Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Stephen L. Gardner

End of the Philosophies of History?

Email - Profile - Subtheme # 5

ABSTRACT

No act seems more exemplary of the impact of 9/11 on the American psyche than the invasion of Iraq .  Far more than the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan , which answered clear military and political exigencies, the invasion of Iraq was motivated by desire, a political passion sufficiently strong and well-grounded in culture if not in reality to trump one's better judgment.  The Iraq war was–is–a metaphysical war, so to say.  It is calculated not to achieve realizable ambitions but to express the "essence" of America , as if its "being" had been attacked.

            The argument suggests that the West cannot deal effectively with its mortal enemies without confronting the demons of its own "modernist" underpinnings.  Politically, this has to do especially with a commitment to revolution, a mythic ideal from which modern western political thought and culture has never entirely extricated itself.   This commitment is epitomized in the invasion of Iraq , an "idea" in which otherwise competing strands of modern ideology are twined together.  The program to democratize Iraq combines conservatism and liberalism, traditionalism and rationalism, secular progressivism and religious millennialism, the left and the right.  As a symbol it transcends all the usual differences.  Thus secular progress returned to its (heretical Protestant) religious roots; American conservatism (always more an ideology than a tradition, as in Europe ) showed how revolutionary it could be, in an Enlightenment convention that includes Karl Marx;  the Right displaced the Left as the avant garde of democracy.  The idea of revolution inscribed in the heart of the modern notion of freedom here implies an idealistic militarism driven by a utopian belief in a terminal end of human conflict.  Yet this utopianism (as in its left-wing varieties)  seems calculated to intensify and extend conflict–to pursue conflict as an end in itself–rather than to achieve definable political aims.  This is scarcely the first time such a utopianism has been indulged in the modern world, but it is not usually associated with “conservatism.”

            To defend itself–as well as to arrive at a viable modus convivendi with the Islamic world–the West must abandon the rationalist universalism (in either its militarist or pacificist forms) that underwrites the progressivist project, and return to an understanding of human history that is not so much post-modern as pre-modern, and that acknowledges the irreducible fact of enmity, of conflictual differences, in human existence.  This implies a readiness for war (the periodic unavoidablity of war or  military means) but also a recognition of the law of nations (and of the importance of justice in war).  This view accepts the inevitability of conflict in human affairs, implied by the division of humanity into “nations,” but it refuses to romanticize it and especially to ideologize it, as conflict between pure good and pure evil–what was once known as Manichean heresy.  Human enmity on the national level is ultimately founded not necessarily on good and evil but upon the sheer fact of irreducible difference.

-----------------------------------

Stephen L. Gardner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.  He is is author of Myths of Freedom: Equality, Modern Thought, and Philosophical Radicalism (Greenwood, 1998), a “mimetic” analysis of early modern thought from Descartes to Hegel,  and is currently at work on The Sublime Lie of History: The Quixotic Imperatives of Democratic Desire, a Girardian critique of later modern thought from Marx to Sartre.