This is a collection of essays written by the French philosopher on the topics of modernity, politics, and religion. Manent was influenced both by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss and while some essays deal specifically with their thoughts, others focus on the history of philosophy and sociology more broadly. All the essays are connected by the exploration of what it means to be an individual in modern society. Manent writes about the tension of “liberal democracy (necessarily caught between the promotion and the critique of representation, between the emancipation of the individual and the imposition of a uniform rule).” He teases out the dichotomy of liberty and equality that is at the heart of democracy. Man gradually becomes aware of the freedom and responsibilities than modernity brings. “In Tocqueville’s democracy the power of democracy is not the power of man over man, or the power of one party over another, or it is so only very secondarily and provisionally. It is rather the power of man over himself: more and more actions, more and more sentiments, more and more thoughts, come to live under the democratic regime.” One check to this impulse has naturally been the institution of religion. “By its origins and perhaps its essence, it is external to democracy; this is why it can regulate democracy. It says to democratic man’s liberty, to his envy, and to his disordered passions, you will not go any further!” As democratic man has become individuated he has lost his natural social bonds, for better and for worse. The separation of Church and State was not an equal divide. It is “founded on an essential inequality of consents, which gives a decisive advantage to the public institution over the private one. The inequality of the consents demanded or required translates into the essential superiority of the state over the churches in the regime of separation.” Through the social contract man has consented to be ruled by men.
Modernity tried to build a world ex novo. Manent quotes Charles Peguy, the modern State“ is opposed, it runs counter to all the ancient cultures, to all the anciens regimes, to all the ancient cities, to everything which is culture, to all that is a city.” The conception of the city, as either Platonic or Aristotelean ideal of community, no longer has purchase. Modernity has nothing to learn from the past. Or rather, it picks and chooses at its will and leisure. Manent reflects, “we no longer perceive the extraordinary audacity of the original project of establishing the human world on the narrow point of the human will.” Modern philosophy, starting with Machiavelli, became infatuated with the rational will and the science of what was possible. “It is precisely modern humanity that desires to be the sovereign over nature, creator of its own nature.” Democracy has severed itself from past humanity, from tradition, custom, and culture. “The man of the future, man par excellence, is a being without conscience.” Manent, reflecting on Aurel Kolnai, suggests that man would be better served by combining the moral absolutes of his own conscience with the traditions of conservatism. “We are born in and act in a world already structured by institutions, models, achievements, traditions- by traditions, moreover, which do not force us to be “traditionalists,” precisely because we have the good fortune to be heirs to the tradition of rationally criticizing tradition…. It is because there is a natural and necessary tension between the conscientious and the conservative attitudes that the prudent man has to learn how to combine them, to learn that the relative weight of each depends on circumstances and on the agent’s ability to compose and harmonize, judiciously and even stylishly, the various legitimate themes of free conduct. A conscience with a lively sensitivity to universal moral demands but also well aware of political constraints, of ambiguities and conflicts of values and the uncertainties attending action: a conscience which, when it is at odds with the world, does not hurry to condemn the world but takes time to weigh the adversary’s reasons.”
Individual man has often found himself lost at sea, alone, left to his own devices. He has demanded of the political authority that it acknowledges his consent. “The communities to which people belong in the democratic world no longer command them…. The past itself, understood as the community of those who are dead, has lost all authority to command, whether it be in the moral, social, political, or religious sphere, and is no more than a collection of “memorable places” thrown open to historical tourism.” History no longer advises and urges caution. The past is only studied for amusement. Tradition is quaint. “The only vocation that contemporary man recognizes is that of being an individual. Modern man aims to become ever more the author and artist of all his ties- to be always more un-obliged or disconnected.”
Throughout these essays, Manent is at heart a philosopher. “Philosophy is the endeavor, at once heroic and unobtrusive, to keep one’s distance, to refuse one’s adherence to all these interpretations by interposing between them and oneself the small question, What is?” Philosophy is a disposition. “Philosophy is essentially skeptical. It is therefore not a doctrine, system, or view of the world, but a way of life.” Socrates was the philosopher par excellence. “One must act morally, and not think morally.” More so than even romantic love, true friendship guides the path of the philosopher. in the past, the bonds of friendship were desired because they engendered the quest for a common truth in man. The ideal man sought “the life of reason, the life dedicated to understanding life… “The love of wisdom” (philosophy) is literally, and nonmetaphorically, the most erotic of the soul’s dispositions, the one that leads toward its highest possibility and that consequently is capable of forming the strongest human tie because it is the most genuine one…. Life is worthy of being loved because it is capable of being understood.”
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