Conservatism, Phenomenology, and the Enlightenment

This review appears in the Winter-Spring 2011 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

The Geography of Good and Evil: Philosophical Investigations
by Andreas Kinneging, translated by Ineke Hardy
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009)

This is an important book that should be widely read among American conservatives. It represents a type of moral and political reflection that is seldom found on American shores. Kinneging is Professor of Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Leiden. Like many others in the generation of conservatives since the Second World War, he is a convert to his position: he once uncritically accepted the superiority of the Enlightenment rationalism that this book calls seriously into question.

Though the book itself is a collection of independently written essays, it has a substantially unified structure of criticizing the sufficiency of Enlightenment optimism and rationalism and presenting a thoughtful conservative alternative. This is a theme with which many readers are familiar.

The book is not divided into sections, but I think one can discern natural divisions in the way the chapters are arranged. The first four chapters are a critique of Enlightenment optimism and “pseudo-rationalism.” The next eight chapters treat important parts of the moral tradition of the West (e.g., honor and conscience, justice and love, forgiveness, virtues, and rights). In each of these chapters there are rich insights that repay careful study. The final four chapters lay a foundational argument for an objective moral order and show how this foundation illuminates crucial contemporary questions about marriage, family, and public moral order.

The book’s importance for Americans lies in the way that Kinneging grounds his conservatism and develops it.

Three Approaches to Conservatism

In America in recent decades, three main approaches to conservatism have been dominant. The first is what we might call skeptical conservatism. In this view there is no system of moral and political thought that human beings can know as true with any certainty. So the best policy is to conserve those beliefs and practices that we have found through the ages to be conducive to human well-being. In varying ways, libertarians like Milton Friedman, avowed skeptics like Michael Oakeshott, and traditional conservatives like M. E. Bradford can be found in this camp.

The second approach is that of the natural law conservatives who draw primarily upon the resources of the Catholic intellectual tradition of Aquinas and, more remotely, Aristotle. Thinkers like Russell Hittinger are in this tradition. Alongside them are those associated with the “new natural law,” for example, John Finnis and Robert George. For these thinkers, an analysis of human nature grounds moral knowledge in a manner different from and deeper than the empirical “scientism” of modernity.

The third approach is more recent and less well formulated. This is the social conservatism of engaged Evangelical Protestantism, which roots its conservatism fundamentally in biblical revelation. Where possible, this tradition connects revealed truth with empirical arguments. Though similar to the second view, this tradition distrusts philosophy and has none of the metaphysical sophistication of those in the natural law camp.

To see the difference between these views, consider the question of gay marriage. Conservatives of the first sort (as distinct from pure libertarians) tend to hold that heterosexual marriage with children has been a bedrock of social and political stability. Altering the definition of marriage in the way that gay marriage supporters desire is a great risk not worth taking. Conservatives of the second sort believe that a careful analysis of human nature will show that marriage must be about a heterosexual union that has as its end or telos the bringing forth of new life. This telos naturally conforms to the telos found in biblical revelation, but it can be known independent of revelation. The third version of social conservatism starts with knowing the truth from Scripture and then adds whatever social science data are needed to make a practical case against gay marriage.

This schema is much too neat to account fully for any of these figures, but it provides a way of showing how Kinneging’s work is situated. His views are not those of a skeptic who denies the reality of an objective moral order. To be sure, he is fully aware of the human inclination to evil and the need to construct social institutions in light of this fact. But the very recognition of evil requires a moral order in terms of which good and evil can be grasped.

Neither is Kinneging a theist who finds convincing a moral law revealed by God. He respects the Christian tradition and its moral teaching, but he finds the source of this law in revelation to be unconvincing.

Third, while Kinneging’s relationship with the natural law tradition is much too complex to explore fully here, we can note that he is neither a Thomist nor a conventional Aristotelian. In this respect his views differ from many Catholic conservatives. He does not start with a broad philosophy of human nature, utilizing metaphysics and biology, and then developing an account of morality, as Aristotle does.

Rather, he starts with a phenomenology of the person as already a moral being. His intellectual tradition is the moral phenomenology that grew from the early work of Edmund Husserl. Kinneging’s forerunners are Max Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Dietrich von Hildebrand. He is the editor of the new three-volume English edition of Hartmann’s magisterial Ethics (1926). Though not particularly well known in America, this is the intellectual milieu of Pope John Paul II, whose greatest pre-papal work in moral theology was The Acting Person (1969), a brilliant addition to the tradition of moral phenomenology, connecting it carefully to the Catholic tradition of Aquinas. We can also note that one of the most profound defenses of Humanae Vitae was undertaken by Hildebrand, another of the thinkers that Kinneging explicitly mentions as an influence.

These thinkers—Scheler, Hartmann, and Hildebrand—were convinced that the early Husserl, the Husserl who published Logical Investigations at the turn of the twentieth century, was profoundly correct. Morality is not simply created by the individual for himself; it is not calculated in the pursuit of pleasure; nor is it imposed by the dictates of a perfectly good transcendental will. Rather, morality is discovered through an analysis of the world around us, which reveals the “eidetic” structure of morality in the world itself. The “principles of ethics” are not first foundational to our thinking; rather, they are foundational to the very world we inhabit. They are neither created nor imposed: they are discovered.

The Modern versus the Moral Order

Unlike skeptical conservatives, Kinneging is convinced that there is an objective moral order. Unlike both natural lawyers and Evangelical social conservatives, however, he explicitly does not connect his moral teaching to divine law or Biblical revelation. This is a version of moral objectivity and a defense of conservative moral truths with which Americans need to become more familiar, and this book is a excellent place to start in reading this literature.

The last three chapters exemplify the teaching about a moral order grasped phenomenologically, with a focus on that most crucial and most contested part of modernity, the family. The family is the central institution of civilization. Unless we get this institution right, everything else will go wrong. As Kinneging dryly notes, “wherever man has found himself, the family too was there.” He argues that there are two basic family types: the nuclear family and the extended family. His preference for the extended family is clear. It has historically been a much sturdier institution that took care of family members in tough times: extended families did not need foster care agencies or social insurance for the aged.

Kinneging astutely notes that three modern ideas have dramatically undermined the truth about the family: sex, romance, and self-fulfillment. Marriage is said to be about sexual gratification. It is also said to be about romantic merging, a finding of one’s “soul mate.” Finally, it is said to be about “self-fulfillment.” None of these assertions is true. To be sure, sexual intimacy is important in marriage. But one can have sexual intimacy in an affair, or simply by paying for it. Neither of which is marriage. The “soul mate” concept destroys marriage when the partners discover that even the best marriages have stress and conflict. In dating or courting we are always on our best behavior; not so in marriage. Finally, no marriage can be simply about self-fulfillment: it must also be about obligation, commitment, loyalty, and trust. Marriage is about a certain kind of love, not erotic passion. It is about shared sacrifice and mutual responsibilities. It is not about finding a “soul mate,” but about another person of the opposite sex who is committed to creating a family. In a passage that is powerfully antimodern but deeply true, Kinneging writes:

The question remains, of course, whether the gain in terms of “passionate luster” and “blissful harmony” makes up for the loss in terms of security and care that are the essence of the traditional concept of marriage. That concept is particularly poignant when it comes to children, whose interest in the passion and bliss of their parents would seem to pale before their interest in a safe and caring family.

This book is beautifully produced, with a dust jacket depicting Vermeer’s “The Geographer.” My one criticism is that it would have helped the nonexpert reader to have a bibliography of works cited, indicating both the original languages the author used and any available English translations.♦

Richard Sherlock, a professor of philosophy at Utah State University, is the author of Nature’s End: The Theological Meaning of the New Genetics.