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

Preface. Modern Science on Who We Are as Free and/or Relational Beings

PREFACE Modern Science on Who We Are as Free and/or Relational Beings This book examines the influence the philosopher René Descartes, the political theorist John Locke, and the biologist Charles Darwin have had on our modern understanding of human beings and human virtue . Written by leading thinkers from a variety of fields, its thirteen chapters reflect on the complex relation between modern science and modern virtue, that is, between a kind of modern thought and a kind of modern action. The volume offers more than just a series of substantive introductions to Descartes’, Locke’s, and Darwin’s respective accounts of who we are and the kind of virtue to which we can aspire, though it does do that. It ultimately invites the reader to think about the ways in which the writings of these three seminal thinkers shaped the democratic and technological world in which we modern human beings live. The contributors to this volume cover a great deal of ground. Each author learnedly addresses subjects and questions drawn from the diverse disciplines of political science, philosophy, theology, biology, and metaphysics . But let the reader be warned: The authors of these essays are anything but consensual in their analysis. Set side by side and read as a whole, the chapters in this volume carry out an internal debate that mirrors theoretical modernity’s ongoing debate about the true nature of human beings and the science of virtue. Authors like Larry Arnhart, Lauren Hall, and to a lesser degree, James Stoner, for example, argue powerfully that Locke’s and Darwin’s thought is, in principle, amenable to the claims made about human beings and human virtue by classical philosophers such as Aristotle and classical Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Others , such as Peter Lawler, Marc Guerra, Thomas Hibbs, and Paul Seaton viii PREFACE make the opposite case, drawing attention to the ways in which Descartes, Locke, and Darwin knowingly and dialectically depart from central teachings of both classical philosophy and classical Christian theology. Readers can judge on their own which side of this argument they find most persuasive . Regardless of which side they fall on, however, I am sure they will walk away having learned something new and having seen a dimension of this debate they had not seen before. Rather than walk the reader through short and sketchy treatments of the rich chapters that follow, I want to touch on some of the concrete ways in which theoretical or academic debates about the true relationship between science and virtue actually manifest themselves in American society today. After all, whatever differences they had, Descartes, Locke, and Darwin not only agreed (to use Richard Weaver’s phrase) that “ideas have consequences,” but each intended their ideas about human beings and human virtue to have real, world-changing consequences. American Cartesianism Today One of the more curious features of America’s contemporary political landscape is that the most resolute—if frequently unwitting—followers of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes tend to be libertarians. This is not a new phenomenon, however. Alexis de Tocqueville famously remarked that America is “the one country in the world where the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.” Contemporary Cartesian-libertarians are likely to be for gay rights and for property rights and against any claims that treat an individual as part of some greater whole. American Cartesians are typically “non-foundationalists .” In their view, the individual’s irreducible existence is the bottom line. Recourse to country or to nature or to God to defend the individual’s existence only detracts from his singular existence. Worse still, such appeals might result in the individual being slaughtered in the name of some collective, ideological cause that is not his own. American Cartesians frequently use academically trendy language like “deconstruct” (good) and “privilege” (bad). When analyzing American democracy, they are likely to deconstruct any theory that privileges one person’s word over another. Such theorists assert that the democratic individual as democratic individual should resist being absorbed into any social or relational whole, from the family up to the nation. Democratic PREFACE ix Cartesianism liberates the individual from the authority of priests, poets , philosophers, preachers, politicians, (theoretical) physicists, parents, and the judgment of the Bible’s personal God. It also, as the nineteenthcentury democratic theorist Walt Whitman celebrated, inexorably marks the individual’s unlimited, indefinite movement away from nature and toward...