Conservative Restoration?
by Donald Devine
Issue 95 -November 7, 2007

There is a nascent philosopher on the loose and he wants to redefine conservatism. He is Edward Feser, a professor and author of several books, on John Locke, F.A. Hayek, Robert Nozick and the Philosophy of Mind. He apparently once considered himself a conservative-libertarian fusionist in the mold of the movement’s founders--William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, and Hayek. But he now insists upon going beyond fusionism, an up from fusionism, as Buckley (who once wrote “Up From Liberalism”) might put it.

Feser is a tough guy. He wrote an article not long ago for the hip on-line magazine Tech Central Station, titled “Why Are Universities Dominated by the Left.” Naturally, the academy went wild, with a professor attacking him on a “philosophy” blog filled with invective and promising that Feser was “committing professional suicide”--asking for “insight” into Feser’s character to help make his prediction self-fulfilling. It did not deter Feser from publishing a second installment, “The Opium of the Professors.”

Feser’s foray into fusionist revisionism is a conversation among friends. But make no mistake, he is seriously challenging fusionist conservative philosophy and he is very convincing. Although his recent articles have set the stage, he gets down to business in his new book, “Locke.” Rather than interpreting philosopher John Locke—who is so central to justifying America’s founding--as belonging in the tradition of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as Hayek does, Feser counts Locke (and Hayek) in the tradition of Descartes, the man Hayek faults as the father of modern hyper-rationalism and utopianism. Every serious admirer of Locke is aware that his “Essay on Human Understanding” is methodologically reductionist so most conservatives insist that all of his works be considered together in making an evaluation of his epistemology. Feser will have none of this—this is not “wholly satisfactory,” --insisting the Essay be taken as Locke’s last word regarding methodology.

To Feser (following Alasdair MacIntyre), Locke’s fundamental error is “he tried to preserve some elements of the classical or pre-modern moral tradition deriving from Plato, Aristotle and their medieval successors, while abandoning other elements without which the first ones lose their point.” Feser concludes:

One must either endorse Locke’s revisionist metaphysics—his rejection of objective essences in nature, his mechanism, his reductionist accounts of personal identity and free will and so forth—and abandon the traditional moral and metaphysical elements of his philosophy and thus anything that could plausibly be regarded as natural law or, if one wants to maintain those conservative elements, one must reject the revisionist metaphysics and also anything distinctively liberal. One must either be a radical or a reactionary. It is no longer possible (if it ever was) to be a Lockean.

What concerns Feser most is what has happened to Locke in modern times. He is concerned that Locke’s conception of freedom and individualism has led to moral relativism. Locke rejects “innate ideas,” saying they cannot exist by themselves without being related to experience. He insists on a material side to nature. Without personal experience innateness is purely abstract and leads to arbitrariness and dogmatism. “Tis [consciousness] that makes everyone to be what he calls self and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things; in this alone consists personal identity,” says Locke. This, Feser fears “seems to entail that a human body utterly devoid of consciousness would not be a person.” It is this loss of the objective idea of the person that Feser believes has lead to the decline of the dignity of the human individual in the modern world.

In Locke’s attempt to eliminate “innate ideas,” Feser argues, he throws out objectivity, especially Aristotle’s grounding in form and substance, and the whole concept of a traditional morality resting on a human nature. “For Locke, the self is not identical with any substance at all. For the scholastics, on whose view the soul is not an immaterial substance but the substantial form of the body, a person is neither a soul nor a body by itself but a composite of soul and body.” Without Aristotle’s objective “final causality” or the purpose of the thing or person, or medievalism’s natural laws, human nature is merely subjectively defined. “Those who take a more or less Lockean view of personal identity are likely to defend abortion and euthanasia, for they are more likely to take the view that fetuses and patients… lacking as they do the rich conscious lives of normal adults, do not count as persons.”

While libertarians and traditionalists might agree as fusionists that “using recreational drugs, watching pornography, engaging in extramarital sex and so forth” should not be enforced by law, what about their morality? Feser notes that Locke and Hayek did reject these as immoral but Locke did so because man is God’s property and thus the individual has no right to harm himself against His law and Hayek, without a belief in God, did so because he finds the rejection of those behaviors pragmatically necessary for social life. But most modern libertarians would certainly reject the former reasoning and probably not concede that social utility defined morality either, leaving traditionalists not only without legal sanction but without social pressure to support their values. The end result of fusionism, Feser says, is libertarianism alone with no traditional morality and no fused Lockeanism.

Feser insists that one must be either radical or reactionary—either libertarian or traditional—rejecting fusionism, which insists upon synthesis, harmony, a middle way between the two. One could argue that Aristotle and his medieval successors (but not Plato) built their epistemologies on this fusionist ground but Feser is reluctant to separate Plato and Aristotle (as Hayek does) and finds that the essentials of the “classical or pre-modern moral tradition” are form, essence and final causality. In fact, the result of not reading natural law as requiring the reality of essences and that forms (universals) have a “final causality”—i.e., an objective purpose--IS modern subjectivism and relativism.

The “reactionary” direction Feser insists upon is a return to objectivity in morality, to return to medieval philosophy and its metaphysics of form, essence and final causality. Yet, to do so he must answer some questions. Why are Plato and Aristotle in the same tradition? Hayek says they are not because the former makes form and essence independent of experience and the later (like Locke) does not. In fact, Feser recognizes this: “Of course, for Aristotelians, this does not mean, as it did for Plato, that the forms exist totally independently of the material world, for they regard forms as existing in general somehow only ‘in’ the things they inform.” Feser concedes that while Locke rejects innate ideas he accepts innate capacities such as sensations, reflection and cognitive abilities and innate practical principles and natural tendencies. Contrary to his conclusion, Feser even admits Locke recognizes a kind of real essence, that he accepts “a secondary and mediate signification to things themselves.” But Feser objects to Locke’s vagueness on the matter and especially to what “would become” in modern thinkers an opaque reality divorced from common sense.

Since Feser makes these concessions, why is not Locke’s essence not a “minor variation” of essentialism, in his own words, not “an advance over the medieval approach” as far as the reality of essences is concerned? Feser worries that such “conceptualism” is vague and subject to misinterpretation. But is it proper to blame Locke for what “would become” with probability rather than what it was with him? Yes, value would be sounder with objective forms and final causality. Is that possible with what we know today? The great Blaise Pascal was instrumental in introducing the empirical indeterminacy of probability that has not only affected philosophy but changed science, neither of which has fully resolved the issue to this day. Pascal was the first to disprove a central Aristotelian idea—that all nature was substance in motion--and thus that a vacuum was not possible. Pascal’s solution was to posit two types of definition—in a dualism comfortable to scholasticism—the scientific and mathematical realm where forms are simply subjectively defined by the investigator for analytical purposes (Karl Popper calls this “methodological nominalism”) and the real world realm where there are true essences that are embedded in reality and available to common sense, even if only in a probabilistic manner (Popper calls this “metaphysical realism”).

It is not just Pascal (and Locke and Hayek and Popper) who give this reality role to common sense as justification for essence and final causality and do so because they believe reason cannot reach this far. Aristotle himself used a similar device prior to philosophy with “pre-existent knowledge” which he said was better known than reasoning from it and Feser acknowledges the importance of common sense to scholasticism. Is it possible for philosophy to justify such fundamentals or, as Joseph Ratzinger argues, can such ultimate questions “no longer be decided by arguments from natural science or even philosophical thought,” as essential as they are in their own realm, since these methods have reached their limits by then?

If not, why is Aristotle not sufficient? Final causality, form and essence are sufficiently explained by him. Why bring St. Thomas, much less Jesus, into the picture at all? Feser freely admits that God the Creator is much more central to Locke than to other philosophers. Everything comes from Him, from life, liberty and property to the fact that man is God’s property and as such is obligated to follow God and his nature’s law but is given the freedom to reject them too. If Aristotle is sufficient, Christianity was not necessary. But Locke found that Aristotle was not sufficient. To Locke, the resurrection of Jesus and this proof that there was a life after death:

changed the nature of things in the world and gave the advantage to piety over all that could tempt it. The philosophers, indeed, showed the beauty of virtue; they set her off so as drew men’s eyes and approbation to her; but leaving her unendowed, very few were willing to espouse her. The generality could not refuse her their esteem; but still turned their backs on her, and forsook her. . . . But now there being put into scales on her side, “an exceeding and immortal weight of glory”: interest is come about to her and virtue is now visibly the most enriching purpose, and by much the best bargain.

The “philosophers” were not enough. Christianity changed everything to Locke. It was Jesus who divided and harmonized God and Cesar and St. Paul synthesized Greek and Jew only in Christ. Moreover, it was a material and historical event that changed everything, not a form. Indeed, Locke held that the “mere probability” of the truth of Jesus and His resurrection was enough to change everything.

Of course, Feser’s real point is not about Locke per se but that without a concept of essence and final causality, it is impossible not to fall into utter moral confusion, which is the modern condition. While he does not say it, even the Frankfurt School’s Jurgen Habermas admitted to Ratzinger that modernity had gone “off the rails” and needs something like religion to help it back on its feet. For if there is not a purpose to things, there is no purpose, no reason, no sense in anything. Feser’s insistence that essence and final causality receive explicit recognition is fundamental to returning rationality to the modern skeptical world.

Feser’s objections to Locke, Pascal, Hayek, Popper and company are that they have a “deflationary account of knowledge” and that their purpose is to pragmatically diffuse disputes over values rather than speak the truth. So is it probability that is the “revisionist metaphysics” that must be rejected? The issue is, as Feser notes, is it true, and convincing? Consider Pascal’s famous “wager.” If I wager for and God is -- infinite gain; if I wager for and God is not -- no loss; if I wager against and God is -- infinite loss; if I wager against and God is not -- neither loss nor gain. Pascal argues this leads reason to accept God’s truth as the most convincing solution to common sense. Can essence and final causality be accepted by similar calculations within the world of common sense? This is not the certainty of Aristotle but it is a sparse certainty of a kind and it is also the reasoning of Locke, especially in the “Reasonableness of Christianity.” It is a calculation most of the people of the world are capable of making as opposed to the unendowed and thus unespoused beauty of Platonic or even Aristotelian reasoning.

The great news is that Feser is writing a new book to resolve all of these questions. In fact, conservatism is in an intellectual and moral crisis and it sorely needs a Professor Feser to rationally fight his way through it all. We all need him to be successful or we all will surely either sink into the relativistic moral morass that so threatens the West or be forced to accept a theistically endowed monism such as Islam offers. Only Western harmonic fusionism has provided a middle way for the modern world but unless there is a restoration, it will become irrelevant to it.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.