The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of Democracy

Epilogue: The Scholar and the Citizen

E p i l o g u e The Scholar and the Citizen In short, we must disintellectualize the real if we are to be faithful to it. —Ortega y Gasset, “History as a System” In Miller’s estimation, the Eleaticism of Parmenides or the Ionianism of Heraclitus offers few resources for understanding democracy. At their extreme, monism or radical pluralism destroys the bases of authority. These conceptual and practical confusions are related to the split between the active life and the contemplative life wherein action and thought, individuality and universality, as well as history and philosophy are alienated one from another. A metaphysics of democracy, by contrast , joins a strong conception of authority with an equally robust estimation of the finite person by integrating reflection and action. In the responsible agent the false division between the active and contemplative lives is ameliorated. Two claims have been basic to the preceding chapters. The first is that the principles, procedures, and institutions of democracy have metaphysical import. They are not just useful means for coping with actuality but, rather, are modes of disclosure and provide terms according to which actuality is articulated. The second claim is that Miller’s metaphysics of democracy elevates the finite and thus transforms mundane activity into something of greater, indeed universal, significance. These claims are the keynotes of the heroic character of democratic life. This idea of heroism is developed via a consideration of two specific forms of life—the scholar and the citizen. In these two figures of contemporary heroism we find concrete instances of the reconciliation of the active and contemplative lives, as well as bases for reenvisioning democratic practice. Miller notes that the modern temper does not allow for heroes (MP 19:3). Modern individuals are understood to behave but not to act. There can be no true heroes. Those who pose as or are set up to be “heroes” are no longer admired or emulated but rather explained in terms of motivations and habits. On the topic of heroism, Miller writes: 185 This man, the individual, has been lost and is not to be derived from physics or the regnant psychology. “A so-and-so” yields no individual, no act, no local control, no midworld, no vehicle of the unique. . . . [W]e lack a medium in which the individual could declare himself or be manifest to others. We allow no heroes. “A so-and-so” is never a hero, saint or devil, wise man or fool. There is no moral problem . . . until unique individuals supply a locus. (MP 31:5) The rarified forms of the contemplative life cannot abide heroes. (It is a peculiarity of the parallel histories of the contemplative life and democracy that the growth of democracy has been coincident with the development and magnification of this distinction .)1 The result has been the subordination of the active life to the contemplative life to such a degree that the active life has sometimes appeared to be eclipsed entirely. Personhood, history, and politics have all, to varying degrees, been brought under the rule of theory. One result is that much of what constituted the import and glory of the political life has been removed and politics has been interpreted on psychological and technical models. Miller counters this trend and insists that democratic practice requires heroism—both the recognition of the heroic actors of the past and of one’s own capacity for heroic action (cf. Colapietro, 2003, pp. 79–80). Liberal democracy needs a profound sense of the import and responsibility of agency— what Hannah Arendt termed natality (1978, v. 2, p. 217). There must be persons who speak original words and do novel things. Those words and deeds must be legislative; they must have consequences for the disclosure of one’s world (see MS 110). And while there may be few grand heroes, “those who live and justify life,” the deeds of such persons “call the rest of us back to a new courage” (PC 29). In this vein, Miller describes his approach to philosophy as one of bolstering morale (see AH 257, 266–67; MS 185–92). Actualism is interested in establishing assurance or confidence in action and instilling vitality in our democratic practices and institutions. Miller’s metaphysics of democracy is as prescriptive as it is descriptive.2 In his Democratic Vistas Walt Whitman wrote of breathing into the average person “the breath recuperative of sane and heroic life” (1867/1982, p. 940). Miller’s interest is in...