D.C. Schindler, Boris Mezhuev: A Conversation between Two Philosophers

Below is an interview conducted by Russian philosopher Boris Mezhuev with American philosopher-theologian D.C. Schindler. The interview was a follow up to the publication of Schindler’s “What is Liberalism,” in Russian translation, on the site Russkaya Idea (appearing there in two parts: January 28 and Feb. 28, 2021).  This text has just recently, after a certain delay, appeared in Russian, and we hasten now to share it with the English-speaking world. The conversation between the two philosophers testifies, at a particularly opportune moment in history, to the power of reason (when taken seriously, that is) to unite. -- Editors

[Introduction by Boris Mezhuev]: I would like to translate the philosophical conclusions reached by D.C. Schindler into the language familiar to Russian religious philosophy.  Here I want to draw attention to a certain similarity of Schindler's ideas with the Christological views held by V. Soloviev during the last period of his life, a period which was marked by a strong gravitation towards Catholicism. Schindler relies primarily on Aristotle with his fundamental ontological position concerning the superiority of actuality, that is, accomplished, real being over potentiality; the superiority of spirit over matter. In the context of Christian metaphysics, this means the unconditional affirmation of the Incarnation and the recognition of the Christian Church as the body of God on earth. Doubt in this fact, the erosion of the historical fact of the Incarnation is, in Schindler's view, the true religious source of liberalism. I see here a clear similarity with the late V. Solovyov, for whom all of Christian history was evidence of the unconditional historical fact of the Resurrection of Christ. Putting it perhaps a bit crudely, we might say that for Solovyov the Resurrection of Christ is not an object of faith, but a fact confirmed by history itself, the doubt of which can be explained either by a misunderstanding, or by honest disbelief in the spirit of the Apostle Thomas, or by an evil inspiration acting in a doubting person.  Soloviev wrote that the prophet Jesus, who was executed in a province far from Rome, could never have become a significant figure for hundreds of thousands of believers throughout the Mediterranean if the rumor about His miraculous victory over death had not spread throughout the empire.

It would appear that such an ontological attitude sharply contradicts the ideas of religious existentialism, developed in philosophical form by Kierkegaard, and expressed in artistic form by Dostoevsky. Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky agree that every believer should test his faith by radical doubt, by trying to place himself in the position of being a witness to the crucifixion of Christ, but in the absence of any even slightest evidence in favor of His divine power. It is easy to see that in the context of such an existential rethinking of Christianity, which is close to certain aspects of Protestantism and Dostoevsky's worldview, that doubt receives a religious justification, and along with it, liberalism is partially rehabilitated along with many of its social implications, which Schindler himself so observantly identifies. It seems to me that a conservatively oriented liberalism reveals a religious side in as much as, according to Kierkegaard, genuine Christians should not make use of arguments from history.  Loyalty to the Gospel cancels history, and a Christian’s faith should test itself against the absence of any metaphysical guarantees of the Victory of good over evil.  These existentialist thinkers appear to be assigning a religious value to ‘potency’ if only in the sense of doubt, uncertainty.

Q. Would it be fair to conclude, then, that liberalism – with its preference assigned to potency -- has, perhaps, erroneous, but in any case religious features?  How does doubt and uncertainty concerning faith fit into your world view and the relation between actuality and potentiality?

How would you respond, more generally, to the existentialist position toward freedom, e.g., in respect to the ‘free’ existential ‘choice’ proposed by both Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard as regards faith?

American philosopher D.C. Schindler

D.C. SCHINDLER:  I would want to start here by drawing a distinction, which I think is essential with respect to the general drift of your questions.  The perspective I take in the book and in the essay is decidedly cultural and institutional rather than personal and existential.  There is of course a relationship between these (or at least there ought to be some connection), but I would approach things in a far different way if I were intending to present the personal/existential dimension.  My aim was to discuss the institutional recognition of the Church and the presence of the Church as such in the political order, rather than the question of faith per se.  Now, by making this distinction I don’t mean to be saying that the cultural presence of the Church should be detached from the question of its truth, and of course the question of the truth of the Church immediately involves the question of faith.  (As I’ll explain in a moment, the reason I hesitate to “sign on” to “conservatism” in one of its basic currents in any event is precisely because it tends to reduce the Church, and indeed truth in general, to its social and political implications.)  It may be helpful here to draw an analogy: love and marriage are, or as we generally and I think rightly suppose at least ought to be, inseparable.  But one can talk about the institution of marriage and its place in the political order—questions of legal requirements, tax policies, and so forth—without discussing the drama of falling in love, the uncertainties and risks involved, the sometimes violent reversals of intentions, the suffering, the joy, and so on.  It would in fact be out of place to make any of this a matter of public policy.  But all of this is (or ought to be) taken for granted when one discusses the political significance of the institution of marriage.  Similarly, though perhaps less obviously, the dramatic experience of love ought to have the institution of marriage as a reference point.  (In fact, the drama loses quite a bit of its intensity and power if this is “off the table” from the outset.)  Love and marriage cannot be separated from each other, but they can certainly be distinguished in discourse.

My focus in these texts is the institutional dimension of Christianity as it bears on the meaning of the political order.  In this regard, I would want to qualify the sentence you wrote to sum up my conclusion: “Doubt in this fact [i.e., that the Church is the body of Christ on earth], the erosion of the historical fact of the Incarnation is, in Schindler's view, the true religious source of liberalism.”  To my mind, “doubt” is principally a personal/existential category rather than an institutional/cultural one, and so is not immediately relevant here.  It is not doubt, in this sense, that poses the problem, but rather the legal/institutional elimination of the Church qua extension of the Incarnation from the official public sphere that is the problem at the root of liberalism.  One can eliminate the official status of the Church in this regard and have no existential doubts at all about Jesus, or one could affirm the official status of the Church and be filled with doubts on a personal level.  But these are different levels of the question.  To go back to the analogy, the parallel critique would be that the status of marriage has been legally undermined in all sorts of ways, not that people don’t love each other enough.

Now, once the distinction is clear, I would say that, because there is a deep connection between these, if we do eliminate the official reality of marriage it will have a corrosive effect on one’s capacity to love fully.  Similarly, if the official significance of the Church is eliminated, it will have a corrosive effect on the quality of people’s faith (specifically, it will force that faith to become exclusively “private,” in the sense that would eventually degenerate to mere sentimentality, moral intentions, and pious practices).

On this score, I would affirm the extraordinary drama that can accompany faith, especially in existentialist accounts: the heroic leap, the trusting in spite of all evidence, the suffering of the absence of God, and so forth.  But—and perhaps this would be a difference between us—I would not make things like the “cancellation of history” normative for faith.  Instead, I would want to preserve the existential and personal aspects of such things: in other words, these experiences can be for certain people, obviously for some mystics and saints, and to different degrees for different individuals, an essential part of coming to faith.  But to allow such things to define faith not only deprives them of their personal and existential character (because they become “universal qualities”), but entails a host of other problems, such as “colluding” with the political and economic powers that want to isolate individuals from each other so as to have more control over them.

So, I do think that doubt and uncertainty–and therefore “potency”–can have a deep religious significance at the personal and existential level.  But I would not “officially enshrine” doubt at the institutional level, which I think would be a confusion of orders.

Q. Simone Weil once accused Dostoevsky of having committed a terrible heresy when he wrote that, if forced to choose between truth and Christ, he would choose Christ.  For Weil, the heresy committed by Dostoevsky was in imagining any separation between Christ and truth.  It is possible that Dostoevsky here is drawing a distinction between ‘the truth of this world’ and truth as such.  But it is also possible that he is willing to reject reality (actuality), if reality should conflict with what he sees as the absolute good.  In any case, how would you adjudicate this question, and this dispute between the two thinkers?

D.C. SCHINDLER:  I have always understood Dostoevsky to mean “the truth of this world,” because I think it ultimately becomes incoherent to oppose Christ and truth as such.  It has become clear to me that one of the (many!) shortcomings in the things I’ve written is a failure to clarify the meaning of reality/actuality.  Admittedly, it’s not entirely possible to define the concept (which even Aristotle admits) for good philosophical reasons, but it would be possible to say more about what it does not mean.  Actuality in the strict and proper sense is not the same as what happens empirically to be the case.  The “world” (in the existential sense) could present certain conditions as inevitable and even as true, which in fact we have to reject in the name of Christ.  The “absolute good” is more real, more actual, than any present conditions.  But in this case, it is also more true.  In a dramatic moment, faith might require a person to abandon what one always thought, up to that point, was right and true, but—and I think I am taking Simone Weil’s side here, or at least George Grant’s recapitulation of it—after making this leap, so to speak, one discovers that it was not as true as it pretended to be, and that what faith demanded is in fact the truth in the deeper sense.  The idea that Christ could be in some ultimate and absolute way the opposite of truth would just mean that Christ couldn’t be the Son of God, i.e., of the Creator and so of the source of all truth, and that just crumbles into nonsense and confusion in the end.

Q. In your book ‘Freedom from Reality’ you contrast the ‘symbolical’ freedom associated with the classical tradition with the ‘diabolical’ freedom that separates a person from the rest of the world. As I read your book, I get the impression that the nub of your argument is directed not so much against liberalism and the Enlightenment, as it is against Protestantism of the sort which Max Weber described in his famous book.  Do you see Protestantism as having embraced the idea of freedom as accumulation of potentiality – and potentiality first of all in the form of money (capital)?  Is your critique of liberalism/Protestantism at the same time, at least to a great extent, also a fundamental critique of Capitalism? 

D.C. SCHINDLER:  Yes, that’s essentially true.  Rather than single out one phenomenon from the sphere of politics and culture and identify that one thing as the “real” problem, I sought to uncover what seems to me to be a kind of “Ur-gestalt,” if you will, that expresses itself in the various phenomena that we tend to identify with modernity.  The capitalist mode of economics (especially in the ultra-abstract form of finance markets) is absolutely one of the most prominent.  But this is just the economic expression of an “ethos” that has analogous expressions in other areas: in religion (Protestantism, especially in its “low church” forms), politics (a certain kind of liberal democracy), and culture (technology, social media, and so forth).  It occurred to me that the “diabolical” is a provocative way of characterizing the “Ur-gestalt” behind all of these things because of the deep etymological significance of the word, and also of course the rich cultural allusions it conjures up.  For a long-term future project, I have sketched out the lineaments of a fairly comprehensive “symbolic philosophy,” which would offer a response to this Ur-gestalt, but I may not live long enough to write the whole thing. . .

Q.  I understand that you have not positioned yourself, in the American context, as a 'conservative,' and have explicitly distanced yourself from both Burke and de Maistre.  How would you define yourself, if not as a conservative?  Is Post-liberalism a positive philosophical trend, and if so, how would you define it?  Finally, what is it in these two major conservative thinkers (Burke, de Maistre) that makes you want to distance yourself from them?

D.C. SCHINDLER:  The late German philosopher Robert Spaemann wrote an essay (it was actually his first published piece) critiquing a certain kind of conservatism: “The Traditionalist Error: On the Sociologizing of the Idea of God in the Nineteenth Century.”  It is quite illuminating in relation to this question. Spaemann directed his attention principally to de Bonald (on whom he wrote his well-regarded dissertation, On the Origins of Sociology), but what he said could be applied to de Maistre, and even in some respect to Burke, though Burke is a little more complex on this score, I think.  In a nutshell, there is a tendency in conservatives of a certain stripe to reduce theological and metaphysical questions to their social and political implications.  There are a couple of ironies here: first, this instrumentalizing of truth is actually a capitulation to modernist thought forms.  In this regard, Spaemann has argued that it is actually not the revolutionaries who represent the true “coming of age” of modernity, but the restorationists, insofar as these latter attempted to recover the tradition on what had become in the meantime non-traditional grounds.  The second irony is that in fact a truth that has been instrumentalized for social and political ends turns out not to serve those ends well.  What society and the political order needs is a truth that transcends society and politics, a truth and goodness and beauty for its own sake.

Burke is an important thinker, and not to be dismissed.  He has said many important, and even essential, things.  If I were to raise a concern about his approach to things, however, I would say that his notion of tradition tends to be empirical, positivistic and pragmatic, in a way that poses deep problems in the long run.  I don’t think there can be a proper sense of tradition without metaphysics and theology.  It has always astonished me that followers of Burke are often enthusiastic about the work of David Hume, apparently because the kind of skepticism he espouses deflates the pretensions of Enlightenment rationalism.  But Hume affirms tradition precisely against reason, and this has disastrous consequences.  Although I appreciate many of the positions Burke defends, I think he does not sufficiently integrate reason and the question of truth.  (To be sure, the “reason” of which he is skeptical is Enlightenment reason, but rather than concede that version and reject it, I would argue we need to recover the deeper roots of reason.)

If I resist the label “conservative” myself, it is not because I am against “conservation.”  It is not that I think we ought to be a little more “progressive,” and less concerned about tradition, than conservatives allow.  Instead, if I avoid the label it is because I think that so-called conservatives are generally not conservative enough; we need a more, not a less, robust sense of tradition.  “Conservatism,” as it is conventionally understood, was born in the modern age as a reaction to the progressive currents of the Enlightenment, and typically those who embrace the name “conservative” typically point to people like Burke or de Maistre as founding figures of the movement.  But, to my mind, it is essential to go both deeper and further back: in order to deal with the problems of contemporary culture, we need to draw on the whole classical tradition, from Plato and Aristotle, through the Romans, to the great thinkers of the middle ages, and we need to draw on their metaphysics and theology as much as on their specifically political thought.  Most fundamentally, we need to draw on the Gospels, and on the Word expressed in their words, namely, Jesus Christ.  But even Christ needs to be interpreted in the light of the Old Testament tradition that he brings to fulfillment.  None of this, of course, is meant to exclude the sometimes quite profound contributions of modern thinkers.  In this regard, we have to be “conservative” in the sense of receiving and handing on the tradition, but this is something a bit different from the meaning typically associate with the label.  One of the best models for this “ressourcement” of the tradition, to my mind, is Charles Péguy, who understood that the most radical novelty arrives precisely through the effort to be faithful to the past, drawing on sources that are themselves essentially generative, and so productive of ever new forms.  In fact, as many profound thinkers (such as Gabriel Marcel) have pointed out, fidelity to the tradition generates far more novelty and advancement of the human condition than “progressives” are able to imagine.  There is nothing static or stagnant or anti-intellectual in this view of tradition.

As far as “post-liberalism” goes, I appreciate the recognition implied in this moniker that liberalism is over as an ideal or aspirational model (even if its remnants will no doubt continue to haunt us for decades, if not centuries).  But there is a danger in any label, really.  If the name indicates yet another form of “reactionary” thought, I think it is best discarded.  All of that said, there are groups emerging in connection with this name that present genuine hope, it seems to me, since they are seeking to recover more authentic forms of thought and being beyond the usual divides between “left wing” and “right wing.”  The important thing is to realize that the essential Christian mission is to transform not just hearts and minds, but also bodies: the grace of redemption is meant to penetrate to the core of all that we have and do.  There are a number of “post-liberal” thinkers that embrace just this mission.

Russian philosopher Boris Mezhuev

Q.  It has been observed that Catholicism and liberalism have recently been reaching an unprecedented entente lately, given that a self-professedly liberal is hailed as the second Catholic president in US history, and the current pope is being identified (in the New York Times, among other places), as a liberal.  What are your thoughts on this observation?

D.C. SCHINDLER:  Although this observation is a common one, I think it overestimates both the extent to which Biden is Catholic and the sense in which Pope Francis is a liberal.  First of all, regarding Biden, none of the Catholics I know regard him as Catholic, in fact.  The affirmation of Biden as a “Catholic president” tends to come from outside the Church (like NPR), from those only loosely connected to the Church, or from a current of the Church committed to the ideological Left.  For people who would identify themselves as “serious Catholics” (for example, those who go to daily Mass), saying Biden is Catholic is about as significant as saying that Trump is German.  It's true in some distant, cultural sense, and some people make a lot out of it I suppose, but it doesn't really mean much in reality.  There is nothing at all, to my mind, in Biden's way of thinking or in any of the particular positions he takes that is distinctively Catholic (any more than Trump's way of thinking being distinctively German).  He strikes me as thinking like a fairly conventional American, who happens to be "culturally Catholic."  It is obvious that the categories of his conventional Americanism immediately trump any Catholic notions he might have if any sort of conflict or tension would emerge.  The bishops’ proposal to consider withholding Communion seems pretty straightforward if one takes the Catholic Church as a reference point in relation to which to judge American politics rather than the reverse.

The more interesting question is whether Pope Francis would qualify as a "liberal" in the American sense.  That's a much trickier one, to my mind, than the Biden question, even if one qualifies “liberal” in the larger sense as embracing both conservatives and liberals in the more limited political arena.  Even though South America is part of the New World, it has a more profound connection to the European tradition (and therefore the Catholic Church) than the US does, and so the categories don't apply without modification.  Of course, in some respect all of the modern West is liberal, but the US represents liberalism in the purest state, as far as I can see, because it is so self-consciously constituted  by the rupture with all preceding traditions.  Pope Francis certainly expresses some liberal ideas more evidently than perhaps any pope before him, but I think that, once one broke through a series of superficial agreements between Biden and Francis, of which there are no doubt quite a few, one would discover significant misunderstandings and miscommunications between them.  Although I find Pope Francis’s statements on fundamental matters so maddeningly inadequate, it seems to me that Francis would hold some notions of human solidarity, of the Christian sense of poverty, of the reality of good and evil, and the like, that differ in subtle ways from Biden's way of thinking.  All of that said, I would not identify Francis as a conservative thinker or as having a good sense of tradition.