Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty by D. C. Schindler (review)

D.C. Schindler has produced one of those exceedingly rare books capable of making you rethink everything you thought you knew on a subject (here, modern liberty or liberalism) and on exhaustively studied great philosophers (in this case, especially Locke, Plato, and Aristotle). The text is densely packed with close analysis of the relevant sources and requires slow, careful reading to digest. Schindler's basic thesis is that the commitment to modern liberty, as quintessentially formulated by John Locke, involves a flight from reality, a flight in particular from engagement with any concrete, substantive goods beyond a subjective personal satisfaction that in fact never really satisfies. The root of modern liberty, Schindler suggests, is a deliberate divorcing of potency from actuality, from any transcendent ground of the will or any transcendent ends toward which the will inherently tends, from a motive of wanting to possess pure power over against any controlling natural order or any good not self-determined. The problem with modernity is not modern values in the abstract but that the values (rights, equality, and so on) are reduced to abstractions, have been completely abstracted from the larger reality in which each of us stands—from any ultimate transcendent good and from any concrete positive human relations (relations of friendship or generosity as opposed to mere interest-based contractual arrangements).

If this looks like a Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian critique of liberalism, it is, but Schindler's analysis is novel in several respects, and his case is argued with unusual power of insight. Most notable on a substantive level is the evaluation of modern liberty, as the book's subtitle indicates, as having a "diabolical character." This diabolical character of modern liberty is part and parcel of the diabolical order, or rather disorder, of modern human experience, which comes into focus in juxtaposition to the "symbolical order" of premodern times, of which the diabolical is a "subversion." One of the outstanding features of Schindler's work is his effort to recover lost meanings through etymological tracings, and the most important of these is his analysis of the Greek ςυμβαλλω, which suggests a kind of bringing together, and διαβαλλω, which suggests a dividing and breaking apart, with a connotation in its extended meaning of a deceptive and distorting representation of reality.

The term "symbolon," Schindler tells us, was originally connected with the ancient token of friendship known as the tessera hospitalis, an act of hospitality symbolizing a preexisting friendship. A "symbolical" social order was a kind of community of friends understood to reflect and participate, through such hospitable enactments, in a larger order of nature that was fundamentally good. The notion of "participation" is of crucial importance. The members of the community participate together in a larger good that transcends them but in which they dwell harmoniously. Schindler does not explain exactly how the modern "diabolical subversion" of this premodern symbolical order occurred, but he expounds the diabolical elements of the subversion in a way that sheds great light on modern problems.

The actual order of the world in which the symbolical order is embedded is, as actual, inescapable. The order that results from the will's attempt to make itself autonomous cannot therefore dispense with, but only subvert, the symbolical order. It must live parasitically on the symbolical order, mimicking it while emptying the new order of the old substantive content, or indeed of any substantive content. But emptying order of substantive content is self-subverting. The diabolical order retains something of the form of reality but is left with only its outer crust. Human relationships and even one's own personality are completely externalized. There is no real vitality within the shell, and no intimacy between persons because their relations are defined by their external boundaries.

In terms of liberty, the features of diabolical liberty are all negative—rights are rights against others and against government; equality tends...