ideologies developed in the early modern period and carried into effect in the twentieth century have reached their intellectual limits.I2They have nowhere else to turn but on themselves or backto reason f conservaand revelation. It is the task o tism not just not to forget our deeds but also not to forget the ideas that caused them. This cannot bedonewithout attention to human measure, to standards o f what it is to be human. No doubt the twenty-first centurys greatest heresywill f the effort through ecology arise out o and environmentalism to gain complete f man, o f begetting and o f dying. control o Thus, in the confused name of ongoing earth,nothing in life is left unregulated or uncontrolled by a narrow and demand-

ing vision of some new man. H e is to be completely formed by an aberrant science, which will decide who ought and who ought not to exist. The abolitionof man recalls man. It is the task o f the p h k s o p h i c side of phi!osophic tonservatism not merely to preserve and t o keep the measure of human things, but to recall what men d o when they forget this measure. In Nietzsches Twilight of the Idols, written at the close of the nineteenth century, we read: When the anarchist, as the mouth piece o f the declining strata of society, demands with a fine imagination, what is right, justice, and equal rights, h e is merely under the pressure of his own uncultured state, which cannot comprehend the real reason for his suffering-what it is that he is poor in: life.Acausal instinct asserts itself in him: it must be somebodys fault that he is in a bad way.13The mission of conservatism and philosophy itself is to preserve among men that it is not somebody elses fault that he is in a bad way. If men preserve but one truth-namely, that if man is in a bad way it is his own fault, not somebody elses-it is enough to begin to preserve and to keep the measure of human things even in the third millenf knowledge is meanium. The truth o sured by the knowable object. Life is stranger than art. Homo non proprie humanus sed suprahumanus est. The cities of men reflect the souls o f men who compose them.

1. Ideas and Opinions (New York,1954), 51. 2.The Correspondence ofShelbyFoote & WalkerPercy,ed. Jay Tolson (New York, 1997), 167.3.The Abolition of Man (New York, 1962). 4. Darwins Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York, 1996).5.Ed.J.G.A. PocockOndianapoIis,1987),152153.6. The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), 7.7. See Charles N. R. McCoy, The Structure of Political Thought (New York, 1963), 243-250. 8. Enemies of

Permanent Things (La Salle, Ill., 1984), 61. 9. Philosophy-An Introduction mew York, 1972). 14-15. 10. Trans. J. Wilde and W. Kluback (New Haven, 1956), 79.11. Meetingwith Rectors in Toru(June 7, 1999), LOsservatore Romano, English, 16 June 1999, 8. 12. Conversations with Eric Voegelin (Montreal, 1980), 16-17. 13. #34, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968), 534.

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