Comments on: What is Conservatism? Part II

By: jonathanjones02

jonathanjones02 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:17:06 +0000

I think metaphysics shouldn’t try to uproot the objects of our knowledge from the historical/cultural situation through which we know them. And actually, that’s kind of a Burkean conservative idea!

Yes, certainly, and one of the reasons Richard Weaver (a conservative scholar concerned with the debasement of rhetoric and language) criticized both Burke and Kirk.

By: Kyle R. Cupp

Kyle R. Cupp — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:04:43 +0000

That’s a good way of putting a key difference. Generally speaking, postmodernists deny the existence of the big, capital-lettered truths, whether expressed as Truth, Being, Essence, or Form; or at least, they deny that we can know them as such. In terms of traditional categories of philosophy, postmodernism falls more into the category of an epistemological project, one focused on the limiting and enabling conditions of language and other aspects of knowledge. Conservatives are known to conserve what we know (especially the permanent things like truth, beauty, and the good), and conserve the branch of philosophy called metaphysics, a branch many postmodernists have dismissed as a failed attempt to know Being, or the Things Themselves.

While I don the postmodernist label, I still think metaphysics is possible, in a limited sense. I think that we can know truths that transcend time and culture, but that the object that we know in knowing them is partially a product of the mediating functions of language. Metaphysics may search for Being, but what it arrives as it a being, rooted in time and culture and language. You might say that my postmodernism informs my philosophical conservatism. I think metaphysics shouldn’t try to uproot the objects of our knowledge from the historical/cultural situation through which we know them. And actually, that’s kind of a Burkean conservative idea!

By: jonathanjones02

jonathanjones02 — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:04:54 +0000

Thank you for the comment Kyle.

One difference between postmodernism and conservatism might be “big T” truths and “little t” truths – conservatism, especially as viewed by the religious, seeks the former, while postmodernism might deny either that it exists or that we may come to know it (Kirk, at his conversion to Catholicism, found the final summit of truth, beauty, and the good to be Christ).

By: Kyle R. Cupp

Kyle R. Cupp — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:08:24 +0000

I see an intriguing similarity between the conservative’s distrust of ideologies and the postmodernist’s incredulity towards meta-narratives — particularly the totalizing narratives of the Enlightenment and of Marxism. Granted, many postmodernists would look upon the conservative’s “permanent things” and “eternal truths” as meta-narratives, and Burke’s “moral imagination” as incapable of moving beyond the messiness and chaos of experience. Still, there is a shared concern: people becoming trapped in ideologies, meta-narratives, and other constructs and failing to see what is going on beyond them. This is a concern especially when people build grand institutions or other structures, such as governments, on abstract ideological constructions with little rootedness in history and humanity.

Great series, btw, Jonathan.

By: X-Cathedra

X-Cathedra — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:25:01 +0000

Amen.

By: jonathanjones02

jonathanjones02 — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:19:37 +0000

Why all the partisan hackery? It’s tiresome. Let’s get philosophical.

By: Michael J. Iafrate

Michael J. Iafrate — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:14:31 +0000

A quote from it has Obama saying: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

A legend in his own mind.

Isn’t he simply admitting what fanatic anti-Obama types are saying repeatedly?? Which is it?

By: jonathanjones02

jonathanjones02 — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:05:55 +0000

A question: how is the exercise of prudent statesmanship as guided by the universals of human nature and the contingencies of human history to be understood?

By: Gerald A. Naus

Gerald A. Naus — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:13:07 +0000

Burke might comment, “Why, he sounds just like Robespierre’ ;) Just that Obama wouldn’t make Reason divine.

By: Gerald A. Naus

Gerald A. Naus — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:11:35 +0000

Tangentially, file under Dystopia, if you haven’t read the Washington Post skewering Obama, you have to read it http://www.geraldnaus.com/?p=10699

A quote from it has Obama saying: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

A legend in his own mind.