TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

Ralph C. Hancock

Those who know Pierre Manent only by reputation as a conservative Catholic political philosopher will think they know the thrust of this book from its title: natural rights are the problem, and natural law is the solution. This formula is not exactly wrong, but it certainly risks missing the whole point—the profoundly original and challenging point—of this book.

The doctrine of natural rights, which has necessarily evolved into the doctrine of human rights, is certainly the problem. Indeed the problem is precisely that the idea or project of natural rights, as understood in the modern tradition of political philosophy, and most eminently and symptomatically by Thomas Hobbes, slides irresistibly into the assertion of human rights. The original appeal to a standard of nature dissolves into sheer human assertion. As Manent shows, this dissolution is inherent in the modern project, because the “nature” to which Hobbes and his followers appeal, nature as the radically individuated biological being, ultimately reduces to the individual’s power-claim.

In the first of six chapters, Manent deftly exposes the bankruptcy of modern natural/human rights. The human rights ideology is at once universalist and relativist; it promises both to liberate the person from his physical, sexual nature and to justify him on the basis of his natural or irresistible desires or “orientation.” At bottom this ideology’s only coherence is purely negative; it only knows what it is against: in the name of equality (the equality of a being defined only by the right to define and to redefine himself, or herself, or itself ), “human rights” wages endless war against common sense, against what is best and richest in the spontaneous expression of our natures, against (as Manent wrote already in Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy) “all that has human form.” Manent bravely suggests, in fact, that the successful campaign for the recognition of homosexuality in the form of “marriage for all” must be understood as a fundamentally metaphysical demand, the demand that everyone renounce natural law, that no one recognize a norm or objective that is not the assertion of a pure human will.

In the second chapter, Manent begins to point to an alternative to the moral desert of subjective rights by sketching the character and genesis of the modern project. The modern viewpoint is at once the perspective of the subject’s unbounded power and that of a theoretical observer in absolute possession of his object. The triumph of willfulness is at the same time the ascendency of theory; our current practical impasse is the result of a “hypertrophy of theory.” Did theory’s monstrous overgrowth result from the influence of the new naturalistic physics over our understanding of the human world? Manent turns the tables on this conventional view of the history of ideas and proposes instead that the rise of theory was irresistible because the character of practice had already been obscured by Europe’s political and religious circumstances. Hobbes was not wrong to complain that the European rivalry between church and state as ultimate powers caused Western man to “see double” and crippled our capacities for action. Machiavelli’s and Luther’s apparently opposite responses to this disabling double vision have proved to be mutually reinforcing.

To diagnose the modern response to the medieval double vision Manent begins to unveil his subtle and penetrating understanding of the very structure of human action. There is a tension or a “gap” inherent in human action. Christianity did not invent this gap, but it exaggerated it and brought it to light. It is all too human to conceive of an “imaginary republic” (Machiavelli) as the culmination of good action, which is always action in view of the common good. All human beings always fall short of consistently acting in view of a higher good; our deeds inevitably fall short of our speech. This is the natural gap. Christianity absolutized this gap by conceiving of the common good as perfectly realized only in a city of God understood to be so purely common (selfless) and so purely good (perfectly satisfying) that it was utterly beyond attainment by man’s natural powers. Machiavelli and Luther were so affected by the intolerable tension of this infinite gap that they proposed to close it definitively, either by replacing normative law with fear (Machiavelli) or by reducing the good, or salvation, to the subjective act of faith (Luther). In both cases the gap inherent in action was suppressed, and human action was deprived of any higher horizon. Thus Machiavellian fear proved to be the effectual truth of radical Protestant faith.

The problem of the gap inherent in practice, as interpreted first in classical and then in Christian thought, bears closer examination. The reader will find that Manent is content to be suggestive and not fully explicit on the “most delicate point” of the role of Christianity in what one might call the rise and fall of the humanizing gap. In portraying the relationship of classical philosophy to Christian theology, Manent is attentive both to a fundamental continuity (distilled in the Christian notion of “conscience”) and a momentous rupture occasioned by the infinite expansion of the gap between human means and divine end; he does not offer any obvious reconciliation of these two interpretive stances. To understand the bearing of Manent’s delicate discussion and how it prepares his outline of a positive new teaching of the natural law in this book’s last chapter, one might consult Manent’s essay “Knowledge and Politics” (included as an appendix to Seeing Things Politically).¹ Here Manent defends a teaching of Aristotle’s that many have found perplexing—that is, the idea that deliberation and choice concern means and not ends. The end, in a decisively practical way, always remains bound up with the means. In defending Aristotle’s focus on means, Manent may be said to forswear all attempts, philosophical or theological, finally to resolve the gap between the practical, virtuous means and some philosophical or theological end.

One can say, if one insists, that value is the purpose of action, but this is to presuppose that “value” can exist as simply posited, that it can exist independently of the means sought through deliberation. Value is the end without means, and thus it is not even an end, but at most a wish. It is the lovely but confused image of a possible action, which amounts to little unless deliberation concerning means has been set in motion. Since value is subject to the manifold of representation, the variety of values is infinite, whereas the number of actual motives of action, as we have emphasized, is actually quite limited. And since the political order is based on ongoing deliberation and action, without which it would immediately cease to be, it consists in the ceaseless setting to work of actual motives for action according to the pattern of the cardinal virtues.²

Manent returns explicitly to “The Christian Question” in a section of the third chapter, which I will leave to the reader to explore. He then shows how Thomas Hobbes’s “moralized fear” responded to this question and effectively theorized and universalized the Machiavellian strategy of collapsing the natural gap of means and ends in human action. With Hobbes the hypertrophy of theory, the claimed superiority of the power of thinking over the matter of thought, and in particular over the natural meaning of human action, becomes fully evident. The immediate practical manifestation of this inhuman theory is the unintelligible sovereign state; its more remote consequence is the elusive but pervasive authority of global exchange and technology. Finally the modern project drives toward its soulless beginning: “At the end of its course the modern state produces a social state that asymptomatically approaches the state of nature as presupposed in its construction.”

Chapters 4 and 5 further develop Manent’s penetrating account of the inherent character of action, which has been obscured and all but suppressed by the collusion between the “ideal” of individual autonomy, which in fact reduces the human person to the brute assertion of a conatus,³ and the abstract, end-less state that hides its governing power behind the function of guarantor of the asserted “rights” of this blind and mute conatus. Manent’s brilliantly original account of action hovers delicately between poles that one might name voluntarism and rational teleology. On the one hand, action is necessarily, inherently, “archic”: action commands, it initiates, it rules. Action is active, one might almost say creative; it is in no way reducible to the straightforward application of a rule or preexisting template. Action involves an irreducible element of personal response, a singular ruling response to a singular practical opportunity. “Thus there are only commands and the act of commanding, in this world or in the other, because action and the human agent are naturally and necessarily under the rule of action” (emphasis added).

On the other hand, action is never arbitrary or purely “creative”; action always asserts a reason for its rule: “Action and the human agent are naturally and necessarily under the rule of action. . . . The practical world is never given over essentially to the arbitrary commands of gods or of men, because along with action come the reasons for action, and because the human agent cannot engage in action without entering to some degree into its reasons” (emphasis added).

Human action and practical reason thus naturally fuse commanding (the “archic,” ruling/initiating) with reasoning: virtuous action accomplishes reason in a commanding act.⁴ Thus Manent proposes precisely not to resolve but to recover and respect the gap inherent in action, a kind of virtuous circle that links human means and divine end. However great we conceive the gap between God and human beings to be, it cannot finally displace the humanizing gap, the insuperable circle, between end and means. Not even the everlooming fact of mortality, ground zero for the deconstruction of common, “inauthentic” human being-in-the-world in both atheistic and transcendent discourses of absolute otherness, can distract or discourage Pierre Manent from his faithful attachment to the practical ground of human meaning:

If the agent, the acting human being, despite his fear, his great fear of death, does not, unlike the free individual, spend every effort to avoid or avert death, this is precisely because he is an agent, an acting human being, and as such obeys his nature and the logic of action. . . . As an agent he is in search of the right action, which has its rules and priorities, and which thus may include and even command acting in a way that implies mortal risk. It is not that he looks at death without blinking; it is that in acting he looks first at the rule of action, and death or the fear of death cannot be the main thing on his mind.

Keeping in mind Manent’s critique of theoretical hypertrophy and his resolute respect for the meaning inherent in practice, the reader will be prepared to appreciate the audacious modesty of his outline of a positive account of natural law in his final chapter. Manent’s natural law does not begin with some “organic” or “communitarian” vision of a “certain idea of nature” as the objective synthesis of all desirable norms. Rather, the author posits natural law as free action in view of the three basic kinds of motives available to human beings, motives that recall Aristotle’s three kinds of friendship: the pleasant, the useful, and the “honnête” (this last resonating with both the “noble” and the “just”). If the simple acknowledgment of the pleasant and the useful seems to evoke a rather “low but solid” ground of natural law, then the latitude, the judgment, the agency inherent in the determination of the noble point to the law’s participation in the highest goods. “Among all beings . . . the rational creature is subject to divine Providence in a more excellent way, in that it is itself made a participant in this Providence, by providing for itself and for others.”⁵

The ground of Pierre Manent’s approach to natural law is his confidence in the perspective of the agent. The author’s respectful attention to the meaning inherent in action itself provides him the key to “recovering law’s intelligence,” and thus to appreciating the goodness of human action as it points beyond practical virtue to a divine goodness that, like the goodness of action itself, must always exceed the grasp of theoretical or theological reasoning. The excessive meaning of the practical and the excessive meaning of the divine cannot fail to color each other. (See emphases above.) It is confidence in this goodness that carries Manent as an agent as well as a thinker beyond the delicate historical question of the philosophical and theological genesis of the modern hypertrophy of theory to embrace the possibility of an unprecedented recovery of natural law. Our situation as practical rational beings is no longer defined by the contest between philosophy and theology, but instead by the good that is at work in both, but that both, as they opposed each other in our Western history, tended to obscure. As he explains in the appendix to this volume: “The problem is no longer to define the border and to order relations among two institutions, one political and the other religious, both equally ambitious and proud, but to measure the content in terms of the common good of this mixed law that has defined the Christian custom of Europe over the centuries and that is rediscovering an unexpected ordering power.”

The recovery of law’s intelligence thus involves a respectful but firm adieu to the long Western rivalry between the two versions of theoretical hypertrophy. Stepping away from this rivalry, the author invites us to open our minds and hearts to the goods, at once practical and divine, useful and noble, that have long summoned us both to act and to pray. To choose the right means for the right reason, and in doing so to know oneself as participating in, even as contributing to, the very order of creation—this is the humble simplicity and the fearless majesty of the vision Pierre Manent begins here to propose to us.

Pierre Manent’s lucid prose, which conveys a mind both master of its ideas and respectful of the intransigent realities to which these ideas give access, is always a pleasure to translate. Some of his arguments will surprise, and thus appear quite dense to the unfamiliar reader. But the reader’s due attention to the argument allows this density to reveal itself as the compactness of an argument that has taken everything into account without reviewing everything.

There are always hard choices to make in a translation, and the more the translator loves the original, the harder the choices. Manent’s bracing directness, which may sometimes stretch common French usage itself just a bit, does not always translate into the most familiar English idiom. Endeavoring to strike the usual translator’s balance between faithfulness and idiom, I willingly confess succumbing overall to the temptations of faithfulness to the French original.

A key, intractable example is the author’s use of “commande”— which could be rendered either “command” or “commandment.” Since “commandment” suggests an exclusively religious usage in English, I have favored “command.” Still, the term, already bracing in French, may sound downright harsh in English. Well, so be it: Manent’s argument compels us to come to terms with the commanding side of action. And this is as it should be. (See both D. Mahoney’s introductory comments above and my own here for a proper contextualization of this commanding dimension.)

The reader who will enter into Manent’s idiom as I have done my best to render it in English will find a whole world of insight opened up to him or her—a world in which a recovery of “law’s intelligence” is a real and blessed possibility.

Ithank University of Notre Dame Press’s anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on the translation. And I thank most especially the author, Pierre Manent, for his invaluable consultations and his friendly encouragement in this translation project.