Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 4: 1970–1988 by George Grant (review)

This large volume, the last in the series of George Grant’s collected works, provides writings and lectures from the last two decades of his life, when he was teaching in the religion department at McMaster and in classics and political science at Dalhousie. In the 1960s, he had become a celebrated public intellectual, particularly after the appearance of his controversial nationalist classic Lament for a Nation in 1965. But it is as a profound critic of modernity–‘that enormous enterprise which came out of western Europe in the last centuries and has now become worldwide’ – that Grant is most interesting, and his later writings collected here provide the clearest explanation of his unorthodox ‘red tory’ dissent. With fewer of the topical references that engaged an earlier generation of Canadians, but that are now dated and may even be misleading, these later writings more clearly show the sources and depth of Grant’s thought.

Like the earlier volumes in the series, this one includes interviews and unpublished material as well as the writings Grant himself published. His three books from the 1970s and 1980s (Time as History, English-Speaking Justice, and Technology and Justice) and other publications make up a little less than half of the total. The remaining half consists of unpublished manuscripts, recorded interviews, and notes and lecture material culled from Grant’s files. The arrangement is essentially chronological, with one important exception: the section devoted to Grant’s lectures, notes, manuscripts, and reviews dealing with Simone Weil spans a period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s.

Grant’s reservations about our way of life, despite its obvious attractions, were rooted in his understanding of Christianity and ancient philosophy, but strengthened and clarified by his study of the major thinkers and writers who get the most attention in this volume, namely Nietzsche, Heidegger, Céline, and Weil. For a time when he was young and the powerful influence of his friend and Dalhousie colleague James Doull, Grant believed that Hegel had reconciled ancient and modern thought in a synthesis that preserved the truth of both. But in the early 1960she ‘crossed the Rubicon’ that separates those who retain some faith in the modern project from those who have abandoned the common belief ‘that all human problems will be solved by unlimited technological development’ and who ‘can thereafter only approach modern society with fear and perhaps trembling and, above all, caution.’

For Grant, the term that came closest to unlocking the mysteries of our dangerously progressive civilization was technology, understood not as the vast and loosely defined aggregate of recently developed techniques (devices, potions, etc.) suggested by the term, but rather as a way of apprehending reality and our place in it. Technology in this Heideggerian sense derived, he maintained, from the novel union of knowing and making that came to dominate Western science and philosophy during the seventeenth century. It encourages the view that we cannot know any meaning or purpose that we have not ourselves made. The result, using the shorthand of one of Grant’s titles (for the last of his writings about abortion), must be ‘the triumph of the will.’ ‘It is of the very heart of fascism to think that what matters is not what is true, but what one holds to be true.’

The great contribution of a ‘collected works’ is to provide easy access to the scattered shorter publications and unpublished materials that illuminate an author’s better known and more accessible works. In the present case, this basic contribution is enhanced by the excellent introductions and helpful annotations provided by the editors or by others who knew Grant well. The result is a reminder that whatever it means to say that Grant transcended his own time in thought, he did so, and as much our time as his, so he remains an invaluable guide into the intricacies of...