-
Chapter Twenty-five: The Person and the Common Good
- University of Notre Dame Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
t w e n t y - f i v e the Person and the Common Good toward a language of Paradox David Walsh the title has been chosen to recall the masterpiece of concision published by Jacques maritain under the same name over forty years ago.1 He too had concluded that the political language by which we juxtapose the “individual” and the “common good” had doomed the possibility of recomposing them. Confident that we know what we are talking about when we envisage individuals coming together for the sake of a common good, we fail to see that we have really confused two different orders of reality. the common good is something external to the individuals who constitute it, but the individuals themselves are not externalities at all. not even the distinction between the public and the private can capture this incommensurability, or rather it captures it by way of obscuring the radical incommensurability involved. this was the contribution of maritain’s short book. He understood, almost as the culmination of his efforts to preserve and defend the mod618 the Person and the Common Good 619 ern heightening of respect for the individual, that the language by which it was conventionally expressed had to be disrupted. this is why he invoked the tension between the person and the common good. as with much of the incomplete project of “personalism,” maritain saw the need to at least make a beginning by insisting on the unbridgeability between every single human being and the political aggregation of the many. He understood that the politics he advocated, liberal democratic politics, revolved around the very recognition of that incommensurability . the difficulty was that the liberal democratic language had never managed to achieve the transparence it sought to express. While straining to relate the individual to the whole in such a way that the individual could never be subordinated to the whole, it had never found a way of capturing the uniqueness of the relationship. that is, as maritain suggested, the liberal democratic achievement is to have created “a whole composed of wholes.”2 no prescription of the common good, no matter how extensive the anticipated social rewards might be, can justify the abolition of the rights of a single individual along the way. the calculation of costs and benefits cannot be extended to human beings. Only the defense of particular rights can subtend the diminution of particular rights. mere advancement of the collective welfare never provides a basis for a subordination that is tantamount to the devaluation of the single individual. this is the meaning of the liberal guarantee of the rights of equal dignity and respect. Only the rights of one can trump the rights of another. nothing of merely collective significance , even their happiness or welfare, occupies such a primary position . in weighing the rights of one against the rights of another, we are engaged in weighing two infinities, so that the result is always the same. it is not that the result cannot be calculated but that the calculation cannot be resolved in anything less than equality. When considerations of the common or collective welfare enter in, we are immediately transferred to the realm of the finite, the calculable as such, and that is precisely what is forbidden. measurement of the individual and the common good in terms of anything other than their incommensurability is foreclosed. that is the innermost core of liberal democracy. [44.205.5.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:23 GMT) 620 David Walsh yet it must remain inaccessible to the publicly available language even in the practical acknowledgment of its imperative. Personalist Philosophy Has yet to Be Developed The Incomplete Revolution of Personalism maritain had a profound intuition of the paradox of liberal democracy, and he struggled, if not to resolve it, at least to render it more perspicuous . that was his achievement, especially in The Person and the Common Good, where he introduced a more powerfully personalist language . the project can be seen as a first step beyond the philosophical language of substance. maritain understood that the traditional understanding of man as imago Dei, even as that reached its culminating affirmation in the incarnation of Christ and his redemptive outpouring for all, could no longer function as the authoritative source for the public evocation of human dignity and respect. not only was it a language tied to Judaic and Christian faith, but, even for believers, there remained the problem of translating it into the...