The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke

10 - The Mutual Sacrifice of Science and Virtue

tHe MutuaL saCrifiCe of sCienCe anD Virtue Ralph Hancock JeffReY P. BIShoP INVIteS US to See, with heidegger’s help, that modern knowing or technological science is by no means a neutral openness to reality, to the way things are, or to the being of beings. This science, rather, is a “stance,” a particular way of revealing or disclosing things. Leo Strauss would prefer to say that modern science is a “project,” so as not to say a “fate.” to recognize science as such a determinate stance entails practical implications for the meaning of our freedom: to imagine that we can choose freely as modern “individuals” without questioning this project or confronting this fate is a desperate wish indeed. René Descartes has, inevitably, figured prominently in our discussions of modern science as a project. Allan Bloom was no doubt knowingly exaggerating when he wrote that all the french (unlike us less literate Americans ) grow up as either Cartesians or Pascalians, but in another sense he might not have claimed enough: It seems to me that all of us moderns, at least as moderns, are left to choose between Descartes and Pascal or perhaps , rather, to oscillate between these influences or these understandings of the world and of our humanity. We are everything—all powerful—and yet nothing, nothing but matter in motion. or, we are nothing, a worm, a speck of dust, a reed, but then we are everything or, with our God, the 10 184 Ralph Hancock most important thing—a thinking reed, self-conscious and longing for another world. On the one hand, we accept the authority of science and therefore regard the world as so much material for our free transformation and consumption; on the other hand, we know that we are not simply of this world and that our freedom means something more than scientific mastery. The mysterious transcendence of this freedom is nowhere more touchingly evoked than by the very Pascalian Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince, so unimpressed by the serious, calculated projects of grown-ups, who learns finally to welcome the death-bearing serpent in the hope of reunion with the ordinary rose on his little star, an ordinary rose and star he has learned to embrace as unique in the universe. This oscillation between the impersonality and the personality of what is ultimate is not so evident in classical (pre-Christian) thought, but perhaps it is there, discretely contained within a narrower but very intense vibration. Examining the relation between Science and Virtue, we are confronted with a bottomless paradox or circularity, which takes forms both ancient and modern. Socrates sacrificed a science of the whole for a virtuous conversation on virtue. But in another sense (at least, if Leo Strauss is right), he sacrificed virtue for a zetetic science of virtue. The classical loop is a tight one, because the meanings of “virtue” and “science” shade into one another: Each remains tied to the ordering of the soul and the cosmos on the model of the aristocratic city. The hierarchic rule of reason holds science and human meaning together. The modern loop between science and virtue is somehow infinite and infinitesimal. It is as clear in Descartes as anywhere. The modern sacrifice of science to virtue could, perhaps, be set thus: The prideful ancient pretension to an elevating, soulful science must be sacrificed to the new, effective virtue; the systematic production of material benefits for all mankind , for the relief of the human condition. The modern sacrifice of virtue to science could, perhaps, be set thus: The deep, latent, purely formal/ mathematical causes can only be accessed by suppressing absolutely the natural human interest in final causes, by renouncing all “anthropomorphism ” (Heidegger); the question of the good (Hibbs’ Descartes) can only be resolved by not allowing it to arise. Harvey Mansfield has (in the classroom, as I recall) described Machiavelli ’s modern strategy thus: “We can afford anything, but we cannot afford to be moral.” To receive the apparent benefit of joining together appearance and result (Prince, ch. 18), we have to renounce all hope that Science The Mutual Sacrifice of Science and Virtue 185 and Virtue both derive from Truth—that is, from a Truth above human power. This infinite negation or mutual sacrifice lies behind the fundamental paradox of modernity that has emerged in our discussions in various guises: Bacon: To master nature we must conform to...