Origins of the Pantheistic Revolution

The possibility of the utopian distortion of the meaning of the metaxy had been present from the beginning. When the concrete experience of the higher reason’s opening to transcendence and the concomitant experience of the limitation and imperfection of the immanent sphere were lost, the results of differentiation could easily be construed as an abstract rational blueprint for social reorganization, in line with the generalistic trend of Greek throught and its apprehension of nature in contradistinction to convention. Burke turned against the ‘thoroughbred metaphysicians’ of the Enlightenment, and his historicist followers today see no mystery in the development of Strauss’s analysis and endorsement of the classics more or less into the same kind of Jacobin ideology of democratic imperialism. [See Ryn, The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State (2011 (1991)), and America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire (2003).] While the differentiated experience did reveal a transcendent, divine order with a moral dimension, and this revelation guided the development of the Christian concept of natural right, the utopian mindset, without full access to the engendering experience, could transfer the claims of perfection to its own limited schemes, and posit the latter, in stark opposition to history and convention, as guiding principles for comprehensive social revolution.

This potentiality of a kind of “totalitarianism” – or of a limited vision oppressively posited as a false totality – and some of the later monistic developments of Platonism were, however, combined with, added to, and in some cases replaced by the corresponding Israelite and Christian distortion of differentiational experience. The resultant Gnosticism and Hermeticism, or what I shall henceforward call the esoteric tradition, has – while containing some noble, valuable, and interesting variations – in some of its central characteristics been of decisive importance as a subsequently ever-present threat to differentiational and person-centered civilization. The esoteric tradition can today be seen to have shaped Western modernity from the outset, and, directly and indirectly, almost in its entirety.

This tradition, of which from the earliest stages monistic mysticism was a part, the Schwärmerei of the millenarian sects, and the rationalism of the philosophers (in the late medieval period added to by the influence of Averroism), combined to set in motion what I suggest could be called a pantheistic revolution, a revolution which, through ever bolder syntheses, comprised the most important modes of impersonalistic thought and practice of the modern West.

This was not a return to the early pantheism of the cosmological civilizations, which was in its own way ordered and structured, where the elements of differentiation were present in compact form, where they were undiscovered in their true nature yet not denied. It was a search, theoretical as well as violently practical, and driven by the failure to live with the tension of the metaxy, for a new kind of pantheism, for a new kind of closed immanence, a re-divinized immanence without order and structure, and filled with new content. To this day, and with unabated vigour, its impersonalistic momentum undermines in ever new and shifting expressions the moral, humanistic, and religious values of which the person is the most important bearer.

Humanities Institute at Beijing Normal University

Claes Ryn and the Vice-Chancellor of Beijing Normal University, Dong Qi, unveil a plaque at the inauguration in May of the new Humanities Institute, Renwen Yanjiusuo, whose work, like that of Ryn’s National Humanities Institute in Washington, D.C., will be inspired by Babbittian humanism and its further philosophical elaboration:

Babbitt, whose wife, Dora, grew up in China, and who often made reference to Confucianism and also analysed the different strands of Taoism, had Chinese followers in the 1930s, and there has long been a renewed interest in him in this country as world events have increasingly borne out his analyses and revealed the relevance of his work. In 2010, Zhang Yuan, one of Ryn’s visiting scholars in Washington, the executive director of the new Humanities Institute, and associate professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at BNU, won the top Chinese academic prize in philosophy and the social sciences for her book on Babbitt’s influence in China.

In this picture can be seen the dignitaries who spoke at the ceremony, in which Ryn was also made Honorary Professor; the woman next to Ryn is the highly influential Yue Daiyun, a famous Chinese intellectual who, perhaps more than anyone else, has promoted Ryn’s work in China – three of his books have been published in Chinese translation – since the late 1990s:

Claes G. Ryn: The New Jacobinism

America as Revolutionary State

National Humanities Institute, 2011 (1991)     Amazon.com

With a Major New Afterword by the Author

Back Cover:

This strongly and lucidly argued book gave early warning of a political-intellectual movement that was spreading in the universities, media, think-tanks, and foreign-policy and national security establishment of the United States. That movement claims that America represents universal principles and should establish armed global hegemony. Claes G. Ryn demonstrates that, although this ideology is often called “conservative” or “neoconservative”, it has more in common with the radical Jacobin ideology of the French Revolution of 1789. The French Jacobins selected France as savior of the world. The new Jacobins have anointed the United States. The author explains that the new Jacobinism manifests a precipitous decline of American civilization and that it poses a serious threat to traditional American constitutionalism and liberty. The book’s analyses and predictions have proved almost eerily prophetic. President George W. Bush made neo-Jacobin ideology the basis of U.S. foreign policy, and it continues to exercise great influence in both parties. This new edition of a modern classic contains a thought-provoking afterword by the author that brings the book up to date.

RynThe first edition of The New Jacobinism received extraordinary praise:

“Well done, The New Jacobinism!…Lucid and succinct and right.”  Russell Kirk

“A much-needed antidote to some of the fatuous assessments of The New World Order emanating from many of the foreign policy experts who live in the Washington Beltway – the modern version of Plato’s Cave.”  President Richard M. Nixon

“A splendid, eloquent, hard-hitting effort…[Ryn] has identified for us, as well as it can possibly be done, our malady and the course of treatment we must follow to survive.”  Clyde Wilson

“The New Jacobinism…is splendid. [It fills] an important need with eloquence and convincing argument.”  Herbert London

“Right on target on an important subject that has long needed to be addressed.”  Peter J. Stanlis

“[This] book is truly excellent.”  Patrick J. Buchanan

Claes G. Ryn is professor of politics and former chairman of his department at the Catholic University of America. He is chairman of the National Humanities Institute, editor of Humanitas, and president of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. He is widely published on both sides of the Atlantic and in China. In 2000 he gave the Distinguished Foreign Scholar Lectures at Beijing University. His many books include America the Virtuous, A Common Human Ground, Will, Imagination and Reason, and Democracy and the Ethical Life.

Richard M. Gamble: The War for Righteousness

Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation

ISI Books, 2003     Amazon.com

Back Cover:

In The War for Righteousness, Richard Gamble tells the story of how progressive Christian leaders in America transformed themselves from principled pacifists to crusading interventionists at the time of the First World War. Gamble reconstructs the inner world of the social gospel clergy, showing how they came to see their task as evangelists for the new creeds of democracy and internationalism, and ultimately for the redemption of civilization itself through the agency of total war. World War I thus became a transcendent moment of fulfillment. Gamble also engages the broader questions of religion’s role in shaping the modern American mind and the development, at the deepest levels, of the logic of messianic interventionism – the idea that America has been destined by divine Providence to bring a kind of secular salvation to the less enlightened nations of the world. This timely book not only fills a significant gap in our collective memory of the Great War, it also helps demonstrate how and why that war heralded the advent of a different American self-understanding.

“Gamble’s insight could scarcely be keener, nor his timing better. From Bunker Hill to Baghdad, America’s wars have always been ‘holy’ because Americans, from the Puritans of old to the secular liberals, neoconservatives, and evangelicals of today, imagine their country a promised land with a calling to redeem the world…if necessary, by force. The War for Righteousness brilliantly parses the ‘progressive’ theology sustaining that mission.”  Walter A. McDougall, University of Pennsylvania, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

“The War for Righteousness is ‘relevant’ history in the best sense. Nobody can claim to understand truly the role of the United States government in the world today unless he has been over the ground that Gamble has covered. It is impossible to overestimate the contribution of this book to American self-understanding.”  Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History, University of South Carolina

“This is a splendid study of progressive Christianity and its political significance before and during the Great War. Gamble perceptively explains the important connection between a spiritually dubious form of Christianity and a desire for international political crusading. This fine historical work is also highly relevant to assessing present moralistic calls for American empire.”  Claes G. Ryn, Professor of Political Science, Catholic University of America

About the Author:

Richard M. Gamble is Assistant Professor of History at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he has tauht in the history and honors programs since 1994. He is also a Visiting Scholar at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, and regularly returns to the Western Front to lead travel-study programs on the Battle of Verdun. His essays and reviews have appeared in Humanitas, the Journal of Southern History, Chronicles, the Independent Review, and Ideas on Liberty.

JOB’s Comment:

I think Gamble is now at Hillsdale College. I met him at a colloquium in Savannah, GA in 2000. A charming, humble scholar, thoroughly familiar with the work of Irving Babbitt, which is fundamental to his analysis in this book.

Thomas J. Knock: To End All Wars

Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order

Princeton University Press, 1995     Amazon.com

Book Description:

In his widely acclaimed To End All Wars, Thomas Knock provides an intriguing, often provocative narrative of Woodrow Wilson’s epic quest for a new world order. The account follows Wilson’s thought and diplomacy from his policy toward revolutionary Mexico, through his dramatic call for “Peace without Victory” in World War I, to the Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations. Throughout Knock explores the place of internationalism in American politics, sweeping away the old view that isolationism was the cause of Wilson’s failure and revealing the role of competing visions of internationalism – conservative and progressive.

About the Author:

Thomas J. Knock received his A.B. from Miami University, his M.A. from Boston College, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Reviews in American History, and several anthologies. A native of Harrison, Ohio (near Cincinnati), he lives in Dallas, Texas and is Associate Professor of History at Southern Methodist University.

JOB’s Comment:

The full phrase, used by Wilson and others, was of course “the war to end all wars”. As was soon remarked, the war led to a peace to end all peace. Others were responsible for the terms of that peace, but Wilson was, I think, responsible for disastrously prolonging the war, and certainly for implementing and expanding decisively the new policy of American intervention in the name of international democratism. The epic tragedy of the “new world order”, having reached the post-national stage, far beyond the Wilsonian one of alleged national self-determination vs the old empires, continues to win “victories” without peace (let alone true freedom and civilization): “Perpetual war for perpetual peace”, as Charles Beard called it. But although many of them need to be understood in a different light, important facts are presented in this book. We have by now a vast and unambiguous historical experience of the problematic nature and the errors of twentieth-century “internationalism” and its underlying ideology and interests. But along with it, and properly taking it into account, we need a vision of an alternative internationalism. For this purpose, some of the discussion here of the “competing visions” of internationalism at the time of Wilson is worth considering.

Personlig identitet som substanslöst medvetande

Anledningen till att man insisterat på kopplingen av självets personliga identitet till kroppens eller själens eller bådas substans söker Locke, med Ayers’ ord, i det förhållandet att minnets ofullkomlighet och medvetandets avbrott “have stimulated in us the doubt whether the same subject underlies the phenomenal train of consciousness throughout”. Locke säger att vi “lose sight of our past selves”.

Förvisso kan vi enligt Locke, såsom skedde i debatterna om kroppens uppståndelse, tvivla på att vi förblir samma substans (Locke torde mena: att samma substans fortsätter att underligga vårt av fenomenellt innehåll fyllda medvetande), men han insisterar på att otillfredsställelsen med detta blotta fenomenella medvetande som enhets- och kontinuitets- och därmed också identitetsprincip är ogrundad, att kravet på detta medvetandes förankring som accidens i en underliggande substans’ identitet är överflödigt, att självet eller personens identitet icke är beroende av en sådan förankring.

Men när Locke vill bevisa detta, hamnar han i en ståndpunkt som samtidigt innebär självets/personens oberoende av kroppen, men också en ny komplex uppfattning av deras förhållande. Hans argument

“both echoed and deliberately distorted the orthodox Cartesian doctrine that a person is a ‘vital union’ of soul and body. Locke agreed that we consist in such a union of that which thinks in us with the parts of the body of which we are intimately conscious, but denied that our continuous identity requires the continuous identity of either material or immaterial substance. On the contrary, the role of the body as a part of the self illustrates the absence of any such requirement. If we cut off a hand, then the substance of the self is changed, although the self or person remains the same.” [Ayers, Locke, II, 262 f.]

Medvetandet är således oberoende av substans och någonting mer än accidens: individuationen och den personliga identiteten beror av medvetandet självt allena. Hauser: “Als Bewusstsein ist sich die Person in unmittelbarer Selbstgewissheit präsent.” [Selbstbewusstsein und personale Identität. Positionen und Aporien ihrer vorkantischen Geschichte. Locke, Leibniz, Hume und Tetens (1994), 39.]

Locke accepterar konsekvent att vi utifrån vår begränsade kunskap visserligen inte kan utesluta det som följer ur denna ståndpunkt, att medvetandet/den personliga identiteten kan bestå trots förändring av substansen. Han diskuterar som tankeexperiment möjligheten av ett byte av immateriella substanser, eftersom sådana alltså är den sannolikaste hypotesen, men betraktar samtidigt detta som en orimlighet. [Ayers, II, 264.]

Även genom en analogi med livet vill Locke stödja sin ståndpunkt. Även detta förklarar han vara icke-substantiell organisk enhets- och kontinuitetsprincip, och som sådan definierande attribut för de “levande ting”, d.v.s. de substantiella organiserade kroppar med föränderliga delar som rör sig i den mekaniska natursfären. Medvetande- och självmedvetandebegreppen förs alltså med denna likhet i närheten av livsbegreppet. Detta är en utveckling av ny insikt inom ramen för den snabbt framväxande moderniteten, ja inom vad som huvudsakligen uppfattas som dess empiristiska gren. Vad som nu tränger sig på är definitionen av substans i relation till denna framväxande nya konception. Ligger i substansbegreppet självt den nödvändiga aristoteliska förbundenheten med accidenser, så att om det accepteras medvetandet måste förstås som blott accidens?