Gilles Paquet: Homo hereticus

Chapter 28. The Dialectics of the Heart: Gilles Paquet on Moral Contracts and Social Learning

 300  Chapter 28 The Dialectics of the Heart: Gilles Paquet on Moral Contracts and Social Learning  Ralph Heintzman There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with . . . all the people he met now, which gained for him universal goodwill. This was his acknowledgement of the freedom of everybody to think, feel and see things in his own way. . . . This legitimate individuality of every man’s views, which in the old days used to trouble and irritate Pierre, now formed the basis of the sympathy he felt for and the interest he took in other people. —L. N. Tolstoy Perhaps it is not surprising to find that the idea of conversation is one of the connecting threads in Gilles Paquet’s writing and thought. Paquet is, after all, one of our best academic conversationalists. But the lens of conversation lends both an organic unity to his work and reveals him in ways somewhat different from those by which he sometimes presents himself. The Paquet persona is that of a realist and a skeptic. He sometimes refers to himself (at least in the lively conversations at which he excels) as an Aristotelian or even an Epicurean. And maybe there is something in this. He is certainly more alert to the facts of the real world than many a self-declared, hard-headed empiricist. ButacloselookatPaquet’sownwritingsuggeststhatGillesisalsoadistinguished latter-day representative of quite a different tradition, a tradition associated instead with names like those of Plato and Hegel. The Platonic and Hegelian flavour of Paquet’s oeuvre is apparent in its literary élan (especially in French), its playful THE DIALECTICS OF THE HEART  301  delight in language, its irony, its relishing of obscure terminology, its strong emotional and moral charge, and its subterranean but passionate idealism. But above all is Paquet’s indelibly dialectical vision of the mind, of society, and of life itself. Dialectics of Mind and Society The fundamentally dialectical quality of Paquet’s cast of mind can be detected in at least two forms: procedural and substantive. By procedural, I mean the emphasis on discussion, deliberation, and dialogue that pervades almost everything that Gilles has written. For him, the give and take, question and answer, statement and response of dialogue or conversation are the basis of individual mental processes, organizational dynamics, political deliberation, and social well-being. And this dialogical imperative was, of course, the original meaning given to dialectic by Plato. In the Platonic canon, dialectic appears to have at least four meanings. But all of them derive from the root meaning of the “back-and-forth of discussion” that was at once Plato’s basic philosophical procedure—reflected in the famous Platonic dialogues—and his vision of the good (Gadamer 1980, 1). By substantive, I mean that, beyond procedure, the world as it emerges from Paquet’s writing also displays a dialectical ontology or, at the least, a dialectical epistemology. We do not simply explore the world through the dialectical process of conversation: it is dialectical in the very marrow of its being. Or at least as the being of the world can be known to us. And this is the dialectical world—emerging from but going substantially beyond the ancient notion of dialectic—that Hegel above all others taught us to see (Gadamer 1976). Dialectic in this modern Hegelian or neo-Hegelian sense might be defined as “a concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change” or “the concrete unity of opposed principles” (Lonergan 1958, 217, 233). And this concrete, dynamic, evolving unity of opposed principles is also the defining characteristic of the world that Paquet’s essays reveal to us. The world that they explore is shaped by a conflict of goods, by “the basic tensions with which humanity must live.” It is a “world of paradoxes and essentially contested concepts.” It is constituted—but also maintained and developed—by “creative dialectical relationships” (Paquet 1999, 243–45). For Paquet, institutions and societies are “social armistices” embodying a “workable tension” between opposed principles or dynamics such as coherence and GILLES PAQUET  HOMO HERETICUS  302  flexibility, resilience and learning, freedom and order. These imperatives may point in “contradictory directions,” but each must be respected and “balanced” with its opposite to achieve the good (Paquet 2005a, 151; 2005b, 17, 281, 7). Paquet’s playful description of his own outlook as “chaordic” (chaos + order!) or “baroque” is intended to capture precisely this...