Dialectics in Practice
Anthony Mansueto
Dean, Communications and Humanities
The
dialectical tradition is in crisis. Born out of a desire to reground a
discourse on justice in a society when meaning and value had been called into
question by the emergence of petty commodity production (Mansueto 2001,
Mansueto and Mansueto 2005), and an integral part of the larger process of
religious rationalization and democratization which Jaspers (Jaspers 1953)
called the Axial Age, dialectics has, in our own time, come to be branded as
constitutive of modern totalitarianism and as incompatible with authentic
spirituality and democracy of any kind. This argument has been made philosophically,
on the basis of its affinity with “ontotheology (Heidegger 1934/1989),” i.e.
with a discourse on first principles which aims at explaining the universe and
ordering human action, historically, on the basis of its association with
antidemocratic tendencies in Athens (Wood 1978), and politically, on the basis
of the historic practice of the modern embodiment of the dialectical tradition,
the communist movement.[1]
This thesis turns, fundamentally, on the claim that the attempt to ground
meaning and order human action on the basis of a rationally intelligible first
principle extinguishes difference and undermines respect for the Other, both
interpersonal and transcendental, which is the condition of both democracy and
spirituality.
I have answered this thesis on a philosophical and
historical level in previous works (Mansueto 2001, Mansueto 2002, Mansueto and
Mansueto 2005). Here I would like to address directly the relationship between
dialectics, democracy, and spirituality at a very concrete strategic and tactical
level. I will begin by discussing the relationship between dialectics, democracy,
and spirituality, historically and in the modern era. This will frame the
principal strategic problem of dialectical politics –how to make conscious the
latent potential of the people, both as political subjects and as real
participants in the life of God. I will then demonstrate the underlying
continuity between a cluster of practices which, I
will argue, show extraordinary promise in this regard: Socratic dialectic or dialogue,
oral history or in-depth interview research, and the individual relational
meeting developed by interfaith community organizing tradition. I will conclude
by showing how these foundational practices can be linked to community based
liberal arts programs and public citizen deliberation to lay the groundwork for
the creation of a public arena constituted by deliberation around fundamental
questions of meaning and value.
The Paradox of Dialectic
Politics
Dialectics
is both a spirituality and a politics, both a strategy for expanding human
capacities towards the divine and a strategy for transforming human society in
a way which makes the cultivation of such excellence possible. But until the
modern era, the dialectical tradition was profoundly pessimistic about the
prospects for both divinization and for social justice. And it was, to say the
least, skeptical about democracy. Neither Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle nor
their interpreters in the
This ambiguity regarding democracy continued during the Silk
Road Era. Indeed, it was especially marked among precisely those thinkers who modern
dialecticians regarded as most in continuity with their tradition: ibn Rusd and
the Latin Averroists (Dahm 1988). It is precisely because of his concern for
social justice that ibn Rusd abhors democracy (siyasat al-jama`iyya or al-hurriyya).
Patricia Crone explains:
What he actually meant by a democracy was a society in which
the public sphere had turned into a private playground for big men, whose
competition for power tended sooner or later to result in the establishment of
tyranny: the privatization of public power and revenues was common to both
regimes. Magnate families who plundered the masses had been characteristic of
Ibn Rusd
does, not, furthermore, seem to believe that democracy would have more
potential were the people to be cultivated philosophically. On the contrary,
ibn Rusd’s response to al-Ghazali’s critique of philosophy, as well as his
“definitive treatise” make it quite clear that philosophy – which is the
condition for authentic participation in governance-- is only for the few. For
the vast majority, myth, which presents the truths of philosophy in imaginative
form, and a rigorous application of the sharia’ are in order. Indeed,
while ibn Rusd rejects literalistic interpretations of the scriptures as a
matter of principle, he is also critical of rationalizing kalam as
merely a half measure and confusing to the people (ibn Rusd Tahafut al-tahafut, The Definitive Treatise)..
This political pessimism was accompanied by a spiritual
pessimism. While Plato seems to have taught a doctrine of
reincarnation (Plato. Republic
608cff), and did not directly consider the question of the ultimate destiny of humanity, individually or collectively, the
Aristotelian tradition, at least outside of Christianity, seems to have either
denied personal immortality altogether, or else marked its limits at an
identity with the Agent Intellect, the intelligence which governs the sublunar
sphere. It is precisely this sort of identification with the Agent Intellect
which distinguishes the prophets and gives them the capacity to make external
matter obey their commands and thus to perform what seem to ordinary people to
be miracles –and ultimately to shape history (Nasr 1964: 29-44).
The only real exception to this pattern of
political-theological pessimism is Thomas Aquinas. This is largely because
Thomas is so clear that God is Being as such (Thomas
Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. I: 2.3, 3, 4) and that we humans are real
participants in God’s creative activity. We enjoy a kind of connaturality with
God which, though the cultivation of virtue, can be extended into a kind of
divinization (Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae II, Q 45, a2, Maritain
1937).[2]
And while Thomas certainly recognized that some human beings are more developed
than others, the basic qualification for rule –possession of an intellect— he
regarded as a universal human characteristic (Thomas. Summa Theologiae. I-II:
90. 1, 3).
Modern dialectics represents, in this regard, a
fundamentally new development. What it proposes, in effect, is to actually
realize both the political and the spiritual aspirations of the older
dialectical tradition, by means of a combination of philosophical wisdom and
revolutionary political practice. On the one hand, where earlier dialecticians
contented themselves with containing injustice, it proposes to actually build a
justice society. On the other hand, where earlier dialectics recognized strict
limits to the possibilities of human development, modern dialectics proposes a
kind of inner-worldly divinization in which humanity actually transcends
contingency and, becoming the subject of its own history, in effect becomes the
Necessary Being, or God. These two aims are, furthermore, intimately linked
together. By means of the revolutionary transformation of human society,
humanity acquires Absolute Knowledge (Hegel 1807/1967) and becomes the “unique subject-object”
of the historical process (Lukacs 1922/1971).
But there is more. Modern dialectics aspires not only to
building a just society and to a kind of inner-worldly divinization. It seems,
at least, to radically democratize the traditional ideal of the philosopher,
opening up participation in it to the people as a whole and especially to the
proletariat. This was certainly the aspiration of the autodidact artisans who
formed the mass base of the first generations of the socialist movement (Sewell
1980) and who remained an important force well into the early part of the
twentieth century (Mansueto 2002). And it seems implicit in the historic aim of
socialism: making the proletariat the ruling class in society. And yet there is
a profound ambiguity here. Listen to what Marx has to say in his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right that
As philosophy finds its material weapon in the proletariat,
so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapon in philosophy … The head of this emancipation is philosophy,
its heart the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself
without the transcendence [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and
the proletariat cannot transcend itself without the realization [Verwirklichung] of philosophy (Marx
1843/1978).
From the very beginning, in other words, there were hints
that it was not at all the empirical working class which was to exercise power.
Rather, the working class is a “material weapon” of philosophy, the “heart” of
the revolution which pumps blood to (or spills it on behalf of) its head, which
is philosophy.
This is not, furthermore, merely the result of a
failure on the part of the communist movement to live up to its democratic
principles. On the contrary, where the workers movement has let itself be
guided by the empirical demands of the working classes it has ceased to be a
movement for revolutionary social transformation and become at best a movement
a movement for reform within capitalism and at worst an instrument of
chauvinism and inter-imperialist rivalry (Lenin 1905/1971). This is because,
whatever the ontological status of
the working class may be as a participant and representative of the creative
power of the universe, its day to day conditions of life do nothing to
cultivate the capacities necessary for revolutionary social transformation. And
of course a merely reformist politics would not transform humanity collectively
into the subject of its own history, and would thus fall short of the spiritual aim of the communist movement,
its strategy for divinization … But where the working classes have yielded to
the leadership of revolutionary elites, this leadership has not, first of all,
generally been that of philosophers, but rather of technocratic modernizers,
and even where it has significantly ameliorated their material conditions, it
has not cultivated the capacities necessary for rational autonomy and
democratic citizenship which Marx, and the left of the mid-nineteenth century
took for granted as conquests of the democratic
revolutions. Indeed, the result has uniformly been the suppression, to a
greater or lesser degree, of the democratic public arena itself.
It is this contradiction, which is specific to
modern dialectics, and not anything intrinsic to the dialectical project
itself, which has implicated dialectics in modern totalitarianism. But this
leaves us with another dilemma. Must we retreat back into the historic pessimism
(political and spiritual) which characterized dialectics before the advent of
modernity? Or is there a way to advance the dialectical project which avoids
both pessimism and totalitarianism? I would like to argue that there is. It is
to that question that we now turn.
Practical
Dialectics
My
starting points are simple and, I think, ought to be noncontroversial. First,
human beings possess, indeed are defined by, their intellect, and this
universally shared intellectual capacity extends beyond instrumental reason (techne or phronesis) to reasoning around fundamental questions of meaning and
value (sophia).
We are, in other words, not just homo
faber but first and foremost homo sapiens.
Second, meaning emerges through dialogue, either direct or indirect,
spontaneous or conscious. The meanings we spontaneously find in things are
challenged and deepened in our encounters with others, who draw out
implications (sometimes implications we would rather avoid) or point out
contradictions, and push us towards a higher synthesis. This latter process is,
quite simply, the dialectic, and everyone practices it, though most do so
without realizing it and generally do not do it very well.
This said, there is clearly
something more to an effective dialectical politics than the spontaneous
process of ordinary conversation. It is here that I would like to call
attention to three practices which, each in its own way, make the dialectic
conscious and use it to engage and cultivate the capacities of the people.
Socratic Dialogue
The
first of these practices is the Socratic Dialogue itself, both as practiced by
Socrates himself and as deployed in the traditional liberal arts curriculum.
There are many places where we can watch Socrates in action, but none is more
fruitful for our purposes than the opening passages of the Republic.
Plato opens the Republic with
a scene which situates the dialogue in its concrete political context. Socrates
is returning from the feast of the Goddess Bendis, a Thracian huntress deity
associated with a women’s revolt at Lemnos which left all of the men on the
island dead, at
This insistence on a substantive
ethics already challenges existing norms. Socrates then goes on to answer three
positions which were quite common in
At each stage of the argument Socrates uses three specific
tactics. First, he begins with people where they are –with their actually
existing beliefs and values. Philosophy does not “enter” the city, as if from
above, but emerges from within it. Second, he asks what organizers call
agitational questions –questions which stir up thought, even at the cost of
seeming a bit odd or a bit irritating. Indeed, he all but tells Cephalus that
he is on death’s door! Third, he reinterprets what his interlocutors say in a
way which helps them to see it in a new light. He is not concerned with
teaching a doctrine but with cultivating the capacity of his interlocutors to
achieve wisdom themselves.
These same techniques make up the repertoire of the
dialectician who uses Socratic dialogue to teach the liberal arts. The common
starting point, to be sure, may be a text rather than a concrete political
situation (though it certainly need not be). But the centrality of the
agitational question and the practice of reinterpreting in a way which suggests
new possibilities remains fundamental.
Oral History and In-Depth Interview Research
The
second practice to which I would like to call attention is that of oral history
and in-depth interview research. Ordinarily understood as a qualitative
research method rather than as a political practice, the in-depth interview
explores a question and attempts to sustain a thesis (generally one involving
the meanings which the subjects attach to their experience) by engaging
ordinary people in a lengthy, open-ended, but nonetheless directed
conversation. Among the most important
examples of such research in recent years, we would include Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart and The Good Society (Bellah et al 1985,
1991).
Like Socratic Dialogue, in-depth interview research presupposes
that ordinary people seriously engage fundamental questions of meaning and
value. It also presupposes that meaning emerges in dialogue with others. What
it does, in effect, is to accelerate the
process by which meaning emerges, make it conscious,
and direct it by posing a definite
set of questions. The interviewer, to be sure, uses a flexible protocol and
formulates questions in response to what the subject has to say, always
avoiding leading questions. But the very presence of the research question
itself shapes the results and creates meaning which would not otherwise of have
emerged.
In-depth interviews are generally recorded, indexed, and
transcribed. Usually an analysis accompanies each interview and the archive of
interviews is made available to scholars researching similar issues. But the
principal investigator or investigators also, usually, produce a monograph
based on the study, which makes conscious and explicit the meanings which
emerged in the process of the study, while offering further interpretation or
explanation.
The key difference between Socratic Dialogue and oral
history or in-depth interview research turns on the question of
reinterpretation. Humanistic researchers try at all costs to avoid imposing
their meanings on those they are studying. And certainly no study would be
taken seriously if an interviewer mimicked Socrates’ leading questions. On the other
hand the very act of framing and posing a question shapes the way in which an
interlocutor interprets their experience. Questions are more or less leading;
they are never meaning or value neutral. And of course, there are no “pristine”
research subjects. The meanings our subjects attach to their experience are in
significant measure the result of the conscious or unconscious interventions of
others. And we are not outside this system of cultural actors which shape the
way they create meaning; rather, we are participants in that system, catalyzing
the emergence of yet a new layer of meaning.
While it is thus proper to think of oral history or in-depth
interview research as a practice distinct
from the Socratic Dialogue, it shares with it certain common presuppositions
and techniques. It simply refrains from explicit reinterpretation with the aim
of understanding the meanings the subject attaches to his or her experience,
and allows the dialogical process itself to carry out the work of deepening
reflection. But we would be fooling ourselves (and denying ourselves access to
a powerful tool) if we pretended that it is not a transformative practice, both
for the individual interviewed and for the community which is the subject of
such a study. Both become conscious of their meanings and their history and
thus potential political subjects in a way which was not previously possible. Both
cultivate the capacity to engage questions of meaning and value and thus the
intellectual virtue of wisdom, which is at the center of the spiritual aims of
the dialectical tradition. And the process is even more transformative for the
interviewer, who overcomes the common assumption that ordinary people don’t
think deeply about questions of meaning and value, and who cultivates the
capacity both to question and to listen. Participation in this kind of study
prepares the ground, as it were, for other practices which demand more and
which would be resisted without this preparation.
The Individual Relational Meeting
The
third practice to which I would like to call attention is the individual relational meeting developed
by the congregation based organizing movement founded by Saul Alinsky and
developed further by such organizations as the Industrial Areas Foundation, the
Gamaliel Foundation, and the Pacific Institute for Community Organizing (Wood
2002). This is the principal method used by interfaith based organizations to
identify potential leaders, but also serves as the first step in cultivating
leadership potential. As taught by the Industrial Areas Foundation, the
individual relational meeting involves the following steps:
1)
Begin the conversation
with something you know or suspect is of interest to the person.
2)
Pose an agitational question.
By this is meant a question which provokes real thought and reflection. It can
be as simple as “Why?” or “What do you mean by?”
3)
Get the person’s story.
What people have done tells us more about who they are and what they value than
what they say.
4)
Probe for more meaning.
Use each story as the starting point for deepening the conversation and drawing
out new insights and interests.
5)
Reinterpret experience
in a way that leads to action. It is at this point that the individual
relational meeting differs most clearly from the in-depth interview. Where the
humanistic researcher tries to limit the impact of the interview on the
subject, the organizer –who aims at action— will question the way someone sees
the world, and especially challenge understandings of the world which lead to
passivity.
6)
Respect the iron rule.
Never do something for someone which they can do for themselves.
An individual relational meeting generally results in a self-interest map of the potential
leader. This map is essentially an analysis of the person’s principal interests
and relationships and allows the organizer to assess the person’s leadership
potential. Potential leaders are generally classified as follows:
v
Primary leaders are
interested in principles and values (e.g. Judaism, Islam, or Democracy) and
build or maintain the institutions (a religious institution or political party)
which promote those principles and values. They have broad networks which
include other primary and secondary leaders. Because of their high level of
responsibility, they will generally be cautious about acting, but can bring
significant resources to the table when they do act.
v
Secondary leaders are
interested in issues (abortion, world peace) and build social movements
(pro-life, antiwar) which address those issues. They have networks of other
secondary leaders and of tertiary leaders. Secondary leaders are action
oriented, but tend to go through cycles of hyperactivity and burn-out as their
movements wax and wane.
v
Tertiary leaders are
interested in concrete problems (a principal who discriminates against Mexican
students), and take individual isolated actions (meeting with the principal,
participating in a school boycott) to address them. What makes them leaders is
the fact that they can turn out significant numbers of people who also care
about the problem in question and motivate them to act.
Generally
speaking, in order to build an effective organization, one needs a core of a
dozen primary leaders and a periphery of 70 secondary leaders, as well as
several hundred tertiary leaders, each with significant followings.
The individual relational meeting, it should be apparent, is
structured in much the same way as Socratic Dialogue and the oral history or
in-depth interview. The principal difference is that unlike the oral history or
in-depth interview (but like Socratic Dialogue) there is explicit
reinterpretation of the interlocutor’s responses. But where Socratic Dialogue
reinterprets primarily in order to catalyze deeper thought, the individual relational meeting reinterprets in order to
catalyze action.
A Strategy for …
These
three practices, I would like to suggest, point not only towards a new strategy
for engaging the people on behalf of the dialectical tradition, but towards a
comprehensive retheorization of the aims of a dialectical politics and towards
a new kind of dialectical spirituality. As I noted above, the dialectical
tradition emerged out of an effort to reground a
discourse around justice in a society in which agnosticism regarding questions
of meaning and value had become hegemonic as a result of the emergence of petty
commodity relations. It is above all the desire to subject resource allocation
to substantive judgments of value which links this older dialectical tradition to
modern dialectics generally and to the socialist project in particular. Premodern
dialectics remained politically impotent so long as it regarded the vast
majority of the people (those who had an interest in subjecting resource
allocation to substantive judgments of value) as incapable of engaging
fundamental questions of meaning and value. And modern dialectics discovered
“the people” only to turn them into a “material weapon” in a struggle which
aimed ultimately at a kind of inner-worldly divinization –a project which was
doomed to begin with because it is metaphysically impossible— or else
sacrificed its higher aims in order to win popular support, becoming the agent
of a kind of refined, collectivist, consumerism.
The foregoing analysis points towards a very different kind
of dialectical politics and a very different kind of dialectical spirituality.
On the one hand, it rejects from the outset any kind of messianism,
innerworldly or otherworldly, individual or collective. Instead, it aims at
both learning from and cultivating the actual capacities of the people. And the
priority it places on listening and on the careful cultivation of virtue among
the people precludes the kind of grand-transformative politics which forms the
basis in experience for the modern-dialectical spirituality of inner-worldly
divinization. On the other hand, it opens up an historically unprecedented
possibility: an extension (admittedly likely to be very gradual and uneven) of
a political participation historically reserved for an elite (the Platonic
philosopher or the Leninist vanguard) to the people as a whole. And it suggests
a way of reconciling conscious philosophical leadership with popular democratic
participation.
From the standpoint of means what we propose is simple. We
need to systematically engage the whole
people, one by one, in a discussion of the most fundamental questions,
helping them to make their meanings
explicit and thus enabling them to become real participants in public
deliberation. We can do this by the staged deployment of the three practices we
have discussed above. The first to be deployed should, almost certainly, be
in-depth/oral history research. This demands the least from the people and
allows us to understand the many ways in which they are already engaging
fundamental questions, while making these meanings explicit and persuading them
that they really are interested in such engagement.
From here, Socratic Dialogue and the Individual Relational
Meeting can be deployed together,
with the understanding that deeper thought leads to more complex action –and
vice versa. Indeed, the boundaries between the in-depth interview and these
consciously reinterpretive practices may well me more artificial than we
imagine. It is a mistake to think that people will act only if prodded to do so
by carefully constructed reinterpretations of their experience. Becoming
conscious of long cherished meanings and values or discovering new ones is
itself a catalyst to action. Organizers who treat leaders like pieces on a chess
board (a pattern which is not, unfortunately, that uncommon) are not
sufficiently respecting their own “iron rule.”
The way forward, I would like to suggest, is to understand
humanistic research and organizing as part of a larger teaching function, through
which we help the people both to make
the meanings and values they have already discovered conscious and explicit, and to think more deeply about questions
of meaning and value, and to undertake this process with their active and conscious collaboration, so that they really
are subjects and not objects of the research and organizing
process.
Methodologically, this is not very difficult. On the one
hand, we need to be open with the people we are engaging about the full scope
of the process we are undertaking. We approach people not as something to be
studied, but as fellow human beings and citizens. And, during the early stages
of the process, we simply hold back from reinterpreting the experience of the
people we are engaging, so that we can develop as clear as possible a picture
of where they stand at the beginning of the process. When we return,
furthermore, to continue the conversation, we share with them what we have
discovered and, rather than offering a reinterpretation which drives them
quickly towards action, we continue to pose agitational questions which draw
out implications and contradictions, and point towards a higher synthesis.
These questions, furthermore, ought not only to be ours, but those of others in
the process, so that the dialectic becomes an authentic process of
deliberation.
One way to widen the conversation, of course, is simply to
share with people what we have found in the course of our interviews or
individual meetings –a standard technique in community organizing and a common
practice as well in oral history projects. Another, way, however, is to include
them in humanity’s ongoing conversation regarding fundamental questions of
meaning and value. This, of course, is the traditional task of a liberal arts
education, and it may be that some of our interlocutors will already have
mastered the liberal arts. Many more, however, will not, or will have done so
only in a rudimentary and inadequate fashion, either because their educational
aims were primarily vocational, or because the institutions they attended (like
most) no longer offered such an education. Our second task, therefore, is to
make an authentic and ongoing education in the liberal arts accessible to as
many who want it and are capable of it.
This is a multidimensional task. Partly, of course, it is a
matter of challenging our colleges and universities to re-engage the liberal
arts tradition, and to build the financial support necessary to insure that all
students have access to such an education, regardless of their class
background. And there is, of course, the question of preparing students for a liberal arts education, something which
will require a radically different curriculum than that currently offered by
our public (and many of our private) schools.
There are, however, many people who either do not need a
degree, because they already have one, or for whom a traditional college format
will not work. It is therefore vitally important that we develop community based liberal arts programs,
especially for those who are participating in our effort to create a public
arena constituted by deliberation around fundamental questions of meaning and
value.
Whether it takes place within a traditional academic setting
or in community based formats, liberal arts education ought, as I have argued
elsewhere, to be organized around fundamental questions (Mansueto 2006), with
classical and contemporary texts used to illustrate the principal ways in which
humanity has answered these questions, and thus as conversation partners for our
students. This approach –which is essentially the quaestio method used in medieval universities— has the added
advantage of allowing us to include in the conversation sources from all of
humanity’s wisdom traditions without forcing students to master an unwieldy
list of texts. And, of course, it represents a further extension of the
dialectic.
There, are, to be sure, some disciplines which do not really
fit into this format –literature and the arts generally, for example. And there
is something to be said for situating texts in their historical contexts. So
courses or community workshops focusing on fundamental questions ought to be
supplemented by an ongoing history of human civilization in the context of
which the arts and literature as well as science, philosophy, and religion are
engaged.
This engagement or re-engagement with fundamental questions
and classical answers to those questions is not, however, necessary only for
those without or with an inadequate education in the liberal arts. It is also
necessary for those who have an
authentic liberal arts education, but who have little or no experience engaging
those outside their own tradition, or whose work has taken them away from
engagement with fundamental questions. This includes organizers, pastors, and
scholars. Thus, in addition to engaging the people in the traditional
disciplines of the liberal arts, in both traditional academic and community
based settings, it is essential to engage leaders or potential leaders, albeit
at a higher level, in something more like an ongoing seminar, which focuses
their attention on fundamental questions, challenges them to engage
perspectives and traditions different from their own, while challenging them to
become better representatives of their own traditions to outsiders, and which
begins to build bridges between the pastoral, political, and academic arenas.
If this process works, authentic deliberation regarding
fundamental questions will begin to emerge spontaneously. Engaging each other
and engaging classical texts around fundamental questions, people will
eventually find their own voices and begin to take and defend positions
regarding those questions and to do so as conscious participants in rational
deliberation. Such deliberation can be catalyzed and strengthened, however, by
modeling it. This is a special responsibility of those who excel in engaging
fundamental questions: philosophers, theologians, and those in related
disciplines. This is the final practice in our tactical repertoire. The people
will see Catholic Bishops answering and learning from Buddhist monks, Muslim
imams answering and learning from atheistic public intellectuals, and they will
begin to do this themselves. They will learn that it is possible to be both a
person of deep conviction and open to new ideas, both passionate and civil, to
teach and to learn, both within and across ideological and cultural boundaries.
This is not, to be sure, historic socialism. There is
nothing here which requires or ensures the transcendence of either private
property or market relations. But it is much more than the Platonic utopia of a
society ruled by philosophers which is presented only to show why it is
impossible. It is at least a society of people who are learning philosophy and of philosophers who are learning from the
people. It probably makes the most sense to speak of a public arena constituted by deliberation regarding
fundamental questions of meaning and value. But such a public arena has already
subordinated decisions regarding resource allocation, at least in principle, to
scrutiny from the standpoint of substantive judgments of value.
I would like to suggest, finally, that the practices which I
have described also point towards a new kind of dialectical spirituality. First,
they expand participation in the traditional dialectical spirituality centered
on the cultivation of acquired or philosophical wisdom. Second, however,
precisely because they eschew messianism and grand transformative politics, and
integrate both a concern with effective political practice with a recognition
of the limits of such practice, they promises to stretch us beyond acquired
wisdom. Knowing what is just and doing it, we inevitably find ourselves in
situations which demand more of us that we expected. We discover that our lives
and our actions are ordered not just towards human development and
civilizational progress but towards something larger and deeper –and harder—
towards a great un-namable bringing into Being at
which our acquired wisdom only hints. Sometimes we learn this by running up
against the limits of political action. Hard as we push, the people will not
move, and we must come to terms with the fact that the end of our action
remains hidden from us, behind a horizon beyond which reason cannot see. But
sometimes we learn this by encountering people whose lives already teach such a
higher wisdom. It is one of the great benefits of this method that it allows us
to discover individuals who in an older time would have been called tzadikim or bodhisattvas. I have met a few in my time, and they have been among
my most important teachers –not, to be sure, in a way which negates the value
of dialectics and acquired wisdom, but in a way which builds on and transcends
it. Indeed, it is they who have helped me chart my path through and beyond the
contradictions, political and spiritual, of modern dialectics.
***
This is,
of course, a very labor intensive and gradualist strategy. It eschews the
modernist obsession with speed and scale and final solutions to the riddle of
history. Instead it takes seriously both the oldest historic aims of our
tradition and what we believe to be sound in modernity: the desire to
democratize the dialectical project and a confidence in the potential of
ordinary people. And it gives a new meaning to the old Platonic ideal of the
philosopher-king. In order to lead the philosopher must first learn to question
and then to listen and only in the context of questioning and listening to
teach and challenge. It returns us to the place where we started, to the figure
of Socrates (before
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