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On theMeasure and Conservationof Human Things

J ames I /: Schall, S.J.

For the truthof knowledge ismeasuredby the knowable object. For it isbecausea thingissoorisnotsothat a statementisknown to be true or false, and not therevers e.

-THOMASAQUINAS, ommentary onAristotlesMetaphysics,Books,1.17,#1003A people that were to honor falsehood,defamation, fraud, and murder would beunable, indeed, to subsist for very long.

--ALBERT EINSTEIN,Religionand Science:Irreconcilable?, J une1948Ive cometothe damndest watershed inmy life-done what I wanted to do in thenovel, with linguistics, children grown,sitting down here in the Louisiana au-tumn. Everything quiet. What now? Itwould be a good time to die, but on theother hand, Id as soon not. Its all veryspooky.Lifeismuch stranger than art....

-WALKERPERCYo Shelby Foote, May14, 1972*

HUMAN HINGS A RE NOT divine things.Feuerbach says, brashly, that divineJAMES. SCHALL,.J., is Professorof Govern-ment at Georgetown University and authorofnumerous books including At the Limts ofPolitical PhilosophyandSchallonChesterton.

things are the producto human things.Plato and Aristotle describe human thingsas open to, but not identical with, divinethings. They also intimate that it ishu-man, as much aswe can, toseek divinethings. Homo non proprie humanus sedsuperhumanus est.The man who sets outonly to be human somehow becomeslessthan human. We ignore the highestthings at our peril. Human things arefinite, incomplete; nonetheless, they arereal and worthy. They are worth keeping.Their very imperfection, indeed theirperfection, implies something beyondthemselves, some abiding unsettlementor restlessness, as Augustine remindsus. Though we have here no lastingcity,we still found cities, preserve them,refashion them, sometimes destroy orabandon them. We are often, asChesterton said, homesick at home.Still we first need homes that abidesothat we might know what this curioushomesickness might indicate about ourhuman condition.But human beings can do unworthythings, things both against human thingsand against divine things. To be unable,in principle, to choose and to do evilthings, however, would necessitate acontraryincapacityto do gracious things.The drama of human existence woulddisappear if either of these peculiar ca-pacities were lacking to us. We would,

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compared to what we are, be dull, boredbeings. Our contentment would be likethat of the animals, whereas our actualdiscontents point beyond us, to the gods.Rewards and punishments have theirbasis i i i hiiman reality, in the conse-quencesof exercised freedom.The citiesof men are set up to reflectthe soulsof men who compose them. Ifthere canbedisordered souls, there canbe disordered cities. In fact, the maxi-mum disorder in human things reflectsitself most clearly and most dangerouslyin the worst regime. But the origin of thisdisorder isnot in the city itself; it remainsin the soul, in that part of the soul thatcan do otherwise. Reforms of cities,both for better and for worse, begin andend in reforms of souls. Much of modernpolitical thought has been a deliberateeffort to avoid, to obscure, or to deny thistruth. Unless we conserve this same truth,however, we will not know what we are.Knowing what we areisthe first thing wemust keep. To loveis to keep.A city that is disordered, however,implies the existence, at least in speech,of a city that isnot disordered. Fraud,a disorder, means that we recognize whatisnot fraud, that it need not have been,but is. The city that is completely or-dered, the best regime,isthe main philo-sophic concern of politics insofar as itreflects on its own experience, on its ownunique activities. The exact location ofthe best regime is the true mystery ofpolitical things. Politics, by being poli-tics, brings us to things that are notmerely political, to things in the order ofwhatis.The best regime of men, becauseit is rare, implies the best regimeof thegods, the Cityof God. In revelation, Godis,as it were, using Aristotles phrase, asocial and political being, a Trinity. Godisneither lonely nor in need either of theworld or of us. Will men be like gods?has always been, since Genesis, a ques-tion formulated against God, a questionthat implied that men thought that they

could make themselves better than Godcreated or redeemed them. This claim toautonomy overwhat man i s, in the tradi-tion, has always been called pride. Itmeans the claim that man isthe cause ofhis cwn being and e! a! that is not hisown being, including the gods.

In revelation, man ismade in the im-ageofthis triune God. That is,heisnothimself, by himself, a god. His relativeperfection does not consist in becomingsomething else other than what he i s,thoughwhatheisimplies his responsibil-ity for becoming this best. Otherwise, hewould not be what he is, a being freeenough either to reject or to attainwhathei s. Neither in the stateof nature, nor inthe household, nor in the polity, nor inthe City of God isit good or man to bealone. Man comes to know what he isthrough reflectingonwhat he does.Ageresequitur esse. How we act follows fromwhat we are. The being of man impliesthe goodof man. His being isgiven, butnot by himself; his goodness he mustchoose to bring about in himself. Mandoes not make man to be man, asAristotle already knew, but taking himfrom nature as man, makes him to begood man.Machiavelli, nafamous passage, askedus to pay attention not to what menought to do, but to what they do do.W eare, he advised, to reject the ancientphilosophers and tolisten to the modernones, to himself. He did not flinch atdescribing some rather terrible thingsthat men do to each other. Doing suchthings, indeed, he thought, could be use-ful.Heexplicitly rejects Socratess stan-dard that itisnever right to do wrong.Machiavelli issaid thereby to have intro-duced observation and accurate founda-tions into politics. In other words, hemade politics scientific,as Hobbes wasto attempt to do more systematicallysome century and a half later. Boththought that they reduced human thingsto the lowest possible denominator and,

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on this basis, constructed political thingsindependently ofmoral things. The im-provement of mans estate, to useBacons phrase, could now be contem-plated as a product of our own making ifwe did not expect too much, if we low-ered our sights. We could become moredemocratic by becoming less noble. Wecould do this in the name of modernscience. Human things were to be mod-eled on non-human thingssothat amonghuman things we could have the certi-tude of natural things. This improve-ment was to be achieved at great cost.But, paradoxically, men and Princeswho honor alsehood, defamation, fraud,and even murder not infrequently lastfor a longer time in power than even ascientific Einstein seems to anticipate.How is it, if these are disordered acts,that they last at all? Is time necessarythat the results of our acts might becomevisible, even to us? Politics isthe publicspace in which the results of our acts,good or bad, appear. MachiavellisPrince,to recall, was empowered with suchtools as lies, defamation, fraud, andmurder precisely so that he might besuccessful,sohe and his new politicalregime would last.He was liberatedfrom the restrictions of what we oughttodo,from the bonds of virtue,sothat hemight be successful in staying in power.If this new Prince took the measureofmen, it wassothat he might measure andmanipulate them for his own purposes.The Prince was not measured by any-thing but his own criteria. He was notonly a new Prince; he was a new man,an unmeasured, unlimited being. Manwas for himself. Science, when appliedto politics, eliminated what politics wasabout because the methods of sciencewere not proportionate to the subjectmatter of political things.Can we find and remove the causesfor such disorders as lying, defamation,fraud, and murder, assuming we agreethat they are disorders? Revelation was

awareof the perplexity o these mattersunder the rubric of the Fall. It impliedthat both politicians and scientists couldthemselves manifest these disorders; thatisto say, there was no political or scien-tific cure for them-which did not nec-essarily mean, that there was no cure atall. Could there be a reality whose activi-ties are not subject to scientific method,which seesonly what such method al-lows it to see? Reductionism means,briefly, to identify all reality with whatscientific methods allow to be consid-ered. f the method does not reach some-thing, it isassumed not to exist. Thisisaradical narrowing of reality. Culture, reli-gion, philosophy, in some sense, meanthe preservation both of science and,more especially, of what science cannotreach by its own peculiar methods.Those wholie,defame, commit fraud,and murder do, moreover, give us rea-sons for their acts. Their reasons aredesigned to make such acts seem noble,necessary, worthy, justified. This expli-cation would not be necessary if suchacts were simply what they are, if theydid not call attention in their very beingto their opposites, to truth, honor, hon-esty, and the dignity of life.These samePrinces who practice these newer poli-tics likewise complain if these deviantmethods are used against themselves,even if they think all men do them.Doesnt this reactionseemodd?Doesthedenial of a standard indicate the exist-ence of a standard?Machiavellis Prince,in his own terms, might be successfulfor a time, evenalong time, among virtu-ous Princes. But a Machiavellian Princeamong Machiavellian Princes-what ad-vantage does he have?

Ought we then to conserve not onlythe record of our noble deeds but alsothe record of our heinous ones-monu-ments to both kings and tyrants? Or is itpossible, as C. S. Lewis intimated in aremarkable little book, a book largelyabout science and literature, to abolishModern Age 73


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man?3Andthis abolition,as Lewis con-ceived it, is not the result of necessarycosmic forces or natural disasters butofthe developmentof mans knowledge, ofhis brain, of his science, along with, per-haps, the cnrruptinn nf his wi!!. Thisabolition isthe product, in other words,of mans own choice, of his free will.Istheultimate proof or ndication that man hasliberty, in other words, hisvery scientificchoosing not to conserve himself aswhathe is?Ishe initially ill-made in suchawaythat his own remaking can claim to im-prove on the divine things that are saidby the classical authors to be the highestthings about him?When we have done all we set out todo, why, in Walker Percys words, is it agood timeto die? sthereafinitecomple-tion to lifeduetous, a four score yearsand ten, as Scripture implied? Ciceroalso seems to think so in his famousessay On Old Age.Isdeath itself,then,something that we should conserve?Or isdeaths elimination, just like alter-ing the processes of begetting and birth,a proper object of science? Would it bean improvement if scientists replacedthis four score years and ten man witha four-hundred-year-old man?Isextendedlengthof time an improvement on ever-lastinglifein the revelational sense? Andguish art and life,yet Aquinas remarksthat living things, indeed all things, arethe products of the divine art. They allbetray the classic questions: Why isthere something, not nothing? Whyisthis thing not that thing? Things do notdesign hemselves, though many thingsare subject to mans re-furbishing pow-ers. Michael Behe points out that thehuman eye, for example,is itself so intri-cate,socomplex that it could not simplyhave happened or resulted from slow,statistical f orce~.~tbetrays a design notof its own making. This is presumablywhy, reflecting on what he learns aboutthe eye, a man can invent eye-glasses.

~

I why islifestranger than art?We distin-

Doesman himself betray the same prin-ciple? If he makes himself, is he stillhimself?Art isa human thing, the relation be-

tween what we want to make and what wedn make. !f art or fictianwere strange:than life,where would such art or fictioncome from?Among us, art seemstocomeafter life;among things, art seems tocome first. They are what they are, not ofthemselves. Knowledge does not mea-sure knowledge. Existing things measureknowledge. Truth s,asPlato said, tosayof what i s, that it is,of what isnot, that itisnot. And what measures things? Espe-cially, what measures human things? Canhuman beings, as Einstein, the scientist,seemed to think, do things that are nothuman? f they mustdo them, or f theyare as good as their opposites, what dowe have to complain about, or even talkabout?Our complaints imply a standard,a rule. Our talking implies an effort todistinguish among things. We seek toknow, knowing wedo not know.In hisReflections on the Revolution inFrance,perhaps the greatesto the mod-ern books that distinguish science andpolitics, Burke comments on those, likeEmpedocles among the ancients andBuffon among the moderns, who want touse geometry and mathematics as prin-ciplesof politics. When these state sur-veyors came to take a viewof their workofmeasurement, Burke writes,

they soon found that in politics the mostfallacious o all things was geometricaldemonstration.They had then recourseto another basis (or rather buttress) tosupport the building, which tottered onthat false foundation. It was evident thatthegoodnessof the soil,thenumber of thepeople, their wealth, and the largeness oftheir contribution madesuchinfinitevaria-tion between square and square as torender mensuration a ridiculous standardof powerinthe commonwealth,andequal-ity in geometry the most unequal of allmeasures in thedistributionof men.5

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This iswhy Aristotle had already toldus that we should not expect more certi-tudeof a science than the subject matterof that science could yield. Yet, becausehuman things cannot accurately be mea-sured by mathematical or other scien-tific criteria, it does not necessarily fol-low that human things have no propermeasure of their own.Human things, the things that cameforth from reason and will, are as suchtrue on1yforthe most part. Whyisthis?It is because of the variety of circum-stance and condition in human things,because there are many different ways todo almost anything good or bad. N otwohuman acts, either of good or evil,areexactly the same. Yet they come to be byhuman agency. Thus, thereisan area oraspect of reality that isunique to humanliving, that could not exist without it. Itexists because human beings exist, thereality of things that proceed from hu-man knowledge and will. The practicalsciences, as Aristotle called them, inves-tigate the reality of things that need notbe, the things that can be otherwise,things that proceed from human actingand causing. If these things could, at anymoment, have been otherwise, we can-not study them as f they were things thatwould always betray the same propertiesand activities. We cannot exactly antici-pate aheadof time what they will be. Thevariety of human things, including politi-cal things, thus, smore complicated thanthe diversities o natural and cosmicthings. But once human acts have beenput into reality, it always remains truethat they exist in this way, not that way.What kind of a good is science? Sci-ence, Aristotlesays, isaperfection of ourminds, of our knowing. But itisthe know-ing not of ourselves but of what is notourselves. We know ourselves only inknowing what isnot ourselves. We seekto know that things are, how things are,why they are as they are. The moderndevelopment of science, however,asLeo

Strauss perceptively observed, came upagainst one curious obstacle.After some timeitappeared thatthecon-quest o nature requires the conquest ofhuman nature and hencein the firstplacethe questioning o theunchangeability ofhuman nature: an unchangeable humannature might set limits to progress. AC-cordingly the naturalneedsof mencouldno longer direct the conquest o nature;thedirectionhad to come from reason asdistinguished from nature, fromtheratio-nal Ought asdistinguished from the neu-tral IS.^This remarkable passage sets theagenda for Lewiss abolitionof man. Itmay be that the unchangeableness ofhuman nature isnot a necessary thingthat cannot be otherwise but a moralthing that we make otherwise at our peril,at the cost of what we are. Wecan do: itispossible to do what we ought not to do.

If we do, the costo oursodoingisto livewith our choices, with the world made byourselves.The natural needs of men meant thatthey could learn what they are, even ifthey did not make themselves, by ob-serving in themselves what they natu-rally need and strive for. I f, however,what mun is turns out to be itself anindifferent object of science, itself absentof any norm for its being the way it is,then man no longer ismeasured by thebeing heisgiven. TheIsofmans natureisnot neutral,as Strauss intimates. Forit implies that man does haveanaturalmeasure thatisnot simplythe productohis own Ought now released from na-ture and dependent solely on his ownconstructive, or artistic, reason. Hence-forth, the reconstructiono human na-ture in the name of progress will be interms of, ronically, human rights, hem-selves presupposed to nothing but whatthe autonomous intellect, individual orpolitical,seeksto put in place. The rightsof man are divorced from the beingoman and turn upon it. Human natureisno

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longer itself a measure,even though wecan compare what science now proposeswhen it is no longer blocked by an un-changeable human nature, with humannature as it manifested itself in history.we can know, in the nameof progress,that we have not improved fundamentalthings.Theresan analysis of modern conser-vatism, though not the only one, thatmakes it merely a more cautious versionof modern liberalism; neither the one northe other isbased on any unchangingnorms.7 If some aberration comes intoexistence foralong time, if it isreducedto habit or custom, it becomes some-thing embedded, something of the past,something, yes, of human nature to bepreserved. Custom can be as arbitrary asrevolution. Thereisno reason that whatmen dodocannot itself become a habit.Habits and customs can be good or bad;they requireastandard of judgment. Of-ten, as Burke also implied, evil habits orcustoms can in practice be changed ormodified in such a way, still using thesame words or manners, that they nolonger bear the disorder in which theyfirst appeared. But this approach isnotan argument about making things thatare evil to be good, but rather about howdisordered things can be best modifiedslowly, in practice. Oftentimes, the effortto change things quickly, evenevil things,rather than gradually, produces, as St.Thomas observed, not improvement butsomething worse. W eare as responsiblewhen our good ideas produce evil aswhen our bad ideas have the same result.But to understand the difference betweengood and bad results, we need ideas thatare at some level standards, measures,permanencies.We cling to permanent things, thenorms o our being, Russell Kirk onceobserved, because all other groundsare quicksand.sConserving and keepingare as noble enterprises as discoveringand finding. It isperhaps moreof a featto

..,conserve good institutions (or good hab-its) than it is to form them in the firstplace. What isglorious about our mindsis not merely that they exist, but thatthey put us in contact with the world.Since we can iorget or reject what wehave learned, there isa place for keep-ing, conserving what we have learnedabout ourselves and about the worldthatisnot ourselves but within which welive. Permanent things, first things, com-mon things -such things remain even inour own rejections. But it isthe functiono any true keepingo things that what iskept is kept because i t is worthy. Thisdoesnot deny that we should know theaberrationsof ourselves andof our kindas a permanent lesson to us. But theemphasisson the fact that human thingsmustbeconserved, deliberately kept.J . M. Bochenski once gave avividillus-tration about the relationship betweenthe lawsof the mind and the lawsexisting in things, and more especiallyabout the fact that the universal laws arerelated to concrete things. In the world,he says,

laws are really valid. Let us takethe fol-lowing example. When an engineer plansa bridge,herelieson a great numberofphysical laws.Now, if one would assume,as Hume does, that all of these laws areonly habits o mankind, or more preciselyof this engineer, then one mustaskhow itispossible that a bridgewhichis correctlyplanned according to proper laws willstand solid, whereas one in whoseplan-ningtheengineerhasmade mistakeswillfall apart. How can human habitsbedeci-sive for such masses o concrete and iron?I tseems as f the laws areonlysecondarilyin the mnd o the engineer. Primarily theyare valid for the world, for iron and con-crete, totally ndependent of whether any-one knows something about them or not?If the laws of engineering are derivedand known from reality, no less so arethe laws of human nature. The primarydifferenceisthat the iron or the cement

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has no choice but to be what it iswhencorrectly placed in a bridge. Human be-ings have to put into effect the laws oftheir own being. They are like a bridgewhich knows how to build itself, and Qpari,how not to build itself. f they makeamistake, the bridge will not stand. f wereject our being, we do not cease to be,but we do cease to be well.In his What I s Philosophy?, MartinHeidegger cites the following passagefrom Plato: Plato says (Theatet, 155d):For this isespecially thepathos [emo-tion] of a philosopher,tobe astonished.For there is no other beginning ofphilosophia than this.1 What isaston-ishing about the bridge of Bochenskisengineer is that it works. Who wouldever think, looking at it, that a bridgecomes from the art that is not strangerthan life?What iseven more astonishingis that not all bridge designs work. I t ispossible to err. There is a differencebetween a good design and a bad one.The origin of the good design or the baddesignisthe same; itisfound in the mindo the engineer. The engineer, in thissense, is an artist. It seems amazingthat things work, yet we know they dowhen constructed properly. But, to re-call Walker Percy, lifeis stranger thanart. That is to say, why should humanlifebe able to make a bridge? And onceabridge as an idea is formed, many differ-ent kinds of bridges can be made. Thefirst mystery remains the connection ofmind and being.

Attempts are often made to convincepeople that we have reached the twilightof the age of certainty in the knowledgeof truth, and that we are irrevocablycondemned to the total absenceof mean-ing, the provisional nature of all knowl-edge, and to permanent instability andrelativity, John Paul I 1 remarked in anaddress to Rectors of Polish Universi-ties.

In this situation, it appears imperative to

reaffirm a basic confidence in human rea-son and its capacity to know the truth,including absolute and definitive truth.Man is capable of elaborating a uniformand organic conceptionof knowledge. Thefragmentation of knowledge destroysmans inner unity. Man aspires to thefullnessof knowledge, since he isa beingwho by hisvery natureseeks the truth andcannot live without it. Contemporaryscholarship, and especially present dayphilosophy, each in itsown sphere, needsto rediscover that sapiential dimensionwhich consists in the searchfor the defini-tive and overall meaningof human exist-ence.What is implied here is that we neednot, on thebasis of evidence, accept themovements and philosophies that endthe twentieth century as definitiveo thehuman condition. Man does have an in-ner unity.H ecan develop a coherent setof principles that do explain reality. The

meaning of his own existence need not becompletely obscure to such a degreethat he can know nothing of himself orofthe world.One of the burdens of classical politi-cal philosophy was to convince the busypolitician that there was reason to et thephilosopher philosophize and that eventhough he might be, likeSocrates, a gad-fly, f notanuisanceandadisturberofthepeace, his lifeand activity were impor-tant to thepolityitself. What theclassicalpolitician was notsoawareof,and thisisthe situation o the century we now en-ter, isnot the corrupt politician but thephilosopher who rejects what is. Or toput it in another way, it is the philoso-pher who has corrupted the politicianand encouraged him to put into effectideas that involve the radical reconstruc-tion of man contrary to any good that isinherent in his being.The modern political tyrant, likeCallicles and Alcibiades among the an-cients, is liable to praise the philosophyofhis youth. He is likely to have things

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going for him, personally and politically.The twentieth century has been peculiarbecause its worst tyrants were oftenthemselves philosophers. The combina-tion of politician and philosopher cametoexist inamost unforiunaie maiiner. Sthere anything more dangerous than this?It would seemso.What would be worsewould be politicians, busy about theirown ways, attuned to the philosopherswho themselves deny any possibility ofknowing truth, of knowing what we are,of knowing anything but what we make,including our polities.And yet we ought not forget that inclassical thought, to know evil things isnot to be evil. That is to say, as EricVoegelin remarked, there is a certainsalutary good in seeing that the ideolo-gies developed in the early modern pe-riod and carried into effect in the twenti-eth century have reached their intellec-tual limits.I2They have nowhere else toturn but on themselves or backto reasonand revelation. It isthe taskof conserva-tism not just not to forget our deeds butalso not to forget the ideas that causedthem. This cannot bedonewithout atten-tion to human measure, to standardsofwhat it is to be human. No doubt thetwenty-first centurys greatest heresywillarise out of the effort through ecologyand environmentalism to gain completecontrol of man,of begetting ando dying.Thus, in the confused name of ongoingearth,nothing inlifeisleft unregulated oruncontrolled by anarrow and demand-

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1. Ideas and Opinions (New York,1954), 51. 2.TheCorrespondence ofShelbyFoote&WalkerPercy,ed.Jay Tolson(New York, 1997), 167.3.TheAbolitionof Man (New York, 1962). 4.Darwins Black Box:The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (NewYork,1996). 5.Ed.J .G.A. ocockOndianapoIis, 1987),152-153.6.The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), 7.7. SeeCharles N. R. McCoy, The Structure of PoliticalThought(NewYork, 1963), 243-250. 8. Enemies of

ing vision of some new man. H e is tobecompletely formed by an aberrant sci-ence, which will decide who ought andwho ought not to exist. The abolition ofman recalls man. I t is the task of thephksophic sideof phi!osophic tonser-vatism not merely to preserve and tokeep the measure of human things, but torecall what men do when they forget thismeasure.

In Nietzsches Twilight of the I dols,written at the closeof the nineteenthcentury, we read: When the anarchist,as the mouth pieceof the declining strataof society, demands withafine imagina-tion, what is right, justice, and equalrights, he ismerely under the pressureof his own uncultured state, which can-not comprehend the real reason for hissuffering-what it is that he is poor in:life. Acausal instinct asserts itself in him:it mustbesomebodys fault that he is ina bad way.13The mission of conserva-tism and philosophy itself isto preserveamong men that tisnot somebodyelsesfault that he is in a bad way. If menpreserve but one truth-namely, that ifman isinabad way itishis own fault, notsomebody elses-it is enough to beginto preserve and to keep the measure ofhuman things even in the third millen-nium. The truth of knowledge is mea-sured by the knowable object. Life isstranger than art. Homo non propriehumanus sed suprahumanusest.The cit-iesofmen reflect the soulsof men whocompose them.

Permanent Things (La Salle, Ill., 1984), 61.9. Phi-losophy-An Introduction mewYork, 1972). 14-15.10. Trans. J . Wilde andW. Kluback (New Haven,1956), 79.11. Meetingwith Rectors in Toru (June7, 1999), LOsservatore Romano, English, 16 J une1999, 8. 12. Conversations with Eric Voegelin(Montreal, 1980), 16-17.13. #34, in The PortableNietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1968),534.

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