Reason and Revelation

From our discussion of might and right, we can come to some understanding of the proper relationship between reason and revelation.  History is the incarnation of meaning in the realm of fact.  History is distinguishable from a mere chronicle in that it attempts to impose a system of organization on a set of factual occurrences.  A good history makes the facts intelligible, a bad history, to maintain its coherence, must sacrifice the facts.

We are born to particular parents at a particular time in a particular culture.  We learn a particular language.  We live in a particular neighborhood.  We may belong to a particular ethnic or religious group.  We belong to, from an anthropological perspective, a particular race.  We do not choose any of these facts, they are arbitrary or providential depending on our perspective.  Memory is not solely a characteristic of an individual.  A language is collective, and within a language, speakers share a sense of collective meaning.  Similarly, the same is true of religious or ethnic customs.  To be born a human, a social and political animal, is to be born into a particular system of collective meaning and memory.  From a biological perspective, human beings are more or less the same.  From a social and political perspective, human beings are fundamentally different.  For example, consider different culture attitudes toward child marriage or eating dog meat or marriage between siblings.  Imagine a small community composed of secular Western educated feminist vegans living side by side with a tribal people who regarded eating dogs to be a delicacy and marrying off twelve year old girls to prosperous middle aged men a good way to provide a stable life.  These two forms of life cannot be reconciled:  one group must dominate the other and impose their way of life on the other.

Our form of life, in the first instance, is not chosen, it is entirely a historical accident.  There are a plurality of forms of life, and never, in the history of the world, has one form of life succeeded in attaining hegemony.  There is no a priori means of judging between forms of life.  I say this as dogma, but it may warrant a return in a subsequent post--simply treat it as a hypothesis if you disagree.  What we can say, as a description of history, is that forms of life compete with each other for power.  Moreover, to say "form of life" implies a condition of stasis which is absent.  Forms of life transform in the struggle for power and survival.  Augustine spoke of rational seeds, rationale seminales, essentially dynamic processes enacted in history.  Like plants, forms emerge, grow in strength, decay and weaken, and eventually die off.  Languages and religions die out.  Governments collapse.  Techniques of production disappear.  The sands of time consume everything.

In history, we engage in a type of comparative morphology, looking dialectically at similarities and dissimilarities between historical processes.  We start from historical accident, and we order these accidents in terms of forms, and we make discursive judgments based on the comparison of forms.  In so doing, we consider the meaning of history.  One arche, or first principal, for looking at the history of anthropos is the notion of original sin.  The origin of the idea of original sin is obviously a historical accident, but the use of the concept of original sin lies in its explanatory power, its capacity to make historical facts intelligible.  Likewise, we can see certain general cultural traits, such as courage or industriousness, emerging in forms of life through historical accident, but giving rise to cultural success in the struggle for dominance and hegemony.  A courageous and industrious people will have a will to fight, and the resources to fight, and will triumph over a cowardly and lazy people.  This is not to say that all members of group A are courageous and industrious, and all members of group B are cowardly and lazy, but rather that group A, in general, is more virtuous than group B.

According to Carl Schmitt, politics is based on a distinction between friends and enemies.  To be a member of a political group is to define internal friends and enemies and external friends and enemies.  Domestic politics is a struggle to dominate internal enemies, and international politics is an attempt to dominate external enemies.  All complex societies are controlled by an elite, managed by a bureaucracy, and most people are subjects of the state.  Domestic politics involves a struggle between factions for dominance.  Those in charge want to stay in charge, and those who harbor ambition seek to displace the current elite, usually through alliances with disaffected elements of the bureaucracy and the masses.  Likewise, the same may be said of the struggle between nations, those seeking to maintain the balance of power, and the usurpers.

The basic human dynamic principle is, as Nietzsche noted, the will to power.  This principle does not drive all people, but it drives all political struggle.  Because the attainment of power means the capacity to legislate, the legal rules, the defined right, is always parasitic on constituted power.  Thus, we have a basis for ethical considerations, namely, those customs and practices which create a vibrant and dynamic political life and which are conducive to the creation and preservation of a stable order of power, such as the Roman Republic or the Byzantine Empire.  These would be virtues per Aristotle, and would not be deduced from autonomous reason, but reveled in history.  From this viewpoint, wisdom would consist in the practical application of the virtues to present circumstance, and philosophy could not be ultimately distinguished from statecraft.  To the extent the philosopher possessed wisdom, and guided the ship of state successfully, the state would flourish.