On Moderation: Defending an Ancient Virtue in a Modern World

3. Philosophical Moderation: Tempering the Mind

83 8 PHILOSOPHICAL MODERATION Tempering the Mind Chapter 3 I have sought to test and justify the idea of moderation through confrontation and dialogue with several modern (and psychologically oriented) outlooks on the human condition—Nietzschean, Romantic, Freudian, progressive post-Freudian—which are remote from the philosophic origins of the idea and would seem to pose sizeable challenges to it. Though in substance these perspectives are diverse, they have one element in common and which they share with the viewpoint I am maintaining: each one, in its own way, yields judgments about better and worse, healthy and unhealthy, states of personality. That is, each one entails some conception or other of what constitutes human flourishing, and so we can envision a dialogue with and among them. We can also envision something like the following response from a modernistic or postmodern point of view, radically skeptical and relativistic : “This project is a misguided one; you are wrong in supposing that there is such a thing as human flourishing to have a dialogue about. In fact no defensible foundation exists for any judgments about what is better and worse, even healthy and unhealthy, for mankind as such. Reasoning cannot supply any foundation because, in the final analysis, all evaluations about what is good for us are products of subjective opinions 84 / On Moderation dictated by one’s personality, one’s culture, or both. Your conclusions can seem plausible only if your underlying assumptions about our humanity are accepted as true, but these are truths not discovered but constructed, ultimately invented, and they do not acquire validity simply because, as many have been induced to believe them, they pass as common sense. This has to be the case because an objective understanding of reality is unavailable. You might as well have recourse to religious visions and biblical stories.” I have responded to aspects of this critique from time to time, but without a sufficiently systematic focus on its basic claims and its own assumptions. Let us note at the outset that what follows from it is that a case for moderation can have no more general validity than a case for vitalistic immoderation, and a harmonious balance in the psyche is in reality no more of a good thing than chaos in the psyche. Let us come to grips with the central concepts and attitudes that entail such conclusions . This inquiry will lead us further on to exploration of what several of the most interestingly pertinent moral philosophers have had to say on our topic. 8 Every vision of our fulfillment can be traced finally to some conception of what we are; call it human nature or the kind of being that is human. Cultural relativists are bent upon showing and emphasizing the great variety of ways of being human, while denigrating ideas of uniformity or normality for our species as a whole. The current mantra is that all such ideas, including those purporting to be analytic or contemplative, are necessarily “social constructs”—reflections of the way people happen to live in one or another of the diverse (parochial) cultures. For example, in the West we practice and therefore extol monogamy, with the values it entails, whereas in other places they practice and extol polygamy, and a moral philosophy arguing the worthiness of the former would be dismissible as rationalization of ethnocentric preference. Postmodern doctrines incorporate cultural relativism while adding to it relentless attacks upon rationality and the prospects for genuine knowledge about trans-subjective realities. This critique prominently claims that thought, however I Philosophical Moderation / 85 abstract, is determined by social and political interests, especially by the location of one’s group in a social hierarchy (class, race, and gender are the current determinants in vogue). More pointedly, theories and speculations about life and its problems are said to be constructed in the service of power; the thing to do with them is “deconstruction,” that is, disclosing their implicit justifications for the exercise of power by those who have it or its acquisition by those who don’t. The autonomy of the mind— its capacity for nonpartisan inquiries and conclusions—is emphatically debunked.1 Indeed, none of the substantive perspectives I’ve discussed in these essays would survive the acids of this reductionism (not even those affirming the preeminent value of the irrational), because they all claim to have some hold on the truth. But perhaps moderation is the greatest...