American Revolution as Total Revolution: Del Noce and the American Experiment
Marx mural using Coca Cola font, Latin America. Photo credit: Vince C
Philosopher Michael Hanby argues here that America’s ideology is fundamentally revolutionary. The United States wages “interminable war against every form of antecedent order” and is constantly in search of “new sources of oppression” to destroy. America is pragmatic, restless, and anti-philosophical to the point of being anti-thought.
If it is true that America’s ‘philosophy’ is revolutionary -- and the detailed case laid out here by Hanby seems hardly refutable — shouldn’t it follow that the United States, in respect to foreign affairs, must also act as a revolutionary power? A revolutionary power, as the young Henry Kissinger once wrote in reference to Napoleonic France, seeks to overturn the status quo everywhere. Such a power never rests. From its own perspective, only its own security interests matter because only it is the bearer of the correct ideology. To be sure, Hanby’s essay addresses America’s revolutionary character from a philosophical, and not at all from the geo-political perspective, but presumably the more general category (philosophy) is inclusive of the more specific one (geo-politics).
“American Revolution as Total Revolution” first appeared in the Fall 2021 edition of Communio International Catholic Review. It is being re-published here, with permission, in abbreviated form. To benefit from the full import of Hanby’s detailed argument we encourage reading the complete essay (a downloadable version of which can be found here). His complete argument adds, it seems to us, an important corrective to the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce’s over-reliance on the influence of Marxism on contemporary American ‘revolutionism.’
Michael Hanby is professor of religion and philosophy of science at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at Catholic University in America.
The Decomposition of America
America today has made a prophet of Augusto Del Noce, which is undoubtedly one reason why Carlo Lancellotti’s superb translations of Del Noce’s essays into English have met with such an enthusiastic reception.[1] The “totalitarianism of disintegration” that Del Noce foresaw seems to have reached its most perfect expression thus far in the present-day United States.[2] “Total revolution” seems to have taken on a life of its own as the social or anti-social form of an empire united by nothing but its mutual fascination with and enslavement to technology and its collective opposition to fascism, which it more or less equates with being. Its mutual surveillance of all against all is the work of everyone in general and no one in particular, made possible by the digital conquest of time and space. The “rebellion against being” unleashed by total revolution is now rapidly annihilating not only the cultural residuum of a people who, lacking a shared tradition or faith or history from before the age of progress, has never really been a people. It is also negating our shared human nature and even the language by which we recognize a world in common. Ideas and words have ceased to be vessels of truth and communication and become instruments—or weapons—of social change.[3] Young people are inculcated into this brutally instrumental vision, and assimilated into the process of revolutionary change, by a massively bloated educational apparatus without the slightest idea what education actually is. The only “reason” held in common is identical with what Del Noce called “scientism,” which is predicated on the philosophical renunciation of universal reason and the unknowability—if not the non-existence—of ultimate truths and goods. Two-dimensional “sociologism,” which is congenitally incapable of recognizing a profound question, governs public discourse among intellectuals, while reality is increasingly mediated to everyone through the even cruder empiricism that is journalism.[4] Twenty-first century America exemplifies what Del Noce meant in referring to a “semi-culture,” the “outlook of those who receive from outside, from the mass media and thus from the groups who direct and control the flow of information, certain ‘new’ opinions and accept them without any serious consideration of the premises that shape them.”[5] Most subjects of the new totalitarianism thus have no idea that they are being coerced.
Del Noce’s genius was to recognize that the root of the political crisis in the West is not itself political, but metaphysical and religious.[6] At its core is the elevation of becoming to primacy over being—in a word, “anti-Platonism.” “Every revolutionary negation of traditional values,” he writes, “depends upon this initial negation.”[7] The primacy of becoming replaces the vertical transcendence of eternity with the horizontal transcendence of futurity.
From the anti-Platonic vantage, the world is “a system of forces, not of values.”[8] The primacy of force elevates politics over ethics—indeed over everything—even as the negation of universal reason and human nature undermines the basic condition of possibility for a genuinely political society: a world of shared meanings and a common good. Herein lies the novelty of the new totalitarianism according to Del Noce. It “is not that of a political movement that aims at world domination.” It is, rather, a wholly negative phenomenon—anti-racist, anti-fascist, etc.—“marked by a quest to bring about a disintegration of one part of the world” in the name of freedom. [9] It is total war legitimated by its perennial opposition to fascism, falsely defined as whatever sins “against the progressive direction of history.”[10]
Total revolution could only become total by bringing the whole of human nature within its purview, that is, in sexual revolution.[11] One of Del Noce’s greatest insights is to see that “scientism” and “eroticism” form a unity. They are but two sides of the same ontological coin and are mutually efficacious in advancing total revolution. Together, they annihilate all but the barest “biologistic” conception of human nature with its vital energies. “Nature” is simply whatever can be observed, which means anything is just as natural—or unnatural—as anything else. The family must be dissolved; only then can the “meta-empirical order of truth” finally be abolished.[12] The fundamental realities of human nature—man, woman, mother, father, child—must be perpetually redefined. History must be erased, since the past is oppressive by definition, and language, morality, and law must all be ideologically reconceived. The inevitable result is what Federico Sciacca, called “the reign of stupidity.”[13] If all truth claims are merely the expression of class interest, bigotry, or psychosis, if “only what is subject to empirical observation and can be empirically represented… ‘is’”, then there is no possibility of argument, only rhetorical persuasion and manipulation. Scientism and eroticism are twin pillars in “the rule of systematically organized mendacity.”[14]
Del Noce sought “to go beyond both the modern and anti-modern position” in his explanation.[15] Viewed from the perspective he called “ideal causality,” the history of the twentieth century could be seen to unfold according to the logic of a philosophical system. It “represents the complete success of Marxism” as a worldwide event, which also turns out to be its complete defeat.[16] Del Noce called this simultaneous fulfillment and collapse the “suicide of the revolution.”[17] It is a function of an inner conflict deep within the heart of Marxism itself between its historical materialism (which leads to relativism) and dialectical materialism. Classical Marxism elevated becoming over being, substituting horizontal for vertical transcendence, and attacked traditional religion, metaphysics, and morality, denying the good and the true of traditional metaphysics as enduring “values.”[18] Even so, there remained what Del Noce calls a residually Platonic dimension to Marxism. Early Marxism retained a residual belief in an objective order of values derived from the necessities of history and its emancipatory destiny, the residuum of eschatology that Marx inherited from Christianity. As Lancellotti puts it, “In Marx the absolutization of politics is accompanied by faith in the coming of the revolution, the self-redeeming action whereby mankind will liberate itself from its alienated image (God).”[19] Over time, though, the teleology and eschatology of dialectical materialism could not withstand the “rebellion against being” latent in Marx’s thought. The “spirit of negation” that Marxism unleashes thus eventually negates Marxism’s own eschatology, leaving only perpetual revolution, the interminable war against every form of antecedent order. Marxism eventually succumbs to technological civilization and becomes the agent of an even more radically bourgeois culture. “If we consider the necessary process by which Marxism yields to the so-called ‘technological society,’ we find the paradoxical feature that the process it started leads, out of necessary consistency, to the type—which at last becomes realized, of the pure bourgeois, who denies and desecrates all he values.”[20] The only possible utopianism after revolutionary suicide is “a utopianism in the modern sense, which first appeared when Bacon equated science with power”: the interminable quest for a liberating mastery over nature itself for the sake of a thoroughly immanent, and thoroughly bourgeois “well-being.”[21] This civilization of “well-being” arises as a consequence of the inner contradiction of Marxism itself. “Therefore, the technological civilization defeats Marxism in the sense that it appropriates all its negations of transcendent values, by pushing to the limit the very source of negation, namely the aspect of Marxism that makes it a form of absolute relativism.”[22]
Del Noce’s diagnosis fits Marxism’s American profile and casts light on what has been, until recently, its subterranean presence in American life. Marxism in America has always been bourgeois, less a phenomenon among political party bosses and factory floor proletarians than among elites in universities, where “critical theory” has now metastasized into every conceivable kind of gender and “cultural studies” department. Now that these ideologies have escaped their decades long confinement in universities to overtake corporate boardrooms, the media, popular culture, and parts of the government, it seems obvious that Americans have underestimated its potency as a historical force in this country. It should be said, moreover, that Del Noce saw something in America that made it uniquely susceptible to revolutionary thought. He regarded America as “the wellspring of disintegration” and followed Reich in thinking it the “only country where the sexual revolution could take off, in spite of many obstacles and of Puritan resistance.”[23]
Del Noce’s analysis of the decomposition of Marxism casts a bright spotlight on the decomposition of contemporary American life, leaving little doubt that the former is a contributing factor to the latter. It is to be wondered, nevertheless, to what extent this correlation equals causation, and whether the decomposition of Marxism suffices to explain the suicide of the American revolution—the fulfillment of American liberal order in its totalitarian opposite—that seems to be unfolding before us according to some terrible, hidden logic. There are several important issues at stake in this question, the least being why the revolution has enjoyed unparalleled success in America, given the relatively marginal place of Marxism in American culture in comparison to Europe. There is also the question of a remedy if there is one. The belief, congenial to many American conservatives, that American Founding principles are not fatally flawed but corrupted by the later corrosive influence of Marxism leads to the ineluctable—and in our view, woefully, wrong conclusion—that an impossible return to those principles in their classical, pristine form, would rescue America from its nihilistic course. But the most serious question is whether the “crisis of modernity” can be adequately apprehended on the basis of this ideal history alone, without at the same time grasping the meaning of the quintessentially modern nation, the historical and philosophical novelty that is America.
Though Del Noce regarded America as “the wellspring of disintegration,” he was content to say that “the poisoning of America has largely been the work of Europeans,” failing to consider that the American gaze upon their vast new home as potential real estate already presupposed, well before the arrival of Marx, an ontological reduction of nature, a primacy of “praxis,” and a continual surpassing of the given.[24] Yet at other moments Del Noce seems to have an intuition of more. He perhaps says more than he could possibly be expected to know when he wrote “the American spirit found in Pragmatism its philosophical expression.” And he is very near to the mark when he approvingly cites a 1954 remark by Michele Frederico: that “even if society in the United States calls itself Christian, American philosophy is essentially all atheistic. Not only that: it is marked by the idolatry of science, the tool that will radically change humanity by producing technical development and will bring to mankind all the happiness that man by his ‘nature’ can desire.”[25]
The American Atlantis
We wish to affirm this intuition and propose that the revolutionary elements Del Noce associates with Marxism are already present, sometimes implicitly, at other times more radically, in the so-called American experiment. Indeed, we wish to go further and say that America, unlike the nations of Europe, is the essentially modern nation and that the American experiment is thus essentially revolutionary—perhaps, in the final analysis, more revolutionary than Marxism. This opens a possibility that Del Noce did not consider and that we can only begin to sketch here, that the truest “ideal history” of late modernity is not the decomposition of Marxism—though we do not wish to discount Del Noce’s diagnosis so much as circumscribe it—but the decomposition of America. The ideal history of the modern West is the outworking of the totalitarian logic of technological society, of which the United States is the historical and philosophical exemplar. This would provide an additional reason, besides its internal self-contradictions, for why Marxism could yield to technological civilization so completely. To be clear, we do not propose this as a replacement for Del Noce’s explanation, which retains its full force as far as we are concerned, but as a complement to it that we hope will strengthen the pertinence of his arguments to our present situation. A world-historical event like the dawning of a ubiquitous new totalitarianism defies reduction to a single cause.
To grasp fully the revolutionary character of the American project, it is necessary, as with Del Noce’s treatment of Marx, to grasp it in its metaphysical meaning. Americans have long had their own version of the absolutization of politics, and Lancellotti is correct about the shortcomings of a merely political critique of American liberalism, as the political incarnation of John Locke’s philosophy, for example.[26] This is not false, but it is far from the whole truth. Historically speaking, such a reduction fails to appreciate not only the amalgam of influences upon the American Founders—e.g., civic republicanism, Scottish Enlightenment epistemology and moral theory, and Protestant Christianity—but, philosophically, it would separate political philosophy from its foundation in natural philosophy and isolate Locke’s political thought from the critical reduction of reason that elevated Baconian experimentalism to first philosophy among English-speaking Protestants.[27] In other words, by failing to grasp the metaphysical and even theological meaning of Locke, the typical reductio to Locke fails to grasp what is arguably the most significant aspect of the Lockean inheritance in the American Founding, its function as a midwife to the establishment of Bacon’s New Atlantis on the western shores of the Atlantic.
There is a school of thought on the American Catholic Right that argues the American Revolution, in contradistinction to the French, was essentially conservative because it restored an older natural law tradition that had been eclipsed by the absolutist strands in English political theory such as Hobbes’ and Robert Filmer’s.[28] The obvious implication is that our present moral and political disintegration could theoretically be halted by returning to a more original form of America’s founding principles, with its stress on the Declaration’s “self-evident” moral truths, negative rights, personal responsibility, and a limited role for the state within a broader civil society. Europeans who are not deeply schooled in Anglo-American thought and who rely inordinately on contemporary English speakers for their understanding seem particularly susceptible to the diagnostic, if not the prescriptive aspect of this argument.
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It is true that the “Laws of Nature” were everywhere on men’s minds and lips in the eighteenth century, but most of the contemporary appeals to this tradition fail to account for the radical transformation in the meaning of nature, law, God, knowledge, truth, and Christianity that occurred in this era.
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The problem with this understanding is not that it is false so much as empty. It is true that the “Laws of Nature” were everywhere on men’s minds and lips in the eighteenth century, but most of the contemporary appeals to this tradition fail to account for the radical transformation in the meaning of nature, law, God, knowledge, truth, and Christianity that occurred in this era. The inevitable result is some or other species of Whig history.[29] The overthrow of Platonism—whether it be in neo-Platonic or Aristotelian form—was essentially completed long before Marx by the seventeenth century architects of the scientific revolution, the mathematical apriorism of Descartes notwithstanding.[30] The Cartesian bifurcation of reality (which merely repeated in dramatic and more speculative form the working ontology of Galileo) gave philosophical expression to a new, positive conception of matter as some kind of dimensive quality fully actual prior to and outside of any relationship to form.[31] With superficial variations, this basic conception would become axiomatic in the English-speaking world from Newton all the way up until the time of Darwin.[32] Here already is a re-conception of reality as “a system of forces, not of values.” The result was to transform “form” into the formalism of law (Newton) or the process of coming to be (Bacon). In either event, form in the sense of “essential nature” would cease to be the internal principle of motion and rest that ontologically precedes a thing’s unfolding—a notion which presumes a “Platonic” distinction between a transcendent order of being and a historical order of development—and becomes, to the extent this notion has any application at all, the “accidental” consequence of the arrangement of material parts. The self-transcending identity, indivisible existential unity, and interiority that had heretofore distinguished natural things from artifacts is erased. As nature is reduced to artifice, creation is reduced to “manufacture.”
Beginning with Bacon and Descartes and culminating in Kant, the critical project of modern philosophy restricted the scope of reason within ever-stricter bounds—muting the world, so to speak—in order to magnify the power of technical and instrumental reason over it. This was certainly true of Locke who, along with Hume, represents the apex of this trajectory in the English-speaking world prior to the advent of American pragmatism. Locke’s very definition of ideas as mere objects of thought—which simply sets aside the long philosophical and theological history of “ideas”—testifies to the fact that the metaphysics of participation has already been ruptured, well before he goes on to deny that such ideas are innate.[33] Locke further restricts the scope of reason by excluding all but the barest affirmation of God’s existence from the rational sphere—thereby also excluding both Catholicism and Protestant “enthusiasm”—and sets this rupture in stone by restricting knowledge to the knowledge of our ideas only.[34] This turns out to be a false modesty, however; for it is the very impotence of reason before the unintelligibility of the world that warrants the triumph of experimental reason over it.
America, as we have said, is more than the incarnation of Lockean philosophy, which is less important for specific tenets that the American Founders may have drawn from him—on property or liberty, e.g.—than as a representative of philosophical sensibilities that, though internally contested, were becoming axiomatic in the English-speaking world. There are profound implications to this that will subsequently prove decisive for the subsequent shape of American liberal order. In one stroke, Locke radically restricts the scope of things we can meaningfully be said to think about, making “nonsense” an important category of Anglo-American philosophy. Indeed, it is arguably this—what can no longer be thought about—that is the most distinctive characteristic of this philosophy. The disincentive to understanding, the inducement to thoughtlessness, is built into the structure of reason itself that corresponds to the primacy of technical rationality. If by manipulating variable x, I can produce result y, and if y provides an “inference ticket” to new experiment z, then it is no longer necessary—or even possible with reason thus construed—to ask what being or causality or truth is, or even what x, y, and z are.[35] “They are,” John Dewey will later say, “what they can do and what can be done with them.”[36] Americans have never confronted reality as a mystery to be contemplated, but as a set of problems to be solved or challenges overcome. The persistence of moralism in a once-Protestant culture is both a sign and a delayer of the fateful implications of this fact.
Del Noce premises all the negations that characterize revolutionary thought on the elevation of becoming over being. Another, more Aristotelian way to describe the same phenomenon, which perhaps allows us to see certain of its implications more clearly, is to speak of the elevation of possibility (i.e. posse/power) over actuality, consequent upon the “artificial” reimagination of God and nature. In its political guise, American order valorizes possibility under the form of freedom; in it scientific and technical guise, it valorizes possibility under the name of truth.
The re-conception of freedom and truth as indefinite possibility gives the American project its revolutionary character, concretely realized in the interminable conquest of every kind of “frontier.”[37] Philosophically, the elimination of intrinsic form and finality from the natural order means that freedom (at least in its highest instance) could no longer be understood as the uninterrupted, undivided enjoyment of the good as it had been in the tradition. Freedom is reconceived as the power to act or forbear from acting, in other words, as indeterminate possibility. The liberal conception of rights, which D.C. Schindler defines as the “enclosure of a field of power,” enshrines this possibility and makes the protection of this enclosure the raison d’etre of American political order.[38] Yet this enclosure can only be protected, can only become real, in a sense, by remaining unreal—by negating all the claims of the actual world that threaten to define me prior to my choosing, of which there is no end. An inexhaustible spirit of annihilation is thus unleashed under the name of progress and prosperity in the technological and economic sphere and under the name of rights in the political sphere. This spirit needs something to devour in order to affirm itself. It must forever be in search of new sources of oppression, lest it die. As enclosures of possibility ever threatened by the determination of antecedent order, rights must proliferate endlessly, as indeed they have. And yet every new right extends the power of the state to protect and enforce that right. Politics becomes absolute, ironically, in the name of protecting freedom, mediating all human relationships and eventually interjecting itself even between persons and their own nature.
The claims of nature are not just philosophical but inscribed into our flesh. And it is here, among other places, that technological reason, perhaps even more decisively than liberal freedom, contributes to the revolutionary character of the American project. The Marxist equation of truth with “the historical reality it is able to produce” is preceded by the Baconian equation of truth and utility, knowledge and power. This does not mean merely that knowledge is for the sake of power as means to an end. Rather it means that our knowledge is identical to—verified by—the various kinds of power we can exercise over natural phenomena. “The task of human Power,” he wrote, “is to generate and superinduce on a given body a new nature or natures…to subordinate the transformation of concrete bodies from one thing into another within the bounds of the Possible.”[39] And yet the ultimate limits of possibility can only be discovered by perpetually transgressing the present limits of possibility. With the conflation of truth and possibility, the so-called “technological imperative”—that what can be done must and will be done—is built into the very structure of reason. To abandon it—if it were possible—would be to abandon reason itself. Built into truth as possibility is a “an unwanted, built-in, automatic utopianism,” a “self-feeding necessity,” “a principle of innovation in itself which made its constant further occurrence mandatory.”[40] By the hidden necessity of their own inner logic, a regime of necessity that takes on a life of its own as prior decisions and technological interventions determine the conditions of subsequent thought and action, the exaltation of possibility as freedom and truth sets in motion an interminable war against every form of antecedent order.
The first and most fundamental order, the bearer of that vision of reality being overthrown, is the Catholic Church. The new vision of God and nature which legitimated the triumph of political over ecclesiastical order meant that Christianity would have to be reinvented as an instrument of the new orders of nature, reason, and politics. There is perhaps something of significance that Del Noce does not quite perceive in the continued affirmation of God’s existence and the persistence of morality in a world reconceived to exclude him, something unique to Grant’s “break” and the primal “meeting of the alien and yet unconquerable land with English-speaking Protestants.”[41] Thomas Jefferson astutely observed “that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism.”[42] We might similarly suggest, in contrast to Italy and the rest of continental Europe, that there was no need for America to pass through the stage of “postulatory” and “positive” atheism en route to an irreligious destiny, just as there was no need in America to “ban the questions” that heretofore constituted the Western philosophical tradition. [43] Just as the American mind, constituted as American by its break with Platonism, was drained of the capacity to ask such questions, so too was American Christianity always already “irreligious.” Irreligious Christianity is perfectly compatible with moralism and pietism. For these can coexist peacefully—frequently in the same soul—alongside an apprehension of the world that is functionally atheistic.[44] The new vision of God and nature necessitated this. In Locke, for example. mechanistic nature and Baconian empiricism have as their religious corollary a Christianity reduced to the barest affirmation of God’s existence and of Jesus as the historical Messiah, coupled with the recognition of moral norms that could only derive their binding force, in a world drained of goodness as an ontological principle, from the prospect of eternal reward and punishment. The Church likewise ceases to be genuinely Catholic (kata holos.) It is no longer the sacrament of God and the supernatural completion of an inherently symbolic creation, the transcendent whole that contains the political order within its plenitude. Rather churches are reduced to voluntary associations within the transcendent whole that is liberal order.
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John Dewey traced the origins of pragmatism back to Francis Bacon, “the real founder of modern thought.” [45] This made Dewey’s “renascent liberalism” a natural consequence of the “classical liberalism” of the Founders, even if they, like Bacon himself, had a foot in two worlds that prevented them from realizing the full historicist implications of their own philosophy.[46] It is thus not an accident, though there have been Americans of every philosophical school, that this philosophical justification for philosophical suicide is America’s only enduring contribution to the history of philosophy. Jefferson had praised the scientific societies of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in terms worthy of Dewey, as “a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth,” whose “correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation,” and which remains “always in peace, however their nations may be at war.[47] The mission of conquering the vast American continent with its ocean of possibilities necessitated that America itself be a “great fraternity” of this kind. To become the America that we in fact became, the nation would have to become a State, in Dewey’s words, “organized for collective inquiry,” It would require that society take the form of an “organized intelligence” spanning generations, that “attacks nature collectively."[48] This, and not a novel exercise in self-government—is the deepest meaning of the American experiment.” Progressives of Dewey’s generation helped birth the administrative state and presided over the great bureaucratization of American life in the early decades of the twentieth century, often juxtaposing their own “organic” liberalism with the more static, “mechanical” liberalism of the Founders. But it should be said that the collective nature of this attack is entailed in the very nature of scientific truth as possibility, which makes every result provisional and generative of unforeseen consequences. The “organization” of intelligence is as much an emergent feature of its aggregate actions, a “self-organizing” intelligence springing almost spontaneously from the ground up as a conscious “design” imposed from the top down.[49] Once its premises are accepted and put into practice, the New Atlantis almost builds itself without anyone exactly intending it. This explains one of the most novel features of the new, technocratic totalitarianism, its almost automatic character. It is not the rule of one, a classical tyrant controlling the levers of power, but the rule of nobody, with no control levers to pull.
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NOTES
[1] The two volumes edited and translated by Lancellotti (with a third on the way) are Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2014) and The Age of Secularization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s2017). All citations of Del Noce will be from these two volumes, hereafter referred to as CM and AS.
[2] Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, 95.
[3] On the banalization of language, see Del Noce, CM, 191.
[4] Del Noce’s description of sociologism places its metaphysical and anthropological underpinnings in sharp relief to that of the tradition, revealing what is it stake in its contest for primacy with philosophy: “The true clash is between two conceptions of life. One could be described in terms of the religious dimension or the presence of the divine in us; it certainly achieves fullness in Christian thought, or in fact in Catholic thought, though per se it is not specifically Christian in the proper sense. Rather, it is the precondition that makes it possible for the act of faith to germinate in man, inasmuch as it is man’s natural aptitude to apprehend the sacred. (I cannot linger here on the definition of this dimension and I must refer to the very beautiful pages by Fr. Danielou.) The other is the conception that ultimately can be called sociologistic, in the sense that contemporary sociologism reduces all conceptions of the world to ideologies, as expressions of the historical situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures of forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests, unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances of social life. So that the progress of the human sciences is supposed to lead to social science as the full extension of scientific reason to the human world, achieving a complete replacement of philosophical discourse by scientific discourse and thus clarifying the worldly, social, and historical origin of metaphysical thought” (Del Noce, AS, 219.
[5]Del Noce, CM, 140.
[6] Ibid., 228.
[7] Ibid., 58.
[8] Ibid., 232.
[9] Ibid., 87.
[10] Ibid., 101.
[11] Del Noce, CM, 167.
[12] Ibid., 161.
[13] Ibid., 130.
[14] DN
[15] Del Noce, CM, 8.
[16] Ibid., 73-85.
[17] Ibid., 36.
[18] Ibid., 126
[19] Lancellotti, “Auguste Del Noce on Marx’s Abolition of Human Nature,” 576.
[20] Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, 240.
[21] This led to an interesting, and ironic, observation in 1970 on the difference between Russia and the West. “Anyway, it is unquestionably true that Russia constitutes the last bastion of the sacral mindset in the field of politics. Can this defence be delimited to the political field? Or, instead, is this the reason why in Russia religiosity has made a comeback, as attested by many observers? Is this why the Orthodox Church has been affected the least (or not at all) by the new Modernism, the theology of secularization and of the death of God has impacted it very little, and Russian theology schools are the most traditional and (I have heard) the most rigorous in their teaching? On the contrary, Europe thought that it could renew itself by adopting the ways of the civilization of well-being, in which well-being is the only political-social goal—and then whoever wishes to believe that this well-being will continue or increase in another life is free to do so (but, in fact, who thinks about that any longer?)” Del Noce, CM, 120.
[22] Del Noce, AS, 79.
[23] Del Noce, CM 133.
[24] Ibid., 133. On this point Grant writes, “The conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have some sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did. There can be nothing immemorial for us except the environment as object. Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery.” Grant, Technology and Empire, 17.
[25] Del Noce, CM, 123.
[26] Lancellotti would undoubtedly agree that the rich analyses of liberalism by D.L. and D.C. Schindler constitute an exception to this tendency.
[27] See Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America: Reflection on the Birth of the United States (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011).
[28] For two recent books of this genre stemming from the Claremont school of West Coast Straussians, see Robert R. Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020); Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Right, Public Policy, and the Moral Condition of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For a more sustained critique of this genre, see Michael Hanby, “The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God: A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial,” New Polity, forthcoming.
[29] For more detailed accounts see Michael Hanby, No God, No Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 107-49; “The Birth of Liberal Order and the Death of God: A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial,” New Polity, forthcoming.
[30] Suffice to say I dissent from Del Noce’s assessment of Descartes as an “’accident’ in the history of the new science,” but adjudicating this dispute is beyond the scope of this essay. Del Noce, CM, 14. For more on my position, see Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-49 and Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003), 134-77.
[31] This is especially clear in Descartes short treatise, “The World,” written before the Meditations or the Discourse but published posthumously. Descartes declined to publish the essay during his lifetime after learning of the condemnation of Galileo. Here the mechanical philosophy of the Meditations and the Discourse is laid bare, without any of the skeptical apparatus Descartes’ would later build as a path of induction toward it. See Descartes, “The World,” in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (eds.), The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 81-98.
[32] On Darwin’s “Newtonianism,” see David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber, Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 85-140.
[33] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, (London: Penguin Classics, 1997), II.1.1.
[34]See, e.g., Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.23.29.
[35] On a “knowledge that can’t say what anything is,” see Henry B. Veatch, The Two Logics: The Conflict Between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969).
[36] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 115.
[37] I will sometimes refer to the “American project” or “the American experiment” rather than American thought both because these more encompassing terms capture the essence of America not only philosophically, but in its historical, political, and institutional aspects, and because, as we are in the process of unfolding, the latent metaphysics of this project provides philosophical justification for the operational primacy of a mode of action that is largely unthinking.
[38] D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 182.
[39] Bacon, New Organon, II.1.
[40] Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 21 and Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood: Prentice Hall, 1974), 48, 51
[41] This, broadly speaking, is how I would interpret Alasdair MacIntyre’s “disquieting suggestion” of moral collapse which was the subject of After Virtue.
[42] Jefferson, “To Thomas Law, 1814,” in in Merrill D. Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1336.
[43] Lancellotti describes Marx’s “postulatory” and “positive” atheism. “God is not denied on the basis of some newly acquired scientific knowledge or metaphysical argument; rather, God, cannot exist, because if he existed man could not be free. However, Marx operates within a post-Christian world, and so he inevitably thinks of man as transcending the natural world. Thus, his rejection of God cannot take the form of a reabsorption of humanity into the cosmos a la ancient paganism; instead it must coincide with a deification of man, or, to be more precise, with a reclaiming by man of the attributes he previously ‘alienated’ to God. As a result, Marxism is also the first fully developed form of positive atheism.” He contrasts this with earlier forms of “negative” atheism, which, because it is pessimistic and potentially nihilistic, according to Del Noce, “’goes through a cycle that leads it to shed progressively its atheistic character, and to reconcile with religious thought.’” Lancelotti, “On Marx’s Abolition of Human Nature,” 571.
[44] One could undertake an analysis of the liberal Protestantism of the early twentieth-century analogous to Del Noce’s analysis of the Catholic progressivism in the 1960s. See Del Noce, AS, 236-66.
[45] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 28.
[46]See the whole of Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst, Prometheus Books, 2000).
[47] Thomas Jefferson, “To John Hollins, (1809), Writings, 1201.
[48] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, (London: Forgotten Books), 37.
[49] Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 37.